Harvard professors juggle myriad activities. When they are not in class or at their office hours, they are often conducting groundbreaking research in their academic fields. This year yielded a range of significant and eclectic findings—some professors studied hate with economics and medieval history with science, while others found new ways to analyze antimatter and manipulate light.

LOVING HATE

Scholars have often claimed that hatred defies comprehension, but 37-year-old Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser says the opposite. According to Glaeser, who was recently appointed co-director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Kennedy School, the market for hate is open to economic analysis.

Glaeser’s specialty is studying cities, but his interests are no means constrained to their boundaries and include obesity, city planning, transportation and religion.

Falling under a subfield of economics called behavioral economics, his work draws heavily on psychology and incorporates threads of various other disciplines including history and political science.

David M. Cutler, dean of the social sciences and professor of economics, praised Glaeser’s “provocative” work for its incorporation of many different disciplines and says that it “creates steam” for this reason.

“Ec 10 teaches that people have preferences...behavioral economics is about trying to understand where those preferences come from,” Cutler says. “Ed’s stuff...goes a step beyond and tries to understand why leaders do what they do.”

In a paper entitled “The Political Economy of Hatred,” which will be submitted to a journal this year, Glaeser explores the economics of hatred, putting forward several economic models to describe historical examples of hatred.

“Ed shows how economics can be used very constructively to think about racial and ethnic hatred not as some historical given, but as a phenomenon instigated by political entrepreneurs who used hatred for their own ends,” says Andrei Shleifer ’82, the Jones professor of economics. “It’s some of the most innovative research in economics done in a long time.”

Glaeser argues that hatred is a simple product of supply and demand.

The supply of hatred, or the willingness of political entrepreneurs to spread lies about minority groups, is governed by the wealth of the party who benefits from hatred, the electoral power of the hated party and the improvement of communications, he suggests.

Whereas, the demand, or the willingness of people to accept these lies (or truths, depending on the case), is a product of the costs and private benefits of information about the minority group.

“The central message of this paper is that hatred is particularly likely to spread against groups that are politically relevant and socially isolated,” Glaeser writes in a draft of the paper.

“[This] model helps us understand...why anti-American hatred in the Middle East has become so important,” he says. “The most important policy decision in Middle Eastern countries is how they’re going to treat the U.S.—we’re enormously salient and policy relevant.”

However, the U.S. is socially absent from the Middle East, he said. Therefore, average people in the Middle East have no contact with Americans and no incentive to understand the truth, he says.