In my last post I gave several reasons why I think the ‘good society’ is a useful concept. There is another reason. The concept of a ‘good society’ may help us to think more clearly about progress.
What is the problem with progress? I am just about old enough to remember the 1950s when the most [...]

The CMIE Consumer Pyramids data shows that in all their income categories, more than 50% of households have a mobile phone. It is only in their bottom category `Lower Middle Income – II’ that only 37.5% of households have mobile phones. From `Higher Middle Income – III’ upwards, the incidence is above 80%. If you [...]

Sanjeev Sanyal in Business Standard : Building cities for 21st century India, Delhi (which leads you to delhinullahs.org), and Calcutta. Also see: The Sustainable Planet Institute.
Why investment banks were fated to be roadkill, [...]

I recently came to a rather obvious, yet remarkable insight. The 20th century was a truly unique and remarkable moment in human history. There is not a single aspect of human civilization that changed less during the 20th than in any of the centuries that came before. Population, economic output, [...]

In 1993, before the World Wide Web and before the commercial Internet, AT&T ran a set of television advertisements. They are visible on Youtube. At first blush, a lot of it sounded wide eyed and futuristic. But to people who were in the field then, everything in [...]

President Obama has made the advancement of renewable energy sources (RES-e in greenspeak) an integral part of both his environmental and economic policies, and Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens has enough belief in its potential to invest heavily in wind power. But as thirty plus years of research spending and ineffective regulations have proven, that’s [...]

There have been more words written about the iPhone “phenomenon” than perhaps any other single piece of technology. So it might seem like another blog would be just one more for the pile.
But the iPhone presents a perfect example of technology making its mark on consumer behavior. A recent article in the LA Times discusses [...]

One concept most scientists agree on is that water is necessary for life. Because of this, finding water on Mars has become a mission for NASA. In the October 3 issue of Science, it was reported that the Phoenix mission to Mars has found minerals that “are indicators of liquid water in the past,” according [...]

“Eat your vegetables,” my mother told me when I was growing up in America in the 1950s. “Children are starving in Europe.”
My mother’s postwar economic geography sounds comically antiquated today; she could never have foreseen a world in which the euro is stronger than the U.S. dollar. But in another sense she was half a [...]

In about 10 years we could all feel a little closer, technologically speaking, to George Jetson. Although our cars probably won’t be flying, they could be driving themselves. In June 2008, Carnegie Mellon University issued a press release stating that their robotics institute had just received a $5 million grant from General Motors. This money [...]