2014

For decades, policy makers and private-sector leaders have tried to solve the affordable housing problem, yet it has only grown more severe and is on track to expand dramatically as urbanization plays out in developing economies. We believe that there is a plausible alternative, because there are clear solutions that—under proper management—can narrow the affordable housing gap substantially by 2025, writes Lola Woetzel, Jan Mischke, and Sangeeth Ram on Harvard Business Review.

It is a notable irony that India, which produces solutions to many of the knottiest information-technology problems faced by the world’s largest companies, has benefited little from technological progress. Fortunately for India’s citizens, Prime Minister Narendra Modi intends to change that, writes Raghunath A. Mashelkar and Anu Madgavkar on Project Syndicate.

Recapping the top stories from the past 12 months is the media’s favorite year-end pastime. Here’s what probably won’t get a lot of attention, but whose economic impact is denominated in hundreds of billions of dollars to trillions: a fattening world, robots and our future sci-fi existence.   Indeed, while focusing on individual events, however momentous, is popular, it tends to gloss over the seismic shifts that reshape the landscape. It’s the long-term technological and economic trends that matter, and from those come my purely personal and idiosyncratic list of things that changed the conversation in 2014, and signal even bigger transformations ahead, writes James Manyika on Ozy.com

The internet is fundamentally transforming the way we work, socialize, create and share information, and organize the flow of people, ideas and things around the globe. Yet the magnitude of this transformation is often underappreciated, James Manyika and Jacques Bughin write in a column on FT.com.