The Economist

“I PRAY to God that I will never know about economics,” President Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in his economic policy. The Lord appears to have answered his prayer. On his watch, the world oil price has soared from $62 a barrel when he was elected in June 2005 to $72 a barrel in recent weeks. Iran, which has a young, well-educated workforce, along with the world's second-largest reserves of both oil and gas, should be on… more

With his leg injured in a recent skiing accident, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, this week announced a plan that could change the terms of America's health-care debate. The Republican in charge of the country's most populous state, where 6.5m people, almost one resident in five, lack medical insurance, said he wants to introduce universal health-care coverage.

His recipe is a combination of insurance-market reform, government subsidies and—most important—compulsion...

Although the details are still sketchy, Mr Schwarzenegger's plan is very like another pioneering… more

A year ago, the prospects for democracy in the Muslim world depended solely on incremental developments in the politics of individual countries. Free elections in Turkey, for example, had brought to power an Islamic-oriented party which was, and still is, governing democratically with less military interference than many expected. Quasi-free elections in Morocco and Pakistan had shown that Islamic parties would win votes when autocratic rulers gave them a chance to take part. In Iran, meanwhile, it… more

There is always something new out of California. Watch out for an initiative on the state ballot in March 2002 that will take the first step towards barring the identification of Americans by race. It could overturn, in time, the whole apparatus by which government delivers social policy. It could mark the start of the end of "hyphenated Americans": those who call themselves African-American, native-American, Chinese-American and so on. A new generation is arriving that may spurn the definitions their… more

In 1790, the United States became the first modern nation to undertake a comprehensive count of its population as a routine responsibility of government. The constitutionally mandated decennial census was part and parcel of a revolutionary concept in government. If the new nation's democratically elected governments were to be truly representative of… more