Putin ordered hack on Democratic Party database - Financial Times

Putin behind hacking of Democrates ' data base to sway election in Trump's favour -

Russian President Vladimir Putin personally approved Russian cyber attacks aimed at interfering with last year’s presidential election motivated by “a clear preference” for Donald Trump, according to a newly declassified study by the US intelligence community.

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In“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” the report concluded. “Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

The joint effort by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency said the campaign was in keeping with Moscow’s traditional interest in weakening the US-led global order. But the use of purloined emails to hobble Democrat Hillary Clinton marked a “significant escalation” beyond traditional Russian espionage activities, it added, writes David Lynch in Washington.

All three agencies agreed that Russia “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances” by discrediting Clinton or contrasting her unfavorably to him. The CIA and FBI said they had “high confidence” in that judgment while NSA backed it with moderate confidence.

Russia took a flexible approach to executing a multi-faceted campaign involving cyber attacks, traditional propaganda, and “fake news” spread via social media “trolls.” When Mrs Clinton appeared likely to be elected, the campaign focused on “undermining her future presidency.”

Putin has nursed a grudge against Clinton for what he saw as her role in anti-government protests in Moscow in late 2011 and 2012, the report said. The Russian leader also “has had many positive experiences working with Western business leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia,” the report said, citing forme Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

On Election Day, Russian social media allies readied an effort to call into question the legitimacy of the vote through the twitter hashtag #DemocracyRIP, the report said

Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), responsible for overseas spying, likely began its cyber attacks against the Democratic national Committe computers in March of last year. By May, Russian hackers had extracted “large volumes of data from the DNC,” the report said.

Financial Times

Intelligence report says Putin ordered the computer hack to help Trump - Economist

Intelligence report says Putin ordered a campaign to help Trump

Jan 6th 2017, 22:40  by LEXINGTON | WASHINGTON, DC 

AMERICAN democracy has suffered a grave assault—yet political leaders from its two main parties cannot agree on how or even whether to investigate. In a move that is both astonishing and without precedent the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on December 6th issued a declassified version of a secret assessment earlier given to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It found that the intelligence services of a foreign country hacked into the email accounts and computers of senior officials involved in the 2016 presidential campaign, notably at the Democratic National Committee, and released much of that stolen data to the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website. The same hostile power also gained access to computer systems of several state and local electoral boards (though not systems involved in vote tallying) and used an array of front organisations, television channels and social media “trolls” to feed disinformation and propaganda to American audiences, in a bid to influence the result of the election and “undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

In language as blunt as it is startling, the assessment, written by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, declares that this crime is no whodunit. Though the declassified report does not make public its sources or supporting evidence, it declares the “high confidence” of American spy chiefs that they know the culprit. It finds that: “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Russia succeeded in swaying the election results, though leaks from government officials to the Washington Post reported on December 5th that American spooks picked up gleeful communications among senior Russian figures celebrating Mr Trump’s win. The saga is so alarming because political leaders and the two parties have failed to unite in defence of their country.

Mr Trump’s reaction has been the most troubling. To him the hacking of the DNC and such figures as John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton presidential campaign, is not so much a whodunit as a “who cares”? In a long string of scornful tweets over many days he has cast doubt on American intelligence agencies, suggesting that they are too incompetent to know whether Russia is to blame (he mentioned their failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction more than once). In an interview with the New York Times, shortly before being briefed on the DNI’s assessment, Mr Trump called the hacking probe “a political witch hunt” against him. He has urged America to “move on” rather than impose sanctions on Russia and in a statement after his briefing endeavoured to divert opinion away from Moscow. “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations,” Mr Trump said, promising that as president he would appoint a team to come up with a plan to combat cyber-attacks, whose details would necessarily remain secret to avoid helping foes.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have mostly refrained from trash-talking American intelligence agencies, but otherwise struggled to present a united front. Perhaps the best way to understand this confusing situation is to take a leaf from the world of criminal justice. When seeking to prove a crime, cops and prosecutors know that they must weigh three key elements.

The first involves proving that a suspect had the means to commit a crime. That is not a controversial question in this case. Hacking is all too common, and many countries have been credibly accused of carrying out cyber-spying.

The second element in a criminal prosecution involves opportunity. This is the point that unites Mr Trump with Republicans in Congress. The president-elect and his future colleagues on Capitol Hill may disagree on whether Russia is behind the hacking, with such party leaders as Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, saying that it is clear that Russia is to blame, and denouncing “any outside interference in our elections.”

But when it comes to explaining how hackers were able to steal emails with such ease, Mr Trump and senior Republicans have been happy to blame Democrats for allowing themselves to become victims.

To buttress that criticism Mr Trump has quoted the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. One Trump Tweet declared: “Julian Assange said "a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta" - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

The chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, Representative Ed Royce of California, joined many congressional colleagues in a formulation of sinuous elegance. In a statement Mr Royce condemned Russia for hacking the election, but then pivoted and blamed a weak Mr Obama for creating that opportunity for mischief.

“This report confirms what we already know: Vladimir Putin’s acts of aggression pose serious threats to vital US interests.  The Obama administration’s response to Putin’s propaganda machine was weak and ineffective in Eastern Europe, and now we’re paying the price here at home.” Mr Royce declared, adding for good measure that the report found no evidence that “Russian meddling impacted our voting and tallying process in any way.  Donald Trump won.”

But it is the third key element of a criminal prosecution that really divides the political classes: motive. All the rowing and squabbling about who did what among Republicans and between Republicans and Democrats boils down to this: lots of powerful figures in American politics cannot bear to contemplate a much more painful question: why the hacking was carried out.

The DNI’s report does not mince words. It finds that the motive of the Russian government was to help Mr Trump win. The declassified report says: “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”

In contrast, the DNI report finds, Mr Putin publicly praised Mr Trump’s willingness to work with Russia and “pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin publicly contrasted the President-elect’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric”.

There is more. Official Washington has seethed for months with rumours about various forms of leverage that Russia or Russian interests might have over Mr Trump. The DNI report does not shed any light directly on that question. But it does include the following striking paragraph: “Putin has had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.”

Mr Trump can hardly deny that he has called for closer and friendlier links with Russia. He has repeatedly praised Mr Putin as smart and strong. In July 2016 he publicly expressed hopes that Russian intelligence agencies had hacked into Mrs Clinton’s private email server and encouraged them to publish what they found.

But for other Republicans, the idea that a hostile Russia thinks of the Republican president-elect as an ally is too much to bear. So that motive cannot be confronted head-on. Mr Ryan’s statement after the publication of the DNI report sidesteps the question of whether Russia might have wanted Mr Trump to win. Instead it seems to question the motives of those drawing attention to that claim, saying: “We cannot allow partisans to exploit this report in an attempt to delegitimize the president-elect’s victory. Donald Trump won this election fair and square because he heard the voices of Americans who felt forgotten.”

Mr Ryan and other Republican leaders have every incentive to want this story to go away, and stop casting a shadow on the inauguration of Mr Trump on January 20th. Given the Republicans’ unified control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, do not expect very much from committee probes into the election hacking which have been announced.

This tawdry tale cannot be forgotten, though. In the weeks between his election victory and taking office Mr Trump has chosen to tear down public trust in intelligence services he will soon lead, telling his supporters, in effect, not to believe the very federal bodies tasked with keeping the country safe. Follow the trail of means, opportunity and motive, and all evidence suggests that Mr Trump has carried out his own assault on America’s body politic.

