Chris Sims at the Graduate Center!

April 14, 2015 Jin Chung

How I lost my past
In almost all recent literature that analyzes Br-exit and Trump-entry, there is a constant theme of a fall from the heady days at the end of the Cold War, of pining for a time when unstoppable victory of democracy and neoliberal economics was a certainty and liberal capitalism stood at the pinnacle of human achievement. […]
How China became a market economy--Review of Julian Gewirtz’s “Unlikely Partners”
Perhaps the most momentous set of economic decisions in the world in the past half-century occurred in the period 1976-1989 when after Mao’s death Chinese leadership decided to change course and to focus on economic development of China rather than on “class struggle”. The change in focus led to the creation of market economy in […]
“Nothing is true and everything is possible”. Indeed. A review of Peter Pomerantsev’s book
It is a strange book. It does not pretend to be written by a deep thinker but has interesting insights. It is written very well and engagingly, in parts; and in parts it reads like a bad cliché.The first insight by Pomerantsev (discussed only very briefly) is how Communism created a deep hypocrisy among individuals […]
Ibn Khaldoun and Nikolay Trubetskoy: nomads vs. sedentary populations
I recently read the translation of “The Legacy of Genghis Khan” by Nikolay Trubetskoy, famous Russian linguist, who is considered the founder of Euroasianism, an ideology currently experiencing a revival in some quasi-official circles in Russia. Alexander Dugin, an influential thinker, is a well-known admirer of Trubetskoy. I will not discuss here the ideology of […]
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 […]

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Graduate Center Economics Student Blog

Chris Sims at the Graduate Center!

A blog for Econ students, by Econ students.