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Articles from Syndicated Column "Against the Current" (for Project Syndicate)
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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The Unreality of the “Real” Business Cycle
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Tuesday, January 13, 2009
London – Testifying recently before a United States congressional committee, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that the recent financial meltdown had shattered his “intellectual structure.” I am keen to understand what he meant.
Since I have had no opportunity to ask him, I have to rely on his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, for clues. But that book was published in 2007 – before, presumably, his intellectual structure fell apart.
In his memoirs, Greenspan revealed that his favorite economist was Joseph Schumpeter, inventor of the concept of “creative destruction.” In Greenspan’s summary of Schumpeter’s thinking, a ...
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Perfect Losers
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Monday, December 22, 2008
London – Economics, it seems, has very little to tell us about the current economic crisis. Indeed, no less a figure than former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently confessed that his entire “intellectual edifice” had been “demolished” by recent events.
Scratch around the rubble, however, and one can come up with useful fragments. One of them is called “asymmetric information.” This means that some people know more about some things than other people. Not a very startling insight, perhaps. But apply it to buyers and sellers. Suppose the seller of a product knows more about its quality than the buyer does, or ...
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