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This is a wonderful group, and it represents the tip of the iceberg of ERIN, Economic Research on Identities, Norms, and Narratives, which is a group that we founded that has a very simple idea. And the idea is that we as people are shaped by social forces, particularly identities, norms, and narratives. And our economic decisions are shaped by social forces as well. And consequently, the way economists think about how we make decisions should reflect the role that social forces play. And social forces affect our objectives, our preferences. They affect our beliefs and they affect our perceived constraints. So every aspect of our decision-making, as we know it in economics, is affected by social forces. And this happens from day one, from when a baby appears out of the birth canal. There is a connection between the baby and its mother, and that's extended to the broader family and friends and broader society. There is no sense in which the individual is primary. The individual is shaped by social forces, and that needs to become central to economics. That's basically the idea. And within that context, it then becomes an interesting question as to whether in this new framework we can understand social dysfunctions more easily, whether there are new ways of understanding the sources of inequality marginalization, economic marginalization in society, unemployment, corruption, crime, warfare and conflict, financial crises, economic stagnation, environmental degradation, and so on and so forth. All these well-known phenomena in economics ought to be shed light on through the social forces that help shape our economic decisions. And the different speakers here will emphasize different aspects of this. And we'll start out with Jean-Paul Carvalho on your extreme left. He's an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, and interim director of the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences there. He will be talking about his QJE paper on veiling, but he has done a lot of work on identity and the role it plays in education, under what circumstances you may wish to resist education because of your identity, social mobility, religious movements, the role of identity in coordination within cultures, and also the role of identity in organizations. But today he'll tell us about veiling.

Thank you very much, Dennis. Thank you to Aynet and to Rob Johnson in particular. And it's an honor to share a panel with Robbie, George, and Dennis. George Akerlof and Rachel Cranton are really the founders of this field of economics of identity. I owe them a great debt, as I do Robbie and Dennis, for their contributions to the field. Today, I'm going to be speaking about religious identity, and we're going to kind of zoom in on a particular type of religious identity, and that's veiling. But let's start 50 years ago. 1967, the Summer of Love, San Francisco. The bohemian part of me would love to have been there. Idealistic college kids from around the US descended on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. They cooked meals, fed people in the park, played music. provided even free medical care and so forth. By all accounts, it was a great time, but why did it end? Why was this the Summer of Love and not the Summers of Love? Well, what happened was it made news, national news, in 1967. And the next year, the college kids once again arrived, but now they were joined by people with no spiritual or ideological connection to the movement. These were the free riders, there for the free food, the free rent, and the free love of the flower children. And with this, the movement collapsed under the weight of its own success. So, there are valuable lessons to learn from this. A successful social movement requires the production of both spiritual/ideological and material goods. Free riders undermine both forms of production. So once the movement becomes successful enough, you generate enough efficiency in producing material goods that these free riders enter, they consume the material goods that are collectively produced by the group, and in doing so, they exhaust the group's resources, and they undermine the basis for cooperation within the group, and that's reciprocal altruism. But they also undermine the spiritual and ideological life of the group with their infectious lack of commitment to the mission, the movement's mission. So without a way to screen out these free riders, social movements collapse. They are self-undermining. Success begets failure. In this regard, we can learn a lot from observing religious groups, religious communities. Religious organizations are among the most stable and long-lived organizations in human history, perhaps the most. They have an incredible way of surviving even while at odds with the host community, perhaps especially while at odds with the host community. And one of the things that they One of their real skills is screening out free riders. And in doing so, religious identity plays a critical role. By religious identity, I mean conspicuous religious markers that distinguish members from non-members, including unconventional forms of dress, speech, dietary and sexual practices, etc. And these unconventional requirements stigmatize members in the society at large. Now, this is a cost, but the stigma plays 2 constructive roles. Firstly, it plays a screening role. There's a selection role, a screening role. By making membership costly, it makes— it screens out anyone who is not committed to the movement's mission. So it selects for cooperative types and true believers, essentially. Secondly, by reducing— by acting as a kind of tax on outside activity, this stigma induces members to divert money and time from outside activity to activity within the group. So this is how it stabilizes cooperation within the group, by solving collective incentive problems, stigmatizing members in the outside community, and segregating themselves, segregating members from the outside world. So this is not my theory, this is the theory, the now canonical theory in the economics of religion that was developed by Larry Iannaccone. It's a simple and it's a powerful theory. You see this with many strict religious sects, this notion of religious identity stigmatizing and segregating members and thereby stabilizing cooperation within the group. What I want to talk about today is veiling among Muslim women, by which I mean various concealing forms of dress, especially head covering? Now, I think the explanation here is a little different to the standard clubs model, and to really understand it, I think we need to incorporate ideas from the economics of identity, and that's what we're here to do here. So, first of all, let us place veiling in its proper context. In the Middle East, Particular Egypt, this new veiling movement is, as the name suggests, a 20th century innovation. It's not the preservation, firstly, of some ancient tradition. In Cairo, there was a de-veiling movement in 1923 led by a woman named Huda Sharawi after she arrived back from a meeting of feminists in Rome. After that, middle and upper-class women in Cairo stopped veiling. And, in fact, when anthropologists visited Cairo in 1970, almost no women are veiled. That's their report. By 2000, about 80% of women in Cairo wear some form of head covering. So this is a dramatic change in 30 years. So— and, in fact, some of the new forms of veiling are actually quite distinct from modes of veiling that you see in the past. So you have different modes of veiling here. On the left, you see less strict versions, like the headscarf, and to the right, you see the niqab and then the burqa, which are more strict versions. In fact, the more antiquated forms of veiling on the right had a certain motivation. They were actually aristocratic forms of veiling. Peasant women did not veil to that extent because they worked in the fields, but wealthier households did undertake that kind of veiling and it was a signal that a man could preserve a harem of women without them having recourse to work by veiling like this. It was an aristocratic signal. Now, the new forms of veiling have different motivations and we'll think about them closely here. So, closer to home, large-scale immigration to Western Europe, the US, and British offshoots has precipitated, I think, what we can describe as a national identity crisis. And the veil, as you know, has become a kind of symbol, perhaps the symbol, of cultural separation, cultural rejection, and social separation. And this kind of gels with the religious clubs theory, but it doesn't necessarily gel, I think, with the more elaborate version that I'm going to give you today based on a closer reading of the precise practices. Of veiling as it occurs today. So we also see, as you know, this kind of interpretation of veiling as cultural rejection and social separation give rise to public policy. So bans on veiling in many countries including various types of veiling including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and parts of Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Russia. So when I started writing this paper on veiling, I thought that there was a lot written about it, a lot of public policy, but there was very little analytical attention devoted to it. The movement was seen, I think, on all sides as symbolic and moral, okay, a symbolic and moral issue. And so I want to take an analytical lens to this here. So in particular, using the economics of identity. The economics of identity is an approach to social diversity which has at its core the notion that individuals are assigned, either through self or social categorization, to different social categories or identities. These social categories or identities impose upon them certain behavioral prescriptions, that is, ideals and expectations of their behavior. So we see here a person is categorized, they have an identity A or B, and that identity conditions their choice by imposing upon them certain behavioral prescriptions. And we see this when individuals violate their behavioral prescriptions. For example, in the early 20th century in the US, when married women started taking on paid work, there was a kind of violation of traditional gender roles that led to some kind of stigma. These gender roles, of course, have changed over time. Religious identity is no exception to this, actually. If you choose to veil, you have different prescriptions, behavioral prescriptions. We're treating it here as a binary thing, veil or no veil, but actually, in the model, it's modeled as a continuous choice variable, and really, in reality, it's a continuous degree of concealment. But the more you veil, the stricter the Muslim you are deemed to be, and that imposes specific identity-specific ideals and expectations on you. You are expected to abide by religious rules more closely, and you bear a higher social stigma for violating religious rules of behavior. So if you veil, you're more likely to engage in religious behavior as when you don't veil. So this is the role of veiling, I think, that we have, that is at play, and let me explain it. So taking this approach to veiling, I want to address 3 questions in this paper. 1, why do women veil? 2, why has there been a rise in veiling since the 1970s? And 3, what happens if you ban veiling?

