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State programs also have a range of political effects, which can be located on a spectrum—from those that assume and affirm political belonging to those that stigmatize and efface citizenship. Some programs, such as Social Security, were designed for “deserving” citizens and tend to enhance the rights, resources, and standing of beneficiaries. Such programs are rarely means tested, entail minimal surveillance, and in some cases obscure—often to the point of invisibility—any notion of dependence on the state. Despite the ostensibly universal character of many such programs, access has been highly racialized and gendered. New Deal policy makers effectively barred many immigrants, Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, and African Americans from these programs. They built a bifurcated welfare state, making domestic and agricultural workers ineligible for social insurance and relegating many of the most vulnerable workers, people of color, and single mothers to paltry and stigmatized programs that were typically means and morals tested.9

Where social insurance programs assumed their beneficiaries' full membership in the political community, other programs marked their own beneficiaries as being at the margins of the polity or the economy, but still as candidates for inclusion. Policy makers have used such assimilative goals to rationalize the redistribution of resources. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit has ameliorated the poverty of millions of families by subsidizing low wages through a refundable tax credit. However, assimilative strategies can also reify hierarchies and unequal social relations by marking certain behaviors and populations as deviant. For example, in the mid-twentieth century, AFDC social workers denied aid to mothers whose homes they deemed “unsuitable,” often because of alleged sexual misconduct. Programs aiming to rehabilitate beneficiaries, typically on terms delineated by elites or dominant cultural norms, can stigmatize those unable or unwilling to conform to prescribed social norms. They tend to conceptualize marginality as the result of blocked opportunities, or of individual or cultural maladaptation, instead of as arising from the dynamics of social or market relations.

The monopolies of physical violence and taxes build the modern State. The

liberal autocracy achieves legal absolutism, the entire legal production of the

Pandemics are here to stay, like global warming.[81]The most disadvantaged are experiencing the global pandemic as a disease and, at the same time, as an economic recession. It is difficult to separate both sides of Covid-19, whose effects are on workers, the unemployed, the elderly, women. The States, in general, has launched a massive effort of public spending; it is the right thing to do. But, it is necessary to remark that some people and companies benefit from the crisis simultaneously. There is growing inequality within the community, and those who suffer from it are the same ones who provide public resources to fight the pandemic and recession.The syllogism is overwhelming. Climate change exhibits the social costs not paid by polluting companies,public and private, and Covid-19 is one of its particular corollaries, the economic cost of which is borne by those who mainly suffer from it.The absence of political commitment from the State, subordinate to market forces, renounces the democratic protection of the population and its legitimate demand for redistribution. The guardians of the market are also the guardians of the State, basically to prevent the response to more social justice and equality.[82]Griziotti described Public Finance as illegal or arbitrary when fiscal policy is without cause and is extortionate or parasitic, sacrificing aspirations for substantial justice and creating privileges for the richest and most powerful.Public evil is the reverse of the public good. There is perverse solidarity that serves selfish destruction and predatory individualistic behaviors. Examples of systemic risks are there: the financial crisis of 2008,climate change, institutional corruption, the pandemic, and economic recession, the negative consequences of digitalization, and, also, the tax erosion and the profits shifting to offshore territories without tax.It is worth noting that the redistributive tax is necessary for dramatic social moments, be it war,pandemic, climate change, etc., because the States cannot achieve solutions by throwing away the costs on the disadvantaged. Tax compensation can only occur through the systemic tax on excess profits on those who take advantage of systemic crises (e-commerce, pharmaceutical companies, gig economy. "[83]The UN proclaims three responses: Expansion of health coverage, safeguarding lives and livelihoods, and a better world post-Covid-19.In tax matters, they suggest a wealth tax, environmental taxes, the fight against tax avoidance and evasion and illicit cash flows, reduction of fiscal inequality, and green tax reform.It's an exciting opening. At least, the denomination pandemic of inequality is timely and indicated but leaves without reference to those who feed it. As in the financial crisis, those responsible have a first and last name and systemic risk, in all its aspects, must cite them in the cause.

