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Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired.

Microsoft Research just announced the opening of a skunk-works group called Special Projects.

All of their parent companies, however, are determined to learn from the mistakes that Xerox and AT&T made, namely failing to capitalize on their own research. It’s Valley lore, after all, that companies like Apple and Fairchild Semiconductor built their fame and fortune on research done at Xerox and Bell.

Astro Teller

Google X does the inverse: It picks products to make, then hires people specifically to build them: artists and philosophers and designers, many of whom don’t even know what they’ll be working on until they join.

The word ‘basic’ implies ‘unguided,’ and ‘unguided’ is probably best put in government-funded universities rather than industry.”

The other way is to move to what is called a territorial system, one in which countries tax only profits earned in those countries.

In this country, notwithstanding the high rate, the corporate income tax now brings in about 18 percent of all income tax revenue, with individuals paying the rest. That is half the share corporations paid when Dwight Eisenhower was president.

More than any other economist, Peter understood that monetary union was a legal as well as an economic construct. His careful parsing of the Maastricht Treaty explained to the economics profession exactly what the treaty did and did not allow (Kenen 1992).

Peter even anticipated the debate over TARGET2 imbalances, observing in 1999 that it was possible to “easily conceive of conditions…in which one [national central bank] would be reluctant to build up claims indefinitely on some other national central bank.” (Kenen 1999).

Finally, Peter observed that the possibility of a member state exiting from the Eurozone could not be ruled out but warned that European officials should be cautious in bandying about the idea (Kenen 1999). “The costs of defecting,” he wrote back in 1999, “could be very high.”

Unfortunately, often supervisors in charge of the failing entity in the years of the debt run up were the ones charged with uncovering the problems.

Spain was the leader in the introduction of a dynamic provision – a provisioning tool that forces banks to increase provisions without reference to any specific loan. The intention of this tool was twofold: to mitigate the bad times, and to cool the booms in the good times (Holmstrom and Tirole 1997). Dynamic provisions were endorsed as part of the Basel III standards in December 2010, in part on the strength of Spain’s experience. And indeed the existing evidence (Jiménez et al. 2012) shows that the tool worked as intended, dampening the credit boom and softening somewhat the credit crunch. However, it is clear by now that their level was not nearly enough, as their size – 3% of GDP at their highest point (2004) – was simply not of a magnitude commensurate with the credit losses.

Without the provisions, the reality of the cajas' accounts would have become much faster a concern, and would have imposed itself on the regulator

Had the Banco de España ordered an audit of the system after uncovering numerous irregularities in CCM, it would have not been able to deal with the capital shortfalls uncovered as there was no appropriate resolution regime in Spain at the time

governance played a critical role in the development of the Spanish crisis. In the Spanish case, the supervisor, confronted with powerful and well connected ex-politicians decided to look the other way in the face of obvious building trouble.

More systematic evidence of the role played by these governance issues is provided in a 2009 paper (Cuñat and Garicano 2009b) where we showed that cajas with chief executives who had no previous banking experience (!), no graduate education, and were politically connected did substantially worse in the run up to the crisis (granting more real estate developer loan, up to half of the entire loan book in some instances) and during the crisis (with higher NPLs).

Well, let's put it this way: If a grandmother is lying in hospital and her family is already looking for a headstone -- does that create trust?

The arrears that Irish debtors owe to foreign banks amount to around 320 percent of Ireland's gross domestic product. One has to ask oneself if the Irish state would ever be in a position to meet such huge commitments.

I'm not saying that the idea of creditors sharing in the risk is fundamentally wrong.

One idea drawn up by ministers Antonio Catricala and Antonio Polillo, from the Finance ministry, is to move them and the military holidays to the nearest Sunday so they will in effect still be celebrated but not on the specific date itself.

'These holidays represent the best of our past, the values on which our Republic was founded on, they are in a word history and they should not be touched. You cannot tell us that there are no other ways of boosting productivity and increasing growth. ''The country should be left its history and it should be allowed to conserve its values, values that the majority of the country are fully supportive of, that is what we are asking the government to remember.''

