Robert Skidelsky

Lord Robert Skidelsky (United Kingdom), Member of the House of Lords, UK Parliament Edward Skidelsky (United Kingdom), Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter; Author НА РУССКОМ: https://youtu.be/QsEG-soNS0k

[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...