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

Please register via the link provided.

This talk will be followed by a book sale, signing and drinks reception, all welcome. Copies available at half price — £10 — to cash buyers only.

Adam Smith is world-famous as a founding father of economics, and well-known to political theorists and philosophers for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). His work as a jurist is much less well known. As a notorious perfectionist, he worked for decades on a book that would have spanned the ground between the moral philosophy of TMS and the empirical sociology and economics of Wealth of Nations (WN). He never completed it, and on his deathbed he asked his executors to destroy his manuscripts. Which, sadly for us, they did.

But thanks to two near-miraculous survivals we know a great deal about what Adam Smith’s book on jurisprudence would have said. Two of his Glasgow students kept detailed notes of his lectures there between 1762 and 1764. One set was rediscovered in 1895, the other in 1958. They were taken in successive academic years, and they show that Smith shifted the order in which he presented his topics, but not the essentials of his course. The two independent sources validate each other.

Professor Iain McLean will lay out the principles of Smith’s jurisprudence; show how it forms the bridge between TMS and WN; and try to show Smith’s half-submerged influence on the new republic of the United States, in whose revolution he took a great deal of interest.

The lecture opens a one-day workshop on Tuesday 13 November on the jurisprudence behind the writings and philosophy of Adam Smith.

Iain McLean was born and brought up in Edinburgh. He is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. One of his research interests is the interaction of the Scottish, American, and French Enlightenments of the 18th century. His Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian (2006) was written at the instigation of Smith’s fellow Fifer Gordon Brown.

Hella Pick is one of the trailblazers for the modern female foreign correspondent. She worked across three continents and covered the death of Yugoslavia’s leader, President Tito. Yugoslavia was always the saving grace of covering the Soviet bloc,” she remembers. “While in East Germany you were followed and listened to all the time, but Tito’s regime was a symbol of independent communism. Even the American ambassador was predicting the country would survive beyond Tito. Of course, we were all wrong.” Pick will talk about her incredible career, the stories she has covered and the current challenges facing journalism.
Neal Ascherson went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. The historian Eric Hobsbawm was his tutor and described him as “perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn’t really teach him much, I just let him get on with it.” After graduating he he chose a career in journalism, first at The Manchester Guardian and then at The Scotsman, The Observer and The Independent on Sunday.He contributed scripts for the documentary series The World at War (1973–74) and the Cold War (1998). He has also been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Ascherson has lectured and written extensively about Polish and Eastern Europe affairs.

In this book talk, Professor Sonia Contera will talk about how Nanotechnology is transforming medicine and the future of biology.

Please register via the link provided. This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception, book sale and book signing, all welcome.

Inaugural event in our new events series focusing on responsible leadership: Driving Diversity and Inclusion Seminar Series.

Progress on diversity in the UK civil service and why it matters. How the dial only really shifted on gender, and why the focus is now on inclusion and addressing bullying and harassment. What the good leaders are doing?

Dame Sue Owen will give a talk followed by a Q&A with the audience moderated by Sue Dopson, Rhodes Trust Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Fellow of Green Templeton College, Deputy Dean of Saïd Business School.

Event Schedule:
17:15 – Registration opens
17:45 – Event starts
18:45 – Drinks reception
19:45 – Close

When the UK joined the EU in 1973 all previous trade barriers with the EU were abolished, which led to a strong intensification of trade with the European continent.

This situation will soon be a thing of the past, however, as new trade barriers will be erected with the withdrawal. Since the food self-sufficiency rate in the UK is particular low newly invoked trade barriers will significantly affect how food is produced and consumed in the UK.

Please register via the link provided.

New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines.

In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. Yet in A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind shows why this time really is different. Advances in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.

Susskind will argue that machines no longer need to reason like us in order to outperform us. Increasingly, tasks that used to be beyond the capability of computers – from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts – are now within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is real.

So how can we all thrive in a world with less work? Susskind will remind us that technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of mankind’s oldest problems: making sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenge will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the centre of our lives.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, book sale and signing, all welcome.

Lord Sumption will discuss the impact on our constitution and political system of the referendum of 2016 and its aftermath.

Part of the Oxford Martin Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

Come and take a role in a simulation of our world between now and 2030. It’s a challenging time and other people will have different objectives to yours.
How can business and society create the world we all want?
Can the UN Sustainable Development Goals help?

Hear a whole phD in just three minutes!
Can you understand a whole phD in just three minutes? Perhaps you are an Undergraduate or Masters student who is aiming for a future PhD?
Join Humanities and Social Sciences PhD students as we challenge them to boil down their whole PhD to just three minutes and one slide – in a way that makes sense to everyone!

One estimate suggests that $2.3trillion was invested in infrastructure worldwide last year.

That vast investment has provided roads, power plants, mobile phone networks, dams and recycling plants. Whether those investments have been sustainable is questionable.

As well as providing essential services that people need, infrastructure too often locks in carbon emissions, fragments habitats and opens them up for exploitation, appropriates land and exacerbates inequalities. In many respects, choices about infrastructure investment are a remarkable point of leverage, when the future course of development is set, literally, in concrete.Too often these decisions are subject to political patronage, rent seeking and worse.

This lecture will examine the many impacts that infrastructure can have on sustainable development, for better or for worse. Professor Hall will share experiences of establishing long-term plans for sustainable infrastructure in many countries around the world.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

Globally, renewable energy has a foot in the door. But significant challenges remain.

Will we be able to execute on the rapid deployment of zero carbon energy required to meet a 1.5C future? This presentation highlights the major challenges and provides some early insights on how we might tackle these significant societal issues.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

This lecture will describe research in chemistry and polymer materials carried out in the Williams research laboratories.

This research focusses on how to activate and transform non-petrochemical raw materials into polymers (plastics). For example, waste plants or agricultural by-products or even waste carbon dioxide can all be used as raw materials to make polymers, replacing petrochemicals derived from oil. The properties of polymers will be discussed and examples will given of possible end-user applications for these new renewable polymers. The lecture will introduce some concepts to consider when evaluating polymer sustainability and life cycles.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

This book colloquium will discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, her influential account of the challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, specifically, how the commodification of personal information threatens our core values of freedom, democracy, and privacy.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behaviour modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioural futures markets”, where predictions about our behaviour are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioural modification”.

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit – at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future – if we let it.

Participants include:
Dr Christopher Decker, Economist and Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Oxford

Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Ivan Manokha, Lecturer in Political Economy, Oxford

Praise for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
“Easily the most important book to be published this century … this generation’s Das Kapital.”
— Zadie Smith

With the UK population predicted to grow nearly 20% by 2050 (circa 77 million people), over 65s making up around 25% of the population and more and more demands being put on the healthcare system what does the future hold?

Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, will discuss predictions for the future advancement of healthcare in the UK and how these advancements will monitor, diagnose and treat us and how this will change our healthcare system.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

‘Job insecurity at the end of the 20th century has given way to income insecurity at the start of the 21st.’ – Andy Haldane, July 2019

Join us for a stimulating morning of talks exploring the current challenges of income insecurity, with keynote speaker Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England. We will discuss labour market precarity, pay volatility and income insecurity issues in the UK and more widely, and their implications for the labour market and the structure of the social security system.

Programme:

Welcome and introduction by Charles Godfray, Director, Oxford Martin School
Keynote address: Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England
‘Pay volatility and income insecurity: what role for social security?’ by Jane Millar, Professor of Social Policy, University of Bath
‘Measuring economic insecurity: Why and How?’ by Matteo Richiardi, Professor of Economics and Director of EUROMOD, University of Essex, INET Associate
Panel discussion and Q&A: chaired by Brian Nolan, Professor of Social Policy at Oxford, with speakers and Fran Bennett, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
This event is free, but registration is essential to ensure your place.

You are welcome to bring lunch with you.

This series of talks is organised by the Oxford Martin School, Department of Social Policy and Intervention & Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford

Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations, University of Oxford, will deliver a lecture on the contemporary decline of the liberal order, and call for a rethinking of liberal ideas and practices. The Keynote Lecture will open a workshop the following day.

The term ‘liberal international order’ has become widely used – generally to refer to the international system that developed in the years after the end of the Cold War in 1989, or even to the whole period since the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Although the term itself is relatively new, the ideas and practices that comprise it are not. They include multi-party democracy, the growth of international law and institutions, recognition of human rights, freedom of religious belief, the removal of barriers to international trade.

All of the above have been advocated as means of reducing the incidence of war between states. This is not an elegy for a liberal international order that is now under threat, but rather a call for rethinking it, especially in light of its long, diverse, and troubled history.

Adam Roberts is Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at Oxford University and a Fellow of Balliol College. In 2009–13 he was President of the British Academy, the UK national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He was awarded a knighthood in 2002 for services to the study and practice of international relations, and has given expert advice to parliamentary committees, governments and non-governmental bodies in the UK and overseas.

His numerous books include (co-edited.) Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters, Oxford University Press, 2016. He is currently working on a book on the history of the idea of liberal international order.

