In 1867, Karl Marx famously declared, “It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labor out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of laborers, if the cost is about the same.” Since then, the phenomenon of the “reserve army of labor,” or the existence of structural unemployment […]

Last spring brought a glimmer of hope to an issue that Canada neglects: bereavement leave. Facebook announced an unprecedented leap forward, providing employees with 20 days paid leave to grieve the loss of an immediate family member, and 10 days for extended family members. It has been much discussed that this policy was at least […]

Donald Trump achieved what many considered unthinkable. He is president of the United States, having won 304 Electoral College votes in the 2016 election. In addition, the Republican Party won majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. “Why did the electorate do what they did tonight?” Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, posed […]

BY JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MAROIS Most climate change awareness campaigns feature stranded polar bears on drifting ice sheets, or sea levels creeping over the island of Manhattan. But are these strategies convincing? The “protect the planet” approach has proven to be too weak of a public narrative to mobilize voters. Instead, imagine opening the newspaper to […]

BY CLAIRE CHAUMONT “From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us.” The Plague, A. Camus, 1947[1] On 24 January 2014, the head of Meliandou health post, a sparsely populated village in Guinea, West Africa, informed district health officials of five cases of an unknown infectious disease characterized […]

BY BENJAMIN CLAYTON I’m British, so I know what a waning superpower looks like. America, welcome to the club. In 2015, Joseph Nye, geopolitical analyst extraordinaire, published a book: “Is the American Century Over?” His answer: no. Across three dimensions of power – economic, hard, and soft – Nye concluded that only in the first […]

BY WEN HOE If you visited Kara Tepe on a Saturday night, you might not guess it is a refugee camp. The main hall bursts with music, men and women dance in white pants and colorful robes, and teens tussle in a three-on-three soccer match outside. A cool breeze carries the day’s heat away from […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. The forces of gentrification have reached the gates of Chinatowns. Across America, upscale property developments threaten to encroach on venerable ethnic enclaves that happen to sit on very valuable real estate. While Chinatown gentrification in some ways repeats a pattern played […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Abstract This paper examines wealth distribution and ethnically structured inequality among Asian American elderly. This paper uses three different datasets—the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and micro-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS)—to […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. On January 14, 2017, a week before President Donald Trump’s inauguration day, Junsoo Lee, a nineteen-year-old undocumented Korean American from Virginia, gave a speech at the “Here To Stay” rally in Washington, DC. He said, “Because of the ignorance and hatred […]

BY COLIN MURPHY In the United States, twenty-two million people work in government.[1] These people sweep our streets, educate our children, and protect our borders. So much of our quality of life depends on how well these employees and their teams are working. Government performance—the ability of the people and organizations within government to deliver […]

BY HAMADA ZAHAWI The windy, unpaved coastal road seemed to stretch forever. We were clearly lost, driving as we had been for miles in search of the almost mythical ‘Lifejacket Graveyard’ near Molyvos. We were in Greece as part of a group of 45 student volunteers from myriad countries, professions, and schools across Harvard—tasked with […]