When Britain’s Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed the country’s first coalition government since World War II, many predicted that it wouldn’t last until the next election. So far, the coalition is still together, but the British public remains pessimistic about its fortunes, with only 16 percent polled last summer believing the coalition would last another […]

Iranian officials are calling it an “economic war”, and according to recent reports that’s an accurate description. Following new rounds of US sanctions issued yesterday, the Associated Press reports today that Iranian oil revenue has plummeted: Iran’s revenues from vital oil and gas exports have dropped by 45 percent because of sanctions over its suspect nuclear program, […]

Decades of activism haven’t taught greens much about policy. The latest horror out of the sequential failure machine known as the green movement is the biofuels disaster now afflicting the Guatemalan poor. The New York Times reports: Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have […]

When we talk about America’s fiscal crisis, in large part what we’re talking about boils down to spending in one area: health care. Health care spending already accounts for more than 15 percent of U.S. GDP, and programs like Medicare and Medicaid are on track to devour the entire budget unless something changes. If America […]

The long term threats to the sustainability of Social Security are well known. Higher average life expectancies combined with declining demographics mean that the program’s funds will run out in 2033, according to current government estimates. Writing in the NYT, Gary King and Samir Sonjei warn, however, that the 2033 estimate is based on data […]

Did you know that beer was an alcoholic substance and not a “food product”? That’s what Moscow has just declared in its latest bid to curb alcohol use in one of the planet’s tipsiest countries. The status change means that beer will no longer be allowed to be sold in street kiosks and will only […]

Despite miracle cures at the hands of everyone from Jesus to Fidel Castro’s vaunted Cuban medical complex to Afro-Caribbean priests and spiritual healers, Hugo Chavez appears to be in danger of imminent death. Nothing is certain about his condition as his health is being treated as a state secret, but more and more signs point to the probability […]

The Washington press corps has been whipping itself into a frenzy on the president’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense. With Hagel joining John Kerry, it’s an old white men, establishment team that President Obama is taking into his second term. But many are looking at the Hagel pick as a sign that […]

2012 saw the passing of a great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97.Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This approach establishes causality […]

As the Yule Blogging wound down this week, our two non-Christmas essays focused on prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace and on the real deficit we’re facing as a nation.In the former, we argued that if Obama wanted to achieve some sort of breakthrough in the peace process, he would have to focus his energies on […]