Will John Key make Clint's day?

Historian, columnist and pundit Niall Ferguson compares the world economy with a scene in his favourite westerm, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) have finally found the cemetery where they know the gold is buried. Trouble is, they’re in a vast Civil War graveyard, and they don’t know where to find the loot. Eastwood looks at his gun, looks at Wallach, and utters the immortal line: “In this world, there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns … and those who dig.”

In the post-crisis economic order, there are likewise two kinds of economies. Those with vast accumulations of assets, including sovereign wealth funds (currently in excess of $US4 trillion) and hard-currency reserves ($US5.5 trillion for emerging markets alone), are the ones with loaded guns. The economies with huge public debts, by contrast, are the ones that have to dig. The question is, just how will they dig their way out?

This sums up the dilemma this week for Prime Minister John Key and the Reserve Bank. New Zealand is a country that needs a big shovel, literally and figuratively. The devastation and multi-billion dollar fallout from the Christchurch earthquake will weigh on the economy for some time, so Mr Key urged the Reserve Bank to make today’s cut in the OCR.

But it was a largely symbolic gesture and, as many economists have pointed out, it will do little for an economy that is also facing inflationary threats and a government reluctant to upset public opinion by taking away voter-friendly entitlements.

Never fade away
Old leftists have a remarkable lifespan in academia. The UK historian Eric Hobsbawn is in his 94th year and is still having his books published, even though his belief in communism has proved his life’s work wrong. Critics excoriate him for failing to denounce Stalin’s purges and the gulags. Nevertheless, his latest work, How to Change the World (2011), was widely praised and his Age trilogy (covering events from 1848-1991) are key texts in most university history departments.

Rivalling Hobsbawm in prolific output if not academic reputation is Tariq Ali, born in Lahore (now in Pakistan) and also wedded to high-profile left-wing causes (and privately to New Left Review editor Susan Watkins). I still have his first book, Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power (1970) and the first of several others predicting that country’s demise, Can Pakistan Survive? (1983).

It has, of course, but that doesn’t hold Ali back. He is a Radio New Zealand go-to guy for anti-American comment and is soon destined for the University of Auckland, where he will deliver the annual Robb Lectures on, you guessed it, the end of American imperialism. Ali will no doubt be keen to catch up with other Marxist professors at Auckland where the unionised staff are battling to retain travel and other privileges from the vice-chancellor’s desire to use scarce money in more-needed areas.

How to get published
You may wonder why academics on the left seem to dominate the textbook lists and bookshop shelves when the wider public is more evenly divided on their merits.These writers are also more likely to turn up as guest lecturers and make appearances at book festivals. Yet the best-known are given short shrift.

Given a choice, would Auckland have opted for, say, Robert Conquest or the afore-mentioned Ferguson? Apart from his Newsweek columns, Ferguson is one-man media machine, whose new book Civilisation is bound to be as popular as its predecessor, The Ascent of Money. It was a bestseller but the TV series on which it was based screened, I recall, only on Sky’s Documentary channel (though it was free-to-air in the UK and Australia).

Civilisation takes a far more world-centric approach than the famous series of the same name by Sir Kenneth Clark, which focused mainly on art and buildings in Europe. Apart from a wider definition of what makes a civilisation, Ferguson also includes social, economic and other aspects of human endeavour. He is, he says, as interested in the contribution of plumbing to great cities as the edifices above the ground.

Ferguson’s private life is also interesting because he now has a relationship with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP and anti-Islamist feminist author.

Meanwhile, an American survey confirms that academic publishers publish more left-wing books than free-market ones. The study is based on the nearly 500 politics and economics books Harvard University Press has published in the last 10 years. The survey found just 47 had a classical liberal or conservative bias, 218 were left-wing or communitarian, and the rest were judged to be centrist or neutral. It is a fascinating look at what is published and why when commercial imperatives are missing.

Celebrity corner
Like their lowbrow tabloid rivals, the highbrow media that lead the debate on world affairs cannot get enough when it comes to celebrities. Top of the list for a while was Russian-born Anna Chapman, who was outed as a sleeper agent in New York and deported back home in a Cold War-style spy swap.

She has since risen to permanent celebrity status in Russia with her own weekly TV show and a high position in Prime Minister Putin’s political party. Her website, in Russian, has pictures of her with colleagues on the show and news of her recent exploits and opinions.

Anna has since been displaced by Ruby Rubacuori (the Heart Stealer), who rose to fame as part of Italian Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties. She has a Wikipedia entry and was last heard of as Austrian building billionaire Richard Lugner’s guest at the Vienna Opera Ball.

Also rising fast is Marine Le Pen, who is creating as many ripples in French politics as Sarah Palin once did in America. As the Independent's John Lichfield writes in this profile, Marine

cleverly exploits the hunger for "identity" and simple "values" in a threateningly "global" world. She surfs on the rise of China and decline of the West; the erosion in middle-class living standards; the screw-you arrogance of bankers; the threat of extremist Islam; the contempt for elites fostered, sometimes reasonably, by the internet and by WikiLeaks.