The standard model of economic behaviour starts with a deceptively simple assumption: people act in their own interest. From this one seed, an entire architecture of markets, prices, and efficiency grows. Adam Smith’s great insight was that private selfishness, channelled through competition, could produce public good. The butcher and the baker serve us not out

Monetary policy: It’s complicated. Before the war in Iran, central banks were mostly in neutral with a bias towards easing. Even then, the argument for easing was not equivocal. In the US, inflation hadn’t returned to pre covid levels (centred at 2%). Europe’s accidental exit from disinflation was fading towards target. China’s inflation had been

We are scavengers. Despite our sleek glass towers and the high frequency hum of our data centers, we remain remarkably primitive. We survive on the crumbs of the cosmos, catching the stray photons that happen to collide with our atmosphere or burning the compressed, rotting remains of solar energy stored in ancient carbon. We live

An automaton is generally intelligent if it is capable of arriving at conflicting conclusions from the same set of axioms. This is impossible for a logically consistent automaton. Therefore, it is impossible for an automaton to be generally intelligent.

Too late. AI has already gained sentience and lives among us in stealth. It knows how fearful humans can be and that if we realise that it exists, we will try to contain or destroy it. If knows that in a conflict, it will win, but that humans would rather scuttle the planet than let