Public Engagement in an Age of Complexity, a project of the Science & Technology Innovation Program, is proud to welcome Gregory Ip to discuss his latest book, Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe (Little, Brown).

In Foolproof, Ip looks at how we often force new, unexpected risks to develop in unexpected places as we seek to minimize risk from crises like financial downturns and natural disasters. This is a phenomenon only likely to increase as our financial systems and cities become more complex and interconnected, but Ip concludes that these crises actually benefit society.

“We can make disaster and crisis less frequent and more survivable, but we won’t end either,’ IP writes in Foolproof. “Nor should we want to. Periodic crisis is the price we pay for an economic system that encourages, and rewards, risk. Periodic disasters are the price we pay for situating our cities in desirable, productive places. The right trade-off between risk and stability will maximize the units of innovation we get per unit of instability.”  

Ip is the chief economics commentator of The Wall Street Journal, covering U.S. and international economics in the newspaper’s Capital Account column and on its Real Time Economics blog. Before joining the Journal, Ip was the U.S. Economics Editor for The Economist from 2008 to 2015. From 1996 to 2008, he was a reporter in Washington and New York for the Journal. He also wrote The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World (Wiley). Ip received a bachelor’s degree in economics and journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe comes out Oct. 13. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event.

David Rejeski, director of the Science & Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center, will lead the discussion, which will include time for audience questions.

For more information or press inquiries, please contact Aaron Lovell at (202) 691-4320 or aaron.lovell@wilsoncenter.org

More information about Public Engagement in an Age of Complexity can be found here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/public-engagement-age-complexity