Events
Better answers to the biggest challenges of our time
Immigration and inequality, slowing growth and climate change – these are sources of anxiety across the world. We have the resources to address these great challenges, but lack the bold ideas that will help us overcome the distrust that divides us. If we fail, the potential losses are incalculable. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude.
In this talk, hosted by our partners at how to: Academy, 2019 Nobel laureate Esther Duflo will build on cutting-edge research in economics to explain the real sources of our present troubles – and make a persuasive case for intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect.
Missions and moonshots: rethinking innovation
How can we turn the talk about rethinking ‘purpose’ in business into a real moonshot?
A more purposeful capitalism requires more than just letters, speeches and goodwill gestures. Business, government and civil society must act together, courageously, to ensure that their walk is as good as their talk.
Mariana is a critic of mainstream thinking in economics which assumes policy can, at best, ‘fix’ market failures. She argues that a more dynamic approach is needed to co-create and shape markets: strategic public sector investment can catalyse economic activity, crowd-in the private sector, spark innovation, solve public problems, and lay the foundations for future economic growth.
In this process, there are important lessons that we can take from the ‘mission-oriented’ investments of the past, such as the Apollo space programme.
How to predict the next financial crisis
Nobel laureate and Yale Professor Robert Shiller predicts bubbles, busts and other financial crises years before anyone else. Join us at this event hosted by how to: Academy and be the first to discover his most powerful idea yet.
Ideas move markets. Spread through society by word of mouth and social media, TV news and internet troll farms, the stories that we tell each other about the economy drive how we invest, spend, and save – and lead, ultimately, to financial crashes, mass unemployment, and wars.
But although the power of stories to affect economies seems obvious, until now no-one has produced a coherent theory for explaining the role they play – let alone a toolkit for harnessing such an understanding to prepare for future crises, recessions and depressions.
Richard Vague, author of 'A Brief History of Doom'
Financial crises happen time and again — and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable.
In his latest book, he examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years and argues that the story of financial crisis is fundamentally the story of private debt and runaway lending.
Convinced that we have it within our power to break the cycle, Vague provides the tools to enable politicians, bankers, and private citizens to recognise and respond to the danger signs before the next crisis arises.
This event is held in partnership with INET, the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
Matthias Doepke, Northwestern University
Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why?
Love, money, and parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children.
Through personal anecdotes and original research, the authors show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and ’70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity.
Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing “parenting gap” between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are less high, and social mobility is not under threat.
The Growth Delusion
In The Growth Delusion, David Pilling explores how economists and their cult of growth have hijacked our policy-making and infiltrated our thinking about what makes societies work.
Our policies are geared relentlessly towards increasing our standard measure of growth, GDP. By this yardstick we have never been wealthier or happier. So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why are we living in such fractured times, with global populism on the rise and wealth inequality as stark as ever?
Straight Talk on Trade, co-hosted with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Not so long ago the nation-state seemed to be on its deathbed, condemned to irrelevance by the forces of globalisation and technology. Now it is back with a vengeance, propelled by a groundswell of populists around the world.
Dani Rodrik was an early and outspoken critic of economic globalization taken too far. He argues that the obsession of elites and technocrats with hyper-globalization has made it more difficult for nations to achieve legitimate economic and social objectives, calling for a balance to be found between national and global governance.
Delivering economics for the common good
In his talk, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Jean Tirole, will focus on how to take good economic ideas into the domain of effective public policy (rather than leaving them to languish in the academic departments where they were developed).
Can public decision-making be structured to achieve better outcomes? What role should the market, the state and broader ideas of social responsibility play in achieving the common good? Can economists and other experts overcome the distrust in which they are currently held by the public? And how can they become more effective in their work?
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
In mid-2000s, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, American businesses began to invest more in intangible assets (such as design, branding, R&D or software) than tangible assets (machinery, buildings and computers), a trend that has been mirrored in other rich countries.
In Capitalism without Capital, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake bring together a decade of research on how to measure intangible investment and what its impacts are. They argue that the rise of intangible investment is an underappreciated cause of some of the greatest economic concerns of our time, including increasing economic inequality and stagnating productivity levels.
Putting the human back into economics
In conjunction with INET (the Institute for New Economic Thinking) we present Margaret Heffernan, entrepreneur, chief executive and celebrated author of Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril and A Bigger Prize: Why Competition isn’t Everything and How We Do Better.
If economists are so clever, why are we in such a mess with rising inequality, populist movements upending global relationships and the rise of technology impacting global social stability? Perhaps we have been asking the wrong questions all along.
Heffernan believes that economics is often blind to the range of human experience, with potentially disastrous consequences. She argues that the disconnection of economics from disciplines including psychology, history, and sociology has left it unable to reckon with the disruptions and distortions of the 21st century and asks “How can we ensure economics is up to the task?”
Past Events
Author and former Managing Director of Condé Nast
Imagination in the Age of Technology
