Listen Now - 11052008 | Download Audio - 11052008
Join us for a fresh look at the way finance works. Professor Niall Ferguson's analysis draws on the work of the French Naturalist Jean Bapiste de Lamarck - the idea that organisms alter and adapt in response to a changing environment. He applies this framework to our current, uneasy financial climate and asks: are we on the brink of a great dying?
Listen Now - 04052008 | Download Audio - 04052008
Intelligence Squared has come to Australia. We present the inaugural home grown version of a debate-series that is making headlines overseas. The first one to be contested on home soil is not for intellectual shrinking violets. Under the strict rules of Oxford-style debating, two teams of three slug out the proposition that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If sovereignty belongs to Allah how can you have popular sovereignty?
In his final lecture, Alberto Manguel examines an unfinished novel by Jack London. In The Assassination Bureau, a shady organisation believes it can purify society by killing off 'undesirables'. Manguel compares London's dark creation with our world of interconnected multinational corporations who, he says, hide behind a screen of countless anonymous shareholders, threatening the planet and our very humanity.
Alberto Manguel's focus today is on one of the most cherished stories of the western canon. In the 17th century a returned Spanish soldier turned writer dreamed up a bookish and impoverished old gentleman who decides one day to become a knight errant. What can Don Quixote tell us about the quest for a peaceful civilisation?
Sunday 5pm
repeated Saturday 7pm
Sunday 18 May 2008
Australia is witnessing yet another round of bank mergers. The big grow bigger on the pretext that size maters in a global economy. But small also matters. The Grameen Bank is heralded internationally as a lifesaver for tens of thousands of people. Based on the unworldly principle of micro credit the bank lends over half-a-billion each year. It invokes inverse rules of banking: if you have nothing they want to know you. Business Week named its founder Muhammed Yunus as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. His portrait hangs next to Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller. Muhammed Yunus recounts the remarkable work of Grameen, over three decades. with the poor and neglected.
This year marks the 48th anniversary of the Boyer Lectures. Professor Graeme Clark, creator of the bionic ear, is ABC Radio National's Boyer lecturer for 2007.Find out more...
Audio, transcripts and program information is available for an array of past Big Ideas features including The Boyer Lectures, The Wisdom Interviews, The Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures and much more. [find out more...]
Is Capitalism Moral? The full unedited inaugural Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor's debate on Capitalism and the Soul. Download MP3 [1'18" - 36MB] Find out more...
5.55pm AEST
Perspective
with Sue Clark
Expert commentary by opinion-makers from Australia and overseas
