I listened to it - an easy-listening hum-along to a list of bien-pensant faves - and after deciding I couldn't be bothered even to critique it seriously, I was left wondering whether the Reith Lectures were always so poor. You see, I have a memory of a time long long ago in my youth, when they intrigued me. Have they always been this bad/bland? Or is the Received Pronunciation of Opinion now simply more tedious than it was of yesteryear?

God I feel old. I remember when I had to read Rawls. Seriously!

A quick question on Rawls. What was reason did he give that his Rational Calculators would think they where coming out into a Zero Sum world? There has to be some reason because if the world that they are going to live in then they would not chose Maximin as the correct strategy, since in any world that is not Zero Sum (like our world) Maximin is provably not the best strategy.

Rational decision making wasn't the only thinking in Rawls' original position. Maximin had something to do with being able to justify the position of the least well off in any given society, so that every individual would be aware that their interests had been considered under the principles of justice.

I am still studying it, and it is indeed rather grim.

Nothing to do with a zero sum game Chris Strange (Rawls would have been less bad had he been making that mistake).

Let us say you proved that something you (Chris Strange) were doing would make you better off and NO ONE WORSE OFF (no one at all).

John Rawls would still say you should be forbidden to work at your project - unless you could prove you were making the "least favoured" better off.

This is because he held that increased inequality (you getting better off without EVERYONE ELSE GETTING BETTER OFF) was evil as it undermined the feelings of self worth of the very poor. John Rawls also denied that this was envy - by redefining the word "envy".

As for Prof S.

President Barack Obama a sign of "hope of a new morality" in politics. This of the man who spent decades supporting the Chicago Machine and has a long record both of personal corruption (such as the earmark he got for the Chicago hospital in return for the big cash payoff for his wife) and of lying - lying about just about everything.

"Morality" and anti materialism from this Obama guy and his wife in her 600 Dollar training shoes.

The problem for me is that is dangerious to laugh and throw up at the same time. So I turned off the lecture.

However, if Prof S. mentioned that that the government dominated the economy (via regualtions and vast government spending - taking more than 40% of the economy in Britain and close to that in the United States) at exactly the time he claims there was ultra capitalism and "market mania" then I will eat my cap.

Just as I will if he mentioned that the Federal Reserve system increase in the credit money supply was the basic cause of the current crises - not market "deregulation".

By the way John Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" (a book that has nothing to with justice) falls apart by about page 3 - when he says that people going beyond his "veil of ignorance" have no conceptions of good (no idea about right and wrong - good or evil).

Someone with no such conceptions, no opinions on what is right and wrong, is not human - and I am not interested in what such flesh robots are doing behind some veil of John Rawls.

The new "child poverty" statute that the British government is propising is a good example of Rawls/Sandle type thinking, in that it is not really about "poverty" at all.

It defines "poverty" as 60% or less of average income (regardless to whatever average income happens to be). So the proposed statute is really about inequality - not poverty.