Contributor(s): Dr Ben S Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard, Professor Lawrence H. Summers, Axel A. Weber | Five years on, the global economy continues to come to terms with the impact of the financial crisis. This event examines the lessons that both economists and policymakers should learn in order to lessen the chance of future crises. Ben S. Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006, as chairman and a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. Before his appointment as chairman, Dr. Bernanke was chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006. Olivier Blanchard is economic counsellor and director, Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since where he holds the post of Class of 1941 Professor of Economics. Lawrence H. Summers is President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades he has served in a series of senior policy positions, including vice president of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank, undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, director of the National Economic Council for the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011, and secretary of the treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2001. He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University. Axel A. Weber is visiting professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, former president of the Deutsche Bundesbank and current chairman of the board of UBS. Professor Sir Mervyn King is governor of the Bank of England. Before joining the Bank he was professor of economics at the LSE, and a founder of the Financial Markets Group.

Contributor(s): Dr Steffen Hertog, Professor Giacomo Luciani, Dr Marc Valeri, Dr Khalid AlMezaini | Although most Arab countries remain authoritarian, many have undergone a restructuring of state-society relations. Lower and middle class interest groups have lost ground, while big business has benefited in terms of its integration into policy-making and the opening-up of economic sectors that used to be state-dominated. Arab businesses have also started taking on aspects of public service provision in health, media and education that used to be the domain of the state, while also becoming increasingly active in philanthropy. This launch for Business Politics in the Middle East (Hurst, 2013), a volume by LSE's Dr Steffen Hertog and edited by Professor Giacomo Luciani and Dr Marc Valeri, will cover the political role of regional capitalists during and after the Arab uprisings, prospects for the emergence of a more independent bourgeoisie, economic reform and new social contracts. Dr Steffen Hertog is Senior Lecture in Comparative Politics in LSE’s Department of Government. Hertog has been researching the comparative political economy of the Gulf and Middle East for more than a decade, working with a number of local and international institutions. Professor Giacomo Luciani is Scientific Director of the Master in International Energy of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences-Po and a Princeton University Global Scholar attached to the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Near Eastern Studies. He is also a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and co-director of the Executive Master in Oil and Gas Leadership. Dr Marc Valeri is Lecturer in Political Economy of the Middle East at the University of Exeter. After a Master's Degree in Comparative Politics, with speciality on Arab and Muslim worlds, he received a PhD in 2005 from Sciences Po Paris. His work dealt with nation-building and political legitimacy in the Sultanate of Oman since 1970. Dr Khalid Almezaini is an Assistant Professor at Qatar University and was previously a research fellow in the Kuwait Programme at LSE. He has taught International Relations at Cambridge, Edinburgh and Exeter universities. His research focuses on International Relations of the Middle East and the Gulf in particular.

Contributor(s): Dr Linda Yueh | What drives China's impressive growth and will it continue? Parsing the evidence leads to some surprising conclusions and also points to needed reforms to sustain development in the coming decades. Linda Yueh is director of the China Growth Centre and fellow in economics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She is also adjunct professor of economics at the London Business School. Linda's new book is entitled China's Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower.

Contributor(s): Hilary Lawson, Dr Parashkev Nachev, Dr Jaime Whyte | We have seen a gradual erosion of belief in objective truth, but in a world without truth how are we to understand lies? This second event in the series debates the nature of lies and their importance. Are lies necessarily morally wrong, and what is the relationship between lies, power and individual identity? This lecture is the second of a three-part series entitled Error, Lies and Adventure, the first talk 'Beyond Truth: Error and Adventure' will take place on 4 March. Hilary Lawson is director of the Institute of Art and Ideas and the author of Closure. Parashkev Nachev is senior clinical research associate at the Institute of Neurology, UCL, and honorary clinical lecturer at Imperial College London. Jamie Whyte is a former Times columnist and Cambridge philosopher. Joanna Kavenna is an Orange Award-winning novelist. She has written for the London Review of Books and the Observer.

Contributor(s): Professor Andrew Abbott | This lecture argues that since excess and overabundance are central phenomena of modern life, we should refound social theory on the concept of "too much of" rather than "too little of." I trace the origin of the scarcity theories that dominate our reasoning, and sketch the outlines of a social theory based on excess. Andrew Abbott is the Gustavus F and Ann M Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology, Chicago University. Abbott's major research interests lie in the sociology of occupations, professions, and work, the sociology of culture and knowledge, and social theory. Abbott also has longstanding interests in methods, heuristics, and the philosophy and practice of sociology.

