Commentary
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Weird Data Says This is a Recession
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Mark Sheppard is a current Economics PhD student at CUNY Graduate Center. He is an alumnus of both the Harris School of Public Policy (MPP ’21) and Georgetown University (MA ’19). He is also a former Executive Board member of the Chicago Policy Review. As the Federal Reserve raises interest…
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Racial Justice is Infrastructure
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True political moments represent a chance to try and right a historical wrong. The infrastructure bill signed into law last November creates a unique political moment to make marginal progress on longstanding issues of racial justice. Too often policy windows pass, news cycles change and political moments come and go…
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Halt of Nord Stream 2 Could Kickstart Europe’s Energy Transition
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Sarah Elisabeth Huber is a Student-at-Large from the University of Vienna, studying at Harris School of Public Policy and at the College. After years of controversy and sanctions, the contested Nord Stream 2 pipeline project has been put on hold by the German government as a result of Russia invading…
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China’s Coal Relapse – Is It Here to Stay?
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Ran Cheng is an MPP candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. China is indulging in coal again. It built 38.4GW of new coal-fired power installations in 2020, three times as much as the rest of the world. The expansion continued in 2021 and early 2022. Given China’s proposed…
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Political Bad Faith: When Misinformation is the Point
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This article was co-authored by Allison Swimmer, Matilde Tinazzi Martini, Ilina Mitra, and Jose Villalobos Gonzalez. All are first year MPP candidates at University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. From unfounded theories about homeopathic COVID-19 remedies to baseless claims regarding herd immunity, manipulated information is sweeping across the…
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Evaluating the Costs and Consequences of Sanctions
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The joint US, EU, and G7 allies sanctions regime against Russia is unprecedented in scope, magnitude, and timing. The ‘Western’ alliance has targeted a broad range of Russian institutions, entities, and domestic industries. Additional sanctions have been directly levied on Russian elites and their fancy toys. As a senior Biden…
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As Russo-American Tensions Rise, Nuclear Policy Must Stay Grounded
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As Russia encroaches on Ukraine’s sovereignty, it bears remembering: the United States currently has over a thousand nuclear weapons currently deployed, hundreds of which can be launched in five minutes of the President deciding to initiate a strike. Russia is similarly armed. And yet since the fall of the USSR,…
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Soldiers to Guardians: Transition to a Community Policing Model
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The murder of George Floyd, committed by a former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer in an extremely gruesome and heinous fashion, caught the world’s attention and shed light on other unjust slayings. However, police killings are not new. Data collected by Statista suggested that over 1,000 known individuals were murdered…
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Maybe We Should Make Some Rules Here: A Framework for Social Media
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Article co-authored by Ellie Vorhaben. This piece comes as a follow up to a prior article concerning Facebook’s limited legal liability from the whistleblower. We’ve watched the same scene play out over and over. Reporters reveal another negative impact of social media. Outrage and handwringing ensue. Then a mix of…
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Anti-Asian Violence Is Not Random: Why Increased Policing Will Fail Us
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With the Atlanta spa shootings earlier this year, and the pandemic exacerbating incendiary rhetoric about Asian Americans, violence has become a regular conversation topic in my circles. My Asian-American friends share stories about street harassment, while my mother, in her native Chinese, always urges me to “stay careful” and “pay…
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Sweden’s Unconventional Approach to Covid-19: What went wrong
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While most countries endured harsh lockdowns during March 2020, Swedes went on with their lives largely as before, indulging in nightlife, visiting elderly relatives, and so on. Government officials hoped that a large enough portion of the Swedish population would gain immunity to COVID-19, making the diseases’ spread less consequential.…