Project Syndicate

As we mark #WorldPopulationDay, Beata Javorcik’s commentary offers a timely reminder that demographic change is population aging rather than population growth. Her commentary explores how societies can adapt to shrinking workforces and profound shifts in age structure.

Diane Coyle considers some of the lessons Andy Burnham should take with him to Downing Street. https://mrf.lu/2NbSY

Barry Eichengreen explains why the longtime #FederalReserve chair was one of the Fed's most consequential leaders—for good and bad. https://mrf.lu/2NdyJ

Baroness Dambisa Moyo highlights the vulnerabilities of US financial markets, Kenneth Rogoff explains how Europe could lose the AI race but turn its way of life into an export industry, Shang-Jin Wei documents 250 years of American state capitalism, Angus Armstrong applies the late English artist David Hockney’s appreciation for the unknowability of reality to economics, Barry Eichengreen compares SpaceX and other coming mega-IPOs to what followed that of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1987, Michael Strain implores recent graduates and younger workers to say no to remote work, Andrés Velasco shows how small countries’ success in the World Cup mirrors the pattern of economic success, and more in this week’s edition of PS Economics.

There has been a 78% increase in lawsuits against journalists in the last five years. At the Meliore Foundation/PS Media & Democracy Summit, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information Mariya Gabriel considered what it will take to protect journalists from escalating legal threats. Watch the discussion at the link: https://bit.ly/4awawZX #PSEvents #Journalism #UNESCO #PressFreedom #MediaFreedom

Historian James Livingston shows that, unlike the US elite that emerged from the Gilded Age, today's tech bros have money but no purpose legitimizing their power. https://bit.ly/4f2HmTx

Sami Mahroum (PhD) argues that addressing the productivity gap with the US should start with how each economy creates wealth. https://mrf.lu/2NbBz #Productivity #Europe

Maternal deaths are not evenly distributed. Roughly 87% of them occur in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with the latter alone accounting for nearly 70%. By contrast, high-income countries experience far lower rates, although stark inequities remain. In the United States, for example, Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to die from maternity-related causes. My latest piece for Project Syndicate. https://lnkd.in/eaM2-bxr #maternalhealth #maternal #birth #childbirth #keepwalkingwithdrbill Melinda French Gates Bill Gates Gates Foundation Gates Foundation India Gates Foundation Africa Gates Foundation Middle East Gates Foundation - United States African Union Africa CDC National Health Insurance Authority of Nigeria Atlantic Institute Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity (AFSE) Tekano - Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity in South Africa Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity

Just out! My new Project Syndicate article where I discuss: The US stock market hitting historic highs but with great growth comes great risk. *Record Highs vs. Steep Prices: Markets are rallying, but traditional metrics warn stocks are overvalued. *Massive Funding vs. Rising Debt: A huge tech infrastructure spend is fueling the economy, but the stock market rally is also propped up by a record $1.4T in borrowed investor debt. *AI Potential vs. Concentration Risk: Global productivity could skyrocket if the "Magnificent Seven" tech giants succeed in their AI bets—but any disappointment could trigger a massive correction. Read the full article https://lnkd.in/gSzfdceP

Wars used to target ports and power grids. Now they target something harder to replace! My latest piece in Project Syndicate argues that Digital Public Infrastructure has crossed a threshold. It is no longer an administrative tool. It is a domain of strategic competition, and most governments are not treating it that way. I made this argument at a roundtable at Oxford not long ago. The pushback was immediate: surely the efficiencies outweigh the risks. Surely redundancy can be engineered in. These are fair objections. But they miss the point. The question is not whether a government would choose disruption. It is whether, in a world of cascading interdependencies, disruption can arrive without anyone choosing it. Four risks that don’t get enough attention: 1. The illusion of control. Owning the application is not owning the infrastructure. When a US directive restricted AI model access for certain foreign users, governments that had built on those capabilities found themselves exposed to a decision made in Washington that had nothing to do with their own policies. That is not sovereignty. That is dependency dressed up as capability. 2. Success as fragility. India’s UPI. Brazil’s Pix. Genuine achievements. But systems so deeply embedded in daily life that a sustained outage no longer merely inconveniences — it halts commerce, cuts welfare payments, and triggers a governance crisis within hours. 3. Concentration at the infrastructure level, not just the application level. A handful of cloud platforms, chip designers, and undersea cable operators now underpin the digital economy. A geopolitical disruption affecting any one of them sends cascading effects across governments that had no part in the original dispute. 4. The state itself. Without independent oversight and strong legal frameworks, the same infrastructure that delivers welfare payments to the rural poor can be turned into an instrument of exclusion and political control. Trust cannot be added to DPI after the fact. It has to be built into the architecture from the outset. I have spent two decades inside these systems, at NADRA, in advisory work with UNDP and the World Bank. The case for DPI remains compelling. What we need is a different quality of ambition. Resilient. Interoperable. Genuinely accountable. The digital foundations of the state are a matter of national security. It is time we designed them accordingly. → Full article in Project Syndicate: https://prosyn.org/NBeiHuh What is your government actually depending on, and on whose terms? #DigitalGovernance #NationalSecurity #DPI #DigitalSovereignty #TechPolicy