Bank robber "Slick Willie" Sutton famously - maybe apocryphally -- said that he robbed banks because "that's where the money is."

Sutton's principle is worth keeping in mind when considering the latest massive heist to hit the diamond trading center in Antwerp, Belgium. On Monday, some $50 million (Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting it may have been up to $350 million) in diamonds en route from Antwerp to Switzerland were stolen from the cargo hold of a plane at Brussels'  international airport. The robbery may have been "one of the biggest" ever, as a source at the Antwerp World Diamond Center said, but it's actually at least the fourth heist on this scale to hit the Antwerp market in the last decade.

The most audacious heist was probably the 2003 theft from the safes at the Antwerp trading center itself. 123 out of the center's 160 safes, protected behind 10 layers of security, were hit by an Italian gang known as the "School of Turin." In a highly entertaining 2009 Wired article on the theft, one of the robbers speculates that the heist may have been part of a larger insurance fraud scheme.

The scale of the 2003 job was matched by the 2005 theft of approximately $99 million in Antwerp-bound diamonds and jewelry from an armored car at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. There was also a $28 million diamond heist from an Antwerp bank in 2007 by a man who had spent more than a year posing as a wealthy diamond merchant under the amazing name Carlos Hector Flomenbaum and had gained the bank staff's trust to the point that he was able to walk into the vault with a key and help himself to the rocks.

The problem probably isn't so much that Antwerp's security is bad. But even with "2,000 surveillance cameras, police monitoring and countless identity controls," Antwerp and the shipments that come in and out of it will continue to be targets for thieves because that's where the diamonds are: about 84 percent of the 118.5 million carats of uncut stones mined in 2011 passed through the city.

The biggest threat to Antwerp probably isn't thieves but globalization.  In recent years, the city's diamond cutting monopoly has been facing competition from emerging competitors like Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, and Tel Aviv. Last year, Antwerp took a major blow when De Beers - the world's largest diamond producer - moved its sorting and trading facility from London to Botswana. (Antwerp's proximity to London had been one of its main competitive advantages as a trading center.)

These rising alternative diamond centers have yet seen robberies on the scale of the recent Antwerp jobs. This is a bit surprising given the lax security Jason Miklian described at the diamond polishing center in Surat, India in a recent FP article. The fact that the big-game robbers seem to still focus on Antwerp suggests either a vote of confidence for the city's place in the industry or lack of imagination by the criminals. (Or it could lend credence to the conspiracy theory that many of these thefts are inside jobs, as the jailed School of Turin robber suggested to Wired. Smuggling and embezzlement aren't exactly unheard of in Antwerp, so insurance fraud doesn't seem beyond the pale. )

As Slate's Matthew Yglesias suggests, the seeming ease of the thefts doesn't really help Antwerp make the case for its relevance in an increasingly crowded marketplace. When cutting, polishing, and trading can be done for a fraction of the price in India, why ship diamonds to Belgium when security's not guaranteed?  

India and Dubai do have some big diamond heists now and then, but we'll probably know these markets have really arrived when they have their first $10 million job.

Over the next few days, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School. 

Today's author is S.C.M. Paine. Here's the jury's citation for The Wars of Asia: 1911-1949:

"The Wars for Asia: 1911 - 1949 brings a valuable sense of proportion to our understanding of the defining conflicts of the period, including Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour and the ultimate victory of Mao Tse Tung in China in 1949. S. C. M. Paine pulls our gaze away from the European theatre to the intense and extensive wars on the Chinese mainland which set the stage for Japan's entry into the Second World War, bringing the United States to the fronts, and creating the conditions for Mao's success. The ‘logic' of Japanese imperialism is deftly documented, and its consequence for the outcome of the Second World War itself clearly illuminated with sobering implications." 

Listen to the interview here.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School.

Today's authors are Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor. Here's the jury's citation for The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama:

The nature of Barack Obama's thought-process and leadership is well illuminated in The Endgame by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. This is the tale of a delicate dance out of Iraq by American forces, beginning with George W. Bush's support of a ‘surge' of U.S. forces into a growing civil war, and the decision by Barack Obama to leave but a skeleton of U.S. forces behind. In between, the authors document the many shifts in policy and people on the American side, even as Iraq's government teeters between uneasy compromise and incipient collapse. The relevance of this book to events in Afghanistan today is striking.

Listen to the interview here.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School.

Today's authors are Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. Here's the jury's citation for Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying:

Soldaten, in translation from the German by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, provides a compelling window into the views and psychology primarily of German prisoners of war held in American and British camps during the Second World War. Taken from secretly recorded transcripts of conversations among POWs, the book offers verbatim evidence of the horrors of combat and genocide, casually described soldier to soldier in yet more evidence for the banality of evil. The transcripts also provide insight into the culture of war itself, and the relationship of German soldiers to the Nazi leadership and regime. A memorable, disturbing chronicle.

