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In the last four decades, centrist or modernist Islamists, most of whom accept the rules of the political game, brilliantly positioned themselves as the alternative to the failed secular "authoritarian bargain". They invested considerable capital in building social networks on the national and local levels, including non-government professional civil society associations, welfare, and family ties. In contrast to their secular-minded opponents, Islamists have mastered the art of local politics and built a formidable political machine that repeatedly has proved able to deliver the vote. Islamists’ recent parliamentary victories are not surprising, because they had paid their dues and earned the trust of voters

Islamist parties are increasingly becoming "service" parties: an acknowledgment that political legitimacy and the likelihood of re-election rests on the ability to deliver jobs, economic growth, and to demonstrate transparency. This factor introduces a huge degree of pragmatism in their policies. The example of Turkey, especially its economic success, has had a major impact on Arab Islamists, many of whom would like to emulate the Turkish model. The Arab Islamists have, in other words, understood the truth of the slogan, "It is the economy, stupid!" The Turkish model, with the religiously observant provincial bourgeoisie as its kingpin, also acts as a reminder that Islam and capitalism are mutually reinforcing and compatible.

It is notable that the Islamists' economic agenda does not espouse a distinctive "Islamic" economic model. This is unsurprising, however, as an Islamic economic model does not exist

the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.

three trends are making this harder

the explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate. Where a sector such as pharmaceuticals or telecommunications (and, of course, banking) might have had dozens of big players a couple of decades ago, now it has closer to five. When I began in the intelligence industry 15 years ago, I did projects for Compaq, Amoco, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Cingular -- all of which have since been rolled into the conglomerates of Hewlett Packard, British Petroleum, Pfizer, and AT&T. There are fewer firms for an intelligence analyst to track, and their behavior has to be understood on totally different terms than when this discipline was created.

THERE may be no topic that more reliably divides liberals and conservatives than the relationship between success and luck.

Conservatives, for example, understandably fret that encouraging people to view life as a lottery might encourage them just to sit back and hope for the best. Liberals, for their part, worry that encouraging people to claim an unrealistically large share of the credit for their own success might make them more reluctant to aid the less fortunate.

recent experiments suggest that chance events may influence market outcomes far more heavily than previously thought.

drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment. There is already a long-term trend towards lower levels of employment in some rich countries. The proportion of American adults participating in the labour force recently hit its lowest level since 1978

In a recent speech that was modelled in part on Keynes’s “Possibilities”, Larry Summers, a former American treasury secretary, looked at employment trends among American men between 25 and 54. In the 1960s only one in 20 of those men was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven.

A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of the University of Oxford, argued that jobs are at high risk of being automated in 47% of the occupational categories into which work is customarily sorted. That includes accountancy, legal work, technical writing and a lot of other white-collar occupations.

The inherent dynamism of competitive markets is bringing costs so far down that many goods and services are becoming nearly free, abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.

in 1999 when Napster, the music service, developed a network enabling millions of people to share music without paying the producers and artists, wreaking havoc on the music industry. Similar phenomena went on to severely disrupt the newspaper and book publishing industries.

Cisco forecasts that by 2022, the private sector productivity gains wrought by the Internet of Things will exceed $14 trillion. A General Electric study estimates that productivity advances from the Internet of Things could affect half the global economy by 2025.

in a market with no copyright distortion, these graphs would show "a fairly smoothly doward sloping curve from the decade 2000-20010 to the decade of 1800-1810 based on the assumption that works generally become less popular as they age (and therefore are less desirable to market)."

But that's not at all what we see. "Instead," he continues, "the curve declines sharply and quickly, and then rebounds significantly for books currently in the public domain initially published before 1923." Heald's conclusion? Copyright "makes books disappear"; its expiration brings them back to life.

The books that are the worst affected by this are those from pretty recent decades, such as the 80s and 90s, for which there is presumably the largest gap between what would satisfy some abstract notion of people's interest and what is actually available.

rom the outset, the Volcker Rule was the product of compromise. The Obama administration declined to favor legislation forcing banks to spin off their turbulent Wall Street operations from their deposit-taking businesses. At the same time, it did not want regulated banks, which enjoy deposit insurance and other forms of government support, trading for their own profit. That business, known as proprietary trading, had long been a lucrative, albeit risky, business for Wall Street banks.

Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve who served as an adviser to President Obama, urged that Dodd-Frank outlaw proprietary trading. And over the objections of Wall Street, the administration inserted into Dodd-Frank what became known as the Volcker Rule.