Okay?

And there was a lot of debate over veiling, there was very little thought given to these 3 questions, actually.

Thank you.

So, firstly, why do women veil? Well, one possible hypothesis runs along the lines of the aristocratic model of veiling that I showed you before. Veiling reduces the woman's outside option and increases male bargaining power within the household. That's one possible hypothesis that you could entertain. I think that— The new veiling movement that we see is somewhat different, and in fact it relates— and I want to talk about the bulk of the movement, which relates more to the moderate forms of veiling like head covering that we saw to the left on an earlier slide. First of all, the first thing you need to note is that in the vanguard of this new veiling movement lies women, urban, working, educated, middle-class women? Why do they veil? Okay, and so what I suggest is that veiling acts as a commitment mechanism to abiding by religious norms, as we saw before. With that, by veiling, you impose on yourself certain behavioral prescriptions, and that has practical implications. So you can't just simply walk into a bar wearing a headscarf. It's incongruous. You attract different friends and social encounters. And all of this seeks— is a kind of commitment to religious norms of behavior. Moreover, it's not just a commitment, an individual commitment, but it's also a signal of this commitment to one's community. So why the rise in veiling? Well, whether it be women who are moving from rural Egypt to Cairo or migrants from Muslim societies to the UK, for example, women face an expansion in their economic opportunities, educational opportunities, labor market opportunities, just opportunities for interaction in the urban environment. Now, in religiously conservative communities, Women's behavior is subject to intense social scrutiny and social judgment. Exploiting economic opportunities and interacting outside of the monitoring range of one's community can attract negative social influences and judgments. You could lose esteem within your community. That means a deterioration of marriage market prospects. It means possibly a loss of access to community resources and so forth. But by veiling and committing to abiding by religious norms of behavior, even while you're outside of the monitoring range of your community, women can take up these economic opportunities while still preserving their esteem within the community. So in this sense, veiling is a kind of partial integration strategy, and some forms of veiling, I think, are not necessarily regressive. So this is a different narrative of veiling. This also changes our view of the consequences of banning veiling. Banning veiling in public spaces now would lead to— could lead to actual segregation of these women as they take segregation within the home or the community as a costly substitute for interacting in public and veiling. More surprisingly, actually, when you embed this in a model of intergenerational transmission of preferences, what you find is that banning veiling can actually lead to a rise in religiosity in these communities. And it's not due to a blowback mechanism; it's actually more subtle than that. It's to do with the substitutability between external and internal control mechanisms. Say you're a parent; you want to control the behavior of your child. you have different instruments at your disposal. You have external control mechanisms and internal control mechanisms. The veil is like an external control mechanism, right? If you have, for example, a society that mandates a high degree of veiling, but a homogeneous degree of veiling amongst everyone, then what happens is behavior is relatively controlled in society, and so the behavior of religious and secular women is quite similar. But that reduces the incentives of parents to expend resources on internal control mechanisms like religious education, and transmitting religious preferences. So you could get, in a seemingly very religious society, secularization going on under the surface. I think something like this goes on in Iran. On the other hand, if you ban veiling and secular women integrate while not veiling, whereas religious women segregate in the home, that drives a big wedge in their behavior. And now it really matters whether your child— for their behavior, whether your child is religious or not. And that increases the incentives for parents, religious parents, to transmit religious preferences to their child, and that can lead to an increase in religiosity in these communities. So, if the motivation for a ban on veiling is to integrate and secularize these communities, actually, you could end up achieving quite the opposite. So, recent empirical work by sociologists indicates— well, supports at least the first part of this theory, And that is that women who veil tend to be— at least religious women who exhibit higher rates of veiling are ones who are more exposed to modern influences, in particular education, urbanization, and contact with non-Muslims. So this runs counter to the alternative view of veiling, and it's more in line with the view that I suggest. Now, how does this fit in with the economics of religion and these club models that we saw before? Well, we can distinguish between 2 domains, rather crudely, but we can distinguish between 2 domains: the economic and social domain. If, in the extreme, you want to set up a fully segregated community, like the Amish, what you have to do is you have to impose requirements and forms of religious identity that stigmatize members both in the economic and social domain, okay, to develop a fully segregated society. That includes banning money, modern technology, etc. However, if you have a community that you want to be partially integrated, then you want to attract members who are economically productive but adhere to non-mainstream behavioral norms, then you may impose a requirement for religious identity that is something like veiling, that does not attract discrimination in the economic domain, that is in education or the labor market, but that does induce some kind of social stigma in the social domain and separation in the social domain. So that means that this partial integration strategy rests on the combination of these 2 factors. One, so if discrimination, if either discrimination appears in the economic domain, in the educational labor market, or veiling becomes normalized and loses its stigma in the social domain, then it loses its power as a partial integration strategy. Actually, what would happen would be something— the community would go to one of the extremes. If returns, to economic and social participation are high enough, there would be full integration. Otherwise, there would be full segregation, because you're removing this kind of partial strategy of integration. So this is the way in which the economics of identity, with its focus on social categories and behavioral prescriptions, intersects really with the economics of identity. intersects with the economics of religion with its focus on clubs and groups and social stigma. How many minutes do I have left, Dennis?

Just about.

