Worklife
Learn about how you can achieve a better work-life balance, and check out the latest news about the world of work, including advancements on ideas like the four-day work week and universal basic income.
Why I used crowdfunding to bring a truckload of plastic trash to Stockholm
A container of plastic garbage pulled into Stockholm a couple of weeks ago. Then the garbage was dumped onto the floor of the National Museum of Science and Technology, in a big dusty pile. On purpose. And a global crowdfunding campaign helped pay for it. Before I tell you how we accomplished that, Read More...
Forget bitcoin. The blockchain could reveal what’s true today and tomorrow
As far back as the 1880s, people stood on the curb outside the New York Stock Exchange taking bets on political elections, and newspapers would report the odds as a way of predicting the results at the polls. In the years since, economists refined the concept, and more recently, prediction markets Read More...
Bitcoin is changing the way companies go public
Electronic cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, will disrupt money finance as we know it. These currencies have the potential to create peer-to-peer money without the need for government regulation. Cryptocurrencies can also be used for companies going public without going to the stock exchange. That Read More...
Blockchain could redistribute value to make the sharing economy more fair
The traditional economic model was dominated by large companies that have top-down hierarchical organizations providing services to passive consumers. Now, companies like Google, Uber and AirBnB represent a shift operating online platforms where most value is generated by the users. The problem Read More...
Economics professor turns to crowdfunding to pay salary
A professor of economics has turned to crowdfunding to pay his salary because universities “no longer provide the time and freedom they once gave to original thinkers”. Steve Keen, who is currently employed full time at Kingston University but expects to remain there next year on a Read More...
How will the rise of crowdfunding reshape how we give to charity?
Last September, a Chicago resident named Joel Cervantes Macias spotted an 89-year old man named Fendicio hawking Mexican ice pops–they’re called “paletas”– out of a street cart. The man looked too old to be working, but Macias only had so much spare cash (and so much Read More...
How blockchain applications will move beyond finance
To understand the transformation that’s being brought about by blockchain technology, it’s useful to start with its largest implementation to date: bitcoin. In the fall of 2014 my colleague Catherine Tucker and I conducted a large-scale experiment at MIT, in which 4,494 undergraduate Read More...
Five years on equity crowdfunding has become the new normal
How Crowdfunding Took On Private Equity And Won was the headline on Forbes following the latest edition of The Deal, Beauhurst’s recent report on equity investments in private UK companies. Yet, when I recently took part in a World Economic Forum roundtable on financial innovation, the host Read More...
Apple's new campus partially built with green bonds
A year after Apple issued the largest green bond by any U.S. corporation, the tech giant is providing a closer peek at the projects the $1.5 billion issue has helped fund so far. Its first Green Bond Impact Report (PDF), which highlights the projects funded in the 2016 fiscal year, shows that Apple Read More...
A brief history of blockchain
Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person. Now we Read More...