KGB agents are apparently not taught history, or so it would seem from Vladimir Putin’s recent statement that only “God knows” how a part of southeastern Ukraine ever became part of that country. The Russian president refers to the region as “New Russia,” an old idea that has always been ― and remains ― an aspiration rather than a fact. Luhansk, Donetsk, Odessa and other New Russian cities have been a part of Ukraine for nearly a century. And even before that, they were never truly Russian.It wa

If you can’t beat them, outspend them. That seems to be the thinking behind a huge new infrastructure investment fund being promoted by China as an alternative to established international lending agencies. It’s a terrible rationale for starting a bank ― and a good reason to reform the current international system, which remains dominated by Americans, Europeans and Japanese.Japan, in particular, seems to be the target of China’s proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Tensions between th

Saturday marked the death of Gary Becker, perhaps the greatest social scientist of the last 50 years. More than anyone else, Becker is responsible for the rigorous pursuit of the idea that human beings are rational and responsive to incentives. That’s a simple idea, but Becker used it to produce path-breaking insights into countless areas, including crime, discrimination, addiction, politics and the structure of the family.Becker was a colleague and a friend of mine, and he was a quintessentiall

At the same moment last Friday when U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel set a late-May deadline to get serious about sanctioning Russia over Ukraine, a pitched battle was under way in Odessa that killed, at current count, at least 34 people. The two Western leaders couldn’t have known about the deadly fire raging at the time. Yet the coincidence of timing demonstrates how far the U.S. and Europe have fallen behind events in Ukraine.The clash in Odessa matters not just

BERKELEY, California ― In the online journal The Baffler, Kathleen Geier recently attempted a roundup of conservative criticism of Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The astonishing thing to me is how weak the right’s appraisal of Piketty’s arguments has turned out to be.Piketty’s argument is detailed and complicated. But five points seem particularly salient:1. A society’s wealth relative to its annual income will grow (or shrink) to a level equal to its net saving

Since the early 1990s, crime rates have generally been falling in the U.S. In particular, there has been a big drop in the incidence of robbery, burglary and larceny. How come?New research suggests an unexpected factor. In the 1990s, the national government started requiring states to deliver welfare benefits through the new Electronic Benefit Transfer system instead of paper checks. EBT allowed beneficiaries to get their money via debit cards ― meaning a big reduction of cash on the street and,

PARIS ― A Cold War is purely an intelligence war. If you go on a Ukrainian geopolitical bender in front of a former KGB chief like Russian President Vladimir Putin without having a firm grasp of the opposition’s mindset, you risk launching yourself into a wall like some kind of drunken frat bro on a Slip ‘N Slide.Here are a few handy tips for understanding the Russian intelligence modus operandi and how it differs from America’s.HUMINT vs. OSINT: Russia has higher standards and capacity for espi

Democracy’s biggest flaw, perhaps, is its tendency to force everyone to bite off more than they can chew. When an overwhelmed team runs a corporation, the worst-case scenario is bankruptcy for those concerned. When a group of people has to do everything “for” a country after winning an election, there is no limit to how bad things can get.This is not an anti-democracy argument. This is an argument for some serious reconsideration of the orthodox belief that, in a democracy there must be only one

One of the key differences between Nepal and Scandinavian countries is that equality between men and women is a real thing there and not merely a slogan of NGOs or footnotes in job advertisements. In Norway, it was around the 1960s when women began demanding and were given equal status as men. Currently 40 percent of its parliamentarians are women. Working women there lead a life similar to men who have to handle both work and family. Similarly in Latin America, a Facebook post, courtesy of Deve