UCL Global Citizenship Lecture

UCL is really pushing a new agenda of ‘education for global citzenship’.  There are a number of webpages and more explanation of what this entails here.  My sense is that this is a worthy but difficult agenda.  Most importantly it has to have real content that goes beyond just slogans.  I look forward to seeing this happen.

Anyway, so this is the context for UCL’s new Global Citizenship Lecture series.  UCL is doing this in partnership with the Commonwealth Secretariat.  I had the extraordinary, and frankly terrifying, honour of taking part in the inaugral lecture ‘Reforming International Institutions: An Agenda for the 21st Century’.  The event was filmed and is available for viewing here.  I haven’t brought myself to watch it yet and probably won’t!

Although the time on the evening was short, the basic idea is that we should go back to John Maynard Keynes’s plans for international monetary reform as they were expressed in the 1940s.  We cannot rely on the US to reflate unilaterally.  The global nature of the crisis and the shift in the economic balance of power requires a different response.  Keynes’s work was not just limited to the need for domestic fiscal stimulus, so neither should our reading and invocation of him be.

Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis

In the middle of January I took part in a rountable on the financial crisis with the brilliant Professor Donald MacKenzie and the excellent Dr Iain Hardie.  Details of the roundtable are here.

It was the first opportunity to present some of the research I have been doing (increasingly obsessively) on what John Maynard Keynes’s work has to offer us for understanding and responding to the current financial crisis and economic downturn.  Much, I would argue.  And not just in terms of the case for fiscal stimulus.  In fact this may well be the least interesting part of the puzzle.  For me, the issues of uncertainty and international monetary reform are potentially far more important.  These themes will be revisited and hopefully improved for a talk at UCL with the to the Commonwealth Secretariat and in New York for the International Studies Convention in February.