Tag Archives: Economics

Politics/Opinion: Jacobin Magazine – Winter 2025

Jacobin Magazine (December 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Why Bidenism Failed’….

Bye Bye Bidenism

“You and [Franklin] Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, be-tween Moscow and Washington? In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they are building offices, they are creating a number of state regula-tion bodies, they are organising a long-needed Civil Service. 

Neoliberalism’s Hollow Promise of Freedom

Neoliberalism often presents itself as a victory for individual autonomy. In an interview, Grace Blakeley explains the hollowness of this claim — and why the Left needs to offer its own, better vision of human freedom.

UnitedHealth’s Unchecked Growth Has Caused Widespread Misery

Despite antitrust regulators’ efforts to rein it in, UnitedHealth Group has been growing to control ever more of the health care sector. The corporation’s expanding power has meant worse care, higher prices, and a mounting human toll.

Reviews: Best Books On Foreign Affairs Of 2024

Foreign Policy Magazine (December 8, 2023): The Best of Books 2024  on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and book reviewers.

Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy

by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

In a revelatory book, Farrell and Newman describe how the United States has turned its control over information networks into a hidden tool of economic domination—and warn of the risks of Washington’s weaponization of data power for ordinary people, as well as for the global financial system.read the review

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power

by Sergey Radchenko

In a major reconsideration of Cold War history, Radchenko examines the Soviet Union’s competing ambitions for revolution, security, and legitimacy—and how Soviet leadership, blinded by its own hubris and aggression, set the stage for the downfall of the USSR. read the review

Freedom From Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism

by Alan S. Kahan

Kahan argues that what unifies liberals across the centuries, including those involved in building and defending liberal democracy today, are their efforts to build societies free from the fear of arbitrary power. He sculpts a masterful and beautifully written history of liberalism’s long intellectual journey. read the review

Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

In this sobering study, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how the United States’ enduring constitutional order—one forged in a pre-democratic age—increasingly thwarts the will of an expanding multicultural majority in favor of a shrinking rural white minority.read the review

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

Focused on the sophisticated and networked world of autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny, Applebaum argues that what separates hardcore autocratic states, such as China and Russia, from softer illiberal and authoritarian regimes, such as those in Hungary, India, and Turkey, is the ruthlessness and reach of their dictatorial power and their deep hostility to the Western-led democratic world.read the review

Culture: The Hedgehog Review – Fall 2024 Issue

In Need of Repair

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW (FALL 2024): This issue’s theme is “In Need of Repair,” and it includes contributions from James Davison Hunter, Nicholas Carr, Martha Bayles, Olivier Zunz, Elias Crim, Aaron Horvath, Paul Scherz, Firmin DeBrabander, and John J. Lennon, as well as other reviews and essays from such contributors as Eugene McCarraher, Alan Jacobs, Paul Nedelisky, Rita Koganzon, Matthew Milliner, and Richard Hughes Gibson.

In Need of Repair

At the bottom of each of our system dysfunctions is a distinctive cultural disorder emerging from the many pressures of our rapidly modernizing world.

Supply Chain Sublime

The Material World is no place for humans. By Richard Hughes Gibson

Culture Wars: The Endgame

Nihilism’s Grip on American Democracy by James Davison Hunter

The Age of the Average

All the Little Data

The Pathologies of Precision Medicine

Analysis: ‘The American Economy’ (Oct. 19, 2024)

Special reports: The envy of the world

The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (October 15, 2024): The latest special report features “The American Economy” – The envy of the world…

The envy of the world

The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust. Expect that to continue, argue Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr

The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust

American productivity still leads the world

Is higher inequality the price America pays for faster growth?

The shale revolution helped make America’s economy great

Why the American stockmarket reigns supreme

China’s yuan is nowhere close to displacing the greenback

What can stop the American economy now?

Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Fall 2024

2024 U.S. Election: The World's Advice to the Next White House

Foreign Policy Magazine – September 9, 2024: The new issue features 2024 U.S. Election: The World’s Advice to the Next White House

Letters to the Next President

No matter who wins the White House, these nine thinkers from around the world would like a word. Catherine AshtonJason BordoffArancha GonzálezMartin KimaniMark Malloch-BrownJoseph S. Nye Jr.Danny QuahNirupama RaoJoseph E. Stiglitz

The Most Important Factor in Presidential Debates

A dramatic moment between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford showed the camera really is king.

Is 2024 Really the Most Important Election in History?

Democracy—and the global system—might not be so easily dismantled.

Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Summer 2024

Europe-issue-FP-Summer-2024

Foreign Policy Magazine – July 1, 2024: The new issue features ‘Europe Alone’ – Ten thinkers on a future without America’s embrace….

