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Articles from Syndicated Column "Against the Current" (for Project Syndicate)
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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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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The Treason of the Economists
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Monday, April 13, 2009
LONDON – All epoch-defining events are the result of conjunctures – the correlation of normally unconnected events that jolt humanity out of a rut. Such conjunctures create what the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swans” – unpredictable events with a vast impact. A small number of Black Swans, Taleb believes, “explain almost everything in our world.”
The prosperity of the first age of globalization before 1914, for example, resulted from a successful constellation of developments: falling transport and communication costs, the technological breakthroughs of the second industrial revolution, the pacific state of international ...
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A Warrant of Hypocrisy
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Friday, March 13, 2009
LONDON – Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) upheld the request of the court’s chief prosecutor to issue an arrest warrant for Omar el-Bashir, the President of Sudan, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bashir responded by expelling foreign aid agencies looking after the refugee camps in Darfur.
This is the first time that a sitting head of state has been indicted for war crimes, with reaction around the world mainly divided between those who hailed the move as a great step for international justice and those who condemned it as colonialism. Both positions are hopelessly buried in ... Continue reading...
Shaky Social Contracts
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Friday, February 13, 2009
London – “Enrich yourselves,” China’s Deng Xiaoping told his fellow countrymen when he started dismantling Mao Zedong’s failed socialist model. In fact, elites everywhere have always lived by this injunction, and ordinary people have not minded very much, provided that the elites fulfill their part of the bargain: protect the country against its enemies and improve living conditions. It is this implied social contract that is now endangered by economic collapse.
Of course, the terms of the contract vary with place and time. In nineteenth-century Europe, the rich were expected to be frugal. Conspicuous consumption was eschewed. The rich ...
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