Absolute beginners: behavioural economics and human happiness [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Paul Dolan | In Absolute Beginners by The Jam, Paul Weller sang "I need the strength to go and get what I want". The problem is that we often want things that do not improve our wellbeing. Or at least that is what we think the evidence is telling us. This lecture explores the sources of our mistakes and the robustness of the evidence. It considers the implications for public policy of us being absolute beginners about the sources of our wellbeing. Paul Dolan is a Professor
Climate Forecasting with Chaos, or Chaos in Climate Forecasting? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Roman Frigg | Predicting how climate change will affect us is of paramount importance, yet it is beset with both practical and conceptual problems. This lecture explores the impact that chaos has on what we can reasonably assert on the basis of climate models. Roman Frigg is deputy director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, LSE.
The Foreign Policy of Modern Russia: The Prospects for Russian British Relations [Audio]
Speaker(s): Sergey Lavrov | Sergey Lavrov is Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Prior to this he served from 1994-2004 as Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation at the United Nations. He graduated from the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Moscow State Institute of International Relations, beginning his diplomatic career at the Soviet Embassy in Sri Lanka. This event is the opening lecture in Russian Business Week organised by the LSESU Russian Business Society wh
Impact, Concerns and Future of Political Transitions in Latin America [Audio]
Speaker(s): Carlos Mesa | Editor's note: The audio podcast is in Spanish. Having worked for the government from 2000, Carlos Mesa Gisbert was President of Bolivia from 2003 to 2005. His presidency focussed on constitutional reform to increase political representation and participation of citizen groups and indigenous people; Bolivian decentralization; and strengthening relations with other Latin American countries. As an academic and journalist Carlos Mesa has published extensively on the politi
Literary Festival 2011 - This House Believes that the Future of Rights is Left not Right [Audio]
Speaker(s): David Davis MP, Professor Conor Gearty | For the past twenty weeks Conor Gearty has been writing a collaborative book online, at www.therightsfuture.com, with an essay appearing weekly alongside regular longer items and occasional brief remarks on current affairs, with each post being open for comment from the general public. Many have replied with dedication and commitment. The result is a series of essays, discussions and critical engagements addressing such issues as the meaning o
Literary Festival 2011 - Science Fiction and International Orders [Audio]
Speaker(s): Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul McAuley, Ken McLeod | The study of popular culture has always been a feature of the social sciences as well as of the humanities – indeed, the social sciences have often been in advance of the humanities in this area, more willing to recognise the importance of genres that are frowned upon by the arts establishment. This event will bring together a number of writers of imaginative fiction and academics who have written in this field. Jon Courtney Grimwo
Literary Festival 2011 - Facts are Subversive: crossing the borders between history and journalism [
Speaker(s): Professor Timothy Garton Ash | The border between journalism and academic history is a minefield. Timothy Garton Ash has been crossing it stubbornly for the last thirty years, attempting to combine the crafts of journalist and historian, writing what he calls ‘history of the present’. Taking examples from his most recent book, Facts are Subversive, he talks about the delights and pitfalls of this mongrel craft. Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing o
India and China: Competition, Co-operation or conflict? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Shashi Tharoor | This lecture is part of India Week 2011. Dr Shashi Tharoor is an elected Member of Parliament and a former Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. A prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction, he is also a widely-published critic, commentator and columnist. In 2007 he concluded a nearly 29-year career with the United Nations, including working for refugees in South-East Asia at the peak of the "boat people" crisis
Literary Festival 2011 - Through the Soviet Looking-Glass [Audio]
Speaker(s): Francis Spufford | At first sight, the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s is a formidably remote and strange place for an early 21st-century western observer to try to inhabit: ideological, materially alien, suffused with obsolete expectations, and operating in its daily life and economic life according to rules that eerily reverse our own. But the reward for crossing this particular imaginative border, argues Francis Spufford, is the discovery, in the mirrorworld of the Soviet Union, of de
Literary Festival 2011 - The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Deat
Speaker(s): Professor John Gray | During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century science became the vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for faith. John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visitin
