Yesterday the Financial Times reported that in the energy sector neither private firms nor the government are spending as much on R&D as is spent in other tech-reliant industries: US Energy firms reinvest less than 1 per cent of revenues in research, development and demonstration. In contrast, sectors such as IT, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals typically reinvest 15 to […]

A group of private investors spearheaded by Quicken founder Dan Gilbert is leading the effort for a modest recovery in snake-bit Detroit. Taking advantage of the city’s cheap real estate and generous tax breaks for development projects, these investors have ambitious plans. The Wall Street Journal reports: Today, the district is showing signs of progress, with […]

Poverty is getting richer all the time. Ten years ago, a home broadband connection was a rare luxury. Now school kids can’t do their homework without it. The WSJ reports: Much of what students get on the Internet still comes in books available free at school or the public library. But many school administrators are purposely pushing […]

As France announces plans to stand down in Mali, the United States is standing up. With the French announcing sharp limits on their objectives in Mali, the United States is advancing deeper into the north African theater of the global war on terror that the Obama administration ended four years ago and setting up a […]

The situation in Egypt is looking a bit more revolutionary today, in the sense that the country is approaching the status of ungovernable abyss. The army is the country’s best hope to avoid total meltdown and real revolution (as opposed to power shifts among elite political factions). In the short term this state of affairs […]

The trickle of businesses ditching NYC is slowly becoming a flood. First it was banks; now it’s private equity and hedge funds. They’re leaving the high taxes of Big Apple behind for Palm Beach County’s sandy beaches and appealing business environment, the New York Post reports: “Florida is a state of choice,” said Thalius Hecksher, global […]

The BRICs are crumbling. Last month Beijing residents choked on the fumes from the exhaust of China’s extraordinary growth engine. In an article for Fortune, Claremont McKenna professor Minxin Pei calls China’s environmental woes an “economic death sentence”: The World Bank estimated, in a 2007 report, that pollution caused 5.8% of China’s GDP in premature deaths, health care […]

The wonks in Washington have no shortage of miracle fixes for America’s health care system. One is performance rewards, where doctors are rewarded for the quality and efficiency of their treatments. As usual, the theory is sound: paying doctors based on outcomes rather than treatments should reduce the use of expensive or unnecessary medical procedures. But […]

The nature of world politics has changed more rapidly in the past four years than anyone expected. From the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the financial crisis of 2008, the United States had enjoyed a unprecedented period of hegemony. A decade ago, the US defense budget by itself was larger than the combined […]

The blue vision of the future, as I wrote in my last essay, is a bleak one in many respects. If the establishment liberals of our time are right in their future vision, most of the population will be economically surplus; globalization and automation will empower a creative class on Wall Street and in Hollywood […]