“Letter: The economic conditions that make wars more likely” in the Financial Times, Cowritten and Cosigned by Dimitri Papadimitriou

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a collection of professors of economics wrote and cosigned a letter to the Financial Times asking what can be done to avoid rising military tensions and war. Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics at Bard College, was among the signatories. “We reject the thesis of a ‘clash of civilisations,’” they wrote. “Rather, we need to recognise that the contradictions in the deregulated global economic system have made geopolitical tensions more acute.” Their proposal involves regulating current account imbalances, drawing on “John Maynard Keynes’s project for an international clearing union”—and soon. “The task of our time is urgent: we need to assess whether it is possible to create the economic conditions for world pacification before military tensions reach a point of no return.”

Post Date: 02-21-2023