Network Science's Chief Economist

Matthew O. Jackson is perhaps the world’s most renowned scholar of the economics of networks; as a 2005-06 CASBS fellow, he wrote most of his still-influential book Social and Economic Networks. In this wide-ranging conversation with 2025-26 CASBS fellow Rajiv Sethi, Jackson discusses his foundational work on strategic modeling of networks, empirical applications on the role of economic connectedness in influencing people’s life trajectories in the U.S., related multi-disciplinary and cross-national work he is undertaking at the Sant Fe Institute, and recent cutting-edge work using large language models to gain insights into human motivations and behaviors. Matthew O. Jackson: Stanford faculty page | Personal website | CASBS page | Wikipedia page | Google Scholar page | National Academy of Sciences bio | Stanford profile | SFI page | NBER working papers | Jackson CV | Rajiv Sethi: Barnard faculty page | Columbia page | CASBS page | Google Scholar page | SFI page | Rajiv's Substack newsletter, Imperfect Information |  Matt Jackson works referenced in this episode: Matthew Jackson and Asher Wolinsky, "A Strategic Model of Social and Economic Networks," Journal of Economic Theory (1996) Matthew Jackson and Alison Watts, "The Evolution of Social and Economic Networks," Journal of Economic Theory (2002) Raj Chetty, Matthew Jackson, et al., "Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobiliity," Nature (2022) Raj Chetty, Matthew Jackson, et al., "Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness," Nature (2022) Chetty, Jackson, et al., Opportunity Insights Social Capital Atlas (website)Dynamics of Wealth Inequality project (Santa Fe Institute) Matthew Jackson, Social and Economic Networks, Princeton University Press (2008) Matthew Jackson, The Human Network, Penguin Random House (2020) Mei, Yuan, and Jackson, "A Turing Test of Whether AI Chatbots are Behaviorally Similar to Humans," PNAS (2024) Xie, Mei, Yuan, and Jackson, "Using Large Language Models to Categorize Strategic Situations and Decipher Motivations Behind Human Behaviors," PNAS (2025) --- Rajiv Set