Hundreds of Former Israeli Spies Are Working in Big Tech, Database Shows Drop Site
Dictators love a crisis. “For reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State
The Atlantic – no paywall – “This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A Warning Out of Time.” It has been updated to clarify that Ernst Fraenkel deployed with the German army in World War I to Poland and the Western Front.
As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society.
What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply
Why the household analogy in economics is wrong
As I have written many times before, one of the most persistent and damaging myths in economics is the so-called household analogy. This is the
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What is the richest country in the world in 2025?
The Economist – no paywall: “Being Rich is not just about earning more. Prices differ between countries, and a modest salary can go further where things are cheaper. Working hours vary too: some places manage to generate high incomes with fewer hours of labour, leaving time for leisure. So which countries are truly rich?
To answer that we ranked 178 countries using three measures. The first is GDP per person at market exchange rates. It is simple and intuitive, and widely cited. But it ignores price differences between countries. The second measure adjusts incomes for these local costs (known as purchasing-power parity, or PPP). This offers a better guide to living standards but one that takes no account of leisure time: the share of people in work, and how long they work, varies by country.
Our final yardstick accounts for both local prices and hours worked. See how the countries stack up below. The three countries that top our lists are Switzerland, Singapore and Norway. In dollar terms Switzerland comes top, with average earnings above $100,000 last year. Singapore and Norway follow, at $90,700 and $86,800, respectively.
But Switzerland is also one of the most expensive countries in the world, so its high salaries do not stretch very far. Adjusted for local costs, Singapore jumps ahead. And adjusted for hours worked, Norway takes first place, as it did last year, followed by Qatar and Denmark. America, the world’s biggest economy by GDP, ranks 4th, 7th and 6th on the three measures. Britain is placed 19th, 27th and 25th. How countries’ ranking changes across measures can reflect social patterns.
Those where few women are paid to work—such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey—rank higher on income per hour than on income alone, because earnings are concentrated among fewer people. Countries with unusually old or young populations also shift: in Italy, many people are retired; in Nigeria, many are not yet of working age. In both, a smaller working cohort supports a larger one..”
Elon Musk says Tesla will be worth $30 trillion one day — but investors think otherwise The Cool Down
