On Becoming Mickey Mantle

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility.

This article is part of an ongoing series in which Rob shares his life experiences, and biggest lessons learned. If you’re an aspiring expert in economics or a related field, this is for you. It might mitigate the depth and duration of your mid-life crisisEarlier articles in this series can be found here.


5 – On becoming mickey mantle

“When I got to know Soros in the late 1980s, he introduced me to this guy he’d hired: Stanley Druckenmiller. Stan was an absolute genius. In those days —before LeBron James—I’d call him the Michael Jordan of traders. The three of us came to have frequent discussions about the state of the world and strategy. There clearly was a strong connection between Soros and I; a kind of a strategic side and an intuitive side, which I was very in sync with him about. Largely because the work of Charles Kindleberger (who had inspired me to become an economist) resonates with Soros’ approaches.  

And it seemed that Stanley and I could be a very good team. Stanley was a much better trader than I, but I could augment him as a kind of sounding board, and be a constructive critic on strategy. I think Soros believed in teams as a way to diminish error; if you have two bright people who trust each other working together, you’ll know that when both of them give the green light on something, the likelihood of success is pretty good.   

So at one point, they offered me a job with them. But I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t think I was ready. I looked at them and I used a baseball analogy: I said “you’re Babe Ruth and you’re Lou Gehrig but I’m not yet Mickey Mantle!” I knew that if I joined, there may not be that much time to learn the ropes; the firm had a reputation for hiring people quickly. And if someone didn’t work out, they’d just throw them back out. So, I wanted to strengthen myself first. But when I said that, Soros looked at me and he said, “well, Robert, if you want to stay in the womb and not be born, that’s your problem.” He was tough love.  

So, I kept working at Bankers Trust. At this time, I was trying to build a long, short fund in Asia. My clients were like the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, and others who had reserve management in the Asian countries. The Asian system was not as formal as the ERM, and I learned how to play with it. And they could learn by watching me; I agreed I’d report my positions to them every week.   

Then, the following spring, in 1992, they had what was called the Maastricht Vote, and the Danish voted against affirming the Maastricht Treaty. Everybody’s position, including ours, had been really long the periphery, and short the core. And Germany was going through unification and unification required a very big fiscal stimulus. I actually understood the situation fundamental textbook macroeconomics. You have a nominal exchange rate that’s locked or within a narrow band. And you have in Germany a stimulus, in the real sector, from the fiscal rebuilding of East Germany. That puts pressure on the system, so have to allow the real exchange rate to appreciate. 

At that point, you can do one of three things:  1) You can break the German Mark out and let it rise,  2) You can let Germany inflate, which was undesirable in their minds after the hyperinflation in the 1920s, 3) You can deflate everybody else. So, we started to watch the situation. Everybody had all these positions; not just speculative funds. Lots of corporations were funding themselves in Deutschmarks at eight percent rather than at Swedish kroner at 12 percent. They were saving on what you call “the carry.” The pressure in the system was going to build up. Then, in May, the French announced that they were going to hold a vote in September. That was my cue to schedule a dinner with Stanley Druckenmiller.   

Stan and I got together at an Italian restaurant on the East Side. We talked through the strategy together and at one point I said “I think I’m Mickey Mantle now; I think it’s time I come work with you guys.” So Stan and I talked for a while. And then, that same night, he talked to George, and they made me an offer that I accepted…”

Earlier articles in this series can be found here.


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When to get your marbles off the table

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility.

This article is part of an ongoing series in which Rob shares his life experiences, and biggest lessons learned. If you’re an aspiring expert in economics or a related field, this is for you. It might mitigate the depth and duration of your mid-life crisisEarlier articles in this series can be found here.


4 – When to get your marbles off the table

After working at the Senate Banking Committee, when Senator Proxmire retired, I became curious about the private sector and interviewed with a place called Bankers Trust. There was a brilliant man there at the time, Jay Pomeranz, who was the head of the foreign exchange trading floor, and an ordained rabbi.

As part of the hiring process, I first had a whole day with all of his deputies and it all seemed to go very well. But then Jay walks in. He’s got big fluffy hair, looks like Carlos Castañeda, and he’s got Birkenstock sandals on. He says “well, you had a good day with everybody, and these guys want to make you an offer, but if you and I don’t connect, you’re toast.”

I said, “no, I’m not toast. I just don’t get the job here.” And I do want the job here. So he asks me “well, what do you want?” And I said “well, talk to me about what the terms are.” So he lays out a whole thing with a guaranteed bonus of a hundred thousand dollars. And I looked at him and I said “you know what? You can keep that bonus, if I get the chair on the floor sitting next to you for the first year.”

At this point Pomeranz goes, “ahhh I don’t know if I can do that!” but I persisted. I said “how you expect how you expect your strategist to learn unless you put me in the flow? I’m not gonna sit back here in some office and try to figure out what you guys need. I gotta be here, in the turmoil. I have to connect with people and be the guy they call late at night. I gotta learn how to provide this service! I’ll make a lot more money for you, for me, for the firm, if you give me that.” And then he walked out. He went and had some kind of consultation. A few minutes go by but then he calls me onto the trading floor, with 400 people sitting there. And Pomeranz just jumps up on top of the desk and starts walking down and says “I want everybody to meet our new foreign exchange team member!” and everybody started yelling.

I ended up really enjoying my work with them. There was an ethical frame that their best people adopted. You’d make mistakes. You lose money, you make money, whatever. But they didn’t they didn’t have a sneaky bone in their body.

I was paired with a man called Norman Weinstein, who was a grandmaster in chess. He and I ended up co-managing an intra-European long/short leveraged currency fund. Usually long the periphery, short the core. To a large degree, my job was to be on airplanes, in the field, using my policy language and training to meet with finance ministers, central banks and the like all over Europe.

Then a couple of things happened in 1991. After the Berlin wall had come down, the Soviet Union was collapsing. At the time, we had a two billion dollar position long in the Finnish Markka. But I figured out that Finland might actually get hit hard because they were economically deeply intertwined with a collapsing nation (USSR). So I basically went and lived in a hotel room in Helsinki. I was well-connected there, had friends from graduate school and I knew all the central bankers. Plus, at Princeton, one of my professors had been a disciple of the famous Finnish economist Pentti Kouri.

So I was in Finland, meeting with everybody. I’d take the policy officials out and if they’d have a lot to drink (which was not something I had to induce) I’d say things like “you guys are talking like if you devalue, there’s gonna be inflation. But you got 14% unemployment; you’re not gonna get inflation!” Then, they would all start talking about the simulations they were doing on devaluation. So once I heard that directly from the central bank and finance ministry staff, I figured I better get my two billion dollars out of there.

Now, Finland only had about eight billion dollars worth of reserves. So ours was a big position in relation to that. So I told the postal bank and the Finance Ministry that I will not short against them, but that I need to get my money out–right at the boundary, but in one swoop. They agreed to that as a way of not starting a storm. So I did that and then I got on an airplane and flew back to New York

It turned out I was correct, Finland blew up. So when Soros heard the news, he called Pentti Kouri and asked him “who got this right?” And Kouri said, well, there was a guy from New York named Rob Johnson who was over here, staring in the whites of their eyes. He got his marbles off the table. So soon after, when I was at a birthday party for Richard Medley that Soros was at as well, he came right up and started talking to me…


Subscribe to receive the next article directly to your inbox! And in the mean time, take a look at Rob’s podcast Economics and Beyond, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Why do we need to transform economics, and how do we do it?

In a profoundly invigorating keynote speech, Professor Jayati Ghosh, Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the of Jawaharlal Nehru University, urges young economists to to take initiative and transform their discipline. Outlining eight problems with the status quo, and providing five clear ways to combat them, she inspires the next generation of economists to forge alliances, gather strength, and most importantly: be bold.


Keynote Lecture to UNCTAD-YSI Summer School 2020 

By Jayati Ghosh | It’s truly a delight for me to be able to address the UNCTAD-YSI Summer School. This is not only because these are two groups that I have huge respect for and sympathy with. It’s also because the theme of this Summer School (“From the Transformation of Economics to Economic Transformation: Pathways to a Better Future”) is something very close to my heart, something I and some of my colleagues have been grappling with for decades. It’s really quite energising to realise that there are so many young people willing to engage in this project. So I am going to treat this as an opportunity for me to think through some of the concerns I have, in the hope that all of you are going to be the ones taking forward this transformation. 

