Robert Skidelsky

Lord Robert Skidelsky will be holding a lecture on The Dream of Machinery: Liberation versus Control at the IWM (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna on Tuesday the 15th March. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Lord Robert Skidelsky will be lecturing on “The  Ukrainian Crisis:A brief history lesson” on Thursday 10th March at Brighton College. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Lord Robert Skidelsky will be lecturing on “Why Keynes?” on Wednesday, June 15, 6 pm at Innsbruck University Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Martin Wolf is right to say that Vladimir Putin has ignited an indefensible war against Ukraine (Opinion, March 2). That it is worse than a crime is a folly highlighted by your report about Kharkiv, described as “another Stalingrad” (March 3). You do not call Ukrainians your brothers, then bomb them into submission. Whatever the war’s immediate results, Putin has ensured that Russia’s western borders become “ungovernable”. Belarus will be next on the list for “brotherly” persuasion, once...

The COVID-19 pandemic is an invitation to what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction: a chance to liquidate obsolete investments and to create something new, better, and, in the jargon, more ‘resilient’ and ‘sustainable’. Schumpeter understood that humankind does not progress in a balanced way, rather it lurches from one extreme to another, each extreme producing its own reaction. In political economy, the subject of this contribution, the excesses of the...

In der aktuellen Corona-Krise wiederholen sich die Muster früherer Krisen. Vor dem Hintergrund sinkender Produktion und steigender Arbeitslosigkeit versuchen Notenbanken und Staaten weltweit ihre Ökonomien vor einem größeren Absturz zu bewahren. Die Rezeptur für diese Stabilisierungspolitik basiert auf der Lehre des britischen Ökonomen John Maynard Keynes, die dieser vor dem Hintergrund der Großen Depression im Jahr 1936 in seiner „Allgemeinen Theorie der Beschäftigung, des Zinses und des...

The theorist of “creative destruction,” one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, was no stranger to violent disruption in his personal life, as a new biography reveals Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) was one of the greatest economists of the 20th century—commonly bracketed with such giants as Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. He is best known for his theory of “creative destruction”—the view that the capitalist system progresses by constantly revolutionising its economic...

Nato governments have rightly said they are willing to address Russia’s security concerns, but then say in the same breath that Russia has no legitimate security concerns because Nato is a purely defensive alliance. Whether we like it or not, a Nato that now borders Russia and could in future border even more of Russia is seen by Russia as a security concern. In 2014 Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post that “internationally [Ukraine] should pursue a posture comparable to that...

In this episode, Liam talks to Professor Lord Robert Skidelsky, Biographer of John Maynard Keynes – the most influential economist of the 20th century. In this wide-ranging interview, Skidelsky discusses how he helped David Owen to set up the SDP in the early 1980s, how economic policymaking works and how he developed from a historian into an economist. “Britain’s history was forged outside Europe, not within Europe,” Lord Skidelsky remarks, reflecting on the...

In the past, humans used machines, but did not live in a machine age. In other words, machines did not determine their conditions of life. These conditions barely changed over thousands of years. Today, we depend on machines for the way we work, the way we think, and the way we live. The machine age has come in a rush. It raises three questions. How and why has it come about? What has been its effect on the human condition? And what influence, if any, do we have on the further ‘march...