I refer to Colin Teese’s article “EU’s options for tackling the eurozone crisis” (News Weekly, December 10, 2011). While I found it interesting, I would like to add a few points that I think, at least from a European perspective, could be insightful to the non-European reader. The main thrust of the first…
The global economic crisis has created civil and political unrest across Europe and the US, while in the Middle East newly educated, angry unemployed youth are bringing down old military autocracies. World-wide unemployment is 210 million, the highest in history, with the world needing to create another 440 million jobs in the next decade for new workers entering the global workforce, according to the International Monetary Fund. So the world will have to find a total of 650 million jobs in 10 years. Already, the highest unemployment is among youth. (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, “Saving the lost generation”, IMFdirect, September 14, 2011).…
On January 14, 2012, on the centenary of the formation of the Republic of China, elections will take place for the presidency of the Republic of China in Taiwan. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Republic of China was established by Sun Yat-sen, following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the last of a series of dynasties which had ruled China for over 2,000 years. The elections on Taiwan will set the country’s direction as it enters its second century, including the complex question of relations with the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Unlike the mainland where there have…
Across the globe, the proportion of national income going to wages has been falling for three decades, made worse by the global financial crisis (GFC) and austerity measures. It also explains the growing social unrest across Europe and the United States. Labour’s share of the economic pie varies across the business cycle, but has been consistently falling since the early 1980s. Growing US income disparities: 1979-2007. According to Peter Orszag, vice-chairman of the global banking Citigroup Inc., the fall is substantial. Writing in Bloomberg (October 19, 2011), he said that in the US, labour’s share of business income fell…
THE FATHER OF US ALL: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson (New York: Bloomsbury Press) Paperback: 272 pages ISBN: 9781608194100 RRP: AUD$33.95 Reviewed by Mervyn F. Bendle “War is an ugly thing”, observed John Stuart Mill, but “the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse” (p.17). It is this insight and its implications that shape Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on military history and the study of war. This collects many of his most interesting and accessible articles published over the past decade,…
The European Union is looking like an idea with a better past than a future. We can all identify the disastrous mistake made by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels in devising the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which prescribed balanced budgets for member-states of the EU and thereafter tenaciously held to the mistaken belief (or hope?) that this could be enforced. Maastricht was the foundation on which the currency union was built. Sadly, many of those member-states joining the currency union neither intended nor believed Maastricht to be binding. But Maastricht and its contradictions are only part of the problem — perhaps,…
