Frederick D. Barton, a lecturer at Princeton SPIA and former U.S. ambassador to to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, delivered the keynote address at the 52nd Yale Model United Nations on Jan. 16. More than 2,000 high school students from 35 countries attended the four-day gathering.

Barton’s remarks focused on the importance of supporting a peaceful world and the U.N.’s role in it. He drew on his experience as U.N. deputy high commissioner for refugees, when he traveled to Guinea and helped provide essential services to 300,000 refugees from war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“They didn’t know when they were going home, but really it was the U.N. that was there for them and keeping them alive,” Barton told the attendees, recounting an encounter with a Liberian mother who had just given birth and lost two of her triplets. She named the third Barton. “It cemented for me the clear view that the U.N. really was the best hope for a lot of people…. It still is the best hope out there for peace.”

Atif Mian delivered the Bank of Italy’s 17th Paolo Baffi Lecture on Nov. 25. The focus of his talk, “The Hidden Roots of our Debt Crisis,” was why global debt has risen and interest rates have fallen over the past 45 years. Mian identified two related phenomena: greater financial liberalization and rising income inequality.

“It was a great honor to give the Paolo Baffi Lecture at the Bank of Italy. I had the opportunity to discuss how today’s global debt crisis is rooted in structural imbalances — especially extreme inequality — and how these forces have pushed economies to rely increasingly on debt creation, often at the expense of long-run well-being. The lecture drew on my Princeton research over the past few years on the deep, long-run links between the macroeconomy and financial markets,” said Mian, who is the director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance and the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy, and Finance.

The Baffi Lectures, named after Paolo Baffi, Bank of Italy Governor from 1975 to 1979, are hosted biennially and serve as a forum for original work by eminent scholars on monetary and financial questions.