Technology & Innovation

While people wonder daily about the future of the newspaper, music and publishing industries, the television business seems to be surviving on its own terms. Sure it has lost revenue […]

Gary Becker and Richard Posner of the University of Chicago discuss the merits of a Value Added Tax as a replacement for income tax and a solution to American budget deficits.

Of all old media platforms, TV has been the best at adapting to the Internet and still enjoys popularity while the CD, the newspaper, and possibly the book, are in decline.

“To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position,” writes Sven Birkerts.

Plenty of people on Wall Street knew that a crash was coming—and that they responded by grabbing all the profit they could, writes Christopher Hayes. He thinks they should face criminal sanctions.

Paul Krugman writes that the Greek crisis demonstrates the dangers of nations putting themselves in a “policy straitjacket.”

Faulkner would sacrifice his grandmother for his fiction—Anne Lamott, however, would not. For writers who, like most of us, have the goods on their family and friends, “honest can be […]

Big Think’s Peter Hopkins will interview journalist and tech entrepreneur John Battelle in Mountain View, California this afternoon for the HP-sponsored webcast “New Marketing in the New Normal.” Battelle, the […]

After months of struggling with unending debt, the time has come for Germany to step in and help Greece. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, was less than happy about […]

“Americans must be willing to show a greater appreciation for the things government rightly does on our behalf and have an honest discussion about how to pay for them,” writes Dennis Jett.

James Bridle writes that publishers need to look beyond one-size-fits-all definitions of their product, and take a long look at where and how people are reading.

The Los Angeles Times began placing ads within its editorial stories this week; they couldn’t have come up with a more misguided or damaging effort to bring in revenue if […]

Benjamin Kunkel thinks that, absent a political movement for full employment, the U.S. will continue to have fewer jobs—and those with jobs will be increasingly exploited.

“For centuries in the past we’ve been in the center of the world.In fact, you know, ‘China’ in Chinese means ‘the middle kingdom,’ that we are in the middle of […]

I used to have a joke I told all the time, back when the mortgage business was booming, about the “loan officer’s tool kit.” If I saw someone standing in […]

“Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid,” writes Megan McArdle.

The Internet hasn’t brought the global peace, love, and liberty that many believed it had promised. “A networked world is not inherently a more just world,” writes Evgeny Morozov.

This Thursday, April 29, Big Think will be interviewing Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr., a.k.a. Perez Hilton, in Los Angeles—and we’re giving you, Big Think readers, the chance to contribute questions […]

“With all the uncertainty and anxiety these days over landing a job with a steady paycheck, more job seekers are finding it harder to resist fudging on a résumé or job application,” writes Anna Prior.

“Too much debt is always dangerous,” write Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. It’s dangerous when the government is borrowing from foreign governments, as well as when it does from its own citizens.

The Economist is conducting a live debate on whether GDP growth is a poor measure of improving living standards; two of their columnists start the debate.

The wealth disparities of naked capitalism are indefensible, but so too is the welfare state; there must be a third way, writes the New Statesman.

Though popularly billed as the spokesman for the free-market, it’s high time we realize Adam Smith felt government intervention in markets was necessary.

Is China’s interest in Africa’s resources a path toward development for the Dark Continent or is it yet another round of colonialism?

Rather than apologize for recent Western economic dominance, we should try to copy its model and implement it in developing nations to reduce poverty, writes David Landes.

Ernst Weizsäcker, Co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, believes that we could be doing five times better than we are when it comes to addressing global […]

For Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz, a business was born from a bar of soap. For most of his life, Goetz washed his face, body, hair and shaved with the […]

Behind the scenes at the German-language version of Wikipedia, a small cadre of dedicated volunteers gets into bitter disputes over what is true and what isn’t.

“Requiring derivatives and synthetic securities to be registered would be simple and effective; yet the legislation currently under consideration contains no such requirement,” writes George Soros.

The most recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning is Mark Fiore, a freelancer whose only medium is electronic. His iPhone app was rejected long before he was […]