The ‘Cornwall Consensus’ heralds the end of a free-market driven agenda and the return of state to the economic arena. Rather than a united effort, the NZE2050 agenda risks pitting rich minority countries against the poor majority ones. What’s on the AI agenda for the next two decades and its consequences (good and less good). Over focus on Covid-19 risks blinding us to other pandemic risks that should be on the agenda. A new look at human history.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Marianna Mazzucato, A New Global Economic Consensus
(Project Syndicate, 13 October 2021)
This article embodies the view of the newly formed “Cornwall Consensus”, now embraced by the G7, and to be put forward at the G20 meeting next week. It proclaims the end of the Washington consensus, essentially arguing that the pandemic has highlighted the deficiencies of economic deregulation and market liberalization, and that a new policymaking paradigm is emerging. It will invert the previous imperatives of an aggressive free-market agenda of deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization, and its success will depend on concrete reforms and the creation of new mission-driven institutions that remain to be defined. A certainty: the state’s economic role will be revitalized (metered paywall – reads in 7-8 min).
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Chandran Nair, Net Zero and Carbon Neutrality: Unscientific Myths for an US and THEM World
(The Club of Rome, 18 October 2021)
The founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and member of the Club of Rome exposes a problem that will certainly beset the discussions in Glasgow at the COP 26 and prevent progress in the fight against climate change. He essentially argues that NZE2050 policies (Net Zero Emissions by 2050) are a fallacy put forward by the rich world that will pit ‘global minority countries’ (i.e., the rich and Western ones) against ‘global majority countries’ (i.e., the poor ones). Read on and make up your own mind! (Free access – 6-8 min).
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How AI Will Advance In The Next Two Decades
(Noéma Magazine, 5 October 2021)
In this interview, Kai-Fu Lee, author of “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order” and a former Google executive in China, explains how intelligent machines will master context, enable precision medicine — and use vast amounts of energy for computation in the process. There’ll also be complex legal, ethical and moral implications. His take is quite positive (free access – reads in 6-7 min).
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John Vidal, Factory farms of disease: how industrial chicken production is breeding the next pandemic
(The Guardian, 18 October 2021)
We’ve got enough to worry about, but this is a weak signal getting ever stronger. Global attention is fixed on Covid-19, but eight or more variants of avian flu, all of which can infect and kill humans and are potentially more severe than Covid-19, now regularly rattle around the world’s factory farms. Despite reassurances from governments and the poultry and livestock industries that intensive farming is safe, scientific evidence shows that stressful, crowded conditions drive the emergence and spread of many infectious diseases, and act as an “epidemiological bridge” between wildlife and human infections (free access – reads in 7-9 min).
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William Deresiewicz, Human History Gets a Rewrite
(The Atlantic, 18 October 2021)
Just before he died last year, David Graeber had written “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”. It has now been published and the author of this article calls it “a brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change”.
The book (written by Graeber and David Wengrow – an archeologist) “demolishes the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces” and is written against the conventional account of human social history. Intriguing and thought-provoking! (Metered paywall, reads in about 10 min).
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