Festival of Ideas 2012:
Shifting Tectonic (Social) Plates
Every so often the world shifts – in geographical, social, cultural, and material ways. Floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, tsunamis can result when shifting plates slide or collide. But it is not only the movement of interconnected plates under the earth’s crust that can produce startling and catastrophic changes, tectonic shifts in social and cultural structures and forms also disrupt social relationships, cultural expectations, political arrangements and even scientific discoveries in dramatic ways. Social breakdowns on the order of revolutions and war represent tectonic shifts in the “order” and “organization” of the social, political, economic and cultural taken-for-granted, everyday world.
Join us November 14-18, 2012 for a series of presentations, lectures, panel discussions, exhibits, and performances that explore the tectonic shifts that have changed—or in future may change—our world.
Festival of Ideas 2012 will include (as of November 22, 2011):
Fran Lebowitz
Author, Journalist, and Social Commentator
Purveyor of urban cool, witty chronicler of the “me decade,” and the cultural satirist whom many call the heir to Dorothy Parker, Fran Lebowitz remains one of the foremost advocates of the Extreme Statement. She offers insights on timely issues such as gender, race, gay rights, and the media as well as her own pet peeves – including celebrity culture, tourists, and strollers.
Her writing -- pointed, taut and economical -- is forthright, irascible, and unapologetically opinionated. Fran Lebowitz’s first two classic books of essays, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, have been collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader. She is also the author of the children’s book Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas. She recently broke a ten-year writer’s block and is back at work on her novel, Exterior Signs of Wealth. A documentary film about Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking, directed by Martin Scorsese, premiered on HBO in November 2010.
“Before the amusements of The Onion or Sex and the City, there was Fran Lebowitz: the single inheritor to the smart-not-smarmy, sarcastic, cosmopolitan crown left by Dorothy Parker.”
– Philadelphia City Paper
“Fran Lebowitz’s trademark is the sneer; she disapproves of virtually everything except sleep, cigarette smoking, and good furniture. Her essays and topical interviews on subjects ranging from the difficulty of finding an acceptable apartment to the art of freeloading at weekend houses have come to be regarded as classics of literary humor and social observation.”
– The Paris Review
Thomas J. Sargent, William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business, New York University
Winner of the 2011 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
One of the founders of the rational expectations model and the freshwater economics movement, Thomas J. Sargent is one of today’s most influential economists. He holds the W.R. Berkley Professorship of Economics and Business at New York University and is the author of many significant books and articles, including the classic economic textbooks Macroeconomic Theory and Dynamic Economic Theory. His research is widely recognized as having revolutionized both the field of economics and the economic strategy adopted by successful capitalist economies over the past 20 years.
Sargent’s crucial insight behind rational expectations is this: people make decisions based on a reasonable mental model of the economy and on their understanding of the government’s economic policies. This means that, since consumers and investors adjust their behaviors whenever the government shifts policies, these policies rarely have their intended effect. It’s an insight that revolutionized economics and it continues to dominate economic thinking today.
Sargent’s current work involves developing models to understand persistently high European unemployment rates; using new statistical methods to characterize rigorously the changing behavior of the Fed since WWII and the changing responsiveness of the U.S. economy to Fed actions; and applying techniques of robust control from engineering to optimal policy and the study of individual behavior.
Sargent’s career comprises over three decades of involvement in academic, foundation, and government work. He is currently an advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Chicago. He has had an ongoing involvement with the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has served as a research associate, a position he has held on and off since 1970. He has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987 and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.