World economy

We read a book for this week's episode.

We read a book called The Invisible Hand of Mariah Edgeworth, How a 19th Century Novelist Taught the World Economics.

It is written by Gina Smilek and it was published by Knopf.

Its pub date is October 6, 2026.

I'd like to start with your base case, which is how you start the book.

So the book is really about describing the last 25 years in the global economy and Australia's place in it, but also offering some forecasts, although maybe that's not quite the right word, forecast for the next 25 years.

We can get into that.

But in any case, you begin the book with a base case for the next 25 years of the global economy.

Tell us firstly, what is that base case and how did you arrive at it?

Well, looking back to 1945 in the world economy, we can see that every 25 years, the global economy doubles in size and living standards rise by about 50% globally.

And that was true of the last 25 years in Australia from 2000 to 2025.

Despite US recessions, COVID, recessions in Europe, wars, calamities of all kind, nonetheless, the world economy doubled in size and living standards rose 50%.

I'm Paul Dales, Chief UK Economist, filling in for Neil Shearing while he visits clients in Europe.

Next week is shaping up to be a very big one for the global economy.

We have interest rate decisions from both the Fed and the ECB, not to mention one of the biggest dates in the UK economic calendar, the budget.

And there's plenty at stake.

So a huge week ahead, the Fed, the ECB and the UK budget with very little room for error.

We'll be watching all three events very closely.

And if you'd like to read Capital Economics reactions to these events next week or explore a whole range of our analysis about the global economy and about financial markets, please visit our website, capitaleconomics.com.

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Between 2013 and 2019, he directed the university's Master of Science program in Economic and Social Sciences.

Beyond his primary institution, he served as an affiliated scholar at the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality in New York, a research fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research in London, and a research associate at the Center for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the University of Warwick.

Throughout his career, he has held numerous visiting appointments at international institutions, including the EHES, Newfield College at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Glasgow, and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

Professor Alfani has served as a principal investigator for two major European research council projects.

But then it becomes a question of valuable for who? Whomst? Editor, just put whatever the smart one is.

And this is where we get to a discussion of how much something like clickbait has truly cost the global economy.

Don't worry, I wasn't going to clickbait you in a video about clickbait.

Now the simple solution would be to take studies estimating how much time people spend on their devices outside of work, find the portion of that time wasted on misleading content, and multiply it by the national average productivity for those workers, that is the calculation of how much economic value they create for every hour of work.