What I'm reading: Networked nature of gun violence

By Fareed Zakaria

“There are still huge pools of private wealth sitting on the sidelines that can be rapidly mobilized to support productive infrastructure. The government needs to help with rights of way before construction, and with strong regulation to protect the public interest afterwards,” writes Ken Rogoff for Project Syndicate.

“In his first term in office, U.S. President Barack Obama suggested the creation of an infrastructure bank to help promote public-private partnerships. It is still a good idea, particularly if the bank maintained a professional staff to help guide public choice on costs and benefits (including environmental costs and benefits). Even if Keynesian multipliers are truly at the upper end of consensus, mobilizing private capital for investment has most of the advantages of issuing public debt.”

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“Even as the Suez Canal has become a touchstone of Egyptian nationalism, the great power of today – the United States – tends to see the waterway in similar terms as the colonial powers of the past,” argues Steven Cook in Foreign Affairs. “Like Disraeli, U.S. presidents and strategic planners have long regarded the canal as a means to another end – a critical component of global trade and a vital conduit for U.S. warships between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The question is no longer about control; Egyptian control of the canal is universally accepted. Yet as the debate about U.S. military aid to Egypt raged after the July 3 military coup, and as the subsequent low-level insurgency broke out in the Sinai Peninsula, analysts have begun to question just how secure the canal is – and whether that even matters anymore.”

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“Understanding the networked nature of gun violence has important implications for how it can be addressed,” writes Andrew V. Papachristos in the Washington Post. “Prevention efforts can be directed toward those individuals and communities most susceptible to the infection. The solution is not broad, sweeping policies, such as New York’s “stop and frisk” or mass arrests, but the opposite: highly targeted efforts to reach specific people in specific places, akin to providing clean needles to drug users to prevent the spread of HIV.