The debate about how to control AI and limit its potential for damage is healthy and necessary. It is also unavoidable and urgent. 

But this is not the only vital debate. There are also vital questions about how the upsides of AI are shared fairly. Business as usual has left the world's poorest people behind, so far. And for those caught up in conflict—in places like Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, and Afghanistan—AI can help meet urgent needs. 

It is clear to me that the world has more resources to do good than at any time in human history, but too often, we don't distribute them where they are most needed. Now, AI stands to create even more resources in the form of free time, insights, and funds. And they need to be spent in the right places.

The AI revolution is going to mint a new generation of billionaires and millionaires—and with them, a new generation of philanthropists; a term stemming from the Ancient Greek philanthropia, meaning “love of humanity”. It’s a reminder that the act of giving begins with some of the most fundamentally human impulses: care, love, empathy, and selflessness.

Maybe this explains why Effective Altruism—the idea that generosity should be subjected to evidence and calculation—seemed counterintuitive. But I never understood why. After all, who wants ineffective altruism? We should all be asking where our money can do the most good. 

Organizations working at the sharpest end of the world’s toughest problems—like the one I lead—need philanthropy to be the smart money: hard-headed as well as big-hearted, focused on outcomes not visibility, concerned to add value not just kudos. Results, not just responsibility, should be the watchword.

Fortunately, there’s been an evidence revolution over the last 20 years. We know a whole lot more about what actually works. This makes giving much easier. Distance no longer needs to be the enemy of confidence. 

In fact, there is every reason to think globally, not just locally, about where to make a difference. As the world has become more and more connected, governments have retreated from global problems. For instance, official development assistance funds from Organisation for  Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries dropped by a historic 23.1% in 2025. Now, we need new philanthropy to provide some balance in a world that is clearly out of balance.

Around 94% of American philanthropy is spent in the U.S. But the rest of the world is not just where the needs are greatest—from acute childhood malnutrition to violence against women—but where the gains from philanthropy can be greatest.

The 20 countries at greatest risk of a worsening humanitarian crisis, ranked by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) annually in our Emergency Watchlist, represent just 12% of the global population, but 90% of those in humanitarian need. In these places, led by regions like Sudan, Gaza, and South Sudan, children are three times more likely to die before their fifth birthday and 10 times more likely to grow up in extreme poverty than children born elsewhere. The people living here have done the least to contribute to climate change, but face the combined pressures of climate change and conflict—and receive the least support to adapt.  

If philanthropy and its “love of humanity” belong anywhere, it is these areas. And just in time, humanitarians have developed increasingly sophisticated tools to transform what we know about how to help people survive through and recover from crisis.  Real-time data, randomized controlled trials, cost-effectiveness and cost-efficiency analysis, plus predictive analytics, have transformed the evidence base and the basis for action.  

The IRC alone has conducted over 50 impact evaluations since 2020 as well as 500 cost analyses, allowing us to measure not simply whether an intervention works, but how much it costs and how much further each additional dollar can go. So we don't need to be daunted by the big numbers highlighting the 43 million children who are acutely malnourished, the 20 million kids without full immunization, over 300 million people hungry, and hundreds of thousands of women dying in childbirth in fragile states alone. These are problems that we actually know how to solve at manageable, in fact low, cost.

For example, we have learned how to deliver vaccine shots—40 million of them—at just $2 a shot in places like Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, negotiating with armed groups along the way to get access to populations otherwise cut off from healthcare.  This offers lifelong benefit, not just a short-term palliative.

We’ve shown how local health workers can more simply diagnose and treat acute malnutrition directly in communities where crisis-affected children live. This approach offers a 92% recovery rate, and earlier interventions can catch malnutrition before it becomes severe. The result is that we are 20% more cost-effective, allowing us to help more kids for the same amount of money.  

There are more examples. We've demonstrated that violence against women and violence against kids can be reduced by over 70% when they are tackled together. We have also proven the benefits of giving aid in advance of climate disasters, not just in reaction to them: in Afghanistan, our clients were three times less likely to fall further into poverty. 

Of course, the contexts stricken by war and state failure are challenging. But that makes the philanthropic imperative towards the people who live there all the more urgent.

The same technology that is delivering fortunes in Silicon Valley can also deliver help to the least fortunate. IRC’s global digital helpdesk, Signpost, has reached 20 million people forced to flee crisis in 12 languages with timely, life-saving information. Leading tech companies helped us develop it.  In Somalia, IRC teams employed anticipatory action ahead of last year’s devastating drought, a disaster that typically drives cholera outbreaks. Again, it took partnership of financial support, technical know-how, and NGO savvy.

In all these areas, the traditional aid system is falling short.  Too often, climate and humanitarian systems work in separate silos. Despite the evidence, less than 1% of aid is invested in anticipatory action. Every government donor has its own bureaucracy, with different reporting systems, compliance requirements, and measurement metrics. 

This is the syndrome that philanthropy can help break. By focusing on what works, measuring what counts, and investing in innovation. The risk does not lie in action; it lies in inertia. 

We know more than ever about what works in humanitarian crises, and we have new tools capable of extending those gains. The opportunity for this generation of philanthropists is not simply to give more. It is to take what we have learned and apply it where the stakes are highest. The real test isn't how much they give. It’s where.

