BackGeorge Soros-backed I-Net wants to increase India presence
Think tank to have 'significant manpower' in India, will bring economists from other countries occasionally
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Mumbai: An economics think tank backed by billionaire financier George Soros wants to increase its presence in India, according to a senior official at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (I-Net).
“There is a very strong desire to create an I-Net India," said Robert Johnson, president of the institute.
An economist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johnson joined Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller in the famous short trade against the British pound that pushed the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.
I-Net was set up after the financial crisis of 2008 brought traditional economics into disrepute. Johnson says it was an “unmasking moment" for mainstream economics. The institute seeks to fund research on what its website describes as a “fundamental shift in economic thinking".
Johnson said that there are four key areas where he wants I-Net to work more intensively in India: create a digital database on historical economic data in India, helping to improve the quality of data available to Indian policymakers, backing research on the challenges of financial sector reforms and how to promote low-carbon development in India through different energy choices.
I-Net will have “significant manpower" in India, while flying in economists from other parts of the world every now and then.
I-Net is already working with the Azim Premji University in Bengaluru since 2012 to conduct joint workshops and seminars on Indian development issues.
“We decided to work together because we share the same ideas about what is a good society as well as the feeling that economics has a central role to play in creating a good society but has lost its moorings by becoming too narrow," said Anurag Behar, CEO of Azim Premji Foundation and vice-chancellor of Azim Premji University.
Johnson also wants the proposed Indian arm to take part in the global attempt to develop a new economics curriculum for students.
Johnson, more bluntly, describes a lot of contemporary economics as formalism masquerading as science.
The institute was not set up on the principle of vengeance but to provide new direction for economic research, said Johnson. The aim is to support young scholars, but the institute gets credibility from several established economists such as George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Michael Spence. “When you start, you tend to go to the elder statement," said Johnson.
The five thrust areas right now are a new architecture for the global financial system, the economics of innovation, the economics of inequality, resource sustainability and emerging issues such as social norms, the psychology of choice and identity economics.
Soros and Johnson have placed economic history and the history of economic thought — both of which are rarely taught in modern economics courses —at the top of their agenda.
This has led to an inevitable paradox: an institute that seeks to promote new economic thinking has actually been busy mining the works of economists of earlier ages.
Johnson mentions a quip by economist Mark Thoma at one of his conferences: “New economic thinking seems to mean reading old economics books".
He argues that new does not necessarily mean novel, and that I-Net is keen to promote sound economics. It is, then, not surprising that the names of many dead economists make the way into the conversation he had with this newspaper: Adam Smith, Frank Knight, Joan Robinson and John Maynard Keynes, for instance.
Johnson, who has found some of the writings of Rabindranath Tagore very insightful, said that countries such as India should be part of the attempt to rebuild economics because of its “very deep and powerful philosophical traditions that predate the Western Enlightenment".
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