SHORT FILM
Open Future, The Economist, 4 May 2018
Although there is a lot to learn from Marx, his solution was far worse than the disease. At the same time it can’t be said that today’s capitalism, dominated by immense inequality and financial crises has triumphed.
For more from The Economist and their Open Future project, click here.
SHORT FILM
Open Future, The Economist, 17 April 2018
Liberalism has been the dominant political philosophy in the West for more than 200 years. Populists say liberals are too elite and are out of touch with ordinary people. Here’s what you need to know about liberalism and its place in modern society.
For more from The Economist and their Open Future project, click here.
SHORT FILM
David McWilliams, Punk Economics, ft.com
And, of course, outsiderdom is politically located where the nationalist old and disenfranchised you intersect. Outsiders are not defined by traditional labels, but they do form strange coalitions. So the small shopkeeper could well have conservative instincts, while the twenty-something tattooed barista could be liberal to her core. Yet both of them see themselves as outsiders, and neither has a voice, but what they do have is a vote and every once in a while, if pushed, they say – enough!
For more from David McWilliams and his work on contemporary economics, click here.
Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.
ARTICLE
Linda Poon, City Lab, Sep 11, 2015
The most valuable visual information that these maps convey is the density of a particular area. Planned right, a dense city can be a positive environment for productivity. Griffiths explains that the clustering effect creates “agglomeration economies.” “If you cluster a whole lot of people close to each other, with skills that aren’t necessarily the same,” he says, “you get opportunities for new creations.”
America’s cities and towns spent as much on water and sewage at the start of the 20th Century as the Federal Government spent on the Post Office and the Army.
What they needed was investment in their children. What they needed was safer streets. What they got? A monorail.
BOOK
Edward L. Glaeser, Penguin Press, 2011
Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.
For a talk by Edward Glaeser at UC San Diego summarising this book click here. For a discussion of Glaeser’s work on eliminating barriers to innovation for food trucks by The Urbanist, Alan Davies click here.