through the private law of property and contracts, and the second challenge is to transform social needs into public goods. That is a progressive tax system. 2.4. Fiscal governmentality. Police discipline wins in perfection because it conveys a discourse of unifying and totalizing power over society and the State itself that frequently masks its unilateral and coercive nature under disciplinary normalization, emergency police sovereignty, which justifies it. The normalization society, says Foucault, is a society where, according to a vertical articulation, the norm of the discipline from the outside intersects with the model of the field -the fact- that regulates the interior of the processes employing the reduction of the deviations, the return to the average, the maintenance of the balance. The normalizing power inspires the liberal order of the reason of State ,on subjection to discipline and its transfer that affects everyone's behavior. A "disciplinary normalization." The disciplines provide coherence to the media that regulates, corrects, and modulates the behavior of the people who are the protagonists of them or created by individuals who promote them. The disciplines refer to forms of social behavior inflexible for those who fall under their scope because they frame to trade, profession, techniques, and knowledge necessary to pretend to be or occupy what it is. There are procedures for information, declaration, accounting, economic budgets, audit interpretation, good corporate practices, and imposed technical references. Its adherence ensures the usual rule, and its rejection causes the destruction or marginalization of those who carry it out. The disciplines centralize the general production of individual liberties and interests compatible with the effectiveness and efficiency of the economic system, correlative to personal, patrimonial, and capital freedom and security. The core of normalization is the economization of life, including the intimate and particular spheres of each one. There is no other reason for government than that of the market. The commodification turns into metaphysics any moral imposition of justice, social equality, and solidarity. The entrepreneur finds his motivation in his selfish interest, and his self-esteem grows with the satisfaction of his interest, with no more economic rationale than his own decision. Thus, his throne of interest leads him to the throne of sacrifice because he perceives as disadvantages the protection of public presence, cooperation or solidarity with others, or the legal regulation of the toxic competition of extreme powers of multinationals, digital, financial banking system (oligopolies, concentration, globalization).

!23!The tax must be per the market economy and companies. The mass taxpayers with fewer resources, consumers, workers, or small owners are outside the circuit. The tax system not only preserves the game from gamers who avoid or evade it but also causes the fiscal impoverishment of low-income people. Ultimately, they end up supporting taxes higher than they receive from the Public Treasury. The poor pay taxes over the transfers they receive, often taking them below the poverty line. The paradox of the belief in the universality and homogeneity of the tax system explains the lack of knowledge that those who barely demonstrate the ability to pay to contribute more than those who have more. Fiscal impoverishment arises when people experiencing poverty are poorer because of the taxes charged to them over the tax benefits they receive. This is the experience on salaries or sales tax. A. Jurow Kleiman is right when she argues that fiscal impoverishment violates human dignity because it damages people's physical and emotional well-being and worsens their social exclusion.37 The tax becomes a price for the enjoyment of public goods or services that only those who use or enjoy them pay. The tax is not a tax on the ability to pay off those who have the most, but the use and enjoyment of public goods of those with less power of disposal. The security devices, the practical reason of the government, set the limits to preaching freedom and controls or sanctions to its application without risks or dangers. Individual freedom cannot exist without orderly and consented intervention, and democracy is a danger as long as it is not limited to the regulatory form of prices. The most significant risk is the security device of the sovereign state of exception that creates its order without right: the illegality of the law. "When (Foucault ) speaks to us of illegalisms, he indicates that every legislative device has contemplated some reserved spaces in which the law can be violated, others in which it can be ignored and finally, still others in which infractions can be punished. "38 Tax evasion is the first sign of violation of the law, and avoidance or aggressive tax planning is the second sign of law refusal that can be without consequences. The legal tax system transfers the tax burden on third parties, consumers, or workers. The tax is redistributive in the opposite direction to what is declared and hides its effects to avoid debate among those affected. The impact of the tax burden is a legal and economic privilege of the enterprise and owner, and its transfer is a sophisticated instrument of difference between the types of nominal taxes and the effective ones. The art of neoliberal government makes an art of the culture of danger. The culture of danger depends on the success or failure of each one, their ambition in the market, and the cultivation of their economic interests. The greatest threat is those who do not even pass the property, wealth, or orderly behavior test in the social system and throw normalized society into disorder. The danger comes from the poor, not the de facto inequality supporting those who enjoy economic, social, and political power. Inequality results from the lack of each individual and the natural order of the market. Competition demands its maximum guarantee to avoid the overreach of democracy and the arbitrary interference of the State. The liberal order is the victim of a crisis of governmentality (social, economic, and political turmoil) when the economic cost of liberties is higher than its results and the safety devices of the life of the population break. The crisis of governmentality imposes a return to the defense at all costs of sovereignty as a last resort against "dangerous accidents", the return to legal absolutism, through or despite the law, and, in the end, the alternative to urgency and the exception of the rule of law. Autocracy, exception, and urgency inspire discipline, not normalization, without the adherence and consensus of the population and the east shore of coercion.

