Four For Friday | May 1, 2026
LF217 Mazzucato's fixing economics, Stress isn't good for you, Mulgan's fixing global intelligence and homelessness can be addressed by public + private capital + Conference AI tool
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Just landed back in Australia after two intense weeks in Japan at Sushi Tech among other things. Enjoy!
1. Mariana Mazzucato wants to fix economics
Celebrity economist Mariana ‘mission-driven’ Mazzucato and Spain’s Deputy PM have launched the Global Council on New Economics for the 21st Century, a sort of constitutional convention for the field. It aims to give the discipline a wake up call.
Picking Spain is smart - it’s the top performing European country currently, and having a moment. Economics hasn’t actually fared very well as a tool for stability and rising living standards since the 1980s. The Council’s beef is not with markets but with the orthodoxies treated as physics: that they self-correct, that governments should stand back, that growth trickles down. Drawing on Mazzucato’s forthcoming book, The Common Good Economy, the body will interrogate eight cross-cutting assumptions, from what we measure to who governance serves, with reform proposals due autumn 2027.
The So What: Economics is overdue for a reckoning. This could force it justify its assumptions, and impacts.
2. Maybe stress is killing you after all
For years, I’ve been a happy believer in hormesis, the idea that mild stress makes you bounce back stronger. From Nietzsche to David Sinclair, this appealing idea was one of the reasons why I suffer cold showers and try to have a fast day once a week. It also makes me fret less about doing too much and living on caffeine-fuelled deadlines. That rather satisfying idea may be up for question.
A new University of Sheffield study suggests the opposite. By manipulating the Integrated Stress Response (ISR) in tens of thousands of fruit flies, the team found that suppressing the GCN2–ATF4 axis, not activating it, extended lifespan robustly, even under dietary stress.
Chronic ISR activation, by contrast, shortened lives. The findings complicate yeast and C. elegans orthodoxy and reframe ISR as a pharmacological target for healthspan, not just disease.
The So What: Aging biology keeps humbling its own dogmas. Hormesis as a theory is coming under stress - let’s see if it bounces back stronger.
3. Mapping planetary intelligence
Geoff Mulgan often appears in this newsletter, as someone who is consistently both novel and bold. He hasn’t got the memo about staying in your lane. His latest paper for the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, argues that humanity’s biggest challenges, from pandemics to climate change, demand systematic study of “macro-cognition,” the orchestration of intelligence at planetary scale.
Drawing on examples from ICARUS satellite tracking of animals, Google Maps, global medicine and the International Solar Alliance, which aims to mobilise $1 trillion in investment by 2030, Mulgan identifies seven organising capabilities of intelligence at any scale: anchoring, updating, nesting, sharing, balancing, generating and synthesising.
Most existing “intelligence assemblies” cover only a few. The COVID-19 response, which forced decision-makers to juggle sixteen distinct types of knowledge with no method for weighing them, exposed how poorly we synthesise across domains.
The So What: Designing planetary intelligence is now as urgent as designing AI. We are starving the former.
4. Guess what? Homelessness is not intractable
The evaluation of Britain’s £50 million ‘Everyone In’ Social Investment Pilot offers hard evidence that blended capital works. This is systems investing in the wild, and I’m thrilled to see hard data, which is rare.
Seeded with £30 million of public and Better Society Capital money, then expanded with a further £138 million of private investment, the scheme procured 528 properties through three fund managers, with 91% sited in the local authorities of greatest homelessness need. The London leases ran 15% cheaper than private lets; other stakeholders saved up to 22% versus private rents and over 70% versus temporary accommodation. And it makes money - the portfolio is forecast to yield ~8% real returns by 2030.
The So What: Patient capital can house the homeless cost-effectively, but only when wrapped around relational, person-centred services.
Conference hack of the week - Farah The Fox
The Skoll World Forum in Oxford has just concluded and this custom GPT was created to help people navigate the potentially overwhelming array of attendees, speakers and topics. It’s a great idea and I expect conference organizers will be increasingly using these tools to help attendees network more productively. We’ve been building a similar tool, so would be great to hear from any meeting organizers looking to test out this kind of next generation, AI-powered event support.
That’s all for now, happy weekend everyone.
- Stephen