Paul Seabright

John Lanchester writes that ‘the most damaging damage done by Wal-Mart is in the developing world,’ citing as instances the 189,000 seamstresses employed in Bangladesh in conditions that he and I would find unspeakably harsh, and the imports from China to Wal-Mart of $18 billion per year (LRB, 22 June). Does Lanchester imagine that Wal-Mart has created the poverty in Bangladesh and China that makes...

Peter Pulzer (Letters, 23 January) puts his finger on a difficult point when he writes that for Tom Paulin to deny ‘the legitimacy of Israel as a state … is to imply that all peoples may have nation-states, with just one exception.’ Is there no room then for a point of view that would deny any peoples as such the entitlement to a nation-state, which sees nation-states as owing duties to their...

Since he first ran in a Presidential election in 1974, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been telling his audiences that the French political classes are lying to them. He is not wrong. Mainstream politicians of all parties have maintained, even more than in most other industrial democracies, a pas devant les enfants approach to difficult issues of all kinds, including the funding of political parties, economic...

I was gloomily unsurprised to learn from Chris Miller (Letters, 29 November 2001) that the UK is even more densely packed with sites stocked with poisons and explosives than is France. The fact that Toulouse is a relatively safe place makes the recent explosion here all the more disturbing. Until 11 September public policy sought to secure aircraft against accidents and sabotage by the prudent, but...