In Bitcoin We Trust?
LONDON – Many regard the market for Bitcoin – the world’s leading cryptocurrency – as a game of winners and losers played out among hedge funds, amateur investors, geeks, and criminals. The huge risk inherent in a highly volatile anonymous digital currency is best left to those who understand the ga…
Congo’s latest killer is the climate crisis. Inaction is unthinkable
For thousands of years, Lake Tanganyika was an exquisite sight that soothed and supported generations of Congolese people. Those living by its shores in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have snoozed in hammocks under the tropical sun, watching their children splash in Africa’s …
Biden Can Keep the Two-State Solution Alive
President Joe Biden and his team came into office understandably hoping to deprioritize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They saw Washington-led negotiations as a trap that had ensnared previous U.S. administrations, and the prospects for progress looked bleaker than ever. But some issues can’t be …
Macron and Le Pen lose out as French voters shun local elections
Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally both failed to garner expected support in French regional elections that saw an unprecedented rate of abstention. The president and his government failed to mobilise supporters, with an estimated 68% of voters shunning the…
The Logic of Effective Climate Action
BERKELEY – In his classic book, The Logic of Collective Action, the late great Mancur Olson explained that the hardest policies to implement are those with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs. Olson’s argument was straightforward: individuals bearing the costs will vigorously oppose the policy, …
We Don’t Need the G7
NEW YORK – The latest G7 summit was a waste of resources. If it had to be held at all, it should have been conducted online, saving time, logistical costs, and airplane emissions. But, more fundamentally, G7 summits are an anachronism. Political leaders need to stop devoting their energy to an exerc…
Modern Factors Determining the Future of Healthcare
Being one of the most turbulent years in the last few decades, 2020 brought life changing events on a global scale. The outcome is still uncertain, but the implementation of some old-new solution to the functioning models in various industries seems very likely. Notably, in healthcare, the change mi…
Europe’s Digital Future
In recent years, the European Union has unveiled a series of ambitious legislative and regulatory packages to rein in problems endemic to the new digital economy. Can leading the world in tech governance help to establish Europe’s place in the twenty-first century? Recently, Anu Bradford, a professo…
Producing a Vaccine Requires More Than a Patent
On May 5, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would support an international bid to waive intellectual property rights to vaccines for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, thereby ostensibly allowing other countries to ramp up production even of the sophisticated technology beh…
India’s COVID-19 Crisis Is Spiraling Out of Control. It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
Scenes of mass death are now unavoidable in what’s often called the world’s largest democracy. Social media is filled with images of body bags and urgent requests for medical aid. Indians gasping for breath are being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals, sometimes simply because they don’t have la…