14th of December 2024

Til denne uges Fri Tænkning har jeg talt med den britiske økonom og historiker Robert Skidelsky, der siden 1991 har siddet i det britiske parlaments overhus. I de første ti år som konservativ, men siden da har Skidelsky ikke repræsenteret et politisk parti. Han har tidligere været medlem af både Labour og Socialdemokratiet, som han var med til at stifte og forlod, da det i 1988 blev slået sammen med Det Liberale Parti under et nyt navn, Liberaldemokraterne. 

Skidelsky blev født i 1939 i Kina, fordi familien drev en kulmine og fabrikker dér, efter at de var blevet tvunget til at forlade Rusland, da bolsjevikkerne i 1917 greb magten, og der udbrød borgerkrig. Skidelsky vendte tilbage til Storbritannien under Anden Verdenskrig efter sammen med sine forældre at

23 November 2024

This book tells three stories about the impact of machines on the human condition: on the way  we work, on our freedom, and on our physical survival. Each story contains within it a vision of heaven and hell: the promise of relief from work, freedom to think our own thoughts, and almost indefinite improvement of health and extension of life   confronts  their  opposites  in the spectre of human uselessness, of Orwelliam thought control, and of  man made disaster.

Let me tell the positives and downsides of each story as quickly as I can.

The first is about technology’s promise   to free us from work. In a short essay Economic  Possibilities for  our Grandchildren, dating from 1930, the economist  John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now most of us would only

19 November 2024

Introduction

As we all know  Frankenstein was the  scientist in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of that name, who invented a human machine, which he intended   to be a benefactor,  but  which  turned out to be a monster. The question I want to address this evening is: can we avoid  our technology destroying us?  This is the most important thread running through my  book, Mindless, just published in the United States.  It discusses   the impact of machines on jobs, on freedom, on our survival as a species. The question which dominates all three concerns   the impact of machines on our humanness . Today we ponder whether there is still time to  control The Machine before it controls us.  I will talk about  three Frankensteins who wanted to  create gods and created

November 22nd, 2024

There are many reasons for regretting the resurrection of Donald Trump, but one overwhelming reason for welcoming it is that he is a peacemaker, not a war maker, and will actively leverage America’s power to pacify an increasingly dangerous world.

Western leaders do not actively seek war with Russia, China, or Iran. But they do not actively seek peace. Ukraine is a case in point.

Our leaders have repeatedly stated that it is up to Ukraine to define the terms on which it will make peace. Meanwhile, they will continue to supply it with ‘all it takes’ for victory. Given that the big demographic and military imbalance between Ukraine and Russia precludes a Ukrainian victory at the present level of support, this stance leaves only two options: Ukraine’s defeat

11th of November 2024

My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge.

The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had underestimated what it called austerity’s negative multipliers, which is simply code for it having been disastrously wrong in estimating the negative effects of austerity.

The cost of austerity has been severe. Median per capita income is lower than it was in 2010. The public debt to GDP ratio has

21st of October 2024

I am so happy to have been asked to contribute to this round table in honour of David. We were close friends for over fifty years. All who knew him well could sense the extraordinary unity between his life and work. His life bore testimony to his ideals. There were no obvious tensions, loose pieces. I want to capture something of what we got from him because his thinking remains an indispensable fount of wisdom in an increasingly deranged world.

Let me start though with his idea of order, and how it fits into the discourse of interstate relations, because it was as a theorist of world order that he made his most sapient contributions.

Theories of international relations fall into two main categories: empire and balance of power.

Imperial rule was the

My interview on my new book with Andrew Keen has just been released. Please find it on the link below: https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2229-robert-skidelsky-worries

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Below is my speech on Ukraine in the House of Lords on the 25th of October. Unfortunately, time constraints forced me to leave out two bits of my argument which I will put in brackets in the text.

“My Lords, I am usually put last on the speakers’ list in any debate on this topic, but I treat that as a badge of honour. I welcome the opportunity we have been given to take note. I have been taking note of the Government’s position on Ukraine for over two years now. It is unchanging: the promise, endlessly repeated, to support Ukraine “up to the hilt”—to do “whatever it takes”. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, has simply repeated this with his usual eloquence.

