Dinner Parties During “Lost Decades”: On the Difficulties of Rethinking Financial Markets, Fostering Elite Consensus, and Renewing Political Economy

This Article addresses two groups of problems that ought to be understood in relation to one another. This Article has three movements. In Part II, I discuss conceptual obstacles to forming the new elite consensus that rethinking the role of financial markets requires. To produce policy reform, it is not enough to have new ideas; the ideas must be understood, adopted, and acted upon by people.

Policy reform is thus always a function of conversations. In Part III, I discuss some possible ways the elite consensus might be formed. In Part V, the conclusion, I offer a preliminary assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach taken by “Rethinking Financial Markets,” which goes “live” as this journal goes to press.