Why the values that have shaped the West’s socioeconomic landscape appear to be in decline COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | Reading this fall’s selection of new nonfiction books, one cannot help but recall W.B. Yeats’ prescient lines from The Second Coming: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center …
Read More »
Why we would be wise to give it another chance before we resign ourselves to the capitalist-socialist conflict COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | In 2009, while the world economy was still reeling from the global financial crisis, Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas observed that “everyone is a Keynesian in the foxhole.” …
Read More »
Unchecked financial blacklisting, fueled by regulatory zeal, is neither reasonable nor prudent COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the driving force behind the campaign for the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, recently caused an uproar when he revealed …
Read More »
This state of affairs should not only be better than previous state, it must cover evils of transition COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | One of the regrettable consequences of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was the advent of the pseudoscience known as geopolitics. Drawing inspiration from Darwin’s concepts of …
Read More »
Danger in West’s `human-centered’ regulating of AI, converging with China’s authoritarian model COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | With investors pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence-related startups, the generative AI frenzy is beginning to look like a speculative bubble akin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s and the South …
Read More »
At a time of geopolitical conflict and ideological polarisation, can we prevent it being weaponized? COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, scientist Victor Frankenstein famously uses dead body parts to create a hyperintelligent “superhuman” monster that – driven mad by human cruelty and …
Read More »
The national budget’s purpose should be to use fiscal policy to protect the least well-off from disruptive blows COMMENT | Robert Skidelsky | In 1969, the British financial journalist Samuel Brittan published a book called `Steering the Economy: The Role of the Treasury’. At the time, it was still widely assumed that …
Read More »
Geopolitics is once again threatening to break international order lacking strong political foundations COMMENT | Robert Skidelsky | Is the world economy globalising or deglobalising? The answer would have seemed obvious in 1990. Communism had just collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe. In China, Deng Xiaoping was unleashing capitalist enterprise. And …
Read More »
The sanctions imposed so far on Russia do not yet threaten the survival of the Russian state. But President Vladimir Putin may regard a Western attempt to cut off the remainder of Russia’s international trade, especially in energy, as an existential threat. COMMENT | ROBERT SKIDELSKY | The West has …
Read More »
The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price