Totally agree, overall a presumptuous piece of conjecture and a weak justification of the present state of suffering experienced by millions (excluding the author I presume).

It also struck me as originating from a highly US-centric view of the events in Latin America/Europe/Middle East. Low in nuance and meshing poorly with how the leadership of these countries understand and characterize their own economic/political dilemmas and decisions. It essentially assumes a "one right path for the world" and considers confused or invalid any deviation in discourse or policy. Also seems to perpetuate the old Colonialist chestnut - civilize the world (often directly against its will) at any price.

Ukraine too. Russia was subject to an enormous amount of provocation from the US, very little of which is reported. For an alternate view, the Russian President's office publishes his speeches in english; this [1] is worth reading.

But whatever you think of Ukraine, just remember how we reacted when Russian put nukes on our doorstep. Yet the US government is happy to meddle in Ukraine, on Russia's doorstep, and is shocked, shocked! when Russian reacts very negatively.

[1] http://eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/23137

Another day, another hack, another story ignored by the main stream media:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-25/hacked-us-documents...

you put it well

   > No facts, no cold hard hard data, no references, all 
   > emotional hand-waving.

Come on, it warned you straight in the title with "An economist explains..."

I like that. Just my 5p. When economist explains - journalist listens and statistician laughs.

A lot of fields can not be perfectly quantitated. Unfortunately, economics is one of them. And I think it's far away from that ideal. For fields like this, like jokoon said, opinion matters.

edit: typo: quantized => quantitated

so ? you can't always measure everything. and actually there is one or two reference in there.

I do like opinion pieces on economics.

Welcome to popular economics!