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A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.

The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?

Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances … “that, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness”, as Marx wrote—and that changes in the way things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

What he postulated, and what made him different from any previous theorist of materialism whether historical or dialectical, was a sharp distinction between the forces and the relations of production. Within the integument of one system of exploitation, in other words, was contained a systemic conflict that, if not resolved, would lead to stagnation and decline but, if properly confronted, might lead to a higher synthesis of abundance and equality.

there was an underlying love-hate relationship between Marx and capitalism. As early as the Manifesto, he had written of capitalism’s operations with a sort of awe, describing how the bourgeoisie had revolutionized all human and social and economic relations, and had released productive capacities of a sort undreamed-of in feudal times.

In my opinion, therefore, the most powerful Marxist book of the past four decades was Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative, which showed how and why the East German state and economy were certain to implode. Communism, said Bahro—one of its former functionaries—was compelled to educate and train people up to a certain level. But beyond that level, it forbade them to think, or to inquire, or to use their initiative. Thus, while it created a vast amount of “surplus consciousness,” it could find no way of employing this energy except by squandering and dissipating and ultimately repressing it. The conflict between the forces and relations of production in the eastern part of the homeland of Karl Marx thus became a locus classicus of the sort of contradiction he had originally identified.

Marx was a keen admirer of that other great Victorian Charles Darwin, and according to Engels he wanted to do for the economic system what the author of The Origin of Species had done for the natural order: lay bare its objective laws of motion and thus make it possible at last to dispense with subjective and idealist interpretations.

The term exploitation, for example, should be not a moralizing one but a cold measure of the difference between use value and exchange value, or between the wages earned at the coal face and the real worth of that labor to the mine owner

(War between competitive capitalist states, for example, would be an instance of the negative. Seizure of power by an educated working class that understood and could transcend the logic of private ownership would be an example of human progress.

it does not quite explain Marx’s later failure, in Capital, to grasp quite how revolutionary capitalist innovation really was. (The chapter on new industrial machinery opens with a snobbish quotation from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” This must have seemed absurd even at the time, and it appears preposterous after the third wave of technological revolution and rationalization that modern capitalism has brought in its train.

There’s also the not-inconsiderable question of capitalism’s ability to decide, if not on the value of a commodity, at least on some sort of price for the damn thing. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the other members of the Austrian school were able to point out this critical shortcoming of Capital—no pricing policy—during Marx’s lifetime

John Cassidy wrote of Marx, “His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.” That would appear to mean that Marxism and capitalism are symbiotic, and that neither can expect to outlive the other,

Russia has undoubtedly suffered economically from the global downturn in energy prices and from economic sanctions following the annexation of the Crimea, but the degree of dependence, in particular energy dependence, that Western Europe has on Russia is highly significant.

For example, the Nord Stream pipeline laid in international waters along the Baltic from Russia to Germany, supplies a significant -- according to EU figures, 38.7% -- proportion of Western Europe's gas needs.

Russia desperately needs the foreign earnings this generates

Consequently, while the armies and individual battles might be smaller than those in World War II, the death toll, the loss of war-making material and both sides' ability to reduce everything in their paths to rubble would make a large-scale conflict far more wide-reaching and, in terms of recovery, longer-lasting than anything we have seen before.

Turkey, on Russia's southern border, joined the military alliance in 1952, and since the end of the Cold War, many of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States have signed up, too.

It's certainly in Putin's interests that the West cuts defense spending and has a diminished appetite for brinkmanship and it is perhaps understandable that a recently retired general should push for this to be reversed.

However, NATO's forces are deployed globally to a far greater extent than Russia's. And even acknowledging that Russia could achieve a temporary military advantage in, say, the Baltic, for how long and at what price?

the likelihood of a Kursk-style pitched battle between heavy armor is highly unlikely.

A real-life analysis of the Russian president's actions would suggest that he is being entirely rational and that his actions are those or an arch-realist who places the needs of his country first.

