OPINION

CAMBRIDGE – We live in a world where geopolitical stability relies largely on deterrence. But how can we prove that deterrence works? Consider the ongoing war in Europe. Beginning in December 2021, US President Joe Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would face severe new sanctions if he …

GENEVA – Over the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated headlines and spurred scientific research, with experts around the world focusing resources and any potentially useful technology on the problem. While the spotlight on COVID-19 has dimmed slightly, it remains a high global priority, sometimes to the detriment …

WASHINGTON, DC –To intervene or not to intervene. That has been a central debate about the state’s role in the economy at least since the eighteenth century. Over the past 40 years, the United States and other Western liberal democracies have championed free markets, free trade, and a limited role …

STOCKHOLM – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a final warning to humanity: unless we halve greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2030, we will have no chance of capping global temperatures at 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Achieving that target will be extremely challenging, but it is both possible and …

WASHINGTON, DC – When Edmundo, a waste picker in Peru, caught COVID-19, he had to take out a bank loan to pay for his visit to the clinic. Many of his colleagues also fell ill and subsequently went into debt, desperately seeking loans, emptying their savings, and selling their land …

NEW YORK – We are at the halfway point for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (from 2015 to 2030), but we are not halfway to achieving them. In fact, in many critical areas – from poverty to food security – progress has been reversed in recent years, owing to severe and compounding crises. In …

Doha, 9 March – The Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC5) in Doha, Qatar ended today with member states committing to measures to deliver on the Doha Programme of Action, a ten-year plan to put the world’s 46 most vulnerable countries back on track to achieving …

MUNICH – In the year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has evolved in ways few predicted. The conventional wisdom was that Russian forces would quickly overwhelm the overmatched Ukrainians and take possession of much more of the country than they gained in 2014. Others went …

MADISON, WISCONSIN – China’s population decline, which the Chinese government officially confirmed in January, has led many observers to wonder if the country’s current demographic trends threaten its stability. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s population shrank last year for the first time in 60 years, nine years earlier than government projections …

CAMBRIDGE – Microsoft is reportedly delighted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural-language artificial-intelligence program capable of generating text that reads as if a human wrote it. Taking advantage of easy access to finance over the past decade, companies and venture-capital funds invested billions in an AI arms race, resulting in a technology that …