The Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies 2023
Bounding rationality: the wisdom of conscious blinders
‘The world is awash with complex problems where we would often like to be useful, but where we would like to be useful we're often slow to respond; we're not always asked to help in places where we think we might be useful, we're not always the best helpers when we try, we're not always attractive to recruits; and we're not always liked in either in the general or the specific.’
This event is the first of the three Clarendon Lectures in Management 2023. The Clarendon Lectures are jointly organised by Oxford University Press and Saïd Business School. Every year a leading international academic is invited to give a series of lectures on a topic related to management education and research, broadly defined. The lectures form the basis of a book subsequently published by Oxford University Press.
The lectures this year are delivered by Professor Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
He argues that today’s scorn for 'elites' limits academia’s ability to create and apply expertise that society needs to address complex problems, such as climate change, arms control, homelessness, biodiversity loss, pandemic disease, and political repression. However, academia cannot throw all the blame on society for failing to understand the science: instead, it can look at ways in which different academic disciplines can collaborate to make better decisions, understand risk, and thereby better serve society.
