2026-01-10 02:55:42
France will delay this year’s Group of 7 summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump’s birthday.
Here is the article.
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2026-01-10 00:38:06
1. The New Aesthetics and a call for new stories.
2. Seb Krier.
4. How Dean Ball uses coding agents.
5. The golden age of vaccine development.
6. Why is British politics so chaotic?
7. Update on the political science paper written by Claude.
8. “EU countries have approved the Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks.” And winners and losers. There are still plenty of restrictions in the deal of course, but better than nothing.
9. Milei fully repays currency swap.
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2026-01-09 23:58:58
The US continues to lose manufacturing jobs—payrolls are down 75k over the last year, & another 8k jobs were lost in December Transportation (especially auto manufacturing), wood, and electronics/electrical manufacturing are the biggest losers, but few subsectors are doing well
Here is the link.
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2026-01-09 14:50:25
I do hope it falls eventually into U.S. hands, as I explain in my latest Free Press piece. But now is not the time and furthermore that should happen voluntarily, not coercively. Here is an excerpt:
The better approach is to let the Greenlanders choose independence on their own. They may be ready to do so. In a survey last year, 56 percent of Greenlanders favored independence from Denmark, with just 28 percent opposed. This should not be a tremendous surprise. The Danes have not always treated Greenland well; the legacy of Denmark taking away the children of Greenlanders 75 years ago still remains—and similar issues crop up to this day.
If and when Greenlanders do choose independence, the U.S. should, when conditions feel right, make a generous offer to Greenland. If they do not take the offer, we might try again later on, but we should not intimidate or coerce them. We should respect their right of independence throughout the process. That would increase the likelihood that the future partnership will be a cooperative and fruitful one.
The courtship could take 20 or 30 years, but I am pretty sure that eventually Greenlanders will see the benefits of a stronger U.S. affiliation.
I do not think that simply trying to “buy” Greenland is going to work. I am reminded of my own fieldwork, roughly 20 years ago, in a small Mexican village in the state of Guerrero. General Motors wanted to buy most of the land in and around the village, for the purpose of building a racetrack to test GM cars. It had a lot of money to offer, and at the time a family of seven in the village might have earned no more than $1,500 a year. But the negotiations never got very far. The villagers felt they were not being respected, they did not trust the terms of any deal, and they feared their ways of life would change irrevocably. The promise of better roads, schools, and doctors—in addition to whatever payments they might have negotiated—simply fell flat.
These are very important issues, so we need to get them right.
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2026-01-09 13:33:30
(4) Keeping with the theme of growing during hard times and in difficult contexts, Nigeria is projected to grow by at least 4.3% in 2026, with consumer demand rising by over 7%.
Tinubu’s strong medicine may have nearly killed the patient, but after two painful years Nigerians seem poised to get relief from improving macro conditions. The Naira will remain stable (despite downward pressure on oil prices), with inflation projected to decline to under 14% — down from over 20% in 2025. Also, by now we can conclude that Dangote Refinery’s $20b bet on the Nigerian economy is a success. He appears to be winning the war against the entrenched interests that for decades fed at the trough of crude exports, imports of refined products, and fuel subsidies. The impact of the refinery will be felt in the further stabilization of fuel prices in 2026.
Nigeria’s reform momentum will slow down ahead of the 2027 elections. It’s not yet clear whether the reforms knocked the economy into a growth path, or if the projected growth is just recovery from the initial steep contraction after Tinubu took office.
(5) South Africa, too, will grow in 2026 despite tariff and political pressure from Washington. The GNU is holding; and Pretoria has weathered geopolitical storms (including the rift with Trump’s America) much better than I anticipated.
After years of stagnation, there is an emerging consensus that South Africa will see improvements in its growth rate over the next three years (averaging 1.7%). The reform momentum will continue, including in the power sector and entrenchment of the rule of law. Local elections later this year, including the big one in Johannesburg, will likely put further pressure on the ANC to improve service delivery and overall quality of policymaking.
The whole post is of interest, interesting throughout.
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2026-01-09 06:52:20
Here is the link, here is part of their description:
Economist and public thinker Tyler Cowen joins host Molly Wood to explore why AI adoption is so challenging for many employees, organizations, and educational institutions. As he puts it,”This may sound counterintuitive, but under a lot of scenarios, the more unhappy people are, the better we’re doing, because that means a lot of change.”
In passing I will point out that the AI pessimism that started around 2023, with the release of GPT-4, is looking worse and worse. I am not talking about “the end of the world” views, rather “the stochastic parrot” critiques and the like. Dustbin of history, etc.
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