Just four decades ago, many saw Japan as the successor to the United States as the world’s “number one.” Ezra F. Vogel wrote in his famous 1979 book that “Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of postindustrial society than any other country.” But following the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble and the subsequent “lost decade,” the Asian Financial Crisis, and the country’s accelerating demographic decline, Japan faded from global attention…

On February 4, 2024, President Nayib Bukele secured a thumping reelection in El Salvador, receiving an astonishing 85 percent of the vote. His victory signals the consolidation of an unprecedented sociopolitical trans­formation in Latin America. Not long ago, El Salva­dor was consid­ered to be one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, on par with war-ravaged Syria and Somalia. Today, El Salvador’s homicide rate rivals the likes of Canada…

Disdain for the people inhabiting the periphery has long been embedded in the media and academic worldview, dating back even before the writings of Lewis Mumford. It is also ultimately terrible politics. Demeaning non-city dwellers as racists, homophobes, and fascists may not be the best way to start a conversation with the roughly 90 percent of Americans who live outside the urban core…

What is taking place in America’s most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services, resulting in some of the most heavily taxed populations in the country. But this tax revenue is then squandered on private contracts to unaccountable nonprofit organizations whose activities do little to rectify the problems they are nominally being funded to address…

To the end of his life, Sklar professed to be a socialist and political thinker on the left. Yet he ended up an outspoken defender of both George W. Bush’s neoconservative globalism and the Tea Party move­ment. These stances emerged from an increasingly idiosyncratic and expansive understanding of the macro-historical leftward movement of the United States, but also from personal and professional grievances. Drawing on his experiences of the sectarian New Left milieu of the 1970s and within academia, Sklar became a strident critic of what is now known as identity politics…

In short, if we have learned anything from the competing antitrust approaches of the Biden administration, it appears that an expanded consumer welfare standard, incorporating non-priced harms, is likely to win out. Neo-Brandeisian critiques may be more theoretically exciting for some antitrust advocates, and perhaps have helped to raise public awareness. The FTC has also taken meaningful action in other areas, such as recently banning noncompete agreements. But the DOJ’s en­hanced consumer welfare approach seems poised to deliver more con­crete successes in addressing concentration in Big Tech and beyond…

“What is your moat?” That’s Silicon Valley-speak for “what defends you from the competition.” As investors hunt for the next big AI company, it’s also one question that the hundreds of start-ups launched in the wake of ChatGPT increasingly can’t avoid. How do you profit off intelligence once it’s been commoditized? Will the AI transition…

With Anxious Generation, Haidt comes to the very opposite set of conclusions that a reader might expect. Haidt shows that Silicon Valley’s products are, by design, structurally at odds with the developmental needs of human children as members of the species. The only serious solution, then, is for government (and other responsible entities) to step in and restrict children’s access…

April 2023 marked the emergence of a “New Washington Consensus,” according to President Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, who coined the term in a much discussed speech at the Brook­ings Institution. His argument in brief: events have forced proponents of the original “Washington Consensus”—which he defined as the U.S.-led order that served as the global economy’s foundation since the Second World War—to reexamine its underlying policy assumptions. Recent years, Sullivan suggested, “revealed cracks in those foundations,” particularly the global financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate disasters, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine…

It is impossible to understand the 1990s political landscape without appreciating the smaller yet pivotal transformations that occurred in the 1970s. Throughout the decade, continued changes to U.S. trade law, geopolitical developments in East Asia, and novel shipping technology combined to change the incentive structure that American businesses faced. This began a fundamental alteration in how these companies saw international trade. Slowly, American firms that once viewed trade as a way to expand the market for their American-made products began to view trade as a means to restructure their own production processes: exchanging a focus on foreign sales for a focus on foreign workers…