ECU'nomist 2015-2016 Issue 3

The ECU’nomist May 2016, YEAR 24, ISSUE 3

Dawm Populism Entrepeneurship in Indonesia Interview: Janneke Plantenga Interview: Charles van Marrewijk Interview: The Adam Smith Canteen hero Art, art, art!

Emlightenment 2.0 The Revival of Basic Income The New World Order Space mining

ACTIVITIES CALENDAR REBO Careernights DATE: 23,24&26 May TIME: 18.00 LOCATION: Janskerkhof 2-3

ECU’92 Drinks: BOMB

DATE: 30-5

TIME: 21.00

LOCATION: Nieuwe Dikke Dries

Football Tournament & BBQ Ticket: €4,-pp

DATE: 1-6

TIME: 12.00

LOCATION: Olympos

Honours Symposium DATE: 2-6

TIME: 15.00

LOCATION: Auditorium

Inhouse Day at Finext DATE: 9-6

TIME: 11.00

LOCATION: The Hague

Graduate Barbecue DATE: 6-7

TIME: 18.00

Ticket: T.B.A. LOCATION: Adam Smith Garden

Opening hours: Monday: 09.00h - 15.00h Tuesday - Friday: 09.00h - 16.30h

MORE INFORMATION: www.ecu92.nl

Letter from the Editor

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Dear readers, [Insert “end of the year” greeting here]. This time of the year has come time and time again, so I will try to give you an abridged version. We’ve reached the final issue of the academic year. As you might have noticed, this third issue being the last is peculiar, as the Editorial committee generally releases four issues. Due to our last issue being rather “big boned” compared to the rest, over budget meant that the ECU’nomist was risking to “file for chapter 7”, bankruptcy. While things are not quite as drastic, we’ve decided to start issuing three issues per year and use the fourth period to produce a super quick September issue. This is ground-breaking my friends, never will you have to wait until mid-October/November for your first ECU’nomist of the year!

First order of business; I am proud to announce this issue as it is a very special one; we are in the middle of our University’s 380th birthday, and in light of this we’ve conducted interviews with our beloved teaching and non-teaching staff at U.S.E..

Namely, Janneke Plantenga, our faculty’s dean is featured and covers not only her own professional background, but gives us insight into our “hatchling” faculty’s history. We also contacted the unsung hero of our faculty: Cynthia, the canteen lady’s veil is lifted.

Finally, Charles van Marrewijk, professor of International Geographical Macroeconomics–many of you, including myself, met Charles in Growth and Development together with dr. Julia Swart–interviewed by the now regular guest writer, Sander ’ten Hoedt. Speaking of which, three more guest articles are featured in this issue: Eni Iljazi. Jannick Kuiper, our Brazilian correspondent, makes the best out of the Brazil’s nationally organized chaos–no offense Brazil, personally I’m a big fan of Jobim, Bossa, and feijoada but sometimes enough is enough. Marek Sustak takes a critical eye on the media and our beloved problem-saturated world. Iulia Vaneadu just fresh from Hong Kong is shares her exchange experiences.

The pieces by the “fulltime” writers are also quite exciting; Sjoerd, takes on the “Dawn of Populism” and brings us through the ECU’92 “Breaking barriers” conference we’ve held a while back. Linda writes about art and its steep prices. Aleks’ pieces are on space mining (did you know this was becoming a “thing”?), and Annette takes us to the southeast Asian tropics to look at the entrepreneurship outlook in her country, Indonesia.

Maroushka interviewed the aforementioned unsung hero, Cynthia, and as for your’s truly, if you’re interested in the multidisciplinary outlook, I review Joseph Heath’s “Enlightenment 2.0”; a fantastic book which combines political philosophy with behavioural economics. I truly hope you will enjoy this issue. On behalf of the ECU’nomist and the Editorial committee, thank you for a great year.

Your’s truly,

Filippo Ricci 1

Letter from the Board

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Dear member, alumnus/ alumna, benefactor, reader, Doesn’t time fly? It seems like the year has only just begun or it is almost over already. All real big activities organised by ECU’92 lie behind us and we are in the middle of the process of choosing our successors. Of course this does not mean that we, the current board, are done yet. We are still working hard to prepare our association for a new year full of bigger, more fun and more professional activities. After all, next year is ECU’92’s 25th year of existence; the silver jubilee.

But before we are entering this special year, we still have some great activities in store for you. Among these are the REBO career nights, Project SiX, the annual football tournament with barbeque and a collaboration party with the students from the social science faculty. As you can see, also in the fourth period we have a broad and diverse offering content, career and social-wise. Keep track of our Facebook page and website and take a look at all posters for more information.

Because this is the final issue of the ECU’nomist of this academic year, I want to take the opportunity to look back and evaluate. In the first issue I introduced the board members of ECU’92 to our readers. The general impression I tried to transfer in that introduction was that we like to have fun while professionally guiding the association towards a better future.

In my opinion we succeeded in doing this with the help of many of our members. Your contribution as an active member in the organization of more than 50 activities or as a regular member by coming to these activities and participating in questionnaires have helped us a lot.

In the remaining months of this academic year, besides the activities still to come, we’ll present a long-term strategic plan for the next five years and of course the (financial) annual report. We’ll be helping the new board members by giving advice and transferring our knowledge in the best way possible. Besides, the ECU’92 room will be open all summer so we can answer all your questions and keep offering you our delicious free coffee, tea and humour.

All in all, we can look back on a fantastic year in which we gained a lot of managing experience, we got to know many great, new people but also faced many difficult challenges. On a personal note, I can say that I’m honoured to have been part of the 25th board of ECU’92 and I’m sure the others feel the same. Now let’s celebrate, it’s almost summer!

On behalf of the XXVth board of ECU’92,

On behalf of the XXVth Board of ECU’92,

Luuk Wagenaar Chairman ECU’92

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Contents

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

The World

Current Affairs:

On the cover: Right wing on the rise. The modern dark ages are a time in which demagoguery rules and rationality fails. Years from now, some artists may come up with this display.

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The Entrepeneurship Outlook in Indonesia

Food for Thought:

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10 20 24

22

Art, art, art!

Guest Articles:

The Revival of Basic Income The New World Order A Look Inside the Brazilian Crisis

Book Review:

Enlightenment 2.0

Europe and the World:

Current Affairs:

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The Dawn of Populism

Food for Thought:

11

A Space Mining Odyssey

Janneke Plantenga, dean of U.S.E..

Univeristy Life:

John Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0

Interviews:

26 30 33

Charles van Marrewijk Janneke Plantenga The Adam Smith Hall Cafeteria Hero

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Exchange Article:

Event Reviews:

13 16

Photos of Utrecht ECU’92 photo page

Univeristy of Hong Kong

32 Breaking Barriers Conference 34 Committee Introductions:

Graduate Committee

Career Day Committee

Marketing Committee

BVVK (Investment)

Yearbook Committee

The ECU’nomist is published every quarter online, as well as printed in a circulation of 500 for members, patrons and external contacts of ECU’92 | Annette Aprilana | Sjoerd van Alten | Marouschka Blahetek | Linda Kunertova | Martijn van Leeuwen | | Filippo Ricci | Aleksander Tase | Study Association ECU’92 Campusplein www.ecu92.nl Utrecht ecunomist@ecu92.nl T 030-2539680 Published by Issuu

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Europe and the World Current Affairs

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

The Dawn of Populism Assessing the popularity of populistic movements from the eighties ‘til now.

Sjoerd van Alten “[The] Netherlands for the Dutch”, that is one of the statements for which the Dutch politician Hans Janmaat got convicted in 1997.

Janmaat, who first got elected for Dutch parliament in 1982 when his party, the Center Democrats, scored one seat, caused great uproar in the 1980s because of his strong anti-immigration standpoints. He has often been called a racist, fascist or Nazi. His party was continually ostracized by a cordon sanitaire conducted by other parties. Meanwhile, journalists gave him as little exposure as possible because they did not want to spread his ideas, which they considered dangerous. Strikingly enough, in 2011, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte basically repeated Janmaat’s illegal statement, by saying that “we are going to make sure that we give these beautiful Netherlands back to the Dutch”. Although he got criticized for saying this, a major uproar did not happen. Rutte was not called a racist, nor a fascist, nor a Nazi. The history of this small statement is exemplifying for the twist that has occurred in the democratic debate in the last decades in not only the Netherlands, but the whole of Europe. Statements on anti-immigration and other topics that were initially only uttered by radical lone rangers, and where considered disgusting by the majority, are now voiced by a broad range of parties and have become commonplace.

During the nineties, many new parties whose standpoints and rhetoric can be considered as modern populist started to sprout across Europe. Janmaat can be seen as a right-wing populist avant la lettre. A hipster Marine LePen, Geert Wilders or Nigel Farage, practicing anti-immigration politics before it was, as it now is considered by many, cool. In different European countries, small populist movements had already tried to address anti-immigration standpoints. Their democratic support was usually marginal how-

ever. Like Janmaat, virtually all these eighties’ populist movements got ostracized and denounced by press and politicians. During the nineties, public support for populist movements grew, and the press could no longer brush them aside. On the contrary, coverage for populist movements and their leaders slowly became abundant, which in turn lead to more democratic support.

How can the success of the populists in the nineties, compared to those in the eighties, be understood? To understand this properly, a proper definition of populism is needed to work with.

This is troublesome, because recent populist parties in Europe have as many similarities as they have differences. An often heard definition about populism however, is that populist movements claim to voice the concerns of ‘the people’, while postulating that more established political parties do not steer their policies according to general will, but instead act according to the will of a ‘corrupt elite’. By making this distinction, populists can profile themselves as democratic champions, who are the only reasonable alternative for the corrupt bunch of rulers up in their ivory towers.

The aim of the populist is to overthrow the ruling elite, establishing a government for the ‘people’ instead. The upper definition of populism explains why it is so hard for established politicians to counter the populists. By pushing established politicians in the role of a corrupt elitist, the established politician gets labeled as an antidemocrat by the populist. Therefore the populist robs the established politician of his credibility. This gives the populist an advantage in debates and makes it easier for the populist to defend extreme ideas. It also gives him the opportunity to nip much of the critique that established politicians can give to the populists in the bud. When an established politician denounces a populist for criticizing minority groups, the populist can often respond by arguing

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Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

dress populism, the establishment could no longer portray populists as radicals talking to a wall.

The tactic that the political establishment has used since is basically twofold. First of all, the establishment keeps criticizing the extreme standpoints that populists often have. Different from during the eighties, populist standpoints are now being criticized individually rather than being thrown on a pile and dismissed altogether. Populist standpoints have thus become part of the democratic debate. Second of all, many established parties have incorporated populist standpoints in their own party programmes in the hope to win irate voters back. On the right-wing, conservative parties have adopted anti-immigration policy ideas, although usually in a milder form than the populists. Another recent trend is the emergence of left-wing populism, were the traditional left takes over the anti-elite rhetoric of populist movements.

