Bush-whacked

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Financier and philanthropist George Soros wants you—to vote President Bush out of office this November. Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, came to campus today to tell students why: he thinks Bush is leading the country and the world in the wrong direction. “It’s your future which is at stake,” he told a packed audience in Max Palevsky cinema, his first stop on a college and university tour.

Soros also makes his argument against Bush in a new book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of Power (PublicAffairs, 2004). During the talk, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business, he challenged the administration’s foreign policy of pre-emptive military action. In his work, Soros proposes an alternative of multilateral engagement and “preventive action of a constructive nature.” But it would “take too long to explain,” he concluded. Curiosity piqued, many students bought the book, on sale for $22 in the lobby afterwards.

But first two in-house scholars weighed in. Roger Myerson, the W. C. Norby professor in Economics, praised Soros’s insights. Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack professor of entrepreneurship and finance, took issue with some of Soros’s points, particularly a capitalist critique and a comparison of the Bush administration’s policies with a stock-market bubble. Zingales, however, emphasized that he too was opposed to the war in Iraq.

M.L.

February 11, 2004