Caveat
I have spent over one and a half year of my life living in China, and a significantly larger part visiting it, learning the language, watching movies and soap-operas, reading blogs, discussing it with Chinese and non-Chinese, and in general thinking about it. There is still so much I don’t know or understand, but it […]

Danah Boyd, a researcher of emerging social networks, and teens’ behavior, wrote about the “social externalities” of innovation. The concept of externalities, negative or positive, is becoming accepted partly due to the environmental movement. The idea is that whenever a voluntary trade occurs, it is supposed to benefit both parts - I have a chair, […]

Note, this post is based on a book review I wrote for school. It’s a very good book, and I wanted to share some of the main topics. I cut down about 40%, especially my own analyses (which were tenous at best). This is my first attempt at posting something not written originally for the […]

I first became aware of the process of unionizing the workers at SODEXHO during a meeting, where we were shown the excellent movie “Occupation” about students staging a sit-in at Harvard university - the second wealthiest non-profit in the world, after the Vatican - to fight for living wages for the university staff. They also […]

Ever since I discovered the Economist at my school in Italy, I thought it was a great source of news and analysis. At that time, I would mostly disagree virulently with all of their conclusions, but I recognized that they had the intellectual integrity to write what they felt the facts were. As I put […]

I have written about information I found on brain drain, during my research for a thesis, earlier. The topic proved very interesting, especially as I started exploring topics like the anthropological impacts of remittances on communities in the developing world, and I would like to read much more about it. However, every thesis has a […]

Ever since I came to Canada, I’ve been noticing a lot of small things about how things work, that I liked or didn’t like. One thing that annoyed me a little bit was the large amounts of change that ended up in my wallet. Partly because prices in Canada end up being so weird, because […]

I had the good fortune to listen to Sachs speak at the biannual CIDA conference in Ottawa last year. Although I had read things about him before the meeting describing him as some sort of “economic hitman”, I was impressed by his presentation. Now I just finished reading his book End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities […]

I just finished reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. He makes many arguments in the book, many of which I agree to, although I think he is quite a little bit too optimistic about technodeterminism and the whole world becoming equal and happy. One of his starting thoughts, which I quite liked, is […]

This is simply awesome! I wish I had thought of that; Kiva is a website gives you the option to make direct microcredit loans to small entrepreneurs in developing countries. You can choose to donate as little as 25$ through Paypal, and throughout the duration of the loan (usually 6-12 months) you get updates from […]