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Albert Wenger is Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, which has invested in some of today's most exciting technology companies. In his new book, "The World After Capital", he argues that capitalism cannot allocate all resources efficiently in the digital age – where the new shortage isn't capital, but rather, human attention. While economically incentivized activities will not go away, he says, we must make room for the things we cannot put a price on. He proposes increasing three freedoms: economic, informational, and psychological, to ensure the continuation of human knowledge production. His book is available free of charge at https://worldaftercapital.org/.

As the new year begins we look back on some of the most heavily read LDI news stories published in 2023. They reflected many of health care policy's most pressing matters, including inadequate nurse staffing, the negative impact of hospital consolidation, health care flaws in prisons and jails, structural racism, drug pricing, the opioid epidemic, […]

This year, LDI Staff covered health policy topics from A to Z. Within our coverage, we discussed all five of LDI's focus areas, distilling the research contributions of our network of Fellows into digestible insights for you, our readers! Thank you so much for accompanying us on our journey through the complex landscape of health […]

"More 'super rich' Norwegians left Norway in 2022 than during the previous 13 years combined. The reason wealthy Norwegians are fleeing the country is not a secret." ~ Jon Miltimore

How can the world forge the cooperation needed to manage climate change? Most answers to that question hinge on the challenge of enforcement. It is easy to dream up bold agreements but hard to make them stick. Over the last decade, there has been a lot of new thinking about how international treaties on climate…

While Hamas' 7 October attack on Israel has provided an opportunity for partisan commentators to condemn or to advocate, one Australian contribution suggestively points beyond polarisation, and beyond fixation on Gaza. Broadening our perspective may be the most useful way forward.

Even a 10 percent chance of a big impact by decades's end means AI is a subject more than worthy enough for discussion in a 2024 presidential election—even if the discussants are two elderly gentlemen who may not be tech savvy, exactly.
The post AI's Rapid Advancement: Why It Deserves Attention in the 2024 Presidential Race appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Yes, yes, OK, this is something of a cheap shot, this is in The Guardian after all. Further, it's by Devi Sridhar, so v cheap. But still: For the past 75 years in global public health, one of the major priorities has been exponential population growth and Malthusian concerns that the supply of food on the planet won't be able to keep up. In 1951, the world's population was 2.5 billion, which increased to 4 billion by 1975, 6.1 billion by 2000, and 8 billion by 2023. Governments in the two most populous countries, India and China, even implemented, respectively, draconian policies such as forced sterilisation and a one-child restriction.So global public health has concentrated, for the best part of a century, on being wholly, exactly and precisely wrong then? How they went wrong is, of course, that they ignored economics. The Malthusian concern was wrong because they didn't bother to look at agricultural productivity. Which increased faster than the population did - that's why we've now 8 billion in a world awash with food. The exponential population growth was wrong because they didn't understand the impact of both wealth itself and the economic liberation of women (two closely linked issues of course). The two, together, leading to the collapse in fertility rates.No, really, it's not contraception and it's not abortion either. It is desired fertility that has fallen. As a result of that richer world - and greater liberation - leading to there being more things to do in a life. Therefore any one of them gets done less. That's the flip side of opportunity costs and if we're not going to include opportunity costs in our analysis then we might be doing something but it won't be anything sensible. So, if global public health has been majorly wrong pretty much since the inception of the field then how much weight should we put upon current obsession in the field?As, yes, they're trying to ban vaping so that more people will smoke cigarettes, aren't they? Which does lead to an interesting question. Is there any other example of a science getting worse a century in from its inception?

Historically, Black voters in the US have supported the Democratic Party. But after successive Democratic victories at the national and state level, and seemingly few tangible benefits for the Black community, this support is beginning to waver, writes Donovan A. Watts. In new research which analyses the party identification of Black Americans, he finds that … Continued

Buried beneath the headlines of atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine, a recently released UN report suggests 15,000 civilians have been slaughtered in the city of El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. This is more than the initial toll for the entire conflict and more attention from the international community is urgently needed to stop the genocidal atrocities.

The Guardian does try to tell us what we should be doing about the economy. Then there are those acres of paper devoted to telling us how economics is going to kill us all. The problem with this is that if the people who write and edit the paper have no clue of the basics of economics then why should we pay attention to their blatherings? For example, we have an assitant opinion editor there telling us about Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. Which, when stripped of its verbiage, is simply a statement that economic growth is constrained by reality. Well, yes….But here we've got what The G thinks is the explanation of it all:Growth, the process by which a country increases the amount of goods and services it produces, is supposed to raise people's wages and provide governments with an income that can be invested into public services such as schools and hospitals.And no, that's not it at all. Growth here is GDP, obviously. And sure, there are problems with GDP, it doesn't measure distribution, doesn't include non-monetised transactions like household labour and so on. But at what GDP sets out to do it's pretty good. And what it doesn't set out to do is measure the amount of goods and services. In fact it's entirely nothing to do with that at all.GDP measures - as best it can - the value added in an economy. Further, by definition value added in production equals all incomes equals all consumption - because our incomes and our consumption are the value added. So, if GDP, value added, rises then by definition total incomes rise.This is an important distinction. It's also one all too many fail to make. For if the economy, growth, GDP, are the volume of stuff then sure, we'll face physical limits pretty quickly. If growth is about value add then the limitation is in knowing how to add value - not something notably constrained by the physical world, rather by the state of knowledge.This is back to that Herman Daly differentiation between quantitative growth and qualitative. He insists - as does Raworth - that physical limits mean we can only have that qualitative growth. We think the physical limits to quantitative growth - and we do know our minerals and metals around here - are a lot further away than most people do but we'll agree they exist. The bit that's being missed is that GDP, that standard measure of growth, includes that qualitative growth. In fact, the majority of growth recorded in GDP is that qualitative, not quantitative.But the real point we want to hammer home here is that people are critiquing that standard economics without even grasping the basic definitions and terms of art in use. No wonder they're all so mystified by it.

Governments around the world have begun piloting central bank digital currencies. CBDCs are issued and backed by centralised financial authorities and have the potential to reshape the international financial system. Russia, China, Saudia Arabia and ...

Things you may have missed between the Trump disqualification case, Biden special counsel report, and NBA trade deadline.

With all that's going on in the world, you could be forgiven for missing that the 10th anniversary forum of Xi Jinping's flagship foreign policy and trade program, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), was ...

Like the history of the Soviet repressions itself, this Cascade Memorial remains largely neglected, which is something a handful of Armenians are now trying to change.