Charles Lindblom bio
Charles E. Lindblom is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science at Yale University. He is a past president of the American Political Science Association, past president of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, and a founder and former director of the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Throughout his career he has pursued the troubled attempt (of scholars, political leaders, and ordinary citizens) to understand the social world well enough to shape it. His synthesis on that question in his book Inquiry and Change (Yale University Press, 1990) won the Woodrow Wilson Prize of the American Political Science Association for the best book of the year. His other works include Politics and Markets (Basic Books, 1977) an earlier year winner of the same prize. Of his journal articles, “The Science of Muddling Through” in the 1959 Public Administration Review has for 45 years stimulated further inquiry into incremental and mutually adjusting policy making and is one of the most frequently cited articles in social science.
For hands-on experience in trying to understand the social world well enough to shape it, he spent 1963 to 1965 in Delhi and other Indian locations working through both theory and action on Indian economic development.
In The Market System (Yale University Press, 2001), he undertook a systematic summary analysis of the merits and defects, both mammoth, of the market system, with attention both to capitalism and other kinds of market systems.
