The Globalist

As Tamar Jacoby of Immigration Works USA put it, referring to the quotas for low-skilled workers in general, "The program is puny—less than half the size it needs to be, perhaps less than a third..." As long as demand remains strong and opportunities ...

When American and foreign observers speculate about American decline, as they often do, they tend to draw parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire. But parallels between a modern, industrial, urban, nearly-monolingual nation-state and a loose collection of tribes with an agrarian economy are worthless.

A more apt comparison is between the America of the early 2000s and the Britain of the early 1900s. Is the United States repeating the United Kingdom's decline, but on a larger scale?

... In this Read My Lips, Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” explains why the immediate concern is not a question of how many people the world can support — but rather how much consumption is sustainable. ...

The participation of a plethora of entities in governing can be considered not only as a natural outgrowth, but also as a strength of the American system.

The U.S. model of governing builds on the nation’s rich tradition of voluntary associations playing a role in public and civil life.

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, the United States needs a new economic model — one that will decentralize power and put it in the hands of the workers. As Steven Hill suggests in this excerpt from his book, "Europe's Promise," the United States might have a lesson to learn from post-World War II Germany.In the terrible aftermath of World War II, a group of prominent German economists proposed what they called the “social market economy.” They believed that a free market should also serve broader social goals.

Imagine a place where doctors still do house calls. When I was visiting my friend Meredith, living in the small rural town of Lautrec about an hour's drive outside Toulouse, France, one day she was stung badly by a wasp, causing a sizable and painful swelling on her hand.

She called her doctor, and to my great surprise within 15 minutes he had shown up at her door -- the famous French doctor's house call. I couldn't get over it. "House calls in the United States went out when Eisenhower was president," I told her, shaking my head.

When future historians look back at the major shift in power that came in the fall of 2008, they will focus not just on the election of Barack Obama. Less than two weeks after Obama's historic election, finance ministers and central bank governors from the G-20 nations convened in Washington at the height of a global panic to discuss the future of global finance.

What will Putin’s legacy amount to? For starters, let us dispense with a giant "red herring" that too many Western commentators have pursued for far too long.

What I am referring to is the question of whether Putin is a “democratic reformer” -- or a “Soviet authoritarian.”

Our meal with President Vladimir Putin took place at the presidential villa at Novo-Ogaryevo in 2006.

The drive to the presidential village was a short tour of the world of the new Russian elite -- which is now not so very new anymore, given the years that have passed since the Soviet collapse.

The new Russian elite

The road led through the former village of Zhukovka, now containing enormous villas -- some almost as large as that of the president.

The museum of the Khanti and Mansii tradition is intelligently and attractively designed, with vaguely New-Ageish references to Khanti and Mansii religion, but also genuinely interesting and informative about their beliefs.

Among these, following the Russian conquest of the 17th century, was a conflation of Jesus Christ with their traditional principal object of worship, the bear.