Judging from my Twitter feed, there were many people who still thought that there was a real chance that Prime Minister Putin would let President Medvedev run for re-election in Russia and are disappointed that Putin will return to the big job for the next presidential term.I’m surprised by the surprise; it’s been clear for […]

The latest OECD report on education results in rich countries is out, and as usual there is little good news for the US.  The Economist tells all: Many of the 20 leading economic performers in the OECD doubled or tripled their education spending in real terms between 1970 and 1994, yet outcomes in many countries […]

Debates over the ongoing Euro crisis tend to be focused on a few familiar faces: Germany’s Merkel, France’s Sarkozy, Italy’s Berlusconi, Greece’s Papandreou. Notable in his absence in the nominal head of the E.U. Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council.When the post was created in 2009 and the eurocracy made it known that […]

The ever-insightful urbanist Joel Kotkin has a must-read piece out on the limitations of the Blue Social Model in New York City. The Big Apple has been touted as the archetypal new Blue city and has experienced a revival of sorts as a “luxury city.” But the luxury city model is rapidly approaching its demise, […]

Ireland, the US, the UK, Spain, China: now there’s a real estate bubble bursting in India.  Real estate firms, badly affected by the central bank’s efforts to fight inflation, could trigger a string of defaults with repercussions beyond India’s borders.  The FT has the story: The Indian real estate sector, once the realm of high-risk […]

In my otherwise not particularly effusive review of the sloppy and tendentious book on the Israel lobby by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, I was careful to say that while many of the book’s errors and some of its rhetorical patterns mimicked classic anti-Semitic conventions, the book itself offered no proof that the two authors […]

In God and Gold, I wrote about the special relationship between the UK and the US and compared them to the Walrus and the Carpenter characters in the poem by Lewis Carroll.  Every few years the British press indulges itself in an orgy of breast beating about the end of the ‘special relationship’ between the […]

With the recent flurry of disappointing reports on employment growth in the U.S. and the increasingly embarrassing wipe out of President Obama’s green jobs initiative, one can hardly help feeling, well, blue.Luckily, this report from blogger (and New America Foundation fellow) Reihan Salam on a study published by the University of Maryland offers a flicker […]

Crashing planes and capsizing ships apparently aren’t enough to convince Russia to seriously reform its transportation and energy infrastructure. Apparently neither is the memory of the Chernobyl disaster. As the WSJ reports, Soviet-era nuclear reactors — just like the one that exploded at Chernobyl — will be repaired and continue to operate for another fifteen […]

President Obama’s budget proposal includes some items that are making farm state representatives see red, but they make sense.  The White House wants to carve more than $30 billion in savings over the next ten years out of a variety of farm subsidy and crop insurance programs.Historically, farm subsidies came into being as a way […]