A workshop to scrutinize the transformation of the contemporary international order, encompassing its social, political, legal, economic, and technological dimensions. The workshop will serve as an in-depth examination of the issues outlined in Professor Sir Adam Roberts’ lecture of the previous day.

It is plain that shifts in the organization and structure of the international order, and the social relationships within these, are experiencing stress and strain and being reconceived and redesigned in reaction to deeper forces.

Among the factors driving this change and revision, even transformation, include:

relations among nations;
the rise of social movements in response to changing attitudes to authority and established ideas and institutions;
altered dispositions towards international law and international and regional institutions;
challenges to the liberal order;
scepticism about human rights, universal principles, and the power of the courts to uphold them;
new economic perspectives, revised business and financial relations and practices; and
the rapid development of technology, the dawn of the digital age, and the consequences.
Participants include:
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Mary Bartkus, Special Counsel, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP

Ralph Schroeder, Professor of Social Science of the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute

David Vines, Professor of Economics, Oxford

This talk will focus on the disruptive ingredients and recipes at the heart of Ocado’s ongoing journey of self-disruption and reinvention.

One of these recipes relates to growing, manufacturing and delivering our food in much more efficient, scalable and sustainable ways. This is going to require some much bigger thinking.

Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

Over 60 different organisations running stalls and activities for all ages, with four different learning zones (environment, science, design and fiction). Speakers, exhibitions, outdoor performances and robot shows!

Lecture 2: The case for collective defined contribution (CDC)
On any sensible approach to the valuation of a DB scheme, ineliminable risk will remain that returns on a portfolio weighted towards return-seeking equities and property will fall significantly short of fully funding the DB pension promise. On the actuarial approach, this risk is deemed sufficiently low that it is reasonable and prudent to take in the case of an open scheme that will be cashflow positive for many decades. But if they deem the risk so low, shouldn’t scheme members who advocate such an approach be willing to put their money where their mouth is, by agreeing to bear at least some of this downside risk through a reduction in their pensions if returns are not good enough to achieve full funding? Some such conditionality would simply involve a return to the practices of DB pension schemes during their heyday three and more decades ago. The subsequent hardening of the pension promise has hastened the demise of DB. The target pensions of collective defined contribution (CDC) might provide a means of preserving the benefits of collective pensions, in a manner that is more cost effective for all than any form of defined benefit promise. In one form of CDC, the risks are collectively pooled across generations. In another form, they are collectively pooled only among the members of each age cohorts.

What happens when new artificial intelligence (AI) tools are integrated into organisations around the world?

For example, digital medicine promises to combine emerging and novel sources of data and new analysis techniques like AI and machine learning to improve diagnosis, care delivery and condition management. But healthcare workers find themselves at the frontlines of figuring out new ways to care for patients through, with – and sometimes despite – their data. Paradoxically, new data-intensive tasks required to make AI work are often seen as of secondary importance. Gina calls these tasks data work, and her team studied how data work is changing in Danish & US hospitals (Moller, Bossen, Pine, Nielsen and Neff, forthcoming ACM Interactions).

Based on critical data studies and organisational ethnography, this talk will argue that while advances in AI have sparked scholarly and public attention to the challenges of the ethical design of technologies, less attention has been focused on the requirements for their ethical use. Unfortunately, this means that the hidden talents and secret logics that fuel successful AI projects are undervalued and successful AI projects continue to be seen as technological, not social, accomplishments.

In this talk we will examine publicly known “failures” of AI systems to show how this gap between design and use creates dangerous oversights and to develop a framework to predict where and how these oversights emerge. The resulting framework can help scholars and practitioners to query AI tools to show who and whose goals are being achieved or promised through, what structured performance using what division of labour, under whose control and at whose expense. In this way, data work becomes an analytical lens on the power of social institutions for shaping technologies-in-practice.

Lecture 3: The case for an unfunded pay as you go (PAYG) pension

The previous two lectures grappled with various challenges that funded collective pension schemes face. In the final lecture, I ask whether an unfunded ‘pay as you go’ (PAYG) approach might provide a solution. With PAYG, money is directly transferred from those who are currently working to pay the pensions of those who are currently retired. Rather than drawing from a pension fund consisting of a portfolio of financial assets, these pensions are paid out of the Treasury’s coffers. The pension one is entitled to in retirement is often, however, a function of, even though not funded by, the pensions contributions one has made during one’s working life. I explore the extent to which a PAYG pension can be justified as a form of indirect reciprocity that cascades down generations. This contrasts with a redistributive concern to mitigate the inequality between those who are young, healthy, able-bodied, and productive and those who are elderly, infirm, and out of work. I explore claims inspired by Ken Binmore and Joseph Heath that PAYG pensions in which each generation pays the pensions of the previous generation can be justified as in mutually advantageous Nash equilibrium. I also discuss the relevance to the case for PAYG of Thomas Piketty’s claim that r > g, where “r” is the rate of return on capital and “g” is the rate of growth of the economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on societies around the world.

