Reuven Brenner

Reuven Brenner is an economics professor, holding the REPAP Chair of Economics at McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management.

Over the last twenty 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. In his 2002 book, "The 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." On the capital side of the ledger, Brenner writes that Hong Kong has prospered because it has "kept its capital markets open, something it did in part because it happened to be a city that could not count on rents from natural resources."

In addition to The Force of Finance, Reuven Brenner is the author of seven other books. "Labyrinths of Prosperity" (1994) 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.

In "Gambling and Speculation" (1991), 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. "Betting on Ideas" (1985) and "History - The Human Gamble" (1983) also cover human action, including why people buy lottery tickets, foment revolutions, commit crimes, and gamble on both war and peace.

In "Educating Economists" (1992), Brenner and co-author David Colander discuss ways to improve the training of future economists. "Rivalry: In Business, Science, Among Nations" (1990) 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. It also discusses the impact of mathematics on business, and whether the latter discipline perhaps leads to a static, rather than fluid approach to commerce.

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).

External links

* [http://people.mcgill.ca/reuven.brenner/ Faculty profile] at McGill