When Should You Retire?

With this blog post, I am seemingly coming out of a short retirement, so it seems appropriate to start with a discussion of retirements.** As you may know, France has recently been witnessing (larger than usual) protests and strikes against a proposal by President Nicolas Sarkozy to raise the retirement age there from 60 to 62 years of age.

A War on “Westernization” in China

A fair share of readers have taken international relations or global economics courses in college. And even more people reading this currently mow through a daily assortment of news and blog content. It would not be presumptive of me, then, to assume that you know the ubiquity with which the term “Westernization” is used in both academic and daily communication.
But the word “Westernization” is usually meaningless. Authors and laypeople alike need to quickly reduce the frequency with which they use this term.

The Costs of Imperialism

A friend recently sent me a presentation at TED by a doctor named Hans Rosling, who has already gained some fame at TED for his first talk, in which he made statistics more visually palatable and effective for learning. In the latest video, which you can view below, Rosling estimates that China and India will reach the per capita income level of Western countries by 2048. Seeing as growth models often change, this is open to debate.