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The Icelanders, the Cypriots, and the Greeks: is history repeating itself?

In 2008, Iceland experienced one of the worst financial crises in history, which involved the collapse of all three of its major commercial banks. The causes of this collapse were numerous and complex, and included the banks’ difficulty in refinancing their short-term debt and a run on their deposits (a bank run is a situation in which a large number of bank depositors withdraw their deposits simultaneously due to concerns about the bank’s solvency). The Icelandic banks had sought capital to a great extent abroad, first in the European debt securities market and later in the American debt securities market. The global reduction in liquidity in financial markets that began in 2007 soon blocked this access, and ultimately led to the collapse of the banking sector.

The assets of those banking entities were equal to more than 9 times the Icelandic GDP, meaning that they were controlling amounts of money far greater than the country’s own wealth and there was no pos­sibility for the Icelandic government and central bank to step in and provide financial assistance or rescue (‘bail out’) those entities.  Separately, the Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund, a fund which is designed to protect eligible depositors up to a certain limit (20,887 EUR at the time), had very scarce resources in comparison with the bank deposits it was meant to protect.

The Icelandic banking system had become ‘too big to control’ and most importantly ‘too big to save’.

As a result, in the autumn of 2008, the three largest commercial banks, ‘Glitnir’, ‘Landsbanki’, and ‘Kaupþing Bank’, were resolved (i.e. they were split into ‘old’ and ‘new’ banks by the authorities).  The banks’ domestic assets and liabilities (including deposits) were placed into the ‘new’ banks and received full protection. Foreign assets and liabilities (including foreign deposits) were mainly placed in the old ‘banks’, and subjected to winding-up procedures. These procedures could not ensure that losses are not imposed on creditors, including depositors, as their aim is the eventual closure of operations.

Iceland also imposed strict controls on capital movements, inward as well as outward, which were originally envisaged to be in effect for 2-3 years. Instead they have lasted almost seven years and it was in June 2015 that the government announced a strategy to gradually lift them.

Four years after the Icelandic crisis, in 2012, history repeated itself and we saw another example of a banking system that was both ‘too big to control’ and ‘too big to save’ comparing to the size of the country’s economy: the Cypriot banking crisis. Among the factors that contributed to that crisis were: banks’ exposure to overleveraged local property companies, the Greek government’s debt crisis, banks’ risky expansion strategies, and the reluctance of the government to restructure the troubled Cypriot financial sector.

2011 Greece Uprising – 100,000 protest austerity measures in Athens. By Kotsolis, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In March 2013, the country agreed with international lenders to resolve its two largest banks, Cyprus Popular Bank (also known as ‘Laiki Bank’) and the Bank of Cyprus. Laiki Bank’s business was partially transferred (e.g. good assets, covered deposits, and the entire amount of deposits belonging to financial institutions, the Cypriot government and other public entities) to the Bank of Cyprus, with the exception of those subsidiaries and branches that were not located in Cyprus (e.g. Greek branches of Laiki Bank and Bank of Cyprus were sold to Piraeus Bank). Uncovered deposits (i.e. deposits that exceeded the amount of 100,000 EUR) were not protected and transferred to a ‘bad’ bank which would be liquidated over time. In the case of the Bank of Cyprus, the bail-in resolution tool was applied, meaning that losses were absorbed by the bank’s shareholders and unsecured creditors, including uncovered depositors, through the conversion of existing shares and debt to new shares.

Cyprus was the first rescue by international lenders with a condition to impose losses on bank depositors, a measure considered inconceivable until then. The rescue agreement was followed by a closure of the entire banking sector for nearly two weeks with the imposition of capital controls with a view to preventing a bank run. Just as Iceland, Cyprus expected to institute capital controls for a short period of time, only to unwind them this year.

And as history continues to repeat itself, Greece imposed capital controls in late June 2015, in an attempt to prevent a bank run and the collapse of its banking sector. The causes of the Greek financial crisis are numerous yet different to some extent from those of the aforementioned cases; they relate, among other things, to the unsustainable debt that the government has been borrowing, the five years of unsuccessful efforts to stem the burgeoning crisis and the design of the Eurozone. The consequences are nevertheless the same: the Greek banks are currently in need of a substantial restructuring and the question of how their depositors would be treated is still unsettled.

The country’s banking system was once ‘too interconnected to fail’ but this is, arguably, no longer the case as Europe has put up safeguards to limit financial contagion and keep the problems from spreading to other countries. Iceland’s and Cyprus’ recoveries have been just as impressive as their crises; it remains to be seen whether history will repeat itself in this respect for Greece as well.

Featured image credit: Macros 8 by Keith Williamson. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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The Carr case: New York is still the tax capital of the nation

Governor Andrew Cuomo says that he no longer wants New York to be “the tax capital of the nation.” The recent experience of Patrick J. Carr demonstrates the long distance New York must still travel to reach the governor’s goal.

Mr. Carr, an attorney, was a former New York resident who had moved to Florida. He remained a member of the New York bar but lived and maintained an office only in Florida.

