Wladimir Nikoluk is currently working for the regional bureau of the United Nations Development Programme in Amman, Jordan. In collaboration with representatives of governments, NGOs and UN agencies, his job is to assist countries most affected by the Syria crisis and help them become more resilient to demographic, economic and political shocks. His previous professional experience includes placements in the public sector practice of McKinsey in Berlin and the sustainability unit of the Confederation of Indian Industry in New-Delhi. During university he was president of the Oxford Economics Society, co-organizer at TEDxOxford and project leader at the Oxford Microfinance Initiative. He holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford and is a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Many economists have good reasons to be more dismal than usual. After all, their academic discipline took a bashing in the wake of the financial crisis, and the practical relevance of economic insights has been repeatedly questioned.
A quick analysis of the list of academic economists present at the World Economic Forum in Davos yields a somewhat unsurprising insight: women are under-represented in the economics profession.
Despite recent drawbacks, the Eurozone is out of the emergency room after years of trials and tribulations. But the latest report by the European Commission throws some doubt on this assessment. It is clear that the Eurozone has issues to tackle that are beyond the immediate economic collapse of some of its members.
At a Wall Street Journal conference in 2009, then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stated that one should never let a crisis go to waste. In this sense, the 2008 financial crisis is just like any other crisis: a disaster and an opportunity. A disaster because it led to the destruction of $4 trillion worth of global assets, millions of people losing their livelihood, and bringing the whole economic system incredibly close to a cataclysmic meltdown.
Unless you are an anarchist, you probably appreciate a little bit of state in your life – the collective force that upholds public order, guarantees your personal security and protects your private property. In the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes asked what would happen if individuals were allowed to interact with each other in the absence of a powerful state apparatus, that is in the absence of a Leviathan. He asserted that competition, jealousy and selfishness would lead to a war of all against all, making, in his now famous words, the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. For generations that have never witnessed civil war, this seems exaggerated, but it serves to illustrate the dangers associated with leaderless political communities. In the future, the global order might be characterized exactly by this absence of leadership. (more…)
Forget the G-8, the G-20, the United Nations and all other initiatives of global cooperation – in the emerging global order every nation fights for itself. At the World Economic Forum in Dubai few were as outspoken in the exclusion of the possibility of truly global cooperation as Dr. Ian Bremmer, who argues that it is to the benefit of nobody to close one’s eyes to the volatility, insecurity and humanitarian casualties that arise as ever fewer nations have the capacity and none have the willingness to exercise global leadership. (more…)
Economic paradigms come and go. The seemingly endless debate between neo-liberals and –Keynesians in the past century provides a fascinating account of this. It shows that there must be words in economic debate other than last words – that no matter how certain an insight might seem in a particular instance, it will likely be proved wrong in the myriad combinations of circumstances that history inevitably yields. The essence of capitalism evolves around the centrality of profit, which in many ways is the very reason it has outcompeted its economic alternatives. Few would disagree with the central claim of University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman’s controversial essay on social responsibility (New York Times Magazine) that the paramount social objective of any business is to achieve profits within its legal constraints.