Kennedy School Review

BY TRACEY LAM AND JONATHAN HUI “If you say ‘Asian,’ what pops into your head? They think we’re all supposed to be doctors, you know? Or they think we come from a good, rich family. But we don’t.”[i] These words are from Pass or Fail in Cambodia Town, a documentary about the true stories of […]

Most Australians today accept that the mining boom of the mid-to late 2000s, which reshaped the country, is largely over. But an overlooked segment of history is that the end of the stunning run in bulk commodity prices came as a rapid and unexpected shock to most of the nation. Despite predictions of weaker Chinese […]

BY PAUL-ADRIEN HYPPOLITE AND NINA ROUSSILLE The 12 July 2015 Euro Area summit ended with a last minute agreement that avoided an imminent Greek exit from the Eurozone (“Grexit”).[i] Even before engaging talks about the third bailout program in 2015, the Greek government had accepted several prior bailouts with accompanying conditions negotiated with their European […]

BY KAVI PATEL Democrats added a $15 federal minimum wage to their platform before the Democratic National Convention at a time when the minimum wage debate is a hot topic and the “Fight for 15” Movement has already been successful in California and New York.  Advocates of an increase in the minimum wage argue that it […]

BY BRYNNA QUILLIN Crammed into a narrow hallway leading to the convention hall, I stood on my tiptoes to locate the podium on stage above the ponytails and tall “Hillary” signs. For months I had been eagerly awaiting Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Clutching the “USA” and “Michelle” signs I had scavenged […]

BY JACK GAO AND DIANA ZHOU Imagine a world where cars operate on electricity alone. Cars are silent, engineless, odorless. Gas stations are replaced by individual electric charging stations located in homes, offices, and shopping mall parking lots. Roads and pavement use friction technology to charge cars as they drive. In dense urban metropolises like […]

BY MALIKA NOOR MEHTA “Birth. Marriage. Death. In India, these three landmarks are celebrated with zeal,” says Rajneesh Yadav, the India Country Director at Free the Slaves, an international NGO working to eradicate sex trafficking and debt bondage. “When families refuse to perform the rituals associated with each of these events, they are considered social […]

BY ANDREAS WESTGAARD For years, the Republican Party’s foundation has solidly rested on a three-legged stool of social conservatism, interventionist foreign policy, and fiscal moderation. Remarkably, the current Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, does not espouse any of these values, deviating from what the Reagan Revolution set in stone more than three decades […]

BY YAEL STERN AND GAL LIN “Will you answer a survey we are conducting to understand people’s values?” the surveyor asked the young Iranian man on the other end of the phone line. “Sure,” he answered. The young man answered the surveyor’s questions pleasantly and openly, even joking occasionally. They reached question twenty: How similar […]

BY MATTHEW E. SPECTOR The balloons dropped slowly, almost painfully so, to close last week’s Republican National Convention. A string of controversies and half-truths, the part-P.T. Barnum antics, part-raucous rally was something the American voter had not anticipated. This election has become at its core a battle between globalism and nationalism, and puts American democracy […]

BY MOCTAR ABOUBACAR For the past two years I have been working for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Sudan, in charge of analyzing how vulnerable Darfur’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are to food security and livelihood shocks. WFP and other humanitarian organizations have been supporting IDPs in camps since the height of the Darfurian conflict […]

BY SHANOOR SEERVAI The resounding victory of Hindu nationalists at India’s federal polls in May 2014 is attributed to one man: Narendra Modi. Fed up with the corruption and complacency of the Congress—the party that led India’s anti-colonial struggle and governed for much of its independent history—the world’s largest democracy voted for a leader who […]