Thomas Schelling

Schelling was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, California.[3] Schelling graduated from San Diego High. He received his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1951.

Schelling served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, the White House, and the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953.[4] He wrote most of his dissertation on national income behavior working at night while in Europe. He left government to join the economics faculty at Yale University.

In 1956, "...he joined the RAND Corporation as an adjunct fellow, becoming a full-time researcher for a year after leaving Yale, and returning to adjunct status through 2002."[5] In 1958 Schelling was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. That same year, he "co-founded the Center for International Affairs, which was [later] renamed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs."[6]

In 1969, Schelling joined Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy.[4] He was among the "founding fathers" of the "modern" Kennedy School, as he helped to shift the curriculum's emphasis away from administration and more toward leadership.[6]

Between 1994 and 1999, he conducted research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg, Austria.

In 1990, he left Harvard and joined the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and University of Maryland Department of Economics.[7] In 1991, he accepted the presidency of the American Economic Association, an organization of which he was also a Distinguished Fellow.[8]

In 1995, he accepted the presidency of the Eastern Economic Association.[9]

Schelling was a contributing participant of the Copenhagen Consensus.[4][10]

Schelling was married to Corinne Tigay Saposs from 1947 to 1991, with whom he had four sons. Later in 1991 he married Alice M. Coleman, who brought two sons to the marriage; they became his stepsons.[13][14]

Schelling died on December 13, 2016, in Bethesda, Maryland, from complications following a hip fracture at the age of 95.[7]

Schelling's family auctioned his Nobel award medal, fetching $187,000. They donated this money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American 501 nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Alice Schelling said her late husband had credited Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James, the winner of the Newbery Medal in 1927, as the most influential book he had read.[15]

The Strategy of Conflict, which Schelling published in 1960,[16] pioneered the study of bargaining and strategic behavior in what he refers to as "conflict behavior."[17] The Times Literary Supplement in 1995 ranked it as one of the hundred most influential books in the 50 years since 1945.[18] In this book Schelling introduced concepts such as the "focal point" and "credible commitment." In a 1961 review, International Relations scholar Morton Kaplan described the book as a "strikingly original contribution" and a "landmark in the literature."[19]

Schelling's book comprised a series of scholarly journal articles that he had published over the period 1957–1960.[19]

The strategic view toward conflict that Schelling encourages in this work is equally "rational" and "successful."[16] He believes that it cannot be based merely on one's intelligence, but must also address the "advantages" associated with a course of action. The advantages gleaned, he says, should be firmly fixed in a value system that is both "explicit" and "consistent."[16]

Conflict too has a distinct meaning. In Schelling's approach, it is not enough to defeat your opponent. Instead, one must seize opportunities to cooperate. And in most cases, there are many. Only on the rarest of occasions, in what is known as "pure conflict," he points out, will the interests of participants be implacably opposed.[16] He uses the example of "a war of complete extermination" to illustrate this phenomenon.[16]

Cooperation, where available, may take many forms, and thus could potentially involve everything from "deterrence, limited war, and disarmament" to "negotiation."[16] Indeed, it is through such actions that participants are left with less of a conflict and more of a "bargaining situation."[16] The bargaining itself is best thought of in terms of the other participant's actions, as any gains one might realize are highly dependent upon the "choices or decisions" of their opponent.[16]

Communication between parties, though, is another matter entirely. Verbal or written communication is known as "explicit," and involves such activities as "offering concessions."[16] What happens, though, when this type of communication becomes impossible or improbable? This is when something called "tacit maneuvers" become important.[16] Think of this as action-based communication. Schelling uses the example of one's occupation or evacuation of strategic territory to illustrate this latter communication method.

In an article celebrating Schelling's Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics,[20] Michael Kinsley, Washington Post op‑ed columnist and one of Schelling's former students, anecdotally summarizes Schelling's reorientation of game theory thus: "[Y]ou're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to someone else. You'll be released, and one of you will get a large prize, as soon as the other gives in. How do you persuade the other guy to give in, when the only method at your disposal—threatening to push him off the cliff—would doom you both? Answer: You start dancing, closer and closer to the edge. That way, you don't have to convince him that you would do something totally irrational: plunge him and yourself off the cliff. You just have to convince him that you are prepared to take a higher risk than he is of accidentally falling off the cliff. If you can do that, you win."

Schelling's theories about war were extended in Arms and Influence, published in 1966.[21] According to the publisher, the book "carries forward the analysis so brilliantly begun in his earlier The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Strategy and Arms Control (with Morton Halperin, 1961), and makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on modern war and diplomacy." Chapter headings include The Diplomacy of Violence, The Diplomacy of Ultimate Survival and The Dynamics of Mutual Alarm.

Within this work, Schelling discusses military capabilities and how they can be used as bargaining power. Instead of just considering the choices available to you on a surface level, you can think ahead to try to influence the other party to come to the conclusion you want. Specifically he mentions the actions taken by the U.S. during the Cuban and Berlin crises and how they functioned not just as preparation for war, but signals as well. For example, Schelling points out that the bombing of North Vietnam "is as much coercive as tactical".[22] Not only was the bombing to cripple their enemies armies, but it also served to bring Vietnam to the table for negotiations. Much of this writing was influenced largely due to Schelling's personal interest in Game Theory and its application to nuclear armaments.

Schelling's work influenced Robert Jervis.[23][24]

In 1969 and 1971, Schelling published widely cited articles dealing with racial dynamics and what he termed "a general theory of tipping."[25] In these papers he showed that a preference that one's neighbors be of the same color, or even a preference for a mixture "up to some limit," could lead to total segregation, thus arguing that motives, malicious or not, were indistinguishable as to explaining the phenomenon of complete local separation of distinct groups. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and dimes in different patterns on the "board" and then moving them one by one if they were in an "unhappy" situation.

Schelling's dynamics has been cited as a way of explaining variations that are found in what are regarded as meaningful differences – gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and religion. Once a cycle of such change has begun, it may have a self-sustaining momentum. His 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior expanded on and generalized these themes[26][27] and is often cited in the literature of agent-based computational economics.