On Monday, September 12, I’ll be giving a speech at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The public is welcome.
My speech is titled, “Lessons Not Learned from 9/11: An Economic, Numerate, Constitutional Perspective.” It will go from 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. and will be in Grise Hall 235.
What strikes me as I look back at the last 10 years is how little most people have learned after that horrendous day: about real airplane security, about why “they” hate “us,” about how to think about low-probability events, etc. I’ll draw on Hayek’s “Use of Knowledge in Society,” John Mueller’s “A False Sense of Insecurity,” and my own thoughts, posts, and articles over the years (see here, here, here, and here, for example) for the economic/numerate part of the talk. On the last link I’ve listed here, make sure you read the last 3 paragraphs.
READER COMMENTS
Caleb
Sep 5 2011 at 11:57am
Another great source for analysis on the impact of highly improbable events is Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan.” I especially like his framing of the fundamental mathematical assumptions underlying traditional economic modeling and “risk analysis.”
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