Contributor(s): Evgeny Morozov | Evgeny Morozov will be presenting his latest book To Save Everything, Click Here, which argues that the proliferation of sensors, big data, and social networks have given policymakers the irresistible temptation to solve problems that, perhaps, should not be solved at all - or only solved via democratic debate, not nifty technological fixes. Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (which was the winner of the 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize) and a contributing editor for The New Republic. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation, a Yahoo fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown (where he also taught), and a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he also served on the board of the Information Program). Prior to moving to the US, Morozov worked as Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO based in Prague. His monthly column on technology comes out in Slate, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and several other newspapers. He's also written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and other publications.

Contributor(s): Professor Ulrich Beck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Professor Mary Kaldor | The basic rules of European democracy are being subverted or turned into their opposite, bypassing parliaments, governments and EU institutions. Multilateralism is turning into unilateralism, equality into hegemony, sovereignty into the dependency and recognition into disrespect for the dignity of other nations. Even France, which long dominated European integration, must submit to Berlin’s strictures now that it must fear for its international credit rating. In this event, Ulrich Beck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Mary Kaldor discuss the current political crisis and how to reinvent democracy in Europe. Ulrich Beck is professor of Sociology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. His recent books include Cosmopolitan Europe (with Edgar Grande) (Polity Press 2007), World at Risk (Polity Press 2009), A God of One’s Own (Polity Press 2010), Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil (Polity Press 2012), Distant Love (together with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim) (Polity Press 2013) and German Europe (Polity Press 2013). Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a German politician, active also in France. He is currently co-president of the group European Greens–European Free Alliance in the European Parliament and co-chair of the Spinelli Group, a European parliament intergroup aiming at relaunching the federalist project in Europe. His latest book is For Europe (2012; with Guy Verhofstadt). Mary Kaldor is professor of Global Governance in the Department of International Development at LSE, where she directs the Human Security and Civil Society Research Unit. She has just completed a report on The Bubbling Up of Subterranean Politics in Europe based on research undertaken by seven field teams across Europe.

Contributor(s): Professor Ian Goldin | The growing gap between global problems and solutions reflects a crisis in global governance. Professor Ian Goldin will present ideas from his latest book, Divided Nations: Why Global Governance is Failing and What can be done about it? Ian will focus on the financial crisis, the internet, pandemics, migration and climate change to highlight the need for urgent global action and provide proposals as to what is to be done. Professor Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He was previously vice president and director of policy for the World Bank after serving as advisor to President Mandela and chief executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. He has been knighted by the French government and author of 16 books, including Globalization for Development, Exceptional People (On Migration), and his most recent Divided Nations. Born in South Africa, Goldin has a BA (Hons) and a BSc from the University of Cape Town, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Doctorate from the University of Oxford.

Contributor(s): Dr Daniel Gros, Professor Charles Goodhart, Professor Michael Haliassos | Dr Daniel Gros is director of Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels. Professor Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Banking & Finance; director of Financial Regulation Research Programme, LSE. Professor Michael Haliassos is chair for Macroeconomics and Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt; director, Center for Financial Studies, Frankfurt.

Contributor(s): Professor Anne Phillips | In this inaugural lecture, to celebrate her appointment as the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science, Anne Phillips addresses the status of the human in politics. Is what Hannah Arendt called 'the abstract nakedness of being human' sufficient to establish principles of solidarity or equality? And can we talk of what, as humans, we have in common without thereby dismissing as irrelevancies our gender, sexuality, or 'race'? Anne Phillips is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government. She is also currently Director of the LSE Gender Institute. She joined the LSE in 1999 as Professor of Gender Theory, and was Director of the Gender Institute until September 2004. She subsequently moved to a joint appointment between the Gender Institute and Department of Government. She is a leading figure in feminist political theory, and writes on issues of bodies and property, democracy and representation, equality, multiculturalism, and difference. Much of her work can be read as challenging the narrowness of contemporary liberal theory. In 1992, she was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award for Best Book on Women and Politics published in 1991 (awarded for Engendering Democracy). She was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Aalborg in 1999; was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Political Science Programme of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 2002-6; and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. In 2008, she received a Special Recognition Award from the Political Studies Association, UK, for her contribution to Political Studies. In 2012, she was awarded the title Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science. Simon Hix is Professor of European and Comparative Politics and Head of the Government Department at LSE.