Such a war, employing ships, submarines and aircraft with truly global reach, would indeed be a world war and would pay scant attention to the difference between military and civilian targets: this would truly be a war among the peoples.

Despite Shirreff's warnings, the nightmare scenario of nuclear war is highly unlikely as neither side ultimately would wish to unleash destruction on that scale.

This would be total war, waged on every imaginable front, from the internet and the stock market to outer space.

Why is his opposition to immigrants and Mexicans in particular so resonant when immigration liberalization ostensibly has majority support in most polls?

Support for immigration “may be greatly overestimated.”

polls conducted by large survey organizations never ask about immigration in geographic contex

This kind of abstract framing tends to push respondents toward giving more “politically correct” answers to standard poll questions about immigration.

The quest by American liberals and progressives for support, or at least tolerance, of diversity, inclusiveness and multiculturalism is likely to prevail — particularly if the compulsory dimension of compliance is curtailed.

one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance asthe feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

I would say that decades of political correctness, with its focus on “straight white men” as the villains and oppressors — now extended to “straight white cis-gendered men” — has caused some degree of reactance in many and perhaps most white men.

In both the workplace and academia, Haidt argues,the accusatory and vindictive approach of many social justice activists and diversity trainers may actually have increased the desire and willingness of some white men to say and do un-PC things.

Trump comes along and punches political correctness in the face. Anyone feeling some degree of anti-PC reactance is going to feel a thrill in their heart, and will want to stand up and applaud. And because feelings drive reasoning, these feelings of gratitude will make it hard for anyone to present arguments to them about the downsides of a Trump presidency.

Trump responded on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on May 2. What Clinton said “was a very derogatory statement to men,” Trump declared. “It was almost as though she’s going to tell us what to do, tell men what to do.” He continued, “It was a real put-down.”

many Trump followers respond to Clinton in a fashion similar to that of8th grade boys reacting to their homeroom teacher. But I think this has more to do with her gender than with any particular behaviors on her part — in other words, there are some who would respond to any woman running for president as an 8th grader in homeroom who resents the teacher.

since reactance is driven by perceptions rather than by facts, this works well in Trump’s favor, considering his often cavalier relationship with the truth.

research that shows that some people will reject a policy or action that is to their advantage when they feel pushed or forced into making the “correct” decision.

In other words, reactance can foster a totalizing loyalty that does not respond to reasoned fault finding. This might help explain Trump’s seeming immunity to criticism from his adversaries. His followers feel that they have experienced a “diminution of freedom” and believe that Trump can “restore their autonomy.”

He has won a unique admixture of support, based in part on what might be called an anti-rational or irrational loyalty but also in part on his recognition of legitimate grievances among his adherents that many other politicians belittle or deny.

Clinton remains the favorite, but she faces five months of treading water in a shark tank. She has yet to discover a compelling rebuttal to Trump on political correctness, and it will be difficult for her to placate opponents of immigration while holding her advantage with her bas

Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.

American officials say the multiplying crises have led Mr. Maduro to fall out of favor with members of his own socialist party, who they believe may turn on him, leading to chaos in the streets.

Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.

Mr. Almagro responded with an open letter blasting the president, calling on him to allow the recall referendum his opponents are pushing this year to remove Mr. Maduro from office.

Venezuela’s public schools are now closed on Fridays, another effort to save electricity. So Ms. González was waiting in line with her elder child at an A.T.M., while her husband watched over the other one at home.

Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.

But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products.

On a recent day in the downtown government center, pedestrians milled about, but nearly every building — including several museums, the public registry office and a Social Security center — was empty, giving the appearance of a holiday.

Most Islamists—people who, in his words, “believe Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in political life”—are not terrorists. But the meaning they find in religion, Hamid said, helps explain their vision of governance, and it’s one that can seem incomprehensible to people who live in liberal democracies.

