The Unintended Mood Altering Political Disaster

S. Philip Morgan and his colleagues have identified an interestingly complex effect, after Obama’s election in 2008, Republicans became more pessimistic about the economic future while Democrats remained more optimistic; that optimism or pessimism influenced decisions to have children – to the advantage of blue states. Claude Fisher, Professor of Sociology U.C. Berkeley The […]

Send in the Clowns, Where are the Clowns, They’re Already Here

The sense of common decency is a rare commodity these days, a very rare commodity indeed, something that has all but disappeared in this day and age. Brazen means someone without shame. The parties that have taken an entire nation hostage just so that they don’t have to reveal certain unspeakable facts certainly have no concept of […]

Golds Up, Better Ideas are Down……

The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago. Venkatesh Rao The RibbonFarm Blog, A Brief History of the Corporation The […]

The Usual Suspects

Two other important examples the study dissects are financial deregulation in the United States and privatization in post-Soviet Russia. In both cases, economic reforms that made a lot of sense in the abstract and in terms of economic efficiency had the unintended consequence of strengthening already powerful political interests. As the powerful often do, they […]

Pull the Curtain Back and Take a Good Look

“Of course the irremediable bitterness in Picasso’s soul, the power of the inner sanction he felt later in life to wound and humiliate others, had to come in part out of the paradox that the paintings that brought him the greatest sums were precisely the works which had cost him the most miserable days of […]

It’s Nothing But Chump Change

“Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy ( […]

Voluptuous Economics and Stingy Sweethearts

MONDRAGON Corporation is a business-based socioeconomic initiative with deep roots in the Basque Country… Fosters participation and the involvement of people in the management, profits and ownership of their companies, developing a shared project which unites social, business and personal progress. From Mondragon’s website If the Best is Yet Come, Exactly What was All of […]

So How Come YOU Know So Much?

“The airline industry has spent untold millions on quieter airplanes and noise mitigation around airports. Telecoms lose money on the copper wire landlines maintained to comply with universal-service requirements. If corporations want to dance in the discothèque, there’s a cover charge called the public good.” Rumble Seat, Dan Neil (My Favorite Auto Feature Writer) May […]

The Greatest Human Folly of All Time

“There is a bottleneck in human history. The human condition is going to change. It could be that we end in a catastrophe or that we are transformed by taking much greater control over our biology. “It’s not science fiction, religious doctrine or a late-night conversation in the pub. “There is no plausible moral case […]

Market Testing Narrative Or How I Celebrated My Vegetative State of Mind

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data New York Times May 6, 2013 Front Page (Below the Fold) Time heals all things. Yesterday while flying back from Seattle I choked down this front pager from the NYT on the notion of using data before the making of a script into a […]