Conflict of interest

How can politicians be taken seriously as regulators of the economic system, if they have one eye on becoming employed by those they are supposed to regulate? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay them a bit (or a lot) more but legally prevent them from going over to the other side once they “retire”?

Blair works on makeover for Kazakhstan – FT

Mr Blair, who runs a business called Tony Blair Associates, has a lucrative portfolio of advisory roles. Clients include JPMorgan Chase, the US bank, and Zurich Financial Services, the Swiss insurance group. He has advised the government of Kuwait, UI Energy Corporation, a South Korean oil firm, and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi investment fund.

REProduction, REFerence, and RELigion

Religion has figured in unusual ways in recent days. Tony Blair (as announced on the Daily Show ) started to teach a course on “Faith and Globalisation” at Yale last week. The archbishops of the Church of England were commenting on the financial technique of short selling earlier this week. And on Thursday, Bruno Latour – connecting the ecological crisis, science, and religion – asked: “Will Non-humans be Saved?” Read the text of his lecture here [PDF]. Latour addresses the standoff between creationism and neo-Darwinism by redefining what science and religion do on the basis of three ontological categories or “modes of existence:” reproduction, reference, and religion.