Humans will soon have an average life span of 125 to 150 years, says Michael Zey. This will have profound implications for education, careers and marriages What has been dubbed the superlongevity revolution – the continuing and rapid extension of the human life span – is a landmark process in human history that promises to…
A host of new technologies, including biochips and robots sensitive to human emotions, will bring further dramatic improvements in quality of life, says Jong-Yong Yun We have been living through a revolution in technology since the 1960s. Those of us leading the change, however, must continue to look ahead for future drivers of the economy….
When the global house-price bubble deflates, the economic consequences will be painful, says Pam Woodall From London to Los Angeles, from Melbourne to Madrid, house prices seem to have lost touch with reality. Never before have there been simultaneous housing booms in so many countries. But the bigger the boom, the bigger the eventual bust….
China’s meteoric rise has alarmed some observers, say Yang Fujia and Colin Campbell. Joint education projects will help ensure that it is peaceful The rise of China is a reality. The Chinese economy has grown at an astonishing 9% or so a year since the late 1970s. In 2004, China’s national income reached Rmb12.5 trillion…
Flat taxes stimulate growth and employment and, paradoxically, higher tax revenues, says Steve Forbes The flat tax is a powerful generator of economic growth. It is very simple: a single, ideally low, tax rate is applied to personal incomes after generous exemptions for adults and children alike. For businesses, the profits tax would also be…
A number of events on the horizon could combine to form the “perfect storm” for emerging markets, says Kristin Forbes, unless governments and the international financial institutions act now In October 1991 a “perfect storm” swept across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc and killing several Massachusetts fishermen (in a story later popularized by Hollywood). A perfect…
Turkey has as much to offer the European Union as the EU has to offer Turkey, says Tayyip Erdogan Turkey and the European Union need each other. This is because Turkey’s future membership of the EU is a synthesis of the challenges and opportunities facing us at a global level. Turkey has been a part…
Bioterrorism should be taken as seriously as biological attacks from rogue states or a natural epidemic, says Gerald Epstein It is difficult to prove how serious the threat from bioterrorism is. True, several nations’ bioweapons programmes demonstrated, long ago, that bacteria and viruses can kill over large areas and place many thousands of lives at…
The threat of violence undertaken with atomic weapons has never been so great, Mohamed ElBaradei tells Taimur Ahmad The worries that plague Mohamed ElBaradei have scarcely been eased by the Nobel Peace Prize that he won last October. If anything, the 63-year-old Egyptian diplomat who runs the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear…
Democracy cannot take root in countries such as Iran unless individuals enjoy freedom of expression, says Shirin Ebadi The struggle in undemocratic, especially Muslim, countries to cultivate a political culture that would allow democracy to flourish has been a long one. Iranians, for example, have tried for more than a century to install democracy. Since…
