Millions of people in India and Pakistan are victims of a modern form of slavery known as bonded labor or peshgi. As Dawood Ahmed writes in The Express Tribune, Pakistan and India remain amazingly ineffective at cracking down on bonded labor. Despite over a million laborers being enslaved in Pakistan’s brick kiln industry alone, As at […]

Since the Brezhnev era, Russia has been skimping on maintenance. Factories, highways, bridges, rail networks, schools, hospitals: Russians have been trying to keep them running rather than investing money they don’t have to maintain, upgrade and replace them.Corruption, low salaries and the general malaise of post-Soviet Russia make things worse.  Russia has been running on […]

The international media and some analysts in Israel are quick to say that recent protests signal the increasing influence of the long-dormant Israeli left and the arrival of the Arab Spring in Israel. Not quite, I’m afraid.A revival of the Israeli left would make President Obama’s life easier: Labor governments are usually more willing to […]

The Aspiring Chief Anklebiter has cancer, and his allies and enemies alike are pondering the future of Venezuela without him. Says the Washington Post: Chavez has not groomed a successor or built institutions that can manage a transition. He has concentrated all power in his hands, providing a focus for the opposition and leaving no space for […]

Huffington Post published an article about college students who use  ‘Sugar Daddies’ in order to pay off their college debt. There’s even a website to facilitate intergenerational hookups. The deeply untrustworthy sources for the story claim that 35% of the site’s 800,000 members identify themselves as students. Those who enter an .edu email address to […]

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy”, said Amartya Sen in 1999.Sen needs a quick trip to Kenya, where the worst drought in sixty years has forced people to survive on wild fruits and food aid.Or perhaps the theory was that two countries with famines will […]

Looks like Europe is still winning the competition for world’s most financially irresponsible major player. As I told David Sanger yesterday the US is fighting with Europe and Japan in this competition, but the latest from Italy suggests that Europe is starting to pull ahead.

From the NYT: BEIJING —Chinese authorities on Monday accused Pakistan-trained Uighur separatists of planning and executing the first of two deadly attacks over the weekend that struck the ancient Silk Road town of Kashgar in China’s far-western Xinjiang region.The piece goes on to report some skepticism about the Pakistan claim; Chinese authorities don’t like the […]

Moore’s Law has become a foundational assumption in modern business and economic thought: that computer chip capacity will double every 2 years is an article of faith among singularity buffs and other technophiles.Think again: scientists now say progress could slow. The problem is not that they cannot squeeze more transistors onto the chips — they […]

In case you missed it over the weekend, a new long post is up. You can find it here.