Just about done. Okay, so I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

Okay, our next speaker is Robert Akerlof, who is He's an associate professor at the University of Warwick. He'll be talking about 2 papers, Movers and Shakers, and the other one is—

Value Formation.

Value Formation: The Role of Esteem. He's written a lot of other things and also provides us with a broader framework for understanding all this work.

Thanks, Dennis. So I'm gonna start, in fact, with a little bit of kind of an overview. I'm gonna try and kind of put this work into a little bit of a broader context. So, you know, I think I want to try and give a sense of what the research agenda is, not just for myself, but I think the sort of agenda we share. So I'll start, I'll talk a little bit about that, and then mention these 2 papers. And time permitting, I'll also mention some work in progress. Okay, so on the research agenda. So, you know, I think behavioral economics has obviously had a huge impact on the field. And so I think one of the things it's done that's been extremely important is it's made us think much more carefully about what's really running through people's heads when they make decisions. Has told us we need to think much more carefully about that. The first generation of behavioral economics has largely been focused on individuals in isolation and sort of what's running through individuals' heads, viewing them in isolation. And I think, in fact, what's running through people's heads is very influenced by social interaction and by social context. And so I think that's really what's motivating this research is the idea that who we are and what we're thinking about is very shaped by social interaction. So I think the first kind of question that we're trying to answer is how are we generally shaped by social interaction, our beliefs, our preferences, and then second, of course, what are the economic consequences?

of that.

You know, so one of the key objects, I think, for study is beliefs. So, you know, our beliefs are very shaped by our social interactions. So, you know, one thing to look at is our positive beliefs. So, you know, these are beliefs about what is the world like. And I think we're also really interested in people's normative beliefs. So, you know, people have beliefs not just about what the world is like, but also what is good and and what is bad, what is better and what is worse. So I think we're interested in both. So identity, you can think of that really as a package of beliefs. So one piece of that package are beliefs about who am I, who are others. So these are sort of beliefs about your type and others' types. So these are positive beliefs. And the second aspect of that package are their beliefs About how should someone of my type or someone of others' types behave? What's the appropriate way to behave? So you could think about gender norms here as an example. So if you're a man, what is the appropriate way to behave? If you're a woman, what's the appropriate way to behave? So identity is really about beliefs. So also part of the title of this session, we've talked a little bit about it already, are narratives. or stories. So I think that's very important as well. So you can think about the fact you probably— everyone here has some kind of story about what you're doing here today, what you're doing at this conference, and that gives an order to your actions and your behavior. And so these stories that we tell ourselves, they encapsulate certain beliefs. So examples would be, you might have a story that encapsulates a belief that the world is zero-sum, and that might affect your behavior that you have that story. Or you might have a belief that people get what they deserve, so a belief in a just world, and that might impact your behavior, your voting decisions. So there are these important stories, and these— so I think these beliefs beliefs encapsulated in these stories are important to us. And the stories that are resonant to us, they depend very much on the stories that other people have in their heads. It's easier to hold a story in your head if other people have that story in their head or they're telling this story. Maybe a politician, for instance, makes a speech and tells a story and that makes it as a sort of social enterprise, it's making it easier for everyone listening to that speech to hold that story in their heads. So how are these beliefs determined? So I'll give you sort of 2 frameworks for thinking about that. So one useful framework for thinking about this is you can sort of think of a demand and supply for belief. So the supply side, what I mean by supply side is, you know, what am I able to believe? What are the things that constrain me in terms of what I'm able to believe? The demand side is, is what do I want to believe? So one can think of, you know, the sort of standard classical model as being embedded in here, right? We have the view that information is constraining of beliefs that appears on the supply side, and that's essentially all we put in. We sort of think of that as pinning down our beliefs. But demand matters, so that's one deviation from the sort of standard model. And then social interaction can play a role both on the demand side and the supply side.

Yeah.

So on the supply side, even independent of sort of the informational content of the message, of social interaction, one can be influenced on the supply side, right, by what others believe. So the Asch line experiment gives an example of these kinds of effects that, you know, it's— so in this experiment, maybe some of you know it, there's clearly one line is the longest of 3 lines, and people are asked which is the longest line. And there are a bunch of confederates in the experiment who all give the wrong answer. And this really upsets people and it leads a lot of people to switch their answer away from the obvious answer. So somehow, just the fact that other people seem to believe something other than what you'd like to believe can have a big effect on you. Okay, so this is one organizing framework. So you can think about demand and supply of belief. Another nice framework for thinking about how beliefs are determined is given by this picture, and this will also relate to the first of the 2 papers I'm gonna discuss. So you can think about people are embedded in social networks, and your social interactions, they influence your beliefs, and your beliefs in turn influence your choice of actions, And one of your actions then is to decide whom you're gonna try and seek out interaction with, who you wanna avoid interaction with, so actions in turn influence the shape of the social network. So you can think about a kind of equilibrium of this kind of a system. So that actually takes me to the first paper, so I'm gonna look at a version of this, so I'm gonna replace beliefs in here with values, which you can think of as a type of normative belief. Okay, so the running example for this first paper is a high school, okay? And so, you know, 2 kind of classic groups in high schools are nerds and burnouts. So that's the term in the education literature for this group, the burnouts, okay? And so they might look like this with green hair. Okay, and so nerds and burnouts, they have very different values, of course. And so there's this, you know, basic question: what's determinative of people's values, and how are people's values shaped by social interaction? So this paper builds a model to try to understand theoretically how this works. So I'm just gonna give you a kind of sketch of the model. So values in the model are something that people choose. You choose what values to hold, and that choice is motivated by economic considerations, but crucially also by the desire for esteem. And there are 2 components of esteem, and they result in conflicting desires for people. So on the one hand, people care about obtaining esteem from peers, and this desire for peer esteem is something that generates conformity. So your desire for peer esteem leads you to act and choose values that are similar to those of your peers. On the other hand, people also care in the model about self-esteem, and that might lead you to differentiate. That's often satisfying yourself, you know, having— maximizing your self-esteem is best Satisfied by differentiating. For instance, if there are a lot of people who are successful academics in a school, maybe it's hard to get high self-esteem. If you also value academics, maybe you can become a burnout. Instead, have very different values from those academic peers and generate self-esteem through a different channel. Okay, so here is sort of a summary. A sense of the setup of the model. Okay, so the baseline model has— it's 2 players, it's a simultaneous move game. You can extend it, for what it's worth, beyond 2 players to many players. Players make 3 choices. So they choose effort at 2 activities. So the activities I'm gonna think of as academics, so that's the nerd activity, and rock music, which is meant to stand in for the burnout activity.

Okay.

And so achievement at activities then depends both upon people's effort and also on their abilities at activities. So that's the first choice is effort. The second choice is whether to value activities. So you can value academics or not and you can value rock music or not. And then third, people choose whether to initiate interaction with the other player and I assume interaction Right. Takes place if either person initiates it. Okay, so the 3 main assumptions then of the model, those are the choices. The main assumptions are that the basis upon which a player confers esteem depends upon his values. So if you only cared about academics, you'd only esteem yourself and others on the basis of their academic achievement, okay? So the second key assumption is that players players are esteemed for their relative achievements. So it's not just about how you perform individually, but how you compare to others. And the third assumption is that players value, they always value self-esteem, and you also value the esteem of the other player if you're interacting. And so that's gonna be something that motivates the decision of whether to interact with the other player. Or not, whether they positively or negatively esteem you. Okay, so I'm gonna just sort of skip to a picture that shows what the results look like. So, so this shows what the equilibria are of this game as a function of the academic abilities of the 2 players. So alpha 1 and alpha 2 denote the academic ability of the, the players. And so the equilibria sort of balance this tension between the desires of the players to conform and differentiate. So in the region of the 45-degree line in this picture, what sort of the dominant thing is this desire to conform. As their abilities become more dissimilar, so the further you get from the 45-degree line, the more this desire to differentiate. differentiate is what dominates. So, along the 45-degree line, I'll focus on that first, players choose to value the same activities. They're either both scholars, so they're both nerds, or they're both rock musicians or burnouts. And there's a region of overlap where either is a possibility. They could both be musicians or burnouts. They could both be nerds. And that's actually sort of intuitive because when there's sort of this desire for conformity, that could generate multiple equilibria. And so that's what happens on the 45-degree line. And importantly, they interact when they share the same values. So why is that? Well, When they share the same values, they actually, they have positive esteem for one another, and so they find it pleasant to interact. So one of the predictions generally of the model is that people form into sort of cliques around their values, interaction groups around their values. And that's something that's sort of been well observed in many contexts. Sociologists call this value homophily. That's Robert Merton's term for this. So off of the 45-degree line, the person who is better at academics becomes the nerd, the person who is worse becomes a musician or a burnout, and then they don't interact. Because what happens there is that each thinks of themself as superior to the other and they look down on the other person. So they each disesteem each other and then they avoid interaction. So one thing that's That's interesting to do then with this picture is to look at comparative statics. So the dotted line is meant to be a comparative static exercise. We can think about changing the first player's academic ability. So the first thing I'll show you is what happens to player 2's academic achievement as his peer's ability changes. So you could think about this as moving a student from a worse to a better school.

Okay.

So on the left, right, we've got a student who's a pretty good student in a bad school. And so they're a nerd in a bad school where other students are burnouts. That's what's happening on the far left. And then if we move them to a slightly better school, so alpha 1 increases, what happens is that now they're a nerd in a school of other nerds. And now there's this desire to— well, you increase your academic effort because you want the esteem of your peers now. So you put in more effort. So this per— so we get an increasing achievement of player 2 here. But what happens if we move player 2 to a sufficiently good school? So now, if he's in a very good school, it's hard for him to have high self-esteem as a nerd. He compares himself to these other people. And so what he does instead is he switches his values and he becomes the burnout now. And now you can see his academic achievement plummets. Okay, so you get these interesting non-monotonicities and this accounts for a sort of puzzle in the peer effects literature. So the majority of peer effects studies have found positive Pure effects, but there's a significant minority of studies that have found negative pure effects. So that's this, you know, this second part, the right-hand part of this picture is this negative pure effect. So this accounts for why sometimes we see it one way and sometimes the other. So another thing to note along this dotted line, so one thing that's interesting to look at is player 1's self-esteem along that dotted line. So you might think that self-esteem is simply increasing in your ability, but in fact that's not what we find. And the reason for that is that people might sacrifice self-esteem for the sake of peer esteem. So that's what's happening in the middle, is that people choose to sacrifice self-esteem to be part of the group. And so this picture actually You know, you can think about this as capturing sort of a whole high school and findings about self-esteem in high school. So James Coleman, in a classic book called Adolescent Society that studies schools in northern Illinois, he looks at the self-esteem of the students and he asks who— he finds out who is in the quote-unquote leading crowd of the school. And so those people in the leading crowd, they have very high self-esteem. So in terms of this picture, they're the people on the far right, okay? He also finds that people who are quite distant from the leading crowd, so they're the people on the left in this picture, they also have relatively high self-esteem. And he finds that those people, they say they don't really want to be part of the leading crowd. And so that's indicative that they have different values, which is the case for these people on the left in this picture. So they have different values from the leading crowd. And in the middle, these people, these are the people who Coleman says are hangers-on to the leading crowd. And they have the lowest, he finds they have the lowest self-esteem because they're trying to fit in and not wholly successfully. Okay. So the paper captures a number of results about schools, but it's also applicable to a lot of contexts besides schools. So one context that I talk about in the paper is inner cities. So William Julius Wilson has talked about how deindustrialization in the late 1960s and early 1970s has led to a decline in inner cities and the emergence of of what he calls a kind of oppositional culture to form. And so one can think about that in terms of the model, that people are changing their values, forming an oppositional culture in order to protect self-esteem. So one can tell that story in terms of the model. So another related phenomenon is this idea that if you're a good student in an inner-city school, that you're derided as acting white. And that's something one can think about in terms of the model as well. So that's this sense of those people who have changed their values, adopted those oppositional values, they're now going to disesteem you as someone who's nerdy. So they're the burnouts in the model who look down on you as nerdy. So, that's one application. So, another interesting application, so there are a number of sociological studies that document what's called in this literature resistance within organizations, where there are people within, say, a firm who act up in all kinds of ways. That are significantly detrimental to the productivity of the firm. So one example of this is given by Robert Ramsey in a study of the Merchant Marines. So he talks about how crewmen on these Merchant Marine ships will do things like, people who wash dishes, rather than actually washing the dishes, they'll throw plates out of the portholes. and kind of smile about throwing these plates out of the portholes. Or they'll do things like, people charged with ironing the officers' shirts will take a malicious delight in burning the officers' shirts. So there's this sort of deep anger of these crew that he documents at the officers. And what's underlying this is that these people feel they're not being given the esteem that is due to them. And I think it's not just by the way that they are accorded low self-esteem, but also that they think they deserve more, that there's this difference. And so that's something that exists in the model. There's this notion of the esteem you accord yourself and the esteem accorded to you by others. And when there's a difference in value, there's gonna be a divergence there. And that can lead to— Anger, so I don't model that anger in the paper, but you can think about adding that to the model that that's gonna generate anger and some of this resistance behavior. So, okay, so this paper is all about sort of determination of belief, particularly these normative beliefs. So the second paper I wanna briefly touch on is with Richard Holden. It's called Movers and Shakers, and it's answering— it's talking about a different question, but it's also an important question about social interaction. So the question here is, are there economic returns to being socially connected, and what are the sources of such returns? So we normally focus on human capital and the economic returns to human capital, but the question is, is there a return to social connections, or one might call this network capital, and what are those returns? So, the key idea of this paper is that there are many economic projects that require coordinating parties to be successful and getting them to participate in projects, and that someone then who is socially connected can play a very important role in in that task of coordination and thereby generate rents. So I'm gonna give you an example of this. So this person is named William Zeckendorf. So he was the preeminent real estate developer in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. And so he was a very social character, so he was a real fixture on the New York social scene, and even owned a nightclub called the Monte Carlo, and he would sort of hold court there 2 or 3 nights a week and entertain friends and business associates. And so there were many major projects that he undertook. L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. would be one you might know. So Let me give you an example of one that I think particularly illustrates our point called Place Ville-Marie. So this was in Montreal. And so what's the story here? So the area that was developed was a kind of rail yard next to the central station in Montreal. And the Canadian National Railway, who own this rail yard, they've been trying to develop this site for something like 30 years. And Canadian developers had shied away because they felt this was too challenging to develop this site. And so what was the challenge of developing this site? Well, so there's a coordination problem here. So what was it? So you needed the participation of 2 groups to make this successful. So one is you needed to get a bunch of investors to invest in this project. It required a lot of capital, and you weren't likely to get all of this capital from one source. So you needed to get a bunch of investors to participate. So this big tower here that's pictured, which is the main piece of the development, cost $100 million to build, which I think in the 1950s was a lot of money. a reasonable amount of money. So that was one coordination problem. The other coordination problem was getting tenants into this building. So the main commercial district was on St. James Street, or business district was on St. James Street, and so you had to coordinate people on moving to this new area. And so initially Zeckendorf faced a freeze from people when he was trying to get them to participate in this project. So he went to many investors and many potential tenants and they all said no. But, you know, he kept persisting and because he was so socially connected, he was able to kind of shift beliefs. And so his first success was a sort of friend of a friend was the head of the Royal Bank of Canada. And he got him to agree to be the, the anchor tenant of the building. They gave them very good terms. They said they'd name the tower the Royal Bank Tower. And so that began to unlock this freeze. So the next big break was that MetLife agreed to give $50 million. So half of what was needed to build this tower. And that got them then a second big tenant, Aluminum Limited. And once they had these 3 people lined up, all kinds of people who had said, no, no, no, I won't have anything to do with you, all of a sudden reversed and decided they'd come in. So this is the key thing he was able to do, was to coordinate all these parties and earn a big return. And I think, you know, so one of the things to note is there's something self-fulfilling about being a mover and shaker, and this is something we model in the paper, that, you know, someone who is socially connected in this way is someone you want to be connected to. Someone who is able to get these big projects done, if you're an investor, that's someone you want to know. And so there's a kind of self-fulfilling aspect to this. There's an aspect of luck in being a mover and shaker, and the people who are movers and shakers, they may be very good at running projects, But they needn't be. You know, in fact, you know, you could have someone who builds a lousy building and they might even think that that's— that their clever decisions are what is the source of their return. They might think they're genius at what to do in terms of building this building, but in fact they might succeed in spite of their ideas rather than because of them.

