This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Christy Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs where every week I ask my

guest to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with

them if they were cast away on a desert island. For rights reasons, the music on these podcast

versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen

to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

My cast away this week is the economist, Dame Manouche-Shafique. She took up her position as Director

of the London School of Economics last autumn. At a time when global growth forecasts were being

upgraded and the worldwide economy was basking in what those of her ilk refer to as a welcome

cyclical upturn. However, given the extent of her experience, she likely took a rather sanguine

view of those passing events. A one-time deputy governor of the Bank of England and before that the

youngest ever vice president of the World Bank, she has seen bubbles, bull markets and crashes come and

go. She also knows, from bitter family experience, the impact a country's economic fortunes has on

its citizens. In the mid-60s, her once well-to-do family fled Egypt penniless after President

Nasser's nationalization program. She says, most of human progress has come from the application of

expertise to human problems. And I think the current dismissal of expertise is very troubling.

Experts lost a lot of credibility after the financial crisis. People said,

you told us this system was fine and then it blows up. You'll be used to that, say,

Minishifika. Is it partly also to do with the fact that experts maybe up until then and even

now it's starting again have oversold what they can tell us about the world and what they can

predict? That would be fair. It would be fair. Some experts pretended that they could predict the

future and probably expressed more certainty about their forecast than was merited. Having said

...