Robert Skidelsky

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This month marks the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, one of the agreements that brought World War I to a close. In a sense, the tables have turned. Whereas the treaty imposed huge reparations on Germany, today’s Germany has taken the lead in imposing a large debt obligation on its fellow eurozone member Greece. Although the creditor-debtor cards have been reshuffled since 1919, the game remains the same. Creditors want their pound of flesh, and debtors want to avoid giving it....

The funeral of Norman Stone took place on Friday 28 June in the Deak Lutheran Church in Budapest. His son Rupert asked me to be a pall bearer and I followed the coffin up the aisle behind the prime minister Viktor Orban. Historians Niall Ferguson and Harold James, among others, eulogised him. My presence was in a sense accidental. I happened to be spending a month in Vienna and I had come over from to Budapest to see him the previous week: on the day, in fact, he died. I had known Norman...

Debate, June 3, 2019 In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the...

Debate, June 3, 2019 In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the...

This month marks the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, one of the agreements that brought World War I to a close. In a sense, the tables have turned. Whereas the treaty imposed huge reparations on Germany, today’s Germany has taken the lead in imposing a large debt obligation on its fellow eurozone member Greece. Although the creditor-debtor cards have been reshuffled since 1919, the game remains the same. Creditors want their pound of flesh, and debtors want to avoid giving it....

Lord Robert Skidelsky (United Kingdom), MP, House of Lords, UK Parliament; Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Warwick; Author of the Biography of John Maynard Keynes; Member of the British Academy

Lord Robert Skidelsky (United Kingdom), MP, House of Lords, UK Parliament; Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Warwick; Author of the Biography of John Maynard Keynes; Member of the British Academy

By Geoffrey Lyons In a 2015 article for Project Syndicate, historian Niall Ferguson accused Lord Robert Skidelsky of being “un-Keynesian” for refusing to admit that George Osborne’s austerity policies worked. Skidelsky’s position, Ferguson argued, wasn’t true to the great economist-statesman’s view that one ought to adjust their beliefs in the face of changing facts. Ferguson must have known this was a critical hit. It’s not that Skidelsky has come to identify his views with those of “the...