John Lanchester Quotes
I grew up mainly in the Far East, where my father worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which was then a small, well-run colonial institution and not the global colossus it is today.
Lanchester, John. I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. Simon & Schuster, 2010.
The National Chamber of Commerce claims that the represent American business and indeed many business men and women join their local Chamber of Commerce, never realizing that the National Chamber of Commerce is controlled by partisan political ideologues who mainly represent the largest of corporations. The leaders have extreme egos and spend millions of dollars from the local chambers to put themselves on television with their own TV studios and ignoring the interest of most small businesses. When Hollings made this quotation, he felt that many large companies were moving their manufacturing and packaging to China. This not only exported the jobs of American workers, but hurt small businesses who could no longer sell the large companies packaging material, printing, sub assembly of even supply parts. The nut and bolt manufacturer in Peoria no longer sells the nuts and bolts to an American Manufacturer as the Chinese make their own nuts and bolts. Even small training companies had few workers to train. But the National Chamber of Commerce took the money from small business as they lobbied hard for the expansion of business with China. The National Chamber, never puts its policies to a vote of its member companies or the small companies would out vote the larger ones and the monopolies whom the Chamber national executives mainly serve.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising. Although a century ago, Connolly captured the centrality of the development problem of every Third World County trying to compete in a global economy. The irony is that Ireland, long after achieving Independence, had the lowest standard of living in Europe for years. The great Irish breakthrough came as the result of the government making a huge national investment providing the capital for giving all of Ireland access to the Internet and passed laws for the information age. The Irish people took it from there. They leapfrogged wealthier nations and found customers all over the globe because they had the infrastructure to reach the rest of the globe just as fast as anyone else. See {589760} for Connolly’s idea to bring technology of the time to Ireland. The Irish information revolution was accomplished by using this idea for information technology instead of farm technology.
Hong Kong was not always a successful city or colony. In 1844 the British were thinking of swapping it for a better colony. However, in a rare combination of synergistic development of a colony, the great strengths of the Chinese and that of the English combined to make Hong Kong one of the best and well developed cities in the world. Few imperial colonies turned out as well.
It was a classic economic protectionist practice to for an imperial nation to sell manufactured goods to its colonies, but not to allow the colonies to sell high labor value goods back to the mother country. The early American colonies were victims of this, and Brandgee was the leader of the protectionist wing of the Republican party. See {640519} for William Howard Taft’s opinion of him.
In China, the religious activities of the Missionaries never really lead to the many troubles between the missionaries and the Chinese. It was their activities in the non-religious arenas articulated here by Denby.
John Henry Lanchester is a British journalist and novelist. He was born in Hamburg, brought up in Hong Kong and educated in England; between 1972 and 1980 at Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk, then at St John's College, Oxford. He is married to historian and author Miranda Carter, with whom he has two children, and lives in London.
