CFR fellow Michael Levi, one of the smartest people in this business, tweeted that the numbers in Joel Kotkin’s post referenced here on Via Meadia are off.Here’s the Levi tweet: I wish it were so. Kotkin numbers look off by >2X -include royalty recipients as employees. Ditto w wages- ~60k, good, but not 100Kotkin and […]

A month has passed since the Virginia earthquake and it looks like the Washington Monument is going to be closed indefinitely until a team of engineers can check every stone.  The WaPo reports: Officials said a “debris field,” made up mostly of mortar that had fallen during the quake, had been found at the base […]

The situation in Greece is so bad – with sovereign debt at 150% of GDP and economic growth forecasts continuing to fall – that economists and foreign policy thinkers are scrambling to think through the implications of default. What would happen if a bankrupt Greece dropped the euro? Ian Bremmer at the Financial Times explains […]

In San Francisco, the jobs of the future are already beginning to appear. A new company called cater2.me has gone into business providing a variety of catered lunches to businesses too small to afford a chef of their own. The New York Times reports: It’s true that these companies, which are paying engineers $100,000 or […]

While the government has been spending billions of dollars to produce a handful of sickly green jobs without much staying power, a veritable gusher of ‘brown’ jobs in traditional mining and energy extractive industries is on the brink of rejuvenating the American economy.That at least is what Joel Kotkin and his associates have discovered.  Looking […]

Anybody hungry for a dose of good news should go to Bill Glahn’s blog for a cheery story on America’s growing energy independence. Just when it seems that all the news is bad, a ray a light peeks through the clouds.  Our dependence on foreign oil, a bugaboo for Presidents dating back to Nixon, has […]

The Senator John McCain that so many of us admired before his deeply uninspiring presidential campaign in 2008 is back, this time waging war on unauthorized and inefficient government spending on defense projects.  The Vietnam war hero is specifically targeting the Senate Appropriations Committee, or, as he put it, “a handful of senior appropriators and […]

As longtime readers know, I’m not particularly skeptical about climate science, suitably wrapped with the inevitable cautions and caveats about complex natural systems whose history and dynamics are imperfectly understood, but I am deeply skeptical about climate policy.  Green climate policies tend to be otherworldly utopian fantasies like the global carbon treaty or heavy handed, […]

In American states, past voting trends and the number of electoral college votes up for grabs shape presidential candidates’ campaigns, as Gerald Seib describes in the WSJ: The important thing to remember about a presidential election is that it isn’t a contest to win the popular vote nationwide. It is a contest to win in […]

Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the head of one of the most important centers of learning in the Islamic world, wrote a remarkably tolerant article in the Egyptian government daily newspaper Al-Ahram back in June. Translated excerpts of the article recently appeared at MEMRI: The Koran, which Many Muslims know by heart, affirms that had God […]