Timur Kuran

Timur Kuran is a Turkish American economist, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor in Islamic Studies at Duke University. His work spans economics, political science, history, and legal studies.

Kuran was born in New York City in 1954, where his parents were graduate students at Yale University. They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara (where his father taught at the Middle East Technical University). The family moved to Istanbul while Kuran was a teenager, and, for a decade, he lived just off the campus of Boğaziçi University, where his father was president and professor of Islamic architectural history.

Kuran obtained his secondary education in Turkey, graduating from Robert College in Istanbul in 1973. He then studied economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977. He went on to Stanford University where he obtained a doctorate in economics, supervised by Nobel laureate Professor Kenneth Arrow.

Professor Kuran has written extensively on the evolution of preferences and institutions, with contributions to the study of hidden preferences, the unpredictability of social revolutions, the dynamics of ethnic conflict, perceptions of discrimination, and the evolution of morality. His best known theoretical work is Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press), which deals with the repercussions of being dishonest about what one knows and wants. Since its original publication in 1995, this book has appeared also in German, Swedish, Turkish, and Chinese.

...
Wikipedia