Robert Skidelsky
Watch a podcast of
the new economics foundation’s conference ABOUT TIME, 11 January
Wednesday, February
15, 2012
The podcast of the
new economics foundation's ABOUT TIME event is now online at the LSE's website.
Robert Skidelsky,
Juliet Schor, Tim Jackson and Anna Coote discuss the need for a shorter working
week to distribute work more evenly across the population.
Good and Bad Deficits
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate |
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
LONDON – “Deficits are always bad,” thunder
fiscal hawks. Not so, replies strategic investment analyst H. Wood Brock in an
interesting new book, The American Gridlock. A proper assessment, Brock argues,
depends on the “composition and quality of total government spending.”
Government deficits incurred on current
spending for services or transfers are bad, because they produce no revenue and
add to the national debt. Deficits resulting from capital spending, by
contrast, are – or can be – good. If wisely administered, such spending
produces a revenue stream that services and eventually extinguishes the debt;
more importantly, it raises productivity, and thus improves a country’s
long-run growth potential.
Printing money and
tax cuts aren’t enough. We need real investment
Robert Skidelsky and
Felix Martin
New Statesman |
Monday, March 05, 2012
With less than a
month to go until Budget day, doubts over the government's austerity programme
are growing. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has
forecast that the British economy will shrink this year. The Office for
National Statistics has announced that, on the broadest measure, more than 6.3
million Britons are underemployed – the highest number since records began,
nearly 20 years ago.
Even Moody's,
arbiters of global finance, is no longer confident that the coalition's current
strategy is working: on 13 February, the agency changed its outlook on the UK's
prized AAA credit rating to negative, citing uncertainty over whether the
coalition government's strategy of fiscal consolidation will succeed in
reducing
Why Fair Trade?
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate |
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
LONDON –
Historically, the term “fair trade” has meant many things. The Fair Trade
League was founded in Britain
in 1881 to restrict imports from foreign countries. In the United States,
businesses and labor unions use “fair trade” laws to construct what economist
Joseph Stiglitz calls “barbed-wire barriers to imports.” These so called
“anti-dumping” laws allow a company that suspects a foreign rival of selling a
product below cost to request that the government impose special tariffs to
protect it from “unfair” competition.
Such dark
protectionist thoughts are far from the minds of the benevolent organizers of
the United Kingdom’s
annual “Fairtrade Fortnight,” during which I just bought two bars of fair-trade
chocolate and a jar of
Rethinking how we
teach economics: study economic history
Robert Skidelsky
New York Times |
Monday, April 02, 2012
The most important
steps to improve the training of young economists would be to make economic
history and the history of economic thought compulsory in all undergraduate
teaching of economics. Both survive, if at all, as curricular options that the
brightest are discouraged from taking. The rich history of economic thought has
been replaced by a narrow range of currently fashionable mathematical
"models" taught and often learned by rote: the sweeping panorama of
economic history, by a training in econometrics, the accuracy of whose data is
necessarily confined to the last few years. Yet it is these theoretical models
and econometric forecasting techniques that were caught lamentably short by the
economic collapse of 2008.
Lord Skidelsky is
Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick.
His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992,
2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for
International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for
International Relations. He is the author of the The World After Communism
(1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer
in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy
in 1994. He is chairman of the Govenors of Brighton College
Robert Skidelsky was
born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria.
His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked
for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the
Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain
and Japan in December 1941,
he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese
internees in England.
From 1953 to 1958, he
was a boarder at Brighton
College (of which he is
now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College,
Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was
successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College,
Oxford. In
1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government
of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in
which British politicians handled the Great Depression.
During a two year research
fellowship at the British
Academy, he began work in
his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English
Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced
International Studies, John Hopkins
University. But the
controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley -
in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins
University to refuse him
tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give
him a permanent post.
In 1978, he was
appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick,
where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as
Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White
Professor-at-Large at Cornell
University.
The first volume of
his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published
in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the
Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946
(2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur
Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations.
In the 1980s, he
began to take a more active interest in politics. He was a founder member of
the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and remained in the party till its
dissolution in 1992. In 1991, he became chairman of the Social Market
Foundation, and the same year was made a life peer. Initially, he took the SDP
whip but subsequently joined the Conservatives. He was made Chief Opposition
Spokesman in the Lords, first for Culture, then for Treasury Affairs (1997-9),
but he was sacked by the then Conservative party leader, William Hague, for
publicly opposing Nato's bombing of Kosovo. In 2001, he left the Conservative
Party for the cross benches. He is currently a member of the All Party
Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition.
Since 2003, he has
been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Rusnano Capital; from
2003-2011 he was a non-executive director of Janus Capital; and from 2008-10 he
sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School
of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the
UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for
Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New
Economic Thinking.
He writes a monthly
column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is
syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current
economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin
Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the
volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles
edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing
How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward
Skidelsky.
Ne štedite i tiskajte
novac
Robert Skidelsky
Hrvatska je u zamci
niske zaposlenosti i treba što prije naći izlaz, a za to je potrebna hrabrost i
razmišljanje izvan okvira - poruka je lorda Roberta Skidelskog. Taj svjetski
poznati i nagrađivani profesor ekonomije, povjesničar i pisac održao je predavanje
u Hrvatskoj gospodarskoj komori. Ono što vrijedi za Njemačku, ne mora vrijediti
i za male zemlje poput Hrvatske. Proračunska strogoća manje zemlje vuče na dno.
Predlaže veću potrošnju koja potiče zaposlenost.
Ako u trenutačnim
uvjetima režete državni sektor, onda režete radna mjesta, a pogrešno je misliti da će nezaposleni brzo
naći novi posao u privatnom sektoru, istaknuo je. Hrvatska je u zamci niske
razine zaposlenosti te mora pronaći izlaz iz te situacije kako se ne bi
napravila još veća socijalna šteta, naglasio je. Rekao je da ne poznaje dobro
Hrvatsku, ali želi potaknuti razmišljanja o drugačijim ekonomskim modelima od
dosadašnjih.
Skidelsky kaže kako
Hrvatska ima dva alata, i to kontrolu vlastitog tečaja i tiskanje novca. Želimo
li povećati izvoz, trebamo razmisliti i o drugačijoj politici središnje banke.
Mislim da je Hrvatskoj potrebna deprecijacija kune. Istina, malo je rizično,
zbog velike zaduženosti pa bi to trebalo napraviti u dogovoru s međunarodnim
kreditorima, rekao je.
U današnje vrijeme
recesije, donedavno zaboravljena Keynsova teorija veće državne potrošnje i
poticanja zapošljavanja - relevantnija je, kaže, nego ikad. Rješenje vidi u
jakim nacionalnim investicijskim bankama. Kapitalizam slobodnog tržišta pokazao
se kao nestabilan i nedovoljan. Potrebna je veća uloga države, bilo da je riječ
o investicijama ili raspodjeli bogatstva, ističe.
Iako je Hrvatska na
putu u Europsku uniju, ne moramo je u svemu slijediti. Temeljna je poruka da se
svijet traži i da u tom kontekstu Hrvatska ima prvi put priliku graditi
vlastiti ekonomski model, rekao je predsjednik HGK Nadan Vidošević. Ekonomski
model lorda Skidelskog, ako je suditi prema posjećenosti predavanja, danas je
zanimao - jedino znanstvenike. Iz Vlade
i HNB-a nije došao - nitko!