Posts Tagged ‘environment

My latest book review for the Financial Times was published on 2 December. For anyone who sees environmentalism as a radical outlook, its adoption by business must be bewildering. The examples are legion. From the World Wildlife Fund credit card from Bank of America to Conservation International’s partnership with McDonald’s to promote Happy Meals; and […]

The audio recording of my Berlin Salon debate on “Do we need economic growth?” is now online. It turned out to be a fiery exchange in places.

Spiked has published an article by me critiquing “progressive” environmentalism. I will upload the full text at a later date but in the meantime it is available here.

I will be debating “are greens the friends or the enemies of progress?” at the Zurich Salon on the evening of Tuesday 19 January. The other speakers are Thomas Vellacott (CEO of WWF Switzerland), Silvio Borner (professor of economics) and Stephen Tindale (director of the Alvin Weinberg Foundation). It will be chaired by Sabine Beppler-Spahl […]

The debate on social justice I participated in this week at the City of London Festival is now available to listen to as a podcast.  It is also appropriately topical that my debate on European austerity from last year’s Battle of Ideas is now available to watch on video.

The last thing I expected to be thinking about after a long and boozy Christmas lunch was economics. However, my first ride in an Uber taxi set me thinking. For those who have not used Uber, which operates in over 50 countries, it is service that allows users to order taxis using their mobile phone. […]

The extent to which inequality has come to be blamed for most of the world’s economic problems is astounding. Will Hutton, principal of Hertford College, Oxford, summed up the charges in an Observer article earlier this year: “It’s inequality that is behind poverty, ill health and the growth of the welfare bill. It’s inequality propelling the […]

This is my Perspective column from this week’s Fund Strategy magazine. Although GDP is central to much economic and financial debate, it is remarkably poorly understood. Experts pore over every statistical release and every subsequent revision but rarely question the meaning of the measure itself. This one-sidedness was clear in the recent preliminary estimate for […]

Economist and author Dan O’Neill and journalist and author Daniel Ben-Ami go head-to-head. This debate is from the May issue of New Internationalist. Feel free to comment on the magazine’s site. Dan Kenneth Boulding once warned that anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an […]

One of the most peculiar but least understood developments of our time is the emergence of billionaires against capitalism. Even some of the greatest beneficiaries of the market system seem deeply disillusioned with it. Bill Gates provided a striking example this week when he slated the market for distorting important priorities. He reportedly told a […]