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But new data released on Wednesday morning showed price growth cooled slightly in May, cheering markets and the White House.

“Prices are still too high, but today’s report shows welcome progress on lowering inflation, which was zero on a monthly basis in May and is down nearly two-thirds from its peak,” the president said in a statement.

It's starting to feel a little bit like late 2023: For the second straight month, the Consumer Price Index was cooler than expected — a sign that inflation might be back on a downward path.

Why it matters: The first few months of the year stoked fears that price pressures were reaccelerating. So far, the second quarter appears much different — with a soft landing path for the economy looking like a reality.

A key measure of underlying US inflation stepped down for a second month in May, a pleasant surprise for Federal Reserve officials looking for signs that they can start to lower interest rates.

The so-called core consumer price index — which excludes food and energy costs — climbed 0.2% from April, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showed. The year-over-year measure rose 3.4%, cooling to the slowest pace in more than three years, according to data out Wednesday.

Yet now as before, inflation is a geopolitical phenomenon, which is rooted partly in rising global tensions and could have deeply corrosive effects on the U.S.-led world order.

That’s what happened the last time the U.S. faced this problem, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. “To all Americans,” Ronald Reagan said while running for president in 1980, inflation had become "something as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man." The causes were closely tied to global affairs.

Inflation in the United States eased in May for a second straight month, a hopeful sign that an acceleration of prices that occurred early this year may have passed. The trend, if it holds, could move the Federal Reserve closer to cutting its benchmark interest rate from its 23-year peak.

Consumer prices excluding volatile food and energy costs — the closely watched “core” index — rose 0.2% from April to May, the government said Wednesday. That was down from 0.3% the previous month and was the smallest increase since October. Measured from a year earlier, core prices climbed 3.4%, below last month’s 3.6% rise, and the mildest such increase in three years.

Higher wages translate into higher costs for companies which, in turn, leads them to raise prices further as they attempt to remain profitable or at least break even. Wages make up more than half of total costs in the hospitality, food service and retail sectors where profit margins are already low. It is the job of central banks to halt such a wage-price spiral before it gets out of hand.

Raising interest rates is their main tool to do so, which is why Jay Powell, the US Federal Reserve chairman, promises to ‘keep at it’ until inflation comes down to the US target of 2 per cent on the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the core Personal Consumption Expenditure, which rose by 4.6 per cent in August. This could mean much higher interest rates will be needed, both in the US and elsewhere.

Inflation in the United States eased in May for a second straight month, a hopeful sign that an acceleration of prices that occurred early this year may have passed. The trend, if it holds, could move the Federal Reserve closer to cutting its benchmark interest rate from its 23-year peak.

Consumer prices excluding volatile food and energy costs — the closely watched “core” index — rose 0.2% from April to May, the government said Wednesday. That was down from 0.3% the previous month and was the smallest increase since October. Measured from a year earlier, core prices climbed 3.4%, below last month’s 3.6% rise, and the mildest such increase in three years.

Information is coming at us like a torrent. Relentless. Unstoppable. Without Context. What’s changed? Printing presses went from this to THIS. $99 at Best Buy, or free with a coupon. Television went from big trucks and expensive satellites to the transmitter we all have in our pockets And print, books and magazines, shifted to this - an ever-changing cloud of information. 

Today -The tools are democratized, more consumers are makers. Information is abundant. These are all good things. Well, sort of. We lack the tools to find context. Information is now relentless. Content we disagree with is labeled “fake” - even if it’s factually correct. We can place blame, on Reddit, Facebook, Google and Twitter. But that misses the point. Today - we use the handy and forbidding phrase: “Fake News” as a moniker to label unreliable information.