Where I would very much part ways with those on the far right who are skeptical about Islam is that I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for Islam to play an outsized role in public life.

Green: Are you endorsing the incorporation of theology into governments of predominantly Muslim nations?

Hamid: For me, the question of whether it’s good or bad is beside the point, and that’s not the question I’m trying to answer.

ultimately I think it’s up to the people of the region to decide what’s best for themselves through a democratic process that would play out over time.

Hamid: As political scientists, when we try to understand why someone joins an Islamist party, we tend to think of it as, “Is this person interested in power or community or belonging?” But sometimes it’s even simpler than that. It [can be] about a desire for eternal salvation. It’s about a desire to enter paradise. In the bastions of Northeastern, liberal, elite thought, that sounds bizarre. Political scientists don’t use that kind of language because, first of all, how do you measure that? But I think we should take seriously what people say they believe in.

With the advent of secularism as a competing idea, or ideology, for the first time Muslims have to ask themselves these kinds of questions of who they are and what their relationship to the state is. So, in that sense, Islamism only makes sense in opposition to something else that isn’t Islamism, i.e., secularism.

Hamid: On a basic level, violence offers meaning. And that’s what makes it scary. In the broader sweep of history, mass violence and mass killing is actually the norm. It’s only in recent centuries that states and institutions have tried to persuade people to avoid such practices.

If ISIS were defeated tomorrow morning, we would still have to consider ISIS one of the most successful Islamist state-building groups. And that’s what makes it scary and frightening as an organization: They have offered a counter model. They’ve shown that capturing and holding territory is actually an objective worth striving for. An overwhelming majority of Muslims dislike ISIS and oppose them. But ISIS has changed the terms of the debate, because other Islamist groups in recent decades have not been able to govern. They have not been able to build states, and ISIS has.

Hamid: First of all, most Islamists aren’t ISIS. When we use Islamist, or Islamism, as shorthand for groups like ISIS, we are getting it completely wrong. I think it’s dangerous, these tropes that “Islamism is the enemy”

Islamism is a very modern thing. It was inconceivable four centuries ago. In the pre-modern era [in the Islamic world], Islam imbued every aspect of public and political life. It was the unquestioned overarching legal and moral culture in these territories.

think classical liberalism makes a lot of sense intellectually. But it doesn’t necessarily fill the gap that many people in Europe and the U.S. seem to have in their own lives, whether that means [they] resort to ideology, religion, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, exclusionary politics, or anti-immigrant politics. All of these things give voters a sense that there is something greater.

If I had to sum up mainstream Islamism in a sentence, I would say it’s the attempt to reconcile pre-modern Islamic law with the modern nation-state. But the problem is that Islamic law wasn’t designed for the modern nation-state. It was designed for the pre-modern era. So the question then is, “How do you take something that wasn’t meant for the modern era and adapt it to the modern era—the era of nation-states?” That is the conundrum that Islamist movements are facing.

the bigger issue is, “How do Muslim countries adapt Islamic law or sharia to a modern context?” I think Americans need to make an effort to understand something that may at first seem foreign.

This is what I’ve realized over time: Islam is a complicated religion. It is very difficult to convey some of these ideas to people who have no experience with Muslims. But I think it is important to try.

Economies dominated by hedge financing—that is, those with strong cashflows and low debt levels—are the most stable. When speculative and, especially, Ponzi financing come to the fore, financial systems are more vulnerable. If asset values start to fall, either because of monetary tightening or some external shock, the most overstretched firms will be forced to sell their positions. This further undermines asset values, causing pain for even more firms. They could avoid this trouble by restricting themselves to hedge financing. But over time, particularly when the economy is in fine fettle, the temptation to take on debt is irresistible. When growth looks assured, why not borrow more? Banks add to the dynamic, lowering their credit standards the longer booms last. If defaults are minimal, why not lend more? Minsky’s conclusion was unsettling. Economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.

