Mostrando resultados por narrador "Kevin Stillwell" en Todas las categorías

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. This means that the real winners of the future will be neither the providers of cheap labor nor the owners of ordinary capital, but rather those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

In a biological sense, last year’s Ebola epidemic, which struck West Africa, spilled over into the United States and Europe, and has to date led to more than 27,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths, was a great surprise.

Almost seven years after the Great Recession officially ended, the U.S. economy continues to grow at a sluggish rate. Real wages are stagnant. The real median wage earned by men in the United States is lower today than it was in 1969. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 1999 and has barely risen in the past several years despite the formal end of the recession in 2009.

To create broad-based and sustainable economic growth, governments in the developing world should foster market-creating innovation - that is, the generation of new products and services that reach an entirely new population of customers.

In 1941, a hand grenade explodes in a Cairo bar, taking the life of Stern, a petty gunrunner and morphine addict. His death could easily go unnoticed as Rommel's tanks charge through the desert in an attempt to open the Middle East to Hitler's forces. Yet the mystery behind Stern's death is a top priority for intelligence experts. Master spies from three countries converge on Joe O'Sullivan Beare, who is closer to Stern than anyone, in an effort to unravel the disturbing puzzle.

Four months into his presidency, at a summit in Prague, Barack Obama pledged to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet nearly eight years later, he presides over a program to modernize the entire US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $35 billion a year through the next decade and beyond. To those who accuse him of hypocrisy, Obama has said that he always regarded a nuclear-free world as a long-term goal, unlikely to be met in his lifetime, much less his time in office.

Several developed countries, including the United States, are beginning to slide toward kleptocracy. To turn the tide, reformers need to focus on cultural change.

How should politicians and policymakers respond to economic inequality? A new collection of essays offers some answers, but much work still needs to be done to turn academic ideas into practical proposals.

With US hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

At what point does an extremist become a violent extremist? As the world - wakened by the recent terrorist attacks in Baghdad, Beirut, Paris, and now in California and London, too - struggles to defeat the Islamic State (also called ISIS), the answer is more important than ever.

Few anticipated that 2016 would see such unprecedented missile and nuclear testing in North Korea, most recently its fifth and largest ever test, reportedly coming in at 10 kilotons. But none of this should have come as a surprise. Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s approach to developing its strategic forces is markedly different - more aggressive - than it was under his father or grandfather.

Brazil has rarely had it so bad. The country’s economy has collapsed: since 2013, its un-employment rate has nearly doubled, to more than 11 percent, and last year its GDP shrank by 3.8 percent, the largest contraction in a quarter century. Petrobras, Brazil’s semipublic oil giant, has lost around 85 percent of its value since 2008, thanks to declining commodity prices and its role in a massive corruption scandal. The Zika virus has infected thousands of Brazilians, exposing the frailty of the country’s health system.

An expatriate businessman, Gregg Westwood, leaves the Officers’ Club at an American Air Base in Japan unaware about the impression he’s made on two intelligence agents. They sized him up as someone with potential for strategic deployment, and more importantly, he's under the radar. Gregg's exploits start with what he thinks is a one-off assignment as a courier, and the straightforward task spirals out of control. He's forced to rise to the occasion and use every resource available to survive. Even his family is jeopardized which forces him to return to Japan to settle scores.

The Obama administration did not give away the Internet by freeing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to act autonomously. In fact, its actions will protect the best of the Internet: its openness, diversity, and resilience.

For nearly four centuries, since the Peace of Westphalia, the concept of sovereignty has occupied the core of what international order there has been. But an approach to international order premised solely on respect for sovereignty is no longer sufficient. Today’s circumstances call for an updated operating system—call it World Order 2.0—that includes not only the rights of sovereign states but also those states’ obligations to others.

Almost as soon as the financial crisis struck in late 2007, policy-makers began working to prevent another one. The roots of the crisis, they contended, lay in reckless lending and excess debt. Banks had made massive loans to “subprime” borrowers, who had little ability to repay them, and the banks funded these investments with borrowed money. When the US housing bubble burst, millions of Americans defaulted on their mortgages, and the overleveraged banks collapsed.

Fifty years ago this week, the Cultural Revolution began with a sudden shift in power. China’s youth, raised to revere their teachers and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres, were abruptly told to overthrow them instead. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong urged students to “bombard the headquarters,” smoking out crypto-capitalists and spies who had wormed their way into the party and betrayed the revolution. “To rebel,” the chairman assured the young, “is justified.”

Successful foreign policy is largely invisible. It often means paying up front for benefits that are hard to see until you lose them.

Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist who for months competed with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, has popularized a simple vision for reform: introduce a Nordic-style welfare state in the United States.

In environments characterized by rapid political change, limited rule of law, and endemic corruption, moderate citizens have rational reasons to favor ideologically extreme groups.