ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
Berhanu Anteneh The world is at a crossroads, with one path leading to ever more global fragmentation and deepening crises, and the other offering a chance to pursue individual and shared prosperity through joint solutions to common problems. While the choice seems clear, the outcome depends on our ability to overhaul existing institutions. EDINBURGH – The Bretton …
Institutional and economic development generally occur simultaneously, making it difficult to know which is causing which. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics tackled this question by examining the trajectories of former European colonies, starting with the mortality rate of settlers at the time of colonization. CAMBRIDGE – Why have some countries grown rich and others …
Although everyone is supposed to benefit when individual countries leverage their comparative advantages, this canonical economic theory can run into problems when blindly applied to the real world. In the case of China, American leaders failed to consider why the country exhibits the strengths that it does. BOSTON – Instead of assuming that more international …
In terms of economic growth, the Polish and Ukrainian experiences in the decades since the fall of communism have been a portrait in contrasts. Whereas Poland embraced the power of democratic civil society and grew wealthier, Ukraine remained trapped by kleptocratic institutions that bred a culture of corruption and destroyed public trust. CAMBRIDGE – In …
Although the United States clearly could have done a better job of managing its departure from Afghanistan, the tragedy playing out this month has been 20 years in the making. From the outset, America and its allies embraced – and never reconsidered – a top-down state-building strategy that was always destined to fail. ISTANBUL – The …
While even the world’s poorest economies have become richer in recent decades, they have continued to lag far behind their higher-income counterparts – and the gap is not getting any smaller. According to this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economists, institutions are a key reason why. From Ukraine’s reconstruction to the regulation of artificial intelligence, the implications …
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 …
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 …
David Ricardo, one of the founders of modern economics in the early 1800s, understood that machines are not necessarily good or bad. His insight that whether they destroy or create jobs all depends on how we deploy them, and on who makes those choices, could not be more relevant today. BOSTON – Artificial intelligence and …
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 …