Minsky’s insight might sound obvious. Of course, debt and finance matter. But for decades the study of economics paid little heed to the former and relegated the latter to a sub-discipline, not an essential element in broader theories.

Minsky was a maverick. He challenged both the Keynesian backbone of macroeconomics and a prevailing belief in efficient markets.

t Messrs Hicks and Hansen largely left the financial sector out of the picture, even though Keynes was keenly aware of the importance of markets. To Minsky, this was an “unfair and naive representation of Keynes’s subtle and sophisticated views”. Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis helped fill in the holes.

His challenge to the prophets of efficient markets was even more acute. Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas, among others, persuaded most of academia and policymaking circles that markets tended towards equilibrium as people digested all available information. The structure of the financial system was treated as almost irrelevant

In recent years, behavioural economists have attacked one plank of efficient-market theory: people, far from being rational actors who maximise their gains, are often clueless about what they want and make the wrong decisions.

But years earlier Minsky had attacked another: deep-seated forces in financial systems propel them towards trouble, he argued, with stability only ever a fleeting illusion.

Investors were faster than professors to latch onto his views. More than anyone else it was Paul McCulley of PIMCO, a fund-management group, who popularised his ideas. He coined the term “Minsky moment” to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging. Mr McCulley initially used the term in explaining the Russian financial crisis of 1998. Since the global turmoil of 2008, it has become ubiquitous. For investment analysts and fund managers, a “Minsky moment” is now virtually synonymous with a financial crisis.

it would be a stretch to expect the financial-instability hypothesis to become a new foundation for economic theory. Minsky’s legacy has more to do with focusing on the right things than correctly structuring quantifiable models. It is enough to observe that debt and financial instability, his main preoccupations, have become some of the principal topics of inquiry for economists today

As Mr Krugman has quipped: “We are all Minskyites now.”

She said Trump would set the agenda and needed people with inside knowledge to reform the system. Maddox sees other criticisms as part of the same howl of anger at Trump’s victory from what she regards as a privileged and entitled liberal establishment.

“They’re saying all those who supported him are stupid white men. Do they understand the lives of underprivileged people? They’re living in these $10m penthouses in New York. Come live down with the people here that are struggling and lucky if they can pay for a house that’s a $100,000. Knock yourself off your pedestal and bring yourself down here. You’re going to think people here live in poverty, but people down here make the best of what they have,” she said. “Just because you don’t have the boo-coo dollars they have over there does not make you an ignorant person. Does not make you incapable of making rational decisions.”

Every man on this planet at some point has said something vulgar or inappropriate about a woman. And if they say they haven’t, they’re liars. Honestly, what he says to his buddies doesn’t affect me in the least,” she said. “I could care less what he did personally. That has nothing to do with me. That doesn’t affect me. What I care about is what he’s going to do professionally.”

Like many of the estimated 3 million undocumented immigrants in California, they live near the poverty line without the social protections available to American citizens. The Galvans rely on a local clinic offering affordable care to low-income families. Luis Galvan faced navigating life without documents which, at best, meant stunted expectations and the constant fear of arrest.

Then in 2012, Obama issued an executive order lifting the threat of deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US before they were 16 and granting them work permits. More than 750,000 “Dreamers” have applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, popularly known as Daca, liberating them from life in the shadows and offering hope of a future beyond labouring in the fields. Galvan’s Daca authorisation opened the door to a place in college to train as a teacher.

Although he is not likely to be an immediate target for deportation, Galvan also worries that the immigration service now knows where to find his family from the Daca application. He says his father fears the worst and is saving money to buy land in Mexico ready to return.

“I have an uncle that’s packing already. He’s like: ‘I’m going. I’m sorry but I don’t want to deal with this stuff. It’s going to get worse.’ I was trying to calm down but he said no. He has a lot of kids, all US citizens. They’re all going back to Mexico,” said Galvan. “A lot of people are making an escape plan.”

