by INET conferencing beyond disappointment I’m sitting in a coffee shop opposite Haymarket Station in Edinburgh. Just up the road, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is holding its conference. I’m supposed to be there, as I was yesterday and the day before. But I am not at all sure I want to go. The last two days have left a very bitter taste. This conference, grandly entitled “Reawakening”, is supposed to be a showcase for the “new economic thinking” of INET’s name. I hoped to hear new voices and exciting ideas … Not a bit of it. In the last two days we have had panel after panel of old white men discussing economic theories developed by old white men, many of them dead. Economic beliefs that I thought had been comprehensively debunked have
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics
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INET conferencing beyond disappointment
I’m sitting in a coffee shop opposite Haymarket Station in Edinburgh. Just up the road, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is holding its conference. I’m supposed to be there, as I was yesterday and the day before. But I am not at all sure I want to go. The last two days have left a very bitter taste.
This conference, grandly entitled “Reawakening”, is supposed to be a showcase for the “new economic thinking” of INET’s name. I hoped to hear new voices and exciting ideas …
Not a bit of it. In the last two days we have had panel after panel of old white men discussing economic theories developed by old white men, many of them dead. Economic beliefs that I thought had been comprehensively debunked have reappeared, dressed up as “new thinking” …
I returned for a panel on debt traps, public and private – and I despaired again … Oh dear. It went from bad to worse.
Pontus Rendahl … claimed that “banks don’t create money” and explained that Barclays creates its own currency “pegged at par to the central bank currency”, which apparently only works if the central bank “is complicit”. The Bank of England debunked this nonsense back in 2014. Why is it still being presented now? …
This is not “new thinking”, it is the same old elite economists’ voodoo in different clothes.
It is indeed difficult not to agree. A lot of the stuff presented at INET conferences are just regurgitations of the same old mainstream dogma. And to even for a second think that a visionless neoclassical economist like Rendahl should have anything to do with new thinking in economics is of course totally gobsmacking!