Some valuable words from Brad de Long:
If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have [...]
One of the joy of the Internet is rapidly learning about entirely new things. Via a blog comment here I came across ‘econophysics’, described in a Nature article as:
For the past two decades, some physicists have been trying to apply their ideas and tools to an area that seems a long way from traditional physics. [...]
Thinking of of writing a book on the modest topic of the past and future of socialist politics. Much Australian left commentary sees the history of socialism as irrelevant, in particular the Communist movement is either an embarrassment or else the product of malign individuals.
Reviewing my lecture on Marxism for Modern Political Ideologies I looked over Andrew Heywood’s valuable Political Ideologies. To Heywood any future for Marxism rests on ‘post-Marxism’ in the Laclau-Mouffe sense. There was a time when an alternative road was proposed: that of analytical Marxism. Jerry Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History was one of its [...]
Primaries are back in the news in Australia following media reports of their use by the British conservatives to endorse a candidate. Primaries seem to attract sympathy from the left judging by Larvatus Pradeo. I doubt however that the current uninspiring quality of Labor MPs would be much improved by primaries, although some of the [...]
Discussion of the Chinese economy often centers on the idea that Chinese economic growth is fundamentally unbalanced due to low levels of domestic consumption and a reliance on exports. Yet China seems to have weathered the global financial crisis particularly well. Zacharay Karabell:
China’s path, of course, is hardly without skeptics. The common argument against how [...]
Leszek Kolakowski the Polish philosopher died a few days ago. He began a zealous young Marxist in postwar Poland, was then a leading intellectual reform Communist in the 1950s and early 1960s who sought to revive an allegedly pure Leninist Communism shed of Stalinist corruptions and then finally renounced Marxism altogether. His major work on [...]