Okay.

So I'll conclude by just pointing to some future directions of work. So one thing that I'm working on at the moment, some work in progress, concerns group identity. And so it takes the kind of framework that I was mentioning in the value formation paper and it applies it to thinking about other beliefs and how other beliefs form. And so here, you know, so in the values paper, your esteem derives purely from your individual achievements. But in point of fact, we take pride, for instance, in our nationality. You might take pride in being Scottish. You take pride maybe in the department, economics department you're in. So various groups that one's a part of matter and give us esteem. And And so this paper is sort of viewing identity, you know, who you identify with as a potential choice. And these considerations of peer esteem and self-esteem create similar tensions. So on the one hand, there's some desire to be in bigger groups because in a bigger group there are more people who are rah-rah about your group, and that gives you more peer esteem. Another effect though is that if, you know, suppose you were in a group that everyone was in. So there's a Gilbert and Sullivan line of, if everyone is someone, then no one is anybody, right? So one wants to have people who are not part of your group so that your group can form a story of how it's superior to other groups. And so this picture shows, you know, you can have a sort of non-monotonic relationship between group size and the utility of group members. And so this can explain things like the results of minimal group experiments that show that even in a rather simple lab setting where people are kind of homogeneous, that people will have this desire to form groups just based on sort of random assignments. So that's one project that sort of builds further in thinking about how beliefs form. And so another project that I'm working on with Paul Collier and Luis Reyos concerns narratives that exist within families. So there are all kinds of narratives in families. There are things like lineage narratives. You know, how much of my identity comes from mom and how much from dad? So you can think of the idea of patrilineage as more of my identity comes from dad than mom, and vice versa for matrilineal. So another narrative, and this relates very much to what Jean-Paul was talking about, we're calling the protector narrative. And sort of the idea of this is that under this narrative, the view is that people need protection of their sort of sexual purity, and particularly women. And one can think about how this sort of thing would lead to a whole pattern of behaviors, a sort of cloistering of women that might take a more extreme form like veiling, or a less extreme form like women becoming sort of housewives and staying at home and not working. So that's sort of one kind of behavior associated with this narrative. It would also lead to things like early age of marriage for women, and maybe a difference in age with sort of older men And younger women marrying because older men are better protectors and women feel they can't sort of be out of their— the house, out of their father's house and not be married. So there are a whole set of behaviors that kind of grow out of a narrative like that. And one can think about how these narratives change over time and how these change in narratives are predictive of change in family behaviors and dynamics. So I'll stop there. Thank you.

And we now have George Akerlof, who has fundamentally changed economics multiple times. The first time with the market for lemons, which we all knew. Then there were many contributions that embodied psychology and sociology and economics, like partial gift exchange, animal spirits, and so on. But extraordinarily, I think we're all agreed that his most fundamental contributions came after he won the Nobel Prize. And one of them is identity economics, which he developed with Rachel Cranton. And the other one concerns Fishing for Fools, which shows how people can be misled, either emotionally or through their cognitive biases, and that economies may therefore tend towards a fishing general equilibrium. And that, to my mind, is also a fundamental contribution that the profession has not fully understood or adopted yet. Aaron builds very much on identity economics, but extends it to norms and particularly narratives, and the floor is yours.

Thank you, Dennis. That's very nice.

Okay.

