“When you have the wages in China doubling every few years, it changes the whole calculus,” said Christopher Wilson, an economics scholar at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “Mexico has become the most competitive place to manufacture goods for the North American market, for sure, and it’s also become the most cost-competitive place to manufacture some goods for all over the world.”
Trouble in Russia’s Other Backyard →
The president of the semi-independent state of Abkhazia has apparently fled the capital, Sukhumi, after protesters stormed his headquarters. The opposition is reportedly still in control of the building.
Reporting Saudi Arabia's hidden uprising →
In Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province, protesters inspired by the Arab Spring have been venting their anger against the government for the last three years.
Seeds of Discord in Ukraine →
As a historian of 19th-century financial panics, I knew something that many commentators do not: Ukraine has some of the best and most productive land on earth, land that fed Europe for more than a hundred years after the French Revolution. It is hard to see that now. Ukrainians have suffered for a century for the wealth that lies just beneath their feet.
Study: The U.S. Is an Oligarchy →
A new study by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern Universities finds that America's government policies reflect the wishes of the rich and of powerful interest groups, rather than the wishes of the majority of citizens.
The researchers examined close to 1,800 U.S. policy changes in the years between 1981 and 2002; then, they compared those policy changes with the expressed preferences of the median American, at the 50th percentile of income; with affluent Americans, at the 90th percentile of income; and with the position of powerful interest and lobbying groups.
No surprise, but it is nice to see real analysis to back that up.
The $2.8 trillion question: Are health costs growing fast again? →
A four-year slowdown in health spending growth could be coming to an end.
Americans used more medical care in 2013 as the economy recovered, new reports show. Federal data suggests that health care spending is now growing just as quickly as it was prior to the recession.
And that's not good. The ACA was never set up in a way to contain out-of-control costs which are due to numerous problems in the US healthcare system.
Supreme Court Strikes Down Overall Political Donation Cap →
Ok, this is the biggest story of the year so far for the US, as far as I'm concerned. The Congress is way too dependent on campaign contributions from way too few people. What's the over/under on them voting to be more competitive or open? I'm all for activist courts sometime. And ruling the other way wouldn't even necessarily be activist! Linking a follow-up article that gets to the heart of the matter, and if that interpretation is correct, it's the *conservative* *originalists* who are being activist. Ye gods, I'm livid.
The Continuing Public/Private Surveillance Partnership →
But even if this were not true, even if -- for example -- Google were willing to forgo data mining your e-mail and video conversations in exchange for the marketing advantage it would give it over Microsoft, it still won't offer you real security. It can't.
The biggest Internet companies don't offer real security because the U.S. government won't permit it.
The law needs to catch up to a reality that is moving ever-more-quickly towards no such thing as privacy.