Category Archives: economics

economics and behavior

Most people have a naive view of money based on the model of the household budget. They’re not used to thinking about money as an artificial token of exchange backed by the totality of productive capacity in the economy, whose … Continue reading

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experience economy

The basic idea of the experience economy was in my head soon after I got to ID, but I am only now reading it firsthand. The 1998 HBR article seems to be an excellent blueprint for creating a design consultancy … Continue reading

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invasive species

Henry King (of Doblin) makes a widely-recognized observation that the recession will lead to innovation. He takes it one small step farther: as the economy picks up again, we’ll see emerging new business models and unexpected fast-growing players in many … Continue reading

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droughts and margins

Droughts kill societies. Along with using up resources, the straight out vagaries of nature are not amenable to our long-term goals. It’s not always our own human nature that drives the death of society – although in this light these … Continue reading

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economics

There are two basic principles on which economics is based, and they are both false. 1. People act in their own best self-interest. In fact, that doesn’t always happen – it’s demonstrable that people don’t do this. They have social, … Continue reading

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Bottom, Middle, Top of the pyramid

A project I worked on last semester parallels work that is being done at google.org – my project for Larry Keeley’s class (dqe1.com/files/juncture-proposal.pdf) focused on creating an ‘opportunity engine’ that connects various NGOs like Kiva, Grammeen Bank, and Heifer Intl. … Continue reading

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http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about the nature of the financial system with a framework similar to the viewpoint I developed while reading about Godel and the philosophy of science a couple years ago. Basically, he says that while logic, … Continue reading

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