What This Year's Nobel Prize in Economics Says About the Nobel Prize in Economics
The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. Read More »
Last Chance to Own the First Copy of SuperFreakonomics
The charity auction for the first copy off the presses of SuperFreakonomics will wrap up later today. Read More »
Radical Reform of Executive Pay
The recent proposal by the Fed to regulate bankers’ compensation practices is understandable given the events of the past two years, but setting caps on salaries and bonuses misses the fundamental problem of compensation on Wall Street. Despite the public resentment surrounding finance-industry payouts, the fact is that no one objects to paying for performance. We just want to make sure we’re not getting fleeced or paying for pure dumb luck, and this is where the problem lies. Read More »
How Do You Feed a City?
Architect Carolyn Steel’s TED talk, posted this week, discusses how ancient food routes shaped the cities we live in today and the future of food in our world. Steel believes we can “use food as a really powerful tool, a conceptual tool, a design tool to shape the world differently.” Read More »
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