As the U.S. election campaign nears its climax, Donald Trump is amping up his claim that the failure of opinion polls to predict the U.K.’s June vote to leave the European Union presages a similar surprise in his favor on Tuesday. While there are some lessons to be learned from the Brexit referendum, other conclusions aren’t backed by the …

  A funny thing happened on the path to disruption. This decade, most of Silicon Valley’s big societal claims have turned out to be wrong. These claims arguably began around the time this cycle’s real expansion began, in late 2011. Two scholars’ 2011 text, “Race Against the Machine,” looked at some of the problems plaguing the U.S. economy —stagnant wage …

  Pankaj Mishra Africa is “rising,” or so authoritative sources declared a few years ago. An Economist cover story in 2013 amplified the claim; the Wall Street Journal carried a series of articles on economic growth in Africa under this title. African “lions,” according to a report published as recently as September by the McKinsey Global Institute, are “on the …