Schools brief | Externalities

Pigouvian taxes

What to do when the interests of individuals and society do not coincide? The fourth in our series

LOUD conversation in a train carriage that makes concentration impossible for fellow-passengers. A farmer spraying weedkiller that destroys his neighbour’s crop. Motorists whose idling cars spew fumes into the air, polluting the atmosphere for everyone. Such behaviour might be considered thoughtless, anti-social or even immoral. For economists these spillovers are a problem to be solved.

This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “The lives of others”

Donald Trump has no grasp of what it means to be president

From the August 19th 2017 edition

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AI needs regulation, but what kind, and how much?

Different countries are taking different approaches to regulating artificial intelligence

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LLMs will transform medicine, media and more

But not without a helping (human) hand


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How AI models are getting smarter

Deep neural networks are learning diffusion and other tricks


The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips

The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together

A short history of AI

In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering