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China’s official urban unemployment rate presents an implausibly calm picture of the world’s largest labor market. Since the measure was introduced in 2018, it has landed between 5% and 6% in 99 of 115 months. Even during the covid-19 shock it never rose above 6.2%. The article argues that this stability is not reassuring. It is a warning that the statistic may be shaped by the government’s targets and by the way China’s migrant workforce moves in and out of the survey.

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Bond investors are sending governments an uncomfortable message: borrowing is becoming more expensive for reasons that will not disappear with a single policy announcement. Long-term yields have climbed across rich countries, reflecting a mix of renewed inflation fears, heavy corporate borrowing and deep concern about public debt. The article argues that official efforts may calm markets briefly, but governments have few painless ways to restore confidence.

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Daron Acemoglu occupies an unusual position in economics: he is both one of the field’s most accomplished scholars and a target of mounting unease among his peers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor shared the 2024 Nobel prize for research on how institutions shape prosperity, has produced hundreds of papers and routinely influences public debate. The article’s concern is not that his work is incompetent. It is that prestige, productivity and technical sophistication may have given several contestable ideas more authority than their evidence deserves.

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Calling someone a Luddite usually ends an argument. The word suggests reflexive fear of technology: people smashing useful machines because they cannot understand progress. The original Luddites were more complicated. Their story, and a later struggle over computers in India, suggests that resistance from workers rarely determines whether a technology spreads. The decisive force is usually the state.

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The landing that never came

For much of the early 2020s, central bankers described the fight against inflation as an attempt to land an aircraft. A “soft landing” would bring price growth back under control without causing a recession. A “hard landing” would crush inflation by damaging the economy. The supposedly unserious third possibility was “no landing”: growth and inflation would both remain strong, leaving policymakers permanently aloft.

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Taylor Swift’s marriage to Travis Kelce gives the article a vivid example of a still-unusual household arrangement. Kelce reportedly earns around \$50m a year, yet that is only about a fifth of the couple’s combined income. Their celebrity scale is exceptional, but the imbalance points to a broader puzzle: women have made enormous gains in education and employment without becoming primary earners in most two-income households.

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The world produces roughly \$120trn of goods and services each year, but annual output is only one way to measure prosperity. A balance sheet asks a different question: what stock of wealth supports that income? The distinction matters because households can become much richer on paper even when the world adds relatively little to its productive capacity.

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China’s next export surge may arrive without a shipping container. Chinese artificial-intelligence companies are rapidly taking robotaxis, delivery vehicles, cloud services and chatbots abroad. Their expansion is often described as a sign of technological strength. It is also a response to a harder economic problem: many of these businesses struggle to earn money at home, while Beijing wants the benefits of AI without the disruption that mass automation could bring to Chinese workers.

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Prediction markets turn beliefs about future events into contracts that can be traded directly. Instead of building a complicated portfolio to express a view on an election, an interest-rate decision or an energy price, a trader can simply buy a contract tied to that outcome. Kalshi and Polymarket have proved that this idea can attract a large retail audience. Their harder task is convincing Wall Street that these markets are reliable, liquid and efficient enough for serious institutional money.

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Public hostility toward billionaires is rising just as the way extreme fortunes are made appears to be improving. Drawing on a new analysis of about 7,000 billionaires over 25 years, The Economist argues that a growing share of billionaire wealth now comes from founders competing to sell useful goods and services, rather than from inheritance, political connections or protected industries. That shift does not erase concerns about concentrated power, but it changes which remedies make sense.