University of Maryland economics professor Thomas Schelling, whose research interests include nuclear weapons policy and arms control, climate change, drugs policy and smoking, will speak at Cornell College as the Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar.
Schelling will speak on “Smoking, Drugs, and Gambling: Rational Choice?” at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 1, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons; and on “Global Warming and Climate Change: How Seriously Should We Take It?” at 11:10 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 2, in Room 100 of West Science Center. Admission is free to both.
Schelling is Distinguished University Professor in the department of economics and the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park. From 1948 to 1953 he worked in Europe and Washington with the Marshall Plan and other programs. He spent five years at Yale University, then from 1958 to 1990 taught in the department of economics and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he is professor of economics emeritus. One of his students at Harvard was Les Garner, current president of Cornell.
Schelling was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, and received the academy’s award for “behavioral research relevant to the prevention of nuclear war.”
His books include “The Strategy of Conflict,” selected as one of the “100 most influential in the West since 1945″; “National Income Behavior”; “International Economics”; “Strategy and Arms Control”; “Arms and Influence”; “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”; “Thinking Through the Energy Problem”; and “Choice and Consequence.”
Among more than 3,600 U.S. colleges and universities, Cornell is one of only 255 with an active chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most select honorary society in the United States.