Sublime

The title for the chapter on Japan is “A Bug in Search of a Windshield.” While the currency of the Land of the Rising Sun is very strong as we write, there are real structural reasons, as well as political ones, that lead us to predict that the yen will begin to weaken. At first, it will be gradual. But without real reform in government expenditure

En 1819, le Suisse Jean de Sismondi cherchait à définir une nouvelle approche de l’économie politique qui ait pour but non l’accumulation de richesses mais le bien-être humain. Dans les années 1860, le Britannique John Ruskin prit la relève, dénonçant la vision socio-économique de son temps : « Il n’y a de richesse que la vie […]. Le pays le plus r

Most of Eurasia’s population has lived in a subtropical band of latitude and climate zone that historians including Ian Morris have christened “the lucky latitudes.”

Comme Schumpeter l’écrit dans son Histoire de l’analyse économique (1954) :

If we think regionally rather than nationally, we can say that there are now three centers of endogenous growth in the world economy: the United States; the European Union; and northeast Asia, including three R&D powerhouses: China, Japan, and South Korea. For the first time since the industrial revolution, innovation is not centered in the Nor

We are left, in the end, with a need, a hope, and a conundrum. The need is to steer the new age of globalization so that our energies are directed toward ending human poverty rather than human life. The hope is that across the world’s societies and religions there are common ethical underpinnings. The conundrum is how easily we nonetheless fall pre

Governments cannot run deficits in excess of the growth in GDP without eventual consequences. As we will see in the chapter covering the research of Rogoff and Reinhart, things go along well until Bang! bond investors lose confidence in the ability of a government to pay its debt, even if that debt is denominated in a currency the government can pr

While scale is crucial for productivity and innovation, geography is often decisive in determining scale. The scale of an economy, or a group of interconnected economies, depends on the ability to trade, and therefore on the geographic conditions for the movement of goods, people, and ideas. Places that are remote or isolated will not benefit as mu