Interview with Majid Oukacha, for Gatestone Institute

  This interview was published on October 8, 2016 at 5:00 am on Gatestone Institute, a “non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank based in New York City” with a specialization in strategy and defense issues.

photo Majid Oukacha HD  Majid Oukacha is a young French essayist who was born and grew up in a France which he recognizes less every year. « A former Muslim but an eternal patriot, » as he sometimes likes to describe himself, he is the author of Face to Faith With Islam, a systematic critique, without value judgments, of the most inconsistent and imprecise Koranic laws.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Could you start by reminding us of the circumstances and motives of your abandoning Islam — and of your decision to take up your pen to unravel your former religion for the public at large?

  Majid Oukacha: Like all Frenchmen who were born and grew up in France in the late twentieth century, I am fortunate to belong to a peaceful nation that allowed me to enjoy rights and freedoms for which I never personally had to fight. My parents, French citizens of Algerian origin and Muslim persuasion, provided me with a religious education, which destined me to remain a devout Muslim. They also gave me a civic, social and ethical education based on respect for France and its values, as embodied in its motto, « liberty, equality, fraternity. »

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Interview with Jed Diamond — in exclusivity on Grégoire Canlorbe’s website

This interview is published in exclusivity on Grégoire Canlorbe’s website.

Jed1cmyk.jpg  Jed Diamond, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives.

  Jed is the author of 14 books including his latest: The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best is Still to Come. Since its inception in 1992, he has been on the Board of Advisors of the Men’s Health Network. He is also a member of the International Society of Men’s Health and a founding member of the American Society of Men’s Health.

  He blogs for the ThirdAge, Huffington Post, BeliefNet, Scribd, and other venues. He is the only male columnist who blogs for the National Association of Baby Boomer Women. His homepage is MenAlive.com.

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Interview with Geerat J. Vermeij, for Man and the Economy

  This interview was published in the June 2016 issue of Man and the Economy journal, founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase. For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

geerat.j.vermeij  Geerat J. Vermeij is a Dutch-born professor of geology at the University of California at Davis. Blind from the age of three, he graduated from Princeton University in 1968 and received his Ph.D. in biology and geology from Yale University in 1971.

  An evolutionary biologist and paleontologist, he studies marine mollusks both as fossils and as living creatures. He started writing about his Escalation hypothesis in the 1970s. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. In 2000 Vermeij was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.

  His books include Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life, A Natural History of Shells, Privileged Hands, Nature: An Economic History, and The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization.

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Interview with Steve Kates, for Man and the Economy

  This interview was published in the December 2016 issue of Man and the Economy journal, founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase. For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

 steve_katesSteven Kates is Associate Professor of Economics at RMIT. He was chief economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce for 24 years and a commissioner on the Productivity Commission. If he has a mission in life, it is to see Keynesian economic theory disappear from our textbooks and the return of the classical theory of the cycle as the guide to economic policy.

  He has written Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader (Edward Elgar 2011), which explains what economic theory looks like if the entrepreneur is placed at the centre of microeconomic analysis and in which Say’s Law is brought back as the core of macro.

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Interview with Roy Barzilai, for Agefi Magazine–english version

  This interview was initially published on the website of Institut Coppet, on September 16, 2015. It was also published, in French, on the website of Institut Turgot, on October 20, 2015, and in the February 2016 issue of Agefi Magazine

 8056037 Roy Barzilai is an independent scholar, who studied both Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and Rivka Schechter’s philosophy of language, rooted in the Hebrew Bible. The synthesis of Rand’s Aristotelian philosophy, and the biblical creed of ethical monotheism provides profound insights into the ideas that shaped the Western mind. By exploring the intellectual history of Western civilization, Roy seeks to reach a greater understanding of the human mind.

  As a financial analyst for more than a decade, Roy became aware of the herd mentality in financial markets. He studied the Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the new science of socionomics, focusing on how change in social mood affects society, its ideas, philosophy, culture, and economy. This dynamism is the engine of history.

