The Reporter

A rare disaster is an event for which there is a small probability of an extremely bad outcome, leading to a large deterioration in the quality of life. Examples of rare disasters include global warfare, pandemics, and financial crises. Indeed, a pandemic illustrates a key principle about the distribution of possible outcomes of such events. The laws of geometric growth imply that many contagious illnesses die out. Some however spread quickly and pervasively, in a...

Differences in agricultural systems are highly relevant to the large income differences between rich and poor countries. There are two complementary reasons for this: poor countries are much less productive in agriculture than in the rest of the economy when compared with rich countries, and poor countries allocate most of their labor to agriculture. Whereas in rich countries less than 5 percent of the labor force works in agriculture, more than 70 percent is employed there...