Understanding Society

In 2011 James Scott gave a pair of Tanner Lectures at Harvard. He had chosen a topic for which he felt he had a fairly good understandin...

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on sma...

Image: Shanxi countryside In 1978 China's government initiated a major change in the agricultural economy. It began a rapid transi...

I've just spent an interesting several days in Wuhan at a conference on China's rural transformation. It was a genuinely producti...

We don't get a lot of exposure to social science and policy research from Vietnam, so it was very interesting for me recently to r...

For a billion or so of us on planet earth, we are immersed in a sea of ever-changing technology. How does technology shape us? And how do we...

The study of economic history reveals a number of different patterns when it comes to agricultural production and the standard of living o...

James Scott is one of the really exceptional social scientists of his generation.  His contributions to peasant studies have been transfor...

What theories and values ought to underlie our best thinking about global economic development?  Along with Amartya Sen ( Development as F...