Abstract
Avner Offer’s work includes the history of property politics in England before the Great War; the impact of the international food economy on politics and strategy in Britain, the British Empire and Germany before and during that War; analysis of the experience of affluence and its impact on social mores and well-being in the United Kingdom and the United States since 1950; and a study of abstract economic theory and its influence on political ideologies and economic organisation in the West since the late 1960s. In his model building, he sees motivation through the lens of a quest for self-esteem and approbation and views institutions as devices to control and constrain commitment across time. Much of his work can be read as a defence of social democracy, and an analysis of how welfare can be destroyed by political and economic calculations inducing inequality and conflict.
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References
Main Works by Avner Offer
Offer, A. (1977). ‘The Origins of the Law of Property Acts, 1910–25’. Modern Law Review, 40(5): 505–522.
Offer, A. (1980). ‘Ricardo’s Paradox and the Movement of Rents in Britain, c.1870–1910’. Economic History Review, New Series, 33(2): 236–252.
Offer, A. (1981). Property and Politics 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offer, A. (1989). The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Offer, A. (1991). ‘Farm Tenure and Land Values in England, c.1750–1950’. Economic History Review, New Series, 44(1): 1–20.
Offer, A. (1993). ‘The British Empire, 1870–1914: A Waste of Money?’. Economic History Review, New Series, 46(2): 215–238.
Offer, A. (1994). ‘Lawyers and Land Law Revisited’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 14(2): 269–278.
Offer, A. (1995). ‘Going to War in 1914: A Matter of Honor?’. Politics & Society, 23(2): 213–241.
Offer, A. (1997). ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’. Economic History Review, New Series, 50(3): 450–476.
Offer, A. (2001). ‘Body Weight and Self-Control in the United States and Britain Since the 1950s’. Social History of Medicine, 14(1): 79–106.
Offer, A. (2003). Why Has the Public Sector Grown So Large in Market Societies? The Political Economy of Prudence in the UK, c.1870–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Offer, A. (2006). The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Offer, A. (2012a). ‘The Economy of Obligation: Incomplete Contracts and the Cost of the Welfare State’. Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, University of Oxford, 103(August). Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a673/f0e499acb03a343b6a303ccc3de82e7e3192.pdf?_ga=2.191585325.601989749.1591885991-635948987.1548679853.
Offer, A. (2012b). ‘Self-Interest, Sympathy and the Invisible Hand: From Adam Smith to Market Liberalism’. Economic Thought, 1(2): 1–14.
Offer, A. (2014a). ‘Narrow Banking, Real Estate, and Financial Stability in the UK, c.1870–2010’. Chapter 9 in N. Dimsdale and A. Hotson (eds) British Financial Crises Since 1825. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 158–173.
Offer, A. (2014b). Burn Mark: A Photographic Memoir of the Six Day War. Oxford: Lintel Press.
Offer, A. (2014c). ‘A Warrant for Pain: Caveat Emptor vs the Duty of Care in American Medicine, c.1970–2010’. Chapter 15 in N. Morris and D. Vines (eds) Capital Failure: Rebuilding Trust in Financial Services. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 332–349.
Offer, A. (2017a). ‘The Market Turn: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism’. Economic History Review, 70(4): 1,051–1,071.
Offer, A. (2017b). ‘Charles Hilliard Feinstein (1932–2004)’. Chapter 46 in R.A. Cord (ed.) The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 1,027–1,044.
Offer, A. (2018). ‘Patient and Impatient Capital: Time Horizons as Market Boundaries’. Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, University of Oxford, 165(August). Available at: https://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/working_papers/4670/165-avner-offer.pdf.
Offer, A., R. Pechey and S. Ulijaszek (2010). ‘Obesity Under Affluence Varies by Welfare Regimes: The Effect of Fast Food, Insecurity, and Inequality’. Economics & Human Biology, 8(3): 297–308.
Offer, A. and G. Söderberg (2016). The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Other Works Referred To
Ainslie, G. (1992). Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States Within the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, J.S. (1992). Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law 1832–1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Case, A. and A. Deaton (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Denoon, D. (1983). Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere. New York: Oxford University Press.
The Economist (2006). ‘The Perils of Prosperity: Can You Be Too Rich?’. 27 April. Available at: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/04/27/the-perils-of-prosperity.
Friedman, M. (1956). ‘The Distribution of Income and the Welfare Activities of Government’. Lecture delivered at Wabash College, 20 June. Available at: https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/MFlecture_06_1956_5.pdf.
Gintis, H. (2007). ‘Economic Growth and Well-Being: A Behavioural Analysis’. Economic Journal, 117(521): F445–F459.
James, O. (2006). ‘Workaholic Consumerism is Now a Treadmill and a Curse’. The Guardian, 2 May. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/02/comment.politics1.
Nunan, T. (2012). ‘Interview with Avner Offer’. 28 July. Available at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxhdm9mZmVyfGd4OmVjNjRhMmRhNzliMzA1Zg.
Oswald, A.J. and N. Powdthavee (2007). ‘Obesity, Unhappiness, and The Challenge of Affluence: Theory and Evidence’. Economic Journal, 117(521): F441–F459.
Perkin, H. (1989). The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. Abingdon: Routledge.
Pottage, A. (1994). ‘The Measure of Land’. Modern Law Review, 57(3): 361–384.
Talmon, J.L. (1952). The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy: Political Theory and Practice During the French Revolution and Beyond. London: Secker & Warburg.
Venook, J. (2016). ‘The Political Slant of the Nobel Prize in Economics’. The Atlantic, 9 October. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/nobel-factor-offer-soderberg/503186/.
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Getzler, J. (2021). Avner Offer (1944–). In: Cord, R.A. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_25
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