news & blog.

25.09.09.

Introducing big ideas - two down, two to go

The Introducing Big Ideas series kicked off two weeks ago with Ziauddin Sardar, the chair for all four events, in discussion with the author of the bestselling (and BBC Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted) Quantum, Manjit Kumar. Their - very tough - brief was to try to explain Einstein's theory of Relativity: what it is and what it's relevance is today.

Manjit was brilliant in helping to distill some of 20th century science's most difficult ideas into (at least reasonably) understandable bite-sized pieces. But his particular strength lies in telling the story of these scientific ideas and the men (and it was pretty much only men) who discovered them. It was fascinating to learn how Einstein was really a mediocre student and in fact worked in a patent office in Vienna when he first began to formulate his theories about relativity, rather than cossetted in a department at a university. In fact, Manjit argued, that it was the sort of skills that Einstein has learnt as a patent clerk, where he had to pour tirelessly through other people's ideas to spot problems, which really gave him the basis for revolutionising the physics that had changed little since Newton.

Last night saw the second event, on a very different but no less fundamental idea - Capitalism.

For this event Zia Sardar was joined at Foyles by Peter Pugh, the author of Introducing Keynes and Lars Kroijer, author of a forthcoming book on the collaspe of Lehman Brothers and a hedge fund manager for ten years.

Answering the question: Capitalism: good or bad was never likely to be easy, straightforward or uncontroversial and so it proved. Lars Kroijer gave a very personal insight into his working life in hedge funds and did his best to explain how they work - or worked. It's easy to see, in retrospect of course, how a culture of intense competition and greed encouraged managers like him to take more and more risks, with far too little regard for the risks in anything but the very short term.

Peter Pugh played the part of Keynes for the evening and gave the great economist's point-of-view on recent events - and this view was very clearly that, as Keynes preached, the very best thing to do in a recession for governments is to spend money. Don't worry too much about the conesquences - the UK is still paying back to the US the money it borrowed to fight the Second World War - but without such stimuli, escaping from the ravages of recession will take much longer. And he reminded us that governments - contrary to what many people seem to think - HAVE learnt lessons from the past and despite the lazy comparisions, the economic downturn of 2008 / 09 is simply nothing like that of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The next two Big Ideas events - again all free and again at Foyles Bookstore on Charing Cross Road, central London - are on French postmodern philosopher Michael Foucault (who died of AIDS 25 years ago this year) on 7th October, where Zia Sardar will be joined by psychologist Darian Leader and philosopher Chris Horrocks, and, on 22nd October on Ethics, which features philosophers Julian Baggini and Anthony O'Hear.

More information is available here and spaces can be reserved by emailing events@foyles.co.uk