The influential Mohamed A. El-Erian, who serves as Barack Obama’s Global Development Council chair, has staked out a new position on the effectiveness of monetary policy in his latest blog posting for Project Syndicate. He argues that the low-growth era for Western economies is dissipating and believes that politicians need to pick up their game to intervene more and reduce the dependence on central banks for economic policy.
Max Braun, a Google engineer, got tired of looking at himself in the mirror and only seeing himself. He set out to produce a mirror that everyone has been saying was possible but no one was producing. He bought a two-way mirror, a display panel, a controller board and a bunch of components and created something that tells him the time, the weather, and the news as he shaves, combs or brushes his teeth. No, it doesn’t comment when he has puffy eyes.
We love to think we’re amid some sort of industrial revolution propelled by technology. Feels good, doesn’t it?
Well, we may not be amid all that’s cracked up to be. Paul Krugman, the economist/Nobel laureate who writes for The New York Times, looks at a new book by Robert J. Gordon, himself an economist and historian. The Rise and Fall of American Growth calls for a little perspective on the techno-optimism and a recognition that so many other eras did so much more to change society. The five bigger ones: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and modern communication. Moreover, Gordon argues that the rapid economic growth we have come to expect was “a one-time-only event,” Krugman notes.
Many of us at a certain age might be grateful we didn’t have social media early in careers, but at the very least we ought to sympathize for those in that playground who seem to forget that what we create is something everybody can consume.
Quartz takes a look at how the Internet wants to get us fired. Where once this cascade of shocking, shaming and severing was confined to the public figures and titans of business, now it has invaded the ranks of the rank and file. No one is social media-safe
Trade is thought of as good, thought of as the source of prosperity for all, and thus thought of incorrectly. The Economist points out globalization has the potential to help everyone. Underline the word potential. Sudden exposure to foreign competition, even in richer countries, can depress wages and employment for a decade. To work better, though, politicians have to stop thinking of assistance, retraining and additional spending as goodies to buy off the opponents. They’re necessary, the magazine notes.
The New York Times likes British Columbia’s carbon tax. It notes how effective it’s been and argues that a tax on oil, as proposed by the U.S. Administration, would be good policy to invest in mass transit, high-speed rail and research into clean energy and self-driving cars.
