The 2009 Spring Symposium
Perspectives on Global Commerce
Commerce in the 21st Century:
Economics for a Crowded Planet
Friday, April 24, 2009
9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Old Cabell Hall
University of Virginia
This year’s symposium featured a keynote address by renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of The End of Poverty and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. After his presentation, Professor Sachs was joined by a distinguished panel of UVA faculty for a discussion, moderated by Jeffrey Walker (McIntire ’77):
James F. Childress
Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education
Institute for Practical Ethics
University of Virginia
William Morrish
Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Environmental Planning
School of Architecture
University of Virginia
Gowher Rizvi
Vice Provost for International Programs
University of Virginia
Saras D. Sarasvathy
Associate Professor of Business Administration and a member of the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics Area
Darden School of Business
University of Virginia
James F. Childress
Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education Institute for Practical Ethics
University of Virginia
James F. Childress is the Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Institute for Practical Ethics. He served as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies from 1972 to 1975 and 1986 to 1994, as Principal of UVA's Monroe Hill College from 1988 to 1991, and as Co-Director of the Virginia Health Policy Center from 1991 to 1999. In 1990, he was named Professor of the Year in the state of Virginia by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.
He is the author of numerous articles and several books in biomedical ethics, including Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom L. Beauchamp); Priorities in Biomedical Ethics; Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care; and Practical Reasoning in Bioethics. His other books include The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics (2nd edition), co-edited with John Macquarrie; Civil Disobedience and Political Obligation; and Moral Reasoning in Conflicts.
Childress was Vice Chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation, and he has also served on the board of directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several data and safety monitoring boards for NIH clinical trials. From 1996 to 2001, he served on the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission.
Childress is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 1998, was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a fellow of The Hastings Center. He has been the Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at The Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University (1975-1979) and a Visiting Professor at The University of Chicago Divinity School and Princeton University.
He received his B.A. from Guilford College, his B.D. from Divinity School, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.
William Morrish
Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Environmental Planning
School of Architecture
University of Virginia
William Morrish is the Elwood R. Quesada Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture. He was hailed by New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp as “the most valuable thinker in urbanism.” His work is exemplified by his innovative urban design plan for the city of Phoenix’s public art plan that unites artist and public work engineers in the transformation of city utilities into a citywide cultural setting and new public realm. He approaches urban design work as a cultural landscape — the connective safety net that knits citizens, public spaces, social institutions, cultural expression, and the natural environment into multi-operational urban landscape networks. In addition to infrastructure, his research work involves working on the development of models for compact mid-density affordable housing to be located inside existing single-ring suburban towns. Recently, he has served as consultant to the United Nations in Africa
Gowher Rizvi
Vice Provost for International Programs
University of Virginia
Gowher Rizvi, an internationally renowned political scientist and former Director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, took the post of Vice Provost for International Programs at the University of Virginia in fall 2008. In his new role, he will develop and implement a comprehensive plan for enhancing the University's global impact.
During a career of more than 25 years across four continents, he has combined academic appointments with positions in international organizations, not-for-profit institutions, and the media. He originally trained as a social scientist but is an area studies and development expert. His publications have spanned the disciplines of history, politics, international relations, and development economics. His books include South Asia in a Changing International Order; South Asian Insecurity and the Great Powers; Bangladesh: The Struggle for the Restoration of Democracy; Perspectives on Imperialism and Decolonization; and Linlithgow and India. He is the founding Editor of Contemporary South Asia, an academic and policy studies journal published at Oxford. In addition, he has also been widely engaged in working to manage conflicts and strengthen democratic institutions and processes in Asia.
Rizvi earned a "double first" in B.A. Honors and M.A. from the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He earned a D.Phil. at Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development
Professor of Health Policy and Management
Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the U.N. Millennium Project and Special Advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.
Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the leading international economic adviser of his generation. For more than 20 years, Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world benefit from expanding economic opportunities and well-being. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of The Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.
He is internationally renowned for his work as economic adviser to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa and for his work with international agencies on problems of poverty reduction, debt cancellation for the poorest countries, and disease control. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Sachs has been an adviser to the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Development Program, among other international agencies. During 2000-2001, he was Chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization, and from September 1999 through March 2000, he served as a member of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission established by the U.S. Congress.
Professor Sachs was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004 and 2005, and the World Affairs Council of America identified him as one of the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy. In February 2002, Nature magazine stated that Sachs "has revitalized public health thinking since he brought his financial mind to it." In 1993, he was cited in The New York Times Magazine as "probably the most important economist in the world" and called in Time magazine’s 1994 issue on 50 promising young leaders "the world's best-known economist." In 1997, the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur cited Professor Sachs as one of the world's 50 most important leaders on globalization. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 50 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, Scientific American, and Time magazine.
Sachs' research interests include the links of health and development, economic geography, globalization, transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, international financial markets, international macroeconomic policy coordination, emerging markets, economic development and growth, global competitiveness, and macroeconomic policies in developing and developed countries. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including The New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005).
Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society. In 2007, he received the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution International Advocate for Peace Award and was also awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian government. He is also the 2005 recipient of the Sargent Shriver Award for Equal Justice. He is a member of the Brookings Panel of Economists and the Board of Advisors of the Chinese Economists Society, among other organizations. He is the first holder of the Royal Professor Ungku Aziz Chair in Poverty Studies at the Centre for Poverty and Development Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, from 2007 to 2009.
He has received honorary degrees from many universities, including Pace University, State University of New York, Cracow University of Economics, Ursinus College, Whitman College, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Ohio Wesleyan University, the College of the Atlantic, Southern Methodist University, Simon Fraser University, McGill University, Southern New Hampshire University, St. John’s University, Iona College, St. Gallen University in Switzerland, the Lingnan College of Hong Kong, and Varna Economics University in Bulgaria, and an honorary professorship at Universidad del Pacifico in Peru. In 2007, Sachs was awarded the Centennial Medal from The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University for his contribution to society. Distinguished lecture series include the London School of Economics, Oxford University, Tel Aviv, Jakarta, Yale and the BBC Reith Lectures 2007.
Before his arrival at Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over 20 years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.
Sachs was born in Detroit in 1954. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980, respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in 1983.
Saras D. Sarasvathy
Associate Professor of Business Administration and member of the Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Ethics Area
Darden School of Business
University of Virginia
Saras D. Sarasvathy is Associate Professor at the Darden Graduate Business School at the University of Virginia. She teaches entrepreneurship, organic growth, and ethics to M.B.A. students and executives, as well as several doctoral courses and the research seminar on "Markets in Human Hope." In 2007, Sarasvathy was named one of the top 18 entrepreneurship professors by Fortune Small Business magazine.
Sarasvathy is a leading scholar on the cognitive basis for high-performance entrepreneurship and is the author of Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise (nominated for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award for 2009). Effectuation consists of a set of principles and overall logic that expert entrepreneurs (founders of companies ranging in size from $200 million to $6.5 billion) acquire through 15 or more years of entrepreneurial experience and is widely acclaimed as a rigorous framework for understanding the creation and growth of new organizations and markets. The research program based on effectuation involves over a dozen scholars from around the world whose published and working papers can be found at www.effectuation.org. Sarasvathy has also developed several cases and other instructional materials to teach effectuation. A new textbook, along with a detailed instructor’s manual, is currently in the works.
In addition to a master’s degree in industrial administration, Sarasvathy received a Ph.D. in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Her thesis on entrepreneurial expertise was supervised by Herbert Simon, 1978 Nobel Laureate in Economics. Before joining Darden, she had been on the faculty of the University of Washington and the University of Maryland. Before that, she was part of the founding team in five entrepreneurial ventures.
Jeffrey C. Walker
Former Chairman and CEO
CCMP Capital
Jeffrey C. Walker is former Chairman and CEO of CCMP Capital (CCMP). CCMP is the $12 billion successor to JPMorgan Partners (JPMP), JPMorgan Chase & Co’s global private equity group, with operations in North America, Europe, and Asia. He was previously Vice Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Before co-founding JPMorgan Partners in 1984, Walker worked in the Investment Banking and Finance Divisions of Chemical Bank and the Audit and Consulting Divisions of Arthur Young & Co. Walker is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Management Accountant. He graduated with a B.S. from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.
Walker is a Director of 1-800-Flowers (Nasdaq-FLWS), Harbor Point Reinsurance, Hanley Wood, and Metokote. He was previously Vice Chairman of the National Association of Small Business Investment Corporations and served on other corporate boards, including those of House of Blues, Parker Pen, Domain, Gymboree, Guitar Center, Tenax Corporation, Harris Chemicals, Six Flags Amusement Parks, Doane Pet Care, Axis Insurance, Backe Communications, and Somerset Pharmaceuticals. He focused on retail, consumer, media/entertainment, and financial services deals.
Walker currently serves on the Advisory Board of Solera Capital. He was on the Investment Committee of CCMP Capital Asia II and was also Chairman of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation.
Walker received the 1998 Award for Excellence in Growth Capital Investing from the University of Michigan Business School. JPMorgan Partners was named to the Private Equity Hall of Fame by Private Equity Analyst.
Walker serves on the boards of several nonprofits, including those of NPower (Founder and former Chairman), Morgan Library, and Big Apple Circus. He is a former board member of St. Luke's School in New Canaan, Conn., and the New York City Investment Fund. He is also the Chairman of Millennium Promise, Vice Chair and former Chairman of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and former Chairman of Wilton Public Schools (in Wilton, Conn.). In addition, he taught a seminar on high-impact change organizations (applying private equity techniques to the not-for-profit world) during fall 2008 at the Center for Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School (graduate students).
At the University of Virginia, Walker serves on the Campaign Executive Committee and on the board of the President's Endowment ($50 million). He is also a Trustee of the McIntire School of Commerce Foundation, and served as the foundation's President from 1999 to 2006.