Mainstream economics, why do I not love thee? Let me count the ways. 

First, a lot of it is simply wrong: that is, it is misleading about how economies work and the implications of economic policies and processes. For decades now, a significant and powerful lobby within the discipline has peddled half-truths and absolute falsehoods on many critical issues: 

  • how financial markets work and whether they are or can be “efficient” without regulation; 
  • the role and nature of fiscal policy and the implications of austerity; 
  • what impact the deregulation of labour markets and wages actually has on employment and unemployment; 
  • how patterns of international trade and investment affect livelihoods and possibilities of industrialisation and diversification; 
  • the distributive effects of different macroeconomic policies; 
  • the extent to which private investment responds positively (or not) to policy incentives like tax breaks and subsidies or negatively to increased government spending; 
  • the effects of multinational investment and global value chains on producers and consumers in particular countries; 
  • the ecological damage created by patterns of production and consumption; 
  • whether tighter intellectual property rights are really necessary to promote invention and innovation; 

And so on—I could go on and on, these are just some of the more evident examples, and you can probably think of many more if you just take the time to do so. But if these are so wrong, why is this not widely known, and how are they so widely propagated? This is done through a fearsome combination of explicit and implicit controls within the discipline (which I will talk about) and without in the wider world through media and by imbuing policy circles with these mistaken notions. 

Some of this comes from the second major problem I have with the discipline: too much of it is in the service of power.

And the power that it increasingly serves is that of large capital and its supporting states: effectively the power of kleptocracy, at national and international levels. Many of the theoretical premises and empirical investigations of mainstream economics are conducted in ways that either divert attention from more critical issues, or assume them away, and thereby produce “results” and associated policy recommendations that reinforce existing power structures and imbalances. Therefore notions of exploitation of labour by capital and the unsustainable exploitation of nature by forms of economic activity, of labour market segmentation by social categories that allows for differential exploitation of different types of workers, of the appropriation of value, of the abuse of market power and rent-seeking behaviour by large capital, of the use of political power to push economic interests including of cronies, of the distributive impact of fiscal and monetary policies—all these are swept aside, covered up and rarely brought out as the focus of analysis. The deep and continuing concerns with GDP as a measure of progress are similarly ignored, and despite the conceptual and methodological flaws in its calculation, it simply continues to be used as the basic indicator to track, just because it’s there. All these slights of hand occur at the global level with regard to the international economic and financial architecture; they happens within countries at the level of macroeconomic policies; and they are evident in a lot of microeconomic analysis and in the development industry that claims to focus on poverty reduction. 

Once again, you will all be able to find many more examples of this tendency from your own study and experience—but the problem is that often these tendencies to reinforce underlying power imbalances are not immediately evident unless we actively look for them. They are reinforced because they are simply assumed away in the modelling and not accounted for in empirical analysis. And then the discussion on theoretical models or econometric results is shifted onto a purely technical arena, that moves away from their relevance to the actual world or their viability in explaining economic phenomena. 

This is related to the third big problem: the tendency to underplay the significance of assumptions in deriving analytical results, and most of all in presenting those results to a wider audience especially in policy debates.

Talk to most mainstream theoretical economists, and they will tell you that they have moved far away from the early neoclassical assumptions like perfect competition, constant returns to scale, full employment, etc., which bear no relation to actual economic functioning anywhere. But these assumptions still persist in the models that are explicitly or implicitly used to undergird far too many policy prescriptions, whether on trade and industrial policies, or macroeconomic policies or “poverty reduction” strategies. These are what give rise to so many of the myths that the next sessions are going to debunk. But because they are repeated so constantly, and because this repetition is done not only by the media but by people in authority, they get taken as axiomatic. 

For example, across the world, there were Finance Ministers and other leaders who took it for granted that a public debt level of more than 90 per cent would result in a financial crisis—even though the empirical research that supposedly generated that result was quickly exposed as deeply flawed to the point that the result not only contained spreadsheet errors, but also vanished completely if just one country’s data were removed. While on that topic, it’s interesting to note that many of the governments in advanced countries, which had earlier refused to entertain the possibility of larger fiscal deficits to deal with unemployment because they would add to public debt, completely changed track when confronted with the pandemic. Suddenly large deficits were okay and rising levels of public debt were not a problem—not because the economics of this had actually changed, but because large capital and even finance capital now found it to be necessary. 

Being in the service of power requires the enforcement of strict power hierarchies within the discipline, and a system of marginalising and disincentivising alternative theories, explanations and analysis.

This gives rise to the fourth problem: the power structures within the profession that reinforce the dominant (mainstream) thinking, even—and possibly especially—when it is less relevant and applicable.

One way this works is through the tyranny of “top journals” and their gatekeepers. Academic jobs, as well as jobs as economists in other organisations, are dependent on the applicant’s publications; these publications are “ranked” according to the supposed quality of the journal they are in, in a system that openly and aggressively keeps out journals that publish articles from alternative perspectives; promotions and further success in the profession depend on these markers, which in turn continue to disincentivise those who would like to extend their analysis or break away from this mould. Certainly, for young economists, there’s no doubt that professional incentive structures are heavily loaded in favour of staying firmly within the mainstream. 

The fifth problem could have emerged from this: because of these pressures and incentives, many of the brightest minds are diverted away from a genuine study of the economy, to try to understand its workings and their implications for people, into what can only be called trivial pursuits.

Too many so-called “top” academic journals contain esoteric models that provide additional “value” only by relaxing one small assumption or providing a slightly different econometric test of some earlier versions. Yet in most cases they leave out some critical aspects that would actually provide a better understanding of the economic reality, because it would make it harder to model or because it might generate inconvenient truths. Since economists mainly talk to each other (and then proselytise their findings among policy makers) they are rarely forced to interrogate this approach. Instead, at the “apex” of the discipline, the more mathematically sophisticated the approach, the better it is taken to be. So economic forces that are necessarily complex, muddied with the impact of many different variables and reflecting the effects of history, society and politics, cannot be studied while recognising all this complexity. Instead they have to be squeezed into a mould that will make them mathematically tractable, even if this means that they cease to have any resemblance to the actual economic reality. This has gone so far that even some of the most successful mainstream economists have railed against this tendency—but with little effect so far on the gatekeepers of the profession. Given the seriousness of the economic and other problems facing humanity, and the importance of developing economic analysis and strategies to confront them, this is probably much worse than Nero fiddling while Rome burnt; it amounts to spending the time looking for little pieces of tinder to fan the flames. 

This lack of interest in other disciplines has meant a major and growing impoverishment of economics, leading to the sixth concern. The lack of a strong sense of history (which should imbue any current social and economic analysis) is a major drawback.

Recently it has become fashionable for economists to dabble in psychology, with the rise of behavioural economics and the “nudgers”. But this too is very often presented ahistorically and without a sense of the varying social and political contexts that affect how people actually behave and respond in particular circumstances. Over several decades, this also led to a shift in the discipline away from trying to understand evolutionary processes and macro tendencies to a focus on the particular, to microeconomic patterns and proclivities that effectively erase the background and context that shapes economic behaviour and responses. And of course, the underlying and deeply problematic underpinning of methodological individualism remains: it is unfortunately still taken for granted, because (unlike those who began the study of political economy) so few economists go anywhere near a philosophical assessment of their own approach and work. 

The short-termism and indeed short-sightedness, not just of some economists but also of the discipline as a whole also deserves to be highlighted, as the seventh problem.

It is true that John Maynard Keynes famously said “in the long run we are all dead”, but he also thought about “economic possibilities for our grandchildren”. But most contemporary economists, despite paying some lip service to issues like climate change mainly because they have to, display hardly any concern for issues that stretch into the future. The most egregious example of this is the inadequate factoring in of ecological damage and climate change concerns into assessments of policy choices and future trajectories. 

How can economists keep doing this, making such huge blunders and ignoring so much essential reality? Partly because of the eighth problem: arrogance.

