Take the red pill? Become a real economist in a Belgian castle🍋
Opportunities for 18-30 year olds at Nova Academia, an embryonic new university
Remember the choice the revolutionary leader Morpheus offered the young hero Neo in the film The Matrix? Take the blue pill and go back to a sedated life, kept dumb but numb, or take the red pill that offers truth but also the harsh reality outside the herd. Obviously the hero takes the red pill, leading to three movie sequels as he tries to save humanity.
Let me describe a new educational initiative that you can join if you are between 18 and 30. It too presents a somewhat radical departure from the normal. (Even you’re older than 30, I expect you to still find something of interest in this post.)
Nova Academia is an embryonic new university, listing about 40 different thinkers and academics on its website. It is run by an international group of well-known academics who were outspoken in the Covid era, including economics professors Gigi Foster, Cameron Murray, Benno Torgler and myself (Paul Frijters). We are award winners, well published, and have ongoing jobs at recognised universities, including London School of Economics, University of New South Wales, and Queensland University of Technology.
We have gathered under the banner of Nova Academia, bought a castle in Belgium, and are launching a 1-year economics programme this September. (There are also health programmes run by well-known outspoken health academics but I will concentrate on economics here.)
The 1-year programme promises to expand the personal world view of the young adults involved. It will finish in a co-publication with the academics: a book on the main economic sectors of Belgium and the Netherlands in the same style as the best-selling books Rigged (2022) and Game of Mates (2017). Those books shook the Australian policy world with a brutal expose of endemic corruption; and introduced democratic and institutional-reform ideas to reverse such corruption.
You can see the hint of a red pill in what Nova Academia promises the students will end up co-producing: a book that helps the local population know what is going on and what could be done. Relevantly, several of the policies advocated in Rigged and Game of Mates made it on the policy platforms of small parties in Australian elections (e.g. the Greens and others adopted some of the property-market proposals).
Apart from this red-pill promise of what they will end up being able to do, Nova Academia also promises students a “Healthy Campus Program” with a lot of personal development activities (i.e. sports, arts, food, music) and a low-internet footprint. Students thus live together for a year in that castle and its surrounding area, co-creating a healthy community. So an eye-opening programme and a totally different way of running an academy.
How unusual is what is offered, compared to ‘normal’ universities?
On the surface, the programme heralds a return to the values and habits of classic academia. Students are taken seriously with almost no standard exams but a maximum of free speech, and the immediate involvement of students into intellectual leadership roles in their society. The promise to live healthily, with minimal social media, maximum bonding, and embedding of aesthetics, is similarly a carbon copy of the promise of ancient academies: mens sana in sana corpore (a healthy mind in a healthy body). Indeed, the associated youth organisation calls itself Societas Liberi Mentis (the society of the free mind). These people take free speech seriously, as people once did at most universities.
If you look a little bit closer at the people running the economics curriculum (Professors Frijters and Foster, together with their long-time co-author Dr Cameron Murray), you can see a real interest in how policy actually works. The basic set-up of the curriculum around big ideas with clear immediate policy relevance (such as creative destruction and limited liability) was first devised in workshops designed for the Australian Treasury 20 years ago. Those workshops kept going for 10 years, and the curriculum has subsequently been added to and expanded by all three authors, and tested in many universities. We boast over 10 books between us that share this combination of ideas-in-policy-action.
These books contain cost-benefits analyses of major policies, the optimal institutions around property markets, how to use citizen juries to appoint top people in the public sector, when to organise in teams or hierarchies, etc. These ideas have been presented to parliaments, adopted by political parties, and even adopted by institutions. For example, the WELLBY1 methodology Frijters developed at the LSE in 2017-2020 has since been adopted by both the UK Treasury and the NZ Treasury as a go-to methodology for doing cost-benefit analyses with large effects on social life and mental health.
Walking the policy walk
So we have walked the policy walk, which is unusual. Most people who critique policies are not on the side of the public sector, know little about it, and have no interest in workable solutions. We claim to be different, having shown an interest in reforming and even rescuing the public sector from its many problems.
You see this commitment to both good policy and to translating academic ideas into a form that is actually useful for the realities of bureaucracy in what the 1-year programme promises: a 360-degree analysis of the main sectors in the Belgium and Dutch economies, with an eye on finding out what can be improved and how. These are the type of questions seasoned policy mandarins need 10 years of internal policy reviews for, and even then they’d be circumspect. Yet, we intend to get a whole group of bright young sparks to do it for whole economies, starting their economics from scratch.