Several epidemics, such as the Black Death and the Spanish flu, have threatened human life throughout history; however, it is unclear if humans will remain safe from the sudden and fast spread of epidemic diseases. Moreover, the transmission characteristics of epidemics remain undiscovered. In this study, we present the results of an epidemic simulation experiment revealing the relationship between epidemic parameters and pandemic risk. To analyze the time-dependent risk and impact of epidemics, we considered two parameters for infectious diseases: the recovery time from infection and the transmission rate of the disease. Based on the epidemic simulation, we identified two important aspects of human safety with regard to the threat of a pandemic. First, humans should be safe if the fatality rate is below 100%. Second, even when the fatality rate is 100%, humans would be safe if the average degree of human social networks is below a threshold value. Nevertheless, certain diseases can potentially infect all nodes in the human social networks, and these diseases cause a pandemic when the average degree is larger than the threshold value. These results indicated that certain infectious diseases lead to human extinction and can be prevented by minimizing human contact.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic was met with rapid, unprecedented global collaboration and action. Even still, the public health, societal, and economic impact may be felt for years to come. The risk of another pandemic occurring in the next few decades is ever-present and potentially increasing due to trends such as urbanization and climate change. While it is difficult to predict the next pandemic pathogen threat, making reasonable assumptions today and evaluating prior efforts to plan for and respond to disease outbreaks and pandemics may enable a more proactive, effective response in the future. Lessons from the COVID-19 response and pandemic influenza preparedness underscore the importance of strengthening surveillance systems, investing in early-stage research on pandemic pathogens and development of platform technologies, and diversifying response plans across a range of tactics to enable earlier access to safe and effective interventions in the next pandemic. Further, sustaining the robust vaccine manufacturing capacity built because of COVID-19 will keep it ready for rapid response in the future. These actions will not be successful without improved global coordination and collaboration. Everyone, including the biopharmaceutical industry, has a role to play in pandemic preparedness, and working together will ensure that the most lives are saved in the next pandemic.

The substantial public health and societal costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are wide-ranging and have been observed across the world. As of August 2023, COVID-19 has infected over 770 million people and resulted in over 6.9 million reported deaths globally1, although the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates mortality could be much higher based on global excess mortality2. It has contributed to a reduction in global life expectancy; in the United States alone, life expectancy fell by an estimated 1.8 years, with a disproportionate drop among racial minorities. Many of those infected with COVID-19 still suffer from long-term COVID, with symptoms remaining months after the initial illness.

