Author Archive

The website will not be updated for the next few days and may go off-line temporarily. However, it should hopefully be replaced soon by a shiny new and much improved website. Watch this space.

The Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University is asking the perfectly reasonably question of what the recent financial crisis – along with the trend to increasing food and fuel prices – means for development. Unfortunately its reimagining development project moves even further away from the notion of development as economic transformation. Instead it emphasises […]

It is looking increasingly certain that the trend to classify everyday behaviour as abnormal will intensify further. Proposed changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) unveiled last month would widen the definition of psychiatric disorders substantially. If the proposals are adopted when the enormously influential reference work is […]

Speedy ambition

In: Uncategorized

10 Mar 2010

A great example of ambition from Chinese railways as shown in an article on the American ABC news website: “China is negotiating to extend its own high-speed railway network to up to 17 countries in 10 to 15 years, eventually potentially connecting London with Beijing and then on to Singapore.” Evidently at its maximum speed […]

Nothing to do with growth scepticism but readers may be interested in my spiked article on why assassination plays a central role in Israeli society. A long time ago, before I started writing about economics, I used to write about the Middle East.

For the record

In: Uncategorized

7 Mar 2010

The incorrect claim in last Friday’s BBC World programme that I am a former Financial Times (FT) correspondent made me think that, for the record, I should correct some other misconceptions about my biography. Below I list the main ones I have come across and outline how I think they arose. * The claim that […]

Most people find watching themselves on video odd but this item from BBC World television (only broadcast outside Britain) is truly weird. It holds me up as a critic of the “green economy” (which is fine) only to have me knocked down by a top panel at a United Nations conference in Indonesia including a […]

A great new blog for anyone interested in American politics, economics or culture. The American Situation is run by Sean Collins, a fellow spiked contributor and a native New Yorker.

In 1990 Amartya Sen, who has since won the Nobel prize in economics, wrote an article in the New York Review of Books arguing there were 100m “missing” baby girls in the third world. From an examination of statistics that many baby girls in poorer countries died as a result of poorer medical care or […]

The second part of Matthew Lockwood’s scathing critique of the New Economic Foundation’s Growth Isn’t Possible (see 27 February post).