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Welcome to Forbes. Deep sea mining – the gold rush on the ocean floor | Environment. Anger, Not Envy, Is Raising Americans' Ire. More than 2,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters marched near New York’s Bryant Park in May 2012. The movement was formed partly as a reaction against the deepening level of income inequality in the United States. (Photo: Ozier Muhammad / The New York Times) Suddenly, or so it seems, inequality has surged into public consciousness - and neither the 1 percent nor its reliable defenders seem to know how to cope.

Some of the reactions are crazy - "it's Kristallnacht," "they're coming to kill us" - and the craziness is quite widespread. Notice how many billionaires, plus of course The Wall Street Journal, rallied around the venture capitalist Tom Perkins (who compared public criticism of the 1 percent to Nazi attacks on Jews in a letter to the editor of The Journal in January). But even the saner-sounding voices evidently have a hard time wrapping their minds around the notion that anyone might find 21st-century finance capitalism a bit, well, unfair. Mr. The Invention Of 'The Economy' : Planet Money. Wikimedia Commons If you'd asked somebody 100 years ago, "How's the economy doing? " they wouldn't have known what you were talking about.

At the time, people talked about things like banking panics, and national wealth, and trade. But, according to Zachary Karabell, this thing we call the economy — this thing that we constantly measure with specific numbers — wasn't really invented until the 20th century. "It was invented because of the Great Depression," says Karabell, who just wrote a book called The Leading Indicators. He says: It was invented because there was clearly a perception that there was something really, really bad going on but they didn't really know what. So the government starts calculating out this single, official number called national income. When it's released in the depression, this wonky statistic becomes an overnight sensation. In the decades that follow, national income becomes gross national product and eventually GDP — and it sweeps the world.

China Dream | JUCCCE. China Dream The China Dream project seeks to reimagine prosperity and reshape consumerism in China. The goal is to catalyze a new aspirational lifestyle that is innately sustainable for the emergent middle class in China. Shaping the new China Dream (or "Harmonious Happy Dream 和悦梦想" in Chinese) for China is a large-scale co-creation process that involves key opinion leaders from green practitioners, cultural experts, and ad agency thought leaders. Activating these new norms is a multi-channel process, from government, media, brands, academic institutions and more. After three years of co-creation workshops, and consulting with behavior change experts, the China Dream (or "Harmonious Happy Dream 和悦梦想" in Chinese) is defined as: To make the China Dream come alive, we need to build a coalition of volunteers and organizations to help visualize, brand, activate the China Dream.

Please volunteer your expertise or creative services at charliemathews@juccce.org. New York Times. New York Times. We have a G Zero world - Solution make more durable and effective coalitions of the willing. Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Here he gives the talk "The Rise of the Different: Why the Global Order Doesn't Work and What We Can Do About It. " His analysis focuses on global macro political trends and emerging markets, which he defines as "those countries where politics matter at least as much as economics for market outcomes. " China, India and other emerging countries are still poor. They will still be poor for many years. They do not have the capacity for foreign aid and do not have the institutions to do what the developed countries have done. The US is stepping back from leading the world. China is actually two China's - Rural and poor China and Urban and wealthy China Ian Bremmer on China's Reforms US Foreign Policy in Decline Winners and Losers in a leaderless World After a US led world it becomes a world of regions.

Amazon Might Try Shipping Things Out Before You Even Buy Them. Alan Greenspan’s graph of the year: Businesses are (still) holding back on investment. Time has its "Person of the Year. " Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. Here is Greenspan's explanation: Private construction has been a major contributor to every recovery out of recession since 1949—except that of 2009. Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.

Financial Planning for Immortality and/or the Apocalypse — Weird Future. My parents raised me to be financially prudent. It didn’t take, but they tried. They are still trying. For his birthday, my father asked me to tell him I’d read a particular book on financial planning. It doesn’t matter which one, because in broad strokes the lessons are always the same. Here’s how to be financially secure: Step 1: Spend less than you earn. Step 2: Spend even less than that. Past Results In 1889, Otto Bismarck’s Germany set the retirement age to 70 (later, they lowered it to 65, which has become the near-universal standard). In 1930, US life expectancy was around 60.

These aren’t theoretical concerns. “They calculated the figure based on my monthly income from GM lasting me another 10 1/2 years,” Reuters reports retiree Richard Fusinski as saying. And so employers have washed their hands of predicting the future and outsourced Step 3 to each of us. Best not to dredge up past results which do not predict future returns, anyway. Do Not Predict Already, we have a problem. What You Need to Know About the New Equity-Crowdfunding Model.

