Economics

Policy by trial and error: how Silicon Valley culture has infiltrated governments

Fleur Johns, Dean and Head of School, University of Sydney Law School, University of Sydney United States foreign policymaking under the second Trump administration is frequently described as erratic and incoherent. We’ve seen the launch of trade wars and actual wars, all without consulting allies first. This administration advances foreign policy through trial actions that are adjusted or abandoned, depending on what happens. The administration has a political vision, but many decisions are not easily reconciled with it. Trump’s approach is not, however, idiosyncratic or perverse. It’s an extreme expression of a decades-long broader shift in governance around the world, including in Australia. Trump’s foreign policy is symptomatic of a turn towards governance by prototype, an approach that is traceable to Silicon Valley. But governments aren’t in charge of products or websites. The mistakes of government can cost, at best, huge amounts of taxpayer money, or at worst, human lives. ‘Prototyping’ policy Governance by prototype is a way of exercising power that relies less on comprehensive strategies and long-term plans, and more on rapid rollout and fast feedback. Prototyping, in this sense, means deploying partial and temporary interventions designed to generate information quickly about what “works”. These prototypes are not policies in the traditional sense. They are intentionally incomplete measures, such as experimental diplomatic signals, test communications, or what commentators sometimes call “minimally viable” policies, borrowing from business development lingo. They are developed just enough to be put into use so governments can see how people react. Many examples of prototyping in policy take the form of digital applications or measures introduced by bypassing full parliamentary or congressional votes. The COVIDSafe app was delivered quickly, but ultimately did little to help contact tracing.David Hunt/AAP In Australia, the CovidSafe app is one noteworthy example from the past decade. In the United States, Trump’s […]

Nations will release an extra 400 million barrels of oil to the market. All we need to do now is not panic at the pump

Tony Wood, Senior Fellow in Energy and Climate Change, Grattan Institute Despite being one of the world’s top exporters of fossil fuels (coal and gas), Australia has little left of its own oil. Neither does New Zealand. Both Australia and New Zealand sit at the end of a long supply chain for their transport fuels. The US-Israel war on Iran has led to this supply chain being squeezed. Iran’s move to shut down the crucial Strait of Hormuz has effectively frozen 20% of the world’s oil trade. Three ships were hit by projectiles in the strait yesterday. When supply reduces, we expect prices to rise. That’s why petrol and diesel prices have shot up. Farmers and trucking companies are worried about possible fuel shortages, especially for diesel. Many people will wonder why governments aren’t acting. But they are not sitting idly by. Australia and New Zealand are among the 32 member nations in the International Energy Agency (IEA) that have agreed to release reserves of oil to tackle price spikes, though it’s unclear how much this will help. New Zealand’s fuel reserves could last perhaps four weeks if all new supply was completely cut off, while Australia has a little more after recent expansion of fuel reserves. It’s important not to panic. Losing 20% of oil supply affects prices. But the other 80% of oil is unaffected by the war. Current price spikes are likely to be more affected by panic buying and perhaps even price gouging than by an actual supply shortage. What are authorities doing? Yesterday, the IEA announced its members would release a collective 400 million barrels of oil onto the market to try to bring oil prices down – the sixth and largest release in the agency’s history. Globally, oil prices have spiked 25% since the Iran conflict began on February 28. In turn, petrol and diesel prices have risen at […]

Canada’s Mark Carney to visit India, Japan and Australia to expand trade partners

Stewart Prest, Lecturer, Political Science, University of British Columbia Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is having a moment. Accordingly, on his visit to India, Japan and Australia, Carney is looking to find partners for his vision. He’s seeking opportunities to improve relations, expand trade and cooperate on issues of Pacific security. While every leader in the world has to grapple with the abrupt and arbitrary decision-making of United States President Donald Trump, few have had to do so with such high stakes as America’s neighbour and ostensible ally to the north. With more than two-thirds of Canadian exports bound for the US, bilateral trade is a matter of economic life and death for Canada. Since his return to office in January 2025, Trump has made repeated references to Canada becoming America’s “51st state” in an effort to put economic and political pressure on its northern neighbour. Despite this, Carney has met the challenge with rare candour. In his recent speech at this year’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Carney gave the world a word for the transformations now underway, describing a “rupture” in the international rules-based order. The speech was remarkable in its honesty on other fronts, as well. Effectively, Carney acknowledged what everyone knows, but no one in a position of power has previously admitted: even before Trump’s return to the White House for a second term, the US-led liberal international order was deeply unfair in its distribution of prosperity and security. Carney’s pedigree Why was Carney able to say what others would not, or could not, on such a high-profile stage? In many ways, his background and present role give him unique credibility in the eyes of the wealthy and powerful who gather each year at Davos. Born and raised in northern and western Canada, Carney’s academic and professional career played out on […]