When New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance audited Mr. Carr, the Department determined that, by virtue of his New York bar license, the income Mr. Carr earned in Florida providing legal representation was taxable to the Empire State. In Patrick J. Carr, administrative law judge Barbara J. Russo rejected the Department’s claim, concluding that Mr. Carr, a Florida resident, earned all of his income in Florida.

The good news is that Mr. Carr prevailed. The bad news is that New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance unnecessarily inflicted substantial cost on Mr. Carr, forcing him to defend himself against the Department’s unwarranted tax assessment.

Tax Analysts’ Cara Griffith labels the Department’s argument in Carr “ridiculous” and “contrary to state law.” She warns that Carr may signal that the Department “is getting more creative when attempting to impose income tax on residents that have moved out of” New York.

The Department’s position in Carr also flouted the Due Process clause of the US Constitution. Due Process forbids the kind of extraterritorial taxation of nonresidents the Department asserted against Mr. Carr, who lived in Florida, was no longer a resident of the Empire State and earned all of his income in Florida.

Carr is not an isolated case but, rather, reflects the determination with which the New York tax collector improperly seeks to export the costs of New York government onto nonresidents.

The litany of New York’s Carr-like litigation against nonresidents is long. Sometimes, the nonresident taxpayer, at great expense, convinces New York’s courts to curb the Department’s aggressive extraterritorial taxation. In Matter of Gaied v. New York State Tax Appeals Trib., the Department asserted that an individual who lived in New Jersey was taxable on his worldwide income as a New York resident because he owned a three-family apartment building on Staten Island and let his parents live in one of the building’s three apartments. This apartment, New York’s Court of Appeals ruled, was not Mr. Gaied’s “permanent place of abode in New York” because he did not live there.

The good news is that Mr. Gaied, like Mr. Carr, also eventually prevailed. The bad news is that Mr. Gaied had to take his case to New York’s highest court to reach the common sense outcome that the apartment used by his parents was not his home.

Other nonresident taxpayers have not been so fortunate. I am something of a poster boy for the Department’s projection of New York’s tax authority beyond its boundaries. The Department takes the position that nonresidents such as me owe New York income taxes on the days we work at our out-of-state homes and do not set foot in the Empire State. Though every independent commentator rejects as unconstitutional this extraterritorial taxation of nonresidents, New York’s courts have sustained the Department’s position.

Thus, the Department, bolstered by New York’s courts, holds that I must pay New York income tax on days I work at home in New Haven, Connecticut; that Thomas Huckaby owes New York income tax on days he works at his home in Nashville, Tennessee; and that Manohar Kakar must pay New York income tax on the days he works at his residence in Gilbert, Arizona.

Consider as well the case of John J. Barker. Mr. Barker lives with his wife and their three children in Connecticut. Mr. Barker commutes daily to Manhattan where he works as an investment manager. The Barkers bought a beach house in the “seasonal community” of Napeague, New York. The Barkers’ use of this beach home “was sporadic,” basically occurring on isolated weekends during the summer. For the Department and New York’s Tax Appeals Tribunal, this was enough to make Mr. Barker taxable as a New York resident.

Anyone who has experienced a New York tax audit, as a nonresident taxpayer or representing a nonresident taxpayer, understands that these cases are not aberrational. Rather, these cases reflect the Department’s fierce determination to tax nonresidents, regardless of constitutional or tax policy norms.

The Department’s behavior signals to those who live, work or invest in New York and those who contemplate living, working or investing in New York that, as far as the Department of Taxation and Finance is concerned, New York is an unwelcoming place.

Carr is the most recent manifestation of New York’s overly-aggressive and unconstitutional approach to nonresidents. As long as New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance behaves this way, New York will, despite Governor Cuomo’s protestations, continue to deserve its reputation as the “tax capital of the United States.”

Image Credit: “Tax Day, New York City” by Amit Gupta. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Global health inequalities and the “brain drain”

There are massive inequalities in global health opportunities and outcomes.  Consider, for instance, that Japan has around twenty-one physicians per 10,000 people, while Malawi has only one physician for every fifty thousand people.  This radical inequality in medical skills and talents has, obviously, bad consequences for health; people born in Malawi will live, on average, 32 years fewer than their counterparts born in Japan.  These facts are troubling in themselves.  They become even more troubling, though, when we start asking why nations like Malawi have so few physicians.  The answer, it seems, is not that the citizens of developing countries have no interest in becoming physicians, or a lack of opportunity for medical training; in many cases, developing societies spend a great deal of money training new physicians, and spots in medical school are avidly sought.  The reason for the low numbers of physicians, instead, has much to do with what medical training provides: namely, the opportunity to leave the developing society, and enter into a more developed one.  Developed societies such as the United States and the United Kingdom have made immigration comparatively easy for those with scarce medical skills.  The result is that those who are trained abroad will often choose to take their newly-minted skills to the developed world, leaving their impoverished compatriots behind.  The result is a continued shortage of medical personnel in sub-Saharan Africa.  No matter how much a developing country puts into medical education, it is unlikely to thereby obtain an adequate stock of medical personnel.  In 2000, for example, Ghana trained 250 new nurses – and lost 500 nurses to emigration.  In 2001, Zimbabwe graduated 40 pharmacists – and lost 60.  In 2002 alone, Malawi lost 75 nurses to the United Kingdom – a cohort that represented 12% of all the nurses resident in Malawi.