  Roy holds undergraduate degrees from Tel Aviv University in Law, accounting, and computer science. He is the author of two books: The Objective Bible, published in 2014, and The Testosterone Hypothesis, published in 2015.

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Interview with Guang Zhen Sun, for Man and the Economy

  This interview was published in the December 2015 issue of Man and the Economy journal, founded by Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase. For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

sun  Holding a PhD in economics from Monash University, Australia, GZ SUN now teaches economics at the University of Macau, Macao Special Administrative Region, China. His research interests are mainly microeconomics and the history of economic thought.

  His joint work with collaborators helped establish the theoretical foundation of a literature on endogenous labor specialization. He has also published at times on topics in axiomatization, public choice, theory of the firm, evolutionary economics, etc., and on less-dismal-than-normal topics such as general equilibrium analysis of how large-scale societies of ants self-organize. Among the services he has provided to the scientific community of economists, the commitment he currently takes most seriously is his editorial job at a new journal, Man and the Economy, founded by the late Mr. Ronald H Coase.

  His book The Division of Labor in Economics: A History provides, for the first time, a systematic and comprehensive narrative of the history of one central idea in economics, namely the division of labour, over the past two and a half millennia, with special focus on that having occurred in the most recent two and a half centuries. Quite contrary to the widely held belief, the idea has a fascinating biography, much richer than that exemplified by the pin-making story that was popularized by Adam Smith’s classical work published in 1776.

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Entretien avec Deirdre McCloskey, pour le journal « Man and the Economy »–version francophone

  Cette entrevue a été publiée, en anglais, par le journal Man and the Economy, dans leur édition de juin 2017, et mise en ligne sur leur site web dès décembre 2016.

  Deirdre Nansen McCloskey a enseigné l’économie, l’histoire, l’anglais et la communication à l’université d’Illinois à Chicago de 2000 à 2005. Economiste, historienne et rhétoricienne réputée, elle a écrit 17 livres et environ 400 publications académiques sur des sujets divers et variés allant de l’économie technique et la théorie statistique à la promotion du transgenre et l’éthique des vertus bourgeoises. Elle est connue en tant qu’économiste « conservatrice » de l’école de Chicago (où elle a enseigné dans les Facultés d’Économie et d’Histoire de 1968 à 1980), mais se présente en tant que « femme du Midwest lettrée, adepte de la théorie quantitative, postmoderne, épiscopalienne progressiste et adepte du libre marché. Et non « conservatrice » ! Je suis une libertarienne chrétienne. »

  Son dernier livre (sorti en mai 2016 aux presses de l’Université de Chicago) s’intitule L’Égalité bourgeoise: comment les idées, et non le capital ou les institutions, ont enrichi le monde (Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World) et donne une explication fondée sur les idées quant à la forte élévation des standards de vie de 1800 à nos jours. Les accidents de la Réforme et de la Révolte en Europe du nord-ouest de 1517 à 1789 menèrent à une nouvelle forme de liberté et de dignité pour les citoyens – via la diffusion d’idées appelées « libérales » – qui provoquèrent ensuite l’explosion de la hausse des standards de vie par la voie du commerce dès lors « libéré ».

  Son livre précédent, appartenant à une même trilogie et intitulé La dignité bourgeoise : pourquoi l’économie est incapable d’expliquer le monde moderne (Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World – 2010) démontre que les explications matérialistes telles que l’épargne et l’exploitation n’ont pas suffisamment de vigueur économique ou de pertinence historique. Le premier livre de la trilogie L’ère bourgeoise (the Bourgeois Era trilogy), Les vertus bourgeoises: l’éthique de l’ère du commerce (The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce – 2006), démontre que, contrairement à ce que clame le clergé à gauche comme à droite depuis 1848, la bourgeoisie a du bon et l’enrichissement par le commerce n’est pas la pire des éthiques.

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Interview with Stephen Hicks, for Foundation for Economic Education — unabridged version

  This interview was originally published in an abridged version, on Foundation for Economic Education’s website, on May 2 2016.