At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.

One cannot predict the future of a marketplace by trend analysis alone, because oligopolies do not compete the same way as do firms in free markets. 

industry consolidations have created gigantic bureaucracies. Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligence about the reality of the marketplace is critical. Life is different in gigantic organizations, where success and failure are almost impossible to attribute to individual decisions.

In large, slow-moving bureaucracies, conventional thinking and risk avoidance become paramount

, the world's economy is today driven more by policy makers than at any time in recent history. At the behest of government officials, banks have been shielded from the consequences of their market decisions, and in many cases exempt from prosecution for their potential law-breaking. Nation-state policy-makers pick the winners in industries

How can you use classical competitive analysis to examine the future of markets when the relationships between firms and government agencies are so incestuous and the choices of consumers so severely limited by industrial consolidation?

Companies still need guidance, but if rational analysis is nearly impossible, is it any wonder that executives are asking for less of it? What they are asking for is something, well, less productive.

executives today do not do well when their analysts confront them with challenging, though often relatively benign, predictions. Confusion, anger, and psychological transference are common responses to unwelcome analysis.

There are two kinds of shoppers, says Brett Gordon, a professor at Columbia Business School. There's the bargain-hunter and the clock-watcher. If the first walks into a store without a bargain, she leaves. But the second customer isn't looking for markdowns. She's looking at her watch. She just wants what she wants, and fast, coupons or no.

Sadly, and shockingly given where the U.S. used to stand in most rankings, few of the best practices foreign leaders want to emulate are any longer in the U.S.

Young Americans who see this country from different shores can't help but conclude that something is awry in a political culture that denies what they plainly see elsewhere: health care systems that provide better outcomes at lower cost and for everyone; better airports, faster trains, more extensive urban public transportation--and even, amazingly, better highways; more upward mobility (yes, the American dream is now more real in many other countries than it is here); more sustainable energy policies; elections that work more quickly and inexpensively, with more rational discourse and greater citizen participation. The list is long.

Consider some of the things that have fueled that American lantern of attraction for more than two centuries. Perhaps more than anything else, it has been the American Dream: the universal desire of all parents that their children will lead lives better than their own. This dream was given an American name, and not just in American dictionaries. But that dream is dying. And it can't be resuscitated if talented people sit on the political sidelines or don't attend the game at all. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, only 17 percent of Americans believe our national government possesses the consent of the governed. These numbers may not seem shocking, because they've been low for so long. But not always. In 1964, Pew found 77 percent of Americans expected their government to do "the right thing" most of the time.

One of the strongest indications of American democratic dysfunction is pervasive and expanding poverty. It is not just its existence in the richest country on earth that is shameful, but its utter absence from political discourse. Most of the poor don't vote; they have largely given up hope. And what national politician talks about poverty? Can you name any? America is moving toward the kind of bifurcated society we used to deride in banana republics--rich getting richer in gated communities, while the poor grow poorer, barely seen in segregated urban ghettos and hidden rural decay. Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty. One in 50 Americans' only income is food stamps. Add the poor and the near-poor--that is under $44K for a family of four--and you have more than 100 million people. The richest country in the world now has the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The U.S. has gone from being relatively egalitarian to one of the most unequal countries in the world.

hese are just a few signs that American government is broken. So why is it so broken? Let's consider the matter of money. When I left for Oxford in 1974, the total spent by all candidates for Congress, House and Senate, was $77 million. In 2010, it was $1.8 billion. Members of Congress spend up to 70 percent of their time raising money; that is their job; they become fundraisers far more than they are legislators. In that same year, 3 percent of retiring Congressmen became lobbyists. Now it's 50 percent of Senators, 42 percent of House members. Critics from the left and right and middle alike call our political finance system one of "legalized bribery."

