Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures And Seminars

Professor David Vines, Professor of Economics at INET Oxford, discusses the need for international cooperation to support emerging economies after the covid-19 crisis. The Covid crisis has caused the greatest collapse in economic activity since 1720. Some advanced countries have mounted a massive fiscal response, both to pay for disease-fighting action and to preserve the incomes of firms and workers until the economic recovery is underway. But there are many emerging market economies which have been be prevented from doing what is needed by their high existing levels of public debt and - especially - by the external financial constraints which they face. Professor David Vines, Professor of Economics at INET Oxford, discusses that there is a need for international cooperation to allow such countries to undertake the kind of massive fiscal response that all countries now need, and that many advanced countries have been able to carry out. So far such cooperation has been notably lacking; the contrast with wha

Professor Beata Javorcik, Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, discusses the recent developments in international trade and the link between trade finance and resilience of trade flows ready for a post-COVID world

Phil Howard, author of Lie Machines and Nicola Aitken, Policy Manager at Full Fact, discuss the implications of fake news and misinformation. In the age of COVID-19, the lie machine is working to undermine trust in institutions like the World Health Organization. They are pushing a narrative that scientists and experts should not be trusted. And this has worrying implications for global health. Join us online as Professor Phil Howard, author of Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives and Nicola Aitken, Policy Manager at Full Fact, discuss the implications, power and effectiveness of these lie machines and how we can utilise them or shut them down.

Paul Clarke, Ocado's Chief Technology Officer, will focus on the disruptive ingredients and recipes at the heart of Ocado's ongoing journey of self-disruption and reinvention.

For this year's James Martin Memorial Lecture, Sir Paul Nurse will consider some of the fundamental ideas of biology with the aim of identifying principles that define living organisms.

Can every doctor understand health statistics? Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence.

William bird discusses how healthcare focused on communities and acitve lifestyles can lead to greater wellbeing. We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare. The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine. However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living. So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a key part of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates' access to data.

Carl Frey discusses his book 'The Technology Trap' In this book talk the Author, Carl Benedikt Frey, will discuss how the Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but how few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. Now that we are in the midst of another technological revolution, how can the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present?

Robin Cohen discusses migration throughout history and in the present day. Migration is present at the dawn of human history - the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself. The flight from natural disasters, adverse climatic changes, famine, and territorial aggression by other communities or other species were also common occurrences. But if migration is as old as the hills, why is it now so politically sensitive? Why do migrants leave? Where do they go, in what numbers and for what reasons? Do migrants represent a threat to the social and political order? Are they none-the-less necessary to provide labour, develop their home countries, increase consumer demand and generate wealth? Can migration be stopped? One of Britain's leading migration scholars, Robin Cohen, will probe these issues in this talk.

The President of the Rockefeller Foundation discusses the need for new solutions for energy transformation and economic development. We cannot end poverty without ending energy poverty. Ever since the world’s first power plants whirred to life in 1882, we have seen how electricity is the lynchpin for development in all of its forms. Manufacturing and industrial productivity, agriculture and food security, nutrition, hygiene, water, public health, education, even community engagement, in other words, daily life in a modern economy, demand access to reliable energy. And yet despite significant progress over nearly 140 years, more than 800 million people around the world live without access to electricity, and hundreds of millions more struggle with unreliable or unaffordable service. Families are deprived of the means to labour productively and their quality of life and status in extreme poverty goes unchanged. We need urgently to fast-track sustainable power solutions, investments, and partnerships across t

Prof Beinhocker will argue that by changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system. The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices. Furthermore, over the past 40 years, the gains of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top 10%, fuelling populist anger across many countries, endangering both democracy and global action on climate change. This talk will argue that underlying the current dominant model of capitalism are a set of theories and ideologies that are outdated, unscientific, and morally unsound. New foundations can be built from modern understandings of human behaviour, complex syst

Professor Sir Paul Collier and Professor Colin Mayer CBE will share the latest thinking and research into the future of capitalism and the corporation to understand how business might be changed to make it work better for society. The speakers will bring together their new books, The Future of Capitalism: Facing The New Anxieties and Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good, alongside the British Academy's Future of the Corporation programme research to pose serious questions of our economic system.

Nick Eyre and Myles Allen give a talk for the Oxford Martin School on climate change and the IPCC report. One of the key objectives of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in 2014, was to provide a comprehensive description of the science of climate change and options for adaptation and mitigation for negotiators preparing for the Paris Conference in 2015. IPCC authors Myles Allen and Nick Eyre will explain the IPCC process, and ask whether this model of a technical panel giving “policy relevant, not policy prescriptive” advice to governments is still working. They will highlight some key findings, such as the increased level of confidence that human influence is the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th-century, the importance of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, the challenges of emission reductions, but also the multiple mitigation pathways still open for achieving the goal of limiting warming to 2oC. They will also discuss so

Dr Nathalie Seddon, Director of the Biodiversity Institute, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. The future of biodiversity conservation is under increasing threat from both climate change and human impact. Dr Nathalie Seddon, Director of the Biodiversity Institute, will look at how rapid growth of climate change affects our ecosystems, how species’ will be forced to adapt to survive, and how we can reduce the effects of climate change on our planet.

Sir John Beddington, Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, gives a talk on climate change Some five years ago Sir John Beddington, Senior Adviser at the Oxford Martin School, raised the concept of 'The Perfect Storm' in which the issues of food, water and energy security needed to be addressed at the same time as mitigating and adapting to climate change. In this seminar he highlights changes that have occurred since then and the progress made and challenges that are currently faced.

Professor Gideon Henderson, Professor of Earth Sciences, and Professor David Marshall, Professor of Physical Oceanography, will explore the role of oceans in climate change. How are oceans affected by our rapidly changing climate? What can they tell us about the processes controlling climate change? And what role do they play in driving climate?

In this seminar Dr Rob Bellamy, James Martin Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, will explore how and why people disagree about how to tackle climate change. What hope then is there for a global political agreement in Paris 2015?

In this talk Professor Tim Palmer CBE, Co-Director of the Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate, gives a talk for the Oxford Martin School. Tim Palmer will address three related questions. Firstly, what are the physical reasons why predictions of climate change are necessarily uncertain? Secondly, how can we communicate this uncertainty in a simple but rigorous way to those policy makers for whom uncertainty quantification may seem an unnecessary complication. Finally, what is needed to reduce uncertainty about future climate change? For the latter, I will argue that the sort of inspiration and ambition that led to the Large Hadron Collider is now needed for the development of climate-change science.

John Kampfner and Katrine Marçal discuss the growing gap between rich and poor and its implications for society, chaired by Professor Ian Goldin. This roundtable is part of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival 2015, the Oxford Martin School is the Festival Ideas Partner Is it morally justified to allow the creation of a 'super rich' that leave the rest behind? Is the growing gap between rich and poor actually holding back wider economic growth and financial wellbeing? Could it be a cause of social unrest? And what can we do to address the gap between rich and poor? This panel event is one of a series of roundtable talks and audience question time hosted by the Oxford Martin School.