Brookings Today, 9/18/14

A roundup of some of the content published today by Brookings.

• Billionaires. A book by and a podcast with Darrell West on the upper crust and why they are not like the rest of us.
• Time to give Ukraine defensive weapons. On the eve of Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s visit to the U.S., Steven Pifer and Strobe Talbott argued that President Obama should say “yes” to his request for U.S. military assistance.
• Public school teacher tenure. Matt Chingos analyzes whether challenges to teacher tenure laws, if successful, will lead to improvements in education.
• China, India, and the U.S. … inside out. In the first of a series of posts, Bill Antholis looks at the inner workings and complex bilateral relationships of the three countries which contain two-fifths of the world’s people and GDP.
• An economist’s perspective on U.S. student loans. Susan Dynarski provides an economic perspective on student debt in the United States, including addressing the question of whether there is a debt crisis.
• Why humanitarians should pay attention to the climate change summit. Elizabeth Ferris expresses her hope that the upcoming UN Climate Change Summit and the processes leading up to the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 will be an opportunity for both sets of actors to examine the humanitarian impacts of climate change.
• Top 10 global hometowns of America’s foreign students. Neil Ruiz shows how American education has become a global commodity.

Charmaine Crutchfield contributed to this post.