In a piece for The Wall Street Journal, Professor Reuven Brenner makes the case for legalized sports gambling – an activity that has only recently been legalized in the US through a Supreme Court ruling.
“As in sports, so in high culture – prohibitions, bad regulations and badly imposed taxes destroy businesses and have long-term unintended consequences,” explains Brenner.
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner traces the early manifestations of anti-Semitism into the present, suggesting that the constant in all of this is the Jewish people’s opposition to dominant ideologies of a given time.
In a piece for Asia Times, Professor Reuven Brenner points to history and other geographic contexts to demonstrate how Asian countries, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, can redress democratic deviances.
Professor Reuven Brenner was invited to present on a panel that discussed venture capital in Quebec’s biotech and life sciences industry. The high-profile event was attended by Quebec Ministers Mr. Gaétan Barrette and Ms. Dominique Anglade, while the discussion was moderated in part by Mr. Pierre-Marc Johnson, former Premier of Quebec.
In a piece for American Affairs, Professor Reuven Brenner takes a pulse of contemporary U.S. education and outlines some of the key challenges in this area, including skewed high school graduation rates and the lack of rigorous training to develop skills and discipline.
As a solution, Prof. Brenner proposes an accelerated education program that is complemented by new institutions to better prepare students for their lives and careers.
As society continues to embrace technological advancement, we tend to overlook how the words that our ancestors used have lost their meaning. In an article for Asia Times, Desautels professor Reuven Brenner explores what happens when the words used for the physical realm are applied to a digitized society, and how the fit is not always a natural one. Prof. Brenner illustrates his point by referring to the legal system’s struggles with interpreting Google’s business practices.
Bitcoin has been the target of much speculation among financial circles with some experts alleging that it has the potential to become comparable to gold, a currency legitimized through social convention.
In a piece for Asia Times, Desautels professor Reuven Brenner explores what it takes for a new monetary yardstick to emerge, and argues that, historically, social convention must be combined with scarcity.
A Weekly Standard op-ed examines the way the Fed is trying to tame a $4-trillion quantitative easing problem in case another recession hits.
The piece quotes Desautels professor Reuven Brenner’s withering criticism of current policies in American Affairs (in which he likens them more to astrology than science) but allows that the Fed is trying to make sense of a vastly confusing set of circumstances: low unemployment should be pushing wages and inflation upward, but it’s not happening.
Desautels Professor of Finance, Reuven Brenner, was recently published in American Affairs Journal, a quarterly journal of public policy and political thought.
Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner writes in a recent Asia Times op-ed that, as societies become literate, earlier metaphors become codified as literal truths, much to the detriment of those societies and the cultures that exist within them. There are parallels between the “fake news” of today and analogues in early societies, where one people’s superstitions about another group could bring the two into conflict.”
A recent Forbes book review delves into James Rickards’ The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan For The Next Financial Crisis, which makes the case that there is a big-ticket financial collapse coming, one that dwarfs the 2008 recession. Rickards lays much of the blame on macroeconomics, drawing a parallel between it and astrology.
A piece in Contrepoints takes the whole practise of regular GDP forecasting to task for being based on flawed economic models, referencing Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner’s article in the inaugural issue of American Affairs, in which he calls for the abandonment of macroeconomics in favour of a more accountability-based model. Greater accountability would result in maximized potential and fewer squandered resources.
Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner gave a lecture as part of the Centre for the Thought of John Paul II’s series on Moral Capitalism, in which he explored the concept of the pursuit of happiness, as first codified in the US’s 1776 Declaration of Independence. He goes into the fact that the Declaration’s use of the term was no more than a promise to set up a legal framework that would let people try their luck or live happily — without even trying to classify just what that happiness meant.
During a debate hosted in part by the Centre for the Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw, Poland, Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner explores the military origins of venture capital, as well as the associated National Defence Education Act, which he blames for starting the decline he sees in the quality of university education.
John Tamny starts his review of Nike founder Phil Knight’s eminently enjoyable memoir, Shoe Dog, with a quote by Desautels Professor Reuven Brenner that macroeconomics is a “tautology and a myth, a dangerous one at that, sustaining that prosperity is necessarily linked to territory, national units and government spending in general.” He then goes into why the book’s author would likely agree with Professor Brenner. Indeed, Nike’s continued existence is partly a product of an integrated global economy.
