Business and Media

The consequences of the Japanese earthquake – especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant – resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them.

Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake – which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing – and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events.

There’s an old joke on Madison Avenue: Half of all the advertising is wasted on customers who will never buy – it’s just that nobody knows which half. People avoid health-care jokes, but you could say the same thing about drugs.

In fact, in both advertising and pharmaceuticals, no one knows what the numbers are, because no one knows what “effectiveness” means, other than people buying things or recovering their health. But was it the advertisements or the drugs that led to one outcome or another?

In the lead up to the Group of 20 Summit in South Korea this November, a global economy caught between recovery and stagnation seemed to be fostering a new type of indecision. The momentum behind policy coordination and consensus that characterized the G20’s first meetings was giving way to power struggles. As the heads of state of the world’s 20 leading nations convened in Seoul on Nov. 11, it was perhaps the finger pointing that best characterized the mood.

Currency wars and global imbalances had dominated the debate in the days leading up to the two-day affair. Nothing new in monetary policy discussions, but the deliberations had taken on new tensions following the Nov. 3 decision by the Federal Reserve to resume quantitative easing.

While we all love mix-tapes and can remember creating our own by stringing together songs, most of us haven’t made or listened to a mix-tape in quite a while. Once we started buying single tracks online and loading our mp3 players with music, those well thought-out compilations we used to make for friends seem to have become a thing of the past.

Cloned animal flesh for food; millions of tiny Nano Robots in our blood allowing us to live for centuries; low cost computers a million times more powerful than today; and computers that will actually think and dramatically improve our world.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil was up on all of it, speaking Oct. 19 in Vienna at the Telekom Austria Group’s “Future Talk” series.

“Why shouldn’t I create my own chocolate according to my own taste, right in the same way as I could order a pizza only with those toppings that I liked?” declares Gabor Meszaros, the owner and founder of chocoMe, a gourmet chocolatier shop in Budapest.

Meszaros has realized a very decadent dream: establishing himself as a sagacious gourmet of cacao. Even as a child, he daydreamed of being a renowned chocolatier. Upon reaching adulthood, Meszaros began to revolutionize the Hungarian chocolate industry by endowing it with both quality and experimental technology.

Transparency seems to be the word of the day in a wide array of policy domains. But is greater transparency always good?

Ever since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, there has been a call for “greater transparency” in financial services. The financial-reform law passed by the United States Congress last month requires improved transparency from banks and other financial-services firms. Moreover, thanks to the hard work of Oxfam America and the Publish What You Pay coalition, the law also requires oil and mining companies – both U.S. and foreign – that want to raise capital in the U.S. to disclose their payments to the governments of countries in which they operate.