Imagine that the people who benefit from public support were asked to pay back in some way, not with money but by helping others. That wasn't how the welfare state was intended to work - but it is an idea being explored at the liberal end of US politics, by philanthropists and professionals. Their answers may turn out to be relevant to one of the central questions facing the "Blair [...]

''Don't call me that word!" says a furious six-year-old, sitting between worried parents and NHS psychologists in a drab, suburban family centre. She is in the middle of what is becoming a familiar scene in modern Britain: the ritual of the official diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, or mild autism. It's the word Asperger's that has been whispered between her parents and professionals in her hearing once too often. Some specialists [...]

The big problem about abolishing the pound is that one interest rate cannot possibly suit a whole continent, and the bigger the currency, the more dangerous the effect on poorer people of pretending that it does. Germany's economy, for example, has been greatly damaged by the belief that one currency can suit east and west. Argentina's present plight can be traced back to its decision to link the peso to [...]

As Gordon Brown struggles, on the eve of his Budget, to balance the unbalanceable - a job that was difficult enough even before we went to war with Iraq - a glimmer of an idea is emerging about how to pay for railways, postal services and all the other public service demands that crowd in upon him. It sounds like the search for Atlantis or for zero-point energy - and [...]

My parents live in a small Hampshire village called Nether Wallop. It has more than its fair share of thatched roofs and retired major-generals, but it has council housing and playing fields, too.

Half a century ago, it boasted two village shops, a post office, two pubs, a butcher, a village policeman and police house, a doctor and district nurse, a railway station a short bus ride away, and a [...]

"It may work fine in practice," goes a joke that the French make at their own expense. "The trouble is, it just doesn't work in theory." So it is strange that Paris has become the birthplace of a revolt against the pre-eminence of theory over practice, of economic abstraction over reality, and statistics over real life. Called "post-autistic economics" - "autistic" is intended to imply an obsessive preoccupation with numbers [...]

Two light aircraft - one British and one German - met every few days on the tarmac at Lisbon airport, for most of the Second World War, to exchange a bundle of the latest newspapers from home. Both sides regarded poring over each other's papers as so crucial to the war effort - to judge each other's morale and track their own propaganda - that they were prepared to risk [...]

Even before scientists discovered distant and mysterious planets such as Neptune and Pluto, they knew they were there because something seemed to be bending the orbit of the planets around them. It's the same with that much-discussed but irritatingly elusive earthbound quality known as "social capital". It may be impossible to define or to bottle - but it still seems to have an effect.

The American journal Science recently carried [...]

Where did all the money go? Not so much those billions that disappeared from computer screens when the stock market began its downward slide in the summer. Rather, I am thinking of those missing chunks of the last $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia, now being sought by Russian interior ministry officials.

According to those who know about these things, a large proportion of the missing IMF money [...]