Skidelsky at LSE

I highly recommend this brilliant LSE lecture by Robert Skidelsky. Among the topics covered: risk versus uncertainty; Chicago school as the academic scribblers responsible for recent disastrous ideological capture; rational expectations, efficient markets and all that nonsense; economics as a science (not) and the role of mathematics; fiscal versus monetary stimulus; Glass-Steagall; Capital ascendant over Labor and Government: the renewed relevance of Marx; the role of globalization and the neoliberal agenda.

Before attacking me as a socialist pinko (I am not), listen to the talk or at least read the earlier post linked to below.

Keynes and the Crisis of Capitalism
(podcast and video available)

Date: Wednesday 7 October 2009
Speaker: Professor Lord Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

This event celebrates his latest book, Keynes: The Return of the Master.

For more from Skidelsky on Keynes and the current crisis, see this earlier post.

Keynes: ... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.