History Readings

Turchin’s thesis is basically the following: the eternal tension between liberty and equality has a recognizable shape in historical and economic cycles, which are perhaps better understood today. The optimal moment for successful societies is when the middle class dominates, where political institutions reflect a mass interest in governing the society well, because everyone feels they have a stake (so more people than usual want and need collective success), and because they share some basic commonalities in experience, and so can find a way to compromise.

When societies grow more unequal, commonalities fray. Wealth accumulates among the few, who begin to see the polity as something to be used for private interests rather than engaged in for public-spirited reform. But as wealth at the top grows and grows, and as more and more of the middle class attempt to become part of the super-wealthy club, the loss of economic demand among the increasingly struggling majority puts a crimp in the social mobility of the wannabe elites. So we have a wealth glut: hugely wealthy one-percenters and a larger group of under-employed or unemployed professionals. It’s from these disgruntled elites that you will get the tribunes of the new plebeians. And they will be guided by revenge just as destructively as the top one percent is now guided by naked self-interest.

conspiracists aren’t completely isolated. They’re surrounded by a substantial number of deep skeptics—people who aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid but don’t trust the government to tell the whole story. On average, these people seem to represent about a quarter of the population. In many cases, when combined with the conspiracy believers, they add up to a majority

The lesson in these

We need to understand more about these skeptics. We need to keep them from falling into the arms of the conspiracy-theory peddlers. If th

Merrill Newman, a Korean War veteran, was taken off a plane by uniformed officers at the end of a guided tour in North Korea last month, his son said.

The guided tour was arranged with a travel agent "approved by the North Korean government for travel of foreigners", he added

The veteran appeared to have discussed his experience in the Korean War with North Korean officials the day before his detention, his son added.

Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.

arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too

In July 2011, a government inquiry found that the causes of the crash were complex but mundane: organizational negligence, poor pilot training, bad weather and the shoddy state of the airport at Smolensk. In short, the presidential plane should never have taken off that day.

Yet wild theories abounded: The Russians had produced the fog; a “vacuum bomb” had been set off; the plane had been dragged to the ground by magnets; several passengers had survived the crash but been finished off on the ground.

Poland’s liberal intelligentsia coined a phrase for this overheated paranoia: the “Smolensk religion.” Its doctrine was a singular, explosive mixture of Polish messianism and religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and a love of martyrdom. For followers of the faith, any rational argument about the crash was instantly transubstantiated into further proof of the assassins’ cunning.

The autocratic, pro-Western military government that took power in 1975 instigated limited economic liberalization. This enabled Bangladeshi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the Multifiber Arrangement, an international trade agreement on textiles and garments that placed export quotas on the emerging economies of East Asia in order to shield Western economies from competition. Very poor countries were exempt from the restrictions, and in the 1980s the new military elite of Bangladesh, hoping to capitalize on the cheap local labor, opened garment factories with the help of South Korean investors. Know-how soon spread, attracting more investment. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China.

because Bangladesh’s banking sector and stock market are “not very much exposed to the world,” Muhith explained, the country has weathered global financial crises well, holding a G.D.P. growth rate at an average of 5 percent since 1990.

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

One way to determine whether JPMorgan has gotten off lightly is to calculate the settlement payments as a percentage of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages that the bank sold. From 2004 through 2007, JPMorgan, along with Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, sold around $1 trillion of mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication. So far, JPMorgan has paid or set aside about $25 billion to meet claims that the loans should not have been sold. In other words, that sum is 2.5 percent of the total, though that figure could increase as the bank strikes other settlements.

Since the crisis, many attempts have been made to assess how many of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages inside the bonds were of too low a standard. The results are staggering.

Occupancy was a focus of one of the lawsuits that was wrapped into the government settlement. The suit, brought by Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that, in one bond deal, 15 percent of the loans were for a second home, five times the level stated in the deal’s prospectus. Most of those loans probably defaulted, which means the ultimate loss rate on the bond was probably far higher than 2.5 percent.

Ahead of a new round of Iran nuclear talks, the country's supreme leader voiced support on Wednesday for the negotiations, but he insisted there are limits to concessions that Iran will make in exchange for an easing of sanctions choking its economy.