Hicks-Stephen-2013  Hicks is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, which argues that postmodernism is best understood as a rhetorical strategy of intellectuals and academics on the far-Left of the political spectrum in response to the failure of socialism and communism.

  His documentary and book Nietzsche and the Nazis is an examination of the ideological roots of National Socialism, particularly how Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas were used, and in some cases misused, by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to justify their beliefs and practices.

  Additionally, Hicks has published articles on a range of subjects, including free speech in academia, the development of modern art, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, business ethics, and the philosophy of education, including a series of YouTube lectures. He is also the co-editor, with David Kelley, of a critical thinking textbook, The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: According to a popular opinion, left to its own devices, capitalism inevitably tends to a monopoly economy. An economy in which there is no competition. In a monopoly environment, the dominant companies can freeze competition and entrepreneurial initiative. In this regard, any monopoly is problematic, even the monopoly of the local baker or shoemaker. Without competition, the quality of service slips. And innovation becomes an expensive nuisance unless it wildly jacks up profits.

  As a fine connoisseur and renowned debunker of anti-capitalist arguments, how would you assess this widespread analysis?

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Interview with George Gilder, for Agefi Magazine’s April 2016 issue

Picture 2  This interview was initially published in French in Agefi Magazine’s April 2016 issue.

  George Gilder is a venture capitalist and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and American Principles Project, Editor-in-Chief of the Gilder Technology Forum (from Forbes).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to hear that the global weakness of the contemporary USA lies in the worsening of income inequalities. The best predictor of social and economic class is nowadays the social and economic class of parents. People like the Rockefellers or the family of Mitt Romney are born into the 1% and pass that position along to their children. In other words, the USA have a plutocracy, like it or not; and that plutocracy should at least pay a higher tax rate and a higher death tax—a higher tax for passing along its wealth to its kids. America works best when it can open the path for dirt-poor kids with drive and intelligence to rise—as Abraham Lincoln rose from the poverty and mud of his father’s farm in Illinois.

  What is your opinion on this popular view?

  George Gilder: The popular view is nonsense. Inequality is irrelevant. Under free markets, capital flows not to those who most quickly spend it but to those who can best expand it. It goes to suppliers rather than demanders. What matters is mobility and creativity. Forbes magazine shows ever more rapid arrivals and departures from their lists of rich people. However, the “hypertrophy of finance” in the world economy that I describe in The Scandal of Money is fostering more inequality based not on merit but on government privileges.

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Entretien avec Pierre Bergé, pour la revue « Arguments »

  Cet entretien a été initialement publié par la revue « Arguments », fin mars 2017.

  Pierre Bergé est un entrepreneur en confection de luxe, essayiste, et mécène français. Compagnon d’Yves Saint Laurent, il l’aide à fonder la maison de couture du même nom. Il est aujourd’hui président de la Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, reconnue d’utilité publique en 2002, dont les missions sont la conservation de l’œuvre d’Yves Saint Laurent, l’organisation d’expositions et le soutien d’activités culturelles et éducatives.

  De 1977 à 1981, il dirige le théâtre de l’Athénée puis préside l’Opéra Bastille de 1988 à 1993, année où il est nommé « ambassadeur de bonne volonté de l’UNESCO ». Soutien médiatique et financier du Parti socialiste, il est également un militant qui soutient la cause homosexuelle et la lutte contre le sida, cofondateur de l’association Sidaction dont il est aujourd’hui président. Il était propriétaire du magazine Têtu jusqu’en janvier 2013. En 2010, il prend le contrôle du quotidien Le Monde, conjointement avec Xavier Niel et Matthieu Pigasse, au travers d’une recapitalisation du groupe.

  Pierre Bergé est, enfin, l’auteur de plusieurs essais consacrés à Yves Saint Laurent, ainsi qu’à la liberté et aux valeurs républicaines. Évoquons notamment Liberté, j’écris ton nom, de 1991, Inventaire Mitterrand, de 2001, Les jours s’en vont je demeure, de 2003, et Lettres à Yves, de 2008. Il se définit politiquement comme un « démocrate rooseveltien ».

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