Politics & Economics

Can music actually make us feel more powerful? INSEAD Professor of Organizational Behavior, Li Huang, examines music’s psychological and creative effects.

Ancient Greeks worshiped Helios, the “Sun God.” It’s not hard to see why they worshiped the personification of the great ball of fire in the sky. The sun provides warmth, heat, and now—energy. Here, science writer Kristen Pope provides 15 facts about solar energy you likely didn’t know.

Has the luxury of boundless possibilities paradoxically made timeless human endeavors like getting a job, raising children, and living in a house-with-a-white-picket-fence impossibly difficult? From the cynical rhetoric of economists, environmentalists, politicians, and most remarkably from millennials—the generation defining the #yolo present—it seems that expecting to have a decent, well-paying job and not hate your children might be too much to ask, as highlighted in this curation of 3QD picks.

What does $50 mean to you? In the microfinance world, a $50 loan might mean the ability for a woman in rural Bangladesh to open a market grocer or a teenager in Kenya to build tech support for his poorly-wired community. Micro Equity specialist and current medical school student Mark Wien weighs in on his favorite Reads on the subject.

For economists, 2014 will go down as the year Thomas Piketty’s Capital arrived on America’s shores. But what does “r > g” really mean and what are Capital’s most critical lessons? 3QD editor Zujaja Tauqeer explores this in a walk through 3QD’s archives.

In this Hippo Thinks piece, Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist Vinnie Lauria digs into the historical reasons undergirding Singapore’s rising economy.

In this Thinks piece combining academic thought with industry insights, entrepreneur and investor Tripp Baird investigates the most pervasive myths surrounding stakeholder capitalism today.