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 […]

President Obama has just completed an important ritual of an American presidency: on this third visit to South Korea as president he has visited the demarcation line between North and South Korea, peering into the windswept, desolate north from behind bulletproof glass.What some in the press hailed as a unique triumph of Obaman diplomacy—actually, yet […]

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the most interesting and even tragic figures in world politics.Consider his statement made in response to the horrific shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, after its jihadist perpetrator claimed to have been acting in service of the Palestinian cause. Said Fayyad: It is time for […]

In recent years the king of Saudi Arabia has won plaudits around the world for promoting interfaith dialogs. Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula.The ruling came in response […]

Longtime watchers of Argentina have seen this movie before: in the aftermath of a mighty economic crash, an Argentine government embraces an unorthodox set of economic polices. For a time, they work—partly because the crash was so huge that some kind of recovery was inevitable and partly because Argentina’s rich natural resource endowment (fertile soil, […]

In the challenge to President Obama’s signature health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), the Supreme Court  faces a daunting series of issues. The unprecedented schedule of oral arguments—a total of six hours—bespeaks the Court’s willingness to confront those issues squarely. The most historic decision since Roe v. Wade could well […]

Foreign Affairs, the banner publication of the Council of Foreign Relations, carries in its March-April 2012 issue, an interesting article on religion and politics in the United States. It is by two prominent political scientists, David Campbell (Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard). Their title is “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and […]

When horrible things happen, like the terror attack on a Jewish school in southern France on Monday, our emotions churn and sometimes get the better of our capacity for reason. One commentator, an old friend who will remain nameless, blames the slimy subterranean anti-Semitism of contemporary Europe––much of the time masquerading in anti-Israel drag––for supplying […]

The conventional wisdom today holds that deep splits between conservatives and liberals have paralyzed the United States government. The country needs major changes, fast, writers like Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum say in their recent book That Used to Be Us, but polarized politics have stopped change dead in its tracks.Actually, the situation is a little […]

As President Obama’s signature health care law comes before the Supreme Court, most of the constitutional commentary has focused on whether Congress has the power to require individuals to purchase health insurance. Relatively little attention has been given to a more complicated and potentially more far-reaching issue: If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual […]