The Committee on Global Thought presents:
The State of the World Economy in the Age of COVID and Beyond
A Conversation Between Raghuram Rajan and Adam Tooze
Tuesday, October 19, 2021 | 5:30 – 6:30 PM ET
Adam Tooze, CGT Member and author of “Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy,” and Raghuram Rajan, Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and current Professor at Chicago Booth, will discuss the current state of the world economy as well as their visions for the future.
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About the Speakers
Adam Tooze
Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History, Columbia University
Director, European Institute
Member, Committee on Global Thought
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and the Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Born in London, Professor Tooze grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, before taking a first degree in economics from King’s College Cambridge. After postgraduate study at the Free University Berlin he took his Ph.D. in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1996. For 13 years he taught in the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge before joining Yale University, where he was the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and the Co-Director of International Security Studies from 2009 to 2015.
He has authored three prize-winning books: Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (UK edition, Penguin Allen Lane, 2006), The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (Viking, 2014), and Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (Penguin Random House, 2021). Tooze’s books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Mandarin, Polish and Bulgarian.
Statistics and the German State 1900-1945 explores the connection between the emergence of modern national economic statistics and the crisis of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century. Wages of Destruction provides a novel account of the Third Reich viewed from the perspective of the regime’s efforts to harness the German economy for its bid for continental hegemony. The Deluge is an analysis of the First World War that challenges the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. Most recently, it won the 2015 Los Angeles Times History Book Prize.
Professor Tooze has served on the academic panels charged with writing the histories of both the German Finance Ministry and Ministry of Economics Affairs. He has served as the Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point and contributed to the academic advisory panel of the National Intelligence Council. He has written and reviewed for Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung and Spiegel Magazine, and New Left Review.
Raghuram G. Rajan
Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, Chicago Booth
Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India
Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth. He was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Between 2003 and 2006, Dr. Rajan was the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund.
Dr. Rajan’s research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development, especially the role finance plays in it. The books he has written include The Third Pillar: How the State and Markets are leaving Communities Behind 2019, I do What I do: On Reform, Rhetoric, and Resolve, 2017, and Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, for which he was awarded the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs prize for best business book in 2010.
Dr. Rajan is a member of the Group of Thirty. He was the President of the American Finance Association in 2011 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2003, the American Finance Association awarded Dr. Rajan the inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The other awards he has received include the Infosys prize for the Economic Sciences in 2012, the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics in 2013, Euromoney Central Banker Governor of the Year 2014, and Banker Magazine (FT Group) Central Bank Governor of the Year 2016.