Talks & Entertainment

Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us?

To answer this question, Greenspan embarked on a multiyear examination of how Homo economicus predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better. The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting is an effort to update our forecasting conceptual grid using twenty-first-century technologies. It integrates the history of economic prediction, the new work of behavioral economists, and the fruits of the author’s own career to offer an empirically based grounding in what we can and can’t know about economic forecasting.

The book explores how culture is and isn’t destiny and probes what we can predict about the world’s biggest looming challenges, from debt and the reform of the welfare state to our competition with China to natural disasters in an age of global warming. In conversation with Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance. This program will not include a book signing.