Feudalism

Even within the walls of the World Trade Organization, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, or TRIPS, is a paradox and a freak: a temple to monopoly inside the church of free trade. The Biden administration’s announcement on May 5 that it supports an emergency waiver of intellectual property rules…

A central problem in labor economics is how to raise wages without first killing off a significant portion of the workforce. Plagues have historically reduced income inequality by reducing the labor supply, with the necessary caveat that in order to enjoy this higher standard of living the worker in question…

Los Angeles may never pass New York as a world capital, but the prospect of a livable and attractive future, a beacon to a new generation, is possible if we can only make an exit from political dogma and create it. Read Full Article » Read More

For most of the last century, Los Angeles loomed as the next great American city, a burgeoning paradise riding the shift of world power west. It seemed posed to leave New York and London in the dust, the engines of growth inexorable. There was the city's dominance of the entertainment…

In March of last year, Reddit user Oneawkwardpanda mentioned that the pandemic stay-home order had resulted in a “massive dip in productivity” for them and asked for advice. “How do you keep yourself accountable? How do you stop snacking?” Many others shared this anxiety about getting as much work as…

SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE had a Romantic vision when he created the World Wide Web in 1989. In his words, he helped “weave” it together as a way of connecting anything to anything—as if he were sitting at a loom, not at CERN, a particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. But those were…

I’ve missed all the demos so far for Stronghold Warlords, the upcoming instalment in Firefly Studios’ long-running castle-building-and-bashing series, despite being a big fan of the original games. But seeing as Warlords is being featured at Ye Olde PAX X EGX, and I had my hands on the new demo…

Before he vaulted to infamy in August for allegedly shooting three people and killing two in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Kyle Rittenhouse led a regular teenager’s life in the Illinois village of Antioch. Its slogan is “Authentic by Nature.” It’s the type of slogan, and Antioch the type of…

I see the athletes' anti-racist revolt in the U.S. as a remarkable democratic moment, like the Potemkin rebellion of Russian sailors in 1905, or the night of August 4, 1789, when French nobles voted to abolish feudalism. Why? You can see a political process unfolding in the players' minds as they work through this.…

By most accounts, the Cold War came to end in 1991. Soviet defeat equaled the victory of the West. The Washington consensus set the economic terms. Democracies were proliferating after 1991, and on the horizon a rules-based liberal international order was more and more clearly emerging, a global analog to…