A world dominated by totalitarian states would be more incompetent, more war-prone, less cooperative, and more inhibitive of progress than one dominated by democratic states. Our current world is not particularly competent, peaceful, cooperative, or progressive—a totalitarian-dominated world would be worse. It would increase the risk of another collapse and extinction and could shape the future toward less desirable trajectories (Beckstead, 2013). Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996; Dikotter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and extinction. A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely to have major wars. States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever) go to war with one another (Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalculation might be a particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and disincentives for accurate information, leading to well-known strategic disasters such as Hitler and Stalin’s blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993). War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by raising the chance of weapons of mass destruction being used. Linked to this, totalitarian states are less cooperative than democratic states. While cooperation is possible (Ginsburg, 2020), their internal norms are characterized by paranoia and treachery, and their lack of transparency limits their ability to credibly commit to agreements. This is bad for all risks that require cooperation such as pandemics or climate change (Tomasik, 2015). Finally, continued social and scientific progress is likely to reduce risks of collapse and extinction. Social progress could reduce global inequality and other risk factors. Scientific progress could help address natural risks and climate change (Sandberg, 2018), differentially increase defensive rather than offensive power (Garfinkel & Dafoe, 2019), and solve safety challenges in AI or biotechnology (Russell, 2019). However, as we will now discuss totalitarian states would likely inhibit social progress. A central question from a longtermist perspective is: Which values should shape the future? I would argue that we should prefer it to be shaped by liberal democratic values. This is not to say that the current democracy-dominated world is perfect—far from it. The fate of billions of factory-farmed animals or hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty makes that abundantly clear. However, democracies have two advantages. First, democracies have space for cosmopolitan values such as human rights, plurality, freedom, and equality. These are better than those that characterize life under totalitarianism: Fear, terror, subjection, and secrecy. Second, they have within themselves the mechanism to allow progress. In the last 100 (or even 50) years, the lives of women, LGBT people, religious minorities, and non-white people have dramatically improved. Our “moral circle” has expanded, and could continue to expand (Singer, 1981). The arc of the moral universe is long, but given the right conditions, it might just bend toward justice (King, 1968). A global society dominated by these values, and with the possibility of improving more, has a better longterm potential. A totalitarian-dominated world, on the other hand, would reduce the space for resistance and progress—distorting the human trajectory. We should be particularly concerned about “bottlenecks” at which values are particularly important—where there is a risk of “locking-in” some particular set of (possibly far from optimal) values. While they are currently far-off, future technologies such as artificial general intelligence, space settlement, life extension (of autocrats), or much better surveillance could enable lock-in (Caplan, 2008).17 Conditional on them avoiding new catastrophes, world orders dominated by totalitarians could be quite long-lasting (Caplan, 2008). Democracies can undermine authoritarian and totalitarian regimes through the following ways: Control, including conquest; contagion through proximity; and consent, promoting receptivity toward democratization (Whitehead, 2001). Democracies can actively undermine these regimes through war, sanctions, hosting rebellious exiles, or sponsoring internal movements. Passively, through contagion, they offer a demonstration that a better, more prosperous life is possible. For example, in the final years of the USSR, ordinary Soviet citizens were able to see that the West had a higher standard of living—more innovation, more choice, and more consumer goods. The elites were able to read books from the outside, and travel—Gorbachev’s contacts and friendships with European politicians may have made him more favorable to social democracy (Brown, 1996). Democracies can undermine the will and capacity of the coercive apparatus (Bellin, 2004). However, in a world not dominated by democracies, all these pressures would be far less. A world in which, say, totalitarian regimes emerged as dominant after World War II (for example if the USA was defeated) could be self-reinforcing and long-lasting, like the self-reinforcing relationship of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (Orwell, 1949). Orwell’s fictional world is characterized by constant low-grade warfare to justify emergency powers and secure elites, and with shifting alliances of convenience as states bandwagon and balance, thereby preventing any resolution. A totalitarian-dominated world order could be rather robust, perhaps for decades or even centuries. A long-lasting totalitarian-dominated world would extend the period of time humanity would spend with a heightened risk of collapse or extinction, as well as increased potential for distortion of the human trajectory and the possibility that a “lock-in” event may occur. This example illustrates the possibility of a “negative recovery,” resulting in a trajectory with less or no scientific and social progress and a less favorable geopolitical situation, which would threaten the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential.

It is no longer hard to see that the rising power and the mounting pugnaciousness of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have become a comprehensive challenge for the United States. China’s Machiavellian policies and actions at home and abroad have turned an otherwise naturally complementary Sino-American economic relationship into a near zero-sum, if not already a zero-sum, competition for market, jobs, technology, and financial primacy. Beijing now openly flexes its new muscles in its neighborhood and beyond to resist, reduce, and replace American leadership and presence everywhere possible, seeking to undermine the U.S.-led international economic order and American-anchored collective security arrangements. The PRC has been burning billions, for example, hoping to replace the U.S. dollar with the over-printed Chinese Renminbi (RMB). Extraordinarily heavy extraction of its own economy, the world’s second largest, and its enormous foreign currency reserve resulting from the gross imbalance in U.S.-China trade have enabled the PRC to massively expand its military. That military is already the world’s second largest; its navy, for example, is projected to soon surpass the U.S. Navy in fleet tonnage. At the same time, massive but opaque spending sprees has allowed the PRC to actively procure power and proxies even inside the United States, positioning Beijing to reshape international opinions and norms more easily than ever.

What is less known, perhaps, is that the rising PRC state also seeks an overhaul of the very world order that has enabled the greatest advances of human civilization over the past few centuries – the Westphalian system of nation-states. This world order was codified in the 17th century, expanded to a global scale in the 20th century, and now is in its post-World War II and post-Cold War iteration — the so-called America-led Liberal International Order (LIO). The rise of Chinese power, under the autocracy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is not just contesting U.S. national security and American global leadership but also the existing world order. Never since the heyday of the Cold War has the world seen such a full challenge to the United States and to the Westphalian system.

