Introduction to PPE: Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation

This interdisciplinary course provides an overview of how markets work, and under what conditions they create wealth and prosperity. Along the way, we’ll think about the role of political institutions in structuring market exchange and allocating resources. The goal of the class is to give students a sense of how some fundamental principles in ethics, economics, and political science fit together. In addition to the usual applications of PPE concepts to debates over drug laws, kidney markets, etc, this summer we’ll end by focusing on a question of increasing interest: how should we regulate reproductive technologies that have the power to alter future people? This question has both moral and economic dimensions, since black markets for reproductive technologies are likely to flourish even if we can manage to regulate them in reasonable ways.