Although adopting populist standpoints appears to be a logical tactic for slummed traditional parties to pursue, it is not sufficient to keep the wind out of populist sails. Reason is the anti-elitist characteristics of populist movements. To real populist voters, voting for the traditional establishment is just not a considerable option, no matter the particular parties’ political agenda.

Therefore, adopting populist standpoints does not yield many benefits to the established party, but it does expose it to the risk of pushing off existing voters that strongly disagree with these standpoints. Anno 2016, again a populist is on trial for possibly illegal statements in the Netherlands. Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders has to justify himself in court for asking to a big audience if they wanted ‘more or fewer Moroccans’ in the Netherlands, to which the audience vividly replied: ‘fewer, fewer, fewer’. Apart from the question if this statement is, according to the law, legal or not, convicting Wilders will not stop his ideas from catching on. Just as with the conviction of Janmaat in the nineties, a conviction for Wilders now will only confirm the anti-elitist views of many populist voters. For many, it will only flare up the idea that the political elite currently in power does not want to address their problems and that the law suppresses their right of freedom of speech. As a result, the populist voters will feel more alienated from the political process as ever before, and democratic debate will polarize even further.

that the politician does not adhere himself to the will of the people, blaming him for ‘political correctness’. Furthermore, the establishment has a hard time criticizing the, often extreme and unrealistic, standpoints of populists using scientific facts, since many populist movements have anti-intellectual characteristics. To illustrate: the English UKIP, Dutch PVV and the German ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ are just a few examples of rightwing populist parties that deny that there is proper scientific evidence for global warming caused by human behavior.

The pool of potential voters for populist parties is mainly filled with the lower educated and the poor. This is a group that, as usually is considered, has not reaped the benefits from increasing globalization and neoliberalist policy measures since the 1980s.

During this period, the European political establishment was mainly concerned with creating the big internal free market that Europe is today: The treaty of Schengen and Maastricht were signed in the nineties and the Euro was introduced at the turn of the millennium. Never before had national politicians been so eager to transfer national sovereignty to a supranational institution. A proper democratic discussion on a national level has not been held on this topic, in the same way as questioning the lenient immigration policies used to be a political taboo. The group of people that did not benefit from these policies, or were maybe even hurt by them, therefore slowly developed a feeling of alienation from the democratic process. They felt as if the political establishment was fighting for a cause that was not theirs. Established politicians therefore sowed anti-elitist sentiments themselves, seeds that populist movements were later on eager to reap.

During the nineties and before, the political establishment tried to counter populism by shutting out populist standpoints from the democratic debate. By labeling anti-immigration ideas as racist or fascist, the political establishment tried to create a mood of fear around these issues: even to consider the utterings of the populist as slightly reasonable was to be considered immoral. This withheld many potential voters from voting for populist movements. It also encouraged the press to report as little as possible about populist affairs. However, the longer the concerns that many people in the lower-class had kept being ignored, the more the support for populist movements grew. Once the press started to ad-

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Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Indonesian President Joko Widodo

Current Affairs

The Entrepreneurship Outlook in Indonesia Opportunities, improvements and potential Annette Aprilana

R

ECENTLY, an increasing number of men in matching green helmets and jackets can be seen cruising the streets of Jakarta on their motorcycles. These men are the drivers of GO-JEK, a revolutionising motorcycle taxi company that offers services more than just a taxi. In the busy and hectic city of Jakarta for example, residents not only get to use the GO-JEK app to order their rides, but also to order their groceries (GO-MART) or food (GOFOOD). In addition, the app has several other services including GO-SEND, a courier service; GO-CLEAN, a daily cleaning service; and GO-BOX, a service that helps move large items; among a few others more.

As you can see, GO-JEK has proven itself to be a very popular, ambitious and so far successful e-commerce startup in Indonesia. CEO and co-founder Nadiem Makarim created a company that was able to catch on the Uber wave and enter the market successfully because of the “right place, right time” factor. Though GO-JEK is one example of a fruitful tech startup, it is not the case for all startups

across the Indonesian archipelago. There is still a lot of progress to be made and a look into the country’s business climate can give us an insight to aspects where action can most definitely be taken.

Shaky Foundations Two things become major hindrances for entrepreneurs in Indonesia when starting up their businesses, that is, the grim bureaucracy and the burdensome regulations. A process essential to starting a business is obtaining the permits and licenses necessary to start operating legally.

Unfortunately for Indonesia, this process is notoriously known to be highly cumbersome, time-consuming, and corrupt.

What takes 4 days in Malaysia and 2.5 in Singapore, takes a prolonged 47 days in Indonesia. According to the World Bank’s 2016 data in business, Indonesia ranks 109 of 189 economies in ease of launching a business. As a promising and hopeful country with a favourable business environment for investors, this position just doesn’t cut it for Southeast Asia’s biggest

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economy. When compared to its region’s closest neighbours, Singapore and Malaysia, who rank 1st and 18th, respectively, these conditions aren’t helpful for the country to remain seriously competitive.

Since 2001, Indonesia has taken a radical decentralisation process, which has transferred power from the central government to local authorities of cities, districts, and provinces. However, in their effort to be more flexible, the resulting outcome led to the formation of new laws, which focus more on short-term revenue creation through taxes and fees, rather than more important long-term growth schemes. In regards to investments, Indonesian president Joko Widodo, more commonly known as Jokowi, says that there are 42,000 regulations, on top of the 3000 local laws, that become a hindrance. One can only imagine the infuriating process for entrepreneurs who have to go through the painful bureaucracy that no doubt makes red tape so pervasive, causing about 80% of the domestic, private sector to remain informal and unregistered.

How then can the country’s real growth be properly accounted for if this is the case?

Culture vs Spirit On a positive note, Indonesians have a strong spirit when it comes to a support-

Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 ive entrepreneurship culture. At least the external conditions don’t deter their internal motivations from wanting to start their own businesses. However, according to Ernst and Young’s 2013 Entrepreneurship Barometer, this spirit isn’t reflected in Indonesia’s performance on innovationrelated metrics. Two of the causes for this outcome are the lack of R&D expenditure and the country’s education system. With the latter, Indonesia faces more difficulties in creating more mature entrepreneurial ventures as a result. Low enrolment rates in secondary and tertiary education negatively impact the country’s performance and thus due to this poor education system, innovation is held back. This is clearly seen in practice as productivity gains are usually made by adopting technologies and methods from more mature economies, as opposed to innovation cultivated from home. Additionally, for the years 20072009, Indonesia spent an average of only 0.1% of GDP on R&D spending, which along with Saudi Arabia, is the lowest level among the G20 countries. This environment has to be changed if Indonesia wants to foster their entrepreneurial culture.

The reality is, even though the entrepreneurial spirit is strong and e-commerce businesses are booming, firms that are actually technologically innovative, coming up with new ideas that can be patented, are rarely seen. In 2014, Indonesia received 702 patent applications, while Malaysia has 1353 and Singapore 1303.

With a population of around 250 million people, we would expect Indonesia to have a higher percentage of the population being able to come up with more technological innovation. But this is not the case, which can be an indication that there is serious action needed to be taken in the education arena to equip the population with the proper and necessary knowledge. Many of the country’s entrepreneurs operate in sectors that don’t require technological innovation, such as the retail,

food and beverage, or hospitality sectors.

These entrepreneurial businesses account for 57% of GDP in 2012, which the Indonesian economy might be too reliant on.

Ongoing solutions But all hope is not lost. Indonesia is a young and developing economy that, when treated with the right conditions and environment, can become very prosperous. We have established that Indonesia has many startups, mostly informal and unregistered, and that startups which actually need to be registered to operate on a larger scale or internationally, are not well accommodated by the country’s irritating bureaucracy and stifling regulations. To combat the stifling regulations, President Jokowi has instructed his chief economic minister to remove more regulations in the coming months.

He has also eased logistical matters to improve the business climate by launching a one-stop service that won’t require long hours that could turn into weeks of going to different ministries to deal with matters necessary to start up a business.

A growing number of the middle class also works in favour of Indonesia’s position to provide a better education for their children. More people can afford formal education, which will in turn boost the supply of educated graduates that will include those with more entrepreneurial spirits to launch new technologically innovative ventures. Though secondary and tertiary education could do with encouraging more of an entrepreneurial drive, mentoring, entrepreneurial programs at universities, and vocational training have also been growing, which are positive elements in fostering Indonesia’s entrepreneurial environment.

We must also not forget that Indonesia has a large domestic market base that is currently experiencing rapid growth. Of all the G20 countries, the survey by EY suggests that entrepreneurs in Indonesia are the most optimistic about the progress

GO-JEK biker

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Reynold Wijaya (left) and Kelvin Teo (right) Founders of Modalku and Harvard MBA graduates

that their country is making. Two quite revolutionising startups that have gained popularity are Qlue and Modalku. As part of the Jakarta Smart City programme, the governor worked together with Terralogiq, a Google Enterprise geo-spatial technology solution provider to create Qlue, an application that allows Jakarta citizens to monitor public service performance. Qlue acts as a platform for Jakarta citizens to report any problems they see in the city, from garbage that hasn’t been picked up for weeks to roads that have potholes. A financial service startup called Modalku, on the other hand, takes the form of an online platform for SME owners to start or grow their business by providing access to funding from individuals as well as institutional lenders. This startup is part of the FinTech industry, an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial services more efficient. Modalku is already said to be a revolutionising business in Southeast Asia, attracting big banks in the region to form partnerships with these innovators.

Now, instead of seeing many informal and unregistered startups promoting themselves through Instagram, Facebook, or similar online platforms, we should expect to see new companies and applications such as GO-JEK, Qlue and Modalku to be on the rise. After all, it is these types of technologically innovative ideas that can revolutionise and provide a positive impact on Indonesia’s growing economy.

World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Food for Thought

Art, art, art...

Linda Kunertova

Art. It’s astonishing how much passion this simple word can stir up when someone brings it up at a dinner table conversation. Discussing its meaning, importance and merit can easily take hours and hours as it is rather rare to find a group of people who would share the same opinion on the topic. There is always an individual stubbornly convinced that art is nothing but a pointless invention by bohemian people. Yet there are also people who are indifferent about art and don’t care about it as long as they don’t have to support it with their taxes, these are people who like to pretend they are engaging in informed and intellectual conversations, but use the names Monet and Manet interchangeably.

