“There are downsides to insulting and threatening friends and acting like a Mafia don slapping around his goons. You risk turning them against you, for one thing. But if those friends have been freeloading off you for years, well, there are some upsides, too. We’re seeing that as President Donald Trump’s rough treatment of our European allies has driven them to huffily make steps to actually defend themselves rather than continue to rely on the American defense umbrella.” (02/09/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey D Sachs & Sybil Fares
“History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East. Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for comprehensive negotiations: ‘If the Iranians want to meet, we’re ready.’ He proposed for talks to include the nuclear issue, Iran’s military capabilities, and its support for proxy groups around the region. On its surface, this sounds like a serious and constructive proposal. The Middle East’s security crises are interconnected, and diplomacy that isolates nuclear issues from broader regional dynamics is unlikely to endure.” (02/09/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“People talk a lot about inequality of income but there are other forms of inequality. In a society where most women get married and whom they marry largely determines the rest of their lives, inequality in the characteristics that men value in a wife, most obviously physical attractiveness, may be more important than inequality of wealth. An attractive woman has her choice of husbands, an ugly woman may be unable to get an offer from even one. In a society with bride price and dowry, the parents of an attractive woman can collect a sizable bride price while other parents, if they want to marry off their daughter, may have to provide a sizable dowry. Herodotus describes an economist’s solution to this particular form of inequality.” (02/09/26)
Source: Washington Post
by Phil Gramm and Donald J Boudreaux
“President Donald Trump regularly claims to have achieved unprecedented prosperity in his second term, which he attributes to his implementation of the highest tariffs since the Great Depression. But no matter what data points the president points to, his tariff policies appear to be holding back the very prosperity he claims to have achieved. How can one know this? Test the president’s claim with a comparison that’s as close as you get in the real world to a controlled experiment: Evaluate economic growth in the first year of his first term — which did not see the implementation of tariffs — against the same data in the first year of his second term, which did. This comparison works because all other economic policies in the two terms are virtually identical.” (02/09/26)
“Americans today spend a great deal of political and cultural energy litigating between the comparative importance and veracity of two well-documented crises, in education as well as in life more broadly. The first crisis, worrisome to conservatives and thoughtful liberals but considered explicable if not laudable by many progressives, is the political radicalization of young women. … The second crisis, broadly associated with masculinity, has two elements: male academic and professional underperformance and failure to launch, combined with elevated mortality and decreasing life expectancy …. the truth is that too many young Americans of both sexes have the same basic problem: They lack any sense of purpose or duty larger than themselves and their own preferences.” (02/09/26)
“The dollar’s lost half its value and the price of gold exploded since our author first warned that politicians are ruining our purchasing power.” (02/09/26)
“It’s Super Bowl Sunday, and Bad Bunny is playing the halftime show, and as you may have heard white bigots in the U.S. are losing their minds over it. There’s a whole separate halftime show that’s been counter-programmed just for people who experience psychological distress at the idea of a fellow human being taking center stage at one of the grand U.S.ian cultural events, if that fellow speaks Spanish. Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen, by the way. He hails from Puerto Rico, which is a part of the United States. He’s also one of the most popular and acclaimed musical acts on the planet.” (02/08/26)
“The 401(k) is one of the most consequential financial inventions of the last half-century. Accounting for $9.3 trillion in assets, 401(k)s direct the investment and retirement decisions of 70 million Americans. But they’re not as high-yielding as most plan owners might think. When workers set one up through brokerages like Fidelity or Voya, they learn that their ‘choices’ are limited to mutual funds, target-date funds, and perhaps a bond fund. … Such limits don’t come from brokerages or technological barriers. A federal law called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) regulates 401(k)s. Passed a half-century ago, it imposes a mindset that’s both infantilizing and outdated, and in practice is designed less to empower workers than protect employers from lawsuits.” (02/08/26)
