Coca-Cola: Globalization in the Modern Mayan World
We know we’re living in a globalized world when we realize we’re able to go to our local grocery store and find food from every continent or when our need [...]
Region northamerica
Caution, Migrants Crossing: The Black Economy of Transmigration in Mexico
In August 2011, a heap of 72 bodies of illegal migrants who had been summarily executed was found in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Most of them were Central Americans from El Salvador, [...]
Better Integration: The Lesson of the Boston Bombings?
Just the other day I was having this rather unusual conversation with one of my American friends. I was fascinated at the depth of ‘philosophical’ ideas he had about multiculturalism [...]
Can Washington Fix the Economy?
Panelists at the Bertelsmann Foundation’s economic conference do not see much opportunity for progress in Washington DC; however, this might not be as bad as many think. Can gridlock be good if it prevents the government from doing too much harm?
INCRA: Rating the United States
Our blogger Josh Grundleger reports about the Bertelsmann Foundation’s fifth annual conference which focuses on economic growth through innovation, global financial governance and the eurozone crisis: “System Upgrade: Time for [...]
Certain about Uncertainty
Our blogger Josh Grundleger reports about the Bertelsmann Foundation’s fifth annual conference which focuses on economic growth through innovation, global financial governance and the eurozone crisis: “System Upgrade: Time for [...]
The Partisan Divide
Our blogger Josh Grundleger reports about the Bertelsmann Foundation’s fifth annual conference which focuses on economic growth through innovation, global financial governance and the eurozone crisis: “System Upgrade: Time for [...]
City Living
A citizen and his State. This relationship is at the forefront of discussion as the welfare state tests its limits and migration patterns become increasingly metropolitan. Thanks in particular to [...]
Women’s “Work” ? The case of Sexual Exploitation
She wakes up in the morning with no dreams on the table, no plans for the future and nothing but the promise of around 30 to 50 men paying to [...]
The Illusion of the Welfare State
Western cultures have developed an illusion of the welfare state. The US and Europe must correct this cultural misperception of what a welfare state can and cannot accomplish before they can successfully address its economic problems.
Crossing Borders For Health: Mexico and the USA
When you consider what nations have the most effective health care systems, most Mexicans think of countries like Cuba, where the welfare state provides comprehensive general medicine, or France, where [...]
Mutual Benefits: The Path to Sustainable Governance
“There are men who fight one day and they are good, men who fight one year and they are better, men who fight many years and they are really great, [...]
Contradictions in a Two-Tiered Nation
Health care in the U.S. is treated more like a consumer good than a right for all people—regardless of age, race, class, or sex. In fact, the health care industry [...]
Unhealthy Healthcare
The Mexican healthcare system suffers from a peculiar disease best known as financial dysfunction. Its main symptoms consist of a constantly growing number of users contrasted with revenue insufficient to [...]
Designing our very own American Dream
Growing up in Central and South America, we were raised on tales of the “American Dream”: how an immigrant could go to the USA and before long have a house, [...]
At Risk of the Flu
“Only a crisis- actual or perceived- produces real change”- Milton Friedman In September 2011, Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre stood at a scientific conference in Malta and announced [...]
Lighting a Fire in the Economy
An economy is, in many ways, like a forest. It is constructed by opposing and necessary forces that together strengthen the whole. Without the destructive, the constructive would cease to exist. Without fire, the forest would choke on its own excess. Without economic downturn and job loss, so would an economy.
Mexico and the 2008 Financial Crisis, from Flu to Pneumonia
In early 2008 preceding the American economic crisis, former Mexican Treasury Secretary Agustín Carstens stated that the effects of such a recession on the Mexican economy would be “a simple [...]
El lado oscuro del TLCAN: una historia sobre el campesinado en México
Abstract: In spite of the enormous commercial benefits brought by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), millions of Mexican farmers have been forced to withdraw from the market as [...]
Spanish Youth Look for Jobs in Mexico
The youth unemployment situation in Spain is disturbing: more than 50% of young people (between 18 and 30 years old) are unemployed. This has caused a strong immigration wave of Spanish youth [...]
Transformational Diplomacy: Liberalism, not democracy
On January 18, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new foreign policy called transformational diplomacy. Challenging old assumptions that the domestic character of other countries did not matter for [...]
The Whole Enchilada
9/11 not only changed American discourses on security but also modified the US- Mexican relations and with it its promises of a fair accomplishment of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) regarding immigration and trade
Adding Insult to Injury: Natural Disasters and the Poor
As Hurricane Sandy made landfall in my home state of New Jersey, eight members of my immediate family and myself were huddled in our basement. Power was out and there [...]
Why They Are Afraid
Barely a week into London’s post-Olympic stupor, before the stardust had settled, a lanky, middle-aged man emerged on the ground-floor balcony of a white stucco-fronted, red-brick building on Hans Crescent, [...]
Conflict is Here to Stay
Conflict is an innate aspect of human nature and thus inevitable. Man can never realistically avoid every single point of discord. Different perspectives, disagreements, divergent values, competing goals, and overlapping claims will always exist. Individuals, and the states they construct, in the quest to achieve their goals, will thus indubitably come to loggerheads. To ignore this fact is to lead policymakers, and the people who they are supposed to protect, down a dangerous path.
