Kannan Srinivasan in New York

  Karen Karniol-Tambour of the investment management company Bridgewater offers advice  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/opinion/tariffs-europe-trade-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ), not only to her high net-worth clients but to all of Europe:   Europe has lagged behind the United States thanks to its fractious and duplicative regulatory system, particularly in the tech sector, and rigid labor markets that make it hard for companies to hire and fire workers.…The continent’s security crisis may finally be galvanizing action. Germany has taken a essential step and forgone self-imposed constraints on fiscal policy to make meaningful investments in defense. The question is whether Europe will take this opportunity to more broadly transform its economy — and whether its leaders will realize they have no other good choices. Why? Because, For decades, the rest of the world, especially China and countries in Europe, have produced much more...

  Re Savarkar, Bakhle, Karnad, Modi Readers of LRB may be as puzzled as I have over the years whenever it carries  something about India; or economics. It is difficult to make out Raghu Karnad’s point ( Raghu Karnad; Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva  by Janaki Bakhle. Princeton, 501 pp., £38, April 2024 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/raghu-karnad/sacred-geography)  in his confusing review of Janaki Bakhle’s book Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva  by Janaki Bakhle.  Princeton, 501 pp., £38, April 2024 , other than that he had to read it in secrecy (I confess I faced no threat). But what does he want us to understand about his subject Savarkar , & his relevance today? Just to make this simple:  a dozen years ago I wrote an essay about Savarkar (https://www.threeessays.com/product/fascism-essays-on-europe-and-india/) where I described how he began a movement to harness a national sense of defeat after the crushing of the 1857...

Make a Desert & Call it Peace, or Cognitive Dissonance Declaring that “justice has been served,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that  the killing of Yahya Sinwar , the Hamas leader whom she called the “mastermind” of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, created an opportunity to end the war in Gaza ( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/us/politics/harris-yahya-sinwar-hamas-israel-gaza.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ) Surely this is cognitive dissonance :  for how does America not see how the world sees it? How apt Tacitus’ expression describing the Roman subjugation of Britain,   “They make a desert, & call it peace!” As it is remembered, though it might be better translated as “they make a solitude, & call it peace”  (for that supposed speech by the Scottish chief Galgacus, that Tacitus’ biography of his father in law Gnaeus Julius Agricola who had governed Britain, recounts as beginning  “Whenever...

  Is this the Nobel Prize for property rights --- or for how  genocide  is the pre-condition for economic growth? Acemoglu Johnson & Robinson  https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369   seem to argue that in those countries where colonial settlement having  followed genocide  in replacing the native aborigine, public institutions were set up mirroring those back home, thereby ensuring life expectancy outcomes for their descendants comparable to their own countries of origin. These were markedly superior to the populations of other countries where by contrast, insalubrious conditions having made settlement unattractive for European settlers,  aborigine populations were allowed to survive.  Yet since democratic representation & welfare measures towards that end were  not considered necessary for subject peoples, the colonial powers employed such territories purely for the purpose of the extraction & the t...