Constitutional legal assets transform the very nature of the fiscal monopoly. It is not only about the good collection of the necessary resources for the Public Treasury. It is essential to identify the figures that convey them, the taxpayers to whom it is applied, and the duties that oblige them in case of noncompliance. All the tax is embedded with moral principles under justice. There is no direct and immediate relationship of economic equivalence between public spending and the specific and singular duty to contribute. But, the tax (tribute) is not exhausted in the authority of the general powers to its application.

The State withdraws physical violence, military and police means, from individuals, reserving its ownership and exercise to the central power and establishing the monopoly of taxes to its domain and exclusive control. Tax resources sustain the monopoly of physical violence, which, in turn, guarantees the fiscal monopoly. "Les deux monopoles se tiennent la balance, l`un étant inconcevable sans l' autre."(N. Elias) The symmetry between war and tax is the golden rule in functioning what we would later call the State. Occasional aid gives way to permanent taxes, and the Administration grows to manage them. Coercion is connatural to the tax. G. Bourdieu's metaphor describing the collection of taxes as a civil war is no exaggeration. Failure to comply could lead to death or jail. Tax revolts have accompanied the development of the fiscal monopoly, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Conflicts are the mirror of what we would see today. The bourgeoisie and the sectors of artisans and merchants dominate the local estates and agree, as far as possible, on their tax burden with the central power of the Prince. The mistreated are the peasants and workers. The wealthiest social sectors defend indirect and non-proportional taxes, while the less affluent sectors prefer direct taxes, modulated according to the taxpayers' wealth.(N. Elias)

Legality requires legitimacy: its conformity to constitutional values and principles. The sovereignty of the law is replaced - it is dethroned - by the fundamentality of the Constitution. ( Zagrebelsky) . Legitimacy is the arch that supports public, political, and judicial authority, which means doing what is due as a result of justice. When this happens, the direct application of the finalist constitutional principles shared by the citizenry prevails, and they respond by doing what they are asked to do.(N.Lipari) Representative democracy becomes constitutional. The majority's recognition prevails in the institutional set, specifying its teleological limits of exercise. It is the positivization of moral principles, human rights, the distribution and practice of public powers, and the subordinate action of the law, the Administration, and the jurisdiction to its application content. (G. Zaccaria, Baldassare Pastore, F.Viola) The key is reciprocity between authority, in any manifestations, and democracy cloistered in constitutional assets. The legitimacy of the law is the result of the coincidence of its democratic expression and the relevant legal principles and constitutional assets that precede, come before, the authority. Authority is not enough to legitimize itself, nor does it guarantee the submission of its recipients. The purpose of legal discipline is not the mere duty of obedience under coercion but the collective acceptance of its formulation. Legitimate authority does not exist unless citizens participate democratically in its institution and control its exercise. (M.Vogliotti) The constitutionalization of the person is an epochal change in the liberal autocracy since it combines individual dignity with the collective, shared public good and the recovery of the State as a subject devoted to another disinterested interest broader than the occasional interest of the minorities that occupy it. The production of constitutional legal goods is public goods aimed at protecting the person from the arbitrariness of third parties. Human security goes beyond absolute individual property and concerns the use and enjoyment of shared and collective goods. There is a close connection between fundamental rights and access to the dignity of survival without threats. The authority must bend to a reality more extensive than the one offered by the monarchical or monoclassist State. The constitutional principles of the public monopolies of the State, in particular of the fiscal monopoly, acquire a different dimension from the one that characterized them, according to N. Elias. The sovereign author is subject to the sovereignty of the supreme principles and values and the results of justice. And the foundation lies in the total, complete democracy of the multi-class State.(S.Rodotà)

The immense economic power dominates politics and conditions spending and public income for its benefit. The law motive consists in the discouragement of the democratic majority. One of its main elements is the requirement of reinforced majorities for the approval of taxes or social spending, which both consolidate the strength of organized minorities (and lobbies) and make it impossible for the majority to carry out any significant tax reform project or progressive public spending.

In foreign, financial, and military policies, totalitarian political power reserves the art of government to its elites, holders of an unequal capacity that only corresponds to them. Tax and fiscal policy is part of the art of government of the elites.

Fraenkel corrects Foucault. The sovereign police state does not disappear or dissolve before the liberal State of political economy. On the contrary, its monopoly over physical violence, taxes, and public debt, allows it to take a step back, preserving its prerogatives in the face of governmentality crises that endanger the State of the economy. The State of measures is the equivalent of the State of police, and the normative State is the Rule of Law of the economy. One responds to the permanent coup - the state of exception - and the other to the protection of the economic power of the market and its agents.

The State of norms and measures are complementary constructions combining their respective competencies, an interdependent whole that does not admit precise analysis. The presumption of competence of the Rule of Law yields to the competence of the State of measures. No matter is left out except the market, the company, property, contracts, and taxes. Conversely, the normative State does not enter into the arbitrariness, abuse, judicial, administrative, or political excesses of the State of measures.

As an ordinary criterion of governmentality, the exception ratifies the dichotomy exclusion/inclusion and inclusion/exclusion. In the tax system, the exclusion of the People means the inclusion of the people, and conversely, the inclusion of the People means the exclusion of the people. In the first case, the tax resources come mainly from direct and indirect taxation on the people and the exclusion of the people from the tax, repercussion, avoidance, and evasion. In the second case, the advantages include the People in the form of tax advantages, exemptions, bonuses, amortizations, expenses, and losses and, excluding those deprived of the same or similar benefits. In public spending, the budget orders the expenses based on the interests of the People and the postponement of the interests of the people. The tax system is progressive not only or solely due to the preference for progressive taxes but rather when its results derive from the financing of public goods aimed at satisfying the social and economic needs of the majority. The public expenditure-revenue connection is the one that best clarifies the progressivity of the tax system. The domination and submission of the people is a constant of liberal and neoliberal governmentality that becomes evident in situations of emergency, necessity, and urgency because consensus is essential for social cohesion and continuity. The border is riddled with illegal gaps: arbitrary practices, emergency ordinances, absence of minimum guarantees, the delegation of functions without legal ties, opacity, and irresponsibility in the face of errors. Its limits are not taken into consideration because what prevails is the written form, the text, the lexicon of the legislative rule, and the weakening of the principles and values of the constitutionalization of the person. Law formalism embodies the truth of the anti-politics of force without discussion. And this is valid both for the punitive power and the power of taxation and the allocation of budgetary expenses. An empty law, meaningless that has lost its content. The norm disapplies to the exception. The consequence is illegal legality, as a source of unfair arbitrariness, and legal illegality, as a source of exceptionality, necessity, or urgency. Illegal legality aims at those it seeks to protect, such as homicide, avoidance, or evasion. The interest is in taxes, like crimes and criminal law penalties. The taxes distributes the burden from the "census aristocracy of power" ( MS Giannini ) to the community as a whole. Those who pay are people with low incomes, and those who do not pay taxes because they cannot bear the repercussion of fiscal impoverishment. The less affluent are like criminals and are under eternal suspicion or are invisible.

