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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.”

The former seems to me a not unreasonable forecast — we’ve been losing good jobs for decades, while low-wage employment in the service sector has grown. But no paid work? That’s more a dream (or a nightmare) than a forecast

Farhad Manjoo: Because I’m scared that they’ll unleash their bots on me, I should start by defending the techies a bit

They see a future in which a small group of highly skilled tech workers reign supreme, while the rest of the job world resembles the piecemeal, transitional work we see coming out of tech today (Uber drivers, Etsy shopkeepers, people who scrape by on other people’s platforms).

Why does that future call for instituting a basic income instead of the smaller and more feasible labor-policy ideas that you outline? I think they see two reasons. First, techies have a philosophical bent toward big ideas, and U.B.I. is very big.

They see software not just altering the labor market at the margins but fundamentally changing everything about human society. While there will be some work, for most nonprogrammers work will be insecure and unreliable. People could have long stretches of not working at all — and U.B.I. is alone among proposals that would allow you to get a subsidy even if you’re not working at all

If there are, in fact, jobs to be had, a universal basic income may not be the best choice of policy. The lack of good work is probably best addressed by making the work better — better paid and more skilled — and equipping workers to perform it,

The challenge of less work could just lead to fewer working hours. Others are already moving in this direction. People work much less in many other rich countries: Norwegians work 20 percent fewer hours per year than Americans; Germans 25 percent fewer.

Farhad Manjoo: One key factor in the push for U.B.I., I think, is the idea that it could help reorder social expectations. At the moment we are all defined by work; Western society generally, but especially American society, keeps social score according to what people do and how much they make for it. The dreamiest proponents of U.B.I. see that changing as work goes away. It will be O.K., under this policy, to choose a life of learning instead of a low-paying bad job

Eduardo Porter: To my mind, a universal basic income functions properly only in a world with little or no paid work because the odds of anybody taking a job when his or her needs are already being met are going to be fairly low.

The discussion, I guess, really depends on how high this universal basic income would be. How many of our needs would it satisfy?

You give the techies credit for seriously proposing this as an optimal solution to wrenching technological and economic change. But in a way, isn’t it a cop-out? They’re just passing the bag to the political system. Telling Congress, “You fix it.

the idea of the American government agreeing to tax capitalists enough to hand out checks to support the entire working class is in an entirely new category of fantasy.

paradoxically, they also see U.B.I. as more politically feasible than some of the other policy proposals you call for. One of the reasons some libertarians and conservatives like U.B.I. is that it is a very simple, efficient and universal form of welfare — everyone gets a monthly check, even the rich, and the government isn’t going to tell you what to spend it on. Its very universality breaks through political opposition.

Eduardo Porter: I guess some enormous discontinuity right around the corner might vastly expand our prosperity. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian that knows much more than I do about the evolution of technology, argues that the tools and techniques we have developed in recent times — from gene sequencing to electron microscopes to computers that can analyze data at enormous speeds — are about to open up vast new frontiers of possibility. We will be able to invent materials to precisely fit the specifications of our homes and cars and tools, rather than make our homes, cars and tools with whatever materials are available.

The question is whether this could produce another burst of productivity like the one we experienced between 1920 and 1970, which — by the way — was much greater than the mini-productivity boom produced by information technology in the 1990s.

investors don’t seem to think so. Long-term interest rates have been gradually declining for a fairly long time. This would suggest that investors do not expect a very high rate of return on their future investments. R.&D. intensity is slowing down, and the rate at which new businesses are formed is also slowing.

Little in these dynamics suggests a high-tech utopia — or dystopia, for that matter — in the offing

The hierarchy of status is a different one. The professionals are the apex of that hierarchy.

these two hierarchies live side by side. They share a lot of the same assumptions about the world and a lot of the same attitudes, but they also differ in important ways. So I’m not one of these people who says the Democrats and the Republicans are the same. I don’t think they are. But there are sometimes similarities between these two groups.

professionals tend to be very liberal on essentially any issue other than workplaces issues. So on every matter of cultural issues, culture war issues, all the things that have been so prominent in the past, they can be very liberal.