I'm not sure I can live up to all that. So let me try to place the last 2 talks. By Jean-Paul and by Robbie in the context of economics more generally. Can people hear?

Yeah.

Okay.

I'll try to place them in the context of new economic thinking. Current behavioral economics is based on economics and on psychology, but there's another emerging branch of economics that's based on sociology. Rather than on psychology. So probably most people here remember the can opener joke about economics. So just to remind you if you don't know, a physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. And a can of soup washes ashore, but they don't have a can opener. And the physicist says, it will open if we drop it from the top of a tree. And the chemist says, If we put the can in a fire, it will burst. And the economist says, as you all know, let's just assume a can opener. Now, for a very long time, I did not take the can opener joke seriously, but now I do. I sort of thought us economists, we try to make our assumptions realistic, blah, blah, blah. So let me explain why I do now and why sociology makes a What's the difference? All Economics 1 textbooks, they teach the derivation of demand curves in the following. Somebody like Barbara goes to the supermarket and she has a budget to buy her apples and oranges. And then she has this utility function which describes how happy she would be if she had capital A apples and capital O oranges. And she chooses the apples and oranges to maximize her utility subject to her budget constraint. Everybody here knows this. Now the textbook gives this as a model for how we should do all economics. Now perhaps surprisingly, this derivation actually fails to describe real life. So you look at financial data, personal financial data, it shows strongly that most people in real life find it difficult to meet a budget. They save less than they want to and they're broke at the end of the month. So where's the mistake in the model? The basic mistake is that our economic models rain in on people from 30,000 feet our assumptions regarding what they care about and then correspondingly how they behave. So people may be purposeful As economists always presume, that means we're maximizing something. But then the question is, how do people behave? And how people behave is determined by the stories, by how they think. Now, Robbie and Jean-Paul were talking about how they think. So a good way to picture how people think think and what determines how we behave is that every moment of our lives we're living out some story. The decisions that we make depend upon the stories that are our focus at the time we make those decisions. I think Robbie said something like that. That corresponds then to the core, to the core of both sociology and cultural anthropology. The core of those 2 fields is ethnographies. And what do ethnographies do? Ethnographies uncover those stories that people are telling themselves. So in order to make our economics right, we need to base motivation on those stories. We shouldn't just be assuming them, whatever these people are. We have to see That's right. So central to all stories are, first of all, the protagonists. Okay? To get that, you need to understand the protagonist and also the context in which they operate. So think about any New Yorker weekly fiction story. So how does it begin? So with rare exception, this is what you're going to see. The first paragraph will define who the central character is, that is the person's identity, and it will also describe the social context of the person. So we would say that that sets the scene. So that's what both— what Jean-Paul's and Robbie's 2 papers are doing. They place up front and central who The protagonists think they are. So in Jean-Paul's case, it concerns religion. In Robbie's case of norm formation, it concerns whether they are going to be a nerd or whether they're going to be a burnout. And then both of them, both Jean-Paul and Robbie, also include how other people, how other people will also view the protagonist's response. thoughts and behavior. So this is new economic thinking that's defined in the stories that people are telling about themselves and about others. And then corresponding to those stories, it also determines the actions that people take and others' responses to those actions. But then they will also include who will or who will not be in the respective social network.

Okay.

So the stories are then propagated within those social networks. So they've then told us, they've told us how to break away from the can opener joke. So they've shown us how to construct economic theory that includes the stories that people are telling themselves. That is, they make those stories and the reactions that people have to them They make them endogenous. So the question arises, does this make a difference? So, so what? So the rest of— does it make a difference to the economics? So the rest of my talk will then give 4 examples that will demonstrate the importance of stories.

Okay?

Each of these stories has been critical to economic and political outcomes. So I apologize to the young scholars who heard these stories earlier, but I'm going to go over them again. So what's my first story? Okay, so my first story is— okay, I guess we're—

the euro.

I see you didn't get some slides. So how did the Europeans get themselves into the euro? So there's a new book coming out by Ashok Moti, and its title is Euro Tragedy. So There was a story that the Europeans' desire for unity would allow them to easily overcome the problems of a fixed exchange rate across most of Europe. So Helmut Kohl had told a similar story. He told a similar story in Germany in the late 1980s, early 1990s regarding the currency union of East and West Germany at a 1-to-1 ratio. ratio between East marks and Deutschmarks. And then Kohl, having told this story to himself, became a leading supporter of the euro. The economic integration of East and— But the economic integration of East and West Germany had been difficult enough, but with the euro, no single language would ease migration as had occurred between the 2 Germanies, nor would they be the huge fiscal transfers from richer countries to poorer countries to ease problems as it— which had occurred during German unification. So economists' warnings that a single currency would obviate needed exchange rate adjustments were ignored. Instead, the benefits from the euro gained traction. So Modi tells how Now the myth, the myth of the benefits of the Euro escaped like a virus from official meetings. People, part of that story was simply magical thinking that the problems of a fixed exchange rate would be magically solved with the wave of a desire for unity magic wand. Okay? This story itself has played a crucial role in the economic problems of Europe today. So now I'm going to give you another example in which a story made a huge difference. Okay? So it's from a paper by Dennis Snower and myself entitled Bread and Bullets. So it begins with a joke from communist Russia.

Okay?

So a man walks into a grocery store with a notebook. Do you have sausage?

No.

Um, nope. He makes a note. Bread? Nope. He makes another note. 20 years ago, they would have shot you for making notes like that, says a woman waiting in line. No bullets either, he writes. So the joke illustrates the Soviet system at every scale. So our article demonstrates the role of the Bolshevik story under the communists. According to that story, the Bolshevik plan for force-fed industrialization would create a new paradise on earth. So that story legitimated— this is what it legitimated— it legitimated extreme cruelty against anyone accused of resisting the plan. So think about the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. Yet, It was yet worse. So ruthless men like Stalin falsely accused their opponents of resistance to the plan. And this is the type of thing that actually you saw throughout the communist world. I mean, they used this Bolshevik-Leninist story and then they used this in the same way. So then they used— these people used the sanctions legitimated by the Bolshevik story to eliminate Okay, so let's turn to another story. So this is supposed to be showing that stories matter. This should be part of our economics. This time, I hate to tell you, we economists did not do so well. So according to standard economic theory, in the absence of externalities, the equilibrium of a free market competitive economy will be Pareto optimal. In the 1990s, financial derivatives of many different complicated types were introduced and then they grew wildly. But economists offered few warnings. Instead, instead they were most prominently telling the story that the new securities would be benign, the new securities would help people hedge against risk. Based on this reasoning, and you can read it, There's a speech. The US Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 greatly restricted the regulation of financial derivatives. The story behind this deregulation failed to see that financial markets serve 2 functions. They match savers with investors and that's probably a good thing. That's good. But financial markets are also a gambling casino And thus also a way to bilk the unwary, and that's bad. So the spread of these derivatives has greatly increased the fragility of financial markets. The securities can be designed to dupe people into taking risks they had never intended. And then those people go bust and cause financial crashes. So the markets for derivatives have been a playing field to fish people for food. Dennis referred to that, which resulted in the worldwide financial crash of 2008. Okay, so let me give you another story. Okay, so another story about global warming. The first inconvenient truth about global warming is the physical problem of global warming itself. That's the story that the public tells.

