The Internet's governing body, ICANN, is allowing for a dramatic expansion of the namespace with a host of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). That is likely to create money for ICANN’s primary constituents, but only added costs for companies and the public at large.
Europe needs to face reality and initiate the difficult adjustment processes within the real economy that are necessary to rebalance the eurozone. Eurobonds would numb the distressed countries’ current pain, but they – and the eurozone as a whole – would end up far sicker than before.
Let's be clear: we do need to tackle climate change. But this does not mean that we should just cut all emissions. Burning fossil fuels also has significant benefits, and we should weigh those benefits against the costs.
The United States no longer dominates the world economy to the extent that it did in the past. Just as the US now has to share the world stage with other economies, the dollar will have to make room for other international currencies.
We may live in a post-industrial age, in which information technologies, biotech, and high-value services have become drivers of economic growth. But countries ignore the health of their manufacturing industries at their peril.
Terrorism is a form of theater. It works not by sheer destruction, but rather by dramatizing atrocious acts against civilians. It is like jiu jitsu: the weaker adversary wins by leveraging the power of the stronger against itself.
The debt dilemmas in Europe and the US prove yet again that elected officials will ignore long-run costs to achieve short-run benefits, and will act only when forced, in a doomed effort to circumvent the laws of economics and revoke the laws of arithmetic.
Could the financial crisis of 2007-2008 happen again? Since the crisis erupted, there has been no shortage of opportunities – in the form of inadequate conclusions and decisions by officials – to nurture one’s anxiety about that prospect.
America’s enormous budget deficit is now exceeded as a share of national income only by Greece and Egypt among all of the world’s major countries. And the economic downturn since 2008 is only part of the reason.
Perhaps for the first time in modern history, the future of the global economy lies in the hands of poor countries. The United States and Europe struggle on as wounded giants, casualties of their financial excesses and political paralysis.
Murdoch's media empire is a model of the modern global enterprise – a model that is now threatened by the fallout from the scandal that started with phone hacking in Murdoch's British press operations. But the Murdochs' problems reflect the underlying weaknesses of "family capitalism."
No one expects venture capitalists to divert their resources to village schools, but perhaps they could focus a little more on training new employees rather than poaching them from the competition at inflated salaries.