On the importance of kindness
A global epidemic can seem rather abstract, until someone you know personally is killed by it. Last week Emeritus Professor of Economics at Birmingham University Peter Sinclair died at the age of 73...
View ArticleWhy “Chinese virus” is wrong
I was asked a question by a student today and I thought I would share my answer in this blog. The question: “You rightly call the global financial crisis of ’08 the North American crisis – in...
View ArticleIndia and China
Recent news of increasingly lethal clashes on the long and disputed border between India and China raises a question, how have the two most populous nations on Earth previously mostly kept the peace? *...
View ArticleShould oil companies invest in renewable electricity?
Oil and gas companies have few skills that are transferable to electricity generation and risk wasting a lot of their shareholders’ money. * “Peak oil” used to refer to supply but in recent years has...
View ArticleHas the US “lost” China a second time?
The shift of US attitudes on China owes as much to American disappointments as it does to changes in China’s behaviour * After the revolution that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949,...
View ArticleThe importance of infrastructure
People paid to worry about bad stuff happening concluded long ago that one way to destroy the USA as a functioning state would be to explode a high altitude nuclear weapon above the country; the...
View ArticleTen years after Fukushima
What happened? At 14.46 on 11 March 2011, the largest earthquake ever to hit Japan started in the Pacific Ocean about 72km (45 miles) from the Japanese coast. Occurring in fairly shallow waters, the...
View ArticleThe case for bitcoin
People are often surprised when they ask economists, what is money, and the reply is, well, anything that fulfills the functions of money is money: money is as money does. The classic definition of...
View ArticleThe beginning of the end of the oil age
Some people who know me don’t believe it, but as a child I wasn’t interested in international politics. But, like most people in Britain in the 1970s, I knew the name of the Saudi oil minister, because...
View ArticleThe paradox of Chinese Communist ideology
A country with several thousand years of distinctive cultural history is governed through European ideology * It is often said that China is one of the world’s oldest civilisations, tracing a history...
View ArticleAvoiding another Cold War
A child’s enquiry about the Cold War brings back memories and raises concerns for the future * The other day a friend’s child asked me, what was the Cold War? Children ask about history all the time,...
View ArticleWhat is geopolitics?
Geopolitics has two related but distinct meanings * International politics, the relationship between states, is complicated. What are a nation’s interests? Determined by who? How do national politics...
View ArticleYou can’t insure against climate change
Climate change involves systemic risk, so it’s not possible to insure against, or diversify away the risk. * Over the years I have sometimes heard investors talk of insuring their portfolios against...
View ArticleWhy markets ignore sovereign debt ratings for the US
Debt rating agencies have no particular expertise or special information on sovereign debt, especially for developed economies, so their views don’t matter * News that Fitch downgraded the US sovereign...
View ArticleNuclear is only a small part of the answer to climate change
Nuclear has a role to play in providing reliable carbon-free electricity, but in the US and Europe it is likely to be too expensive to have more than a small role. * As I have written two books about...
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