There are also those with genuine affection and passion for art, often endowed with an admirable knowledge or great taste or both. But even for people with similar views on that matter, the debate of how to

define and grasp the notion of art is usually never ending and hardly ever reaches any conclusions. Maybe one of the reasons there is so much talk about money is that it is simply way easier to talk about than art.

So naturally, when it comes to valuing art in monetary terms, it becomes even more intricate. How can we put a price tag on something so abstract, something we can hardly define? If art is so elusive that we can barely say what it actually is and should represent, determining its financial value can’t follow any standard economic rules and principles. For the past 25 years the art market has been increasingly spiraling upwards, completely untouched by the recent financial crisis, almost as though it existed in a parallel universe.

Since the 1990s, the value of art sold was worth about 27 billion dollars. But the industry has almost tripled with a turnover of 66 billion dollars in its peak year

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2007. The massive growth of the business has been catalysed and grown in popularity due to the emergence of new economies, new money and tighter integration of the global market. The art world is no longer exclusively dominated by European and American art lovers and philanthropists; Russian and Japanese investors and billionaires have also entered the game and play a substantial role in the business. Love for art is not the only reason that motivates buyers to spend a fortune on a piece anymore–it is a business opportunity, an investment and a chance to make a statement. By buying Picasso, one buys a certain social status, approval by the upper-class and prestige.

It is not diamonds and gold–trade with paintings and sculptures is the new fashion.

This huge international appetite for art has quickly driven the prices sky high, causing auction houses and art dealers to report record-breaking sales.

World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 Up to this day, the most expensive artwork ever sold in an auction was Pablo Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger” (“Version O”), a part of a 15 work series that the artist created in 1954-55, designed with the letters A through O. This new world record sale amounting $179.4m that was realized in May 2015 at Christie’s, surpassed the prior all-time high, the “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” by Francis Bacon which was sold for $142.4m. When it comes to private sales, the sums paid out for artwork reach even higher figures. The painting “When will you marry?” by the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin became the most expensive artwork ever when it was sold for $300m in February 2015.

After hearing these dizzying prices, thinking what else in the world could be done with all this money, it is natural to start to wonder: are the tremendously expensive artworks even worth their prices? Do the amounts for which artworks are often purchased even match their intrinsic values? Indeed, in many cases, the truth is that the sums attached to paintings are not just about the art and value in it, but have become a pure result of the supply-demand market scheme, forced up by fierce competition and bidding wars in auction houses by whoever has pockets deep

enough to pay for it. That particularly holds true in contemporary art, where buyers undertake huge risks when investing in the works of these contemporary artists. This is unlike the old pieces by great masters such as Renoir, Cézanne, Monet and many others. These pieces still haven’t stood the test of time and it is not unlikely that a painting worth millions of dollars today, could in a few years turn into a worthless canvas.

The market for contemporary art has grown very robust and has doubled since the times of financial recovery from the crisis in 2008-9. However, when looking at the work of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, with all respect to their vision and the message they are trying to convey, it is not easy to resist the feeling that the whole world of art has grown slightly insane. It seems that most contemporary works are valued according to the amount of controversy they evoke, rather than their actual merit, which of course might not always be entirely wrong. But it appears a bit irrational to automatically presume that controversy is a guarantee of timelessness and quality. Then again, given its intangibility, how can we ever be certain that the prices we attach to art are accurate?

It could very well be that today’s art market finds itself in an overhyped state

A sculpture “Away from the Flock” by English artist, Damien Hirst.

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Paul Gauguin’s “When will you marry” .

that will not last for long and can burst like any other market bubble any time. In order to avoid a collapse, the business should slowly cool down and no matter how problematic it is to correctly translate works of art into money, we shouldn’t let art grow beyond itself.

Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Guest Article

The Revival of Basic Income Eni Iljazi

A

S NORTHERN EUROPE BUZZES with talk of Basic Income, most lay citizens are still unaware of what exactly the concept entails. As defined by BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network), Basic Income is ‘an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means, tests, or work requirements’. As most people look for a ‘catch’ after first hearing about this social utopia, economists and policymakers continue their research on why and how to turn Basic Income into a reality. Recent years have seen a genuine increase in interest in the concept of a basic income, especially after Finland announced they are to start a universal Basic Income Pilot in early 2017. Utrecht, the very city we live in, will engage in a Basic Income experiment later in 2016, albeit it will take a different form and produce other implications.

If we’re only hearing about this now, is the idea of “free money” innovative and a 21st century creation? The answer is: quite the opposite! The notion, embracing different nametags over the decades, has been around for quite some time. One need only read through Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, to name but a few, or even step outside of economics through the writings of Virginia Wolf to notice the allure this idea held throughout centuries.

Thus the second question arises: why are we only developing it now? Again, contrary to popular belief, we are not. Up north in a different continent, Canada bridged the gap from thought to reality many decades ago. A program dubbed “Mincome” (neologism for minimum income), was implemented from 1974 to 1979 in the city of Manitoba, whose residents received

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monthly cheques for five years–no strings attached. Things seemed to be going great, until the Conservative government came in power and unplugged the project.

Sadly, a final report was never released.

Finland is being rather secretive about their pilot since the stakes are much higher given it is a nation-wide project, not a simpler city experiment. The Finnish Social Insurance Institution (KELA) has announced that all Finnish citizens would be paid an untaxed benefit sum free of charge by the government, 800 euros a month in the final version, 550 euros a month in the model’s pilot phase. KELA’s Research Department Director, Olli Kangas, later announced that although the pilot phase would be nation-wide, the citizens participating in the experiment would be chosen through a lottery. As ambiguity gave rise

Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

to speculation, there are yet many details to be made clear to the public, as well as legal paperwork to consider while trying to find a system which respects the Finnish Constitution. Uncertainties hover over the concept itself and its implementation.

A few worries come to mind as to why basic income often seems “too good to be true”. One of economists’ fundamental concerns is that of ‘parasitism’, i.e. the disincentive to work expected to blossom once everyone is guaranteed a secure income regardless of their labor inputs. Evidence has shown that not to be true, and on the contrary, the positive effects generated from a secure income spill over to other fields.

Critics were proved wrong once again, as BIEN puts it, when in January 2016 a recent Swiss survey showed that only 2% of the population would stop working completely if they had a basic income. Monetary rewards are not the only reason people show up for work on a Monday morning.

Most people like what they’re doing, and this is precisely where basic income comes in to ameliorate the situation. A basic income provides a minimum secure standard

for every single individual, allowing them to pursue their true calling, without having to worry about getting the job that pays the bills. A basic income guarantees a certain freedom of choice that is unparalleled by other welfare systems. The opinion poll in Switzerland showed that 67% of the respondents believed basic income would “relieve people from existential fears”.

A legitimate concern, especially for liberal economies, is the funding of a Basic Income programme. The straightforward answer to that dilemma is via taxes, the main revenue source for a government.

Several (sometimes drastic) changes must take place in the Tax and Transfer system of a country, for a basic income programme to be viable and sustainable (financing via debt is another issue altogether). It must be noted however, that a basic income is not an extreme reality or a very futuristic alternative when compared to the Northern European social democracies like Sweden.

The Netherlands, for example, already provides a universal system of child benefits, student grants and generous unemployment benefits. The Utrecht experiment is in itself not Basic Income per se (as it is defined in economic literature), since there are certain requirements for eligibility, thus conflicting the universality principle. The experiment to a large extent substitutes benefits, and different control groups are used mainly for behavioral economics insight. (see last issue’s interview with Loek Groot).

Furthermore, worrisome sounds the prospect of a higher inflation. What most economists are interested in is observing expenditure behavior. In a basic income scenario, with more money circulating in the economy, spending will go up by default, psychological effects playing a crucial role in spending patterns as people are less reluctant to spend money they did not earn directly (a percentage of the new “allowance” will go into savings, however it is safe to say that the majority will circulate back into the economy). The increased amount of money in circulation is prone to cause inflation, as prices go up, and thus risking a nullifying effect in the basic income implementation (after all, money is neutral in the long run). Surprisingly enough, very little is said on the specific relationship between inflation and Basic income.

Before being swept away with starry-eyed visions of what Virginia Woolf calls “500 pounds a year perpetually”, one should stop and think when a basic income project is appropriate for the existing economy. According to Loek Groot, who together with Philip van Parijs, has written

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extensively on the subject; a Basic Income is a viable fallback solution only when the problem of unemployment cannot be solved with conventional economic tools. In a setting of massive unemployment, working can be seen as a privilege denied to many, thus making it much easier to morally tolerate the “handing out of income” to individuals regardless of whether they are idle or working part-time. It might be a long time before some countries are ready to implement such an unorthodox social welfare system, whereas for other economies the journey seems to be much shorter. It is imperative that we keep in mind that economic conditions alone are not enough for implementing a basic income programme.

Political feasibility is always at the centre of the debate regarding policy-making.

The prospect remains highly controversial among economists alone, and society must be ready to overcome ethical considerations of fairness and justice. Until then, we’d best keep an eye on the exiting developments and wish Finland the best of luck.

Food for Thought

A Space Mining Odyssey Aleksander Tase “Luxembourg to support space mining”.

Such deceptively simple but almost surreal article titles seemed to slip unnoticed right under our nose this early February when the small nation voiced its interest in investing in exploration of asteroids for the purpose of mining. Up until now this sounds like the plot of an amateur sci-fi novel and nobody would blame you for thinking that the rich little country probably has too much time on its hands. Let’s not forget what got Luxembourg so rich in the first place though. Smart investments. Luxembourg is the leading investment fund center in Europe and second only in the world behind the United States, pretty impressive for a country of only half a million people.

It makes sense to take Luxembourg’s initiatives seriously as it seems they’ve done their homework, together with the US, which is the only other country with similar plans, no surprises coming from NASA though. All this talk of science fiction is bound to get your imagination working on overdrive, pulsing with possibilities, but let’s dig deeper into this curious issue.

Europe and the World

Why and How? Luxembourg has a long-standing space industry and played a significant role in the development of satellite communications a generation ago, including setting up SES (Société Européenne des Satellites), one of the world’s largest satellite operators. In collaboration with US and European commercial partners it now aims to help create a space industry to exploit asteroids for metals and other materials that are scarce on Earth but plentiful in “near-Earth objects”.

NEOs typically orbit the sun in trajectories tens of millions of miles away—much further than the moon but closer than Mars and within easy reach of unmanned spacecraft.

Although the prospects sound promising, one obstacle is actually man made. The outer space treaty of 1967, signed by the leading industrial countries, designated natural resources beyond Earth as the common heritage of mankind, although it did not address asteroid mining. Last year the US passed the commercial space launch competitiveness act which, among many other things, gave US companies property rights over resources they obtained from asteroids. Some legal experts have suggested this violates the 1967 treaty. Jean-Jacques Dordain, director-general of the European Space Agency, agrees that international legal issues need to be addressed but does not expect them to be a fundamental obstacle to asteroid mining. “I’m sure we can find a way forward,” he says, “just as we did with the extraction of deep sea resources”.

