The Past Speaks

A.S. The Institute for New Economic Thinking conference will be taking place in Toronto, April 10-12, 2014. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, will be opening the conference with a speech. The conference will focus on innovation and its impact on economics and society. Speakers include Larry Summers, Koichi Hamada, Adair Lord Turner, Rodgin Cohen, Andy Haldane, Gary Gensler, Peter Thiel, Jim Balsillie, John Ralston Saul, and Michael Sandel, as well as Nobel Prize Winners Michael Spence, James Heckman, and Joseph Stiglitz. 

The conference programme is dominated, as one would expect, by scholars based in economics departments, particularly by those who want to challenge the dominance of neoclassical orthodoxy. However, there is a panel that contains three academics who teach in history departments.

Angus Burgin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University

Jonathan Levy, Professor, Department of History, Princeton University

Jamie Pietruska, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

Eric Weinstein, Managing Director, Thiel Capital / Visiting Research Fellow, Oxford University

Moderator: Emma Rothschild, Professor and Director, Center of History and Economics,  Harvard University

The theme of the panel is the “economics of radical uncertainty”. It appears that the participants will be talking about the history of forecasting and risk management. They will doubtless be interested in Walter Friedman’s new book  Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters.