INET Should Rename Itself IPNET Because Preventing New Economic Thinking Is What it Does

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was established in 2009 and is a New York based, George Soros funded and CIA supported organisation whose apparent and nominal objective is the promotion of “new economic thinking” but that is not what it does. Judging it by its actions and its publications, INET would be better renamed as IPNET – The Institute for the Prevention of New Economic Thinking – because that disservice is what it actually performs.

INET is a cheerleader and supporter of the Washington Consensus and it is quite inevitable, in the Westernised world and in the area of the Anglosphere, the political influence of the only economics taught in the Western universities – neoclassical economics – is the only mindset backed by INET. With few exceptions, the Western university intellectual macroeconomic learning process is based upon teaching university students that neoclassical economics is the whole world of macroeconomics.

Unfortunately for INET and for the people of the major Western economies such as these in the United States and United Europe, and also for the suffering populations of the developing world where the neoclassical non-remedies of the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank (and within the EU, the ECB) prevail, there’s no neoclassical solution to economic decline, nor any understanding about how to promote rapid economic growth, nor is there any way out from the policy of the impoverishment of whole populations where their governments have previously run up sovereign borrowing for whatever purpose.

It is not difficult to see when this problem began. The late Alice Amsden has documented the turning point in history where neoclassical macroeconomics became the only acceptable quasi-religious economic faith in the West. The years in which this happened were the early years of the 1980s, when it was argued that neoclassical economics was on a par with physics and had universally applicable answers to all the world’s economic problems. Yet there are better economic systems that produce the goods.

As the late Alice Hoffenberg Amsden (1943- 2012) observed in the first para of her book “Escape from Empire”Š-“ŠThe Developing World’s Journey Through Heaven and Hell”.

“For more than half a century after World War II, first one American empire and then another dominated a territory larger than that imagined by King Solomon or Alexander the Great. The first lifted all boats, the second lifted all yachts. In one case, prosperity and growth were graced by Heaven. In the other, inequality and stagnation were squired by Hell. Whatever we can say about the rise and fall of American imperialism, it was not black and white, and it saw big changes. The new economic stars that are forming in the firmament. constellations like China and India, will rapidly alter survival patterns here on Earth.”

Two of these squires of Hell are INET and the CIA. They should know better.

Neither are acting in the best interests of the populations of the countries they should be serving, although it could be argued they are acting in the interests of the elites of these countries. The impoverishment of whole populations and the decline of the West is not a deliberate aim of the Western politicians or elites. These people could not possibly be so misguided,

because the previously leading Western economies are losing power and influence at an increasing rate to the rising China Sea economies and the elites are unhappy about that. INET and the CIA should refocus their objectives to consider the alternative economic system which is producing much more rapid economic growth in the Tokyo Consensus countries, which Zone is likely to eclipse the West as that process continues.

The Chinese and the Japanese (that is, the two largest Tokyo Consensus economies) cannot be allowed to continue to benefit from a quasi-monopoly in their understanding of high-growth macroeconomics. Less developed countries want the economic understanding, the investment credits and the manufacturing technology which produces economic growth, and if the US and the EU do not provide it, China or Japan will. As Alice Hoffenberg Amsden unerringly puts it:

“The Second American Empire is now in decline, possibly from immoderation but principally from a lack of greatness: it has made little contribution to economic development due to what may be described as a closed mind. Can its way of thinking be changed, or it is too late?” That is the question.

© George Tait Edwards 2015

Note: George Tait Edwards has published a book about “Shimomuran Economics and the Rise of The Tokyo Consensus” at http://www.lulu.com/shop/george-tait-edwards/shimomuran-economics-and-the-rise-of-the-tokyo-consensus/paperback/product-22379793.html and has written much else about this topic during the last four decades.

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This post was written by George Tait Edwards