About MacroPolo

We create distinctive and impactful work to decipher the macro trends and defining questions that will shape the global economy and politics for decades to come.

This is why MacroPolo believes in:

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creating distinctive products that have a high insight to noise ratio;

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harnessing technology and data to build functional, beautiful, and accessible content;

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delivering consistently high-quality and forward-looking analysis and best-in-class research;

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taking a design-centric approach to simplify complexity in everything we do.

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Our insistence on originality, quality, and credibility serves a core purpose: to simplify complexity amid increasingly complex and fraught global dynamics. It’s a noisy and information-rich world out there, where discovery is much easier but distinction much harder.

With technology propelling the democratization of knowledge, the world’s information can be had with “hey ChatGPT”. That content abundance is overwhelming, making it all the more important to focus on what actually matters instead of all matters.

This is why we have defined the “Four Ds” that will likely matter significantly to global outcomes: deglobalization, decarbonization, debt, and demographics.

For the foreseeable future, these macro themes will set the parameters and guide our work across our longstanding focuses on political economy, technology, and energy. While all these themes exhibit prominently in major economies like China or Japan, virtually all G20 economies (~80% of global GDP) are grappling with some combination of them.

It is our belief that these secular forces will determine the set of choices and trade-offs for advanced and developing countries alike, which will in turn determine the emerging order that is struggling to take shape.

That shape is still blurry like a Monet, but impressions of key features are coming into focus. A new form of regionalism and resurgent industrial policy appear to be here to stay. It’s not just regionalism at the global level — a reshuffling of regions at the national level will occur in tandem as national priorities zero in on reindustrialization and securing supply chains, especially in advanced economies like the United States.

One such region of rising importance is the American Midwest. We at MacroPolo are proud and fortunate to have that Midwest heritage, not least because we get a front row seat to witness how America’s industrial heartland revives and evolves. To compete amid a fast-changing global environment, the Midwest will necessarily have to adopt a more global vantage.

Times of unease are usually accompanied by equal helpings of anxiety and uncertainty. Humility about the future is necessary, but striving for clarity is just as important. We aim to do so through our deep insights, discerning foresight, and differentiated products. Each week we challenge ourselves to bring you the most useful, original, and creative products you’ve come to expect of MacroPolo.

Yet as seriously as we take our work, we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We are just genuinely excited to be part of the generation that will ultimately write the epilogue to this paradigm shift. We would love to hear from you and your ideas on how we can think tank differently.

Our Work on Political Economy

Focusing exclusively on economics or politics is to miss the mutual influence one exerts on the other. Political decisions can have as dramatic an impact on economic outcomes as economic fundamentals can reshape politics. Where the twain shall meet is where the insight resides.

This is especially so when it comes to emerging markets or mixed economies where the visible hand of the state operates alongside the invisible hand of the market. But advanced economies are also converging with emerging markets on state intervention, as industrial policy is being ramped up in the name of economic security. Whether it is our work on debt or elite politics or decarbonization, we sit at the intersection of economics and politics.

Our Work on Technology

Technology has become a key source of economic, geopolitical, and values competition—one in which the United States and China play starring roles. But the intense focus on bilateral competition obscures how complex and multinational tech supply chains are and how talent and knowledge are actually distributed. That focus also has the tendency to hype respective capabilities and progress rather than anchor assessments in empirical reality.

In an open-source world, it is clear that no major power has a monopoly on innovation and technological progress. The future rules of technology and breakthrough innovations could emanate just as much from Beijing as they do from Palo Alto or Paris or Seoul.

Our work—from human capital to supply chains and from chips to companies—looks under the hood of how technology progresses. It assesses relative capabilities and analyzes the players, the industries, and the ecosystems from which today’s technologies are scaled and where tomorrow’s technologies might spawn.

Our Work on Energy

Mature and emerging technologies, as well as the economics of renewables, have shifted the broad political narrative. Whereas climate action was once construed as constraining growth, it is now anchored in winning a clean energy future that requires a whole lot of manufacturing, mining, material science, and market capital.

Yet nowhere is industrial policy as prominent as it is in this endeavor to remake the global energy landscape. While China, America, and Europe will largely determine the pace and scale of the energy transition in the foreseeable future, their successes and failures will also determine the decarbonization blueprint for the global south.

Our work—from electric vehicles to nuclear power to hydrogen—brings a sharp lens onto how this crucial energy transition will transform industries, institutions, and incentives in the process.

Interactives and Multimedia

Our interactive, multimedia, and data visualization assets aim to make content accessible for both specialists and generalists and may not always fall into our core areas. By harnessing technology and thoughtful design, we build research products that engage our users differently.