David Runciman recounts the rise and fall of Blue Labour, the fitful effort on the part of Britain’s center-left opposition party to build a politics of social cohesion. Alexandra Harney warns that Japan’s “silver democracy” — in which the outsized influence of older voters, magnified through the overrepresentation of rural areas, increases with each passing year — threatens the viability of the country’s pension, nursing care, and health systems, and that it stymies a wide range of growth-enhancing reforms. (And on a tangentially related note, Kanoko Matsuyama of Bloomberg News offers a personal perspective on end-of-life in Japan.)