Volume VIII
Volume VII
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Volume IV
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Foreign Government Subsidies and FDA Regulatory Failures Are Causing Drug Shortages in the United States: Here’s How to Fix It
The United States is suffering from the worst drug shortage crisis in recent history. Whether it is basic generic drugs, antibiotics, or chemotherapy drugs, patients, doctors, and hospitals are facing shortages that are claiming American lives and straining our nation’s health care system. According to FDA data on drug shortages from 2015 to 2022, drug…
The China Challenge: A Conversation with Reps. Jake Auchincloss and Ro Khanna
Please join us in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 8 for a conversation with Representatives Jake Auchincloss and Ro Khanna. The China Challenge: The Future of U.S.-China Relations and Revitalizing American Industry…
The Travails of Bidenomics
The recent media flurry over “Bidenomics” is the latest attempt to distill a complex but far from complete rupture with neoliberalism. Premised in part on lifting the wages and employment rate of historically low-income groups, Bidenomics is really about two things: strengthening the relationship between climate policy and national security, and prodding capital to commit…
The Ghosts of Mont Pelerin: Visiting the Birthplace of Neoliberalism
elerin” means pilgrim in French. I made a pilgrimage—an ironic one—to Mont Pelerin in Switzerland. It was here in 1947 that F. A. Hayek organized the foundational meeting that would effectively launch neoliberalism as an intellectual and policy movement (the term was coined at a predecessor meeting1 held in Paris before the war). The ideas…
Making—and Sustaining—the News: A Virtual Discussion
The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. With the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust newsgathering operations. Since 2005, 2,500 newspapers, or more than a quarter…
Making—and Sustaining—the News
The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. Since the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust newsgathering operations. Since 2005, 2,500 newspapers, or more than a…
Should We Save Newspapers from Google?
There are a lot of discussions about the media in American politics, but very few about advertising, which is the key pivot point around which the media organizes itself. In America, and throughout the world, the press is dying, starved of ad revenue. Since 2005, we’ve lost more than 2,500 newspapers and tens of thousands…
Big Tech and the News: A Problem of Countervailing Power
On the morning of October 14, 2020, I caught a firsthand glimpse of what it’s like for a traditional media outlet to go up against the vast agglomeration of economic and digital power known as Big Tech—and to do so without the benefit of what economist John Kenneth Galbraith defined as countervailing power. That was…
Small Media, Big Tech, and the “Partiality” Imperative
It has been about two years since Australia enacted its much-disputed News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) legislation. That new dispensation Down Under requires hegemonic Big Tech platforms to remunerate local Aussie media outlets, in straightforward enough fashion, for the right to post and disseminate an outlet’s substantive content on a technology platform. The motivating idea…
Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and the World It Created
If publishers bargaining for payments from platforms was going to save local journalism in Australia, we’d probably know it by now. After all, back in 2021 Australia passed the News Media Bargaining Code, presented as a way for publishers to claw back advertising revenue. In their eyes, their articles, photos, columns, editorials, and letters to…
Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code: A New Institutional Perspective
In 2021, the Australian Federal Government passed a landmark News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code through both houses of parliament, which requires the platform companies Google and Meta (then Facebook) to contribute financially to the production of news content by Australian news publishers. This measure, which is estimated to involve an annual transfer…
How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives
In a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens. This gap was present in all years observed in the study (2005–18). It grew significantly starting in 2012, however, as depressive affect unilaterally spiked among liberals. Three years…
Big Philanthropy and the Benefits—and Limits—of the Bygone “Grand Bargain”
Big Philanthropy is now on the defensive, however. Increasingly aggressive critiques of it often, though not always, focus on alleged violations of the Grand Bargain. These critiques are cross-ideological. Many progressives and activists think the bargain’s terms have come to allow too much latitude for anti-democratic oligarchs, for example. Meanwhile, some populist conservatives…
Where the Chips Fell
Before student loan forgiveness, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and the Inflation Reduction Act, something called the CHIPS Act was a major news story for a few days in late July. CHIPS was essentially a bill to support semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, and the final version that passed into law, which added basic research…
Panama’s Border Crisis and U.S. Immigration Policy
Every night inside the chain link fence of Panama’s San Vicente Migration Reception Station near the Colombian border, up to a thousand or more migrants emerge from a sea of tents to board a caravan of sixty-seat buses run by the Panamanian government. Together in a convoy, the buses travel overnight to another migration reception…
Revisiting Albert O. Hirschman on Trade and Development
Hirschman is simply different from typical economists. He could certainly “do the math.” But when one reads him, he gives the impression that he is working up the numbers and setting up the Marshallian graphs and curves more to satisfy his academic colleagues and less to persuade his wider audience. Hirschman’s approach to economics was always grounded in historical and experiential reality…
The Beginning of History