Lazzarato regards neoliberal governmentality as the complex combination of technologies that govern the debt society and state in the post-Fordist era. He stresses that the financial crash of 2007-2008 disclosed that we do not live in an ideal form of security society as suggested by classical liberal governmentality but in a society built upon the complex assemblage of the sovereign, disciplinary and security modalities of power. Accordingly, sovereign/the state and disciplinary power apparatuses have brought to the front certain repressive techniques, policies, political rationalities, and mechanisms of norm imposition. Lazzarato argues that we need to consider the fact that neoliberal governmentality assumes both centralizing and decentralizing strategies and creates sweeping social effects. For him, the 2008 global financial crisis has proved that we are living in an “authoritarian governmentality” (Lazzarato, 2015: 169) which relies on a specific articulation of three modalities of power. Lazzarato argues that the sovereign and disciplinary techniques of governmentality have gained ascendancy in exerting power (2015: 211). What is most significant in Lazzarato’s argument is that he identifies the role of taxation in constituting and controlling the contemporary debt and rent society in line with the authoritarian neoliberal governmentality. Taxes, in his own words, intercede as the weapon of political governmentality. Taxes assure the continuity and reproduction of profit and rent that crises interrupt; they exert economic-disciplinary control over the population. They are the measure of how effective austerity policies are on the indebted man (Lazzarato, 2015: 8).

Lazzarato pays special attention to taxation as one of the three apparatuses of capture alongside profit and rent. He is of the opinion that, “[t]he transition from Fordism to neoliberalism presupposes no less, and perhaps more, important changes in how money and taxation function” (2015: 31). He argues that, after the crisis, taxation, outweighing rents and profit, has now occupied the first order in the hierarchy of the means of capture. Taxation has become the essential power instrument that monetizes economy (2015: 33) as part of the quantitative easing policy put into effect as a remedy to heal the damaged financial industry as a result of the 2008 crisis. When individual debts and rents have reached their limits and as such finance capital turned its face to the state finance for profitable gains, taxes have become vital apparatus to maintain financial gains and flows. Taxes now function no more than as a “political levy” (2015: 36) that secures the current and future conditions of financial profit.

The cybernetic theory of consciousness could support a highly nuanced understanding of networks, the fuzzy boundaries between the machine and the brain and the technical nonconscious that reconfigures all of us as citizens and consumers, without making clear distinctions between the conscious and the nonconscious as modulated by deep technological structures (Hayles, 2016; Sampson, 2017). Instead, how- ever, the neuroliberal state adopts an analytical perspective that opens the porous borders of the human mind to ‘somatic surveillance’ (Hayles, 2016: 43) in quasi-scientific neuroliberal experimental set-ups analysing group behaviour from the outside without permission. Indeed, neurolib- eral policy experiments, such as the basic income trial, draw on the mysteries of the human soul but have no genuine interest in it unless microscale modifications of human cognition offer techno-rational solutions to organise the disorganised and control the uncontrolled in stabilising finances.

Monetarism was more of a disciplinary phase of the neoliberal governmentality. It ascribed disciplinary mechanisms to budgeting around limitations and restrictions. On the other side, it has laid one of the essential stones of neoliberal governmentality by establishing the recognition of poverty and unemployment as the natural situation of the market society.

The account of Dardot and Laval is helpful in recognizing that fiscal discipline resides in a wider scope of neoliberal disciplinary power regime. In addition, in comparison to monetarism, public choice, which escapes Foucault’s attention, aims for a broader spectrum and space of sociality and technologies to transform government and individuals within a constitutional framework.