In her book Cash From the Crowd, Sally Outlaw, founder and CEO of crowdfunding website peerbackers, reveals the secrets of funding your business with help from colleagues, peers, family, friends and even perfect strangers through a crowdfunding campaign. In this edited excerpt, the author provides information on the new equity-crowdfunding model that was authorized by the JOBS Act of 2012.

Until now, crowdfunding has come from backers who donate money with no expectation of a financial return, but that's about to change. The JOBS Act, which offers the first changes to securities law in more than 80 years, enables a new equity-crowdfunding model that allows backers to buy shares in posted ventures. Entrepreneurs who list on equity-crowdfunding platforms will have an opportunity to raise serious capital and must also manage new expectations, responsibilities and obligations to regulators and shareholders.

Related: The Basics of Crowdfunding Some pros of equity crowdfunding include: Equity Crowdfunding. Mebotics. The idea behind the Mebotics Microfactory began when friends who were helping grow a local makerspace, the Artisan’s Asylum, started kicking around the idea of a portable, clean and quiet hybrid manufacturing machine. The concept grew out of a shared frustration – a desire to develop functional prototypes and art pieces in our homes and business (outside of traditional machine shop space) without making a mess or driving our neighbors and spouses crazy. The company incorporated in 2012 and, over the next few years, self-financed the development if 5 versions of the machine.

In that time we received feedback from people both in our makerspace and around the world: toy designers, architects, small apparel makers, novelty manufacturers, and dental implant producers (just to name a few) who share the vision of using an affordable machine capable of working in wood, plastic and metal in the middle of their current offices. Why the market for 3D printing will triple in five years - Quartz. Wall Street is starting to wake up to the potential of 3D printing. This morning Citi analyst Kenneth Wong released a bullish note projecting that the market for 3D printing and related services will triple by 2018, citing the leading companies in this area, Stratasys and 3D Systems.

(Granted, such rapid growth is possible partly because the industry is still tiny, just $1.7 billion in 2011, with the market for 3D printed parts accounting for about half of that.) Wong attributes future growth to such mouthfuls as “broader adoption across more upstream production applications and the consumer end market,” and “increased utilization of existing systems as customers start to extend use case beyond small batch digital manufacturing,” but here’s what that means in plain English. 3D printing will explode in 2014, thanks to the expiration of key patents. The materials with which you can 3D-print something continue to multiply—the latest is plain old printer paper, not to mention human tissue.

The Rise of the Intangible Economy: U.S. GDP Counts R&D, Artistic Creation. On July 31, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will rewrite history on a grand scale by restating the size and composition of the gross domestic product, all the way back to the first year it was recorded, 1929. The biggest change will be the reclassification—nay, the elevation—of research and development. R&D will no longer be treated as a mere expense, like the electricity bill or food for the company cafeteria. It will be categorized on the government’s books as an investment, akin to constructing a factory or digging a mine. In another victory for intellectual property, original works of art such as films, music, and books will be treated for the first time as long-lived assets. It’s a great idea, if late. GDP is the main yardstick of macroeconomics—the sum total of all goods and services produced in the country.

The effect of the revision will be immediate. Of course, it’s hard to work up much excitement over an upward revision in historical GDP figures.

Currency

2013 trends and How to analyse the industry in a mobile first world? Introduction In this article, I present some ideas which form the basis of my course at Oxford and also my tech policy analysis. It represents 2013 trends as I see them but also a framework to analyse these trends going forward I will update this every month and also discuss in my Oxford course. If you wish to be a part of this community and discussion and receive updates, please contact me at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com For the past few years, we have been asking ‘Is this the year of mobile?’ We no longer do so. Mobility is well and truly upon us and it is disrupting industries. Over the years, I have been analysing disruptive trends in mobile both from a technical perspective and also from a transatlantic policy perspective. This has analysis also has been a part of the course I teach at Oxford.

The question now is – How to analyse the industry in a mobile first world? Why does this matter? Mobility is more than ‘access via a mobile device’. The VC/angel investor Chris Dixon commented. The Fourth Turning Predicts a Coming Crisis for the Economy & Society. Chris Martenson: Welcome to this Peak Prosperity podcast. I am your host, of course, Chris Martenson, and we are living through one of the most exceptional periods of human existence defined on one side by extraordinary technological advances and on the other side by ecological and resource limits that we are just starting to bump up against. And I think although it is really tempting to think of this time being different, it will not be, not really. If history does not repeat, it sure does rhyme, and if looked at correctly, history is not names and dates strung along in a blur marked by events, but rather it has a structure that repeats.

