economics

I recently had my attention called to a great post on the WSJ.com blog by Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal. Though it’s the opposite of the sort of advice one would expect to get from the Wall Street Journal, it was apparently first posted in 2009 and then re-upped in November, 2012: Read More »

[...] Governments across the world are triumphantly declaring that gas fracking is the solution to our rapacious energy needs. Yet as each month goes by new studies emerge in the United States of how this industry is poisoning water supplies and posing a grave threat to public health. Read More »

Efforts to give the public free access to peer-reviewed papers have reached a milestone: One-half of all papers are now freely available within a year or two of publication, concludes a study funded by the European Commission and released today. [...] Read More »

I've noticed a trend of late.  A significant number of standards efforts are being pushed forwards by funded projects, instead of through unfunded initiatives.  I'd call them "volunteer-led" initiatives, but in an SDO, there are few real volunteers.  I get paid by my employer to participate in standards activities, as do most people I know who are involved.  It is simply a matter direct vs. indirect economic benefit. Read More »

You hear stories about crazy medical bills, but what very few people realize is that the reality of hospital bills can often be orders of magnitude more crazy than what most people expect. [...] Stephen Brill has a very long, but absolutely gripping, detailed analysis of the insanity of medical billing for Time Magazine... Read More »

While federal legislation focuses on payor / provider synergies, there is nothing in the mandated programs beyond pilot projects or experiments according to the legislative texts. Read More »

Peter Buffett, the second son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, worries that the state of philanthropy in America “just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.” At meetings of charitable foundations, he says “you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.” [...] Read More »