In 2024, two Michigan high school students were sitting in the bleachers during a student-teacher basketball game when their physical education teacher collapsed from cardiac arrest. They had both recently learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at a career-focused technical nursing center and rushed to help, beginning chest compressions and using an automated external defibrillator (AED) before emergency responders arrived. 

Thanks to their actions, their teacher survived, and is one of approximately 350,000 Americans who experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year. Roughly nine out of ten will not survive. 

We often describe the difference between life and death as a matter of speed: how quickly emergency services arrive and how fast a hospital can intervene. But in reality, cardiac arrest outcomes often depend on whether someone nearby begins CPR in the first few minutes, which rarely belong to emergency responders, but instead to whomever is standing closest: a classmate, teacher, stranger at a basketball game, or someone waiting for a train. Every minute without CPR sharply reduces the chances the patient will live long enough to reach a hospital.

Schools occupy a special role in public health. As a location most Americans pass through and one of the only places they may ever encounter CPR training, a high school classroom may be the best opportunity to prepare the next generation of lifesavers. 

Schools already rehearse fire drills and lockdown drills for dangers that are statistically rare. Cardiac arrest is the reverse: far more common, and far less rehearsed. CPR skills can save lives years down the road when a cardiac arrest occurs at home, in a gym, at an airport, or at a university. Harnessing that opportunity requires both the resources to teach CPR effectively and the policies to ensure every student has the chance to learn it.

In Europe, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and England implemented school CPR education through national requirements or curriculum standards. Denmark offers a clear example of the positive impact. From 2001 to 2010, as Denmark introduced nationwide resuscitation initiatives including mandatory school CPR education, bystander CPR rates more than doubled, while 30-day survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest more than tripled.

A central challenge is how to implement CPR training at scale. The international KIDS SAVE LIVES initiative offers a practical blueprint. Endorsed by the World Health Organization, it calls for recurring, age-appropriate basic life support education beginning in childhood. Research from the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation shows children can learn the early links in the chain of survival from the young age of 4, perform effective chest compressions by age 12, and pass skills to family members and others.

Some may hesitate to perform CPR because of legal concerns over causing injury—like rib fractures—while administering CPR, but every state has Good Samaritan laws providing protections to people who render emergency aid in good faith. A 30-year review of U.S. litigation across all 50 states from 1989 to 2019 found no cases in which a layperson who provided CPR was held liable for causing harm. 

The U.S. has also made significant progress in bringing CPR education into schools. In 1984, Alabama became the first state to require CPR instruction for high school graduation. Over the four decades since, communities have taken different approaches to bring CPR into the classroom. In West Virginia and Alaska, educators’ unions formally backed legislation requiring CPR education, while efforts in Washington and Illinois advanced in memory of students lost to cardiac arrest.

Today, 43 states require some form of CPR education before high school graduation. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Wyoming are the seven that remain. Several are already taking steps to expand CPR education. Massachusetts invested $425,000 to expand CPR education in public schools, while Colorado includes hands-on CPR and AED instruction in its statewide health education guidelines but stops short of requiring schools to provide it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a resolution directing the Instructional Quality Commission to include high school CPR in the state’s next health curriculum framework. San Francisco is taking an even broader approach, with paramedics and firefighters working to train 100,000 community members in CPR.

There is evidence that laws can translate into lifesaving action. A study of nearly 300,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests across 20 states found that patients had 12% higher odds of receiving bystander CPR in states with high school CPR education laws than those without them.

Other lifesaving education efforts can also offer a roadmap. In Georgia, Wesley’s Law, championed by Laura and Larry Gay after their son’s death, required public schools to stock overdose-reversal medication such as naloxone. In 2025, the state launched an opioid-settlement-funded initiative to provide overdose-reversal kits to public schools statewide, along with training resources for staff. In Indiana, emergency-response professionals helped expand Stop the Bleed training in schools, and the state’s Secured School Safety Grant program now offers funding for school bleeding-control programs and kits.

Both examples demonstrate how local champions and an existing source of funding can help turn a lifesaving idea into reality. Broadening collaboration among organizations such as the American Medical Association, American Red Cross, Project ADAM, and American Heart Association can also help expand CPR education nationwide.

After Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field in 2023, he became a leading advocate for the bipartisan HEARTS Act, which Congress passed unanimously in 2024. President Biden signed it into law later that year, supporting schools in expanding access to AEDs, CPR and AED education, and cardiac emergency response planning.

Cardiac arrest does not wait for emergency responders. The students who stepped forward when their teacher collapsed playing basketball in Michigan illustrate what becomes possible when CPR skills are taught before they are needed. Someday, every high school student in the U.S. could graduate prepared to step up and become a lifesaver.

After riding a series of escalators to the fifth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I stepped into a gallery where, on display, were a dozen paintings and lithographs by late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat.

But most visitors were gathered around one explosively colorful painting in swirling shades of light and dark blue, bottle green, and pale gold. 

Instantly recognizable. 

One of the most famous paintings in the world. 

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh.  

These were the early days of my research about a little-known woman who is key to shedding light on three inevitable questions when it comes to Vincent van Gogh. Why did he cut off his ear? Why did he commit suicide? And how, after dying in obscurity, did he eventually become regarded as one of the world’s greatest artists? 

Gauging Van Gogh

Watching and talking to people as they engaged with this particular masterpiece seemed an apropos way to gauge the interest of Van Gogh lovers.

