Rethinking the Economy

How’s the Wall Street bailout going? If you’re on Wall Street, it’s going really well. For the rest of us? Here’s the assessment of Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general managing the Troubled Asset Relief Program:
“These banks that were too big to fail are now bigger,” Barofsky said. “Government has sponsored and supported several [...]

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A few weeks ago, I checked out the Solar Decathlon on the National Mall. It’s a competition sponsored every two years by the Department of Energy in which 20 college teams — mostly from the US, but with a few contenders from other countries — build a small house that runs entirely on solar [...]

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[Part 4 of the Getting Green Done book review]
Unlike a lot of other books on the business of going green, Getting Green Done argues that government has to be a big part of the solution.
business is only one key to addressing climate change. Businesses are nimble, motivated (by profit), and powerful enough [...]

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[Part 3 of the Getting Green Done book review]
In Getting Green Done, Schendler makes a confession: a lot of enviros drive him batshit.
As Aspen Skiing Company’s Executive Director of Sustainability, Schendler sometimes gets calls like this:
“I wanted to talk with you about your season passes. Is there a way to recycle [...]

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One last point from Cassidy’s article. Any time we start talking about regulating finance, Wall Street says, your rules will stifle our innovation! Cassidy’s reply:
That’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew [...]

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A great piece by John Cassidy in the New Yorker on one major reason why Wall Street crashed.
According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some [...]

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[Part 2 of the Getting Green Done book review]
As we saw last week , in Getting Green Done Auden Schendler says the Enviro movement has to get comfortable talking about their mistakes as well as their successes. Here’s one of his.
When Schendler first started at Aspen Skiing Co., he told Eric Calderon, [...]

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