What’s in it for us?

Although asteroids and Earth originated from the same starting materials, Earth’s relatively stronger gravity pulled all heavy elements into its core during its molten youth more than four billion years ago. This left

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

the crust depleted of such valuable elements until a rain of asteroid impacts re-infused the depleted crust with metals like gold, cobalt, iron and platinum. Today, these rare metals are mined from Earth’s crust, and they are essential for economic and technological progress. Ton per ton an asteroid’s surface contains many times more precious metals than Earth’s. How much you say?

In 1997 it was speculated that a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of about 1.6 km contains more than 20 trillion euros worth of industrial and precious metals. A comparatively small M-type asteroid (NEOs of partially known composition) with a diameter of 1 km could contain more than two billion metric tons of iron–nickel ore, or two to three times the world production of 2004.

The asteroid 16 Psyche, the largest known M-type asteroid, is believed to contain 1.7×1019 kg of nickel–iron, which could supply the world production requirement for several million years! Move over Pandora, there’s a new player in town.

Getting a mine up and running on the moon or an asteroid would cost less than building the biggest gas terminals on Earth, according to research presented to a forum of company executives and NASA scientists. A mission to Ceres, a dwarf planet 257 million miles from the Sun and the size of Texas, may cost about $27 billion.

The expense includes 10 rocket launches to convey equipment, the extraction of metals and water, and the construction of an in -orbit facility to process the raw materials.

Similar asteroids convey similar price tags.

Even with the technology available today, profit is possible in such a futuristic market.

Is it even legal?

The United Nations Space Treaty of 1967

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forbids ownership of other celestial bodies by governments on Earth. But American administrations have long argued that the same is not true of private companies and potential mining rights. While an American court has ruled that an individual cannot own an asteroid, the question of extraction rights has not been tested. Moon rocks brought back to Earth during the Apollo program are considered to belong to the United States, and the Russian space agency has sold some moon samples it has returned to Earth—sales seen by some as setting a precedent. The space treaty was ratified during the cold war and signed by over 100 nations agreeing with it. The treaty was an efficient way of keeping tempers low between the USA, which landed on the moon only two years before, and the USSR. Although peacekeeping, like many outdated treaties the time has come for it to be subject to “reinterpretation” and open the doors to new possibilities. The picture is becoming clearer and clearer, space mining is a very real and lucrative possibility

Supposing all this becomes reality in our lifetime, I can’t help but conjure images of Jules Verne space stations fitted with artificial gravity and powered by comets or large mining colonies in a far-away Avatar planet. Imagination has the tendency of running wild in such situations, but its imagination which gives birth to unfathomable technologies and discoveries in the first place.

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World Guest Article

The New Global Order Marek Sustak

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F YOU HAVE BEEN READING the news for the past year, and it sure has been hard not to, the world seems to have been thrown into a chaotic mess. The Paris and Brussels attacks, Europe’s refugee crisis, Donald Trump, Brexit, the Syria, Yemen and Libya Civil Wars, ISIS and Boko Haram, and North-Korea’s never-ending nuclear threats, et cetera. It may seem like too much to handle. And yet our lives go on undisturbed, apart from the occasional temporary French-flag-themed Facebook profile picture. So who do we, the globalized world, turn to in our supposed time of need?

The first issue with this question is whether these issues are truly as daunting as our current media would paint them to be. A 2014 study on the impact of Social Media on News, conducted by ING, shows that with the growth of social media there has also a come a decrease in fact-checking which has “become less thorough, ‘publish first, correct if necessary’ is the order of the day. Only one-fifth of journalists always check their facts before publishing.” Simultaneously there has been a large increase in using consumer opinion on social media to write articles. This makes sense considering the vast interconnectedness of the modern world, but it has some serious implications. Within the same study, expectations on the future of journalism, as told by journalists, are laid out. These include: journalism to be driven by clicks and views more than by content, public opinion to be used and accepted as true more frequently and user-generated content (such as twitter posts or videos from bystanders) to become even more widely used.

In some ways you can see this for yourself already, but only if you look closely. On the majority of major news outlets such as BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera News and others there are constantly new features being added such as for example most popularly read articles or most viewed video. Unless there is major breaking news in the world, such as the Paris Attacks or more recently Brussels, these most popular articles tend to be banalities. After having checked just now the top 3 on BBC included articles about Messi’s shoes, a YouTuber and one of Trump’s many accusations. But it is not unnatural that this should be the case. A study made by Microsoft between the years of 2000 and 2015 found

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 that the average attention span of humans has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds (this is less than the attention span of a goldfish!), due to the increase in use of smartphones and other information devices. Conversely, we have become more efficient at determining what information matters to us, and at multi-tasking. So why is it that we so often choose sensational information over facts?

To be fair, the plus side of all the information access is precisely all the information access. If one searches for a short while, he/she can find pretty much anything on the Internet. So despite media having to adapt to the public, there is still the unprecedentedly easy option for everyone to educate themselves. The problem is that the mixture of our decreasing attention spans and the massive overload of information make most of us stop at the title and maybe the abstract of a research paper, or at the headline of a news article, or even just at the heading of a Facebook post. Don’t blame yourselves; I am the same in that regard. Which brings us to the second issue, the fickleness of human nature, specifically in a macro perspective of the masses.

In this regard I have to make a detour and point to a wonderful BBC documentary called ‘The Century of the Self’, that I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in modern society. Within it, a brief history of the 20th century is told from a unique perspective. You probably have not heard of Edward Bernays, but he happens to be one of the most influential people of the 20th century. Having gathered early knowledge of human psyche from his uncle Sigmund Freud, Edward

Two issues of the ISIS propaganda magazine: DABIQ.

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Lucky Strike advertisement appeals to emotional valuees.

Bernays proceeded to apply previously unknown methods of manipulation of the masses throughout the 20th century. By tying emotional values to products he triggered repressed desires from the subconscious (the so called ‘id’) in masses of consumers, and thus purposefully started the transformation to the current consumerist-based society we live in.

Okay but returning to the topic at hand, macro human nature. We can see that the world has changed vastly since the simple advertisement Bernays would have used in the 1920s. We modern people wouldn’t be convinced by such silly commercials. And yet Donald Trump is talked about incessantly, sensational news leads

World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Image source: www.wikipedia.org

the way and populism within politics is on the rise in Europe. In fact it was precisely on the same wave of using psychology within business that the focus group (a gathering of a representative sample of the population discussing personal, psychological matters) was created. It was then introduced into politics, and allowed for politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and former actor Ronald Reagan to become state leaders. It is the development of the Bernays culture on a massive interconnected scale that allows a demagogue such as Donald Trump and other populists to be in the spotlight, for they press the exact buttons which make the masses have those gut feelings. This is what gives the demagogue the power to manipulate subconscious primal instincts and hence the masses.

You may still think I’m wrong.

With the Internet and age of information humanity must have surely surpassed such a simple form of manipulation. After all we’re all thoughtful individuals, each unique in his/her own way. But, I’m sad to inform, even this feeling of individuality is something that was sold to consumers within the Western World around the ’80s and ’90s. With the Cold War it became clear that capitalism was the dominant strategy in governing a country, and thus the corporate hands of the capitalist machine adapted to the focus group’s results; that the people within masses wanted to

feel more like individuals. And this adaptation has continued throughout into the 21st century, with the Internet environment creating platforms adapted precisely to the demands of the masses, creating a perpetual and symbiotic control. A prime example of this is ISIS’s use of social media, Internet recruitment and sophisticated advertisement such as magazines.

Which brings me to the last issue I want to discuss, the wars of the world.

Despite having analyzed the ways in which news sensationalizes facts, and the role human nature plays in encouraging this, it should not be said that the current global situation is not grim.

Above is a map portraying the countries in ongoing-armed conflicts as of March 2016. This shows four regions, namely Nigeria (Boko-Haram), Syria and Iraq (ISIS, Syrian Civil War) and Afghanistan (Taliban) currently in Major Wars, and many others in Wars. Furthermore according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism Organization there has been an 800% increase in deaths from terrorist attacks since 2010. One of the main goals of terrorists is to destabilize governments. By targeting the primal instinct of fear of death within people, they exploit the subconscious of the masses. This in turn leads to an increase in the issues mentioned above (demagoguery, sensational news, popu-

It is imperative for humanity to step away from the polarization of politics, media and peoples.

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lism, mass manipulation etc.) and is what allows terrorist organizations to reach their goal of creating chaos.

So where does that leave us with an answer to the original question: whom do we, the globalized world, turn to in our supposed time of need? A hint lies within the question itself, the word ‘supposed’.

One of the ways in which humanity can combat the growing disarray in the world is to not allow it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy by giving it credibility. This definitely does not mean ignoring the facts, but rather, to not be swayed by the opportunistic mass-manipulation of power lusting madmen. Without our constant attention to negative media coverage (no press is bad press), Donald Trump would be forgotten.

Without the helping hand we give to populist politicians, European countries would not be falling prey to even more destabilization, poor integration of minorities and hence radicalization. So the answer to “who do we turn to?” is simply and necessarily ourselves.

As we enter the fourth industrial revolution many aspects of life and the global order will continue to change, as they have been exponentially in recent years. In order to manage this massive transition I believe humanity must learn from components of the failed experiment of Communism, which in its ideal form is a theory of peace and collaboration. We must finally reach a collective and rational consciousness to unify the globalized world, and to this end it is imperative for humanity to step away from the polarization of politics, media and peoples.

Europe and the World

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Book Review

A closer look into John Heath’s new book: Enlightenment 2.0 Filippo Ricci

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HEN IT COMES TO POLITICS, we live in the dark. Over the last two decades, political systems of our western world have become increasingly divided.

Historically, we’ve never had a hard time telling the reds from the blues, but now, with our vision blurred, we are hardly able to tell the two apart. The post WWII right and left no longer exist. Today we make a broader, more important distinction; we divide the crazies, from the non-crazies.

What is more disturbing is that the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand and this becomes ever so relevant with the upcoming U.S.A. Presidential elections. We need not look to far in any direction before we catch a glimpse of Donald Trump’s growing combover. Like for many in the past, Donald’s campaign, is one founded upon the four great pillars of ignorance, false claims, refusal of acknowledging error, and a lot of bullshit. Why would people even vote a candidate based on such a campaign?