Economist

Trump makes it necessary to re-define the term " elite " - New York Times

Our new president is a private-jet-setting billionaire Ivy League graduate, a real estate tycoon, a TV star and a son of inherited wealth. But he is no longer, by his own calculations, a member of the “elite.” Nor are the men (and the few women) now joining his inner circle — 1-percenters and corporate executives, Harvard and Yale alumni, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Goldman Sachs bankers. The true elite apparently sits elsewhere, among those who, in Sarah Palin’s notable 2008 formulation, think “that they’re — I guess — better than anyone else.”
As an adjective, the word “elite” still conveys something positive, even aspirational: elite athlete, elite model, elite travel services. But as a noun, embodied by actual living people, it has become one of the nastiest epithets in American politics. “Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans,” complainsTrump’s adviser Steve Bannon (of Harvard, Goldman Sachs and Hollywood). In this formulation, elites are a destructive, condescending collective, plotting against the beleaguered masses outside their ranks.
And in these attacks, the president-elect and his team are deploying one of the most effective partisan political stereotypes of the modern age. For most of American history, anti-elite sentiment was a matter of up versus down, not left versus right. But about half a century ago, the conservative movement set out to claim anti-elite politics as its own. That meant redefining the term away from class and toward culture, where the “elite” could be identified by its liberal ideas, coastal real estate and highbrow consumer preferences. The right-wing Club for Growth captured this type in a famous 2004 attack ad, instructing the Democrat Howard Dean to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”
Trump adjusted the formula for the hot topics of the 2016 campaign. “I was on the right side of that issue, as you know, with the people,” he boasted after Brexit, adding that “Hillary, as always, stood with the elites.” His complaints against “political correctness” conjure a world of absurdist campus politics, where overprivileged students squabble over gender pronouns and the fine points of racial victimization. “Media elites” come in for special attack, cordoned off in pens to be mocked and jeered at during rallies, labeled both liars and incompetents.
But Trump has also ventured beyond mere name-calling, turning the 2016 election into a competition between knowledge systems: the tell-it-like-it-is “people” versus the know-it-all “elites.” His campaign insisted for months that pollsters and technocrats and media would be proven wrong by his electoral success. The fact that he did win dealt a blow to an entire worldview, one in which empirical inquiry and truth-telling were supposed to triumph in the end. The question, now, is whether it’s possible to run an executive branch based on hostility toward experts and professionals of all political stripes — and how many billionaires and Ivy Leaguers Trump can appoint before this rhetorical pose begins to break down altogether.
The notion that distant elites might be conspiring against the people comes straight from the Founding Fathers, whose Declaration of Independence lamented the “long train of abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon ordinary Americans by an arrogant British king. From there on, United States history might be seen as a repeating cycle of anti-elite revolt. The Jacksonians rebelled against the Founders’ aristocratic pretensions. Northern “free labor” went to war against the oligarchical slavocracy. And the Populist revolts of the late 19th century adapted this story to modern capitalism, with farmers and laborers rebelling against robber barons, bankers, time-management experts and college-educated professionals.
The first historians to study those Populists described them as heroic crusaders, champions of the “people” against the “powers.” But by the middle of the 20th century, alarmed by the rise of fascism and homegrown demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy, a new generation of scholars took a more anxious view of the anti-elite spirit. In his 1955 book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter dismissed the Populists as backward-looking, provincial anti-Semites, the latent fascists of their day. Eight years later, his “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” documented a dangerous suspicion of “the critical mind” that seemed to course through the national culture. From his perspective, the 1952 election captured everything wrong with American political life, with Dwight Eisenhower’s “philistinism” winning over Adlai Stevenson’s “intellect.”
Hofstadter did not usually describe his ideal intellectually minded citizens as members of an “elite.” That word conveyed something different — a ruling class that held direct political and economic power. The most famous articulation of this view came from the sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 assessment of America’s “power elite.” “They rule the big corporations,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment.” In Mills’s view, these people were tied together not by culture or ideology but by their positions at the helms of large, ever-more-complex institutions. As individuals, they might be Republicans or Democrats, and might live in Ohio or California. The point was that they were in charge of things.
But that vision never gained much traction in mainstream politics, where a more partisan, targeted definition was starting to emerge. William F. Buckley Jr. carved out some essentials in his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” drawing a neat distinction between respectable Ivy-educated men like himself and the socialistic eggheads of the professoriate. Ronald Reagan chose the term “elite” to bring it all together in his famed 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. “This is the issue of this election,” he said: “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
Lyndon Johnson won that election in a blowout, but Reagan’s vision of a smug and detached liberal elite helped spark the oncoming “culture wars,” pitting a supposedly indignant Middle America against the liberal snobs of the coasts. By the 1990s, with the rise of right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, bashing the “liberal elite” had become a favorite blood sport of the American right.
Despite all the abuse hurled their way, some “liberal elites” have accepted at least part of their detractors’ critique, particularly on the progressive left. It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that the social critic Christopher Lasch published “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” which mourned that “upper-middle-class liberals” had turned into “petulant, self-righteous, intolerant” scolds, thoroughly out of touch with the concerns of Middle America. Since then, the torch has passed to a younger generation of writers, including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, whose 2012 “Twilight of the Elites” called for rethinking the entire ethos of liberal “meritocracy” — a system, he argued, that tends to fuel self-congratulation and incompetence at the top while offering little but contempt and dim prospects for those at the bottom.
So as 2017 begins, we find ourselves in a strange and uncertain political moment. Antipathy toward a wealthy, preening managerial class seems to be gaining popularity across the political spectrum — and, oddly, to have helped elect a wealthy, preening incoming president. Meanwhile, both liberal and conservative “elites” are scrambling to figure out what happens if the president-elect continues to reject basic political norms and even routine intelligence briefings. Under a Trump presidency, such “elites” may have no choice but to attempt a radical redefinition of their role in American life. Otherwise, the man in the White House will do it for them.
Beverly Gage is a history professor at Yale. She last wrote for the magazine about Donald Trump’s Nixonian calls for ‘‘law and order.’’

New York Times

Putin won last round against Obama - Economist

Vladimir Putin wins his last round against Barack Obama
IT WAS Vladimir Putin as we have come to know him: unpredictable, cynical and skilful at trumping real events with propaganda. On December 29th Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats involved in intelligence work (along with their families), ordered two Russian diplomatic compounds in America closed, and imposed fresh sanctions against Russian security agencies and a list of individuals. Mr Obama was retaliating for Russian interference in America’s elections, which included hacking the computers of high-level Democratic Party officials and leaking the embarrassing contents to the press. The White House expected Russia to eject an equal number of American diplomats. Instead, Mr Putin responded asymmetrically, parrying the American action and mocking Mr Obama as a bitter loser.
Mr Putin’s performance was carefully choreographed. In the first move Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, appeared on state television to declare that Russia would respond to America’s actions in kind. The foreign ministry and other agencies, he said, had proposed to Mr Putin that 31 diplomats from the American embassy and four diplomats from the consulate in St Petersburg be declared personae non gratae. Mr Lavrov also recommended shutting down the American embassy’s dacha in a wooded Moscow park.
In the second move, Mr Putin publicly overruled his foreign minister. While America’s actions were “unfriendly” and “provocative”, and merited the toughest response, Mr Putin said, he would not “resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy” but would instead plan steps for improved relations with the incoming president, Donald Trump. Moreover, he would not punish the children of American diplomats for the tensions between the two countries. Instead, he invited them to a Christmas and New Year’s Day show at the Kremlin. He then wished Mr Obama and Mr Trump a happy new year.
Russian state television, which has been pumping out anti-American propaganda for years, quickly seized on a new narrative. “The provocation has failed,” announced a news anchor on Channel One. Mr Obama had found himself “in a puddle”, while Mr Putin had displayed diplomatic “mastery at the world level”. The invocation of Christmas and family seemed a backhanded jab at Mr Obama’s pacific reputation and his public displays of affection for children. The media stunt earned an unctuous tweet from Mr Trump: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”
Mr Trump’s tweet added to the mystery of his apparent infatuation with Mr Putin and fuelled anxiety about Russia’s ability to undermine American democracy. Yet for pro-Western Russian liberals, the panicked attitude of some of America’s mainstream media was equally discomfiting. It seemed a mirror image of Russia’s own hysteria about the role of America in sowing chaos and staging colour revolutions in Russia’s back yard.
“In the eyes of the West, Russia appears to be the source of most uncomfortable social changes,” wrote Maxim Trudolyubov in a column in Vedomosti, an independent daily. “As a Russian, it is amusing to watch this. The West now identifies all its problems with ‘Russia’, just as Russia identifies all its problems with ‘the West’.”
Americans’ treatment of Russia as a bogeyman fills Mr Putin’s supporters with pride. They see it at a sign of Russia’s renewed great-power status. But while the Kremlin may be benefiting from fears of its influence in the short term, it is unclear how it plans to turn those fears to its longer-term advantage. Mr Putin has long depended on fear of America as a mighty enemy to reinforce his hold on power. Kicking the outgoing Mr Obama may be a poor substitute. Paradoxically, Mr Trump’s dismissal of Russian influence could be more harmful to the Kremlin’s narrative than fears of its interference.
Economist

