We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is importantit must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make among competing priorities. Even when the language of efficiency is used carefully, that language alone is not enough. Unilingualism will not do. We need to go beyond the cult of efficiency to talk about accountability. Much of the democratic debate of...

Many people today are afflicted with a sense that they cannot change things for the better. They feel helpless, constrained, caught in a word, fatalistic. Beyond Fate examines why. In her characteristically lively prose, Margaret Visser investigates what fate means to us, and where the propensity to believe in it and accept it comes from. She takes an ancient metaphor where time is "seen" and spoken of as though it were space and examines how this way of picturing reality can be a useful tool to think with - or, on the other hand, how it may lead people into disastrous...