Dan Ariely is probably the best known voice in the popularization of behavioural economics. Behavioural economics represents the most significant challenge to the ideas of classical economic theorists built around notions of more-or-less perfectly rational individuals who calculate and diligently pursue narrow profit maximisation. Building on the insights of behavioural psychology – especially in its […]
Michael J Sandel opens What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) with a list (3-5) of some novel items that can be bought: In California prisoners can pay $82 a night for better, quieter cells. $8 to drive alone in a car pool lane during rush hour in […]
The best joke in the Finnish Nazis-on-the-moon movie Iron Sky is, ironically, also the one that best demonstrates the film’s weaknesses. Idealistic Nazi teacher, Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), shows her young class a sharply edited (ten minutes long) version of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and, as the Jewish barber disguised as Hynkel dances with the […]
The Triads of Ireland by Kuno Meyer (1906, available from Project Gutenberg) is a collection of a specifically Irish form of poetry popular amongst Irish bards that probably date from the Ninth Century[i]. They are, as the name suggests, based on threes – they’re sometimes witty, sometimes profound, sometimes strange and I discovered them recently […]
I want to start this post by saying plainly that I believe that it is possible for writers to create important and insightful work about cultures to which they do not belong. There is a somewhat crude (but, it seems to me, increasingly common) form of postcolonial criticism – often proceeding from a partial, or […]
Robert Reich has been banging on about the risks to advanced economies of increasing levels of inequality for longer than most. The Work of Nations (published in 1991 and the book that got him headhunted by Bill Clinton’s campaign and, eventually, appointed as US Secretary of Labor) set out pretty accurately how the “global” economy […]
From issue 58 of Focus the third of my pieces of flash fiction “inspired” by the common writing errors and bad habits catalogued in The Turkey City Lexicon. This time I go toe-to-toe with a “burly detective”: This useful term is taken from SF’s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series […]
I am slightly worried, given the brightly coloured cover of this book and the snappy title (screaming exclamation mark and all), that Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! (Melrose Road Partners, 2012) is going to end up in the hands of a lot of disappointed people looking for a quick fix for the their mental […]
I first read some of Frank O’Connor’s short stories (and translated Irish poetry) when I was at school and they made an impression because when I picked up a second hand collection recently, some of the stories came back to me word for word and, I realised, they’d been pickling in my brain for decades. […]
Chris Beckett’s third novel, Dark Eden, is a complex thing. It draws, as the title suggests, on the ur-biblical theme of the fall from innocence but it is also the story of an isolated human community culturally (and physically) devolving. It belongs to a sfnal tradition that has its roots in works like Lord of […]