economic risks
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Marxism is the second Enlightenment tradition upon which the course will focus. Contrary to popular belief, Marx did not hate capitalism but derived from economic analysis that it would self-destruct and lead to socialism. It is also a myth that Marx did not care about freedom; he was only egalitarian in the sense that he wanted everyone to have freedom. Ergo, Professor Shapiro asserts that Marx's dialectical materialism is as committed to...more
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Until now, the models we've used in this course have focused on the case where everyone can perfectly forecast future economic conditions. Clearly, to understand financial markets, we have to incorporate uncertainty into these models. The first half of this lecture continues reviewing the key statistical concepts that we'll need to be able to think seriously about uncertainty, including expectation, variance, and covariance. We apply these...more
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The sanitary movement was an approach to public health first developed in England in the 1830s and '40s. With increasing industrialization and urbanization, the removal of filth from towns and cities became a major focus in the struggle against infectious diseases. As pioneered by Edwin Chadwick, the sanitary movement also embraced an explicit political objective, according to which urban cleansing took on a figurative as well as a literal...more
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Professor Shapiro continues his examination of Jeremy Bentham's formulation of classical utilitarianism, with a focus on the distributive implications of the theory of "maximizing the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He engages students in a discussion of a guiding principle of classical utilitarianism, the principle of diminishing marginal utility, and some traditional critiques of this principle. Professor Shapiro examines the...more
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The global AIDS pandemic furnishes a case study for many of the themes addressed throughout the course. While in the developed West the disease largely afflicts concentrated high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users and the sexually promiscuous, in Southern Africa it is much more a generalized disease of poverty. In countries such as Botswana and Swaziland, the economic and social consequences of the disease have created a vicious ci...more
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) To illustrate the linkages among national security, secrecy, and environmental quality, Professor Wargo describes the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear tests in the 1950s. The Atomic Energy Commission collected data on the spread of radionuclides from the nuclear tests, and discovered that the radionuclides were circulating around the world. This process of discovery raised issues regarding way...more
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) During this session, Professor Wargo stresses the importance of considering the persistence of pollutants in the environment. He continues the discussion of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) risk management strategies in the wake of nuclear experiments from 1945-1963, and also introduces risk reduction strategies attempted after the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. These strategies underestima...more
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Estrin talks about the personal connectivity cycle. The cycle of connecting people is the notion of people being able to connect to each other and connect to information anywhere. This means true mobility and ubiquitous, high bandwidth connectivity, she says. The enablers of this cycle are economic and behavioral. From an IT demand perspective, she explains, the real win is in the consumer devices and services and not in the IT infrastruct...more
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The bubonic plague is the measure by which succeeding epidemics have long been measured. Its extreme virulence, horrible symptoms, and indiscriminate victim profile all contributed to making plague the archetypical worst-case scenario. For these same reasons, the plague is also an ideal test case for the thesis that epidemic diseases play a major role in shaping human history. Over the course of its three pandemics, the plague had major ec...more
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Epidemics, or high-impact infectious diseases, have had an historical impact equal to that of wars, revolutions and economic crises. This course looks at the various ways in which these diseases have affected societies in Europe and North America from 1600 to the present. Contrary to optimistic mid-twentieth-century predictions, epidemic diseases still pose a major threat to human well-being. Diseases will be considered not only in their b...more
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In the first or second year of his medical residency training in the US in 1978, Palmaz went to an early meeting of the Society of Cardiovascular Intervention and Radiology in New Orleans. The keynote speaker was a young professor from Germany, Andreas Grunzig, who was coming to the states to report on his early experience with balloon angioplasty. Grunzig was charasmatic and intelligent, and explained balloon angioplasty so clearly--benef...more
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While economists didn't have a good theory of interest until Irving Fisher came along, and didn't understand the role of collateral until even later, Shakespeare understood many of these things hundreds of years earlier. The first half of this lecture examines Shakespeare's economic insights in depth, and sees how they sometimes prefigured or even surpassed Irving Fisher's intuitions. The second half of this lecture uses the concept of pre...more
