Growing the aid budget at a time of deficit reduction: moral imperative and political challenge [Aud
Speaker(s): Harriet Harman MP | The three main political parties have committed to the target of spending 0.7 per cent of Britain's Gross National Income on overseas aid from 2013. But, at a time when the government are embarking on a programme of deficit reduction, that political consensus cannot be allowed to lead to complacency. Harriet Harman MP, Labour's Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, will set out the arguments for overseas aid and, in a changing economic and polit
Uprising: will emerging markets shape or shake the world economy [Audio]
Speaker(s): George Magnus | George Magnus will look at China and emerging markets from a post-financial crisis perspective, inviting us to reconsider how they will adapt to a new world economy. What reforms are needed to meet global goals? George Magnus is senior economic advisor at UBS Investment Bank, London. His latest book is Uprising: will emerging markets shapes or stoke the world economy.
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
The Nobel Lecture: Equilibrium in the Labour Market with Search Frictions [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Christopher Pissarides | Editor's note: Content Copyright: © The Nobel Foundation 2010. We apologise for the poor audio quality during the first few minutes of the video. Christopher Pissarides was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 2010 (jointly with Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen) for their work on the economics of unemployment, especially job flows and the effect of being out of work. Christopher Pissarides is professor of economics at LSE and h
Kapuscinski Lecture: How to respond to global threats in the decade ahead [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Jan Pronk | Editor's note: We apologise for the audio interference that can be heard in parts of this lecture The lectures honour the name of Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist and writer known as the Voice of the Poor, who died in 2007. The project is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the United Nations Development Programme.Present challenges (such as climate change and economic dualism) are structural. They are larger than before. They last longer, not only
Representing Atrocity: distant suffering and the politics of pity [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor Stjepan Mestrovic, Dr Irene Bruna Seu | Humanitarian campaigns create a 'politics of pity' that transforms the way we think about our moral responsibility for distant suffering. What is the impact on the relationship between knowing and acting? Lilie Chouliaraki is professor of media and communications at LSE. Stjepan Mestrovic is professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. Irene Bruna Seu is senior lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial
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
Where is Future Growth Going to Come From? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor John Van Reenen, Professor Jonathan Haskel | Where will the sources of new growth come from in the wake of the financial crisis and recession? What is the role of education, labour markets and government policy in supporting this growth?John Van Reenen has been professor of economics at LSE and the director of the Centre for Economic Performance, since October 2003.Jonathan Haskel is a Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School based in the Healthcare Manage
Literary Festival 2011 - The Making of Bestsellers [Audio]
Speaker(s): John Thompson, Andrew Franklin | The world of book publishing is going through turbulent times. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the 21st Century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book. In his book, Merch
Literary Festival 2011 - The Four Walls of My Freedom [Audio]
Speaker(s): Donna Thomson, Geraldine Bedell | Donna Thomson will discuss her book, The Four Walls of My Freedom, which describes her family's experience of coping with her son's cerebral palsy. Her own encounter with adversity takes on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Professor Amartya Sen and other philosophers' roadmaps of how to realize a good life against all odds. This lens includes not only people with disability, but also the enormous generation of post-WWII Baby Boomers who ar
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
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
Israeli Society and the Occupation [Audio]
Speaker(s): Gideon Levy | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor audio quality of the podcast. Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. In his lecture he will explore how Israeli society deals with the occupation and with the international criticism of this. He will also examine the role of the Israeli media in supporting the occupation. Gideon Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He is the author of the
The Economic Future of the European Union [Audio]
Speaker(s): John Bruton | John Bruton is chair of IFSC Ireland. He was EU ambassador to the US from 2004 to 2009, and was Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland from 1994 to 1997.
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
Buying Low, Flying High: carbon offsets and partial compliance [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Kai Spiekermann | Many airlines allow their customers to 'offset' the emissions caused by flying. Is it permissible to fly purely for pleasure as long as we buy carbon offsets? Kai Spiekermann is lecturer in political philosophy at LSE's Department of Government.