John Heath, our beloved philosopher, has several ideas on the matter. In short, the current political environment portrayed via the mass-media, doesn’t shelter our rational thought. Rather, it kills it. Elections and campaigns are won and successful when they win over the voters’ hearts, not their minds. Propagating this heart over head dogma is the mass media; like a mantra, news channel ‘cycles’ give opportunity to cognitively associate two things such as Trump and Wall or Clinton and email scandal. All of this makes reason not suitable

as the vox populi. All of this is migrating us towards a barbaric state. However, there is still hope, or rather, a shining light in the distance to enlighten us once more. Heath argues that in order to improve the status quo we need “slow-politics”. Slow-politics calls defense of “quiet, rational deliberation” in order to fight the everyday political insanity. Heath departs from recent psychological and philosophical research, such as Kahneman & Tversky’s system 1 and 2, as well as Richard Thaler’s nudging, System 1: Intuitive, heuristic • Unconscious, automatic • Rapid, computationally powerful, massively parallel • Associative • Pragmatic (contextualizes problems in the light of prior knowledge and belief) • Does not require the resources of central working memory • Functioning not related to individual differences in general intelligence • Low effort

for we need some insight to understand the shortcomings of reason, and intuition.

The central flaw in the concept of reason that animated the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is that it is entirely individualistic. Reason was thought to be contained entirely within the brain of the individual.

The result was a lack of attention to what

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was going on in the individual’s environment, both physical and social. Our cognition fires via two systems, 1 and 2. System 1, the heart. Our everyday tasks are a balancing act between these two systems, with usually a larger load being borne by system 1. The reason for this are that thinking rationally is very difficult, and takes herculean mental strength. Our brain’s system 1 can be thought of as a set of heuristics that our brains developed over the course of human evolution. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. Our System 2: Rational, analytic • Linked with language and reflective consciousness • Slow and sequential • Linked to working memory and general intelligence • Capable of abstract and hypothetical thinking • Volitional or controlled—responsive to instructions and stated intentions

intuition is the product of human evolution.

Being startled by loud noises such as one made by saber tooth tiger might might have made us more fit to survive in the past. In the same way, using the availability of a memory as a proxy for frequency of an event, such as the said saber tooth tiger attacking one of our friends, might have kept

Europe and the World

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the absence of evidence that that is inconsistent with the hypothesis.

Belief Bias i.e. we reject as illogical any argument that leads to a conclusion that we take to be false. Higher intelligence does not make people less susceptible to cognitive biases. The most powerful check we have on our own biased tendencies is the willingness for others to correct us.

John Heath in his home in Toronto, Canada.

us away from tigers all together. And most of the times, as a testament to evolution and the fact that humanity has survived until now, we can say that intuition, system 1, has done a pretty good job. Unfortunately though, our environment today no longer is the environment our ancestors lived in.

We changed our environment a million different ways, and our intuition misfires because of this all the time. Recall the availability of a memory? Take terrorist attacks for instance. The fact that we’ve been exposed to countless news shorts about the recent Paris attacks impresses the events into our memory. Since the terrorist attack it’s so readily available in our minds, we chronically overestimate the actual probabilities of it happening. So while evolution has done a great job at keeping us alive, given our modern day environment, our intuition misfires a little too much. What we need in this case is rational override.

The first Enlightenment led to the rise of many great thinkers. The general idea was that everyone has had enough of tradition in particular when it stood in the way of progress. Reason almost became a religion; an absolute, pure truth that everyone should follow. The thinkers tended to believe that once prejudice and superstition were overthrown, reason would naturally take their place, without any sort of slippage or backsliding. Today we know that this is far from the truth. Reason is not ecclesiastical; there’s no angels beating their wings, ascending our minds into reason.

When we think of reason, we ought not think of angels but rather of home made Nigerian helicopters. Like these helicopters, reason is a kludge: an ill assorted collection of parts, individually designed for a different purpose than the one their inventor means for them to achieve together (e.g. flying like a helicopter). So whilst our helicopter works, it does so in a terri-

bly inelegant way. The seats come from an old minivan, the engine came from a refurbished Toyota corolla, and the joystick, ripped away from its intended flight simulator. What I’m trying to show you is that like Nigerian helicopters, reason is something our brains were never designed to do.

Saving for retirement, exercising, eating healthily, flossing, not smoking; these are all psychologically unnatural forms of behaviour: they require rational override of our intuitive impulses. In the same way our bodies were not designed to last that long (people would die around 40 if it weren’t for modern medicine saving our butts).

Not only is reason inelegant, but it tends to misfire, or can be caused to misfire just like intuition. For reason, we call it hubris of rationality i.e. the overconfidence of the role that reason plays or must play, or in the degree to which we deploy reason as individuals. We all think we’re pretty reasonable, but that ended for me once I looked at some research which told me how terrible I am at being rational. Let’s take a look:

Apophenia i.e. seeing patterns where in fact none exist. Such as the shuffle function on iTunes or flipping a coin and “swearing” that heads occurs more frequently. People lack an intuitive feel for what true randomness is like, and are constantly amazed by coincidences that are not particularly improbably.

Nevertheless, the cry for reason should still be strong. In the first half of the twentieth century we experienced some of the most catastrophic moments of Western civilisation. We started with not one, but two hyper-destructive wars, and a climax into a nuclear standoff which “came rather close to destroying all of humanity”, Heath says. “There are certain instinctual forms of human behaviour that may be harmless when deployed in small-scale societies but become disastrous when applied at the level of modern, technologically advantaged, large-scale nation states”. We absolutely need reason.

But “how?”, you may ask! Our environments are designed for us to think impulsively; how can we be expected to restore sanity to our political systems when we’re having trouble being a functional

Myside Bias i.e. an excuse sounds more plausible when it is used to explain our own behaviour. Distributions seem more fair when it generates a benefit for us.

Framing & Anchoring effects i.e. People will often make completely different decisions depending on how the choice is framed (i.e. presented to them). List price of houses has an impact on what people take that house to be worth.

Loss aversion i.e. people care more about losses than equivalent forgone gains. Type of framing effect.

Confirmation Bias i.e. people tend to consider only positive evidence that is consistent with their hypothesis, failing to ensure

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Enlightenment 2.0: Front cover

Europe and the World democracy? Heath says that the answer lies in kludges (also known as nudges, as popularized by Richard Thaler). The idea is that we redesign our environments in such a way to trigger a particular kind of behaviour which is socially beneficial.

Consider the person who’s on a diet, most effectively, it would benefit the person the most if she didn’t buy snacks all together; but as she knows that she will have some friends over soon, she simply hides them somewhere far from reach of eye and arm.

By making the snacks less available in her immediate environment--recall that she can neither see them, nor reach them without the help of a stool-- she is effectively nudging herself to stay on diet. She consciously designed her own environment so her impulses wouldn’t have the best of her.

Consider the following. You buy a book from our friendly ECU’92 website.

You have a few nights of fun at the beginning of period 4 before you say: “okay, this period, I’m going to stay ahead of the course material.” You sit down on your comfortable home desk and you open the textbook you bought. You start reading about about the “consequences of the short term fluctuations of the business cycle”.

You hear your phone go off, you feel the temptation to check but you remember and recite what you told yourself before “I’m going to stay ahead now, I’m going to stay focused”. You go on, trying to get beyond the introduction which is dry and factual, very much like a wikipedia page. ‘Ring’ goes the phone again, by now you know it’s probably your friend group on WhatsApp; you look out the window, and the first rays of sunshine have come out. You turn back quickly to the desk and check your phone; as you had suspected, it’s your friends, Sam just sent a picture of a Barbeque accompanied by a simple “anyone wanna go to Wilhemina?” You look up from your phone, you look back down, everyone’s already messaged back and ready for the sunshine. You want to go. You hesitate, but then you say “it’s not even the end of week one, why would I not go?” And frankly, I don’t know many who would refuse such an offer, instant grilled pleasure in exchange for a couple extra points on an exam seven weeks from now? The point is that the whole affair could’ve been avoided had you simply put your phone in the other room, or turned it off altogether.

You would’ve never seen the message and stayed focused on the dry, factual textbook.

As a bonus, in order to avoid situations like these when you really need to, here are the

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 “7 kludges of highly effective people”: 1. Be alone 2. Be in a quiet space 3. Be in a familiar space, and 4. Nothing which reminds you of Sex 5. Be healthy 6. Be well fed 7. Be well rested The goal the above 7 kludges/nudges are trying to achieve is to produce a study environment which renders the task of reading the textbook more entertaining than anything else. Interestingly, “half the population finds sex second only to pain in its ability to command attention”.

So how’s this all related, Filippo?

Our era, which began and evolved under the pure ideals of the first Enlightenment, invented the liberal democracy. Recently however, we are enslaved by speed; we have all succumbed to the fast life. The kind of life which disrupts our habits, impairs our focus and forces us to consume information in ever-smaller bite size packets. “To be worthy of the name, we Homo sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction”. What we need according to Heath is “quiet, rational deliberation”.

First, we must better understand the conditions that make reason possible--remember that we must make our environment, and political environment fair, in order to prevent demagogues from praying on our intuition. Demagogues appeal to the innate, evolutionary prejudices and make little to no use of rationality. Second, we must deliberate about how to improve those conditions. Heath means we need much more debate, and not the kind we see on TV nowadays, riddled with ad hominem fallacies.

And finally, we must engage in collective action aimed at bringing about those improvements. This last one is tricky. Heath is very aware of the problems liberal parties have had in bringing about changes.

The main problem with Liberal lobbying is that it lacks a clear, sense of direction. We try to change thirty-seven things at once, whilst the Conservatives seek to change one or two things. This is why Occupy Wall-Street, together with many others, were largely unsuccessful political movements. Given this, what I gathered, is that we must collectively take action, but do so in a more Conservative way, with Liberal ideals. Personally, I find the ending rather weak. The slow-politics manifesto gave me an uncomfortable feeling of vagueness. In

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my opinion, what we need is rational conservatism. Like Heath’s slow-politics, I realize change must happen slowly; however, there must be a level playing field for politics. This means that we must impose high regulations on the way campaigns and political advertisements are run. I am quite satisfied with the role comedians are taking in politics, in particular John Oliver in Last week tonight, or Trevor Noah in the Daily Show. These are shows that point out the fallacies of politics and call for reason, whilst giving us a laugh or two. They recognize that the liberal can also take advantage of emotions in order to bring about their points. In this case, humor seems to have become a great communicator for the previously dry, factual liberal. However, we mustn’t shun tradition all together, for it might be the only way to progress towards a rational world.

Guest Article

A look Inside the Brazilian Crisis: Jannick Kuiper

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T IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT that change is difficult; the human race doesn’t like change. It comes with fear and uncertainty; it brings you out of your comfort zone. However, sometimes change is needed and inevitable and can occur for many reasons. Unfortunately, the human race tends to be more reactive than

Protests in Sao Paulo

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The ECU’nomist, May 2016 proactive and in many cases one has to experience a crisis or a disaster first in order to realize that this change is required.

