Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20004-3027
T 202/691-4000
Is It 1837 All Over Again?
POSTED: Feb 27, 2012 02:50 PMBy Cullen Nutt
Alasdair Roberts’ forthcoming book America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837 reminds us that the Great Depression of the 1930s, examined in our Winter 2012 cluster, was not the country’s first experience with financial
What We're Reading
POSTED: Feb 24, 2012 11:41 AM
Steven Lagerfeld: E-books are so convenient that I pick them up (turn them on?) only when convenience is a top priority, so it wasn’t until I took a long plane trip recently that I got to two that I had been keen to read for awhile. The authors, Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, have both written for the WQ, and Cowen is a member of our board of editorial advisers. Not only that, but the pair are the co-proprietors of my favorite blog,Marginal Revolution. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen makes the provocative argument that all the digital wonders of the past few decades can’t hold a candle to earlier transformative technologies such as the car and the railroad, which not only changed our lives but created countless jobs. That, he says, helps explain why Americans’ incomes have grown so little since the 1970s. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but like the many people who have been talking about this book, I found it made me rethink my assumptions.
Cowen also makes a good argument that we benefitted in the last century by taking lots of smart, undereducated kids and pushing them through ramped up public school and higher education systems. But that untapped talent pool is depleted now.
Education also figures in Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, which I’d characterized as a flurry of sharp jabs around a theme—
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Innovative Schools
POSTED: Feb 21, 2012 09:51 AMBy Steven Lagerfeld
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In the modest lakeside community of Mathis, Texas, cattle and cotton rule. It’s a small, poor, largely Hispanic town in the flatlands about 30 miles from Corpus Christi. Yet at Mathis High School, with a student body of just over 500, local teenagers are learning to think big. Thanks to Superintendent of Schools Maria Rodriguez-Casas, they are taking classes in Chinese, mingling with Chinese exchange students, and traveling far from their small community.
I met Rodriguez-Casas in Corpus Christi, where I traveled last week as a guest of the World Affairs Council of South Texas to talk about the WQ’s Autumn cover cluster, “America’s Schools: Four Big Questions.” An editor’s knowledge is usually a mile wide and an inch deep, so humility was in order, but happily my Texas visit reinforced my argument for a more optimistic take on the future of America’s schools.
Rodriguez-Casas is vibrant testimony to one of the few things we can say with certainty about education: exceptional leaders and teachers can make a huge difference. She’s a hurricane of passion and conviction, the child of migrant laborers whose life was changed, she told me, when a counselor took her and other teenagers to a “fancy” restaurant unlike any they’d ever experienced—at a Holiday Inn—to give them a glimpse of the wider world. Now she’s trying to do the same thing for the children of Mathis (and
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The Whole Truth
POSTED: Feb 08, 2012 01:57 PMBy Michael Kugelman
In his piece for the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly, my colleague Zahid Hussain masterfully evokes the volatility and lawlessness of Pakistan’s tribal belt. As he suggests, bringing some semblance of stability to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is essential for the future of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States.
At the same time, we must not let this remote frontier dominate our perceptions of Pakistan. There is after all another Pakistan—settled Pakistan, and particularly its vibrant cities. These are home to the country’s growing pharmaceutical, finance, and information technology industries. Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital, boasts the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of Asia’s most prestigious higher education institutes. A professor there was recently recognized by Technology Review as one of the world’s top 35 innovators.
Yet Pakistan’s cities also suffer from grinding poverty, high unemployment, and natural resource constraints. With Pakistan urbanizing rapidly, these problems will likely worsen. Such conditions, coupled with the strong urban influence of deeply conservative Islamic ideologies, are helping fuel the extremism now afflicting Pakistan’s cities.
Urban Pakistan reflects a critical convergence—one where the promise of change and the threat of instability are coming together. For this reason, it represents, according to a new Wilson Center
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Nietzsche’s Numbers
POSTED: Feb 02, 2012 09:55 AMBy Cullen Nutt
In our new issue, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tells the peculiar story of America’s unlikely romance with Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who famously proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche (1844-1900) did not live long enough to bask in the American spotlight, notes Ratner-
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