Adair Turner is the jewel in the crown of British public servants. He is one of a tiny minority in public life today capable of thinking and acting at the highest level. Economics after the Crisis, based on three lectures he delivered at the London School of Economics in 2010, is a thinking person’s delight, … Continue reading Does economic growth make you happy?

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: easy money, high rollers and the great credit crash by Charles R. Morris Public Affairs £13.99 The Credit Crunch: housing bubbles, globalization and the worldwide economic crisis by Graham Turner Pluto Press. Paperback. £14.99 The Conscience of a Liberal: reclaiming America from the Right By Paul Krugman Allen Lane. £20. Common … Continue reading Book Review: On the threshold – of what?

Decline of the Public by David Marquand Polity. Paperback, £14.99 The world is filling up with disillusioned Blairites, and not just because of the Prime Minister's unswerving support for George W. Bush's foreign policy. David Marquand swells the chorus with this powerful and eloquent polemic. Marquand hoped that a "New Labour" Government would reinvigorate "the … Continue reading Book Review: Now You Don’t

The Stakeholder Society by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott Yale University Press. £16.95. In the 1980s, both Communism and democratic socialism succumbed to globalization. There is much about this double defeat which is still mysterious, not least its rough coincidence in time. What is clear is that, from the 1970s onwards, socialism started to recede. … Continue reading Book Review: A stake in the heart

Shaw was much older than Keynes. He was born in 1856, Keynes in 1883. He was a Victorian, Keynes an Edwardian. When their lives started to criss-cross after the First World War, Keynes was in his forties, Shaw already in his seventies. There is a photograph of them together on the steps of the Fitzwilliam … Continue reading Doing good and being good

False Dawn: Delusions of global capitalism by John Gray Granta Books £17.99 While reading John Gray's False Dawn, a diatribe against global capitalism, I had to keep reminding myself that I was reviewing a book, not a person. Gray's intellectual gyrations have become legendary. I am told he was a socialist in the 1970s. He … Continue reading What’s wrong with global capitalism?

The character of an educational system can most readily be understood by discovering who controls it. In 1979, the answer was reasonably clear. To use today's fashionable term, there were five main educational stakeholders: local authorities, teachers' unions, colleges of education, examination boards and the central government. Of these, the most import-ant were the local … Continue reading Essay: First steps in making schools independent

India's Economic Reforms 1991-2001 By Vijay Joshi and I. M. D. Little 282pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press £25 The decade of the 1980s was a historical watershed. The twentieth century has been dominated by collectivism - the planning and control of economic life by governments. In the 1980s, collectivism collapsed, both as a project and as … Continue reading Book Review: The road of excess leads to wisdom

The Good Society By John Kenneth Galbraith Sinclair-Stevenson. £12.99 It is hard to be critical of someone who writes as wittily and pithily as John Kenneth Galbraith. But any temptation to undue leniency on this score should be resisted. An economist's track record is more important than his style, and Galbraith's is not good. Twenty … Continue reading Book Review: Whatever happened to the New Industrial State?

Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty By Andrew Gamble Oxford: Polity. £45 Friedrich von Hayek's career is a story of death and resurrection. He was born in Vienna in 1899 and died in Freiburg in 1992, the most famous survivor of the once famous Austrian school of economics. For much of his life he fought … Continue reading Book Review: After serfdom