Cost-benefit analyses are fairly central to mainstream economics. Even if one sets aside developments in economics of information or behaviour economics, which make room for irrationalities, social and psychological factors or asymmetries in information, economists will insist, and most of us may agree, that “things have to be paid for”. There is, however, a big […]
I Lagardien
I am a political economist. In earlier incarnations, I worked as a journalist and photojournalist, as a professor of political economy and an international and national public servant. I rarely get time to write for this space as often as I would like to.... I don't read the comments section
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Voting is not as simple as it is made out to be
So, I have registered to vote in South Africa for the first time. Who, then, shall I vote for? Sometimes the simplest questions are unbearably difficult to answer. The easy part is, of course, entering the polling booth, a domain situated behind a veil of secrecy, and enact perhaps the most atomistic ritual in liberal […]
Posted inGeneral
Short story of the electrician and his apprentice
Sometimes, in this fractured and fractious society of ours, things actually work. When they do, I often pause to think: Why? How? What is it that makes some things work, all too infrequently, it should be said? Why can’t we make more things work, and other things work better? For now, I have no conclusions, […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Madiba, this is why I am a public servant
I posted this on my Facebook profile, today. I figured I would share it widely on this worst of days. He held my hand for twenty minutes and told me of the vision he had for our country. No, I said, I was a journalist. It is all I ever wanted to be. I loved […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
In captivity, in life and approaching death, we stalk Mandela
In a previous incarnation (what seems like a lifetime ago in a distant land) I worked as a journalist; as a reporter, a news photographer, a sub-editor and then as a political correspondent. The brief period that I worked as a news photographer coincided, loosely, with some of the darkest days of the late apartheid […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
On systemic lawlessness in South Africa
What we have in South Africa today is systemic lawlessness. The parking meters around the mall I often visit have not worked in more than two months. The last time I visited, everyone seemed fully aware of the malfunction, but nobody seemed to care. Some people were quite gleeful about there being free parking. Others […]
Posted inNews/Politics
US election 2012: Reconstituting a plutocracy
For the first time in more than three decades – since at least the election of Ronald Reagan – I have absolutely no interest in the outcome of the US presidential elections. This decline in interest has to do more with the fact that there is little difference, today, between Republican and Democrat candidates. The […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Student radio not what it used to be
In many parts of the world student radio stations are bastions of progressivism and staffed by active, engaged students who lead discussions against injustice and stand up for persecuted and vulnerable groups and communities. In the US, where I spent several years teaching at university, radio stations typically get involved in progressive causes: LGBT issues, […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Pantomime of the parvenu
South Africa is a particularly fractious society. Rarely does a week pass without something stirring the country’s intellectuals from their silences. The noise generated by this fractiousness says more, perhaps, about South Africa’s collective neurosis, than it does about anything else. What is amusing to behold, though, is the theatrics of intellectuals that play out […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
Too Much Information: Where does it all go?
In an age where identity theft is rife, it is increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that almost everywhere you go in the country, one is expected to provide detailed and quite crucial information about yourself. Moving between the National Library and a university library, over several weeks recently, I had to provide my identity […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, News/Politics
There’s something odious about academic publishing
There is something terribly wrong about peer-reviewed scholarship and about academic publishing in general. It resembles an exclusive club of knowledge production where new knowledge is circulated among an elite group of scholars who confirm each other’s prejudices and biases and then pat each other on the back. In some ways, once new knowledge is […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The fallibility of memory
I am in the final stages of research and writing a paper on memory which I expect to submit for peer review and publication early in the new year. This paper has proven most difficult to complete, least of all because I started doing research about eight months ago — at the beginning of a […]