“Today there is an enormous risk that higher education will turn into a series of utilitarian and functional courses, which are simply designed to pass on knowledge and skills to those consumers who somehow manage to acquire enough resources to purchase them. In such a world, education becomes contractual and mechanistic; the ends justify the …
Continue reading ‘From the new Dean of Christ Church, Oxford’ »
Alan Greenspan served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. During his tenure at the Fed, he presided over an orgy of bank takeovers. There were approximately 14,000 banks in the United States when he started, most of them community banks that served small, local companies. When he …
Continue reading ‘Never apologise, never change your mind’ »
Some while ago two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, pushed Congress and the president into giving away what could amount to over $130 billion worth of copper under the ground in Tonto National Forest – public land in Arizona. The giveaway was sneaked into the massive Defense Authorization Bill. There are approximately 23.5 million …
The soaring cost of treating obesity-related conditions is the single biggest threat to Western health services. It costs the UK alone £47bn a year, equivalent to almost half of the NHS budget. Part of the problem, as we all know, is that people don’t get enough exercise any more. A comparison of survey data from …
Yesterday, the US House of Representatives failed to pass a key element of a package of bills that would have given Obama the ability to fast-track a trade deal with Pacific-Rim nations (TPP), and by inference the Eurean version (TTIP). This might prove a temporary setback, but it is a sign of the growing backlash …
Continue reading ‘The TTP and TTIP trade deals: some good news’ »
