CategoryEconomics
How Data Can Appear in Science Papers — Out of Thin Air!
At Retraction Watch, Gary Smith explains how one author team apparently copy pasted missing data about green innovation in various countriesRecently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
Full-Time: Why We Need More Creative Productivity, Not Less
A new book shows how we lost the meaning of work and the ways we can get back on track.
If Information Is Wealth, Are Deepfakes a Form of Counterfeiting?
The current tech media overdose on panic over deepfakes. They could be drowning out practical ways of fighting back
Artists Strike Back!: New Tool “Poisons” Images Pirated by AI
Nightshade, developed by University of Chicago computer science prof Ben Zhao, makes the AI generator keep giving you a cat when you ask for a dog
Industry Pro: No, AI Is NOT Driving the Mass Big Tech Layoffs!
“It may explain the loss of some content generation and customer support positions — but doesn’t explain the layoffs of software developers.”
Is New AI Driving the Mass Big Tech layoffs?
The jury’s out on whether that’s really what’s happening and, if so, whether it will improve profitability
What Will the New Media Landscape Look Like?
Billionaires have been “scooping up” publishers in recent years but that has not stopped the bleed of red ink
Business Media Report That 2023 Was a Bad Year for Tech Startups
What AI Will Probably Really Do to White Collar Businesses
The tech media are full of scare stories but we can look at what happened when advanced technology hit blue collar industries as a guide
AI Will Disrupt Everything — But Forget the Robot Apocalypse!
It will be a slow, steady, measured disruption, like the one the printing press created
How Bottom Up Media Now Threaten the Traditional Top Tier
New media resources like subscription-based Substack are rapidly becoming the venue of choice for whistleblowers with stories to break
How Bottom Up Media Are Slowly Replacing Top Down Media
The decline and death of legacy media organizations is speeding up and the media replacing them are much smaller, more numerous and more independent
Can Money Be Pure Information? Merely a Trusted Idea?
A group of pragmatic Pacific Islanders put that concept to the test centuries ago
Pooley on Superabundance and the Time Price Revolution
We live with more and work less than ever before
Martin Luther King Jr. on the Failures of Communism
The great advocate for justice saw, as George Gilder does, why materialism fails us
More Gale Pooley and More Population Growth
We're living in a time-price revolutionCountering the prevailing narrative of doom, economist Dr. Gale Pooley shows how the incredible power of learning curves has instead brought about an era of unprecedented abundance. Based on his research into time prices (the money price divided by one’s hourly income), Pooley demonstrates that virtually every commodity is substantially cheaper today than it was decades or centuries ago. We are truly in a time-price revolution. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Read More ›
Why So Blue? Look at the Progress We’ve Made
Even though there are reasons to celebrate, the mainstream narrative hides themWe’ve cited the groundbreaking book Superabundance several times here at Mind Matters, mainly in connection to its co-author, Gale Pooley, a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, and a speaker at the 2021 COSM conference, the yearly technology summit that has attracted speakers like Carver Mead, Peter Thiel, and others. Pooley’s co-author, Marian Tupy, who lectured at COSM 2022 on the book, does work on human progress at the Cato Institute, and published a post showing the many ways humanity has benefitted over the last century. He stands opposed to the mainstream approximations of doom that declare our world’s swift-approaching expiration date, writing, The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe — earthquake, Read More ›
New Review of “Life After Capitalism” Amplifies Book’s Core Themes
Returning to the "mind-centered economy" where knowledge is wealthA new review of George Gilder’s latest book Life After Capitalism from Samuel Gregg highlights the need for the return of the “mind-centered economy,” in which governmental bureaucracies no longer hamper human creativity and imagination. When capitalistic, democratic societies fall for materialistic presuppositions of the world, they end up resembling socialist contexts in which the state is everything and individual men and women are squelched. Gregg writes at the Acton power blog, [Gilder]takes this notion of the free human mind as the decisive factor in driving economic growth and applies it across the board to economic theory, technology, and our understanding of money. Looking at the question of incentives, for example, Gilder points out that they would yield nothing in Read More ›
George Gilder on the Eric Metaxas Show: Wealth is Knowledge
Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growthGeorge Gilder, economist, venture capitalist, and author of the new book Life After Capitalism, appeared on the Eric Metaxas Show to discuss his new title and the overarching story of his life. Gilder co-founded Discovery Institute, the parent organization of Mind Matters and the Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, and his 1980 book Wealth & Poverty strongly influenced the economic policy decisions of President Ronald Reagan. In this interview, Gilder speaks with Metaxas about his upbringing, his ascendancy into the public policy sphere, and the philosophy that underpins his life work. Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growth, and that this points to the fact that the activity of Read More ›