Interesting times call for interesting books. In Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis (2010) (and elsewhere) Anatole Kaletsky, Editor-at-Large of The Times, comes up with a thoughtful analysis of the past, present and future of global capitalism. Putting the events of the 2007-2009 economic crisis, epitomized by the fall of Lehmann Brothers, into a historical perspective, he writes:
A new era comes with new acronyms for new phenomena. We have already commented on the rise of the BRICs, which is an apt shorthand for Brasil, Russia, India and China, the economic powers to be (or that be). Yet there are also less flattering acronyms around. What to think of the PI(I)GS, for example. It …
‘The Rally to Restore Sanity’, held on October 30th in Washington D.C. was first announced back in September by Jon Stewart on his satirical ‘fake-news’ programme The Daily Show. Clearly intended as a response to extreme-right pundit Glenn Beck’s earlier ‘Restoring Honor Rally’, Stewart pitched the event as a protest against the hyperbolic and self-perpetuating nature of the media’s political discourse in the U.S., unfurling a banner behind him that urged viewers to “Take it Down a Notch, for America”. Immediately following the announcement, Stephen Colbert (an ex-Daily Show correspondent whose act consists of parodying the right by embodying its values ironically) announced a counter-rally on The Colbert Report: ‘The March to Keep Fear Alive’. Supposedly campaigning on the precise opposite of Stewart’s message, Colbert asserted, “Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom!”
The ecosystem is severely disrupted, the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven. CEOs and Politicians express their ‘desire for change’ at every interview, voice a heartfelt ‘yes we can’ at each photo-op. Planners and architects increasingly replace their blueprints …
Paper addressed at Thinking in Unity Conference LMU Munich Read More »
The postmodern years have been marked by a slow but steady development towards political stability and economic prosperity, at least from a western perspective. After the turmoil of the 1960s and, to a lesser extent, the 1970s and, to a much lesser extent, the 1980s, the 1990s might be described, in the words of Charles …
At the beginning of the decade, just after the events of 9/11, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist Jim O’Neill coined the remarkably apt acronym BRIC to describe a group of nations that would become, in his view, the main contenders of Western economic dominance. This group consists of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), and, since the …
