Futures studies work best when they're vague and build upon current trends to their logical (and often extreme) conclusion. Along the way, they usually play into their intended audience's hopes and fears: economic collapse, infinite growth for the middle class, Malthusian predictions of food crashes, and a belief in the fundamental know-ability of what is to come.

At the same time, any specific prediction in these texts will almost invariably be wrong. And that limits how useful they can ever be beyond a limited scope of activity. It is rare to see government officials or even corporate executives making long-term plans based on a vision of the future laid out in these studies. You just won't hear someone saying, "We should do this because of GT2030."

That doesn't mean this sort of study is useless. The GT2030 report is important for how it's changing the process and trying to encourage adaptive thinking about the future. It helps leaders understand not just the current trends (which can change on a moment's notice, in the way the 2008 recession undid all the previous predictions of forever-growth), but also how to be flexible enough to adapt to rapid change.

Leaders should look at reports like GT2030 and think about how they can evolve current institutions to be more adaptable and flexible in the future. It seems odd to think that the decentralized world GT2030 describes is going to be met with institutions that were designed in the 1940s.

In 1997, the U.S. intelligence outfit charged with long-term strategic thinking made some startling predictions: by 2010, North Korea would be transformed into a normal state and tensions on the peninsula would be eliminated; the western world would see unending 2-percent growth in personal income; and precision weapons would make conflicts smaller and less costly.

None of those things happened. North Korea remains mostly unchanged today -- except for its nuclear program, which perhaps poses more of a threat than ever. Not only did the 2008 financial crisis stall most economic growth in the Western world, but personal incomes have largelystagnated as well. Finally, while precision weapons did make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan less costly in some respects, neither war could be considered small. Few would argue those were examples of a new, high-tech way of fighting.

According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly. 

But there is another truth: The reality of large, impersonal forces like geography and the environment that also help to determine the future of human events. Africa has historically been poor largely because of few good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior to the coast. Russia is paranoid because its land mass is exposed to invasion with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy not because of ideas but because of large energy deposits underground. You get the point. Intellectuals concentrate on what they can change, but we are helpless to change much of what happens.

The National Intelligence Council has issued Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, “intended to stimulate thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories during the next 15-20 years.”

The report sees four megatrends:

Individual empowerment will accelerate substantially during the next 15-20 years owing to poverty reduction and a huge growth of the global middle class, greater educational attainment, better health care, and widespread exploitation of new communications and manufacturing technologies.  Enabled by communications technologies, power will shift toward multifaceted and amorphous networks that will form to influence state and global actions.

Diffusion of power among countries will have a dramatic impact by 2030. Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP, population size, military spending, and technological investment. China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030.

Demographic Patterns: in the world of 2030—a world in which a growing global population will have reached somewhere close to 8.3 billion people (up from 7.1 billion in 2012)—four key trends will be aging—a shrinking number of youthful societies and states; migration, which will increasingly be a cross-border issue; and growing urbanization, which will spur economic growth but could put new strains on food and water resources.

Growing Food, Water, and Energy Nexus: Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources.

The U.S. energy situation also will improve dramatically under most scenarios, and it can be expected to be able to supply most of its energy needs from Western Hemispheric sources within a few years. A decline in dependence on energy resources drawn from the Eastern Hemisphere reduces the need of the United States to intervene there and particularly reduces the need to concern itself with the Persian Gulf. That will be a sea change in how the global system works.

How the Internet of everything will change the world

November 8, 2012

Internet of Everything (credit: Cisco)

From the Internet of Things (IoT), where we are today, we are just beginning to enter a new realm: the Internet of Everything (IoE), where things will gain context awareness, increased processing power, and greater sensing abilities, says Cisco in their blog.

Add people and information into the mix and you get a network of networks where billions or even trillions of connections create unprecedented opportunities and give things that were silent a voice.

Cisco says their IoE as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before — turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.

Over 50% of oil use around the world is for transport and three-quarters of the energy used in the transport sector is consumed on the roads.

Current trends in energy supply and use are patently unsustainable – economically, environmentally and socially. Without decisive action, energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will more than double by 2050 and increased oil demand will heighten concerns over the security of supplies. We can and must change our current path, but this will take an energy prevolution and low-carbon energy technologies will have a crucial role to play. Energy efficiency, many types of renewable energy, carbon capture pand storage (CCS), nuclear power and new transport technologies will all require widespread deployment if we are to reach our greenhousegas (GHG) emission goals. Every major country and sector of the economy must be involved. The task is also urgent if we are to make sure that pinvestment decisions taken now do not saddle us with sub-optimal technologies in the long term. 

