“What a commentary on the state of twentieth-century capitalism,” mused “motivational speaker” Jordan Belfort as he looked back on his life of fraud, sex, and drugs. As head of the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, he fleeced investors of hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 1990’s. I saw Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of … Continue reading The Wolves of Wall Street
Category: Journalism
The Osborne Audit: What have we learned?
On Wednesday, for the first time in four Budgets, George Osborne will be able to claim plausibly that Britain has come out of the Great Recession. Growth was 1.8 per cent in 2013 and is expected to be between 2.4 and 2.8 per cent in 2014. That’s the good news. The bad news is that … Continue reading The Osborne Audit: What have we learned?
Death to Machines?
At the start of the Industrial Revolution, textile workers in the Midlands and the North of England, mainly weavers, staged a spontaneous revolt, smashing machinery and burning factories. Their complaint was that the newfangled machines were robbing them of their wages and jobs. The rebels took their name, and inspiration, from the apocryphal Ned Ludd, … Continue reading Death to Machines?
Witter: Robert Skidelsky
The world’s fastest interview: 140 characters max per answer — the economist, 74, on happiness, taxation and loyalty in politics Witter: You’ve consumed political parties with abandon. Now you’re a cross-bencher. Are you at all loyal to any of the parties you have belonged to? RS: I do not accept Disraeli’s dictum: “Damn your principles! Stick to … Continue reading Witter: Robert Skidelsky
What Makes Us Human?
Let’s start with an addled view of what it is to be human. According to economists, it is the ability to calculate. Their picture of the human is that of homo economicus ‘economic man’, a calculating machine who is always weighing up the costs and benefits of every course of action. Economics is about ‘economizing’ … Continue reading What Makes Us Human?
Inventing the World’s Money
The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil Council on Foreign Relations/Princeton University Press, 449 p., $29.95 1. Do we need another book on Bretton Woods, the conference in 1944 in New Hampshire that established a new monetary system following World … Continue reading Inventing the World’s Money
Shale Gas to the Rescue?
The developed world is slowly emerging from the Great Recession, but a question lingers: How fast and how far will the recovery go? One big source of pessimism has been the idea that we are running out of investment opportunities – and have been since before the 2008 crash. But is that true? The last … Continue reading Shale Gas to the Rescue?
Four Fallacies of the Second Great Depression
The period since 2008 has produced a plentiful crop of recycled economic fallacies, mostly falling from the lips of political leaders. Here are my four favorites. The Swabian Housewife. “One should simply have asked the Swabian housewife,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. “She would have told us … Continue reading Four Fallacies of the Second Great Depression
The folly of George Osborne
The Chancellor has been celebrating the recent estimates showing that the economy has grown by 0.8 per cent in the third quarter of this year. However, these forecasts do not tell us anything about what is most important: well-being. National well-being is the only object of economic growth, but GDP data says nothing about it. … Continue reading The folly of George Osborne
Misconceiving British Austerity
Was the British government’s decision to embrace austerity in the wake of the global financial crisis the right policy, after all? Yes, claims the economist Kenneth Rogoff in a much-discussed recent commentary. Rogoff argues that while, in hindsight, the government should have borrowed more, at the time there was a real danger that Britain would … Continue reading Misconceiving British Austerity
Robert Skidelsky 