David Brooks's latest column in the New York Times calls for a restoration of "economic values" in the United States, with the aim of making "the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy." Brooks sees a decline in traditional values of restraint behind the rise of consumer spending to ever greater portions of …
Continue reading Will the DPJ weather the global rebalancing?
With his party's launch scheduled for 8 August, Watanabe Yoshimi has finally revealed its name.Minna no tō.Apparently the official English translation will be "Your Party." I'm not sure which is worse, the name in the original Japanese or its translation. I realize that Japanese parties have run the gamut when it comes to names, and …
Every once in a while, I read an article that is worth posting largely without comment. Tony Judt, a professor of European history at NYU, has written one such article, a review in the New York Review of Books of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism.The key paragraphs:But we have good reason to believe that this may be …
I could not help asking that question — paraphrasing Richard Nixon's famous pronouncement — read a pair of articles that look at how post-industrial global capitalism is evolving, and how publics, especially in the US and other mature democracies, are responding to the emergent order.In Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter, noting the rise …
The Yomiuri Shimbun's lead editorial today focuses on an agreement reached at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ABD) to pool currency reserves among the ASEAN + 3 countries so to be able to provide liquidity in the event of a crisis.Building on the Chiang Mai Initiative, an earlier agreement in ASEAN + …
Tobias S. Harris 