I am no fan of China. I have for years been on the Academic Advisory Board for Asia of Human Rights Watch and have advocated an “open mouth” policy in which we citizens here freely criticize China’s egregious human rights violations and its lack of democracy, which I also consider to be an important human right today. After all, the Chinese leadership is neither Stalinist nor Fascist; and ensuring that “they do not get away with it” brings pressure, however small, to get them to change their ways; and it provides moral support to the nascent growth of dissent in China.

The tragedy in Greece is out of character. It is premature: Dionysia, the traditional festival that is popular for its performance of Greek tragedies, is at the end of March. Besides, a Greek tragedy brings a great figure down, thanks to his own mistaken action. But here, the Greek mistakes on fiscal policy are bringing down the euro, and distressing the big European players, Germany and France.

In the ultimate analysis, of course, the bigger EU nations that masterminded the euro are not entirely blameless: They overlooked the fragility of a common currency if a tight control of fiscal policy is not accompanied by a zealous monitoring system. We all know that several German economists predicted what has just happened; and that a fiscally handicapped nation like Greece would bust the fiscal discipline, and then threaten the euro.

With the milk spilt, however, the overriding question that is keeping the EU, most economists, and all the media busy is: What can the EU do?

It is good that President Obama saw the Dalai Lama. Human Rights are important today and the Chinese systematically violate them; even the lack of democracy is regarded by many of us as deplorable and unacceptable in a decent society.

True, sometimes governments, particularly ones like ours which have worldwide interests, must balance off human rights against realpolitik considerations. But no one seriously believes that the Dalai Lama is engaging in seditious activities. So, to surrender to Chinese demands not to see him would have been unjustified, even if the Chinese go beyond bluster and try to seek retribution.

After all, India correctly gave asylum to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans, with strict injunction against political activities, even though this created further tensions with China. Asylum is a very important principle; and I admire India for having stuck to it despite Chinese anger. If India did the right thing, why not the United States, which is immensely more powerful, both economically and militarily?

The announcement by President Obama on February 13th that he had appointed a Muslim aide, Rashad Hussain, as his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), reminded me of the time that, some years ago, I spoke about regionalism on a panel at Davos with former presidents Obasanjo of Nigeria and Musharraf of Pakistan. I believe I was included because I wrote, and continue to write, (critically) on bilateral and regional free trade agreements. I said that I would talk as an intellectual rather than as an economist (which prompted Strobe Talbott, the panel moderator, to wisecrack that he was delighted that I made that distinction).

Toyota’s sudden collapse, with recalls multiplying and engulfing its best cars, has implications for Tom Friedman’s 2005 thesis that The World is Flat. It is yet another example of why Friedman is wrong.

Friedman had essentially argued that comparative advantage—or what might simply be called competitive advantage—has disappeared and that one could produce anything at the same cost around the world: in India and China, as in the United States. Friedman is a pro-globalization intellectual who probably meant this as a wake-up call for the United States to shape up. But it ironically served to alarm several of his readers into thinking that the United States was doomed by open competition from abroad, that the Chinese and the Indians would now, like Russell Crowe’s Roman legions, march in lockstep across this flat world and vanquish us.

After many years, I stopped going to Davos because it had degenerated into panels of officials, who all make banal observations that are constrained by briefs from their governments, or panels that were continually expanded so as to put ill-informed NGOs, moneybags, and lobbyists alongside people knowledgeable in a field. In short: We were not playing doubles tennis but, rather, cricket elevens with amateurs and professionals thrown together. The media, of course, love Davos, with even “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer,” The New York Times (our “newspaper of record” with standards that have frayed so much that Bono is a contributing editor) and the Financial Times now “reporting” solemnly from Davos as if it measures the pulse of where the world is headed.

The current issue of Foreign Policy sketches the “anthropology” of the “fair trade” idea, unfortunately betraying an incomplete familiarity not only with the different ways in which this phrase has been used, but also with the considerable literature on why its extensive use by Oxfam, Bono, et al, has fed protectionism in the rich countries and, hence, caused immense damage to market access by the developing countries. (I even might go so far as to be self-referential in my own blog and refer the well-meaning editor to several reader-friendly articles that I have written on the subject in the Financial Times and elsewhere—some now on my Web site, www.columbia.edu/~38. And also, if she has the intellectual stamina, to refer her to work through the pioneering analyses of the contention that fair trade and harmonization are prerequisites for free trade, which I co-authored with the eminent legal jurist Robert Hudec in two volumes that were published by MIT Press in 1996.)

There are three distinct senses in which the phrase “fair trade” has been used in public policy circles in recent decades, each case with parallels to historical events.