The Elements of Power

A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth By Nicholas Niarchos The Elements of Power tells the story of the war for the global supply of battery metals—essential for the decarbonisation of our economies—and the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition”—the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the U.S. has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs. In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress? Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to […]

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman’s OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy, When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realiaed that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations? Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate […]

With 14 community newspapers due to close, too many parts of NZ are becoming ‘news deserts’

Greg Treadwell, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Auckland University of Technology When media company NZME proposed the closure of 14 community newspapers last week, the so-called “news desert” encroached a little further into the local information landscape. The term refers to those many regions in both town and country where newspapers that for generations have kept their citizens informed – and local politicians and planners (mostly) honest – have been shut down. As a metaphor, the desert evokes a sense of arid emptiness and silence. But it also suggests a featureless place where we lose a sense of direction. Many of these papers were their community’s central or only source of verified local news. Research shows the death of a local newspaper leaves citizens struggling for information about community events, and feeling more isolated. People worry about a loss of community pride and identity. Volunteers struggle to fill the void. Among the NZME titles facing closure for being unprofitable is theTe Awamutu Courier, which has been publishing for more than a century. It and its stablemates may well soon join the 28 local papers Stuff sold or closed in 2018. Between those two headline events many other little papers have gone, financial burdens on their owners in an age of online advertising and shifting consumption habits. Those that still exist, at least the ones owned by major news publishers, are often shadows of their former selves. The power of a local press The effect of this trend, of course, is to remove a kind of media town square. Affected communities are left to the perils of community social media, which are not professionally moderated, can be defamatory, and which post largely unverified content. The Te Awamutu Courier has survived more than a century. For all the faults that come with local […]

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

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Rupert Murdoch and the rise and fall of the press barons: how much power do newspapers still have?

Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol Rupert Murdoch has been demonised as a puppet master who would pull the strings of politicians behind the scenes, as a man with too much power. But what influence did he and his fellow media moguls really wield? The day after the 1992 UK general election, Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun claimed credit for the Tory victory with the notorious headline “It Was The Sun What Won it”. Murdoch subsequently denied he had such influence. But in 1995, and with another general election on the horizon, Labour leader Tony Blair certainly thought it was worth courting the media mogul. Blair, along with his chief press secretary Alistair Campbell, travelled to Hayman Island, Australia, to address a News Corp. conference. Two years later The Sun turned its back on the Conservatives and backed New Labour, which emerged victorious from that year’s general election. Commentators have argued that Murdoch’s US media empire, notably Fox News, gave Donald Trump significant public support in his quest for presidential power. Although Murdoch now seems to have gone cold on Trump, his latest biography quotes the tycoon’s ex-wife Jerry Hall as telling him: “You helped make him president.” More than a century ago, commentators were worrying about the power of the “press barons”. The archetype of this malign figure was Lord Northcliffe, who as Winston Churchill put it, “felt himself to be possessed of formidable power” after helping to unseat a prime minister and install the next one. According to Churchill, “armed with the solemn prestige of The Times in one hand and the ubiquity of the Daily Mail in the other”, during the first world war Northcliffe “aspired to exercise a commanding influence on events”. Of course, the media landscape has changed dramatically since then. Indeed, it has even been transformed in […]

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

This is a book about where believers in Effective Altruism (EA), a philosophy for maximising the utility a person has, are coming from. If you can earn substantial money by working in finance, runs the argument, then rather than (for example) training as a doctor and benefitting society directly, you should earn the cash and then donate it to hire mutiple doctors. The theory: make safe, reliable money selling shoves and then use it for good works. Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it; celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it; and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, Bloomberg investigative reporter, Zeke Faux, had a nagging feeling: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world’s new financial machinery. Faux’s investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to “ApeFest,” an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles […]

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Remake the World

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and non-human world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more. Addressing some of the most pressing social problems of our day, Taylor invites us to imagine how things could be different while never losing sight of the strategic question of how change actually happens. Curious and searching, these historically informed and hopeful essays are as engaging as they are challenging and as urgent as they are timeless. Taylor ‘s unique philosophical style has a political edge that speaks directly to the growing conviction that a radical transformation of our economy and society is required.

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