The rule, however, does not ban types of trading that are thought to be part of a bank’s basic business. Banks can still buy stocks and bonds for their clients — a practice called market making — and place trades that are meant to hedge their risks.

a lot of Congressional Republicans are resistant to the more plausible conservative proposals  on health care precisely because they don’t want to find the money required to make any of them work — in some cases because they prefer the comforting illusion that the current system represents some sort of free market ideal that would be wrecked if we started providing tax credits to the currently-uninsured, and in other cases because they’re all-too-aware that some of that money would have to come from caps and cuts that affect groups that currently vote Republican.

right now, with the new health care law as-yet-unimplemented, we’re still in a world where the G.O.P.’s politicians and activists and interest groups think of themselves as working from a pre-Obamacare policy baseline. And this, in in turn, creates a strong political reluctance to propose alternatives that deviate from that baseline in ways that might negatively impact the groups — including, as Barro says, “the overwhelmingly insured Republican electorate” — that the party has tried to rally against the health care law from the beginning.

But the first moment when a Republican Congress might actually be able to pass a health care overhaul won’t arrive until February of 2017, at which point Obamacare will have been the baseline for two years

there are a few broader trends to be observed. The first is that the cutting-edge, progressive economic arguments do not seem to be swaying voters.

Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.

The conservative victories probably have more to do with the public’s skepticism about the left than with any positive enthusiasm toward the right.

What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?

With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.

The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

what is limited — in short supply — is learning that is academic rather than consumerist or market-driven. After two years of college, they report, students are “just slightly more proficient in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing than when they entered.”

The authors give several explanations for this unhappy result. First, a majority of students surveyed said “that they had not taken a single course . . . that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.” Moreover, “only 42 percent had experienced both a reading and writing requirement of this character during the prior semester.” The conclusion? “If students are not being asked . . . to read and write on a regular basis . . . it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks.”

“market-based educational reforms that elevate the role of students as ‘consumers’ do not necessarily yield improved outcomes in terms of student learning.” (There’s an understatement.)

Suppose that an authoritarian government decides to embark on a program of curricular reform, with the explicit goal of indoctrinating the nation’s high school students. Suppose that it wants to change the curriculum to teach students that their government is good and trustworthy, that their system is democratic and committed to the rule of law, and that free markets are a big problem.Will such a government succeed?

New research, from Davide Cantoni of the University of Munich and several co-authors, shows that recent curricular reforms in China, explicitly designed to transform students’ political views, have mostly worked. The findings offer remarkable evidence about the potential influence of the high school curriculum on what students end up thinking

they give us some important insights into contemporary China as well.

What would we have discussed if we’d had a serious election? How about the biggest challenge we’re facing today: The resilience of our workers, environment and institutions.

Because: The world is fast. The three biggest forces on the planet — the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s Law — are all surging, really fast, at the same time.

Moore’s Law, the theory that the speed and power of microchips will double every two years, is, as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson posit in their book, “The Second Machine Age,” so relentlessly increasing the power of software, computers and robots that they’re now replacing many more traditional white- and blue-collar jobs, while spinning off new ones

On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings

more than half of all American households will not have enough retirement income to maintain the living standards they were accustomed to before retirement,

83 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers in the bottom fourth of the income distribution will eventually run short of money.

what is wrong with us?

entire

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

A Kuhnian paradigm is a set of assumptions that allows scientists in a particular field to avoid time-wasting arguments over the basics and spend their days solving small but useful puzzles

Scientific assumptions are never perfect mirrors of reality, though (“all models are wrong; but some are useful“). When evidence piles up that contradicts the paradigm, a science sometimes needs to go through the painful process of a paradigm shift.

Financial economics adopted its own, narrower paradigm, in which the starting point was that the prices prevailing on financial markets were more or less correct (a belief that in those days went under the name Efficient market Hypothesis

what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.

Other officials attending the meetings this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity, agreed that the role of the United States around the world was at the top of their concerns.

Washington’s retreat is not so much by intent, Mr. Subramanian said, but a result of dysfunction and a lack of resources to project economic power the way it once did. Because of tight budgets and competing financial demands, the United States is less able to maintain its economic power, and because of political infighting, it has been unable to formally share it either.

India To Be World's Fastest Growing Economy: Keeping It Going Will Be The Difficult Trick

So, a predicted growth rate of 7.3% for the last quarter of last year, with that rate expected to be maintained in the year to come is good news.

Well, there’re worries about the present too but as ever in an economy we need to look at the short term, where macroeconomics holds sway, and also at the long term, where it’s microeconomics all the way down.