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With less than a week to go before the Iowa Caucus, it looks like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum finally has some momentum. According to the latest CNN poll, Santorum has moved up to third place behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, with the backing of 16 percent of likely voters. This may ...
It was an innocuous enough statement. The fact that it referred to an event that had occurred while much of the World – and particularly the Western media – was on holiday, explains why it received such little coverage. But then good news, especially if it is associated with the United Nations ...
Americans are unhappy with inequality. Americans are unhappy with campaign financing. Americans are unhappy with differences in pay and unemployment. And more than anything, Americans are unhappy that the American dream - going from rags to riches - seems to be fading away. Actually, Americans ...
Occupy Wall Street is a giant human hashtag -- a conversation, a thread, a way of organizing ideas. I resist calling it a “movement” because that may imply that people who do not yet consider themselves participants are excluded from the conversation. What Occupy Wall Street allows people to do ...
Sure, economics is about making money. But it's really about human behavior in general. In his lecture entitled "Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200: Monopolies as an Introduction to Economics," part of Floating University's Great Big Ideas course, University of Chicago professor Saul Levmore ...
By identifying overlaps between environmental and corporate interests, and forming multi million-dollar partnerships with international companies, Mark Tercek of the Nature Conservancy is seeking to change the relationship between big business and the environment. He’s also trying to save the ...
What's the Big Idea? What will historians say about our time 100 years from now? How will our world be remembered? According to Lawrence Summers, economist and former President of Harvard, a civilization's legacy has more to do with the work of its many teachers and thinkers -- artists ...
What’s the Big Idea? Quick. Grab a pencil. I’ll say a word and you write down the first three things that come to mind. Ready? Manufacturing. I’m betting China was number one. Which is why a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group suggesting that America is set for a “manufacturing ...
There’s a lot of negative rhetoric being spouted about China around the world these days. Frustrated European policymakers, for example, complain because Beijing has been unwilling to jump in and bail out the debt-laden EU without some assurances. In Washington, D.C., lawmakers in Congress ...
Economic growth is a tough thing to control if the tools you’re using only deal with one part of the economy. The problem is that when you push on one end of an economy, you might be pulling on the other, and vice versa. It’s a lesson that people who work in international development are finally ...
What’s the Big Idea? Want to scare a book publisher, a record store owner, or even a doctor? Creep up behind her and shout: disintermediation! This is the term du jour for "cutting out the middleman," which happens any time a producer of something - a writer, a band, or a pharmaceutical company ...
In recent weeks members of Congress have again moved to punish China for keeping its currency at a low value relative to the dollar. It’s fashionable and easy to blame vast, mysterious, authoritarian China for our economic problems. It’s also not quite fair. In fact, China’s currency policy ...
Editor's Note: The following remarks are from a speech Lionel Barber delivered in Sydney, Australia on 11/17/2011, as part of the Lowy Institute for International Policy's lecture series. The fundamental question I would like tonight to tackle the proposition head-on: Is the West ...
What’s the Big Idea? How many drachmas do you want to bet that Europe’s not out of the woods yet? Faced with the prospect of a Greek default with dire repercussions for European markets, EU leaders Merkel and Sarkozy scrambled in October to craft a complex rescue package. Then at the 11th hour ...
Markets shuddered when George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, said he would call a referendum on the latest bailout package being offered by Europe’s economic powers. What scared the markets most was apparently the possibility that the Greeks would choose according to their own interests ...