LMD podcast: Ibrahim Warde on HSBC scandals
Will the fresh revelations about tax evasion through HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary actually lead to any major prosecutions? Previous tax fraud leaks haven’t changed much.
All posts filed under: economics
Food adulteration is nothing new
With horse meat cropping up all over the place in food in the UK at the moment, I went back to the interview I recorded in 2008 for Princeton University Press with Bee Wilson about her book Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Ersatz Coffee. As the book makes clear, (justifiable) concern about what’s in our food is nothing new: complaints about adulterated bread date back at least as far as the Middle Ages, and the Victorians had to contend with fake tea, ersatz coffee and cheese coloured with red lead. In this interview, Bee says: Adulteration is a universal in history – it’s always been with us and it’s always going to be with us in some form or another. But it only seems to have become endemic in modern industrialized cities coupled with a particular kind of state. You would have editorials written in the Times between about the 1820s and the 1860s quite regularly saying things like, if a gentleman wants to sell chicory and call it coffee, that’s his business, no one …
Peter Nolan: Is China Buying the World?
China is the world’s second biggest economy and its largest exporter. It possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves and has 29 firms in the FT 500 list of the world’s largest companies. ‘China’s Rise’ preoccupies the global media, which carry regular articles suggesting that it is using its financial resources to ‘buy the world’. Is there any truth to this idea? Or is this just scaremongering by Western commentators who have little interest in a balanced presentation of China’s role in the global political economy? In this short book Peter Nolan – Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading international experts on China and the global economy – probes behind the media rhetoric and shows that the idea that China is buying the world is founded on misapprehensions. To listen to extracts from an interview with Peter Nolan about this book, click on the links below. To listen to the complete interview, click here. 1. Peter Nolan begins by discussing the prevailing discourse in Western media, which …
Merchants of Culture – new edition for a changing industry
When John Thompson‘s Merchants of Culture appeared in the summer of 2010, it was the first serious study of the publishing industry in many years. Thompson compared himself to an anthropologist studying his subjects in order to explain a field of human activity that strikes many outsiders as baffling and often irrational. The industry recognized itself in the portrait that Thompson drew. One reviewer said succinctly: “If you want to understand the publishing industry, read this book” and one New York Times bestselling author called it “a must-read for anyone hoping to become a published writer, or who already is one”. Now, some eighteen months later, comes a substantially revised paperback edition which takes into account the profound changes affecting the industry as print sales shrink and uncertainty grows over where power will reside in an electronic future in which the roles of publishers, authors and agents are set to change. To listen to the complete interview, click here. For my original interview from the summer of 2010, click here. And to listen to extracts …
Consumption and its consequences: “rethinking our relationship to the material world”
My guest in this programme is Professor of Material Culture at UCL, Daniel Miller. Daniel appeared in an earlier Polity Books podcast to talk about his previous book, Tales from Facebook, which looked at how people really use Facebook as a form of social interaction, as opposed to how media commentators would have us think they use it. In his new book, Consumption and its Consequences, Daniel takes a similar approach, examining how we behave as consumers by paying close attention to what we do, rather than heeding received ideas about consumption. Of course, with consumption, the stakes are potentially very high, as our patterns of consumption have direct bearing on the earth’s resources and its climate. So the questions Daniel addresses here, while informed by academic research, are of much more than just academic interest. Understanding how and why we consume is, the book argues, a prerequisite for finding ways to consume without completely exhausting our planet’s resources. And to pursue these issues, Daniel opens and closes the book with an imaginary three-way conversation …
Alex Callinicos on Bonfire of Illusions
Le Monde diplomatique podcast – James K. Galbraith
This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He’s the author of six books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps” The interview accompanies and amplifies his article in the current issue of Le Monde diplo, which looks at what he calls “the Europeanization of Mediterranean debt” forced on the EU by speculators, and what he predicts will become a vicious circle of budget cutting, debt deflation and depression. He further predicts that old patterns of hardship migration will re-emerge: “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps because they weren’t willing to deal with them at home”. To listen to the podcast, click here.