Economics is a very arrogant discipline, even though this is completely unjustified. Most mainstream (and male) economists are especially and appallingly arrogant, whether consciously or unconsciously so, and are either openly or subtly into hierarchies. This arrogance is just one of the reasons that Claudia Sahm (the macroeconomist who formerly worked with the US Federal Reserve) declared that “economics is a disgrace”. There is a marked sense of superiority and unwillingness to engage with and learn from other areas of knowledge, especially other social sciences and humanities, which are brushed aside as “soft”. Several economists who have done so and thereby hugely enriched their own analysis and their contribution to broader economic insights, have been displaced from standard Economics departments and relegated to Sociology or Politics, joining the “second division” teams rather than the front runners of the discipline in terms of perception. 

There is of course a strong machismo to all of this, and so it is no surprise that a macho ethos permeates the mainstream discipline, just as an atmosphere of clever aggression dominates a lot of mainstream economics conferences. Male domination (similar to chimpanzee societies) has very much been part of this as well, whereby males compete aggressively with one another but also bond together and gang up to dominate over females. Some strong young women with voice in the profession are just beginning to make inroads into this—and more power to them! —but the spread of patriarchy is still vast and deep. It’s not just machismo, of course: the adverse impact of relational power also affects other socially marginalised categories, whether according to class, race, ethnicity, language, and so on. And then there is the huge impact of location: the mainstream discipline is completely dominated by the North Atlantic, whether in terms of prestige, influence or the ability to determine the content and direction of what is globally accepted in the discipline. Just as an example, all the 84 prizes awarded by the Swedish Central Bank Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel (falsely called the Economics Nobel Prize) have gone to economists resident in the North, and essentially living and working in the US and Europe. The North Atlantic still dominates in publications and in setting the research and policy agenda. The enormous knowledge, insights and contributions to economic analysis that are made by economists located in the Global South are largely ignored, almost certainly by those in the North, but even (sadly) by economists in other parts of the South. There is an even worse tendency in development economics, of treating the South as the objects of study and policy action (with its economists often becoming glorified research assistants in international research projects), while “real” knowledge is supposedly created in the North and disseminated outwards. 

And finally, there is the proclivity of economists to play God. In perhaps no other discipline is there so much power to engage in what can only be called social engineering, couched in technocratic terms so as to make it largely incomprehensible to ordinary people who are told and persuaded that rigid economic laws make particular economic strategies the only possible choice. Increasingly, this attitude verges on or collapses into the unethical. The recent craze in development economics personified by the randomistas exemplifies this. There has been a lot of valid outcry and disgust about some Randomised Control Trials being conducted (inevitably) on poor people in the developing world, that have involved cutting off water supply to see if that incentivises bill payments, or checking whether poor parents will send only their better performing children to school once they are informed about their results. Clearly, quite apart from the numerous methodological problems with such studies, this shows the extent to which at least some economists have completely lost moral compass, and the strong class/region forces at work whereby the poor, and especially those in developing countries, can be experimented on in this way. The rot goes beyond those conducting such studies, to the research funders, the international organisations, the editors of journals and the university teachers who put such studies into their course material. 

But I want to remind you that while such RCTs and the underlying neo-colonial attitudes they carry are certainly objectionable and distasteful, that this is only the latest example of economists playing God, trying out their pet theories of what will make economic processes change, often regardless of the impact on human lives. Think of the shock therapy so blithely imposed on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the human tragedies they generated as well as the oligarchies they ultimately gave rise to. Think of the structural adjustment measures in Africa that reduced public health spending and created systemic fragilities that cost so many lives in previous epidemics like Ebola and have rendered health systems completely unfit to deal with the current pandemic. You get the idea: this is not the first time that economists have played with the lives and livelihoods of masses of people, secure in the knowledge that there will be no impact on their own safely distant lives and no accountability for their prescriptions. 

So here’s the thing—economics is too important for the present and future of humanity to be left in this appalling state.

It’s certainly true that economics is too important to be left to economists, and that greater genuine economic literacy is required through society to enable people to call the bluff on supposedly technocratic decisions that only favour particular groups. But even within the economics discipline, we simply cannot let one stream, which is currently unfortunately the mainstream, dominate and colour everyone else’ views on how economies work. Fortunately, this is not the only stream: and over the course of the next few days you will be exposed to some of the finest minds who have made important contributions in developing realistic and applicable analyses of economic phenomena. It’s sad that we still have to refer to them and to ourselves as “heterodox” and “non-mainstream”, but that only reflects the power imbalances in economics and in economies, that I have already talked about. 

So how do we change all this?

At first sight it appears almost impossible: the structures are so entrenched; the vested interests are so strong; there is so much at stake for global capital and the ruling powers that they will most certainly resist efforts to change. Let me also be honest and admit to you that I speak to you from a position of relative failure, as someone who has tried for nearly four decades but without much success, to make a dent in this power structure and to change both the content and the direction of the economics discipline to a limited extent. The need for drastic change in the discipline has never been so drastic and so urgent. We are facing major existential crises as a species; the global economy was already limping and fragile and is now effectively devastated by the latest blow of the pandemic; environmental threats are already translating into awful reality; inequalities that seemed impossibly large have grown even more, creating societies that will soon become dysfunctional to the point of becoming unliveable. All this requires urgent, major economic action. Yet mainstream economics persists in doing business as usual, as if tinkering at the margins with minor changes will have an impact on these fundamental problems. 

The good news is that there are apparently winds of change blowing. The world— and the world economy—may be in an unbelievable mess, but we have more economists, especially young economists, recognising this and thinking about how to avert the immediate dangers and transform the future. There are movements that have been led by students, demanding that the discipline and the pedagogy change, like Post Autistic Economics that transformed into Real World Economics. There are hundreds of you who have registered for the Summer School from across the world, suggesting that there is a real intellectual hunger for change. The Young Scholars Initiative and similar groups have huge potential, and I’m hoping that many of you who are based in developing countries will also get more involved in International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) to take that network forward in raising the voice and enabling exchange between economists based in the Global South. 

It’s clear from my earlier interactions with YSI and some young dynamic economists who are at the forefront of these movements, that you don’t really need advice from people like me. Nevertheless, let me offer whatever little insight I have gleaned from my years of trying to do this. 

First, something I think you all already know: diversity matters.

Diversity of gender, of race, of class background, of ethnicity and so on: these are essential to enrich the discipline and have now been widely commented on. Currently there is a raging discussion on social media about this, with expected pushback from those accustomed to their privileged positions. But there is also the aspect that is often overlooked, diversity of location, which I mentioned and which is also necessary for enriching the discipline. So I request all of you, in your own work, search out readings by scholars and economists from different parts of the world, even if your teachers have not made you aware of them. Fortunately, the internet now makes this much more possible than ever before. Be mindful of whom you quote or refer to when writing up your research. Don’t look only for “empirical validation” from Southern economists while taking your theoretical knowledge from the North: many economists based in the developing world have made far more insightful and profound contributions to economic understanding, even if they have not found a place in the so-called “top” journals and rarely find their way into reading lists. 

Second, remember to be respectful of diversity of approaches, which is really what being “heterodox” is all about.

Recently there has been some discussion about whether this is a useful term at all, and a tendency to be slightly shamefaced about it, which I believe is completely misplaced. To me, a heterodox approach is defined by pluralism, which means that I may adopt a particular theoretical framework to understand how the economy works, but I should be willing to learn from other different approaches. The whole point is that we should be willing to engage with diverse perspectives and draw insights from one another without getting locked into sectarian squabbles. This doesn’t mean that we can’t have arguments, which are of course essential; only that we should try to be as inclusive as possible and encourage diversity in as many ways as possible. 

Third, —and this is really important—don’t let identity substitute for analysis.

It’s essential to hold ourselves and our work to the highest standards of rigour and careful, systematic research. This rigour need not be mathematical, but it must be logical, and it must be empirically grounded and aware of history. 

Fourth, don’t be too purist and don’t obsess about classifying everyone into their own little methodological boxes.