Normally, one would dismiss the very possibility of such a thing, if it were not for the fact that our team has already written over four books of exactly this nature themselves, and have spent decades educating smart people from scratch in the ways of economics.
A radical departure in content and form
Delve a level deeper still and you could say that we scholars are revolutionary not merely in policy suggestions but also in how we intend to teach. Consider the radical departure in content and form:
We do not even mention preference maps, welfare theorems, game theory, MMT, EMH,2 and many other staples of economics teaching in their teaching material. From our voluminous writing on those topics (including theory papers in game theory and analyses of Bitcoin), one can see it is not ignorance but choice: we have deliberately decided to axe such elements, deeming them irrelevant to good economics policy. Ouch! Similarly we treat the notions of rational decision making, SDG goals3, and “optimal social planners” as curiosa worthy of no more than passing interest — fairly irrelevant to a good policy designer. We have thus radically gone through economics as we know it and cut away much for the scrapheap of history as a set of mistakes best forgotten.
We treat economics as a designer treats the construction of buildings. It is the job of economists to say what should be done, to design actual institutions and mechanisms to fix some problem, and to be mindful of the material and local landscape that gives rise to the problem and to possible solutions. We treat well-meaning top public servants as brothers in arms but most politicians as part of the problem. This is in the tradition of Keynes, but completely counter to the American first-principles school of Samuelson that dominates modern textbooks and treats policy makers as gods for whom one writes unreadable papers. Instead, we have adopted the key insights of business schools that one should “start where you are, use what there is, do what you can”, implicitly rejecting approaches in which optimal policies get solved in consistent models with 5 differential equations. We thus teach students how to recognise what is actually going on, and equip them with a dynamic toolkit to solve problems.
Nova Academia has done away with the notion of courses and thus of modular chunks of information and skills, which is a view convenient for bureaucracies but the antithesis of traditional academic learning. That, of course, is all about individual feedback and developing one’s own world view through challenge, projects, reading, and reflection. We promise “Jules Verne Notes” systems of individualised learning, Obsidian-assisted personal worldview development, and individual mentoring. Check out the website to see what I mean. By going the opposite direction, we are essentially accusing existing universities of being no more than snack bars offering intellectual junk food, raising uncritical students who can do no better than ChatGPT.
Even the regular day at Nova Academia is a radical departure of those at existing universities. Three hours of largely Socratic learning in the mornings (including statistics), followed by at least 2 hours of esthetics, sports, and other personal development in the afternoon. Particular hours for internet study and social media, interspersed with personal feedback and community activities. Like the colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, we will thus run a community that eats together, celebrates togethers, and brims with international guest speakers and local thinkers.
The implicit verdict
Though neither the website nor the flyers say so, the implicit verdict on our current society is devastating. By doing it very differently, we are holding up a mirror in which our societies and universities look selfish, atomistic, boring, unproductive, paternalistic, docile, distracted, and ruthlessly misled. In a sense hence, Nova Academia is the red pill in The Matrix: not an easy ride but a ticket to a small new community of truth-seekers and reformers, forging new ways.
New Zealand young adults can stay in Belgium for a year on a Working Holiday Visa and hence actually join. Should you? Nova Academia offers a truly policy-immersive and critical-thinking immersive experience that differs radically from regular universities or the training within bureaucracy. Our aim is to help young adults learn how to be adults who can function in a community, work on social problems together, and to become practical problem solvers suited to the top of the public and private sectors.
It is not so easy to get in
Nova Academia is targeting only the top 5% of thinkers, openly saying that most people at university should not be there; demanding full commitment for a year; and asking a price tag between €20-30K for tuition. Compared to Harvard, which asks US$80K for a year that is far more regular, that is a bargain; but then of course you will not end up with a degree that says Harvard but with a chapter in a book sure to become controversial. You could join the first batch of a new academic community, one that attempts an answer at many major individual and social problems in one go.
To get in, you have to be brave, young, smart, have some independent means (though there are scholarships), and a hunger for something different. If this sounds like it is for you or someone you know, check it all out at novacad.org or email info@novacad.org.
WELLBY = wellbeing adjusted life year.
MMT= modern monetary theory; EMH = efficient markets hypothesis.
SDG = the UN’s sustainable development goals.
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