Clair Brown is a professor emerita of economics and a past director of the Institute of Industrial Relations (IRLE) at UC Berkeley. She 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. Her books include American Standards of Living, 1919-1988, Chips and Change: How crisis reshapes the semiconductor industry, and Buddhist Economics: An enlightened approach to the dismal science. In 2011, Brown began a field, Buddhist economics, at UC Berkeley. It integrates global sustainability and shared prosperity to provide a holistic model of economic behavior and well-being.