26 - Network State Conference 2026 - Parag Khanna on Where to Find Alpha on the Map

Thank you. Good afternoon. So, when I was a teenager, what one source did every geek like me turn to to devour all of the information we could consume about all of the countries in the world that we had never been to? The CIA World Factbook. Who remembers that if you're old enough? Okay, good. So, you may or may not have known uh or might not know that it was actually discontinued earlier this year. But, in the last decade or so, I'm sure it's web traffic declined pretty significantly because it's more or less been replaced by a vast plethora of hundreds of different rankings and data sets purporting to explain uh political stability, the economic growth, attractiveness, air quality of every country in the world. But, the result of that is that learning about places becomes like the blind men feeling the elephant, right? Everyone, each person seems feel pretends or thinks that they understand the whole, but they really don't get the full picture. So, we tried to overcome this deficit in knowledge, comprehensive knowledge about places through a number of efforts. One of them you're seeing here was called a periodic table of states that we released last year. What we did there is to curate about 30 very specific data sets that really help answer fundamental questions about the quality of a state, its strength, its state capacity, its stability, the things that really do matter, the things you're looking for. And when you strip away the privilege of size, we found came to some novel conclusions. For example, countries in the East like Japan or Korea, fare every bit as well or better than a number of Western societies like the US or Canada or Germany. And small countries like Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden tick all of the right boxes as well. So trying to answer the questions, you know, what really helps you get to know a place better as you're deciding where you want to go and set up a node in your network state. Now we've created a tool that's not just analytically richer and more comprehensive, but also interactive, so you can tailor your queries accordingly depending on what you are looking for in a place. This is called the global dynamism signals. It's more than a hundred data sets that really speak that that cover about 20 different categories and covers every country in the world. And we've specifically focused on really forward-looking indicators like infrastructure quality, investment levels, innovation, the reliability of the electricity grid, the affordability, climate resilience, migration trends. So now you can rank, screen, filter, compare places according to what matters really to you most of all. Now I mentioned migration. And this in the last book I wrote called move, I said this is really the ultimate societal biomarker is measuring migration. If your country is attracting young talent, then it must be doing something right. Young talented people are voluntarily coming to your society. If, however, your country is losing talent, then you must be doing any number of things wrong. But migration data, which helps us point the way to figure out which countries are really healthy societally, is notoriously laggy. The United Nations is still updating data from 2023 and 2024. So, what we did is to apply some real brute force and AI to capture all international flows of people through the end of the year 2025 among all 200 countries in the world. So, that's 21,000 pairs of flows and it's further broken down by wealthy investors, by skilled professionals, students, and tourists. So, now comes the fun part. We also added a AI layer that tracks all policy changes that all countries are undertaking in real time to attract those specific segments into their borders. So, again, there's no better way to know if a country is going to win or lose than by tracking those flows of young people as they vote with their feet and their wallets. So, let me conclude with a reminder that the ultimate mega trend is actually urbanization. It's the best predictor of which places are going to win the future. A lot of people have visions of launching new special jurisdictions and special economic zones around the world. I portrayed exotic geographies that I feel are going to be terraformed through climate change, but in reality, almost all population growth occurs in cities and to cities. We're simultaneously reaching peak humanity, 9.5 billion people, and there's going to be There's 12,000 cities in the world and 11,995 of them already exist. So, understanding where that additional population is flowing is going to help you decide what are the places you want to invest in and bet in in the future. The question I set out to answer today is where to find alpha on the map. And the answer lies in data science tools like this, but most importantly, with yourselves. Make sure that you are in an alpha location and contribute to making it so through your own decisions and investments. So, to learn more, check us out at Alpha Geo. Thank you.