Joseph Heath

Author of Filthy Lucre and The Rebel Sell

Money and Other Illusions: How Common Sense Leads Us to Economic Irrationality

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From countercultural rebellion to financial derivatives, Joseph Heath is an expert on what makes the market tick. He preaches the science of economics, but without the graphs and equations. As a philosopher, he revels in the surprising and the unexpected. He enjoys nothing more than finding out that things he once thought true are in fact false. Always opinionated, invariably controversial, he would be more than happy to tell you why everything you think you know about the economy is wrong.

Joseph Heath is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. He is the author of four bestselling books: Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism, The Efficient Society: Why Canada is As Close to Utopia as it Gets, with Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, and now his most recent book Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism. His work has been translated into 12 different languages and counting.

Joseph Heath Speech Topics

The Secret History of Risk

There are some things about the recent financial crisis that you won't find out reading the newspaper. Banks, we are told, started lending money to people with no jobs, no skills, and no prospects. What happened? Did bankers around the world go crazy? Of course not. They had a theory about what they we doing -- a theory, of course, that turned out to be mistaken. It was based upon a particular understanding of risk. In order to figure out what went wrong, and in order to avoid repeating past mistakes, we need a better understanding. We need to figure out the role that risk plays in our society, and how other societies, throughout human history, have dealt with the most basic problem of dealing with uncertainty.

Overcoming Bias: How to Think Straight

Our brains are the product of evolution. What sort of consequences does this have for our day-to-day lives? The most important is that it forces us to realize that we are imperfect. Just as your spine was not really designed to support upright posture, so your brain was not designed to support rational thought. Nature is not in the business of producing perfection, it's in the business of producing things that are good enough. Yet this does not mean that we are fated to be irrational, any more than we are fated to suffer from back pain. There are ways we can learn to overcome the biases that nature has instilled in us.

Understanding the Rebel Consumer

Do you hate consumer culture? Angry about all that packaging? Irritated by all those commercials? Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in North American life. Strangely, it has also become one of the most powerful marketing tools. What can we conclude from all this? How can we all denounce consumerism, and yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society? The answer is quite simple. Popular anti-consumerism is not actually a critique of consumerism; it's merely a restatement of the "critique of mass society" that has been around since the 1960s. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumer spending for more than 50 years.

What's Right, and what's Wrong, about Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporations in the 21st century are facing increased demands for "socially responsible" and "sustainable" investment. At the same time, shareholder activism is putting increased pressure on managers to creates value for investors. What is the responsible manager to do? The best place to look for an answer is to the marketplace itself. The market is, after all, not a jungle but rather a carefully staged competition, designed to align the interests of corporations with those of society more generally. A better understanding of the nature of this competition provides the best guide for thinking about the ethical dilemmas that arise in a business context.

VIDEOS

LINKS

Joseph Heath at the University of Toronto

BOOKS

Economics Without Illusions

The Rebel Sell

Filthy Lucre

ARTICLES

Review of Filthy Lucre - Quill and Quire

All Speakers > Joseph Heath

GAYLE LEMMON at TEDxWOMEN

"If you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs," says Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. "And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women." Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestselling book The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a Contributing Editor-at-Large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She has devoted her life to shedding light on the resiliency of female entrepreneurs, and their remarkable power to reshape local economies. By recognizing and investing in these female breadwinners, Lemmon says, we can help grow economies of all development levels around the world.