Since January 2020, roughly 6.9 million people have died from COVID-19. In the United States alone, the pandemic cost the economy roughly $14 trillion.1 As grim as the numbers are, without the breakthroughs in biotechnology that enabled the COVID-19 vaccine, they could have been much worse.2 Operation Warp Speed showed the power of the U.S. government to direct national biotech capabilities around a shared goal—in this case, a novel vaccine. But there are many other promising applications for biotech, and America cannot afford to wait for the next pandemic before it acts to prioritize and strengthen its biotech sector.

Now more than ever, the international community needs what emerging biotechnologies promise to do—for health, climate, energy security, agriculture, supply chain resilience, and more. And to meet the moment, the United States must reassert its biotech leadership, not only for its own economic and national security, but to ensure that democratic principles underpin the global biorevolution.

It is true that there is something called “innovation” found today in many products and services, but it is critically important to differentiate what Clayton Christensen calls “disruptive innovation” from the kind of innovation that simply maintains or improves on existing products or services in order to stay competitive and preserve market share. Many cutting-edge technologies require the kind of disruptive innovation that Professor Christensen describes and that are essential to this nation’s ability to maintain its leadership in science and technology. Examples abound – quantum computing, nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, CRISPR, vaccines, etc. This type of disruptive innovation is far more the province of startups, entrepreneurs and high-risk investors than existing incumbents and large companies.

We should acknowledge that large companies are certainly important to our nation’s economy, and many large companies perform exceptionally well in terms of organizational efficiencies, cost control, manufacturing, distribution and developing worldwide markets. These organizations invest in R&D largely to improve their legacy products in order to compete with other companies and maintain their market share. What large companies do not do well is to create disruptive new technologies that amount to paradigm shifts. It is nimble entrepreneurs and inventors that are most likely to develop these new technologies that truly disrupt industries and markets and make old technologies obsolete. There are many reasons for this, starting with the level of passion in pursuit of a vision that leads startup founders and their employees to work hundreds of hours each week, sleep on the floor of an office or cubicle, and be single minded about their objectives for months or years. Ideas and dedication for creating genuinely new technologies characterize every startup I have ever worked with, and it is hard for any large company to replicate these qualities with its own employees.

The theoretical case for prophetic examples rests on benefit to patentees. The Patent Act requires inventors to describe how to make and use their invention.18 Inventors often do this by writing experimental protocols and results in the patent. 19 For example, a patent on a diabetes medication might include an experiment showing how to synthesize the molecule and another showing that the molecule can be given to humans to reduce the need for insulin injections. 20 The broader the patent, the more experiments are required.21 A patent covering one molecule might only need to include one synthesis protocol, whereas a patent covering a family of one hundred molecules might need to include many more experiments.22 It is always faster and cheaper to make up data than to conduct real experiments, so if the experiments disclosed in the patent can be fictional, inventors will be able to file broader patents more easily.23 This should be particularly useful for small companies, who have small budgets and cannot afford extensive real experimentation.24 For companies of all sizes, broader patents provide a greater reward to the inventor, which might incentivize more innovation.

These days, of course, the world didn’t really need any new reasons to feel queasy about the United States. President Trump’s attacks on traditional allies, disinterest in human rights and democracy promotion, and generally boorish behavior have already put the country’s global reputation on a path of steady decline. Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that in many parts of the globe, approval of the United States was at an all-time low. The Trump administration’s bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left over 110,000 Americans dead, surely did not reverse this trend.

Conclusion The dyadic understanding of the democratic peace has become ubiquitous in International Relations. By looking beyond simple dyadic analysis, accounting for the embededness of states in a much more complex network, we found the democratic peace may not be as robust as previously thought. Our results demonstrate that after accounting for the tendency for like-regime states with common enemies not to fight one another, the effect of the democratic peace not only vanishes, but jointly democratic dyads seem to be more conflict prone than mixed dyads. These results are consistent across operationalizations of the outcome variable, our triadic closure predictor, measurements of joint democracy, and a variety of other factors. We believe this explanation for the democratic peace is not a mechanism for understanding the democratic peace, but instead, an alternative. What we have shown here is that conflict between democracies indeed exists and the peaceful relations occasionally found are not necessarily a function of the affinity of democratic states, or intrinsic attributes of democratic states, but instead, a function of the strategic inefficiencies of fighting a state with a shared enemy. While regime type may influence the interests of states, we find that it does not directly influence the probability that any two states fight one another. There are three major implications to our research. First, scholars should be hesitant to consider dyadic conflict in isolation, as there are network dependencies informing whether a state engages or joins a MID. Second, preferences operating in addition to network interdependencies and collaboration explain much of the democratic peace. Third, when studying conflict, scholars and practitioners should consider the cost structure of collaboration, and how these dynamics inform not only conflict initiation, but conflict escalation. Particularly interesting is that the theoretical mechanism at work here is dramatically simpler than any of the established justifications for the democratic peace. We do not rely on arguments about institutions or norms, but just the simple and intuitive proposition that it does not make much sense for two states fighting a third to also fight each other. What the existing literature seems to have missed, usually theoretically and almost always empirically, is that dyadic conflicts do not occur in isolation, but in the context of a complex network of relations.

Anyone who urges universities to live up to their mission of promoting knowledge, truth, and reason is bound to be confronted with the objection that these aspirations are just so 20th century. Aren’t we living in a post-truth era? Haven’t cognitive psychologists shown that humans are fundamentally irrational? Mustn’t we acknowledge that the pursuit of disinterested reason and objective truth are Enlightenment anachronisms?

The answer to all of these questions is “no.”

A recent analysis of 31 European countries found that almost a third of Europeans now vote for anti-establishment populist parties, the majority of which are on the far-right. The situation in Britain is, according to political scientist Cas Mudde, in some ways similar, although rather than an ascendent radical right party, it is the Conservative Party that is mainstreaming extremist ideas. The situation in the United States is perhaps even more pessimistic: not only is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump saddled with 91 criminal indictments, he and many of his fellow Republicans exhibit open contempt for American political norms and institutions, including the mainstream media. And many Americans share his views. For instance, polling in 2023 found that 50% of Americans believe that most national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public (emphasis added). Meanwhile, the percentage of people reporting a great deal or quite a lot of trust in newspapers has declined precipitously in the US over the last half-century: from just under 40% in 1973 to 16% by 2022.

What explains this decline of trust and the growing embrace of right-wing parties and politicians?

Misinformation has reached crisis proportions. It poses a risk to international peace (1), interferes with democratic decision making (2), endangers the well-being of the planet (3), and threatens public health (4, 5). Public support for policies to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is being undercut by misinformation, leading to the World Health Organization’s “infodemic” declaration (6). Ultimately, misinformation undermines collective sense making and collective action. We cannot solve problems of public health, social inequity, or climate change without also addressing the growing problem of misinformation. Most of the research efforts and interventions examine broad, public consumption of misinformation—modeling the spreading dynamics of falsehoods (7, 8), examining social network effects (9, 10), and evaluating crowd-sourced mediation (11), with a special focus on crisis events (12) and political elections (13). In this article, we turn the spotlight on science. We look at the ways that misinformation can travel within science due to misaligned incentives, out-of-date publishing norms, and sociotechnical systems that concentrate attention and credit on a small subset of the literature. Appealing as it may be to view science as occupying a privileged epistemic position, scientific communication has fallen victim to the ill effects of an attention economy. This is not to say that science is broken. Far from it. Science is the greatest of human inventions for understanding our world, and it functions remarkably well despite these challenges. Still, scientists compete for eyeballs just as journalists do. They face incentives to hype their work and to publish selectively those findings that are surprising and “clickable.” Like other information consumers and producers, researchers rely on search engines, recommendation systems, and social media to find relevant information. In turn, scientists can be susceptible to filter bubbles, predatory publishers, and undue deference to the authority of numbers, P values, and black box algorithms.