A grand motif that plays over and over again, but maybe with different notes. To help us get our bearings today is Neil Howe, an American historian, economist, demographer, and best known for his work with William Strauss on social generations and generational cycles in American history, including the book, The Fourth Turning. Chris Martenson: Yep. Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Others Put $5.9 Million Into Company Which Lets You Invest in Humans. Bill Moyers: WATCH: The United States of Inequality. Originally published at BillMoyers.com Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn't, but they are usually so high up the ladder they can't even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast and growing. The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County live longer than those who live next door in less-rich Putnam County.

The Post concluded: The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation's growing economic inequality: Even as the nation's life expectancy has marched steadily upward... a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder. That's true across America. Inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating. Think about this. Reinhard-Rogoff Austerity Research Errors May Give Unemployed Someone To Blame. Are you unemployed? Perhaps you should blame some of America's most celebrated economists, and their troubles with math. Tuesday's big non-Boston news appears to be the rather significant economist punch-up now underway between "This Time It's Different" authors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff -- whose work is a foundational text among austerity's highest priests -- and University of Massachusetts Amherst economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, who obtained the data spreadsheet that underpinned the conclusions of the Reinhart-Rogoff 2010 paper, "Growth In A Time Of Debt" and found it to be riven with errors.

The Roosevelt Institute's Mike Konczal can claim credit for penning the most viral summary of Herndon, Ash, and Pollin's take. Reinhart and Rogoff have initially responded by suggesting that the Amherst economists do not threaten their original findings. Depending how this battle royale shakes out, someone may have to surrender their calculator. The Wallaby Card | Wallaby Financial. Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt. " Their "main result is that...median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.

" Countries with debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent have a slightly negative average growth rate, in fact. This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget states their study "found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth. " The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth. " Is it conclusive? They find that three main issues stand out.

List of alternative cryptocurrencies.

Tourism

Modern Gunmaking’s Surprising Tools - Plastic and 3-D Printer. Rare Earth Elements Infographic Shows the Impact of Resource Depletion on Green Technology. Making sustainability as routine as examining market trends.... Sustainability. The Inequality Speech That TED Won't Show You - Restoration Roundtable. Dancing With Derivatives. The Fastest-Dying Jobs of This Generation (and What Replaced Them) - Jordan Weissmann - Business. German voters must break the Merkel mindset that got them into this | Robin Wells. Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism. A Free Beginner's Guide to the Sharing Economy. Boards wake up to a shareholder spring. The Sun, the Moon and Walmart.

Kickstarter Sets Off $7 Million Stampede for a Watch Not Yet Made. Peer-to-Peer Equity: Crowdcube. A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100. Www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs Writing/2012/World Happiness Report.pdf. The Wolfson Economics Prize and the Euro-Zone Breakup. 3D Printing is Merged with Printed Electronics (NASDAQ:SSYS) Bifo says relax by malcolm harris | thestate. Small-Town Solar Revolution Has Created Jobs Galore & Driven Down Price of Power in Germany. Essay. The Challenges and Rewards of Local Production. The Amazing Technicolor Localcoat: The Economics of Etsy. Revisiting our limits: 40 years after Club of Rome's seminal work The Limits to Growth, ways to move beyond GDP are still sought. What's Next Big Thing ?) :: (Infographic) Startup Ecosystem: Predator vs. Prey.

Reimagining Capitalism - Polly LaBarre. The Atlas of Economic Complexity. Researchers find a country's wealth correlates with its collective knowledge. Abundance – The Future is Better Than You Think. Long-term-thinking-fpf-report-july-11. UN Declares 2012 The Year of The Co-op: Is This The Future of Capitalism? The Zuckerberg Tax. Could Ecuador be the most radical and exciting place on Earth? Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show. Global economic crisis: could we have predicted it? - Forecasting Net. Ten Things You're Not Allowed to Say at Davos - Umair Haque. The shame and pride of joining food stamp nation - F**ked. Overconsumption won't save America - Food Stamps. The cause of this recession? Economic pundits ignoring history's voice | Simon Jenkins. The Post-Truth Campaign. Bank of America ATMs In San Francisco Turned Into Truth Machines. Davos founder Klaus Schwab: Focus on jobs, morals.

Four Futures.