Commentaries

Putin and Medvedev: Teammates or Rivals?

Vyacheslav Nikonov Series: A Window on Russia

2008-01-31

Vladimir Putin’s decision to serve as prime minister should Dmitri Medvedev become Russia’s next president has made their electoral success in March a virtual certainty, while raising serious questions about who will really be in charge. But their power tandem could produce more effective governance than many expect.... read

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Breaking the Neoclassical Monopoly in Economics

Thomas I. Palley Series: The Worldly Philosophers

2008-01-31

Just as philosophers are divided on the nature of truth and understanding, economics is divided on the workings of the real world. Yet, in practice, the dominance of the belief in “one economics,” particularly in North America and Europe, has led increasingly to a narrow and exclusionary view of the discipline.... read

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China’s Dangerous Nobodies

Guy Sorman Series: Against the Current

2008-01-31

Many optimistic observers of China bet on a soft transition from despotism toward an open society. So why, then, has the Chinese Communist Party launched a wave of harsh repression against moderate, law-abiding activists?... read

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In Marx’s Shadow Again

J. Bradford DeLong Series: Anatomy of the Global Economy

2008-01-30

Ever since Karl Marx predicted that the modern capitalism he saw evolving would prove incapable of producing an acceptable distribution of income, mainstream economists have earned their bread and butter patiently explaining why he was wrong. But, with the decline of social-democratic politics, that task has gotten a lot harder.... read

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Instability from Rigidity

Simon Johnson and Jonathan D. Ostry Series: Frontiers of Growth

2008-01-30

Everyone wants economic stability, and many are reluctant to abandon today what gave them stability yesterday. But the stability of the international financial system today depends on the willingness of countries with rigid exchange rates to allow greater flexibility.... read

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America and Europe

Joschka Fischer Series: The Rebel Realist

2008-01-29

Deeply frustrated by the Bush administration’s policies, many people and governments in Europe hope for a fundamental change in American foreign policy after the upcoming presidential election. But it would take a miracle for these hopes to be realized, and a miracle will not happen – whoever is elected.... read

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Inflation Comes to China

Jun Zhang Series: China Stands Up

2008-01-29

SHANGHAI – Macroeconomic conditions in any country are like running water. How large and fast is the flow? Where does it originate and where does it go?... read

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Putin’s Balkan Mischief

Morton Abramowitz Series: Human Rights

2008-01-28

At every turn, Russia has challenged Western efforts to facilitate Kosovo’s independence. While the US and the EU do not want to worsen relations with Russia, they cannot retreat in the face of Russian obduracy, because Europe's security is at stake.... read

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The EU is Missing in Action in Afghanistan

Daniel Korski Series: The World in Words

2008-01-28

Six years of war and the biggest military operation in NATO’s history have failed to subdue the Afghan insurgency, leaving President Hamid Karzai’s government dependent on the continued presence of international forces. There are many reasons for this outcome, but at least some of the blame lies with the European Union.... read

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Gaza Then and Now

Daoud Kuttab Series: The World in Words

2008-01-25

Gaza’s history, and evaporating support for Hamas there, suggests that integrating Gazans into mainstream Palestinian life would not be difficult. But it also suggests that maintaining the current siege would merely punish a peace-loving population while strengthening the grip of its worst elements on society and public life.... read

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Trends and Trendiness at Davos

Dominique Moisi Series: European Observer

2008-01-25

Today, more than ever, the World Economic Forum’s proud motto, “Committed to the improvement of the world,” seems disconnected from reality. How can you pretend to be acting to change the world if you no longer understand it?... read

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The Lucifer Effect

Phillip Zimbardo Series: Health and Medicine

2008-01-25

While most people are good most of the time, powerful situational forces – anonymity, group pressures, or diffusion of personal responsibility – can easily lead them blindly to obey authority and to aggress against innocent others after dehumanizing them. But understanding such situational forces can enable us to uncover, oppose, defy, and triumph over them.... read

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Bolivia Divided

Victor Hugo Cardenas Series: Latin America

2008-01-24

Bolivia President Evo Morales won 53% of the vote in December 2005, after campaigning for democratic coexistence, social change, and national unity. But two years later, the country is marked by regional, social, ethnic, and ideological divisions, and its government is confused and disoriented.... read

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A Wake-Up Call for the ECB

Melvyn Krauss Series: Transatlantic Perspectives

2008-01-23

While Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has announced a whopping 75-basis-point interest-rate cut, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet continues to threaten to hike interest rates. But, with the US downturn threatening the global economy – including Europe – Trichet's fear of a wage-price spiral triggered by rapid public-sector wage gains is misplaced.... read

