Spring 2019 / Volume III, Number 1
Economies out of Balance
Does America Need Global Savings to Finance Its Fiscal and Trade Deficits?
It is frequently argued that America’s twin deficits—the government budget deficit and the trade deficit—result from profligate spending by the government and private sectors. This excess domestic spending, moreover, must be financed by global savings, putting America on an unsustainable debt path. Problems are compounded as the U.S. demand for savings can push up interest rates, crowding out investment and causing the dollar to appreciate. American investment and exports are thereby depressed, slowing the growth of productive capacity. At some point, global savers will cut the flow of dollars to America’s borrowers, making it difficult to continue to finance spending. As spending falls and the economy struggles, there could be…
How the Financial Crisis Did Not Change the World
The tenth anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis came and went with surprisingly little reflection. Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World was perhaps the most celebrated attempt to analyze the crisis with the benefit of hindsight. Unfortunately, much of the book offers little more than a chronology of newspaper headlines, displaying superficial…
Managed Obsolescence: Homelessness in America’s Gilded Cities
It was last July, somewhere around Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway, when I first noticed the RVs. Miles and miles of vintage cream-colored RVs parked bumper to bumper along the inland shoulder of the PCH. My first thought was that they must have belonged to tourists spending a day at the beach. But they…
China and Russia
The New Silk Road and the Return of Geopolitics
The grand design came in 2013 from President Xi Jinping himself. The goal was to launch the project “One Belt One Road,” or OBOR, across and around Eurasia, and to ensure mutually beneficial cooperation among all participating countries. At the time, the announcement of OBOR received little if any attention from European observers, distracted as they were by the difficulties of emerging from the euro crisis and the foreign policy challenges of Iran and Russia…
Solidarity under a Song: What Strikes in China Tell Us
Early one Monday morning in 2010, Tan Guocheng came to his shift at Honda’s Nanhai factory in Guangdong Province. Tan was a twenty-four-year-old migrant worker from Hunan, a neighboring province, and the factory manufactured automobile parts. But…
Reflections in the Russian Mirror
Driving through Kaliningrad Oblast last summer, I came across a shining new piece of Russian deviousness: the government of Vladimir Putin has rebuilt Immanuel Kant’s old house, or at least a small red-brick building that Kant rented for a few years in the 1740s…
America’s Science and Engineering Crisis
The Decline of American Science and Engineering
Imagine sitting in front of your television in 1969, watching the Apollo lunar landing, and noting the marvels of modern engineering. The person sitting next to you responds, “Oh yes, but this is a passing fad; soon we will return to premodern engineering. Groping in the dark requires so much less intellect…
America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security
On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it…
Liberalism’s Limitations
Toward a Party of the State
As critiques of liberalism have become more pronounced, alarm bells about possible alternatives to liberalism have grown louder. These alarms, ironically enough, have often been sounded most emphatically by American writers who otherwise describe themselves as conservatives. In response to the recent challenges to liberalism, conservatives have generally dropped the pretense that they are anything other than liberals, or “classical liberals,” as they prefer to say. But what has enabled the conservative recolonization of liberalism is precisely the fact that no one else—that is, no “liberals” or progressives—any longer bothers to occupy the territory, or live up to the standards, of “liberalism.” The Left forfeited the contest over liberalism years…
Losing Momentum: A Warning from the Fracturing British Left
In mid-November 2018, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez issued a rallying cry that was not given sufficient attention. She called on left-wing activists to take over the Democratic Party. Her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti went one step further, openly calling on left-wingers to primary sitting Democrats. Together with YouTube personalities Cenk Uyger and Kyle Kulinski, Chakrabarti is…
Liberalism and the Invisible Hand
Liberalism as a concrete sociopolitical order rests upon a series of invisible hand systems: free competition in explicit economic markets, free competition in the marketplace of ideas, institutional competition among branches of government, and so on. Yet liberal faith in these systems far outruns any of the social-scientific mechanisms or evidence adduced to support…
The Illusion of a “Marketplace of Ideas” and the Right to Truth
The traditional model of a “marketplace of ideas” was intended to justify freedom of speech in terms of its optimal outcome in the production of truth. But today our behavior on the internet, the main locus of the “marketplace of ideas,” is continuously monitored and processed through the analysis of big data. Complex algorithms categorize…
The Return of the Hidden Persuaders
Critiques of advertising are back. Ten years ago, casual talk about how advertising influences behavior would have come across as weird and paranoid—the preserve of the online conspiracy fringe. Today it is everywhere. Leading journalistic outlets fret over something resembling mind control. Politicos talk in ominous tones of stolen elections and Manchurian candidates. And government…