Brazil, a nation famous for their football, beaches and its Carnaval, is now undergoing such a crisis. The nation has a very rich culture filled with a mixture of traditions and which has been molded by Portuguese, African, and local Native influences over the past centuries. It is a culture of happiness and love, bursting with dance and music. Nonetheless, the same culture that brings so much joy is one of the reasons why the Brazilian people are loved worldwide and is regrettably also the cause of the current chaos Brazil finds itself in. The problems that Brazilians have to face cannot be blamed on anyone or anything else except for themselves. The country has never been under a threat of any kind of natural disasters; no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no volcanoes. It is safe from wars, terrorism and has some of the richest soil, mineral and natural resources in the world. One of the issues that Brazil has been always struggling with is poverty and social inequality, the state of society where 1% of the population owns larger proportion of wealth than the remaining 99%. This has led to a creation of thousands of slums (favelas), spreading out throughout the nation with many of them housing over 40 thousand people.

The extreme conditions some people have to live in have increased the crime rate and generated large criminal and drug networks. Nowadays Sao Paulo has become such a place where the Police kill two citizens a day and Rio de Janeiro is a city where an assault occurs every 5 minutes.

These problems in Brazil were

”Order and Progress” in its twisted symbolism.

largely ignored as the country had been faring well economically with foreign investors eying Brazil as one of the largest potential for economic growth. Since the start of the 21st century, all winds have been in favor; Brazil became a gold mine for private investors and international companies due to the nation’s excess of natural resources and commodities.

However, the image of a prosperous and perspective country that Brazil had didn’t correspond with the reality and completely masked the most burdensome problem; corruption.

While a fruit may still seem shiny and ripe from the outside, the inside has been rotting for ages slowly making its way out. Corruption isn’t an occurrence exclusive to Brazil as it is widespread all over the planet. However, corruption is like diabetes, it has to be treated every day.

Unfortunately as Brazilians haven’t been coping with this disease well, it has gradually evolved into an incurable monster.

Hermes Magnus, the owner of an electronic component manufacture, filed a complaint to the police in 2008 as he suspected that money was being laundered through his company. When the case was investigated it was revealed that there were four large criminal organizations involved. Two of the leaders of these organizations were taken into custody and agreed to a plea bargain. Further investigations disclosed that the corruption scandal was much larger than originally expected and the scope of the investigation was widened to nine major construction firms and the massive state owned petroleum company, Petrobras. 2014 saw a launch of another investigation “operação Lava-

Jato”, translated as ‘operation car wash’, with its name referring to well-established criminal practices of laundering money using gas stations and laundry shops.

The “operação Lava-Jato” is still going on and has currently entered its 26th phase. The investigation has brought over 1000 suspects with 139 arrests already and revealed another widely used criminal schemes, such as intentional overvaluing of the cost inflation calculations for new construction projects (in many cases priced even 4 times higher than its actual value).

The extra money would then be used as funds for bribing. High number of politicians and government officials were accused of creating fake construction plans, publicly introducing them as projects beneficial for the development of society while illegally putting the money in their pockets. Many of these constructions weren’t even completed and were abandoned. The judge responsible for the largest corruption case that Brazil has ever known is Sergio Moro, who is in charge of investigating the ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, accused of money laundering, organized crime, and concealed assets.

While these investigations are happening the country, economists fear Brazil is experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The public debt in relation to Brazil’s GDP reached more than 60% in 2015 with expectations of a further increase up to 70% throughout 2016. Brazil’s GDP has decreased by 3.8% in 2016 and is expected to decrease another by 3.5% this year. Inflation counted more than 10% in 2015 with some industries such as the retail sector having

Nowadays Sao Paulo has become such a place where the Police kill two citizens a day and Rio de Janeiro is a city where an assault occurs every 5 minutes.

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University Life inflation of 17%. The unemployment numbers nationwide went from 5.2% in March 2015 to 8.2% in March 2016 and the currency is now suffering major depreciation.

The fact is Brazilian people are being hit hard by the financial crisis and the only place where they could find a solution for their problems might be the government. In the past two years government spending hasn’t decreased and taxes have been increased. As more and more of the elected leaders are heading to prison, face charges or are being investigated, people are completely losing their faith in the government. In March 2016, Brazil witnessed the largest registered protest in history. One million people took the streets of Sao Paulo alone, with the number reaching 6 mil-

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 lion throughout the nation calling for the impeachment of current president Dilma Rousseff. The first action that she took after these protests was electing her mentor and party associate, ex-president Lula as Minister of the Chief of Staff. This was very controversial step resulted in a huge outrage of the public as Lula is still under investigation run by the judge Moro for corruption activities. As Brazilian ministers cannot be trialed by a judge but only by the Supreme Court, Rousseff’s action raises suspicion that the reason she nominated Lula a minister was to evade imprisonment. Due to these political controversies, public protests and financial crisis, an impeachment committee was created where 10 debate sessions shall decide the future of the pres-

ident. This process is currently on-going.

In a way, reaching one of the deepest points in a nation’s history has a positive twist. Major structural changes are about to happen, something that is only possible due to the desperate situation that country has found itself in. Politicians and businessmen who are participating in corruption schemes are finally being prosecuted and arrested, a phenomenon unheard of in the past. This will hopefully deter people away from committing these crimes. Brazil has lost an entire decade as its economy has plummeted to 2002 levels, but if the right decisions are made now, the nation can build its way to prosperity again in the future.

Interview

Charles van Marrewijk Sander ten Hoedt The ECU’nomist sat down with Charles van Marrewijk, professor of international and geographical macroeconomics at U.S.E.. Well, part time that is. Looking for new opportunities and challenges, Mr. van Marrewijk has been working full time at the Xi’an JiaoTong Liverpool University (XJTLU) since September 2014 as a professor of Economics. He lives there with his wife and young son. He’s back for a few weeks every year to continue teaching here at U.S.E.. You may have seen his name before. It graces the cover of our international economics textbook and you may have seen a useful article of his come by while doing research on the topic of international trade, macroeconomics or economic geography.

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JTLU WAS FOUNDED IN 2006, as a collaboration between Xi’an Jiaotong University and Liverpool University.

Located in the SuZhou business park on the outskirts of the ancient city of SuZhou, the university is right at home between the offices of multinational firms, including a Samsung factory. SuZhou business park itself was a joint project between the Chinese government and Singapore, and was initially called SuZhou Singapore industrial park. Gradually, Singapore was phased out, the only remaining testament to this legacy being the SuZhou Singapore international school, to which many expats send their children. SuZhou, in particular its industrial park, is a result of careful government policy of subsidies and focused development. Today it boasts a GDP per capita comparable to that of the UK. Van Marrewijk’s XJTLU is opening a new south campus, an ambitious 5-year architectural project funded by the university itself. It is one of the things Charles is

extremely impressed with. “It’s amazing what they have achieved in such a short period of time” he says, with admiration in his voice. Clearly, business is good.

As part of the economic faculty at XJTLU, van Marrewijk is mostly involved in the later stages of a student’s career there, teaching in the last year of the bachelor program as well as the masters and MBA programs. Part of a faculty comprised of half Chinese, half foreign professors, he is one of two Dutch nationals teaching a student body comprised of the top scorers of the Chinese secondary school’s final exam, the brutal ‘gaokao’.

Taking 18 hours over a span of two days, the gaokao exam is famous for the level of memorization of information, rather than perhaps a more analytical approach taken in the west. 75% of Chinese secondary school graduates are not allowed to enter university. Only the top 25% may do so, and this subset is further split into 3 tiers. XJTLU is one of the top universities in the coun-

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SuZhou’s Times Square

University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 try, recruiting from those who achieved a score high enough for a tier 1 school.

I ask van Marrewijk if he notices any differences in the way Chinese university students interact in the classroom compared to the students he has taught and studied with in the Netherlands and the U.S. “There is certainly a difference [...] by the time I am teaching them it’s fairly comparable to the Netherlands. However, neither have quite as much [interaction] as the U.S.”. First years XJTLU students follow a mandatory first year university schedule, decreed by the Chinese government before entering a fully-fledged economics program in their third and fourth years. They learn how to discuss and give arguments and feedback, all in preparation for foreign universities.

What kind of students does a college such as this attract?

“Tuition is high, so the students that study here are usually from the top strata of Chinese society, although there are some opportunities for tuition waivers for the less well off”.

I wonder whether such a high profile school has some element of getting the future generation ready for leadership positions.

“That is probably true, although it’s impossible to tell the background of the students, whether their parents are into politics or business or such” he says.

“The XJTLU is tailored to students who wish to study abroad after finishing their studies here in China” he continues.

“Nowhere have I seen motivation among parents to provide the best possible education for their children as strong as in China”.

“I just want to add one thing. Nowhere have I seen motivation among parents to provide the best possible education for their children as strong as in China. It’s admirable and I believe it’s one of the biggest differences between China and, for example, India”.

Internationally, China has been doing extremely well. The reach of Chinese academia has certainly become broader, but in a lot of ways, China is still playing catch up. One way that has proven very effective in the case of the world’s largest economy (PPP) is to import or copy the knowledge that they don’t have. Could that have been a reason for van Marrewijk to be asked to teach there?

“I can’t say anything other than that it’s true. Half of my colleagues are foreign”.

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Charles was approached by a British headhunting agency. Initially, he said, the idea of teaching in China didn’t seem very appealing.

But at the time, as a keynote speaker at a conference in Shanghai, he was close by already and decided to have a look. Impressed with the level of infrastructure and progress in the city, he started to warm up to the idea, returning once more together with his wife to seal the deal.

SuZhou, especially the industrial park, is awash with Starbucks and Pacific Coffee places. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from any other campus by the coffee at least. Temperatures are very agreeable all year round. “Except perhaps in July and August when it gets very hot, but I’m usually not there at that time” van Marrewijk laughs. The teaching language is English, and due to the large number of foreigners at the business park, English is enough to get by. Communication outside the very international SuZhou business park is more difficult. The average SuZhouian speaks little other than mandarin. Van Marrewijk needs no Chinese for his work, and due to the trickle of spare time he has, he’s not planning on learning any either. Van Marrewijk and his family are planning on staying for a while. His position could last till retirement if he so wished. “I’m happy to be living in SuZhou with my wife and son and being able to help out the development of China in our own way”.

Charles’ self portrait. Not only has Charles written the “International Economics” textbook, but has also done the illustrations for it.

