by Christina Jerne* In April 2020, a truck transporting half a million euros in cash was stopped at Italy’s eastern border, testifying that the ’Ndrangheta, one of the world’s largest and richest mafia groups, had made its own Covid-19 emergency liquidity plan. In the midst of tough European negotiations on EU solidarity mechanisms, the German […]
Political economy
by Rudabeh Shahid, Nischal Dhungel, and Shakthi De Silva* In September, Nepal became the third South Asian country in three years to see its government collapse under the weight of mass protests. After the government banned twenty-six social media platforms, young Nepalis poured into Kathmandu’s streets, furious at what they saw as an attempt to silence […]
by Martin Eiermann* In international comparison, the United States stand out for the wide range of political hopes that are attached to the right to privacy—which covers anything from abortion and contraceptive access to employee claims against workplace surveillance and consumer rights—and for having a uniquely fragmented landscape of privacy laws. The privacy of health-related […]
by Basak Kus* “It is China, more than any other place that has served as the ‘other’ for the modern West’s stories about itself, from Smith and Malthus to Marx and Weber,” wrote historian Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence. The historical origins of the East–West divide—why Europe and China’s developmental trajectories diverged […]
I’m in the midst of doing research, teaching, and outreach activities on a set of questions around economic growth and its relationship to what we value. My research team has Tim Jackson visiting tomorrow, who will give a talk on postgrowth economics and also talk a bit about his new book, The Care Economy. The […]
by Jawied Nawabi* At least, since the end of WWII the world has advanced significantly in scientific knowledge, technology, and the institutionalization of universal human rights conventions, yet there still prevails enormous levels of inequality, malnutrition, and poverty in the world. With all our advancements in the social sciences in the past seven decades on how […]
(Hi all, wonderful to become part of this great blog! But now, directly on to some content!) Imagine that you have a toothache, and a visit at the dentist reveals that a major operation is needed. You phone your health insurance. You listen to the voice of the chatbot, press the buttons to go through […]
by Rutger Claassen and Ingrid Robeyns Let’s establish an upper limit on the personal wealth any individual can possess. This is the core principle behind ‘limitarianism’. Limitarianism represents one of the more radical proposals in the debate on wealth inequality. Over the past few years, one of us has developed the philosophy of limitarianism (first […]
So in the last three years or so — since COVID, basically — Romania and Taiwan have both joined a very special club of countries. There are not a lot of countries in this club. If you’re very generous, you could include perhaps a dozen or so. But to my way of thinking, there are […]
by Prabhat Patnaik* In his remarkable work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes said that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” His putting only […]