The fall of Bo Xilai, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party in the sprawling mid-Western city of Chongqing, is the stuff of movies. But it’s even more compelling when you begin to parse what it means politically and economically for the Middle Kingdom, and the world.
The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from 9% to about 8% in the last year, to the delight of everyone from job seekers to the Obama re-election team. But traditional economic theory tells us that shouldn’t have happened unless the economy was growing by double its current 2.5% rate.
Here’s Jim Manzi (no, not that one; this one), writing in National Affairs (via Michael Pettis) on the question, addressed here a couple of days ago, of balancing economic security with economic dynamism: Conservatives have …, as a rhetorical and political strategy, downplayed the problems of cohesion — problems like inequality, wage stagnation, worker displacement, [...]