I, for one, could remember, as a child, first seeing The Starry Night reprinted in one of my parents’ art history books. It was my modern art “aha” moment. No one was standing over my shoulder telling me to pay it special attention, but I was mesmerized. The painting became imprinted on my young imagination, and I never forgot it.

As I observed the gallery, I quickly learned my reaction is hardly unique. 

A man from Southern California named Paul Duelo was laughing. “I know this painting, and I don’t know anything about art,” he said with a chuckle, nodding at the crowd standing around The Starry Night.  “Look at everyone!”

A woman from Seattle stood gazing quietly with her arms folded. Sheri Larison first saw a picture of The Starry Night more than 30 years ago in her high school art class. A reproduction of the iconic painting hung in her office. This was her very first time seeing the original.

“It’s overwhelming,” Larison whispered, with tears in her eyes. “It evokes something. It’s magical.”

She was interested in the painting’s origin story. “His mental health was declining,” she said, and that was true, although perhaps also misleading.

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June of 1889 during a year he spent in a mental asylum in the south of France.  

It does not represent an actual place but a compilation of elements—a village, starry sky, moon, dark hills, and a cypress tree—all things that Vincent had seen at one time and brought together in this composition. The sight of stars, he said, always made him dream. 

Hanging just to the left of The Starry Night was a Paul Gauguin’s painting, The Moon and the Earth. The juxtaposition provoked a curious thought. Gauguin and Van Gogh lived and worked together in Vincent’s yellow house in Arles in the south of France for several weeks. What would the hot-tempered, competitive Gauguin have thought seeing so many people gathered around Vincent’s painting at this moment while his was comparatively ignored? And what would Vincent have made of all the attention given to The Starry Night?

It is generally believed that it was an argument with Gauguin, who was threatening to quit Arles (in effect abandoning Van Gogh), which spun the mentally unstable Vincent into such a state of despair and frustration that he mutilated himself by slicing off his left ear.  

The fine art of family matters

But, as I was learning, family matters also very likely played a part in the most notorious instance of self-harm in art history. 

It’s a tragic story of dependence and the limits of love. And it’s where Jo van Gogh-Bonger comes in. Biographical details about her—revealed in her diaries and letters—have only recently been made public by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They paint a picture of a determined woman to whom the world of art owes a tremendous debt.

Jo was married to Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, who was an art dealer in Paris and Vincent’s only source of income. Theo supported Vincent with a monthly allowance, and in exchange Vincent gave Theo his paintings to try to market and sell. The financial arrangement, as it would in most families, put an emotional strain on both brothers. Theo was not rich, and Vincent constantly complained about being broke, with not even enough money for food, and often practically begged his brother for more money. 

Over the course of 10 years, Vincent created more than 800 paintings and 700 drawings, desperately hoping for financial independence and commercial success. But in Vincent’s lifetime, Theo is known to have sold just one painting: Red Vineyard at Arles.

In July of 1890, believing himself a failure as an artist and a man, Vincent shot himself in the chest. He was only 37.

Six months after Vincent’s suicide, Theo died from the ravages of syphilis, leaving Jo a young widow with a baby to support, not much money, and an unusual inheritance—Vincent’s paintings—more than 400 in total. 

They filled the walls of their Paris apartment, were stored in closets, under beds, and at a nearby art supply store. The Potato Eaters, Irises, Sunflowers, self-portraits, and The Starry Night. Celebrated as masterpieces today, at the time they were regarded as the unpolished works of a depressed, crazy man and commercially worthless. Jo thought differently. She had no formal art training, but she loved his work and her instincts told her that Vincent was (as Theo had come to believe) a genius. 

Jo also inherited hundreds of letters that Vincent wrote and received, most exchanged with Theo. Jo read and re-read those letters, initially to feel closer to Theo, but she was also captivated by Vincent’s compassion and intelligence. She decided the world should read them too. It was part of her plan: to organize exhibitions, lobby critics, and publicize the letters, which showed how vulnerable and anguished Vincent was, yes, but also how deliberate he was in his craft and how close Vincent and Theo were to each other. Eventually, in 1914, Jo succeeded in publishing Vincent’s letters in an ambitious three-volume book, which today is considered one of the most revealing and important works of art history. 

An infamous ear

As much as she would play a vital role in propelling him to fame, Jo was also someone who unwittingly played a part in Vincent’s self-destructive descent, something she at times admitted feeling guilt about after his death. Jo understood Vincent was lonely and that he became more isolated after she married his brother. 

That infamous act of self-mutilation, when Vincent cut off his ear, happened the very day Vincent likely received the surprising news that Theo and Jo were engaged, triggering what some Van Gogh experts, including Martin Bailey, suspect were unquenchable fears that Theo might eventually abandon him.

And Vincent shot himself just days after a stressful visit with Jo and Theo in Paris. Theo was thinking about quitting his job to start his own business, which meant, for a time, no income. The couple (who by now had a baby son they named after Vincent) hoped to rent a better apartment on a lower floor. But budgets were tight, arguments ensued, and Vincent eventually rushed out of the apartment, unable to shake the thought that he was a burden that Theo would or could no longer bear. 

Jo didn’t seek to put herself at the center of this story, but she is there, nonetheless. A surprisingly relatable woman (at times insecure, at times doggedly persistent), she courageously stood up to the male-dominated art world as a champion for Vincent and spent 30 years of her life promoting his work and life story in Holland, Germany, France, England, and even, for a time, in America. 

