Norbert Häring — George Soros’ INET, the Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy

Four years ago, I framed it as a question: “George Soros‘ INET: An institute to improve the world or a Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy?” Today I would not use a question mark any more.Frances Coppola came to a similiar conclusion after attending the big INET gathering in Edingburgh in October.…

Sleeping with the devil.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
George Soros’ INET, the Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy

Norbert Häring | economics correspondent for Handelsblatt, the German business newspaper, and co-founder and co-director of the World Economics Association and co-editor of the World Economic Review

Frances Coppola — Beyond disappointment

Symptoms showing why both deconstruction and inclusion are necessary in economics to avoid cognitive sclerosis.

Coppola Comment
Beyond disappointment

Frances Coppola

Norbert Haering — George Soros’ INET: A conspiracy theory assessment

Is INET a Trojan horse, planted to distract from real reform? Haering finds the evidence ambivalent. I think that the conspiracy theory is unsupported but there is reason to think that rather than new economic thinking there's a lot of useful idiocy mixed in with genuine reform.

World Economics Association
George Soros’ INET: A conspiracy theory assessment
Norbert Haering

Bill Mitchell — Macroeconomic textbooks ripe for composting

Bill trashes the mainstream and thrashes INET's "new economic thinking" as a rehash of the old thinking.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Macroeconomic textbooks ripe for composting
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Merijn Knibbe — Tony Yates hits the nail on the head. But he should have hit a stake…

In a twitterstream about this blogpost Tony Yates (@t0nyyates) however hits the nail on the head (quote, not out of context):

“so much in economic theory unobservable. Utility, TFP, discount factor, elasticities, even capital“.

Which is right (well, not entirely, we do actually measure TFP (Total Factor Productivity) and capital, see below a little about capital). But Yates seems happy with this situation. Which he shouldn’t be....

Students are, however, still taught about outdated unobservables like ‘utility’. So, who is teaching and writing about ‘phlogiston’? People like Kay and Yates, who base their ideas on ‘unobservables’, or somebody like the late Wayne Godley, who wrote about observed fact. Or the very alive Steve Keen? Or Ha-Joon Chang? Or economists like the ‘heterodox’ Georgists, who promote the idea that ‘produced capital’ and ‘land and other non-produced resources’ are analytically and empirically distinct concepts (just like Ricardo already stated, by the way)

And no, this is not naïve empiricism - economic measurements very much dependent on the theoretical ideas embedded in the concepts and operationalisations. Here you can find a not so flaky recent blogpost by J.W. Mason about this. Which means that we should our students exactly this – economic measurement is a difficult science and an art and you can’t be an economic scientists if you do not have a deep knowledge about the process of measurement of this moving target. And we have to confront them with this wisdom again and again and to teach them that we have to muddle through with whatever imperfect data we have – but we should not, never construct models which are unobservable to their core. Kay and Yates, however, do not seem to be aware of these problems, and seem more than happy with unobservables and the fuzzy models based upon phlogs. Talk about flaky…

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Tony Yates hits the nail on the head. But he should have hit a stake…
Merijn Knibbe

Norbert Häring — George Soros‘ INET: An institute to improve the world or a Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy?

The financial oligarchy might also recollect that economics is their most important ally in shaping public opinion and policies in their favor. To prevent a loss of power as it happened hence, they might want to make sure first that economics will not challenge the notion of leaving financial markets mostly to themselves and will continue to downplay the role of money and the power of the financial oligarchy, and of power in general....

So far, the history and the actions of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, founded by George Soros and other members of the financial establishment, are compatible with the hypothesis that it might be a Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy, meant to control the movement for reform of economics. However, despite some limited evidence to the contrary, it is also still compatible with the counter-hypothesis that it is a bona fide effort to push such reform to the benefit of society at large. A restrictive policy of supporting independent initiatives with the same stated goals, and a recent tendency toward the promotion of the less radical reformist ideas make it opportune to monitor the activities of INET with an open but skeptical mind.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
George Soros‘ INET: An institute to improve the world or a Trojan horse of the financial oligarchy?

Norbert Häring | Co-founder and co-director of the World Economics Association

At least INET is better than the Peterson Foundation, Concord Coalition and Fix the Debt, which are quite transparently organized to prevent a repeat of the Pecora Commission, Glass-Steagall, and the New Deal reforms.

Matias Vernengo — Why the crisis didn't discredit mainstream (neoclassical) economics?

Simple answer — star power sell out. Philip Mirowski's critique is short and to the point.

Naked Keynesianism

Why the crisis didn't discredit mainstream (neoclassical) economics?

Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah

The Future of Central Banking - INET Hong Kong

Keynote panel on "The Future of Central Banking" at the Institute for New Economic Thinking's "Changing of the Guard?" conference in Hong Kong. Featured panelists include Liu Mingkang and INET Advisory Board members Charles Goodhart, Richard Koo, and Adam Posen, with Fung Global Institute President and INET Advisory Board member Andrew Sheng moderating.

The Future of Central Banking - INET Hong Kong
INETeconomics

INET — Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Stability - Adair Turner Keynote at INET Hong Kong

Video and paper.

INET Senior Fellow Adair Lord Turner delivers the day 1 keynote address at the Institute for New Economic Thinking's "Changing of the Guard? Conference in Hong Kong, with an introduction by George Soros.