European Economic Woes Spur Separatists in Pockets of Prosperity

Can states of the "Old Continent" survive the economic crisis? Separatist movements across Europe have gained popularity during the last few months. The separatist New Flemish Alliance dominated Belgium's Dutch-speaking Flanders in the last elections; protests are held for the independence of Venice and South Tyrol in Italy; separatists remain strong in the Basque region of Spain; and respective referendums will decide the future of Catalonia and Scotland. Regions demanding autonomy are not the most affected by the crisis. On the contrary, in times of economic instability, "the separatist trend has been strongest in prosperous regions of Europe, where there is growing resentment at having to pay for the less well-off." (New York Times)

A new study by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, has found that the top 1 percent of households now hold a larger share of overall wealth than the bottom 90 percent does.

Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression, and the recession has done little to reverse the trend, with the top 1 percent of earners taking 93 percent of the income gains in the first full year of the recovery.

The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class — has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well.

“Growth becomes more fragile” in countries with high levels of inequality like the United States, said Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, whose research suggests that the widening disparity since the 1980s might shorten the nation’s economic expansions by as much as a third.

Reducing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be “two sides of the same coin,” research published last year by the I.M.F. concluded.

Since the 1980s, rich households in the United States have earned a larger and larger share of overall income. The 1 percent earns about one-sixth of all income and the top 10 percent about half, according to statistics compiled by the respected economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

For years, economists have thought of such inequality in part as a side effect of policies that fostered the country’s economic dynamism — its tax preferences for investment income, for instance. And organizations like the World Bank and the I.M.F., which is based in Washington, have generally not tackled inequality in the world head on.

But economists’ thinking has changed sharply in recent years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development this year warned about the “negative consequences” of the country’s high levels of pay inequality, and suggested an aggressive series of changes to tax and spending programs to tackle it.

The I.M.F. has cautioned the United States, too. “Some dismiss inequality and focus instead on overall growth — arguing, in effect, that a rising tide lifts all boats,” a commentary by fund economists said. “When a handful of yachts become ocean liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss.”

Income Inequality May Take Toll on Growth

( Injustice and Inequality )

Picture Credit: intelligentspeculator.net

In this article Annie Lowrey highlights the rising share of US income going to the highest earners. She argues that income inequality has a big impact on economic growth and, quotes an IMF economist, “when a handful of yachts become liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss.” While both US presidential candidates agree that restoring the “middle class” is crucial to the economy, they disagree strongly on the policy alternatives. Outcomes of these policies will be limited if there is no solid reform to the US economic and financial system.  

Sometimes we choose not to solve big technological problems.

Sometimes we fail to solve big problems because our institutions have failed.

Sometimes big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so, or could more plausibly be solved through other means. 

Finally, sometimes big problems elude any solution because we don't really understand the problem.

What to Do

It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem, and we must understand it. 

The Apollo program, which has become a metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria, but it is an irreproducible model for the future. This is not 1961: there is no galvanizing historical context akin to the Cold War, no likely politician who can heroize the difficult and dangerous, no body of engineers who yearn for the productive regimentation they had enjoyed in the military, and no popular faith in a science-fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon was easy. It was only three days away. Arguably, it wasn't even solving much of a problem. We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. 

We don't lack for challenges. A billion people want electricity, millions are without clean water, the climate is changing, manufacturing is inefficient, traffic snarls cities, education is a luxury, and dementia or cancer will strike almost all of us if we live long enough. In this special package of stories, we examine these problems and introduce you to the indefatigable technologists who refuse to give up trying to solve them.

To contemporaries, the Apollo program occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. The first half of the century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis; in the middle years of the century, polio was on its way to being eradicated; and by 1979 smallpox would be eliminated. More, the progress seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler dubbed an "accelerative thrust" in Future Shock, published in 1970. The adjectival swagger is pardonable: for decades, technology had been increasing the maximum speed of human travel. During most of history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail; by the First World War, automobiles and trains could propel us at more than 100 miles an hour. Every decade thereafter, cars and planes sped humans faster. By 1961, a rocket-powered X-15 had been piloted to more than 4,000 miles per hour; in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000. Wasn't it the very time to explore the galaxy—"to blow this great blue, white, green planet or to be blown from it," as Saul Bellow wrote in Mr. Sammler's Planet (also 1970)?

Why we cant solve big problems

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/

The great energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is under way. As fossil fuel prices rise, as oil insecurity deepens, and as concerns about pollution and climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging. The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with an economy powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The Earth’s renewable energy resources are vast and available to be tapped through visionary initiatives. Our civilization needs to embrace renewable energy on a scale and at a pace we’ve never seen before. 

