Corporate tax rates have halved in forty years, and yet public revenues broadly hold up. How can a company book billions in profit everywhere and be taxed almost nowhere? From transfer pricing to the 15 percent global minimum tax, this Fundamental decodes the mechanisms that decide where profit is really declared, and, in the end, who really funds the state.
We connect each event to the mechanism at work behind it. We explain it from scratch, no prior knowledge needed. Briefs to follow the news, fundamentals to keep your bearings.
The world has never invented so much: 3.7 million patents filed in 2024, a record. Yet across advanced economies, productivity has been slowing for twenty years. How can this paradox hold? This Fundamental takes apart the three floors of innovation, research, the patent and diffusion, and shows, with figures and examples, why even a brilliant invention only transforms an economy on the day it truly spreads.
The most profitable companies on the planet give their products away, charge tiny sums or sell nothing tangible. Yet they are worth trillions. Behind that contradiction lies a handful of models that rewrote the rules of value creation: subscription, advertising, the marketplace and free.
The United States spends two and a half times the OECD average on health, and lives nearly three years less. Spending measures neither the quality of care nor the protection of patients. Behind every system sit three functions, four financing models and one universal trade-off. Every system rations care somewhere: the only question worth asking is where the constraint has been placed, and who quietly pays for it.
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