Try to make allies, across other disciplines, in wider society and also among mainstream economists who are beginning to see its limitations. In searching for and finding allies, it’s also necessary to make ourselves easily comprehensible as well, and not create a miasma of verbiage or formulas that can obscure the argument. In this regard, I have a simple “grandmother rule” for my students: you can be as complicated, nuanced and sophisticated as you like in your work, but ultimately you must be able to state your basic argument in words comprehensible to your grandmother (who is usually a very smart woman, even if she is not as educated in economics). Try it: it’s not as easy as it sounds. 

Finally, be bold!

Don’t be afraid to ask awkward questions of anyone, don’t let anyone slap you down using the well-worn techniques of the socially powerful, don’t be intimidated by institutional hierarchies and power structures. The more fearless you are, the more you accomplish; and the more other people whom you can persuade to be fearless with you, the more unstoppable you will be. And also, I think, the more fun the whole process will be. 

So here’s hoping that you will indeed be unstoppable and that this Summer School becomes another step in forging alliances and gathering strength to transform the discipline of economics and make it once more the moral yet worldly philosophy it was originally intended to be. 


About UNCTAD | UNCTAD is a permanent intergovernmental body established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1964. The organization is governed by its 194 member States and is the United Nations body responsible for dealing with economic and sustainable development issues with a focus on trade, finance, investment and technology. It helps developing countriesto participate equitably in the global economy. UNCTAD carries out economic research, produces innovative analyses and makes policy recommendations to support government decision-making.

UNCTAD YSI Summer School | Entitled “From the Transformation of Economics to Economic Transformation: Pathways to a Better Future”, this year’s summer school took place from August 15-23,2020. It’s aim is to connect the intellectual challenge of rethinking economic analysis to the practical challenge of building a healthier, more resilient, more equal and greener future for all.


From Nearly Dropping out to Fishing with the Chairman of the Fed

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility.

This article is part of an ongoing series in which Rob shares his life experiences, and biggest lessons learned. If you’re an aspiring expert in economics or a related field, this is for you. It might mitigate the depth and duration of your mid-life crisisEarlier articles in this series can be found here.

Today, we hear about Rob’s time in graduate school, and how he started his career in the U.S. Senate.


3 – FROM NEARLY DROPPING OUT TO FISHING WITH THE CHAIRMAN OF THE FED

“As a graduate student at Princeton, I worked with some very good and interesting people, including Joe Stiglitz and Alan Blinder. But still, I almost dropped out. I just didn’t see the point of all the formalism, game theory, set theory, etc. It wasn’t that it was too difficult; I was well trained in using math from my sailing and MIT days. But I felt that I was burning away my time on this planet doing this ritual in modeling technique. A lot of it was rigid formalism that was not insightful.

But then Axel Leijonhufvud was visiting Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, led by Albert Hirschman and with Marcello De Cecco. Their environment and approach opened my eyes. Axel was a big influence. He started having me come to their seminars and introduced me to people in the history department. David Abraham, who was a friend of Tom Ferguson, Arno Meyer, who wrote all about the transition from the Bolshevik revolution; and Carl Schorske–they brought the material to life for me. Axel actually told me I’m lucky that I can do the math. I could get through, he said, and then really use my time to go through channels of political economy, history, and institutional economics. They bred me as a dissident, and kept me going. I could again see how to approach understanding the calamity in Detroit.

Towards the end of my time there, I was thinking about what direction my career would take. I knew this Professor, Peter Kenen, who had tremendous international finance knowledge, which made me want to go fishing with him every Saturday. And one day, Kenen said “I’m gonna bring this guy along next time; he’s the Chairman of the Fed. So before I knew it, Paul Volcker and Peter Kenen and I stood together on a boat throwing our rods, and I listened to the two of them talk. At one point, Paul said to me “You don’t sound like someone who just wants to be an academic. Why don’t you apply for a dissertation fellowship and come to the Federal Reserve and you can work with Ken Rogoff and Dale Henderson there.” Well, I did that, but I ended up working with a wonderful mentor named Peter Isard.

It let me write my dissertation while maintaining a connection to practitioners and the “real world.” Paul and I talked about that; he agreed that in order to be a meaningful economist, you have to choose which problems to focus on. The best way to do that is through what I now call “inductive inspiration”; by being around real events. That’s how you ask the better questions. Albert Hirschman always stressed this, too; he would also go out into the field periodically to get inspiration on what would be important to work on.

Then, during my life at the Fed, as I was finishing my dissertation, I got in a serious relationship with a woman there and we wanted to get married. Her name was Bonnie Loopesko, and she was the head of Japan Analysis, which was a big job in the 1980s. And so Paul Volcker called me to his office and told me that he needed her to stay, and that it would be a bad idea for me to work in the same place as my wife. He asked if he could help me, and that he could talk to some people. Then the next day he said “Senator Pete Domenici – Republican senator from New Mexico – would like to meet with you.”

So I ended up at the U.S. Senate, working for Republican Chairman Pete Domenici on the Senate Budget Committee, with a brilliant team led by Bill Hoagland and Gail Fosler, and always consulting with former chief of staff Steve Bell. I learned about hearings, speechwriting, and how legislation on economic issues was made. Domenici told me that I should listen to him on the Senate floor, write speeches with my economic ideas in his voice, and then brief him on who in the Senate would be an ally and who would not. Afterwards, we would experience the reaction to see what we learned, and formulate a strategy for hearings and legislative action. It was like a postdoc in political economy.

During this time I also met the brilliant journalist and writer William Greider, who wrote “The Education of David Stockman.” At the time, he was writing a book on the Federal Reserve, and reached out to me to ask about Central Banking. I told Volcker about it, and he told me to go ahead, and that he would be interviewed, too. So I told Greider that I would not gossip about people or meetings inside the Fed, but that I’d be happy to discuss monetary and macro theory with him, and critique his drafts. Greider agreed, shared many of his ideas with me, and introduced me to a fabulous network of people in Washington D.C. Later on, Steve Bell from the Domenici staff went to work with David Stockham, which led me to connect with him as well. He, too, was a valuable advisor.

After the Senate changed to Democratic control in November of 1986, I moved over to be the Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under Democratic Chairman William Proxmire. That was interesting because it was the time of the savings and loan bailout and the 1987 stock market crash.  My Kindleberger background came in useful. Traders had been doing what they call arbitrage, by creating a kind of dynamic option. Portfolio insurance was what they named it. But that didn’t work out in the midst of a crisis; the quant methods they were using were not realistic in the marketplace.

After that happened, I ran the Senate side Humphrey Hawkins hearings, which is where the Federal Reserve reports on their mission to the U.S. Congress. I met many great journalists that way,  including Paul Blustein, Alan Murray, Tom Ricks, Martin Wolf, Anatole Kaletsky and Lionel Barber. And I was also reaching out to people behind the scenes, like Warren Buffett and George Soros, who Dave Smick and Richard Medley introduced me to. 

Soros had lost 120 million dollars in that crash, which I was told was nearly a third of his net worth at the time. I wanted him to be a witness, but he didn’t want to appear himself. But he was very happy to give me guidance so that I could run hearings focused on the crux of the problem. I got to know him quite well, and later worked on his 500-day plan for how Russia should transform its structure of governance.  Naturally, Soros asked me to envision how a parliament should interact with a Central Bank.


Enjoy sound with the story!

Theme From Mahogany – Diana Ross
Goin’ Down –  Jeff Beck


Reading List

William Greider – Secrets of the Temple
William Greider – The Economic Education of David Stockman


Subscribe to receive the next article directly to your inbox! And in the mean time, take a look at Rob’s podcast Economics and Beyond, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Be Humble, Acknowledge Uncertainty, and Don’t Assume A Happy Ending

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility.

This article is part of an ongoing series in which Rob shares his life experiences, and biggest lessons learned. If you’re an aspiring expert in economics or a related field, this is for you. It might mitigate the depth and duration of your mid-life crisis. Earlier articles in this series can be found here.

Today, we pick up at Rob’s time at MIT, and see what lessons economists might be able to learn from sailors.


