In reality, financial capitalism works well for the most part.
Thursday, 15. November 2012, 18:15 – 20:00 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOL-G-201 (Aula)
The history of recent centuries shows that the coexistence of people is increasingly governed by financial instruments and institutions. Since the global financial crisis that began in 2007 and was characterised by speculative bubbles and collapses, there have been frequent complaints about the "financialisation" of society. However, the development of financial capitalism - past and future - should be understood as an ongoing process of institutional innovation that addresses the complex structures and contradictions of the human psyche with creative approaches and ensures that we have an economic system that works well overall in everyday reality, despite occasional bubbles and other malfunctions.
Robert J. Shiller was born in 1943 and is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics in the Economics Department and the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, as well as Professor of Finance and a faculty member at the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. He has written several bestsellers; his most recent work, Finance and the Good Society, was published by Princeton University in April 2012. Shiller has been a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980 and has organised NBER workshops, on behavioural economics with Richard Thaler since 1991 and on macroeconomics and individual decision-making (behavioural macro-economics) with George Akerlof since 1994. He served as Vice-President of the American Economic Association in 2005 and as President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2006-2007. Shiller writes the columns "Finance in the 21st Century" for the international ideas platform Project Syndicate and "Economic View" for the New York Times.