Regular LRB contributor and professor of politics at Cambridge David Runciman believes modern liberal democracies are remarkably good at recovering from crises, but remarkably bad at avoiding them. In his latest book The Confidence Trap (Princeton) he focuses on debt, climate change, the rise of China and the war on terror to argue that what we have learned from history, rather than wisdom, is a dangerous complacency. David Runciman will be in conversation with LRB contributing editor John Lanchester.
