Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky, eminent biographer of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), whose ideas continue to reverberate and influence government policies across the world, and Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning American economist, debate what Keynes might propose in the current climate of international economic turmoil. Can they interpret for our times Keynes’s belief that the political problem of humankind is to combine three things: “economic efficiency, social justice...

November 13 2020Even if a successful rollout of a new COVID-19 vaccine causes the current health crisis to recede by next spring, the unemployment crisis will remain. That is especially true in the United Kingdom, where fiscal stimulus is urgently needed to avert a lost decade – if not a lost generation – of growth. EDINBURGH/LONDON – In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, both the US and European economies are gearing up for large-scale job creation. US President-elect Joe Biden has...

I will confine my remarks to Part 5 of this Bill. I find myself swayed by two completely opposite accusations of bad faith. The government accuses    EU negotiators of bad faith in seeking to erect  ‘unreasonable’ customs barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK . Opponents of the Bill  say the bad faith is our own government’s. The Withdrawal Agreement set up a  Joint Committee to  resolve trade disputes; the government have chosen not to use it So, as Ed Milliband...

Social-media companies’ only incentive to tackle the problem of fake news is to minimize the bad press that disseminating it has generated for them. But unless and until telling the truth serves the bottom line, it is futile to expect them to change course. LONDON – On October 6, US President Donald Trump posted a tweet claiming that the common flu sometimes kills “over 100,000” Americans in a year. “Are we going to close down our Country?” he asked. “No, we have learned to live with...

The UK government’s proposed “breach” of its Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union is purely a negotiating ploy. Critics of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s tactics must argue their case on pragmatic rather than legal grounds. LONDON – Whenever the great and the good unite in approval or condemnation of something, my impulse is to break ranks. So, I find it hard to join the chorus of moral indignation at the UK government’s recent decision to “break international law” by amending...

In the long-run, Covid-19 may well change the way we work and live. It may – and should – lead us towards a greener, less consumption-driven economy. The question for now is what to do about the economic devastation it will bring in its wake. Around 730,000 UK jobs were lost between March and July, the biggest quarterly decline since 2009, and unemployment is forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility to reach its highest level since 1984 (11.9 per cent).  The coming downturn is...

The argument that public investment invariably “crowds out” private capital is wrong both theoretically and empirically. States have always played a leading role in allocating capital, either through direct investments, or by deliberately encouraging certain types of private investment.LONDON – Three economic effects of COVID-19 seem to be generally agreed upon. First, the developed world is on the brink of a severe recession. Second, there will be no automatic V-shaped recovery. And...

Historian Lord Robert Skidelsky reads a letter that John Maynard Keynes wrote to Friedrich Hayek about “The Road to Serfdom,” and then discusses with Rob Johnson the tense relationship between the two famous economists.