Timur Kuran

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Timur Kuran
Born	1954 (age 66–67) New York City, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American, Turkish
Institution	Duke University
Field	Political economy Economic history
Alma mater	Princeton University (B.A.) Stanford University (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	Kenneth Arrow
Contributions	Preference falsification

Timur Kuran is a Turkish American economist, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor in Islamic Studies at Duke University. His work spans economics, political science, history, and legal studies.^[1]

Early life and education[]

Kuran was born in New York City in 1954, where his parents were graduate students at Yale University. They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara (where his father taught at the Middle East Technical University). The family moved to Istanbul while Kuran was a teenager, and, for a decade, he lived just off the campus of Boğaziçi University, where his father was president and professor of Islamic architectural history.

Kuran obtained his secondary education in Turkey, graduating from Robert College in Istanbul in 1973. He then studied economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977. He went on to Stanford University where he obtained a doctorate in economics, supervised by Nobel laureate Professor Kenneth Arrow.^[2]

Career[]

From 1990 to 2008 Kuran served as editor of an interdisciplinary book series published by the University of Michigan Press. This series was re-established at Cambridge University Press in 2009 under the title Cambridge Studies in Economics, Cognition and Society. He has served, or currently serves, on the editorial or advisory boards of numerous scholarly journals. He 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. From 2005 to 2007, he was Director of USC's Institute for Economic Research on Civilizations, which he founded. In 1989–90 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in 1996–97 he held the John Olin visiting professorship at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; and in 2004–05 he was visiting professor of economics at Stanford University.^[3] From 2008 to 2014 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association.^[4]

Research[]

Private Truths, Public Lies[]

In 1995, Kuran published “Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification”, where he coined the term and developed the concept of preference falsification. This is the idea that people will publicly state they believe one thing, while privately believing another, or even its opposite, in order to appear socially acceptable to others. Preference falsification is often prevalent in totalitarian regimes, or where the negative social consequences of articulating a contrary opinion are severe.

The Long Divergence[]

In 2011, Kuran published "The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East" summarizing his arguments on the institutional roots of the Middle East's economic stagnation.

Reviews include: "The Crescent and the Company," by Schumpeter in the Economist;^[5] "Is Islam the Problem?" by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times;^[6] "The Long Divergence," by Ziauddin Sardar in the Independent;^[7] "Prophet Motive," by John Cassidy in the New Yorker;^[8] "Selling Out the Koran," by Chris Berg in the National Times of Australia;^[9] "Long Divergence," by L. Carl Brown in Foreign Affairs;^[10] "What Made the Middle East Fall Behind the West?," by Şahin Alpay in Today's Zaman;^[11] Kai Ryssdal's radio interview on Marketplace: "Historical Roots of Middle Eastern Uprisings."^[12] An essay summarizing key arguments: "Legal Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East", (Feb–Mar 2011): 10–11.^[13] Peter Passell provides a review and long excerpt in the Milken Institute Review, 13 (2011): 59–76.^[14]

References[]

External links[]

• Prof. Kuran's Profile at Duke