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at the beginning of July 2002, the United Nations Development Program released the Arab Human Development Report 2002, the first in a continuing series. Written by Arab scholars, it was a no-holds-barred indictment of economic, social, and political backwardness in the Arab world. American and European audiences received the report with tremendous enthusiasm. Time magazine (December 30, 2002) called it “perhaps the most important volume published in 2002” (Elliott, 2002). In a review entitled “Self-Doomed to Failure,” The Economist (July 6, 2002) asked, “What went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times?” The authors of the Arab Human Development Report 2002 did not claim to be making a balanced assessment of human development in Arab countries, even going so far as to construct an “alternative human development index” designed to show the “deficits” of the Arab world. Nevertheless, their view has become the basis of conventional wisdom regarding Arab development...

S ince 2015, there  has been a chorus of doomsaying about the European Union. Commentators’ odds on its survival lengthened as the Eurozone crisis foretold the prospect of sovereign-debt defaults, the narrow avoidance of ‘Grexit’ was managed at an enormous cost to Greek citizens, the refugee crisis hit European shores with its full and tragic force and the  uk  voted to quit. Out of this quartet of crises came a swathe of ‘end of  eu ’ writing, from historian John Gillingham’s  The  eu   : An Obituary  to Douglas Murray’s  The Strange Death of Europe , lamenting the continent’s cultural collapse. Even the most convinced Europeans had their doubts. Guy Verhofstadt, one of Europe’s most ardent federalists and long-serving leader of the liberal group in the European Parliament, published  De ziekte van Europa —‘Europe’s Sickness’—though by the time the English version was published he had opted for the more optimistic  Europe’s Last C...

n 1709, the  Kangxi Emperor alerted his officials to a ‘serious problem’. ‘It has been nearly 68 years since our dynasty [the Qing] was established. The people have lived in peace and the population has grown by the day, yet the acreage of farmland has not increased accordingly. One person’s land is now farmed by several families. How can they make an adequate living?’, the Emperor asked, and went on to stress: ‘We must find solutions.’ footnote 1  At the time, China’s population was between 100 and 150 million, the highest it had ever been, but this was only the beginning of a long period of steady demographic growth. A century later, the country had 360 million inhabitants. footnote 2  This was an era of general prosperity for Imperial China, yet the problem of supporting a large and growing population with limited farmland posed an unrelenting challenge to Kangxi and his successors. China today is a vastly different country. Rapid economic growth, urbanization and ...