The Economic Crisis and the Age of Uncertainty

Don Tapscott, business strategist, consultant and author of Wikinomics.

Discussants: Andrew Keen, writer, entrepreneur and author of The Cult of the Amateur: how the internet is killing our cultur... Don Tapscott, business strategist, consultant and author of Wikinomics. Discussants: Andrew Keen, writer, entrepreneur and author of The Cult of the Amateur: how the internet is killing our culture; Dan Hind, editorial director, The Bodley Head and author of The Threat to Reason: how the enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it; Professor Lord Eatwell, economist and President, Queens College, Cambridge.

(Mar 26, 2009 at the RSA)

To what extent has the global economic crisis triggered a crisis of confidence in our previously trusted repositories of knowledge?

What do the failures of the financial system tell us about the dangers of a hierarchal system of knowledge where power lies in the hands of a professional elite? Can we continue to have confidence in the professional authority of bankers, financiers and economists, when they seem to have so grossly failed us?

Has economics as a discipline failed? Do these failures further case for new organisational models, based on more open, more transparent cultures of collaboration (the "wikinomics" model)? Does the democratisation of knowledge and wealth of information offered by the internet open up the possibility of taking economic decision-making out of the academy and institutions, and into the hands of individual citizens?

Or should we be wary of blurring the expert/amateur divide and trusting too much in the wisdom of crowds?