Ex-CIA chief resigns from Trump's transition team - NBC News

Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey Quits Trump Transition Team

Former CIA director James Woolsey has left the Donald Trump presidential transition team, a spokesman for the former defense official and ambassador said. 

"Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a senior advisor to President-elect Trump or the Transition. He wishes the president-elect and his administration great success in their time in office," Woolsey spokesman Jonathan Franks said in a statement on his behalf. 

Woolsey, who was CIA director under President Bill Clinton, had served as a senior adviser to Trump on national security and intelligence.

Woolsey said in an interview on CNN Thursday night that he put out the statement to clear up a possible misconception that he was more heavily involved in the transition process, or that he was still giving advice to the president-elect. 

Related: Clapper Takes Swipe at Trump, Assange as He Defends Russia Hack Intel

A person close to Woolsey said the former CIA chief "didn't want to have his name out there as a 'senior adviser' when he wasn't giving advice," citing the strong influence on Trump of incoming National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. 

The resignation comes as Trump has been in a war of words with U.S. intelligence agencies over assessments that the Russian government was likely involved in a covert campaign to attempt to interfere in the U.S. election. 

A source close to Woolsey told NBC News the former CIA chief felt increasingly uncomfortable with the Trump transition's decision-making on matters of intelligence, particularly amid a report the incoming administration is considering restructuring certain intelligence agencies. But that report has been batted down as "100 percent false" by a transition spokesman. 

Related: Russians Celebrated When Trump Won Election, Intel Report Says: Source

On PBS' "NewsHour" Wednesday, Woolsey didn't agree with a question that suggested Trump was showing "disregard" to U.S. intelligence officials, but said "it certainly is raising issues. There's no doubt about is that." 

"Donald Trump does that in his own way. He raised issues in a way that turned out to be very successful for him politically, got him elected president of the United States, when virtually everybody that he talked to said you can't raise issues that way," Woolsey said on the program. 

"So I think we all need to take half a step back and look at the fact that he handles things like this differently than a lot of other people," he said. 

Related: Trump Jabs 'Intelligence' Officials for Allegedly Delaying 'Russian Hacking' Briefing

In an interview with CNN also on Wednesday, Woolsey made comments about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose website posted stolen emails purportedly from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account, that were different in tone from Trump. 

While Trump on Wednesday cited an Assange interview casting doubt on Russia being a source of the leaks, Woolsey said on CNN: "I don't think there's any point in listening to Julian Assange. He's quite a ne'er-do-well."

NBC News

The Real Reason the French Work Less Than Americans Do - TIME Business

The Real Reason the French Work Less Than Americans Do

Posted: 03 Jan 2017 01:00 PM PST

When the French government instituted a policy that will allow employees to disconnect from work email while they’re not in the office, effective at the start of 2017, many American workers may have looked across the ocean with jealousy.
Though the new French law doesn’t set any hard-and-fast rules, it’s designed to help workers limit the amount of time that work email infringes upon leisure time. It’s just one example of the many labor laws and norms—from regulations that control actual hours worked to policies about paid parental leave—that tend to leave European workers with a more even work-life balance than their U.S. counterparts experience.

For instance, in 2015, the French worked an average of 1,482 hours a year, while American workers worked about 1,790 hours, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, U.S. workers—who receive about 15 days off per year—also get less vacation time than their European counterparts, who get about 30, according to a 2015 survey from Expedia.com. What’s more, while American employees take about 73% of their allotted vacation time, German and French workers take nearly all of the vacation time they’re allowed.
But how did the worker experience in these two regions get so different in the first place?
Some have argued that European culture is generally more inclined toward a leisurely pace than American culture is. However, the cause of that laid-back French workplace culture is about more than just some vague notion that relaxing is good. As TIME has previously reported, Americans used to believe that their own time spent at the office would decrease over time:

Factory output per worker jumped more than 40% from 1919 to 1925, and even the Great Depression would be only a blip in the broader trend. World War II’s wage-controlled labor market compelled employers to offer better benefits to recruit workers. By 1961, a FORTUNE story heralded “The Expanding Vacation”; the piece suggested that organized labor had become sufficiently content with wages to a point where union leaders instead sought ways for workers to enjoy those wages. The United Auto Workers even founded a program whereby it would charter flights to Europe, Hawaii and Mexico for workers. A 1968 law moved several date-fixed federal holidays to Mondays, creating the modern three-day weekend.
But by the 1970s, the steady decline in the average length of the American workweek reversed itself. The decade brought a rise in consumerism that coincided with a slowdown in economic growth, forcing Americans to work more hours just to maintain an ill-considered standard of living, argued sociologist Juliet Schor in her 1992 book The Overworked American. We had volunteered to exhaust ourselves.

Meanwhile, until the 1970s, French employees worked more hours than Americans did.
The reversal can be traced to union and collective-bargaining contracts, says Bruce Sacerdote, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College who has studied workplace trends in the U.S. and in European countries. As unemployment rose in France in the 1970s, French unions responded to the economic trouble in a way that was very different from the response to slowing growth in the U.S.: they advocated a policy of work sharing, in which individual workers’ hours would be reduced in response to the increasing number of people without jobs. Using catchphrases like “work less, work all,” they argued that society would benefit if the same amount of work could be done by a greater number of workers, with each working less.
These attractive policies caused the unions to become stronger and represent more workers. Eventually, they secured valuable time off — which, by the time the economic downturn had passed, had become the status quo in France. Once workers were given several weeks off in August, for instance, they understandably didn’t want to later give up that prized vacation time.
That situation also led to what Sacerdote called a “coordination benefit.” France, for example, has 25 federally-mandated vacation days, allowing most employees in the country to be off at the same time. That way, productivity doesn’t suffer in the same way that it would if people staggered their vacation days.

“It led to a general feeling that this was a good thing, that they wanted to be off at the same time,” Sacerdote said, comparing that plan to the informal break that tends to occur between the Christmas holidays and New Year’s Day in the U.S.

