history

Pari passu clauses were deliberately crafted to gain an upper hand in sovereign bankruptcy disputes brought to the London stock exchange’s jurisdiction

Few persons, even legal scholars, realize that sovereign bankruptcy has a long history. Far from a pie-in-the-sky scheme conceived in the 1980s by international lawyers such as Christopher Oeschli and economists such as Jeffrey Sachs that later inspired the failed IMF Krueger proposal for a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, the concept of sovereign debt bankruptcy and discharge (write-off) has an ancient and little known history. My new INET working paper sets out this history for the first time.

The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application […]

The post The Lie of Nation Building appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

From Partygate to Trussomics, the death of the Monarch, and the humiliation of Vladimir Putin, OttoEnglish's review of the year takes us on a roller coaster of major fails and meteoric falls

in his editorial from the December print edition of Byline Times Peter Jukes says the tumultuous events of the last year may have been shocking, but not a complete surprise

Stephen Unwin explores how the famed author's views about disability were typical of a growing intellectual endorsement of the dangerous ideology of eugenics in the early 20th century

There's a reason Dickens' Christmas Carol is a perennial festive favourite, says A V Deggar – the Malthusian ideas of Scrooge are still with us

I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton’s lack of inside knowledge … Continue reading →

I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I’m hoping … Continue reading →

Below is Ross Garnaut’s lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in the ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences in 1972, at the … Continue reading →

As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British parliamentary system … Continue reading →