Transcript
CAROL GRAHAM: At the Center for Social and Economic Dynamics we place a particular focus on the social norms that govern behavior and the way in which social interactions can determine very large differences in aggregate outcomes. So we address a range of policy questions, from inequality, to spontaneous outbreaks of civil violence, and to the spread of epidemics and infectious diseases, the topic of today's forum. In our view though, understanding the social interactions that underlie these phenomenon are absolutely critical to understanding the aggregate outcomes, and if you consider that most models of disease transmission do not really account for social interactions and yet how people interact with each other makes a major difference to the rate and pattern of disease spread, I hope you will see today that our models are uniquely well suited to addressing these questions.
One of the things that distinguishes Brookings from other think tanks is our capacity to do in-depth longer-term research, and while certainly at times we do focus on short-term problems and tell people what to think about particular policy problems, I think what distinguishes us is our ability to frame policy debates and, in other words, not to tell people what to do about a particular policy problem, but how to think about a deeper range of policy problems. And I think you will see in these presentations that they are as much about how to think about the pandemic flu challenge as to what to think about a particular outbreak. One presentation from Josh Epstein will do so from the epidemiological side, and the other by Warwick McKibbin will do so from the economics perspective.
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