And experts say that coordination is not the only benefit of the French method. Though the U.S. is more productive than France in terms of output per worker and income per capita, France’s policies are not making the country lazy. Instead, taking a liberal amount of time off—and fully disconnecting when they do so—tends to make people more productive during the hours they’re actually on the clock, Sacerdote said.
“Almost as much productivity can happen, but within a defined set of hours,” Sacerdote said. “It’s setting an expectation; people don’t feel like they have to be checking email.”

Why is Trump sweet on Russia but rough on China - CNN

Why is Trump soft with Russia but tough with China ?
Washington (CNN)President-elect Donald Trump has been playing global favorites on Twitter.
He has showered praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him "very smart!," and dismissed charges that Moscow tried to hack the election process -- even as he's bashed China for currency manipulation, skewing trade and failing to rein in North Korea.
It's unusual enough for a president-elect to try to sway foreign policy before he's in office, let alone in 140-character bursts. While Trump aides have said some of his statements shouldn't be taken "literally," the tweets offer insight to his foreign policy views and raise a question: When both China and Russia are challenging US power globally, why is he so sweet on Moscow and so sour on Beijing?
Trump's positions on Russia and China mark a sharp turn from current policies -- and that might to the point. Trump and much of the Republican establishment have made clear they aim to dismantle parts of President Barack Obama's legacy. Trump is also looking to use international relations in pursuit of economic ends, even as some observers worry his approach is based on misperceptions of economic forces.
Some analysts point to the possibility that Trump is taking a deeply strategic approach; others say he simply fails to understand the crucial importance of long-standing US alliances. At the least, it is an approach that contrasts with Obama, who has tried to find areas of common interest with China to bridge serious divides. At the same time, he has endeavored, with little success, to isolate Russia for a series of international violations.
"It's a sign of confusion if you're making trouble with the Chinese at the same time as you're making trouble with US allies in Asia, and it's a sign of confusion if you're trying to make up with Russia at the same that you're not tending to American alliances in Europe," said Steven Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump "acts like a guy who thinks he can make everybody mad at the same time and not pay a price for it," Sestanovich said.
Russia has conducted a stealth invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea -- the first attempt to alter European borders by force since World War II -- and is believed to have supplied the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war, including in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo, in direct opposition to the US. The Russian military has buzzed US aircraft and ships. And the US intelligence community found with "high confidence" that Russia was behind hacking during the presidential election campaign meant to sow doubts about American democracy.
And yet Trump speaks warmly of Putin and his desire for better cooperation with Russia, publicly dismissing the hacking allegations and accusing the intelligence community of acting politically.
That stand has damaged morale within the intelligence community and puzzled observers who wonder whether it's a strategic decision or a function of Trump's admiration for authoritarian figures, possible business deals with Russian oligarchs, or as-yet-undiscovered links or financial debts. Russian officials have said they were in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.
RELATED: Trump attacks set intelligence community on edge
Matt Rojansky, head of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, said one reason could be Trump's belief that the US should do more work with Russia to defeat terrorism and his view of that challenge as a "civilizational battle between radical Islam and, broadly speaking, the forces of Western civilization."
Trump and his aides, particularly his future national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, are much more comfortable including Russia under the "Western civilization" umbrella than prominent Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rojansky said. That will cause friction, possibly sooner rather than later.
McCain will hold hearings Thursday to examine Russia's role in the election hacking. The Arizona senator and Graham have announced that they will also lead new sanctions against Russia. McCain already is working on legislation with the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.
If Trump's stance on Russia might fray some of his alliances in Congress, he's already put European allies on edge with his warmth toward Putin and questions about the worth of NATO. He's also unnerved Asian allies by questioning the cost of helping Japan and South Korea defend themselves.
"I can see why it's a temptation for a big shot like Trump to think that smaller powers don't matter and you just solve your problems with the other big guys," said Sestanovich, who is also a professor at Columbia University. "That's just a mistake. The other guys are going to eat your lunch if you have let American alliance ties wither. I think that's what he doesn't get."
He said that, "The biggest lever we have with the Chinese is our network of alliances, similarly with the Russians."



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Trump slams N. Korea, China in tweets 01:44
"It's a sign of confusion if you're making trouble with the Chinese at the same time as you're making trouble with US allies in Asia, and it's a sign of confusion if you're trying to make up with Russia at the same that you're not tending to American alliances in Europe," said Steven Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump "acts like a guy who thinks he can make everybody mad at the same time and not pay a price for it," Sestanovich said.
Russia has conducted a stealth invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea -- the first attempt to alter European borders by force since World War II -- and is believed to have supplied the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war, including in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo, in direct opposition to the US. The Russian military has buzzed US aircraft and ships. And the US intelligence community found with "high confidence" that Russia was behind hacking during the presidential election campaign meant to sow doubts about American democracy.
And yet Trump speaks warmly of Putin and his desire for better cooperation with Russia, publicly dismissing the hacking allegations and accusing the intelligence community of acting politically.
That stand has damaged morale within the intelligence community and puzzled observers who wonder whether it's a strategic decision or a function of Trump's admiration for authoritarian figures, possible business deals with Russian oligarchs, or as-yet-undiscovered links or financial debts. Russian officials have said they were in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.
RELATED: Trump attacks set intelligence community on edge
Matt Rojansky, head of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, said one reason could be Trump's belief that the US should do more work with Russia to defeat terrorism and his view of that challenge as a "civilizational battle between radical Islam and, broadly speaking, the forces of Western civilization."
Trump and his aides, particularly his future national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, are much more comfortable including Russia under the "Western civilization" umbrella than prominent Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rojansky said. That will cause friction, possibly sooner rather than later.
McCain will hold hearings Thursday to examine Russia's role in the election hacking. The Arizona senator and Graham have announced that they will also lead new sanctions against Russia. McCain already is working on legislation with the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.
If Trump's stance on Russia might fray some of his alliances in Congress, he's already put European allies on edge with his warmth toward Putin and questions about the worth of NATO. He's also unnerved Asian allies by questioning the cost of helping Japan and South Korea defend themselves.
"I can see why it's a temptation for a big shot like Trump to think that smaller powers don't matter and you just solve your problems with the other big guys," said Sestanovich, who is also a professor at Columbia University. "That's just a mistake. The other guys are going to eat your lunch if you have let American alliance ties wither. I think that's what he doesn't get."
He said that, "The biggest lever we have with the Chinese is our network of alliances, similarly with the Russians."



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Trump mocks intel agencies on Russian hack 02:08
Some analysts have suggested Trump is practicing a sophisticated version of the "triangular diplomacy" former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon used to play the Soviet Union and China off against each other in the 1970s.
But the two nations are no longer bitter enemies and instead have a well-defined, if mutually wary, relationship.
"There's no way by improving relations with Russia you get a significant bang for your buck with the Chinese," Sestanovich said.
China, like Russia, has targeted the US with cyberattacks. Beijing has pushed US companies in China to give up proprietary technology, it has contested US claims to freedom of navigation through Asian waters, its military has buzzed US naval vessels and Air Force jets, and it recently stole a US underwater drone.
If Trump seems to look the other way on Russian transgressions, China gets no free pass.
The President-elect, who manufactures parts of his clothing line in China, often charges that Beijing steals American jobs with unfair trade practices. "China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won't help with North Korea. Nice!" he tweeted Monday. Soon after winning the presidency, he antagonized Beijing by holding a phone conversation with Taiwan's leader.
Trump has long made China a bogeyman, accusing it in a 2012 tweet of having "created" the concept of global warming in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. He has particularly fixated on China's economic practices, blasting it on trade and currency throughout the presidential race and blaming it for the loss of American jobs. Trade and job losses were central rallying cries of his campaign.
RELATED: Donald Trump's fight with America's spies
Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, said Trump's criticisms reflect a lack of understanding about international economics. "The jobs China is accused of stealing, many were lost a long time ago to Korea or Japan and moved from there to China," he said. "A lot of that job loss occurred because of technology change," he said.
And despite Trump's promises to bring jobs back to the US, Bush said, "Nobody in the US would do them at the wages companies would want to charge. Those jobs are never going to be gotten back."
Bush also pointed out that there are limits to how much any US president can change relations with China. "Will the American business community sit idly by and watch Trump undertake a trade war with China? They have a lot at stake in this," he said.
In the meantime, Trump's stream of anti-Chinese Tweets poses risks, he said.
While Trump might be trying to create bargaining positions or exert pressure, his tweets might be misunderstood, Bush said, creating the chance that "China would regard a potential challenge as more dangerous than it actually might be."

