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FiveBooks Interviews
Georgetown University’s Professor of International Affairs says rivalries come to an end and are replaced by friendship through diplomacy not coercion. ‘There was a big debate between Barack Obama and John McCain during the US presidential election about whether you should talk to adversaries like Iran. Looking at 20 precedents, I find that the answer is yes – unequivocally.’
Academic G R Berridge, founder of the Leicester Centre for the Study of Diplomacy in 1994, is the author of a large number of textbooks on diplomacy – the core of most English-language diplomacy courses. He tells FiveBooks that we need professional diplomats for the same reason that we need trained doctors: ‘Diplomacy, like medicine, is a specialised activity with a store of complex knowledge, well-tried procedures, and distinctive lexicon.’
Will Hopper is the co-author of The Puritan Gift. Founder chairman of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, he also chaired the investment bank, W J Hopper & Co Limited, until he closed it down last year. He has represented Greater Manchester West as a Conservative member in the European Parliament. For many years both Will and his elder brother and co-author Ken have watched what they perceive to be a decline in America’s traditional managerial culture from the peak of excellence which it attained in the last century – ‘financial engineering has replaced mechanical engineering’.
Professor Danny Dorling says it is becoming very hard to argue against inequality when, under the surface, arguments are beginning to be made that it’s rational to have inequality. His latest book, Injustice, rejects the arguments that are put forward for preserving inequality, one by one. He chooses essential reading on the subject.
John Lanchester wrote an account of the 2008 global financial meltdown and he tells FiveBooks that nothing has been done since the crisis. If Barclays tomorrow were to announce, ‘Really sorry, we’ve just lost a trillion dollars betting on whether the Chinese renminbi would appreciate, and it hasn’t, and can we have our bailout now?’, the state would have no choice but to say, OK, they’re too big, and too systemically important. The implosion was more than a year and a half ago, and it’s all completely unfixed. It’s as if they’d performed some heroic feat of steering and then immediately fell asleep at the wheel.
The former banker and author of 12 books on economics says that over the last 30 years economics has been colonising every science. ‘Even something like education all comes down to incentives, and that mind-set has become pervasive. One of the good things about this recent crash is that it might counter that because it’s clearly wrong.’
The head of Enlightenment Economics, specialising in technology and globalisation, talks about recession as a collective failure of confidence in what the future is going to bring. It’s almost a kind of contagious disease, where a recession becomes a self-fulfilling phenomenon.
Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialises in development economics and thinks, along with Amartya Sen, that the socialist legacy of emphasising education and health is an important tool in helping countries out of poverty while remaining productive. He sees China as a good example, but challenges the received wisdom that its success has been solely built on globalisation. Land redistribution is key.
The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-winner says the idea behind the bank he founded, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, is simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. Human beings are not selfish, he says – they are both selfish and selfless. Economic theory needs to accommodate both sides of human nature if it wants to help us avoid disaster.
The veteran British journalist and chief executive of Index on Censorship says the Chinese promise of eight per cent economic growth in 2009, at the height of the global financial crisis, was of the utmost importance. By fair means or foul, they had to make this target in order to keep the people confident that the country was continuing to grow, he says. All the predictions of social unrest faded away because the ruling elite managed to deliver material comfort. In China, material comforts offset failures in democracy.