Compared with other developed countries, the United States has very low taxes, little income redistribution, and an extraordinarily complex tax code.

For two decades, the United States has dominated the global arms trade, reaping a broad range of economic and geopolitical benefits in the process.

Discussions of Hispanic Americans in the media and on the campaign trail are warped by ignorance about who they really are and what they really want.

According to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail, economic development hinges on a country's political institutions.

In the latest installment of his epic biography of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro reveals a man who obsessively sought power to assuage a misplaced sense of his own suffering.

The warnings of The Limits to Growth were far more prescient than Bjørn Lomborg suggests, argue several critics, including two of the book's authors.

Since weak demand is at the heart of the recession, governments need to enact not just structural reforms but also stimulus programs, argues Menzie Chinn.

Given the threats it faces, from nuclear-armed autocracies to terrorists, the United States cannot afford to scale back its military, argues Paul Miller. Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen reply that the danger of these challenges is vastly exaggerated and that an overly militarized foreign policy has not made the country safer.

Brazil's rise never depended on the sale of commodities, and thanks to recent reforms, the country will continue to prosper, write Shannon O'Neil, Richard Lapper, and Larry Rohter. Ronaldo Lemos, meanwhile, claims that those reforms have not gone far enough.

With the Iraq war over and U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan, the U.S. Army faces a decade of change, writes its chief of staff. It will need to adjust to smaller budgets, focus more on Asia, and embrace a fuller range of potential missions.

Mexico is winning its death match against the drug cartels and rebuilding once-corrupt institutions in the process. But an election is approaching, and the candidates are calling for a truce. Mexico can take its place in the sun, but only if it wipes out the cartels for good.

In 64 BC, the great Roman lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero ran for consul. His younger brother, Quintus, wrote a detailed strategy memo laying out just what Marcus needed to do to win. It's the best guide to electioneering you'll ever read, presented here with a commentary by the legendary political consultant James Carville.

Judged by the standard of protecting U.S. interests, things have worked out quite well for the Obama administration; judged by the standard of midwifing a new global order, they remain a work in progress.

The West's recent growth was dependent on borrowing. Going even further into debt now won't help; instead, countries need to address the underlying flaws in their economies.

Brazil's economy depends too much on high commodity prices, and as demand falls, so may Brazil.

Unions are declining, and the working and middle classes are paying the price. Reviving labor won't be easy -- but doing so is critical to preserving America's economic and social health.

A pair of books by Charles Mann describe life in the Americas before and after Columbus linked the hemispheres and kicked off the first era of globalization. It turns out that the New World was far more technologically advanced than subsequent generations have realized, with plenty to teach the Old -- especially about how to simultaneously exploit and preserve key natural resources.

Executing policy through tax breaks and other indirect measures encourages Americans to think that they do not rely on the government for help, even when they do. The result is a distorted public discourse and an erosion of democratic legitimacy.

The United States has tried cracking down on Pakistan before. It did not work then, and it will not work now, writes Alexander Evans. The difference, counters Stephen Krasner, is that this time the United States has real leverage.

Running down the list of the U.S. State Department's Latin America policy objectives in El País in September 2010, the economist Moisés Naím noted that they focused almost exclusively on domestic concerns.