Timur Kuran | |
---|---|
Born | 1954 (age 69–70) New York City, New York, U.S. |
Education | Princeton University (BA) Stanford University (MA, PhD) |
Academic career | |
Field | Political economy Economic history Political history Middle East Islamic studies |
Institutions | University of Southern California Duke University |
Doctoral advisor | Kenneth Arrow |
Contributions | Preference falsification |
Timur Kuran is a Turkish-American economist and political scientist currently serving as a Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research lies at the intersection of economics, political science, history, and law. [1]
Kuran was born in 1954 in New York City, where his parents were graduate students at Yale University. They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father, Aptullah Kuran, taught at Middle East Technical University. The family moved to Istanbul in 1969, when the senior Kuran joined the faculty of Robert College, whose higher education side became Boğaziçi University in 1971. [2]
Kuran obtained his secondary education in Istanbul, graduating from Robert College in 1973. He went on to study economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977. [3] He obtained his doctorate at Stanford University, under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow. [4]
Kuran taught at University of Southern California between 1982 and 2007, where he held the King Faisal professorship in Islamic Thought and Culture from 1993 onwards. He moved to Duke University in 2007, as Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies and with a joint appointment in the departments of Economics and Political Science.
Kuran’s visiting positions include: Institute for Advanced Study (1989–90), Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; (1996-1997), Economics Department, Stanford University (2004-2005), Law School, Yale University (2020). [3]
From 2008 to 2014 Kuran served on the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. [5] He is a founding member of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), which he has directed since its establishment in 2011.
Kuran was the founding editor of the University of Michigan Press book series Economics, Cognition, and Society (1989-2006). Since 2009, he has been co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society, which he co-founded with Peter Boettke. He has co-edited the Journal of Comparative Economics since 2017.
Kuran is a promoter of freedom of expression, within and outside academia. In 2021, he became a co-founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). In 2022, he joined the Advisory Council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Four themes stand out in Kuran’s research: preference falsification, the roles of Islamic institutions in the economic performance of the Middle East, the economic agenda of contemporary Islamism, and the political legacies of Islamic institutions in the Middle East. The last three themes benefit from his passion for collecting Ottoman and Turkish documents.
Kuran coined the term preference falsification in a 1987 article to describe the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It involves tailoring one's expressed preferences to what appears socially acceptable or politically advantageous. [6] His subsequent works argue that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and that it can have huge social, political, and economic consequences. The effects hinge on interdependencies between the personal preferences that individuals choose to express publicly. A broad statement of his argument is in Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. [7] This 1995 book explains how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.
An April 1989 article by Kuran, "Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution", presented the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), and the Iranian Revolution (1979) as examples of events that stunned the world; and it explained how preference falsification, combined with interdependencies among publicly expressed preferences, keeps people from anticipating political earthquakes that are easily explained in retrospect. [8] After the East European Revolutions of late 1989, Kuran explained why seasoned experts of the Communist Bloc were caught off guard in “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989”. [9] These papers and Private Truths, Public Lies suggest that political revolutions and big shifts in public opinion will surprise the world repeatedly, because of people’s readiness, under perceived social pressures, to conceal their political dispositions. [10]
Kuran has used his theory to shed light on the persistence of East European communism despite its inefficiencies, [11] why India’s caste system has remained a powerful institution for millennia, [12] transformations of American race relations, [13] the aggravation of ethnic conflicts through a self-reinforcing process whereby ethnic symbols gain salience and practical significance, [14] (with Cass Sunstein) the eruption of mass hysteria over minor risks, [15] and American polarization. [16]
In the mid-1990s, Kuran started exploring the drivers of the Middle East’s economic trajectory from the birth of Islam to the present. His focus has been on the roles of Islamic law (Sharia) in shaping economic opportunities.