2 – Be Humble, Acknowledge Uncertainty, and Don’t Assume A Happy Ending

“MIT was tough. I had weird stuff happen to me there. One day, in a computer lab, I was sitting next to this black guy. He told me he’s working on his Ph.D. in medical engineering. And he’s 20 years old. I’m 19, an undergraduate. He’d been at MIT since he was twelve. He told me he’d bet me that he could multiply two numbers in his head faster than he could type them into an HP calculator. And he was right! I said how do you do that? He said he converts everything to base 2. He transformed the numbers in his mind like this. Not even a scratchpad! I just sat there and figured there’s a lot of people here smarter than me. It was humbling. And invigorating. 

So everyone found out real fast that they were not the smartest person in the room. For some people, that was hard, especially for people who were a bit socially awkward, and didn’t have much other than their intellect. They had been a valedictorian at home and an average guy here. So for some time, MIT saw a lot of suicides among freshmen. But then they adapted and made freshman year pass-fail. That gave people a longer runway. More room to explore. But it was humbling to be there nonetheless.  

The sea also taught me to be humble. When you go offshore, sailing, you know you don’t know. If you go way offshore like into the arctic ocean, you feel small. And you feel grateful that whatever there’s up there didn’t take your soul. There’s humility. When economists say things are uncertain, they still pretend to know. But when sailing, you can’t pretend. You have to function despite the fear. You do not have the power to extinguish the uncertainty you have to cope with. You can’t escape. There are things you do, of course, that are prudent. You wear life jackets, safety harnesses, you keep the more novice sailors off the deck. You decide who should go on the voyage because of needing competent people in a crisis to keep everybody safe. But at the end of it, you are coping with something that’s more powerful than you are. 

So when I went to my first economics classes at MIT, I heard them talk about equilibrium. I raised my hand and, not trying to be a smart-ass, I said “isn’t that like assuming a happy ending?” I knew that the same math worked in engineering. But it doesn’t work that great in economics. We were doing Fourier transformations–looking at things in time and frequency domain. In an engineering lab, you can do that on electrical signals, and it fits like a glove. But if you use that stuff on economics data, it looks like mud. So I thought: what are these people doing? What they are doing is pretending to have certainty when they don’t have it. 

For me, having experienced the social turmoil of growing up in Detroit, and knowing the uncertainty of the sea, this was crazy. But the work with Kindleberger resonated. I worked with him on Manias, Panics, and Crashes, which is a historical account of financial crises, and the radical uncertainty that underpin them.  

In the end, I got a scholarship to go to Princeton, with Solow and Kindleberger backing me. And they told me the rising star at Princeton was going to be Joseph Stiglitz, and the faculty there was going to be amazing. I had applied to Harvard and Berkeley and all these places, but MIT had told me that if I got into Princeton, I had to go there. So I went to try graduate school…” 


Enjoy sound with the story!

This playlist, put together by Rob, captures the spirit of the Sea.


Read along!

Recommended Read:
Charles P. Kindleberger – Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises


Subscribe to receive the next article directly to your inbox! And in the mean time, take a look at Rob’s podcast Economics and Beyond, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Social Instability, Music, Sailing, and… Economics?

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility.

This article is part of an ongoing series in which Rob shares his life experiences, and biggest lessons learned. If you’re an aspiring expert in economics or a related field, this is for you. It might mitigate the depth and duration of your mid-life crisis. Earlier articles in this series can be found here.

Today, we start at the start. We hear from Rob about his youth, and the way he got involved in economics in the first place. Spoiler alert: it was not a linear path.


1 – Social Instability, Music, Sailing, and… Economics?

“As I was growing up, Detroit was a cauldron for social instability, disorder, racial tension, and labor management issues. It was the time of the Vietnam War, and the 1967 race riots; I was in the middle of that when I was a child. MLK spoke, at what would be my high school 3 years into the future,  three weeks to the day before he got assassinated! My parents were talking about whether we needed to evacuate. I saw a lot of violence at 10 and 11 years old. It left me mesmerized by MLK; I wanted to know who he was to evoke such a powerful reaction in society. 

I also grew up surrounded by music. My father was a doctor and jazz musician, and my mother was a singer and worked in development fundraising for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; they brought lots of music into the home. And on top of that, I had a mad passion for sailing. All throughout high school, I was doing high level races. I learned navigation by learning trigonometry myself. I learned aerodynamics by teaching myself calculus. Grades, school, and report cards didn’t matter that much to me. I cared about winning the sailboat races! So I studied meteorology. I read about the history of the great explorers. The North Pole, the South Pole, everything.  

When it came time for college, sailing led me to MIT. The greatest naval architect of the 20th century–Olin Stevens–had gone there. And a guy who I sailed on a crew with, John Bertrand (who later became the first person to win the America’s Cup away from America in 132 years) had, too! Plus, my dad was encouraging me. So that’s what I wanted; to go to MIT, and to study engineering and become a Naval Architect.  

At MIT, I started out majoring in engineering, aeronautical engineering, I minored in music and creative writing. In creative writing, I chose to specialize in understanding the collective writings of Martin Luther King, and the style and techniques of argument, etc. Because I was still haunted by him.  

Then, one day, I was looking at electives. I found a course in financial history of western Europe with a man named Charles Kindleberger, and signed up.  

About a month into the semester, there was an article about me in the school newspaper, talking about how I was the leader of a crew that won a college sailing race at the naval academy. Kindleberger had seen it, and he told me “I saw you’re a sailor! And since this is your sophomore year, next year you’ll have to write a junior paper, and I think you should write about the role of marine technology in affecting the trade between the Dutch and the British empire. I can hire you as a research assistant.”  

So Kindleberger, at the time of the two oil crises, got me a job between him and a man named Morris Adelman, the most famous oil economist in the world. We were sitting in the same suite. And Kindleberger was amazing. On Friday mornings, he’d take students to the last pre-performance rehearsal of the Boston Symphony. And then we’d go to breakfast and talk about world affairs; he was this lovely, lovely man. 

But in the middle of that junior paper, Kindleberger says to me, “well you’re good at engineering and math. If you take advanced econometrics, micro and macro, you can get credit for intermediate and beginners, too; that gives you triple the credits. And I’m gonna be selfish. We have nine people majoring in economics… But if we get a tenth, they double our budget!”  

Kindleberger told me that the person who should advise me should be my advisor was  Robert Solow, because he and his wife were about to learn how to sail. Teach him how to sail, he said, and he’ll teach you economics and help you in your career.  

So here I was, with my background of social turmoil, a passion for sailing, a curiosity for MLK, a love for music, and I’m about to dive deeper into economics…”


Enjoy sound with the story!

This playlist, put together by Rob, captures the spirit of Detroit.


Subscribe to receive the next article directly to your inbox! And in the mean time, take a look at Rob’s podcast Economics and Beyond, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet Rob Johnson, President of INET

Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is not your average economist. He’s got heart and soul, or if you’ll have it, the blues! With his deep connection to the arts and humanities, Rob leads the new economic thinking not just with a sharp mind, but also with sensibility. His mentorship to the YSI community is invaluable. 

Over the next few weeks, we’re thrilled to bring you Rob’s life story, with all its twists and turns, surprising anecdotes, and life lessons learned. If you’re a young scholar looking to navigate the choppy waters of economic thinking, you’re in for a treat.  

Below is a little glimpse, citing some of the books that made Rob Rob, and foreshadowing the themes that this series will uncover. Enjoy this appetizer, and stay tuned for the main course! 


Prologue – The books behind Rob Johnson 

“I grew up in the midst of social turmoil in Detroit; I was ten years old at the time of the Vietnam War and the 1967 race riots. Years later, when I read The Origins of the Urban Crisis, I realized what an impact that had had. It made me lose my innocence. I was also left mesmerized by MLK, who gave a speech at what would become my high school just 3 weeks before he got assassinated. I did not understand it then, but I could tell it was important. Later on, I studied his writing and speeches in depth, reading them collected in A Testament of Hope

Another major element in my youth was with sailing–I was obsessed with it and it propelled my learning.  At 13, I took The American Practical Navigator out of the library, learning geometry and trigonometry just to become a navigator. I also needed to understand meteorology, so I read Watts’ Wind and Sailing Boats. A couple years later I had moved on to yacht design which meant calculus and Sailing Theory and Practice. I did race and after race, and very successfully. 