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Recount Kenyans’ Votes

Jeffrey D. Sachs Series: Economics and Justice

2008-01-23

The US has led the international diplomatic response to Kenya's post-election crisis, but its approach has been deeply flawed. Rather than calling for power-sharing, the world should be demanding an independent recount of the vote.... read

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France à la Sarkozy

Charles Wyplosz Series: European Economies

2008-01-23

Nicolas Sarkozy is not quite turning France, long a country hostile to supply-side reform, into what many would consider a normal economy. While he has the right instincts concerning labor markets, he is very French on other issues.... read

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The Sixty-Year Storm

George Soros Series: The World in Words

2008-01-22

Today’s financial crisis, triggered by the collapse of the housing bubble in the US, also marks the end of a 60-year era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency. But the current crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with the US declining relative to China and other developing countries.... read

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The Open Education Revolution

Jimmy Wales and Richard Baraniuk Series: The World in Words

2008-01-22

High book prices, language barriers, and obsolete knowledge impede education today. So the world of tomorrow, argue the founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, should be defined by "open education," in which people everywhere can write, assemble, customize, and publish their own courses and textbooks.... read

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A Bollywood Bride for Sarkozy?

Mira Kamdar Series: The Asian Century

2008-01-21

Nicolas Sarkozy's affaire de coeur with Carla Bruni has been a political disaster at home and a protocol nightmare abroad, first in Egypt, and soon in India. A lavishly exotic South Asian wedding in February could solve both problems.... read

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Two Energy Futures

Jeroen van der Veer Series: Frontiers of Growth

2008-01-21

The world faces a long voyage before it reaches a low-carbon energy system. Companies can suggest possible routes to get there, but governments will determine whether we should prepare for bitter competition or a true team effort.... read

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What About the World?

Richard N. Haass Series: The Statesmen's Debate

2008-01-18

America’s next president will face a host of pressing and difficult foreign policy challenges – and how he or she responds will affect not only the US, but the entire world. In the meantime, though, foreign policy will have only an indirect influence on Americans’ choice. ... read

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Nigeria’s Resurgent Oil Diplomacy

Ike Okonta Series: Into Africa

2008-01-18

Russia is not alone in seeing oil as a means to transform its global standing. Nowadays, the mantra of President Umar Yar’Adua, who took power in June 2007, following controversial elections, is to transform the country into one of the world’s 20 largest economies by 2020. Yar’Adua and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are struggling to stamp their authority on an unwieldy and restive country of 140 million people, and the government views rapid growth as a means to achieving that aim.... read

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Automatic Savers

Robert J. Shiller Series: Finance in the 21st Century

2008-01-18

One of the biggest challenges governments face is humans’ apathy about saving for the future. But, while some countries force people to set aside a fixed proportion of their income, recent research suggests that automatic enrollment in employee savings schemes can be almost as effective, even if people can opt out.... read

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Pakistan’s Iranian Shadow

Karim Sadjadpour Series: The World in Words

2008-01-17

As the future of Pakistan wallows in uncertainty, parallels are being drawn to the 1979 fall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Once again, a liberal elite rails against a dictator, confident that their country is primed for secular democracy, but ready to embrace a politics of rage in which Islamist extremists thrive.... read

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Serbia's Choice

John O'Brennan Series: Europe at Home and Abroad

2008-01-15

Serbia's upcoming presidential election may decide the country’s political path for decades to come. As Kosovo’s new government moves toward a unilateral declaration of independence, Serbs face a stark choice: retain Kosovo and effectively sever ties with the European Union, or accept the painful reality of Kosovar independence and embrace a new future within the EU.... read

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China’s Gift to Europe

Melvyn Krauss Series: Transatlantic Perspectives

2008-01-14

Europeans are wrong to be angry with China because its currency peg to the US dollar has boosted the euro against most currencies on foreign exchange markets. On the contrary, they should view the currency peg as a valuable gift.... read

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Two Degrees of Misrepresentation

Bjørn Lomborg Series: Global Warning

2008-01-14

At the UN climate change conference in Bali, environmental campaigners vilified America for resisting pressure to pre-commit to specific temperature targets – namely, that global warming should be limited to no more than 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial temperatures. But this target is not scientifically backed, and the suggestion that we could achieve it is entirely implausible. ... read

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Hypocrisy on the High Seas?

