BUniverse

Why Care? A Conversation with Timberland President and CEO Jeffrey Swartz about Our Collective Responsibility

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Jeffrey Swartz, president and chief executive officer of Timberland, visits Boston University to discuss sustainability, carbon emissions, and corporate responsibility to provide ethical consumer choices. Throughout the lecture, Swartz draws on his own business experience and his company’s attempts to foster sustainability, highlighting Timberland’s efforts to discourage waste, encourage community action by its employees, and reduce its carbon footprint. Kristen McCormack, faculty director of the School of Management’s Public and Nonprofit Management Program, moderates the event.

As Timberland has grown, Swartz explains, it has begun to focus more intently on curbing its environmental impact. He discusses Timberland’s aims to reduce carbon emissions in the manufacturing of its leather, to safely eliminate toxins produced in its factories, and to make sure its working conditions are safe. He also emphasizes the need for business competitors to work together to create change in the area of sustainability. Swartz describes his own corporate philosophy, saying he runs his company on a belief in the notion of “justice in commerce.”

October 14, 2009, 4 p.m.

Morse Auditorium

Video Length is 01:12:03.

About the Speaker:

Jeffrey Swartz is the president and CEO of the outdoor apparel company Timberland, one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Since joining the family business in 1986, he has created a social enterprise department to encourage employees’ community service and has spoken frequently on corporate responsibility. In 1988, he helped launch Timberland’s public/private partnership with City Year, a national youth service organization, where he has served on the board of directors since 1989 and acted as the board’s chairman from 1994 to 2003. He served on President George W. Bush’s task force on national service, Business Strengthening America. Swartz is a member of the executive committee of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, chairman of the board of directors of the Maimonides School in Newton, Massachusetts, and a board member of Birthright Israel. He is a graduate of Brown University and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University.

Future Challenges: Global Development Beyond the Financial Crisis

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Moderated by Adil Najam, director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Global Development Beyond the Financial Crisis examines the long-term fallout of last year’s global financial collapse and the resulting stimulus spending. The panelists are William Grimes, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of international relations, Shahrukh Rafi Khan, a visiting professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College, and Michael Walton, a lecturer in international development at the Harvard Kennedy School. They debate the role of the International Monetary Fund, the United States, East Asia, and other players in reconstructing the world economy.

Khan begins by discussing the role of international institutions in managing global recovery, particularly the newly strengthened International Monetary Fund and the Group of Twenty, which seems to have taken the place of the more exclusive Group of Eight. He notes that even wealthy countries will experience some upheaval: two-thirds of the world’s 80 high-income economies have “stable or declining” manufacturing, “so they have their work cut out for them.” Grimes follows with a brief talk on the East Asian economic bloc, which he says “is coming out of this crisis faster and stronger than anyone else.” He applauds Asian countries for opening their economies, but wonders if China in particular will be able to transition from buying U.S. debt to promoting demand-centric growth within its borders. Walton concludes by exploring policy avenues that would lead to successful moderate transformation for developing countries. While the recent financial crisis was a flaw, not a fundamental failure, of capitalism, he says, we should not expect that the transition out of debt and collapse will be easy for developing nations.

A question-and-answer period follows.

October 9, 2009, noon
Pardee House

Video length is 01:27:13.

About the speakers:
William W. Grimes is a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of international relations and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Asia at Boston University. He has published extensively on Japanese monetary policy and the impacts of financial regionalism and globalization in Japan and East Asia and is the author of Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism (2008).

Shahrukh Rafi Khan is a visiting professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College. From 1996 to 2002, he was executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is the author of several books on trade, labor, and education in the developing world, including Export Success and Industrial Linkages: The Case of Readymade Garments in South Asia (2009).

Michael Walton is a lecturer in international development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the past year, he has been the V.K.R.V. Rao Chair Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, India, and a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, India. From 1980 to 2004, he worked at the World Bank, where he spent extended periods in Zimbabwe and Indonesia and contributed to World Development Reports on poverty, labor, and equity and development.

