Europe

The Unexpected Future

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We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways.  read more »

Population and Fertility to 2100: 10 Largest Nations

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The recently released United Nations World Population Prospects: 2022 forecasts a future with fewer people in 2100 than there were in 2000.  read more »

Free Trade's Heavy Cost

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Free trade and open markets are great ideals. These principles, over the last few centuries, but especially since World War II, have created tremendous wealth, particularly in the developing world. But free markets were made for human society, not the other way around.  read more »

Media War in Ukraine: Class and Gender

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Like all physical conflicts, the current war in Ukraine is also an ongoing war of narratives, in this case one making heavy use of visual imagery.  As they have played out, the threads of these narratives have a telling sequence of their own, revealing the tragic arc of most wars as they confront the ultimate—and ultimately gendered and classed—victims of modern warfare:  women, children, the elderly, the poor and working classes.  read more »

Europe's Entrepreneurial Paradox

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When mapping the concentration of superentrepreneurs in the world, we find a paradox in Europe. Half of the top-ten countries with the most superentrepreneurs are found in Europe, yet Europe is far behind the US and Canada when it comes to high-end entrepreneurship. Another perhaps surprising fact is that gender equal Europe has a particularly strong deficit of women superentrepreneurs.  read more »

China and Russia Rejoice at America’s Quest to Go Green

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China and Russia are great War historians of WWI and WWII, and know that the countries that control the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world!  read more »

The "Myth" of Russian Gas

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Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine may be paid for with its oil and gas sales to Europe, but this gift is one that may stop giving. Russia’s oil resources are increasingly located in the hardest to reach areas  read more »

Subjects:

The Kids Are Not Alright and the Center is No Longer Holding

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Across the West, the young are losing faith in the future.

The recent French election provides a case study. In the first round vote, voters narrowly favored President Emmanuel Macron, the epitome of “enlightened” elite rule, over Marine Le Pen, the doyenne of French fascism.  read more »

The Working Classes Are a Volcano Waiting to Erupt

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Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from gender fluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs.  read more »

We Told You So: On Trade, the Working Class Was Right

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It seems impolite to say “we told you so,” but the working class and labor unions were so unjustly maligned more than two decades ago—when they fought the push to expand unfettered global trade—that it seems more than fair to serve some humble pie to global trade’s champions.  read more »