Showing 1 - 10 of 16
It's the economic history, stupid
Oped, Iker Saitua, Published on 14/01/2026
» Every year, I walk into a first-year lecture hall in Bilbao at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and watch shoulders slump. The title of the course I'm teaching -- "Economic History" -- draws a similarly dejected reaction from my students: "Meh." "Boooring." "What's this even for?" Some call it "the history class", as if it belonged to another century.
What's to blame for inequality?
Oped, Keun Lee, Published on 01/09/2025
» Over a decade ago, Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, together with their co-author Thierry Verdier, contrasted America's "cutthroat" brand of capitalism with Western Europe's "cuddly" version. The qualities that make cutthroat capitalism more conducive to innovation, they argued, also lead to higher levels of inequality, while cuddly reward structures tend to lead to lower growth and higher welfare. Today, inequality is soaring, notably in the United States. Do policies aimed at boosting innovation risk making a bad situation worse?
Remembering a journo like no other
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 04/04/2025
» Gwen Robinson was a quintessential journalist who probed for the best scoop and pried for the juiciest gossip, an old-style old hand the likes of which we are unlikely to see again. In the new contentious era of geopolitical conflict and geoeconomic tension underpinned by American economic nationalism, Robinson's journalist craft over more than four decades explaining and linking Asia and the West will be sorely missed.
Beastly diversions
Oped, Postbag, Published on 19/10/2024
» Re: "Thailand's most unlikely A-list celebrity", (PostScript, Sept 22) & "Hippo rescue", (PostBag, Oct 17).
Meet your biodiversity pledges
Oped, Mary Robinson, Published on 19/07/2024
» This summer of record-breaking heat waves and contentious elections around the world offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on the role individuals can play in driving positive change. By building coalitions and amplifying the voices of those most affected by crises, we can muster the courage and political will needed to overcome seemingly insurmountable global challenges.
How South Korea broke the mould
Oped, Keun Lee, Published on 02/07/2024
» South Korea is one of just a few countries to transform itself from a low- to high-income economy and the only country to go from a recipient of aid from the OECD's Development Assistance Committee to a DAC donor. It achieved this not by blindly following a pre-designed development path but by taking the right detours.
Economics, at its core, is irredeemably sexist
Oped, Yanis Varoufakis, Published on 05/04/2024
» Economics has an intractable "women problem". High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And the problem runs deeper than the difficulty of attracting enough women to mathematics, science, and engineering. Even women who have reached the discipline's summit, like Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, consider economists "a tribal clique" and their models defective.
Boeing needs organisational shift to end crisis
Oped, Ashley Fulmer & Michele Gelfand, Published on 15/03/2024
» Boeing's mounting crises are beginning to resemble an aviation thriller cooked up in Hollywood. In addition to a piece of fuselage falling off midair during a recent commercial passenger flight, there was the nail-biting discovery of mis-drilled holes in undelivered planes and revelations that an inspector had found an "excessive amount of defects" in a supplier's operations.
Brics now expanding in the wrong way
Oped, Daron Acemoglu, Published on 02/09/2023
» At first blush, it may seem like good news that the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) group will expand to include Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Argentina. An 11-strong Brics+ could be more representative of the world's emerging economies, providing a useful counterweight against American hegemony.
The tragic misbehaviour of big business
Oped, Daron Acemoglu, Published on 07/10/2022
» Are successful businesspeople more like heroes or villains? In fictional accounts, one can find plenty of examples of each, from Charles Dickens's miserly Ebenezer Scrooge to Ayn Rand's rugged individualist entrepreneur John Galt. In F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan represents privileged old money, with its ruthlessness and incapacity for empathy, whereas Jay Gatsby is a self-made millionaire with no shortage of sentimentality and idealism.