Geoengineering Is in the Air
Levitt recently wrote about geoengineering going mainstream – i.e., being featured in the M.I.T. Technology Review. That fine publication may not be as “mainstream” for the rest of us as it is for Levitt. But now NBC Nightly News has weighed in on the topic. Read More »
Can Public-Funded Entrepreneurship Work? A Q&A With the Author of Boulevard of Broken Dreams
In recent months, the U.S. government has taken on a challenging and controversial new role: private sector investor. This development has raised a host of questions about the government’s role in the economy and a new book by Josh Lerner, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed – and What to Do About It, is required reading for anyone hoping to understand the issues. Read More »
The Quiet Danger of Non-Inflation-Adjusted Stock Returns
In today’s Wall Street Journal, E.S. Browning has written a quietly important article (gated) about the fact that stock-market returns are almost never adjusted for inflation. While most shrewd investors factor in this omission, my sense is that a great many people never think about it, and therefore significantly overestimate their investment gains. Read More »
Where Is All the Hard-Time Crime?
Despite the recession, the Associated Press reports, U.S. crime rates continue to fall in 2009 compared to last year. Sociologists and crime experts are citing the economic stimulus, people staying home from lack of work, and even an aging population as possible causes of the drop. Read More »
Prediction Markets vs. Super Crunching: Which Can Better Predict How Justice Kennedy Will Vote?
One of the great unresolved questions of predictive analytics is trying to figure out when prediction markets will produce better predictions than good old-fashion mining of historic data. I think that there is fairly good evidence that either approach tends to beat the statistically unaided predictions of traditional experts. Read More »
Quotes Uncovered: Revenge Served Cold and Lobotomies
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round. Read More »
Incentivized Altruism
Only one in ten Israeli adults is an organ donor and the country is addressing the situation with an innovative new policy. Organ donors and their close relatives will now receive priority if they require a transplant. Read More »
Geoengineering Goes Mainstream
The MIT Technology Review — one of my favorite magazines –
writes about geoengineering in the January/February 2010 issue. Much of what is said in the article will be familiar to people who have read SuperFreakonomics, but it also talks about carbon capture, which we didn’t discuss much.
Read More »
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