In this episode, Ramanan speaks with Robert Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor Emeritus of Management and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos.
For more than a decade, Frank’s "Economic View" column appeared monthly in The New York Times. His book The Winner-Take-All Society, which examined the concentration of wealth and power in the contemporary economy, received a Critic's Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.
His most recent book, Under the Influence, describes how our environments are in part products of our behavior and explains how we can structure our environments to catalyze positive behavior change at scale. Frank is a co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
They discuss positional arms races, motivations for consumption, and behavioral contagion. Full transcript is available above. This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
In Our Hands is a production of Amasia. Follow these links for more about our firm, the Amasia blog, our climate fiction podcast, and Ramanan’s blog.
Highlights
[00:07:56] Positional Arms Races
[00:14:23] Motivations for Consumption
[00:17:24] Behavioral Contagion