Interestingly, of all the paintings Jo inherited, no one—not Jo or Theo or Vincent—considered The Starry Night one of Vincent’s best. Vincent didn’t even sign it. Research recently published by the Van Gogh Museum points out that Vincent signed only about 16% of his paintings, hypothesizing he did so usually when he was completely satisfied or wanted to make them a gift to friends or family. In the brothers’ correspondence, The Starry Night was referred to rather than named. Theo called it simply “the village in the moonlight,” critically writing to Vincent that “I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things.” 

Vincent conceded the painting lacked character and considered it a mistake that “…once again I’m allowing myself to do stars too big…new setback, and I’ve had enough of that.” 

Jo also didn’t seem to consider The Starry Night as especially important. She sold it early on but reacquired it briefly in time for a major exhibition she organized in Amsterdam in 1905. It was painting number 199, called De Sterren (The Stars), and it changed hands two more times before MoMA acquired it in 1941. By then, it had been rechristened The Starry Night. The name stuck. 

There is a world of personal stories behind the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, and they reaffirm an old adage: we can’t separate the art from the artist. I believe Jo would agree. 

Paul Duelo, the man from California I met while admiring MoMA’s The Starry Night, lit up when I told him about Jo van Gogh-Bonger. 

He had never heard of her before. 

But he wanted to know more. 

If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988.

Approaching life with positive expectations, a get-up-and-go attitude, and eagerness is related to many good things in life. This individual asset is often referred to as zest, and it can be purposefully developed to assist us in managing daily stressors as well as creating meaningful lives. 

True zest is not due to hyperarousal or too much caffeine. It is a cultivated cheerfulness and joy. When we are stressed or not feeling well, it’s hard to avoid doing things halfway or halfheartedly. But there are ways we can increase zest even when it seems like the deck is stacked against us, the world is filled with conflict, and our social media feeds are thick with chaos and gloom. 

Psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman pioneered the field of positive psychology, the scientific study of human flourishing. One of the highlights of their initiatives was published in 2004, Character Strengths and Virtues, a groundbreaking text on the 24 universal character strengths. Zest is one of the 24 strengths.

When you cultivate zest, you’ll want to fully engage in life and not just view it from the sidelines, look forward to each day, and wake to anticipation over the day’s possibilities. Zest has also been referred to as vitality, exuberance, and joie de vivre, the French phrase for the joy of living. 

In an analysis of data from 130 studies involving more than 275,000 people around the globe, most character strengths were associated with greater mental health. But zest was one of just two strengths (the other is hope) that had the strongest relationship to mental well-being across countries and age groups. Zest contributes to life satisfaction among children, adolescents, and adults. In addition, in a study of nearly 10,000 employed adults, those who scored high on zest had higher work satisfaction and were more likely to view work as a calling. People who score high on measures of zest are also more likely to view their lives as meaningful. 

I reached out to Ryan Niemiec, a psychologist and author of several books, including The Power of Character Strengths and Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners. Niemiec is the chief science and education officer at the VIA Institute on Character, a non-profit focused on the science and practice of character strengths. I asked him about the most effective ways people can increase zest in their own lives. 

“In terms of boosting zest, I turn straight to behavioral activation, one of the most proven strategies for depression,” Niemiec said. “In practical terms, this means to take action in some way to boost oneself—to take that one step forward in lifting one’s energy.” He encouraged people to engage every day in one healthy pleasure, one form of physical activity, and one action that makes you feel like you accomplished something. 

Some of us seem to naturally have this irresistible aliveness, often invigorating those around us. Others work hard to cultivate zest. Research supports the idea that we are never too old to change. And we can learn how to cultivate zest. 

We can learn to savor pleasures, set good intentions, and try to view life as an adventure. Other intentional ways to potentially lift our spirits include taking a brisk 10-minute walk every morning, doing cardiovascular or strength-building challenges, practicing Reiki or yoga, laughing with friends, and engaging in stimulating tasks and work. The VIA Institute on Character has activities, workbooks, videos, webinars, and courses—some of them free—on improving all the character strengths, including zest. 

To be sure, practicing a zest for life can be harder for those who have physical illness and pain and those who engage in unhealthy lifestyle behaviors. And those striving for zest under these circumstances may benefit from assistance from a mental health professional like a psychologist, a physical health provider like a physician, or a personal trainer or fitness instructor. 

For some of us, being hard on ourselves is second nature. We expect our mental health to stretch under strain. Rather than exclusively focusing on what’s wrong with our mental health, one approach is to develop skills, traits, and perspectives that can help us. Acquiring zest is a worthwhile investment and may help us not only through challenging times, but also help us to see beauty and soar in our lives and workplaces.

After nearly a century, America has rediscovered the wealth tax. This November, Californians will vote on Proposition 40, a union-backed initiative levying a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state's billionaires. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna have introduced a federal version; a dozen states have advanced millionaire or billionaire taxes this year; and Maine, Washington, Hawaii, and Rhode Island have all enacted one. Not since the Progressive Era has taxing the rich had this much momentum.

The energy is easy to understand. The 25 wealthiest Americans pay a “true tax rate” of just 3.4%—a fraction of what nurses and teachers pay—while holding about 2% of the nation's wealth. That’s nearly as much as the entire bottom half of the country combined. 

This spring, Forbes counted a record 3,428 billionaires worth $20.1 trillion, up $4 trillion since last year. Elon Musk topped the list at $839 billion, and this summer he became history's first trillionaire. At the same time, workers' share of economic output fell to 52.8%, the lowest since records began in 1947. Today, billionaire wealth is at an all-time high while labor's share is at an all-time low. 

