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.
The first big event is a conference at Cambridge (England) in April.
The invitation-only inaugural Conference is a landmark achievement reflecting the organization’s extraordinary commitment and dedication to invigorating the conversation around economic theory, method, and policy and to fostering the development of original and innovative contributions to economic thinking.
We envision that more than 150 academic, business and government policy thought leaders from around the world will convene to explore the reasons why prevailing economic theory failed to predict the financial and economic crisis that erupted in 2007-2008.
Of course the Austrians claim that they had a handle on this even though the precise timing of the bust could not be specified.
Remarkable one of the speakers at the opening dinner will be Bruce Caldwell who is a classical liberal and Austrian fellow traveller. This is an interview with him. He is also the author of a major biography of Hayek. Asked about the surge of interest in Hayek in recent times he replied.
It all started with the fall of the East Bloc and Soviet Union,” Mr. Caldwell said. Until then, though Hayek’s Road To Serfdom had been a bestseller when it was published in 1944 and Hayek had won the Nobel prize in 1974, “the Austrians were not taken seriously” by the rest of the economics profession. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, things started to change, both in university economics departments and in the popular press. The New Yorker ran two articles on Hayek, one by Robert Heilbroner saying Hayek had been right about the Soviet Union and another by John Cassidy saying “it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.” Public television broadcast a series, Commanding Heights, based on a book by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, that devoted its first episode to the debate between Hayek and Keynes.
Of course the Austrians claim that they had a handle on this even though the precise timing of the bust could not be specified.
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Then why did no-one here take talk of imminent doom seriously? Just asking.
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it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century
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An exaggeration? No. Straight up hyperbole, no ice, no water. How the bloody hell could anyone claim to be the leading light of the twentieth century? In anything?
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That all said what Hayek argues in the Road To Serfdom is entirely correct. If the Left allowed it to penetrate, confronted the inconvenient facts of it they might be relevant once again.
Adrien
13 Feb 10 at 11:40 am
Bravo to Soros, but what a sense of dejavu!
In 1933, a group of Jewish neo-Marxist intellectuals fled Nazi Europe for New York, where they established the The University in Exile as a university focused on graduate studies in economics and the social sciences, which quickly was integrated within The New School For Social Research, in Greenwich Village.
Funded by gazillionaires like the Rockefeller Foundation, The New School – as it is known today – was soon the home for the likes of Veblen, Eric Fromm, neocon godfather Leo Strauss, psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, Hannah Arendt. More recently, even Christopher Hitchens is an adjunct Professor.
So nearly 80 years later Jewish intellectual brilliance (George Akerlof, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Romer, Martin Wolf, and of course, Soros himself) and plutocratic billions ally to turn great minds to politico-economic crisis.
The New School has long been the world’s leading avowedly left-wing university, and a fine one at that. With this new Institute for New Economic Thinking alliance of, once more, mainly Jewish heterodox political economy thinking and plutocratic finance capital also based in Manhattan, it looks hopeful that the five years of ossified training the current budding academic economist must endure might be on the way out.
Maybe it is time to dust off that once dreamt about PhD in Economics.
Peter Patton
13 Feb 10 at 12:29 pm
While Hayek was no doubt a profound influence on the thinking of many 20th century movers and shakers, I’d would attribute the tone of that century to those actual movers and shakers. Books do not change the world, people, earthquakes, and famines do. As far as thinkers go, I would rank Marx above Hayek as inspiration behind the unfolding of the 20th century.
I would award the Academy Award for Most Significant Historical Performance By a Female to Margaret Thatcher.
I would award the Academy Award for Most Significant Historical Performance By a Male to Joseph Stalin.
Peter Patton
13 Feb 10 at 12:35 pm
Among classical liberal thinkers the two titans of the 20th century were probably von Mises and Popper. The influence of von Mises on Hayek was decisive to convert him from the Fabian persuasion. He did not have the originality of Popper or von Mises but he was a tireless front man and the team would probably vote him the players player for organization and effort. Unlike Popper and von Mises he ended up with two families and children to support as well.
Rafe
14 Feb 10 at 12:29 pm