Lest you think the bullying and foot-stomping of Congress most resemble a tantrum-prone bunch of second-graders, think again. Data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group focused on greater transparency in Washington, has shown that today’s congressional “dialogue” is actually on a par with a 10th-grader’s verbal prowess.By running our representatives’ speeches through what’s called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which associates longer sentences and more complex words wit

NEW YORK ― It is now clear that the main cause of the euro crisis is the member states’ surrender of their right to print money to the European Central Bank. They did not understand just what that surrender entailed ― and neither did the European authorities.When the euro was introduced, regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital, and the ECB discounted all eurozone government bonds on equal terms. Commercial banks found it adva

BERLIN ― The multipolar nature of today’s international system will again be on display at the upcoming G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico. Global problems are no longer solved, crises managed, or global rules defined, let alone implemented, the old-fashioned way, by a few, mostly Western, powers. Incipient great and middle powers, such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and South Africa, also demand their say.Some of these powers are still emerging economies. Politically, however, m

Oscar Wilde used to say that the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. I belong to the baby boomer generation, born from 1946 to 1965 that helped to create an era of incredible economic prosperity and technology, and also responsible for the biggest financial bubble, as well as consumers of planetary resources at a rate that will leave future generations poorer. Many of us feel that before we go to the other side, we must do something to give back to society what we w

Next week, world leaders gather for a momentous occasion ― the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Will it be a success? In my opinion, yes. To be sure, the negotiations have been lengthy. Even now there is more disagreement than agreement on the details of the so-called “outcome document” that will emerge. Yet that will not be the defining measure. Far more important is what the Rio conference has already accomplished. And that is to build a global movement f

NEW YORK ― The critics of foreign aid are wrong. A growing flood of data shows that death rates in many poor countries are falling sharply, and that aid-supported programs for health-care delivery have played a key role. Aid works; it saves lives.One of the newest studies, by Gabriel Demombynes and Sofia Trommlerova, shows that Kenya’s infant mortality (deaths under the age of one year) has plummeted in recent years, and attributes a significant part of the gain to the massive uptake of anti-mal