Avner Offer

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Avner Offer is an Economic historian and distinguished academic who currently holds the Chichele Professorship in Economic history at the University of Oxford, England. He is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and of the British Academy. He specializes in international political economy, law, the First World War and land tenure. Over the past decade Professor Offer's main interest has been in post-war economic growth, particularly in affluent societies, and the challenges that this affluence presents to well being.

[edit] Biography

Avner Offer was born and raised in Israel. Unlike many academics, he has a broad range of experience in many walks of life. He has worked as a dairy farmer, soldier, and conservation worker before embarking on his successful academic career. This has involved positions at Cambridge university, England, the Australian National University, New York University, USA, Rutgers University, USA, and finally the University of Oxford, England. Offer is also regarded for his quick and lively wit and charismatic lecture style. He is married with two children.

Offer's most recent work, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950, represents to some extent a challenge to Neoclassical economics. Through it he argues that "well-being" has in fact lagged behind the increasing affluence of western societies: that "affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being...the paradox of affluence and its challenge is that the flow of new rewards can undermine the capacity to enjoy them."¹ The central concepts are therefore future discount, "bounded rationality," and myopia.

[edit] Selected Publications

Property and Politics 1870-1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England. (Cambridge, 1981)

The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation. (Oxford, 1989)

(with S. Bowden), 'Household Appliances and the Use of Time in the U.S.A., and Britain since the 1920s', Economic History Review, second series. Vol 47, 4 (1994)

'Between the gift and the market: The economy of regard', The Economic History Review. Vol 50, 3 (1997) pp. 450-476

'Costs and Benefits, Prosperity and Security, 1870-1914' in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (ed. A. Porter), (Oxford, 1999) pp. 690-711

'Body-Weight and Self-Control in the USA and Britain since the 1950s', Social History of Medicine. Vol 14, 1 (2001) pp. 79-106

Why is the Public Sector so large in Market Societies? The Political Economy of Prudence in the UK, c. 1870-2000. (Oxford, 2003) 45pp.

The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the USA and Britain since 1950. (Oxford, 2006)

[edit] References

1) The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the USA and Britain since 1950. (Oxford, 2006)