Books

Economics is the religion of our secular scientific civilization

https://economicsociology.org/2022/12/30/economics-is-the-religion-of-the-secul…
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 06:57
Keith Hart, a renowned and influential economic anthropologist: “Western civilization represents itself as an economy these days. The TV news bombards us with the ephemeral movements of stock prices, exchange rates, and the latest unemployment figures. Elections are fought and lost on a government’s economic record. International diplomacy is mainly about trade and banking. The […]

The Powerful and the Damned by Lionel Barber review – cosying up to power?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/31/the-powerful-and-the-damned-by-li…
Created
Sat, 31/10/2020 - 18:30

All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’

Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?

Books