London School of Economics: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Professor Richard Rose | Less than a year away from the 2014 European Parliament elections, Professor Richard Rose talks about his new book on democracy in Europe, Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Approach (OUP). With the European Union now impacting more and more on people's lives, he analyses how democratic the EU institutions are, how far they respond to voters' concerns, how voters see European elections and referenda, and how the EU institutions might yet be reformed.Richard Rose is one of the world's leading political scientists. He founded the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at University of Strathcyde in 1976, and is Visiting Professor at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published more than 40 books and lectured in 45 countries, with writings translated into 17 languages. He received the Sir Isaiah Berlin Lifetime Achievement Prize of the UK Political Studies Association in 2009.

Speaker(s): Jean-François Copé | Leading figure of the centre-right opposition, Jean-François Copé assesses François Hollande’s Presidency and sets out an agenda for domestic reform and France’s European policy.Jean-François Copé is founder of think tank Generation France and leader of the French opposition. He is the mayor of Meaux, deputy for the 6th constituency of Seine-et-Marne, and acts as president of the Union for a Popular Movement Group in the French National Assembly.Jean-Luc Allavena is partner at Apollo Management.

Speaker(s): Dr Rupert Read, Professor Roger Scruton | On the basis of a shared interest in planetary survival, can we forge an alliance across the left/right rift in our culture?Rupert Read is chair of the Green House thinktank, East of England Green Party co-ordinator and a reader in Philosophy at UEA.Roger Scruton is a philosopher, writer and consultant who holds visiting positions at St Andrews University and the University of Oxford.

Speaker(s): Jo da Silva | Jo da Silva explores how engineers and built environment professionals need to shift from responding to natural disasters to building everyday resilience within homes, communities and cities. Jo da Silva is the founding director of Arup International Development.

Speaker(s): Professor John Kay, Professor Mariana Mazzucato | This lecture is Political Quarterly's Annual Lecture.John Kay chaired the Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision-Making which reported to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in July 2012. He is a visiting Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a director of several public companies and contributes a weekly column to the Financial Times. He is the author of many books, including The Truth about Markets (2003) and The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry (2009) and his latest book, Obliquity was published by Profile Books in March 2010.Mariana Mazzucato, an economist, holds the RM Phillips Chair in Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex (SPRU). Her work focuses on the relationship between financial markets, innovation, and economic growth, and is currently funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Ford Foundation and the European Commission. She advises the EC on innovation led growth through two expert groups, and is a member of related task forces in the UK, such as the UCL Green Economy Policy Commission. Her work on The Entrepreneurial State (DEMOS, 2011) has had significant policy impact across Europe, and her forthcoming book (Anthem, 2013) with the same title, develops this work further, focusing on the need to develop new frameworks to understand the role of the state in economic growth—and how to enable rewards from innovation to be just as ‘social’ as the risks taken.

Speaker(s): Professor Roberto Franzosi | This talk will illustrate the power of Quantitative Narrative Analysis, a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the speaker using data collected from newspapers on the rise of Italian fascism and lynchings in the American 'Deep South'. It will show how narrative data lend themselves to cutting-edge tools of data visualization and analysis as dynamic network graphs and maps in Google Earth and other GIS software, and how QNA data provide the basis for fascinating digital humanities projects.Roberto Franzosi is professor of sociology and linguistics at Emory University.

Speaker(s): Professor Michael Pollan | The food writer and journalist discusses what is at stake when we let corporations do the cooking, and why we need to take back control of our diets for the sake of our health, our environment and our family and social lives.Michael Pollan is professor of journalism at Berkeley and one of Time Magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. His new book is Cooked: a natural history of transformation.

Speaker(s): Sir James Wolfensohn, Professor Amartya Sen | James Wolfensohn was the ninth president of the World Bank. Amartya Sen is professor of economics at Harvard University and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is an honorary fellow of LSE.

Speaker(s): Dr Joel Smith | This lecture will discuss some of the central ideas contained within Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego and consider their continued relevance for contemporary accounts of conscious experience.Joel Smith is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Manchester.

