G20 > G8 > UN

Sometime today, the G20 will be declared to have supplanted the G8 as the "permanent council for international economic cooperation." Yay, G20! Having international economic confabs that didn't include Brazil or India or China no longer made any sense. Then again, having a UN Security Council where France and the UK have veto power and India and Brazil aren't even members no longer makes a lot of sense, either, but there's no sign that's changing anytime soon. I don't know that anything all that dramatic and world-changing will come out of Pittsburgh today, but whatever the G20 agrees to will amount to an awful lot more than whatever was accomplished (was anything accomplished?) at the UN in New York earlier in the week. The G20 is the grownups' table, where the discussions are more serious and food-fights rare. Now there are those—such as my new best friend Naomi Klein—who would say that's the problem with the G20. But I kind of like it. Yay, grownups!