By Anjali Kapoor Feb. 21, 2025 Microfinance was once the crown jewel of global development policy—a market-based miracle that promised to lift billions from poverty through access to credit. Two decades later, the dream has fractured. What began as an instrument of empowerment has quietly evolved into a web of predatory lending, data extraction, and financial dependency. According to the World Bank Global Microfinance Survey (2025) , over 180 million people  worldwide hold ac

By Ethan Zhao Feb. 23, 2025 Artificial intelligence was once hailed as a democratizer of art. Now, it threatens to turn culture itself into a speculative asset class. From AI-written novels to generative music and design, machine learning has not just entered the creative economy—it has begun to dominate it. The result is a silent inflation: an explosion of synthetic content that devalues human creativity while enriching the platforms that profit from it. According to the UNE

By Hana Yamamoto Feb. 25, 2025 As the world races toward electrification, lithium has become the new oil—strategic, scarce, and politically charged. Nations pledge green revolutions, but beneath the rhetoric lies a familiar story: extraction, inequality, and exploitation. What was once called “sustainable development” now risks replicating 20th-century colonial economics under a decarbonized disguise. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA Critical Minerals Outlook

By Thomas White Feb. 27, 2025 Every year, the world loses enough money in offshore tax avoidance to fund the entire global clean-energy transition. Yet while governments pledge trillions toward climate goals, the same financial systems that enable those goals also drain them. The contradiction is structural: climate finance operates in a world where capital escapes accountability. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF Fiscal Integrity Database, 2025) , multination

By Rahul Bhatia Mar. 1, 2025 Economic sanctions were once considered the alternative to war. Today, they are the primary weapon of geopolitics—powerful enough to cripple nations, yet imprecise enough to destabilize the very system that gives them force. The rise of “financial statecraft”—the strategic use of currency, trade, and banking restrictions—has redrawn the map of global influence. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF Global Sanctions Tracker, 2025) , the

By Grace Zhang Mar. 2, 2025 Population decline was once a statistical concern. Now, it’s an economic emergency. Across developed nations, birth rates have plunged below replacement levels, labor pools are shrinking, and welfare systems are straining under the weight of the elderly. But the deeper crisis is intellectual, not just demographic: as societies age, innovation slows, risk tolerance collapses, and the engines of productivity stall. According to the United Nations Pop

By Yuto Tanaka Mar. 4, 2025 Water was once treated as a natural right. Today, it’s becoming a premium service—allocated not by geography or rainfall, but by bandwidth and balance sheets. As climate change intensifies droughts and population growth strains urban systems, the world’s freshwater crisis is colliding with the digital economy. From semiconductor plants in Taiwan to data centers in Arizona, industries that sustain modern life now depend on a resource growing scarcer

By Arnav Mehta Mar. 6, 2025 Urban planners call it resilience . Economists call it revitalization . But for many residents, the global push for “green cities” has become a quiet form of displacement. As governments retrofit neighborhoods with sea walls, solar grids, and urban forests, property values soar—pricing out the very communities these projects were meant to protect. The World Bank Urban Climate Adaptation Review (2025)  estimates that climate-resilient infrastructure

By Daniel Evans Mar. 8, 2025 Inflation was once the domain of central bankers. Today, it is increasingly engineered by algorithms. From ride-sharing apps to airline tickets and grocery delivery platforms, artificial intelligence now determines the price of everyday goods—adjusting them in real time, responding not only to supply and demand but to you . What began as an innovation in efficiency has evolved into a subtle, systemic form of economic distortion. According to the B

By Chloe Lin Mar. 9, 2025 Every time you speak to an AI, like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, you are not just conversing with code—you are standing atop an invisible empire of human labor. Millions of people around the world label data, moderate content, and train algorithms for pennies. This “ghost work” , as anthropologists call it, is the silent backbone of the digital economy—a system that extracts human intelligence while erasing its existence. The International Labour Orga

