Quotes from John Micklethwait

Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics because of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition, and opportunity. The West has to change because it is going broke. The emerging world needs to reform to keep forging ahead. There is a global contest, but one based on promise as much as fear: Government can be done better.

The desire to control everything is giving way to pluralism, uniformity to diversity, centralization to localism, opacity to transparency, and immobilisme, or the resistance to change, to experimentation. The state is beginning to move in each case (though it could move a lot faster).

Not many people in Washington are thinking beyond the 2016 presidential election. It is sometimes argued that an American administration operates strategically for only about six months, at the beginning of its second year—after it has gotten its staff confirmed by the Senate and before the midterms campaign begins.

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that politicians can always rely on Paul's vote if they give him money that they steal from Peter. This understates the problem with democracy because Paul is an old man and Peter is either a child or unborn.

Bringing Leviathan under control will be the heart of global politics

without serious reforms of its public sector America will turn into "an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army,"11 with all the money going to entitlements and defense and none left for education or anything else.

Berlusconi is us," as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago puts it.

The British general election of 2010 returned only three MPs to the Commons who described their professions as "science or research" (compared with thirty-eight barristers).

If the United States sinks into political paralysis, its epitaph could well be, "government of the people, by the people, for the people.

If the eurozone collapses, its epitaph should be the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg, in 2007: "We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."32

As it has expanded, the Western state has tended to give people more rights—the right to vote, the right to education and health care and welfare. Things like a university education that a century ago were regarded as a white, male, wealthy privilege are now seen as a public service, in some cases a free entitlement, for everybody.

We live and do business in the Information Age," Barack Obama once complained, "but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black-and-white TV.

1500 only a madman would have bet that the future belonged to Europe. By 1700 only a madman would have bet that it belonged anywhere else.

the "compendium of learning" set in motion by the Ming Emperor Yongle (1360–1424), which drew on the talents of more than two thousand scholars and filled more than eleven thousand volumes—and remained the largest encyclopedia in the world until Wikipedia surpassed it in 2007.

Just because something is useful, it does not mean we should give away freedoms to get it.

In London, more people died of the virus in one four-week stretch in April than in the worst four weeks of the Blitz.

Transparency was a guardian of frugality, just as confusion had been a handmaiden of extravagance.

There are thirty-two closed-circuit television cameras near the flat where George Orwell wrote 1984. The night watchman standing guard at the gate has become the nanny inside the home and the office, hanging over your shoulder in the kitchen, sitting room, boardroom, and even bedroom. But it is not a very good nanny.

The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.

The Peterson Foundation calculates that, since 2010, fiscal uncertainty—i.e., gridlock—might have slowed America's GDP growth by one percentage point and stopped the creation of two million jobs.

Vagueness about numbers is a curse of the public sector. In the worst cases it borders on the criminal. Challenged to find one reliable number in the Argentine government's books, a group of the most respected economists in Buenos Aires went into a huddle and came back with the answer: "Maybe one of the trade ones, but we are not sure which.