Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to be the lone communication scholar in a sea of economists, physicists, and mathematicians for a three-week problem-solving workshop hosted by the Fields Institute for Advanced Mathematical Research. The problem-solving workshop was an opportunity to investigate and rethink economic approaches to systemic recovery.
Needless to say, it was an exciting three weeks. Over the course of the workshop, I worked with an international cohort of brillaint collaborators, all of whom are represented in the video below, to develop an answer to the problem posed by the Canadian Department of Finance regarding the need for a new class of economic models for managing crisis. The problem incorporated questions of radical uncertainty, trade-offs between resilience and uncertainty, and the introduction of social and institutional factors into economic modelling.
We quickly decided that we needed to divide these projects into two mutually informative sub-projects: an applied project and an epistemological project.
Collectively, our team worked to simultaneously create an initial exploration of various crisis scenarios and policy interventions using an agent-based model and to develop a more theoretically-focused analysis of the various ways that modeling techniques and economic theory can engage new understandings of uncertainty, resilience, and social dynamics.
It was an incredible privilege to be able to think with and learn from the brilliant minds in this workshop, and I am so pleased to have the recorded evidence of our work preserved in the video below.
