CItY JOURNAL . . . .It’s hard to imagine a political debate over the need for food or water. Not about howor from where either is obtained, but about the human need for them. We don’t need to say “Plant, Baby, Plant!” to remind us that agriculture is a critical industry, or “Pump, Baby, Pump!”…
CITY JOURNAL . . . Starting this month, everyday citizens, not just hedge fund managers and traders, will be able to make direct bets on “big” issues ranging from basic economic indicators to the weather. Based in Greenwich, Connecticut, the global trading firm Interactive Brokers has won U.S. federal approval to run a “prediction market” platform…
inFOCUS Quarterly . . . . There was remarkably little fanfare for the 70th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s December 8, 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations. Seven months before that anniversary, Time Magazine featured an essay headlined, “Nuclear Energy’s Moment Has Come,” by Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of the man who led the…
CITY JOURNAL . . . . One of the most remarkable and unanticipated benefits of the cloud revolution has been the emergence and rapid growth of the so-called gig economy. Ubiquitous personal geo-location, itself an unheralded revolution, combined with a cloud-centric software “platform” that connects buyers and sellers, has spawned one of society’s most dynamic,…
CITY JOURNAL . . .The laptop class has rediscovered a basic truth: foundational innovation, once adoption proceeds at scale, is followed by an epic increase in energy consumption. It’s an iron law of our universe. To illustrate that law, consider three recent examples, all vectors leading to the “shocking” discovery of radical increases in expected…
CITY JOURNAL . . .The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time. For progressive politicians here and in Europe, the “energy transition” has achieved totemic status. But it…