Future Challenges: Governance and Sustainability

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Hans Hoogeveen of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Abid Suleri of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, and Mukul Sanwal of the United Nations speak on the difficulties of governing forests, food, and climate, respectively. Adil Najam, director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, moderates this seminar on how we can govern three complex problems — forest, food, and climate management — without compromising human well-being.

The linkages between global governments and issues of development can no longer be ignored, the speakers say. For example, Hoogeveen says, forests are integral to health, trade, resources, and climate change, yet they are governed by over forty regional and international agreements that fail to address those issues in a comprehensive manner. However, recognizing that complex problems require complex solutions, he says, a single global forest treaty will not solve the problem.

Suleri underscores the role of national and sub-national policies in episodes of food scarcity, adding that there is no such thing as a “non-political famine.” He points out the small role international institutions play, which is mainly limited to food assistance during a crisis. Sanwal concludes the discussion by arguing that states must adapt to and mitigate climate change. He highlights the imbalance in current mitigations discussions, which demand developing countries curtail infrastructure development while wealthier countries merely adjust their consumption practices. From a developing country’s perspective, he says, technology is more relevant than finance in combating climate change.

A question-and-answer period follows the lecture.

June 5, 2009, 12 p.m.

67 Bay State Road

Video length is 1:26:02

About the speakers:

Hans Hoogeveen is the director general for international affairs at the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and Food Quality. He served as chair of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) and in the Seventeenth UN Commission on Sustainable Development, where the Netherlands held the chairmanship.

Mukul Sanwal has been the senior policy advisor at the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a negotiator for the Indian government. His current research centers on strategies for institutional reform in the UN, innovative means to support international cooperation, and the development of partnerships among governments, the private sector, and local communities for environmentally sustainable economic growth.

Abid Suleri is the executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Pakistan, and the author of a recent Pardee Center Issues in Brief paper on food and governance, “The Role of National Governance.” He is currently analyzing the state of food security in Pakistan and leading an SDPI team that is formulating National Sustainable Development Strategy (NSDS) in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme.

The Internet Coming of Age

Thu, 07 May 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

Computer communications pioneer Louis Pouzin understands well the challenges that accompanied the development of the Internet and the serious challenges that remain, particularly in terms of the social, political, and economic fabric of a globalized world. These challenges include conflicts of interest, multinational squabbles, and the technological dominance of certain cultures.

Pouzin discusses the current state of the Internet and the critical issues that will affect its future, such as Internet governance, control of critical resources, and business applicability of the current Internet platform. Pouzin also addresses the effectiveness of the network, which was primarily developed based on technical expertise, in a multi-polar world, where politics, language, culture, and religion often intersect and diverge. Ultimately, he says, the continued growth and integration of the Internet will require the cooperation, at many levels, of various groups.

It is important to note that, despite all kinds of disagreements and service interruptions, the Internet has been well engineered and is largely resistant to physical trouble, Pouzin says. Access can still be problematic, particularly in the developing world, he says.

But the lack of clear international standards creates opportunities for monopolies to stake competing claims without interference or oversight, warns Pouzin. The coming decade, he says, will include further technological evolution; tensions between the “connected” and the “disconnected”; a familial/social divide; ethnic, cultural, geographic, and religious clashes; nonexistent or obsolete legislation; and alternative communities.

A question-and-answer session follows the lecture.

May 7, 2009, 5 p.m.
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video Length is 01:21:04.

About the Speaker:

Louis Pouzin is a pioneer in computer communications. He invented the concept of datagams, or connectionless communication, as the foundation for modern networking. As the director of the Cyclades project in the 1970s, at the Institut de Recherche d’Informatique et d’Automatique in France, Pouzin designed and directed the development of the Cyclades network, the first to use datagrams and the concept of end-to-end protocols, later adopted by Internet.

Pouzin graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and has served as dean of information technology at THESEUS, a France telecom institute. He has published more than eighty articles and a book on computer networks and has received numerous awards for his contributions to computer science and networking, including the French Légion d’Honneur.