What Ukraine thinks it takes is shown by President Zelensky’s latest victory plan: the Russian army must be driven out of Crimea

July 19, 2024

This essay falls into three parts. First, I  discuss the question of what it is which makes  humans unique — that is, irreplaceable.  Second, I consider whether  machines  on balance  enhance or diminish humanness.   This has become an issue of the moment  with the growth of machine intelligence. Finally, I try to answer two questions: how can we secure our survival as  human beings? Is it worth trying to do so?

A quick preview of  my answer to the first question. Some bits of humans are  clearly replaceable. They fall into the category of  spare parts. The bits which aren’t are what used to be called soul and which we now call mind: in religious language,  the bits which link  us to the Divine. We urgently need to decide  which bits should and should not be

17th of October, 2024

Over the years, “Fortress Europe” has relied on a mix of bribery and force to keep out undocumented migrants fleeing wars, famine, and conditions of extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. But such measures are no solution to a problem that ultimately stems from much larger global and historical forces.

LONDON – In 2023, 150,000 migrants crossed the Central Mediterranean in small boats from North Africa, fleeing war, pestilence, and starvation in their own countries. Over the years, thousands have died making this journey, because their boats have capsized or caught fire. Yet while these tragedies regularly evoke humanitarian concerns, the steady flow of migrants has also fuelled right-wing nativist parties across the democratic world.

A prescient, but now

“My Lords, in taking part in this debate, I must declare an interest: recently, I was a victim of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller. Although this is not the kind of interest a Member is normally obliged to declare, I believe that my personal experience has given me a certain insight into the way the system works, which may be of public interest.

I welcome the committee’s aim to shorten and clarify the code and guide wherever possible—they require drastic pruning—but, because their expansion is part of a more general demand for increased transparency in public life, it is very hard to know how and where to stand out against the tide; one then sort of looks rather like King Canute. That is a problem the committee must face.

When I was made a Peer

“”My Lords, I was not on the committee and therefore would like to allow myself a few mild criticisms of a very thought-provoking report. I will touch on three aspects of its central problem: “Who watches the watchdogs?”

First, a bit of history might be helpful. In its present form, this challenge was created by the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s, which produced a new dividing line between the state and the private sector. Previously, 

the Government owned the public utilities and were accountable to Parliament, while the private sector was in the hands of private companies that were in theory accountable to the market. That was the model, anyway, but it was swept away by the reforms of the 1980s. Injected into the private sector by Margaret Thatcher and her successors were some

“Skidelsky, a British economist, draws on literature, political philosophy, history, and cultural developments in this brooding meditation on the rise of artificial intelligence. The promise of a better world, he warns, “is open only to a tiny minority”.” –THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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Letter: The New Statesman, 6th of September 2024

It is to the great credit of the New Statesman that it allowed two such opposing views on Ukraine to be published in its issue of 23 August. Brendan Simms says that Britain must do everything it can to “empower” Ukraine to restore its 1991 frontiers; Wolfgang Münchau writes that waning German and US support for “doing whatever it takes” to expel Russia from Ukraine will force a negotiated peace.

Simms and those like him who advocate an extension of the war into Russian territory entirely ignores the possibility that, in response, the Russians will deploy more dangerous weapons of their own, in an escalation to the nuclear level. Why is a professor of international relations at Cambridge encouraging Ukraine to strike cruise missiles

The Spectator, 13 January 2024

Monetarism, with which his name is associated, has long defined economic policy. But what would Friedman have made of the banking collapse, so soon after his death in 2006?

The Keynesian economist Nicholas Kaldor called Milton Friedman one of the two most evil men of the 20th century. (Friedman was in distinguished company.) The ‘scourge’ he inflicted on the world was monetarism, a product of what Kaldor called Friedman’s Big Lie – of which more later. Moral judgments aside, how does Friedman rank in the world of 20th-century economists? By common consent, he stands with Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes at the apex of his profession. All wrestled with the defining problem of their age: the radical economic and political instability of the

My latest book has so far have been published in three different places under three different titles. In the UK (hardback November 2023, paperback November 2024). It was entitled “The Machine Age” An Idea, A History,. A Warning. In Germany it was published in April 2024 under the title: Werden Wir Ersetzt: Vom Fortschrittswahn zu einer Ökonomie des gerechten Lebens. In America it was published in October 2024, under the title of: Mindless: The Human Condition in the Machine Age.