By Aarav Joshi Mar. 12, 2025 Welfare systems were once designed by politicians and economists. Today, they are coded by engineers. From Estonia’s “digital citizen” registry to the United States’ automated unemployment verification systems, algorithmic welfare —the use of artificial intelligence to determine eligibility, risk, and benefit allocation—has become the new architecture of public policy. Governments embrace automation to cut costs and enhance efficiency. But as AI i

By Akira Fujii Mar. 14, 2025 The global energy transition was supposed to liberate us from extraction. Yet as the world races toward electrification, lithium—the lightest metal on Earth—has become its heaviest burden. Marketed as the cornerstone of clean technology, lithium now underpins everything from electric vehicles (EVs) to smartphones. But beneath the rhetoric of sustainability lies a paradox: the green revolution is powered by a new kind of resource dependency, one th

By Jason Luo Mar. 16, 2025 For centuries, universities were society’s engines of mobility—transforming talent into opportunity and knowledge into progress. But in 2025, they more closely resemble luxury brands than public institutions. Tuition has soared, prestige has eclipsed purpose, and degrees have become status symbols rather than ladders. The World Bank Education Economics Report (2025)  estimates that global higher education spending now exceeds US$2.9 trillion , yet g

By Olivia Williams Mar. 18, 2025 Artificial intelligence promised efficiency, not exhaustion. Yet as data centers sprawl and generative models multiply, the industry once hailed as humanity’s smartest invention is becoming its hungriest. The International Energy Agency (IEA Digital Power Outlook, 2025)  estimates that global AI-related electricity demand will triple by 2030—reaching 4 percent of total global consumption , equivalent to the energy use of Japan. Tech executives

By Aisha Sharma Mar. 20, 2025 In the 20th century, oil shaped geopolitics. In the 21st, it will be water. Behind every semiconductor, latte, and lithium battery lies an invisible currency—freshwater—and humanity is overspending it at a staggering rate. According to the World Resources Institute (Global Aquatic Stress Index, 2025) , over 3.2 billion people  now live under “high to extremely high” water stress conditions. Yet global finance, trade, and policy continue to treat

By Ethan Liu Mar. 22, 2025 For decades, policymakers have treated inflation as a solved equation—measurable, trackable, and tameable. Yet consumers everywhere sense something amiss: prices stabilize, but everything feels cheaper, flimsier, smaller. From half-filled cereal boxes to fragile appliances, the modern economy is waging a quiet war of attrition against quality itself. This hidden phenomenon—known as skimpflation  and shrinkflation —represents capitalism’s newest surv

By Sarah Wong Mar. 24, 2025 The 20th century’s economic miracle was built on one assumption: population growth. Yet that foundation is crumbling beneath our feet. From Seoul to Stockholm, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level, ushering in what the United Nations Population Division (World Fertility Outlook, 2025)  calls “the most rapid demographic contraction in recorded history.” By 2050, two-thirds of the global population  will live in countries with shrinkin

By Yuna Takahashi Mar. 25, 2025 Democracy’s oldest promise was that every vote counts. In the digital age, that promise has been rewritten: every click counts—some more than others. Across the world, the mechanics of political persuasion have shifted from the public square to the algorithm. Campaigns, media outlets, and governments now compete not for policies, but for placement  in personalized feeds curated by opaque machine-learning systems. According to the Oxford Interne

By Rohan Kumar Mar. 27, 2025 Capitalism’s traditional bargain was simple: innovate, produce, and profit. But in the 2020s, a new logic has quietly supplanted it—own, hold, and extract. Across developed economies, the profits once driven by productivity gains are now increasingly generated by asset appreciation, rent-seeking, and financial intermediation. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS Macrofinancial Bulletin, 2025)  estimates that non-productive capital income no

By William Harris Mar. 29, 2025 When a sneaker company claims carbon neutrality or an e-commerce giant boasts of zero-emission delivery, most of the emissions haven’t disappeared—they’ve just been exported. Across industries, the global supply chain has become a tool for statistical  decarbonization: shifting emissions to jurisdictions with weaker oversight, opaque subcontracting networks, and untraceable logistics. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP Global Emissions Audit, 2