As to what’s wrong with William Dalrymple this becomes to me evident in his latest book ( The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £30, September ) which ends thus: “ Today.. many believe that India’s moment has come again, and that it is now returning to its traditional place at the centre of world affairs, bridging east and west and acting as a crossroads of civilisations…... The only questions are whether it is India, China or the United States which will dominate. …………For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread with its traders along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders–comparable to the Hellenised world fashioned by Alexander the Great…Within this area Indian culture and civilisation transformed everything they touched. This poses a question, unthinkable in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?” Yet note that Fer...
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How We Got Here, How to Get Out Kannan Srinivasan
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How We Got Here, How to Get Out Kannan Srinivasan Modernization taught us science & taught us the point of democracy. Renouncing all its benefits, governments all over the world from India to the United States embrace every measure that speeds up global warming. This is certain to kill us all. What explains this collective compulsion? I suggest that some part of the explanation might lie in specific policy. Namely the long-term bipartisan US decision to sustain measures originally taken by the Reagan Administration in the early Eighties to induce capital flight from everywhere, which had, I shall argue, the effect of perpetuating an expensive dollar sustained not by trade earnings but inflows of capital so substantial as to dramatically enrich Wall Street & its billionaire allies all over the world, making imports into the US cheap while making everything produced domestically so expensive as to render American workers jobless ...