Listen to the interview here.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School. 

Today's author is Andrew Preston. Here's the jury's citation for Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy:

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith follows the remarkable influence of Christian and then Jewish religious belief on the conduct of American foreign policy through the formation of the American colonies to present times. Andrew Preston delivers a richly documented and often surprising portrait of ‘God's hand' on the tiller of U.S. initiatives from the Middle East to the Philippines, from Lincoln to George W. Bush. The formal separation of church and state in the United States belies their union in the men and women who govern it.

Listen to the interview here.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School. 

Today's author is Fredrik Logevall. Here's the jury's citation for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam:

In Embers of War, Fredrik Logevall describes the tragedy of Vietnam in the 20th Century, from its invisibility at the 1919 Paris peace conference to its recapture by the French after 1945, and ultimately its sacrifice on the altar of the Cold War in the 1960s. This is an epic tale of missed opportunity, egotism and waste that makes the case for the role of dumbheadedness, more than evil, in the course of human affairs. Deeply detailed and dramatically powerful, Embers of War is a potent cautionary tale.

Listen to the interview here.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to be featuring one interview per day with the authors of the books nominated for this year's Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the year's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. The award is sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in cooperation with Foreign Policy. The interviews are conducted by Rob Steiner, former Wall Street Journal correspondent and director of fellowships in international journalism at the Munk School. 

Today's author is David Crist. Here's the jury's citation for The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran:

"The extent of ‘war' between Iran and the United States for more than 30 years is captured with authority and intensity by David Crist.  This is a story of chronic intrigue and occasional hope amounting to little more than deepening animosity and higher stakes. From the Iran-Contra scandal to Stuxnet, the ‘Twilight War' between the United States and Iran speaks to the tenacity of history and ideology in the face of human agency - a whodunit with the answer known before the story begins."  

Listen to the interview here.

The big story out of the British Isles this week is that consumers in Ireland and the U.K. have been unwittingly eating horse meat in several products -- including burgers and packaged lasagna -- labeled as beef. As the New York Times notes, "Few things divide British eating habits from those of continental Europe as much as a distaste for consuming horse meat."

Horse meat is an interesting cultural case. While considered disgusting in Britain and the United States ("So hungry I could eat a horse" is an expression here for a reason), over 200,000 horses are slaughtered for their meat every year in the European Union, according to the Humane Society International. It's also a staple in some Central Asian countries -- Kazakh Olympians brought along their own supply of horse sausages to the London Olympics. It seems to be something of an Anglo taboo, though an often hypocritical one. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders don't generally eat horses, but they do slaughter them for export.

Economist Alvin Roth, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize, uses horse meat as a central example in his famous paper, "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets." The idea of the paper is that cultural biases against certain transactions serve as market constraints that economists would do well to take seriously rather than dismissing as irrational. He discusses well-known examples such as organ-exchange markets and beliefs about the charging of interest in the Islamic world, as well as more outré practices such as dwarf-tossing.

Here's what he has to say about horse meat:

Why can't you eat horse or dog meat in a restaurant in California, a state with a population that hails from all over the world, including some places where such meals are appreciated? The answer is that many Californians not only don't wish to eat horses or dogs themselves, but find it repugnant that anyone else should do so, and they enacted this repugnance into California law by referendum in 1998. Section 598 of the California Penal Code states in part: "[H]orsemeat may not be offered for sale for human consumption. No restaurant, cafe, or other public eating place may offer horsemeat for human consumption." The measure passed by a margin of 60 to 40 percent with over 4.6 million people voting for it (see http://vote98.ss.ca.gov/Returns/prop/00.htm[1]).

Notice that this law does not seek to protect the safety of consumers by governing the slaughter, sale, preparation, and labeling of animals used for food. It is different from laws prohibiting the inhumane treatment of animals, like rules on how farm animals can be raised or slaughtered, or laws prohibiting cockfights, or the recently established (and still contested) ban on selling foie gras in Chicago restaurants (Ruethling, 2006). It is not illegal in California to kill horses; the California law only outlaws such killing "if that person knows or should have known that any part of that horse will be used for human consumption." The prohibited use is "human consumption," so it apparently remains legal in California to buy and sell pet food that contains horse meat (although the use of horse meat in pet food has declined in the face of the demand in Europe for U.S. horse meat for human consumption).

He would argue that laws against horse meat are irrational in a society where eating cows, pigs, and other similar animals is considered perfectly acceptable. After all, the British consumers who are outraged about having been fed Polish horse meat were perfectly willing to buy lasagna made from cows that were likely raised and slaughtered in brutal factory farms and felt few moral qualms about it.

But Roth also suggests that the fact that they are irrational doesn't mean such attitudes aren't real factors that should be taken into account by economists designing markets. In other words, if you want to stay in the packaged-lasagna business, don't sell horse meat to the Brits. And certainly don't pretend it's something else.