China has an air quality problem. About 1.2 million people died as a result of air pollution in 2010. World Bank report estimates that smoggy skies cost the country 5.78 percent of its GDP every year. China is investing heavily in clean energy sources, but it still burns nearly half of the world’s coal. Last […]

In this series of posts on the nature of effective government, I want to keep the focus narrowed to questions of implementation. Many of the comments made by the governance specialists on my “What is Governance?” paper on the Governance web site criticized my effort to restrict my focus to implementation. They argued that it […]

A man killed two Chinese government officials and injured four others at a family planning bureau on Wednesday. Earlier the man had gone to the bureau to register his fourth child but had failed to pay the exorbitant fee for having more than one child and was turned away. In China, your child must be […]

Like anyone following Detroit’s downfall, we had heard about the debate raging over whether or not to sell off the Detroit Institute of Arts’ vast art collection. We hadn’t been paying attention to the actual numbers in play. John Fund at National Review rounds up some estimates: The Detroit Free Press asked New York and Michigan art dealers […]

A New Era in U.S. Health Care: Critical Next Steps Under the Affordable Care Act by Stephen Davidson (Stanford University Press, 2013), 128 pp., $12.99It’s a bad time to be a supporter of the Affordable Care Act. Public support for the law remains low, and seems to be getting lower. Moderate and conservative Democrats who backed […]

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its International Energy Outlook today, and it’s chock-full of excellent data. It points to a number of global energy trends, and the overarching narrative that emerges is the economic ascendence of the developing world (especially China and India) and the sharp rise in energy usage expected to accompany that […]

The congressional debate over indexing federal student loan interest rates appears to be nearing conclusion. On July 1st the rate for future borrowers doubled due to congressional inaction. Now a retroactive measure to address this is wending its way through Congress. On Wednesday the Senate voted 81-18 to pass a bill that will link college loan […]

Bo Xilai was indicted on charges of extortion, bribery, and abusing power today, and he will soon be put on trial, according to officials at the court in Shandong province where the charges were filed. Bo’s sentence could range from 15–20 years in prison to a suspended death sentence, analysts say, but his trial will […]

It looks as though direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will begin again after a three-year-plus hiatus, probably in Washington, sometime during the next week or so. What does it all mean, for the protagonists, for the wider region and for U.S. foreign policy?For starters, it means John Kerry has landed on the map of history. No one […]

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has released a new report that offers the most comprehensive data to date on the current costs of health insurance across all 50 states. At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff used the report to compare the current costs of insurance to the predicted costs of insurance under the ACA (which, we’ve said, wonks should have been […]