"It is not so easy to ask our young scientists to think outside the box when a significant portion of their salary (and mortgage payments) depends on guaranteeing a steady source of funding. Consequently, professors become highly attuned to the institutional priorities of various funding agencies -- often at a cost to their own creativity and desired research directions."
New York Times, 2/11/09
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- Venezuela's Second Six-Year Plan (2013-2019)
As the economic boom of the post-war period ended in the early 1970s, neoliberal ideology emerged as a rebellion against the statist strategies of the previous era. While neoliberalism was critical of Keynes it was also a further development of themes present in classical and neoclassical economic thought. Its most famous proponent was the economist-philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). His theory till the 2012 U.S. elections constituted the central intellectual adversary for the global justice movements, the leftist states in Latin America and other critics of corporate capitalism.
It's been amusing to listen to the pundits discuss the economic implications of Hurricane Sandy. Of course, we all know it closed the financial markets in NYC for two days. (That should lead to a sudden spike in productivity, by my reckoning, since millions of people stop looking at pointless charts and do something useful for a change.) Financial analysts worry about the impact on insurance companies. Their shares surely plunged on Wednesday morning when the markets reopened. One trader interviewed on Toronto radio put it bluntly: "Shoot first, ask questions later." In other words, sell them all off, and then buy back any that you later find out may not have been hit so badly by Sandy's fallout. [Rarely do you get such an honest glimpse into the base
One of the entertaining characteristics of Ronald Reagan's first cabinet was that most of its members wore a tie bearing a cameo profile of Adam Smith. The new team had a clear vision: it was time to replace the statist capitalism theorized by John Maynard Keynes with the free market capitalism espoused by An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.