Thought Economics

Victor Vescovo changed history. It was often said that more people have walked on the surface of the moon than have descended to the deepest point of any single ocean. As Vescovo himself puts it: “That used to be true, but since we started diving, it is not anymore.

Eric Ries transformed the way a generation of entrepreneurs built companies. His New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup gave founders a rigorous methodology for turning ideas into products and products into viable businesses — build, measure, learn, iterate. The book became a global phenomenon, influencing not just Silicon Valley but corporate innovation programmes, government agencies, and university curricula worldwide.

Turi Munthe is a writer, journalist and media entrepreneur whose career has straddled publishing, broadcasting and the founding of digital newsrooms. He spent the early part of his career at Penguin before becoming Senior Middle East Editor at Jane’s Information Group, and went on to found Demotix, the citizen-journalism photo agency later acquired by Corbis.

For most of medical history, obesity was treated as a failure of character — a moral problem dressed in physiological language, to be solved by willpower and self-denial. The class of medicines now traded under names like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound does something more radical than reduce body weight: it dismantles that framing. What we are looking at is not really a drug story at all.

Few economists have done more to shape how scarce, life-changing resources are actually allocated in the modern world than Alvin E. Roth.

Professor Andrés Velasco is one of the most distinguished economist-practitioners of his generation. The Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics, Velasco served as Chile’s Minister of Finance from 2006 to 2010 under President Michelle Bachelet, where his disciplined stewardship of the country’s copper windfall — building a sovereign wealth fund that later financed Chile’s crisis response — earned him recognition as Latin American Finance Minister of the Year.

We live alongside people whose behaviour corrodes everything it touches. The colleague who undermines you while smiling. The partner who makes you question your own sanity. The boss whose cruelty radiates through an entire organisation and follows employees home.

Few people have shaped the trajectory of modern artificial intelligence as directly as Richard Socher. As a PhD student at Stanford, he championed the use of neural networks for natural language processing at a time when the research establishment was deeply sceptical, going on to invent the most widely used word vectors and contextual vectors, and pioneering the concept of prompt engineering that would become central to the age of large language models.

Nir Eyal is one of the most influential thinkers at the intersection of psychology, technology, and human behaviour. A former lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, he has spent over two decades studying how and why people do what they do.

We are living through a quiet revolution in how we understand the human body and its relationship to time. For most of human history, aging was treated as an inescapable fact of existence—a process governed by natural laws that were beyond human intervention or comprehension. We aged, our bodies declined, and we died. This was not a matter of policy or science; it was simply how things were. Philosophers wrote about the inevitability of death. Religions offered consolation for its reality.