Slide presentations
• Tuesday, February 28 [PDF]
• Thursday, March 2 [PDF]
Readings
• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (2007), Let’s talk about the introduction (“Blank is beautiful”), and the Roy text below. If you have time & interest, also take a look at the conclusion (“Shock wears off”)
• Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”, Financial Times, April 2020. (Note: For context please take a look at the date when this was written.)
• (Optional.) Kenneth Saltman, Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools, 2007. We’ll have our hands full with the above two, and Klein already talks a bit about public schools (specifically in the aftermath of Katrina), but this text by Saltman goes deeper into how market forces are attempting to reshape public education in America. If anyone ends up wanting to do something about public education for their group’s final project, this could be a good resource to come back to.
Video
Recording of my interview with Charles Hargrove, President of NYC-ARECS
Guest
[Update: Dr Mordecai was not able to join us today after all, so we’ll try to find another time for him in our semester, and we may also take a look at the website and materials of the RiskEcon® Lab.]
Dr. David K.A. Mordecai, Co-founders of RiskEcon® Lab, at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. (Dr. Mordecai’s co-founder & partner Dr. Samantha Kappagoda will be unable to join us.)
Dr. Mordecai’s research centers around using advanced mathematics to develop techniques for financial industry to manage risk, for example as it relates to insurance and various other types of investments. You can see a few representative scholarly papers here:
- “Alternative Risk Transfer: Investing Directly in Insurance Risk as an Alternative Investment Strategy”, The Journal of Alternative Investments, Spring 1999 (abstract only)
- “The ‘Art’ Of Alternative Risk Transfer”, PDF of panel discussion
- “Insurance Risk Securitization, Model Robustness, and the Convergence of Event and Credit Risk: A Rating Analyst’s View”, from Securitized Insurance Risk, 1998
These texts are going to be too specialized for us to make much sense of without doing deep research into this field, but I hope that reviewing them might give you a sense of some ideas that his work engages with. Please also take some time to browse the RiskEcon Lab website to get a sense of the projects that Dr. Mordecai and his research group work on.
Leave a Reply