29 August 2012, No. 23/2012

The Winner Takes It All – An Economic Take on Science

The latest edition of the Humboldt Kosmos magazine is out today. 

‘The Winner Takes It All – An Economic Take on Science’, the latest edition of the Humboldt Kosmos magazine, is out today. With a focus on science and the economy, the magazine looks not only at how economic scientists regard their discipline’s role in the global financial crisis but also at the economisation of research itself. After all, economics and its laws have long since entered the world of academia, where they determine success and strategies. The market will take care of itself, runs the economists’ mantra. But can this patent remedy also be applied to science? The authors of this edition took an excursion into a marketplace with rules of its own, where the lead currency is reputation, taking part means little and winning is everything.

Also included in this edition:

• “We’re not physicists”: an interview with the American economist Daniel Hamermesh on the reliability of economic theories.
• Lessons from the crisis: Claudia Buch from the German Council of Economic Experts describes how economists’ tools have to change.
• The lord of the beans: why coffee drinking has become a science and how the coffee industry is using this development. Kosmos meets an insider.
• Brief enquiries. Humboldtians report on what drives them and what they are currently working on: how a new kind of cement can help mitigate climate change, what ravens and small children have in common, why personalised medicine is a prescription for the future and how city beaches are taking over German pedestrian zones.

Kosmos has a circulation of around 37,000 copies and reaches the Humboldt Network of over 25,000 Humboldtians in more thanover 130 countries around the world plus their approx. 10,000 collaborative partners in Germany.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables more than 2,000 researchers from all over the world to spend time researching in Germany. The Foundation maintains a network of well over 25,000 Humboldtians from all disciplines in more than 130 countries worldwide – including 48 Nobel Prize winners.