Horace "Woody" Brock, Ph.D.

President, Strategic Economic Decisions, Inc.

Dr. Horace "Woody" Brock, one of the world's foremost economists, is the author of the book, American Gridlock - Why the Right and Left Are Both Wrong, Commonsense 101 Solutions to the Economic Crises. More than 50 leading chief executives, academics, journalists and investors endorsed the book, published in January 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. As the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions, a renowned economic think tank, Dr. Brock has spent more than 30 years counseling global corporations and other institutions who benefit from his in-depth analysis of ongoing structural changes in the global economy.

Dr. Brock earned his B.A., M.B.A. and M.S. from Harvard University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University (mathematical economics and political philosophy). He studied under Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University, and the late John C. Harsanyi, University of California, Berkeley, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

As a celebrated public speaker, he is well known for his ability to take complex and counter-intuitive concepts and make them easily comprehensible to a broad range of people. His speaking engagements have included audiences such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, the CIA, The Aspen Institute, board of directors of corporations and banks, high net-worth family offices, private equity groups, and hedge funds. In addition to speaking and authoring SED's periodic publications and numerous publications in professional journals, Dr. Brock is also the author of a series of Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Brock's institute specializes in applications of the modern Economics of Uncertainty, originally developed and championed by Professor Arrow, to forecasting and risk assessment in the international economy and its asset markets. Dr. Brock authored Interest Rate Insight, the first Expert-System developed for financial markets. In 1976, he was elected an Andrew Mellon Foundation Bicentennial Fellow. In its research, SED has focused on apprehending ongoing structural changes in the economy and markets to help clients avoid the pitfalls of illegitimately extrapolating the past into the future. In this regard, Dr. Brock has worked closely with Professor Mordecai Kurz of Stanford University in developing the new theory of Rational Beliefs that is now replacing the classical theory of "Efficient Markets." This theory explains for the first time the way in which history rhymes but does not repeat itself.

Dr. Brock is an avid collector of fine arts and has written extensively on the topic of esthetics. His contributions to the field of Distributive Justice are widely recognized and he developed one of the first mathematical theories applied to the concept of social justice.