Category: politics
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Causes of Poverty and Prosperity
Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and prosperity, offering new (to me) insights on innovation, technology and markets. It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. […] The…
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Models of Racial Segregation
Tim Harford—the FT’s ‘Undercover Economist’—has produced a video demonstrating Thomas Schelling’s theory of racial segregation, in 2 minutes. Schelling, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”, showed with his Models of Segregation that even a mild preference for the colour of…
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Using Neighbourhood Comparisons to Promote Conservation
By comparing customers’ usage to that of others in the neighbourhood, utility companies are starting to reduce their energy consumption. This, from an experiment conducted by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged…
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The Psychology of False Confessions and Punishment
A recent instalment of Scientific American’s ’60-Second Psych’ discusses a series of articles on why innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and the problems this can pose. Scientists had 206 subjects witness a “staged” crime and then were asked to pick the perpetrator from a line up. They were later told that their…
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Action Through Advertising
Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas: The ads avoided the negatives…
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Setting the Bar for Obama
To ensure we fairly evalute Obama’s presidency, we must ask ourselves now what our expectations are for his term. It’s not as easy as you think, considering that many of America’s current woes should be improved by even a mediocre president. We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole about how Bush was the “Worst. President. Ever.”…
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Inauguration Roundup
The Internet is bustling with news of yesterday’s inauguration of President Obama (it feels strange writing that) and I feel somewhat guilty adding to the overabundance of news. As a compromise I’m going to limit myself to this single roundup post. One intrepid soul has compiled a collection of videos of every inauguration speech from the…
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The World in 2009
The Economist‘s annual issue collecting predictions for the coming year has been released in the form of The World in 2009. From the introduction, by editor Daniel Franklin: Anyone hoping for a period of calm after the turbulence of the past year will be disappointed. For the economy and for business, as well as for…
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Interview with Obama’s Campaign Manager
An interview with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager, David Plouffe: There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don’t have quarter…
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Iran’s Sexual Revolution
Taking the lead from Pardis Mahdavi’s latest book, Passionate Uprisings, The Nation looks at Iran’s ‘sexual revolution’ in these days of political dissent and upheaval. Somehow, one suspects that the grassroots push to change sexual mores cannot be totally divorced from the effort, on the part of feminist activists but also some reformist parliamentarians and…