[Updated] Fellow American Interest blogger Francis Fukuyama has an excellent review of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail” up on his blog. He has some important insights that should be read by every development specialist or NGO employee looking into the problems facing developing countries: Acemoglu and Robinson (henceforth AR; Simon Johnson of the […]

Many Australians are republicans, hoping to replace the Queen of England as their head of state someday with an elected or appointed Australian.  Maybe that will happen, but whether it is a republic or a monarchy Australia looks set to keep playing the Game of Thrones.These days America and Australia just can’t get enough of […]

WRM and Frank Fukuyama, together with Robert Kagan, were recently interviewed on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a Canadian program. The title of the talk was Is America Still the Land of the Future? Here’s the YouTube clip: 

Remember that Mormon conspiracy to take over America that folks like Yale’s Harold Bloom and Salon’s Sally Denton keep warning us about? Well, according to a new survey of Utah lawmakers, it runs so deep that most Utah politicians have never even been lobbied by the LDS Church. BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins has the insidious details: […]

Two simmering conflicts in Asia’s biggest countries have jumped back to the headlines recently. In India today, Naxalite forces ambushed a police convoy, killing fifteen policemen. And among China’s restive Tibetans, self immolations are on the rise. It’s a reminder that both these countries are dealing with serious internal unrest.In China’s Tibetan communities, something like thirty people […]

The NY Times reports that Americans are quickly souring on the war in Afghanistan: After a series of violent episodes and setbacks, support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped sharply among both Republicans and Democrats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — […]

Regular readers of Via Meadia may sometimes get the impression that we have something against settled science. In critiquing hysterical greens for their draconian, hear-no-dissent discourse on climate change and what to do about it, we have often pointed to the ever-changing scientific consensus on such diverse matters as video games, human reproduction, the Theory […]

When a self-proclaimed jihadist slaughters Jewish schoolchildren in France on account of events in the Middle East, the proper response is collective horror and serious societal soul-searching. Via Meadia highlighted one laudable example of this in the form of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and there have been many more in France.  Unfortunately, there are […]

Via Meadia has been keeping a watchful eye on the violence unleashed in Nigeria by Boko Haram, the Islamist group responsible for more than 900 killings in the past two years. In its battle against the Nigerian state, Boko Haram has preyed on “police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers […]

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have just published Why Nations Fail, a big book on development that will attract a lot of attention. The latest fad in development studies has been to conduct controlled randomized experiments on a host of micro-questions, such as whether co-payments for mosquito bed nets improves their uptake. Whether such studies […]