This phenomenon of high levels of migration of talented (and, often, expensively trained) people from developing nations to developed ones, is often referred to as the “brain drain”. The phenomenon is, or should be, troubling to those of us who care about global justice. The phenomenon seems poised to perpetuate the inequality in life-chances between the developing and developed societies.  The absent talent of the emigrant undermines both the life-chances of present citizens of the developing society – a society with fewer doctors, after all, is a society in which more people will die avoidable deaths – and the chances for that society to develop flourishing institutions for future citizens.  The phenomenon also seems almost ludicrously unfair: the wealthy citizens of the United States, already well-equipped with medical services, are increasing their stock of medical personnel by depriving the most needy global citizens of medical practitioners.  It is tempting to conclude, as a recent headline in the New York Times had it, that America is stealing the world’s doctors.

Like any complex phenomenon, it is likely that different people will have different responsibilities to reduce injustices associated with the problems presented by brain drain.  Agents from affluent developed countries — such as recruiting agents for healthcare organizations in the U.S. – may well have one set of important responsibilities.  And those in poor developing countries might have another.  In efforts to address these problems, might governments of poor developing countries defensibly introduce compulsory service programs?  Would they be justified in requiring high skilled migrants who have left the country to pay taxes for a short period (e.g. 3 years) after leaving their countries of origin?

Two powerful lines of argument pull in opposite directions.  On the one hand, the dire needs of compatriots, the investment of public resources in training highly skilled citizens who leave, governments’ responsibilities to provide services that would meet needs, the benefits the migrant has received while living in her country of origin and her duties to reciprocate, suggests short periods of compulsory service or taxation may be justified.  On the other hand proposals for compulsory service or taxation might be construed as both unfair and illiberal.  They might be thought unfair because they place a disproportionate share of the burden of global justice on talented and educated residents of developing societies; and illiberal, because they rest upon an illegitimate vision of what the state is entitled to claim as its own.  Which, if either, of these lines of argument is more compelling?  If neither, are we faced with only tragic choices in trying to confront the problems presented by brain drain?

 

Feature Image: Globe Earth World Globalization Planet Global by geralt. Public Domain via Pixabay

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Diamonds are forever, and so are mathematical truths?

Over the next few weeks, Leo Corry, author of A Brief History of Numbers, helps us understand how the history of mathematics can be harnessed to develop modern-day applications today. In this first post, he explores how the differences between perceptions of truth in maths and history affect the study of those subjects.

Try googling ‘mathematical gem.’ I just got 465,000 results. Quite a lot. Indeed, the metaphor of mathematical ideas as precious little gems is an old one, and it is well known to anyone with a zest for mathematics. A diamond is a little, fully transparent structure, all of whose parts can be observed with awe from any angle. It is breathtaking in its beauty, yet at the same time powerful and virtually indestructible. This description applies equally well to so many pieces of mathematical knowledge: proofs, formulae, and algorithms.

Leonhard Euler, for instance, was the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century and we associate his name nowadays with many beautiful mathematical gems. Think of the so-called Euler Formula: V – E + F = 2. This concise expression embodies a surprising property of any convex polyhedron, of which V represents the numbers of its vertices, E of its edges, and F of its faces. But probably the most famous gem associated with his name is the so-called ‘Euler identity':

 e i π + 1 = 0.

Beyond the mathematical importance of this identity it is remarkable how often it is known and praised, above all, for its beauty: “the most beautiful equation of maths”, we read in various places. A most impressive diamond!

But we can compare mathematical ideas to diamonds not only in terms of beauty. Diamonds are also, as you surely remember from the James Bond film, forever. And so are proved mathematical results. Indeed, the theme song of the Bond film defines very aptly, I think, the way in which mathematicians relate to those ideas with which they become involved and invest their best efforts for long periods of time:

Diamonds are forever,


Hold one up and then caress it,


Touch it, stroke it and undress it,


I can see every part,


Nothing hides in the heart to hurt me.


— Shirley Bassey, Diamonds Are Forever

Of course, before reaching the point where mathematical ideas become diamonds, likely to remain forever, there is a period of groping in the dark. This period may sometimes be long and the dark may be deep, before light is finally turned on and the diamond becomes transparent. You can then touch it, stroke it and undress it, and you will truly understand the necessary interconnection between all of its parts.

In a recent TED video, the Spanish mathematician Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón tells his audience that “if you want to tell someone that you will love her forever you can give her a diamond. But if you want to tell her that you’ll love her forever and ever, give her a theorem!” (Unfortunately, in spite of the accompanying English subtitles, his most successful jokes are lost in translation from Spanish.)

Diamond by nafets. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

And so, it is the eternal character of mathematical truths and the unanimity of mathematicians about them that sets mathematics apart from almost all other endeavors of human knowledge. This unique character of mathematics as a system of knowledge may be stressed even more sharply by comparison to another discipline, like history for example. At its core, mathematical knowledge deals with certain, necessary, and universal truths. True mathematical statements do not depend on contextual considerations, either in time or in geographical location. Generally speaking, established mathematical statements are considered to be beyond dispute or interpretation.