Can Middle East peace be imposed? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Henry Siegman | Henry Siegman is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, an initiative focused on U.S.-Middle East policy and the Israel-Palestine conflict, launched by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1994. The organization was established as an independent policy institute in 2006 under the chairmanship of General Brent Scowcroft. Mr Siegman is also a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Univer
Catch-Up History and the Cold War [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Lord Peter Hennessy | World-renowned expert on Cold War intelligence and espionage Peter Hennessy will address recently declassified documents and how history can help us 'catch-up' with the threats of today. Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at QMUL and was recently elected a Fellow of the British Academy as well as being an Honorary Fellow of LSE. Before joining the Department in 1992, he was a journalist for twenty years with spells on Th
Documenting China: Being a Professional Photographer in the Middle Kingdom [Audio]
Speaker(s): Ryan Pyle | Canadian born, award winning, documentary photographer Ryan Pyle first visited China in 2001. After a 3 month trip around the country he was hooked. He has never left since. It was very much Ryan's first trip to China that inspired him to enter the discipline of photography, and since then his imagery has graced the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Sunday Times Magazine and the Financial Times Magazine. Ryan will visit the LSE
The Lure of Authority: Motivation and Incentive Effects of Power [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Ernst Fehr | Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life - yet there is limited empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority. Based on an experimental approach, Ernst Fehr's lecture will explore the psychological consequences of authority for important economic interactions. He will document the human desire to exercise authority, the motivation-enhancing effect of possessing authority and the detrimental motivationa
Nuclear Arms and Human Rights [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Niall Ferguson | The decisive breakthroughs in the Cold War occurred in seemingly unrelated fields – nuclear arms control and human rights. But was the collapse of communism a reflection of imperial overstretch or the result of liberal aspirations for freedom? This event celebrates the publication of Professor Ferguson's new book Civilization: The West and the Rest. Niall Ferguson is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2010-11.
Out of Europe? The United States in an Asian age [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Michael Cox, Professor Arne Westad | Niall Ferguson argues that the world is now being shaped more by the emerging economies of the East than by the once dominant West. But within the West another kind of power shift is taking place, one that leads to the growing irrelevance of Europe. Is this true? And does it really matter? Michael Cox is professor of international relations at LSE and codirector of LSE IDEAS. Arne Westad is professor of international history at LSE and c
Good Life in Hard Times [Audio]
Speaker(s): Archbishop Vincent Nichols | Archbishop Nichols will be speaking about the importance of religious freedom, and arguing that promoting religious freedom increases our capacity to do good in the public square. He will also be drawing out some implications from Catholic social teaching for a richer understanding of human dignity and the role of the state and the market in serving human needs. Vincent Nichols is the 11th Archbishop of Westminster. He was elected president of the Catholi
Britain: a country divided? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor John Hills, Dr Polly Vizard, Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, David Darton | At the centre of CASE's work is the understanding of different aspects of inequality and the impacts of public policy on them. At this event, John Hills and Polly Vizard will present findings from the detailed analysis of economic inequalities carried out by the National Equality Panel, and across wider dimensions using the Equality Measurement Framework, as developed by CASE and its partners for the E
The Human Sciences in the 'Age of Biology' – revitalising sociology [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Nikolas Rose | Thanks to the insights of genomics and neuroscience we now understand ourselves in radically new ways. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st century? Nikolas Rose is professor of sociology and director of BIOS at LSE.
21st Century Statecraft [Audio]
Speaker(s): Alec Ross | Technology and innovation have changed the conditions for statecraft in the 21st century. Just as the internet has changed economics, culture, and politics, it is also transforming the practice of foreign policy. It is not simply the fact that more people are using ever more sophisticated technologies; the structural and demographic changes that have accompanied these quantum leaps in connection technologies are highly disruptive. Recent events in North Africa and the Mid
