Henry Farrell

Corey Robin has two posts on Friedrich von Hayek’s admiration for Augusto Pinochet, quoting extensively from a new article by Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, and Sebastian Berger. Here is just a taste: For instance, Hayek—writing to The Times in 1978 and explicitly invoking Pinochet by name—noted that under certain “historical circumstances,” an authoritarian government may […]

A few days ago, Paul Krugman speculated on the similarities and differences between the pre-Civil War United States, and the eurozone today. Greece and Portugal are relatively poor, with GDP per capita of 82 and 77 percent, respectively, of the EU average; this means roughly 76 and 71 percent of the eurozone average, since the […]

A new paper by Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts. The size and sophistication of the Chinese government’s program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history. … In this paper, we show that this program, designed to limit freedom of speech of Chinese citizens, paradoxically […]

(original here). Update: Even if Brooks doesn’t, you know, deign to mention it, his column is obviously a response to Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites, a book which I can’t pretend to be objective about for various reasons, but which I can enthusiastically and unobjectively encourage you to buy and read (Powells, Amazon). [Cross-posted […]

Philip Rehm, Jacob Hacker and Mark Schlesinger have an article in the new American Political Science Review. There are two major approaches to explaining different levels of popular support in different countries for welfare state policies. One concentrates on class politics – the argument here is that people’s social class shapes their attitude to the […]

Locusmag notice here. His earlier work was better than his later, and his short stories were better than his novels – some of them (especially the ones where over-ripe sentimental Americana turns into horror) are unforgettable. I’ve always had a specific weakness for the handful of stories he set in Ireland (where he lived for […]

Francis Spufford’s earlier semi-autobiographical book on childhood and reading, The Child that Books Built, talks about fairytales. It tells us about Propp, Bettelheim and the others, relates fairy tales to Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood (the ur source of all stories) and to his own childhood, and finishes by arguing that fairytales pose a challenge. They […]

From the Washingtonian article on the battle for control over Cato. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies, in Arlington—which offers seminars and scholarships for students interested in libertarianism—underwent a change in direction that one former employee described as “the Shadow falling on Rivendell.” “[Charles] Koch, evidently beginning to despair at the […]

A few months ago, Jacob Kirkegaard was congratulating the EU’s northern member states for having discovered how awesome brinkmanship was as a mode of bargaining over Greek policy reforms. As I noted then, brinkmanship, contra Kirkegaard, is a terrible way of making policy. It only works to the extent that the threat of catastrophe for […]