The latest blogs from the Social Affairs Unit

By Alex Singleton | 2 September 2005

The brilliantly controversial and thought-provoking Social Affairs Unit has a stampede of interesting articles on its site at the moment. One is an article titled Is intellectual property theft?:

Are current intellectual property rules a fundamental underpinning of the market economy? Dr William Coleman - Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Australian National University - argues that far from being a central underpinning of the market, these rules may in fact produce the opposite of competitive markets.

Then there's an article called Will Sri Lanka's cease-fire hold?:

It was widely hoped that in the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami Sri Lanka's politicians might be able to find a common purpose in rebuilding the island. These hopes have come to nothing, Clifford Bastin reports. Sri Lanka now stands perilously close to renewed civil war.

And there's an interesting piece on neo-conservatives:

What do neoconservatives think of capitalism? Dr William Coleman - the author of Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics - argues that neoconservative thinkers tend to glorify heroic, marshal virtues over bourgeois, mercantile ones. Neoconservatism, argues Dr Coleman, is thus a variant of anti-economic thought.