Blue-collar capitalists
By: The Economist June 8, 2019 Ida tarbell, the great muckraker of the early 20th century, not only wielded her pen against Standard Oil. She also used it to advocate for better versions of capitalism. In “New Ideals in Business”, a book from 1916, she explained how William Cooper Procter, a pioneering Episcopalian, introduced profit […]
America and its economic allies have announced five “democratic” principles for AI
By: Technology Review May 22, 2019 The Trump administration might be building walls between America and some countries, but it is eager to forge alliances when it comes to shaping the course of artificial intelligence. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a coalition of countries dedicated to promoting democracy and economic development, has […]
Working, Learning, Leading in the Exponential Age
By: John Seely Brown July 2016 John Seely Brown, also referred to as JSB, who will discuss that perhaps business schools need to rethink how to prepare students for a world of constant and increasingly rapid changes and disruptions. We’re all aware that change is needed. Part of the challenge is how do you go […]
Speech recognition technology is not a solution for poor readers
By: Phys.org May 13, 2019 About one in five people is considered to be low literate or illiterate, unable to read or write simple statements. Low literacy can be due to reading impairments such as dyslexia or little or no reading practice. For developing countries with low literacy rates, voice recognition has been hailed as […]
In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant
By: The Guardian February 15, 2017 In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines? Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned […]
The sons of slaveholders quickly recovered their fathers’ wealth
By: The Economist April 4, 2019 Socialism never took hold in America, John Steinbeck allegedly quipped, because the poor saw themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Yet in the case of southern slaveholders, who lost much of their wealth after the abolition of slavery in America and General William Sherman’s scorched-earth […]
The independence of central banks is under threat from politics
By: The Economist April 3, 2019 Critics of economics like to say that its abstract theories lack real-world pay-offs. There is a glaring counter-example: the global rise of central-bank independence in the past 25 years. In the 1970s it was normal for politicians to manipulate interest rates to boost their own popularity. That led to a […]
The IMF adds to a chorus of concern about competition
By: The Economist April 4, 2019 Physicists’ quest for a “theory of everything” is well-known. The equivalent in economics is the hunt for common causes for the rich-world macroeconomic trends of the past decade or so: a shrinking share of the economic pie for workers, disappointing investment and lacklustre productivity growth. These must be reconciled with […]
Slower growth in ageing economies is not inevitable
By: Economist March 28, 2019 For the first time in history, the Earth has more people over the age of 65 than under the age of five. In another two decades the ratio will be two-to-one, according to a recent analysis by Torsten Sløk of Deutsche Bank. The trend has economists worried about everything […]