Afghanistan experienced rapid economic growth in the decade following the US invasion and the ouster of the Taliban. But the subsequent stagnation of living standards – rooted in the failure to build a self-sustaining domestic economy – made unrest all but inevitable.
As proliferating disasters starkly demonstrate, severe damage to the environment is a crime against everyone. Rather than leave it to regulation by individual states, the International Criminal Court should recognize “ecocide” as an international crime.
The meltdown in Afghanistan has brought Europe’s rancorous debate over immigration and asylum back to the fore. The new front line is the border area between Belarus and its EU neighbors, where politicians are already exploiting the plight of refugees for political gain.
The hasty and chaotic Western retreat from Afghanistan provides several lessons. If the United States and Europe fail to heed them, the cause of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century could could go the way of the country they just surrendered to the Taliban.
Addressing climate change will require a massive transition from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies, as well as behavioral changes on the part of millions of households. The existing economic system can manage the challenge, but political leaders should be clear about what it will entail.
As technology advances and the environment changes, some of the key assumptions underpinning mainstream economic thinking will become obsolete. To reverse the public’s loss of confidence in the discipline, economists must get back to doing what made the field so valuable in the first place.
The exponential increase in EVs suggests that they will take over the global auto market by the early 2040s. This will send oil prices plummeting, with profound economic and geopolitical consequences.
The absence of a Food Systems Stability Board is a notable gap in the global governance architecture needed to bolster sustainability and resilience. By agreeing to launch consultations regarding the creation of such a body, governments could contribute to a better future for hundreds of millions of highly vulnerable people.
Though we live in a highly complex, networked world, the paradigm that guides policymaking is largely linear, mechanical, and “rational.” This leaves us blind to the obvious – including our own blindness – and vulnerable to conceptual traps and collective-action problems.