Economic sociology is a rapidly expanding field, applying sociology's core insight--that individuals behave according to scripts that are tied to social roles--to economic behavior. It places homo economicus (that tried-and-true fictive actor who is completely rational, acts only out of...

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany. He was an inventor and designer of electrical control gear, later also a patent...

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1978

Economics, which has traditionally been concerned with what decisions are made rather than with how they are made, has more and more reason to interest itself in the procedural aspects of decision, especially to deal with uncertainty, and more generally, with nonequilibrium phenomena. A number...

This paper proposes an explanation for a fundamental property that appears to be shared by all multicelled organisms. Such organisms consist of a hierarchy of components, such that, at any level of the hierarchy, the rates of interaction within components at that level are much higher than the...