But then—

Oh, no. But then there's a second inconvenient truth. That second inconvenient truth is the story that the public is telling itself. At the extreme, that story says that it's a hoax. Yet more prevalent, at least from the surveys, is failure to perceive the urgency of acting against global warming. And so what we see is year after year after Year after year slips by and the threat gets ever worse. Okay? All right. So now I'm going to give you an indication of the ubiquity of stories. So these stories that people are telling themselves are simply everywhere. So I'm going to give you an indication of the ubiquity of stories in any capitalist economy. So You see it on any commercial street in any town. You see this in Edinburgh and almost anywhere. The shop windows are there, there to induce you to tell yourself a story that gets you to come in and buy, right? So in the United States, in the old days, on shopping streets in suburban areas, There used to be pet stores that placed puppies in the window. And there was an old song which the older of us will probably remember. So Patti Page, the singer, is coming down the street, okay? And she sees such a puppy and she sings. Now, I hope you don't mind if I sing, okay? You have to have me sing. So how much is that puppy? Doggy in the window. I do— the one with the waggly tail. How much is that doggy in the window?

Arf, arf!

I do hope that doggy's for sale. So some people know that first verse, but I think Almost nobody knows what comes next. So let me give you what comes next. So let's see if we can get it. So I must take a trip to California and leave my poor sweetheart alone. If he has a dog, he won't be lonesome, and the doggie will have a good home. So I don't know if it's intentional. I think it is. But this song has a beautiful ambiguity. On the one hand, the girl's purchase may be marvelously considerate. Her relationship with her boyfriend may be perfect, and every time the doggy wags its tail, the boyfriend will be reminded of their beautiful romance. Okay, that's one thing. On the other hand, the relationship may be a disaster. The girl may be totally scatterbrained, and every time the doggy needs to be walked, the boyfriend will have to take care of it. And he will also be reminded of the failed relationship. So life in a capitalist economy is therefore not just an opportunity to get what you want. It's about the creation and spread of stories, these stories that Motivate us. That influence you to come in and buy. So those stories are to get you to buy irrespective of whether the purchase is good for you or not. So what is the general lesson? So now let me give you a general lesson. And I think this is the general lesson that was coming from Jean-Paul and was coming from Robbie. These stories are important. And they are something that you can actually model. We can do what economists do with them and we ought to, and not to do so is wrong. Okay, so let's see what I said. The world's problems are not just the fundamental physical problems like global warming itself. The world's problems also include the stories, the stories that people tell themselves that get us into physical problems. And they also include— What's the difference between the physical problems and the stories? the stories that keep us from dealing with those problems effectively when they arise. And so as illustrations, we saw, I guess, 5 of them: the euro, communists, financial derivatives, global warming, and then we saw the donkey. Okay, so let's go back to Jean-Paul and Robbie. So, but then the presentations by Jean-Paul and Robbie have given us examples regarding how our economics can be opened up to new questions. So what and why and where do those stories come from? And what are their consequences? So the major job of leaders and politicians is telling the stories that get people to make the right decisions. That's what those people should be doing. So that storytelling gets people to understand the world on the one hand, Robbie referred to that, but also to mutually cooperate and to overcome their differences. And that's what happens if we're successful. So hopefully this is opening up an important new area for new economic things. So thanks.

Before—

we will overrun by a about 5 minutes, but before we start taking questions from the floor, I'd like to make an attempt at pulling all of this together. We talked about this shortly before we came into this room, and we have, or we are developing slowly, a narrative on the narrative of economics. There are 3 basic functions that narratives seem to fulfill, at least that's what I think at the moment. One is that narratives help us make sense of our physical and social world. We need to have mental models of what goes on that enables us to focus on certain things and ignore everything else, and so narratives help us do that and focus on certain causal relations within the world that help us predict events. That's one role of narratives. Second role of narratives is that they motivate us and provide a normative structure for what we do. That came out very strongly in the 2 papers. Jean-Paul? In fact, all 3, and norms and values play a very large role in this. And thirdly, narratives structure our social space. They generate social structures, provide legitimate hierarchies within which we can find our place in society. They assign social roles to us, and thereby also assign power relationships among us, and that too figured very strongly in these stories. So by doing all of this, narratives enable us to perform the trick that makes us evolutionarily superior to other animals. We are the only animal that can cooperate in very large numbers flexibly. Ants can cooperate in larger numbers, but they lack flexibility. Chimps, great apes, can cooperate flexibly, but only in small numbers because they need to know one another. We have the instrument of narratives that gives us a sense of an imagined order, and that imagined order enables strangers to cooperate because everyone who's part of this imagined order knows their place within it, and that permits us to coordinate our activities to an extraordinary degree. Now narratives, of course, are created and they can also in While they are going full swing, we find it difficult to imagine their implosion, but the fall of communism, for example, is an example of an implosion of a narrative that seemed virtually immortal at the time. Now, the question that I've asked myself that plagues me is why is this so difficult to understand for economists, and why is there so much resistance against it? And I'd just like to give you my hunch, which is ever since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, we have adopted this instrumental approach to reality where we have a, an objective, a disengaged objectivity towards the world. The individual observes the world, gathers data from it, and that has released a huge amount of scientific discovery, innovation. And for the first time in history over the past 350 years, enabled us to grow from year to year, at least vast swathes of society, and that has been done with a view to solving human problems. And now the big question that we have to ask ourselves is, how did humanity decide that that was the path to follow? And in order to do that, humanity had to convince itself that it was superior to other animals. And the way it did that initially is by saying, oh, we have an eternal soul. And then when people's belief in souls started to implode, they said it was consciousness. And then after that came self-consciousness, which animals may not have. Now, you may imagine that these impassioned speakers who totally forget themselves when they talk about their new discoveries, they're not being self-conscious at all. Does that put them to the level of animals? Possibly not. But in any case, we have created a narrative that makes us superior, and that narrative has achieved a state of affairs where nowadays 90% of all large animals are domesticated, most of them undergoing huge amount of suffering. Now, each— and their narrative is based on the fact that each individual has enormous worth. And what we've been talking about here is that the view of an individual as someone Yes. Who is— cannot be— has temporal stability and is an entity that survives intact, like the eternal soul does. Individual means something that cannot be divided, an indivisible essence. That is what is being disputed here. If the triumph of humanity results from mass cooperation that depends on narratives and social forces that shape our behavior, then the individual is not necessarily a temporally stable identity. And that undermines the basic idea that has propelled us since the Enlightenment. I think that is why we're and that's why there's so much resistance to this thinking. But in any case, I will stop and take questions. Yes, please.

