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Wired magazine dares to challenge and deconstruct one of the media’s and the Western world’s dominant memes about the economy. The article introduces its readers to Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, who recently launched a frontal attack on modern capitalism’s favorite fairy...
Despite having a technocratic president in Cyril Ramaphosa, are the structural underpinnings of the economy so weak that South Africa’s future is endangered? Allied to weak economic foundations are the questions of corruption and extremely poor public administration. The mismanagement at both...
Andy Serwer, editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance, has just addressed an open letter to Donald Trump. He begins by congratulating the billionaire president of the United States on the current success of the American economy before segueing into a polite but acerbic critique of Trump’s legacy, in...
The public must decide: Should billionaires be taxed out of existence, banished from the republic or forced to do the bidding of the poor one day in the year in a modern version of the medieval “Feast of Fools”? Put another way, the media have decided that the fisticuffs, in particular between...
The first thing to bear in mind when looking at the recent violent demonstrations that have occurred in Latin American countries like Chile, Ecuador, Haiti and Bolivia is to resist the spell of common myths about the region. Latin America is a vast territory composed of 20 countries, from Mexico...
Just as it seemed that the leftist “pink tide” had finally receded across Latin America, a wave of social movements are shaking market-friendly governments in the region. While certainly a reflection of the polarized political climate on a global scale, the recent convulsions across the...
On October 20, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Maruf Amin were officially sworn in as the president and vice president of Indonesia after winning the election in April. Three days later, President Jokowi officially installed his new cabinet. The figures in the new cabinet come from various circles:...
The TED website describes Kishore Mahbubani, a career diplomat from Singapore, as someone who “re-envisions global power dynamics through the lens of rising Asian economies.” This description is not just apt for Mahbubani but also for his new book, “Has the West Lost It?” The title may...
Debate has raged for centuries over the causes of poverty, and the views expressed have not changed significantly over that time. The same ideas come in and out of fashion as seasons and sentiments change. Each person finds some potential cause that attracts them and presents it as poverty’s...
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, American muckraker Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle,” a searing account of the savage working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Such a mind-boggling exposé of exploited workers laboring amid rotten, contaminated and diseased meat,...
A recent article in The Atlantic addressed a new and emerging trend — the “sex recession.” Apparently, or so serious studies suggest, youngsters today have less sex than previous generations. This trend is not confined to the United States. Researchers in Britain, Finland, Australia, the...