INET
Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Stability - Adair Turner Keynote at INET Hong Kong

Soros on Japan — Video

George Soros on Adair Turner's Groundbreaking Keynote and Why BOJ Stimulus is Risky

from INET Blog

INET: Financial Instability Mini-Documentary

INET: Financial Instability Mini-Documentary (8 min.)

(h/t David Lawson at Steve Keen's DebtWatch)

Andrew Sheng reflects on INET Berlin 2012

Almost everyone agrees that the old paradigm of neoclassical economics is broken, but there is no agreement on what can replace it. A recent conference in Berlin explored the possibilities.

Read it at Project Syndicate
A Berlin Consensus?
by Andrew Sheng, chief adviser to China's Banking Regulatory Commission, is President of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong. Previously, he served as Chairman of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission, and was Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. In the late 1990’s, he chaired the Financial Stability Forum’s Task Force on Implementation of Standards. His latest book is From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.

More INET Videos: Sessions on Complexity and Fiscal Policy

Links.

Read it at Economist's View
More INET Videos: Sessions on Complexity and Fiscal Policy

by Mark Thoma

Perry Mehrling on George Soros at INET Berlin

Mr. Soros has referred to the European Union as a fantastical object.

I want to propose right here at the beginning of the conference that we seriously consider the possibility that intertemporal general equilibrium functions for economists as a “fantastical object”.

Observers of economics easily miss this, focusing instead on the fights between those who think government intervention is the solution and those who think government intervention is the problem. But typically both sides of this fight have vividly in front of them the very same fantastical object; they are fighting about how best to make that fantastical object a present reality, but they are in agreement about resisting Mr. Soros’ attempts to get them to let go of their fantastical object.

Read it at INET
Mehrling on Soros
by Perry Mehrling

INET Berlin Conference links up

Complete links for the INET Berlin now up at INET
(h/t beowulf)

Zero Hedge — Financial Instability For (Keynesian) Dummies

Zero Hedge figures it out. Keen and Bezemer mentioned.

Read it at Zero Hedge (short, on INET Berlin)
Financial Instability For (Keynesian) Dummies
Submitted by Tyler Durden

INET Berlin Videos, Days 1 - 3

Day 1

Leverage recommends the presentation by cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio, whose work I have often cited here.

Leverage:  Peter Victor: Managing the Global Commons 1/5; apparently this guys are building a model which integrates, both real economy, financial and environment. For the financial part they are using Wynne Godley & Mark Lavoie so functional finance and should be close enough to MMT (I would like them getting ideas from Keen on banking & credit, some collaboration would be awesome).

Day 2

I would especially recommend the presentations of Axel Leijonhufvud and, of course, Michael Hudson.

Day 3

Here I would especially recommend the presentation of Amartya Sen

I didn't mention the videos here that I have already posted individually.

Steve Keen announces availability of his INET 2019 paper

My paper “Instability in Financial Markets: Sources and Remedies” for the INET conference “Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics and Politics“, to be held in Berlin on April 12-14, is now available via the INET website.

If you’d like to download it, you can get it either from my INET page, or from a link on the conference program. For copyright reasons I can’t reproduce it here, but I can provide a quick synopsis and some excerpts, so here goes....

Read it at Steve Keen's DebtWatch
My paper for INET’s Berlin 2012 Conference
By Steve Keen

INET " Overwhelming Response to YSI in Berlin: INET’s Class of 2012

We reserved 25 slots, but we got 563 applications. Something had to be done.

So, after carefully selecting the 25, we have been putting our energy into creating something new, that we are calling YSI [Young Scholars Institute] Commons. The name is meant to evoke the intellectual commons that we all share, a deep and wide well that we collectively tap as a vital resource for facing the challenges of the present. And it is also meant as a reference to the venerable “common room” of traditional universities, a central axis of scholarly society and culture.  

In Berlin, our Commons will have an actual physical location, a room in the Adlon Hotel right next to Axica Conference Center. Everyone (yes everyone) who applied to YSI in Berlin has been invited to register for the YSI Commons, which will feature live video of all sessions, scheduled visits by selected speakers, and lots more. We have created a Berlin-based Task Force comprised entirely of Young Scholars specifically for the purpose of building out this new concept.

After Berlin, our common room will relocate to a permanent home on our web page, where we hope it will serve as the central axis of a new scholarly society and culture, a culture organized for new economic thinking. But everything will have started at Berlin.We are calling them the Class of 2012, the 563 Young Scholars who took the time to tell us what new economic thinking means to them, and why it is so necessary. We used every one of those 563 answers to construct the word bubble below, which we hereby adopt as the logo of the Class of 2012. 

Read it at The Institute for New Economic Thinking

Overwhelming Response to YSI in Berlin: INET’s Class of 2012

by INET

At INET, new economic thinking means new thinking about the economy, not necessarily by economists. Accordingly, only ten of the twenty-five students chosen state “Economics” or “Finance” as their major field of study, and the rest range from “Anthropology” and “Philosophy” to “Cognitive Science” and “Computational Social Science”. In between, we find “Political Economy”, “Law and Finance”, “Economic History” and “History of Economic Thought”. What all have in common is their sense of adventure, and their commitment to a life spent thinking long and hard about the most fundamental economic problems of our age.

Signs of sanity dawning?

Mario Seccareccia on MMT and Functional Finance at INET's Bretton Woods