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George Soros has put some $50 million (probably small change from the floor of his car) into an Institute for New Economics
The Institute and conference were born when a group led by George Soros came together at the Bedford Summit to discuss the crisis in 2008. Concerns over a history of poor economic guidance revealed the need for continued conversations and a new forum. The conference will gather the world’s brightest economists and leaders to provoke innovative thinking and positive change.
A bundle of books from Amazon, Mirowski More Heat than Light: Economics as social physics, Mirowski’s essays on science studies The Effortless Economy of Science and The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds Mirowski and Plehwe., Harvard Uni Press, 2009.
You probably thought that Pete Boettke and Steve Howwitz and their colleagues are just some regular guys with an eccentric take on economics and politics but you need to be warned that they are a part of “the most important movement in political and economic thought in the second half of the twentieth century”. (426). In other words, they are IMPORTANT and they are a worry! The Mont Pelerin Society provides the thread to organise the mass of intricate historical detail that the authors have compiled on the activities of the “neoliberal thought collective” and precursors such as a group associated with Walter Lippmann in France.
Dieter Plehwe wrote the introduction. Keith Tribe – the movement in Britain from 1930 to 1980. Ralf Ptak – the ordoliberal foundations of the social market economy. Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski – the rise of the Chicago School of Economics. Yves Steiner – confronting the trade unions. Rob van Horn – on the Chicago attack on the law and economics of trust-busting. Dieter Plehwe on the origins of the neoliberal economic development discourse. Kim Phillips-Fein on the role of business conservatives. Karin Fischer on the influence of the neolibs in Chile before, during and after Pinochet. Jennifer Bair on the new international order. Timothy Mitchell on urban property rights in Peru. Postface, Mirowski defining neoliberalism.
Legal Eagle has an interesting post on Peter Garrett.
I confess that I’ve never really held much brief for celebrity politicians. Of course, I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I try to cast my prejudice aside. But I can’t help thinking that if you’re a performer or an actor or a musician, you might not have had much experience actually running things. You don’t have to implement your ideas or make them work.
Another thing about celebrity politicians is that you inevitably end up feeling very disappointed in them. It’s easy to admire someone when they just have to put in a good performance, and they don’t have to make difficult decisions or let you down. However, the nature of being a politician is that you have to compromise, and make hard decisions which may end up hurting people in one way or another. You can’t be popular with everyone in politics.
So I feel disappointed about Peter Garrett (Labor Environment Minister and former lead singer of Midnight Oil, for non-Aussie readers). For one thing, I liked his music. But it’s hard to listen to it now without thinking of his political persona, and of his various shortcomings and the ways in which I believe he has betrayed his own ideals.
The AFR made a similar point this morning, saying that he had traded-off his credibility for policy relevance.
I think people have given him too little credit. Yes he was a rock star, but another way to look at that is being an entrepreneur. There is a business side to being a successful rock star. Yes, he was an activist and now he is a minister. Some people say that he has sold-out his principles. But politics is the art of the possible. A lot of people miss this point. Garrett has worked very hard to manage the tension between being an activist and being a member of the leadership team of a mainstream political party. Unlike other high profile activists he hasn’t (that I can recall) had any public dummy-spits; rather he has put up with a lot of what some might consider public humiliation – picking up the dregs of the environment portfolio for example. So I think people have underestimated him on that score. Of course, that doesn’t condone what has happened in his portfolio but, to be fair, the whole idea of just spending money willy nilly was poor and the rest of the cabinet (and some senior bureaucrats) must share the blame.
I can’t say I liked all his music, but I did like Diesel and Dust and especially Beds are burning. That album came out in the late 1980s when South Africa was in turmoil. The SABC had a music station called Radio 5 (much like JJJ, I imagine). One of the DJs – Alex Jay – was a bit of a rebel and he started playing Beds are burning a lot. It became very popular and did very well in record sales going to number one on the hit parade. Now this just goes to show that many people sing along to songs without actually listening to the words or thinking about their meaning. One fine day some apartheid apparatchik must have listened to song and it got dropped from the playlist. Did this song play any role in ending apartheid? No; probably not. But it did give me great amusement and satisfaction at the time.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDkwUlaJhs0[/youtube]
So I like Garrett and I think he doesn’t get enough credit for trying to use the appropriate institutions to further his ideals. I don’t agree with his ideals, but any hippy can be an activist.
To be sure he can’t survive in his current position but that has little to do with his celebrity status but rather to do with poor government planning and irresponsible spending.
Update: DavidJ draws or attention to this photo. I’m not condoning it nor condemning it. The police have a very difficult role balancing the need for law and order versus the right to protest.
One of my colleagues sent me a link showing a documentary of North Korea. It is well worth watching.
CNN provide some background here.
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The Keynes vs Hayek rap. I like the bit where Hayek finds the General Principles in the drawer in his hotel room.
