Geoff Mann

Geoff Mann is at work on a book about uncertainty. He teaches at Simon Fraser University.

More than​ 43,000 people were killed with guns in the United States in 2023. That’s around one death every twelve minutes. More than half of those deaths were suicides or accidents, almost 19,000 were homicides, and guns were among the leading causes of death among children and teenagers. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident resulting in ...

Treading Thin Air: Catastrophic Thinking

Geoff Mann, 7 September 2023

It’seasy to forget that this isn’t the first time the world has seemed to teeter on a precipice. ‘To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer,’ Hannah Arendt wrote fifty years ago, reflecting on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Then, as now, an apocalyptic ...

On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who? ...

From The Blog
10 February 2023

On the morning of Friday, 13 January it was -20°C in St John’s, eight inches of snow on the ground. By Saturday noon it was +12°C, raining on and off and blowing hard enough at the top of Signal Hill that it was difficult to keep your eyes open. On Tuesday, it was 13°C and almost sunny all the way from Heart’s Delight through Heart’s Desire and up to Heart’s Content, but 6°C in Harbour Grace, the fog so thick you couldn’t see the end of the wharf.

It is hard to know​ how to talk about modern economies without talking about growth: productivity, entrepreneurial ‘risk-taking’ and the profit-driven cycle of expansion and accumulation. Economic growth is understood to be a natural or automatic process, its absence taken as evidence that we must somehow have got in its way. The purpose of economic policymaking is, accordingly ...

Tempestuous Seasons: Keynes in China

Adam Tooze, 13 September 2018

If, faced with fundamental environmental challenges, Keynesianism is reaching its ultimate limit, will it end with a whimper or a bang?

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