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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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Transcript

Question: Have we seen the worst of the housing crisis?

Paul Krugman: Okay no. Housing crisis is just in the first act, right? The . . . All the indications are that we’ll have . . . housing will be depressed for years to come. A lot of the financial stuff, there are some charts that have been making the rounds showing the mortgage resets lying ahead that are likely to force a lot of people into . . . into delinquency and into foreclosure. And those have just started. There was a huge wave of lending with low teaser rates that expire after two years. And that wave of lending took place in 2005, 2006. So in the years coming, we’re going to start to have these . . . these terrible burden of, you know . . . The financial situation will probably get substantially worse before it gets better. So no. Housing is . . . is gonna be a millstone around the economy’s neck for quite some time.