“Macroeconomics has not done well in recent years…” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The standard models didn’t predict the Great Recession; and even said it couldn’t happen. After the bubble burst, the models did not predict the full consequences.” In a hugely relevant recent paper titled “Reconstructing Macroeconomic Theory…
Each and every year, I have the pleasure of judging at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Tens of thousands of enterprising students from around the world compete, with a handful making it to the finals in Houston, Texas. At this incredible event, student entrepreneurs pitch to the crème-de-la-crème of global…
Money is a strange phenomenon. Our modern notion of it mean that (in essence) it is intrinsically useless apart from as a medium of exchange. Our government, regulators, law and communities agree that phenomena (whether a physical banknote or an electronic ledger such as a bank account) have certain value,…
Many of recent history’s most significant market events have manifest in what was (previously) the extreme of the market. These “bubbles” and “crashes” follow power laws, meaning that (in theory) they could reach any size and fundamentally threaten the functionality of the entire financial system. Typical central-bank and policy…
It’s quite conceivable that the grandparents (or even parents) of the future will be made to feel even more archaic as the young of that generation look at them quizzically and state “…are you serious? You used to use bits of paper as money?!” Money is a cultural abstract. It…
The perception that we learn from our mistakes is just one in a long-list of cognitive and behavioural biases that exist in the human mind. As WIRED reported in 2009, “Researchers from MIT have shown that the brain learns more after a success than a failure. This study indicates, contrary…
“Behold, the lewd, pornographic embrace of two great American pathologies…” wrote David Simon, “Race and guns, both of which have conspired not only to take the life of a teenager, but to make that killing entirely permissible. I can’t look an African-American parent in the eye for thinking about what…
Originally Published in Entrepreneur Country, July 2013 “Throughout much of history… ” writes Prof. Edward Barbier, “a critical driving force behind global economic development has been the response of society to the scarcity of key natural resources, such as land, forests, fish, fossil fuels and minerals. Increasing scarcity raises the cost of exploiting…
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These accumulating errors can foster feelings of the world being against us, a sense of continuous misfortune, and the magnification of everyday stresses and unhappiness.
With Foursquare, our original app was a good idea but it wasn't a hundred million users good idea. The data behind the app, and what we do with the data? That's our good idea. That's our hundred million dollars in revenue idea.
Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to 'wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.' They're not getting rich; they're barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. That's crazy. That's a crazy society and a crazy life.
He was just always looking for that hockey stick effect, and he would always tell me, and others, that you might get it 60% right, but go for the 100% right. And that might just be turning one other lever to the right or to the left.
The reality is that most consumers aren't excited by incremental changes. To capture consumers' attention and make the market take notice, you need meaningful innovation—something genuinely new.
Ten in-depth articles distilling insights from over 550 interviews with the world's leading thinkers, creators, and changemakers.