ParisTech Review

There are systematic reasons why elected officials make certain kinds of mistakes over and over. One thing political scientists have discovered by examining the political species is that it shares common characteristics picked up by adapting to its natural environment. One of the strongest motivating forces in this environment is the pressure for reelection. It is precisely this drive for reelection that introduces predictable biases into political decision-making and helps explain governments' paralysis in the face of some very serious problems.

As a theme, social innovation emerged in the 1960s, driven by management theorists like Peter Drucker and social entrepreneurs such as Michael Young, founder of the Open University. But only in the last decade has it really taken off, by redrawing the sometimes blurry line between business and civil society, one drawing inspiration from the other and vice versa.

Mobile phone communications have provided fertile territory for research into the spatial dimensions of communities. Studies of calling patterns have shed new light on the complex nature of networks. The analysis of billions of calls across a number of countries has led to a surprising conclusion: telephone exchanges are still largely dictated according to administrative boundaries laid down long before the arrival of the mobile handset.

From risk profiling to gene therapy and molecular diagnostics, personalized medicine opens new, exciting fields to medical research. Not only is it good news for the patients: considerable improvements are at stake, both for health systems and pharmaceutical firms now struggling to reinvent themselves. But the road ahead is still full of obstacles.

The recently-adopted smoking bans in bars and restaurants epitomize a cultural transformation. By creating an environment where smoking becomes increasingly more difficult, the bans help shift social norms away from the acceptance of smoking in everyday life and promotes public rejection of cigarettes. And this is only the beginning. New public policies such as nudging smokers are now developed, raising legal and moral issues.

Technology-enabled home health care should be thriving. An aging population and the transformation of acute illnesses such as heart failure into chronic diseases mean that the number of patients is growing. In addition, new medical-technology devices could help keep patients at home rather than in costly institutions, such as assisted-living facilities or nursing homes - leading to potentially big savings for the health care systems. Instead, the full potential of the technology-enabled home health care market remains to be tapped.

Brain malfunctions account for 35% of all diseases in Europe, with an annual cost of 400 billion Euros, well above the costs of cardiovascular disease and cancer. This is not surprising because a complex structure is subject to a huge number of dysfunctions.

In most places in the world, the death rate keeps falling. Even in the West, where we keep doing our best to tempt fate by gaining more weight, the trend continues to be toward longer life. Now some scientists believe the rapid growth of genetic knowledge may make further medical breakthroughs even more likely. How much longer might we live? And how will society cope if we do?

Globalization has given rise to a new definition of competition and the capacity to innovate has become the new international standard for differentiation. France's elite engineering schools are now more than ever being measured for their performance against the world's most prestigious universities. The Institut Montaigne recently published a report entitled, "Adapting our engineers' education to globalization", in which the challenges of the new reality are made clear. First and foremost : "making innovation the motor of the engineering curriculum".

Nearly 40 years ago, telecommuting looked like an unstoppable trend. Today, it still does. Why is this revolution taking so long and what will the future of work look like when it finally arrives?

The multiple interactions that underlie complex situations are poorly understood by the market approach. For economists they should represent the submerged portion of an iceberg that is much larger than it appears. Externalities are the visible manifestation of untapped potential and herald rich seams of value that have bubbled just under the firmament of human interaction since the dawn of the digital age. Make no mistake, at the level of individual enterprise as well as the wider economy, externalities will occupy a central role for the foreseeable future.

Is engineering destined to remain a man's world? Not everywhere. In China, 40% of engineers are women and in the USSR of the 1980s, women accounted for 58% of the engineering workforce. But in Western countries, and in a large number of emerging economies, the feminization of the profession continues to be very slow and now seems to have reached its limit. This plateau is of concern to policy experts. For the last 10 years, the European Commission has highlighted the risks related to the shortage of engineers and has called on member states to draw more widely on the pool of female talent. In Australia and India, the press has taken up the matter. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics warned last year that the demand for computer engineers would see an increase of 36% by the year 2012 in the United States alone. It seems urgent in these conditions to train more women. But first, one has to ask what the obstacles are.

It is not just Hollywood celebrities whose lives are an open book. Everyone is now being watched, monitored, and analyzed more closely than ever before - and for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. Highway cameras keep track of who is speeding, corporate computers collect information on what we buy, and all sorts of surveillance tools help governments find out what their citizens are saying. Computer technology has become so intrusive, some experts argue, that the traditional notion of privacy has largely been gutted. But others insist that the use of data can be regulated and that a balance can be struck that protects privacy while still permitting the collection of appropriate kinds of information.

The Internet may be one of the single greatest changes in communications since the telephone, maybe the telegraph. In only 20 years, the fabric of life has changed in almost every corner of the world, thanks to the Internet. Now, some scholars and medical researchers believe that it may be changing humanity itself.

Construction is an age-old activity but the interest that architecture evokes -like the interest that other arts generate- is cyclic. Why? Today some reasons appear to be quite obvious: the growth of cities means increased construction, technological advances open up new possibilities, and the need for sustainable development calls for a drastic change in habits. All the ingredients are in place for an architectural creation. And this should be enough. But some countries, cities, and organizations still feel the need to express wealth, power, progress, or ambition through buildings. This desire does not ignore, at least in general, the functional aspect of construction. But it is no longer able to completely justify itself through this feature alone. Architecture becomes "a means of communication" and architects become "stars" like the great communicators. This article, a contemplation of forty years of private practice, does not judge this evolution. But it can help in understanding and eventually guiding it.

The more time goes by, the more staggering population statistics become: in 2050, people over the age of 65 will represent a quarter of the population in the most developed countries, against 16% today. The rise to power of the older generation disrupts companies, institutions, and policies. After publishing an interview of Francis Mer, former Minister of Economy and Finance of France, ParisTech Review continues its analysis of the upheavals caused by an aging population.

In all developed countries, the increase in life expectancy -almost three months a year at the current rate- coupled with the fall in the fertility rates has resulted in an inevitable demographic ageing. By the year 2050, a quarter of the French population, for example, will be over 65 years compared to 16 per cent today. The decline in the proportion of active population to inactive is a major economic challenge. Francis Mer, Minister for Economics and Finances of France from 2002 to 2004, analyses the consequences of an ageing population.

This first article in our Zero/base series, like all the ones to come, is purely an intellectual exercise. This one describes what a secondary education system might look like if it ignored all existing educational models and was based on current information technology resources and on the way children and adolescents behave today.

Throughout history, changes in human behavior have caused the dissemination of infectious diseases, from smallpox to the flu. But thanks to scientific progress and plain old international cooperation and coordination, we’ve been able to ward off disaster, or at least the worst of it. However, an additional factor will up the stakes for scientists and policymakers worldwide in the fight against emergence or re-emergence: the remarkable adaptive capacities of microbes. The question is, microbes or men, who will win?