Новости за 05.12.2016

Elegant account of three visits to China by Milton Friedman, who is invited each time to give advice on fighting inflation, but instead lectures his hosts on the evils of socialism. From a first visit in 1980 he returns dispirited. On a second visit in 1988 he bonds with China’s reformist prime minister Zhao Ziyang. On a third visit in 1993 he sees China booming. But where is Zhao? He is deposed and disgraced — denounced, inter alia, for having met the “extreme liberal economist” Milton Friedman

Review of Bridge over Blood River by Kajsa Norman, on the condition of Afrikaners in past and present-day South Africa. “Afrikaner nationalism successfully turned a poor, rural people into a largely prosperous middle class in an unequalled feat of collective social mobility. The National Party was part reactionary racist party but also part labour party, empowering poor whites. It was by far Africa’s most successful nationalist party, which is why the ANC tries so hard to emulate it today”

Satire. Satire!! “I love orchestrating global financial events in a way that is favorable to a cabal of ultra-wealthy power players. But I recently received an offer I couldn’t pass up. So I’m saying goodbye to the Illuminati and starting a new job as an advisor to President-Elect Donald Trump. But my experience at the Illuminati will always stay with me. Once you’ve been initiated via blood oath in the Satanic church behind Lloyd Blankfein’s Buenos Aires sex mansion, there’s really no turning back”

Review of The Moth Snowstorm, by Michael McCarthy, a lament for humanity’s destruction of the natural world which also celebrates Nature’s resilience and beauty. In effect, McCarthy postulates a sort of pantheism. We have an inborn reverence for Nature that tempers our destructiveness. We have not lost our capacity for taking joy in Nature; we could not lose that capacity; rather, we have lost sight of the joy which Nature can bring. We will do better as a species if we reawaken that sensibility

If Jean Cocteau had only ever made films, he would still have a rich claim on posterity. Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Bertolucci and Almodóvar owed much to him. But Cocteau came late to cinema after winning fame as a poet, a playwright, a set designer, a theatre director, a novelist, a travel writer, a librettist, a jewellery maker, an actor and an autobiographer. Ezra Pound called him “the best writer in Europe”. He stands comparison with Picasso, Stravinsky and Proust as a maker of modernism

Interview. Choices include The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon, and Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington. On building for the future: “There are real challenges for non-US companies. Before you can tell whether you’re going to be successful, you eat money. And only the US has finance of scale to turn these into very large businesses. There’s a challenge for companies in any other country, getting to the scale at which they can compete with American titans”

Chase Robinson’s elegant new book, Islamic Civilisation In Thirty Lives, argues the the early Muslim world was “a marketplace of ideas as well as goods”, nurturing and lionizing “free-thinking physicians and biologists, calligraphers, cartographers, historians and poets”. Islamic Cordoba was “the greatest city in Europe and produced some of the greatest minds: without the 12th-century rationalist Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the Enlightenment might never have happened”

Frank Ramsey effortlessly corrected Wittgenstein on matters of philosophy and corrected Keynes on matters of probability when barely out of his teens. He made fundamental contributions to the study of philosophy, economics and mathematics, all before his death in 1930 at the age of just 26. A memoir of Ramsey by his sister, Margaret Ramsey, is a poor record of his life, but it is the best that we have. Ramsey was “one of the greatest intellects of his time”, and arguably of his century