Open House Event For Prospective Students, January 16th, 2014

February 7, 2014 Jin Chung

English language and American solipsism
Several months ago Simon Kuper published what seemed to me a bizarre piece in the weekend edition of the Financial Times arguing that native English speakers are handicapped by the fact that the entire world (or to be more realistic, the global middle and ruling classes) are able to read or speak English. This gave […]
Colonialism applied to Europe: review of Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire”
Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis ruled Europe” is a magisterial book.I read it on vacation, and it is not a book I would suggest you take with you to the beach. Unless you want to spoil your vacation. But once you have made such a choice, you cannot stop reading it and the […]
Multi-party kleptocracies rather than illiberal democracies
The term “illiberal democracy” was, I think, introduced by Fareed Zakaria. It was used as a badge of honor by Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, the erstwhile poster-child of youthful East European reformers and liberals of the 1990s who then decided to turn over the new leaf. More recently, the term has gained further […]
Inevitability of the need for economic growth—the nth time.
Today, I got into a bit of a Twitter spat with Kate Raworth who suggested in a talk to OECD top brass that their statement of objectives (defined, I guess, in the 1950s or 1960s) which emphasizes the achievement of high growth rates should be modified to create “redistributive and regenerative economies..whether or not they […]
Why foreign aid cannot be regressive?
There are many arguments against foreign aid. Angus Deaton has forcefully argued that foreign aid, by providing resources to the governments outside normal taxation, breaks the link of reciprocity which exists between the tax payers and the state. It thus weakens national institutions, and insulates the rulers from the population. Dambisa Mayo believes that aid […]
The simplicity of views regarding civil conflicts
Twenty years ago Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore published a much quoted article entitled “On the number and size of nations”. It was the time of the break-up of Communist-ruled “ethnically-based” federations and, on the other end of the continent, of European integration. The view underlying Alesina-Spolaore (A-S) paper was both simple and seemingly […]
The war for democracy and peace: a review of Adam Tooze’s “The deluge: The Great War, America and the remaking of the world order”
There are at least three ways to look at the period around the end and just after the World War I, from 1916 to the early 1920s, which provides both chronologically (in terms of the years covered) as well in terms of the relative size of the book, the core of Adam Tooze’s “Deluge”.The first […]
My response to DeLong and Pseudoerasmus
I am sometimes puzzled whether (very sharp) people so deeply immersed in their world and their thoughts, do not want to understand what the topic of discussion is, or pretend not to understand.My post (here) to which both Brad DeLong (here) and Pseudoerasmus (here) strongly (and at times intemperately) reacted does not at all ask […]
The hidden dangers of Fukuyama-like triumphalism
Tomorrow, I am attending a conference that deals with the decline of Western “liberalism capitalism” and how it should be arrested. In the past year, I have been submerged with articles and books that discuss the same topic. They come from all parts of social sciences: economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, geopolitics…It seems that you cannot […]
Lenin in his time: Review of Tariq Ali’s “The dilemmas of Lenin”
I bought this book less than a week ago planning to take it with me on vacation. But I “made a mistake” of reading the first chapter and was so captivated that I finished it in just several days.Tariq Ali has not written a standard biography of Lenin. It is not a book that follows […]

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Graduate Center Economics Student Blog

Monthly Archives: February 2014

Open House Event For Prospective Students, January 16th, 2014

A blog for Econ students, by Econ students.