The great globalisation slowdown mystery
Here's something I only noticed while writing a short piece for INTHEBLACK magazine: the rise of globalisation is not only slowing down almost to a...
Keynes on the arts
Someone sent me this article by Keynes celebrating the Arts Council in the Listener shortly after World War II had been won in Europe. A...
Into the parallel universe – with a gun to your head
I followed a link on the site of a complexity theorist I know to this story by Ben Allen on this interesting site (which is mostly about complexity theory)....
Forging a more encompassing politics: solving the Greek crisis – a thought experiment
Everyone is charging into print on the smoking ruin that the Europeans will be leaving Greece after the latest barely believable debacle in which the...
Magna Carta and ‘vox pop’ democracy
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="620"] Intriguingly there are two substantial permanent monuments to Magna Carta at Runnymede. Both are American. This one was erected by the...
Confidence fairies and confidence tricks
When I hear very serious people talk about confidence I often smell a rat. It's such an amorphous thing and impossible to observe directly. Clearly...
The Iran nuclear deal: a new détente between the Shi’ites and the non-Muslims of the world?
The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s meant a huge shift in Middle-East politics and the relation between Islam and the rest. Within a period...