No matter how we pare it, the 2012 #OccupyNigeria protests will remain pivotal in our sociopolitical history. Its significance lies in how much the pushback against government insensitivity resounded nationwide and even among the Nigerians in the Diaspora. It started as protests against the fuel subsidies removal, but it soon culminated in other disquieting issues such as government profligacy. #OccupyNigeria was the crucial juncture where the “breath of fresh air” that supposedly ushered in the Goodluck Jonathan administration—elected less than a year then—was putrefied. Nothing else he did afterward could stop the doomsday clock of his administration that started ticking.…

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust…

It’s disheartening to see a dubiously contrived consensus emerging among unsuspecting and otherwise critically-minded Nigerians on fuel subsidy. The rhetorical offensive of successive governments on the issue is sadly proving successful. The debate has now shifted from whether petrol, the single most consequential product in our economy that directly or indirectly drives all economic activities, should be subsidised, to when and how subsidy should be removed, and how the government should invest the resulting revenue boost. That’s exactly how the political elites want it. These are their preferred terms for discussing subsidy. This framing exculpates them, blames the nebulous and…

In 2008, University of Chicago economist (and future Nobel laureate) Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein published their book Nudge, which popularized the idea that subtle design changes in the architecture of choice (“nudges”) can influence our behavior. The book became a global phenomenon and marked an intellectual watershed. But 15 years after its publication, the question remains: Has behavioral economics lived up to the hype? Thaler and Sunstein based their thesis on the research and insights of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which they had previously applied to the field of law and economics in a…