All of this curiosity and striving were great fuel for a learning mindset. I also devoured the history of the great explorers, like Shackleton and racing geniuses like Elvstrom. I loved St Exupery’s Wind Sand and Stars, which many consider to be the best adventure story ever written. Fiction, too, inspired me: Moby Dick and The Odyssey, for example. All those stories taught me that with preparation and study one could garner the courage to reach further; to get more from life.  

This mix of influences meant that I quickly developed a combination of curiosity and ambition, but also skepticism, and humility. I knew that preparation and skill goes a long way, but you can never really fully comprehend the forces you are up against. So when I first saw an equilibrium graph during my college economics class, I knew it was off. Kindleberger’s notion of radical uncertainty in Manias, Panics, and Crashes would come to resonate much more, and later lead me to feel at home working with George Soros. 

My path has always been guided by music, too, I even had my own record label for some time. Music always felt more like truth than discourse. It offers a window into the deeper regions of the mind; the essential, and the unconscious. The Spirituals and the Blues is a profound book on music, and its links to social change. While spirituals are about the afterlife, the author, James Cone notes, the blues is about defiance in the here and now.  

Cone has written much more, including The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which I think is one of the greatest books written in social science. It shows how people really behave under stress, and why you cannot trust experts to come to the rescue. Because at times of societal malfunctioning, they hide from controversy to preserve their reputation. That’s when it’s time for the fresh vision of young people in conjunction with those who suffer injustice. Together they can see what needs to happen, and make the unfeasible feasible. Nothing is more relevant today.” 


If this leaves you with a lot of questions, stay tuned! Over the next few weeks, we’ll start at the beginning and delve into the details. Subscribe to receive the articles directly to your inbox.

If you’re excited for this series, you’ll also enjoy Rob’s podcast, Economics and Beyond, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the new Coordinator Cohort!

We are so honored to introduce to you our new YSI working group coordinators! Three for each working group, this global group of 63 is stepping in to serve the working groups for a two year term. Get to know them!

We are so honored to introduce to you our new YSI working group coordinators! Three for each working group, this global group of 63 is stepping in to serve the working groups for a two year term. Get to know them!
Written by Mariana Campos Pastrana


Africa


Herbert Mba Aki | Herbert Mba Aki began his career studying law and joined YSI without a background in economics. He joined with the intention to learn about topics in macroeconomics, political economy, and development policies to support his PhD research in Political Science. In 2019, he attended his first YSI event which left him inspired after meeting bright and talented Africans who had careers as entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and policy-makers. Herbert decided to increase his involvement in YSI and saw the Africa Working Group as a space to not only make changes in his academic framework but where he could pose questions and solutions for the economic challenges faced by the region. He now serves as coordinator for the Africa Working Group.


Petronella MunhenzvaAfrica Working Group coordinator, Petronella Munhenzva, grew up in a remote area in Zimbabwe that lacked government resources and access to development. This inspired Petronella to explore the impact of state policies on people’s livelihoods on a local level. Petronella sees access to opportunities and recognition as a challenge faced by African scholars, and also notices that a lot of the theories and concepts that are used to explore African topics tend to be imported from abroad. It is very important to support local knowledge and to support the works of African scholars, which Petronella works hard to do.


Geraldine Sibanda | Geraldine Sibanda first joined YSI three years ago after speaking at a panel at the YSI Africa convening in Zimbabwe and considers the Africa working group her home within YSI. She sees a challenge for the economic field in the region to be that there is little progress made into “unpacking and understanding unique country-specific and region-specific problems and creating tailor-made solutions for them.” Geraldine is currently based at the University of the Free State in South Africa.


Behavior and Society


Leigh Caldwell | Early in his economics career, Leigh Caldwell was building models of human and organizational knowledge while writing software – but he soon realized the implicit rationality assumptions he was relying on were, well, nonsense. He decided to start looking at principal-agent problems that were tied to accuracy. When presenting his insights at a workshop, he was introduced to behavioral economics literature and he realized there was a rich source of material which shined a light on the problems he’d been looking to solve. Today, Leigh serves as one of the coordinators for the Behavior and Society Working Group!


Komal Shakeel | Komal Shakeel has been a part of YSI since our beginning in 2013 and was part of the group that created the founding principles. Back then, working groups were based on regions and she set up a working group of China and Pakistan. Eventually, she realized that this approach was too broad for her interest area. Komal wanted to support and to connect with researchers around the world who were interested in behavioral economics and so the Euro-Economics Working Group was born, which eventually evolved to the Behavior and Society Working Group. She now serves as coordinator for the group.


Iva Parvanova | Iva Parvanova is a Bulgarian researcher currently based at LSE in London. A YSI member since 2016, Iva is one of the new coordinators for the Behavior and Society Working Group. Her research interests are rooted in behavioral and experimental approaches applied to understand corruption in healthcare. A dedicated researcher on this topic, the book currently sitting on her nightstand is “Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick” by Maya Dusenbery.


Complexity Economics


Rutuja Uttawar | Meet Rutuja Uttawar! Rutuja was first introduced to economics when she stumbled on “The Economic Naturalist” by Robert H. Frank, which led her to the world of Heterodox economics and eventually led her to complexity as an approach to economic thinking. She was introduced to the Complexity Economics Working Group after submitting an abstract for the Festival for New Economic Thinking in Edinburgh in 2017. She then joined as a member and organized a reading group and now serves as one of the newest coordinators for the Complexity Economics Working Group.


Vanessa de Lima Avanci | Vanessa de Lima Avanci is currently based at Ideies in Vitória, Brazil and is a coordinator for the Complexity Economics Working Group. She first became acquainted with YSI in 2017 after attending the Innovation Bootcamp in Tallin, and later attended the Latin America convening in Buenos Aires the following year as part of the Complexity Economics Working Group. 


Solomon Owusu | Solomon joined YSI and the Complexity Economics Working Group after being introduced by his friend, Danilo, in 2017. The group has been able to organize many projects and been able to build a strong, open, and transparent community. As coordinator, Solomon is excited to increase activity for the working group with more webinars, research groups and reading groups!


Cooperatives


Emi Do | Meet Emi Do, one of the coordinators for the Cooperatives Working Group who is currently based at the Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan. Emi challenges herself not only through academia but also through trail running. She views this challenging endeavor as an excellent contrast to the arduous nature of academia.  Her longest distance so far has been 115km and she’s hoping to complete a 100 miler within the next year! 


Terence Tapiwa Muzorewa | Coordinator Terence Tapiwa Muzorewa first joined YSI in 2017 after attending a conference at the Free State University in South Africa. Terence admits that he fell in love with the working group! However, he has been working on cooperatives since before joining the working group and studied housing cooperatives for his PhD. Terrence is based at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe.


East Asia


Soheon Lee | Soheon Lee is one of the coordinators for the East Asia Working Group and is currently based at the Korean Embassy in Japan. Soheon first became a member of YSI in 2015 and has been actively participating as part of YSI. She joined the East Asia Working Group when it was re-established in 2017 to connect with Asia-based researchers and has met great colleges, young scholars and mentors through the working group and looks forward to meeting more!


Seung Woo Kim | Seung Woo Kim’s journey to becoming one of the coordinators for the East Asia Working Group began towards the end of his Ph.D. Seung Woo became interested in the global turn in economic history, which highlighted the problematic aspect of the Eurocentric view of the discipline. This pushed Seung Woo to research the way in which the Global South engaged in global finance and the international monetary systems as well as alternative approaches to economics. He then found the East Asia Working Group to be a space in which he could pursue various of these topics.


Rachel Ganly | Rachel Ganly is a MPhil Student in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her work explores the effect of men’s long working hours and gendered work norms on family formation in East Asia, supervised by Stuart Gietel-Basten.


Economic Development


Surbhi Kesar | Meet Surbhi Kesar, coordinator for the Economic Development Working group and a crime fiction fan! Based at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, India, Surbhi believes that research agendas need to be global in its outlook and local in its reach. Her vision for the working group is for members to play the role of community researchers who can engage with questions of development, especially now with the challenges brought on by COVID-19.