Can We Afford the Future? The Economics of a Warming World

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:00:00 EDT

According to Tufts University economist Frank Ackerman, there is no question that global warming exists, but there is little action among the government and society at large to take steps to combat it. Ackerman, author of Can We Afford the Future? The Economics of a Warming World, argues that the standard economic models used to calculate the global cost of protection, versus the cost of destruction of the planet, focus on an incomplete cost-benefit analysis and do not take into account what it would take to ensure that future generations are able to enjoy an hospitable climate.

Ackerman distills the problems of the standard economics of climate change into four ideas: the high discount rates used by traditional economic models; lack of insurance policies for the planet; conventional cost-benefit analyses; and incurred costs for future benefits. He explains that the high discount rates used currently make it hard to see the true costs that climate change can impose on future generations. A discount rate of 1.5 percent is needed to see the costs that extreme weather will have in the future. Secondly, the world needs an insurance policy of sorts, he says. Steps, such as building levees, need to be taken to ensure that the world is prepared for the effects of climate change. Thirdly, traditional cost-benefit analysis methods don’t work in determining the benefits of taking action because they don’t take into account the value of human life and nature, which is priceless, says Ackerman. Lastly, the cost of protection versus the cost of destruction is difficult to determine because the cost of destruction to the planet is incalculable. Some costs for safeguarding the future are worth paying because they lead to the invention of industries, technologies, and jobs, which in turn can pay for themselves, he notes

April 28, 2009 12:00 PM

Pardee Center

Video length is 01:00:24.

About the speaker:

Frank Ackerman is a professor of economics at Tufts University whose work focuses on the economics of climate change. He has written several books on the subject, including Can We Afford the Future? Economics for a Warming World; Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution; Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing; and Why Do We Recycle? Markets, Values, and Public Policy. In 2007, Ackerman began researching climate economics with the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University and the Stockholm Environment Institute. He is a founding member of Economists for Equity and Environment and a member of the Center for Progressive Reform, nonprofit research and educational organization that focuses on protecting the environment.

The Economy: Current State and Outlook

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., president and chief executive officer of the private retirement-investment company TIAA-CREF, explores the roots of the current recession, some early signs of economic recovery, and the lessons both companies and individuals saving for retirement can learn from the financial turmoil of the past few years. Ultimately, he says, we should all learn to make financial decisions more cautiously.

Ferguson begins by analyzing the current state of the American economy. He does not yet see an end to the housing market fallout or rising unemployment; but perhaps the biggest problem, he says, is a drop in consumer confidence. Our trepidation is justified, he argues: overall personal wealth declined by $11 trillion in the past year, and the amount of consumer debt is now higher than the national income. But, he says, there are “early and tentative” signs that the markets are starting to turn: business leaders’ confidence is rising, equity markets are “trying to rally,” and the Federal Reserve’s policies seem to be working.

So what can we learn from the recession? Financial companies, Ferguson says, should take longer-term views of growth and strive to create healthy risk-management cultures. The past decade witnessed “a failing of corporate governance at a number of levels,” he says; creating strong boards of directors and risk-assessment teams will help restore the “extremely fragile” but important trust that shareholders and the government have lost in the financial system. To workers worried about their retirement savings, he advises not to act too quickly or try to outsmart the market: “Though your plans may have changed, your plan should not change.” Ferguson concludes by looking at higher education’s place in America’s financial recovery, noting that by creating human capital, universities “will play a very important role in helping the economy right itself.”

April 22, 2009, 11:30 a.m.

595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video length is 00:36:57.

About the Speaker:

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., is the president and chief executive officer of TIAA-CREF, the country’s largest private retirement system. In February, President Obama appointed Ferguson to his fifteen-person Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Prior to joining TIAA-CREF in 2008, Ferguson was chairman of the American division of the insurance company Swiss Re and vice chairman of the Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, from which he resigned in 2006. He has practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell and McKinsey & Company, where he was a partner. He received his undergraduate degree, a law degree, and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University and was a Frank Knox Fellow at Cambridge University. He serves on the Board of Overseers at Harvard University and on the Board of Directors of the Harvard Alumni Association and is a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He also is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Group of Thirty, an international advisory body of leading financiers and academics.

