Brian Easton

The Endangered Open Society Propels an Urgent Plea For World Financial Reform
Listener 16 January, 1999.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

One of the more bizarre events of the late 1980s was the right wing think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society, holding a conference in Christchurch in honour of philosopher Karl Popper. The approach – one would hardly call it a philosophy – of the majority of attenders was an anathema to Popper. Especially Roger Douglas, whose paper reported his infamous blitzkrieg policy implementation principles, in which democracy is over-ridden, in the total certainty that his policies were correct. Popper would have been interested in the extent that the policies worked – they have not – but Douglas’s unwavering certainty in the truth of his vision would be totally unacceptable. For Popper knowledge is fallible. One constantly reviewed one’s hypotheses to judge their truth. Scepticism is at the heart of his approach, not ideological belief. Douglas’s paper was the equivalent of devil worship in the Popperian church.

From The Whimpering of the State: Policy after MMP p.75

Keywords History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy

People do not behave with the rationalism of the economic theory on which commercialisation was based, especially over their savings. The standard economic theory of individual behaviour is contradicted by the evidence of irrationality (or ‘quasi-rationality’).(1) In practice, as has been attested by numerous studies, the major predictions of economic rationalism fail.(2)

C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ is a parable about the economy.
.Listener 2 January 1999.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

A hundred years ago, scholar, critic, novelist, C.S. (Clive Stapleton) Lewis was born. Like his close Oxford friend, J.R.R. Tolkien (of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), Lewis was an Oxford professor. He is best known for his religious writings (notably The Screwtape Letters and The Four Loves), a science-fiction trilogy, his autobiography A Grief Observed, which became a film Shadowlands, and his Chronicles of Narnia for children, especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was turned into a film. Lewis’s greatest work of scholarship was The Allegory of Love, about the courtly love tradition of medieval times.