Keynote: Richard Bronk

“Coping with uncertainty: imagination, reason, and the need for diversity of response”
Richard Bronk, London School of Economics and Politics

Richard Bronk will discuss the nature of uncertainty in modern political economies, and the need to combine imagination with reason in a form of disciplined eclecticism. He will argue that human imagination and creativity are both a major cause of the uncertainty we face and our best tools for coping with it. Imagination has the power to free us from the determinism of past constraints but can also lead to dangerous fantasies unless carefully stress-tested by rational analysis. There is no single rational answer as to how we should live, and we cannot plan and forecast the future with engineering precision. Instead, diversity of response should be combined with 'reasoning imagination' and deliberative judgment to help us navigate the unknowable future and construct acceptable outcomes.