Welfare state or open borders – pick one
Two very interesting articles during the week, one from the United States and the other one from Australia, both in reaction to the Swedish election, and both making essentially the …
Read MoreTag: economy
When Great is Not Good Enough
Things seem to be going quite well across the United States. The economy is growing consistently at a very healthy rate (eat your heart out, Europe), unemployment keeps falling – …
Read More
Not bigger than Texas
Congratulations, the United States, for the first time in 1973 the world’s biggest oil producer: The feat demonstrates how the US shale oil boom has reshaped the global energy landscape. American oil …
Read More
The new 60:20 rule
It’s difficult to have a properly working democracy and decent government finances when the government is a sugar daddy for most citizens: The top fifth of households by income are …
Read More
“America is moving toward an oligarchical socialism”
This might be the most important piece you will read today, or maybe this week, from my favourite urbanist and demographer Joel Kotkin: Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing …
Read More
Starving people to save them from starving
Policy-making, including in the area of environment (particularly in the area of environment) requires less emotion and more cost-benefit analysis, writes the “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg: When a “solution” to …
Read More
Crisis of the 21st Century
In a long and often bloody and tumultuous history of the Roman Empire, there are few periods like what has become known among scholars as the Crisis of the Third …
Read More
Serfing holidays
Would you rather be a medieval European peasant or a modern American worker? Well, it depends on how much you value your free time: Life for the medieval peasant was …
Read More
The world’s smallest lira
Tayyip Erdogan’s plans to Make Turkey Greater Again run into some Make America Great Again problems: Serap, a 23-year-old clerk at a clothes store in central Istanbul, is sure of who …
Read More
How China aids itself
In the years past, China and Taiwan have engaged in an international bidding war, using foreign aid to buy the recipients’ diplomatic recognition of either regime as the “true China”. …
Read More