By Invitation | Barack Obama

The way ahead

America’s president writes for us about four crucial areas of unfinished business in economic policy that his successor will have to tackle

|Washington, DC

WHEREVER I go these days, at home or abroad, people ask me the same question: what is happening in the American political system? How has a country that has benefited—perhaps more than any other—from immigration, trade and technological innovation suddenly developed a strain of anti-immigrant, anti-innovation protectionism? Why have some on the far left and even more on the far right embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore—and that, for most Americans, never existed at all?

This article appeared in the By Invitation section of the print edition under the headline “The way ahead”

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