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As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin scrambled to save faltering markets at the start of the pandemic last year, America’s top economic officials were in near-constant contact with a Wall Street executive whose firm stood to benefit financially from the rescue.

Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, was in frequent touch with Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency rescue programs were announced in late March.

Mr. Fink planned alongside the government for parts of a financial rescue that his firm referred to in one message as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”

China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.

in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility

The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are being urged by governments and the media to “trust the experts” – that is, public health officials

historians are experts too. Of course our expertise is different, but what it tells us, and what we should communicate to the public, is that “trusting the experts” isn’t nearly as simple as it may seem.

By definition, experts know much more about a given subject than the rest of us: that’s their great strength. But experts can also suffer from tunnel vision: though they know  their own specialties, they may fail to look left or right and see the larger contexts, consequences, or costs of their actions

If, early in the spring, the U.S. had mobilized its ample resources and expertise in a coherent national effort to prepare for the virus, things might have turned out differently. If, in midsummer, the country had doubled down on the measures (masks, social-distancing rules, restricted indoor activities and public gatherings) that seemed to be working, instead of prematurely declaring victory, things might have turned out differently. The tragedy is that if science and common sense solutions were united in a national, coordinated response, the U.S. could have avoided many thousands of more deaths this summer.

. More than 13 million Americans remain unemployed as of August, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Sept. 4.

t this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response

In theory, populists should favor democratic processes that allow for wide-ranging citizen input in policy formation

The executive bureaucracy has proved a more reliable instrument for translating populist causes into policy than nominally democratic institutions like Congress.

For populist policy reforms to succeed, populists — especially those on the right — need to drop their naïve and self-defeating pretensions of “dismantling the administrative state.” Populism should not be conceived as a rejection of all technocratic expertise but rather as a competing vision of how to use it, a concept that some scholars have termed “technopopulism.”

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.

On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced.

It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

Cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, but this wasn’t your average down day: People who thought they knew what they were getting into had, in the space of 24 hours, lost nearly everything. Messages of desperation flooded a Reddit forum for traders of one of the currencies, a coin called Luna, prompting moderators to share phone numbers for international crisis hotlines. Some posters (or “Lunatics,” as the currency’s creator, Do Kwon, has referred to them) shared hope for a turnaround or bailout; most were panicking, mourning and seeking advice.

But in the context of a broad collapse of trust in institutions and the experts who speak for them, it has come to mean something more specific. A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.

DYOR is an attitude, if not quite a practice, that has been adopted by some athletes, musicians, pundits and even politicians to build a sort of outsider credibility. “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.Nowhere are the contradictions of DYOR on such vivid display as in the world of crypto, where the phrase is a rallying cry, a disclaimer, a meme and a joke — an invitation to a community as well as a reminder of its harsh limits.

You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 

Majorities of residents in all nine countries surveyed in Gallup's Poll of the Islamic World say Western nations do not care about poorer nations

Western nations do not treat the minorities in their own countries fairly,

they say Western nations do not respect Arab/Islamic values, do not support Arab causes in international organizations and do not exhibit fairness toward Arab/Islamic countries in general.

Before you merit the label intellectual, in my view, you need to clear a very high bar.

I think of the great New York intellectuals of the middle of the last century: Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Alfred Kazin—writers incomparably more gifted, students immensely more learned, thinkers embarrassingly more profound than any we have to show for ourselves today. The whole culture has gotten less literate, less educated, more shallow; the entire curve has shifted over.

Then there is the public part. The fact that we need it now at all suggests that we’ve forgotten what an intellectual is. It isn’t a smart person; it is someone, precisely, who speaks of public issues to a public audience. Wilson et al. were not called “public” intellectuals, because the public part was taken for granted.

What kind of president would Mitt Romney be?

I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power.

Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party. Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline?

In most areas of the economy, free-market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals. But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.

the truth is that, despite the rhetoric, Romney’s main concern isn’t to bring down over-all health-care costs. In fact, he has regularly attacked one of the Affordable Care Act’s most aggressive cost-cutting measures—the independent board that can make binding recommendations on how to cut Medicare spending. What he wants is just to have the government less involved in health care. Insofar as his plans would lower federal health-care spending, it’s not because of the power of the free market; it’s because a Romney Administration would simply have the government do less. Romney would eliminate the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance. He would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and trim its annual budget, with the result that its funding would lag behind the rise in health-care costs. And, if he adopts his running mate Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan for Medicare, he would make Medicare recipients pay higher premiums. With these changes, the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.

The real issue, come November 6th, isn’t about who has the best ideas for controlling health-care costs. It’s about who has the right idea of what government should do. ♦

We argue that writing contemporary history is different from the role historians might play as public intellectuals who draw on their expertise to comment on recent events in the media. Instead, the writing of recent history shifts the boundaries of what might be considered a legitimate topic of historical study. The very definition of “history” has hinged on the sense of a break between past and present that allows for critical perspective. The historians’ traditional task has been to bring a “dead,” absent past back into the present. However, those doing recent history recognize that their subject matter is not fully past, or as Renee Romano puts it in our edited collection about recent history, it’s “not dead yet.”

studying the recent past presents real methodological challenges. It untethers the academic historian from the aspects of our practice that give us all, regardless of field or political bent, a sense of common enterprise: objectivity, perspective, a defined archive, and a secondary literature that is there to be argued with, corrected and leaned upon.

Rather than a pragmatic fixer-upper, Mr. Trump now seems likely to be the vehicle through which the ideological right achieves its decades-old dream of undoing the Great Society and the Warren and Burger courts. But the victory that made that possible was based explicitly on identity, not ideology.

One of the odd things about Mr. Trump is that he has brought back J.F.K.’s “trust me” mode in a kind of unhinged parody. His plans are neither detailed nor ideological: He will replace the Affordable Care Act with “great plans” and negotiate better deals.

What’s the alternative to ideological or identity politics? Before Reagan, politics had been largely technocratic, substituting expertise for ideology. “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy,” John F. Kennedy said in 1962. Experts would address “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.”

The prospects for James N. Mattis to serve as secretary of defense in the Trump administration received a boost on Tuesday when two experts in military policy recommended that an exception be made so Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star general, can assume the top Pentagon post.

Military officers are barred by law from serving as defense secretary unless they have been retired for seven years.

John McCain, the Arizona Republican who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee and has strongly supported General Mattis’s nomination