Professor Shaikh to Open Sidore Lecture Series on Political Economy
KEENE, N.H. 9/25/06 - More than one-fifth of the world’s population lives on less than $1 a day. More than half a million women die each year (one per minute) from complications in pregnancy and childbirth (UNFPA.org). More than one-third of the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished (worldhunger.org). These horrors persist even though the resources exist to provide adequate nutrition and health care to all of the world’s people. What role should international trade play in addressing these problems?
Professor Anwar M. Shaikh will explore this question in a lecture, “Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade,” on Thursday, October 5, at 7 p.m. in the Mabel Brown Room in the Student Center. His lecture opens a year-long Sidore Lecture Series on political economy at Keene State College.
A professor of economics at The New School for Social Research, Professor Shaikh is one of the pre-eminent radical economists in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of challenging conventional wisdom in the economics discipline for several decades.
“International trade theory stops being mysterious as soon as one recognizes that real international competition works in the same way as national competition: it favors the competitively strong over the competitively weak,” he writes.
Professor Shaikh is a prolific scholar, and his graduate courses at The New School have trained several generations of heterodox economists. His fields of teaching and research include international trade, mathematical economics, growth and cycle theory, national economic accounts, history of economic thought, and macroeconomics.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1945, he has lived in Ankara, Washington, D.C., New York, Lagos, Kuala Lampur, and Kuwait. Professor Shaikh received a B.S.E. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
The Sidore Memorial Foundation and the Sidore Lecture Series have been established to support campus presentations by speakers on emerging ideas and to enhance faculty efforts to challenge students and the wider community to participate in dialogue around original and sometimes controversial issues facing society.
For more information, call Patrick Dolenc at 603-358-2629.
