In a democracy, the “people” are the supreme arbiters, and their wisdom speaks through the electoral process. Such is the assumption on which the modern world has been built since God and monarchs began to fade from the scene. Lately, however, the wisdom of the people has felt a bit off-key. In one country after another, from the Philippines …

  Of an estimated 2.6 billion mobile-phone owners in low- and middle-income countries last year, 1.4 billion were men and 1.2 were women, according to a study conducted for the mobile industry trade group GSMA. Most of that mobile-phone gender gap was concentrated in just one country, India, where 114 million fewer women than men had phones. This leads to …

  In the 1930s, when U.S. started to build public housing, it was focused in the inner cities, because that’s where lots of poor people lived and worked. In recent decades, public housing is more about giving poor people vouchers, which allows them to move into the suburbs. As a result, poverty in the U.S. is no longer mainly an …