WEEKLY SELECTION

Post-pandemic life-work re-assessment is resulting in an unexpected wave of employees quitting their jobs. Bitcoin has no innate value – but this doesn’t stop it being valued and increasingly so. Fake human data risks messing up the algorithms. Post-pandemic and zoom weary we are re-assessing who our friends really are. Re-assessing our life-sleep balance and placing the value on [...]

Ambitious Chinese youth are involuting, but it’s not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. There are lessons on crisis management to be learnt from COVID. Central banks should learn from the past and do something now to curb excessive risk-taking. When it’s an app called Calm, doing very little has proved effective. There are things we can do to help us [...]

Why supply chains can’t meet demand. What might derail the post-pandemic economic rally? Bankruptcies, cyber threats and underestimating the environmental time bomb. Climate tipping points and their cascading consequences contribute to the latter. AI and robotics have made autonomous lethal weapons a reality and their application in the realm of social media has transformed how we interact and who [...]

A never-seen-before decline in world demographics will require innovative adaptation. What are the must-haves that will determine if a country emerges successfully post the pandemic or not? That the future of work is hybrid is a given, less clear are the myriad of consequences. The consequence of culture wars is not always actual physical conflict, but the latter never [...]

Can we be ready for the inevitable and imminent disruption due to AI?  The perennity of any recovery depends on how ready policy makers are to deal with foreseeable risks. Can the big food companies be as nimble as the competition in the race towards veganism? Burnout is widespread and now the science corroborates that excessive working hours can [...]

Active pursuit of solutions across the board could be a source of cautious climate optimism. While optimism is challenged by the inevitability of the next global disaster, policy can make a difference. Central bank policy is adapting to a shifting world. Why a future China – US conflict falls into the realm of realism, not pessimism. A virtuous circle [...]

Some warming up means the engine of the US economy is running again. It is unrealistic to expect the ‘rest’ to rise homogenously – it won’t. Tailoring expectations can lead to happiness – but it might not be quite what you expected. Our future resilience depends on recognizing the critical importance (and fragility) of our biosphere. If we attribute [...]

Silicon Valley no longer has the monopoly on high growth sectors. Exponentials work both ways: exponential (virus) decay could be faster than we initially dared to hope. Current demand trends are good for wood. “Legal but potentially lethal” describes the processed food concoctions we are ‘taught’ to crave.  Workers’ wellbeing, productivity, office life, home life: getting the right balance is [...]

AI could threaten the very fabric of society, but it doesn’t have to – we have a choice. US now sees China as the major threat – the choice for democracies of how to respond to this will not be straightforward. For many, COVID has changed their life/work choices. We have no choice but to protect the soil if [...]