On economic questions, however, they tend not to be. (dishes clattering) They tend to be much more conservative. And their attitudes towards working-class people in general and organized labor specifically is very contemptuous.

if you look just back to the Bill Clinton administration: In policy after policy after policy, he was choosing between groups of Americans, and he was always choosing the interests of professionals over the interests of average people. You take something like NAFTA, which was a straight class issue, right down the middle, where working people are on one side of the divide and professionals are on another. And they’re not just on either side of the divide: Working people are saying, “This is a betrayal. You’re going to ruin us.” And professional people are saying, “What are you talking about? This is a no-brainer. This is what you learn on the first day of economics class.” And hilariously, the working people turned out to be right about that. The people flaunting their college degrees turned out to be wrong.

Every policy decision he made was like this. The crime bill of 1994, which was this sort of extraordinary crackdown on all sorts of different kinds of people. And at the same time he’s deregulating Wall Street.

You’re teaching a course that meets three times a week and you’re getting $1,500 for an entire semester. That was a shocking lesson but at the same time that was happening to us, the price of college was going up and up and up, because increasingly the world or increasingly the American public understands and believes that you have to have a college degree to get ahead in life. So they are charging what the markets can bear

If you go down the list of leading Democrats, leading Democratic politicians, what you find is that they’re all plucked from obscurity by fancy universities. This is their life story. Bill Clinton was from a town in Arkansas, goes to Georgetown, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, goes to Yale Law School — the doors of the world open up for him because of college.

beginning in the 1960s, Americans decided that the right way to pursue opportunities was through the university. It’s more modern than you think. I was reading a book about social class from right after World War II. And the author was describing this transition, this divide between people who came up through their work, who learned on the job and were promoted, versus people who went to universities. And this was in the ’40s. But by the time Bill Clinton was coming up in the ’60s, university was essential

just look at his cabinet choices, which are all from a very concentrated very narrow sector of the American elite. It’s always Ivy League institutions.

The tuition price spiral is one of the great landmark institutions of our country in the last couple of decades.

Or deregulating telecoms. Or capital gains tax cuts. It’s always choosing one group over another.

look, I’m in favor of education. I think people should be educated, should go to college. I think it’s insane that it costs as much as it does. And I think that the country is increasingly agreeing with me

The student debt crisis? This is unbearable. We have put an entire generation of young people — basically they come out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage and very little to show for it. It’s unbelievable that we’ve done this. My dad went to college basically for free. It wasn’t even that expensive when I went, in the early 1980s. This is unbelieveable what we’re doing to young people now and it can’t go on

You seem to be suggesting, the way you talk about the Democrats, that somehow this is elitist and to pursue an education puts you out of touch with real people.I don’t think so. Especially since we’re rapidly becoming a country where — what is the percentage of people who have a college degree now? It’s pretty high. It’s a lot higher than it was when I was young.

One of the chronic failings of meritocracy is orthodoxy. You get people who don’t listen to voices outside their discipline. Economists are the most flagrant example of this. The economics profession, which treats other ways of understanding the world with utter contempt. And in fact they treat a lot of their fellow economists with utter contempt.

there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. The guys at the top of the profession have very little sympathy for the people at the bottom. When one of their colleagues gets fired, they don’t go out on strike

There’s no solidarity in this group, but there is this amazing deference between the people at the top. And that’s what you see with Obama. He’s choosing those guys.

you start to wonder, maybe expertise is a problem.But I don’t think so. I think it’s a number of things.

