Market Trends & Consumer Behaviour
The Download: AI’s energy future Summary MIT Technology Review highlights the growing electricity demands of AI and the potential impact on power grids. The newsletter points to a major investigation (and a short video) that traced AI’s carbon footprint down to single queries, showing data-centre energy use has risen sharply from 2020–2025. The piece balances […]
Melania Trump’s AI Era Is Upon Us Summary WIRED reports that Melania Trump, long a low-profile first lady, is beginning to take a public role around artificial intelligence — specifically initiatives framed as benefiting children and education. The piece sketches how insiders and industry figures view the move: some are intrigued and willing to engage, […]
The Download: America’s gun crisis, and how AI video models work Summary This edition of The Download highlights two major threads: the disturbing omission of gun violence from a new US children’s health strategy, and an explainer on how modern AI models generate video — a fast-moving area with big creative upsides and serious harms. […]
Schulman Properties secures approval for 21-story condo-hotel in downtown Las Vegas Summary Schulman Properties has won planning commission approval to build the 21-storey Eterno Hotel, a 250-foot condo-hotel on a six-acre site at 1003 Iron Horse Court near Charleston Boulevard and Grand Central Parkway in downtown Las Vegas. Perlman Architect is listed as the project […]
The Download: Trump’s impact on science, and meet our climate and energy honourees Summary MIT Technology Review’s The Download rounds up several linked stories: how the Trump administration’s actions are reshaping early-career science in the US; highlights from the 2025 Innovators Under 35, with a focus on climate and energy honourees such as Iwnetim Abate; […]
Brandom Without Entitlement Author: Santiago Napoli (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) — a punchy, targeted intervention in Brandom scholarship. Summary This article examines the role of “entitlement” in Robert Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping account of discursive agency. Napoli tests how dispensable entitlement is relative to Brandom’s other central notion, commitment. He develops three deflationary manoeuvres: a strong […]
The Multinational Revenue, Employment, and Investment Database (MREID) Summary The Multinational Revenue, Employment, and Investment Database (MREID) compiles firm-level measures of revenue, employment and investment for multinational enterprises (MNEs) using Orbis data, harmonised for cross-country and cross-industry analysis. The database covers 185 countries, 25 industries (from agriculture and mining to services), and an initial 12-year […]
Can Small Economies Act Strategically? The Case of Consumption Pollution and Non‐Tradable Goods Summary This paper builds an analytical model of a federation of asymmetric, small jurisdictions with internationally mobile capital and cross-border pollution generated by consumption of either tradable or non-tradable goods. Governments use two instruments — a consumption tax on the polluting good […]
Untangling US Employment Changes: Production Technology Versus Trade Structure Summary This paper uses structural decomposition analysis (SDA) within a global multiregional input–output (GMRIO) framework to split changes in US employment between 1995 and 2008 into contributions from: production technology (changes in production recipes and employment intensities), trade structure (shifts in import/export shares, including the China […]
Understanding Gen Z Consumers: A Typology of (Un)sustainable Purchases Summary This paper uses neutralisation theory to explain why Generation Z (born 1997–2012) often fails to convert pro-environmental attitudes into sustainable purchases. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews (ages 18–26) and thematic analysis, the authors identify four established neutralisation techniques in play (denial of responsibility, condemning the […]
