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The changes around us are simply dizzying. We have restaurants using robots to serve food. We can now pay with our smart phones instead of physical, tangible money. Some supermarkets, including ours, have automated check-out counters. I just read about the wonderful possibilities (and dangers) of ChatGPT — a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence — from answering questions and assist people with tasks, such as composing emails, essays, and code. As a result, a number of jobs will likely become obsolete because of AI technology.

A lower inflation gives us all the more reason to be optimistic this year. It means consumers get the most bang for their buck and are more confident to spend, which will eventually help the economy grow.

What accounts for the ups and downs of popular support for democracy? One would think that if a country has a strong democratic culture then preference toward democracy would at least be stable and consistent. Just for comparison, the Social Weather Stations pointed out that in Europe “except between late 2012 and 2013, satisfaction with the way democracy works has been 50 percent and above since May 1999.”