New Economics Knowledge Services ltd (NEKS) is recently established to demonstrate the value of pluralist economics approaches working with a relatively technical audience of policy people, regulators and business people who are open to and need new ideas - see www.neks.ltd. NEKS is the commercial arm of the Foundation for Promoting Reform towards pluralist Economics for the Public interest (PREP - www.prep.foundation). A key initiative will be creating an international accrediation system for pluralist economics courses.
These initiatives will link to a global campaign around the 10 year anniversaries of the Crash events beginning in September 2017 with the 10 year anniversary of the failure of Northern Rock and culminating in the 10 year anniversary of the G20 meeting in April 2019. The purpose of the campaign will be to draw attention to the causes of the Crash (e.g. monist economics) and the lack of action since to address them (e.g. lack of promotion of pluralist economics). The beginnings of this campaign are already being established in the UK, US, Australia and Austria. The RSA will host a 5 day event in the week of the 10th anniversary of the failure of Northern Rock in September 2017 to kick off the international campaign.
Henry Leveson-Gower (Director of NEKS and Chief Executive of PREP) is a pluralist economist with almost 25 years of experience working mainly in the public sector in the UK and Australia. During that time he has also sought to promote pluralist economics particularly through heednet.info set up in 2003. Please contact Henry Leveson-Gower for more information at henry.leveson-gower@neks.ltd or if you want to be involved in PREP and the 10 year after the Crash campaign.
NEKS will create publications, conferences, events and training on pluralist economics topics (the first conference is on the economics of infrastructure on 24th January 2017) with the aim of getting individuals and organisations to take out a monthly subscription to the NEKS knowledge network, which will be launched at the first conference. This will give subscribers a package of
a weekly email newsletter;
a magazine (think New Economist, a cross between the Economist and the New Scientist, but called the Mint);
discounts to events and training;
executive assessments of the implications of pluralist economics for their work;
networking opportunities with pluralist economic experts; and
free consultancy (for organisations only) which may be used for such things as scoping out a wicked or complex problem the organisation faces.The expectation is that the free consultancy will lead to paid consultancy that will be iterative to explore the issue collaboratively regularly taking stock and re-orienting the work with renewed client commitment or ceasing it if the client is not finding it useful.
The aim of the expert network is to have academics and consultants available with a wide range of expertise from which an appropriate team can be selected for the initial scoping phase (potentially a one day workshop). Experts involved will have their expenses paid. Once a commission arises, these will be on a consultancy basis. It is envisaged that work will be focussed on economic issues so as well as economists other social scientists will clearly be able to contribute to understanding economic institutions, agents and systems.
In order to get individuals and organisations to sign up to the knowledge network, it is crucial to get in place a wide range of experts. Their expertise will be explained on the NEKS website – current experts at www.neks.ltd.
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