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The Bush administration promised to introduce the “ownership society”. A centrepiece of this policy is individual empowerment for retirement, by means of personal accounts for every citizen. This would bring both responsibility for savings, greater wealth and reduction of government debt.

Rendering Social Security to its beneficiaries will also contain the ultimate choice: those who prefer greater risk and returns in the form of investment on capital markets are free to opt out; whereas risk-averse citizens may choose to remain in the current system, albeit with lower benefits.

But with expanding federal expenditure, some fear that retirement reform may stall.

Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Darfur: all these agonies of the post-Cold War landscape are examples of places where the United Nations failed to act as it should. Few people doubt that the UN's ability to guarantee international security stands in urgent need of reform, but there is no real prospect of agreement on how to do it. In the absence of a credible international system for security, do individual countries have the right to take international law into their own hands? Is it better if a democracy, which is at least subject to some form of accountability, does it than if a dictatorship does? Does the existence of a broad coalition make action outside the UN more acceptable? Or are these just steps towards the old doctrine of 'might is right'?

The book investigates the roots of anti-Western stereotypes and the demonizing fantasies about the Western world that fuel so much hatred in the hearts of its enemies. According to the authors, the idea of the West is a dangerous mirage of our own time, just as the mirage of the East was in the Western colonial mind, described by Edward Said in the much acclaimed book ‘Orientalism’. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of reasons, the authors argue, but this doesn’t make it an exclusively Islamic matter. Rather, the bogeyman of the West who stalks the thinking of Al Qaeda and radical Islam is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century.

Launched by Terry o’Dwyer at the House of Lords, the Antidote-PACT (Partnership Against Counterfeit Trade) initiative is an experimental programme designed to bridge the gap between thinking and acting on the problem of medical counterfeiting.

The author has been at the forefront of research into health inequalities for the past 20 years, investigating explanations for the striking inverse social gradient in morbidity and mortality. By drawing on his own research and the research of others, Marmot tries to illustrate that the social gradient in health is related to the nature of the society in which we live and work. How much control an individual has and opportunity for full social engagement in society are crucial for health. These are related to early child development, material well being, the nature of work and communities and the circumstances in which older people live. Being at the bottom of the social pile is bad for health, but so is not being at the top, he argues.

What are the causes behind the sclerosis in the Belgian labour market? Are the workings of the labour market in Belgium so dysfunctional that we have passed the point of no return? It is clear that labour market reform is essential if the Belgian economy is to thrive – but what policies should be adopted? Should Belgians take an Anglo-Saxon approach to labour market regulation – or should it follow the example of its continental neighbours?

Is economic growth the friend or foe of the natural world? Will expanding trade and industry innovation actually help the environment over the long run? Or does the blind pursuit of profit inevitably damage our planet? Can we trust developing countries to get greener as they become more prosperous? Or should our precarious environment always be the top priority, whether we are in the first or the third world? Are we too reckless with our finite natural resources? Or should we sacrifice a few more trees to save a few more people?

The book explores how popular culture is often seen as nothing more than the production of endless entertainment video games, computer games, hand-held gamest, movies and music on computers. It’s also common currency to talk about the declining standards of today’s culture and to say that modern media is dumbing us down. Steven Johnson presents us with a radical alternative though: mass culture is making us smarter by consistently demanding more of our brains. Is popular culture really making us smarter?

The book explores the rise of ‘a peculiar American form of conservatism’ and its consequences on American politics and the world at large. The authors argue that America is fundamentally different from Europe, and while conservatism, embodied in George W. Bush, has proved hugely divisive within the United States, a far larger cultural gulf exists between the US and the rest of the world.
What the Right Nation offers is not simply a list of dissimilar characteristics between the United States and Europe (and indeed, the rest of the world), but an utterly absorbing explanation of why this is so. Is America really fundamentally different from Europe?

Joint Roundtable of the Stockholm Network and Managing Intellectual Property Journal
The Lisbon Agenda and the Future of Information Technology IPRs in Europe: Cause for Hope or Cause for Concern?