Give me a real crisis with enough urgency to invest the parties with ownership, set up a credible process, find a mediator with will and skill, add a little luck, and poof, you too can have a chance at an agreement. Less is more here. Toward that end, here are a half dozen rules of the road on when and how negotiations actually work.

Own up: Former World Bank and Harvard President Larry Summers was right. In the history of the world nobody ever washed a rental car. People really care only about what they own. And without those in conflict actually investing themselves in the need for an agreement, there won’t be one.

Timing is Critical: Woody Allen was wrong. Ninety percent of life isn’t just showing up; it’s showing up at the right time. Ownership just doesn’t ripen like an orange on a tree; it’s driven by a sense of urgency, and that means the presence of sufficient pain and gain to change the locals’ calculations.

Nobody Gets 100%: The Rolling Stones got this one right: You get what you need, not always what you want. To do a deal that lasts requires a balance of interests where both leaders can convince themselves they got enough on the substance—and persuade their publics too. A third party mediator can often help to make the sale by being creative in packaging. But the substance has to be real.

A Credible Process: The so-called peace process—now in a coma—has gotten a bad name. And it’s easy to see why. But if you want to reach an agreement, you’ll need a process that’s credible all the same. Negotiations on complex issues involving identity, religion, security take time. Expectations need to be managed. And there must be a sense that the process—however difficult—is heading toward mutually agreeable goals.

The 3rd Party: It would be nice to fantasize that the Arabs and Israelis could do this peace thing without the help of a third party, but history says no. Sure, the two sides often start the process. But the gaps are too wide, the mistrust too deep, and the need for assurances—economic, technical and security assistance—too great to go it alone.

put down those academic books. Get yourself to the nearest video store and rent West Side Story and the Godfather. That’s what real world negotiations look like.

Spinoza’s extraordinary views on freedom have never been more relevant. In 2010, for example, the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional a law that, among other things, criminalized certain kinds of speech. The speech in question need not be extremely and imminently threatening to anyone or pose “a clear and present danger” (to use Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase). It may involve no incitement to action or violence whatsoever; indeed, it can be an exhortation to non-violence. In a troubling 6-3 decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Court, acceding to most of the arguments presented by President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, upheld a federal law which makes it a crime to provide support for a foreign group designated by the State Department as a “terrorist organization,” even if the “help” one provides involves only peaceful and legal advice, including speech encouraging that organization to adopt nonviolent means for resolving conflicts and educating it in the means to do so.

Now Spinoza does not support absolute freedom of speech. He explicitly states that the expression of “seditious” ideas is not to be tolerated by the sovereign. There is to be no protection for speech that advocates the overthrow of the government, disobedience to its laws or harm to fellow citizens. The people are free to argue for the repeal of laws that they find unreasonable and oppressive, but they must do so peacefully and through rational argument; and if their argument fails to persuade the sovereign to change the law, then that must be the end of the matter.

Spinoza draws the line, albeit a somewhat hazy one, between ideas and action. The government, he insists, has every right to outlaw certain kinds of actions. As the party responsible for the public welfare, the sovereign must have absolute and exclusive power to monitor and legislatively control what people may or may not do. But Spinoza explicitly does not include ideas, even the expression of ideas, under the category of “action.” As individuals emerged from a state of nature to become citizens through the social contract, “it was only the right to act as he thought fit that each man surrendered, and not his right to reason and judge.”

We seem ready not only to engage in a higher degree of self-censorship, but also to accept a loosening of legal protections against prior restraint (whether in print publications or the dissemination of information via the Internet), unwarranted surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure, and other intrusive measures. [2] Spinoza, long ago, recognized the danger in such thinking, both for individuals and for the polity at large

the usual stories of utility maximization and optimal pricing “can’t explain the rise in the whole world’s (absolute) advantage from $3 to $30 a day, not to speak of $137 a day.”

McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.

