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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.
Last week Nick Bunkley wrote an article for The New York Times called "Payoff for Efficient Cars Takes Years". His main contention was that "the added cost of the fuel-efficient technologies is so high that it would take the average driver many years — in some cases more than a decade — to save ...
Can economic relationships affect a dictator? Seven years ago, I wrote an article from Damascus about how the European Union was trying to cultivate economic ties with Syria, a country that the United States had labeled a state sponsor of terrorism. Today, those efforts seem to have been futile ...
Attention, extraterrestrials studying political economy and writing about humans on Earth for your doctoral dissertations: you could do a lot worse than starting your research by reading Alan Beattie's new book, "Who's in Charge Here?" If you thought that the North-South politics of the United ...
How about this for an argument to raise the retirement age: If you don't keep working, your community could die off. That's the threat posed by an intersection of biology and economics which could finally make some famous two-hundred-year-old predictions come true. As the world's population grows ...
Credit-rating agencies were among the bogeymen of the global financial crisis, and for good reason. Moody's, Standard and Poor's, Fitch, and others failed to appraise the real risks of billions of dollars in securities that eventually went bad. Now, they're trying to act responsible by jumping on ...
An interesting thing happened yesterday in American politics. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, beat Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, by just eight votes in the Iowa caucuses. But the really interesting thing was how the people who tried to forecast the result ...
Americans are unhappy with inequality. Americans are unhappy with campaign financing. Americans are unhappy with differences in pay and unemployment. And more than anything, Americans are unhappy that the American dream - going from rags to riches - seems to be fading away. Actually, Americans ...
Economic growth is a tough thing to control if the tools you’re using only deal with one part of the economy. The problem is that when you push on one end of an economy, you might be pulling on the other, and vice versa. It’s a lesson that people who work in international development are finally ...
In recent weeks members of Congress have again moved to punish China for keeping its currency at a low value relative to the dollar. It’s fashionable and easy to blame vast, mysterious, authoritarian China for our economic problems. It’s also not quite fair. In fact, China’s currency policy ...
What’s the Big Idea? How many drachmas do you want to bet that Europe’s not out of the woods yet? Faced with the prospect of a Greek default with dire repercussions for European markets, EU leaders Merkel and Sarkozy scrambled in October to craft a complex rescue package. Then at the 11th hour ...
Markets shuddered when George Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister, said he would call a referendum on the latest bailout package being offered by Europe’s economic powers. What scared the markets most was apparently the possibility that the Greeks would choose according to their own interests ...
While countries in North America and Europe suffer through a downturn that has people questioning the very foundations of their economies, something far more positive is happening in South America. Countries that swung for decades between left-wing populism and right-wing authoritarianism have ...
Though the Bush administration never admitted it, its tax cuts would almost certainly push the incomes of rich and poor further apart. As incomes became more widely dispersed, the gap in wealth between rich and poor would quickly grow as well. Even to a non-economist, the reason was easy to see ...
When a country’s politicians can’t get their economic policies right, what’s a central banker to do? Though central banks are supposed to control inflation, that’s not always their only job. The Federal Reserve Act, for example, gives America’s central bank a mandate of “maximum employment ...
Peaceful protests against an economic elite. A violent reaction from authorities. Political polarization and growing unrest. Some months ago, these words could have described Tunisia on the verge of the Arab Spring. Today, they describe the United States. Just like the Tunisians, the Americans ...