Economics & Finance

Self-interest drives capitalism. Capitalism’s friends and foes agree on this, even if they agree on nothing else.

Solving the world’s biggest problems—from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance—requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us.

A geodesic is the shortest path on Earth’s surface between two given locations. From a professional trader’s point of view, the locations that nowadays matter most are not exchanges’ historic city-centre headquarters, but a couple of dozen unremarkable, mainly suburban buildings in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, buildings that usually could pass for a warehouse.

Start listening to The Spirit of Green by William D. Nordhaus—an innovative account of how and why “green thinking” could cure many of the world’s most serious problems.

With the tax season in full swing, it is wort reflecting on the purposes that taxes serve in society. One is state revenue; ensuring the acceptance of state issued currency in which taxes must be paid is another; and addressing inequality the third.

Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.”