When history is said to repeat itself, it is never for good reasons. George Bernard Shaw captured this when he said: “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.” The question of whether nations can learn from history nag policymakers around the world. Part of the problem is that history is handed down through a variety of interpretations that do not reflect reality. But contemporary history, if genuine presented, can offer policy makers with lessons they can learn from.

In a provocative article, the Economist recently asked whether new technology had stopped driving the world economy. The article challenged innovation pessimists by providing several examples of technologies that mold future economies. The most urgent question, however, is how to train a new generation of young engineers who will be capable of combining technical excellence with a deeper appreciation of societal needs and values. This was the theme of a recent meeting that brought together educators interested in engineering at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In a widely circulated speech, UK environmental activist Mark Lynas has apologized for his past history of demonizing transgenic crops and masterminding the anti-biotechnology campaign.  Explaining at the Oxford Farming Conference in January 2013 why he changed his mind, Lynas said: “I discovered science, and in the process I hope to become a better environmentalist.” Such apologetic statements help to signal the changing times and the shift in the balance of evidence. However, much persecution of biotechnology has been done using laws that severely and unfairly restrict into development and deployment.

(Cross-posted from Global Food for Thought) Global food politics are riddled with paradoxes. While threats to global food security are becoming increasingly evident, efforts to stall the adoption of new technologies appear to intensify. There is a clear disconnect between comfort with familiar agricultural practices and the food challenges that lie ahead. Though food is recognized as a national security issue, it has yet to acquire the strategic importance it deserves, especially in African countries.

A Challenge for Climate Negotiators, and an Opportunity for Scholars The recent demise of serious political consideration of an economy-wide U.S. CO2 cap-and-trade system and the even more recent resurgence in interest among policy wonks in a U.S. carbon taxshould prompt reflection on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we may be going. Lessons Almost fifteen years ago, in an article that appeared in 1998 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “What Can We Learn from the Grand Policy Experiment?  Lessons from SO2 Allowance Trading,” I examined the implications of what was then the very new emissions trading program set up by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to cut acid rain by half over the succeeding decade.

  The price of sequencing your whole genome is dropping so rapidly that it soon may cost about $1,000 to know your entire genetic blueprint. Our whole genome sequence data can reveal predispositions to diabetes, cancer or psychiatric conditions. It can even help a doctor prescribe the right dosage of certain medications. It will soon be less expensive to sequence your entire genome – to know its more than 20,000 genes and 6 billion DNA building blocks – than to perform some individual genetic tests for cancer or metabolic diseases.

  Euphoria swept across Sub-Saharan Africa when Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States in 2008. Kenya, the ancestral home of his father, declared a national holiday to mark his victory. His re-election in 2012 has generated little celebration. This is mainly because in the last four years Africa has learned to relate to President Obama as a leader of another sovereign state and not as a relative of whom much is expected. President Obama’s seeming distance from the continent has helped Africa to reflect on its place in the world in a more mature and self-reliant way.

By my count, [our recent] national election was the third near-death experience faced by the Affordable Care Act (aka: Obamacare, ACA). The first was the election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate in late January 2010, denying Senate Democrats their vital 60th vote -- leading most commentators to declare the drive for health reform dead. The second was the Supreme Court decision released in late June of this year -- again, most commentators thought the law was going down, and it almost did except for a change of mind by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Another Friday filing by the FCC: 146 pages on program access. It’s a classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other item. This time around it’s even worse for the public, because the underlying competitive reality of the wires that run to American homes is being hidden, in two ways: First, the entire discussion is focused on the market for pay-TV, because that’s the subject of the rules being examined. That’s the wrong market definition from a consumer’s point of view. Consumers are buying both data and video in bundles, and in that bundled marketplace we don’t have competition.

A cyber attack could make it all happen again. Verizon's chief technology officer surveyed a flooded major switching facility in lower Manhattan and put it bluntly: "There is nothing working here. Quite frankly, this is wider than the impacts of 9/11." Damage from Sandy is estimated to reach $20 billion, and interrupted phone service is among the least of it. Flooding in New York's century-old subway system is without parallel. Bridges and roads, homes and businesses have been destroyed. Days after the storm, many businesses remain closed, their employees out of work.