Issue 14 – June 2020

Articles

The point of no return

The disintegration of growth is irreversible. Roxana Bobulescu explains. I was born in Romania in 1972 when the country was a socialist republic. It was the year of the Meadows

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Dependency issues

Coming out of the pandemic crisis will be a difficult political and economic balancing act for the Eurozone. And Germany stands to topple, says Dirk Ehnts. The Eurozone is a

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The human touch

Paul Frijters shares a dream. The world is getting hotter and wetter due to humanity increasing its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions over the past 200 years. Even if

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The only way out

Post-war reconstruction involved taxing the richest – it could help with building a low-carbon economy according to Dario Kenner. Amid the worst public health crisis in a generation, an economic disaster has

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An inconveniently complex truth

Roland Kupers tells how complexity characterises climate policy questions. And how it also provides answers. The world’s governments in 2015 made a radical shift in the principles that governed their

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The trillion tree delusion

Going carbon neutral by planting a trillion trees will make our climate problem worse says Kathleen McAfee. Will planting trees save the planet from global warming? Billionaires attending the 2020

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Follow the money

Self-styled comedian and economist, Susie Steed, tells how her guided walk around the City turned into a tour of the British Empire. I never set out to run a tour

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Fake news (the emperor’s old clothes)

Tom London tells how self-aggrandisement, warmongering and bribing the population was a feature of national leadership millennia before any president. Like the Fascist dictator Mussolini, evoking the Roman Empire, and

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Shorn of the debt

Peter Manley describes the horrors of walking dead companies and the dangers in killing them off. The Coronavirus pandemic has put much of the world’s economy on financial life support,

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Down to size

Why exactly is the boss paid so much? Blair Fix says it’s all a question of size. As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, we’re seeing a common trend. Companies are firing

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The comeback kid

Stefan Kesting and André Petersen Ystehede introduce a powerful intellectual force in economics who started early and faced his own firepower. Albert O. Hirschman is a role model as a

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Interviews

Chinese walls are invisible

German economist and erstwhile policy adviser, Wolfram Elsner, has just published a book, The Chinese Century after researching and teaching in China for almost a decade. When he started out, he

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Why not?

Steve Keen is currently viewing the world from Thailand, which is remarkably now almost virus free. He arrived there with his Thai partner on one of the last flights in

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India: an even bigger picture

Smita Srinivas is an Indian pluralist economist whose work includes examining the political economy of the health industry. India has not had good press over its response to the pandemic,

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Back to Africa

Three months ago The Mint discussed with US-based, Kenyan economist, Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, the outlook for Africa in the mounting pandemic. At that time, things did not look good in

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Columns

In black and white

I benefit from multiple privileges. White? Tick. Male? Tick. Posh? Tick and so on. In fact the world is largely designed by people like me for people like me. My

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Banking off road

Don’t consult the map while making a handbrake turn. What an unreality of a year so far. Society has done a handbrake turn and we are hurtling in an unmapped

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Covid confusion: going viral

Frances Coppola shows where the truth lies. If there is one industry that has flourished under coronavirus, it is the statistics industry. Never have so many statistics been produced, charted,

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The class divide

Nigella Vigoroso-Heck asks: if Eton can do it why can’t my local comp? It has been 14 weeks since we closed the school gates. In that time I have: conducted

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Mystically speaking

John Perkins was a self-confessed economic hit man. He had his damascene conversion in the rainforests of the Amazon in conversation with shamans. As a result he has written extensively

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Book Reviews

A cross-field punt

A novelist and a mathematician have combined forces to produce a fictional account of the Lehman Brothers’ crash that injects life into soulless corners of financial teaching reading lists. Review

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