Word: complexity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Three main lessons present themselves. First, our complex financial system is awfully fragile. Second, government action is capable of keeping a financial panic from snowballing into a complete economic disaster along the lines of the Great Depression. Third, the government has - in large part because of its success in averting disaster - found it difficult to take any actions that would make the financial system less fragile in the future. That would, apparently, be too much government intervention...
...genuinely transformative factor is that China now gets Taiwan. The island is a more complex place for Beijing to decipher than Hong Kong and Macau, former British and Portuguese colonies whose governments could make no moral argument against the return of the two territories to Chinese sovereignty. Taiwan is different. Since 1987, when the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) lifted martial law, the island has gradually become a thriving, if somewhat rambunctious, democracy. Its 23 million people determine its future, not Beijing or London or Lisbon. A sizeable portion of the population - some estimates put it at as high as a third...
...China to better understand what makes Taiwan tick. Now Beijing's strategy is more nuanced. That's partly tactical: the hard-line approach was driving people to the DPP. But it's also an effort to win Taiwan hearts and minds and to show that China, too, is more complex than a caricature of a totalitarian state...
...education, health care, employment, immigration and more. There's an old adage that you want to see neither a law nor a sausage being made, but just as there are brilliant sausage makers, so there are brilliant lawmakers, and Kennedy was one of them - immersing himself in the complex detail of policy, looking for deals, finding partners, getting things done. (See TIME's photos: Mourning Ted Kennedy...
Threading that political needle - while trying to stitch together a complex reform bill on which the stability of the entire financial system depends - is a long shot. But at least everyone involved has a reason to make...