How it works

Seven coupled blocks, stepped a year at a time, across every country on file. Here is what is actually inside.

The model

Markets that clear on price

Energy, food and semiconductors each have supply, demand and a price. Supply answers the price on a lag, and a fab takes four years to build, which is the whole reason a chip shock hurts rather than clearing overnight.

A trade network

Bilateral intensity from partner size over distance, adjusted for the agreements and frictions on file. Tariffs, export controls, sanctions and freight all bite through it, and governments answer in kind with a probability rather than automatically.

Supply and demand output

Productivity, labour, capital and energy set what an economy can make. Demand is written as a sum of named contributions. The gap between them drives prices and employment.

Money

A Phillips curve for inflation, a Taylor rule for the policy rate, a currency that mean reverts and responds to rate differentials and risk, and Okun's law for unemployment with an explicit automation displacement term.

The state

Primary balance, debt dynamics, a risk premium that rises with debt and sanctions, and a financing crisis hazard that can fire in any year.

People and power

Births, ageing, migration driven by income gaps and stress, political stability, tension between blocs, and conflict hazard that rises with tension and falls where nuclear weapons are involved.

Why the causes page can be trusted

Growth, inflation and unemployment are not solved and then decomposed afterwards. They are built as a sum of named terms, which means the bars you click are the arithmetic the engine actually ran. Trend, technology, interest rates, fiscal stance, external demand, energy and food, input constraints, conflict, the global cycle, confidence and the unmodelled shock. They add up to the number they explain, every time, and each one opens into what drove it.

Open any term and you get the underlying series, the country's position and the partners or prices responsible.

Why the comparison can be trusted

Random draws are addressed by scenario seed, future number, year, country and channel through a hash rather than pulled from a sequence. Two scenarios run on the same seed meet the same luck in the same years, so the difference between them is your lever and not the noise. That is what makes an A and B comparison meaningful at a few hundred futures instead of needing tens of thousands.

The levers

Trade

Import tariffs, export controls on chips, compute, energy, food, minerals or capital goods, sanctions packages and trade agreements. Any of them can be imposed by a coalition so the whole bloc acts at once.

Resources

Oil and gas production, energy capacity investment, food and minerals supply, carbon price, water stress and the warming path.

Money

Policy rate shifts off the rule, the inflation target itself, currency devaluation and capital controls.

Government

Fiscal impulse, corporate tax, strategic sector subsidies, military spending and debt restructuring.

People

Migration intake and fertility policy, with the twenty year lag to the labour force that makes the second one so slow.

Technology and geopolitics

AI capability steps, automation cost, fab capacity, productivity shifts, armed conflict and pandemics.

Reading about it is slower than trying it

The baseline run takes about two seconds.

Open the simulator