This week’s AFEE Member Highlight is: Rojhat Avsar! Dr. Avsar was elected to the AFEE board this past December and has recently published his book, The Evolutionary Origins of Markets: How Evolution, Psychology, and Biology Have Shaped the Economy, which can be purchased here.
Dr. Avşar is an associate professor of economics at Columbia College Chicago. For him John R. Commons and T. Veblen serve as major inspiring intellectual figures. At Columbia he developed courses such as Ethics and Economics that are informed by the institutionalist and evolutionary literature. His research and teaching interests include social behavior, ethical norms, economic discourse, origin of human institutions, and political economy.
In his recent book, The Evolutionary Origins of Markets: How Evolution Psychology and Biology Have Shaped the Economy, he integrated the growing body of experimental evidence on human nature scattered across a variety of disciplines from experimental economics to social neuroscience into a coherent and original narrative as to whether impersonal exchange relations are reflective of the basic human sociality that was originally adapted to a more tribal existence. He tried to demonstrate that our elaborate market exchange system owes its existence not to our calculating brain or insatiable self-centeredness but rather to our sophisticated and nuanced human sociality and to the inherent rationality built into our emotions. The modern economic system, he argued, is helped a lot more than hindered by our innate social instincts that support our remarkable capacity for building formal and informal institutions.
Dr. Avsar has been regularly presenting his work at AFEE sessions at ASSA. He served as the President of AFIT in 2018 and served as the Executive Director of ASE between June 2017 and April 2019. He is very happy about having joined the AFEE's board and looking forward to helping advance AFEE’s mission further. You can follow him on Twitter at @AvsarRojhat.
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