Rethinking the Economy

The Guardian’s Elliott Ross has been mucking around in Big Pharma’s never-ending quest to make sure that research is slanted their way. It isn’t pretty.
When doctors are deciding which drug to prescribe a patient, the idea behind evidence-based medicine is that they inform their thinking by consulting scientific literature. To a great extent, this [...]

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Great article in the Huffington Post about the epic battle in DC between retailer lobbyists and bank lobbyists over the fee retailers pay when you use your credit card. My favorite quote:
One frustrated moderate Democratic senator asks to remain anonymous so he can speak freely about his legislative education. “I’m surprised at how much [...]

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Exhibit A of why passing good policy isn’t enough, courtesy of Think Progress:
According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, the banks’ spending on lobbying in the first quarter of 2011 was actually higher than it was in the first quarter of 2010, when Dodd-Frank was actively being debated:
Wall Street and the financial [...]

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Recently, I’ve had conversations with two different friends where I wanted to bring up the theory work I’m doing. They aren’t folks who read Brad DeLong, Dean Baker, or Kevin Drum for fun, and they aren’t lefty activists. They’re just good folks who think what’s going on in our country is messed up and want [...]

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Going after players like the Chamber of Commerce is a good idea for greens. But, says Grist’s Dave Roberts, how about also rattling some Dem’s cages?
It would be a terrible mistake for climate hawks to abandon the top-down/money field of battle and decamp entirely to People Politics…. The problem is that greens have [...]

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A little more than a year ago, I wrote a snarky post about Bill McKibben’s plans for 350.org; it didn’t seem like he had a real analysis of power or a real game plan. A year and a quarter later, it’s a different story. 350.org has merged with 1Sky and Naomi Klein [...]

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After playing around with Pieces Round 2, I have 2 ideas about where to go with Checks and Balances:
1) Instead of treating Use Checks & Balances as one of three core principles, I think it makes more sense to think of it as part of a larger piece about the role of power in [...]

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Recently I saw Dan Heath give a talk on a book he and his brother Chip wrote, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. I was really impressed by his ability to take some pretty complex ideas and crunch them down to a simple image: a rider (our analytic side) on [...]

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An interesting idea from Alexis Madrigal, via an interview with Grist’s David Roberts:
DR: Your book is about a series of failures, but it shows that there are better and worse failures. Some increase our knowledge, but in some cases, a bunch of work and thought and science just goes poof. How do we fail well [...]

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As a followup to Monday’s post on We Aren’t As Smart as We Think We Are, 2 quotes:
Fujio Cho, former Chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation:
We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and [...]

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