The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, SASE, is an international, inter-disciplinary academic organization. The academic disciplines represented in SASE include economics, sociology, political science, organization studies, management, psychology, law and history.

SASE had a panel presentation on Sunday, June 26th with speakers including Kieran Healy, Maciej Ceg?owski, Stuart Russell, and AnnaLee Saxenian.

From Kieran’s comments:

In its original sense, the term “moral economy” refers to some kind of informal but forceful collective control over the market. It’s the original wisdom of crowds. It puts justice over efficiency, fairness over freedom, and community expectations over individual opportunity. Its most prominent exponents, E.P. Thompson (1971) and James Scott (1977), had in mind, respectively, 18th century English crowds angry about the price of bread, and norms of reciprocity amongst crop-farming peasants in 20th century Southeast Asia. Both settings are quite far removed from the moralized, technologically enabled but passive-aggressive struggle that unfolded in the Uber I took on Friday evening, on my way here from the airport. The 101 was backed up all the way from the Bridge to Portola. My driver got agitated. “I know a shortcut”, he said, and exited on to some surface streets south of the Mission. “But Google Maps says everything is completely jammed”, I replied, “You should just say on the highway.” “If I cut over to Folsom, it’ll be faster,” he said. “No, just do what the Google Maps Voice says, for God’s sake. It knows better than you! Don’t make me give you a bad rating!” I didn’t say that last part out loud, of course, because I am a conflict averse person. In my mind’s eye, the ghost of E.P. Thompson looked at me in a disgusted sort of way.