LSE Events presents Economics Department and the Financial Markets Group
Date: Tuesday 1 May 2001
Time: 6.00pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Benjamin Friedman
Chair: Professor Charles Goodhart
Does the experience of economic growth bear positive political, social and, ultimately, moral consequences for a society? More specifically, do rising living standards foster such tendencies as openness of opportunity, or tolerance, or social mobility, or a commitment to fairness, or the strengthening of democratic political institutions? If so, under what circumstances, and via what mechanisms? If economic growth does have such positive effects - positive externalities, in the language of economists - then the commonplace view that perceives the benefits of growth exclusively in material terms, and then weighs these material benefits against negative consequences to which we often attach a moral overtone, is seriously incomplete.
Benjamin M Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. His research and writing have primarily focused on economic policy, and in particular on the role of the financial markets in shaping how monetary and fiscal policies affect overall economic activity. His best known book is Day of Reckoning: the consequences of American economic policy under Reagan and after, which received the George S Eccles Prize, awarded annually by Columbia University for excellence in writing about economics. He is currently working on a new book on the moral consequences of economic growth.
This event is not ticketed, it is free and open to all. For further information please call 020 7955 6043 or email events@lse.ac.uk|