The Economist

Editorial Illustrations
Here is a selection of Illustrations commissioned by The Economist.

Art Direction by Stephen Petch, Una Corrigan, Suzy Connolly.
Thanks to Mirabel Fawcett for involving me in the first place.

THE BATTLE OF THREE CENTURIES

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TWENTY years ago, the Bank of England was given the freedom to set interest rates by the British government. It was part of a trend that made central bankers the most powerful financial actors on the planet, setting interest rates, buying trillions of dollars of assets, targeting exchange rates and managing the economic cycle. Over more than 300 years, the power of central banks has ebbed and flowed, as governments have enhanded and restricted their powers, in response to economic necessity and intellectual fashion.

Here is the full article.

ANIMAL FACTORY
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TO A mouse — wee, sleek, cowering, timorous beast that it is –– the departure from Jackson Lab must be a bit bewildering. But a laboratory elsewhere wants to get its hands on a mouse with mutations in its Ghrhr gene, affecting its size, or Foxq1, which influences its sleekness, or Lypd1 or Atcay, which have effects respectively on its fearful nature and general skittishness. As one of the biggest suppliers of lab mice in the world, Jackson Lab, in Bar Harbor, Maine, has a vast catalogue of such made-to-order mice.

Here is the full article.

IF HUMAN CLONING HAPPENED

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Chips off the old block.
It started with sheep. Suppose cloning became routine for people.
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Illustration for THE WORLD IF, The Economist's annual collection of scenarios in the fields of politics, business, technology and history. Just suppose…

Here is the full article.

ON THE SHOULERS OF G'AI'NTS
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Artificial intelligence will help unpick the complexity of biology

IN A former leatherworks, just off the Euston Road in London, a hopeful firm is starting up. BenevolentAI’s main room is large and open-plan. In it, scientists and coders sit busily on benches, plying their various trades. The firm’s star, though, has a private, temperature-controlled office. That star is an Nvidia supercomputer. It runs the software which sits at the core of BenecolentAI’s busines, a piece artificial intelligence (AI) that that can process natural language and formulate new ideas from what it reads. Its job is to sift through vast chemical libraries and medical databases, as well as the scientific literature, looking for drug molecules to treat disease.

Here is the full article.

NOT TURNING OUT

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Democracies are at risk if young people continue to shun the ballot box.

They are getting more and more involved in politics, but not turning up to vote.

Here is the full article.

COASE'S THEORY OF THE FIRM

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The theory of the firm consists of a number of economic theories that explain and predict the nature of the firm, company, or corporation, including its existence, behavior, structure, and relationship to the market.

Here is the full article.

HOW TO PUT BROKEN EGGSHELLS TO USE

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Like any other businessman, Pankaj Pancholi abhors waste. In his case it was the mountain of broken eggshells he was paying some £45,000 ($64,000) a year to have carted away to be buried as landfill. Mr Pancholi is the founder of Just Egg, of Leicester, Britain, a firm that hard- boils up to 1.5m eggs a week for sale in supermarkets and for use in such foodstuffs as sandwiches, mayonnaise and Scotch eggs (a British culinary classic consisting of an egg wrapped in sausage meat). Surely, thought Mr Pancholi, the shells could be used for something, thus earning revenue rather than draining it? So, he teamed up with Andy Abbott of the University of Leicester, to hatch a plan to recycle them.