Sad news. After months – even years – of pain and suffering, the South Korean container shipping company Hanjin finally sank and passed away. Not just any casualty, but the largest shipping bankruptcy in history: Hanjin was the world’s seventh biggest container line with a fleet of 90 ships. Was this an accident, an isolated case of bad luck, or is something more structural going on. More...

Anyone else feeling exhausted by all this drum humming about air pollution? Indeed it appears the fumes won’t be dissipating any time soon as we consider the extent to which tyre and brake rubbish exacerbate the problem. More...

Economic growth (GDP) always gets a lot of attention, but when it comes to determining how people are doing it’s interesting to look at other indicators that focus more on the actual material conditions of households. Let’s see how households in Australia are doing by looking at a few alternative indicators. More...

It was a unique event, for sure: China hosting its first G20 summit in Hangzhou on 4-5 September. The city where Chinese leader Mao Zedong half a century ago regularly met with Third World guerrilla leaders to discuss the battle against US “imperialism”. More...

A session at the 2016 OECD Forum entitled “Teaching & Learning with Robots” brought Nao, a humanoid robot, to meet with a class of young students from the Sections Internationales de Sèvres (SIS) school. Catherine Potter-Jadas, head of the primary school, noted the children’s reactions to the robot. More...

Imagine you have an important decision to make. Do you carefully consider the long-term implications of each possible option or do you act impulsively? Would you approach the decision-making process differently if the consequences stretched out to 30 or even 50 years. More...

A complicated system (such as a car) can be disassembled and understood as the sum of its parts. In contrast, a complex system (such as traffic) exhibits emergent characteristics that arise out of the interaction between its constituent parts. More...

I am a student in a French high school, where I have always studied. The French educational system is different to many other countries because of the length of the day, which typically runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a half day on Wednesday. More...

The financial crisis of 2007/08 was not caused by complexity alone. It was caused by rapidly increasing financial leverage until a breaking point was reached. While the mostly short-term debt used for leveraging up consists of “run-prone contracts“, the precise location of that breaking point had to be discovered in real time and space rather than in a controlled simulation environment. More...

Over the last two centuries there has been a growing acceptance of social and political liberalism as the desirable basis for societal organisation. More...