Two and a half years ago, the UK committed itself to cutting its emissions by 50 percent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2025. It’s an aggressive goal, going even further than the EU-wide targets of 20 percent emissions reductions by 2020. But Britain’s ministers left themselves an out: if the government’s Climate Change Committee determined […]

Efficient health care tied to affordable cost, high quality, and universal access is possible, at least if you’re a country called Singapore. In April, Brookings Press published Affordable Excellence, the first “comprehensive system-level description” of the Singaporean health care system. Tyler Cowen is in Singapore this week, and he’s written a few posts on its health care, pivoting […]

Four years on, it’s time to start asking the question: Is this the rottenest economic recovery ever? GDP is steadily growing again, but the unemployment rate has been so bad that when it finally dropped below 8 percent last year it was touted as excellent news, despite coming nearly half a decade after the beginning […]

The White House has been indicating that any intervention in Syria would be solely for the purpose of punishing Assad for using chemical weapons against his people—that the goal of any retaliation is not regime change, and that the scope of the intervention would be measured in days and not weeks or months.Yet if Iran […]

Another report was leaked this week linking fracking—the drilling technique that has unlocked vast reserves of oil and gas trapped in shale—to earthquakes. The report, released by the same group of scientists who previously linked fracking’s wastewater disposal with micro-quakes, purports to show that the controversial oil and gas extraction process is likely responsible for […]

Talk about a cry for help. The Saudis have apparently judged President Obama to be rudderless in his Middle East policies, judging by their recent diplomatic moves toward Russia: They appear to have plied Putin with a deal to collude in the global oil market, while also urging him to distance himself from Syria’s Butcher […]

The People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party in China, ran an editorial yesterday arguing that, contrary to much analysis by both Western and Chinese economists and international organizations, China doesn’t face a debt crisis. But the rationale for that conclusion is a little shaky: China’s local government debt was primarily used for […]

California Governor Jerry Brown has received some much-deserved flak for his dogged support of the state’s wasteful high-speed rail project, but it’s good to remember that projects like these are not an American invention. Over in the UK, the coalition government has been pushing an equally foolish £50 billion plan for a high-speed rail line […]

China brushed away an offer from Japan to negotiate over disputed territory in the East China Sea today. On several occasions Japan has offered to send high-level officials to China to discuss the sensitive issue, but China has shown no interest. “A meeting between leaders is not simply for the sake of shaking hands and taking […]

Our health care and higher ed systems have the same root problem, and Obama has the solution to both, says Ezra Klein. The root of skyrocketing costs in both of these industries, says Klein, is the relative weakness of the consumer’s negotiating power. We can decline to buy a television or a computer, but we […]