While “Western hyperpluralism,” “the end of history,” or our “Grotian moment” may all derive in particular from sensibilities forged during the Reformation, Dusenbury believes that these ideas could have only come about at the dawn of modernity because the logic of secularity was already present. Dusenbury has sought to show that interpretations of the Roman trial of Jesus have not only “shaped history,” but are the origin of our concept of the secular…
The Canadian Ideology
The city of Ottawa found itself in the unusual position of being at the center of international media attention in early February when the Freedom Convoy occupied Parliament Hill. In the United States and elsewhere, right and left-wing commentators made the most of the crisis, each side integrating it into a preexisting narrative about either…
Stagflation: Causes and Cures
Few today will dispute that inflation is a serious problem. The latest CPI number, from April 2022, came in at 8.3 percent. Core inflation clocked in at 6.2 percent. Although slightly below the highs of March, the last time we saw inflation numbers like these was in the early 1980s. What is even more shocking…
Philanthropy on the Defensive
Establishment philanthropy in America is on the defensive—as it should be. Measured in terms of its size, the philanthropic sector is big and getting bigger; this is not necessarily a bad development in itself, but the sector’s growth in recent decades has been striking. Ideologically, the largest foundations’ policy-oriented grantmaking is lopsidedly liberal and getting…
What Big Tech’s Response to Russia Really Tells Us
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revived discussions of the foreign policy significance of the U.S. tech industry. Companies like Apple, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and Meta have either threatened to shut down or have entirely shut down services in Russia. While immediate reactions have celebrated these companies for taking an active role in condemning the…
The End of Dollar Hegemony?
On February 26, 2022, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the European Commission issued a joint statement that might very well change the global economy forever. In it, these countries pledged to freeze the Central Bank of Russia’s foreign currency reserves in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two days…
Beginning of the End, or End of the Beginning?
The End of History has ended, but History is yet to resume. So argue Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe in The End of the End of History, published by Zero Books last June. For those familiar with Hegel and his post–Cold War reinterpretation by Francis Fukuyama, the paradox of the “end of history” assertion is only too apparent. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, according to Fukuyama, had definitively answered the question of which modern political ideology…
Nationalism or Conservatism?: Lessons from 1912
Conservatism today stands at a crossroads. Throughout its long history, conservatism has sought to hold together a commitment to both a substantive vision of the good—family, faith, and nation, a free community of virtue—and to a sustainable means of securing it—the rule of law, limited and accountable government, secure individual rights. At the best of…
Between the Servile State and Social Pluralism: Essays on Work, Well-Being, and Political Economy
As many authors and essays have argued in the pages of American Affairs, and more recently in other prominent outlets, the polarities which have organized American political and economic life for the past several generations are proving increasingly irrelevant to contemporary developments and challenges. Right-libertarians sloganeer against big government or “tyrannical” state intervention in the otherwise…
The Pluralist Alternative To Neoliberalism
Thanks to rising inequality, sub-replacement fertility, and growing anti-system populism, technological civilization in the United States and worldwide is experiencing the latest of several historic crises that have occurred since the transition from agrarian to industrial economies that began in Britain, Western Europe, and the Northern United States two centuries ago. The central issue from…
Social Pluralism and the Principle of Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity is one of the four basic principles of Catholic social teaching (along with dignity of the individual, common good, and solidarity). Principles however do not create their own facts, and subsidiarity presupposes a certain set of social facts: first, that there exists a comprehensive community called polity (put to one side the issue of…
Monopolies and Humiliation
In America today, we have a monopoly crisis. Over the last twenty years, 75 percent of industries have gotten more concentrated. There is concentrated power in every part of American commerce, in big markets like cable and search and pharmaceuticals, and in small markets like tabletop games, and missiles and munitions. Monopolies generate wage inequality,…
Workism and Falling Fertility
Developed countries have averaged less than two children per woman for over forty years. Nonetheless, the idea that fertility rates in advanced societies could be kept at or near the replacement rate of about two children per woman is buttressed by a body of literature arguing that a return to the two-child family becomes more practical…
Virtual Event—Data Wars: Security, Economics, and Politics
If AI is the engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, data is the fuel. But the economic exploitation of data faces huge obstacles—cybersecurity, national regulation, international competition, and new technologies that threaten to disrupt the control and security of data. What changes are underway, and how can businesses and governments adapt to them? Join Asia…
Announcing the Common Good Economics Grant Program
American Affairs, together with American Compass, is pleased to announce the Common Good Economics Grant Program to support projects aimed at rethinking the role that economic policy can play in advancing the common good. CGE grants will be in amounts from $5,000 to $50,000, and can be used to support new initiatives ranging from individual…
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Amazon?
