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This edition: AI energy use, economic inequality, global population growth, land use over the
Most of the world’s fastest-growing megacities will soon be in Africa—
Many cities across East Asia and Latin America have grown quickly over the last few decades. Since 1950, São Paulo’s population has grown sixfold. Shanghai’s nearly tenfold.
This rapid growth is now ending.
In the past, most people worked in agriculture; in today’s rich countries, only a small share do.
Since the agricultural revolution, the majority of the labor force in countries like France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands worked in farming.
But over the last few
We have a new Economic Inequality topic page—
Public attention to economic inequality has grown a lot over the last twenty years. At the same time, the available data has greatly improved too: it now covers many more countries and longer time periods, and is more comparable and