As Joe Biden eked out a victory in the US presidential election after a few suspenseful days, observers of American democracy were left scratching their heads. Buoyed by polls, many expected a landslide for the Democrats, with the party capturing not only the White House but also the Senate. How di

Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times that articulated what has come to be known as the Friedman doctrine: "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits." It was a theme he had developed in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, where he argu

Innovation is the engine that drives contemporary economies. Living standards are determined by productivity growth, which in turn depends on the introduction and dissemination of new technologies that allow an ever-wider variety of goods and services to be produced with fewer and fewer of our plan

Crises come in two variants: those for which we could not have prepared, because no one had anticipated them, and those for which we should have been prepared, because they were in fact expected. Covid-19 is in the latter category, no matter what US President Donald Trump says to avoid responsibili

  We live in a world with an ever-widening chasm between the skills of the "average" worker and the capabilities demanded by frontier technologies. Robots, software, and artificial intelligence (AI) have increased corporate profits and raised demand for skilled professionals. But they replace

China's economic rise poses significant political and strategic challenges to the existing global order. The emergence of a new superpower in Asia has inevitably produced geopolitical tensions that some have warned may eventually result in military conflict. Even absent war, the hardening of China'

In Mohammed Hanif's novel Red Birds, an American bomber pilot crashes his plane in the Arabian desert and is stranded among the locals in a nearby refugee camp. He finds himself talking about thieves with a local shopkeeper. "Our government is the biggest thief," he explains. "It steals from the li

Is it culture or economics? That question frames much of the debate about contemporary populism. Are Donald Trump's presidency, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing nativist political parties in continental Europe the consequence of a deepening rift in values between social conservatives and social l