In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I used to travel to Sudan from time to time for certain business projects. It never occurred to me how eye-opening what I would see and experience in an underdeveloped country like Sudan could be. When I first landed in Sudan, the airport was covered everywhere with advertising posters of world-famous hotels. Familiar logos, familiar names. Yet the airport itself was terrible, with cats roaming all over the place. The cats were of a kind I h

The Rise of “Resilience” in Economic Discourse It is now commonplace to hear policymakers and markets praise the "resilience" of supply chains, of financial systems, of growth trajectories, and of investor sentiment. In its popularized form, resilience suggests strength, adaptability, and an underlying systemic vitality. What does it mean for an economy to be resilient? The global economy has shown  surprising robustness amid geopolitical shocks recently. Yet, it also warns o

In recent years, the proliferation of data-driven analysis has reshaped the epistemological foundations of economics. Vast computational capacity and algorithmic learning promise to turn uncertainty into calculable probability, and complexity into manageable prediction. Yet, the triumph of data often conceals a deeper conceptual poverty. As economics has increasingly become an empirical technocracy, it risks losing sight of what makes social inquiry meaningful: context, purpo

The Philosopher Who Looked Beyond Capitalism Few thinkers anticipated the dilemmas of twenty-first-century political economy as clearly as André Gorz  (1923–2007) did. Born in Vienna as Gérard Horst, Gorz became part of post-war France’s intellectual milieu, writing for Les Temps Modernes  under the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre . Over time he fused existentialism, Marxism, and ecological thought into a critique that re-imagined what economics could be about: not growth or pr

Once a symbol of unrelenting ascent, China’s model of social mobility is now showing cracks. For millions of young people, especially...