NCF curates a weekly list of blog posts that touch on emerging issues affecting the American business community.

Ryan Avent of The Economist looked at the latest jobs numbers and asked, “Is it morning in America?”

Fact: Streaming Netflix movies account for up to 40% of all Internet traffic at peak times.  That’s a colossal amount of bandwidth.  So, Netflix has chosen to invest in the global cloud computing infrastructure rather than a proprietary content delivery system.  The upside is that their investment will benefit every Internet user, regardless of whether they are Netflix subscribers or not.

Gail Tverberg at the The Oil Drum noted how high energy prices are hurting the European economy.  Indeed, the countries with the worst debt crises and highest trade imbalances are most dependent on pricier imported fuels.

With the death of the Space Shuttle and the rise of privatized space flight, we seem to be entering a new era in exploring the world beyond Earth’s atmosphere.  NASA is working hard to keep up, but popular support just isn’t there for large, expensive, publicly-funded space projects.  As Alexis Madrigal points out in The Atlantic, publicly funded space flight was never that popular, even in the heyday of the Apollo space program.

How the iPad could transform the construction industry.  The key point to me is that the iPad is becoming advance for computing, not just an evolutionary one.

NCF curates a weekly list of blog posts that touch on emerging issues affecting the American business community.

Richard Florida tracked the “rise of the supercommuter” in The Atlantic Cities.

The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist thinks that the “only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself” when it comes to Greece’s impending default.  Greece’s default is becoming increasingly inseparable from its own exit from the Eurozone, a disastrous occurrence that people seem far too complacent about.

NCF Fellow Mark Perry wrote on the stunning decline of print newspaper advertising.

Dane Stangler at Growthology takes a close look at the “nuances of job creation.”

Fast Company’s Michael Raisanen pushed back against the increasing tendency today to make strategic decisions based on data alone, arguing that it’s a sure death knell for groundbreaking innovation.

Jon Walton profiled Azerbaijan’s $100 billion city of artificial islands.

NCF curates a weekly list of blog posts that touch on emerging issues affecting the American business community.

Max Fisher outlined the “next 5 emerging economies that will change the world“:  Turkey, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Congo, and Mexico.  Just for good measure, he added Nigeria as a “maybe.”

Justin Fox outlined the fourteen articles contributed to the Harvard Business Review by some twenty-one authors on the future of American competitiveness.  Under the “government” header, he looks at taxes, fiscal policy, immigration, trade, and entrepreneurship and innovation.  The “business” section examines how to break Washington gridlock, better educate Americans, address the financial system, build clusters of innovation, and engage with the true costs of outsourcing.

James Hamilton at EconBrowser took a close look at oil prices to try to figure out why the price at the pump is rising.  In short, the reason for rising prices comes down to one word: Iran.

Outsourcing work from the West to the East has been one of the big stories in business for the past few decades.  Today, it seems that nearly every consumer product was made in China, a place where the cost of production is appealingly low.  Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution came across a news item that seems to auger a reversal in this trend.  It appears that some Chinese firms are now starting to outsource to (of all places) Europe.  Tabarrok expects that we’ll see a lot more of this East to West outsourcing in the years to come as China grows in wealth and adapts to having a more consumer-driven economy.

Felix Salmon summarized the Greece bailout package, starting with these words: “Greece is now officially a ward of the international community.”

Whether you agree with him or not, Ryan Avent at The Economist made a series of insightful comments about the contributions that manufacturing does (or does not) make to the American economy.  He’s skeptical that the manufacturing industry is worthy of any special support other than that which would be offered to any other industry, i.e., support for R&D, a simplified tax code, and the like.  Laura D’Andrea Tyson made the equally informed counter-argument in the Economix blog for the unique qualities of manufacturing to, say, the support of general innovation in the economy.

NCF curates a weekly list of blog posts that touch on emerging issues affecting the American business community.

Megan McCardle envisioned in The Atlantic a “post-campus America” after MIT announced an inexpensive online certification program called MITx.

Jordan Weissmann (also at The Atlantic) highlighted the best and worst states for high-tech businesses.  Rather than take the cit-based approach of the National Science Foundation at face value, whose research Weissmann is highlighting, I would encourage any reader to look at the overall regions that are most favorable to technology-based companies.  In that light, we see that the mid-Atlantic region is surprisingly strong.

Matt Yglesias considered “the new economics of oil” with today’s expansion of shale oil production.

The Harvard Business Review asked a panel of leading CEOs to describe the greatest threats to U.S. competitiveness.

Jonah Lehrer at Wired asks what Jeremy Lin’s recent success in the NBA teaches about the nature of talent and of identifying gifted individuals to hire.  Unfortunately, even the greatest of meritocracies can’t identify the key predictors of future success.  Even when the evidence of this failure is clear in the NBA, teams often ignore these facts rather than instill “hiring” practices that embrace uncertainty.  In the end, scouting for good players in basketball yields results that are little better than tossing a coin.

Michael Sivy of Time asked, “Are we already planting the seeds of the next financial crisis?”  In the end, his advice is one that rings true no matter the state of the market: exercise “prudence and caution.”