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.
Once again, the Wall Street Journal has published its annual ranking of economic forecasters. Using methods developed with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the newspaper calculated which forecasters made the smallest errors in their prognostications for 2012. There’s just one problem: the ...
Imagine if you could ask the Most Valuable Players of all 47 Super Bowls what they’d learned about winning football games. Wouldn’t that be a great resource for any coach, player, commentator, or fan? As it happens, just such a resource is now available in economics, yet almost no one is using it ...
What's the Big Idea? Ten years after Goldman Sachs dubbed the countries Brazil, Russia, India and China BRICs, what does this term still mean? How have these economies changed? Are they good places to do business? Are there other strong candidates to be added to this group? These questions ...
Does the rise of the robots doom us all to unemployment? The answer is most certainly no. Provocative claims that the United States has reached “peak jobs” and will soon be a “post-scarcity economy” neglect an essential part of the reason why we work. By now you’ve probably heard the argument that ...
Who could have saved us from the global financial crisis? In a word, women. The release of the Federal Reserve’s transcripts of policymaking meetings up to 2007 has shed new light on the machinations inside the central bank as the Great Recession dawned. One member of the Board of Governors cast in ...
What's the Big Idea? The conventional wisdom among economists just a few years ago was that China was manipulating its currency, causing a significant drag on the global economy. Holding down the value of its currency made exports cheaper and thus China more competitive in the global marketplace ...
The latest bout of Washington’s sporadic obsession with reducing deficits is coming at an unhealthy time. Despite the fact that the cost of paying the nation’s debts is now extremely low by historical standards, Democrats and Republicans are talking gravely about the need for belt-tightening. They ...
Forgive me if I’ve already offended you with the title of this piece, but I’m an economist. As such, I tend to weigh up the costs and benefits of just about anything when trying to figure out what it means for society. And when it comes to mass killings, my analysis suggests we have some reason for ...
It’s been a difficult year for economists, who’ve had to endure a combination of criticism when they apparently had the wrong ideas and being ignored when perhaps they had the right ones. Even amongst themselves, they’ve been criticizing huge portions of their own field. But economics marches on ...
What can an economist say about stopping mass shootings? Millions of Americans have views on guns that are deeply rooted in their philosophical, political, and moral principles. But if we put the principles aside and ask what works from an economic perspective, we may have the beginnings of a ...
The debate over the fiscal cliff has spawned a multitude of suggestions for reforming the tax system, including my own. One possible reason for the wide range of proposals, even from mainstream economists, is that the recommendations of standard economic theory may be very different from what the ...
I’ve received dozens of emails since my New York Times op-ed proposing a wealth tax came out on Monday. My goal with the piece was primarily to refocus the inequality debate in the United States on wealth, rather than income. Wealth inequality in the United States is among the most extreme in the ...
Friends, a new world is waiting for all of us. It is a world without want, where every need is satisfied by boundless resources. It is a world of friendship, where war does not exist. And when we get there, we'll achieve immortality. I'm not talking about Heaven, Nirvana, or some other religious ...
Companies are always trying to develop products that make our lives better, but these days some of the most advanced technologies are being aimed at a category that used to be the province of dishwashers and no-iron shirts: goods and services that give us more time. In our daily lives, we all ...
Dear Readers, I made a mistake. In the article below, I said it would take some very high rates of growth to close the $7 trillion gap in Mitt Romney's budget plan. It turns out the gap is not quite so big, depending on your assumptions. The critical assumption I made was that the federal ...