Donald L. Horowitz— Suppose you were advising a constitutional assembly chosen to produce a new constitution for a troubled country. Most constitutions are created because some trouble has occurred: the fall of an authoritarian regime, a civil war, mass discontent with the performance of a government. There is a good
Sebastian Rosato— The problem of the future is one of both access and reliability. There is simply no way for states to access firsthand information about each other’s future intentions. The reason is that the future does not yet exist. As one author points out, “No man can have in
Robinson Woodward-Burns— The federal framers signed the Constitution in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. The following July 4, Philadelphians celebrated the Constitution’s ratification with a mile-long “Grand Federal Procession,” led by a six-horse coach ornamented by a thirteen-foot gilded copy of the Constitution held by an eagle bearing the phrase
Masaaki Shirakawa— Currently, overnight interbank interest rates in many developed economies are zero or slightly negative, and long-term interest rates are also extremely low. Did policymakers and economists expect it to happen and persist, say, twenty years ago? Back then, only Japan experienced such a situation, and it was regarded
Matthew Rose— What comes after liberalism? We know what came before it: oppression, ignorance, violence, and superstition. The myth of our political origins is the story of how we learned to build societies on the values of freedom and equality, rather than the accidents of birth and the cruelties of
Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis— The drive south across the Detroit River from the U.S. city of the same name to the Canadian city of Windsor only takes about twenty minutes. For nearly a century, the big three American automakers have exploited this proximity by operating plants in both
Jan Lucassen— One of the anomalies of our times is the urgent demand for laboring bodies, alongside the denial of their humanity. Think of severe immigration restrictions in Japan, Europe, the USA, and Australia and inequalities in the Gulf States. In the light of a quickly ageing population and rising
Early this summer, we proudly released Duo Duo’s new collection of poems, Words as Grain. Lucas Klein, editor and translator of the career-spanning anthology, notes in his introduction that the poet’s early work has often been seen as an expression of the era, yet his poetry “has never been reducible
Kathryn Tanner— The Protestant ethic was the spirit of industrial capitalism in its Fordist varieties, where investments sunk in expensive equipment dedicated to the production of one thing meant mass production and mass consumption. That Protestant ethic was composed of a set of values in which hard work was a
Donna Hicks— If there were ever a time when leaders needed to understand the role dignity plays in the workplace, that time is now. The pandemic forced us to work from home, disrupting our traditional notion of what work looks like: where to work, how to work, and when to work.