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In recent decades, trade between nations has constituted an important component of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with official estimates showing that it likely accounted for a quarter of total global production. While evidence of…
Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety.…
The purpose of this paper is to review the concept of cryptocurrencies in our economy. First, Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies' histories are analyzed. We then study the implementation of Bitcoin in the airline and real estate…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued for challenging inside views (informed by contextual specifics) with outside views (based on historical "base rates" for certain event types). A reasonable inside view of the prospects for the global…
This article is a prologue to the article "Why Markets are Inefficient: A Gambling 'Theory' of Financial Markets for Practitioners and Theorists." It presents important background for that article --- why gambling is important, even…
The economy globalization measure problem is discussed. Four macroeconomic indices of twenty among the "richest" countries are examined. Four types of "distances" are calculated.Two types of networks are next constructed for each distance…
We study how government-led narratives through mass media evolve from construct, a mechanism for framing expectations, into commitment, a sustainable pillar for growth. We propose the "Narratives-Construct-Commitment (NCC)" framework…
The article reports a numerical investigation of the breakdown of a disordered system considering the effect of local stress concentration under the action of an external tensile force. The statistics of the record-breaking magnitudes of…
Ten years ago we presented a modified version of Okun law for the biggest developed economies and reported its excellent predictive power. In this study, we revisit the original models using the estimates of real GDP per capita and…
Economists have predicted that damages from global warming will be as low as 2.1% of global economic production for a 3$^\circ$C rise in global average surface temperature, and 7.9% for a 6$^\circ$C rise. Such relatively trivial estimates…
Systems of cities at the macroscopic scale have their trajectories conditioned by the evolution of infrastructure networks. This leads to complex planning and management situations in the particular case of international transportation…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
Retirees who exhaust their savings while still alive are said to experience financial ruin. These savings are typically grown during the accumulation phase then spent during the retirement decumulation phase. Extensive research into…
In the current environment of financial distress, many governments are likely to soon become major holders of financial assets, but the policy debate focuses only on the likelihood and extent of short-term market stabilization. This paper…
The term of big data was used since 1990s, but it became very popular around 2012. A recent definition of this term says that big data are information assets characterized by high volume, velocity, variety and veracity that need special…
The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled techno-utopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peer-to-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the…
Robust travel time predictions are of prime importance in managing any transportation infrastructure, and particularly in rail networks where they have major impacts both on traffic regulation and passenger satisfaction. We aim at…
Most cities in the US and in the world were organized around car traffic. In particular, large structures such as urban freeways or ring roads were built for reducing car traffic congestion. With the evolution of public transportation,…
Modern macroeconomic theories were unable to foresee the last Great Recession and could neither predict its prolonged duration nor the recovery rate. They are based on supply-demand equilibria that do not exist during recessionary shocks.…