UNL College of Business professor Hendrik Van den Berg’s new textbook, International Finance and Open Economy Macroeconomics, seeks to define how our current international financial system operates within the context of economic, social and natural constructs of human beings.

Van den Berg takes a look at how in July 1944, John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and nearly 500 economists and government officials from the 44 Allied nations fighting World War II gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods to develop a set of rules under which the international financial system would operate after the war. They were given three weeks to complete the task.

In the first chapter of the book, Van den Berg links the vision of the Bretton Woods delegates though the complications of human interaction to the advancement of knowledge through scientific method. The historical prospective intends to make clear the importance of historical knowledge in developing policy for the future.