The authors come up with a variety of numbers, including one that has received a lot of attention: potential G.D.P.—broadly speaking, the level of G.D.P. consistent with stable inflation—“is currently about 7 percent below the trajectory it appeared to be on prior to 2007.” According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, the G.D.P. is now close to seventeen trillion dollars, and seven per cent of that figure is $1.2 trillion. This is a lot of money to have gone missing, especially if it will never be recovered. Hence Krugman’s dire conclusion: “By tolerating high unemployment we have inflicted huge damage on our long-run prospects …. What passes these days for sound policy is in fact a form of economic self-mutilation, which will cripple America for many years to come.”

As well as figuring out the current level of potential G.D.P., the authors estimate its growth rate. This is the more important figure, because it’s what determines living standards over the long term

In the nineteen-eighties, Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, who is now the chief economist of the I.M.F., resurrected the idea and gave it a new name, which they borrowed from engineering: hysteresis. Blanchard and Summers examined hysteresis in Europe, where high rates of unemployment have long been a problem.

The good news is that things aren’t quite as bad as the figures in the Fed paper might suggest. If we can get policy right and sharply increase the level of over-all demand in the economy, most of the damage done in the past five years is reversible.

At the moment, sadly, there is no prospect of any more fiscal stimulus, let alone a war-sized one, and the onus is falling on the Fed to gee up the economy.

Today, a fifth of U.S. energy consumption is fueled by coal, mainly from Appalachia and the West, a long-term energy source that has provided jobs for millions, a century-old way of life

Roughly speaking, burning coal produces twice as much carbon dioxide as burning the equivalent amount of natural gas. Almost all domestic coal is used to generate electricity—it produces 38 percent of the U.S. power supply. Fracking is swiftly changing this: in 2011, utilities reported plans to shut down 57 of the nation’s 1,287 coal-fired generators the following year. Largely in consequence, U.S. energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have dropped to figures last seen in 1995. Since 2006, they have fallen more than those from any other nation in the world.

In the sort of development that irresistibly attracts descriptors like ironic, Germany, often touted as an environmental model for its commitment to solar and wind power, has expanded its use of coal, and as a result is steadily increasing its carbon-dioxide output. Unlike Americans, Europeans can’t readily switch to natural gas; Continental nations, which import most of their natural gas, agreed to long-term contracts that tie its price to the price of oil, now quite high.

Several researchers told me that the current towel-snapping between Beijing and Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea is due less to nationalistic posturing than to nearby petroleum deposits.)

What is known, says Timothy Collett, the energy-research director for the USGS program, is that some of the gulf’s more than 3,500 oil and gas wells are in gas-hydrate areas.

In Dutch-disease scenarios, oil weakens all the pillars but one—the petroleum industry, which bloats steroidally.

Because the national petroleum company, with its gush of oil revenues, is the center of national economic power, “the ruler typically puts a loyalist in charge,” says Michael Ross, a UCLA political scientist and the author of The Oil Curse (2012). “The possibilities for corruption are endless.” Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. Sometimes the money goes to simple bribes; in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of euros from France’s state oil company, Elf Aquitaine, lined the pockets of businessmen and politicians at home and abroad.

“How will the royal family contain both the mullahs and the unemployed youth without a slush fund?”

It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their replacements.

your coding ability

the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership.

What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead.

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others.

“Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.”

Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it)

Carefully taught, the assignments can help make math more concrete. Students don’t just memorize their times tables and addition facts but also understand how arithmetic works and how to apply it to real-life situations. But in practice, most teachers are unprepared and children are baffled, leaving parents furious.

On national tests, nearly two-thirds of fourth graders and eighth graders are not proficient in math. More than half of fourth graders taking the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress could not accurately read the temperature on a neatly drawn thermometer.

On the same multiple-choice test, three-quarters of fourth graders could not translate a simple word problem about a girl who sold 15 cups of lemonade on Saturday and twice as many on Sunday into the expression “15 + (2×15).” Even in Massachusetts, one of the country’s highest-performing states, math students are more than two years behind their counterparts in Shanghai.

A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy.

One study that examined medical prescriptions gone awry found that 17 percent of errors were caused by math mistakes on the part of doctors or pharmacists.

“I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education.

For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.”

Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change.

The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.

The answer-getting strategies may serve them well for a class period of practice problems, but after a week, they forget. And students often can’t figure out how to apply the strategy for a particular problem to new problems.

In the process, she gave them an opportunity to realize, on their own, why their answers were wrong.

At most education schools, the professors with the research budgets and deanships have little interest in the science of teaching

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.

