Tom Streithorst
Spend, spend, spend: in this climate, you can't have too much of a good thing
Britain, along with much of the western world, has (barely) managed to crawl its way out of recession. That it has done so is mostly thanks to unprecedented and, I dare say heroic, government easing. For two years, monetary policy has been spectacularly loose, with interest rates close to zero, and fiscal policy has been hugely expansive, with deficits more than doubling. Finance ministers haven’t had much choice. With the private sector deleveraging, households and businesses saving instead of spending, the government has had to step in order to maintain demand. Imagine what a mess we would be in today with interest rates at normal levels and without massive deficit spending. Unemployment would be through the roof. But all this government expenditure, combined with lower tax revenues, has pushed deficits to almost wartime levels. The question is: will bond markets continue to shrug off what some see as unsustainable budget deficits?
Economists are fighting a civil war over what is more frightening: government deficits or their eradication. We should all pay attention, because the consequences of either side winning could be brutal.
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John Elliott
What really happened between Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru?
The Jaipur Literary Festival is becoming a major event not just for literary folk but also for India’s prestige-conscious society. Here in the grounds of the city’s Diggi Palace hotel, a charmingly faded pile built in the 1860s as a grand town house for a rural Rajasthan ruler, Delhi’s self-appointed social elite have all mingled with the crowds (around 27,000 people have attended in total), along with famous writers and ambassadors from the US, UK and other countries, without demanding (as they usually do) exclusivity and front row seats.
In a country where prestige and patronage count for so much and do so much damage, it is striking how the festival straddles India’s vast social divides, with sessions on the Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom of India’s social strata, as well as to the lives and loves of the Indian dynasties and the British royal family.
It was fitting that one of these sessions focused on Queen Victoria’s fascination for two particular Indian men, explored in very different ways by two Indian authors. The Exile, by Navtej Sarna, an author and Indian diplomat is a historical novel about the life of Maharaja Duleep Singh who became prominent in Victoria’s court when the queen was in her 30s. More revealing was Victoria and Abdul, Shrabani Basu’s biography of a servant, Abdul Karim, who became an influential and often disruptive adviser to Victoria on India, “a good looking, extravagantly dressed servant…hated by the Queen’s household both for his race and class”.
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James Crabtree
Generally intellectual
Noam Chomsky. Francis Fukuyama. Anthony Giddens. Christopher Hitchens. Slavoj Zizek. All names that didn’t even make the top 10 in Prospect’s contest to crown 2008’s public intellectual of the year. So who did? Moving on from previous attempts to list the world’s 100 greatest living public intellectuals, this year we decided to name those who had the most impact in 2008 alone. We took soundings—from friends, here on First Drafts and on our Facebook group—to bring up a shortlist. From there it was down to our panel of judges. A three-way contest emerged, between economist Nouriel Roubini, social scientists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and General David Petraeus. Our judges voted according to type: the wonks liked the Nudge duo, the more economically minded wanted a thinker linked to the credit crunch, while foreign policy watchers thought the soldier-philosopher deserving of the nod. On our website we provide details of all our judges’ votes, and their reasons, along with short bios of all those we considered. Ultimately, though, there could only be one winner. As in Iraq, so in Prospect: Petraeus surged to victory.
Mary Fitzgerald
2008: hot or flop?
Which political and cultural happenings were given far too much attention this year or far too little? 100 Prospect contributors—including Niall Ferguson, Brian Eno, Duncan Fallowell, Ian Rankin, George Monbiot, Robert Reich, Anne Applebaum, James Lovelock, Pico Iyer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dominic Sandbrook, Peter Hitchens and many, many more—give their picks of the most overrated and underrated events of 2008.
Meanwhile, James Harkin looks back on the big ideas books of 2008. Crowdsourcing, nudging and mass collaborating all jostled for attention, but was it a vintage year overall—or a flop?
Elbow in with your thoughts below.
James Crabtree
but who is 2008's biggest public brain?
We just put the Christmas edition of the magazine to bed, at 3am on Wednesday morning. If you join up for our Facebook group you can see the new cover, and get an overview of the contents. If you aren’t on Facebook, like David Goodhart, our hold-out editor, I’ll put it up here in a day or two. The magazine, meanwhile, arrives at a train station near you in the middle of next week.
Personally, I’m most excited about the results of our public intellectual of 2008 poll. This is different from our previous public vote poll, run with Foreign Policy, to find the greatest living public intellectual. This one is just about the figure who did best in 2008 – and is picked by us, and a team of all-star judges. Thanks to any of you who threw names into the hat for consideration, when we announced it here on First Drafts a month or so ago.
I can’t put the winner on here just yet, but will put the shortlist up shortly. In the meantime, below, are the people who just missed out on the top 10 – those we liked a lot, but didn’t make the cut. More on who actually won in due course – along with the judges’ decisions, and the eventual winner. If this lot didn’t win, who would you have given it to? And what do you make of this longlist – just the same old group of old white English-speaking men? Click the more button to see the list…….
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