Reuven Brenner - Career

Career

Over the last thirty years he has consulted for companies including Bank of America, Knowledge Universe, Bell Canada. The son of concentration camp survivors, he was born in 1947 in Romania, and immigrated to Israel where he served in the Israeli Army during both the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War.

At the core of his economic model is the view that the metaphysical trumps the physical, with human capital the source of true wealth creation around the world. Physical wealth, as in wealth that comes from the ground is not portable, which means it can easily be taxed, or worse, expropriated. His most recent book, A World of Chance argues that at one time gambling fulfilled roles performed by venture capital and banking do today, and that modern financial institutions retain a strong gambling core. The book shows how people dealt with uncertainty and risk since Antiquity, how they rationalized a variety of beliefs and institutions that made it appear that decisions had some solid backing; how people in fact made decisions on a variety of issues linked to finance, gambling, insurance, religion and politics, and, last but not least, he offers his own view of human nature, linking risk taking to trial and error, and venturing into the uncertain. His views have not much in common with either economists' orthodox views of 'risk aversion, or the so-called behavioral approach. Brenner confronts with view with a wide range of facts and events - and no laboratory experiments. As he puts it, people can neither make nor lose millions in laboratories

In his 2002 book, Force of Finance, Brenner notes that economic success in certain countries often results from "political blunders of other nations," that lead "to the rapid outflow of both capital and talented people." Brenner cites Hong Kong as one beneficiary of a talented human inflow, a city with notably nothing in the way of natural wealth to redistribute. To prosper there, "one must use one's brains for a living", and as "brains are mobile, you can't tax them too much." This was also the reason Amsterdam, Singapore, Israel and Florida prospered and why post World War II Germany was able to rebuild.On the capital side of the ledger, Brenner writes that these countries have prospered because they have kept their capital markets open, something they did in part because they happened not to have natural resources on which they could collect rents. The book also discusses the various monetary policy options, pointing out the flaws in inflation rate targeting and floating exchange rates, and suggests that economists have misunderstood the proper role of gold, and reaches the conclusion that it should be serve as an alarm signal. Brenner also integrates his views about democratization of capital markets and entrepreneurship with issues such as nationalism and tolerance, as well as with details about political institutions that can best maintain accountability, illustrating the latter with Swiss' unique "direct democracy."

In addition to Force of Finance, Reuven Brenner is the author of seven other books. Labyrinths of Prosperity helps to explain among other things why the Dutch are seen as frugal, why education spending rose in the United States after 1958, and why Russians refrained from buying apartments there after the U.S.S.R.'s collapse. For the macro-focused, he points out that statistics such as GDP sustain "the illusion that prosperity is necessarily linked with territory, national units, and government spending in general." For those skeptical about government measures of inflation, his discussion of the inherent flaws of CPI is particularly eye-opening. It's about why the Keynesian get it completely wrong, that the paradox of savings is not at all what they capture in their models, and, since none ever discusses that in the last Chapter of the General Theory, where Keynes says that his views are in fact those of Bernard de Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (quoting from it extensively, and which has little to do with what now passes for his framework), it is not clear if they even really read the book.

In Gambling and Speculation Brenner makes a cogent argument for gambling legalization. He uses history and theory to cover all measures of risk taking, noting that risk-taking that is a daily part our lives.

In Educating Economists, Brenner and co-author David Colander discuss ways to improve the training of future economists. In the chapter Making Sense out of Nonsense, Brenner discusses what's wrong with the social sciences and academia today, and in two other chapters focusing on the main courses being taught in economics either being empty of content, or wrong.Rivalry: In Business, Science, Among Nations posits a theory of business enterprise that suggests risks are taken as a way to be outranked by one's peers in the hierarchical sense. The book also deals with antitrust, state owned enterprises, and advertising, showing how the latter saves significant search costs, and how recommendations of family and friends (the non-digital ones of the 1980s) were a good substitute for advertising.

His first two books, History - the Human Gamble and Betting on Ideas present his views on "history," by looking at facts and sequence of events that other historians and social scientists have not, and integrates Brenner's views of human nature, of experimenting with innovations in business, science, politics, with demographic changes. All combined in an entirely jargon-free text, lead to Brenner's view - and the title of his concluding chapter in the first book - that "Happy People Do Not Have a History."

In addition to his books, Brenner's articles have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, National Post (Canada), Financial Times, The Straits Times (Singapore), Asia Times, Dow Jones and Le Figaro (Paris). He also has a column at Forbes.