A strange insurgency

An unintentionally funny article by Michael Hirsh in Newsweek headlined “blame the economists”.  He described how a brave group of subversives are standing up to the powerful ideology of “free market fundamentalism” and its wealthy backers on Wall Street:

“The inaugural gathering of the Institute for New Economic Thinking [Inet], held in the same stately surround at King’s College where John Maynard Keynes developed his General Theory in the mid-1930s, was planned as an insurgency against this way of thinking.”

Yet, as I argued in posts on 6 April and 9 April, the Inet conference was attended by the elite of the economics profession and backed financially by George Soros, a billionaire hedge fund manager. If anyone has any doubts about this here is a partial list of the speakers at the conference:

• George Akerlof – Nobel laureate in economics.
• Charles Dallara – the managing director of the Institute for International Finance (which represents many of the world’s largest financial institutions).
• Anatole Kaletsky – principal economic commentator of the Times (London).
• Joseph Stiglitz – Nobel laureate in economics
• Dominique Strauss-Kahn – managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
• Gillian Tett – assistant editor of the Financial Times.
• Adair Turner – chairman of the Financial Services Authority (Britain’s main financial regulator).
• Justin Yifu Lin – chief economist of the World Bank.

Soon I intend to write a post on what a genuinely new economics would comprise.