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From an economic standpoint, Bannon is talking mumbo jumbo. Protectionism and immigration exclusion retard growth; they do not promote it. We do not lose “sovereignty” when our consumers enjoy a higher standard of living thanks to imported goods. And in the regulations department, what could be more of a regulatory burden than cutting legal immigration, trying to influence which suppliers to use via a border adjustment tax or bullying companies about where they set up their plants?

This is not about sovereignty; it is about creating an even more powerful government, one that is oblivious to economic reality and ignores the political and economic upheavals that the policies create.

If he has been listening to U.S. business leaders, allies, informed members of Congress or the Federal Reserve chairman, he must have figured out how counterproductive his nationalist ideas are. (We’ve tried this before in the 1930s — with poor results.) And yet the appetite to decimate liberal Western democracies and shred an international system that has maintained relative peace and prosperity is unabated.

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.

Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

STRASBOURG, France — When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping.

France recently adopted a controversial law on surveillance that permits major intrusions, without prior judicial authorization, into the private lives of suspects and those who communicate with them, live or work in the same place or even just happen to be near them.

Meanwhile, Austria is set to discuss a draft law that would allow a new security agency to operate with reduced external control and to collect and store communication data for up to six years. The Netherlands is considering legislation allowing dragnet surveillance of all telecommunications, indiscriminate gathering of metadata, decryption and intrusion into the computers of non-suspects. And in Finland, the government is even considering changing the Constitution to weaken privacy protections in order to ease the adoption of a bill granting the military and intelligence services the power to conduct electronic mass surveillance with little oversight.

The country’s 10 percent really do feel strapped, and really don’t understand how much better they have it than the 90 percent below them.

“We worked really hard to make sure we had diaries from all 50 states and from a huge range of income levels,” says Lindsey Stanberry, who launched Refinery29’s “Money Diaries” and is now an editor at CNBC’s Make It. “But our most popular ones were definitely men and women making six figures,” putting them in the top 10 percent and sometimes the top 1 percent of the income distribution.

In these viral budgets and diaries, urban professionals—they are almost always urban professionals—describe spending on $7 lattes and $70 bikini waxes and $70,000 private-school tuition. Some describe themselves as middle-class. Many describe themselves as unable to sav

Seven GOP senators voted with Democrats — the most bipartisan impeachment vote in U.S. history — but well short of the 17 needed to convict the former president

"When this process started, I believed that it was unconstitutional to impeach a president who was no longer in office," he said. "I still believe that to be the case. However, the Senate is an institution based on precedent, and given that the majority in the Senate voted to proceed with this trial, the question of constitutionality is now established precedent."

This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021," she said. "It is instead about President Trump's failure to obey the oath he swore on January 20, 2017. His actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power – the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction."

The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.

What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?

The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.

Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.

Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year

Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”

The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life.

“The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history.

To her mother in South Korea, SuJin Kim is a failure: She’s over 30, single and not working for a big Korean corporation.

But to her millions of followers in Latin America, she has become a relatable friend and a teacher of all things Korean. In Mexico, where she lives, they know her, in fact, as “Chinguamiga,” her online nickname, a mash-up of the words for friend in Korean and Spanish.

Her success has been propelled not just by her ingenuity and charisma, but also by a wave of South Korean popular culture that has swept the world

In the early 1900s, primatologists noticed a group of apes in central Africa with a distinctly slender build; they called them “pygmy chimpanzees.” But as the years passed, it became clear that those animals, now known as bonobos, were profoundly different from chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee societies are dominated by males that kill other males, raid the territory of neighboring troops and defend their own ground with border patrols. Male chimpanzees also attack females to coerce them into mating, and sometimes even kill infants.

Among bonobos, in contrast, females are dominant. Males do not go on patrols, form alliances or kill other bonobos. And bonobos usually resolve their disputes with sex — lots of it.

crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon

“Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast

the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.

this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.

There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago

What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people's suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn't come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world. A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can't help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it's much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

Stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans do have some collective obligation to prevent suffering elsewhere in the world, and that this obligation is properly met, at least in part, via government. (Perhaps because governments are uniquely able to remedy certain kinds of suffering—such as those requiring the mobilization of a military.) Given that we have finite resources, surely the worst possible way to go about this is by making a series of ad hoc judgments about particular cases—the "how much do I care about Steve?" method. The refusal to consider whatever global duty we might have holistically is precisely what leads to irrational allocations—like spending billions to protect civilians and rebel troops in Libya when many more lives would be saved (again, let's suppose for the sake of argument) by far less costly malaria eradication efforts. Unless there's an argument that we have some specific or special obligation to people in Libya—and I certainly haven't seen it—then any claim about our obligation to intervene in this case is, necessarily, just a specific application of some broader principle about our obligation to alleviate global suffering generally. The suggestion that we ought to evaluate this case in a vacuum, then, starts to seem awfully strange, because if we are ever going to intervene for strictly humanitarian reasons (rather than to protect vital security interests), then the standard for when to do so has to be, in part, a function of the aggregate demands whatever standard we pick would place on our limited resources.

We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we're trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they're all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we'd conclude their product isn't the best use of our money.

Mr. Kenny acknowledges that the hundreds of billions of dollars that the West has poured into poor countries has had a limited impact on income, which is what most economists use to measure progress in living standards. As he notes, many countries in Africa today have real per capita incomes lower than that of Britain at the time of the Roman Empire. Over the past several decades, through good times and bad, the income gap between rich and poor countries has grown. And no one really knows why.

Mr. Kenny shows that quality of life—even in the world's poorest countries—has improved dramatically over the past several decades, far more than most people realize. Moreover, with reams of solid data to support his case, he argues that governments and aid agencies have played an important role in this progress.

Fifty years ago, more than half the world's population struggled with getting enough daily calories. By the 1990s, this figure was below 10%. Famine affected less than three-tenths of 1% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa from 1990 to 2005. As Mr. Kenny suggests, the record has thoroughly disproved Malthusian prophecies of food shortages caused by spiraling population growth. Family sizes have fallen for many decades now in every region, including Africa.

The stability (and even monotony) associated with German politics under Ms. Merkel appears to be coming to an end. Her looming retirement marks a deepening crisis of the German political system that threatens not just the future of the country, but of the European Union.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

on the surface Germany appears to be an economic success story. Its G.D.P. has grown consistently for nearly a decade; unemployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1989. In amassing trade surpluses, Germany has enjoyed several advantages: an advanced manufacturing sector; the ability to get primary products and services from other members of the European Union; and being in the eurozone, which effectively gives the country a devalued currency, making its exports more attractive.

Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history

what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018.

I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while

Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind

He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler