17 May 2023 The Baby Bonus Doesn’t Work Any More By Gwynne Dyer I was one of five children – not seen as a particularly big family in Newfoundland at the time – and there was one year when we allegedly beat Guatemala to have the highest birth rate in the world. (That’s probably not …
15 February 2023 The Floaty-Bag Problem: Solved? By Gwynne Dyer The United States has been having “a bit of a floaty-bag problem over its airspace,” as South Africa’s ‘Daily Maverick’ news-site put it. Indeed it has. Four balloons or other flying “objects” shot down by the US Air Force over American or Canadian territory in …
“Well, my dear, we didn’t know where to look. The old codger was getting away with it again, fielding the questions like a man only nine-tenths of his age, and then somebody asked him about Taiwan. He must have rehearsed that one, but still he blew it – big time. We’ll be picking up the …
28 June 2021 The Chinese Communist Party is celebrating the centenary of its foundation this week (Thursday, 1 July), and most people in China accept the origin myth that justifies its dictatorial rule. China was a horrendously impoverished and unequal society in 1921, the official line says, and owes its current prosperity and freedom from …
2 June 2021 There is a great anomaly in China’s modern history, but it isn’t the late, unlamented one-child policy. That is endlessly discussed and debated as if it really mattered, while China’s three lost decades of economic growth and their unintended consequences for the climate crisis go almost unmentioned. There was great excitement among …
22 February 2021 Texas puts out more carbon dioxide than any other US state, so there was some innocent amusement to be had from the indignation of Texans unable to boil their drinking water during the Big Freeze because the power was still out. Things like that are not supposed to happen in a modern, …
20 July 2020 If you wanted evidence that reasonably competent government – not great, not corruption-free, just not awful – produces good results in the end, here it is. Back in 1971, when the two countries split apart, Bangladesh had 65 million people and Pakistan had 60 million. By the end of this century, Bangladesh …
Germany and Japan are finally winning a war together. Unfortunately, it is the War on Rationality. Coal, as everybody knows, is by far the most damaging source of energy we use, in terms of both the harm to human beings and the impact on the climate. It’s twice as bad as natural gas, and dozens …
Nation-states, like four-year-olds, find it very hard to admit they are in the wrong and apologise. Adult intervention often helps, but all Japan and South Korea have is US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (who tried and failed to mediate a week ago in Bangkok). So the trade war between the two grows and festers. …
The last time when North Korean nuclear weapons might have been headed off by diplomacy was 15-20 years ago, when there was a deal freezing North Korean work on nuclear weapons, and then one stopping the country’s work on long-range ballistic missiles. If they had been negotiated with the same attention to detail that was …