China and the Asia-Pacific. PLA Joint Operations Developments and Military Reform April 9, 2014 During recent high-level political meetings, Chinese leaders have made repeated calls for “military reform.” While these speeches have given little detail about the content of such reform, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in... Category: China Brief, Home Page, Military/Security, China and the Asia-Pacific, China Facing Grain Shortfalls, China Asserts Self-Sufficiency Policy Demand for food in China is increasing at an unprecedented rate, as the Chinese become wealthier. Category: China Brief, Home Page, Domestic/Social, Economics, China and the Asia-Pacific, China Sunflowers in Springtime: Taiwan’s Crisis and the End of an Era in Cross-Strait Cooperation With two years left in the second and last term of Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, Taiwan has been embroiled in a political crisis since March 18 that will have serious, and possibly long-lasting, repercussions on the dynamics within...
March 20, 2014 Previous Articles. State of Nature. By James Kwak I’ve been reading a lot of books lately, some of which I’ve mentioned here: The Submerged State by Suzanne Mettler, Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (finally) by David Landes, Exorbitant Privilege by Barry Eichengreen, and a pile of books on the national debt and deficit politics.
(Despite moonlighting as a blogger, I find books more satisfying than the constant stream of newspapers, magazines, and blogs.) But my favorite book I’ve read in a while is Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, by the historian Richard White. For some people, most notably Rick Perry but also much of the conservative base, the late nineteenth century was the golden age: of the gold standard, no income tax, senators elected by state legislatures, and, most importantly, little to no government “regulation” of business. The book focuses on the “transcontinentals”—railroads that began West of the Mississippi and ran to the Pacific. Technics and Civilization, Mumford, Winner. The Twilight of the Leisure Class. Conspicuous leisure, conspicuous waste, conspicuous consumption. Veblen coins these terms in Theory of the Leisure Class to describe the strategies the noble and priestly classes employ to assert their status. Veblen observes that a life of leisure is the readiest evidence of the superior class, while anything having to do with the work-a-day world of earning a living is the occupation of the inferior class.
This argument does not ring true for today's society. If someone gave you the advice, “If you want to show that you are better than everyone else, then hang around obviously doing nothing productive, and even better, waste resources.” you would think they were utterly pathetic. For the first two this is almost immediately evident. What goes for conspicuous leisure goes even more so for conspicuous waste. A reduction in the demand for conspicuous consumption also has implications for the economy. As Mumford points out, industrialization changes what society values. Conservatives and reactionaries. Corey Robin’s new book The Reactionary Mind has attracted plenty of attention both favorable and otherwise. I don’t want to offer a full-scale review, but to respond to the central thesis.
As I read Robin, his central claim is that the current situation in which people who call themselves “conservative” are in fact radical reactionaries is not an aberration, but the norm, and that this has been the case ever since the first self-conscioulsy conservative thinker, Edmund Burke. I’d put this more broadly – conservatism (and, it’s opposites, progressivism radicalism) are, in essence ideas about process, but the most people active in politics are more concerned about pursuing particular goals than about the way they get there. To illustrate the point consider the standard claim about conservatism put forward by Michael Oakeshott in 1956 (also cited by Robin) Now consider how someone who actually held these views in the Britain of 1956 ought to have regarded trade unions. Jimmy johnson reviews studies in settler colonialism « settler colonial studies blog.
Political Economy of Structural Adjustment - Thomas Ferguson. Global Imbalances and Domestic Inequality - Kemal Derviş. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space WASHINGTON, DC – Despite years of official talk about addressing global current-account imbalances, they remained one of the world’s main economic concerns in 2011. Global imbalances were, to be sure, smaller overall than before the crisis, but they did not disappear. Now some are increasing again, alongside inequality in many countries. That link is no accident. One often hears calls for global rebalancing whereby emerging-market countries with payments surpluses – China is the most-often mentioned – would stimulate internal demand, so that advanced countries (the largest being the United States) could reduce their deficits and public debts with less threat to their economies’ recovery.
The net foreign demand created by a reduction in balance-of-payments surpluses abroad would partly offset the weakening of public demand in the US and other high-debt countries as they tightened fiscal policy. War No More. As Steven Pinker observes, we recall the twentieth century as an age of unparalleled violence, and we characterize our own epoch as one of terror. But what if our historical moment is in fact defined not by mass killing but by the greatest levels of peace and safety ever attained by humankind? By way of this provocative hypothesis, the acclaimed psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist aims to liberate us from the overblown victimhood-by-contiguity of the present moment, maintaining quite credibly that we ought to be grateful for living when we do.
In his vivid descriptions of the distant and recent past, Pinker draws from a wide range of fields beyond his own to chart the decline of violence, which he says "may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. " He argues that prehistory was much more violent than early civilization and that the past few decades have been much less violent than the first half of the twentieth century. Don't have an account? Register.