The Poland Peoblem: How A Good Economy Does Not Guarantee A Good Politics This is personal and professional. My wife and I have the third edition of our comparative economics textbook now in press at MIT Press. We have chapters on transition economies, and one is on the Polish economy. The standard story is that Poland has been […]
Black Mirror Big Data Becomes Big Brother In China And maybe coming soon to the US as well, enough to make Orwell sit up and take notice. The first show of the 2016 season of the sci fi TV show, “Black Mirror,” called “Nosedive,” showed a future society where people have overall social scores (1-5) […]
Corporatizatizing The All-Administrative University One of the few good things that appears to have happened in the conference committee on the generally awful impending GOP tax bill is that the hits students were going to take have been eliminated. However, even without that additional burden, college students face costs that are far higher than any […]
The End Of The “Islamic State.” There are two aspects of this debate, one about the term, “Islamic State,” and the other about the its application. So, until about a month ago the entity calling itself ” al-Dawla al Islamiyya fi al-Iraq wa al Sham(s),” was claiming to be the most important Muslim political entity […]
Is Bitcoin A Speculative Bubble? There are at least two definitions of a speculative bubble. The first, and most widely accepted, is that it involves a price of an asset that rises substantially above its fundamental and then falls back towards that fundamental. The other, not necessarily all that clearly distinguishable from the former, involves […]
Tolerance And Terrorism In Saudi Arabia On the one hand this past week, Thomas Friedman at the New York Times has written a praising column about Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (MbS). He is going to bring a new “wave of tolerance” into Saudi Arabia, along with more generally modernizing it. This claim is not […]
A Race To Suppress Academic Freedom? The race is between the two nations competing for global dominance, the US and China. This post is triggered by an unnamed editorial in today’s Washington Post (probably authored by Fred Hiatt) criticizing China for imposing ideological limits on Chinese universities. Since the recent party congress, 40 universities have […]
Proposing A Judicial Coup Via A Tax Bill On today’s Washington Post editorial page in a column entitled “Packing the courts like a turducken” (a deboned duck within a deboned chicken within a deboned turkey, or something like that, all for Thanksgiving, thank you), Ronald A. Klain not only reports on the actual push to […]
Two Powerful Women Losing Power That would be respective Angela Merkel and Janet Yellen, both reported to have lost a lot of power in today’s Washington Post. During at least the last year, if not the last four, they have been probably the two most powerful women on the planet. In the case of Merkel, […]
ARAMCO CEO Is Delusional Financial Times reported yesterday that Amin Nasser, the CEO of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO, currently 100% owned by the Saudi government, although originally founded by four former US oil company majors), has declared that investors should feel pleased that Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman has arrested and purged over […]