The rise of China and India isn’t that surprising, says Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy, when you consider that both cultures have dominated world affairs for most of the last 2,000 years. What is unprecedented is Africa’s “astonishing demographic transformation”. In 1914, the continent’s population was about 124 million, 7% of the world total. Now it’s 1.4 billion, and by 2050 it could be up to 2.5 billion – around a quarter of the global population. Unlike in the rest of the world, where birth rates tend to fall as countries develop, many African nations still see stubbornly high levels of fertility: in large parts of west and east Africa “the desired family size remains in excess of five children”. No wonder Nigeria is expected, by 2050, to replace America as the world’s third most populous country.

Britain is getting older, says Charlie Peters in The Critic, and old people are more likely to vote than the young. That’s why our politics has become so stagnant: anything that might spur economic growth and help the young, like housebuilding, is opposed by well-off pensioners who are more interested in the price of their house going up. Taxes on workers are rising but cuts to pensions are nowhere to be seen. Unsurprisingly, record numbers of people are now planning to emigrate as the cost-of-living crisis bites.