The first is orthodoxy which I mentioned

when Clinton ran in ’92, they were arguing about inequality then as well. And it’s definitely the question of our time. The way that issue manifested was Wall Street in ’08 and ’09. He could have taken much more drastic steps. He could have unwound bailouts, broken up the banks, fired some of those guys. They bailed out banks in the Roosevelt years too and they broke up banks all the time. They put banks out of business. They fired executives, all that sort of thing. It is all possible, there is precedent and he did none of it

the third thing is this. You go back and look at when government by expert has worked, because it has worked. It worked in the Roosevelt administration, very famously. They called it the Brains Trust. These guys were excellent.

These were not the cream of the intellectual crop. Now he did have some Harvard- and Yale-certified brains but even these were guys who were sort of in protest. Galbraith: This is a man who spent his entire career at war with economic orthodoxy. I mean, I love that guy. You go right on down the list. Its amazing the people he chose. They weren’t all from this one part of American life.

Is there a hero in your book?I don’t think there is.

The overarching question of our time is inequality, as [Obama] himself has said. And it was in Bill Clinton’s time too.Well you look back over his record and he’s done a better job than most people have done. He’s no George W. Bush. He hasn’t screwed up like that guy did. There have been no major scandals. He got us out of the Iraq war. He got us some form of national health insurance. Those are pretty positive things. But you have to put them in the context of the times, weigh them against what was possible at the time. And compared to what was possible, I think, no. It’s a disappointment.

The second is that a lot of the professions have been corrupted. This is a very interesting part of the book, which I don’t explore at length. I wish I had explored it more. The professions across the board have been corrupted — accounting, real estate appraisers, you just go down the list

What else? You know a better solution for health care. Instead he has this deal where insurance companies are basically bullet-proof forever. Big Pharma. Same thing: When they write these trade deals, Big Pharma is always protected in them. They talk about free trade. Protectionism is supposed to be a bad word. Big Pharma is always protected when they write these trade deals.

You talk about “a way of life from which politicians have withdrawn their blessing.” What is that way of life?You mean manufacturing?You tell me. A sort of blue-collar way of life. It’s the America that I remember from 20, 30, 40 years ago. An America where ordinary people without college degrees were able to have a middle class standard of living. Which was — this is hard for people to believe today — that was common when I was young

Today that’s disappeared. It’s disappearing or it has disappeared. And we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the reason it’s disappeared is because — on strictly meritocratic grounds, using the logic of professionalism — that people who didn’t go to college don’t have any right to a middle-class standard of living. They aren’t educated enough. You have to be educated if you want a middle-class standard of living.

here have been so many different mechanisms brought into play in order to take their power away. One is the decline of organized labor. It’s very hard to form a union in America. If you try to form a union in the workplace, you’ll just get fired. This is well known. Another, NAFTA. All the free trade treaties we’ve entered upon have been designed to give management the upper hand over their workers. They can threaten to move the plant. That used to happen of course before NAFTA but now it happens more often.

Basically everything we’ve done has been designed to increase the power of management over labor in a broad sociological sense.

And then you think about our solutions for these things. Our solutions for these things always have something to do with education. Democrats look at the problems I am describing and for every economic problem, they see an educational solution

The problem is not that we aren’t smart enough; the problem is that we don’t have any power

Why do you think that is?I go back to the same explanation which is that Obama and company, like Clinton and company, are in thrall to a world view that privileges the interest of this one class over everybody else. And Silicon Valley is today when you talk about the creative class or whatever label you want to apply to this favored group, Silicon Valley is the arch-representative.

So do you think it’s just a matter of being enthralled or is it a matter of money? Jobs? Oh the revolving door! Yes. The revolving door, I mean these things are all mixed together.

When you talk about social class, yes, you are talking about money. You are talking about the jobs that these people do and the jobs that they get after they’re done working for government. Or before they begin working for government. So the revolving door — many people have remarked upon the revolving door between the Obama administration and Wall Street.