One obvious response is to tax the fortunes at the top and redistribute those funds. But I worry that the wealth-tax movement is aimed at the wrong target. Billionaires create a lot of damage, to be sure. As Alex Gibney’s new documentary Musk lays out, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent nearly $300 million helping elect a president and then slashed federal agencies, including several investigating his own companies. Still, he and his tech-bro pals are not themselves the underlying reason for our economic dysfunction. 

In my view, the root cause is corporate power—the way modern corporations are owned, governed, and permitted to organize markets and politics to their own advantage—and how relentlessly that power has concentrated over the past 50 years. The evidence is everywhere. Since the late 1990s, three-quarters of American industries have grown more concentrated. Corporate margins have roughly tripled since 1980, and after-tax profits—below 10% of GDP for virtually all of 1950 to 2010—now exceed 12%, near the record. Economist Thomas Philippon calculates that weakened competition costs the typical household about $300 a month.

Since 1970, when Milton Friedman declared that a corporation's only social responsibility is profit, businesses have been re-engineered around delivering the most value possible to shareholders. Today, the bulk of many senior executives’ pay comes in the form of stock options and share buybacks (when a company spends its earnings to buy up its own stock and lift the price), which now send over a trillion dollars a year to shareholders rather than into wages or investment. Before 1982, this practice was viewed as market manipulation. In the following decades, the forces that once pushed back against inequality were gutted: union membership fell from 20% of American workers to 10%, and antitrust enforcement was consistently muted. 

This is where billionaires come in. Nobody earns $839 billion from a paycheck. A fortune of that scale can only be made by accumulating equity. That is, gains from corporate profits. Profit is simply what remains after wages are held down, taxes are minimized, and costs are pushed onto workers, communities, and the environment. It makes little difference whether the claim to those profits comes from founding a company or, as with hedge-fund and private-equity fortunes, from the fruit of corporations other people built. Because the richest tenth of Americans own nearly 90% of household stock-market wealth, every dollar shifted from paychecks to profit flows almost undiluted to the top.

You don't have to look hard for examples. The Walton fortune rests on wages so low that a federal watchdog found Walmart among the biggest employers of workers on Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, taxpayers are subsidizing the payroll beneath a dynastic fortune. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's wealth compounded over years during which Amazon paid no federal income tax on billions in profit while fighting its warehouse workers' union drives. In each case, the fortune is substantially extracted from workers and the public, not the market reward it is billed as.

None of this would last without help from Washington. Over the past half century, political spending has become a core business strategy and arguably the highest-return investment a large company can make. 

In a 1971 memorandum, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce to put business on a political war footing. Today, lobbying has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry and business now outspends labor and public-interest groups 34-to-one. Since Citizens United removed the last meaningful limits on business political spending in 2010, every election has cost more than the last—nearly $16 billion in 2024, mostly corporate money. 

Under President Donald Trump, the exchange has become impossible to ignore. Corporations lined up with seven-figure donations to his inaugural fund; oil executives, who were asked point-blank for $1 billion at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, have watched climate rules fall ever since; Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit legal experts dismissed while its merger awaited federal approval; and the crypto industry, having spent more than $130 million on the 2024 races, saw the enforcement cases against it evaporate, and this fall is spending hundreds of millions on 2026 midterm races.

This is why a politics aimed only at billionaires will miss the mark. I support wealth taxes, and I hope Proposition 40 passes. Yet wealth taxes only claw back winnings after the fact. This year's Forbes’ Billionaires list added 390 newcomers. Taxing Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires does not touch the executives, boards, investment funds, and political machines that keep minting new ones.

What would it mean to take aim at the root cause of inequality instead? First, we must recognize that the shareholder-primacy firm is a policy choice—the product of lobbying and lawmaking since the 1970s—and policy choices can be remade by rebuilding labor power through labor-law reform and sectoral bargaining, reviving antitrust, and getting corporate money out of politics. Early American corporate charters, after all, were granted for limited public purposes and could be revoked when abused.

It also means redesigning ownership itself. In my research on alternative corporate models, I have studied companies that are deliberately structured so that no one can extract a dynastic fortune, because the equity is legally locked to purpose. When Patagonia's founder moved the company into a purpose trust in 2022, such extraction became impossible by design; Bosch has been majority-owned by a foundation for decades and competes ferociously. Steward ownership, employee ownership, and benefit corporations are working alternatives operating in thousands of companies around the world and address wealth concentration at its source.

The wealth-tax debate, in other words, is about how to redistribute the gains that came from corporate power. But we need to redistribute corporate power itself.

None of this argues against Proposition 40 or its state and federal counterparts. Vote for them, pass them, let the revenue fund healthcare and schools. It is an argument about where attention needs to be focused next. History tells us that previous American confrontations with concentrated wealth, from Progressive Era trustbusters to the New Deal, succeeded not merely by taxing the winners but by restructuring corporate power through antitrust enforcement, securities regulation, and protecting labor rights. 

The real question facing America is whether corporations exist to serve society, or society exists to serve corporations. A politics that stops at the wealth tax has already conceded the answer.

In Ukraine, a Russian drone guided by artificial intelligence killed three civilians at a gas station, including a 19-year-old university student. In Gaza, an AI-assisted intelligence tool helped Israeli forces locate a Hamas commander. The subsequent airstrike killed him and, according to independent estimates, at least 125 other people.

