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For most of human history, controlling what people believed meant, among other things, controlling what they could read. The Spanish Inquisition burned books. The church suppressed heretical texts. Voltaire’s pamphlets went up in flames. If dangerous ideas could not circulate, you could control the truth. But as literacy spread, something else spread with it. When…
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Writing a thesis on living wages as a legally enforceable human right taught me something: the further you dig into the law, the more you realise that law alone cannot explain whether people actually get protected. You can have the rights, you can have the right conventions ratified, you can have the right institutions on…
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We all know what a billionaire is, but you may also know the word oligarch, someone rich enough to have a seat at the table, and sometimes even a hand on the pen. You might know the word from the famous Russian oligarchs; the word became shorthand for fortunes built fast in the chaotic Russian…
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Have you ever wondered where the labels “left” and “right” actually come from? The labels started as seating arrangements. During the French Revolution, legislators who favored preserving the king’s authority and traditional institutions tended to sit on the right side of the assembly, while reformers sat on the left. Over time, that physical divide became…
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A European buyer delays placing orders until “tariff conditions clarify.” Within weeks, a factory on the other side of the world cuts shifts, trims overtime, and quietly lets temporary workers go. In communities where wages were already insufficient, the shock is visible, might be in the form of school fees postponed, remittances reduced, and food…
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James Marriott’s recent essay The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society struck a nerve on me. He mentions that we might be seeing the gradual decline of literacy as the basis for advanced cognition, which goes beyond the current state of books or reading habits. In my opinion, it indicates a more deep shift in the…
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What do shuttered factories in the American Rust Belt and struggling farms in rural India, have in common? Both have seen livelihoods shrink, opportunities vanish, and communities feel abandoned by economic progress (Vance, 2016). This is the fertile ground of insecurity, where right-wing populism has gained momentum across continents (Rodrik, 2018). These movements offer easy…
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People in finance often talk about “alpha”, a fancy word for doing better than the average market investor. Usually, they look for it in cutting-edge tech or business strategies. But what if a powerful source of outperformance has been hiding in plain sight, in how companies treat their people? The idea of “social alpha” is…
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I wake up late, open the app on my phone, and wait for the first order to come in. By midday I’ve already delivered meals across the city, earbuds in, half-listening to podcasts and scrolling through my feeds. The message is everywhere: work harder, push further, the money is out there. If I don’t have…
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Microfinance is known as the provision of small loans, savings, and other basic financial services to people that might be excluded from formal banking, often due to lack of providing necessary paperwork (payslips, collateral, credit history), it has become one of the major cornerstone of international development efforts by many organizations and institutions. There has…