Thanks very much.

I think this question is probably best directed at Robbie because the specific models you showed I think illustrate better what I'm both getting to. Just as it's obvious— just as, I mean, you're drawing good critical attention So you're saying we don't want to swing to the error of Robinson Crusoe economics where we start with a fixed utility function and then we socialize it by just adding Friday and then some more people. On the other hand, we don't want to swing to the other mistake of holding socially given narratives as fixed either, right?

Yeah.

And so what elements seem to be missing from the models? I mean, let's just take the the adolescent model. Something that's been emphasized by Burton Martins, and I put it in some models way back a number of years, is once an individual chooses a group, they need to add value to it, right? They're under pressure to add value to the group, partly by differentiating themselves. So they need a story, not a story of themselves, right? Not just model the group But figure out how to tell a new story that is the story of themselves that's compatible with the group story and crucially differentiated from the story of the outgroup so that they can add more value to the ingroup than other members of the ingroup, right? Because they've got competition amongst those internal stories. And I think that's the way to tell the story of the individual, right? So the individual is a dynamic thing that arises from the efforts to differentiate. Inside the group.

Very good. So I think you bring up a lot of good points. I think the sort of key theme I'm taking from what you said is that somehow one in fact has to think— when one's thinking about people as part of groups and having group identities, we can't lose sight of the fact that people continue to have individual identities. So people are deriving part of their esteem from the group, but they're also deriving esteem from individual achievements. And then there's a question of whether you're accepted as part of the group. You might like to be part of a group. Are you accepted? So this paper I was sort of, you know, I only touched on briefly. There is an element of that. You might be excluded from a group and you might have to, you know, perform as an individual in order to be accepted as part of a group. So I think that's very much part of it. And that also speaks to some things Jean-Paul was talking about in the clubs context. So I take your points. I think they're great.

In order to have a number of questions, I will ask you to keep them very short. So if we can have short questions and answers. Yes, please.

Thank you very much.

So, I mean, I thought it was really interesting. One of the things I want to push you on is that I thought maybe you're still presenting identities as from what Dennis said, identity as more stable and coherent is really warranted, right? So Robert, you talked about identity as a package of beliefs, but maybe it's just a set of Lego pieces that kind of gets recombined all of the time in various ways, some of which we are not aware. So my questions are, first, sort of, what's the role of the unconscious in how you think about identity and narratives? And do you think we can really abstract away from very specific situational contexts Decision context in how we make decisions in general. Great.

You want me to take it?

Anybody or all.

I think you're probably thinking about this more than I am.

Sure. I mean, so, I mean, one thing I would say, I like everything you said, is that, you know, I think there are high and low frequencies to these things. So there might be something you believe for a moment. in one context, and then in another context, you stop believing it. You might believe the exact opposite of that. There are some things that are very stable. So I think identities have both of these dimensions to it, and there's a malleability to it, and there can be inconsistencies in belief as contexts change. So I think that that's very important.

Yeah.

Let me just add one line to that. The standard economic model that everybody's consistent, that is an extremely singular assumption. The fact is that the more— this gives rise to just a whole very interesting topology where people are— you're like Patti Page going down the street and suddenly you think of this puppy. Then of course you bring the puppy back home and it's a terrible puppy. So people are changing as they go along, and that's one of the things that stories opens up.

So one of the things that's been raised is the dynamic nature of these identities, right, in both questions. And you could have identities having different meanings, different— what it means to be a man or a woman, for example, has changed over time. And that conditions your behavior. For example, if being an economist means having predominantly male traits, then that is a kind of tax on participation for women. And that can change over time with the representation of women. So I've got a recent— my current work is on identity-based inequality and this kind of thing. So the more representation, the less the tax there is on women participating, and then the higher the representation and so forth. But that does not necessarily— and you can model this using elaborating what we've kind of said here. That doesn't mean you're going to get equal participation in the end. You could get stuck in very unequal states as a result of this feedback, even for ex ante identical populations. And then you can look at how this— all the amplifier— the multiplier effects of identity in this dynamic process. So this can all be done in a dynamic way.

Since we've overshot, I will take one more question and then the rest will be done in the break. If we can have you, yes, please. No, no, she was—

Building on the can opener joke, I'm wondering if I could pick at some of the assumptions or tenets you use for your models or theories. For example, I'm wondering whether you've built on studies of discussions with women and men Muslim communities to see why they were wearing the veil. And Robert, I'm wondering whether— like, you can imagine an alternate explanation for this esteem, self-esteem, right? So it could be that different groups value differentiation, or others might value conformity more. You can also imagine another situation in which, for example, people choose as a metric for their own self-esteem, something they're very good at, and then the Kruger-Dunning effect comes into play and they kind of overestimate their own ability at that thing, and then they have maybe an expectation as to how well they might do at that, and they might allow themselves to acquire positive self-esteem from a different process other than differentiating themselves from the group. So I'm just wondering how you came at that particular view. And the veiling question as well.

So in the paper—

So could you summarize the statement?

Okay, so Robbie would address part of it, but let me address— so does this kind of model of it— when we do these models, are we doing it completely in isolation from ethnographic evidence, for example, on why women veil? Survey evidence, interview evidence with women? And no, I mean, a large part of the references in the paper are about, from ethnographic work. But in some sense, we go beyond this because that's about the individual motivation. And when we're interested in the social interactions, we have to understand how these individual motivations, these individual decisions aggregate into social norms. And that's the virtue of doing a model. And then you get things like when you have the intergenerational transmission of preferences that you can't really get out of the individual interviews or out of a verbal argument.

Okay.

That's the idea.

Okay, so I'll address one piece of what you said, which is, you know, could we as a group respect each other's diversity and kind of have a preference for diversity? And I think the answer is yes. So, I mean, I think what we're trying to do is we're given— this is a very complex world that gets opened up here, so I think we're trying to draw out a piece of it that's relatively simple that we can sort of begin to think about. But could we have our individual differences and value our individual differences? I think, in fact, one could. That's something that is possible, and we do see— I think that's actually a rather American kind of thing to do, is we sort of form groups where we respect our individuality. So I think what you said is very right.

Thank you.

Good. I'll have to bring this to a close, but I do encourage those who'd like to ask questions to come forward and use the break. Thank you so much for coming, and— Thank you.