Now it’s between the administration and Silicon Valley. There’s people coming in from Google. People going out to work at Uber.

the productivity advances that it has made possible are extraordinary. What I’m skeptical of is when we say, oh, there’s a classic example when Jeff Bezos says, ‘Amazon is not happening to book-selling. The future is happening to book-selling.’ You know when people cast innovation — the interests of my company — as, that’s the future. That’s just God. The invisible hand is doing that. It just is not so.

Every economic arrangement is a political decision. It’s not done by God. It’s not done by the invisible hand — I mean sometimes it is, but it’s not the future doing it. It’s in the power of our elected leaders to set up the economic arrangements that we live in. And to just cast it off and say, oh that’s just technology or the future is to just blow off the entire question of how we should arrange this economy that we’re stumbling into.

I may end up voting for Hillary this fall. If she’s the candidate and Trump is the Republican. You bet I’m voting for her. There’s no doubt in my mind. Unless something were to change really really really dramatically.

Bernie Sanders because he has raised the issues that I think are really critical. He’s a voice of discontent which we really need in the Democratic party. I’m so tired of this smug professional class satisfaction. I’ve just had enough of it. He’s talking about what happens to the millennials. That’s really important. He’s talking about the out-of-control price of college. He’s even talking about monopoly and anti-trust. He’s talking about health care. As far as I’m concerned, he’s hitting all the right notes. Now, Hillary, she’s not so bad, right? I mean she’s saying the same things. Usually after a short delay. But he’s also talking about trade. That’s critical. He’s really raising all of the issues, or most of the issues that I think really need to be raised.

My main critique is that she, like other professional class liberals who are so enthralled with meritocracy, that she can’t see this broader critique of all our economic arrangements that I’ve been describing to you. For her, every problem is a problem of the meritocracy: It’s how do we get talented people into the top ranking positions where they deserve to be

People who are talented should be able to rise to the top. I agree on all that stuff. However that’s not the problem right now. The problems are much more systemic, much deeper, much bigger. The whole thing needs to be called into question. So I think sometimes watching Hillary’s speeches that she just doesn’t get that

Furthermore, both Reagan and Clinton inherited depressed economies, with unemployment well over 7 percent. This meant that there was a lot of economic slack, allowing rapid growth as the unemployed went back to work. Today, by contrast, unemployment is under 5 percent, and other indicators suggest an economy close to full employment. This leaves much less scope for rapid growth.

The only way we could have a growth miracle now would be a huge takeoff in productivity — output per worker-hour. This could, of course, happen: maybe driverless flying cars will arrive en masse. But it’s hardly something one should assume for a baseline projection.

belief that tax cuts and deregulation will reliably produce awesome growth isn’t unique to the Trump-Putin administration.

We heard the same thing from Jeb Bush (who?); we hear it from congressional Republicans like Paul Ryan. The question is why. After all, there is nothing — nothing at all — in the historical record to justify this arrogance.

Yes, Reagan presided over pretty fast growth. But Bill Clinton, who raised taxes on the rich, amid confident predictions from the right that this would cause an economic disaster, presided over even faster growth. President Obama presided over much more rapid private-sector job growth than George W. Bush, even if you leave out the 2008 collapse. Furthermore, two Obama policies that the right totally hated – the 2013 hike in tax rates on the rich, and the 2014 implementation of the Affordable Care Act – produced no slowdown at all in job creation.

Meanwhile, the growing polarization of American politics has given us what amount to economic policy experiments at the state level. Kansas, dominated by conservative true believers, implemented sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week Kansas legislators threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.

At the same time Kansas was turning hard right, California’s newly dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservatives declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine.

It would be nice to pretend that we’re still having a serious, honest discussion here, but we aren’t. At this point we have to get real and talk about whose interests are being served.

Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionaires while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionaires, scammers, and polluters.

And on such matters Donald Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunately, he’s also no better.

Another study, this time looking specifically at business travel, backs up these findings. The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), which represents corporate travel managers, found that business travel transactions in America declined by 3.4% over the course of one week following the president’s order.