2009 Robert A. Rosenthal Memorial Lecture: Effecting Cooperation

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Andrew Postlewaite, economist and game-theory expert from the University of Pennsylvania, delivers the 2009 Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture, on the topic of bounded rationality.

Postlewaite, in conjunction with French researcher Olivier Compte, starts with the premise that “the organization of cooperation within society is arguably the most important question in social science.” The central issue, he says, is to understand how game-theory can help create cooperation and deter misbehavior among economic actors.

Consider the question of why Boston is considered a more pleasant place in which to live than is Somalia. The answer is that, in Boston, bad behavior is more often punished and good behavior is more consistently rewarded. In game-theory terms, Boston has more institutions that track the “continuation values” of citizens. Simply put, people are able to observe one another’s actions and provide incentives for good behavior as well as punishments for misbehavior.

Thus, specific norms put into place to observe and calculate “continuation values” can be said to work most effectively when some kind of public monitoring is available, and become much more difficult as deals move increasingly into the public realm.

Postlewaite uses the example of OPEC nations’ decision to punish violation of an agreement to hold back production to support a certain price-per-barrel of oil. In effect, every nation agrees to punish collectively by overproducing should any single country violate the accord. Punishment is costly to all, and taking such an action is dependent on information being publicly available as a clear and unambiguous sign that somebody has indeed violated the agreement. In actual practice, says Postlewaite, “there’s always a little bit of private monitoring.”

The lecture series was established by the Rosenthal Family in honor of Robert Rosenthal, a prominent and revered faculty member in Boston University’s economics department.

April 21, 2009, 4 p.m.
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video length is 01:39:16.

About the Speaker:
Andrew Postlewaite is Harry P. Kamen Professor of Economics and professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of expertise include game theory, law and economics, mathematical economics, public economics, and social choice. Postlewaite has been on the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1986 and was co-editor of the journal Econometrica from 1997 to 2005. He is now the editor of the journal Microeconomics. Postlewaite was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

Financial Crisis, Public Policy, and Economic Recovery

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Fear and uncertainty have become mainstays during the current financial crisis in the United States. Americans have witnessed the collapse of major banks, insurance companies, automakers, and the real estate market and unemployment numbers continue to break records. The U.S. government continues to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, with no end in sight to what has been called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The College of Arts and Science’s Discovery Series for alumni invited Boston University faculty experts in the area of politics and economics to analyze what has brought the country to this point, debate whether the worst is over, and offer remedies to get the United States back on track financially.

Speakers Robert Bench, a senior fellow at the School of Law’s Morin Center; Simon Gilchrist, a professor of economics; Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics; Charles Whitehead, an associate professor of law; William Grimes, an associate chairman and associate professor of international relations; and Graham Wilson, a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies, offered their opinions on what caused the current economic crisis, including risky lending, the collapse of the real estate market, and the structure of the financial system itself. They also offered solutions, such as limited-purpose banking and modification of current regulations on the market.

A question-and-answer period followed the panel discussion.

April 16, 2009, 7 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video length 01:24:15.

About the speakers:

Robert Bench is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law’s Morin Center, where he is a strategy advisor. He has spent over 40 years in financial regulation and supervision, serving as a national bank supervisor for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of Currency and as managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers regulatory advisory services practice. Bench has also served as advisor to the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, chairman of the steering committee of the financial services forum in Toronto, a member of the Governing Council of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovations in London, an advisor to the central banks of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Korea, and a leader of a World Bank project to modernize regulation at the People’s Bank of China.

Simon Gilchrist is a professor of economics at Boston University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the leading nonprofit economic research organization in the United States, and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review, and an associate editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics. Gilchrist was a staff economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and was an academic consultant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the International Monetary Fund.

Laurence Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Econometric Society, and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company that produces financial planning software. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor of economics at Yale University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was also senior economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the government of Russia, the government of Ukraine, the government of Bolivia, the government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, and AON Corp.

Charles Whitehead is an associate professor of law at Boston University, where he teaches courses in corporations and securities regulation. His areas of interest include securities regulation, corporate governance, the regulation of financial institutions, domestic and international business and Japanese law. He is currently on the U.S.–Japan Bridging Foundation’s board of directors and reviews fellowships for advanced research in the social sciences of Japan for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before coming to Boston University, he practiced law in New York, London, and Tokyo and was an editor and translator for the Journal of Law in Japan.