During Islam’s early centuries, Kuran observes, the economic content of Islamic law was well-suited to global economic conditions. As such, the Middle East was an economically advanced region. [17] Subsequently, it failed to match the institutional transformation through which Western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate production, and conduct trade. [18] Although the Middle East’s economic institutions never froze, in certain areas central to economic modernization changes were minimal until the 1800s, at least in relation to structural transformations in the West. [19]
TheLong Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East is Kuran’s broadest account of this thesis. There, he suggests that several elements of Islamic law helped to turn the Middle East into an economic laggard. Because of its egalitarian character, the Islamic law of inheritance inhibited capital accumulation, and it curtailed needs for organizational innovations to scale up the pooling of capital and labor. [20] The lack of an Islamic concept of corporation also hindered organizational development; in addition, it kept entrepreneurs politically weak. [21] The waqf, Islam’s distinct form of trust, locked vast resources into organizations prone to becoming dysfunctional. [22]
None of these institutions were disadvantageous at their emergence, suggests Kuran; they solved identifiable problems. None caused an absolute decline in economic activity. Each became a handicap by perpetuating itself during the millennium when Western Europe spearheaded economic modernization. [23]
A popular argument is that Islam fosters a conservative ethos that promotes resistance to adaptation. [24] Had conservatism per se made the Middle East fall behind, Kuran says, adjustments would have lagged across the board. But even as institutions of the private economy stalled, military and taxation systems were reformed repeatedly. That commercial and financial organizations were not scaled up points to an institutional trap, not conservative attitudes. [25] Inefficient institutions perpetuated themselves as their interactions dampened incentives to innovate. When in the 1800s the rise of the West created an existential threat, institutional transplants followed. The borrowed institutions perform functions long met through Islamic institutions. [26]
The Islamic institutions that delayed the Middle East’s economic modernization no longer block economic development directly, claims Kuran. But patterns they fostered, including low trust in institutions, rampant corruption, and widespread nepotism, are impeding the region’s catch-up. [27]
Kuran’s research on the Middle East’s economic history draws on data collected from Istanbul’s Islamic court archives. His data from the 1600s has been published as a ten-volume bilingual set. [28]
Kuran’s research agenda has included exploring the origins, logic, and initiatives of Islamic economics, a doctrine that claims to offer an alternative to capitalism and socialism. Its initiatives include the establishment of Islamic financial institutions meant to avoid interest. It also promotes Islamic behavioral norms and has founded anti-poverty systems inspired by zakat practices in seventh-century Arabia, in Islam’s earliest decades. [29]
Kuran argues that the doctrine of Islamic economics is incoherent and largely irrelevant to present challenges. [30] Its practical applications have had no discernible effects on efficiency, trust, or poverty reduction. [31] Its real purpose has not been economic improvement but the cultivation of a distinct Islamic identity. [32] It has served global Islamism (known also as Islamic fundamentalism) by fueling the illusion that modern Muslim societies can live by economic rules based on Islam. [33]
A comprehensive statement of Kuran’s analysis and interpretation of Islamic economics is Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism. [34] [35] Islamic financial firms deal in interest routinely, he argues there, through ruses that make interest appear as a return to risk. Their operations do not differ, except symbolically, from those of conventional financial firms with which they compete. [36] He also observes that modern zakat systems shuffle resources within the middle class or redistribute from poor to rich. [37] Finally, he points to the lack of evidence that Islamic economics has improved trust or trustworthiness. [38]
Following Fazlur Rahman, Kuran argues that Islamic economics misunderstands the original functions of Quran-based Islamic institutions. [39] [40] [41]
Kuran has written on the Islamic controversy over the permissibility of interest; [42] the origins, historical functions, and modern variants of zakat; [43] [44] and Islamic credit cards. [45]
With a focus on the Middle East’s institutional history, Kuran has explored why its modern states tend to be governed autocratically and why the region fares poorly in global indices of freedom. He proposes that three Islamic institutions played critical roles. Though designed to bind the state, Islam’s original tax system was sidelined within a couple of generations. [46] This Islamic waqf (as opposed to the modern waqf, which is a corporation) kept civic life anemic by restricting political participation and hindering collective action from below. [47] And private commercial enterprises remained small and ephemeral, hindering the formation of stable coalitions capable of bargaining with the state. [48] [49]
In his childhood and early adulthood, Timur Kuran collected postal stamps. As his academic career began and research foci changed, his collecting interests turned to poorly studied areas: (1) Ottoman and Turkish postal history and postal stationery; (2) Ottoman and Turkish revenue stamps; and, increasingly, (3) Ottoman and Turkish documents, with an emphasis on evidence relating to the modernization of economic and civic life. [50]
In the third category, his major collections are on the following topics: official revenue stamps and their usages; Ottoman occupations; foreign occupations of Ottoman territories; private and semi-official social assistance; printing, the press, and publishing; banking and insurance; political organizations; education; and lotteries. These collections are furnishing data to Kuran’s ongoing academic research on Ottoman and Turkish modernization from the late 1700s. [50]
He has co-authored, with Mehmet Akan, volume 1 of an intended bilingual trilogy on the microhistory of the Turkish postal system. [51]
The Ottoman Empire, also called the Turkish Empire, was an imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe, between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.
Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam. Zakat is the Arabic word for "Giving to Charity" or "Giving to the Needy". Zakat is a form of almsgiving, often collected by the Muslim Ummah. It is considered in Islam a religious obligation, and by Quranic ranking, is next after prayer (salat) in importance. Eight heads of zakat are mentioned in the Quran.
A waqf, also called a ḥabs, or mortmain property, is an inalienable charitable endowment under Islamic law. It typically involves donating a building, plot of land or other assets for Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of reclaiming the assets. A charitable trust may hold the donated assets. The person making such dedication is known as a waqif ('donor') who uses a mutawalli ('trustee') to manage the property in exchange for a share of the revenues it generates. A waqf allows the state to provide social services in accordance with Islamic law while contributing to the preservation of cultural and historical sites. Although the waqf system depended on several hadiths and presented elements similar to practices from pre-Islamic cultures, it seems that the specific full-fledged Islamic legal form of endowment called waqf dates from the 9th century AD.
Islamic economics refers to the knowledge of economics or economic activities and processes in terms of Islamic principles and teachings. Islam has a set of specific moral norms and values about individual and social economic behavior. Therefore, it has its own economic system, which is based on its philosophical views and is compatible with the Islamic organization of other aspects of human behavior: social and political systems.
Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law. The field emerged in the United States during the early 1960s, primarily from the work of scholars from the Chicago school of economics such as Aaron Director, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The field uses economics concepts to explain the effects of laws, assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and predict which legal rules will be promulgated. There are two major branches of law and economics; one based on the application of the methods and theories of neoclassical economics to the positive and normative analysis of the law, and a second branch which focuses on an institutional analysis of law and legal institutions, with a broader focus on economic, political, and social outcomes, and overlapping with analyses of the institutions of politics and governance.
The economic history of the Ottoman Empire covers the period 1299–1923. Trade, agriculture, transportation, and religion make up the Ottoman Empire's economy.
New Institutional Economics (NIE) is an economic perspective that attempts to extend economics by focusing on the institutions that underlie economic activity and with analysis beyond earlier institutional economics and neoclassical economics.
The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from the Middle East and Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.
Between the 9th and 14th centuries, the Muslim world developed many advanced economic concepts, techniques and usages. These ranged from areas of production, investment, finance, economic development, taxation, property use such as Hawala: an early informal value transfer system, Islamic trusts, known as waqf, systems of contract relied upon by merchants, a widely circulated common currency, cheques, promissory notes, early contracts, bills of exchange, and forms of commercial partnership such as mufawada.
Cultural economics is the branch of economics that studies the relation of culture to economic outcomes. Here, 'culture' is defined by shared beliefs and preferences of respective groups. Programmatic issues include whether and how much culture matters as to economic outcomes and what its relation is to institutions. As a growing field in behavioral economics, the role of culture in economic behavior is increasingly being demonstrated to cause significant differentials in decision-making and the management and valuation of assets.
In the Ottoman Empire, women enjoyed a diverse range of rights and were limited in diverse ways depending on the time period, as well as their religion and class. The empire, first as a Turkoman beylik, and then a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire, was ruled in accordance to the qanun, the semi-secular body of law enacted by Ottoman sultans. Furthermore, the relevant religious scriptures of its many confessional communities played a major role in the legal system, for the majority of Ottoman women, these were the Quran and Hadith as interpreted by Islamic jurists, often termed sharia. Most Ottoman women were permitted to participate in the legal system, purchase and sell property, inherit and bequeath wealth, and participate in other financial activities, rights which were unusual in the rest of Europe until the 19th century.
An economic ideology is a set of views forming the basis of an ideology on how the economy should run. It differentiates itself from economic theory in being normative rather than just explanatory in its approach, whereas the aim of economic theories is to create accurate explanatory models to describe how an economy currently functions. However, the two are closely interrelated, as underlying economic ideology influences the methodology and theory employed in analysis. The diverse ideology and methodology of the 74 Nobel laureates in economics speaks to such interrelation.
Imaret, sometimes also known as a darüzziyafe, is one of several names used to identify the public soup kitchens built throughout the Ottoman Empire from the 14th to the 19th centuries. These public kitchens were often part of a larger complex known as a külliye, which could include hospices, mosques, caravanserais, and colleges. The imarets provided food that was free of charge to specific groups of people and unfortunate individuals. Imarets were not invented by the Ottomans but developed under their rule as highly structured groups of buildings.
Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressure. It involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the underlying privately held preference. People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity. Techniques such as list experiments can be used to uncover preference falsification.
Zakāt is a form of alms-giving treated as a religious tax and/or religious obligation in Islam for all Muslims who meet the necessary criteria of wealth, and one of the Five Pillars of Islam. Beneficiaries of zakat include orphans, widowed, poor muslims, debt-ridden, travelers, zakat collectors, new converts to Islam, Islamic clergy. Zakat is prescribed to cleanse the individual's wealth, heart, and baser characteristics in general, and to replace them with virtues.
Islamic socialism is a political philosophy that incorporates elements of Islam into a system of socialism. As a term, it was coined by various left-wing Muslim leaders to describe a more spiritual form of socialism. Islamic socialists believe that the teachings of the Qur'an and Muhammad, citing aspects of the religion like zakat, are not only compatible with principles of socialism, but also very supportive of them. They draw inspiration from the first Islamic state, which was established by Muhammad in the city of Medina. This blend of Islam with socialist principles was popularized as a viable form of anti-imperialism that could be widely accepted in the Muslim world. This is especially seen in the works of Egyptian writer Salama Moussa, who wrote extensively about socialism and about Egyptian nationalism against British rule.
Marc David Baer is an historian and professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Yeşim Arat (born September 5, 1955), is a Turkish political scientist and author specialized in gender politics, Turkish politics, women in Turkish politics, and women's movements in Turkey. She is a professor in the department of political science and international relations at Boğaziçi University.
Bedross Der Matossian is professor of Modern Middle East history and the Hymen Rosenberg Professor in Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also the vice chair of the Department of History. Der Matossian was born and raised in East Jerusalem.
Knowledge falsification is the deliberate misrepresentation of what one knows under perceived social pressures. The term was coined by Timur Kuran in his book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.
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