A Nobel prize winner describes how his team ran a $19.8 billion spectrum auction and why changing a market's rules changes what people do.
The electricity use hidden behind every seemingly weightless AI query traces back to the data centres that carry the cost.
Pakistan handles hundreds of millions of digital payments a quarter yet still runs on cash, and the article says going cashless risks privacy and leaves some people out.
Explains why Canadian voters rejected a carbon tax that returned most households more money than it cost them.
Argues that rich countries owe the world's poor justice, because the trade and finance rules that decide a child's chances from birth were written without them.
Thailand will miss its 2037 renewable energy target unless it pays for battery storage and improves its metering and bidding systems.
A philosopher says the question to ask is whether your life would get worse if you gave away some surplus, and applies it to effective altruism and net zero.
Looks at what happens when AI trading programs for oil, wheat, and other goods act alike during a crisis, and whether the usual safety rules target the problem.
Looks at the quantum computing boom and finds that firms with working hardware are a fair risk, while firms that only sell a promise are a bet on a story.
Twenty months in, VAT on private school fees is bringing in close to the £1.5 billion a year expected, and enrolment has fallen only a little.
An eight-hour bus ride beside a 78-year-old stranger who marvelled at every sunset leads a writer to argue that optimising your time can leave you under-lived.
A philosopher on why patriotism feels good but falls apart once you try to defend it logically.
Trump's second term is the latest turn of a recurring cycle in American politics that goes back to Hofstadter's writing on paranoid, anti-elite movements.
Africa has over sixty per cent of the world's unused farmland, and the article says what it lacks is infrastructure and patient investment.
An Icelandic economist ties the stalled rollout of a constitution backed by two-thirds of voters fourteen years ago to the resource curse playing out inside a wealthy democracy.
An economist explains how multinationals move profits to places like Bermuda, and says they are productive but increase inequality.
Big data and algorithmic pricing have worn away the privacy that once kept consumers from paying exactly what they were willing to.
A German economist says politicians and economists argue less about the numbers than about whose gains matter more than whose losses.
A philosopher who builds mathematical models of human behaviour maps the attention economy through three character types.
An Egyptian political economist explains how Middle Eastern states can be both authoritarian and weak, and why formal property titles won't fix it.
A researcher of tax havens explains how multinationals avoid tax and says following the money shows who holds power.
Tests Bertrand Russell's claim that ties Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt to Enlightenment philosophers, weighing how much of it is actually true.
Thirty years of climate treaties have produced agreement without compliance, because international law has no way to force a country to follow through.
Why the dollar prices trade between other countries, and how demand for the Swiss franc left Switzerland's central bank holding one of the world's largest balance sheets.
Human attention has quietly become a raw material bought and sold at scale, with costs landing even on services marketed as free.
A game theorist explains how morality can evolve, with universalist morals favoured where people meet once and particularist morals where they meet again and again.
Covers the four factors behind Ukraine's resistance, arguing that leadership and the ability to adapt in the field mattered more than firepower alone.
A political economist uses the story of EU banana rules, which companies and member states pushed for, to show who writes EU law.
Argues that VAT on private school fees raises less than advertised and shrinks the market for schooling, and that fairness should come from improving state schools.
AI is wiping out some job tasks and leaving others alone, and the ones left standing are becoming more valuable.
Compares deontology and utilitarianism with care ethics and argues the latter does a better job explaining why white lies aren't always wrong.
A positive result on a test that catches 99% of cases still leaves only a 16.7% chance you are ill, and the article asks why people get this wrong.
History bends toward justice only when people push it there, and the article asks who has been doing the pushing.
A historian explains how war and the Church built European tax bureaucracies, and why who collects a tax affects whether people pay.
Russia's expectation of a quick fall of Kyiv fell apart under its own overconfidence and flawed planning, made worse by a military still built for an earlier kind of war.
Draws on the collapses of Enron and Carillion, both highly profitable on the surface until they weren't, to show how profit figures can be manipulated in ways cash flow can't.
The Civil Rights Movement completed American democracy while also breaking apart the exclusionary bargain that had kept it stable, leading directly to today's polarisation.
A Colombian economist who once played football applies economics to pressure in sport and advises people to do work they enjoy.
This year's oil price spike will squeeze household budgets and is unlikely to start a second wave of inflation.
An economics professor with 45 years of teaching says economics cannot be free of values, because choosing a policy goal is an ethical decision.
Developing countries already have green technology, and the article says their problem is the high cost of borrowing, which development banks could lower.
A Greek MP argues basic income won't be enough once AI displaces labour, proposing housing, dividend-paying capital, and a personal AI agent for everyone instead.
Uses Edinburgh's boom and Aberdeen's long-term unemployment, just 92 miles apart, as a case study in how growth clusters around a handful of cities.
What an economic model tells a government to do and what that government can get away with before an election are often two different things.
Looks at Asian mining countries and finds they actually do better on quality of life than non-mining ones, suggesting what matters is who controls extraction.
Lebanon's power-sharing system, designed to stop any one sect from dominating, has made the country nearly impossible to govern or reform.
A scholar in Estonia explains how Russia spreads disinformation in the Baltic states and what separates information war from hybrid and cognitive warfare.
Decades-old scientific agreement on climate change has been held back by a lack of political will, and the piece looks at why.
An engineer who once built offshore drilling rigs now runs a platform that connects Korean and Southeast Asian green-tech firms, and explains why the partnership works.
Defends capital punishment for the worst crimes, as long as it is carried out under strict legal limits.
Phones have changed centuries-old student activism, speeding its reach from campus petitions to protests that can topple governments in weeks.
