We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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From Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman: the economic knowledge you need to navigate a volatile world.
There’s an old joke about a government project to find the answer to that great mathematical conundrum, 2 + 2 = ? When the economist gets his turn to answer, he whispers in the ear of the bureaucrat overseeing the project, “What do you want it to equal?” Social scientists have an unsavory ...
(Caution – this piece is wonkish.) An interesting aspect of the Oregon Health Study, which I wrote about a little while ago, is that it uses the “intent to treat” format of a randomized controlled trial. In this kind of study, the control group and treatment group are still randomized. The ...
Two years ago Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman published a book called Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy . Altman offered predictions for what the global economy would look like 10, 20, 40 years down the road. In the video below ...
This week the New England Journal of Medicine published new results from the Oregon Health Study, which randomly selected people for extensions of Medicaid coverage. To anyone who has studied expansions of health coverage in other countries, the results will not have come as a surprise. They may ...
Everyone's got an opinion about economics. In the punditocracy, in the blogosphere. Wherever you look you see differing views about how we really ought to approach economic policy. The problem, as Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman points out in the video below, is that "it's getting ...
There’s been a lot of discussion in the past couple of weeks about Bitcoin, the online virtual currency whose value has been extraordinarily volatile of late. A currency that’s electronic but as untraceable as cash surely has its uses for some people, but there’s one aspect of it that hasn’t been ...
Tax day is no one's favorite day. But perhaps we can take this opportunity to examine how we can reform one of the most complex tax systems in the world. Big Think chief Economist Daniel Altman has a suggestion to end this long national nightmare: get rid of the corporate income tax. As Altman ...
Just how healthy is the American economy? There’s little doubt that it’s healthier than the euro zone, which seems to spawn a new fiscal or banking crisis every week. But with unemployment still above 7 percent, nobody in the United States is celebrating a revival yet. Could one still be on the way ...
We have heard many pronouncements about how technology will profoundly change our lives in the future, so many pronouncements, in fact, that technology has become a 21st century panacea. It is the answer to all of our problems. It is a problem-solving tool in and of itself. There is a chance ...
If your house got blown away by a hurricane, you’d probably want to build a stronger house next time, right? The same should be true for financial markets. The government is regulating banks and other financial institutions more strictly now, but what else is it doing to make sure there’s no repeat ...
Last week, David Leonhardt of The New York Times offered his latest take on why poor but smart kids have trouble getting into top colleges. In the past, he wrote that the colleges didn’t pursue the kids. Now, he adds that the kids don’t apply to the colleges. Fixing this is important to our economy ...
It’s been a few months since I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times to propose a wealth tax as a way to stem the harmful rise of inequality in the United States. Because of that article and a follow-up posted on this blog, I received a multitude of other, sometimes related tax proposals from people ...
The Federal Reserve differs from many other central banks by having a dual mandate: maximum employment and stable prices. Lately, pundits on the left have accused the Fed of not doing enough on either count. Are they right? The Fed’s goals can come into conflict sometimes, for example, when ...
Before the end of the Second World War, officials from the Allied nations met up at a resort town in New Hampshire to create a new economic order for the coming peace. How exactly this happened is a fascinating story that shows how much personalities and politics could triumph over prudent policy ...
Here are some questions and answers about the forced spending cuts that could occur next week as a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, better known as the sequester, and a proposal for a better mechanism: Is now a good time to cut wasteful spending? It’s always a good time to cut spending ...