Speaker(s): Professor Mark Blyth | Governments have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts - austerity - to solve the financial crisis. Austerity however is a dangerous idea that has time and again led to low growth and income inequality. "Austerity" marshals an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.Mark Blyth is professor of International Political Economy at Brown University.Jonathan Hopkin is reader in Comparative Politics at the Department of Government, LSE.

Speaker(s): Professor Daniel Dennett | In this lecture, one of the world's most original thinkers will show how he designs, uses, and dismantles the thinking tools that have illuminated his theories of meaning, mind, and evolution. The big difference between human minds and the minds of other animals is our equipping ourselves with literally hundreds of thinking tools--cultural software that we install in our brains much the way we download Java applets to our laptops and smart phones. Some of these tools are as simple as labels or metaphors, and others are sophisticated intuition pumps--persuasion-machines that can delude us if we're not careful.Daniel Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.Christian List is professor of political science and philosophy at LSE.

Speaker(s): Professor Ephraim Kleiman | Professor Kleiman will discuss the repeated calls in the Palestinian Territories for the abrogation of the Paris Protocol, regulating their economic relations with Israel, which have risen against the background of a stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process, the desire for political change and social justice that underlay the Arab Spring.Ephraim Kleiman is Don Patinkin Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests over the years included international trade, public finance, and history of economic thought, as well as the role of wage and financial indexation under inflation.

Speaker(s): Jared Cohen, Eric Schmidt | Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are two of the leading thinkers of our time. The New Digital Age is a unique and unparalleled collaboration between these two great minds and will offer us their view on the future of the world where everyone is connected: a world full of challenges and benefits which are ours to meet and harness.Jared Cohen is Director of Google Ideas and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he served as a member of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff and a close advisor to both Secretaries of States Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.Eric Schmidt is the Executive Chairman of Google, where he served as CEO from 2001-2011. He is a member of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and is member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Speaker(s): Professor Muhammad Yunus | Muhammad Yunus was born on 28 June 1940 in the village of Bathua, Chittagong, a seaport in Bangladesh. The third of fourteen children, he was educated at Dhaka University and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He then served as chairman of the economics department at Chittagong University before devoting his life to providing financial and social services to the poorest of the poor. He is the founder of Grameen Bank, serving as managing director until May 2011. Yunus is the author of the bestselling Banker to the Poor. In October 2006, Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Grameen Bank, for their efforts to create economic and social development. Muhammad Yunus was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science (Economics) by LSE in November 2011. In April 2013 he received the US Congressional Gold Medal.

Speaker(s): Lord Sainsbury | The neoliberalism that has dominated economic thinking since Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan first came to power is now seen to have serious flaws, and Progressive Capitalism seeks to replace it with a new progressive political economy. This is based on an analysis of why the growth rates of countries differ, and what firms have to do to achieve competitive advantage in today’s global economy.The cornerstone of the political economy of Progressive Capitalism is a belief in capitalism. But it also incorporates the three defining beliefs of progressive thinking. These are: the crucial role of institutions, the need for the state to be involved in their design to resolve conflicting interests, and the use of social justice as an important measure of a country’s economic performance. Social justice, defined as fairness, is used as a measure of performance in addition to the rate of economic growth and liberty.Progressive Capitalism shows how this new progressive political economy can be used by politicians and policy-makers to produce a programme of economic reform for a country. It does this by analysing and proposing reforms for the UK’s equity markets, its system of corporate governance, its national system of innovation, and its education and training system.Finally, Progressive Capitalism describes the role the state should play in the economy, which it sees as an enabling one rather than the command-and-control role of traditional socialism or the minimalist role of neoliberalism.David Sainsbury was Finance Director of J. Sainsbury plc from 1973–1990, Deputy Chairman from 1988–1992, and Chairman from 1992–1998. He became Lord Sainsbury of Turville in October 1997 and served as Minister of Science and Innovation from July 1998 until November 2006. He is the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. His new book is Progressive Capitalism: How To Achieve Economic Growth, Liberty and Social Justice.