AI governance must account for everything from the technology’s material requirements to its effects on communities, businesses, labor markets, the environment, and strategic competition. To this end, a framework of verification-based trust—broader than national regulation and more flexible than a classic treaty—is essential.
Are orbital data centers possible? We might have another data point to help answer that question after today’s scheduled SpaceX Starship launch. The newly public company is currently the only player with a viable path to building space-based infrastructure. And if you’re imagining a massive AI data center build-out in space, you’re also assuming lots…
The views expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management. Introduction Budgets are the central policy instrument for articulating government priorities, allocating scarce resources, and determining the fiscal stance. They set out governments’ expectations for revenues, borrowing, and spending based…
Both historically and today, support of aging parents has largely taken the form of in-kind transfers that require physical proximity, such as housing and caregiving. If Social Security substitutes for such support, it can relax constraints on where recipients’ children live and work. We investigate the long-run intergenerational effects of the early Social Security program,…
In The New York Times, Senators Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) propose to “save” Social Security by lifting the cap on earnings subject to the payroll taxA payroll tax is a tax paid on the wages and salaries of employees to finance social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Payroll taxes…
Using 380 trillion tokens of realized AI consumption across more than four hundred large language models from the licensed proprietary OpenRouter dataset covering approximately 2 percent of current global monthly AI token consumption, we analyze how AI affects firms, markets, and workers. Leveraging the unprecedented size, scope and granularity of this data, we construct the…
Is Parliament no more than a democracy theme park? beng Mon, 07/13/2026 – 08:59 EST. READ TIME 5 MIN. In her critique of the spring parliamentary session, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May argued that democracy and Parliament, by extension, are being disrespected by the current Liberal majority—declaring that Parliament is no more than a theme…
MADRID—One way to represent the AI age is with a steep curve and a gradual slope. The curve rises almost vertically: models rapidly grow cheaper, more powerful, more accessible, and more deeply embedded in production, science, education, finance, administration, security, and war. Beneath it, the slope moves on a far shallower incline. This is the capacity of society to absorb change.