THE MONTHLY SYMPOSIUM

In "The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis", Robert Manne introduces an international symposium on the prime minister's essay and the current economic crisis. Writing exclusively for the Monthly, Eric Hobsbawm, Charles R Morris, John Gray (digital rights restricted), Dean Baker and David Hale each provide an expert analysis of Rudd's response, critically illuminating the broader crisis.   

"What Rudd neglected to mention was the role which government-sponsored enterprises played in driving the sub-prime boom. Congress promoted the boom in high-risk lending by failing to adequately regulate the GSEs." (David Hale)

Criticising Rudd's focus on "private-sector greed", the American global economist David Hale argues that, far from representing an essential failure of neo-liberalism, the present crisis can be attributed to rectifiable shortcomings in regulation. By contrast, the British political philosopher John Gray provides what is arguably the most far-reaching analysis yet of the global implications of the crisis. In agreement with Rudd on the inevitable end of the era of neo-liberalism, Gray goes still further: the present economic crisis, he says, will precipitate a change in the global world order that no one can currently control or predict.  

"The meltdown leaves the world without any effective global governance. No new power is emerging that could exercise hegemony in the aftermath of neo-liberalism in the way the US did after the fall of communism. Instead, we have a polycentric world, shaped by several great powers and ruled by none." (John Gray)

The Washington-based economist Dean Baker takes issue with Rudd's  "diagnosis of the problem", arguing that not only is the prime minister's analysis of the US housing market weak, his understanding of the "villains" of the crisis betrays an inability to "look beyond the rhetoric". The American lawyer and former banker Charles R Morris perceives much sense in Rudd's response but also argues that the current financial disaster highlights the flaws inherent to the profession of economics; the theoretical apparatus of economics, he says, "stems more often from ideologies than from careful observation". And the esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm surveys the history of the present crisis and finds that Rudd may be seriously underestimating the difficulties that lie ahead.

"The problem would be hard enough if the present were like the post-1929 Great Depression, which was only finally overcome by that most terrible, and today inconceivable, mega-investment program, World War II. But that depression did not suffer from anything like the gigantic overload of financial claims." (Eric Hobsbawm)

 THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Over the past few months, I had come to feel there was a match between the look of the inland and a certain kind of music: music was the art that brought one in. I knew that it had been everything to desert people: they saw the terrain around them as a frozen song, and it was clear that singing, and piano music, had been at the heart of early station life - and when I first went down northern roads, I too found it was music that helped me see the country, and feel its impact, and tune myself to my surrounds."

In "Into the Red", Nicolas Rothwell provides a beautifully evocative meditation on the "aims and tasks of art" and the intertwining of music and landscape. Through the prism of his many journeys across Australia's north, Rothwell reflects on the relationship between nature and art, patterns and meaning, and reveals the captivating story of the lost Haydn manuscript.   

"I cannot entirely forebear from mentioning the fate of the Prussian Quartets autograph: the score in Haydn's hand, which, alone among the scoresheets of classical masterpieces, came, through a long chain of chance events, to rest on Australian soil - and it may even be that this link lends the music a distant resonance within the landscape, a tie to its rhythms and its sense of sombre force."

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"By the time Nikos Kazantzakis completed his sequel to The Odyssey, in 1938, The Iliad had shown itself to be better suited to our imperilled, capsizing world. The twentieth century's wars were fought under the sign of Homer's epic. Rupert Brooke recited The Iliad on the troopship to Gallipoli, and ecstatically anticipated a death that would eternalise his name ... Now David Malouf's meditation on one small episode from The Iliad in his novel Ransom gives the epic a renewed relevance."

And in "Troy Revisited", Peter Conrad savours David Malouf's first novel in more than a decade, Ransom. With inimitable style and insight, Conrad traces the many lives of Homer's epics - from retellings by Shakespeare and Joyce, to the recent blockbuster Troy and Malouf's new novel - discerning that "which of Homer's two narratives a writer chooses depends on the temper of the times". Where many modern reincarnations employ The Iliad for political allegory, Conrad finds that Ransom instead suggests "an alternative function for literature".

"Men alone know they are certain to die, and that knowledge should predispose them to sympathise with one another, to make common cause in their grief. Priam has devised a new rationale for tragedy, which is no longer - as the Greeks thought - a lament for the demise of a great man; instead, it commiserates with the sorrows of all men."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Cutting emissions cannot be delayed until the economy is stronger, or carbon capture and storage is proven, or the risks to the environment become clearer - or for any other reason. Climate change is not a problem that will go away. It will dominate our lives, and global and domestic politics, over the coming years."

In the Monthly Comment, Nick Rowley and Tim Flannery offer a comprehensive analysis of the Rudd government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Drawing on their combined experience, Flannery, the renowned environmental scientist, and Rowley, a former advisor at 10 Downing Street, present a carefully qualified argument in favour the CPRS that significantly reframes the terms of the current debate.

"The government has been lulled into the belief that effective climate policy and an effective emissions-trading system are one and the same thing. They are not ... A falsely ambitious scheme has been developed, covering sectors of the economy where imposing a price signal is unlikely to have the desired effect, and where the political realities make doing so impossible."