Nurlan Jahangirli | Nurlan’s interest in Economic Development stems from his childhood in Baku, Azerbaijan. He noticed the economic struggles of the regions and from a young age held the belief that he wanted to contribute to the development of the region. This belief eventually led him to economics, and after a series of adventures, he committed to the area of development. Through the current COVID-19 crisis, Nurlan has seen how fragile economies are with regard to health crises and social problems. Because of this, he sees it as important to reframe how we view the development process. Nurlan is currently based at the University of Hamburg in Germany.


Santiago Gahn | Meet Santiago, an Argentine scholar based at Roma Tré University. He is a guitar aficionado, who favors the Blues and Jazz, and also a keen songwriter. He cites Jimi Hendrix as his biggest inspiration. He is currently working on “Towards a Theory of Economic Development” as there is currently no standardized theory of Economic Development. He sees it as important to read classical economic theories from theorists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx and to interpret them through modern classical theory.


Economics of Innovation


Fernanda Steiner Perin | Fernanda first joined the Economics of Innovation Working Group at the Latin American convening in Buenos Aires in 2018. She later became an organizer as part of the Latin America Working Group and worked on projects related to innovation, which has led her to become a coordinator for the Economics of Innovation Working Group! With the current global situation as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, Fernanda sees a stronger need for innovation and policies to support innovation.


Rosie Collington | When Rosie Collington joined Genetic Alliance UK’s Policy and Public Affairs team back in 2016, her role was to develop and communicate responses to policy developments in genomics, health care, and health data to patients. However, it soon became evident research in these areas within political economy and socio-economics was sparse. Rosie decided to dedicate her work to understanding the economics of health data, public sector digitalization, and health innovation and promote it widely. 


Dario Vazquez | Meet Economics of Innovation coordinator, Darío Vázquez! When we asked Darío what he believes the largest challenge facing the field is, he responded: “to transform the logic of innovation processes in order to guide them towards solving the great social challenges of our time.” Dario is currently based at the UNSAM in Buenos Aires, Argentina.


Economic History


Diego Castañeda | Diego Castañeda takes his economic history talents beyond academia. The new coordinator for the Economic History Working Group hosts “Mancha,” a radio show which debates politics, economics, and public life (you can listen on NoFm-radio.com!) He’s also currently producing a podcast on the economic history of pandemics and covers various different eras, from the Antonine plague that ravaged the Roman Empire to the current COVID-19 crisis.


Maylis Avaro | Meet Maylis Avaro! She is a French scholar currently based at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and one of the new coordinators for the Economic History group. She has been a member of the working group since 2018 when she first participated at the World Economic History Congress in Boston.


Alain Naef | Say hello to Economic History Working Group coordinator, Alain Naef! He is currently based at UC Berkeley in the USA. As coordinator he finds it important to keep a balance in the group between quantitative and qualitative economic history.


Finance, Law, and Economics


Luisa Scarcella | Say hello Luisa Scarcella! Luisa has been a part of YSI since our early days and attended our first plenary in Budapest. She is the new coordinator for the Finance, Law, and Economics Working Group. As coordinator, she places strong importance in keeping the group representative of the different areas of interest that exist within law and economics. She looks forward to fostering a strong online community that remains tight-knit through the current crisis until it is safe to meet in person again.


Christina Refhilwe Mosalagae| Finance, Law, and Economics Working Group coordinator, Christina’s desire to build a better world began in her early days. Christina cites her Setswana mother and her Polish stepfather as her biggest inspiration. “Through their love, sacrifice, and an appreciation for different cultures, they modeled the type of world that I want to be a part of building.”  Christina is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Turin in Italy.


Limia Trifena | Meet Limia Trifena, one of the coordinators for the Finance, Law, and Economics and a boxing enthusiast! Limia first joined YSI two years ago after meeting YSI members at a conference in Berlin. Since this chance encounter, Limia has been an active member of YSI. She is currently based at the University of Warwick in the UK.


Financial Stability


Nathalie Marins | Meet Nathalie Marins! She is based at the University of Campinas in Campinas, Brazil. Nathalie is the newest coordinator for the Financial Stability Working Group, but comes with 11 years of experience in the field of financial stability!


Ádám Kerényi | We asked Ádám Kerényi what is the biggest challenge the Financial Stability Working Group now faces. For him, it’s the COVID-19 pandemic which has not only caused a tragic health crisis and triggered an economic downturn, but a liquidity and solvency crisis as well. These massive challenges to the financial system affect global financial stability. Ádám points out that central banks have remained crucial in safeguarding the stability of global financial markets and maintaining a flow of credit. He sees a need for continued international coordination to observe data, support vulnerable communities, and to contain stability risks.


Nicole Toftum | Nicole Toftum decided at the young age of 15 that she would pursue a career in the social sciences. Although she began her undergraduate years focused on politics, she later discovered Minsky and became fascinated with financial issues. She decided to focus on a multidisciplinary MA. During the 2018 YSI Latin America convening, she discovered the Financial Stability Working Group and joined right away and now serves as coordinator for the working group.


Gender and Economics


Magali Brosio | Magali Brosio first discovered the field of gender and economics when studying for her master’s while scrolling through Twitter. This inspired her to write her dissertation on the gender wage gap. Ever since then, her research interests have been within the field of gender and economics – both inside and outside academia. A proud feminist, Magali is one of the newest coordinators for the Gender and Economics Working Group. 


Shakatakshi Gupta | Coordinator Shatakshi has always been interested in gender inequality issues, partially stemming from her own experiences with gender discrimination. Studying gender bias issues for her Ph.D., she realized that very few universities considered gender and economics a serious subject area and that there is a lack of coverage of the topic. Shatakshi believes that even though more people are acknowledging the role of economists in inhibiting gender discrimination, there is still a lot of work to be done.


Cicero Braga | Meet Cicero Braga, coordinator for the Gender and Economics Working Group. According to Cicero, the biggest issue facing the field is that there is limited literature on the topic. More data and mechanisms are needed to deal with the issues.  Cicero is currently based at the University of Viçosa in Brazil.


History of Economic Thought


Christina Laskaridis | SOAS Ph.D. researcher, Christina Laskaridis, is a new coordinator of the History of Economic Thought Working Group. For Christina, one of the issues facing the niche field is the lack of programs that allow substantial research on the topic. “We are a small field that has been gradually cast out from many Economics departments, and links to adjacent fields are loose.” According to Christina, this creates a challenge in securing Ph.D. programs for newcomers and a lack of career opportunities which would help push the field forward. The History of Economic Thought Working Group is a great place to get started for those interested in doing research within the field. 


Julia Marchevsky | Julia first became interested in the history of economic thought while pursuing her undergraduate degree. She started questioning when it was that the world began to focus on the concept of accumulating wealth and her curiosity led her to her current research interests. Christina also notes the importance of the field as she believes that understanding the progression of economic thought allows for those in the field to be better economists. Julia Marchevsky is currently based at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.


Marius Kuster | Meet Marius Kuster, coordinator for the History of Economic Thought Working Group. The Swiss researcher is based at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. When we asked Marius one of his secret hobbies, he told us he enjoys making music on his computer!


Inequality


Maria Cristina Góes | Meet Maria Cristina Góes! Maria was first inspired to research inequality while writing her master thesis which was inspired by Michel Kalecki’s theories. Kaleckian models explore how changes in the share of income that goes to workers can impact economic activity and employment by analyzing responses from employers and workers. Maria is the new coordinator for the Inequality Working Group and is based at Roma Tre University in Italy.


Natassia Nascimento | Meet coordinator, Natassia Nascimento! She is a Brazilian researcher currently based at UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil! Natassia lists two fellow Brazilians as her biggest inspirations. The first is her grandmother who Natassia admires for her courage and wisdom. The second is Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna, who was not only the best at what he did but passionate about it too.


Francisco Ardila | Francisco Ardila notes that interest in inequality skyrocketed after the 2008 financial crisis but peaked in 2013 with the release of “Capital in the XXI Century” by Piketty. Francisco notes that interest has become diluted by having inequality often being incorporated into other fields of economics and most research on inequality that is done today is really a by-product of research done in other fields. As coordinator of the Inequality Working Group, Francisco feels that inequality is an important enough subject to merit its own field, front, and center.


