“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official. I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most […]
Economics/Finance
(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 […]
At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia. The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, […]
Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country. Development has long ceased to be defined in exclusively economic terms. In 1990, a “human development index” was introduced, […]
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 […]
(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.) In […]
If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. […]
Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]
This post is a memo that I just presented at a workshop organized at the EUI by Kate McNamara, Frederic Merand and Catherine Hoeffler. Some of its key ideas were articulated in an informal discussion with Bill Janeway, Margaret Levi, Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman a couple of weeks back. None of them […]