WHEN the 2008 financial crash happened, Queen Elizabeth apparently wrote a letter to the UK’s top economists to ask them why they had not foreseen it. I don’t know whether the story is true. But I do recall that when the crash happened, I was not surprised as a history student. In fact, I had been expecting it.Although I did not formally study economics, I was fortunate to be able to take a history course by Prof Julian Cobbing, in which he explained the trading mechanisms of the global financial system and how these were leading to the reckless and predatory tendency of hyperspeculative investing. In that course, we were challenged to ask ourselves questions about what our purpose was as university students and what the purpose of the university would be in the future.Were we, as 21st-century university graduates, going to enter the labour market with the aim of perpetuating such an unstable financial system, or would we reform it and maybe even completely dismantle it?At the heart...
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