Search
Robert de Neufville
Contributor, Big Think
I lecture and write about politics and philosophy. I hold degrees in politics from Harvard and Berkeley, and have studied complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Other interests include theoretical physics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and the game of Go. You can find me on Twitter at @rdeneufville.
Read Less
For me, summer is a time to catch up on my reading. As I head out for a few weeks of vacation, I thought I would leave you with a […]
Blogging is hard. It’s hard coming up with new ideas from the comfort of your mom’s basement day after day after day. Like most bloggers, I try to steal other […]
Blogging is hard. It’s hard coming up with new ideas from the comfort of your mom’s basement day after day after day. Like most bloggers, I try to steal other […]
Treasury Secretary Geithner warns that if Congress doesn’t act to raise the federal debt ceiling, it would be “unthinkably damaging to the economy.” As Ezra Klein reports, the governments options […]
Washington was scandalized recently when MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin called President Obama “a dick” on Morning Joe. Halperin quickly apologized and was suspended for the remark, which he admitted was […]
As the August 2 deadline approaches, Congress continues to fight over whether and under what conditions to raise the federal debt ceiling. Both Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s have warned […]
Wednesday evening the bipartisan negotiations on raising the debt ceiling collapsed when House Majority Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced he was pulling out of the talks. Cantor refused to continue the […]
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recentlywrote that while members of the U.S. armed forces may as a group be politically conservative, “they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos.” Kristof’s […]
The smart money is on former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination to challenge President Obama in 2012. Romney leads the early polls, and performed well in […]
On May 26, Congress approved a four-year extension of major surveillance powers in the PATRIOT Act by wide margins in both the House and the Senate. President Obama, who was […]
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claims his recent budget proposal will “save Medicare.” Medicare, he says, will run out of money in the next ten years and is “headed for a […]
It has been a bad 10 years for the economy. As I’ve written before, the last decade was, economically, a lost decade. As this graph from Ezra Klein shows, there […]
Prosperity means more greenhouse gases. In a perverse way, the global recession was good for the environment, because emissions actually fell in 2009. But as the world economy begins to […]
Buzz has been building about the possibility of that Sarah Palin will run for President after all. Palin announced on Thursday that she will launch a bus tour of key […]
In a special election last night, Democrat Kathy Hochul upset Republican Jane Corwin to become New York’s 26th District’s representative in Congress. The race had been widely seen—and was treated […]
Baby Boomers have had it easy in many ways. One of the advantages of being born during a baby boom is that your generation is always going to be large […]
Resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one thing that could really make a lasting difference in our relations with the Middle East.
On June 4, 2009, President Obama gave a speech at Cairo University in Egypt, in which he said he was seeking “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims […]
The 2012 elections may be largely about race. While the state of the economy may ultimately determine whether Obama wins or loses, the rhetoric in both the presidential and congressional […]
Does killing Osama bin Laden guarantee President Obama’s reelection? It’s hard to imagine—short of the unemployment rate magically dropping several points—a single better piece of news for Obama. It’s certainly […]