Keynesian Economics


Ana Bottega | Say hello to Ana Bottega! Ana first joined the Keynesian Economics Working Group in 2018 at the YSI Latin America Convening in Buenos Aires. She is one of the three new coordinators for the group. Currently on her nightstand? A literary classic – Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Ana is currently based at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.


Sylvio Kappes | Meet one of our new coordinators for the Keynesian Working Group, Sylvio Kappes! One of his secret talents is writing fantasy fiction. Sylvio sees that with the current climate, it is crucial that governments do everything possible to end the pandemic; he considers austerity to be a major concern. Sylvio is currently based in Maceió, Brazil.


Lilian Rolim | Lilian Rolim first became involved with the Keynesian Economics Working Group at the Budapest Plenary in 2016 when she met economists working on similar projects. Lilian believes the field needs to adjust to incorporate pressing issues such as climate change and inequality. She also finds it incredibly important for economics to be more inclusive for researchers from diverse backgrounds. Lilian is based at the University of Campinas in Brazil.


Latin America


Gabriel Aidar | For Latin America Working Group coordinator, Gabriel Aidar, one of the biggest challenges he sees is defining the focus of the group. There are many economic topics that are related to the region, but for Gabriel, it is important to create a work plan which allows for the diversity of topics to be pursued while still maintaining focus on the primary issues which the region faces today.


Giuliano Toshiro Yajima | Latin America Working Group coordinator Giuliano Toshiro Yajima hopes to build stronger academic networks within the region. While Latin American research centers and institutions are well connected to their partners in the US or Europe, they have limited ties within the region. For Giuliano, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to strengthen these connections and bolster the research on Latin American economies.


Florencia Jaccoud | Meet yogi and coordinator for the Latin America Working Group, Florencia Jaccoud. Florencia is currently based in Maastricht in the Netherlands at the UNU-MERIT and is originally from Argentina.


Philosophy of Economics


Maisa Ribiero | The philosopher’s role is to question and examine the impact of economic policies and instruments. Philosophy of Economics Working Group coordinator, Maisa Ribiero, gives us an insightful look into how economic philosophers examine economics. One of the focus areas is the tradeoff that comes with economic choices and the impact on human welfare and social justice. Economic reasoning and policies will always impact human welfare and economic philosophers specialize in weighing the ethics of the decisions. They also examine the impact and function of the structures that facilitate economic activity, and they ponder on possible alternatives. For Maisa, the philosopher is a critic of the theories and approaches used by economists. “The most valuable work in science proceeds from the basis of significant expertise on the part of the philosopher”


Merve Burnazoglu | After a visit to her sister’s private banking office in Switzerland, Merve Burnazoglu was fascinated by the connection between the graphs and equations she saw on the screen and how they represented wealth in “the real world”. For Merve, this sparked her curiosity as to how wealth is created or extracted in the real world and this inspired her to study economics. As an economist, she began to further question economic systems and society, which led her to her current research area in Philosophy of Economics.


Juan Melo | For Philosophy of Economics Working Group coordinator, Juan Melo, the biggest challenge economists face is to  bridge the gap between “big picture” topics (such as inequality, discrimination, democracy and markets) and the  methodological questions, modelling, and theory that economists typically use. The way Juan sees it, Philosophers of Economics have the unique opportunity to use their research to foster exchange between science and political economy, which may be a daunting task, but also a rewarding one.


Political Economic of Europe


Stefano Merlo | Stefano Merlo first became part of the Political Economy of Europe working group after presenting his dissertation at the first YSI Plenary in 2016. At the time, he was researching the account imbalances before the Euro Crisis and many researchers in the working group offered guidance, suggesting that he take a look at the EU as well. Stefano not only heeded their advice, but became more interested in the topic, and is now one of the coordinators for the group!


Salome Topuria | Meet Salome Topuria, one of the coordinators for the Political Economy of Europe Working Group! Her research background is in political economy, and she studied Political Economy of European Integration at the Berlin School of Economics and Law and is currently a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Kassel in Berlin.


Stefano Di Bucchianico | Say hello to Stefano Di Bucchianico, an Italian researcher currently based in the beautiful and historic city of Siena at the University of Siena. Stefano is one of the new coordinators for the Political Economy of Europe Working Group and is excited to set up an established schedule of activities for the group!


South Asia


Aneesha Chitgupi | Aneesha Chitgupi first joined YSI while pursuing her PhD. She wanted to explore organizations that supported and encouraged new ways of research, which led her to a YSI workshop in Kolkata, India where she participated as a YSI panelist. The rest is history and we welcome her as one of the coordinators for the South Asia Working Group.


Arun Balachandran  | 24% of the world’s population lives in 3% of the world’s land area in South Asia, as noted by Arun Balachandran, making the density of its population a challenge for the region. Arun points out that most of the major issues in South Asia stem from its demographic composition but its population also has the potential to be a driver for its economic growth. He points out that South Asia has begun to adopt alternative ways of thinking and believes that the spread of people-centric economic development could be the key to the region’s growth. Arun Balachandran is a coordinator for the South Asia Working Group.


Aqdas Afdal | Aqdas Afdal was already an involved member of YSI prior to becoming a coordinator for the South Asia Working Group. He first started attending our events way back in 2015 when YSI was still in its infancy! Aqdas appreciated how the working groups would bring together some of the brightest minds from around the world to generate new ideas for a sustainable, just, and equal world.


States and Markets


Nicolas Aguila | Argentine scholar Nicolás Aguila first became involved with the States and Markets Working Group when the group was first created in 2017, which was also how he was first introduced to YSI. He is currently based in Birmingham, UK.


Esra Urgulu | Esra’s interest in development economics, industrial policy and the role of the state started before she even began studying economics! Over the past few years, she has participated in multiple panels on these topics organized by YSI and the States & Markets Working Group. She is very excited to be one of the group’s new coordinators.


João Macalós | João first fell into his current research topic – quantitative analysis of international monetary relations – during his time as an assistant lecturer. He realized that the field was underdeveloped and eventually discovered the States & Markets Working Group after being introduced by friends and colleagues. The group touched on his research interests and he has been a dedicated member ever since.


Sustainability


Felipe Botelho Tavares | Sustainability is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and according to Sustainability working group coordinator Felipe Botelho Tavares, one of the biggest challenges is working to “re-orient human and economic activities towards new paradigms of prosperity” and also to focus on ensuring a lasting quality of life and environment for future generations to come. Felipe is currently based in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil at the Brazilian Petroleum Institute.


Ariel Ibanez-Choque | Meet Ariel Ibanez-Choque, one of the new coordinators for the Sustainability Working Group! He first became involved with the topic when studying it as part of his master’s degree when he became part of a multidisciplinary and international research team focusing on sustainability and natural resources in Latin America. Ariel is currently based at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.


Dania Clarke Say hello to Dania Clarke, one of the newest coordinators for the Sustainability Working Group. Like many Vancouverites, Dania loves tending to her indoor plants and backcountry hiking through British Columbia’s beautiful scenery. She is currently based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.


Urban and Regional Economics


Kishorekumar Suryaprakash | “After the advent of neoliberalism, urban inequality has increased. Competition between global cities to attract capital have resulted in a relaxation of labour laws, environmental laws, huge tax concessions and expropriation of poor from their lands. [This has] created a major gulf between the rich and poor in cities” – Kishorekumar Suryaprakash, Urban and Regional Economics Working Group coordinator


Rafael Campos | For Rafael Campos, the Urban and Regional Economics Working Group is able to be a strong player in the exchange of ideas between young scholars around the world largely in part because of its global nature. For Rafael, this is of paramount importance since the group often addresses issues such as the role of geographic space on economic development and having members from diverse locations allows for different experiences and approaches to be heard.


Simone Grabner | We asked Simone Grabner if she had any secret talents and like many of us in quarantine, she has been working on her cooking skills! She is a self-confessed foodie and loves to whip up meals for her family and friends. She is currently based at the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L’Aquila, Italy and has become a keen cook in Italian cuisine! Simone is one of the newest coordinators for the Urban and Regional Economics Working Group.