Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to UEA?
This is delving into the distant past – I have been at UEA since 1985! Before then, I had been a very young Lecturer in Economics at the University of York, and a quite young Reader at the University of Newcastle. I was ambitious and decided to start applying for professorships. UEA just happened to be one of the first universities to advertise a professorship after I made that decision. But I think one of the main reasons I was given the job was that UEA was very interdisciplinary and I was working on topics in philosophy and politics as well as economics.
What are you passionate about outside of economics?
I’m very interested in wild plants. I spend a lot of time working in my garden, which I treat as a miniature nature reserve. I’m also a member of a volunteer group which maintains a small woodland area near my home in Taverham, where I try to encourage native plants and to remove unwanted invaders. A lot of what we do is just unskilled outdoor manual labour – a nice change from reading and writing economics. 
What inspired you to pursue a career in economics?
My first degree was in history and economics combined, at the University of York. I enjoyed both subjects a lot but didn’t intend an academic career. I got a job in the Administrative Civil Service and I was allowed to delay entry by a year to take a master’s degree in economics, which I thought would be useful training for a civil service career. In those days it was still just possible to become a Lecturer with only a master’s degree. I’m not sure why I decided to try applying for lectureships, but it wasn’t a really deep commitment to economics – I was quite happy about the idea of being a civil servant. But York offered me a lectureship and I liked the idea of living in York. So that is how I became an economist. The commitment came later!
What excites you the most about economics at the moment?
I’ve been a behavioural economist since the 1980s, when UEA was one of the few places in the world where economists ran experiments. Behavioural economics has been a huge success since then, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of how to do normative analysis when individuals don’t have the well-defined, consistent preferences that economics has traditionally assumed. I’m convinced that the way that most behavioural economists are dealing with this problem is a big mistake. Trying to find a way that really does work is a real challenge.
What are you researching at the moment?
A full answer to this question would be much too long – at any time, I have many research projects, large and small, on the go. But at this very moment: I’m trying to finish a paper which describes a moral principle, the ‘Principle of Mutual Benefit’, which I believe many people act on (and everyone ought to). The basic idea is that if you choose to enter a voluntary interaction with others, you should play your part in achieving mutual benefit, provided that the others do the same. This is very different from the kinds of motivation that are usually assumed by economists who theorise about ‘social preferences’. Many behavioural economists and philosophers maintain that markets are hostile environments for morality, and the idea that markets are fundamentally immoral is gaining ground in public debate. I argue that a well-functioning market system is ultimately grounded on cooperation, not self-interest. Understanding the Principle of Mutual Benefit helps to show how this can be true.
What advice would you give to our students for their future careers?
Whatever career you follow: take your job seriously, think of it as a way of cooperating with other people to achieve things that are useful, not as a zero-sum game.