Posts Tagged “
Economics
”The Video Surveillance Market Is About to Explode!
Video surveillance is the hot new thing. Tech market think tank ABI Research has just come out with a new study predicting that the global video surveillance market will "expand from revenue of about $13.5 billion in 2006 to a remarkable $46 billion in 2013." In a press release only Philip K. Dick could love, ABI gushes excitedly about all the fun new uses of the vidcams and databases you could be manufacturing, buying, and selling to the surveillance-craving masses. More »
paul krugman
Paul Krugman, Master Of The Space Lanes
How would an interstellar trading empire figure out how long goods had been in transit, for the purposes of calculating interest? After all, if the shipping vessels are traveling at close to the speed of light, the shipping time will seem longer to an observer on the ground than it would to someone traveling on the ship. This is apparently the sort of thing rockstar economist Paul Krugman thinks about when he's not prophesying our total doom. Click through for Krugman's solution to this thorny problem. More »
mad economics
Worried About Interplanetary Trade Agreements?
We may not have interplanetary travel for humans yet, but it's never too early to start dealing with problems related to interstellar trade and solar system stock market crashes. That's why textbook publisher Routledge has a journal called Astropolitics, whose latest issue features an in-depth scholarly article on "problems of interplanetary and interstellar trade." And no, the problems aren't "we don't have warp drive yet." More »
social control
Brain Scans Reveal That Inflation Gets You Hot
Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you'll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it's not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price. More »
In the Future, You Will Be Poorer
A new study shows that 2 out of 3 middle-class families in the United States is in danger of economic collapse. Most of these families have no assets, and could lose their sources of income at any time. [Science Blog]








