politics Dec/Jan 2016

Golden Rule

In 1992, the American Economic Review published a “Plea for a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics,” signed by a number of eminent economists, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Kindleberger, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert Heilbroner, and Hyman Minsky. One of the organizers of the manifesto was Geoffrey M. Hodgson, now a research professor in business studies at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Since then, Hodgson has published a number of critiques of mainstream academic economics, including How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (2001)

culture June/July/Aug 2013

The Big Money

What if journalists were to explore the United States? The idea is far from original. From time to time, the project is undertaken by foreign reporters in the United States, or by American journalists who have previously been foreign correspondents. Books by foreign journalists in recent years include insightful ones, like Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (2012), by Edward Luce of the Financial Times, and bad ones, like The Right Nation (2005), by Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (among other huge mistakes, Micklethwait and Wooldridge attribute the

print Apr/May 2012

Obama’s World

AS BARACK OBAMA’S first presidential term approaches its conclusion, the time for assessing his foreign policy in relation to that of his predecessors has arrived. Has Obama turned out to be “Bush Lite,” betraying his campaign promises in order to carry out what amounts, in foreign policy, to a third term for George W. Bush? That’s the claim from many of the president’s critics on the left, who have cited Obama’s failure to close the detention facility at Guantánamo and his prosecution of the Afghan war, together with his administration’s Bushian record on matters such as covert conflict and

print Apr/May 2010

The Yellow Peril

A group of exiles based in New York, calling for an American invasion of the country they have fled, collaborate with sympathetic members of Congress who favor an expanded US military role in the region. Sensationalist journalists play up real and fictitious atrocities to whip up public support for war. When war finally comes, the United States gets bogged down in counter-insurgency campaigns, and American occupying forces commit atrocities. This may sound like a description of the 2003 war in Iraq, but it also describes the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the American war to conquer the

Michael Lind