Chrystia Freeland

In recent months, people and their politicians around the world have been astonished to learn that big companies and billionaires will go to extraordinary lengths to pay lower taxes.

Thanks to the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington, we have discovered that some of the most prominent public figures in the world have banked their fortunes in international tax havens, beyond the scrutiny of their national treasuries.

Meanwhile, Tom Bergin, my Reuters colleague, has become the scourge of the top U.S. multinationals by revealing their low effective tax rate in Britain. Mr. Bergin has found that between 1998 and 2012, Starbucks paid less than 9 million pounds, or about $14 million, in British taxes while registering sales of more than 3 billion pounds. According to statutory filings, Google made $18 billion in revenue in Britain from 2006 to 2011, and paid just $16 million in taxes.

Open the door to the top executives’ suite and you will hear howls of rage over the backlash these revelations have provoked. There is, from the corporate point of view, something a little disingenuous happening here. After all, countries, states and cities have spent the past several decades openly competing to set the lowest corporate tax rates in an effort to attract business. The fact that multinationals would respond to these incentives and turbocharge them with some international tax arbitrage is about as shocking as the discovery of gambling in Casablanca.

After all, as Lord Clyde observed, in a 1929 British tax case: “No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores.”

As it appears in the December 2012 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

George Soros cites Isaiah Berlin as an important intellectual influence, so it makes sense to see Soros through one of the Riga-born philosopher’s best-known lenses — the division of the world into foxes and hedgehogs. In his public life, Soros is a broad-minded fox: As a hedge fund manager, his success rested on his ability to make many different bets every day. In his philanthropy, Soros is foxy too, supporting, under the broad umbrella of “open society” dozens of causes in dozens of countries.

But intellectually, Soros is a more narrowly focused hedgehog. He has been pondering, articulating, elaborating, and publicizing variations on one big idea for more than half a century. The way he describes that central thought today is “the significance of imperfect understanding as a motive force or determinant of history.”

Over the years, Soros’s written expositions of this concept have sometimes met with bafflement, even as his financial prowess and philanthropic accomplishments have been widely admired. For Soros himself, though, his big idea and many public initiatives are intimately connected; his intellectual framework, he believes, is what has made him good at everything else. And, to his delight, after years of struggling to be accepted as a public intellectual, the turmoil in the world economy has finally made the rest of us more receptive to his insight.

This piece first appeared in the Washington Post.

Watching Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings this week, it is tempting to declare — as some have of late — that we have entered the age of women. Not just in politics but in school and in the broader economy women are doing well. Yet this female triumphalism overlooks an important exception: The areas where the real money and power reside are occupied almost exclusively by men.

Consider the industries occupying the commanding heights of capitalism: technology and finance. Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook were all founded by men and are led by male CEOs. All of the big Wall Street banks are run by men. Hedge funds and private equity firms — where the real action is — are a male preserve. Sebastian Mallaby’s fine new history of hedge funds zeroes in on 14 chief protagonists — all male. In 400 pages, he interviews only two female hedge fund executives. Mallaby didn’t speak to more women because there aren’t many to talk to. Of the top 10 highest-paid hedge fund managers in 2009, none were women.

The absence of women at the economic summit is particularly significant because those at the very top of the income distribution have reaped the lion’s share of the rewards in the past couple of decades. For all their success elsewhere, it is precisely this economic apex that women are failing to scale.