Our panel of economists, working both inside and outside of academia, will focus on the tensions between long-range planning and the frequent need to improve economic solutions given the vagaries of life. Broadly, they ask, what are the correlations between market data and democracy?

Panelists: Jim Lightner, President of Falcon Management, and Scott Axelrod, Director of Research at Falcon Management, from the vantage point as economists in the private sector, will speak about the V-Dem Project and correlations between democracy indicators and future market returns. David Axelrod, Department of Economics, will speak on his analysis of the role and power of spirituality in economic analysis and decision-making. Luis Portes, Department of Economics, will speak on insights gained from using computational techniques to study business cycles, international trade, and business inequality. Collectively the panelists will engage both audiences that tend to think about democracy without attending much to the relevance of markets to democracy, and also those who tend to focus on markets and not democracy.