The discipline of history, on the contrary, deals with the particular, the contingent, and the idiosyncratic. It deals with events that happened in a particular location at a particular point in time, and events that happened in a certain way but could have happened otherwise. Historical statements are always partial, debatable, and open to interpretation. Arguments put forward by historians keep changing with time. ‘Thinking historically’ and ‘thinking mathematically’, then, are clearly two different things.

For historians of mathematics, the comparison between mathematics and history, as two different ways of thought and as two different kinds of academic disciplines, is an important issue. Historians in general do not see just providing an account of “one damn thing after the other” (as the phrase often attributed to Arnold Toynbee goes) as the aim of their intellectual pursuit.  Historians of mathematics, in turn, do not see the aims of their pursuits as just providing a chronology of discoveries. What does it mean, then, to think historically about the ways in which people have been ‘thinking mathematically’ throughout history, and about the processes of change that have affected these ways of thinking? If mathematics deals with universal truths, how can we speak about mathematics from a historical perspective (other than to establish the chronology of certain discoveries)? What is it that changes through time in a discipline whose truths are, apparently, eternal?

“Who was the first to discover the formula for the quadratic equation?” That’s not really the kind of question that historians of mathematics try to be involved with. In fact, rather than “Who was the first to discover X?” we may find it more interesting to investigate a question such as “Who was the last person to discover X?” This latter question involves the understanding that in spite of the eternal character of mathematical results, there is still a lot to be said about the way in which mathematical ideas develop and are understood throughout history. It suggests that something that was mathematically proved at some point was not considered to be so at a later time, that mathematicians are not always aware or do not always care about the existence of a proof that later becomes interesting and relevant. It also suggests that it makes historical sense to try and understand the circumstances of this change in mathematical values. The question also implies that only at a certain point in time a mathematical proof became so fundamentally convincing that it impressed upon that result a stamp of eternal validity. Or, at least, temporarily so.

Featured image: Isfahan Lotfollah mosque ceiling symmetric by Phillip Maiwald. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Legal order: lessons from ancient Athens

How do large-scale societies achieve cooperation? Since Thomas Hobbes’ famous work, Leviathan (1651), social scientific treatments of the problem of cooperation have assumed that living together without killing one another requires an act of depersonalization in the form of a transfer of individual powers to an all-powerful central government.

Cooperation without a third party enforcer, the theory holds, can occur, but it is most likely to succeed when groups are sufficiently small and/or sufficiently homogeneous (e.g. Ostrom, 1990; Ellickson, 1991; Bernstein, 1992; 2001; Hadfield and Weingast, 2012; 2013; 2014). Contemporary, globalized, territorially extensive nation states appear doomed to submit to national or global Leviathans (Tilly, 1992; Fukuyama, 2011; 2014; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Morris, 2014).

Hobbes’ predicament, restated by his 19th century successor, Max Weber, still dominates the social sciences. Developed western governments may consider themselves beyond Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature and of the necessity of building a state that keeps members of the community ‘in awe.’ Yet, the notion that centralization is our best hope to avoid widespread social violence and coordination failures still informs the theory and practice of institution building in the developing world.

We take a different view. Our claim is that it may be possible to achieve economic and political development without extensive centralization, even in relatively large-scale and heterogeneous communities and that Classical Athens is a model case exemplifying this. Can Athens help us rethink the process and goals of institution building, particularly legal institutions, in modern developing countries?

Classical Athens provides a unique laboratory for studying the institutional arrangements that enabled a large-scale civilization to reject strong centralization as the guiding principle to solve the collective action problems that plague social order (Ober, 2015).

With a total population of ca. 250,000 people, and a territory of ca. 2500 km2, Athens was a bit less populous than Vanuatu and a bit smaller than Luxembourg. Yet, Athens was certainly not a community of fishermen, a group of cattle herders, or a guild. Smaller than most contemporary states, Athens was larger than most of its immediate neighbors (other Greek poleis) and its inhabitants were, on average, better off than those of most pre-modern societies. The sources suggest that the city and its harbor extension—the deme of Piraeus—were largely populated by Greeks sharing a common culture, language, and religion. Yet, we also hear of a number of non-Greek aliens and foreigners that came progressively to share the material and cultural advantages of living in a prosperous open access society (Carugati 2015; Ober 2008). Athens was not as ethnically diverse as most modern countries, but socioeconomic cleavages, rather than ethnicity, constituted a primary source of conflict (Ober, 1989).

Image credit: Parthenon: Acropolis, by Sam Valadi. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

For roughly 200 years (ca. 508-322 BC), the ancient polis of Athens achieved exceptional levels of prosperity, order, and stability under a democratic government. Unlike modern developed democracies, Athens did not establish strongly centralized legal institutions, such as a hierarchy of authoritative formal courts, public prosecutors, expert judges and lawyers, and an organized police force. These institutions are often regarded as the sine qua non for the establishment of a robust rule of law, on which economic growth and democratic stability depend.

How, then, can we explain Athens’ success? Our paper, “Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens,” explores the role that Athens’ distinctive legal institutions played in fostering social order, democratic stability, and high and sustained economic growth.

