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As the Russia/Ukraine conflict has grown, a number of western commentators have reacted in horror, fearful of a new cold war and the great step backward that it might bring. This standpoint needs examining in some detail, as its assumptions are not at all obvious. In the first place there is a rather awkward elephant…
Continue reading If Putin Wants a Cold War, Then Let Him Have One…
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Rishi Sunak’s recent budget was going down like a lead balloon amongst a significant proportion of Tory backbenchers until he reiterated his long-term commitment to reducing taxes [a very non-specific motherhood and apple pie commitment for Tories; code for a yet further shift away from direct to indirect taxes, helping the better-off at the expense…
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In just a couple of years UBI has gone from the fringe to the mainstream of political discussion. What was once considered a rather wild response to the problem of inequality has become an apparently rational response to the way that the pandemic has accelerated the creation of an economic underclass. Desperate times call for…
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I would struggle to find a book that I could recommend more wholeheartedly than Gillian Tett’s recently published Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life Tett has a stellar reputation as a financial journalist, not least built on her prescience in being one of the few to foresee the financial crash of 2008. Anthro-Vision…
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I was intrigued by this story, the idea of a family abandoning its natural ties and loyalties in favour of an almost demonic political purpose. It seems to speak of a profound social breakdown, an unravelling of the natural order of things as a harbinger of approaching darkness. Characterising those of a radically different opinion…
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QAnon has been described, inter alia, as a conspiracy theory, an alternate reality game and as a cult. None of these descriptions are wrong, although none of them really capture the full nature of the beast. The Internet puts communications on steroids, with the result that information (whether true or false) moves at far faster…
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Amid the widespread concerns about growing inequality and excessive executive pay, I frequently think about Kurosawa’s classic 1954 movie Seven Samurai. It isn’t the samurai who come to mind, but rather the brigands who prey on the villagers who hire the samurai. The brigands’ business model is an effective one: they descend on the village…
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The economic crises of 2008 and now Covid-19 have been met by waves of quantitative easing – central bank injection of money into the economy through purchase of government bonds or other financial assets. As an anti-recessionary form of monetary stimulus the policy has only been partially effective, and has had some undesirable side-effects. Principal…
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The 2016 election result can no longer be dismissed as a one-off, a temporary aberration in American political life. More Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. So 2016 was no accident – seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump in 2020. Seventy-four million Americans were prepared to vote for a climate change denying…
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Giuseppe di Lampedusa In times of economic crisis all sorts of things get turned upside down: Keynesians become Monetarists while Monetarists become Keynesians. At the same time politicians and their most senior hired hands start listening to economists (for a while at least) whom they used to ignore. In such times di Lampedusa’s insight is…
Continue reading ‘Everything Needs to Change, So Everything Can Stay the Same’