Different wars. Different circumstances. But a deeply troubling question: As machines become more involved in decisions of life and death, are we losing sight of the human beings whose lives hang in the balance?

That question brought me back this month to a small white house in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met at Höfði House, representing rival nuclear superpowers divided by decades of distrust. They left without an agreement. Yet their willingness to talk, listen, and imagine what had seemed impossible helped lay the groundwork for historic nuclear arms reductions.

I remember that moment vividly. I was a young Icelandic exchange student living in the United States, watching two world leaders meet in my small home country. I could never have imagined that 40 years later, as President of Iceland, I would return to that same house to ask a new generation of leaders to find the courage to talk.

The enduring lesson of Reykjavík is not simply about nuclear weapons or diplomacy. It is about the extraordinary power of human connection and dialogue. And we urgently need to remember it.

Never have we possessed more sophisticated tools to communicate, yet our ability to understand one another seems increasingly fragile. We are connected across continents in milliseconds, but too often separated by fear, anger, and mistrust.

Our technologies can transform medicine, education, and human prosperity. Yet they can also accelerate conflict, undermine democracy, and challenge human control.

Crucial questions for the AI age

Thanks to new technologies like AI, our power has grown exponentially. But has our wisdom kept pace?

Over the past week, Iceland has explored that question not only through another conventional summit, but through a journey from remembrance to dialogue, and from dialogue to responsibility.

We began with a traveling exhibition from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the testimony of a survivor of the atomic bombing. More than 80 years later, she still vividly recalls what she describes as the sudden appearance of a thousand suns, followed by unimaginable destruction, decades of devastating illness, and the stigma endured by survivors. No discussion of nuclear deterrence should ever lose sight of the human lives behind those words.

We then confronted the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence with technology experts, including Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. The central question was not simply what AI can do, but what we should allow it to do—and who gets to decide.

Perhaps the most important conversations, however, happened far from the conference halls.

Across Iceland, young people invited fellow citizens to put down their phones and sit together to discuss the future they want to create. Students, parents, grandparents, teachers, and neighbors talked about education, belonging, technology, nature, and peace.

The young people were not asking adults to arrive with all the answers. They wanted to be heard. To be taken seriously. To have a voice in decisions that will shape their lives long after today's leaders have left office.

They understood something we too often forget: decisions made far from the people they affect are rarely wise ones.

I found that both humbling and hopeful.

Because dialogue is more than exchanging opinions. At its best, it is an act of recognition: I see you. Your experience matters. Your future matters. Even when we disagree, we share responsibility for what comes next.

The demands of dialogue

The purpose of dialogue is not always consensus. It is connection. And connection is where trust begins. Without trust, even the most brilliant solutions struggle to take root.

We carried that spirit back to Höfði House, where leaders from politics, technology, science, business, and civil society gathered to ask what responsible leadership demands of us today.

The result was A Call from Reykjavík, signed by three women presidents and open to others who wish to join. It calls for meaningful human control over powerful technologies, insists that decisions about war and nuclear weapons remain firmly in human hands, and places peace and responsibility to future generations at the heart of leadership.

The following day, in a public conversation moderated by renowned journalist Christiane Amanpour, President Nataša Pirc Musar of Slovenia, former Irish President Mary Robinson and I reflected on the choices before humanity.

Forty years after two powerful men met in Reykjavík, three women—indeed, three world leaders—came together to continue the conversation. Not because women have all the answers. We do not. But because progress requires more voices, more perspectives, and a willingness to listen across differences. And because the future must never belong only to those who currently hold power.

I do not believe dialogue is a soft alternative to leadership. I believe it is one of its most demanding forms.

It takes courage to listen to someone with whom we profoundly disagree. Humility to acknowledge what we do not know. And strength to resist reducing complex human challenges to slogans, enemies, or simple answers.

Dialogue does not mean abandoning our values, excusing aggression, or accepting injustice. Nor is it a substitute for action. It is how we begin to build the trust and understanding that make lasting action possible.

AI-assisted warfare

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza remind us of the devastating human cost of conflict. AI-assisted warfare adds another dimension: the danger of placing ever greater distance between those making decisions and those living with their consequences.

We must not surrender human judgment, accountability, or conscience to machines.

But technology alone is not the problem, and technology alone cannot provide the answer. We also need stronger human infrastructure: relationships, institutions, shared values, and habits of cooperation that allow us to respond collectively to danger.

We must equip the next generation not only with technical skills, but with the deeply human capacities to shape our future: listening, critical thinking, empathy, courage, and collaboration. In an age of intelligent machines, these may be our most essential skills.

Iceland is a small nation. We cannot dictate the course of global affairs. But perhaps our size reminds us of something larger nations sometimes forget: no one can build a peaceful future alone.

Forty years ago, Reykjavík showed that even the deepest divisions need not determine our destiny. Today, we need a new Reykjavík moment. Not one confined to a single house, summit, or handful of world leaders.

We need it in parliaments and boardrooms, classrooms and communities, across generations and between nations in conflict. Wherever fear has replaced curiosity, wherever people have stopped listening, wherever power has outrun wisdom.

The world does not lack intelligence, information, or ambition. What we too often lack is the courage to truly connect.

Of course, dialogue alone will not save us. But without it, I struggle to see how we can save ourselves. 

