Tag Archives: Economics
East of Palo Alto’s Eden: Race & The Formation of Silicon Valley
In The Garden of Money
In the garden of money
Resentment blooms.
In the jazz music world there has been a steady deterioration of the artist’s economy for at least forty years. This decline began with desegregation and rising real estate costs. The traditional Black communities where jazz began, developed and flourished got colonized and absorbed into the wider marketplace. Just as it became more and more expensive to keep a neighborhood club open, it became more and more difficult to integrate what will never be a ‘popular’ music into the mainstream economy. With the advent of the internet, the physical product of LPs and CDs virtually disappeared. 10 years ago I was talking to the brilliant composer and musician George Lewis about the exciting possibilities of internet distribution. He said, “Yes, but the problem will be the same. How will people know about me?”
The scale and nature of internet distribution means that with…
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How to Make Mass Transit in the US Financially Sustainable:
The Story of Elon Musk & GM’s Race to Build the First Mass-Market Electric Car
Here is How Low Oil Prices Will Shake Things Up in 2015:
The Cold Logic Behind Elon Musk’s $5 billion Gigafactory Gamble
How the Death of Mid-Budget Cinema Left a Generation of Iconic Filmmakers MIA
Reading Piketty at the Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson has always had a penchant for the past. Ever since The Royal Tenenbaums, his movies have increasingly drifted into a historical aesthetic, from the shabby (The Tenenbaums’ vaguely 70s-esque New York) to the quaint (the warm agrarian hues of 1960s New England in Moonrise Kingdom). Few critics have missed the fact that his newest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, amps up all things Anderson to the extreme. It is cute, fussily pristine, ornately detailed, and even more deeply wedded to a time and place—a screwball comedy in the made-up European nation of Zubrowka, a seeming nod to Freedonia in the 1933 Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup. Indeed, Grand Budapest harks back to a beautiful old Europe of the 1930s, one poised for destruction in the pulverizing death machine of fascism and war.
Which brings us to Thomas Piketty, the French economist who has…
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