In the New York Times, Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik are proposing to pre-emptively deal with market power issues arising from the likes of Google and Facebook by advocating for social graph portability. Rather than use price regulation or antitrust, the propose a reallocation of property rights. As they note, this has happened before: [I]n …
Energy fuels the Star Trek Economy
Here is an article I wrote forecasting what Canada might be like in 150 years. Canada +150: Energy fuels Star Trek economy William Shatner as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk is depicted on a commemorative stamp issued by Canada Post in 2016. Handout/Canada PostJoshua Gans, University of Toronto Editor’s note: Canada Day 2017 marks …
Technology Policy and the Trump Administration
Technology policy has been a low priority for most voters in presidential elections in the post-war era. The most recent contest was no exception. Arguments about technology policy never made it into campaign commercials, to say the least, nor even a minute of the televised presidential debates. So it goes. Many denizens of the high-tech …
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Why are peer reviews private?
That is a question raised by the experience of a "rogue" neuroscientist profiled in Wired today: SAM NASTASE WAS taking a break from his lab work to peruse Twitter when he saw a tweet about his manuscript. A PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College, Nastase had sent his research out for review at a …
Ken Arrow: The Greatest
Ken Arrow passed away at the age of 95 yesterday. There will be many who write about his many achievements. Ken won the Nobel prize in 1972 (shared with John Hicks) and was and still is the youngest person to ever win that award. This is all the more amazing since he got a late …
Exit, Tweets and Loyalty
That is the title of a new paper by Avi Goldfarb, Mara Lederman and myself. In 1970, Albert Hirschman wrote a widely read book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, whereby he noted that economists relied solely on a particular mechanism -- exit -- to think about how organisations that aren't performing well are disciplined. Don't like …
Top Posts of 2016
As is traditional, here are the Top Posts of 2016 at Digitopoly The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence The Entrepreneurship/Inequality Myth Adult colouring books reminds us that innovation lies outside economics Top Ten Open Questions for the Techno-Optimist What will it take to disrupt Facebook? Neither Uber nor Lyft believe that sharing is the future …
Top Ten digital events of 2016
Hello good readers! It is time once again for a retrospective look at the top ten digital events of 2016. And what a year it was – elections, political intrigue, hacking, and more! Some very impressive people and action deserve their just rewards, i.e., fifteen seconds of snarky comments. The award is called a Sally. …
A Toast to Eli
Delivered on Nov. 12, on the occasion of Eli's Bar-Mitzvah. My dear son, awesome Eli. This may be the last time in the next few years I can get your attention for an uninterrupted five minutes. Sorry to do this in public. Try to smile. A Bar-Mitzvah traditionally marks the time for passing into adulthood. …
Messiness and automation
Tim Harford is the finest expositor of economic ideas today. That is a view I have held for a long time. While his first few books stayed within the economic view of puzzles his last two have moved beyond that tradition. Adapt looked at how failure breeds innovation. And now he has produced Messy a …
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