Modern Economical Thinkers: Nouriel Roubini

Modern Economical Thinkers: Nouriel Roubini

Described in Wikipedia as “American”, Nouriel Roubini [12] (1958 - ) is really a global citizen. The child of Iranian Jews, he was born in Turkey and grew up in Italy. Much of his early research focuses on Emerging Markets. He is one of the few who predicted the housing bubble crash of 2007 – 2008, being since then nicknamed “Dr. Doom”. Despite not having won a Nobel Prize, he is the living economist which I feel most identified with. Roubini likes to refer to himself as a "global nomad", and says, "You can be sitting still surfing the Internet, and experience other worlds, ideas and societies. But I’ve found that there is nothing better than visiting a different country, even if for three days. ... You can’t only be a virtual Global Nomad, with goggles on, in a virtual reality. You have to be there. You have to see it, smell it and live it. You have to see people, travel, and interact." Partly to fulfil this need, he formed Roubini Global Economics, an economic consultancy for financial analysis. In describing the purpose of RGE Monitor, he said, "the world is my home, so everything about society and culture—no matter how miniscule —is worth knowing. I am an information junkie and created RGE Monitor to collect information about what’s happening around the world.

He is the founder of “Roubini Global Economics” (RGE), a leading independent, global macroeconomic research firm [13] . He is also a main reference when it comes to globalization, technological development and how it impacts the job market. Let us see what he has to say about that: “What is the future of jobs and labour? And what is the future of wealth inequality? Stephen Hawkings has said that robots and automation are going to replace not just jobs, but also the human race. A few things have happened in the last few decades. One is that trade and globalization has led to a significant offshoring of many jobs that were in the US, Europe and Japan. They were labour intensive, global, you add it. And because of trade and globalization they have gone now to emerging markets. These used to be blue-collar jobs, but now this has also extensive to services: Financial Services, Call-centers, anything to do with technology. These jobs can now be done in Bangalore or in Manilla. But they can eventually be replaced by robots, automation or a piece of software. Tomorrow maybe there can be a piece of software that can do a better job reading X-Rays than radiologists. So the first stage of this transformation is offshoring of jobs to emerging markets, first blue-collars, then white collars, but now there is a shift that many of those jobs will be disappearing even from emerging markets”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini
https://www.roubini.com/continuum-redirect