Brexit chief Ivan Rogers' letter to his staff after his resignation - Financial Times

Text of Sir Ivan Rogers’ letter to staff

Dear All,
Happy New Year! I hope that you have all had/are still having, a great break, and that you will come back refreshed and ready for an exciting year ahead.
I am writing to you all on the first day back to tell you that I am today resigning as Permanent Representative.
As most of you will know, I started here in November 2013. My four-year tour is therefore due to end in October – although in practice if we had been doing the Presidency my time here would have been extended by a few months.
As we look ahead to the likely timetable for the next few years, and with the invocation of Article 50 coming up shortly, it is obvious that it will be best if the top team in situ at the time that Article 50 is invoked remains there till the end of the process and can also see through the negotiations for any new deal between the UK and the EU27.
It would obviously make no sense for my role to change hands later this year.
I have therefore decided to step down now, having done everything that I could in the last 6 months to contribute my experience, expertise and address book to get the new team at political and official level under way. This will permit a new appointee to be in place by the time Article 50 is invoked.
Importantly, it will also enable that person to play a role in the appointment of Shan’s replacement as DPR. I know from experience – both my own hugely positive experience of working in partnership with Shan, and from seeing past, less happy, examples – how imperative it is that the PR and DPR operate as a team, if UKREP is to function as well as I believe it has done over the last few years.
I want to put on record how grateful I am to Shan for the great working relationship we have had. She will be hugely missed in UKREP, and by many others here in Brussels, but she will be a tremendous asset to the Welsh Government.
From my soundings before Christmas, I am optimistic that there will be a very good field of candidates for the DPR role. But it is right these two roles now get considered and filled alongside each other, and for my successor to play the leading role in making the DPR appointment. I shall therefore stand aside from the process at this point.
I know that this news will add, temporarily, to the uncertainty that I know, from our many discussions in the autumn, you are all feeling about the role of UKREP in the coming months and years of negotiations over “Brexit.” I am sorry about that, but I hope that it will help produce earlier and greater clarity on the role that UKREP should play.
My own view remains as it has always been. We do not yet know what the Government will set as negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit. There is much we will not know until later this year about the political shape of the EU itself, and who the political protagonists in any negotiation with the UK will be.
But in any negotiation which addresses the new relationship, the technical expertise, the detailed knowledge of positions on the other side of the table – and the reasons for them, and the divisions amongst them – and the negotiating experience and savvy that the people in this building bring, make it essential for all parts of UKREP to be centrally involved in the negotiations if the UK is to achieve the best possible outcomes.
Serious multilateral negotiating experience is in short supply in Whitehall, and that is not the case in the Commission or in the Council. The Government will only achieve the best for the country if it harnesses the best experience we have – a large proportion of which is concentrated in UKREP – and negotiates resolutely. Senior Ministers, who will decide on our positions, issue by issue, also need from you detailed, unvarnished – even where this is uncomfortable — and nuanced understanding of the views, interests and incentives of the other 27.
The structure of the UK’s negotiating team and the allocation of roles and responsibilities to support that team, needs rapid resolution. The working methods which enable the team in London and Brussels to function seamlessly need also to be strengthened.
The great strength of the UK system – at least as it has been perceived by all others in the EU – has always been its unique combination of policy depth, expertise and coherence, message co-ordination and discipline, and the ability to negotiate with skill and determination. UKREP has always been key to all of that. We shall need it more than ever in the years ahead.
As I have argued consistently at every level since June, many opportunities for the UK in the future will derive from the mere fact of having left and being free to take a different path. But others will depend entirely on the precise shape of deals we can negotiate in the years ahead. Contrary to the beliefs of some, free trade does not just happen when it is not thwarted by authorities: increasing market access to other markets and consumer choice in our own, depends on the deals, multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral that we strike, and the terms that we agree. I shall advise my successor to continue to make these points.
Meanwhile, I would urge you all to stick with it, to keep on working at intensifying your links with opposite numbers in DEXEU and line Ministries and to keep on contributing your expertise to the policy-making process as negotiating objectives get drawn up. The famed UKREP combination of immense creativity with realism ground in negotiating experience, is needed more than ever right now.
On a personal level, leaving UKREP will be a tremendous wrench. I have had the great good fortune, and the immense privilege, in my civil service career, to have held some really interesting and challenging roles: to have served 4 successive UK Prime Ministers very closely; to have been EU, G20 and G8 Sherpa; to have chaired a G8 Presidency and to have taken part in some of the most fraught, and fascinating, EU negotiations of the last 25 years – in areas from tax, to the MFF to the renegotiation.
Of all of these posts, I have enjoyed being the Permanent Representative more than any other I have ever held. That is, overwhelmingly, because of all of you and what you all make UKREP: a supremely professional place, with a fantastic co-operative culture, which brings together talented people whether locally employed or UK-based and uniquely brings together people from the home civil service with those from the Foreign Office. UKREP sets itself demanding standards, but people also take the time to support each other which also helps make it an amazingly fun and stimulating place to work. I am grateful for everything you have all done over the last few years to make this such a fantastic operation.
For my part, I hope that in my day-to-day dealings with you I have demonstrated the values which I have always espoused as a public servant. I hope you will continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking and that you will never be afraid to speak the truth to those in power. I hope that you will support each other in those difficult moments where you have to deliver messages that are disagreeable to those who need to hear them. I hope that you will continue to be interested in the views of others, even where you disagree with them, and in understanding why others act and think in the way that they do. I hope that you will always provide the best advice and counsel you can to the politicians that our people have elected, and be proud of the essential role we play in the service of a great democracy.
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The challenges to globalisation in 2017 - Financial Times

Like cats in popular folk wisdom, globalisation appears to have many lives. The integration of markets in goods, services and capital that accelerated in the 1990s with the fall of communism and the rise of China has been written off many times, notably during the global financial crisis. Yet it has survived.
This past year, its obituarists have had more material to work with than usual. The stalling of a number of high-profile trade deals has had the pre-emptive mourners out in force arguing that the engine of liberalisation has failed. Feeble growth in worldwide goods trade relative to the expansion of the global economy has raised fears that protectionism has taken its toll. And the election of Donald Trump, with his tirades against Chinese imports stealing jobs, and the appointment ofChina trade hawks like Peter Navarroto his administration, suggests that the era of liberalised trade is over.
Of these worries, only the last is convincing. Even allowing for the fact that rhetoric on the US presidential campaign trail tends to be far more blood-curdling than subsequent actions when in office, Mr Trump’s zero-sum worldview is deeply troubling.
A number of large trade pacts — usually dubbed “free-trade agreements” whether or not they succeed in liberalising commerce — have failed in recent years. But 2016 was notable for two particularly large ones hitting the buffers — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), involving the US and EU, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) of 12 Asia-Pacific economies. Moreover, the trade world was treated to some comic relief late in the year when the smaller pact between the EU and Canada was held up for a while by obstreperous Walloons, the government of Belgium’s francophone region objecting to various provisions therein.
That said, none of this was wildly surprising. TTIP, predictably for a large multi-stranded deal between two trading blocs used to acting as hegemons, has struggled since its launch. The TPP was opposed by both presidential candidates, even though Hillary Clinton had been intimately involved in its negotiation. It was always going to face an uphill passage through Congress. Under the radar, however, the EU moved closer to a deal with Japan, two of the world’s largest trading powers quietly getting on with business.

