With the first decent US employment figures since 2007 published on Friday, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. The greatest financial crisis in history has not turned into an equally catastrophic economic crisis.

Now that a repeat of the 1930s has been averted, it is a good time to take stock of the lessons from this near-death experience for the world economy. While everyone is aware of the mistakes made by bankers and financial regulators, the economic theories that encouraged and justified these blunders have not received the attention they deserved. This is about to change.

On Thursday, a galaxy of academic economists, including half a dozen Nobel laureates, current or former departments heads from leading universities and top policymakers from institutions such as the IMF, will gather at King's College, Cambridge, alma mater of John Maynard Keynes, to launch the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Funded with an initial grant of $50 million from George Soros, Inet has already had pledges of millions of dollars in additional matching funds from other donors to create research institutes in leading universities in Britain, America and around the world.

Their purpose will be to reopen many of the debates closed down by unrealistic theories based on assumptions of rational and efficient markets. These concepts became increasingly dominant from the 1980s and gradually acquired a virtual monopoly on senior university appointments and research funding. This intellectual monopoly has ended up not just crushing the competition but also destroying itself from within.

These may seem obscure academic issues, but they had enormous practical and political relevance. The assumption that a market economy is always automatically self-stabilising led to some very controversial policy prescriptions that almost any attempt by government to interfere with market forces would damage economic efficiency.

David Fuller's view Discussion of these themes should be encouraged and I particularly enjoyed the email comments which can be found below Anatole Kaletsky's column.

More than new academic theories, I think we need good governance at a governmental, corporate and personal level. This includes common sense, a feeling of responsibility rather than entitlement, and fiscal discipline.

Interested investors of any age can learn how to look after themselves in the markets.