I was interviewd about the german edition by Martin Burckhardt and Hopkins Stanley. Pleas find the video here: https://martinburckhardt.substack.com/p/talking-to-robert-skidelsky

The American edittion has so far been reviewd by John Berthelsen in the Asian Sentinel on the 21st of September 2024.

Project Syndicate 18th of September, 2024

“Shortly after taking office, the United Kingdom’s new Labour government announced the discovery of a massive shortfall in public finances. While much of the political debate has centered on the size of this fiscal hole, the real culprit is the set of arbitrary rules that British governments have imposed on themselves since 1997.“

LONDON – Shortly after taking office, the United Kingdom’s new Labour government announced the discovery of a £22 billion ($29 billion) “black hole” in public finances, allegedly left by its Conservative predecessors. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had pledged to revive growth after years of economic stagnation, rising public debt, and a record-high tax burden, said he had “no choice” but to implement

Project Syndicate 21st of August, 2024

“Even though recorded performances provide some valuable benefits, most people prefer live events. That is because the audience is part of the production, and the two sides exchange energy and the gamut of human emotions in a way that would be impossible in any other setting.“

SALZBURG – While taking in the immensity of Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony at this year’s Salzburg Festival, one of classical music’s most celebrated events, I kept returning to one question: Why do most people prefer live music to a recording?

Seated in the front row of a box directly opposite the orchestra, I had a full view of the stage. But what value did I derive from being there, as opposed to watching an expertly recorded performance? To be sure, a recorded

There is only one acceptable end to the war in Ukraine. And it doesn’t involve giving Kyiv the weapons it would need to entirely drive Russia out

Aug 14, 2024

“The nation must clearly speak with one voice,” declared Baroness Neville-Rolfe, then Conservative minister of state at the cabinet office, on 20th February 2024. No remark so neatly captures the mindset of Britain’s foreign policy and defence establishment on Ukraine. 

The official view, from which Labour has never dissented, is that Britain must give Ukraine “all that it takes” to drive the Russian invader from its soil. “We need consistently and reliably to do whatever Ukraine needs to win this war,” said Grant Shapps as Tory defence minister, in May. “The British government must leave the Kremlin in no doubt that it

Last Friday’s news was dominated by the ‘biggest IT outage in history’, as   a bug in a routine software update cascaded into a global crisis.  Millions of computers were knocked out, thousands of flights  cancelled,  hospital operations  postponed,  television channels went off the air, payments systems  crashed,  supply chains  froze. In  short the digital foundations of our civilisation were  shaken  for hours and in some cases days.

There was no mention that I could see  of  E.M.Forster’s  extraordinarily prescient  novella The Machine Stops. Written in 1906,  it  depicts a humanity wholly dependent on machine-provided services. Then the Machine stops working, little by little at first, then completely. Civilisation comes  to an end,  ‘strangled in the garments [it] has woven’.

In his interesting opinion article (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, 27 July), Ed Newton-Rex misses one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their powers of spying.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every party member’s home, and in all workplaces and public spaces. This allowed Big Brother to monitor individuals’ actions and conversations, while he himself remained invisible.

Today’s digital control systems operating through electronic tracking devices and voice and facial recognition systems are simply Big Brother’s control devices

Sir, William Hague poses a false alternative: letting Russia win or allowing Ukraine to fire western-supplied missiles deep in Russian territory. There is better way: a negotiated peace, involving neither a Ukrainian defeat nor military escalation. This requires a recognition that Ukraine has already won its most important victory. Putin expected to be in Kyiv within a week: Ukraine, with our help, has made sure he will never get there. Some sacrifice of territory in return for real, not nominal, independence, would still leave the balance of a compromise peace enormously in Ukraine’s favour.

