Summer 2011 | Public lectures and events | Video London School of Economics and Political Science

Contributor(s): Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger | Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is the Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford. His research focuses on the role of information in a networked economy. Earlier he spent ten years on the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Professor Mayer-Schönberger has published seven books, as well as over a hundred articles (including in Science) and book chapters. His most recent book, the awards-winning 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age' (Princeton University Press 2009) has received favourable reviews by academic (Nature, Science, New Scientist) and mainstream media (New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, NPR, BBC, Wired) and has been published in four languages. Ideas proposed in the book have now become official policy, e.g. of the European Union.

Contributor(s): Michael Wolff | Rupert Murdoch is currently engulfed in one of the most extraordinary news stories of recent times, his own. Michael Wolff has long argued that a trend of decline for media moguls is inevitable. In this conversation, Wolff will reveal some of the unparalleled insights he has gleaned from his unprecedented access to Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. He will also discuss how this most recent crisis will ultimately impact the most infamous of media moguls going forward. Michael Wolff is an award winning journalist, author and expert on Rupert Murdoch's global media empire. His latest and most timely book, a biography of Rupert Murdoch 'The Man Who Owns the News', is based on nine months of interviews with Murdoch, his family and associates. Wolff began his career at The New York Times and is currently the editorial director of Adweek and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His books include the best-seller 'Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet' (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and 'Autumn of the Moguls' (HarperBusiness, 2003).'

Contributor(s): Michael Atherton | A conversation and Q&A with cricketer Michael Atherton, author of Glorious Summers and Discontents: Looking Back on the Ups and Downs from a Dramatic Decade. Renowned as a shrewd and resolute captain of England, Atherton moved effortlessly into the commentary box and Fleet Street, proving himself every bit as capable with the pen as with the bat. Born in 1968 and educated at Cambridge University, Mike Atherton played his entire career for Lancashire and England, winning 115 Test caps and captaining his country 54 times. After a spell writing for the Sunday Telegraph, he became Cricket Correspondent of The Times in 2008 and also commentates for Sky Sports. He lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and two children.

Contributor(s): Professor David Miles | The banking sector across many developed economies proved fragile – insufficiently robust to prevent worries about the value of bank assets generating a banking crisis. This caused a downturn which in the UK has been severe and prolonged. But this has happened while inflation has stayed relatively high. This creates huge challenges in setting monetary policy. David Miles will analyse those difficulties and consider how banks can be best made more robust. Professor David Miles joined the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England in June 2009. He is also a Visiting Professor at Imperial College. Miles was formerly a professor of financial economics and head of the Finance Department at Imperial. As an economist he has focused on the interaction between financial markets and the wider economy. He was Chief UK Economist at Morgan Stanley from October 2004 to May 2009. He has been a specialist economic advisor to the Treasury Select Committee. In Budget 2003, the Chancellor commissioned Professor Miles to lead a review of the UK mortgage market. The result, published at Budget 2004, was the report: "The UK mortgage market: taking a longer-term view". He is a council member of the Royal Economic Society, a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and at the CESIFO research institute in Munich. He is a former editor of Fiscal Studies.

Contributor(s): Professor George Selgin, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Duncan Weldon, Dr Jamie Whyte | How do we get out of the financial mess we're in? Two of the great economic thinkers of the 20th century had sharply contrasting views: John Maynard Keynes believed that governments could create sustainable employment and growth. His contemporary and rival Friedrich Hayek believed that investments have to be based on real savings rather than fiscal stimulus or artificially low interest rates. BBC Radio 4 will be recording a debate between modern day followers of Keynes and Hayek. George Selgin is Professor of Economics at The Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. Selgin is one of the founders of the Modern Free Banking School, which draws its inspiration from the writings of Hayek on the denationalization of money and choice in currency. He has written extensively on free banking, the private supply of money and deflation. George Selgin is the author of The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply under Competitive Note Issue (1988), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (1997), and Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (2008). Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. His latest book is Keynes: The Return of the Master. Duncan Weldon is a former Bank of England economist and currently works as an economics adviser to an international trade union federation. He has a long standing interest in and admiration for Keynes but also a respect for Hayek. He blogs at Duncan's Economic Blog. Jamie Whyte was born in New Zealand and educated at the University of Auckland and then the University of Cambridge in England, where he gained a Ph.D. in philosophy. Jamie remained at Cambridge for a further three years, as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty. During this time he published a number of academic articles on the nature of truth, belief and desire, and won the Analysis Essay Competition for the best article by a philosopher under the age of 30. Jamie then joined Oliver Wyman & Company, a London-based strategy consulting firm specialising in the financial services industry, for which he still works, as the Head of Research and Publications. Jamie has published two books: Crimes Against Logic (McGraw Hill, Chicago, 2004) and A Load of Blair (Corvo, London, 2005). Jamie is a regular contributor of opinion articles to The Times (of London), the Financial Times and Standpoint magazine. In 2006 he won the Bastiat Prize for journalism.He is on the advisory board of The Cobden Centre. The debate will be chaired by Paul Mason, economics editor of BBC 2's Newsnight and author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed.

Contributor(s): Douglas Edwards | Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander's account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes us inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving us a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company's engineers (both on Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to a wheelbarrow. No academic analysis or bystander's account can capture it. Now Douglas Edwards, Employee Number 59, takes us inside the Googleplex for the closest look you can get without an ID card, giving us a chance to fully experience the potent mix of camaraderie and competition that makes up the company that changed the world. Edwards, Google's first director of marketing and brand management, describes it as it happened. From the first, pioneering steps of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's young, idiosyncratic partners to the evolution of the company's famously nonhierarchical structure (where every employee finds a problem to tackle or a feature to create and works independently), through the physical endurance feats of the company's engineers (both on and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself. Doug Edwards captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world's most transformative corporation. This event marks the launch of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Douglas Edwards was the first director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005 and was responsible for setting the tone and direction of the company's communications with its users. and off the roller-hockey field) to its ethos to always hire someone smarter than yourself. Doug Edwards captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, culture of the world's most transformative corporation. This event marks the launch of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Douglas Edwards was the first director of consumer marketing and brand management at Google from 1999 to 2005 and was responsible for setting the tone and direction of the company's communications with its users.