Well, it looks as though we are back on a semi-regular schedule. Here are things that caught our eye as we went about our business. What’s the world’s second most used resource? Did you guess sand? Neither did I. Anyway, like water, it is getting scarcer. Related to sand, rising agricultural commodity prices are…
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We’ve not done this for a while, but here are some interesting bits from our scanning that caught the eye of FA futurists today. In Sweden, the new ReTuna Återbruksgalleria shopping mall sells only recycled or upcycled goods. Connecting consumers more directly to the recycling/upcycling process could be a way to make the idea of…
DetailsHere are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today Research scientist Gary Paul Nabhan warns of the impact of more frequent heat waves on food production in the Western US and offers a variety of non-biotech strategies for mitigation. Dutch scientists have demonstrated a method for harvesting power from the CO2 emissions from…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Steve Waldman hypothesizes that the moribund economies of World 1 have fallen prey to a technology-driven resource curse. Elite access to finance capital and technology is becoming increasingly monopolized, impeding the re-distribution of economic resources to non-elites. According to Packaging World, waste-to-energy…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. “Computational sociologists” are using recipes to understand global eating patterns. Global food prices have been increasing for a decade and rose 2.7% in 2012. Price volatility has also increased substantially in the last few years, though neither prices nor volatility have…
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I am by no stretch of the imagination an economist. But a recent paper and a recent book on the long-term prospects for sustained US economic growth—and the discussion they generated—captured my attention, perhaps because it makes a forecast that builds on centuries of history. I’ll do my best to briefly describe the paper’s thesis…
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