Most people in metropolitan areas face choices when we travel — to go by car or to use public transit? These decisions have a huge impact on our wallets, on the environment and on our quality of life.
Tags / economist
Tagged with “economist”
(43)
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1. Human Media: Passengers documentary about transportation choices
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Jan Chipchase on future trends
The executive creative director of global insights at frog design on watching devices change hierarchies in the world’s poorest places.
Tagged with jan chipchase future economist
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Data, Data Everywhere
Interview with the author of the recent Economist special report on Big Data.
Tagged with big data interviews economist data analysis
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More or Less: Behind the Stats — Blowing cold, then hot
Why is it harder to predict the climate in 2050 than 2020? Tim Harford investigates reports saying the world will cool over the next two decades before global warming resumes. The More or Less team examine a claim that beautiful people have more daughters. And they use maths to decode a Beatles musical mystery.
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Against Intellectual Property
http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/mpprog/sfubmo_levine.htm
Copyrights and patents have come to be called “intellectual property,” a phrase which suggests that they are much akin to ordinary property. They are not: they are a government grant of monopoly power. The argument in favour of intellectual property must then be that these monopolies provide important offsetting incentives for innovation and creation.
However, all the available evidence suggests that patents and copyrights are a failure, and inhibit innovation and creativity at least as much they encourage it.
In this lively and entertaining lecture, Dr. David Levine documents the history of intellectual property, arguing that the best strategy for stimulating creativity in 21st century society is to eliminate copyrights and patents entirely.
SFU/BMO Bank of Montreal Lecture Series
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On Point: What’s A “Livable” City Now?
New surveys are out on the world’s most livable cities. The places you’d really like to be to raise a family, enjoy life, start a business, savor days and nights and, well, there’s hardly an American city in sight.
The top 25 from the Economist’s Intelligence Unit finds Vancouver, Canada at the top of the list with Vienna, Melbourne, Helsinki, Osaka close behind.
And not a single American city. Pittsburgh sneaks in at 29. Monocle magazine gives Zurich top honors. And Copenhagen, Tokyo. Only Honolulu makes it from the USA. What’s up?
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/06/whats-a-liveable-city-now
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Russ Roberts on MPR Midmorning, 18 June 09
Obama proposes remaking rules governing finance
The way the financial industry is regulated will change dramatically if a proposal by the Obama administration passes Congress. The goal of the package is to make banks and other financial industries more transparent. Opponents don’t like giving the Federal Reserve more regulatory power. Guests
Phil Mattingly: Economics reporter, Congressional Quarterly.
Russell Roberts: Professor of economics at George Mason University. He has a weekly podcast, EconTalk.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/18/midmorning1/
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How Human Psychology Drives the Economy – Robert Shiller
Acclaimed economist Robert Shiller challenges the economic wisdom that got us into the current financial mess, and puts forward a bold new vision to transform economics and restore prosperity. The global financial crisis has made it clear that powerful psychological forces are imperilling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, ‘animal spirits’ are driving financial events worldwide.
Shiller reasserts the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of ‘animal spirits’, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Managing these animal spirits argues Shiller, requires the steady hand of government - simply allowing markets to work won’t do it.
In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviourally informed Keynesianism, Shiller looks at the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in today’s economic life - confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, and a concern for fairness - showing how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.
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Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities
Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?
Speaker: Professor Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard, and Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston; Chair: Howard Davies
(Nov 13, 2008 at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE))
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Munger on the Nature of the Firm
From http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/01/munger_on_the_n.html
Mike Munger, of Duke University, talks about why firms exist. If prices and markets work so well (and they do) in steering economic resources, then why does so much economic activity take place within organizations that use command-and-control, top-down, centralized structures called firms? Within a firm, most of the goods and services that the workers use are given away rather than allocated by prices—computer services, legal services and almost everything else is not handed out by competition but by fiat, decided by a boss. A firm, the lynchpin of capitalism, is run like something akin to a centrally planned economy. Munger’s answer, drawing on work of Ronald Coase, is a fascinating look at the often unseen costs of making various types of economic decisions. The result is a set of fascinating insights into why firms exist and why they do what they do.