Economy/Economics

The World’s Economic Centre of Gravity Is Returning to Asia

Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963. In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following […]

Liberalism and Its Discontents

These are difficult, perilous, and frustrating times. Many cherished beliefs are coming unraveled. Many once-shared values are no longer shared. And distrust of unshakeable institutions is widespread. Yet it was only a little more than three decades ago that North America and European intellectuals joined in acknowledging the triumph of the Western world’s “gift” to […]
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Three Presidents Who Made Thanksgiving a National Holiday And What They Were Thankful For

Three U.S. presidents were instrumental in establishing Thanksgiving as a regular national event. On October 3, 1789, George Washington declared the first federal Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln made it an annual federal holiday. And in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill setting the date at the fourth Thursday of every November. All three presidents […]

China and the US: Who is Helping Who?

File photo: China US The Politico, on November 8, published a piece on China-US relations. The article stated, “Voters in a rural Michigan town sent a message to their leaders Tuesday: don’t help China.” The article described this as “a potential warning signal” to President Joe Biden. During the past year or two, American politicians […]

Cliodynamics

Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, (2023), is one of the founders of the new ‘science’ of cliodynamics, a discipline which coalesced in the 1990s, statistical juggling ‘facts’ from the past, stitched together from bare bones (literally) of archeology, climate, geopolitics, crimes, arrests/ executions, wine imports, lots and lots […]

Postliberalism: A Dangerous “New” Conservatism

In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the most thoughtful expressions of classical liberalism, these passages appear: The true end of Man… is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of […]

The IMF’s Neocolonial Grip on Pakistan Is the Same as Its Grip on the Third World

Pakistan has made international headlines repeatedly over the last year for almost all the wrong reasons. While the country has been associated with extremism and terrorism for over two decades, more recently Pakistan has become known for natural disasters and political upheavals. Among the issues that deserve serious scrutiny – but gets little to no […]