But his mention of Iran's "nuclear rights" was widely interpreted as a reference to uranium enrichment.

Iran would get some sanctions relief under such a first-step deal, without any easing of the most harsh measures — those crippling its ability to sell oil, its main revenue maker.

The head of the main Shia political society in Bahrain has told the BBC that the opposition leadership is being systematically targeted by the state.

Khalil Marzook, is on trial for inciting youth violence and trying to overthrow the Sunni-led government.

"Khalil and the Wefaq party have always advocated a peaceful path to democracy and condemn violence," he insisted.

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

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

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

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.

 our unjust economic system. Under this system, people compete for basic goods and services in what seems to be a fair and non-discriminating market. But since they enter this market from vastly different social circumstances, competition is anything but fair. Those who already possess goods have a much better chance of renewing their access to them, whereas those who don’t have little chance of ever getting them.

an examination of the recent history of Cuba does in fact provide valuable lessons about the complex links between economic justice, access to basic goods and services, racial inequality, and what Gutting refers to as “continuing problems about race.”

In one corner is Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who argues that markets (and by implication, share prices) are often irrational and therefore beatable. He famously predicted the bubble in technology stocks in the late 1990s.

In the other corner is Eugene Fama, the father of the view that markets are efficient and that they are always processing all available information. Mr. Fama’s followers believe that investors who try to beat the averages will inevitably fail.

As someone whose professional life centers on evaluating investment managers, I come down emphatically with Mr. Shiller.

Marseille’s new Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations opened in June, part of the city’s celebration of its status as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

Education First, an international education company, found that while English proficiency among European adults is generally increasing, proficiency in France is both low and declining.

According to the third EF English Proficiency Index, released last week, France ranked 35th among 60 nations where English is not the main language. The study put the country’s average English language skills in the “low proficiency” bracket, between China and the United Arab Emirates — and last among European nations.

Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, have manipulated the genes of the soybean to radically alter the composition of its oil to make it longer-lasting, potentially healthier and free of trans fats.

“It almost mirrors olive oil in terms of the composition of fatty acids.”

“We have been told if we have a product that is beneficial to consumers it will be much more acceptable,”

The Nobel committee recognized Professor Hansen this year for developing a statistical technique, the generalized method of moments. He described it as “a method that allows you to do something without having to do everything.” For example, it’s still impossible to come up with a complete and entirely coherent model of either the overall economy or financial markets, to say nothing of combining the two. But his methods help make it possible to study some of the elements and connections in a statistically valid way. “The idea is to make progress,” he said, “even if you can’t do it all now.” And his approach is in wide use in other areas of social science.

The science of economic model-building is very much a work in progress, he said. “The thing to remember about models is they’re always approximations and they will always turn out to be wrong,” he said. That shouldn’t be a surprise, he said, and it doesn’t mean that the models are useless. “You need to ask, are the models wrong in ways that are central to the questions you want to ask, or are they wrong in ways that aren’t so central?” The important thing is to make them better and to come up with interesting answers, he said.

Prevailing economic models do not adequately explain the financial crisis, the severe recession or the weak global recovery, he said. “Systemic risk” is a buzzword for politicians and financial regulators, he said, but “the truth is, we really don’t know how to measure it or what exactly it is.”

America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency.

And this year that trend is up by at least 33%  from the previous high in 2011.

Since then, the tax and other consequences do not depend on why one leaves. Yet after Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his Facebook IPO riches, there was an angry backlash.

While scores of people are arrested on these charges every day in New York, the laws apparently don’t apply to middle-aged white guys. Or at least they aren’t enforced against us.

About 87 percent of the marijuana arrests in the Bloomberg era have been of blacks and Latinos, most of them men, and generally under the age of 25 — although surveys consistently show that whites are more likely to use it.

These drug busts were the No. 1 harvest of the city’s stop, question and frisk policing from 2009 through 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman. Marijuana possession was the most common charge of those arrested during those stops. The few whites and Asians arrested on these charges were 50 percent more likely than blacks to have the case “adjourned in contemplation of dismissal,” the report showed.

He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”

2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.

Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a marty