Tag Archives: Economics
Africa: The Potentials Of Nigeria Cassava Farming
Video timeline: 0:00 Intro 1:48 History of cassava 2:58 Growing issues 5:42: How garri and fufu are made 6:54 Transportation issues 7:36 How cassava is processed 10:06 Global demand is so high for cassava
Challenges along the country’s entire supply chain have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in cassava spoilage. But one entrepreneur, Yemisi Iranloye, thinks she has the solution. She’s introduced higher-yielding seed varieties and moved processing plants closer to farms.
Now, her farmers earn four times more for their product, and her cassava starch and sorbitol have landed her clients like Nestle and Unilever. Could Yemisi’s model be the way for Nigeria to feed itself and cash in on exports?
Culture: Dal Lake Floating Market, Srinagar, Kashmir
The floating vegetable market on Dal Lake is in Srinagar, Kashmir, where locals trade out of their canoes. The produce sold here is grown in floating gardens.. The rich ecosystem of this wetland produces plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, water chestnuts and the famous nadru (lotus roots, a delicacy in the Kashmir Valley).
They gather in the centre of the lake at dawn, and disappear just as sunlight hits the waters.
Special Report: ‘The Car Industry – A Difficult New World’ (The Economist)
Everything about carmaking is changing at once
The car industry
The industry must reinvent itself to keep pace, says Simon Wright
Electrification
The future lies with electric vehicles
The car industry is electrifying rapidly and irrevocably
- It is getting easier for new entrants to make cars
- China is leading the challenge to incumbent carmakers
- Software is now as important as hardware in cars
- Autonomous vehicles are coming, but relatively slowly
- How geopolitical tensions could disrupt the global car industry
- The future should bring more choice and better cars
Climate Change: 10 Foods That Keep Getting Pricier
And fields that once yielded this delicate spice have become sites for new housing construction. Climate change is threatening the production of all kinds of foods from cloves in India to eels in Japan and Spain. Here are 10 expensive, and vulnerable, foods and why climate change is making them so much more expensive.
Rent Inflation: The Rise Of New ‘Luxury’ Apartments
Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 1:09 — Chapter 1: “Luxury” 5:42 — Chapter 2: Policy 9:55 — Chapter 3: Increasing supply
As a result, many cities remain stuck in a price-elevating housing shortage. Washington lawmakers are now scrutinizing regulations that slow the pace of homebuilding, in an attempt to slow rent inflation.
Preview: Foreign Policy Magazine – Spring 2023
The World Will Regret Its Retreat From Globalization
Trade and financial flows have fallen well below their peaks, and poorer countries will bear the brunt.
It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse
Not planning for the possibility of disintegration betrays a dangerous lack of imagination.
America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up
Industrial policy and subsidies are nothing new and can be useful. But shutting off from the world will have consequences.
Special Report: Insert Coin – The Rise Of Video Gaming
Ready, player four billion: the rise of video games
As video games move from teenage distraction to universal pastime they are following the path of other mass media, says Tom Wainwright
Battles over streaming break out for video games
Streaming subscriptions have revolutionised music and television. What will they do to games?
Book Reviews: Politics & Free Markets (March 2023)
/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F03%2Fcurrency_of_politicsArtboard-1.png)
The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes by STEFAN EICH
NOBODY HAS EVER seen the economy. We can see specific markets, but my local farmers’ market looks very different from the Diamond District in Manhattan and even the street stalls I frequented in East London.
Markets are institutions with more or less physical infrastructures, but “the market” (like “the economy”) is an abstraction, no more fixed or certain than “the Left” or “nature.” If “the economy” and “the market” are often described as though they were things out there in the world to be measured and monitored while other abstractions (such as “beauty” and “joy”) are not, that tells us as much about ways of thinking as it does about the workings of the world.
Powered by this insight, the history of economic thought (and related “new histories of capitalism”) has grown over the past 20 years to become one of the most lively and popular historical subfields.
/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F03%2Ffree_market.jpg)
Free Market: The History of an Idea by JACOB SOLL
The recent controversy over Jacob Soll’s new book Free Market: The History of an Idea (2022) reveals just how attached some people are to their economic ideologies (no surprise there) and to their ideas about who gets to have “economic thoughts.”
In a sweeping text that ranges across 2,500 years in barely 250 pages, Soll argues that, for centuries, “free” markets were understood as existing only where strong, moral governments liberated trade from domination by selfish, moneyed merchants. Markets had to be set free—they were not born that way—and the danger has always lurked of commerce being recaptured to enrich the few rather than benefit the many.
This is a loosely “antitrust” way of describing market freedom, and it might have barely registered at all had Soll attributed it chiefly to Louis Brandeis, Frances Perkins (secretary of labor under FDR), or even Machiavelli. But by invoking the name “Adam Smith,” Soll seems to have violated the holy of holies.
World Economic Forum: Top Stories – Feb 3, 2023
- 0:15 This AI robot is revolutionizing farming – The robot can identify weeds and crops at rate of 20 plants a second. The robot then delivers either weedkiller or fertilizer directly to individual plants to an accuracy of within 1mm. It can treat up to 500,000 plants per hour. The robot was invented by US firm Verdant Robotics.
- 1:24 This company cancelled all internal meetings – In January, e-commerce platform Shopify cancelled all regular meetings with 3 people or more and imposed a 2-week window before staff could schedule anything new. It also permanently banned meetings on Wednesdays and limited large meetings to a strict window on Thursdays. More organizations are trying a ‘meeting reset’, from Dropbox to Asana and Zapier. But why – and could your organization try it too?
- 3:00 How to build a thriving workplace – Businesses often ask staff why they resign. So why not ask why they’re joining or staying? “Why would you wait until people have already committed to walk out the door to say, ‘If only I had a time machine, I would go back to the past and convince you to stay’? What I would much rather see employers do are entry interviews and stay interviews. Entry interview is just asking the same questions you would normally pose at exit at the beginning of the employment relationship: Why are you here? What are you hoping to learn? Right. What are some of the best projects you’ve worked on? Tell me about the worst boss you’ve ever had so we can try to emulate the good and avoid the bad.”
- 5:22 ChatGPT is already being used for scientific research – ChatGPT launched to the public in November 2022. It gives in-depth, natural language answers to prompts, based on what it has learned from a huge database of books and articles. People have been using ChatGPT to perform an impressive range of tasks, from writing university-level essays to debugging code and filling in job applications. It has written fake scientific reports that have fooled scientists and has even been used to write a children’s book.
The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change.
Boomers Daily 