Postponed: Lecture - The Taming of the Economic Agent

Please note, this event has been postponed until the fall. A date will be announced when available!

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Join us for a lecture with Tai Young-Taft, faculty in economics at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, entitled “The Taming of the Economic Agent: A History of Modern Mathematics and the Modern Individual.” The talk is presented as part of the Spring 2020 History and Philosophy of Science Lecture Series and will address the principles of mathematical analysis by way of Newton and Lebesgue. Dr. Young-Taft will show how the modern individual as a cultural practice takes roost in the ontological language it employs. The history of this language and its use in a social setting is drawn out in a restricted case study of Newton, Debreu, and Aumann. This suggests the practice of the modern individual was inherently unstable from the onset and what was meant as a liberatory expression of modernity has digressed into a singular homogenous structure: the subsumption of the economic agent into a social probability function.

About the speaker:

Dr. Young-Taft's research interests include financial market dynamics and their linkage to the real economy--particularly in developing countries, stock-flow consistent modeling, stochastic dynamical systems, and the history of economic thought. In addition to Simon's Rock, he has taught at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait, New York University, and St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Dr. Young-Taft has been teaching at Simon's Rock since 2014.

The lecture will run for one hour, followed by up to 30 minutes for a Q&A. Free and open to the public.