Category: Economics

Reconsidering a Classic: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Reconsidering a Classic: Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

The seminar on March 19, with commentators Pius Adesanmi and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, focused on Walter Rodney’s influential and much debated book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, originally published in 1972. Rodney was a Guyanese scholar educated first at the University of the West Indies and then at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His pioneering work focused both on the slave trade and on the European colonization of Africa. Rodney was also active politically in Guyana, where he was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight.

Ha-Joon Chang on Free Markets and Free Trade

Bryan Bruce interviews Cambridge University Reader in Economics and best selling author Dr Ha-Joon Chang.

Creative Community for Peace in Letter to Jose Feliciano: Healing with Music in Colonial Times, Building Bridges Over the Bodies of the Oppressed

Right: Jose Feliciano Left: Steve Schnur

Jose Feliciano is scheduled to perform in apartheid Israel on October 10, at Nokia Stadium. Already he’s being sent messages professing liberal language of equality and harmony for all, by that elite club for the endless cycle of war profiteering, whitewashing and violence, otherwise known as “Creative Community for Peace” (CCfP). Creative Community for Peace is a specialist in apartheid PR. They’re mere existence is about diverting attention from Israel’s systematic daily war crimes against the Palestinian population under its control, by abusing the word “Peace” and shooting the messenger- Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists (BDS), who connect the dots between Israel’s image of itself and the reality of its erasure of the Palestinian narrative and people.

Unfortunately, Jose Feliciano, for the time being, endorses the “Creative Community for Peace” statement that has been sent to him, and has posted it on the website. Continue reading “Creative Community for Peace in Letter to Jose Feliciano: Healing with Music in Colonial Times, Building Bridges Over the Bodies of the Oppressed”

Creating a Learning Society

Creating a Learning Society with Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Professor Amartya Sen, at the LSE.

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Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman on the Economy

What do you get when you put two of the most well known and most widely cited economists in the world, both Nobel laureates, on stage together? A healthy dose of economic reality. Jojn Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman for a conversation on the economy.

Joseph Stiglitz: The Costs of Inequality

Joseph Stiglitz lecturing for TED on The Costs of Inequality.

Life and Debt

Life and Debt is a 2001 American documentary film directed by Stephanie Black. It examines the economic and social situation in Jamaica, and specifically the impact thereon of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s globalization policies. Its starting point is the essay A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid.*

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The global food waste scandal

A new report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimates that globally 30-50% of food is wasted. (Download the report.). In the following video Trstram Stuart, author of the 2009 book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, tackles the subject. Writing in the Financial Times Tristram quoted Lord Haskins, then one of the chief advisers to the government on food and farming, as estimating that 70% of food produced in Britain is wasted. This is obviously a striking example of market efficiency.

How Much Is Enough?

Lord Skidelsky, Emeritus professor of political economy and Dr Edward Skidelsky, lecturer in philosophy tackle the questions: What constitutes the good life? What is the true value of money? Why do we work such long hours merely to acquire greater wealth?

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Wimpish in America

by William A. Cook

Last month, Stuart Jeffries writing in the Guardian, observed, “Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative?” In 1840, Orestes Brownson in his essay “The Laboring Classes,” asked the same question, “…what shall government do? … Its first doing must be an undoing. … We want first the legislation which shall free the government, whether State of Federal, from the control of the Banks. … a banking system like ours, if sustained, necessarily and inevitably becomes the real and efficient government of the country.” How ironic that 172 years ago, only 49 years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Brownson notes, “… at the end of ten years (of) constant hostility, (we know) all too well the power of the Banks, and their fatal influence on the political action of the community.” He declares further that “uncompromising hostility” against the banking system should be the motto of every working man, and of “every friend of humanity.”

Brownson’s “Laboring Classes” is a call to action, virtually at the inception of the country, to put the control of the government back in the hands of the people. “The system must be destroyed….The system is at war with the rights and interest of labor, and it must go.” How ironic Jeffries’ observation of the current state of affairs when contrasted to that of Brownson.

“Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.”

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