I’ve been visiting Brazil every few years since the late 1980s, and the favelas, the large, informal settlements where the poor cluster in and around the major cities, were until very recently uniform scenes of heartbreaking poverty. Millions of poor Brazilians lived without basic city services like sewer and electric power, and the only order […]

W. Brian Arthur, in a report for McKinsey, writes that we are witnessing enormous fundamental changes to the global economy: “in fact”, he writes, “it may well be the biggest change ever in the economy.” This change is due to what Arthur calls “the second economy” or a “digital economy” that exists alongside the physical […]

Two articles in yesterday’s newspapers are working the same story about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and NATO, with different angles. Panetta, speaking in Brussels, offered praise to NATO for its success in Libya but also charged member nations with failing to contribute their share to the Organization, instead leaving it to the US to fill […]

The latest Open Europe roundup of news from across the pond paints a bleak picture of the state of Europe’s union. As regular VM readers know, the expanding debt crisis has led to intense squabbling among European governments about the role of the EU. Today’s harvest of bad news adds more detail: France and Germany […]

Generations of geostrategists have speculated about the possibility for an alliance between Russia and China.  If those two powers got together, they speculated, they could dominate Eurasia and therefore the world.For a few years after Mao’s revolution, it looked as if that was happening, and it was this strategic nightmare that shaped a lot of […]

China is famously resistant to lectures and harangues from foreign governments, but it is learning the hard way that making large investments abroad makes a country more vulnerable to foreign opinion.Once you’ve made large fixed investments in another country — mines, dams, factories — you become hostage to the politics of those countries.  You don’t […]

Thanks to what China and Russia perceive (accurately, if that matters) as NATO overreaching in Libya, there will be no UN-blessed intervention in Syria. There will be no no-fly zone, no targeted financial sanctions, no arms embargo, not even a resolution to “consider” unspecified “measures” against Syrian President Assad. As the WSJ reports: Mr. [Vitaly] Churkin […]

In a windowless room within a giant government compound in Bangkok sit technicians whose job is to scour the web for material that could offend the Thai king or his family. They have been very busy: about 60,000 websites have been banned because of anti-monarchy content. As the NYT tells us, The technicians work in […]

Do welfare states always end by eating their young?As Greek employers in the public and private sectors trim wages and payroll, the younger generation has less and less reason to stick around. NPR discusses Greece’s crisis of the young: The financial crisis gripping Greece is having a major impact on the country’s young people. A […]

When it comes to China’s purported sins, currency manipulation usually hogs the limelight and this week the US Senate, edging towards a trade war with China, got a nudge from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.  The FT reports: The chairman of the US Federal Reserve has accused China of damaging prospects for a global economic […]