Fowler Law Professor Bart Wilson Publishes “Humankind in Civilization’s Extended Order: A Tragedy, The First Part”
August 16, 2016
Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law Professor Bart Wilson’s article “Humankind in Civilization’s Extended Order: A Tragedy, The First Part” was recently published in Volume 23 of Supreme Court Economic Review.
From the abstract:
This article is a short, scientific story of the labyrinthian human career, of humankind’s place in the natural order of the world, and of the evolution of moral rules and rule following that make the extended order of civilization possible. Drawing upon work in anthropology, biology, and linguistics, the article weaves a science-based narrative of how Homo sapiens came to be the only primate to convert enemy aliens into trading friends. It is a Goethean story of the human condition that postulates the common origins of and modern tension between Pleistocene and Anthropocene morality. It is also a Hayekian story of human universals and the uniqueness of our species that explicates some necessary but not sufficient conditions for our prosperity.
Dr. Bart Wilson has joint appointments with the Fowler School of Law and the Argyros School of Business and Economics. His broad fields of specialty are industrial organization and experimental economics. He is currently pursuing research on the foundations of exchange and specialization and the origins of property right systems in laboratory economies. His other research programs apply the experimental method to topics in gasoline markets, e-commerce, electric power deregulation, and antitrust. Dr. Wilson is part of a team, led by Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, that runs the Economic Science Institute at Chapman.
The National Science Foundation, the Federal Trade Commission, and the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics have supported his research. Dr. Wilson extensively uses experimental economics in teaching undergraduate and graduate classes. He also teaches in the law school, including a seminar on “Spontanoeus Order and the Law” co-taught by Dr. Vernon Smith.
Prior to joining the faculty at Chapman University, Dr. Wilson had an appointment at George Mason University in the Department of Economics, with affiliations in the Schools of Law and Management. He was also a Research Scientist at the Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Before that, he spent a year in Washington D.C. as an Economist in the Division of Economic Policy Analysis and the Antitrust Division of the Federal Trade Commission. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Arizona in 1997.