William Grimes is associate chairman and associate professor of international relations at Boston University. His interests include Japanese and East Asian political economy, Japanese politics, and international political economy. Grimes wrote Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985–2000 and was co-editor of Japan’s Managed Globalization: Adapting to the 21st Century. He has written extensively on East Asian financial regionalism, the impacts of financial globalization in Japan, Japanese monetary policy making, and the relationship between the United States and Japan.

Graham Wilson is a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies at Boston University. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a lecturer at the University of Essex and the University of Oxford. He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant, the PricewaterhouseCoopers Foundation grant, the Vilas Associates Award, the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professorship, and the Nuffield Foundation grant.

The Economic Crisis: Its Origins and the Way Forward

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:00:00 EDT

A year ago we could not have imagined the depths of the current financial crisis, says Marshall Carter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and deputy chairman of NYSE Euronext. Carter offers his expert opinion on the causes of the current economic crisis, and how the United States can recover, at the Edward Lane-Reticker Speaker Series. He blames the compounding of problems—such as dangerous lending, the failure of CEOs and boards to properly provide risk management, the use and growth of credit default swaps, and the housing market crash — for leading to the financial tailspin.

Carter states that the result of the economic crisis and the failure of the system will be “the largest financial reengineering endeavor in U.S. history” and will force a change in the way the markets do business. He predicts that the financial system will need to be completely restructured and that a professional will need to be chosen by the Administration to oversee economic regulations across the board. Carter also cautions that institutions should be regulated based on function and not by the original charter of the institution, which led to the collapse of AIG, an insurance company that was trading securities. In addition, he says, rating agencies should be regulated and a clearinghouse, where unregulated securities can be registered, should be created. Transparency is the key to preventing another economic crisis of this kind, he concludes.

April 15, 2009, Noon

LAW Barristers Hall

Video length is 00:50:46.

About the speaker:

Marshall Carter is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and deputy chairman of NYSE Euronext. Before joining the NYSE in 2003, Carter was chairman and chief executive officer of the State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston and the State Street Corporation. He also spent 15 years with Chase Manhattan Bank, working in finance, operations, and global securities. Carter is a former Marine Corps officer and received the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam. He received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a master’s in operations research and systems analysis from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and another master’s degree in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University.

Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

In the lecture Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities, which is also the title of his forthcoming book, Theodore C. Bestor, professor of anthropology and Japanese studies at Harvard University, explores how ideas of Asia and Asian cuisine are formed in the contemporary age, as well as how sushi has become a global commodity.

Bestor addresses the outward reach of Japanese markets and consumer demand for seafood; the growth of foreign fishing industries that serve Japanese markets; and the popularization of sushi, which has contributed to Japan’s national image.

He traces how sushi — an alien cuisine at one time — has climbed the social ranks and been incorporated across cultural boundaries. As a result, some Japanese sushi chefs have attempted to regulate how it’s prepared, in an effort to preserve Japanese culture. Some consider these chefs “purists,” while others insist they’re “sushi police.”

Along with the increased demand for sushi, Bestor addresses environmental and economic consequences. Bluefin tuna — one of the most popular species of fish exported to Japan for sushi — is being over-fished, and the population has decreased by 90 percent since 1960. As a result, the Mediterranean spawning ground for bluefin tuna is predicted to collapse within the next five years, because it will no longer be commercially sustainable.

April 3, 2009, 11:30 a.m.
LAW Auditorium

Video length is 00:58:23.

About the speaker:
Theodore C. Bestor is professor of anthropology and Japanese studies at Harvard University, as well as chair of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He has previously taught at Cornell University and Columbia University, and has presided as president of the Society of East Asian Anthropology. Bestor is known as the premier ethnographer of modern, urban Japan and fish markets. He has written several books, including Neighborhood Tokyo; Doing Fieldworld in Japan; and Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. Currently, he is writing Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Reality, a forthcoming book about over-fishing and the environmental impact of food culture.