Stanford University

System Error, Live! With Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein

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 Register for System Error, Live!

This event will be held outside on Stanford's campus. In accordance with Santa Clara County Public Health, masks are encouraged to be worn by all at crowded outdoor events.

Join Profs. Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein — the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot — for a discussion hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The operating system of Big Tech is broken, and this panel discussion will explore the path to a reboot. Plus, it will also allow you experience Professor Sahami’s famous tradition of throwing candy into the audience!

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors — experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades — System Error reveals how Big Tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and demands that we change course to renew our democracy and save ourselves.

Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, these three Stanford professors—a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, the director of the undergraduate computer science program who was also an early Google engineer, and a political scientist who served under Barack Obama—reveal how we can hold that power to account. Troubled by the values that permeate the university and Silicon Valley, these professors worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow’s technologists might better approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of Big Tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, join us as they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.

Books will be available for purchase at the event, and the authors will be signing copies as well.

This event is hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and it is co-sponsored by the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Stanford School of Engineering, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

Rob Reich | FSI Affiliate
Mehran Sahami | Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department
Jeremy Weinstein | FSI Senior Fellow at CDDRL
Lectures

Here, Right Matters - Book Talk with Alexander Vindman

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For Fall Quarter 2021, FSI will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will be open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

                                                Register for Zoom                                                         Register for In-Person
                                                           (Open to all)                                                                    (Stanford affiliates only)          


Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who found himself at the center of a firestorm for his decision to report the phone call between former U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to presidential impeachment, tells his own story for the first time.

'Here, Right Matters' by Alexander S. Vindman

Here, Right Matters is a stirring account of Vindman's childhood as an immigrant growing up in New York City, his career in service of his new home on the battlefield and at the White House, and the decisions leading up to the moment of truth he faced for his nation.

Alexander Vindman, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, was most recently the director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia on the White House’s National Security Council. Previously, he served as the Political-Military Affairs Officer for Russia for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as an attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. While on the Joint Staff, he co-authored the National Military Strategy Russia Annex and was the principal author for the Global Campaign for Russia. He is currently a doctoral student and fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Pritzker Military Fellow at the Lawfare Institute, and a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Perry World House. Follow him on Twitter @AVindman.

Alexander Vindman | Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel
Lectures

The Summer of 2021: Consolidation of the New Chinese Economic Model with Professor Barry Naughton

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Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions hosted the 2021 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture featuring Professor Barry Naughton speaking on The Summer of 2021: Consolidation of the New Chinese Economic Model.

Read the event recap and watch the recording on demand. 

During the summer of 2021, a “regulatory storm” shook markets in China.  While the crackdown had its most immediate effects on private education, internet business, and finance, the government has also rolled out new policies to shape manufacturing and infrastructure, and even household fertility and income distribution.  In this talk, Naughton interprets these actions as an extension of the ongoing Chinese government effort to exercise “grand steerage” of the economy.  The new policies of summer 2021 in fact represent the consolidation of a new model, in which the Chinese government decisively steers a predominantly market economy.

Watch the Recording

 

About the Speaker

Photo of Barry Naughton giving a lecture.
Barry Naughton is the So Kwan Lok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. He is one of the world’s most highly respected economists working on China. He is an authority on the Chinese economy with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance and China's transition to a market economy.

Naughton’s recent research focuses on regional economic growth in China and its relationship to foreign trade and investment. He has addressed economic reform in Chinese cities, trade and trade disputes between China and the United States and economic interactions among China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Naughton has written the authoritative textbook “The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth,” which has now been translated into Chinese. His groundbreaking book “Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993” received the Ohira Memorial Prize, and he most recently translated, edited and annotated a collection of articles by the well-known Chinese economist Wu Jinglian. Naughton writes a quarterly analysis of the Chinese economy for China Leadership Monitor. 

Read more about Professor Naughton.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia.

Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

Event Sponsors:
Stanford Libraries
Stanford Center on China's Economy & Institutions

Zoom Webinar

Barry Naughton
Lectures

An Address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

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Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) is honored to host the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, for an address on U.S.-Ukrainian relations. President Zelensky's visit to Stanford follows his August 31 meeting with United States President Joe Biden, and is the first visit to California by a Ukrainian president.

This event is publically available via Zoom. Please register in advance.

Register: https://bit.ly/3DdkPzL

Lectures

French Culture Workshop with Minayo Nasiali

Please join us for a workshop discussion of Dr. Minayo Nasiali's draft book chapter, "A Working Alias: African Sailors and Fungible Identities across France and Great Britain’s Maritime Empires (1920-1939).

