Rethinking the Economy

In an interview with Wired, Vivek Kundra, Obama’s Chief Information Officer, says Obama plans to post online every scrap of government information they can and make them easily to search. Why?
The key is to have debates and analysis and discussions that are fact-based. And for everyone to have access to that raw data, [...]

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On Wednesday, The Kojo Nnamdi Show had a great example of how understanding actors & their ecosystem can be crucial for pushing the economy towards our values.
Today, middle-class professional folks like myself can get great tasting local organic produce from farmers markets, CSAs, etc. for a good chunk of the year. But for many folks, [...]

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Recently NPR ran a piece about the impact behavioral economists — the folks who argue that people aren’t calculators — are having on the Obama administration. NPR gave a sample of the dizzying amount of hard empirical research backing up behavioral economics, then asked, “So why would economists assume that human beings are so hyper-rational?” [...]

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There’s another reason that we have to choose together if we value work life balance: if we don’t, we’ll hurt kids.
Not the kids of computer programmers. The market’s done a truly terrible job so far at creating computer programming jobs with worklife balance. But as our population ages, the number of people who absolutely have [...]

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Suppose you want to be able to work hard at a job you like but also have time for your family or for a life outside work. Womenomics, new book just excerpted by BusinessWeek, says no problem, the market’s going to take care of it. Why? Because most of us really want it:
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Now that I’ve laid out some basic principles & assumptions, it’s time for my first extremely rough draft of a model for thinking about the economy to create a better world. With the principles & assumptions, I’ve been thinking about them for quite a while. This model? This is my first time — the “Stumbling [...]

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As we saw in the last post, one reason computerizing healthcare records can be a disaster is that the people designing the software don’t pay attention to how people will actually use it.
Some software designers argue that the way to avoid this mistake is to use “user-centered design.” Don’t assume that nurses in a hectic [...]

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