Monday, October 10, 2005

Segregation

Congrats to Aumann and Schelling for receiving this year's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2005, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

While certainly aware of both of their work - Aumann's stuff filters into any graduate student's microeconomics training and Schelling tends to show up in a variety of places - the closest tie to what I did in my former life was Schelling's work on segregation. His basic insight, which has much broader implications than the narrow context of housing segregation which was the focus, is that even very mild preferences for living with one's "own kind," however defined, will tend to result in stark segregation by type.


More info from Sawicky and Cowen here and here.