The Economist believes it, so now it must be official: higher education will be transformed in the coming decades. Their Business Insider blog attributes this revolution to three trends: On one front, a funding crisis has created a shortfall that the universities’ brightest brains are struggling to solve. Institutions’ costs are rising, owing to pricey […]
That’s the argument put forth recently in the Economist. Technological innovation is lowering the barriers to creating new devices, appliances and busnesses. And, they argue, this is not just another dot.com bubble: Today’s entrepreneurial boom is based on more solid foundations than the 1990s internet bubble, which makes it more likely to continue for the […]
That is the question raised by the research of Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon. He argues that long-term trends indicate that the US economy has already seen a significant drop in productivity growth over the last 40 years, and that this may only be a harbinger of a complete halt to productivity growth: The analysis […]
The Economist’s Free Exchange blog has a graph comparing the productivity of state economies (measured in GDP output per hour worked) versus the extent of urbanization. The conclusion? More urbanized states tend to have higher productivity. To take it a bit further, there are some highly urbanized states that are even more productive than they […]
It is hard to tell whether economic optimism is justified these days. BusinessWeek reports that the US jobs outlook is brightening thanks to gains in manufacturing and mining–thanks mostly to the expansion in gas extraction (fracking, anyone?) On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal reports that Germany’s economy is in the midst of a […]
. . . the Economist reports that individuals are threatened with hunger and important counter cyclical programs are being damaged when America needs them most: Take food stamps, a programme designed to ensure that poor Americans have enough to eat, which is seen by many Republicans as unsustainable and by many Democrats as untouchable. Participation […]
