Conversation with...Matthew Bishop & Michael Green: "A new capitalism for a big society".

Past Event

Date
 03 February 2011, 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Location
 Lecture Theatre, Oxford Martin School
34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD

Speakers:

  • Matthew Bishop, US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist.
  • Michael Green, leading independent economist and writer

Introduced by Frances Cairncross, Rector of Exeter College and former management editor of The Economist, Bishop and Green will lead a discussion based on their recent book, "The Road From Ruin: A New Capitalism for a Big Society". Together, they will take a look at what set us on the road to the recent financial crisis, whilst also highlighting the signs to guide us back to prosperity.

We’re at a crossroads, and decisions about how to reshape a discredited capitalism will profoundly affect whether the coming years will be ones of depression, stagnation, or renewed prosperity. Instant analysis since the collapse of the financial system in the fall of 2008 has produced no end of ideas about what to do—ranging from those of free market ideologues (let the market do its work and damn the consequences) to extreme government interventionists determined to keep the animal spirits of capitalism penned up.

But if there is anything worse than toxic financial assets it is toxic ideas. We need to reject the old orthodoxies and conventional wisdoms. This talk will take a step back and analyze what can be learned from financial crises of the past—from the Tulip Craze of the seventeenth century through the Great Depression of the 1930s, Japan’s Great Deflation, and the Long-Term Capital debacle of the 1990s to the unprecedented interventions of the government during the past year—to set the agenda for a reformed twenty-first-century capitalism.
Bishop and Green's previous book is Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World, which was described as 'an important book' by President Clinton.
Mr Bishop is also the author of Essential Economics, the official Economist guide to economics.