News & Events
The 21st Annual International Conference on Economics and Security
June 22-23, 2017
Brussels, Belgium
The 21st Annual International Conference on Economics and Security will be held at the Royal Military Academy, Brussels, June 22nd - 23rd 2017.
Registration is now open.
The conference aims to provide an opportunity for economists, political scientists and others from around the world to share ideas and discuss the future developments in the following areas:
- Regional security
- Economics of security
- Corruption and military spending
- Globalisation and the restructuring of the MIC
- Militarism and development
- Security sector reform
- Economics of conflict and war
- Post-conflict reconstruction
- Economics of the arms trade
- Procurement and offsets
- Arms races and alliances
- Peace economics and peace science
- Conversion and demilitarisation
- Economics of terrorism
EPS Welcomes
Stephanie Kelton
as our new Chair
Stephanie Kelton, Ph.D. is Professor of
Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She served as Chief
Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee (minority staff) in 2015 and then
became an Economic Advisor to the Bernie 2016 presidential campaign. She was
the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the top-ranked blog New Economic
Perspectives and a member of the TopWonks network
of the nation’s best thinkers. In 2016, POLITICO recognized her as one of the
50 people across the country who is most influencing
the political debate.
Her book, The State, The Market and The Euro (2001)
predicted the debt crisis in the Eurozone, and her subsequent work correctly
predicted that: (1) Quantitative Easing (QE) wouldn’t lead to high inflation;
(2) government deficits wouldn’t cause a spike in U.S. interest rates; (3)
the S&P downgrade wouldn’t cause investors to flee Treasuries; (4) the
US would not experience a European-style debt crisis.
She is a regular commentator on national radio
and broadcast television.
Stephanie consults with policymakers, investment banks and portfolio managers across the globe. Her research expertise is in: Federal Reserve operations, fiscal policy, social security, international finance and employment policy.
Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/stephaniekelton.
Economists for Peace and Security works to promote non-military solutions to world challenges, and more broadly to work towards freedom from fear and want for all.
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William Baumol
1922-2017
A preeminent economist of his generation, Dr. Baumol taught for more than 40 years at Princeton University and at New York University, where he retired in 2014. His work touched on monetary policy, corporate finance, welfare economics, resource allocation and entrepreneurship, but he was best known for the principle that came to bear his name: Baumol’s cost disease.
The insight came to him in a 4 a.m. epiphany in the 1960s, when he and a colleague, future Princeton president William G. Bowen, were preparing an analysis of the cost of presenting and attending the performing arts.
“I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up!” Dr. Baumol recalled in a 2001 oral history with economist Alan B. Krueger. “I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again. That’s literally how it happened.”
Distilled to its essence, Baumol’s cost disease is the idea that personally delivered services — musical performances, medical care, education and garbage collection, for example — naturally and inevitably increase in price year after year. “The idea is really trivial,” Dr. Baumol said. “But the implication, which I think has not been yet learned, I think is mind-boggling.”
The result of the cost disease, Princeton professor Alan S. Blinder said in an interview, is that services will be “more and more expensive relative to either goods — things you buy in the store, like bagels or cars,” or automated services such as the Internet.
Improved technology may allow bagels and cars to be produced more efficiently and therefore more cost effectively, but, as Dr. Baumol famously observed, a Mozart string quartet requires today the services of four musicians, the same manpower it took in the 18th century. “Productivity improvement of zero,” Blinder said.
Over the years doctors have managed to see more patients in less time by eliminating house calls, but even office visits require a certain minimum amount of time. Schools might increase efficiency by growing class sizes, but few if any parents would regard such a change as an improvement in quality.
Well-appointed garbage trucks might speed collection time, but still they must stop at every house. Police and fire departments similarly require certain base levels of staffing if they are to provide their promised services.
Dr. Baumol’s ideas had immediate relevance in public policy, particularly in the areas of health care and education, where “all kinds of villains have been trotted out,” Blinder said — “local government, teacher unions, rapacious health care providers.”
“You have now explained to me why the Democratic Party is called the party of tax and spend,” the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) once told Dr. Baumol, “because we are financing all the things that are affected by the cost disease.”
Read the full Washington Post Obituary here.