Society, Law & Ethics

Digitalization efforts in low-income countries fail to reduce carbon emissions and can even make environmental outcomes worse.

Combining different fields of knowledge slows down the speed of technology transfer but creates much deeper industrial impact.

Audited financial statements can make stock market crashes more severe by giving investors a false sense of security.

Critical infrastructure in Alexandria will suffer total functional failure decades before the city is actually underwater.

A company can charge two different people two different prices even when those people can easily sell the product to each other for free.

Digital platforms will eventually collapse because they are trying to extract more effort than the human body is biologically capable of recovering.

Government debt limits have nothing to do with protecting future generations from paying back our loans.

Small business loans in middle-income countries are priced based on the owner’s personal biography rather than the company’s actual financial health.

Some countries are not developing toward a better future, but are stuck in a permanent, stable state of being half-built.

Stock market breakouts accompanied by major news headlines are more likely to crash back down than jumps that happen in total silence.

Baseball managers influence their team's outcome by as much as two wins per season regardless of player talent.

Opening a new bank branch in a Muslim neighborhood in India has almost zero impact on the number of people who take out loans.

Financial experts become worse at spotting corporate lies when the media talks more about the greenwashing problem.

The way major investment firms pay their staff actually forces financial advisors to commit fraud against their own clients.

Modern fund managers are more likely to buy stocks from their ancestors' home countries, even if their family left those countries generations ago.

Building a massive, specialized factory is a more effective way to control the government than hiring a team of lobbyists.

Children who have their parents' high credit scores added to their own accounts are significantly more likely to default on their debts.

Private equity firms will intentionally make a local hospital less profitable and less efficient to help a different hospital succeed.

A suicide in your local neighborhood can stop you from buying stocks for several years, even if you never knew the person who died.

A group of AI companies is passing the same $1.4 trillion back and forth to make the industry look more successful than it actually is.

Brazil saw a massive surge in legal firearm registrations between 2019 and 2021 without a single corresponding increase in gun suicides.

Reducing the number of required AI queries for employees actually led to a 7% increase in total sales.

Tightening the endorsement rules on arXiv caused a 50% drop in new researchers entering fields like economics and quantitative biology.

Traders on a prediction market priced in a world leader's death four and a half hours before the government officially confirmed it.

A $200 speeding ticket is a punishment for a teacher but merely a convenience fee for a millionaire.

3G internet access in rural India boosts vaccination rates for toddlers but has no effect on the shots given to newborns.

Children as young as 12 treat social media age-verification screens like puzzles to be solved rather than rules to be followed.

Military officers and political elites now have a financial incentive to keep wars going so they can profit from prediction markets.

Aging populations are not actually the reason governments are struggling to save money.

Children born to a Hindu father and a Muslim mother in India are legally barred from inheriting any property from their parents.

A computer program can solve human moral disagreements more consistently than a room full of people voting on who is right.

Two groups of people can be persuaded to change their political views without ever talking to each other or seeing a single ad.

The textbook rule for choosing the most cost-effective project actually becomes the worst possible strategy in a competitive environment.

A new economic framework called System K replaces the dollar with the megawatt-hour as the fundamental unit of money.

Printing money only helps the poor if the cash is handed out to everyone at the exact same time.

A corner is the most powerful starting position in a 2D territory race as long as you are faster than your opponent.

AI models are making paywalled scientific research invisible by only citing and learning from articles that are free to read.

The Wall Street Journal published biasedly positive stories about companies connected to its own owners to temporarily pump up their stock prices.

The physical shape of a county's connection to its neighbors is the most accurate predictor of how many jobs it will lose in a recession.

AI companies might have no legal power to stop people from using their models to train better, cheaper competitors.

The world's most famous poverty-alleviation model appears to be succeeding in China only because the borrowers are hiding their failures from officials.

The true cost of using AI is not the price of generating a document but the time it takes for a human to check if it is wrong.

Investors and analysts are now making fewer mistakes because they prefer reading financial reports written by AI instead of humans.

The gold standard years between 1873 and 1896 saw a hidden form of inflation that made debts much harder to pay.

Tech companies invest four dollars into the oil and gas industry for every single dollar they spend on green energy.

A standard statistical correction used by city planners for decades actually makes their research less accurate.

Experienced stone tool makers cannot figure out how a prehistoric tool was made just by looking at the finished product.

The Voynich manuscript contains two distinct writing styles that a mathematical model can identify with 89 percent accuracy.

The law of comparative advantage that defines modern global trade was not actually invented by David Ricardo.

France maintains a civic floor that forces citizens to condemn political violence even when the victim is an opponent.