Most economists would say that the most crucial factors in economic growth are workforce, the quantity and quality of it, and capital. Often ignored is the subtle but crucially important role of culture, the way people in a society behave towards other members of the society. A case in point is the economic gap between the U.S. and Brazil: While both countries are endowed with abundant natural resources and filled with non-aboriginal people, Brazil has been unable to match the U.S. for all these

In the opening scene of George Romero’s 1968-horror classic “Night of the Living Dead,” two characters ― Barbra and Johnny ― drive along a convoluted rural road. They’re visiting a desolate cemetery where their father lays buried. He has been dead for many years ― in fact so long that Johnny doesn’t even remember what he looks like. Barbra and Johnny are both adults now, living in a big city, far away from the place where they grew up. They’ve been making the annual trip to their father’s grave

JP Morgan, BP, Walmart, and the multibillionaire Koch brothers have just launched a TV advertisement blasting President Obama for the national debt.Actually, I don’t know who’s behind the ad because there’s no way to know. And that’s a big problem.The ad was paid for by Crossroads GPS, the sister organization to the super PAC American Crossroads run by Republican political operative Karl Rove. But because Crossroads GPS is a nonprofit, tax-exempt “social welfare organization,” it can spend unlim

YANGON ― Across the Middle East, and now in Burma (Myanmar), one of the great questions of contemporary global politics has resurfaced: How can countries move from a failing authoritarianism to some form of self-sustaining pluralism? Foreign ministers everywhere, in turn, face crucial policy questions: When a country launches such a political transition, when should other countries help, and what is the best way to do so?Happy transitions, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are all alike; but every unhappy

In 1764 an Italian nobleman named Cesare Beccaria published a short treatise entitled “On Crimes and Punishments.” In this text he argued convincingly for the abolition of the death penalty from modern society. As we approach the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of this text there is a worldwide movement for the abolition of the death penalty. South Korea has been a part of this movement since 1998 after Kim Dae-jung, a former death row inmate, was inaugurated as president

SEOUL ― Last month, the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea agreed to begin negotiations later this year on a trilateral free-trade agreement. If the talks succeed, the global trade map will need to be redrawn. An FTA that encompasses, respectively, the world’s second, third, and 12th biggest economies (in purchasing power parity terms in 2011), with a population of 1.5 billion, would dwarf the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement, comprising the United States, Canada,

Even before NATO forces begin leaving Afghanistan, predator nations are pouring lavish praise, diplomatic agreements and buckets full of cash on Afghan leaders, trying to win access to the nation’s vast natural resources after Western troops leave.Chief among them are China, Iran and India ― nations that contributed nothing toward the military effort over the last decade but hope to reap benefits from it anyway.For example, in Beijing late last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Chinese Pre