Plenary - Prof Avner Offer
Chichele Professor of Economic History, All Souls College and University of Oxford
Avner Offer has been Professor of Economic History at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College since 2000, after having been a fellow at Nuffield College (1992-2000) and Reader at the University of York (1979-1992). He has recently published The Challenge of Affluence (2006), which is a comparative study of consumption and well-being in the United States and Britain, that applies a dynamic framework of myopic choice to explain and evaluate similarities, differences, time-lags and convergence in the experience of affluence in the two countries. Using approaches to motivation from psychology and behavioural economics, he argues that affluence greatly extends the potential range of human satisfaction, but that abundance also stimulates myopic biases as the capacity for choice is overwhelmed by a flow of new rewards. Choice is fallible... Avner Offer is currently exploring the normative and political issues of the last thirty years in a graduate course entitled 'From social democracy to market liberalism', investigating policy norms which have shifted from obligation and solidarity to individualist market competition. (Excerpts from the link below)
- Biography link (All Souls College, Oxford)
- Guardian Review (02 May, 2006)