RT @JohnMMacgregor: We don't expect Greenland to export mangoes or a shoe factory to produce diamonds. So do we think that #media owned by….

On his election, Barack Obama appointed them both as key economic advisors—just in time to devise a response to the Global Financial Crisis for which they were significantly responsible.

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By exerting political influence in the years to 2009, Lawrence Summers—a hedge fund manager—had intervened to prevent regulation of derivatives, and Robert Rubin (26 years at Goldman Sachs) was instrumental to the Glass-Steagall repeal.

However, none suggest with any precision how to get from one to the other: C. I thought it was time for a book about C. - Preface, The Mechanics of Changing the World.

The subject of democratic decline has now begun making its way up humanity’s ever-growing list of anxieties. Hundreds of books, articles and TED Talks on the state of democracy tell us where we are—A—in contrast to where we should be (B).

. Korea, Brazil, Romania, Albania, India, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, Kenya, Cuba, Nigeria, Thailand, Ethiopia and Mexico. 'The Mechanics of Changing the World’ (Chapter 4—Scattered Reappearance of Democratic Practices.).

From the 3rd millennium BC to the 21st Century, they occurred in China, Egypt, France, Denmark, Lithuania, Hungary, Japan, Catalonia, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and Dutch empires, Vietnam, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Taiwan, Switzerland, Austria. .

When an elite uses its control of politics to shift wealth upwards—as it generally does—you’d expect that common people would fight back: and that world history, therefore, would be a history of peasants’ revolts. Indeed it is.

The existence of gods was questioned, and Plato suggested that women could become philosophers and heads of government—ideas that reached their flowering only in our own era. 'The Mechanics of Changing the World' (Chapter 2—The Long March.).

In the decades that followed Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms, the Parthenon was built, Plato speculated that the Earth was round, and tiny Greece expelled the Persian superpower from the region.

How many of our names will be lower-case adjectives 2,500 years from now?. The era furnished us with further adjectives via its philosophical schools—not only the Platonists and Epicureans, but the Sophists, Skeptics, Peripatetics, Cynics and Stoics.

The Athenian experiment gave us Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Themistocles, Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus, Diogenes, Demosthenes, Epicurus, Hippocrates, Pericles, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

. historiography, social security, constitutional law, politics, sculpture, pottery, drama, viticulture, fitness training, archeology, architecture, physics, optics, harmonics, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, medicine, pharmacology, biology, botany and zoology.

Instead, the years that followed Cleisthenes’ reforms produced many of the elements of what we now think of as civilization. This Greek Classical era, centred on Athens, saw the invention or reinvention of philosophy, logic, rhetoric, poetry, aesthetics, education,. .

What resulted from the birth of democracy in 508 BC was not mob rule, chaos, or the reign of the lowest common denominator. Nor did the citizens bankrupt the polis by awarding themselves perks and benefits.

What we now call ‘direct democracy’ had arrived in Athens. *'The Mechanics of Changing the World' (Chapter 2—The Long March.).

The people’s Assembly now became the prime law-making body. It met on a hill named the Pnyx. Typically, six thousand citizens met there about 40 days per year. The new regime even allowed Athenians to elect their own generals.

3/3.‘The Mechanics of Changing the World’ (Chapter 4—Scattered Reappearance of Democratic Practices.).

2/3.Over the ensuing centuries, elements of Magna Carta were repealed, reinstated, replaced, improved on…. The Charter was less a sea change than a vague but unmistakable warning to monarchs: an intimation of their disposability.

1/3.Kings, the quintessential plutocrats, do not give up their prerogatives gracefully. Forced to sign the Charter, John, much vexed, threw himself to the ground…. "…gnashed his teeth, rolled his eyes, grabbed sticks and straws and gnawed them like a madman.".