For more than a half century, a handful of behavioral issues – drinking, smoking, poor diet and stress coupled with inactivity – have consumed an estimated 80 percent of our nation’s health-care budget. Obviously, we don’t change our behavior easily. (…)

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With much of the Middle East and North Africa in a state of flux following protests and calls for reform, there has never been a better time to look at the region’s influence on the global economy. One of the (…)

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Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist who co-writes the influential Marginal Revolution, has a knack for spotting startling items. Here’s today’s tidbit in its entirety: “Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, (…)

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Economist Paul Krugman has a lengthy piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine looking at the economics of environmental protection and possible approaches to confronting climate change: The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about (…)

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The US federal government spends almost $76 billion a year on information technology, of which $20 billion is spent on hardware, software and file servers. According to Darrell West at The Brookings Institution, a move by federal agencies to cloud (…)

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As the economy shows signs of recovery and CEOs’ fears of pending disaster dissipate, it appears that their concern is shifting to a new question: how to hold onto talent as job opportunities pick up. The Wall Street Journal reports (…)

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Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban seems to irritate a lot of people. But he often has worthwhile views on a range of issues, whether it’s about professional basketball, the problems with newspapers, or the inconsistencies of various business (…)

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Tyler Cowen reckons that financial regulation will always come down to the quality of the regulators, almost irrespective of how legislation is drafted: There isn’t any “once and for all” solution to banking regulation and the harder we try to (…)

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What happened to the Copenhagen Accord, so tortuously reached last December? According to Kevin Drum, the early indications are mixed: There have been a flurry of reports recently about [pledges on greenhouse gas reductions], but no firm conclusion. First up (…)

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In all of the millions of words that have tumbled out on the iPad in the last week, Cory Doctorow is one of the few who has something original to say: It really feels like the second coming of the (…)

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