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Book Review: The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission
Robert Skidelsky
New York Review of Books
| Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Fixing Global Finance
1.
By common consent, we have been living through the greatest economic downturn since World War II. It originated, as we all know, in a collapse of the banking system, and the first attempts to understand the resulting economic crisis focused on the reasons for bank failures. The banks, it was said, had failed to "manage" the new "risks" posed by financial innovation. Alan Greenspan's statement that the cause of the crisis was the "underpricing of risk worldwide" was the most succinct expression of this view.[1] Particular attention was paid to the ...
by Martin Wolf
Johns Hopkins University Press, 230 pp., $24.95
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The Lost Continent
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Saturday, June 13, 2009
LONDON – Home to one-sixth of the world’s people, but contributing only one-fortieth of world GDP, Africa is the most conspicuous victim of the global recession. After a half-decade of 5% growth, the continent’s growth rate is expected to halve in 2009. Some countries, like Angola, are contracting. Elsewhere, the crisis has swept away the benefits of several years of economic reform. Many Africans will fall back into desperate poverty.
Development economists wring their hands in despair: Africa defies their best efforts to create a miracle. On the eve of decolonization in 1960, real GDP per head in Sub-Saharan Africa was almost three ...
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Economists clash on shifting sands
Robert Skidelsky
Financial Times
| Wednesday, June 10, 2009
History is replete with famous intellectual battles. In the natural sciences, these have usually led to decisive victories, with good science ousting bad. There are few Ptolemaic astronomers left, or believers in the phlogiston theory of combustion. In the social sciences, the situation is different. There have been famous battles galore, but no decisive victories. Indeed, it is characteristic of the social sciences that their battles are interminable, temporary defeats being followed by the regrouping of the defeated forces for a renewed assault.
That economics is not a natural science is clear from the inconclusive engagements that ...
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House of Lords Debate: Government Statistics
Robert Skidelsky
Hansard: column 84-6
| Monday, June 01, 2009
My Lords, I should like to take the opportunity provided by the question of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, to raise two topics, one general and one relating to the particular issue of inflation statistics.
My general comment is that I am appalled by the degree of statistical illiteracy abroad. Almost every time I read a newspaper I am aware that the journalists writing it have no knowledge of statistics. They simply pluck out things to create stories, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, and therefore there is constant statistical abuse. Of course, it is very hard to be against more information but sometimes I think we would be better ...
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Anatomy of Thatcherism
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Wednesday, May 13, 2009
London – Thirty years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher came to power. Although precipitated by local conditions, the Thatcher (or more broadly the Thatcher-Reagan) revolution became an instantly recognizable global brand for a set of ideas that inspired policies to free markets from government interference. Three decades later, the world is in a slump, and many people attribute the global crisis to these very ideas.
Indeed, even beyond the political left, the Anglo-American model of capitalism is deemed to have failed. It is held culpable for the near financial meltdown. But 30 years of hindsight enable us to judge which elements of the ...
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