America’s third-largest company by market capitalization has filled the shoes of predecessors like Standard Oil, Sears, and General Electric as an epoch-defining corporation. Indeed, offering enhanced consumer convenience, Amazon now defines an entire way of life. Amazon’s profits soared nearly 200 percent last year as its national fulfillment infrastructure and rapid Prime delivery serviced a lockdown-stricken and home-confined populace. But in spite of its achievement of seamless logistics, Amazon’s dramatic surge has been neither victimless nor costless…
Who’s Minding the App Store?
A conversation on internet platform policy and economics hosted by American Affairs and American Greatness, featuring panelists Mark W. Koran, Minnesota State Senate (R-32); Blake Masters, Thiel Capital; Fiona McFarland, Florida House of Representatives (R-72); and J. D. Vance, Narya Capital…
The Left’s Culture War Rebranding
Technically, you could call it a victory. But what was expected to be a historic blue wave in 2020 turned out to be barely a ripple. Despite many polls predicting a blowout, Democrats only narrowly defeated a president widely believed to have mismanaged a pandemic that has killed over a quarter-million Americans and cratered the…
New Fault Lines in a Post-Globalized World
The economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system and, just as importantly, cast out the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world for the past forty years. But Covid-19 has only accelerated a process that was already well underway, impacting trade negotiations between China, the United States, and the European Union…
How Late Liberalism Undermines Itself
Just as surely as the French Revolution devoured its children, modern-day liberalism is eating itself, and destroying with it all the norms and institutions that help complex societies to mediate differences. As liberalism grows illiberal, as it turns its back on pluralism, its universalism gives way to relativism, and its belief in the inevitability of…
United We Stand
Amid the stresses and strains of today’s America, with our national political fabric seemingly at the tearing point, the notion of disunion as our defining idea might seem ripe for embrace. But is this, really, our national experience? The answer matters…
Individual and National Freedom: Toward a New Conservative Fusion
The 2011 hit series The Newsroom begins with a memorable scene. A panel of pundits is asked by a sorority girl to say “in one sentence or less, why America is the greatest country on earth.” The liberal smugly answers, “Diversity and opportunity.” The conservative, without blinking, responds, “Freedom and freedom.” The second answer speaks…
America’s Unhealthy Gerontocracy
America in its present state of decline increasingly resembles the late Soviet Union, but one of the most unsettling parallels is its unmistakable slide into gerontocracy. From Trump to Biden to Sanders to Pelosi to most of the Senate, one might think that the biblical three score and ten had become a mandatory minimum for…
Lenin versus the God-Builders
James D. White’s Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov is the first comprehensive English-language biography of Bogdanov. In it, White alternates chapters of straight biography with dense chapters that rehash Bogdanov’s philosophy and the debates surrounding it. The volume meticulously provides an inside-baseball look at the evolution of the Bolshevik organism and makes clear the degree to which Bolshevism’s path was not predetermined—it could have been different…
After AIPAC
Bernie Sanders’s announcement that he would not attend this year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (aipac) conference in Washington set off the usual round of recriminations, but it should not have come as a surprise. On his Twitter feed, Sanders described the annual pro-Israel gathering—typically well-attended by presidents, presidential candidates, and elected officials of both…
A Public Baseline: The Australian Health Care Model
Health care in the United States is riddled with contradictions. The country spends $3.5 trillion a year on health care—more than $10,700 per person and 17.9 percent of GDP—yet 28.5 million Americans are uninsured—nearly 9 percent of the population. America is the richest nation on earth but has only the twenty-ninth highest life expectancy. It…
The Reformation in Economics: Back to the Future
It is hard to think of another book of the same genre, less still one recently published, that provides such a clear and accurate guide to what economics should be about and how it should be employed to analyze actual economies…
American Restoration: Edmund Burke and the American Constitution
In mid-July 230 years ago, the people of England received a startling piece of news. They learned that on the previous day, July 14, 1789, a mob of angry Frenchmen had stormed the Bastille prison, thus toppling one of the prominent symbols of the Old Regime. It was now clear to all: the growing unrest…
Momentum Lost: Surveying the Fractured British Left
In spring 2019 I published an article in this journal predicting that the British Left was far more divided than it appeared on its surface. I argued that the activist group Momentum, which had taken over the Labour Party, risked alienating traditional working-class supporters. My argument was based on the fact that Momentum tended to be…
Commodity Financialization (and Why It Matters)
In December 2018, a leading European bank sent its customers investing tips for the next year. To navigate “an increasingly challenging investment environment,” the bank advised, “The latter stages of the economic cycle have historically been one of the better times to invest in commodities. Overall demand tends to stay high while inventories run low.” Until recently, commodities interested mostly those who produced, traded, or consumed them…
How to Relink Seven Billion People?
