Technology & Innovation

“Penny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel; it endangers the nation’s future,” says Paul Krugman, who laments the government’s plans to reign in current spending to pay back the budget deficit.

Should the government continue to give loans to students who attend for-profit colleges given their high dropout and loan default rates? Gary Becker and Richard Posner weigh in on the debate.

“In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown,” says The Guardian. The English daily looks at where the Net is taking us.

“The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory,” says Paul Volcker who maps his ideas for reform in The NY Review of Books.

“When something is free, you tend to use more of it. It’s true for buffets and open bars, and it’s the same with carbon,” says The Atlantic while advocating for a carbon tax to slow global warming.

“The causes of underfunded pensions are similar throughout the developed world,” says the L.A. Times while commenting on France’s recent move to increase the retirement age.

The Big Money shines light on for-profit colleges that take federal money but use far more revenue for recruitment and marketing than for educating their students—a higher education crisis?

Naomi Klein takes stock of the Gulf oil spill and finds a deeper meaning beneath mechanical failure on Deepwater Horizon: the West’s cultural hubris in thinking it can control Nature.

Following in the spirit of U.S. tech mogul Bill Gates, billionaire Azim Premji, the Chairman of Wipro and the second richest man in India, announced recently that he plans to […]

“Will Iceland get from bits what Switzerland gets from bank accounts?” the Economist’s Babbage blog asks as Iceland moves closer to being a digital media haven.

While many people think the U.S.’s military superiority is vital to world security, all of the money and energy that we spend on it may be seriously damaging our economy […]

Advances in technology have created the right conditions for free Wi-Fi. Coffee shops and hotels that still charge their customers are being unnecessarily extortionate, says Farhad Manjoo for Slate.com.

Besides the questionable legality of unpaid internships, their popularity entrenches a class system where only the affluent have access to good career opportunities, says the L.A. Times.

Glenn Greenwald says today’s news media do not understand what holding authority accountable means; power wins out, he says: government over the press and business over the government.

Bob Lord, Global CEO of Razorfish, one of the world’s largest interactive marketing agencies, stopped by Big Think’s offices today to talk about the changing role of the Chief Marketing […]

“If the people who brought us television had played by the same rules that today’s wireless carriers impose – we’d probably all be listening to the radio,” Ryan Singel claims.

China could be on the cusp of a new movement that markedly improves the lives of its workers, but the country is at an incredibly fragile moment, explains Leo Hindery, Jr.

Most Keynesian economics makes good sense to Tyler Cowen but he has to admit that the principles adhered to in Germany might actually be better than the Keynesian alternatives.

“The poor need not always be with us. That goal can be achieved if we ensure that workers are paid enough to feed their families,” says The L.A. Times, whose city has pioneered legislation on the living wage.

Buying a home could prove an economic disadvantage now that mobility is necessary to find new opportunities, but moving is an emotionally trying event, says Caitlin Kelly at True/Slant.

Social media’s honeymoon is over, says James Rainey at The L.A. Times, but those bothered by privacy concerns and a distracted lifestyle are rethinking their relationship to Facebook et al rather than quiting.

Digging for the roots of the real estate crisis, Alyssa Katz finds an American culture that believed home ownership would repair broken neighborhoods by increase people’s investment in them.

“Far from making us stupid, new media technologies are the only things that will keep us smart,” says Steven Pinker in his Op-Ed for the New York Times.

Researchers hoping to fuse neuroscience with marketing are studying brain patterns of consumers with the goal of tapping into their subconscious material desires.

NASA says our sun is preparing for a stormy period and, according to the National Academy of Sciences, “A major solar storm could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.”

Ideological debates that lack context during a financial crisis are like a bikini, says Marc Lackritz of the Financial Times: “What they reveal is suggestive; but what they conceal is vital.”

Stanford Economist Paul Romer wants “dysfunctional nations to kick-start their own development” by leasing territory to foreign governments, an idea criticized as “neo-colonial”.

USC’s vice provost of innovation, Krisztina “Z” Holly, thinks PhD programs need to change. If you think about it, it takes even the most amazing PhD candidates around the world […]

Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder and CEO of Seventh Generation—the eco-friendly manufacturer of cleaning, paper, and personal care products—stopped by the Big Think offices today to talk about about his thoughts on […]

There is a phenomenon going on out here in the blogosphere called “good information dissemination”, a trait that often distinguishes us lower paid or usually unpaid bloggers from the members […]