Lena Martin
The psychology of money: why smart people make predictable financial mistakes
In 1998, the financial economist Terrance Odean published a study of 10,000 individual brokerage accounts spanning seven years of trading activity. The finding was...
The Great Stagnation: why productivity growth slowed and whether it can...
"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Robert Solow wrote that in 1987, in a book review for the...
The underground economy that sustains half the world’s poorest countries
The numbers are precise enough to be insulting. In Lima, Peru, Hernando de Soto's research team spent nine months of near-full-time work navigating the...
The hidden arithmetic of immigration: what the research actually shows
In April 1980, Fidel Castro announced that any Cuban who wanted to leave could do so from the port of Mariel. Roughly 125,000 people...
How the price of housing became the defining economic issue of...
The UK completed 425,000 new homes in 1968 — England accounted for the large majority. At the peak of the postwar building programme —...
Why the global food system is more fragile than anyone admits
On March 7, 2022 — twelve days after Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border — Chicago wheat futures closed at their highest level in...
The rare earth supply chain: the hidden dependency behind every modern...
Somewhere in the North Sea, bolted to the seafloor in 30 metres of grey water, stands a wind turbine generating 3.5 megawatts of electricity....
Why some languages have no word for a concept that shapes...
The languages we speak don't just describe our inner worlds — they help construct them. A century-long scientific debate is finally yielding an answer,...
Why desalination hasn’t solved the water crisis — and what actually...
The countries with the worst water crises have almost no desalination capacity. Not because the technology is new — large-scale desalination has existed since...
The countries most likely to dissolve in the next 50 years
On September 25, 2017, 92.73 percent of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence. Not autonomy. Not enhanced federalism. Independence. The margin was not produced by...