In high school I memorized a scene from “Hamlet” in which the gloomy prince tries to persuade his mother to leave the usurper king, the brother of Hamlet’s murdered father. “Assume a virtue, if you have it not,” Hamlet implores Gertrude. And a few lines later: “Refrain tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence: the next more easy; / For use almost can change the stamp of nature.”The idea that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” is embedded in economics, although I didn’t appreciate it in high school. “Virtue is an acquired practice,” the Nobel economics laureate James Heckman, Bridget Galaty and Haihan Tian wrote in a working paper released last month by the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. They added that this acquired practice “may eventually become the dominant preference of agents in the sense that it influences behaviors.”I’ll wager that’s exactly how Hamlet would have put it if he’d received graduate training in economics instead of kicking around a castle in Denmark.

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Persons: Hamlet’s, “, Gertrude, ”, James Heckman, Bridget Galaty, Haihan Tian, Becker Friedman, he’d Organizations: University of Chicago Locations: Denmark