Christian Economists

Oct. 19 – Economists polled by Reuters think it will be hard for the European bailout fund, the EFSF, to cover debt by Italy and Spain. Berenberg Bank economist Christian Schulz discusses the findings.

A three-part event series by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de In light of the current financial crisis, it has become more urgent than ever before to change and improve the way we do business. Economic practice is also a form of cultural practice — and one of particular interest. How has the relationship between economics and culture evolved historically? How does economic practice function in other contemporary cultures? And most importantly, what kind of economic world can and should we strive for in the future? These are some of the questions which leading economists, scholars and cultural artists discussed at the event series “Cultures of Economics” held on three days in May and June 2010. The artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski has developed a changing installation for each conference in the event series. Her work plays on the motif of “joss paper” which is burned at traditional Chinese ancestor worship ceremonies and New Year celebrations. Originally used as paper money, many people nowadays use joss paper to make life-size papier-mâché models of Western brand-name products. The artist has acquired copies of Western consumer goods from the Asian market and will present them here in a new context. The film curator Florian Wüst will present three short film programmes, each of which is based on the theme of the corresponding conference. The programme, comprised of historical and …

Who’s to blame for the global financial crisis? Building contractors who financed their activities on credit without knowing how they were going to pay their debts? Or bankers, who lent them money and then passed on toxic debts without a qualm? Or is it executive boards and politicians, who saw the whole thing coming and opted to close their eyes, grit their teeth and hope it would all go away?Why did everyone involved behave as irrationally as they did? Scientists working in the relatively novel discipline of neuroeconomics are taking a closer look at homo oeconomicus. Economists and neurologists are cooperating to see what they find. Neurologist Christian Elger and his colleagues are, for example, monitoring subjects’ brain waves as they make economic decisions. In one experiment, they have two test subjects solve the same problem, but award them differently for their efforts. Tomorrow Today joins the researchers to see what effect that inequality has on the subjects’ brain waves, and discovers that human beings are less rational than economists have previously postulated.