Lighthouse Talks in Economics (LITE) Program, Inaugural lecture with Professor Mary S Morgan

The LITE Program aims to establish and nurture a trans-disciplinary dialogue among scholars in Economics, the Humanities and the Social Sciences on contemporary issues of societal relevance.It aims to establish a venue for critical thinking where focal ideas are examined and discussed to reach out and develop a more complex understanding of contemporary societies. 

Our LITE Inaugural Speaker: Professor Mary S Morgan from London School of Economics

Topic: Accounting Reasons - Reasoning Accounts, The Importance of Measurement in Re-Shaping Economies

Date: Friday 22 April 2016

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm (morning tea at 10:30 am)

Cost: Free of charge but registration is essential

Location: Seminar Room 2, Dunmore Lang College, 130 – 134 Herring Road, North Ryde

Transport: by train (Macquarie University Station) or by car (first come first served parking space in the College or 3-hour free parking at Macquarie Shopping Center within 10 minutes walk to the venue)

Registrations: by Friday 15 April at Selma.Huang@mq.edu.au. Please advise of any dietary requirements.

Abstract: At those moments when states aim to re-make their economies into some other form (following transitions, revolutions, wars, etc) economic measurement plays a surprisingly crucial role in the recipes chosen to transform economies. This agenda prompts reflections on a) the relationship between accounting principles and empirical knowledge of causes; b) importance of field guides that do the translations from ideal types of measurement to those made on the ground economy; and c) the relationship between top down expertise and bottom up preferences for the possibility of trust and success.

About the speaker: Mary Morgan is Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and Vice President (Publications) at the British Academy. 

She also holds a professorial appointment at the University of Amsterdam and is a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her major area of scholarship is the history of economic and econometric ideas.  Her recent award winning book, The World in the Model (Cambridge University Press, 2012), considers modelling as a method of enquiry, the imagining and imaging of economic ideas (to consider the way that images emerge and are developed over time to give form, and greater clarity, to economic thinking), model experiments, the uses of simulations and a range of other issues.