Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is a member of the British House of Lords. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
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Robert Skidelsky
Commentaries by Robert Skidelsky
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Austere Illusions
LONDON – The doctrine of imposing present pain for future benefit has a long history – stretching all the way back to Adam Smith and his pra…
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Thatcherism’s Bellicose Soul
LONDON – Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s greatest twentieth-century peacetime prime minister. In the 1980’s, the near-simultaneous crisis of…
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The Chávez Way
LONDON – I remember the exact date of my visit to Venezuela. I was sunbathing by the pool on the roof of the Caracas Hilton. A waiter came u…
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The Rise of the Robots
LONDON – What impact will automation – the so-called “rise of the robots” – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, …
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Natural-Born Pianists?
LONDON – The editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has written a book about how he decided to practice the piano 20 minutes a day. Eighte…
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Models Behaving Badly
LONDON – “Why did no one see the crisis coming?” Queen Elizabeth II asked economists during a visit to the London School of Economics at the…
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Inequality is Killing Capitalism
LONDON – It is generally agreed that the crisis of 2008-2009 was caused by excessive bank lending, and that the failure to recover adequatel…
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Happiness Is Equality
LONDON – The king of Bhutan wants to make us all happier. Governments, he says, should aim to maximize their people’s Gross National Happine…
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Big Countries, Small Wars
LONDON – US President Barack Obama has vowed to avenge the murder of J. Christopher Stevens, America’s former ambassador to Libya. How he pr…
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Olympian Economics
LONDON – As Olympic mania swept the world in recent weeks, it transported the host country, Great Britain, to a rare display of public exult…
Blog posts by Robert Skidelsky
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Economics for the Interested Amateur #1: Deleveraging
Recently I was asked a very reasonable question. When households and firms are deleveraging, why should this decrease demand? Intuitively, w…
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Why 'Inflate and Depreciate' Won't Work
There is a new policy for growth in town – one that is neither particularly new nor likely to result in growth. Having conceded that contrac…
Austere Illusions
Tomas Kurian: So we will remain in a state of “under-employment equilibrium" .... I am afraid that is not an equilibrium at all. This is just a point on downward curve of recession, sliding further into the aby…
The Rise of the Robots
Heriberto Arribas: I mixed Ludd's idea with Laffer's idea. This curve have a maximum. Before, go up, but after, go down. You propose one solution there are other solutions. People no need work to 20 at 65 years old, m…