Archive for the ‘ideas’ Category
“Raining blood”: Suicide bombings in Iraq
In the deadliest attack of its kind since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003, a suicide bomber killed 114 in Baghdad yesterday when he lured civilians to his vehicle with promises of work, then detonated a bomb.
A survivor said that in the midst of the chaos caused by the explosion, it was "raining [...]
Hurricane Katrina, limited government, and pure public goods
Having absorbed more than a week’s worth of U.S. media commentary (primarily via the Web) on the federal government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’d like to round up some highlights here, draw a few tentative conclusions about the political significance of that response, and relate those conclusions to some other developments. The [...]
Al Qaeda in Argentina?
Much has been written on the relative irrelevance of Latin America to the United States since the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, due to its lack of importance to America’s strategic interests. So whenever something like this article from conservative Argentine daily La Nación catches my eye, on the entry of 26 individuals linked [...]
Latin America’s turn to the left
NCM Online (though I’m not sure exactly what what that is) ran a reasonably good summary of the significance of Latin America’s currrent "turn to the left," the most recent evidence of which is Tabaré Vásquez’s victory in Uruguay’s presidential elections and the emergence of Mexico City’s leftist mayor López Obrador as the front-runner in [...]
Recently in the Atlantic Monthly
When I was in grad school I had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly. Later, the magazine would make the majority of its contents available for free online. Not anymore–now the only time I ever manage to read it is when I have a long-distance trip to make (i.e., to Argentina) and I manage to [...]
On economics and self-interest
An article in the February Southern Cone edition of the leftist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique drew my attention to an article by Hazel Henderson and to a surprising piece of information: The so-called "Nobel Prize" in economics is not a Nobel Prize at all, but rather a distinction conferred by the Royal Bank of Sweden, [...]
Two books on “market fundamentalism”
Globalization and Its Discontents, by Joseph E. Stiglitz
One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank
Globalization and Its Discontents
Hardcore anti-globalization activists likely greeted the 2002 publication of Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents with the sense that a justification of their protests from a mainstream, authoritative source had arrived. After all, Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist [...]