Economics

Putting a price tag on the ocean might just save it.

Global solutions, like the greening of the world’s financial system, begin with the right story.

Evolution favors less work and more leisure.

Capitalism in space.

What finance will look like when it is controlled by machines.

In a WTF with Marc Maron podcast episode from 2012, musical comedian Bo Burnham said his fortune felt unreal, as if his life were a futuristic VR game. “I could die, take off a helmet, and, look: It’s the Bo Burnham 2000. There’s a whole line of people crying waiting in line,” he told Maron. […]

The case for making money local again.

Why cryptocurrency will always be political.

A conversation with this month’s Ingenious, Venkat Venkatasubramanian.

When we succeed, we often take that success, in retrospect, to be the result of suffering that liquid trinity of blood, sweat, and tears. Perhaps fortune favored you here and there but, by and large, it was your effort and talent—not contingency—that won the day. Nonsense, says Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell […]

Capitalism in space.

“It’s not surprising that the fight-or-flight response is not going to be the most helpful way to deal with a financial crash in the same way that it’s going to be helpful when you’re being attacked in a back alley. It’s because financial markets and financial threats are a relatively new phenomenon.”Photograph by Kenishirotie / […]

Inside the price tactics of the cancer industrial complex.

The surprising message of the statistics of wealth distribution.

Luck has a lot to do with success. We just don’t want to admit it.

New regulations are applying network science to restructure global finance.

Space mining is no longer science fiction. By the 2020s, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries—for-profit space-mining companies cooperating with NASA—will be sending out swarms of tiny satellites to assess the composition of hurtling hunks of cosmic debris, identify the most lucrative ones, and harvest them. They’ve already developed prototype spacecraft to do the job. […]

Using physics to describe social phenomena can work—if it’s the right physics.

After watching The Big Short, I felt I had a decent grasp on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The film, which is being released across the United States today, is based on the book by Michael Lewis, and describes how a few prescient financiers bet against the debt bubble and made millions. Still, […]

The 2008 financial crisis taught me about the illusion of control, and how to give it up.

The 2008 financial crisis taught me about the illusion of control, and how to give it up.

Shutterstock/PremiumVector As legend has it, it takes most of the year for a retail business to become profitable. After months of being “in the red,” in November they are finally “in the black.” This phrase has been used in this way since 1922. But why black? Darkness, and the color black, is typically associated with […]

Samsø runs on renewable energy—and makes money doing it.

While researching my soon-to-be-released biography on John Horton Conway, an iconoclastic and very influential mathematician at Princeton, I organized a research trip to his native England. We visited with Conway’s elder sister, Joan, in Liverpool, and convened a reunion at his alma mater, Cambridge. We met there with a few of his “sum chums,” his co-authors […]

The debate about what caused the 2010 stock market Flash Crash is missing the point.

Sir Partha DasguptaJohn Steele Wealth itself is observable and objective, a measure a value. And something has value if it is desired. But isn’t desire inescapably subjective? If it is, how can economics determine wealth? Almost 250 years after Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the answer to this question remains unclear. “These are still […]

The insight that will save you from being manipulated.

r.classen via Shutterstock In the 1630s, Holland was gripped by the world’s only known case of “tulip mania.” The intensely colored flowers were already a luxury item before then, but their prices leaped when tulips with flame patterned petals hit the market, and they continued rocketing to previously incomprehensible levels. The price for a single […]

A Cambridge economist discusses wealth, health, and disaster.

Technology has fed our addiction to light, and might help us end it.

Edward Teach Commonly Call’d Black Beard Good negotiators know that one of the trickiest aspects of their job is the timing of offers. As negotiations grind on, the costs of a stalemate rise on both sides. Yet if a settlement is reached too quickly, it is possible one side has left money on the table, […]

Why do investors prefer to put their money to work at home?

Luca Cerabona via Flickr You’ve been waiting for today for weeks. You paid more than you could really afford for tickets to a football game, and the day is finally here. But when you look outside your window early Sunday morning, you realize you’d rather not go. It’s snowing, it’s 20 degrees below zero, and […]

  At this stage of the early 21st century, when transparency has evolved from buzzword to business principle, when it’s possible to track anything just about anywhere, you might think it would be a simple matter to choose some everyday product—a cup of coffee, say, or a pen—and trace the paths taken by its parts […]

Earlier this month the FBI arrested the alleged ringleader of Silk Road, an online bazaar that allowed users to buy and sell illegal drugs (among other things), ending its life on the Web—a life that was surprisingly long, considering what was going on there. At the time many people suspected this would have the domino […]

For better or worse, the Nobel Prize is accepted by both society at large and a great many scientists—though they generally loath admit it—as the ultimate metric of success in the sciences. On the good side, the announcement of one of the science Nobels is a surefire mainstream news story dedicated to new, pathbreaking research; […]

It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties. One concept, though, that seems to penetrate the barriers to statistical understanding is the normal distribution, the standard bell curve. Even if people don’t have the mathematical language to describe it, […]

Past disasters help us prepare—and make us pay attention.

How shipping containers made distance irrelevant.

How shipping containers made distance irrelevant.

Why food aid needs to overhaul its delivery system.

The banana’s journey from the plantation to you is one long science project.