Playing the Pubs of Manchester

I am fresh back in New York after three weeks in Manchester, England, where I was participating in a Workshop on International Development organized by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The final lecture of the workshop was given by Aidan Foster-Carter, a Korea scholar whose academic writings I have long admired. Well, it turns out that he is something of a folksinger as well, specializing in adapting various songs into political commentaries about international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. So after his lecture and a buffet dinner, we all traveled to the Ducie Arms Pub for a performance.

Here is Prof. Stiglitz looking on while Aidan sings about IMF structural adjustment loans to the tune of Elvis's "Return to Sender":


Since it was the Fourth of July, he also led us in an American patriotic song, Phil Ochs' "Power and Glory." And we also slogged through Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" in an attempt to capture the spirit of university campuses in 1968.

Aidan was kind enough to let others share the stage, too. I'm playing "Wild Horses" in this photo:



And when I came around to "Rocking in the Free World," mixmaster Stephen Kaplan of Yale University let me don his cap: