Spring 2014 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Paul Cheshire | LSE London's 2014 Lent term seminar series begins on the 20th of January. Speakers from within and beyond LSE will focus on London's current economic and political environment London, covering relevant issues such as the private rented sector, the distribution of poverty and the densification effects of international migrants. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields. Each seminar is chaired by one of the members of LSE London, while speaker’s presentations, available podcasts and any other related documents are posted here regularly after each session.

Contributor(s): Dr Joshua Busby | Drawing on a rich set of interviews and surveys, Joshua Busby shows how the global AIDS treatment advocacy movement helped millions in the developing world gain access to lifesaving medication. Joshua Busby is an associate professor of public affairs and a fellow in the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service.

Contributor(s): Dr Matthew Goodwin, Peter Kellner | ‘Eurosceptic‘ parties all around Europe are gathering momentum in advance of the European Parliament elections in May. But how wide and how deep does their support actually run? And has hostility towards the EU become a surrogate for other discontents? Matthew Goodwin is associate professor at the University of Nottingham, where his research focuses on radical right parties, immigration and Euroscepticism. He is co-author of the new book, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right in Britain (with Robert Ford). Peter Kellner has been president of YouGov since 2007 and is the former political editor of New Statesman.

Contributor(s): Dr Keyu Jin | The CFM and Department of Economics lecture series focuses on topical macroeconomic questions. Its aim is to give an informative and balanced overview of available knowledge among macroeconomists. This talk considers China’s growing role in the world economy. Keyu Jin is a lecturer at LSE. Her research has focused on global imbalances and global asset prices, as well as international trade and growth. Wouter Den Haan is professor of economics and co-director of the Centre for Macroeconomics at LSE.

Contributor(s): Mark Easton, Penny Lawrence, Aileen Murphie, Jeff Patmore, Professor Lord Stern | University social science plays an essential role in the ‘human-dominated’ and ‘human-influenced’ systems that are central to our modern civilization. Across the world around 40 million people now work or study in university social science, or work in jobs where they ‘translate’ or mediate advances in social science research for use in business, government and public agencies, health care systems, media and civil society organizations. Yet the impacts of university social science have been under-researched, and their effectiveness often decried. Relatively little is known about the scale, diversity, and external salience of university social science research as a discipline group. This evidence-based study attempts to describe this successful and sizeable UK industry and highlights the impacts it systematically has on the UK’s economy and society. The event will hear from an elite panel of experts from government, business, civil society and the media, and will discuss the benefits and barriers to utilizing academic research in their sectors, and the salience and value of social science expertise. Mark Easton is home editor for BBC News. Penny Lawrence is international programmes director at Oxfam GB. Aileen Murphie is director of Local Government VFM at the National Audit Office. Jeff Patmore is former head of strategic university research & collaboration at British Telecom. Nicholas Stern is chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Julia Darby, Professor Danuta Hübner MEP, Dr Alberto Montagnoli, Professor Andrés Rodríguez-Pose | A major innovation in the Four Presidents’ report is the proposal for a shock absorption mechanism that helps regions in the Euro area to adjust. This proposal is a revival of an earlier insurance device that the Commission was asked to develop in the 1990s. The stabilisation potential of such a scheme and its political viability have not been scrutinised in depth so far. It is therefore useful to draw on the experience of another heterogeneous monetary union, namely the UK. The North-South divide in terms of economic structure has been profound, leading to deindustrialisation in the North of England and housing bubbles in the South. With the benefit of hindsight, what would have been measures that could contain counterproductive dynamics such as deindustrialisation and financial overheating? How can the pooling of risks in a heterogeneous union benefit from diversity?

Contributor(s): Jonathan Cooper, Kseniya Kirichenko, Peter Tatchell | On the eve of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, a panel discusses the on-going threats to LGBT rights in Russia – from the recent ‘homosexual propaganda’ law to the banning of gay pride parades. Jonathan Cooper is an international human rights law practitioner and chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust. Kseniya Kirichenko is a legal assistance program coordinator for the St Petersburg LGBT organisation ‘Coming Out’. Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) a renowned LGBT rights campaigner and director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation. Susan Marks is professor of international law in the Department of Law at LSE.

Contributor(s): Dr Panos Hatziprokopiou | Migrant entrepreneurship remains a relatively marginal topic within migration studies in Greece. Yet immigrants’ involvement in self-employment and independent economic activity has grown rather fast and has been linked to the dynamics of immigrants’ settlement and the formation of ethnic communities at a local level, especially in Athens. The deepening crisis and austerity shaking the Greek economy and society transform radically the circumstances and the context in which the phenomenon took shape in the past two decades. Still, the study of migrants’ entrepreneurship unveils three parallel “crises” that predated the current one. Firstly, Greece’s immigration crisis, a product of the way migratory trends have been managed by the State since the early 1990s. This partly relates to the crisis of small enterprises, major employers of migrant labour in the 1990s, and the challenges posed by internationalisation and large-scale competition. Both are in turn associated to the urban crisis of Athens, referring to processes of urban development in relation to shifting social and economic geographies in the city. The seminar will discuss results of a research project kindly funded by the Hellenic Observatory. Combining qualitative and qualitative methods, the study looked at migrant businesses in three Athenian neighbourhoods, adopting thus a micro local lens and a focus on everyday practices and relationships on the ground. These allow us not only to analyse the emergence of ethnic economies, but also to reflect on the dialectics between processes of migrant settlement, institutional and policy developments and the dynamics of urban transformation under changing economic conditions.

Contributor(s): Professor Julia Black, Dr Jon Danielsson, Professor Charles Goodhart | The official response to the current economic crisis may create long term stability or, in actual fact, lay the seeds for the next. The panel of experts will debate what is the more likely outcome. Julia Black is director of LSE’s Law and Financial Markets Project. Jon Danielsson (@JonDanielsson) is co-director of the Systemic Risk Centre (@LSE_SRC). Charles Goodhart is emeritus professor of banking and finance with the Financial Markets Group at LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor George Loewenstein, Samuel Nguyen, Professor Drazen Prelec | Better decisions versus autonomous choices: should policy makers try to influence people’s behaviour using techniques from the behavioural sciences when it comes to retirement savings, organ donation and lunch choice? George Loewenstein is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Samuel Nguyen is senior economist for the Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office. Drazen Prelec is professor of management science and economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.