Athenian laws and legal institutions fostered order, stability and prosperity by securing common knowledge of rules and incentivizing enforcement efforts in a decentralized system of coercion. Common knowledge and incentive-compatibility relied on widespread participation of ordinary people at all stages of the legal process – that is, in creating rules, in managing adjudication, in declaring what counts as a violation, and in enforcing the penalties for rule violation. Participation, in turn, helped the evolution of rules that benefited all, applied to all, and were consistent with longstanding community norms.

We can derive four lessons from the Athenian case: first, involve ordinary people; second, foster common knowledge about rules and classifications; third, make sure that benefits of the rules are universal among enforcers; and fourth, maintain continuity between pre-existing norms and new rules as long as needed to stabilize the acceptance of new institutions across a population.

These are not obviously easy lessons to follow in the modern world. Three main obstacles present themselves. First, maintaining the compatibility of pre-existing traditional norms with new rules in some cases (e.g., gender equality), even if only on the path to a more robust legal order where new rules can emerge, will seriously challenge today’s human rights standards. Second, the costs that participation imposes on the allocation of an individual’s limited time and resources may exceed what our poorest communities can tolerate. And third, the threat that decentralized enforcement may lead to social violence is especially worrisome in a world where the weapons are no longer just spears, clubs, and poison but extend to automatic weapons and car bombs.

Nonetheless, we think the Athenian case shows that decentralized enforcement can be consistent with social order, economic prosperity, and even an expansion of individual rights (in the mid-4th century, the Athenians extended economic and legal privileges to slaves to incentivize their economic activity, Carugati, 2015). Whether similar results can be achieved in modern developing countries remains a question that only further theoretical and empirical work can answer.

We hope to foster a new agenda that reflects seriously on alternative ways of providing critical public goods in places where centralized institutions have proven hard to implement and where the lack of reliable rule enforcement mechanisms is and remains one of the toughest obstacles to individual prosperity and well-being.

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Where next? New politics, kinder politics, and the myth of anti-politics

For many commentators the 2015 General Election was the first genuinely ‘anti-political’ election but at the same time it was one in which the existence of a major debate about the nature of British democracy served to politicize huge sections of society. The surge in party membership for the Scottish National Party, for example, with over 100,000 members at the time of the election (i.e. far more members than soldiers in the whole British Army) deserves some explanation in a context dominated by the rhetoric of disenchantment and decline. The subsequent election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party with over a quarter of a million votes (59.5% of those cast) raises further questions about ‘anti-politics being all the rage’.

The simple fact is that ‘anti-politics’ is a myth. It is also a dangerous myth due to the manner in which it seeks to perpetuate cynicism when the evidence is arguably far more positive. The truth is that the results of the 2015 General Election and the Labour leadership contest were actually more anti-establishment than anti-political. Take, for example, the influential writing and public interventions of Owen Jones [The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, 2014] or Russell Brand’s raw anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-elections nihilism that was captured in his book Revolution (2014). I’m not for one moment suggesting that Jones or Brand were (or are) personally responsible for the dramatic shifts in the nature of British democracy but I am saying they – like Jeremy Corbyn – were able to somehow codify the moral sentiment of the age.

But that sentiment is not anti-political. It is tied to a search for a different form of politics, a ‘new’ politics.

It was this sense of a desire for difference that forged a deep fault-line through the 2015 General Election as ‘insurgent’ parties such as UKIP and the SNP sought to expose and exploit this gap between ‘old’ or traditional politics and a widespread public desire for change, while the mainstream parties sought to close and downplay this gap through a mixture of promising limited reforms and focusing on other issues. Like similar parties and movements in the USA, Austria, Denmark, France, Italy and many other countries, such parties offer a critique of what has gone before and promise new ways of ‘doing politics’. They assert a fundamental divide between the political establishment and ‘the people’ and positioned themselves as a ‘challenger brand’ that promises to deliver a quite different way of ‘doing democracy’. This approach dovetails with major international studies that reveal not so much a crisis of democracy but  – as Pippa Norris has written – that ‘like a swollen river flowing through different tributaries, democratic engagement may have adapted and evolved in accordance with the new structure of opportunities, rather than simply atrophying’. The ‘new’ politics is therefore a world of boycotting, buy-cotting, squatting, pinging, hacking, flashmobs, twitter-led mobilisations, and a general broadening –rather than narrowing – of the ways in which people express themselves politically. ‘Think Politics, Think Vote’ is just so passé.  

What’s arguably happening ‘out there’ is therefore not ‘anti-politics’ but “pro-‘doing politics differently’”.

Three issues flow from this argument.

First and foremost, at the General Election neither the Conservatives nor Labour seemed able to cope with the nature and strength of those public frustrations that became entwined in the ‘anti-politics’ debate in terms of offering a response or vision of what ‘doing politics’ might look like. The Labour Party now finds itself at the heart of a period of radical experimentation; the Conservative Party needs to be very careful not to look either smug or dependent on those ‘old’ forms of aggressive ‘attack politics’ that have alienated large sections of the public. Secondly, the ‘insurgent parties’ must tread a careful line between, on the one hand, rejecting the existing model of politics while, on the other hand, promoting a deeper conviction that democratic politics is not futile, i.e., to nurture support while decrying the existing model. This has arguably been more problematic for the SNP who were at one-and-the-same-time a governing party (in Scotland) and challenger party (in Westminster) at the recent General Election.