Europe Alone

Europe-EU-NATO-Donald-Trump-US-election-foreign-policy-illustration-doug-chayka-3-2

Nine thinkers on the continent’s future without America’s embrace.

By Mark LeonardConstanze StelzenmüllerNathalie TocciCarl BildtRobin NiblettRadoslaw SikorskiGuntram WolffBilahari KausikanIvan Krastev, and Stefan Theil

No bloc of countries has, for the past 75 years, been as umbilically tied to the United States as Europe. First, its western half and, since the end of the Cold War, much of its eastern half have prospered under the world’s most extensive bonds in trade, finance, and investment. Europe could also depend on the U.S. military’s iron commitment—enshrined in the 75-year-old NATO alliance—to come to its defense. Together with a few other nations, the United States and Europe defined many of the institutions that comprise what we call the Western-led order. The U.S.-European alliance has arguably been the bedrock of the global system as we know it today.

Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe

Illustration of a torn map of Europe revealing Donald Trump

Without Washington’s embrace, the continent could revert to an anarchic and illiberal past. By HAL BRANDS

Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, we may soon find out.

Opinion: Vulnerability Of Israel, Immigrants In UK And Elon Musk’s Starship

‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (March 25, 2024): A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, as the death toll climbs in Israel’s war on Gaza, we argue that the country looks deeply vulnerable. Plus, we consider Britain as an unexpected beacon of immigration. And finally, as Elon Musk’s Starship reaches space, we examine SpaceX’s approach to rocket development.

Analysis: The Business Of Waste Management (CNBC)


CNBC (January 8, 2024) CNBC Marathon explores the economics of waste management and how the United States is solving its trash problem. In 2019, the North American waste management market reached $208 billion.

Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:48 How Trash Makes Money In The U.S. (Published July 2021) 15:59 How Amazon, American Airlines And Subaru Burn Waste To Make Energy (Published May 2022) 32:24 How To Clean Up The World’s Most Polluted Rivers (Published August 2022) 46:16 Where Do EV Batteries Go When They Die? (Published March 2023)

Thanks to advancements in modern chemistry and support from municipal governments, landfills have seen astonishing financial success in recent years. Burning waste to make energy is a $10 billion industry in the U.S., and the fastest growing part of the business is waste from big companies like Amazon, Subaru, Quest Diagnostics and American Airlines.

They’re part of a growing corporate movement toward “zero landfill” as pressure mounts to reach sustainability requirements. It’s estimated that every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean through rivers, and as global waste generation increases, the problem is poised to worsen.

But a host of companies from Baltimore, Maryland to Bengaluru, India are working on the issue, developing novel methods to capture trash from rivers before it reaches the ocean. Dozens of electric vehicles are scheduled to debut in the next few years and over 300 million electric vehicles are expected to be on the world’s roads by 2030.

The lifetime for an EV battery is estimated to be 12 to 15 years in moderate climates, but that doesn’t mean the batteries end up in landfills when they die.

Previews: Best Books On Foreign Affairs For 2024

2024-books-2-1

Foreign Policy Magazine (December 31, 2023): The Best of Books 2024 Here are 30 major nonfiction titles coming out this year on Foreign Policy’s radar, from economic manifestos to histories of forgotten eras to new assessments of great-power competition in the 21st century. New titles include:

The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power 

The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake  Corporate Power: 9780316269773: Mattioli, Dana: Books - Amazon.com

by Dana Mattioli (April 23, 2024)

From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating exposé of Amazon’s endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power, in pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary.

In 2017, Lina Khan published a paper that accused Amazon of being a monopoly, having grown so large, and embedded in so many industries, it was akin to a modern-day Standard Oil. Unlike Rockefeller’s empire, however, Bezos’s company had grown voraciously without much scrutiny. 

Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

Foreign Agents

By Casey Michel (August 2024)

A stunning investigation and indictment of the elements in United States’ foreign lobbying industry and the threat they pose to democracy.

For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they’ve not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they’ve secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, journalist Casey Michel contends some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself.

New Cold Wars : China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West

New Cold Wars by David E. Sanger: 9780593443590 | PenguinRandomHouse.com:  Books

By David E. Sanger (April 2024)

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry against the other two great nuclear powers–Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia–in a world far more complex and dangerous than that of a half century ago

.New Cold Wars–the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger–is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations against two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly-democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace–so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy.

Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Winter 2024

Image

Foreign Policy Magazine – December 28, 2023: The new issue features ‘The Year The World Votes’ – Elections have consequences. What will happen when nearly half of the global population heads to the polls?

The Promise and Peril of Geopolitics

The world’s most dismal science could make Eurasia safe for illiberalism and predation—or protect it from those forces.

By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

An illustration shows a stylized globe with a crack through it. A hand with a wrench tightens the screw atop the globe.

Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.”