Soros & Johnson to Shake Up Economic Thinking at INET’s 1st Conference in Cambridge, April 8th - 11th
Friday, 04/2/2010 - 8:49 am by Lynn Parramore | 7 Comments
As you may know, the Roosevelt Institute’s Rob Johnson was recently named to head a $50 million project launched by Georgoe Soros to change the world’s economic paradigm. Johnson and the legendary Soros have been in deep discussions about how to give the world a wake-up call on the flawed thinking that helped propel us into the worst crisis since the Depression. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) will fund research, hold symposia, and establish a journal meant to challenge ‘free market fundamentalism’ — the delusional belief that markets regulate themselves. If anyone can take on such a daunting task, Johnson, our very own ND20 “FinanceSeer” can.
In just a week, influential thinkers, business leaders, and policy experts from all over the globe will be descending on the hallowed campus of Cambridge’s King’s College, the launching pad (not coincidentally!) of John Maynard Keynes. In attendance will be ND20’s Marshall Auerback and Mike Konzcal, who will be giving you the inside scoop on these pages. The invitation-only inaugural Conference reflects the organization’s no-holds-barred commitment to invigorating the conversation around economic theory, method, and policy and to fostering the development of original and innovative contributions to economic thinking.
Session topics include:
* 1930 and the Challenge of the Depression for Economic Thinking: Friedrich Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes
* What Kind of Theory to Guide Reform and Restructuring of the Financial and Non-Financial Sectors?
* Toward a New Global Financial Architecture
* The Consequences of Inequality and Wealth Distribution
Read more here.
**We will have live streaming available on ND20. Stay tuned!
Ah yes, George Soros. The “legendary” George Soros. A wonderful man. Erstwhile destroyer of some some SE Asian currencies and helpful partial cause of the misery of millions. Another billionaire sociopath masquerading as a spreader of good things, a philanthropist, to be sure. An idealist. Using his money to bring on utopia. World-wide brotherly love and unity. Benevolent representative of a cosmic mandate.
Posted by Tim | April 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I don’t know about you, but when I see the words, “Toward a New Global Financial Architecture,” all the red lights on my dashboard start to flash. And when these words are coupled with the name of Soros, I start to hear sirens.
Posted by Jim | April 2nd, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Looking at the agenda, I’ve the following comments.
King’s College Cambridge
SESSION TOPICS
• 1930 and the Challenge of the Depression for Economic Thinking: Friedrich Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes
dc: Hayak did not make the same critique of corporations that he did of government: too big to plan well/ The background is Adam Smith’s critique of corporations as instruments of anti-market control.
• Anatomy of Crisis – The Living History of the Last 30 years: Economic Theory, Politics and Policy
dc:This is the period of the neo-liberals. The previous liberal consensus was also a problem. Leaves out resources at one end of political economy and wealth distribution at the other. The crisis is much longer than 30 years. Perhaps the whole empire and war paradigm from the bronze age is at an end, the planet filled up, we need a really new model of development without growth (Aristotle).
• What Kind of Theory to Guide Reform and Restructuring of the Financial and Non-Financial Sectors?
dc:A theory of economics that begins with nature and ends with wealth. A return to the broader gauge political economy.
• Has the Efficient Market Hypothesis Led to the Crisis? Collapsed with The Crisis?
dc:No, the problem was corporate control of markets, not markets.
• Toward a New Global Financial Architecture
dc: Recognize that finance rides of economics and tries to be free of economic realities to play the game of financial arrangements. Society cannot afford the costs of finance as a separate sector.
• How Empirical Evidence Does or Does Not Influence Economic Thinking and Theory: Calibration, Statistical Inference, and Structural Change
dc:The range of “evidence” and data is too narrow. Leaves out wealth distribution and resource exploitation, unfair about real costs and externalities, treats labor as a cost but profit as a gain. This is really a mess. Measures such as productivity (increase by firing workers) show how biased the current data approach is.
• The Consequences of Inequality and Wealth Distribution
dc: This requires really deep thinking about the nature of human society, civilization, motives, quality of life and culture. But basically inequality leads to politicians bought by money and a system of elites that, as Toynbee said, “in cries, the elites abandon ther own people”. Or Joseph Tainters’ “Collapse of Complex Societies”: elites, owning infrastructure, take ou costs rather than repair, when a crisis is imminent.” (paraphrase)
• Mathematical Models: Rigorously Testable, Qualitative Metaphors, or Simply an Entry Barrier
dc: Models are fine, but of whole systems not of sub systems. Let’s measure real stuff. This gets to climate change, pollution, costs of toxicity..
• Political Economy: What Can Government Do? What Will Government Do?
dc:When governments are owned, not much. Need a deeper understanding of the role of elites, democracy, decentralization. The great problem with the mess we are in now is must we be centralized to make critical decisions, or do we need dispersion so that local experiments can flourish? Population is a key driver. But they major issue for governance is going to be centralization vs regionalization, the argument the Greeks had over Alexander and Macedonia.
Above all, larger scope, and consider
1, time line of how we got here (western civ, population, wars, materialism, etc.)
2. mess map of current nasty dilemmas and their interconnections
3. Plausible scenarios going forward
Posted by Doug Carmichael | April 2nd, 2010 at 11:05 pm
I wish there were no need for a project to expose the dreadful flaws in the ‘free market’ assumptions that ‘free markets’ regulate themselves.
I find it so obvious that they fail to ’self-regulate’ that to it’s appalling to consider a need to take on the bogus beliefs and assumptions implicit in ‘free market fundamentalism’.
Unfortunately, despite the global meltdown, despite the economic woes of the US, and despite reams of data that suggest markets are not at all ‘free’, nor do they ’self regulate’, I still hear people spout nonsense each week that makes it quite clear that they have not yet grasped the slippery follies implicit in free market fundamentalism.
If this event can begin to make the slightest dent in undoing the flawed beliefs we call ‘free market fundamentalism’, then that will be progress.
I hope the sound quality of the streaming files will be very good, as I intend to listen while working.
One agenda item is titled: “Mathematical Models: Rigorously Testable, Qualitative Metaphors, or Simply an Entry Barrier”
I hope the speakers will explain a bit of history behind the mathematical models; which among them come from mechanical engineering (’flows’), and what are the other sources of their origin(s)?
I’m having a bit of trouble grasping the intended meaning of ‘qualitative metaphors,’ and hope that term will be defined at some point.
I regard the event, and the speaker listings, as grounds for optimism. No time like the present to have a very public, very international conversation about the fact that we are in urgent need of new economic paradigms. Quite obviously, the free market fundamentalist views have not produced the greatest good for the greatest number.
Posted by readerOfTeaLeaves | April 3rd, 2010 at 12:57 am
No one from Modern Money Theory? Why is this stuff treated like some sort of disease?
Posted by Benedict@Large | April 3rd, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Benedict
Marshall will be there. He’s as MMT as it gets.
Posted by Greg | April 4th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Randy Wray and Rob Parenteau will also be there as well.
Posted by Marshall Auerback | April 5th, 2010 at 7:54 am