“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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Passing Through: Why the Open Internet Is Worth Saving
One could also read ‘The Master Switch’ as a much bolder attempt to influence the future of the information economy, not just net neutrality. In the book and in recent public appearances, Wu has focused on the growing power of Apple, Facebook, and Twitter—not the usual contestants in net neutrality debates. He believes that some […]
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 […]
The Great Afghan Bank Heist
The troubles at Kabul Bank stand as a parable for the sometimes malign effect that the influx of billions of foreign dollars has had on this impoverished country since 2001. While the Western money spent has done a great deal to create a modern economy, much of it has been captured by a tiny minority […]
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 […]
Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants
“We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem,” said John Reed, 71, a former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc., who estimated only 25 percent of needed changes have been enacted. “I’m astounded because we basically dropped the world’s biggest economy because of an error in […]
What Good Is Wall Street?
Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell […]
After the Great Recession: Interview with President Obama
This was our third interview about the economy, the first two occurring during last year’s campaign. And while the setting was decidedly more formal this time — the Oval Office — the interview felt as conversational as those earlier ones. We sat at the far end of the office from his desk and spoke for […]
Nate Silver: The End of Car Culture
It’s not just erratic gas prices and a bad economy that’s hurting automakers. It may be that Americans are changing.
