Robert Skidelsky

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The tenth anniversary of the start of the Great Recession was the occasion for an elegant essay by the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, who noted how little the debate about the causes and consequences of the crisis have changed over the last decade. Whereas the Great Depression of the 1930s produced Keynesian economics, and the stagflation of the 1970s produced Milton Friedman’s monetarism, the Great Recession has produced no similar...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Dispelling anxiety about robots has become a major preoccupation of business apologetics. The commonsense, and far from foolish, view is that the more jobs are automated, the fewer there will be for humans to perform. The headline example is the driverless car. If cars can drive themselves, what will happen to chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and so on?   Economic theory tells us that our worries are groundless. Attaching machines to workers increases their...

  Lord Skidelsky (CB)My Lords, I will concentrate, as is my wont, on the macroeconomic implications of the Budget. That is not to say that supply-side questions are not important—of course they are. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Maude, that a Government should not be exempt from the efficiency expected of the private sector. However, in general, efficiency is closely related to investment. The more investment there is, the more efficient an economy is likely to be, for the...

  Sociology, anthropology, and history have been making large inroads into the debate on immigration. Homo economicus, who lives for bread alone, has, it seems, given way to someone for whom a sense of belonging is at least as important as eating. This makes one doubt that hostility to mass immigration is simply a protest against job losses, depressed wages, and growing inequality. Economics has certainly played a part in the upsurge of identity politics, but the crisis of identity...

  With all the protectionist talk coming from US President Donald Trump’s administration, it is surprising that no one has mentioned, much less sought to invoke, an obvious tool for addressing persistent external imbalances: the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement’s “scarce-currency clause.”That clause, contained in Article 7 of the agreement, authorizes countries, “after consultation with the [International Monetary] Fund, temporarily to impose limitations on freedom of exchange...

  Bloomberg interview on central bank independence, and the role of monetary and fiscal policy 20 years after the Bank of England was made independent; followed by a discussion about European politics and the future of the European Union after the recent election in Germany. The interview starts after about 1 minute and continues until about 17 minutes 40 seconds in: Comments:There are no comments for this entry...

  Bloomberg interview on central bank independence, and the role of monetary and fiscal policy 20 years after the Bank of England was made independent: www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-09-28/skidelsky-central-bank-independence-won-t-last-video Comments:There are no comments for this entry...  Add comment: Name*: Email*: Location: URL: Comments*:

  Who runs the European Union? On the eve of Germany’s general election, that is a very timely question. One standard reply is, “The EU’s member states” – all 28 of them. Another is, “The European Commission.” But Paul Lever, a former British ambassador to Germany, offers a more pointed answer: Berlin Rules is the title of his new book, in which he writes, “Modern Germany has shown that politics can achieve what used to require war.” Germany is the EU’s most populous state and its...

  David Kynaston is a wonderful social historian, with three massive volumes on post-war Britain and many others to his name. He has been a leading practitioner of “history from below,” reflecting the experiences of ordinary people. He has now turned to telling the story of one of Britain’s most powerful and mysterious institutions—the Bank of England, from its founding in 1694 up to 2013. He faced a number of challenges. Anyone writing an official history is bound to pull his...

   I don’t want to say too much about Nicky Kaldor’s actual stylised facts, but about the methodological implication of the stylised facts approach. Paul Samuelson famously said, “those who can do economics, do it; those who can’t, babble about methodology”. Kaldor could certainly do economics, but he needed a methodology to enable him to do what he wanted to do. This is my excuse for babbling. But let me start with his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1966, “Causes of the Slow...