The art & science of economics at Cambridge - Economist

IN 1924 John Maynard Keynes, who invented macroeconomics, used a biographical essay about his mentor Alfred Marshall to muse on the qualities of a good economist.
He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought…No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.
Such paragons were hard to come by, Keynes sighed: “Good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds.” But there can have been no doubt in his mind that the likeliest place to find them roosting was among the sandstone crenellations of Cambridge colleges. The Cambridge economics department, founded by Marshall and home to Keynes, was at that time the world’s leading school of economics. It not only taught bright young people from around the empire. It also made them into what its faculty thought economists should be: technically accomplished purveyors of policy advice, dispassionate but engaged.
The goal can be seen in the exam questions of the time. Students were expected to combine economic principles with a strong grasp of current affairs. In 1927, for example, one paper on public finance asked students to explain the size and reasons for the main areas of British government spending. They were expected to have the skills of an essayist, spending one three-hour exam on a single question such as the future of gold, the rights and duties of shareholders, or alternatives to democracy. Cambridge economics considered itself to be an analytical science but calculation was not of the essence. A module in statistics produced a page-long test for final-year students; all the other papers were bare of mathematical symbols.
Compare this with the exams of today. Charlotte Grace, a student in the third year of the economics tripos (as undergraduate degrees are known in Cambridge), says she could have passed all the questions she faced in her first year without reading a newspaper. And though the five-page final-year macroeconomics exam that was set in 2015 asked about some contemporary policy conundrums, like which features of the euro zone may have contributed to its sovereign debt crisis, most of the paper sought to test students’ knowledge of tricky, algebra-heavy models. Three-hour pontifications on a single topic have been ditched in favour of a compulsory dissertation in which original empirical analysis is encouraged.
These tests reflect changes in the discipline. Students must master the technical apparatus of a highly specialised field. The maths they need to know and apply is sufficiently taxing as to barely leave time for history. Evidence-based conclusions are preferred to arms-length analysis; economists should know the limits of their expertise, and shy away from political judgments as they think through the effects of whatever policy tweaks providence might throw at them.
The mathematical precision and rigour is appealing to some. On a bright day in October, the first day of lectures this academic year, Angus Groom, a fresh-faced 18-year-old, comments that his first lecture, on macroeconomics, was “the kind of stuff I’ve read about before, but really coming at it from a rigorous perspective.” He is grateful to get beyond the wishy-washy stuff he studied at school.
The structured discipline Mr Groom is studying is a long way from the messy stew Mr Marshall faced when he first conceived of the economics tripos. When he was appointed to the university’s chair of political economy in 1885 economics was nestled in the “moral sciences” tripos along with psychology, logic, ethics and other fields. Marshall argued that “a lad, coming from school to this large and heterogeneous mass of difficult notions entirely strange to him, is bewildered”, and would be left “unripe”.
“The status of economics...appears to have been at a rather low point,” Neil Hart writes in the forthcoming “Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics”. It was looked on as “a minor and disputed area of study, with many of its lecturers and professors recruited or ‘borrowed’ from other established disciplines.” Exam questions reflected the fuzziness of the field’s boundaries. One paper in 1871 asked students to consider whether political economy had more to learn from ethics or vice versa. As was the way of the times, economic issues were seen through the lenses of personal, national and, particularly, class advantage. For example: “If any one had private information that war was about to break out between England and America, what sort of changes in his investments might it be prudent for him to make?” And: “Examine the probable results, to the different classes of English society, if the anticipated decline and ultimate exhaustion of our coalfields were to commence at once.”
Not good enough, Marshall thought. The complexities of the first globalised economy and the accompanying intensification of social problems meant the empire needed more and better economists. Cambridge, he argued, should meet that need by producing professionals with “three years’ scientific training of the same character and on the same general lines as that given to physicists, to physiologists or engineers.” His textbook of 1890, “Principles of Economics,” offered a tidy blueprint.
The Principled stand
Marshall’s book established the use of diagrams to illustrate economic phenomena, inventing the demand and supply curves familiar to fledgling economists ever since. And it provided a view of the economy as a dynamic system akin to a physical one, so complicated that it was best broken into parts. Its partial equilibrium analysis, which held some bits of the economy constant to clarify movements in the others, gave economists a way to carve smaller questions from the complex whole. Along with David Ricardo’s “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” and Karl Marx’s “Capital” it was one of the three most influential economics books of the 19th century.
Marshall was horrified to see Pigou in a Norfolk jacket with holes in both elbows: “So bad for the economics tripos!”
The independent tripos Marshall wanted finally got off the ground in 1903. Its courses were not all curves and equations. His first syllabus expected students to know about the British constitution and to opine on topics like “the use of the term ‘natural’ in economic writings” or “economic aims as a factor in international politics”. But it was already more practical. In a module from 1907 called “Advanced economics: mainly realistic” students were asked to “give some account of industrial arbitration in New Zealand.” The overall idea was to cultivate economics as no more, or less, than “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.”
In 1908 Marshall handed over the reins to Arthur Pigou. A shy 30-year-old and keen mountaineer, Pigou had something of the 19th-century polymath about him. He had started off studying history and had won the university’s poetry prize for his ode to Alfred the Great before switching to the moral-sciences tripos in 1899 to study economics and ethics. Known around Cambridge—unoriginally and, one imagines, rather unhelpfully—as “The Prof”, he had a reputation as one of the city’s worst-dressed men. Marshall was once horrified to see him in a Norfolk jacket with holes in both elbows: “So bad for the economics tripos!”
Whatever his sartorial shortcomings, Pigou’s academic brilliance made him an obvious heir to Marshall. And as the author of “The Economics of Welfare”, he furthered Marshall’s cause by helping economists turn nettlesome political controversies into technical problems. Before he came along, decisions to meddle in markets were seen as helping one constituency over another, at the cost of inefficiency. He himself railed against the protectionism and imperial preference of the time, worrying that they were bungs to a small segment of the population.
In other cases, though, he showed that when there are external costs to someone’s actions, a bit of meddling might improve on the market outcome. For example, those who ignore the effects of their pollution on others will pollute too much. A nifty tax to align the individual’s incentives with those of society can mean better outcomes for everyone. Armed with this idea, economists could argue for intervention on technical grounds of efficiency.
Marshall championed Pigou; but his favourite student was Keynes, who came to one of Marshall’s courses after taking his mathematics degree in 1905. In 1909 Keynes returned to lecture on monetary economics. When he spoke in his essay on Marshall of a master economist as “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher” Keynes could have been describing himself (and perhaps he was: modesty was certainly not part of the recipe). Hopping between roles as an academic, civil servant, government adviser and journalist, he took vigorous part on the biggest topics of the day; his pamphlet arguing against self-defeating economic reparations on Germany, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, made him rich and famous.
Like Pigou, Keynes emphasised that individually sensible decisions might be disastrous for society. He did not have the troves of data that economists have today, but could see that the mass unemployment of the 1930s was the result of a deep market failure: the queues of people on the dole were unwillingly unemployed. In defiance of the consensus that overall the economy would right itself, he thought that economies could end up trapped in deep and nasty slumps simply because of self-fulfilling losses of confidence. The solution was government intervention, in the form of an injection of public spending and confidence. His work justified policy intervention as an antidote to capitalism’s imperfections, to save it rather than to replace it; and it did so, as Pigou’s had, with the help of apparently dispassionate technical argument.
Technical fixers
Keynes and Pigou established economics as a toolkit to be used by policymakers, and pioneered the role of government economic advisers. Keynes famously remarked that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”; his policy activism was designed to replace that unexamined received opinion from the past with explicitly stated apposite analysis from the present. When the British government created a Committee of Economists to advise it in 1930, Keynes and Pigou were both appointed to it. Meanwhile Cambridge strove to produce more of their ilk. Through the 1920s and 1930s Keynes delivered eight lectures a year on his work in progress, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, and created an intellectual hub of economic disciples, known as the “Cambridge circus”. A group of younger members of the faculty began meeting in 1930 to discuss Keynes’s “A Treatise on Money,” published that same year. Specially selected undergraduates could go along too.
Students were by this time expected to take on board a lot more mathematics and theory than they had before. When he visited Cambridge in the 1940s, shortly before Keynes’s death, Harry Johnson, a Canadian economist, was struck by how much more demanding the tripos had become. Once, he wrote, all you had to do to pass the exams was read Marshall’s “Principles” over the course of the year and the Times at breakfast every morning; the rest of the day was free for being “out on the river with God”. By the time he arrived, finalists had to read Keynes’s “General Theory” from cover to cover, and digest intellectual debates such as those between Keynes and D.H. Robertson, a close collaborator who became an intellectual rival, on the “liquidity preference” and “loanable funds” theories of interest. (The heat of debate spilled over into exams: a student of 1947 asked to consider the criticism that “Lord Keynes’ doctrine of liquidity preference ‘seems to leave interest hanging by its own bootstraps’” might reasonably have wanted to know who the examiner would be before answering.)
The flatter world
The Cambridge faculty, though still impressive, has inevitably fallen back from the dizzy heights it occupied from the 1920s to the 1940s. Keynes shook up the settled consensus, codifiable in the textbooks of Marshall and Pigou. The next time a consensus settled within economics, it was forged in a different Cambridge, that of Massachusetts. A post-war intellectual backlash against Keynesianism relegated the original Cambridge to a dissident backwater, condemned to critique the mainstream from outside.
Today the faculty no longer nurtures its own school of thought, but it still suffers from the post-imperial shift towards America’s high-paying universities. Yet even among them, none towers as the Cambridge of Pigou and Keynes once did. The general success of the profession, and the institutional growth that has gone along with it, have made it hard for any single school to achieve true pre-eminence. Nor are battle lines drawn as once they were. Economists have largely fulfilled Marshall���s aim of rising from muddy ideological debates; the biggest fights today are between methodologies, not ideologies.
Keynes and Pigou transformed the discipline with new grand theories of how the economic system works while taking an active part in policy and encouraging others to do the same. The role for economic advice thus created has remained. But in Britain, in particular, the settled opinions of the broad church mean that such advice has been to some extent commoditised. Philosophers and grand debaters have been replaced with specialists building ever more intricate models and finding increasingly sophisticated ways of drawing lessons from data.
Hamish Low, a Cambridge professor who works in applied economics, does not mourn the loss of philosopher kings’ grand intellectual debates. “Now we need to be much more evidence based”, he says. But the discipline’s development has come with a cost. The specialisation associated with expertise can encourage narrow thinking. “Disciplines are now defined too much by methods rather than by questions”, Low says. This narrowness feeds through to policy advice, which too often applies established models to current circumstances, rather than considering fundamental reinterpretions of the issues. Economists can give you an estimate of how much revenue a tax increase will raise, the income loss associated with Brexit, or the employment effects of a minimum wage rise. It calls to mind another aphorism from Keynes about economists being at their best as “humble, competent people on a level with dentists”, using their technical skill to solve pressing problems within a limited area of expertise.
Underlying this intellectual timidity is a bigger failing. After his enjoyably rigorous lecture on macroeconomics, Mr Groom’s second taste of his department comes from Ha-Joon Chang, author of popular books such as “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”. At the heart of Marshall’s desire to separate economics from politics, Mr Chang explains to his rapt audience, lay a contradiction: “Economics is about economic policy, whose making is political.” The new space Marshall carved out for economics, and his new way of teaching it, left the discipline better equipped to inform politics disinterestedly. But the politics were always already there. As the discipline focused more and more on technicalities and models this persistent presence slipped from view. But though it was hidden, its power remained—all the more pernicious for being unseen and thus unquestioned.
As Mr Chang explains to his students, seeing politics as an external factor affecting how economic theory translates into policy can be a useful approximation. But that approximation ignores the rest of the system—the part where economic theory and politics influence each other’s evolution. So, for example, economists have busied themselves constructing models of preference without asking through what exercise of power those preferences were formed. While some spotted the colossal rise in income inequality that took place in Britain and America from the 1980s, they have, until quite recently, tended to dismiss it as primarily a political issue. They are all too often silent on just the sort of questions the tripos used to see as crucial: the rights and duties of shareholders; alternatives to democracy; the effect of the exhaustion of fossil fuels; the meaning, if any, of the word “natural”.
If economists really were dentists, this might be fine; no one needs a political ideology of cavities to perform a root canal. And living without dentistry is a dreadful thing. But Keynes at best only half believed his dentist conceit. He also wanted the “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher”: aloof; earthy; purposeful. Not every economist can be all those things, nor could they ever. But if the old aspiration to try and be so is lost, so is part of Marshall’s original dream of economists seeking not merely to apply their ideas in a worldly way, but to produce both better ideas and, in the end, a better world.