It is this conviction of the importance of care in public life that has motivated the emerging research in care and social policy. In particular, this work has focused on ways in which paid labour and care can be combined in societies in order to ensure better and more readily available care for all citizens without placing undue burdens on the carers, especially women. Not surprisingly, however, most of this research relates specifically to developed, northern welfare states.3 I am arguing here, however, that a political ethic of care has a place in the development of social policy in the South, as well as in global social policy; in particular, a political ethic of care can provide a better framework from which to begin thinking about and acting to create better lives for working and caring women in developing countries. Work and Care in the Global Economy A feminist political ethics of care eschews the dominant idea of rights as the key moral concept for achieving social justice, and focuses instead on responsibility. But responsibility is not regarded as some kind of moral imperative that can be morally or legally enforced; rather, it is understood as an always, already existing part of the daily lives of all people. It recognizes that we all have developed relationships that are ‘thick with commitment or expectation’. Indeed, an ethics of responsibility aims to ‘accommodate the richness and diversity of what people have reasons to care about and take responsibility for’ (Walker 1998: 105–6). Translating this moral orientation into a public value and a policy standpoint means recognizing all people as existing within such networks of relationship and responsibility. Work, then, is not regarded as immune from these networks, but immersed within them. Indeed, research on work in the USA has shown that the difficulties employers have in trying to reduce the ‘work–family’ squeeze lie in deeply rooted assumptions about the nature of work and the workplace; in particular, the idea that the business world is a separate place with separate concerns from the private domestic domain, and has no responsibility for it (Harrington 1999: 52–3). These assumptions are widespread; indeed, they permeate both theory and activism related to globalization and workers in the South. The ‘antisweatshop’ movement, as well as other movements to enforce labour standards and workers’ rights, use the ILO’s core standards as a basis for their activist goals. As noted earlier, these standards focus on rights and freedoms associated with labour organization – including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining – as well as minimum standards with respect to wages and working conditions, and bans on child and forced labour (DeWinter 2003: 142). As I argued earlier, however, these rights are limited, since they retain a narrow focus on work as paid labour, decontextualized from the household, and from the local and global relations of care in which people’s daily lives are immersed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fiona Robinson/Beyond Labour Rights 333 Downloaded by [Simon Fraser University] at 16:10 17 November 2014 Perhaps the first step towards creating global social policy that can improve the lives of women, and indeed all people of the South, is a shift in focus away from rights towards basic needs (Streeten 1981; Moser 1991). Indeed, as Naila Kabeer (2004: 27) argues, we must move away from the narrow preoccupation with labour standards in the globally traded sector to a consideration of working conditions in the wider economy. She argues for greater global redistribution that guarantees access to the basic means of survival; this, in turn, could enable them to engage as citizens in wider struggles for social justice in their society (Kabeer 2004: 28). A care ethics framework reminds us that caring activities and moral orientations are crucial for the provision of basic needs (Sevenhuijsen 2000: 14). A care perspective compels us to recognize the interrelatedness of care and work in the daily lives of many people, including and especially ‘working’ women in the South. Many of these women engage in a variety of kinds of work: paid wage labour in manufacturing; paid and unpaid ‘care’ work in the home or other social institutions, or often in others’ homes; informal sector activities inside and outside of the home; subsistence agriculture and other survival strategies which often fall outside of conventional categories of work. For these women, care and work are not separate; care, while often motivated by love and personal responsibility, is work, and work, traditionally understood, must continually be balanced with responsibilities of care.

As the articles in this issue suggest, when racism is “crucified in public only to be born again in private,” (: 24) we must attend to how race is (re-)produced globally through biopolitical practices. However, the sharp turn and parallel track of the present moment, in which white supremacy is once again openly embraced in the public sphere, only reveals the absurdity of claims to a “post-racial era.” Now, more than ever (or perhaps, just as much as always?), political life is figured as a battle for a particular kind of future; in fact, the future is the term of the battle itself. Trump’s signature phrase and line of hats, “Make America Great Again,” is a fundamentally biopolitical statement of a strikingly racialized and gendered future. Recent political events demand our attention not as breaks with the past, but for the continuities they reveal about the grammar of humanity () through which life and death are made sensible.

These issues of national concern resonate with the global turn to the right – in Britain, India, the Philippines, Turkey, France, Brazil, and other contexts – that is emerging in local forms but holds at its center sharp disagreements over the future. While the Movement for Black Lives articulates the centrality of anti-Blackness to United States racialization, the embedded analysis questions the global workings of empire, and coloniality: when and how do some lives and bodies matter? Disciplinary mechanisms of anti-Blackness and white supremacy serve as a template for global variations of the biopolitical, which, at their very core, rely on fundamentally racialized definitions of who counts as ‘human’ that have proven very durable (; ; ; ; ; ).

