Clair Brown

Clair Brown is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown is a past Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. Brown has published research on many aspects of how economies function, including high-tech industries, development engineering, the standard of living, wage determination, poverty, and unemployment.

Brown was born in 1946 in Tampa, Florida. Her father, Norman Brown, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Shackleford, graduated in economics from Florida State University. Brown was close to her African-American nanny, and realized at an early age that the discrimination against African-Americans and Cubanos was unjust and cruel. She graduated from Wellesley College with a math major in 1968. In 1973, Brown received her PhD in economics at the University of Maryland, where she studied under Barbara Bergmann and Charles Schultz. She was a doctoral fellow at the Brookings Institution, and then joined the UC Berkeley economics faculty in 1973. Clair is married to Richard Katz, and has two sons (Daniel and Jason) and two grandsons (Max and Timothy).

Brown uses an institutional approach to economic analysis, where social rules and customs or norms structure firm and individual behavior that plays out in the marketplace, following in the long line from Veblen to Commons to Williamson. Her early research demonstrated that time and income were not substitutes in many household activities, and this observation has a major impact on women’s use of time, on the constraints faced by one-parent households, and on the constraints faced by unemployed people, as well as important implications for social policies. Then concerned about the standard of living, especially of the poor and working class, Brown began her study of U.S. household budgets. Using an institutional approach that assumes families based their own sense of well-being on how well they are doing compared to others, Brown used a relative income approach, which had been developed by Duesenberry. Following Marshall, Brown assumed that family expenditures could be divided into basics (necessaries), variety (comforts), and status (luxuries or positional goods).

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