Extreme poverty is growing rarer

HANS ROSLING, a Swedish academic who died in 2017, became famous for telling people that the world was faring better than they believed. One of his favourite examples was the rapid decline in extreme poverty. Sadly, just as Rosling’s elegant charts and YouTube talks drilled that story into people’s minds, the facts began to change. […]

Bubbles are rarer than you think

BUBBLES put the fun into financial history. Who can resist stories about Dutch tulips that were worth more than country estates or the floating of an “undertaking of great advantage but no one to know what it is”? Economists have long debated whether bubbles can be identified, or indeed stopped, before they can cause widespread […]