Tag Archives: economics

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Space colonisation – Ceres first, Mars second?

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The dwarf planet Ceres An interesting post over at Colony Worlds suggests that the dwarf planet of Ceres would be a better bet for early human colonisation than Mars – it has supplies of water ice and valuable minerals, but a far shallower gravity well, making it a more viable proposition from logistical and economic perspectives. Personally, I think getting a few working orbital colonies around our home planet would be a sound first move … but after that, why not? [Image from Wikipedia]

[tags]space, Mars, Ceres, colonisation, economics[/tags]
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The bad and good of biofuels

cornfield We’ve been hearing a lot about the potential of biofuels, particularly ethanol, as being a great (and green) answer to our global dependence of petrochemicals. Which is true, to a certain extent.

The problem being that corn ethanol, while itself a cleaner fuel, is a horrendously climate-intensive crop, the cultivation of which may cause as many (if not more) problems than it solves … which is why we’d be wise to look at the numerous other sources for the same chemical (like algae, prairie grass and fast-growing trees) which won’t cause an environmental and economic trainwreck further down the line. [Via Worldchanging]

Of course, we’ll need to do something about the enticing boondoggle subsidies that are making corn ethanol such an enticing political playing piece first. [Image by Jpeg Jedi]

[tags]environment, biofuels, economics, agriculture[/tags]
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Anatomy of a bank run, offline and online

You may or may not have heard about the ‘bank run’ of panicking customers withdrawing their savings from beleaguered UK lending institution Northern Rock over the last few days. While the phenomenon of snowballing panic causing the initial problem to worsen is an old one, it has moved to populate the online world in parallel with the offline – so many customers are trying to access Northern Rock’s website at once that their servers can’t cope and return 404-page-not-found errors, adding to the impression of an institution in trouble. [Image from Getty, copied from BBC article]

As a side note, the Financial Times is predicting that this is the start of a rough period for finance on both sides of the pond – welcome to Crunch Week.

[tags]finance, banking, economics, internet[/tags]
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The Disunited States – the American economic model has five decades to live

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Paul Saffo, notable futurist and advisor to the World Economic Forum, believes there’s a fifty percent chance that the United States will have ceased to be a single nation within the next half a century – and that this would be a desirable outcome. I’m not an economist (nor do I play one on television), but I think I can see the points he’s making here. The question is – would the end result be something like the ancient Greek city-states, or some bizarre balkanized smorgasbord of corporations and micro-nations, as in Stephenson’s Snow Crash? [BeyondTheBeyond]

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Economics2.0 – bandwidth as currency?

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Ad-hoc wireless networkThe planned launch in January 2008 of Tribler, a variation on the BitTorrent protocol, is being hailed by the software’s creators as a way of sharing the burden of peer-to-peer networks more fairly, by treating bandwidth as a commodity to be traded on a global market. Which sounds great to me, especially as it’s open source … but isn’t it somewhat inevitable that someone will make a hacked version with the altruism overridden?

But leeching is hardly a new phenomenon, and by and large the web’s development as a resource for the average user can be largely ascribed to altruistic behavior by participants – Victor Keegan at The Guardian thinks the gift economy of the web actually promotes overall economic welfare. I’m inclined to agree, but I can think of a few counter-examples – how about you? [Image by Peter Kaminski]