The Economist has devoted its April 21st issue to The Third Industrial Revolution. The magazine's editors and reporters present a stirring account of the merging interface between IT and manufacturing that is allowing anyone to become his or her own mini-manufacturer. It is now possible to design software...

The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities made possible by the new energy flows.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are...

It's happened before, in 1848 and in 1968. The youth of the world took to the streets to protest the injustices of autocratic political regimes and rapacious business interests and to demand the most basic human right to participate as equal citizens in the affairs of society.

On October 15th,...

At the moment, Germany is embroiled in a fierce debate over how to save the Eurozone and, with it, the future of the European Union. Although stringent austerity programs will have to be enacted in the member countries to reduce government debt, and new regulatory mechanisms put in place to...

Excerpted from Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, Palgrave Macmillan 2011.

Energy regimes shape the nature of civilizations... how they are organized, how the fruits of commerce and trade are distributed, how political power is...

Excerpted from Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, Palgrave Macmillan 2011.

Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting,...

In a memorial service held in Tucson, Arizona for victims of the recent tragedy, President Obama called on Americans to "sharpen our instincts for empathy" so that we can become a more civil people.

The President's call for a more empathic culture and civil society raises the troubling question of...

I grew up on the South side of Chicago in the 1940s and 50s. My father and mother raised four children in a house that was less than a 1000 square feet. The stairwell to the second floor was so low that we had to stoop over on the walkup....

President Obama has nominated Elena Kagen to be the 112th Justice of the Supreme Court. Strangely, in introducing his new nominee the President made no mention of the 'E' word. Apparently the word been banned at the White House. The mere utterance of the word empathy sends shivers down the...

While our radio talk shows and 24-hour cable TV news programs incessantly play off the political rift between conservative and liberal ideologies, the deeper conflict in America has always been the cultural divide between faith versus reason.

At the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era, the philosophers...

For two hundred years the American Dream has served as the bedrock foundation of the American way of life. The dream, reduced to its essence, is that in America, every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interest in the marketplace, and...

The fossil fuel energies that propelled the great Industrial Revolutions of the past two centuries are now sunsetting and the infrastructure within which they are embedded is on life support. All across the world people are without work and becoming increasingly desperate. An anxious human race is asking the question,...

In the past two weeks, President Obama has made an unprecedented plea for civility in public discourse. Washington insiders say they can't ever recall a period in American public life as full of anger and polarization as now. TV and radio talk show hosts, in particular, have fanned the flames...

The anemic global economic recovery is beginning to stall. Unemployment is shooting up again. The housing market is threatened by a new wave of foreclosures. Tens of millions of Americans are teetering on the edge of survival. Public surveys show that people on Main Street are fast loosing trust in...

Frantic tweets and videos have been seeping out of Haiti, pleading for help from the rest of the human race in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that leveled one of the poorest countries on the planet, spreading destruction and death.

The response by people all over the world...

Two spectacular failures, separated by only 18 months, marked the end of the modern era. In July 2008, the price of oil on world markets peaked at $147/ barrel, inflation soared, the price of everything from food to gasoline skyrocketed, and the global economic engine shut off. Growing demand in...