Schools brief | Six big ideas

Gary Becker’s concept of human capital

Becker made people the central focus of economics. The second in our series on big economic ideas

WHY do families in rich countries have fewer children? Why do companies in poor countries often provide meals for their workers? Why has each new generation spent more time in school than the one that came before? Why have earnings of highly skilled workers risen even as their numbers have also increased? Why should universities charge tuition fees?

This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “The people’s champion”

How to avoid nuclear war with North Korea

From the August 5th 2017 edition

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A computer covered in hazard tape.

AI needs regulation, but what kind, and how much?

Different countries are taking different approaches to regulating artificial intelligence

A toolbox filled with regular tools and speech bubbles.

LLMs will transform medicine, media and more

But not without a helping (human) hand


A flamme under a container diffusing letters turned into a speech bubble.

How AI models are getting smarter

Deep neural networks are learning diffusion and other tricks


The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips

The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together

A short history of AI

In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering