BFI’s Becker Brown Bag series invites prominent speakers to engage UChicago undergraduate and graduate students in discussions on economics. The talks highlight the practical use of economics for answering real-world questions pertinent to businesses and policy makers.
Booth Professor Yueran Ma explored connections between communism and The Chicago School of Economics, including their shared interest in how technology shapes the way production is organized. Ma’s research examines long-term trends in production concentration, and her talk reviews how the prominence of large enterprises influenced different viewpoints from central planning (communism) to free market capitalism (The Chicago School). Through this presentation, she explained the overlaps between these two traditions along the paths of their development, the interactions between them that gave rise to influential concepts in modern economics, and open questions in today’s world that connect to these dialogues.