Where’s the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie
Scotland recently came close to pulling out of Great Britain. What’s that about? As the day of the vote drew near I’d see stories on the theme: If Scotland goes, what next? Catalonia? Quebec? Vermont?...
View ArticleThe Economist explains: How Palestine might become a state | The Economist
As a form of territorial governance, the nation-state emerged in Western Europe some time during the last 1000 years. Just when and where depends, of course, on just what you think qualifies as a...
View ArticleThe demise of the nation-state in the 21st century
At the moment the nation-state seems to be the right and natural way for humans to govern themselves, and yet we know that it was a historical invention cobbled together and refined over decades and...
View ArticleTrump and the end of the administrative state
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henniger asks the question of the decade, “Will the Trump presidency produce order or merely more disorder?” Correlatively, if it does produce a new order,...
View ArticleSometimes David Brooks Makes Sense: After the Women’s March
From today’s NYTimes: In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional...
View ArticleThe Nation State as an Agent of War
Tyler Cowen has a recent post consisting of the abstract to a working paper by Alberto Alesina, Bryony Reich, Alessandro Riboni, “Nation-Building, Nationalism and Wars”. Here’s that abstract: The...
View ArticleThe city-state redux
Jamie Bartlett, in Aeon: Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. As...
View ArticleThe demise of the nation state
I’ve been reading about this for several years now. Rana Dasguta has an article of that title in The Guardian for April 5, 2018. Here’s some excerpts: The most momentous development of our era,...
View ArticleDenmark has appointed an ambassador to Silicon Valley [a call for GOOD]
Silicon Valley, of course, is not a sovereign country. It is a loose collection of powerful tech companies in Northern California. Adam Satariano, The World’s First Ambassador to the Tech Industry,...
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