A nice series of recent posts from Organisations and Markets. BTW this site and its authors polled very well in a recent survey on the credibility and/or popularity of economics blogs
Calls for industry policy in the US.
The transformation of many Israeli kibbutzim into partially privatized, profit-seeking, professionally managed entities that act in capital, product, and factor markets just like private firms.
Problems with cap and trade schemes in Europe.
Happy Schumpeter day!
Missouri Economics Conference (meet Peter Klein).
From Conservative Teacher, an aid for students, the declaration of independence set to music, maybe a bit long but worth a look.
Andrew Norton on the incoherent student loan scheme.
From Michael Warby, Climate Links, “How many global warming sceptics does it take to change a light bulb? None, because it is far too early to say whether it needs changing. (Viscount Monckton) What the IPCC would call a spade pretty funny too.
European Links including a map on the different “alcohol zones”. This map shows Europe dominated by three so-called ‘alcohol belts’, the northernmost one for distilled spirits, a middle one for beer and the southernmost one for wine. Each one’s existence and extension is determined by a mix of culture and agriculture.
I have a great interest in the Intergenerational Report which was a creature of the Howard/Costello government and became mandatory with the passage of the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998. The Charter requires the Government to publish an IGR every five years: there have now been three – 2002, 2007 and 2010.
But like so many things in life, more is not necessarily better, and it is only as useful as the analysis put into it. No one can forecast the future, but the IGR provides a sense of the direction of public finances based on what should be reasonable assumptions and on a no policy change basis. Both the 2002 and 2007 editions were sober documents which were helpful in this respect.
But I agree with Henry Ergas who writes in an excellent article today that the IGR has been politicised and should be produced by an independent organisation.
Sadly Treasury has lost its capacity to produce sober and analytical documents and is now in the habit of producing political polemics.
The latest IGR is a polemic and fits with the Government’s convenient narrative of how it is focused on productivity growth. Yet like the gossamer threads that hold the 2010 IGR together, the Government’s spin on productivity has no substance. Its policies, its lack of analytical rigour and fiscal profligacy will reduce productivity growth.
Shame Treasury, shame.
Tony Makin has kept up a consistent argument against the stimulus package on a mainstream macro-economic basis. He is at it again today in the Australian.
Fiscal stimulus is invariably justified by the depression economics of John Maynard Keynes. As a theory, simple Keynesianism focuses exclusively on the short term, emphasises aggregate spending as the source of economic growth, and largely ignores the future consequences of unproductive public spending and the fiscal deficits that result. This is in keeping with Keynes’s own comment that “in the long run we are all dead”. While that comment is undeniably true, what it fails to recognise is that the vast majority of us can in our lifetimes expect to suffer the consequences of the public debt legacy that Keynesian activism bequeaths, through higher taxes, higher interest rates and higher inflation.
Though Keynes is widely considered to be the most influential macroeconomist Britain ever produced, the US produced a contemporary of Keynes, the much neglected Yale economist, Irving Fisher, 1867-1947.
Although Fisher’s credibility during the Great Depression was damaged by his confident forecast just before the great stock market collapse of 1929 that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau”, he made numerous original contributions to economics and left a body of work that exhibits a clarity and consistency of thought that is lacking in the sometimes incomprehensible musings of Keynes.
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There were no beneficial supply-side effects in providing relief to these groups but there will be adverse supply-side effects through higher future taxes, or forgoing the option of lower marginal income tax rates that past fiscal action now prevents. Strong interest rate pressures may not be evident just yet either, but will be when higher prospective budget deficits that need funding around the world kick in as international economic activity gathers pace.
I think the realisation that the stimulus package was too much spent on so many so as to achieve so little is seeping through to the broader community. Even the Business Council of Australia – under a new chairman Graham Bradley – is speaking up.
As the BCA says, the priorities should be to repair the damage to the budget and to upgrade the economy’s supply-side productivity and flexibility.
So Bradley yesterday followed Productivity Commission chairman Gary Banks and the OECD in calling for unspent stimulus funds, including for school building and home insulation, to be reassessed: “Stimulatory programs that do not create income-generating infrastructure should now be reassessed against competing spending requirements.”
That is a start. Mind you stimulatory programs that do not create income-generating infrastructure should not have been underataken in the first place.
One of the broken promises from the Labor Party is to enhance the Reserve Bank’s independence. Here is a blog I wrote on 16 October 2009
Whatever happened to Labor’s promise to enhance the independence of the Reserve Bank? I write of the Reserve Bank Amendment (Enhanced Independence) Bill 2008 which was introduced with much fanfare on 20 March 2008, was studied and reported by the Senate Economics Committee on 11 June 2008, passed the Senate with helpful amendments on 23 June 2008 and has been languishing in the House of Representives ever since.
The Senate even passed a motion requesting the House to immediately pass the Bill on 19 March 2009, to no avail. The Government keeps the Bill down the bottom of the notice paper.
Every innovation makes its appearance as a luxury of the few well-to-do. After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a necessity for all.
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