The future will not be shaped only by the power of our technology or our weapons, but by the quality of our conversations—and the courage of the choices that follow.

Fortunately, we still have time. And we still have each other.

The French like to take to the streets, and they do it often.

On Sept. 17, students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry, a rather underprivileged high school in the Paris suburb of Créteil, erupted in protest over the abysmal conditions of their institution: chronic shortfall of teachers, poor facilities, long declining quality of education. Two weeks later, a wave of protests had swept cities across France. Students from hundreds of schools and scores of universities joined the protests, backed by their parents, teachers, and trade unions. More than 160,000 students and trade unionists protested across France on Tuesday in the third week of demonstrations.

France has never seen so many violent incidents in a movement made up largely of high school students. So far, over 200 students, 85 school staff, and 700 police officers have been injured in clashes across the country. Protesters have broken into schools and, in some cases, set fire to occupied or blockaded buildings. On Oct. 5, a 15-year-old boy had his hand blown off by a police grenade during a protest in Lens in northern France, an incident that crystallized the heavy-handed response authorities had adopted from the earliest days of the protest. More than 6,000 protesters have been arrested, most of them minors, and later released without charge.

The protests erupted after nearly a decade of Macronisme, the right-of-center, top-down governing style that President Emmanuel Macron of France incarnates. And they express a broader discontent: anger over disparities in school quality, university admissions decisions, and latent racial discrimination, and a sense among young people that those in power were not listening to them, that the country offered them little hope for the future.

The protests are also occurring amid a wider crisis of political confidence in the country. France is holding its presidential elections in April 2027, and the far-right and far-left are leading the opinion polls. The frontrunner is Marine Le Pen, who has worked for years to make her far-right party, the National Rally, more electable while campaigning on immigration, crime, and denunciation of an out-of-touch political class. Her party is already the largest opposition party in parliament, and a snap legislative election following the presidential vote could entrench it further. 

On the other side is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed, a far-left party, who is  promising a sweeping redistribution of power and resources toward the working class. Both have built much of their appeal on opposition to the political establishment, the promise to wish away budget constraints, and deep hostility toward the European Union. 

If France today feels like it is at a crossroads, it is because it is. The postwar model of a large welfare and regulatory state, run by a class of civil servants charged with modernizing the economy, tempering market forces and defining the common good, has run its course. 

The collapse of postwar France

France now runs one of Europe’s largest budget deficits: its public debt stands at 119.3 % of GDP and is expected to rise next year. Fears of a crippling financial crisis are growing. Borrowing costs have risen so high that France is drawing comparisons with Greece, whose debt crisis in 2010 threatened the survival of the Eurozone. And with economic growth stagnating, there is no easy way out.

If anything, France would need to spend more: on defense, as Russia grows more threatening, the war in Ukraine continues, and the United States retreats from its traditional role as Europe’s security guarantor; on new technologies, as the country that once produced Concorde and high-speed trains now trails in high-tech innovation and AI; on strained public services, from schools to hospitals to neglected neighborhoods; and on infrastructure capable of withstanding the growing effects of climate change.

Successive French governments have promised to turn things around and allow for these badly needed investments in the country’s future, but none has succeeded.

The French malaise goes deeper. Inequality has been one of the students’ central grievances. They are not wrong. As in many countries, economic inequalities in France have widened over the past two decades under the combined effects of globalization, industrial decline, and the growing concentration of inherited wealth.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty showed how wealth perpetuates across generations and widens the divide between those who own capital and everyone else. This concentration of wealth and power remains deeply resented: for many, President Macron’s original sin is still his brief stint at the Rothschild investment bank before entering politics.

But the most injurious form of inequality lies elsewhere: in the power of France’s national meritocratic myth, which holds that people broadly owe their social position largely to their academic performance. At the top of that system sit the highly competitive grandes écoles, the elite institutions of higher education that have produced leaders in politics, culture, and business. 

What makes the myth so corrosive is not that academic achievement goes unrewarded but that it remains a pretty reliable path to better jobs, higher status, and positions of power. In such a system, students from underfunded public schools face a profound disadvantage compared with peers who attend better-resourced schools and whose better-educated parents know how to navigate the system.

Private schools offer another route, but are still frowned upon as a way to buy an advantage. It is no surprise that the protests broke out in Créteil, a working-class suburb just outside Paris, where schools are chronically under-resourced.

We shall always have Paris

Racial and geographic discrimination also contribute to the crisis of France. The collection of ethno-racial statistics is prohibited by French law; it is a laudable restriction in principle but problematic in practice. Visible minorities remain vastly underrepresented among France’s political and business elites.

Families with immigrant backgrounds, many with roots in African and Asian countries once colonized by France, are disproportionately concentrated on urban peripheries, where jobs are scarce and residents often face discrimination from employers elsewhere.

Islamophobia has also grown over the last decade amid conflicts in the Middle East and a string of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks. Rhetoric once largely confined to the far right has seeped into the mainstream right, where calls for “order” and “security” often carry an anti-immigrant charge. Macron’s references to the “decivilization” of some young people and former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau’s description of immigrants’ participation in the protests that followed the police killing of a teenager in 2023 as a “regression towards ethnic origins” are emblematic of that shift.

There is another problem with France’s meritocratic ideal: Paris. Political power, economic opportunity, cultural prestige, and elite education remain extraordinarily concentrated in the capital. The result is a deep economic divide between Paris and the rest of the country and an elite that lives largely among its own, surrounded by people with similar educations, careers, and assumptions, and cut off from much of the country.

