Heterodoxy at Oxford University Mr. Soros?
by Benjamin on April 17, 2010
George Soros has put $50m aside to promote economic debate and new research with his foundation the Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet), and has now donated its first lot (of $5m) to that homestead of pluralism and new thinking; Oxford University, UK. You may sense some sarcasm in that statement, because Oxford hasn’t challenged the mainstream thinking since… Well… I’m not entirely sure actually. Tellingly, Joe Stiglitz weighed in at the inaugural conference by arguing that traditional economics could do a lot to understand the crisis by re-jigging the model slightly towards some assymetric information within the traditional story. Revolution here we come.
At one point there was some muttering in the corridors that the New School Economics Department might be able to attract this kind of funding. After all, it has been a mainstay of pluralist approaches to economics for decades – and is arguably the leading American non-mainstream school. UC Riverside, Amherst, Utah and Kansas City could likewise be considered pluralist in the US, with SOAS in the UK and the Cambridge University lecturers in Political Economy equally good places to start with such funding. Instead we’ve started with Oxford, and according to the Times:
It is the first of a dozen or so that Mr Soros hopes to set up at leading universities worldwide. Inet is talking to Cambridge as well as higher education universities in Germany, France, China, Italy and the United States, where there have been discussions under way with Princeton, Columbia and New York University.
Princeton, Columbia and NYU? While I appreciate that Dixit, Sala-i-Martin, Woodford and Rubinstein are good people, they are hardly going to challenge the theories and work which gave us the kind of economics that can’t handle this crisis. I mean, they wrote those theories in the first place! Ok, so Krugman, Stiglitz and Easterly offer a glimmer of hope that such money would be well spent, but lets be honest, they don’t really need it. The funding starved departments who encourage students to think critically about the mainstream needs to get its act together, otherwise Mr Soros will just be adding another brick to the wall.