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Register for a Zoom link

Lectures

The Challenges of Reimagining Policing: A Comparative Perspective

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This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NzD-GVYjRY-vSxHkLmSzdQ

At a time when protests in the United States and around the world are bringing attention to systemic abuses committed by the police, many are asking important questions about what works in police reform. While significant scholarly attention has focused on how increases in police spending impact crime, far less attention has been paid to the efficacy of institutional reforms that reshape who joins the police, how police are trained, and rules and procedures that govern police-citizen relations. Drawing on comparative evidence from their own micro-level studies of police reform in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Beatriz Magaloni and Jeremy Weinstein will explore the evidence base for prominent reforms now on the policy agenda including: community policing, external oversight, and the use of new technologies (e.g. body-worn cameras). Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will offer welcome remarks.

Lectures

Where Do We Go From Here? King's Unanswered Question

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This event will be live streamed on Zoom. RSVP required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MKEESYy6SZWjqlQ5YuQC9w

Martin Luther King, Jr., is best known for his "I Have a Dream" speech, but if we look at his Nobel lecture and final works, it is clear that he is much more than a civil rights leader. In the lecture, he makes clear his global vision and addresses what he termed the "giant triplets of evil": racial injustice, poverty, and war. King perceives the ultimate challenge that we continue to face today: "We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together — black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu — a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace." As I try to help build King's "World House," I find myself returning to his unanswered question: where do we go from here?

Clayborne Carson is the founder of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor of History at Stanford University.

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University.

Lectures

Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth

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Inequality has become an intractable feature of the rich industrialized democracies, despite consensus among mass publics and experts that more social and economic equality is desirable. This book examines the political dynamics underlying the “new normal” of high and rising inequality since 1980. To do so, it traces the largely unsuccessful attempts of west European governments during this period to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in health. In England, France, and Finland, three quite different countries that span the range of European political economies, governments stated their intention to reduce inequalities in health — yet in all three cases, they were largely unable or unwilling to do what it would take to achieve this goal. Lynch finds that when center-left politicians take up the issue of socioeconomic inequalities in health, they do so in response to perceived taboos against redistribution, public spending and market regulation in a neoliberal era. Reframing inequality as a matter of health, rather than of the maldistribution of political or economic resources, is at best a partial solution, however: It reshapes the policy-making environment surrounding social inequality in ways that make it more difficult to reduce either socioeconomic inequality or health inequalities. Technocratic, medicalized inequality discourses result in shifting the Overton window around inequality away from tried-and-true policy remedies for inequality, and toward complex policy levers that are far more likely to fail. In short, inequality persists despite growing awareness of the harms it creates because of the way political leaders choose to talk about it — and not only because of economic necessity or demands from the electorate.
 
 
Julia Lynch

Julia Lynch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her research focuses on the politics of inequality and social policy in the rich democracies, particularly the countries of western Europe. She has special interests in comparative health policy and the politics of health inequalities; the politics of aging; and the relationship between party systems and political economy in western Europe. Lynch serves as an expert advisor to the World Health Organization’s European regional office on issues of health equity, and is past chair of the Health Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association and past treasurer of the Council for European Studies. She is editor of Socio-Economic Review, a multi-disciplinary journal focusing on analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society.  At Penn, Lynch is faculty director of the Penn In Washington Program and co-director of the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium. Lynch holds a BA from Harvard University, a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held visiting appointments at the European University Institute, Sciences Po, and Oxford.
 
Julia Lynch Speaker University of Pennsylvania
Lectures

Innovation Needed to Meet Global Food Security Challenges

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Join us for a talk with agricultural and development economist Christopher B. Barrett, this quarter’s visiting scholar with the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an International Professor of Agriculture with Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Professor Barrett will discuss food systems advances over the past 50 years that have promoted unprecedented reduction globally in poverty and hunger, averted considerable deforestation, and broadly improved lives, livelihoods and environments in much of the world. He’ll share perspectives on the reasons why, despite those advances, those systems increasingly fail large communities in environmental, health, and increasingly in economic terms and appear ill-suited to cope with inevitable further changes in climate, incomes, and population over the coming 50 years. Barrett will explore the new generation of innovations underway that must overcome a host of scientific and socioeconomic obstacles.
 
Also a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, Barrett is co-editor in chief of the journal Food Policy, is a faculty fellow with David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and serves as the director of the Stimulating Agriculture and Rural Transformation (StART) Initiative housed at the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.
 

Lectures

Michel Serres: Thinking in Figures

After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres's prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the  "figures" that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.

 

Dr. Christopher Watkin is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches across French and Literary Studies. He is the author of a number of books in modern and contemporary thought, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009), Difficult Atheism (2011), and French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human (2016). His latest monograph, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, is due to be published with Edinburgh University Press in early 2020. Chris is currently working on a project interrogating the concepts of freedom and liberation in contemporary thought and society in the light of what has been called the Western “emancipation narrative”. He blogs about philosophy and academic research at christopherwatkin.com, and you can find him on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.  

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Christopher Watkin Speaker Monash University – Melbourne, Australia
Lectures
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