Harry Truman famously begged for a one-handed economist. Why? He was sick of his economic advisers saying "on the other hand." Charles Schultz expressed similar frustration here. The idea that economists hedge their bets or disagree constantly with one another is a feature of the discipline. We see it today over issues such as the deficit and health …
Google is putting the "auto" into automobile
If the last big revolution was replacing muscle power with machines, the next one is automating and augmenting more mental tasks. Henry Ford and compatriots replaced the horse, now Google is working to replace the driver. According to John Markoff in the New York Times, their self-driving cars have now logged over 140,000 miles on California …
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Finding Yahoo's way
Last year I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar at Yahoo Research. One of the things that interested me about that part of Yahoo was the fact that it had, in my field of economics, made some very significant hires from academia. In a time where some academically oriented labs had fallen aside, Yahoo …
The Present and Future of Digital Publishing
Here is what we know about publishing. It is going digital, and that means traditional publishers have to switch their complementors — the term we use to describe firms that do essential things but are not strictly suppliers. Traditional publishers' complementors were printers and distributors. Their new complementors will be whoever can get their digital editions to …
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Driving can't be frictionless, but can shopping for gas?
Pull into a parking lot, open the right [mobile] app and you may be able to save a dollar or two on your next fill-up. Over the course of a year, you might even save enough money for a decent meal out. That's from an article by Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times on an emerging …
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Digitopoly 