Harold James
Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. He is the author of The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.
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2012-01-04
| The protracted financial and economic crisis discredited first the American model of capitalism, then the European version, and now could undermine the Asian approach, too. Coming after the failure of state socialism, does this mean that there is no correct way of organizing an economy?... read |
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2011-12-11
| At the just-concluded EU summit, British Prime Minister David Cameron vented decades of accumulated resentment stemming from his country’s relationship with Europe. It wasn't the first time a UK leader has adopted a stance of heroic resistance to Europe – only to be remembered as irrelevant and discredited.... read |
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2011-12-05
| The euro was not just the outcome of an idiosyncratic quest to reduce the wear on pockets stuffed with odd national coins, or to facilitate intra-European trade. The bold European experiment reflected a new attitude about what money should do, as well as how it should be managed.... read |
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2011-11-01
| The alternatives for Europe’s currency, the euro, seem increasingly limited to a desperate muddling through or a chaotic collapse. But there is a bolder and more productive approach that relies on past experience with multiple currencies.... read |
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2011-10-19
| The modern welfare state was created by Germany's "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, who in the 1880’s introduced sickness, accident, and old-age insurance. More than a century later, the problems associated with Bismarck's original plan remain our own.... read |
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2011-10-04
| The economists’ commonplace that a monetary union demands a fiscal union is only part of a much deeper truth about debt and obligation. Debt is rarely sustainable if there is not some sense of communal or collective responsibility.... read |
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2011-09-05
| For months, an increasingly frenetic, even apocalyptic, debate about the fate of the euro has been the major driver of global instability. And yet the euro's exchange rate has remained remarkably stable, because, paradoxically, the governance weaknesses that skeptics criticize are what makes the common currency attractive.... read |
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2011-07-26
| Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a model of the modern global enterprise – a model that is now threatened by the fallout from the scandal that started with phone hacking in Murdoch’s British press operations. But the Murdochs' problems reflect the underlying weaknesses of "family capitalism."... read |
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2011-07-11
| Crises are often learning opportunities. Unfortunately, so far the world seems to have learned very little from the recent financial crisis: with the US worried by its anemic economic recovery, Europe paralyzed by fears for the euro's survival, and emerging markets wrestling with asset-price bubbles, the situation today is as dangerous as it was in 2007.... read |
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Food for Revolution
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Harold James 
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Participants at this year's G-8 summit in Deauville are talking about interesting but peripheral issues, such as the economic impact of the Internet. Worse, they are talking about important issues, like food security, in a peripheral way.... read
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2011-10-04
| The economists’ commonplace that a monetary union demands a fiscal union is only part of a much deeper truth about debt and obligation. Debt is rarely sustainable if there is not some sense of communal or collective responsibility.... read |
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2011-01-05
| The EU’s sovereign-debt crisis constitutes a fundamental threat not only to the euro, but also to democracy and public accountability. Indeed, the principle of not reneging on public debt is is deeply intertwined with the development of legal security, representative government, and modern democracy.... read |
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2009-05-04
| Whenever today’s economic crisis is discussed, analogies to the Great Depression are never far away, with the year 1929 almost always taken as a reference point. But two completely different pathologies were manifest in the Great Depression; each called for different diagnoses – and different cures.... read |
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2009-02-04
| There is a danger that in the push to nationalize banks as a consequence of the current financial crisis, governments will see it as their duty to implement strategies. Indeed, the strategic vision of a bank shaping a country's economic fortunes is as flawed as was the idea of central economic planning.
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2008-12-25
| Karl Marx has returned, if not quite from the grave then from history’s dustbin, as world leaders call for state-compelled credit provision. But, while the “Marxist” revival was probably an inevitable byproduct of the current crisis, its acolytes should reflect on the uniformly disastrous results of centralized credit provision in the past.... read |
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2008-09-18
| PRINCETON – Worried investors and policymakers are becoming obsessed with Great Depression analogies. But the lesson of 1931 is only in part financial or economic. The 1931 crisis was so big and so destructive because it was a financial drama that played out on a geo-political stage. ... read |
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2008-10-02
| Great financial wealth has always been intimately related to the world of art, from Renaissance Florence to J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Frick. But, as the recent auction of works by Damian Hirst showed, when financial bubbles burst, acquiring art is no longer aimed at proving one's discernment to the broad public, but at securing an alternative store of value.... read |
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2008-09-09
| PRINCETON – Ten years after its birth, Google is threatening to re-open the “Browser Wars” of the 1990’s, when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer eliminated its rival, Netscape’s Navigator. This time, however, it is Google’s Chrome that promises to transform the economics underlying the entire software industry, and not only because of its technical innovation in linking very different kinds of software to an Internet browser. In doing so it eliminates the need for a program such as Windows, which previously controlled access to every kind of software. ... read |
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2009-03-04
| In the 1930's, Germany and Japan resorted to forcible regional integration, not economic nationalism, in response to economic crisis. By contrast, in today's crisis, the largest members of the European Union, the best model and greatest hope for benign regionalism, have turned their backs on integration.... read |
