Tag Archives: war

Concur. The march to war has begun after the public has been prepared. Just a matter of time now.Dissident VoiceFurther Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game Edward CurtinSee also Russia is warning the United States firmly that it will not tolerate attacks on its military forces in Syria. The Russian policy mirrors Washington’s own, but the Kremlin has never spoken so forcefully to reiterate that it will retaliate if its forces are attacked. However, the Russian policy only applies to...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A big thanks to all the folks who’ve donated to IPA’s anti-poverty work before the year end (you can also donate through Dean Karlan’s Facebook fundraiser through tomorrow, credit to his brave daughter on that one.) Thirteen prominent economists offer their favorite econ papers of the year, but the paper making a splash this week is from Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin, comparing two approaches to combatting insurgency during...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A big thanks to all the folks who’ve donated to IPA’s anti-poverty work before the year end (you can also donate through Dean Karlan’s Facebook fundraiser through tomorrow, credit to his brave daughter on that one.) Thirteen prominent economists offer their favorite econ papers of the year, but the paper making a splash this week is from Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin, comparing two approaches to combatting insurgency...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A big thanks to all the folks who’ve donated to IPA’s anti-poverty work before the year end (you can also donate through Dean Karlan’s Facebook fundraiser through tomorrow, credit to his brave daughter on that one.) Thirteen prominent economists offer their favorite econ papers of the year, but the paper making a splash this week is from Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin, comparing two approaches to combatting insurgency during...

Peter Praet's speech at the Money, Macro and Finance conference last week was a goldmine. I've already discussed the central bank credibility problem revealed by his final slide. But his presentation went far, far wider than central banks. It raised serious questions about the future of the global economy.This slide - the first in his presentation - shows that there have been three significant global shocks in the last decade, not one: The first, obviously, is the deep global recession...

The last week has been extraordinary, even by the standards of these extraordinary times. A flurry of Executive Orders from the new President of the United States has thrown the global order into chaos and sparked outrage throughout the world. But he has only done exactly what he said he would do. There is nothing in the Executive Orders signed so far that was not announced during the Presidential campaign, repeatedly and to loud cheers from his many supporters. The President was...

Are inheritance taxes unfair? Many people think they are. "Why should I be taxed twice on money I've earned during my lifetime?" they say.  This is, of course, a fallacy. Dead people don't pay taxes. Living ones do. So inheritance tax is not double taxation of money the dead person earned while they were still alive. It is taxation of an unearned windfall for the people to whom they leave their assets, usually their children. Other forms of unearned income, such as interest on...

There has been a huge amount of analysis about the reasons why British people voted to leave the EU. Some of it is very good: some of it less so, saying more about the biases of the writers than it does about the motivations of the British (no, I won't link any of those posts here!). I confess, I have added to the literature myself. I leave it to you to judge into which of these categories my contributions fall.But in all the vast verbiage written on this topic, there appears to be a...

Image: NASA “How is this even a business?” my late father asked when I described a notional model for human space colonization. “How are you going to make money? What product are you going to sell?” Admittedly the model — developing a swarm of self-replicating , self-repairing decentralized, solar-powered construction automata and using them to mine asteroids and produce more such automata as well as habitable colonies— is not monetizable in the same fashion that building a picture-sharing...

In response to my post about the lessons of history, Claudia Dias sent me this clip from The Times, March 31st, 1939: Four months after Kristallnacht, and two weeks after Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, the British government was still repatriating Jewish refugees. This group knew they were being sent back to almost certain death. No wonder they were hysterical.Today, refugees in Greece face deportation to Turkey, and from there probable repatriation to their own countries. If they...