Career
Professor Kuran has written extensively on the evolution of preferences and institutions, with contributions to the study of hidden preferences, the unpredictability of social revolutions, the dynamics of ethnic conflict, perceptions of discrimination, and the evolution of morality. His best known theoretical work is Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press), which deals with the repercussions of being dishonest about what one knows and wants. Since its original publication in 1995, this book has appeared also in German, Swedish, Turkish, and Chinese.
Kuran has also written on Islam and the Middle East, with an initial focus on contemporary attempts to restructure economies according to Islamic teachings. Several of his essays on this topic are included in Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press), which has been translated into Turkish and Arabic. Since the mid-1990s he has turned his attention to the conundrum of why the Middle East, which once had a high standard of living by global standards, subsequently fell behind in various realms, including economic production, organizational capability, technological creativity, democratization, and military strength.
His thesis is that the economic and educational institutions of Islam, though well-suited to the era in which they emerged, were poorly suited to a dynamic industrial economy. These institutions fostered social equilibria that reduced the likelihood of modern capitalism emerging from within Islamic civilization. His recent articles have identified obstacles involving inheritance practices, contract law, procedures of the courts, the absence of corporations, the financial system, and the delivery of social services.
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. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association.
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