Reuven Brenner – författare

In this book, Reuven Brenner argues that people bet on new ideas and are more willing to take risks when they have been outdone by their fellows on local, national, or international scales. Such bets mean that people deviate from the beaten path and either gamble, commit crimes, or come up with new ideas in art, business, or politics, and ideas concerning war and peace in particular. By using evidence on gambling, crime, and creativity now and during the Industrial Revolution, by examining innovations in English and French inheritance laws and the emergence of welfare legislation, and by looking at what has happened before and after wars, Brenner reaches the conclusion that hope and fear, envy and vanity, sentiments provoked when being leapfrogged, make humans race.

What should economists learn in undergraduate and graduate programs? And how does this differ from what students are being taught? In a series of provocative essays, the contributors to Educating Economists cast a critical eye upon the profession and offer solutions to the serious problems they identify in contemporary economics education. The failure of economics teaching is the theme that connects all of the papers in this volume: the failure to develop the skills needed by undergraduate teachers of economics and the failure to prepare students to do work in government and business. The authors point out that professors have lost sight of the skills needed to deal with real-world data, to gain access to existing knowledge, and to critically examine issues, models, and data. Instead, they argue, tenure-minded graduate professors, focused on the use of high-powered mathematical techniques to write formal, technical articles, prepare students only to do abstract research within a framework that just a few other fellow graduates can understand. This situation results in the systematic degradation of the quality of undergraduate economics education and of the institutional usefulness of economics. The contributors conclude that a substantial restructuring of economics education and of the economics profession, including its tenure requirements, is needed and would allow the discipline—and its practitioners—to make a much stronger and more relevant contribution to the people and institutions whose behavior it attempts to explain.

Rivalry is an attempt to understand facets of entrepreneurial societies by integrating the economic analysis with historical, political and psychological considerations, customarily shunned by economists. The author argues that decisions to make new business ventures, and readiness to take risks are both related to concepts of ranking hierarchies on local, national or international levels. He then constructs a theory of business enterprise and of rivalry supported by evidence on entrepreneurship, innovation, advertising, all examined with their historical, political or organisational concerns. This notion of rivalry among businessmen is used to derive guidelines for anti-trust legislation. Instead of pricing, profitability, concentration ratios and other criteria used today to infer non-competitive behaviour, he suggests using a measure of a firm's relative rate of innovation to infer it. By extending the notion of rivalry to the political sphere, national and international, guidelines are derived to evaluate the performance of state-owned enterprises and to examine policies related to free trade.

Although financial markets often try to distance themselves from gambling, the two factors have far more in common than usually thought. When, historically, there were no financial institutions such as banks, lotteries constituted the ways by which expensive items were disposed of, and governments raised money quickly. Gambling tables fulfilled roles that venture capital and banking do today. 'Gamblers' created clearinghouses and sustained liquidity. When those gamblers bet on price distributions in futures markets, they were redefined as 'speculators'. Today they are called 'hedge fund managers' or 'bankers'. Though the names have changed, the actions undertaken have essentially stayed the same. This book shows how discussion on 'chance', 'risk', 'gambling', 'insurance', and 'speculation' illuminates where societies stood, where we are today, and where we may be heading.