If a 3.4% decline sounds small, consider the group’s assertion that a 1% drop in business travel over the course of a year correlates with a loss of 71,000 American jobs and close to $5bn in gross domestic product

a net $185m in business travel bookings was lost

as Mr Trump is broadly unpopular in much of the world, some people were probably already thinking twice about coming to America before the executive order was announced.

Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, a consultancy, told Forbes that the furore will probably “severely damage the US travel sector this year”

He cites the $246bn that international visitors spent in America last year, a figure that vastly exceeds the value of other major American exports such as cars ($152bn), agricultural products ($137bn) and petroleum products ($97bn)

Those high stakes explain why travel firms, normally reluctant to annoy customers by taking a political stance, have gone out of their way to condemn Mr Trump. 

Nevertheless, what distinguishes centrist religious-based groups from their leftist and nationalist counterparts is a friendly sensibility toward business activities including wealth accumulation and free-market economics. Islamism is a bourgeois movement consisting mostly of middle-class professionals, businessmen, shopkeepers, petty merchants and traders.

If there is a slogan that best describes Islamists’ economic attitude, it would be: "Islam-is-good-for-business". Many Arab Islamists admire and wish to imitate the example of Turkey

some Islamist-specific economic measures and ideas will be introduced to complement free-market capitalism

There is nothing in Islamists’ current statements and ideas that shows them to be socialist-oriented, though most readily accept the Keynesian model of active state intervention in the economy. Among Islamists, the interventionist approach appeals most to Salafists, who forcefully call for the adoption of distributive measures to address rampant poverty. Yet the dominant Islamist approach to the economy, with minor variations, is free-market capitalism

These Islamists also face a huge challenge: to deliver critical economic improvements in the short term, while devising a long-term comprehensive reform agenda that lays the foundation of a productive economy. The dismal socioeconomic conditions in transitioning Arab countries - abject poverty, double-digit unemployment, the absence of a competitive private sector, against a background of rising expectations - mean that the new governments will be hard pressed to focus on distributive policies and urgent short-term needs.

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.

We all expect a richer theory underlying the Standard Model. That’s one reason the mass matters to us. Some theories only accommodate a particular range of masses. Knowing the mass will give us insight into what that deeper underlying theory is.

The other possibility is that the answer is not the simple, fundamental particle that the Large Hadron Collider currently is looking for. It could be a more complicated object or part of a more complex sector that would take longer

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes

liberal melancholy hangs not so much on substantive objections but on something more inchoate and emotional: a general feeling that Obama is not Ronald Reagan.

In terms of lasting change, Obama probably has matched Reagan—or, at least, he will if he can win reelection and consolidate health-care reform and financial regulation and tilt the Supreme Court further left than he already has.

The housing is just one example of the military’s expansive role in Mr. Castro’s plan for Cuba, and it illustrates a central conflict in his attempts to open up the economy without dismantling the power structure he and his comrades have been building for more than five decades.

he is relying on the military to push through changes and maintain stability as he experiments with economic liberalization. Yet his abiding dedication as a lifelong soldier who was defense minister for 49 years threatens to further entrench an institution that has often undermined changes challenging its favored status.

As president, Raúl Castro, 82, has accelerated the growth of what some scholars have described as a military oligarchy.

But in the lower and middle ranks, experts say, esteem and relative wealth have eroded. Career officers in Cuba are now more likely to have friends or relatives who live abroad, or who visit Miami and often return with iPhones or new clothes unavailable at the state’s musty stores.

The new housing, a basic necessity in extremely short supply across the island, looks to many Cubans like another attempt at favoritism. According to government figures, the military’s construction budget has more than doubled since 2010. When combined with the Interior Ministry (often described as a branch of the military), the armed forces are now Cuba’s second-largest construction entity.

But in the push and pull that has defined Cuba’s economic policies over the last two years, the government has often struggled with when to let the market function and when to protect the Communist establishment. The authorities, for example, recently cracked down on private vendors selling clothes and other items, widely seen as an effort to help the state’s own retail network.

