Economy

After days of drama-filled meetings, in late October eurozone leaders announced the latest “comprehensive” rescue plan. Although it was an improvement over earlier efforts, this package, too, came up short in that it failed to calm the markets and offer the eurozone a path back to economic growth. And without growth, there will be many more months of crisis.

Providing yet another reason for its 9 percent approval rating, Congress is attempting to write the nation’s next farm bill in secrecy—sneaking it into law as part of the deficit reduction package to be produced by the “supercommittee.”

Is China a bubble?

This question - once the domain of a small group of China sceptics in the global investment community - has gone mainstream. Time magazine posed the question on its cover, warning its readers to "Be Very Afraid of the China Bubble". Global news agencies such as Reuters and Bloomberg are raising troubling questions about China's over-leveraged banks, inflated housing prices and highly indebted local governments. A Wall Street Journal columnist recently wrote: "Forget Greece. Forget Italy. Forget 'Occupy Wall Street', The really ominous news right now? China."

We all know the details of the story by now: a young Tunisian vegetable vendor loses his licence to work because of predatory local police; he refuses to pay a bribe; he complains at the municipality; they tell him to get lost; he lights himself on fire; a nation erupts; a leader falls; the Arab uprisings begin.

'Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come," the French writer Victor Hugo said. But we might add an equally important political corollary: nothing is as powerful as a crisis to propel an idea forward.

The Arab world is in crisis. The events of the so-called Arab Spring have transformed the region in a year that has seen three governments fall, two more face serious and ongoing rebellions and others come face-to-face with a new age of uncertainty.

There was a brief moment, in the go-go 1990s, when the world seemed less reliant on politics and politicians. Globalisation, we were told, was on the march. Markets - efficient and calculating and precise - would dictate our future, not politicians - venal, short-sighted and imprecise. As long as nations hopped on the chugging globalisation train, they, too, would benefit and the ride would be smooth.

In the current phase of globalization, financial, ecological, political and social crises are occurring simultaneously and magnifying each other in unpredictable ways. From the Fukushima nuclear meltdown reshaping German politics and the European power industry, to America’s sub-prime mortgage meltdown threatening the Eurozone, such chain reactions are undermining an already fragile stability.

The latest data on economic growth released this year by the World Bank confirms what we all already knew: The United States and most of the West had a pretty grim decade between the turn of the millennium and 2010. It's a well-worn story now, a decade bookended by bursting bubbles, with limping, debt-financed progress in between. But there is a lot of good news elsewhere in the bank's assessment of gross domestic product (GDP) growth around the globe: Over the same period, 19 economies doubled in size.

Robert H. Frank spoke at New America last Thursday about the guiding principles of his book, The Darwin Economy, and the policy proposals that stem from his model of economic thought. Reid Cramer started the event off connecting Frank’s ideas to recent trends: tax policy is at the forefront of recent political debates and the Occupy Wall Street movement is focusing attention on rampant economic inequality.

The second season of The Walking Dead premiered last week to ratings high enough to raise William Seabrook—the journalist who imported zombies to the United States with the 1929 novel