Soros launches new economic think tank

For many years the billionaire George Soros has been a trenchant critic of neo-liberal free market fundamentalism. He has developed his own theory of reflexivity - a variant on behavioural economics thinking - which stresses the importance of perceptions in markets and powerful feedback effects. The FT describes his theory as one where ’ financial markets tend to influence perceptions of reality, which in turn feed back into markets.’

Now Soros has announced that he is putting $50m into a new think tank - the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) - one of the aims is a moving away from the dominance of high level mathematics in university courses (a seriously good move in my opinion) towards giving students stronger insights in behavioural traits and the importance of politics and history in driving how people operate in real markets. According to Soros “The (economic) dogma has lost touch with reality.”

NET’s founding Advisory Board members include Nobel laureates George Akerlof (famous for his work on the market for lemons and asymmetric information) and Sir James Mirrlees, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, Willem Buiter (from the LSE) Ian Goldin (seen here giving a talk at TED) Charles Goodhart (creator of Goodhart’s law) Anatole Kaletsky (arch-contrarian from the Times) John Kay (from the FT) global economics experts Ken Rogoff and Jeffrey Sachs. Quite a powerful list of people - all of whom are never happy to accept the conventional wisdom.

This is an economics think tank worth keeping a weather eye on.