"Emerging markets are attractive investments for many reason, including their enormous growth potential and their diversification benefits. The problem is, money doesn't discriminate between democratic and anti-democratic leaders: Markets routinely reward authoritarians like Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, and Hugo Chavez. Indeed, foreign money has played a major role in helping some of today's most anti-democratic leaders build, maintain,...

« A highly reasonable, lightly fun introduction to thinking like an economist. When economists wrestle with issues such as unemployment, inflation, or pandemics, they do so in an impersonal, detached way: what's the most low-cost way to maximize good and minimize bad? These trade-offs constitute the core of how economists see the world-and make the policies that govern it. Trade-Offs is an introduction to the economic approach of analyzing controversial...

When seeking to understand why nations come into conflict, political scientists tend to focus either on threats to national security (realism) and or on moral duty, ideology, and domestic pressures (liberalism). Liberalism has been the major lens for international relations scholars analyzing the United States, due to the country's strong democratic foundations. In this expansive new book, Dale Copeland argues that the realist cast can shed fascinating...