Sarah Owen

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

Grand narratives can be considered large-scale formation flight paths through narrative space, modeled perhaps as a Hofstede space crossed with time. When thousands to millions of people are living out versions of aligned, small stories within a larger one, some stories will represent “drafting” off other stories. Stable societies can b

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A new report has identified the 10 financial actors with the most influence on the fossil fuel economy and outlines the decisive role they can play in helping de-carbonize our future.

- at age 26, 30% of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16

- 58% live less than 10 miles away- 80 percent live less than 100 miles away- 90 percent live less than 500 miles away