World population has increased from one billion a century ago to roughly seven billion now, with rates varying greatly between different countries, tribes, and religious groups. Many of today’s unsettled political, economic, and environmental issues—the latter reflected in the recently published UN report stating that human encroachment on habitats may lead to the extinction of…
Subscription Capitalism: The Story of a Power Shift
The emergence of the internet changed the business landscape in fundamental ways. Computer-based services could be offered to anyone irrespective of geographic restrictions. This meant that internet companies could become globally significant with relatively little initial investment, as demonstrated by Facebook, Google, and several others. Their ability to rapidly concentrate wealth with relatively little overhead…
Marvel’s War on Terror
When the Norse god Loki threatens earth in the 2012 film The Avengers, the “playboy billionaire genius” Tony Stark confronts him in a Manhattan penthouse. Overlooking the cityscape, Stark warns Loki that if earth’s most powerful superheroes “can’t protect the earth, you can be damned sure we’ll avenge it.” And so are born the Avengers,…
The Liberal International Disorder
Foreign policy as practiced by the United States, especially in recent decades, enjoys a special distinction. The chaos engendered by its voluntarist will to power is painfully obvious…
The Illiberal Arts
For thousands of years, the liberal arts were not liberal, and that is why they are increasingly unwelcome in our time. An honest study of the past is unsettling in a liberal age, because a person who learns to venerate earlier cultural traditions, from Homer to the baroque, may come to venerate the values to…
Right-Wing Marxists and Left-Wing Nationalists
On the shelf of academics’ memoir-manifestos, there will never be more than one Allan Bloom. Someone forgot to tell F. H. Buckley. Which is a shame because Buckley (unrelated to that Buckley) can be interesting. But the contours of his navel are not. The Republican Workers Party…
What Another Irish Housing Bubble Says about the EU Technocracy
On January 20, the Financial Times reported that the European Central Bank (ECB) would start the process of hiring its new chief economist. At the top of the list, the article said, was Irish central bank governor Philip Lane. The article noted that Lane is popular among European diplomats and is a key ally of…
Peter Thiel, Rachel Carson, and Regulatory Double Standards
Buried in the middle of a two-hour debate in 2014 on religion and modernity is a thought-provoking observation by Peter Thiel regarding technology and the modern economy. Instead of praising Silicon Valley for its tremendous digital inventiveness, Thiel criticized the technological advances of the last fifty years…
Share Buybacks and the Contradictions of “Shareholder Capitalism”
In the jargon of finance, America is suffering from a capital allocation problem. The country seems incapable of making the necessary investments to fuel future productivity and growth, or to ensure widespread prosperity. At the government level, public spending on basic research and development as well as infrastructure investment has declined significantly over the past…
Utopia’s Borders
The political future of the European bloc looks distressingly rough. Already in a December 2016 essay published in the Financial Times, Wolfgang Münchau warned that the “liberal capitalist order” was in peril of capsizing under what he called “uncontrolled flows of people and capital.” The mere…
Sweden’s Ambivalence on Immigration
In 2015, immigration to Sweden reached an all-time high. At its peak, more than 10,000 people arrived in a single week. The total for the entire year was 162,877 people—1.6 percent of the Swedish population. In September, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven welcomed the immigrants, saying that his Europe does not build walls. A month and…
Kanye West’s Radical Black Liberation Theology
Kanye West has always had a streak of what one might call conservatism. He defiantly included “Jesus Walks” on his 2004 debut album, despite repeated urging from record execs to drop it, and predictions that it would never get play. Instead, the single helped make his career. The track begins with Kanye revealing, “We at…
Clean Rooms and Dirtbags
Conservative Canadian professor Jordan Peterson and socialist Brooklynite podcast Chapo Trap House have a lot in common. They each make around a hundred thousand dollars a month from Patreon donations. They each inspire both adoration and revulsion, while rejecting, in different ways, forms of political correctness…
Poland at 100 Years of Independence