And finally, we come to Jeremy Corbyn (forgive me) two little thoughts. The simple fact is that is politics is judged in terms of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ then Jezza has already won. Whatever happens next the Labour Party will undoubtedly have to not so much ‘shift to the left’ but to fundamentally re-evaluate its social role and position. Irrespective of whether he ever becomes Prime Minister, or is even in office at the time of the next General Election, he has ‘won’ in the sense that he has acted as a powerful lightning rod for broader social frustrations and he has put a set of very real and meaningful policy choices back on the agenda. But standing back from Jeremy Corbyn, the ‘mainstreamers’ and the ‘insurgents’ there is a far bigger questions for the UK (and internationally) about the specific form, values and structures that might make up this ‘new politics’. What does ‘doing politics differently’ actually mean?

Answers (please) on a postcard to the Crick Centre, University of Sheffield, S10 2TY.

Featured image: “The British Parliament and Big Ben” by Maurice CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Where next? New politics, kinder politics and the myth of anti-politics

For many commentators the 2015 General Election was the first genuinely ‘anti-political’ election but at the same time it was one in which the existence of a major debate about the nature of British democracy served to politicize huge sections of society. The surge in party membership for the Scottish National Party, for example, with over 100,000 members at the time of the election (i.e. far more members than soldiers in the whole British Army) deserves some explanation in a context dominated by the rhetoric of disenchantment and decline. The subsequent election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party with over a quarter of a million votes (59.5% of those cast) raises further questions about ‘anti-politics being all the rage’.

The simple fact is that ‘anti-politics’ is a myth. It is also a dangerous myth due to the manner in which it seeks to perpetuate cynicism when the evidence is arguably far more positive. The truth is that the results of the 2015 General Election and the Labour leadership contest were actually more anti-establishment than anti-political. Take, for example, the influential writing and public interventions of Owen Jones [The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, 2014] or Russell Brand’s raw anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-elections nihilism that was captured in his book Revolution (2014). I’m not for one moment suggesting that Jones or Brand were (or are) personally responsible for the dramatic shifts in the nature of British democracy but I am saying they – like Jeremy Corbyn – were able to somehow codify the moral sentiment of the age.

But that sentiment is not anti-political. It is tied to a search for a different form of politics, a ‘new’ politics.

It was this sense of a desire for difference that forged a deep fault-line through the 2015 General Election as ‘insurgent’ parties such as UKIP and the SNP sought to expose and exploit this gap between ‘old’ or traditional politics and a widespread public desire for change, while the mainstream parties sought to close and downplay this gap through a mixture of promising limited reforms and focusing on other issues. Like similar parties and movements in the USA, Austria, Denmark, France, Italy and many other countries, such parties offer a critique of what has gone before and promise new ways of ‘doing politics’. They assert a fundamental divide between the political establishment and ‘the people’ and positioned themselves as a ‘challenger brand’ that promises to deliver a quite different way of ‘doing democracy’. This approach dovetails with major international studies that reveal not so much a crisis of democracy but  – as Pippa Norris has written – that ‘like a swollen river flowing through different tributaries, democratic engagement may have adapted and evolved in accordance with the new structure of opportunities, rather than simply atrophying’. The ‘new’ politics is therefore a world of boycotting, buy-cotting, squatting, pinging, hacking, flashmobs, twitter-led mobilisations, and a general broadening –rather than narrowing – of the ways in which people express themselves politically. ‘Think Politics, Think Vote’ is just so passé.  

What’s arguably happening ‘out there’ is therefore not ‘anti-politics’ but “pro-‘doing politics differently’”.

Three issues flow from this argument.

First and foremost, at the General Election neither the Conservatives nor Labour seemed able to cope with the nature and strength of those public frustrations that became entwined in the ‘anti-politics’ debate in terms of offering a response or vision of what ‘doing politics’ might look like. The Labour Party now finds itself at the heart of a period of radical experimentation; the Conservative Party needs to be very careful not to look either smug or dependent on those ‘old’ forms of aggressive ‘attack politics’ that have alienated large sections of the public. Secondly, the ‘insurgent parties’ must tread a careful line between, on the one hand, rejecting the existing model of politics while, on the other hand, promoting a deeper conviction that democratic politics is not futile, i.e., to nurture support while decrying the existing model. This has arguably been more problematic for the SNP who were at one-and-the-same-time a governing party (in Scotland) and challenger party (in Westminster) at the recent General Election.

And finally, we come to Jeremy Corbyn (forgive me) two little thoughts. The simple fact is that is politics is judged in terms of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ then Jezza has already won. Whatever happens next the Labour Party will undoubtedly have to not so much ‘shift to the left’ but to fundamentally re-evaluate its social role and position. Irrespective of whether he ever becomes Prime Minister, or is even in office at the time of the next General Election, he has ‘won’ in the sense that he has acted as a powerful lightning rod for broader social frustrations and he has put a set of very real and meaningful policy choices back on the agenda. But standing back from Jeremy Corbyn, the ‘mainstreamers’ and the ‘insurgents’ there is a far bigger questions for the UK (and internationally) about the specific form, values and structures that might make up this ‘new politics’. What does ‘doing politics differently’ actually mean?