University Life

Exchange

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 abroad: study at a top university and experience living in Asia. I am a very open-minded person and I wanted to experience an environment that would put me in situations with which I was not familiar with. Hong Kong was indeed the best place to be and the University of Hong Kong proved to deserve its reputation of the “top university in Asia”. It is true that the course load was intense and I felt discouraged when seeing so many hard working people. However, I was there to live this and during the time spent together with wonderful people from all over the world, I realized how much I still have to learn about myself.

When you make the choice of going on exchange, you will be provided with a carousel-a brochure, if you will-of how you spend your time while being there; it doesn’t matter which exchange you choose. In regards of Hong Kong, the carousel fit perfectly to all I have been experiencing! It is always a great accomplishment to get accepted to study at the University of Hong Kong considering the few places available. Because of this, the excitement was increasing more and more as the time went by.

tropics

Back to the !

University of Hong Kong Iulia Vadeanu RE YOU THINKING of going on an exchange and you’re not sure which place would combine everything in the best manner?

My name is Iulia Vadeanu and I am a third year Romanian honours student. I did my exchange at the University of Hong Kong. Not only is Hong Kong a great city for partying, sights, and food, but also, the city itself has a lot it can teach you.

I personally have always wanted to go on an exchange. I truly believe that it is equally important to enrich ourselves culturally as well as intellectually. However, picking one of the many options offered by our university is indeed a hard choice. I built my desire based on two different aspects I was expecting from my semester spent

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University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 During my exchange I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the amount of time required to dedicate for my studies but it paid off in the end and trust me, each of us can do it!

As I mentioned before, I have a lot to learn about myself.

Most importantly, I have realized how productive we are expected to be, and to learn and assimilate different concepts and thus, build up very strong knowledge in the field of our studies. This has helped me with almost everything I was expected to do regarding the courses I followed. Moreover, I have studied only finance-related courses, which are considered to me the most difficult offered by their faculty;although they do meet all my expectations based on the rankings I had seen previously. However, you will be amazed by how many different areas they cover and how wide the choice platform is when deciding which subjects to take.

Being in Hong Kong means traveling and having fun! I have never imagined meeting people from almost everywhere in the world. I made great friends there, people who can teach you a lot, people that you will immediately click with. The

exchange community is immense (which is also not very good as they sometimes cannot provide everyone that is accepted with housing).

It is very easy and cheap to visit amazing exotic destinations like the beaches in Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. Moreover, if you are looking for even a bigger “culture shock” you can take part in the trips organized by the University of Hong Kong and visit North Korea.

Macau, the Las Vegas of Asia, is an hour away by ferry and it brings in very nice European sights (being exPortuguese colony) in an Asian way.

Apart from the surroundings, the nightlife in Hong Kong will be one of the best you’ve ever experienced. Your future international friends will become your family! You will find yourself spending so much time with some of them from library to hidings or drunken mornings back at the residence.

Hong Kong is the place to be! The city which makes everyone seem to be a small ant and which has enriched me the most. I had the great opportunity of living with 15 Asian girls on the same floor of our huge building (which you could probably imagine is very common

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in Hong Kong). The way of living in a dorm there is completely different from what is in Europe, it was a very big lesson for me. I was very annoyed initially having three security guards when entering my building who were not even speaking English. However, in the end, I thought it was nice seeing that there is still a taboo talking about certain things that we usually take as normal here.

I was not allowed to bring in friends after 11pm or I always had to check in with my personal card to prove that I was actually living there (or just learn to be sneaky :D). But I was lucky with my accommodation, it was the newest building for university housing and the area was very popular for exchange students.

Moreover, if you are willing to make local students friends, go for it! The girls on my floor were very sweet and calm and they showed me great typical Chinese restaurants where the menu is not in English; that food was the best!

Not knowing what you eat and finding out only after you taste it is indeed a very challenging and interesting experience. I can assure you they know what to give you, so don’t be afraid!

University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Interview

Interviewing Janneke Plantenga Interviewed by Filippo Ricci, 21st March, 2016 Filippo Ricci In light of the University’s 380th birthday, the ECU’nomist interviewed Janneke Plantenga, dean of our university’s economics faculty, U.S.E.. Despite Janneke’s busy schedule, I was able to sit down and have a talk with her over tea. Janneke tells us about her background in research to work in EU organs. As a bonus, she gives us an abridged history of our own faculty. As an advocator for gender equality, interviewing Janneke was a pleasure for me, for she is a strong, living embodiment of gender equality. With no further adue, I trust you readers will enjoy this very special interview.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

I studied economics in Groningen; starting in 1975. I finished in 1981, and was lucky enough to get a position for 4 years as a research assistant within a bigger project on industrial restructuring. My part was to study the restructuring of the textile industry–in particular the impact on female employment. At that time, the universities were less strict in finishing the dissertation in time (‘success rate’ was still a word to be invented..), and I really enjoyed the very time consuming process of unravelling the national and local history of female textile workers in both the Netherlands and Germany… After four years, I was referred to a job as assistant professor in Utrecht.

I had a fantastic time in Groningen, but as my husband and I were dual earners, it was important to settle somewhere in the centre of the Netherlands so that we could both find a suitable job. I got the job at the Economic Institute, at that time part of the faculty of Law, and remained connected to Utrecht University ever since. At the end of the 1980s I got involved in the EU network of Experts on Gender and Employment. As an expert you were supposed to write a national report on the state of affairs on f.e. the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, working time flexibility etc.

When I started, working for the EU was still a different world. The network was coordinated by a Belgian professor and

Janneke Plantenga, Dean of Utrecht University School of Economics

we were supposed to write our reports in French. And during the meetings in Brussels, there were simultaneous translations in German, French, English and Spanish! The meeting took ages, but part of my network and part of my knowledge on the EU originates from that network and all the debates we had on gender equality, European integration etc. I also learned to write. A much needed skill, because I still had to finish my dissertation. Finally in September 1993, eight months pregnant, I defended my thesis on the history of women’s work in the Netherlands and Germany.

Your background is very impressive.

I had a look at your publications and it took me a while to go through them.

Starting from what you’ve mentioned already, the EU labour market, gender pay gap, and more recently childcare.

Could you tell us more about childcare in the EU and the Netherlands?

Originally my focus was indeed on “the position of women on the labour market”, but I became more and more interested in institutions around the labour market and the impact they might have on–for example–equality or social inclusiveness. My focus on child care issues originates from research on a supportive infrastructure

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for gender equality, but I became a bit of a specialist on the sector itself, partly because of the very particular governance structure in the Netherlands. In contrast to many other countries we do not have public facilities, but introduced market force in the childcare sector. So the question is: what does this imply for the availability, affordability and the quality of the services. And what are the effects of child care services on the child development?

I feel like not many of U.S.E.’s students know much about the history of our faculty. Given the Utrecht University’s birthday is just around the corner, what can you tell us about U.S.E. and what it strives to become?

“Let’s start a bit earlier… Up until the ’90s UU didn’t have a proper Economics faculty. It was possible to study economics in Utrecht, but always in combination with other disciplines like for example, history, law or geography. The absence of an economics faculty had partly to do with the fact that Utrecht (together with Leiden) is a very old and distinguished university and for a long time, (business) economics wasn’t considered a science. At the end of the 1990’s it was Jan Veldhuis, at that time president of the Executive Board of the

Univeristy Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016 Utrecht University, who became a bit annoyed by the situation and really pushed the case for U.S.E. On the one hand his argument was that a university in the 20th century simply can’t do without a mature economics department. On the other hand he had a very strategic argument: he claimed that power in the Netherlands shifted from legal experts to academics educated in economics and finance. So, if Utrecht does not offer an economics programme, there is a danger that Utrecht University is becoming invisible in society, because politicians, top civil servants and business executives have been educated everywhere but in Utrecht. Of course, setting up a new faculty has been an very complicated story and there was fierce internal and external resistance, but nevertheless in 2003 U.S.E. got started. Whenever I meet Jan Veldhuis he always gives the impression that setting up a fully-fledged economics department has been one of the most rewarding achievements of his professional life…

example. We rather focus on the synergy between the two subdisciplines. By combining both perspectives, insights from business gain more depth, while insights from economics gain more relevance.

Being a late comer in the field, it was important that as U.S.E. we have a particular focus in our research and our curriculum.

This focus is multidisciplinary economics.

I think it has become part of our DNA. We do not believe in the traditional differentiation between business and economics for

Starting last issue, as an informal theme, we started asking professors and staff for their Music tastes and preferred musical flavours. Do you have music you particularly like and would like to share, a song, an album, artist, or genre?

Part of our DNA is also the integration and cooperation with other neighbouring disciplines. The economic crisis of the past years has been analysed by many as a crisis of the economics discipline. Of course we can discuss the width and depth of this particular crisis, but there is unmistakably a growing support for multidisciplinary cooperation. And this relative openness towards other disciplines here at U.S.E. perfectly fits the strategic agenda of Utrecht University in which excellent science is inspired by societal challenges. Following that agenda, the research of U.S.E. is characterised almost by definition by a strong link to societal questions. They are a source of inspiration, not only for applied but also for fundamental research at the level of U.S.E..

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That is not a difficult question; that is definitely Bach. My mother played the organ and I grew up with his music. This interview is taking place the week before Easter and Saint Matthew’s Passion used to be a must in that particular time of the year. As a child, I thought that these 3 hours–that is if you were lucky; it might also take 3,5 hours–would never end. But it definitely had a lasting impact on my musical taste.

Finally, is there any advice you would like to give your fellow U.S.E. students?

Use your time well; You will never have so many opportunities organized so well during other parts of your life. Opportunities such as events on the International campus, lectures, activities organised by the study association, cultural events… Everything is available and affordable; you only have to say ‘yes’!

University Life

ECU’92 Event Review

Breaking Barriers: Conference Review Sjoerd van Alten

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HAT CAN (FUTURE) economists do to enhance the reputation of their science in a post-crisis world? That was the question that stood central during this year’s ECU’92 conference, which held place on the 17th of February in the gorgeous aula of the Academiegebouw.

The Conference committee had managed to get an all-star line-up of international speakers: Former Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, British economist and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network Guy Standing, German labour economist Klaus Zimmerman and Christian Felber, initiator of the “economy for the common good”. The conference was adequately titled: Breaking Barriers: Envision the future, and indeed, with four renowned speakers all stating their own views, every member in the audience probably left the building at the end of the day with at least one new vision of what the future could behold, but probably multiple.

Prof. Dr. Jan Peter Balkenende, the penultimate Dutch Prime Minister, started the day off with a speech on corporate social responsibility. Balkenende,

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

currently partner at Ernst & Young, seemed to be the ideal speaker on this topic. He had a positive view on how companies have incorporated CSR after the crisis and he thinks this is a lasting phenomenon.