Readiness for compromise also requires shedding the dangerous delusion that a postponement of negotiations will improve Ukraine’s military position. Ukraine may well be supplied with more and

Russia’s latest military gains in the Donetsk region (Report, July 5) reinforce the case for a negotiated settlement of the war in Ukraine. The US and its allies support Ukraine’s key war aim, which is a return to the 2014 frontiers, ie, Russia’s expulsion from Crimea and Donbas. But all informed analysts agree that short of a serious escalation of war, the likeliest outcome will be continued stalemate on the ground, with a not insignificant chance of a Russian victory.

This conclusion points to the desirability, even urgency, of a negotiated peace, not least for the sake of Ukraine itself. Reluctance by the official west to accept a negotiated peace rests on the belief that anything short of a complete Ukrainian victory would allow Putin to “get away with it”.

But this ignores

Labour’s Economic Plan Lacks Keynesian Ambition

Jul 24, 2024 Robert Skidelsky

Today’s risk-averse economic climate calls for increased public investment to attract reluctant private capital. But British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s insistence on adhering to strict fiscal rules casts doubt on his ability to pull the United Kingdom out of its economic malaise.

LONDON – In a recent speech, the United Kingdom’s new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, reiterated her commitment to “fiscal rules.” These rules require that “the current budget must move into balance” and that “the [national] debt must be falling as a share of the economy by [the Labour government’s] fifth year.” This involves reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio from its current level of 100% within five years and

My Lords, I welcome the new Front Bench. I know the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, as an eloquent speaker and a doughty defender of the good fight—if he is allowed to.

I believe the Starmer era will be defined by its handling of foreign affairs. As many noble Lords have pointed out, the world is very dangerous place. There are three powder kegs: in the Far East, in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Each is capable of igniting a world war. I concentrate on Ukraine because it is on the outcome of this conflict that our Government can hope to have their biggest influence.

The gracious Speech says—the noble Lord, Lord Moore, also quoted this—that:

“My Government will continue to give its full support to Ukraine and its people and it will endeavour to play a leading role in providing

23rd July 2021 (Published online)

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May 1 2024 William White is right (Letters, April 29) to say that John Maynard Keynes regarded the rate of interest as “highly conventional”, but he should have quoted the whole sentence from chapter 15 of The General Theory: “The difficulties in the way of [full employment] ensue from the association of a conventional and highly stable rate of interest with a fickle and highly unstable marginal efficiency of capital.” It was for this reason that Keynes advocated an active role for fiscal policy. For as he put it in 1932: “The lender, with his confidence shattered by his experiences, will continue to ask for new enterprise rates of interest which the borrower cannot expect to earn.” The current disabling of fiscal policy has thrown the whole onus of demand management on monetary

Robert was recently interviewed by Martin Burckhardt, the German cultural philosopher, about his new book The Machine Age in Germany. Below is a link to a video of the interview:

Link: https://martinburckhardt.substack.com/p/talking-to-robert-skidelsky

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April 19, 2024 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

George Orwell’s great contribution to dystopian literature was not his depiction of the modern surveillance state, but rather his insight that if everyone used only state-approved language, surveillance would become redundant. The difference today is that Newspeak has emerged from the mechanisms of liberal democracy itself.

LONDON – Language shapes our thinking and perception of the world and, consequently, what happens in it. That is why I worry less about the troubling state of the world nowadays than about the words we use to describe it.

For example, we use the word “war” to describe a phenomenon that exists independently of our term for it. But if we consistently describe and perceive the world as hostile, it tends to become so. By the same

March 21, 2024 ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Faced with a choice between parasitic capitalism and emerging neo-fascism, it is no wonder that Western societies are increasingly pessimistic. While pessimism has pervaded previous eras, today’s mood is sustained, and partly defined, by the absence of a redemptive vision.

LONDON – In 2003, the literary critic Fredric Jameson famously observed that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For the first time in two centuries, he noted, capitalism was viewed as both destructive and irreversible. Waning faith in the possibility of a post-capitalist future has nurtured deep pessimism.

This prevailing despair evokes John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he warned