The New Political Society continued its lecture series with Robert Johnson on Tuesday. The club, which was formed in the spring of 2014, is designed to expose students to new thoughts.
“It was just kind of an idea, that [after] speaking to a lot of students in my classes and friends and professors, we wanted to make a group that brought a different set of ideas to campus,” President Sarallah Salehi, a junior, said. “Given that we are in a university, and a university is a place where you are supposed to embrace new ideas and expose yourself to different sets of thought... We kind of thought we’d want to bring that and embrace that aura and further that mission.”
The New Political Society aims to bring speakers that discuss topics beyond the scope of college life.
“We want to have more dynamic conversations that relate not only to us, but also our community at large,” Dikshant Malla, the club’s public outreach officer, said. “Last week, we had a Marxist economist.”
According to Vice President junior Avi Posen, the club tries to invite a wide variety of speakers.
“There is no connection between our speakers thematically or topically. However, all of our guests are alike in that they each bring deeply novel and intellectual analysis of our existing problems, while also suggesting solutions,” Posen said.
Posen also commented on how the group met Johnson.
“Our organization met Dr. Johnson last semester while he was being interviewed at the Real News Network in downtown Baltimore, and we were all mesmerized by his incredible depth of knowledge,” Posen said.
Johnson is currently the president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which attempts to find innovative solutions to current economic problems.
“[The] Institute for New Economic Thinking... does fantastic research on the economic problems of our time, particularly on the Eurozone crisis,” Posen said. “Dr. Johnson has also occupied so many realms of economic and political power, from important hedge funds to UN commissions, that he certainly can give an enlightened perspective from within the power structure, and, with his Institute, from without.”
Johnson served on the United Nations Commission of Experts on International Monetary Reform, and he was a Managing Director at Soros Fund Management, where he focused on emerging markets, as well as a Managing Director of Bankers Trust company. Johnson also served as the Chief Economist of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, as well as the Senior Economist of the US Senate Budget Committee. His documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, won Johnson an Oscar. He has also served as President of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation.
Dr. Johnson received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Princeton University.
“Robert Johnson is a very prominent figure in the economics field... He was behind one of the most pivotal financial events in the last century, crashing the Bank of England. He works with the most prominent economists, [including] Joseph Stiglitz and John Faust here at Johns Hopkins,” Salehi said.
Johnson discussed many ideas about how the economic system can be improved. According to Johnson, the realm of ideas, the financial system and the government decision-making process need reform. He made it clear that repairing the economy is difficult when no one believes in today’s unfettered markets, in the government or in the experts.
“He talks about a lot of thing things that are very salient in the field,” Salehi said. “A lot of people are doing research on the types of ideas he is talking about, like the dynamic instability of the economic system, specifically the financial framework and the set of legal statutes that are in place.”
Johnson said that there is a pretense of false precision, in which experts are attempting to quantify things that are simple. Economists, he said, are good at portraying the illusion of efficiency. Financiers are sometimes paid to market their ideas more than they are paid to apply their skills.
“[The economy is] kind of built on this false sense that everything is coherent and very rigid and structural when in reality, that’s not how it is. It’s not a kind of a nice square box... People want a sense of comfort and a sense of order. He talked about the yearning for order, and people want to feel like there is a system that’s bound by a sense of physical laws, and that’s not how it really is. It’s built on human constructed norms and ideas,” Salehi said.
Johnson discussed how the government and the economy are intertwined. He said that some of the state’s failures arise from the deterioration of enforcement, the opportunity cost of doing good and fear of bailouts in the legislature. Large-scale enterprise can dominate democracy, which can make governments ineffective.
“He takes a much more abstract approach to the fact that we’ve had poor economic growth. First of all, he talked about wealth inequality and the fact that this derives from this kind of system where we put a lot of power into the hands of a small group of people... They are able to use that to their advantage. They are going to use their money to implement policies and rules that favor them,” Salehi said.
Abby Annear, a freshman majoring in economics, reacted positively to Johnson’s talk.
“I greatly appreciated Dr. Johnson’s emphasis on the multidisciplinary scope of economics in today’s world. While he did discuss the particular economic quandaries and failures that resulted in a slow American recovery, Dr. Johnson focused more on the need to broaden the academic approach to economic analysis to remedy the flawed system, through sociology, behavioral sciences and even classics,” Annear said.
