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?