The hundredth anniversary of the reclamation of Polish independence is cause to celebrate. Poles will celebrate. Yet national and international responses will also be colored by the nation’s recent political controversies, and the tensions of international liberalism. I suspect…
What V. S. Naipaul Taught Me about Posturing
Readers rightly praise V. S. Naipaul’s incandescent prose, his narrative power, and his bracing sense of humor. But for me his art also had another value: Naipaul taught me the value of honesty over posturing. We posture when we pretend to have feelings and opinions that we do not really have. The emotional honesty of…
The Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism
The argument that America is at risk of theocratic domination has always been hyperbole—a rallying cry rather than an analysis of our political situation. Even as the nomination of a Supreme Court justice stirs up liberal fantasies of The Handmaid’s Tale, the threat of a genuine “theocracy” seems rather far off. But there was a…
North Korea’s Search for Totality
In early April, I participated in the Pyongyang Marathon, organized for the birthday of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung (1912–1994), founder of the Kim dynasty. He is the father of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il (1941–2011), and the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un. Our tour…
Privilege and Idolatry
In May of 2005, the late David Foster Wallace delivered one of the wisest, most demanding commencement speeches in recent memory. The speech is titled “This Is Water,” a phrase drawn from the following joke: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way,…
Nicholas II: A Tsar’s Life for the People?
On July 16 and 17, Russia will mark one of the most sensitive centenaries in its recent history: the slaughter of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, his wife (the Anglo-German Empress Alexandra), five children, and four remaining servants at point-blank range by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918. Beyond Russia’s borders, the Great War was…
Robert Kaplan’s World
In 1994, five years after the Berlin Wall fell, American businessmen, journalists, and foreign policy intellectuals generally remained under the trance of the “end of history.” Events still shook enlightened consciences—the Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslav Wars, the first World Trade Center attack—but for the most part, the end of the Cold War brought with it a newfound faith in the power of international institutions to resolve these conflicts. Faith in the inexorable trends of democratization and globalization was high. In stepped Robert D. Kaplan…
The European Banking Union: Intentions and Reality
Emmanuel Macron’s recent proposals for European reform have concentrated on fiscal issues but also include the demand that the European banking union should be completed, since its third pillar (a pan-European deposit guarantee scheme) is not yet implemented. The formation of the European banking union, initiated in 2012, is the last major reform in Europe…
Italy’s Organic Crisis
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci coined the term “organic crisis” to describe a crisis that differs from ”ordinary” financial, economic, or political crises. An organic crisis is a “comprehensive crisis,” encompassing the totality of a system or order that, for whatever reason, is no longer able to generate societal consensus (in material or ideological terms). Such a crisis lays bare fundamental contradictions in the system that the…
Trump, Conservatives, and Human Rights
During his short presidency, President Trump has downplayed human rights, preferring to emphasize American economic and military interests abroad. He has sought to develop close ties with autocratic Arab rulers and invited human rights abusers such as Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte to the White House. Yet the administration has not totally sidelined human rights concerns,…
The Cold War Culture War
How to explain the current nadir in U.S.-Russia relations? The litany of oft-cited causes is by now familiar and includes, but is certainly not limited to, the expansion of NATO, the dispute over Kosovo, the American abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Russo-Georgian War, and the war in Ukraine, as well as allegations (by…
Jordan Peterson: Shepherd of the Easily Freudened
Sometime between 1922 and 1939, James Joyce wrote the following cryptic passage in his equally cryptic book, Finnegan’s Wake: Be who, farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on ’alices, when they were yung and easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and what…
Can Democracy Save Us?
