Rethinking the Economy

There’s one thing Democrats and Republican politicians agree on when it comes to healthcare reform: digitizing healthcare records could be a godsend. When it works, it can improve patient care, reduce medical errors, and save billions of dollars a year — a crucial consideration given the threat that skyrocketing healthcare costs pose to our economic [...]

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Most economists start from the same assumption about organizations that they make about people: they are rational and make well-informed, calculated decisions based on their self-interest.
You might ask, did these economists ever have a real job? If so, were they taking Acid or Ecstasy most of the time? How did they get the idea that [...]

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When most economists talk about the economy, they start from the assumption that people are calculators. If you want to understand how the economy works, they say, pretend that people are rational and that they have all the info they need to make a decision. Take a gazillion people making decisions in their rational self-interest, [...]

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Now that I’ve laid out some basic principles about how we can — and can’t — shape the economy, it’s time to take a closer look at some of the bizarre assumptions economists make when they talk about the economy
We’ve already seen one bizarre assumption: as much as they can, economists ignore how [...]

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We need to remove from the investment banking and the commercial banking industries a lot of the practices and prerogatives that they have so lovingly possessed. If they are too big to fail, they are too big to be allowed to be as gamey and venal as they’ve been — and as stupid as they’ve [...]

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An interesting article by Newsweek’s Sharon Begley about how Greenpeace acts as a check on corporations by helping companies interested in protecting the environment and smacking upside the head companies that aren’t — in short, by Stacking the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys:
As [Kimberly-Clark] CEO Thomas Falk began a speech to [...]

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If a lioness wants to catch more gazelles, she could practice sneaking up on them. She could work on her sprinting skills. In short, she could increase her odds of succeeding according to the current rules.
But if a lioness was a business, she’d have another option. She could try to get a law passed discouraging [...]

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