CIDRAL Public Lecture: Mary Poovey: Some Lessons of History: Why Economists Failed to Anticipate the Great Recession
| Dates: | 13 January 2016 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| How much: | Free |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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Professor Mary Poovey will lecture as part of CIDRAL's Semester 1 programme for the 2015-16 academic year, themed around Finance and the Market.
This lecture explores the relationship between two ideas developed in eighteenth-century political economy and the foundational assumptions of modern economics. The first holds that economic processes, like their natural counterparts, belong to a self-organizing and self-regulating system. The second assumes that human beings are, by nature, rational, self-maximizing agents who can model risk in probabilistic terms. While neither of these ideas is solely responsible for modern economists’ recent failure to predict financial crises, the combination of the two is inadequate for analyzing such events.
Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University. She has written widely on nineteenth-century British literature, as well as eighteenth-century British literature and culture, the history of literary criticism, feminist theory, and economic history. Her most recent books are 'Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain' (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and 'A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society' (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
This event is followed by a wine reception at Kro Bar
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John Casken Lecture Theatre
Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama
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