Over at Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen proposes an interesting intellectual parlour-game*. If you could travel to some distant point in the past, say 1500AD, what could you do to improve the future and help people living in 2013?
It's been National Schumpeter Week on the British High Street. Gales of creative destruction have swept away three well-known chains of stores whose business models had been made obsolete by the last decade of technological progress*.
It's against the law to download a pirated £0.99 MP3. But (technology permitting) it seems that printing your own £249.00 iPod is fine.
The Economist has put a toilet on the front page of its innovation issue. I get it - toilets are useful. They're ubiquitous. Sanitation has saved millions of lives.
News out today suggests that Lord Heseltine's review of industrial strategy will call for foreign takeovers of British businesses to be subject to a "public interest" test.
Who are the neglected heroes of public service innovation? Perhaps it's not the inventors, but the adopters.
Is innovation always a good thing? It's a question I'm often asked, usually rhetorically. The speaker normally has one of two things in mind: innovations that are intended to do harm (cluster bombs, drone strikes) or innovations that go horribly wrong (credit default swaps, grey goo)*.
Martin Wolf wrote a widely quoted article in today's FT arguing that economic growth is slowing down in a long-term and structural way. There's a lot to say about this (I fundamentally disagree with the underlying paper by Robert Gordon that Wolf bases his paper on).
So the bank is out of the bag. Today at the Lib Dem party conference, Vince Cable announced the establishment of a state bank to get credit flowing to businesses. But as the last five years have taught us, there are all sorts of banks: good banks, bad banks, casino banks and zombie banks. Will this new bank be the right sort of bank, and will it help business to grow?
What if the problem with the economy is that good businesses can’t grow and bad businesses can’t shrink?
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