In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all.

Centered in Peru, Inca territory stretched across the Andes’ mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today’s Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru – all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. How did they do it?

Many aspects of Incan life remain mysterious, in part because our accounts of Incan life come from the Spanish invaders who effectively wiped them out. Famously, the conquistador Francisco Pizzaro led just a few men in an incredible defeat of the Incan army in Peru in 1532. But the real blow came roughly a decade before that, when European invaders unwittingly unleashed a smallpox epidemic that some epidemiologists believe may have killed as many as 90 percent of the Incan people. Our knowledge of […]

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The solar industry is booming across the U.S. and the numbers are staggering. Residential solar installations in 2012 reached 488 megawatts – a 62 percent increase over 2011 installations. And according to GTM Research, a solar photovoltaic (PV) system is now installed every four minutes in the U.S.

As rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources have begun to take off across the country, utility companies are becoming increasingly concerned about this ‘existential threat to their business.

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eter Buffett, the second son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, worries that the state of philanthropy in America ‘just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.’ At meetings of charitable foundations, he says ‘you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.’

Describing the stunning growth of what he calls a ‘charitable-industrial complex,’ his recent New York Times op-ed reads in confessional style: ‘People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem.’

An insider’s critique from someone like Peter Buffett is certainly welcome. Charitable giving, after all, has seen a meteoric rise in recent years, virtually unchanged amid a historic global recession. In what the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy calls a ‘New Gilded Age of Philanthropy,’ the ballooning fortunes of the 1% seem to mirror levels of giving by foundations:

As Buffett suggests, this growth in elite largesse, totaling $316 billion in 2012, has done little to combat economic inequality. But the problem isn’t just one of ineffectiveness. A recent paper published in the Journal […]

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The failure of our corporate and political leaders to make sure every worker gets good health care is causing some unpleasant consequences - like widespread stomach flu.

Ill workers often spread illness, because millions of employees who deal directly with the public are not covered by paid sick leave policies. So, when they come down with something like the stomach flu, they tend to drag themselves to work, rather than going to bed until they recover, since staying home means a loss of pay - or even the loss of their jobs.

Low-wage workers in the restaurant industry are particularly vulnerable and, since they handle food, particularly threatening. Nearly 80 percent of America’s food service workers receive no paid sick leave, and researchers have found that about half of them go to work ill because they fear losing their jobs if they don’t. As a result, a study by the Centers for Disease Control finds that ill workers are causing up to 80 percent of America’s stomach flu outbreaks, which is one reason CDC has declared our country’s lack of paid sick leave to be a major public health threat.

You’d think the industry itself would be horrified enough by this endangerment of […]

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This August, China’s leaders withdrew to Beidaihe, a bathing resort on the Bohai Sea where they have gone to calmly debate issues of power and personnel since the days of Mao. Politics, or so it seemed, had gone on a summer holiday.

But that’s where, on Sunday, August 11, the government released a guideline with the modest title ‘Opinions of the State Council on Accelerating the Development of Energy-Saving and Environmental Protection Industries.’ According to the document, the government is upgrading the environmental sector to the rank of a ‘key industry,’ a title that had been reserved for the steel and pharmaceutical industries, as well as biotechnology. Under the new guideline, the sector is expected to earn a massive $728 billion (€545 billion) by 2015, and to grow at twice the rate of the rest of the economy.

Beijing wants to boost manufacturers of energy-efficient power plant equipment, significantly increase the number of cars and buses running on liquefied natural gas and further expand the number of wind and solar farms, as well as nuclear power plants.

The government plans to achieve all of this using investments, tax breaks and direct subsidies — from which companies with foreign investors are expressly to benefit […]

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