The world according to Putin - Economist

WHEN Vladimir Putin justified his annexation of Crimea on the ground that he owed protection to Russian speakers everywhere, this newspaper took a dim view of his line of argument, pointing out that since linguistic borders do not match those of states, it would lead to chaos. We now recognise that this approach to international relations betrayed a deplorable conservatism. Since we pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries in search of a way to clamber out of the box and reach the summit of blue-sky thinking, we reckoned we should grasp the nettle of radical Putinism and run with it. We have, therefore, redrawn the world’s boundaries according to Mr Putin’s principles. We think readers will agree that the resulting map has considerable appeal.
Under Mr Putin’s dispensation, things look up for the old colonial powers. Portugal gets to reclaim Brazil, Spain most of the rest of Central and South America and France most of west Africa, which would probably be fine by the locals, since many of their current governments are not much cop. A mighty Scandinavian kingdom comes into being—including Finland, although Finnish is very different from the Scandinavian tongues. Since Swedish is Finland’s second language, the Vikings would have strong grounds for bringing about the sort of peaceful merger based on shared cultural values for which they are famous.
A unified Arabia would stretch from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. There might be the odd squabble between Sunnis, Shias, Christians and adherents of archaic notions of nation; but united by a common tongue, the Arabs would be sure to get along fine, especially if they teamed up to smite the Persian-speakers on the other side of the Gulf. The two Koreas would become one, which might be a good thing—or not, depending on which system prevailed.
Since Hindi and Urdu are both a mutually intelligible mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, India could make a claim for Pakistan—and vice versa. The existence of nuclear weapons on either side would bring added spark to the debate over linguistic precedence.
Best of all, Britain would regain its empire, including—since it spoke English first—the United States. It would, obviously, give Barack Obama a prestigious position—Keeper of the Woolsack, say—and a nice uniform. Britain might, however, have to surrender some of London’s oligarch-dominated streets, as well as Chelsea Football Club, to Russia. A sizeable minority of The Economist’s staff also speaks Russian and would like to claim Mr Putin’s protection in advance of the next pay negotiations.
There is, however a hitch. Consolidation would be undermined by linguistic independence movements. Dozens of segments would peel away from Mandarin-speaking China. Mayaland would agitate for autonomy in Central America. Swahililand would demand independence in Africa. The world’s 7 billion people speak more than 7,000 languages; in Russia alone there are more than 100. Perhaps, on second thoughts, Mr Putin should quit while he is ahead.