Answers (please) on a postcard to the Crick Centre, University of Sheffield, S10 2TY.

Featured image: “The British Parliament and Big Ben” by Maurice CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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What is your favourite Shakespeare adaptation?

In anticipation of Shakespeare celebrations next year, we asked Oxford University Press and Oxford University staff members to choose their favourite Shakespeare adaptation. From classic to contemporary, the obscure to the infamous, we’ve collected a whole range of faithful and quirky translations from play text to film. Did your favourite film or television programme make the list?

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“I’ve just rewatched with great pleasure Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), which combines Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Merry Wives, bits of Henry V, and Holinshed’s chronicles. It reimagines the plays as the story of Falstaff rather than of Prince Hal, and a nostalgic Falstaff who represents a lost golden age of Merrie England. The montage of the Battle of Shrewsbury is justly famous, but I also loved the wideangle sequence of the forest in which the Gad’s Hill robbery takes place. Purists will find Welles’ reshapings annoying, but I enjoyed its intelligence. Making Falstaff the unnamed drunk who is pardoned by a magnanimous Henry V goes some way to healing the breach between the old man and his protégé.”


— Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College Oxford and adviser for Illuminating Shakespeare

“One of my all-time favorite Shakespeare adaptations is Scotland, PA – a darkly comedic retelling of Macbeth that takes place in a 1970s suburb. Really all you need to know is that Macbeth is recast as a fast food worker with an overly ambitious wife, and Christopher Walken plays Macduff.”


— Lauren Hill, Assistant Marketing Manager, Trade Books

“My favourite Shakespeare film adaptation would have to be The Lion King (based on the story of Hamlet). As soon as I saw it as a child I was in love with the music, the characters, and the story, and although the ending is a little ‘Disney-fied’ compared to Shakespeare’s original, which I fell in love with as an adult, it still remains a movie that will bring a smile to my face.”


— Hannah Charters, Associate Marketing Manager, Online Products

“I tend to love great films and terrible films fairly equally, and can’t decide where She’s The Man falls on this scale. It’s an adaptation of Twelfth Night so loose that Shakespeare’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the DVD, and the writers’ borrowings pretty much begin and end with naming people and things (Channing Tatum = Duke Orsino; a pet tarantula = Malvolio). Yet I can’t help loving the way it modernises Twelfth Night’s tropes into one woman’s stand against the chauvinism of college football. Ok, it’s terrible, but I still love it.”


— Simon Thomas, Marketing Executive, Oxford Dictionaries

“For me, nothing can really match Kenneth Branagh’s slightly bonkers adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. Set in beautiful Italian countryside, Branagh’s Benedick and Emma Thompson’s Beatrice hold their battle of wits alongside a stellar and occasionally hilarious cast – Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves as the brothers Don, a young Robert Sean Leonard, and Brian Blessed being Brian Blessed – and a couple of musical numbers, just because. It’s joyous, silly, and never fails to make me laugh out loud.”


— Helena Palmer, Marketing Assistant, Academic

“My favourite adaption has to be Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet. It came out when I was 15 and, by chance, studying the play at school. I think I was the perfect age to enjoy the MTV-style fast-cut cinematography and I ended up going to see it about six times in a few weeks. I also had the posters, the soundtracks (both of them), and was just generally obsessed with it at the time. Watching it again now, I think it’s beginning to look a little bit ‘of its time,’ but I’ll always have an affection for it, for nostalgic reasons if nothing else.”


— Kirsty Doole, Senior Publicity Manager

“My favourite Shakespeare film adaptation was Laurence Olivier’s King Lear, shown on the BBC in 1983. I was 12, and it marked the moment Shakespeare actually started to come to life for me. I had seen one or two productions in college gardens in Oxford, and had played Puck in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, launching a brief school career of being routinely cast as sprites or wizened old men. But somehow the iambic pentameter and the ‘hey nonny nonny’ always stepped between me and the suspension of disbelief. This adaptation – and its wonderful cast – changed all that, in its terrible grandeur, surrendering the structure to rage and frustration, scheming and grief. While gore is terribly de rigueur these days, the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes truly haunted me awhile.”


— Sophie Goldsworthy, Editorial Director, Academic & Trade

“Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, relocates the story from Scotland to Japan, re-presenting Macbeth’s bloody ambition within the context of a feudal Japanese samurai society. Kurosawa’s famed skill for conveying power dynamics through choreography and framing made Macbeth a perfect match for the director. Through Macbeth’s relationship with his wife, an unforgettable take on Lady Macbeth, he also incorporated interesting consideration of gender. Kurosawa’s reimagining continues to be an influence on global cinema, as we will surely see when Justin Kurzel’s new version starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard is released later this year.”


