The adopted son of two Florida chiropractors, Cornell economist Robert H. Frank taught his first college course before graduating from Georgia Tech in 1966. A Cornell professor and influential teacher of economics since 1972, Frank retired from Cornell on July 1, 2020, after more than a half-century of teaching.
A pioneer and champion of behavioral economics, Frank has written and spoken extensively in his many books, essays, and media interviews about moral sentiments, positional goods, expenditure cascades, the ever-widening income gap, the role of luck in our lives, and, most recently, the power of behavioral contagion.
Here, in his last Cornell lecture, Frank will describe how his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal shaped many of the ideas he later developed in his books and why those ideas support a surprisingly optimistic assessment of our ability to parry threats posed by climate change, inequality, and future pandemics.
