The word colonisation doesn’t really cover the breadth of difference between what happened in Asia, Africa or Latin America

The lesson for commodity exporters, whether Norwegian natural ice exporters until the fridge was invented, or New England oil whalers until crude oil was discovered, is that commodities do not necessarily have any natural value Sell them while you can Human capital is better

Top 4 key findings from Moody’s July 2025 report on Kenya: —Kenya’s fiscal deficit was 5.7% of GDP in FY2025, above target due to weak revenue and rigid spending. —Debt-to-GDP dipped to 66.5%, but affordability remains poor with interest eating up 33% of revenue. —Heavy reliance

Tehran joins Cape Town in the list of cities that have been hit economically by acute water shortages in recent years

The greenest industrial revolution is underway as Africa ramps up solar power generation Big growth in the Gulf too fdiintelligence.com/content/202ea0…

Great pod with tyro Tobi & Charlie Robertson His Insight of electricity design to be initially industry facing resonates - a view consistent with history of all developed countries I've read Charlie Robertson on Fertility, Electricity and Literacy 1914reader.com/p/charlie-robe…

At least there’s a silver lining for Lesotho

A big thanks to ⁦tyro⁩ ⁦Charlie Robertson⁩ for a great conversation that updates some the takes in this book. More importantly it lifted my spirit - I was in a very cynical place about the future of Nigeria & SSAfrica.

This is Stalin’s signature - and Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop, when they met in the Kremlin after World War 2 had begun - and they finalised the carve up of Poland - October 1939. Museum in Gdansk, Poland

Joe Weisenthal Anyone understand how Tariffs would cause services prices to rise? I understand goods, but weird that service prices rose *faster* than goods

Interesting to see Grok so swiftly reply to these questions on corruption with reasonable answers

China wanted better ratings for its corporates and now 90% of them triple A. The problem is “ratings inflation” and that triple A may not be that reliable .. as the default of Yongcheng Coal and Electricity showed in 2020

Investment-grade credit spreads are the tightest since 1998, with investors accepting less and less extra yield over government rates as the year has gone on. (1/2)

In these articles, what jumped out was Japan giving $8.5bn for 80 infrastructure projects since 1993. Vs China lending $182bn since 2000. Plus no easy solutions to the cuts in aid. Edtech may help ..quotes from Justin Sandefur

There have been several recent papers which might be called the ‘Economic History of Science’ but I think this new one is the first true thoroughbred to dash out of the starting stall: A network analysis tracing how discrete scientific ideas diffused amongst scholars through

Indonesia industrialised in line with the education, fertility and electricity thesis of The Time Travelling Economist but has now seen manufacturing shrink from 32% to 19% of GDP For the reasons below And the article suggests because too much focus on Indonesia’s plentiful natural resources

Interesting to listen to Bloomberg live Jackson Hole coverage. US speaker already self-censor themselves, eg none explicitly link relatively high US interest rates with Trump's tariff policy, even as some talk of deflationary impact on Eurozone