Global Business / Economy
Is Passive Income Actually Passive — or Just Active Work You Did Earlier and Are Still Paying For?The promise of passive income is irresistible: earn money while you sleep, travel, or focus on other pursuits. Yet behind many successful income streams lies years of work, experimentation, and ongoing maintenance that rarely make it into social media success stories. Financial experts broadly agree that most forms of passive income require meaningful effort before they begin producing reliable returns, while many continue to demand updates, marketing, or oversight long after launch. The real debate is not whether passive income exists—it does—but whether the term itself creates unrealistic expectations about the time, discipline, and persistence required to build income that eventually works with far less daily involvement.
Global Business / Economy
Should Gig Platforms Be Required to Offer Workers Benefits — or Would That Just Kill the Flexibility That Makes Them Work?For most of human history, small talk was the social glue that held communities together — the weather, the local sports team, the shared mundane. Now it feels like an imposition. Deborah Tannen, Joe Keohane, and Kate Murphy debate whether our growing discomfort with small talk reflects something real about how connection works, or whether we've just convinced ourselves that depth is always better than pleasantry.
Global Business / Economy
Is 'Buy Now, Pay Later' Making a Generation of Consumers Financially Illiterate — or Just Giving Them Access They Didn't Have Before?The colonial era didn't just extract resources and impose borders — it embedded itself in languages, legal systems, educational curricula, and ways of knowing that persist long after independence. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Achille Mbembe, and Walter Mignolo debate whether decolonization is a genuine intellectual and political project underway, or a word that has been so broadly applied it has lost the specificity needed to do any real work.
Global Business / Economy
Is Your Bank Actually Working Against Your Financial Goals — or Do You Just Not Know What to Ask For?Immigration policy debates tend to generate more heat than light — lost in the argument between open borders and fortress nations is a serious conversation about what the evidence actually says. George Borjas, Giovanni Peri, and Jennifer Gordon examine what labor economics, fiscal research, and integration studies actually show about immigration's effects, and why the gap between evidence and policy remains so wide.
Global Business / Economy
Is the Global Talent Shortage a Business Crisis — or the Moment Workers Finally Have the Leverage They Were Always Told They Didn't?Private equity has moved well beyond corporate buyouts — it's now in your child's daycare, your elderly parent's care home, and your local emergency room. Eileen Appelbaum, Josh Lerner, and Atul Gawande debate whether private equity's expansion into essential services is driving efficiency and investment, or extracting value from the most vulnerable people at their most vulnerable moments.
Global Business / Economy
Is the War on Cash a Government Convenience Play — or a Genuine Threat to Financial Privacy That Nobody Is Taking Seriously Enough?Cash transactions have fallen to just 20% of payments in some countries — and governments are nudging that number lower. Catherine O'Neil, Mark Zandi, and Alyssa Silver debate whether the war on cash is a sensible modernization of the financial system or a quiet erosion of the financial privacy that nobody is taking seriously enough.
