UCLA International Institute

Emma Rothschild is director of the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University. Recent publications include Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), "Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the 18th Century Provinces" (Modern Intellectual History, 2004) and “Real, Pretended or Imaginary Dangers” (The New York Review of Books, 2004). She is working on two new projects, about the French colonies in the 1760s and about the East India Company and the American Revolution.

Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world’s most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US because of the US technological superiority. The literature on international factor flows rarely links these two phenomena, instead considering one-at-a-time analyses that stress issues of relative factor abundance. This is unfortunate, since the welfare calculations differ markedly. In a simple Ricardian framework, a country that experiences immigration of factors motivated by technological differences always loses from this migration relative to a free trade baseline, while the other country gains. We provide simple calculations suggesting that the magnitude of the losses for US natives may be quite large – between $52 and $106 billion dollars per year or 0.5 to 1.0 percent of GDP.

This is a concise statement of ten different problems for which a behavioural science should (and may soon be able to) provide coherent, empirically grounded explanations. These problems were chosen for their social importance as well as their theoretical interest, as demonstrations of the need to integrate psychological, economic and evolutionary factors in explanatory models. For each question, I mention pointers to incipent or possible research programmes. The questions are the following: What are the natural limits to family arrangements? Do we have an intuitive understanding of large societies? Why are despised social categories essentialised? Why gender differences in politics? What logic drives ethnic violence? How are moral concepts acquired? What drives people's economic intuitions? Are there cultural differences in low-level cognition? What explains individual religious attitudes? Why religious fundamentalism and extremism? The general aim is to propose a new approach to issues of human culture, not through an abstract discussion of paradigms and traditions, but through specific examples of possible empirical research.

Since the 1990s, stories have spread through Mexico of the ‘coyote saint’ helping migrants cross the U.S. border illegally. In one version, three migrants lost in the desert are saved by a man who offers them a ride in his pickup truck. When the migrants later visit his home village of Santa Ana in the state of Jalisco to thank him, they see his photograph and realize their rescuer was Saint Toribio Romo, who died in 1928. More than 5000 pilgrims now clog the village on a typical weekend.

It is common knowledge that the relationship between Africa and the West has been marked on the one hand, by exploitation and on the other by resistance to this. Africa’s resistance to the West has, in many instances muted into resentment that has in turn created some forms of moral delusions, and cultural relativisms. There is a parallel between African-American resentment of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture and African resentment of European culture. To some degree, the one has influenced the other, and this has had tremendous effects on Africa’s perception of culture as homogenous whole.

One of the most significant developments of the second half of the 20th century has been the spread of liberal economic and political ideas, institutions, and policies across a large part of the globe.