I used to say of investment banking that it was good one day a year: the day you got your bonus. The kicker: that bonus was nothing more than the present value of an inevitable pink slip. Being well paid but expendable was a fact of life.

my abiding memory is the drudgery of it all — none of which has ever been captured on film or in print. With good reason: much of what happens on Wall Street is terrifically boring.

The change Wall Street needs is about what people get rewarded to do, which is to take risks with other people’s money.

We saw how corrosive bad incentives were in the years leading up the financial crisis, when huge bonuses were paid to those who bundled up millions of faulty mortgages into securities and sold them as safe investments to people all over the world. Many of them knew better, but they did it anyway.

Speculating without any concern about being held accountable is exactly what the army of Wall Street bankers and traders will continue to do. Regardless of the fact that this very behavior was a key cause of the recent financial mess, that is what they are still being rewarded to do. Wall Streeters like to extol the complexity of their work, but in reality, it’s that simple.

Across Kiev and beyond, personal barriers that once defined the limits of behavior are crumbling, pushing this fractured but, until a few weeks ago, proudly peaceful nation into a spiral of chaos.

“What have humanism and pacifism ever brought to any nation?” he asked, clutching a battered metal shield and a metal rod, his soot-blackened face covered by a brown balaclava. “Revolutions are violent.”

“Nationalism is what I believe in,” said the man, who gave his name only as Nikolo. “The nation is my religion.”

But while the ranks of the protesters are diverse, the young men like Nikolo are the foot soldiers in a deepening civil conflict, the steel that refuses to bend under the pressure of thousands of riot police officers, volleys of live ammunition, snipers on rooftops and the looming threat of martial law.

The sotni provide a quasi-military discipline to the opposition’s street muscle. The commanders of the hundreds meet with other leaders of bands of young men under the umbrella of the Maidan Self Defense organization, which is led by Andri Parubi, a member of the opposition party Fatherland, though his control over some of the right-wing street groups appears tenuous at times.

But if these groups, whose members are far outnumbered by nonviolent protesters and also by the police, were the only ones driving Ukraine’s opposition to Mr. Yanukovych, the president could easily have defeated them weeks ago. Behind them stands a mass of others who recoil at pugnacious nationalism and scenes of mayhem but who now stand shoulder to shoulder with outfits like Right Sector, enraged that security forces resorted to violence to crack down on what had been a mostly peaceful protest in the mold of the Orange Revolution of 2004.

“We have a genetic memory of fascism here,” said Anatoly Skripnik, a businessman in the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Many protesters played down the role that the quasi-military nationalist groups, and history, are playing in the confrontation. “Some from the west are nationalists,” said Nikolai Visinski, an artist, standing on a barricade Thursday evening. “But we are all united in wanting a change of government. You don’t hear people yelling about Stepan Bandera. People just want to live in a free country.”

If by economic justice we mean egalitarian access to basic goods and services such as food, health, housing, employment and education, then Cuba came closer than any other country in our hemisphere to fulfilling this ideal.

the economic and social programs promoted by the Cuban government produced dramatic results. By the early 1980s, when reliable data to measure the impact of such programs became available, inequality according to race had declined noticeably in a number of key indicators. The life expectancy of nonwhite Cubans was only one year lower than that of whites; life expectancy was basically identical for all racial groups

the Cuban race gap in life expectancy was significantly lower than those found in more affluent multiracial societies such as Brazil (about 6.7 years) and the United States (about 6.3 years) during the same period.

Racial differences in education and employment had also diminished or, in some cases, even  disappeared. The proportion of high school graduates was actually higher among blacks than among whites in Cuba, whereas the opposite was true in both Brazil and the United States.

particularly in comparison to other multiracial societies in the Americas, the Cuban occupational structure was significantly less unequal according to race. On top of that, salaries in the massive public sector (over 90 percent of employment at the time) were regulated by law, so income differences were also extremely low.

