60 Minutes with George Soros

Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations

Moderator : Ghassan Salamé, Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

George Soros founded the Open Society Institute in 1993, and since then, his philanthropy has spawned a network of foundations dedicated to promoting development of open societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. To date, Soros has given over $8 billion to support human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education in 70 countries. Aside from being a world-renowned philanthropic entrepreneur, George Soros has applied his talent for transformation and innovation in the field of higher education, when he founded the Central European University in 1991, as well as in the field of finance, when he applied the social theory of “reflexivity,” a set of ideas that seeks to explain how a feedback mechanism can skew how participants in a market value assets on that market, to predict the emergence of financial bubbles, among other things.

Additionally, George Soros created a private investment fund in 1973 that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the world’s first hedge funds. A prolific writer, his essays on politics, society, and economics appear frequently in major periodicals around the world, and his most recent books include The Soros Lectures: At the Central European University (2010); The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Finance Markets (2009); The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of The War on Terror (2006); The Bubble of American Supremacy (2005); George Soros on Globalization (2002).

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