Most of “Bourgeois Dignity” is devoted to knocking down alternative explanations for the sudden and enormous escalation in living standards. In particular, McCloskey draws on the last half-century of economic-history scholarship to debunk what most people outside the field assume was the critical ingredient: savings and wealth accumulation. We might call this explanation “capital-ism.” Whether derived from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polyani, or, in a more-recent incarnation, Fernand Braudel, she argues, the emphasis on capital simply gets the facts wrong. It is empirically false.

savings rate of at least 12 percent, compared with no more than 10 percent to 20 percent in modern industrial economies. And, contrary to Weber’s story about a new Protestant Ethic, savings rates were roughly the same in Catholic and Protestant countries or, for that matter, in China.

Besides, as economic historians discovered in the 1960s, the economic takeoff didn’t actually require large amounts of capital. Early cotton mills, for instance, were relatively cheap to set up. “The source of the industrial investment required was short-term loans from merchants for inventories and longer- term loans from relative

What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What

ade us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imaginatio

ness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfuln

McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.

here by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs.

All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

Within the GOP libertarianism is a throwaway doctrine that is rhetorically useful in certain situations but often interferes with their core, more authoritarian, beliefs. When the two precepts collide, the authoritarian reflex prevails. In 2009 it was politically useful for the GOP to present the Tea Party as independent-leaning libertarians, when in reality the group was overwhelmingly Republican, with a high quotient of GOP activists and adherents of views common among the religious right. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, eight in ten Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans. Another study found that over half identified as members of the religious right and 55 percent of Tea Partiers agree that “America has always been and is currently a Christian nation”—6 points more than even the percentage of self-described Christian conservatives who would agree to that

academics, policy makers and business leaders have often advanced quite different views. One perspective is that all that matters is economic growth and the right technocratic mix of policies necessary to deliver it. This approach, implicit in the prescriptions of so many International Monetary Fund missions, is that if countries can get richer, everything else will fall into place.

Establish property rights, the reformers in Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing believed, and economic and social success will inevitably follow.

Mr. Acemoglu and Mr. Robinson argue that if an extractive regime is in charge, neither wealth nor private property can save a country from eventual decline.

the leaders of extractive regimes don’t implement policies that stifle sustainable growth out of ignorance. They aren’t stupid; they are merely and rationally pursuing their own self-interest. The real ignorance is that of outsiders who fail to appreciate that in an extractive regime, the interests of the rulers and the ruled do not coincide.

Western scholars laid out the “conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin’s popularity” thus: “Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.”

“This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit).”

“The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia’s path is more likely to be something like that of Angola

Restoring the aid, they said, would send a message of American support at a time when opposition groups are threatening to boycott a Jan. 22 peace conference out of concern that it will only serve to tighten Mr. Assad’s grip on power and discredit them at home.

Aid would continue to be funneled exclusively through the Supreme Military Council, the military wing of moderate, secular Syrian opposition.

Among the questions now being debated at the White House and the State Department, officials said, is how to ensure that the aid flows only to vetted organizations, and whether Islamist groups that receive any of it could be compelled to pledge that they will not work with Al Qaeda.

The administration has signaled a willingness to talk to the Islamic Front, but an effort to arrange a meeting in December was rebuffed by the group when the White House opted to send two midlevel State Department officials rather than the ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford.

While analysts said a decision to resume aid may encourage opposition groups to attend the peace conference, it would be far short of what is necessary to salvage the meeting — known as Geneva II but set to be held in Montreux, a nearby Swiss city.

Opposition groups are scheduled to meet on Jan. 17 to decide whether to attend the conference. But the meeting’s stated goal — to chart a political transition in Syria — seems more elusive than ever, given the recent military gains made by Mr. Assad’s forces.

Still, as other experts noted, the aid in question includes food rations and pickup trucks, not tanks and bullets. None of it is likely to change the trajectory of the conflict, which some experts said had fallen into a kind of “territorial equilibrium,” in which neither the rebels nor Mr. Assad’s forces have much to gain from further fighting.