Month: September 2010

Voters are becoming disillusioned with mainstream political parties unable or unwilling to deal with voters’ real concerns. A quick look at other countries should be a warning where this may lead.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 brought the Cold War to an end. It also ended a decades-long division of Europe. At an event hosted by The Centre for Independent Studies, four academics shared their recollections of the historic events and analysed their long term impacts. They show how the change originated in Poland; how fast the revolution spread to East Germany; how Germany mishandled the process of national reunification; and the lessons for the Chinese leadership from the collapse of the communist East German government.

Economists should take the time to ask themselves what they can learn from the events of the past three years. If they were honest with themselves, they would come to the conclusion that many of them had been too optimistic about their abilities to predict the future with certainty. They would have to confess that the world is too messy a place to be expressed in models of ‘general equilibrium’ or ‘perfect competition.’