The global economy demonstrated remarkable resilience in 2023, as the United States defied expectations and managed to avoid a recession. India, Vietnam, and Japan also achieved impressive economic performance given the circumstances. But while these countries have good reasons to be optimistic about 2024, China will most likely be the single largest contributor to global GDP growth this year. This may come as a surprise to many, given the wave of increasingly gloomy forecasts for the Chinese

Last year, I was invited to join other Princeton University academics in viewing a compilation of raw footage from GoPro cameras carried by Hamas gunmen killing civilians in Israel on Oct. 7. Additional video and audio material came from dashboard cameras, traffic cameras, phone intercepts and victims’ phones. The invitation carried a warning that the footage would show horrific violence and murder. I avoid violent movies, so my instinctive response was to decline the invitation. But as so

Lately, I avoid conversations with my father because of his passion for lecturing me about politics from a hard-right perspective. It began during COVID lockdowns. Not long ago, he told me he sees Tucker Carlson as a hero. Exasperated, I told him he was idolizing a guy who had mocked his daughter's reporting on national TV. He shook his head as if I were lying or whining, then soliloquized about Carlson's defense of traditional masculinity. "Tucker has balls down to the floor,&quo

It was a hectic year-end. Flying 13 hours for a family reunion, doing last-minute gift shopping and getting together with extended family for Christmas dinner kept me busy with scarcely any time to think about the coming year, much less the requisite New Year’s resolutions. Coming up with New Year’s resolutions, as perfunctory as they may be, for me is an opportunity to ruminate on how I want to live the next 12 months. Of course, by February, I would come to realize that I had bit

It’s patriotism when love of your own people comes first; it’s nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first. That definition comes from Charles de Gaulle, a former national hero and president of France. It’s worth keeping in mind as we enter an election year in the US where these two deceptively similar and yet utterly contrary forces will clash. De Gaulle was onto something subtle but big. Patriotism, when you observe that warm feeling welling up inside of

The jetliner was packed so tight that I couldn’t even work on my laptop. The tray table was too low and the seat in front too far back. The screen on the seat in front was too close for my eyes to focus on a movie. I’ve opened cans of sardines that seemed to have more room. My partner, Rick, and I were among the 7.5 million estimated US air travelers this holiday season, a record number since the American Automobile Association started tracking numbers in 2000. We headed from LAX to

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. In classical Western mythology, dragons are hideous monsters to be slain by valiant warriors. Thus, dragon-slaying was an initiation ritual for would-be heroes. For example, Beowulf, Siegfried and Tristan were among the famous dragon slayers of medieval and early modern legends. In classical Chinese mythology, however, a dragon is a pious and auspicious creature that soars into the sky. A python has to wait a thousand years to beco

The lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labor-intensive human newsgathering against pushbutton information produced by artificial intelligence. But legally, the case represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology.

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in 2016, many pundits predicted a worldwide breakdown of democracy, and some warned of civil war. But, aside from Africa’s Sahel region, military coups remain rare, and civil wars rarer still. Instead, democracies have tended to break down through civilian coups. Such coups have been of three types in the post-Cold War era. Two have attracted much media attention; the one that should worry us the most, especially give

City rankings often produce strange results. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s high ranking for Osaka, Japan in recent years has always struck me as odd. The group produces the “Global Liveability Ranking” report for cities around the world. The 2023 report examined 172 cities around the world using more than 30 quantitative and qualitative indicators. Among Asian cities, Osaka was tied for 10th place with Auckland, New Zealand. The most liveable city ranked as Vienna, Austria,

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted that elected officials should listen to and be influenced by the views of the electorate. As James Madison said, “It is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government.” However, the means for government officials to hear from the people are limited. Elected officials receive emails, letters, phone calls and input at town halls, and some agencies occasionally ask for public comments on complex regu

Year 2023 has been another eventful year, as we have experienced in the past, and foreign and security policies are not exceptions. There were some successes in diplomacy with the Republic of Korea, but there were also many disappointing and embarrassing scenes. There has been some progress in the Korea-US alliance, Korea-Japan relations and Korea-US-Japan cooperation. However, as a reaction xto the three nations' solidarity, North Korea has shown more provocative actions, and China, Russi

Monetary-policy watchers are currently divided into two groups. But perhaps both sides should pause and reflect on where we were 18 months ago and where we are now. On one side of the divide are those of us who still obsess over the great imbalance between the supply of savings and the demand for funds for real investment. These were the conditions that underpinned a decade of zero-lower-bound (ZLB) interest rates and secular stagnation (low growth due to structurally low aggregate demand) after

The tempestuous year 2023 is waning and the hopeful year 2024 is dawning. Looking back upon this past year, the best thing that happened was the announcement of the end of the COVID-19 health crisis after the pandemic had devastated the world for three years. The worst thing that happened was the terrible war between Israel and Hamas that broke out amidst the ongoing horrors of the war in Ukraine, making so many people’s lives miserable. In addition, we witnessed the awesome power of artif

The Colorado Supreme Court did the country an enormous service by ruling that Donald Trump is ineligible to be president and squarely presenting the constitutional issue before the US Supreme Court. The high court should take the case and decide quickly whether Donald Trump is disqualified from the ballot because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It would be a political nightmare to resolve this question after Trump wins the Republican nomination or even worse, after he’s elected presi