Christopher Newfield

Nicolas Sarkozy came to power five years ago heralded as France's New Man who would bind the country to global capitalism by separating it from its social model. He jogged and he paddled New Hampshire canoes without his shirt. I thought then that...

The New York Times has just published the latest in Charles Duhigg's important series of pieces on Apple and the iEconomy (see also "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work" and "The iEconomy," written with various coauthors).

This third article is about...

Only a week has passed the debt ceiling deal was finally signed, and we've already seen USAAA become US of AA plus, followed by the return of the worst global market turmoil since the financial chaos of fall 2008. Major U.S. indicies fell between 5 and 7 percent...

What the U.S. really needs is higher ed uncut -- not various public universities down another $500 million next year on top of previous rounds of similar cuts. For the twenty years that I have been at the University of California, the system has steadily squeezed undergraduate instruction -- with...

A paperback edition of my most recent book, Unmaking the Public University, has just been released by Harvard University Press. The original hardback appeared in mid-2008, and offered a genealogy of this pivotal institution's unsustainable financial and cultural situation. Since then, that situation has gone from bad to worse. There...

American politicians seem to have replaced Keynes, the economic theorist of stimulus, with Herbert Hoover, the disastrous Depression prophet of austerity. Destructive cuts in health and education are being imposed in 46 of the 50 states, creating unnecessary misery and delaying economic recovery.

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The core feature of Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget is that it delivers cuts in a framework of austerity, rather than development within short-term constraints. It continues the Hooverite smothering of California society that was Arnold Schwarzenegger's main achievement. The backlash has been relatively muted because some supporters' hope that...