Transcript
MS. CAROL GRAHAM: Good morning and welcome to Brookings for a discussion of one of the more pressing policy problems on our agenda, bio-terror. I'm Carol Graham. I'm Director of our Governance Studies program and Co-Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics here at Brookings.
Prior to turning the agenda over to our two speakers, Josh Epstein and Don Burke, I wanted to say a word about our Center on Social and Economic Dynamics which is a joint effort of the Brookings Institution and the Johns Hopkins University and it's key to this collaborative effort between Drs. Epstein and Burke, and also a word about the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Hopkins.
Our Center on Social and Economic Dynamics is a joint center between Hopkins and Brookings where a number of us are trying to change the way we think about social policy and public policy. We focus on dynamics. Most social science focuses on equilibrium. We actually focus on dynamics. Phenomenon such as tipping phenomenon in crime, sudden explosions of civil violence, the dynamics of the market reform process and many other policy problems where dynamics are really what we are worried about and not equilibrium phenomenon.
One of our major focuses is social interaction. This is going to be key to what you see today. But both social dynamics and social interactions are very difficult to measure and to do so we need new and better data, and more importantly we need new analytical approaches.
What you will see today hinges on an agent-based computer modeling approach to social science that's been pioneered here at Brookings by Joshua Epstein and his colleague Rob Axtell, and it allows us to capture social interactions and social dynamics. Today you'll see it applied to a key public policy issue, bio-terror.
Key to this model and this effort is our collaboration with Professor Burke who's at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and I wanted to say a word about the Bloomberg School of Public Health. It's the oldest, largest, and most academically acclaimed school of public health in the country. Its faculty comprises one-quarter of all faulty of U.S. schools of public health—in other words, one-sixth of all public health doctoral degrees.
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