Timur Kuran

Timur Kuran is a Turkish-American economist and political scientist, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University.

His work spans economics, political science, history, and law.

Although the Middle East’s economic institutions never froze, in certain areas central to economic modernization changes were minimal until the 1800s, at least in relation to structural transformations in the West.

The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East is Kuran’s broadest account of this thesis.

There, he suggests that several elements of Islamic law helped to turn the Middle East into an economic laggard.

Because of its egalitarian character, the Islamic law of inheritance inhibited capital accumulation, and it curtailed needs for organizational innovations to scale up the pooling of capital and labor.

Kuran was born in 1954 in New York City, where his parents were graduate students at Yale University.

They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father, Aptullah Kuran, taught at Middle East Technical University.

The family moved to Istanbul in 1969, when the senior Kuran joined the faculty of Robert College, whose higher education side became Boğaziçi University in 1971.

Kuran obtained his secondary education in Istanbul, graduating from Robert College in 1973.

He went on to study economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977.

He obtained his doctorate at Stanford University, under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow.

Kuran 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.

Kuran coined the term preference falsification in a 1987 article to describe the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures.

It involves tailoring one's expressed preferences to what appears socially acceptable or politically advantageous.

His subsequent works argue that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and that it can have huge social, political, and economic consequences.

The effects hinge on interdependencies between the personal preferences that individuals choose to express publicly.

A broad statement of his argument is in Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.

Kuran’s visiting positions include: Institute for Advanced Study (1989–90), Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; (1996-1997), Economics Department, Stanford University (2004-2005), Law School, Yale University (2020).

Kuran was the founding editor of the University of Michigan Press book series “Economics, Cognition, and Society” (1989-2006).

An April 1989 article by Kuran, “Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution”, presented the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), and the Iranian Revolution (1979) as examples of events that stunned the world; and it explained how preference falsification, combined with interdependencies among publicly expressed preferences, keeps people from anticipating political earthquakes that are easily explained in retrospect.

After the East European Revolutions of late 1989, Kuran explained why seasoned experts of the Communist Bloc were caught off guard in “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989”.

These papers and Private Truths, Public Lies suggest that political revolutions and big shifts in public opinion will surprise the world repeatedly, because of people’s readiness, under perceived social pressures, to conceal their political dispositions.

Kuran has used his theory to shed light on the persistence of East European communism despite its inefficiencies, why India’s caste system has remained a powerful institution for millennia, transformations of American race relations, the aggravation of ethnic conflicts through a self-reinforcing process whereby ethnic symbols gain salience and practical significance, (with Cass Sunstein) the eruption of mass hysteria over minor risks, and American polarization.

In the mid-1990s, Kuran started exploring the drivers of the Middle East’s economic trajectory from the birth of Islam to the present.

His focus has been on the roles of Islamic law (Sharia) in shaping economic opportunities.

During Islam’s early centuries, Kuran observes, the economic content of Islamic law was well-suited to global economic conditions.

As such, the Middle East was an economically advanced region.

Subsequently, it failed to match the institutional transformation through which Western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate production, and conduct trade.

This 1995 book explains how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

He moved to Duke University in 2007, as Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies and with a joint appointment in the departments of Economics and Political Science.

From 2008 to 2014 Kuran served on the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association.

Since 2009, he been co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series “Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society,” which he co-founded with Peter Boettke.

He is a founding member of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), which he has directed since its establishment in 2011.

He has co-edited the Journal of Comparative Economics since 2017.

Kuran is a promoter of freedom of expression, within and outside academia.

In 2021, he became a co-founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA).

In 2022, he joined the Advisory Council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Four themes stand out in Timur Kuran’s works: preference falsification, the roles of Islamic institutions in the economic performance of the Middle East, the economic agenda of contemporary Islamism, and the political legacies of Islamic institutions in the Middle East.

The last three themes benefit from his passion for collecting Ottoman and Turkish documents.