I am cordially inviting you to consider the inequalities and trajectories included in this graph, a visualization of economic performance data obtained form the IBRD World Development Indicators, a publicly available dataset. The variable is per capita GDP (at constant 2015 USD). Please tell me--perhaps in comments--if you think I miss or misread something. Since this is just a research note, something I am doing quickly "on the side," I don't want to / can't get into more detail here--but there are a few things in these data that I feel I must point out, and do so now, especially in the co ..read more

It seems that Google Scholar has recorded 77 items of my previous written work that have scholarly references by others. Here is a list of the top ten most cited items. The formula I used in the computation is x=y/(2023-t) where x=annual mean citations, y=total number of references, t=year of publication. So, here's an account of my "academic performance", as of September, 2023, in terms of citation "intensity", controlled for time elapsed since publication. All this is giving me much food for thought, about intensity of attention, regional geopolitics of mattering, currency of topics, sc ..read more

HUNGARY's current neoliberal-fascist government is setting the stage for yet another round of mass privatization of public assets. The way this has been done--a textbook case, really--is willful letting-to-go-to-rot / collapse of public services. Once they sink to a level that is patently intolerable, the time will be ripe, politically, for those services to be privatized to both foreign and domestic clients of the government, plus of course corrupt high government officials themselves, through proxies (in Hungary pretty much everyone can by now name the biggest and most obvious cronies a ..read more

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the USA deemed it unconstitutional for colleges and universities, except, inexplicably, military colleges, to apply separate admission standards to applicants based on "race." This fundamentally re-designs the system of higher education, not only in the United States, but, in its implications, world-wide.  Let's start by stating the obvious: "Academic performance," very much including academic performance by high school graduates who apply for admission to colleges and universities is a variable that is statistically associated with a multiplicity of determ ..read more

In 2005, I published a piece in the Mumbai-based Economic and Political Weekly, titled "Redistributing Global Inequality: A Thought Experiment."  A few months later, it was re-published in Magyar, in the journal Eszmélet, under the title "Gondolatkísérlet a globális elosztásról: Polányi Károly emlékére,"  followed by re-publications here and there.  In this piece, I argued, and presented some tentative calculations based on publicly available data to demonstrate, that resources are amply available to remedy rampant global inequality. It is pretty compelling to conclude that the ..read more

So, Title 42, the Trump-era anti-migration, anti-migrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights bill, expired last night. The US media is awash with alarmist reports about the "flood" of asylum seekers, and the Biden-administration's stern warnings that, although the anti-refugee law is gone, it will be even tougher for asylum seekers to gain the right to stay in the US. There is also the usual extreme-right drivel about bands and gangs of "criminals and (potential) terrorists" coming.  When it comes to human interest stories, told both from the extreme-right and the liberal middle, (there b ..read more

The 2023 Rutgers strike has yielded what its president calls "a framework on economic issues." At the point of writing these reflections--in the morning on Saturday, April 15--it is unclear whether the union's rank-and file will ratify it.  I have been asked whether I think this is a victory, a defeat, or what. Here is how I feel. It's a flap of a butterfly's wing. Of course we can't exclude the possibility that it would start a transformation of the "universe." But, more likely it is just a lesson to all of us: It is much ado about. . . not much. The "framework" has resulted in something ..read more

I usually do not re-post what I wrote 3 days ago, on facebook . . . but . . . French President Emmanuel Macron gave a major confirmation of my main point. This kind of clear conversation happens only very rarely. Almost never!!!  Macron is putting his read of the geopolitical situation after his and von der Leyen's failed China visit perfectly unambiguously: The "long-term goal [is] “strategic autonomy” for Europe." I.e., the French President thinks the EU doesn't have strategic autonomy right now. Nor is that--"strategic autonomy"--even a short term goa ..read more

Yesterday I became curious about the history of the "advent" of world-systems theory in Hungary. So, I used  Arcanum, an online repository of the history of scanned press publications in Magyar, for the first printed mention of the name "Immanuel Wallerstein" in the Hungarian press. This is what I found, from June 1956: "Communiqué Concerning Paris Consultation between Two Large World Youth Organizations." Szabad Ifjúság,  (Free Youth), 1956. June 10, p. 5. (The same text is re-published here in October, 1956.)   It is a report about a consultation ..read more

There's much spotlight on the UK where Gary Lineker, a very popular former footballer and a current sports commentator, was suspended by his employer, the BBC, for having published a tweet in which he compared the British government's rhetoric regarding refugee inflows to the policies of the Third Reich. In response, the Home Secretary of the UK came out as claiming that Britain "has been taken for a ride" because of the unreasonably high burden that refugee arrivals put on the country.  So, let's see some comparisons.  According to the latest publicly available data, presented by th ..read more