Political Economy

Birthright citizenship Yesterday, I wrote about what unilateralism looks like on the domestic front. And in many ways, it's similar to international unilateralism. The guiding principle is to prematurely forgo compromise and take a stance,…

If you look up the word 'unilateralism', you would see it defined as "the process of acting, reaching a decision, or espousing a principle unilaterally." And we often hear of the US choosing to act using unilateralism or multilateralism on…

I had an epiphany of sorts this morning and I wanted to run the insight by you. Here's what I decided: just maybe the Internet is responsible for a lot of the increasing polarization we see online. Here's how I came to that conclusion.…

I've written my initial reaction to the news out of Germany that Angela Merkel is stepping down at the end of her terms as party chairwoman and Chancellor. Hit up this link for that story. It's on nationalism filling the void. And so that…

What to make of the Hesse election I have a wide assortment of political economy stories to present today. I can't pack them all into one newsletter. So I am going to break out a few into separate posts. I want to start with the news out…

What is nationalism? I think that's a pretty basic question. And it has a fairly straightforward answer. But, in the wild, out on the campaign trail, it's less straightforward. For example, I often see references to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as…

I've written two posts about the history of support for the EU. And I covered the ground through the EU-15 period when Austria, Finland, and Sweden entered the EU.  Today, I want to continue the post series with the introduction of the next…

A segment on the Dutch news program Nieuwsuur prompted this post. Earlier today, I was looking at 10-year yields and noticed Italy jumping to over 3.7%. As I write this, the yield is 3.713%. And that's up from a low of 1.633% in the past…

So, yesterday I parsed the EU sentiment data from the EU's early expansion period. And what we saw was rising support for the EU right up until 1991. But after that time, support for the EU collapsed and has never recovered. I want to look…

Since 1974, the European Commission has published a twice-yearly comprehensive poll to gauge sentiment on various social and economic issues in the European Union. Today, I downloaded every one of these polls and have been busy parsing the…