Our people have witnessed terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, strange new viruses, often bewildering new technology and rapid and sometimes equally bewildering economic change.

After financial implosions, such as the collapse of the dot com bubble in 2000 or the sub prime meltdown of 2007 8, such views appear arrogant. The parallel between bewildering and apparently meaningless art and unintelligible financial products is damning rather than reassuring.

He will need all his skills to address the bewildering range of global tasks that he has taken on since being shoehorned out of office by his dour successor, Gordon Brown. His initial daytime job, after running Britain, was to bring peace to the Middle East by helping establish the governing institutions of a Palestinian state.

Indeed, though you may be excused for skepticism if you have not immersed yourself in years of advanced study in economics, coursework in a typical economics doctoral program produces a bewildering variety of policy prescriptions depending on the specific context. Some of the frameworks economists use to analyze the world favor free markets, while others don t.

He will need all his skills to address the bewildering range of global tasks that he has taken on since being shoehorned out of office by his dour successor, Gordon Brown. His initial daytime job, after running Britain, was to bring peace to the Middle East by helping establish the governing institutions of a Palestinian state.

Rather than exhibiting enlightened leadership, Western policymakers have consistently lagged realities on the ground, with a bewildering mixture of denial, misdiagnosis, and bickering undermining their responses. Rather than proceeding in an orderly manner, today's global changes are being driven by the disorderly forces of de leveraging emanating from a Europe in deep financial crisis and an America seemingly unable to restore sustained high rates of GDP growth and job creation.

In a recent visit to this tropical archipelago of 1.3 million people, I had a chance to see some of the leaps Mauritius has taken accomplishments that can seem bewildering in light of the debate in the US and elsewhere. Consider home ownership while American conservatives say that the government s attempt to extend home ownership to 70 of the US population was responsible for the financial meltdown, 87 of Mauritians own their own homes without fueling a housing bubble.