Rooted in Brown’s historic commitment to interdisciplinary learning and open inquiry, the PPE concentration invites students into a sustained engagement with the values, institutions, and incentives that shape society. While disciplinary expertise remains essential, many of the most important questions today require frameworks that cross disciplinary boundaries. Rigorous social-scientific inquiry must grapple with difficult normative questions, just as normative theory must be informed by well-established empirical knowledge.
Across the curriculum, PPE emphasizes the interplay between individual agency and social structure, the relationship between positive and normative analysis, and the links between institutional design and ethical evaluation. The concentration emphasizes building strong analytic skills, including training in formal logic, mathematical modeling, and cutting-edge empirical approaches.
Students explore questions about cooperation, coordination, markets, efficiency, justice, fairness, democracy, freedom, equality, and deliberation through the combined lenses of all three disciplines. This integrative approach equips graduates with knowledge and skills to address issues ranging from theories of justice to the logic of collective action to the foundations of the wealth of nations.