With the indictments of two campaign associates of then candidate Donald Trump, and the guilty plea of one of his foreign policy advisers, some people are starting to talk again about the possibility of impeachment. Let’s put contemporary issues to one side and instead ask an enduring question: Did the framers get impeachment right? In other words, does the Constitution strike the right balance?　To answer, we need to separate two decisions made during the founding era. The first involves the sta

Viewpoints Nov. 6, 2017

Great Britain, the country that, during the Industrial Revolution, got the rest of the world hooked on burning coal, is planning to end its own dependence on the dirtiest of fossil fuels. Drax, the operator of Britain’s largest coal-fired power plant, plans to stop using coal by 2020, in line with the country’s effort to phase out coal entirely by 2025.　How will Britain make this happen? In part, by switching to biomass, largely in the form of wood pellets. Biomass already accounts for about 8 p

Viewpoints Nov. 6, 2017

The Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million suspected communists in the mid-1960s, paving the path for a dictator, Suharto, who ruled the country for more than three decades. Newly declassified documents from the US embassy in Jakarta reveal an extraordinary degree of American complicity in what remains one of the Cold War’s biggest crimes. The US not only ignored information that could have prevented the atrocity; it facilitated the killings by providing the Indonesian military with mon

Viewpoints Nov. 5, 2017

With authoritarian rulers ascendant in many parts of the world, one wonders what must happen for their countries to liberalize. The likes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey or Xi Jinping in China are entrenched, experienced and not unpopular -- so should their opponents simply resign themselves to an open-ended period of illiberal rule?　According to Daniel Treisman, a UCLA political scientist, that’s not necessarily the case. For a recent paper, he analyzed 218 episodes

Viewpoints Oct. 31, 2017

It’s the rare public intellectual who admits to making big mistakes. Usually, the rule is to defend everything you’ve ever said, in an attempt to maintain a reputation for wisdom. Richard Florida, the noted urbanist and professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, is among the select few to go back and reevaluate his big ideas.　In his 2002 book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Florida both anticipated and helped promote the trends that would come to define the US

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2017

China is witnessing something most of the world’s major economies haven’t seen in quite some time: rising prices. With growth strong but debt at perhaps 300 percent of gross domestic product, that’s a welcome sign. The danger is that China’s government now hopes inflation will solve its other problems.From 2013 until this year, the GDP deflator, a broad measure of prices, never rose by more than 2.3 percent. Most of the time, it hovered just above zero. This pushed up the real cost of China’s de

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2017

Ever since Silicon Valley’s autonomous cars and mobility apps captured the public imagination, so too has the prospect of an epic battle -- between the forces of high industry and high technology. Nurtured in part by recent history and in part by the part of our brains that loves to watch a good fight, the expectation of an auto-versus-tech throwdown has already become nearly inescapable.　And yet, after the first exchange of rhetorical salvos and billion-dollar investments, there are already sig

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2017

Just a few days after Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics earlier this month, the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team released its annual report. What good timing! Thaler helped inspire the creation of the Behavioural Insights Team in 2010, not only with his academic work, but also by numerous (and continuing) discussions with the team.　Drawing on work in psychology, Thaler showed that people don’t always make fully rational choices, and that their decisions can be greatly affected by app

Viewpoints Oct. 27, 2017

Modern-day elections are increasingly defined by two sides: those who trust traditional media and those who rely on the social networks to provide an alternative, which is far more likely to deliver fake news. While in the US, the nature of the conflict is clouded by the social media‘s prevalence, Germany is an example of a society where the battle lines are clearly drawn.Multiple studies in the US have shown that Democrats trust traditional media more than Republicans do, which makes sense. But

Viewpoints Oct. 25, 2017

Economic theories of populism are dead, we Americans just don’t know it yet. Over the past week, two countries have brought populists to power, but in both cases those places have been enjoying decent economic growth.　Andrej Babis’s party dominated the Czech national election Saturday, and he is almost certain to become the next prime minister. Babis has been described as “the anti-establishment businessman pledging to fight political corruption while facing fraud charges himself” -- sound famil

Viewpoints Oct. 25, 2017

Zhou Xiaochuan, the long-serving and respected governor of the People’s Bank of China, raised eyebrows last week when he cautioned that the country could have a “Minsky Moment” if “we are too optimistic when things go smoothly.”　Although he was right to warn against policy complacency and general economic overconfidence, particularly in the context of a growth model that still relies too heavily on credit and debt, the Minsky threat of a financial crisis per se is lower than the risk of generali

Viewpoints Oct. 24, 2017