Recommended Reading: July 28, 2008

Links to quality content for thepanelist.net readers…

Neuroeconomics: A new school of economists is controversially turning to neuroscience to improve the dismal science. "These new neuroeconomists saw that it might be possible to move economics away from its simplified model of rational, self-interested, utility-maximising decision-making," writes The Economist.

"The housing bill that passed in Congress last week is another attempt to fix the financial system without resolving its underlying flaws," argues Paul Krugman at The New York Times.

"My view has been – and remains – that this episode is likely to be remembered as one of those extremes of panic or euphoria in financial markets, which tend to reoccur once or twice every decade, when market prices – of bank shares, of oil, of the dollar and of several other assets – turn out to be simply wrong," writes Anatole Kaletsky at The Times.

"Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, the science world was rocked by one of the most controversial research papers ever published in the highly-respected journal Nature," reports the BBC. "According to a charismatic French scientist named Jacques Benveniste,pure water could somehow remember what it had previously contained."

If you have 20 minutes to spare: In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.