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Articles from Syndicated Column "Against the Current" (for Project Syndicate)
Fictional Sovereignties
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Wednesday, August 19, 2009
London – A year ago, tiny Georgia tried to regain control over its breakaway enclave of South Ossetia. The Russians quickly expelled the Georgian army, to almost universal opprobrium from the West. South Ossetia, together with Abkhazia (combined population 300,000), promptly declared their “independence,” creating two new fictional sovereignties, and acquiring in the process all the official trappings of statehood: national heroes, colorful uniforms, anthems, flags, frontier posts, military forces, presidents, parliaments, and, most important, new opportunities for smuggling and corruption.
So far, only Russia and Nicaragua recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russian recognition was widely seen as retaliation for
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Economic reform needs a dose of reality
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate
| Monday, July 13, 2009
Mainstream economics subscribes to the theory that markets "clear" continuously. The theory's big idea is that if wages and prices are completely flexible, resources will be fully employed, so that any shock to the system will result in instantaneous adjustment of wages and prices to the new situation.
This system-wide responsiveness depends on economic agents having perfect information about the future, which is manifestly absurd. Nevertheless, mainstream economists believe that economic actors possess enough information to lend their theorising a sufficient dose of reality.
The aspect of the theory that applies particularly to financial markets is called the "efficient market theory," which should have been blown sky-high by last
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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 times higher than in Southeast Asia, and Africans were expected to live two years longer on average. In
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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 Thatcher revolution should be preserved, and which should be amended in the light of today’s global
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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 relations, and Great Britain’s successful management of the gold standard. By contrast, in the
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