How will Trump deal with North Korea - CNN

(CNN)North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads into 2017 with two things that loom ominous for the rest of the world -- he's tested a nuclear weapon, and no one really knows how willing he'd be to use one in anger.

North Korea conducted two nuclear tests in 2016, one in January and another, its most powerful ever, in September. Add that to a string of missile tests, both land- and sea-launched, and the world has plenty of reason for worry.

"Combining nuclear warheads with ballistic missile technology in the hands of a volatile leader like Kim Jong Un is a recipe for disaster," Adm. Harry Harris, the head of the US military's Pacific Command, said in a December speech.

Kim Jong Un might be considered the world's most dangerous man.

Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation think tank

Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation think tank, went further still, saying Kim "might be considered the world's most dangerous man."

But just how much of a threat does North Korea pose?

Pyongyang's September test put North Korea's nuclear program in its strongest position ever, at least according to the Kim regime, which claimed to have successfully detonated a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on ballistic rockets.

North Korean state media said the test would enable North Korea to produce "a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power." Western experts fear that could expand the range of North Korea's nuclear weapons, possibly putting Alaska, Hawaii or even the US mainland in danger.

Combining nuclear warheads with ballistic missile technology in the hands of a volatile leader like Kim Jong Un is a recipe for disaster.

Adm. Harry Harris, the head of the US military's Pacific Command,

The warhead tested in September was estimated to have a 10-kiloton explosive power, almost twice as large as the one tested in January, said Kim Nam-wook of South Korea's Meteorological Administration. The atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in 1945 is estimated at 15 kilotons.

Despite Pyongyang's apparent progress on a warhead, Bennett, the Rand analyst, points out that North Korea's test of its delivery systems, those missiles and rockets, weren't promising enough to make it a global threat -- at least not yet.

"To be such, the North would need to have developed some form of reliable delivery mechanism for its nuclear weapons that could reach anywhere in the world. And the North has not yet done that," Bennett said, pointing out that of the eight tests of longer range missiles (2,000 miles or more), seven were considered failures, and the other was tested only over a short range.

And despite testing a submarine-launched missile in August, the North has only one submarine capable of launching such a missile -- and its range is short, making it unlikely to get past Western defenses to pose a threat beyond Asia, added Bennett.

Doubts about its delivery capabilities notwithstanding, North Korea remains the only country on Earth to test a nuclear weapon in the 21st century -- and that offers Kim considerable leverage, analysts say, especially with his continued ability to tolerate the West's only real weapon short of military action, economic sanctions.

"The sanctions would undoubtedly deter North Korea's economy and make the country further isolated ... but Kim Jong Un and his associates believe it is still worth it for them to have an advanced nuclear capability," said Seung-Kyun Ko, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and a former research commissioner in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Nuclear weapons are "a tool for giving the oppressed people pride and hope," Ko said.

The voraciousness of Kim's "nukes at all costs" philosophy was hammered home just this week when a high-ranking North Korean diplomat who defected to the South earlier this year said Kim wouldn't back down even if offered huge sums of money by Western powers.

Thae Yong-ho, formerly No. 2 at the North Korean Embassy in London, said Kim is "racing ahead with nuclear development after setting up a plan to develop nuclear weapons at all costs by the end of 2017."

The suggestion that Kim can't be bought off is echoed by Boris Toucas, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"Kim Jong Un has made the development of the nuclear program its main source of legitimacy, connecting his fate to what he sees as the greatness of his nation, well before economic progress," Toucas wrote in October, shortly after Pyongyang's second nuclear test of 2016.

Kim -- An unstable madman or a calculating mastermind?

Analysts agree that Kim is far from the unstable madman many present him to be. In fact, Ko, the former South Korean Foreign Ministry official, called the North Korean leader "cautious and calculating."

For instance, Ko said, Kim knows he can use the annual string of US-South Korean military exercises, involving thousands of troops and the latest US weaponry, to his advantage.

"He demands from his people and subordinates complete obedience to his leadership, because the country is on the verge of imminent invasion from the US and South Korea," Ko said. "He creates cohesion and unity among his people in facing the invasion."

While he keeps his people in line with talks of an impending invasion, he keeps his adversaries off balance by talking peace.

"Kim continues to pursue a peace treaty with United States," explained Bennett, the RAND expert. "And if he succeeds in getting such a treaty, it is entirely possible that US forces would be withdrawn from South Korea within a few years, likely to never return."

In other words, Kim wins if US troops get off his doorstep.

Is Kim smelling blood in a Trump-led U.S.?

Thae, the defected diplomat from the North, said this week that Kim senses weakness in the US and South Korea right now.

"Due to domestic political procedures, North Korea calculates that South Korea and the US will not be able to take physical or military actions to deter North Korea's nuclear development," the defector said at a news briefing in Seoul.

Those "domestic political procedures" include the impeachment case against South Korea President Park Geun-hye over a corruption scandal and the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump as US President.

But Trump could be a wild card, perhaps as spontaneous as Kim is calculating.

Take Trump's comments on Taiwan and the South China Sea, for example. They might be helping mend the strained but traditional alliance between North Korea and China.

It's an interesting tale of two alpha males and how they're sniffing each other out at this point.

Jasper Kim, professor at of Ewha Women's University in Seoul

"While most observers argue that North Korea successfully exploits the distrust between China and the United States, they often overlook the fact that distrust between North Korea and China has grown at an even greater pace over the past few years, with North Korea constantly embarrassing its neighbor," Toucas, a former official in the French Foreign Ministry, wrote in October, reiterating that any Western deal with North Korea would need Beijing on board.

It's the kind of thing that could leave Kim wondering just what he is facing with the incoming leader of the free world.

"I think Kim Jong Un doesn't know how to size up this person, and vice versa," said Jasper Kim, a professor at of Ewha Women's University in Seoul. "It's an interesting tale of two alpha males and how they're sniffing each other out at this point."

So, what to expect in 2017?

The beginning of the year, at least, could be quiet.

"I heard from a North Korean official that they do not want to make any provocative actions until they know what kind of North Korean policies are in the next administration," said Park Hwee-Rhak, of Kookmin University in Seoul.

How will Trump handle North Korea? 02:42

That means the initiative may be Trump's. He's said he would consider pulling US troops from South Korea. He's even said he might be willing to meet the North Korean leader for discussions over a hamburger, something that would please Kim, who "craves recognition as much as he does nuclear weapons," according to Toucas.

But Trump has also called Kim "a maniac" who needs to be dealt with harshly -- a course of action Park thinks Trump should take.

"I think Mr. Trump should play hard ball. I think he should ask for a review and consideration of the military options, including pre-emptive strikes," Park said.

But if Kim thinks that's in the works, Ko said the North Korean leader could strike out fiercely.

"He tends to be blunt and a bit extreme in his responses to his perceived threats."

CNN's Paula Hancocks contributed to this report.

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