Everybody’s heard the rhetoric on U.S. China relations. They’ve heard politicians lambast China for a variety of human rights abuses and aggressively expanding their territory in the South China Sea. They’ve also heard legislators in the Democratic Party framing competition with China as a main reason to pass legislation such as the CHIPS Act (which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing). While it’s true that China poses a threat to the Post-WWII rules-based international world order, we should not be viewing this relationship with China as a looming catastrophe. In the authoritarianism-versus-democracy scenario that President Biden has laid out, there actually is a lot of hope for our relationship with China if you look at it through the lens of political economy. Before anybody can understand why there’s a positive path forward with U.S. and China relations, they need some background. Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins has studied corruption in many countries and ana...
The most dangerous thing about climate change is that it has the potential to destabilize numerous systems in our world. If left unchecked, it could completely upend weather systems and patterns, food production, oceans, economies, disease patterns, wildlife migration patterns, global trade, governments, and mental health. When poorer countries are slammed by climate disasters it can easily turn their precarious existence from poor to desperate, causing widespread hopelessness, anger and desperation. This becomes fertile ground for climate terrorism. Climate terrorism is when a few people in a country deeply affected by climate change commit an act of violence in retaliation for climicide. Climicide occurs when a small group of wealthy oil executives in rich countries continue pumping out fossil fuels despite knowing the devastating effects. Climicide is such a disturbing phenomenon because fossil fuel companies like Shell, Exxon, BP and Chevron have known all along exactly what t...
Economics is more malleable and spontaneous than Americans realize. Students are taught that the Great Depression was caused by the stock market crash. That’s oversimplified and incorrect. Ben Bernanke won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022 for pinpointing that it was in rural America where things started to unravel. When President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill against the advice of many economists, it decreased the amount of crops farmers could sell globally. Needing cash to pay their bills, so many farmers went to their banks to take out their money that rural banks were forced to close. Coupled with the rural bank closures, the economy had been strained since WWI. Average people used credit to buy new products like cars and radios, but they ended up not having enough money to fully pay. There was no real middle class, so the economy wasn’t anchored by a large population of people with stable incomes. There were no controls on the stock market, no Securities and Exchan...
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