The central Mediterranean today marks one of the most active and dangerous routes for sea crossings to Europe, due in no small part to border regimes designed to prevent the mobilities that have defined these waters from earliest antiquity. This article considers initial results of fieldwork undertaken to document and make visible the material culture of contemporary vessels used to carry forced and undocumented migrants to southeast Sicily over the past decade. These former fishing craft reveal structural and spatial adaptations to facilitate a different traffic, reflected also in items left behind when the boats were intercepted. Archaeology helps to embed these journeys within long-term frameworks of connectivity and to situate their ephemeral traces alongside more traditional notions of Mediterranean maritime heritage. In a region that celebrates its deep connections to the sea, care for the materiality of these contemporary mobilities foregrounds human experiences, while serving goals of advocacy, empowerment, and social justice amid global change.

Is democracy in trouble, perhaps even dying? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country’s system of governance is being “tested” or is “under attack.” But is the future of democracy necessarily so dire? In The Civic Bargain, Brook Manville and Josiah Ober push back against the prevailing pessimism about the fate of democracy around the world. Instead of an epitaph for democracy, they offer a guide for democratic renewal, calling on citizens to recommit to a “civic bargain” with one another to guarantee civic rights of freedom, equality, and dignity. That bargain also requires them to fulfill the duties of democratic citizenship: governing themselves with no “boss” except one another, embracing compromise, treating each other as civic friends, and investing in civic education for each rising generation.

Manville and Ober trace the long progression toward self-government through four key moments in democracy’s history: Classical Athens, Republican Rome, Great Britain’s constitutional monarchy, and America’s founding. Comparing what worked and what failed in each case, they draw out lessons for how modern democracies can survive and thrive. Manville and Ober show that democracy isn’t about getting everything we want; it’s about agreeing on a shared framework for pursuing our often conflicting aims. Crucially, citizens need to be able to compromise, and must not treat one another as political enemies. And we must accept imperfection; democracy is never finished but evolves and renews itself continually. As long as the civic bargain is maintained—through deliberation, bargaining, and compromise—democracy will live.

Governments around the world responded to the economic fallout from the COVID pandemic with unprecedented transfers to households and firms, financing these transfers with large fiscal deficits that will have a long-lasting effect on public debt levels.¹ During this period, private saving rates rose everywhere, and there were important movements in current accounts, including a notable increase in the US current-account deficit (see fig. 1). In this paper, we ask: To what extent were these changes related? How do fiscal deficits affect the world’s balance of payments in the short and the long run?

We show that, in a broad class of menu cost models, the first-order dynamics of aggregate inflation in response to arbitrary shocks to aggregate costs are nearly the same as in Calvo models with suitably chosen Calvo adjustment frequencies. We first prove that the canonical menu cost model is first-order equivalent to a mixture of two time-dependent models, which reflect the extensive and intensive margins of price adjustment. We then show numerically that, in any plausible parameterization, this mixture is well-approximated by a single Calvo model. This close numerical fit carries over to other standard specifications of menu cost models. Thus, for shocks that are not too large, the Phillips curve for a menu cost model looks like the New Keynesian Phillips curve, but with a higher slope.

We propose a general and highly efficient method for solving and estimating general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks in discrete time. Our approach relies on the rapid computation of sequence-space Jacobians—the derivatives of perfect-foresight equilibrium mappings between aggregate sequences around the steady state. Our main contribution is a fast algorithm for calculating Jacobians for a large class of heterogeneous-agent problems. We combine this algorithm with a systematic approach to composing and inverting Jacobians to solve for general equilibrium impulse responses. We obtain a rapid procedure for likelihood-based estimation and computation of nonlinear perfect-foresight transitions. We apply our methods to three canonical heterogeneous-agent models: a neoclassical model, a New Keynesian model with one asset, and a New Keynesian model with two assets.