Despite the massive changes discussed here, blackness continued to be associated with negative social and cultural features. Black was still ugly. Black still meant deficit of culture and refinement, rates of schooling notwithstanding. Black was still associated with violence, rape, robbery, crime. Black continued to be black.  The justice system kept criminalizing black youths, sending a scandalous number of them to prison.

in the 1980s blacks represented the vast majority of the inmate population in Cuba.

Those found to be “dangerous” could be deprived of freedom even without committing acts defined as crimes by the law. In other words, this was a legal institution particularly vulnerable to the influence of preconceptions and stereotypes

whereas nonwhites represented 34 percent of the adult population as a whole, their proportion among the socially “dangerous” was a staggering 78 percent

In other words, despite Cuba’s success in reducing racial inequality, young black males continued to be seen as potential criminals. Perceptions of people of African descent as racially differentiated and inferior continued to permeate Cuban society and institutions.

Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.

Globalization has arguably created a two-tier society in India: one worldly and plugged in, the other mired in medieval poverty. But it gave Bangladesh, which knew it was on the sidelines of modernity, a reason to develop the old-fashioned way: by industrializing to create low-level jobs for the masses

says Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate: “In terms of many typical indicators of living standards, Bangladesh not only does better than India, it has a considerable lead over it.”

confrontation with Beijing over disputed islands in the East China Sea have created a series of testy situations that has underscored the importance of sound decision-making at the top of the government.

Pyongyang's pursuance of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs has also forced Tokyo to confront more urgent weapons threats, adding fuel to Mr. Abe's push to reinterpret the nation's pacifist constitution and lift the self-imposed ban on exercising the right to "collective self defense," or the right to aid allies being attacked.

By integrating the flow of information and providing speedy analysis, the NSC hopes to accelerate the prime minister's decision-making process on various issues involving national defense, including foreign military attacks and other serious emergencies.

Mr. Abe's plan has faced a fair amount of criticism. A state-secrecy bill that goes hand-in-hand with the draft legislation to enact the NSC has generated widespread concern by those who fear it could infringe on journalistic freedom and the public's right to information.

The bill, currently under discussion in parliament, toughens penalties against those who leak sensitive information related to defense, foreign policy, terrorism and other harmful activities, and has grabbed attention in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaking of classified U.S. intelligence information.

NSC will function properly and achieve its aims, or lose substance and become another ineffective bureaucratic institution.

The creation of the council also coincides with Beijing's plans to establish a similar state security committee that could boost President Xi Jinping's grasp over the military, domestic security and foreign policy as China flexes its military and diplomatic muscle in the region.

The NSC will be the control tower for Japan's diplomacy and defense," Mr. Yachi said during a speech he gave in Tokyo earlier this month, explaining that staff will be recruited from the foreign ministry, the police agency and the private sector.

the financial industry has grown much faster than either the flow of savings it channels or the assets it manages.

Defenders of modern finance like to argue that it does the economy a great service by allocating capital to its most productive uses — but that’s a hard argument to sustain after a decade in which Wall Street’s crowning achievement involved directing hundreds of billions of dollars into subprime mortgages.

Wall Street’s friends also used to claim that the proliferation of complex financial instruments was reducing risk and increasing the system’s stability, so that financial crises were a thing of the past. No, really.

if our supersized financial sector isn’t making us either safer or more productive, what is it doing? One answer is that it’s playing small investors for suckers, causing them to waste huge sums in a vain effort to beat the market.

Another answer is that a lot of money is going to speculative activities that are privately profitable but socially unproductive.

n short, we’re giving huge sums to the financial industry while receiving little or nothing — maybe less than nothing — in return. Mr. Philippon puts the waste at 2 percent of G.D.P.

et even that figure, I’d argue, understates the true cost of our bloated financial industry. For there is a clear correlation between the rise of modern finance and America’s return to Gilded Age levels of inequality.