Like electricity and artificial intelligence, biotechnology is poised to drive a general-purpose leap in human history. Offering the ability to manipulate the very essence of life as we know it, biote ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-16
Conservatives often make a big show of worrying about the debt burden that we are passing on to our children. This moral argument featured prominently in congressional Republicans’ refusal to support ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-15
Fiction writers have long imagined scenarios in which every human action is monitored by some malign centralized authority. But now, despite their warnings, we find ourselves careening toward a dystop ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-14
From Russia’s war against Ukraine to America’s rivalry with China, tectonic geopolitical shifts have shaken multilateralism in recent years. While many of the consequences – from surging food and ener ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-13
With the world on track to exceed 1.5° Celsius of warming in the next decade, we can expect climate hazards to intensify, driving millions more into famine, causing trillions of dollars in damage, and ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-12
Hardly a week goes by without various pioneers in artificial intelligence issuing dire warnings about the technology that they introduced to the world. I got an early glimpse of this emerging pessimis ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-09
Some of us are more optimistic than others about the future. We optimists recognize that it is still possible to escape from the traps that America’s Second Gilded Age has laid. During a gilded age, p ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-09
Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) are feeling the financial squeeze. Two-thirds of low-income countries are already in or at high risk of debt distress, Russia’s war in Ukraine is comp ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-08
Globalization brings the world together through the movement of people, things, ideas, money, and much else. But talk of globalization has become increasingly divisive, with competing assessments of t ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-06
As the 2024 US presidential primary campaign season begins, the most likely final contest is a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Judging by the electoral map in 2020, Biden would b ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
One might think that predicting the US Federal Reserve’s next policy moves would become easier now that it has already hiked interest rates ten consecutive times, for a total of five percentage points ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
“The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the early twentieth century. We seem to be living in a similar interregnum today, likewise marked b ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
Following the May G7 summit in Hiroshima, US President Joe Biden claimed that he expects a “thaw” in relations with China. Yet despite some recent official bilateral meetings – with US Secretary of th ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-01
A megadrought – the worst in 1,200 years – has been ravaging the American West for two decades, fueling wildfires and exacerbating the region’s chronic water shortages. As global temperatures continue ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-30
The tentative deal that was just struck to raise the United States’ debt ceiling won’t make the problem go away. Partisan standoffs over the federal debt limit have become a predictable feature of Ame ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-30
Everything changed in early 2020, when it became clear that COVID-19 was not going to be contained. Suddenly, life in the United States and many other countries came to a near standstill: schools and ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-29
Last November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, concluded on a historic high note, with the last-minute agreement to establish a “loss and damage” fund. The ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-29
When Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was found to be safe and effective in 1955, following a successful trial involving nearly two million American children, it marked a turning point in the fight against ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-25
It is too early to tell whether all the talk about reforming development finance at this year’s International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings will translate into meaningful policy action ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-23
During my lengthy career in finance, I picked up several market heuristics that have generally proven more useful than not. Every January, for example, I remember the “five-day rule,” which holds that ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-18
