The Lavin Agency: Joseph Heath

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Exclusively represented by The Lavin Agency. Joseph Heath. Author of Filthy Lucre and The Rebel Sell. Money and other illusions: How common sense.
Exclusively represented by The Lavin Agency

Joseph Heath Author of Filthy Lucre and The Rebel Sell Money and other illusions: How common sense leads us to economic irrationality

From countercultural rebellion to financial derivatives, Joseph Heath is an expert on what makes the market tick. He preaches the science of economics, but without the graphs and equations. As a philosopher, he revels in the surprising and the unexpected. He enjoys nothing more than finding out that things he once thought true are in fact false. Always opinionated, invariably controversial, he would be more than happy to tell you why everything you think you know about the economy is wrong. Joseph Heath is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. He is the author of three bestselling books: The Efficient Society: Why Canada is As Close to Utopia as it Gets, with Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, and now his most recent book Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism. His work has been translated into 12 different languages and counting. Joseph Heath Speech Topics Money and other illusions: How common sense leads us to economic irrationality Money is something that is both intimate and familiar. We use it everyday, and yet how many of us really understand it? We treat it as though it has value, but in reality it has none. This "money illusion" leads us to commit fallacies, when it comes to understanding international trade, wages, taxes and government. Heath identifies the four biggest fallacies we are all prone to, then shows how we can avoid them in our everyday economic reasoning. The Secret History of Risk: Understanding the Financial Crisis There are some things you need to know about the financial crisis that you won't find out reading the newspaper. Banks, we are told, started lending money to people with no jobs, no skills, and no prospects. What happened? Did bankers around the world go crazy? Of course not. They had a theory about what they we doing -- a theory, of course, that turned out to be mistaken. It was based upon a particular understanding of risk. In order to figure out what went wrong, and in order to avoid repeating past mistakes, we need a better understanding. We need to figure out the role that risk plays in our society, and how other societies, throughout human history, have dealt with the most basic problem of dealing with uncertainty. Overcoming Bias: How to Think Straight Our brains are the product of evolution. What sort of consequences does this have for our day-to-day lives? The most important is that it forces us to realize that we are imperfect. Just as your spine was not really

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designed to support upright posture, so your brain was not designed to support rational thought. Nature is not in the business of producing perfection, it's in the business of producing things that are good enough. Yet this does not mean that we are fated to be irrational, any more than we are fated to suffer from back pain. There are ways we can learn to overcome the biases that nature has instilled in us.

800 265 4870 [email protected]

Copyright 2009 The Lavin Agency Ltd.