How the Finance Industry Hurts the Economy

In perhaps the starkest illustration, economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote in a recent paper that every dollar a worker earns in a research field spills over to make the economy $5 better off. Every dollar a similar worker earns in finance comes with a drain, making the economy 60 cents worse off. [...] ...the growth of complex financial products has served primarily to boost income for the firms themselves, Philippon said. A new paper from researchers in t...

 A Second is Subjective

How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life, you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience, and a quiet weekend can disap...

 The Connections in the Brain

Two neurons can communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the computational unit in the brain. The typical cortical synapse is less than a micron in diameter (10-6 meter), near the resolution limit of the light microscope. If the economy of the world is a stretch for us to contemplate, thinking about all the synapses in your head is mind-boggling. If I had a dollar for every synapse in your brain, I could support the current economy of the world for ten years. Cortical neurons on ave...

 Ideas Power the American Economy

Ideas are what power our economy. It’s what sets us apart. It’s what America has been all about. We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it. We do innovation better than anybody else — and that makes our economy stronger. When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else. And because of th...