Browsing: Economics

New regulations are applying network science to restructure global finance.

Using physics to describe social phenomena can work—if it’s the right physics.

The 2008 financial crisis taught me about the illusion of control, and how to give it up.

While researching my soon-to-be-released biography on John Horton Conway, an iconoclastic and very influential mathematician at Princeton, I organized a research trip to his native England. We visited with Conway’s elder sister, Joan, in Liverpool, and convened a reunion at his alma mater, Cambridge. We met there with a few of his “sum chums,” his co-authors […]

The debate about what caused the 2010 stock market Flash Crash is missing the point.

The insight that will save you from being manipulated.

r.classen via Shutterstock In the 1630s, Holland was gripped by the world’s only known case of “tulip mania.” The intensely colored flowers were already a luxury item before then, but their prices leaped when tulips with flame patterned petals hit the market, and they continued rocketing to previously incomprehensible levels. The price for a single […]

A Cambridge economist discusses wealth, health, and disaster.

Technology has fed our addiction to light, and might help us end it.

The full annual economic cost of naval piracy globally is estimated to be about $1.5 billion.