Join us for a special lecture by guest speaker, author Kevin Brine.

Kevin Brine, Montecito resident, Wall Street veteran and co-founder of The RE:Enlightenment Project is author with Mary Poovey of Finance in America: An Unfinished Story. His lecture chronicles the seven stages between 1870 and 2008 of the revolution in model-thinking, model-building, and model-based policy in modern economics and finance. For more information about Kevin Brine and Finance in America, see www.kevinbrinebooks.com.

The seeds of the model revolution in the disciplines of economics and finance, for example, were sown in the late nineteenth century when, in the English-speaking world, Victorian political science took a markedly mathematical turn. Few will dispute that modeling proliferates in academic research in the sciences, the social sciences, and, increasingly, the humanities. Model-thinking also permeates the popular financial press, our medical literature and, of course, the daily weather forecast. Financial planners “model” our investment and spending plans; macroeconomics “model” policy initiatives against probabilistic scenarios which set the interest we pay on our mortgages; bankers “model” collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO’s) and so forth. It is not hyperbole to say that modelling, cast in probabilistic terms, has become the modern way of knowing.

Sponsored by UCSB’s Department of English and its Early Modern Center as well as The RE:Enlightenment Project.