— Rachel Brook, Marketing Assistant, Institutional Marketing

“Given that decent high school dramedies have always been a rarity, the loose Shakespeare adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You comes across as a real flash in the pan. Adapting the plot of The Taming of the Shrew to a high school in Tacoma, Washington? Casting two Hollywood newcomers as the leads (Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, for the uninitiated)? Discarding even a whiff of a Shakespeare allusion in the title? Heath Ledger’s bravura performance of Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You’? A date with white suits and water balloons filled with paint? It’s all so oddball, and yet it works.”


— Taylor Coe, Marketing Coordinator, Oxford Dictionaries

“Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus (1999) was a standout for me. A rarely performed and certainly not much lauded play due to its perceived failure as a tragedy and textual inconsistencies, it knocked me for six when studying it at university. There is an unbelievable level of violence and hatred, with warring families tearing themselves apart by seeking revenge. It could give The Godfather trilogy a run for its money. Taymor’s adaptation was bold, intertwining the traditional and the modern to make it accessible to a twenty-first century audience, and perhaps most memorably it employed toys and tomato ketchup in one of the most interesting openers to a film that I’ve seen for some time.”


— Hannah McGuffie, Senior Marketing Manager, Academic

“I adore Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), an epic adaptation of King Lear set in the Sengoku (warring states) period of feudal Japan. King Lear, or in this version the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji, intends to divide his kingdom among his three sons, explaining his decision through the artful symbolism of three bound arrows—stronger together than apart. His youngest son, Saburo, the Cordelia of the film, breaks the arrows across his knee and bluntly protests the folly of this vision. Hidetora banishes him for his insolence, and thus Ran (chaos) begins. Its incredible performances, vibrant costumes, and lavish set design are forever seared in my memory.”


— Megan McPherson, Marketing Associate, Institutional Marketing

“I think Rupert Goold’s telefilm version of Richard II screened by the BBC as part of the Hollow Crown season stands as one of the most revelatory adaptations of Shakespeare I’ve seen. I’ve seen Fiona Shaw, Eddie Redmayne, and David Tennant, play the role on stage, but seeing Ben Whishaw actually sit down on a beach to ‘tell sad stories of the death of kings’ really brings the story alive. Here is a king more concerned with pomp than justice, and symbolism than ruling, and that the struggle we are seeing is as much about what it takes to be a good king, as between Richard and his cousin Bollingbroke. David Suchet and Patrick Stewart are fantastic as the King’s uncles, two of the most humane parts to be found in the history plays.”


— Joseph Kennedy, OUP Bookshop

“I like the BBC’s Shakespeare ReTold adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing because it retains a lot of the original dialogue while still managing to modernize and update the story, even changing the plot and the ending. I thought that really demonstrated how although modern culture means that stories often end a bit differently, Shakespeare’s characters and language are still relevant today.”


— Celine Aenlle-Rocha, Marketing Assistant, Music

“My favourite Shakespeare film adaptation is Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. This is because it’s set in the wonderful grounds of Blenheim Palace (so if you live around Oxford it’s easy to visit and then pretend you’re in Elsinore), the late Robin Williams is hilarious as Osric, as is Billy Crystal as a Gravedigger, and Charlton Heston delivers a thundering speech as the Player King. It also contains some scary looking eyes from Brian Blessed and Jack Lemmon slavishly reciting blank verse. At over 4 hours long includes pretty much the whole play so is excellent value for money!”


— Chris Wogan, Marketing Manager, Commercial Law

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What’s your favourite film or television adaptation? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Featured image: Red cinema seats. (c) habrda via iStock.

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Philosopher of the month: Karl Marx

This October, the OUP Philosophy team are highlighting German social and political theorist Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) as their Philosopher of the Month. Known as the founder of revolutionary communism, Marx is credited as one of the most influential thinkers for his theoretical framework, widely known as Marxism.

Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law at the university of Bonn, then history and philosophy at Berlin. After completing his doctorate in classical philosophy from the University of Jena, Marx became a journalist for a radical bourgeois newspaper called Rheinische Zeitung. Ultimately frustrated by the political suppression and censorship he faced in both his academic and journalistic careers, Marx moved to France and then Belgium. After the Revolutions of 1848 failed, Marx settled in London in 1849. It was here that he produced his major works on political economy, including the three volumes of Capital (1867-1894). He developed bronchitis and died in London, England in 1883.

Marx is widely known for authoring The Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto became the primary source of the communist doctrine, and established the goals and strategy for the working-class movement. Despite Marx’s suggestion to shelve the work when the Revolutions of 1848 failed, the Manifesto continued a global communist movement well throughout the 20th century.

Keep a look out for #PhilosopherOTM across social media and follow @OUPPhilosophy on Twitter for more Philosopher of the Month content.

Featured image credit: The Bundestag Flag Monument, Berlin, by Kamyq. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Understanding modern Ukraine: a timeline

As with most other countries, the Ukraine we know today—with everything good, bad, and in-between about it—is a result of its history. It shares more than half its borders with Russia, accounting for the two countries’ complicated history. Ukraine’s roots began in the ninth century, spanning across centuries and leading up to the conflict that has caused political and social turbulence in the past few years. In order for us to understand how Ukraine has evolved since its formation, we’ve pulled together a timeline that maps out notable events, with data from Serhy Yekelchyk’s The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Image Credit: Flag of Ukraine. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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