Dr. Cameron Harwick, PHD

Associate Professor: (585) 395-5527
charwick@brockport.edu
Office: Hartwell Hall 113 C
Website

The kinds of things people use as money, and how that changes over the
business cycle
The limitations of formal systems, from smart contracts, to legal institutions, to moral norms
Whether cryptocurrencies can be viable
How norms and institutions coevolve
How computational methods can be used to model economies

“Money’s Mutation of the Modern Moral Mind: The Simmel Hypothesis and the Cultural Evolution of WEIRDness” (2023) — Argues that money made us WEIRD by removing the cultural-evolutionary constraints on the sacred values that previously coordinated the division of labor..
“Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie” (2021) — Argues that social cooperation requires a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs, and discusses implications for governance.
“What’s Holding Back Blockchain Finance? On the Possibility of Decentralized Autonomous Finance” (2021, with James Caton) — Lays out the game theory of why finance is a harder problem than monetary exchange, argues that pure algorithmic governance is impossible, and discusses technologies that can interface between algorithmic and traditional governance structures.
“Bubbles and Broad Monetary Aggregates: Toward a Consensus Approach to Business Cycles” (2019) — Shows how proper measurement of the money supply can resolve long-standing disagreements in business cycle macroeconomics.