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"In fact, this economic climacteric offers an opportunity for business to look again at its reliance on a straightforward financial cosh to secure obedience to collective goals, and to redress the crude, punitive, dehumanising conviction that we work for money alone - for the very good reason that there is now a great deal less money to go around."

In "Incentivising", Gideon Haigh weighs into the debate about executive remuneration, arguing that "efforts to paint it as a ‘complex issue'" on which the ordinary person can have no valid opinion are not only insulting but also  irrational. Those who argue in favour of financial incentives have much to prove, says Haigh, not least "that extrinsic features like pay matter far more than intrinsic features like having a job with meaning and discretion".

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"The title of a compilation is important. Sometimes you start with it; sometimes it emerges. This time, you know right away what it's going to be: Sweet Bitter Love. But you don't want to lead with that song. You need to build up to it, guide the listener along the path, then - wham! You decide to start way back, with Adelaide Hall singing ‘Creole Love Call' with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. She's imitating a horn. No words, so it's like an overture."

And in "C90", Paul Kelly pays tribute to the lost art of the mix tape. Kelly, one of Australia's best-loved singer-songwriters, takes a sentimental journey back to a time before "drag and drop", when the time-consuming process of compiling a mix tape was an integral part of any music fan's burgeoning relationships.

"Early in the millennium, you're going out with a tall blonde who's a writer, a radio presenter and a trained musician. She can play piano and clarinet, and sing Ella Fitzgerald. You like her a lot, though in those first courting days she confesses she doesn't much like football or country music. You brood upon this and start writing a list for a compilation. You start with the name: She Don't Like Country."

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Plus, in "School Days", Alice Pung reflects on schooling, adolescence and the getting of wisdom as she visits a diverse range of schools, from elite private colleges where the girls appeared like "hothouse strawberries: lushly beautiful but easily bruised" to a juvenile-detention centre where quiet and attentive boys all "came to shake my hand after the talk".

ARTS & LETTERS

"The War on Terror, as it has been fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, has something in common with the small wars of the last colonial age, and like them may yet come to be seen as a symptom, or a cause, of imperial decline. But meanwhile, it has grown its own crop of soldier-scholars, of which David Kilcullen is among the best known."

In "Turning a Mouse into an Elephant", Hugh White delivers an authoritative assessment of the Australian counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen's book asks the right questions about contemporary terrorism, White says, but the answers it offers are often elusive and contradictory, "exemplifying the confusions and equivocations that bedevil the War on Terror".

"Like many others, he proposes building up Afghanistan's own forces. But, with a weak and corrupt central government, who will these forces answer to, and who will they work for? You cannot build a stable and just state by first building an army, for no army or police force was ever better than the government it served."

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"The ashes of a healthy society will be found where a corrupt one rules, and those ashes are everywhere in Gomorrah. This is a terrible place, an exhausted world, a landscape blighted by moral corrosion: public housing is in decay, life is cheap, death is everywhere."

In "Purgatory", Luke Davies delves into the murky world of Italian organised crime depicted in Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah. A grim, fast-paced film with a tight, multi-stranded narrative, Gomorrah reveals the unglamorous reality of day-to-day life in a city where "the secret society has become society itself".

"Everyone in the film is part of this dense web of interconnectedness. At one point Pasquale notices, on a TV in a bar, Scarlett Johansson in a typical red-carpet moment, with commentators analysing her beautiful dress. By now we have an idea of the path a gown like that might travel before reaching Johansson."

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"The tribulations Fairweather had to endure, or brought upon himself, almost defy belief. A cut on his little finger became septic and the digit needed to be partially amputated. He left a cigarette on his bed and lost a year's work in the ensuing fire. Later, in Brisbane, an ill-advised choice of materials meant he lost two-and-a-half years' work. He got lead poisoning and became allergic to oils."

And in "Castaway", Sebastian Smee is drawn in by the astonishing life story and impressive reproductions presented in Fairweather, Murray Bail's lavishly illustrated study of the artist Ian Fairweather. Fairweather's art is as uncompromising and difficult as his life was; but Bail's avoidance of serious analysis is, Smee argues, an unnecessary disappointment.       

"Bail is constantly declaring things without explaining them. We repeatedly hear that Fairweather's best work was influenced by cubism, but are never told what aspect of cubism he took on, or how he made it his own. What does it mean to say, of an earlier painting, that ‘the line, although distinctive, is tonal'? Here and elsewhere, we are left hanging."

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"The past ten years have seen a re-engagement with both the era's music and its mother-nature muse. And where once the gaze was post-'60s comedown, with plenty of dope and whisky to knock off the edges and keep the beat loose, the current crop has forsaken the cowboys and their ladies and the good times past for a more neurotic and charged reading of the landscape itself."

Plus, in "In Search of a Songwriter", Robert Forster assesses the latest in country-inspired rock. Bill Callahan - formerly known as Smog - has released a fine album under his new moniker, but Bonnie Prince Billy's most recent record suggests he has made one too many in too short a time. Meanwhile, a lesser-known Melbourne band, Wagons, has really hit its stride.

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There's also Michael Williams on Craig Silvey's impressive second novel, Jasper Jones; Celina Ribeiro on Bodies, the latest from the renowned author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach; and Shane Maloney on the time Brian Burke set out to woo the Danube of Thought, Nicolae Ceausescu.