Peter Singer Series: The Ethics of Life

2008-01-14

Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But Western anti-whaling countries will have little defense against charges of cultural bias until they address the needless animal suffering in their own backyards.... read

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The Fear Factor in US-China Relations

Joseph S. Nye Series: Of Might and Right

2008-01-11

Throughout history, whenever a rising power creates fear among its neighbors and other great powers, seemingly small events can trigger an unforeseen and disastrous chain reaction. This is one reason why the US must manage its policy toward China and an increasingly assertive Taiwan so carefully.... read

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Evading Tax Evasion

Carla Marchese Series: Frontiers of Growth

2008-01-09

Tax evasion is usually confronted with audits and harsh sanctions. But, as the rising tide of tax evasion suggests – the “black” economy has, by some estimates, reached 10% of GDP in advanced countries and can top 70% in developing countries – it is time to try new approaches.... read

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Defending America’s “Freedom Agenda”

Ammar Abdulhamid Series: Islam

2008-01-08

Adopting a “freedom agenda” is not the cause of America’s current travails in the Middle East. The problem has been a lack of consistency in promoting this agenda, failure to develop a larger constituency and broader international support for it, and the behavior of the US itself... read

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Imperial Hubris

Fritz Stern Series: Against the Current

2008-01-08

The United States, with its claims of exceptionalism, is usually thought of as free of historical analogies. But comparisons with the fate of earlier empires are becoming more common.... read

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The Year of the “China Model”

Ian Buruma Series: Crossing Cultures

2008-01-07

To recover from near destitution and bloody tyranny in one generation is a great feat, and China should be saluted for it. But China’s success story is also the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930’s.... read

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Uncertainty and Action on Climate Change

Thomas Schelling Series: Science and Society

2008-01-07

The uncertainties about climate change are many and great. But that, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling explains, is no reason to postpone action.... read

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Arab Fathers and Sons

Shlomo Ben-Ami Series: War and Peace

2008-01-04

The decision by Arab secular republics like Syria, Egypt, and Libya in favor of dynastic succession may be lacking in democracy, but it is not entirely devoid of merit. Arguably, it is a choice for economic modernization, for an end to the politics of conflict, and for positive political change further down the road.... read

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Reviving Europe’s Universities

Lykke Friis Series: Europe at Home and Abroad

2008-01-04

Europe’s universities suffer from “Wimbledon syndrome”: they invented the game, but nowadays they stand no chance of being champions. Higher spending on research and development would help, but not without far-reaching institutional reforms.... read

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The Iowa Caucuses and the Atlantic Alliance

Stephen Holmes Series: The World in Words

2008-01-04

What do the victories of two relatively inexperienced outsiders, Barak Obama and Mike Huckabee, in the Iowa Caucuses mean for American foreign policy in general and the Atlantic Alliance in particular? It is too soon to predict, on the basis of a plurality of votes cast by a sliver of eligible voters in a small state, who will eventually prevail in the nomination process. But it is not too soon to ask if the Bush Administration’s unfathomably cavalier and gratuitously alienating attitude toward America’s European allies will change substantially on January 20, 2009.... read

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India's Bollywood Power

Shashi Tharoor Series: The Asian Century

2008-01-03

In the information age, as Joseph Nye, the guru of soft power, argues, it is not the side with the bigger army, but the side with the better story, that wins. Given its thriving pluralist democracy, India’s greatest prospects for winning admiration in the twenty-first century may lie not in what it does, but simply in what it is.... read

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Workers’ Paradise?

Kenneth Rogoff Series: The Unbound Economy

2008-01-02

Will the political resurgence of labor unions throw a wrench into the wheels of globalization, or make globalization more sustainable by fostering great equality and fairness? One way or the other, unions stand as a major wild card for the evolution of our economic system in 2008 and beyond.... read

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Reviving Georgia’s Western Dream

Ghia Nodia Series: The World in Words

2008-01-01

Georgia’s recent instability has dealt a blow to its international reputation as a new democracy, and many will be watching the upcoming presidential election. But Georgia’s Western ambition remains intact, because the government understands that it cannot afford any long-term deviation from democratic norms.... read

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Stagflation Cometh

Joseph E. Stiglitz Series: Unconventional Economic Wisdom

2008-01-01

Slower economic growth – or possibly a recession – in the US will inevitably cause a global slowdown. And if central banks fail to respond appropriately to growing inflationary pressures – recognizing that much of it is imported, and not a result of excess domestic demand - we should prepare for the worst: another episode of stagflation.... read

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