Robert Frank at the RSA - 10 June

The Economic Naturalist is one of my favourite books on economics. Robert Frank had a simple but powerful idea - to get his students to think of interesting economic enigmas and then write a short paper on each as part of their assessment. The best questions raise all sorts of issues in our mind and prompt us to consider some of the basic core economic concepts that students are presented with in their introductory courses.

Robert Frank is scheduled to speak at the Royal Society for the Arts on Wednesday 10th June and this promises to be a lunchtime meeting full of interest. Here are the details:

“Join the renowned ‘economic naturalist’ Robert Frank, who argues that much of the handwringing about deficit-financed economic stimulus spending is overblown. For Frank, failure to engage in aggressive stimulus spending will simply prolong the downturn, causing tax receipts to decline further and result in even larger deficits. If stimulus spending is focused on investments that yield higher returns than government bonds, its effect will actually be to make our grandchildren richer, not poorer. But they would be much richer still in the long run if we paid for the same investments with our own money. Join Frank as he asks: How can we break out of our current, wasteful consumption pattern? Will a new taxation system solve all of our woes? And can we have ‘more of everything’ by eliminating economic waste?” Details and ticket applications from the RSA website