While rising inequality – a problem that the data suggest is real but overstated – has moved to the center of public debate, the key issue is that living standards are not improving fast enough among those who are falling behind. It is this fact that is fueling much of the political tension across advanced economies today.
Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth. But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.
With US senator from California Kamala Harris no longer a participant in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes/demolition derby, we can say with some certainty that the Golden State won’t have a native son (or daughter) working out of the Oval Office, as an elected commander in chief, until 2025 at the earliest.
by Niall Ferguson, Nick Kumleben, Manny Rincon-Cruzvia The Spectator
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
[Subscription required] As Brits head to the polls for the fourth general election this decade—a frequency of voting matched only in the 1920s and 1970s—there is a tendency amongst some commentators to underestimate how radically the democratic process has changed in the space of a century. Between Bonar Law and Boris Johnson, however, the public sphere has been revolutionised. In the 1920s, newspapers still dominated. In the 1970s, it was television.
Civics education has been a problem forever, or so it seems, and if that problem feels more urgent today it’s because so many are dismayed by the erosion of civility and good citizenship in today’s America, as well as mounting evidence that younger generations are both woefully ignorant in this realm—check out umpteen recent surveys, as well as NAEP data—and losing faith in democracy itself.
As we were putting the final touches on our new report, The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What's Online Any Good?, Amazon unveiled a “new storefront” called Amazon Ignite. The site will allow educators to earn money by publishing—online, of course—their original educational resources (lesson plans, worksheets, games, and more).
The reinsertion of Russia into the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East is one of the big stories of the past decade. Although Russia’s recueillement after 1991 resulted in its effective disappearance from the Middle East, her presence in the region is of course not a new reality in history. Tsars and Soviet leaders pushed their military might and political influence into the region for the last three centuries, clashing with various great powers, from the Ottoman sultanate to the British empire and the United States. But the speed at which the current Russian advance has occurred is surprising and troubling. Moscow has inserted an enormous level of instability and unpredictability to the already murky local power dynamics.
In 1920, a young Winston Churchill wrote a memorandum to the Cabinet outlining his concerns about British policy in the Middle East. Britain was, he wrote, “simultaneously out of sympathy with all the four powers exercising local influence.” The Arabs, erstwhile allies in the war, were already unhappy with the emerging postwar settlement. The defeated Turks, Britain’s traditional regional ally, were resentful and looking for new partners. The Russians, under new Bolshevik leadership, were skillfully courting Turkey and Persia. And the Greeks wanted greater British backing against Turkey.
On a recent episode of “Life, Liberty and Levin,” Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson told host Mark Levin, “The problem at the moment is partly that we are on a kind of permanent war footing with respect to Moscow … It’s also partly that President Putin simply cannot bring himself to trust the United States.”
Imagine two school districts in a metropolitan area in the same state: one with higher incomes and property values, and the other with lower incomes and property values. Say that the schools are funded by local property taxes. Thus, if the same property tax rate applies to both school districts, children in the district with higher incomes and property values will have a lot more spent on their education than children in the district with lower incomes and property taxes.
Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has put forward his recommendations to help the ailing Indian economy out of the ongoing slowdown in the cover story of India Today magazine' How to Fix the Economy.' Rajan calls for reforms in this article, among other items, to liberalize finance, land and labour markets, and to promote investment and growth. He also urged India to judiciously enter free trade agreements to raise demand and increase domestic production.
This fall, the Harvard Law School Library continued its regular series of faculty book talks by Harvard Law School authors on topics ranging from forgiveness in law, transparency in health, and fidelity in constitutional practice. In this ongoing series, faculty authors from various disciplines come together, often with a panel of discussants, to share their recently published books with the Harvard Law community.
According to recent reporting by The Frederick News-Post (“Reducing class size number one priority” published Dec. 5, 2019), many parents and community members believe spending money to reduce class sizes should be the school system’s highest priority. As often happens in politics, research suggests that the politically popular option is unlikely to have a positive impact. Most of the public conversation hasn’t mentioned class size reduction’s many disadvantages.
Admittedly, being Time’s Person of the Year isn’t what it used to be in the magazine’s heyday, but the choice is always interesting. It is inevitably a window into the thinking of the chattering classes (and their chattering offspring). Greta Thunberg, 16, is Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019.
Just over a century ago, on February 22, 1917 (using the Russian Julian calendar which was 13 days behind the West), began the civil protests and strikes in Petrograd that would topple Tsar Nicholas II and mark the start of the Russian Revolution. It would culminate, eight months later, with the Bolshevik coup and Lenin’s assumption of power.