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a well-argued critical dissection of liberalism, one of the most persuasive I have read in recent years. Deneen understands “liberalism” to be one of the three powerful and all-encompassing ideologies of modern times—the other two being fascism and communism—that “proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived plan…
Against the Deformations of Liberalism
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a blistering critique of contemporary American culture and its foundational philosophy of liberalism. Deneen’s surprising argument is that “liberalism has failed because it succeeded,” and that the bankruptcy of liberal ideas has resulted in unsustainable forms of political community…
Liberal Liberation
Patrick Deneen is certainly not the first critic of liberalism to notice that it has something of the character of religion. He is particularly adept, however, at detailing one of its most striking faith-based features. Critics of religion, especially liberal ones, like to point out the irrational tendency of believers, in the face of disaster or social collapse, to believe ever more intensely in their doctrine the more reality seems to fail to conform to it…
Notes on Reclaiming Liberalism
The eclipse of liberalism—interchangeable with what are often referred to as the values of a free society, the American creed, or American exceptionalism—is, in many narratives, the central historical fact of our time. Laments over the eclipse of liberal first principles are regularly heard by the chorus shouting into the wind that the election of…
Moral Overload
Donald Trump’s election as president was a shattering defeat for left-of-center Americans. Commentators said that Democrats had focused too much on protecting specific groups—racial minorities, immigrants, and so on—and not enough on appealing to a broad public.1 The Democratic deficit was not only in votes, however, but in style. In recent decades, the Left has…
Czech Politics: An Unfinished Play in Four Acts
The national legislative elections and upcoming presidential election in the Czech Republic could be the most consequential events since Czech independence in 1993. The elections to the House of the Czech Parliament occurred this past October, and the presidential election looms in January. Though Czech politics does not frequently make headlines in anglophone media, the…
Fiscal Balances and the Rise of Catalonian Separatism: The Misuse of Economic Theory
The question of Catalonian independence is once again receiving international attention. The secessionist movement has received renewed impetus from the institutions of the Catalonian regional government, and the Catalan people are now gravely split, almost in half, on the issue. The tension is straining the relations between the central and regional governments and affecting the…
The New Christian Zionism
Earlier this year, a new U.S. President set as destinations for his first foreign trip the landed centers of the world’s three major monotheistic faiths: Mecca, Jerusalem, and the Vatican. On his visit in Jerusalem he became the first sitting President…
Two Cheers for Tax Reform
The recently announced tax reform package is one of the few serious and intelligent proposals offered by House Republicans in years. Not surprisingly, however, everyone seems to hate it. Defenders no less than critics of the plan seem incapable of thinking about tax policy outside of the simplistic framework of Reaganomics. As a result, most…
China, America, and “Nationalism”
“Fire and fury” were expected at the annual CLSA conference in Hong Kong in September. Stephen Bannon was to deliver a frontal assault on China—on Chinese soil—and advance the proposition that the United States and China are, or should be, engaged in an epic struggle for world domination in the twenty-first century, according to the…
The Incoherence of the Economists
What is an economist? There is an easy answer: economists are social scientists who create simplified quantitative models of large-scale market phenomena. But they are more than that. Besides their scientific role, economists have achieved a social cachet that far exceeds what one might expect from a class of geeky quasi-mathematicians. In addition to being…
U.S. Policy towards Africa under Trump
This paper explores the possible policy and institutional changes affecting South Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) more generally that could occur during the presidency of Donald Trump. The direction that the U.S. government is likely to take after the election…
France 2017: The Impossible Conservative Revolution?
France has just emerged from one of the maddest years of politics in its democratic history. It is often said that the French adore politics; but at the time of writing, the emotion that prevails at the close of legislative elections marked by a massive…
The Verge: Reflections on a Second Civil War
“Are We on the Verge of Another Civil War?” So asks The Nation, in a headline for an interview with David Armitage, the Harvard historian and author of the recent book, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Knopf, 2017). “Are We Nearing Civil War?” So asks the American Conservative, in a headline for a column…
Rob Ford, Donald Trump, and the New Direction of Political Polarization
You are not a typical American. Not even close. The typical American doesn’t read lengthy articles in policy journals. The typical American gets up far too early in the morning, after too little sleep, works too hard for too long in a job that pays too little, before heading home, feeding the kids, cleaning the…
The Great Exhaustion: Manned Space Flight and Philosophy
It is not difficult to imagine historians, several centuries from now, wondering how it could be that Americans, without really knowing how to do it, decided to go to the moon in eight short years. “What were they thinking?” these historians might exclaim! Their amazement could take two forms, however, depending on how Americans today,…