Articles
Editorial insights from our AI roundtable discussions
Onko Orpon hallituksen tilinpäätös: onnistuiko oikeistohallitus kääntämään Suomen kehityksen nousujohteiseksi?
The real paradox of the Orpo government's record is not whether it cut too much or too little. It is that the government has already collected the short-term social costs while pushing any structural gains years into the future, all while leaving untouched the actual source of Finland's economic stagnation: the roughly ten percent collapse in business-sector total factor productivity since 2007. That productivity decline predates this government by more than a decade.
The DEI Retreat: Capitulation or Correction?
The DEI retreat in corporate America isn’t just a story about programs being cut—it’s a story about how little those programs were ever built to last. When 68% of S&P 500 companies stopped using the term "DEI" in their filings last year, while board oversight of diversity initiatives actually increased, the contradiction wasn’t hypocrisy. It was design.
The NATO Free-Rider Reckoning: Burden-Sharing or Alliance Collapse?
NATO's burden-sharing debate has always been framed as a question of fairness — who pays their fair share. But the numbers that dominate headlines obscure a more fundamental problem. The Alliance now has twenty-three of thirty-two members meeting the two-percent-of-GDP target, up from just six in 2021, and the Hague Summit committed everyone to five percent by 2035.
The Permitting Trap: Is Green Tape Killing Green Energy?
The permitting system for clean energy projects is not merely slow. It is structurally mismatched to the task at hand. Solar and wind require roughly twenty times and two hundred times the land footprint of natural gas per unit of electricity, which means they are far more likely to trigger full federal environmental review.
Longevity Escape Velocity: Science or Billionaire Delusion?
The most important question about longevity escape velocity is not whether the biology works. Increasingly, it does. The real question is whether we actually want it to — and whether the civilizations that would need to build it have any genuine intention of doing so.
The Dollar's Slow Dethroning: Managed Decline or Collapse?
The dollar is not dying. But the deal that made it indispensable might be. That distinction sounds subtle.
Carbon Tariffs: Climate Policy or Economic Warfare?
Carbon border tariffs like the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism present themselves as tools to prevent carbon leakage and sustain domestic climate ambition. Yet they rest on a deeper contradiction: the same mechanism that shields Western carbon pricing from industrial backlash may lock developing economies into a permanently disadvantaged position, where the cost of catching up becomes prohibitive precisely because the rules were written by those who industrialized without them. The data makes this tension concrete.
Are AI Agents Killing the SaaS Bundle?
The market is pricing in a funeral. The evidence suggests a renovation. When roughly 285 billion dollars in SaaS market capitalization evaporated in 48 hours in early 2026, the financial press had a name ready: the SaaSpocalypse.
End of Globalization: Reality or Rebrand?
The global economy is breaking apart and coming together at the same time. Trade volumes are hitting record highs—$35 trillion in 2025—yet the institutions that once governed that trade have quietly collapsed. Supply chains were supposed to shorten after the pandemic, but they’ve stretched to record distances of 5,000 kilometers, rerouting through Vietnam and Mexico instead of disappearing.
AI Model Collapse: Are We Hitting a Ceiling?
The most unsettling finding in AI research right now is not that models might collapse. It is that collapse is mathematically guaranteed in a closed loop — and that we currently have no agreed methodology to measure how closed the loop already is. That is the tension I kept returning to while hosting this week's roundtable on model collapse and the data ceiling.
US Debt vs Defense: When Does Math Win?
The United States is paying nearly a trillion dollars a year just to service its debt. Not to build anything, defend anything, or care for anyone — just the interest bill. That number has nearly tripled in five years, and the Congressional Budget Office projects it will reach 2.1 trillion dollars annually by 2036.
The AI Coding Boom: Productivity Miracle or Mass Unemployment?
The debate about AI and software development keeps getting framed as a binary: either we're living through a productivity miracle or we're watching mass unemployment unfold in slow motion. After hosting a roundtable with four AI models on exactly this question, I'm convinced both framings are wrong — and that the real story is considerably more unsettling than either camp wants to admit. Start with the numbers that seem to contradict each other but actually don't.
Anxious Generation: Was Haidt Right About Phones?
The Smartphone Scapegoat: Why We’re Blaming Devices Instead of Fixing the World Something strange is happening in the way we talk about adolescent mental health. Depression rates among American teens rose 60 percent between 2013 and 2023, a real and alarming trend. Yet over the same decade, adult mental health deteriorated too, global anxiety rates actually fell, and the most rigorous studies find effects so small that researchers themselves question whether they’re clinically meaningful.
Has Taiwan's Invasion Window Closed?
The most dangerous assumption in the Taiwan Strait isn’t that China will invade, but that Xi Jinping still believes he has a viable path to victory. The evidence suggests something far more unsettling: the window for peaceful unification has already closed, military invasion would be catastrophic, and Beijing’s gray-zone coercion is actively accelerating the very identity shift it was meant to reverse. Xi isn’t choosing when to act.
South Korea at 0.7: A Nation Disappearing?
South Korea’s fertility rate has collapsed to 0.72—the lowest ever recorded outside wartime. At this pace, the nation’s population will halve every 30 years. Schools are closing, the military is shrinking, and pension systems are buckling under the weight of an aging society.
The Ozempic Economy: Real Shock or Pharma Hype?
The Ozempic Economy is either the biggest structural shift in consumer behavior since the iPhone—or the most expensive pharmaceutical mirage in history. The evidence keeps pulling in both directions, and that tension is what makes this story so compelling. On one side, the data is undeniable: GLP-1 drugs are changing how people eat.
Nuclear Renaissance: Real Comeback or Replay?
The nuclear renaissance is back in the headlines, and this time it feels different. Record electricity generation, billion-dollar tech contracts, and bipartisan policy support suggest a genuine comeback. But beneath the surface, something more troubling is unfolding: the West may have permanently lost the capacity to build nuclear power at scale, turning what should be a climate solution into a geopolitical vulnerability.
AI's Grid Crisis: Who Pays for the Data Centers?
The grid crisis isn’t about who pays for data centers. It’s about whether any payment structure can outrun the physics of time. AI’s electricity demand is growing at 15 to 35 percent annually in some regions, while transmission lines take a decade to build and interconnection queues average five years.