CAMBRIDGE: Spoiler alert: I am not going to talk about how ChatGPT responds when prompted about economic development strategies. It basically regurgitates reasonable, but mediocre ideas that it has seen in its training set. But ChatGPT’s...
CAMBRIDGE: In the traditional (and somewhat outdated) distinction between left and right, left-wing parties represent workers, while right-wing parties represent the owners of capital. When the left is in charge, according to this view, it tends to...
CAMBRIDGE : As I write, Russia’s army has entered Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. It is clear now that the threat of sanctions did not dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from launching his invasion. But making good on the threat can...
CAMBRIDGE: Assume you knew nothing about a particular low-income country except the following facts. Its annual income per capita in 2020 was just $509, the seventh lowest in the world. In the decade to 2019, annual aid inflows had halved, to just...
CAMBRIDGE – Suppose you are a policymaker in a developing economy. Your country’s income per capita is a fraction of that in the United States, Western Europe, or Japan. Your economy has grown over the past 30 years, but so have richer...
CAMBRIDGE – If it ain't broke, don't fix it, the old adage goes. But the world's current vaccination plan is very much “broke,” and nobody seems to be fixing it, despite the disastrous consequences for lives,...
CAMBRIDGE – Poor countries are cheap. In 2019, a dollar could buy more than twice as much in Argentina, Morocco, South Africa, and Thailand as it could in the United States. It could buy more than three times as much in Vietnam, India, and...