The Yellow Vest revolt of 2018 to 2019 was an earlier social explosion of precisely that resentment. It is hardly surprising that students are denouncing the unequal distribution of resources between Paris and the rest of the country, or that the protests began in Créteil, close enough to the capital for the contrast to be impossible to miss.

When students from my own former school, the elite Lycée Henri-IV, where I was a rather poor student, joined the movement in its third week, I noticed how carefully they described themselves as protesting “in solidarity” with less privileged schools. They knew which side of the divide they were on. So much for meritocracy.

Racing to the Elysée

Where does this leave France? With the presidential elections approaching next April, political parties are scrambling to position themselves in relation to a protest movement that has shown no sign of abating. On Oct. 6, more than a quarter-million people took to the streets as high school students were joined by university students, teachers, parents and trade unions. An even wider “national day of protest” is planned for Oct. 17.

Both familiar and new dynamics will shape the election. The familiar one is the runoff dilemma: voters may once again be asked to support a candidate from the opposite political camp simply to prevent Le Pen from reaching the Élysée. Le Pen made the runoff in both 2017 and 2022 and is leading the polls by a large margin. This time, however, the field trailing her is unusually fragmented. Two former prime ministers under Macron, Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, are in the race; Philippe is competing with Mélenchon for second place, while Attal trails both.

Whatever the outcome, the presidential vote may resolve little. A president from the far-right National Rally could find herself governing without a stable parliamentary majority or broad support among the public or within the civil service. A compromise candidate from the center or left could face the same fractured parliament that has bedeviled the final years of Macron’s presidency, during which France has had five prime ministers in two years.

What is new is the extent to which France is being reshaped by forces now familiar across the globe: a crisis of confidence in democracy, conservative billionaires building media empires and financing ideological movements, polarizing social media, foreign interference in elections, and growing voter distrust of supranational institutions, including the European Union.

France, unlike the United States, places strict limits on campaign spending, but money still shapes the broader political ecosystem. Pierre-Édouard Stérin, a self-described “conservative libertarian,” has committed substantial resources to organizations seeking to advance right-wing and far-right agendas. The industrialist Vincent Bolloré has assembled a vast media empire that includes CNews, a Fox News-style channel that has become an important platform for the nationalist right.

Europe on the line

Whatever the result of the Presidential elections, the outlook is troubling for Europe. A Le Pen or Mélenchon presidency would test European cohesion on everything from Ukraine and relations with Russia to migration, budgets, and the authority of the European Union. But even a more centrist president would likely lack a strong enough coalition to govern effectively, mirroring the current situation in Germany, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz is hobbled by unpopularity and a surge in support for the far-right Alternative for Deutschland.

With France and Germany together accounting for roughly 40% of the E.U. economy, political weakness in both capitals would deprive Europe of its traditional engine at a particularly dangerous moment. Europe faces mounting pressure on three fronts: China’s industrial onslaught, reflected in an annual trade deficit of roughly €360 billion; Russia’s war against Ukraine and escalating “gray warfare” operations; and the American turn against the postwar international order on which Europe has long depended. All this comes as Europe must also prepare for the profound disruptions of climate change and AI.

The remedy laid out by Mario Draghi, famed for rescuing the euro during his tenure as president of the European Central Bank, calls for greater integration of the single market, more investment and industrial consolidation, and a greater capacity to act collectively. France is indispensable to any such reforms. A politically paralyzed France would leave Europe weaker at precisely the moment when it can least afford it.

The revolution still to come

At the heart of the French Revolution of 1789 was the abolition of the privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. Close to two and a half centuries later, privilege remains deeply embedded in French society, dispersed across an array of almost caste-like social and professional groups, from journalists, lawyers, and intellectuals to civil servants and unionized workers, each with its own advantages, protections, pension arrangements, and claims on state resources. The result is a politics in which almost everyone agrees that reform is urgently needed, provided someone else pays, and their own group’s advantages remain untouched.

If this sounds like an overreading of 1789, consider Macron’s own choice of title for the book that launched his presidential bid: Révolution. His presidency may not have proved entirely revolutionary, yet many of his larger prescriptions have aged well: governments around the world have embraced state-led industrial policy, greater strategic autonomy, and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, while distrust of American hegemony and calls for deeper European integration have gained traction as the postwar order fragments.

Macron can also claim some credit for preserving, and in places renewing, France’s traditional strengths: an electricity system powered largely by nuclear energy, global leadership in luxury goods, tourism and hospitality, and a deep reservoir of scientific talent, now exemplified by Mistral, Europe’s closest thing to a world-class AI contender.

A skilled diplomat and relentless advocate for the multilateral system, Macron has also taken principled stands on Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, debt relief for the world’s poorest countries, and climate change, while carefully navigating France’s relationships with America and China. France’s permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council gives it diplomatic weight far beyond the country’s economic size, a status French diplomats ironically describe as “flying first class on an economy ticket.”

Yet neither these prescriptions nor these assets have been enough to reverse France’s decline over the past two decades. Perhaps what has been missing is a revolution not so much in policy as in political culture: a new social compact in which the sacrifices required to adjust to France’s reduced means and diminished relative power are accepted because the burdens are seen to be shared fairly. If such a revolution is to come, it is less likely to start in the Élysée or the ministries than among the students in the streets demanding to be heard.