In looking at the literature, few authors draw attention to the public finance from the perspective of governmentality after Foucault. Amongst them, Nikolas Rose (1993; 1996) and Peter Miller (2008, with Rose) refer to budget and budgetization as the mechanism of self-technology and rationalization pertain to neoliberal governmentality in advanced liberal countries. Budget and budgetization are seen as the essential sites and means of advancing expert knowledge, calculative rationalities and self-disciplinary procedures in governing individuals and population.

Taking inspiration from Rose and Miller, Stephan Collier (2007; 2011) makes an important contribution to the analysis of budget as social technology and budgetization as the rationalization of government in the context of and transition to neoliberalism. Collier’s studies are based upon the case of the Russian industrial city Belaya Kalitva in the post-Soviet period and aim to explain how the city has gone under a great transformation towards a social modernity managed by neoliberal governmentality. Following Max Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality, Collier argues that neoliberal governmentality and budgetary processes are not limited to the formal/calculative rationality which is carved out by the market logic. Collier identifies the substantive dimension of neoliberal governmentality and budget/budgetary rationalization, which suggests that governing population and individuals requires taking into consideration the long-term historical structures, norm systems, relations and cultural attitudes of the population. In doing so, Collier shows that neoliberal governmentality is not only concerned with the elimination of the centralized bureaucratic social welfare and planning system through the market mechanisms and formal rationality but also with the transformation and reconstruction of the embedded social structures, milieu, norms and values. This means that instead of pursuing a sharp rupture with the past, neoliberalism works on the continuity of the past values by articulating them to the grid of new societal system. The budget as a social technology is at the service of the neoliberal art of government to rebuild and govern society within its actual, historical and substantive conditions. Based upon the case study Collier argues that life at its micro and macro extent is the target in the process of constitution of social modernity through neoliberal budgetary practices and procedures which would be considered to be ‘biopolitical’ technologies of neoliberal governmentality concerned with both continuities and discontinuities. Thus, budget as a neoliberal social and biopolitical technology engages in the redistribution of the sources among the races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and other specific classifications of the life with an eye to improving and spreading the market rationality.

Domestic food price inflation remains high around the world. Information from the latest month between February 2023 and May 2023 for which food price inflation data are available shows high inflation in most low- and middle-income countries, with inflation higher than 5% in in 63.2% of low-income countries, 79.5% of lower-middle-income countries, and 67% of upper-middle-income countries, with many experiencing double-digit inflation. In addition, 78.9% of high-income countries are experiencing high food price inflation. The most-affected countries are in Africa, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Europe, and Central Asia. In real terms, food price inflation exceeded overall inflation in 80.1% of the 166 countries where data is available.

Download the latest brief on rising food insecurity and World Bank responses

Why catastrophic risks are more dangerous than you think, and how populism makes them worse.

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?, Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.

2016 is widely seen as the annus horribilis for Europe, and the rise of populism identified as the main culprit for the political crisis following the failure to deal with the refugee influx, the British vote to leave the EU, and several other events which seemed to bring the European Union to the brink. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, key decisions about cooperation in Europe seemed determined by the rise of a variety of populist parties, mostly on the far right of the political spectrum, casting a dark shadow on the health and future of the institutions of cooperation such as the European Union.

Understanding the linkages between the rise of populism and Europe’s crises, however, is less clear. Have populist parties really caused this malaise? What responsibility does “the establishment” have? How can we disentangle the ways in which domestic politics impact foreign policy choices?

When Nancy Pelosi, who was then speaker of the United States House of Representatives, visited Taiwan in August 2022 despite Chinese sensitivities around an island it considers its own, Beijing struck back. The Chinese foreign ministry announced that it was suspending high-level cooperation with the US in eight different areas, including climate change. This breakdown in cooperation between the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide might have seemed like a terrible setback for humanity’s efforts to tackle climate change. In truth, however, climate cooperation between these two geopolitical competitors is less important than many have long thought.

A Collective Action Problem or a Conflict over Distribution?