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The text below is the comment I offered on Mr. Soros’ opening speech at INET’s Berlin Conference April 12, 2012. The text of Mr. Soros’ own speech is here. Video of the entire session is below—my bit starts at 55:00.

INET Berlin 2012 - back home again. On stage, it’s been a huge amount of claims, assertions, and arguments about what went wrong, about what exactly happened, about why this time was different, about what will certainly happen, and about what remains deeply uncertain, about what “we” shall do about it, about what “we” could do better.

The title of the conference, “Paradigm Lost,” is an obvious combination of two references.

I think I am on the track of what ‘New Economics’ is, and one could roughly sum up two days of presentations in two diagrams:

Lunch was just interrupted Bill Janeway standing up to announce that this morning he decided to give $25m to INET and the board will fund-raise this up to $100m over ten years, but then George Soros added $50m in unconditional funding for INET.

Just as the agricultural share of employment has fallen from 40% in the 1920s to less than 2% of the workforce in Europe today, manufacturing’s share of employment will fall to less than 5% of employment.

While yesterday presented a number of frontrunning scientists discussing current economics and state of the economy in general, academic terms, today starts with ECB executive board member Asmussen.

Behind all the technical language and the common theme of bashing bankers, there remains the Great Divide between Germans and the rest.

On my way back home from the Brandenburger Tor, I recalled that I already have been there, it must have been in 1988.

A suprisingly large number of talks refer to the issue of human decision making.

Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day.

Just wanted to let you all know that amongst the distinguished, distinguishable and disturbing people at the INET conference we have inserted ourselves in the middle to do some interviews, attend talks and blog about what is going on.

In science, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry, history, and parts of sociology and political science, reason from facts.

FT Alphaville has picked up on my friend James Sweeney’s latest, and since James cites the latest writings by other friends Zoltan Pozsar, Manmohan Singh, as well as my own most recent, the piece reads like a discussant’s comments on a shadow banking symposium.

Having just started Findlay and O’Rourke’s mammoth history of world trade in the second millenia, I have been struck by a strange incongruity