The Capitalist

What is National Conservatism?

That's the question we're grappling with this week following the big National Conservatism Conference in London. While it certainly generated lots of media heat, it's still not particularly clear what this US-imported idea actually stands for. Indeed, the answer seemed to vary depending on which of the eclectic cast of speakers was on stage.

CapX's deputy editor Alys Denby and our CPS colleague Karl Williams both dropped into the conference to take the pulse of this burgeoning movement and assess if it's got much of a future on this side of the pond.

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Trash, garbage, litter or rubbish – whatever you call it the world is producing ever more of the stuff. But where does it all go once it's left our colour-coded bins? And what about all those clothes you leave at the charity shop thining you've done a good turn?

The fascinating tapestry of grime that is the modern waste industry is documented in painstaking, illuminating detail in the new book Wasteland, written by our guest this week, Oliver Franklin-Wallis.

He takes us on a journey from hulking mountains of waste on the outskirts of New Delhi to abandoned mining towns in Oklahoma and back-street repair shops in Ghana, where engineers give new life to millions of the West's discarded gadgets.

A truly enlightening, somewhat shocking episode this week – and I'd heartily recommend Oli's book to all our listeners.

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How do we really live now? From a Romanian truck driver to an Amazon deliveryman and a factory production line worker, Ben Judah tried to answer that question by speaking to the people whose labour makes the freedom and prosperity the rest of us enjoy possible – for his latest book This is Europe.

The author and Atlantic Council fellow crossed the continent conducting hours of painstaking interviews with people whose vivid stories reveal the powerful forces reshaping our world: migration, technology, war and climate change.

He joined the CapX podcast to discuss a book, by turns harrowing and uplifting, about a promise of unity, peace and the good life that’s realised for some in Europe – but painfully illusive for others. And our conversation was almost as wide ranging as the land it covers...

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Breathless predictions of AI-induced doom are all around, with some experts in the field saying the technology has already advanced beyond the point of no return. The recent open letter signed by the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Andrew Yang was just the latest example of the unease that programmes such as Chat GPT-4 have provoked.

So how well-founded are the fears that a super-intelligent AI might render humanity obsolete? And what of the more prosaic and immediate concern that chatbots will turf millions of people out of work, spread disinformation and generally make our already topsy-turvy world even more unstable?

To find out, we invited out colleague Matthew Feeney, Head of Tech at the Centre for Policy Studies, for an illuminating discussion on the history of artificial intelligence, where the tech is now and where it could take us in the future.

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After years where prices barely seemed to rise and interest rates remained stubbornly low, the last two years have seen inflation come roaring back - combined with union strife and an energy crisis it has felt like we've been living through the 1970s all over again.

What better time then, for an economist to publish a handy explainer on just what inflation is, where it comes from and why central banks have so often failed to deal with it.

Stephen D King is an economist and writer who is a senior adviser at HSBC and the author of four books, including his latest We Need To Talk About Inflation - 14 urgent lessons from the last 2,000 years.

We sat down at CapX Towers to talk through the history of inflation and what the UK might have in store in the years to come...

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