
Commentary / World Dec 29, 2019
Negotiating while the world burns
The stunning technological progress during the 2010s makes it possible to cut emissions at a cost far lower than everyone dared hope a decade ago.
For Adair Turner's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
The stunning technological progress during the 2010s makes it possible to cut emissions at a cost far lower than everyone dared hope a decade ago.
Our expanding ability to automate human work across all sectors makes an ever-growing workforce increasingly irrelevant to improvements in human welfare. That's good news for most of the world, but not for Africa.
Only clear targets can transform rational self-interest from a potentially catastrophic force into a powerful driver of beneficial change.
Excessive monetary finance is hugely harmful, and it is dangerous to view it as a costless way to solve long-term challenges.
But it will not be achieved without strong public policies and forward-looking business strategies.
The commonplace gloom about Japan's prospects is grossly overdone — many countries would be lucky to have its problems.
China's huge and increasingly affluent domestic market will make exports less vital to growth.
Over the next year, the bitcoin price could double, soar tenfold, or collapse by 95 percent or more, and no economic analysis can help predict where in that range it will lie.
China could become a highly respected and admired leader in the fight against global climate change.
China's continued economic success calls into question longstanding assumptions about the optimal balance of state and market mechanisms in driving economic development.