Kirsten Korosec writes:  SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering.

The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017.

Installers, panel makers, and even traditional fossil fuel energy companies helped U.S. solar employment grow nearly 22 percent in 2014.

The company’s expansion is indicative of what’s happening within the broader solar industry. More than 31,000 new solar jobs were created in the U.S. in 2014 bringing the total to 173,807—a 21.8 percent increase in employment since November 2013, according to a report released Thursday by The Solar Foundation. This is the second consecutive year that solar jobs have increased by at least 20 percent.

The solar industry is still dwarfed by the 9.8 million workers that the American Petroleum Industry says are employed the oil and gas industry.

Solar already employs more people than coal mining, which has 93,185 workers, and has added 50 percent more jobs in 2014 than the oil and gas pipeline construction industry (10,529) and the crude petroleum and natural gas extraction industry (8,688) did combined, according to the Solar Foundation.

One out of every 78 new jobs created in the U.S. over the past 12 months were created by the solar industry, representing nearly 1.3 percent of all jobs created in the country. Solar companies surveyed for the fifth annual census plan to add another 36,000 employees this year.

Third-party financing that allows homeowners to lease solar systems, a stabilizing manufacturing sector and utility-scale solar developers scrambling to finish projects before the federal investment tax credit drops from 30 percent to 10 percent on Jan. 1, 2017 has helped drive growth, says Andrea Luecke, president and executive director of The Solar Foundation.

The solar job-growth trend has spilled beyond the confines of companies solely dedicated to the renewable energy source.

NRG Energy, one of the largest U.S. independent power producers and owner of 88 fossil fuel and nuclear plants, is expanding its solar business rapidly. NRG’s Home Solar group, the residential solar division of NRG Home, hired 500 people in the past 12 months and now has 1,200 workers.

“We’re growing explosively in several markets,” NRG Home Solar president Kelcy Pegler Jr. said in an interview with Fortune on Thursday following the company’s investor day presentation.

As a result, Pegler’s residential home solar group plans to add “hundreds of jobs” this quarter and will double its current headcount in the next two years.

NRG Energy, which employs 10,000 people, reorganized last year into three business lines: NRG Business, NRG Home and NRG Renew. The company NRG -1.02% has a number of other solar-related jobs within NRG Renew and NRG Home, including its power on the go division which was expanded after the 2014 acquisition of portable solar power company Goal Zero.

These aren’t just part-time jobs either, these are careers.

Stephen Maxie writes:  Last August, my wife and I welcomed our third daughter into the world. It’s wonderful to be the parent of three girls. There is one significant drawback, however: having to field the question, over and over again, from (mostly) well-meaning people: “So are you going to try for a boy now?” There are several solid reasons we are calling it a day in the reproduction department. But if we were interested in having a fourth child, “trying for a boy” would not be the motivation. The idea is preposterous. Having a string of children of one sex does not presage the arrival of a baby of the opposite sex. Each pregnancy brings the same odds of having a boy or a girl, regardless of how previous pregnancies turned out: about 1 in 2.

The inkling that eventually odds come to favor having a baby of the other sex is an application of the “gambler’s fallacy.” This mistake is often explained with the example of coin tosses. Let’s say you flip a fair coin 5 times and it ends up “heads” each time. Many people watching this unbroken string of unlikely flips would bet good money that the sixth flip will bring “tails.” Heads can’t go on forever! What are the chances that there would be six heads in a row? Answer: on the sixth flip, there are even odds of getting heads or tails, just as there were for the first five flips. You’d be a fool to place a big bet on tails—or on heads, for that matter—for any individual coin toss.

In the long run, with millions or billions of flips, a fair coin will produce increasingly even numbers of heads and tails. The numbers will show something very close to a 50/50 split.  But when you’re dealing with only a few handfuls of flips, the law of small numbers applies: seemingly unlikely strings of coin flips are not that improbable after all. In our example, there is a probability of 1/64 that six flips of a fair coin will result in heads each time (that’s 1 over 2 to the sixth power). Those odds aren’t great; they come out to about a 1.6% chance. The gambler’s fallacy is to look at those meager odds and conclude there is a 98.4% chance the sixth flip will be tails. But here’s the fundamental problem: the probability of the first five flips coming up heads is now 100 percent. They have already happened! The only question is what will happen with the next flip, and those odds are, again, 50/50. Here is another way to look at it: any permutation of six coin flips—all heads or all tails or three heads and three tails or one tails and five heads, e.g.—has a probability of 1/64. So it’s just as likely—and just as unlikely—that six flips of a coin will produce six heads, or three tails and three heads—or any of the other 62 possible permutations.

When we zoom in on a string of one or two dozen flips, then, we are likely to find some series of flips that don’t look so random. Such non-random-seeming strings are to be expected from time to time. And this principle holds outside the realm of coin flips; it applies to purportedly amazing coincidences you might experience in your life.

It’s clear how a gambler can suffer from this fallacy: he can lose big money. If you throw all your chips on black in a game of Roulette after the ball has landed on red 10 times in a row because it couldn’t possibly wind up there an eleventh time—well, you have a good chance of walking home empty-pocketed. On August 18, 1913, scores of French gamblers left the Monte Carlo casino bereft after falling victim to this mistake: the Roulette ball landed on black 26 times in a row that day; during the run, everybody was betting that the wheel would even itself out and turn to red. But of course the wheel had no memory of its previous spins. Only the irrational bettors thought that previous spins had anything to do with how the next spin would turn out.

A new piece of research shows there are weighty implications of this cognitive bias well beyond the casino floor. In next Friday’s Praxis, I will discuss evidence that judges, loan officers and baseball umpires tend to succumb to the gambler’s fallacy in their decision making—dramatically expanding the damage the fallacy can cause to innocent bystanders.

Dani Rodrik writes:  A specter of job-killing technology is haunting the world.  How this challenge is met will determine the fate of the world’s market economies and democratic polities.

When the new industrial working class began to organize, governments defused the threat of revolution from below by expanding political and social rights, regulating markets, erecting a welfare state that provided extensive transfers and social insurance, and smoothing the ups and downs of the macroeconomy. In effect, they reinvented capitalism to make it more inclusive and to give workers a stake in the system.

Today’s technological revolutions call for a similarly comprehensive reinvention. The potential benefits of discoveries and new applications in robotics, biotechnology, digital technologies and other areas are all around us and easy to see. Indeed, many believe that the world economy may be on the cusp of another explosion in new technologies.

The  bulk of these new technologies are labor-saving. They entail the replacement of low- and medium-skilled workers with machines operated by a much smaller number of highly skilled workers.

A world in which robots and machines do the work of humans need not be a world of high unemployment. But it is certainly a world in which the lion’s share of productivity gains accrues to the owners of the new technologies and the machines that embody them. The bulk of the workforce is condemned either to joblessness or low wages.

Indeed, something like this has been happening in the developed countries for at least four decades. Skill and capital-intensive technologies are the leading culprit behind the rise in inequality since the late 1970s. By all indications, this trend is likely to continue, producing historically unprecedented levels of inequality and the threat of widespread social and political conflict.

The key is to recognize that disruptive new technologies produce large social gains and private losses simultaneously. These gains and losses can be reconfigured in a manner that benefits everyone. Just as with the earlier reinvention of capitalism, the state must play a large role.

Consider how new technologies develop. Each potential innovator faces a large upside, but also a high degree of risk.

These risks are especially high at the dawn of a new innovation age. Achieving the socially desirable level of innovative effort then requires either foolhardy entrepreneurs – who are willing to take high risks – or a sufficient supply of risk capital.

Imagine that a government established a number of professionally managed public venture funds, which would take equity stakes in a large cross-section of new technologies, raising the necessary funds by issuing bonds in financial markets. These funds would operate on market principles and have to provide periodic accounting to political authorities (especially when their overall rate of return falls below a specified threshold), but would be otherwise autonomous.

Designing the right institutions for public venture capital can be difficult. But central banks offer a model of how such funds might operate independently of day-to-day political pressure. Society, through its agent – the government – would then end up as co-owner of the new generation of technologies and machines.

The public venture funds’ share of profits from the commercialization of new technologies would be returned to ordinary citizens in the form of a “social innovation” dividend – an income stream that would supplement workers’ earnings from the labor market. It would also allow working hours to be reduced.

. An innovation state, established along the lines sketched above, would reconcile equity with the incentives that such investment requires.