Ideas at Work with Toby Shannan

Wendy Carlin is Professor of Economics at University College London (UCL) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). She is leading an international project - the CORE project - to reform the undergraduate economics curriculum. The CORE project has produced an open-access e-book for a first course in economics, which is being used at UCL, Sciences Po, Toulouse School of Economics, Humboldt University and many other universities around the world. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, and the economics of transition. She is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility.

David's research is concerned with the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture, with an emphasis on robust information transmission, signaling dynamics and their role in constructing novel, higher level features. The research spans several levels of organization finding analogous processes in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. At the cellular level he has been interested in molecular processes, which rely on volatile, error-prone, asynchronous, mechanisms, which can be used as a basis for decision making and patterning. He also investigates how signaling interactions at higher levels, including microbial and organismal, are used to coordinate complex life cycles and social systems, and under what conditions we observe the emergence of proto-grammars. Much of this work is motivated by the search for 'noisy-design' principles in biology and culture emerging through evolutionary dynamics that span hierarchical structures. In addition to general principles there is a need to provide an explicit theory of evolutionary history, a theory of memory accounting for those incompressible regularities revealed once the regular components have been subtracted.

Andrew McAfee is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world. His latest book is More From Less: How We Finally Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources - and What Happens Next.

Geoffrey is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as President for the Santa Fe Institute from 2005 through to 2009. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute he was the leader, and founder, of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

He is known for his work in describing the universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems.

David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University.

Join Toby Shannan as he discusses with Jonathan Haidt what an emerging new normal might be post the Covid-19 crisis. Their broad ranging conversation touches on these topics and more while answering Shopifolk questions submitted via the Askify.