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It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!

With Greece and Ireland in economic shreds, while Portugal, Spain, and perhaps even Italy head south, only one nation can save Europe from financial Armageddon: a highly reluctant Germany. The ironies—like the fact that bankers from Düsseldorf were the ultimate patsies in Wall Street’s con game—pile up quickly as Michael Lewis investigates German attitudes toward […]

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What’s Killing Carbon Capture?

Yet only two years in, the future of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is in jeopardy. On July 14, American Electric Power pulled the plug on its CCS efforts, citing a weak economy and the “uncertain status of U.S. climate policy.” CEO Morris said AEP and its partners “have advanced CCS technology more than any […]

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Stop Blaming Wall Street

Much of what liberals blame on financialization is a result of profound changes to both the United States and the global economy that date from as early as 1968—well before the onset of financialization. In fact, the growth of the finance sector was partly a product of these developments. It is true that the speculative […]

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Bad Education

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ […]

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Can Rob Kalin Scale Etsy?

“Etsy has made it possible for a lot of small businesses to get off the ground,” says Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media and the publisher of Make magazine, which covers the do-it-yourself economy. “But even the most successful crafters run up against the limits of their own labor. Handmade can be a limited idea.” […]

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The Printed World

The printing of parts and products has the potential to transform manufacturing because it lowers the costs and risks. No longer does a producer have to make thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of items to recover his fixed costs. In a world where economies of scale do not matter any more, mass-manufacturing identical items may […]

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Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?

“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the […]

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