Welcome to the
website of Bill Emmott
I am a writer and consultant best known for my 13 years as editor-in-chief of The Economist (1993-2006) as well as for my books and films on Japan and Italy. My latest book, out in 2017, was “The Fate of the West” about the future of liberalism. These days, I am a “Brexile” living in Ireland, though I also spend time in Oxford, and am chairman of the Wake Up Foundation, a charity I co-founded with the film-maker Annalisa Piras, as well as of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Japan Society of the UK, and Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. This site carries my articles, videos, speeches and books, as well as my 2050 Index looking at the long-term strengths and prospects of western societies.
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Lessons of Japan’s Heisei period
12.01.19 Publication: Nikkei
It is one of the pure coincidences that history sometimes produces. But the unusual point about the dawn of the Heisei era in 1989-90 is that at exactly the...
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The US and Russia
04.08.18 Publication: Mainichi Shimbun
What has emerged from the summits with Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin is a mixture of the psychological and the geopolitical. The psychological element is not...
Read moreThe greatest issue of our time…
08.07.18 Publication: Prospect
The greatest issue of our time in political economy is how to reconcile societies to the process we now call globalisation, with all the inequality and...
Read moreTrade
22.06.18 Publication: Mainichi Shimbun
A common saying among military men is that a country should never send troops into battle without having an exit strategy, a plan for how to end the conflict...
Read moreThe 2050 Index
In too many countries, politics and policy making is addicted to the short term. To help foster the longer-term thinking we all need, in 2017 I worked out this index, together with James Fransham of The Economist, which ranks 35 advanced western countries according to 25 different measures, grouped under the themes of demography, knowledge, innovation, globalization and resilience. I will be publishing an updated version in 2019.
See the 2050 IndexLatest Book
The fate of the West
In the long aftermath of the worst financial crisis to have hit advanced countries since 1929, liberal ideas have found themselves under threat, from the nationalist, illiberal likes of Donald Trump. But so has the co-operative network of liberal, democratic societies that we call the West, a network of alliances and friendships that was built […]
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