OU Law Students Invited to Dream Course Lecture with Carl Pope Feb. 27

OU Law students are invited to this week’s session of the Political Economy, Technological Innovation and Values Dream Course. The featured speaker is former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and current principal of Inside Straight Strategies. Pope will make two presentations on Feb. 27.

Daytime presentation: "Innovation and Rights; Rigged Markets and Sustainability; The Conflict we Can’t Resolve"
Date:  February 27, 2013
Time:  10:30 a.m. to Noon
Location:  Price Hall 2030        
Synopsis:  Carl Pope will employ a rights-based frame to the problem of sustainability, pointing out that if we genuinely tried to apply pure free market rules, in which all transaction were voluntarily agreed to by all whose rights are effected, innovation, which by its nature tramples existing rights in unanticipated and involuntary ways, would grind to halt — but sustainability would be ensured as a practical matter, because activities which infringe on the interests of the future invariably have dissenters victims in the present as well.      

Evening presentation: "Extraction vs. Development, Why technology and innovation make war on property rights and sustainability — and why free market ideology doesn’t help." 
Date:  February 27, 2013
Time:  6:30 p.m.  
Location:  Devon Energy Hall 120    
Synopsis:  Natural resources, and ecosystem services, pose problems that no version of conventional economics — however Chicago School or Keynsian it might be — has honestly confronted The real conflict is not between development and sustainability.  It’s between extraction and development, and between property rights and innovation.  These conflicts cannot be resolved.  They can only be managed.  Blind faith in free market ideology makes the problem worse.  But taking market principals seriously, and seeing where they take us, opens up some new opportunities.  

For additional information, visit http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/research/dream_course_2013 or contact Farrokh Mistree at 405.325. 2438 or farrokh.mistree@ou.edu   Both talks are complementary and open to the public.