Some of the failure could be explained by active resistance.

A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year.

More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.

In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn.

The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time.

Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback.

“Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.”

In one experiment in which more than 200 American teachers took part in lesson study, student achievement rose, as did teachers’ math knowledge — two rare accomplishments.

Examining nearly 3,000 teachers in six school districts, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently found that nearly two-thirds scored less than “proficient” in the areas of “intellectual challenge” and “classroom discourse.”

"There's no risk to Polish clients," PGNiG spokeswoman Dorota Gajewska said, but added that it was forced to suspend its so-called "reverse flow" transfers to Ukraine.

The move caused the Russian ruble to plunge to another record low against the dollar on Thursday.

"It also can be seen as a kind of response to EU sanctions, targeting the smaller EU members in Moscow's former sphere of influence, not its larger Western partner." "But it's a risky policy, as it further undermines Moscow's credibility in Western Europe. It's not the best idea: either you're a reliable supplier of gas or you're not," he said.

Airbus has struggled to sell the planes. Orders have been slow, and not a single buyer has been found in the United States, South America, Africa or India.

While the A380 program has been a boon for the European aerospace industry, Airbus is unlikely to recover its research and development costs. The best it can now expect is to break even on production costs, according to analysts, provided that it can keep orders going.

Airbus made the wrong prediction about travel preferences. People would rather take direct flights on smaller airplanes, he said, than get on big airplanes — no matter their feats of engineering — that make connections through huge hubs.

“It’s a commercial disaster,” Mr. Aboulafia says. “Every conceivably bad idea that anyone’s ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane.”

Airline executives were wary of expanding their fleets aggressively, especially for a costly, four-engine fuel hog.

And there are a fair number of those routes. Around 15 of the 20 largest long-haul routes by passenger volume in the world today are slot-constrained,

“The A380 is not made for every route, but it is ideal for high-traffic routes, high-volume routes that are congested, or where there are flying constraints,”

A little more than a decade ago, the two dominant airplane makers, Boeing and Airbus, looked at where their businesses were headed and saw similar facts: air traffic doubling every 15 years, estimates that the number of travelers would hit four billion by 2030 — and came to radically different conclusions about what those numbers meant for their future.

Boeing, too, is facing lukewarm demand for its latest jumbo jet upgrade, known as the 747-8. The company has received just 51 orders for this big plane, which can seat about 460 passengers and lists at $357 million. By contrast, it has sold more than 1,200 twin-engine 777s, which sell for as much as $320 million.

Richard H. Anderson, Delta’s chief executive, has said the A380 is “by definition an uneconomic airplane unless you’re a state-owned enterprise with subsidies.”

Bruno Delile, Air France’s senior vice president for fleet management, says that there are a limited number of routes in its network with enough daily traffic to justify the expense of such a big plane. “The forecasts about traffic growth and market saturation haven’t exactly panned out,” he says.

Not only do airlines take a big risk on the size and cost of the A380, but they also have to gain the cooperation of airports to modify gates and widen taxiways to make room for the plane.

With versions that seat 210 to 330 passengers, and with a range of about 9,000 miles, the 787 allows airlines to fly pretty much anywhere in the world and connect smaller airports without going through a hub.

And passengers are willing to pay more to avoid a connection

f most airlines appear skeptical of the A380, Emirates is a true believer. It stunned the industry in December when it ordered 50 more of the planes, beyond the 90 it already had on order, throwing Airbus a much needed lifeline

The airport handled 66 million passengers last year, rivaling Heathrow as the busiest international hub.

for Emirates, the biggest selling point of the A380 is its ability to pack in more business-class seats and create an environment that appeals to big-spending passengers.

Both Ms Le Pen and Mr Grillo want their countries to leave the eurozone.

Unlike two years ago, we now have a clearer idea about the long-term policy response. Austerity is here to stay. Fiscal policy will continue to contract as member states fulfil their obligations under new European fiscal rules.

And what about structural reforms? We should not overestimate their effect. Germany’s much-praised welfare and labour reforms made it more competitive against other eurozone countries. But they did not increase domestic demand. Applied to the eurozone as a whole, their effect would be even smaller as not everybody can become simultaneously more competitive against one another.

hese serial disappointments do not tell us conclusively that the eurozone will fail. But they tell us that secular stagnation is very probable. For me, that constitutes the true metric of failure.