Over at the estimable (but paywall protected) Financial Times, the admirable Gideon Rachman has a good column on the meaning of the French election for France and for Europe. Every serious investor and every serious student of international relations should take a look, because Gideon makes a persuasive case that whoever wins the French election […]

Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization has created a quandary for Congress. On the one hand, members want to respect WTO rules and allow free trade with Russia, thereby further integrating that country into the world economy. On the other hand, many in the policymaking community have concerns over the Russian government’s human-rights record […]

What passes for good news about healthcare costs came in recently: they grew by “only” 4 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, significantly faster than the overall rate of inflation, but less quickly than they’ve grown in the past. Health care now accounts for 18 percent of total US GDP and costs are rising […]

Ces 600 Milliards Qui Manquent à La France (“The Missing 600 Billion”)by Antoine PeillonSeuil, 2012, 192 pp., 15 Euros “Après Sarkozy, le chaos!” Down to the last straw, as polls show him in dead heat with his rival, Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy issued a threatening prediction of the economic anarchy sure to rain down on […]

The German presidency is a largely ceremonial office, though its incumbent is supposed to represent the political virtues of the Federal Republic. Thus the scandal forcing the recent resignation from the presidency of Christian Wulff on February 17, 2012, while closely followed (and perhaps caused) by the German media, was not much noticed abroad. Nor […]

TS Eliot was right, if you are a high school senior: April is the cruelest month.This is the time of year when most college acceptances and rejections go out, the time of year when high school students all over the country worry about whether their incoming mail is fat (stuffed with information and forms for […]

When people think about what will happen to jobs as the blue model continues to crumble, most have a picture in their heads of the type of change that is happening, and it is based on the experience of the last thirty years. Manufacturing jobs are going away. Professional and white collar jobs will continue […]

For me, this is peak opera time in New York. Last Monday night I saw Verdi’s wonderful MacBeth, sandwiched between a Saturday performance of Rheingold and last night’s beautifully sung and acted Valkyrie. I’m halfway through the first cycle of the Met’s new production of the Ring, with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung still to come. Between […]

For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of […]

The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they […]