Society

This week’s New Yorker magazine features Ian Frazier on Theo Jansen, a Dutch artist who makes kinetic sculptures called Strandbeests that walk along the beach. In the video below, Frazier discusses the sculptures and how they fit into…

This is what American education now feels like

We are seeing the specter of instability in the growing protests of income inequality, economic distress of the middle class, and economic and political power of the very wealthy. There is Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., and similar…

Some of the dominant policy issues of today – immigration, energy, the emergence of China – have their analogues in the great Industrial Revolution. The key government policies that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution in…

It was not immediately clear to many when the current crisis began that it was going to be this kind of event. The G7 and IMF understand how the cash register works and have vast experience in tweaking the cash register from time to time.…

He is a remarkable man, full of energy and optimism. He said something about himself that I found wonderfully humble

Great graphic from the Economist. Note that 7 of the 10 are government-run. Amazing WalMart employs almost as many as the People’s Liberation Army. Gives new meaning to the “Human Wave Theory.”

In the US, there is a heated debate about America’s government pension scheme Social Security. The Republican frontrunner for President Rick Perry has called it a ‘Ponzi scheme’, for which he was derided by the previous Republican…

The neoliberal idea is to dismantle the government’s ability to regulate markets to steer growth and economic advance in the national interest. They claim that this is an alternative to centralized planning. But the reality is that it…

Rick Bookstaber opines about a future world in which the flood of information being produced will be filtered by third parties like Facebook and Google with as yet unpredictable consequences for society. Perhaps these filters are just…