What’s Wrong with ChatGPT? (Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson)

Artificial intelligence is being designed and deployed by corporate America in ways that will disempower and displace workers and degrade the consumer experience, ultimately disappointing most investors. Yet economic history shows that it does not have to be this way. CAMBRIDGE – Microsoft is reportedly delighted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural-language artificial-intelligence program capable of generating text …

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Are We Ready for AI Creative Destruction? (Daren Acemoglu)

Rather than blindly trusting elegant but simplistic theories about the nature of historical change, we urgently need to focus on how the next wave of disruptive innovation could affect our social, democratic, and civic institutions. Leaving it to tech entrepreneurs risks more destruction – and less creation – than we bargained for. BOSTON – The …

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Understanding the New Nationalism (Daron Acemoglu)

While undoubtedly yielding large benefits, the post-Cold War project of globalization also created the conditions for resurgent nationalism around the world. With their international credibility at low ebb, Western policymakers will need to rethink how they engage economically and politically with countries that have embraced it. CAMBRIDGE – The euphoria after the fall of the …

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China’s Agents of Chaos: The Military Logic of Beijing’s Growing Partnerships (Oriana Skylar Mastro)

At a joint press conference in June 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg fretted over the strengthening ties between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. They are hardly the only politicians to have done so. The informal pact between these four autocracies has become a major focus in Washington, …

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Ukraine Must Turn the Tide Before It Can Negotiate: The Gain Leverage, Kyiv Needs a Stable Front in the Donbas—and Western Security Guarantees (Jack Watling)

President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent recent weeks endeavoring to sell his “victory plan,” the core elements of which he unveiled to the Ukrainian parliament on October 16, to Ukraine’s partners. The plan includes expanded military assistance to stabilize the front, security guarantees through membership of NATO, and defense-industrial cooperation. The details of the plan have …

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Milton Friedman: Why Government Is the Problem (Milton Friedman)

Executive Summary: The major social problems of the United States—deteriorating education, lawlessness and crime, homelessness, the collapse of family values, the crisis in medical care—have been produced by wellintended actions of government. That is easy to document. The difficult task is understanding why government is the problem. The power of special interests arising from the …

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