The Economics of Sustainability Event

Time:: 16:00 - 17:00
Date:: 17 April 2013
Venue:: Highfield Campus, Building 53, Room 4025

For more information regarding this event, please email Alison Simmance at a.simmance@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

The next seminar of the CS4: Complex Systems Simulation Seminar Series 2012/13 will take place on Wednesday 17th April. Professor Doyne Farmer, University of Oxford, will give the CS4 talk “The economics of sustainability”", 4-5pm, B53/4025, Highfield Campus.

The Economics of sustainability

Achieving sustainability requires understanding the complex interactions between a vast number of systems including climate, economics, technological progress, geology, ecology, space science, population control, security, global politics, and mass psychology. Sustainability forces us to think clearly about our vision of the future, putting philosophy into direct contact with science. As scientists our job is to try to understand causes and effects, both by making predictions and by quantifying the vast uncertainties as best we can. My talk will explore several topics relating to my own work on sustainability, including the subtleties involved in properly discounting the value of the future relative to the present, the flaws in economic models of climate mitigation (and thus the huge uncertainties in their predictions), and my current efforts to predict technological progress (which is perhaps not quite as unpredictable as one might imagine). I will provide a few mathematical illustrations, but most of all, I will try to paint a vision of the complex challenge that we all face.

See the latest CS4 talks and interviews online at: http://cs4southampton.wordpress.com/youtube-channel/

Speaker information

Professor Doyne Farmer,University of Oxford,Co-Director, Complexity Economics, Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School