Notwithstanding the gradually declining fortunes of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan as a journalists’ club (you cannot count on finding a real-life correspondent when you enter its main bar), it still manages to pull off memorable events at which journalists are given the opportunity to engage prominent figures in serious and searching conversation. I participated in one yesterday, at which two recipients of the Japan Prize, David Kuhl & Dennis Meadows, could discuss what they had been doing and thinking. For the radiology pioneer and “father of positron emission tomography scanning" – allowing doctors to look into the physical substance of our brains and other soft tissue – the press could hardly have been expected to express more than awe, but the exchange with Dr. Meadows turned into a probing discussion.
     Having become famous 37 years ago with his Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, Meadows has continued to think about what economies are for and what they cannot do. If the format of the event and time had permitted it, this FCCJ press luncheon could easily have turned into a brainstorming session

and a related new column by Jan Sampiemon

    Outsize controversies attending two much awaited top political meetings held this week – the G20 and NATO – should awaken the world to the fact that the various crises confronting us can also be seen as being linked to a huge conceptual crisis. Being discussed are the two areas of activity that will probably more than anything else decide the medium-term future of the world: the collapse of part of the global financial system and American foreign policy. The latter has been made almost invisible in the news by the former, but continues to be a weighty factor. The shallowness of the talk reaching us from these meetings should worry us. Lack of political will is of course one reason for it, but another one, directly related to that, is the huge conceptual crisis.
     Conceptual crises may follow from intellectual sloppiness, a dearth of imagination and other symptoms of idle brains. But I think more important in this case is a loss of knowledge that cripples otherwise very active brains. The loss of knowledge in the past few decades has been horrendous.

    As evidence continues to pile up about the damage done to national economies and the international financial system through policies inspired by ideological excess, the European Union is beginning to loom large as yet another victim of the same thing. The ample evidence of its being in trouble may not as yet have prompted the mainstream commentariat to see the connection, but it is there even so.
     In short: the neoliberal legacy, sometimes known as market fundamentalism or market worship, has been the major hurdle that halted an earlier gradual process of integration. It mostly blinded

    In these days of multiple crises ingrained assumptions loom large as obstacles to be overcome. This goes for international relations as much as for the tottering financial system that has been absorbing most political attention in recent months. I just stumbled upon a number of interrelated misguided and, in mainstream discussion, rarely examined assumptions on my laptop. They appeared in an article published a year ago by John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs entitled: The Rise of China and the Future of the West – can the Liberal System Survive? A quite appropriate read on my one but last day in Beijing, after having had an opportunity to look at Chinese life up close here and in Kunming and other places in Yunnan (a spectacularly beautiful province, by the way).
     Now, I like to read Ikenberry. I think that in earlier writing he has made important points

    Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times asked a couple of days ago whether Barack Obama’s presidency has already failed. He concedes that in normal times, such a question would be ludicrous. But by now most politically thoughtful people have concluded that these are times, as Wolf puts it, “of great danger”. “Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it.” Wolf,

    The credit crisis and what follows, dominating economic discussions for some five months now, have prompted such a variety of explanations of causes and remedies, that I keep thinking of the famous Hindu and Indian Buddhist parable of the six blind men and the elephant. One feels a leg, another the trunk, and yet another its tail, and they all come with stories challenging each other’s truth. It would be hard to find a better recent instance of what the fable depicts. I have just re-read some contrasting explanations: from Clintonian regulations perverting private incentives, to Greenspan’s supporting the kind of activity and deregulation schemes that eventually made the crisis possible. Too much regulation, too much de-regulation,