Tag Archives: economics

The Rise of the New Global Elite

A nice long-form piece from The Atlantic on the phenomenon and dangers of the New Plutocrats… not just Lloyd Blankfein and his parasitic bankster ilk, but nearly everyone who stands at the so-called Commanding Heights of industry, including productive innovators.  … Continue reading

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When do fuel costs actually matter?

Kim Stanley Robinson gave a fun talk at Google a couple of years ago in which he brought up the possibility of large, slow, wind powered live-aboard bulk freighters, among other ideas.  I was reminded of it by this post … Continue reading

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The Box That Changed the World

The cost of moving a shipping container between most any two points on Earth is about $5000, and only part of that cost is fuel.  So if your container of goods is worth much more than that, then their price … Continue reading

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Markets and Morals

A good talk from Chautauqua on the interaction between markets and morals.  Some interesting examples of morally ambiguous markets: countries paying one another to take on refugee acceptance obligations and the outsourcing pregnancy to impoverished surrogate mothers in Gujarat, India.  … Continue reading

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Fluid norms or Meta-ideology

Steve Randy Waldman takes Krugman and the US left-of-center more generally to task for their implicit assumption that our national ideological stage is somehow not subject to being shaped over time.  Casino games and sport have fixed rules.  Politics does … Continue reading

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A life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL and LED light bulbs

Life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL, and LED light bulbs – It’s important to make sure when you’re using a new technology that supposedly saves energy, that you haven’t just shifted the energy consumption from the operational to the manufacturing … Continue reading

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Nationalist accounting tricks

Nationalist accounting tricks – from The Economist: The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation. You can … Continue reading

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The Finite World

The Finite World – Krugman at the NY Times talking about the resurgence in global commodity prices over the last year.  Economic recovery in developing economies driving the markets, with the US, and indeed the entire West, largely irrelevant.  Not … Continue reading

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Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards

Usually when people say that “better is the enemy of good enough”, they’re pointing out that striving for perfection can be a distraction from just getting the job at hand done.  There are other dynamics that involve these concepts too.  … Continue reading

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Links for the week of December 9th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.

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