Human Trustees

In the first half of this post, the economist delegated by the US to last year’s G7 meeting in Cornwall, Felicia Wong, told us that she and her colleagues from the other 6 nations have noticed a shift in economic thinking. Call it the Washington Consensus of the 1980s giving way to the Cornwall Consensus. Neoliberalism with its mantra of…

This two-part post/essay is my way of introducing (and articulating for myself) one of the main themes of my present book project – human flourishing as defined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030). These 17 goals are breathtakingly comprehensive (see my 2018 post “Ending Hunger” on this). They range from those more traditional development goals like poverty…

We can’t escape it. We are people of our time and place. This often makes for spectacular blind spots in our worldview. For example, how can you be at the same time a politician like J. William Fulbright with an expansive vision for international cooperation after World War II and then oppose a Supreme Court decision to integrate schools in…

This concludes a trilogy of blog posts on the 2019 global street protests. In the first one, I focused particularly on Sudan, where women had been in the forefront. Then I moved to Algeria, where a year of bi-weekly protests produced spectacular results, at least on the surface: toppling a president, imprisoning many of his cronies for corruption, postponing a…

As a follow-up to my last post, “The Rise of Global Protests,” I begin a more in-depth look at the phenomenal street demonstrations that lasted just over a year in Algeria before they were halted by the coronavirus. Perhaps this OpEd in the Washington Post (Feb. 2, 2020) by M. Tahir Kalavuz and Sharan Grewal is the best summary to…

On New Year’s Day 2019 I read an OpEd by “the most important political artist of our time” (as Princeton University Press put it). China’s illustrious artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei, now 61 and living in Germany since 2015, ominously proclaimed, “Human Dignity is in danger. We must stand as one to survive.” Human rights are threatened all over the…