I have been fortunate to have spent two years at the Center. For reasons of space, I write only about the second. Had the closet in my office been large enough, I would have stayed for a third year, but it was too small for me to secret myself within. I know: I tried.
The best part of my year was the companionship, particularly with Margaret Levi, Barry Weingast, Avner Greif, and Jean-Laurant Rosenthal, my colleagues working on the “Analytic Narratives Project.” We all loved history, and some of us in fact knew some; we all did political economy; and each of us was interested in using game theory as an empirical method. Beyond that, we agreed on little, so things were …. stimulating.
The week went like this: Each day, we – well almost all of us — arrived early to work on “our own” projects: mine was a study of the international coffee industry. Then – after Barry Weingast woke up – we gathered to work on our joint project: a book that did economic history using the reasoning that flows from non-cooperative games. After an exhilarating convergence or a depressing recognition of the differences between us, we then returned to our offices. But one day a week, I would venture over to Avner’s instead.
Just before coming to CASB, I had been working in Uganda. I was deeply shaken by what I had seen there. In Avner, I found a colleague who, while with the IDF in Lebanon, had also seen children carrying AK-47s. We both sensed that we had touched the political main spring – violence — and that if we could understand the logic that governed it, we could make a major contribution. We did. And now, many years later, I continue to write up the implications of the model that we devised as we thought about the political foundations of development.
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