With his surprisingly funny comments Balkenende managed to shake the audience awake at the beginning of the day. All in all however, his talk was what one would expect from an ex-politician: Balkenende appeared to say more than he actually was, which, contentwise, was not much.

After a small coffee break, Guy Standing took the stage. Standing is an expert on one of the more radical economic ideas that have become popular after the crisis: Basic income. As co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), he advocates a universal, guaranteed, unconditional minimum income, provided by the government, for all. Standing proved to be a very engaged speaker who easily managed to get his arguments across.

Worldwide stagnation of wages due to technological chance and an increase in unrecorded, unpaid work are in his view justifications for a basic income. Experiments in, among other countries, India had gained very satisfactory results in his eyes.

Klaus Zimmerman, Labour economist at the university of Bonn and former director of the German institute for study of labour (IZA) emphasized the need of a

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more flexible labour market to respond to the trend of further automatization of production processes.

The closing speaker of the day, and probably the most radical one, was Christian Felber. In as little as twenty minutes he attempted, quite successfully, to explain a whole new, different economic model for the future: Economy for the common good. He presented a range of new ideas that could help society forward, such as common good balance sheets for companies and a new democratic system, ideas that should place human beings back at the heart of economic activity. That his ideas are highly ambitious cannot be denied, but are they realistic? Many discussions will have been held on that after Felber’s speech.

The day ended with a panel discussion moderated by our own business ethics professor Hans Schenk in which Standing, Zimmerman, Felber and U.S.E. dean Janneke Plantinga took place. At the end of the day during drinks, many twisted on the different radical ideas they had heard that day. No matter what the future will look like and which forecasts that have been proposed during the conference will come true, certainly all attendants will have left the day with at least a better understanding of what the future might entail.

University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

Interview

The Adam Smith Hall Cafeteria unsung hero: Cynthia Jaggoe Marouschka Blahetek

If you’ve ever walked into the U.S.E cafeteria before you know that you’ll always be greeted with a warm smile of this lovely lady. She might ask you about your day and what you’ve been up to in the weekend, but what do we know about her? The ECU’nomist decided to find out more.

Who are you and where are you from?

Cynthia Jaggoe. I come from Surinam. I was born in Paramaribo, but I came to the Netherlands at the age of 19 to marry my husband.

at first, but I like it and it keeps me busy.

What type of music do you enjoy?

What is your professional background?

What does your average day look like?

In Surinam I graduated as a primary school teacher. But once I came to the Netherlands I decided not to practice. As a girl I was a bit shy and insecure. Of course know, you wouldn’t say that about me now, but I really used to be and in order to be able to teach a class you need to be strong headed.

I start at 9. I begin with baking the bread, starting up the coffee machine and other general prep. I prepare all the sandwiches from scratch freshly in the morning. I buy some of the other prepackaged foods at the UCU Dining Hall. They are sold less, so I’d rather just buy a few over there instead of ordering them, since I don’t want to waste any food. At the end of the day at 1:30, I’ll start with the clean up, making sure everything looks neat. As you can see right now, it’s as if nothing ever happened here! (It was very clean indeed). During opening hours, I like to keep a friendly atmosphere. I’ve had some co-workers in the past who weren’t very friendly and got irritated very quickly, for example when someone took 2 cups instead of 1 cup for their coffee. I don’t think this is the right way to go about it. Ok, it will costs a couple of cents, but I believe that if you stay friendly, customers will feel welcome and are much more likely to come back, which is of course better in the end.

I like all types of music. I also very much enjoy Jazz music and Surinam music like the band Trafassi. They make very upbeat and light-hearted music, very good to dance to. Music makes me happy, that’s why I always have the radio on when I’m working.

Are you planning to work as a teacher in the future?

No I’m not planning on it. I’m enjoying the work I’m doing right now. It’s fun and “gezellig”.

How did you start working in a cafeteria?

That’s a funny story. I used to work in a German drugstore franchise named Schlecker. However, they went bankrupt because of the Action stores that kept popping up everywhere. The Action stores have a great concept; they buy their products from stores that go bankrupt. So first they made us go bankrupt and then they bought all our leftover stock! After that I was out of a job, unfortunately. I talked to a job coach at UWV (Employee Insurance Agency) and she advised me to start with one of the new projects they were running. At Sodexo I was able to work and learn at the same time. I didn’t know what I would be doing precisely, but I thought cooking would be fun. Once I’ve gotten my diploma I worked in multiple Sodexo’s throughout the Utrecht district, and I eventually ended up here. Doing everything by myself was something I had to get used to

What hobbies do you have?

I love cycling, running, reading and dancing. I love to dance salsa, merengue and many more types of dance. I used to play volleyball when I was younger.

Any favorite types of food?

I don’t have a favorite food. I do enjoy cooking tasty dishes myself. Today, I’m planning on cooking a new dish from Jamie Oliver. Sometimes I try cooking recipes from Gordon Ramsay. I can also prepare very nice traditional Surinam dishes.

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The StIB (Student Interest Body) held a questionnaire about the cafeteria and although there were some negative remarks (bit too expensive and too little variation) quite a few people specifically commented that think you’re great and very kind.

What do you think of their remarks?

Last year it was a bit more expensive, but they’ve adjusted the prices. I also introduced the daily special for 2 euros, which I created together with some coworkers from U.S.E.. I’m free to decide what type of topping I want to put on it. Although it may be surprising, but in general a lot of the sandwiches that we sell are less expensive than the ones sold in the UCU Dining Hall. Of course, I’m very flattered to hear that people made nice comments about me. I think most of the students are very friendly and polite. I enjoy that they like to have a chat when they come by and I like hearing what they’ve been up to. Maybe they didn’t pass an exam, so I’ll tell them it will be better next time and that they should work harder (laughs). They also help me sometimes, when I’m carrying heavy things or when I need to pass with a trolley, they will hold the door open for me, which I appreciate very much.

As a sign of appreciation from both StIB and all of the U.S.E. students, Cynthia was gifted a lovely bouquet (for pictures see photopage 12).

University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

GRADUATE COMMITTEE As the graduate committee, we are organising events tailored to the needs of master students, which will be carreer related and often aimed at networking. With Natalia taking care of the financial administration, Thifane as our activities coordinator, and Matt as our Secretary, I am sure we can set up some good activities, which will be both fun and useful at the same time. Supported by the input and experience of our coordinator of the board of ECU’92, Luuk Wagenaar, nothing can stop us! So far we have had the pleasure of organizing a networking event for our Master Students and alumni, and a wine tasting that has been a great success. Both of these events provided us with pleasant evenings and we had a lot of fun organizing them. As we speak, we are making preparations for the next and last activity for this academic year, and are very much looking forward to it. Stay tuned!

Jeffrey de Jong Chairman Graduate Committee

INTRODUCTION COMMITTEE Dear future students and current students!

This year ECU´92 will organize the introduction week and weekend for freshmen again in cooperation with U.S.E.! Although it has only been 6 weeks since we started, we are glad to announce that we already have arranged a lot of fun activities for this year’s introduction. We are working on some nice new ideas, and next to that we will of course include the successful yearly events, like a pub crawl, a city tour, a beer cantus, and much more!

As a committee we are all looking forward to the week and weekend. We advise all the Freshmen to sign up as soon as possible for the weekend, because there are limited spots. Both the introduction week and weekend are the perfect way to get familiar with the studies, to learn your way around the campus, and most important to meet a lot of new people within your studies! Next to that there will also be social events for the older students to get to know the new freshmen so make sure to keep an eye on the website of ECU’92!

Cheers, The Introduction Committee

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University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

CAREER DAY COMMITTEE Dear students of Utrecht University School of Economics, In November 2016, the next Career Day will be organized for you. We are working hard to make it a very interesting, useful and fun day for both the companies and the students who will attend. During this Career Day you will get the chance to meet and talk to people from a wide range of businesses while listening to their presentations, participating in their workshops or while having a personal talk. If you have any questions, tips or anything to say about previous Career Days, please do not hesitate to contact us! We will do anything we can to make sure this day helps you start up your career.

We hope to see you all in November!

Kind Regards, The Career Day Committee 2016

ECONOMISCHE CARRIEREDAG 2014 6

UTRECHT

MARKETING GROUP COMMITTEE The Marketing Group is responsible for the image and promotion of all ECU’92 activities. You will be designing promotional materials and brainstorm about creative ways to promote events. The Marketing Group consists of creative people who are acquainted with Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator. Don’t worry if you are not a great designer yet: the Board will organise several trainings for these programs. Besides this, the Marketing Group also brainstorms about the general branding of ECU’92. Applications are open for first, second and third year students. Recruitment for the Promotion Committee is open in September.

Hope to see you next year!

The Marketing committee

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University Life

The ECU’nomist, May 2016

BVVK (INVESTMENT) COMMITTEE Ever wondered what it would be like to be an investor? Well that’s what the BvvK is for! Our committee meets on a weekly basis to discuss the financial markets, learn new investing skills and make investment decisions.

The past 12 months were a time of mind bending events and overall turbulence in the financial markets as negative interest rates were introduced for the first time in history in the EU and Japan with the long promised US interest rate increases being continually postponed even as government and media sources claim the US economy is doing well. Despite all of this though, the United States stock exchanges officially entered into their 2nd longest lasting bull market in history last April! Next to investing the BvvK created a new Board position this year called the Senior Investor specifically tasked with ensuring BvvK members acquire their investment skills even quicker than previous BvvK generations to enhance future BvvK investment performance. Now even though the BvvK’s main activities involve investing first, fun is definitely a high priority and we’ve had some amazing parties and dinners again last year. Our Christmas dinner was our most chique dinner yet and made for a great evening of fine wine and good food. In terms of parties however all BvvK members will always remember the 5th of May as the day on which legends are born. If you think you’ve got what it takes and want to get your investment and social skills to the next level then join us next year as we head into a new chapter in BvvK history.

YEARBOOK COMMITTEE The five girls in pink hoodies from the yearbook committee have been watching you for a year now. We, Chan, Daisy, Diana, Lara and Valeriya have put in a lot of effort to bring to you a recap of all the events and committees of this academic year. Last year, the yearbook was not successfully published. This year, however, we promise to bring it back, bigger, better and bolder! Through the yearbook, you will get to reminisce through the wonderful memories of your first year in U.S.E.. Of course, there are other surprises in the book and the only way to find them out is to subscribe to the book. Here’s the catch: subscription is completely free! Cannot wait to receive the yearbook? You can subscribe for it in advance through education@ecu92.nl from now onwards! Alternatively, you can wait till further notice. We will make another announcement requesting for subscriptions. Be sure to grab your hands on this legendary book!

Cheers!

The Yearbook Committee

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The ECU’nomist, May 2016

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The ECU’nomist, May 2016

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