As governments mandate social distancing practices and instruct non-essential businesses to close to slow the spread of the outbreak, there is significant uncertainty about the effect such measures will have on lives and livelihoods. While demand for specific sectors such as healthcare has skyrocketed in recent months, other sectors such as air transportation and tourism have seen demand for their services evaporate. At the same time, many sectors are experiencing issues on the supply-side, as governments curtail the activities of non-essential industries.

Which industries will suffer most from demand-side or supply-side shocks resulting from the pandemic? Which workers are most of risk of unemployment or reduced wage income? Who will be the winners and losers?

Professor Doyne Farmer and Maria del Rio-Chanona will talk about their recent paper which estimated these shocks would threaten around 22% of the US economy’s GDP, jeopardise 24% of jobs and reduce total wage income by 17% – while the potential impacts are a multiple of what was experienced during the global financial crisis, and perhaps comparable to the Great Depression. Aggressive fiscal and monetary policies are needed to minimise the impact of these shocks but the avoidance of endangering public health must be the priority.

This talk is in conjunction with The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

To register and watch this talk live and participate in the Q & A: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/supply-and-demand-shocks

To watch later: https://youtu.be/5wtNm6ETuLQ

It is no coincidence that countries with mission-driven governments have fared better in the COVID-19 crisis than those beholden to the cult of efficiency.

Join Mariana Mazzucato, UCL professor and author of The Entrepreneurial State and The Value of Everything, in conversation with Oxford Martin School Director, Sir Charles Godfray, to discuss why states must invest again in dynamic capabilities and capacity – not only to govern more effectively during the pandemic, but to ultimately build back better.

This talk is in partnership with The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

To register and watch this talk live: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/professor-mariana-mazzucato

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRMlPVgR7x0

Expert in globalisation and development, Professor Ian Goldin uses state-of-the-art maps to show humanity’s impact on the planet and demonstrate how we can save it and thrive as a species.

Professor Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University, has traced the paths of peoples, cities, wars, climates and technologies on a global scale in his new book Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years, which he co-authored with Robert Muggah.

In this book talk he will demonstrate the impact of climate change and rises in sea level on cities around the world, the truth about immigration, the future of population growth, trends in health and education, and the realities of inequality and how to end it.

To register and watch live: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/terra-incognita

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMhLn7C7o3g

The FinCEN Files investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, exposed more than $2 trillion in suspicious deals.

Criminals, politicians and others sent money through the world’s major banks, which initially ignored red flags or reported the money as potentially dirty after weeks, months or years of delay. Billions of dollars in suspicious deals moved from Africa into Europe, the United States, the Middle East and secretive tax havens, including payments to and from politicians and family members, state-owned oil and gas companies, arms companies and many others.

Join William Fitzgibbon and Augustin Armendariz, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, Premium Times Nigeria, as they discuss with Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira what the FinCEN Files investigation has uncovered and the implications.

How do you build inclusion from the ground up?

People with albinism face discrimination across the globe but are often left out of activist efforts around diversity and inclusion.

In this episode, we speak to representatives of Sesame Street Workshop, who have been championing diversity for years. With a breadth of expertise in the art of embracing diversity, this insightful look into the world of Sesame Street gives us new ways of approaching our goals. Supermodel and activist Diandra Forrest also joins the conversation. Fellow guest speaker Stephan Bognar, Executive Director of New York Dermatology Group Foundation, completes the line-up. They worked together previously on the Colorfull campaign, which was conceived by NYDG to highlight the prejudice that albinism attracts.

Join Peter Drobac as he interviews Paul Farmer, in an exploration of the lessons we can learn from Paul Farmer’s phenomenal new book, Fevers, feuds and diamonds: Ebola and the ravages of history.

We will reflect on how these lessons can help us tackle the current Covid-19 pandemic and discuss how inequality and exploitation fuelled the spread of a deadly virus and how we might finally learn from history, in order to build a healthier, more equitable world.

For more details, visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/fevers-feuds-and-diamonds-dr-paul-farmer-future-global-health

Join us live or watch the recording on: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers

This event and open to all Registration not required.