Spur 17 Toronto Final Program

a national festival of politics, art and Ideas
TORONTO APRIL 6–9 2017
Sunday April 9
Sunday April 9
CATHERINE WALLACE
DANIEL DALE
VICKY MOCHAMA
SUSAN G. COLE
MODERATOR
DR. JOHN COATES SHEELAH KOLHATKAR Dilip Soman
MODERATOR
Risk and Journalism
10:30 PM
Location: OISE Auditorium
Risk and The Economy
12:30 PM
Location: OISE Auditorium
Alternative facts. Fake news. A combative president. A media on the defensive. Increasing risks for
journalists. What role has journalism traditionally played in speaking truth to power, and how has that
been impacted by the digital tsunami that turned media on its head, and the geopolitical tsunami that
has changed the world order.
Catherine Wallace is the 2016-2017 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the
Honderich family and the Toronto Star. She is a former managing editor of the Montreal Gazette, was executive
producer of its evening iPad edition, and has also worked at the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.
Daniel Dale covers the Trump presidency and other American stories as the Washington bureau chief for the
Toronto Star. Dale covered Mayor Rob Ford’s administration from 2010 to 2014 as a reporter and city hall bureau
chief. He won the Goff Penny Award for Canada’s best young journalist in 2010 and 2011 and a National Newspaper
Award for short features in 2012.
Vicky Mochama is the national columnist for Metro News Canada. Three times a week, you can read her thoughts
on race, politics, and culture in Metro newspapers across the country. She is a co-author of the Canadaland Guide
to Canada (May 2017, Touchstone Books), a rude satirical look at the history, people and places we live in and make
fun of. She has also written for Vice, Hazlitt, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, and The Globe and Mail.
Susan G. Cole is an activist, writer and editor. She is the author of the ground-breaking play A Fertile Imagination,
about two lesbians trying to have a baby, and two books on violence against women. She is the editor of
Outspoken, a collection of scenes and monologues.
As the US looks set to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act (put in place to regulate Wall Street after 2008),
Spur asks: how is financial risk quantified by those within the system, and what are the human
factors – gut feelings, hormones and/or emotions – that impact that? From risky lending practices,
to packaged financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities no one really understood, the
post-mortem on the financial crisis revealed the degree to which human irrationality, bias and
cognitive errors drove the financial decisions of those at the top. Spur explores the confluence of
economics, psychology and neuroscience that influence human decision-making in a sector whose
actions dictate the well-being of the world.
Sheelah Kolhatkar, a former hedge fund analyst, is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about Wall
Street, Silicon Valley, economics and national politics, among other things. She has profiled characters as diverse
as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pimco founder Bill Gross, hedge fund mogul John Paulson and
president Donald Trump. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Black Edge, about the largest insider
trading investigation in history and the transformation of Wall Street and the U.S. economy.
John Coates, former Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, traded derivatives for Goldman Sachs and ran
a trading desk for Deutsche Bank. He developed techniques for valuing and arbitraging the tails of probability
distributions, and for trading low probability events such as financial crises. He now researches the biology of gut
feelings, risk taking, and stress. His book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and
Mind, was short listed for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and the UK Wellcome
Trust Science Prize.
Dilip Soman is a behavioural scientist and does research on interesting human behaviours and applications
to choice architecture, consumer welfare, policy and financial literacy. He is a professor at the Rotman School
of Management at the University of Toronto, the director of the university’s India Innovation Institute, and the
coordinator of the Behavioural Economics in Action research cluster.
Dilip Soman’s research has been funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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