We inherited our current fossil fuel based world energy economy from another era. The 19th century was the century of coal, and oil took the lead during the 20th century. Today, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂)—the principal climate-altering greenhouse gas—come largely from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Coal, mainly used for electricity generation, accounts for 44 percent of global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions. Oil, used primarily for transportation, accounts for 36 percent. Natural gas, used for electricity and heating, accounts for the remaining 20 percent. It is time to design a carbon- and pollution-free energy economy for the 21st century.

Among the trends:

• Protesters around the world show a growing unwillingness to tolerate unethical decisionmaking by power elites.
• An increasingly educated and Internet-connected generation is rising up against the abuse of power.
• Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime are increasing, environmental viability for our life support is diminishing, debt and economic insecurity are increasing, climate change continues, and the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dangerously. However, the most recent data from the World Bank shows that the share of world population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 52% in 1981 to about 20% in 2010.
• The world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.

“The world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, and people are living longer; yet half the world is potentially unstable,” according to Jerome C. Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project and co-author of the “2012 State of the Future,” an overview of our global situation, problems, solutions, and prospects for the future.

The 16th Annual Edition includes 145 pages and a 10,000 page electronic supplement with more than 1,500 additional pages of detailed current material, and searchable research from the past 16 years. It is available on CD, USB flash drive, or download.

The report is a distillation of research, including tables, graphs, and charts with special chapters on 15 Global Challenges, the State of the Future Index, changing stereotypes about women around the world over the past 50 years and projected next 50 years, future factors affecting cooperatives and businesses, and futures of ontologists.

In fact, this issue is just the latest incarnation of a rather old debate. Walter Lippmann famously argued that public opinion was too fickle to be a reliable guide to policy, and that better-informed elites would have to "manufacture consent" in order to lead effectively. Realists like George Kennan used to worry that democracies were no good at statecraftbecause public passions would warp the conduct of foreign policy, although other scholars have argued that democracies often out-perform authoritarian states because they are better at correcting their mistakes. Social scientists have long debated whether media coverage has any systematic effect on wartime behavior, military intervention, or other foreign policy elements.

Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each by each is how the scientific process is supposed work, i.e., experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. How many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disheartening study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over ten years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.

The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. He stacked them in order and he noticed that the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve. Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17^th century. The upshot was that scientific data was doubling every 15 years.

Terrorism is an enduring reality. While geopolitical changes may cause a shift in the actors who employ terrorism as a tactic, terrorism will continue to be used no matter what the next geopolitical cycle brings. It is, and will continue to be, a tactic used by militant actors who want to confront a militarily superior enemy. Focusing on the tradecraft used in attacks and charting its changes and trends not only permits observers to understand what is happening and why but also provides an opportunity to forecast what is coming next.

A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation, but now what is being programmed is the physical world rather than the virtual one. Digital fabrication will allow individuals to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them. Widespread access to these technologies will challenge traditional models of business, aid, and education.

Urban areas around the world are expanding at twice the rate of their populations, reversing historic trends toward increased density within city limits. The result will be more loss of habitat and biodiversity, warns a team of researchers in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More than 1 million square kilometers of land—largely in biodiversity “hotspots”—have a high probability of being converted to urban use by 2030, with nearly half of the expansion occurring in Asia (primarily China and India), according to the authors. However, the fastest land-to-urban conversion will occur in Africa, which will see urban land cover grow 590% above the 2000 level.

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity Lester R. Brown Presentations for Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity APPETIZER Download brief overview presentation in PowerPoint (24 slides, 3.7 MB) Download brief overview presentation as PDF (3.2 MB) FULL SUMMARY Download full summary presentation in PowerPoint (79 slides, 12.1 MB) Download full summary presentation as PDF (12.1 MB)

The Ideas Report - The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/ideas-2012/

Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies(HITS) have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years.

For the first time, it’s now possible to build a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies like those we observe around us.

William Jennings Bryan  told a gathering of businessmen in 1915 that “my Department is your department; the ambassadors, the ministers, the consuls are all yours; it is their business to look after your interests and to guard your rights,” they were enunciating the soul of American foreign policy, as was the much-lauded Wise Man George Kennan when he wrote in a post-World War II State Department policy planning document: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” 

Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

How Bad Is It? – (New Inquiry – May 26, 2012)
'During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, 'all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues - disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45%; card parties declined 50%; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30%. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77% to 37%. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50% - admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital. In Spenglerian fashion, Morris Berman (author of Why America Failed(2011)), seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is -- hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. (Editor’s note: Going well beyond statistics, this essay is worth the reader’s time.)

We Will Rue Stuxnet’s Cavalier Deployment – (Financial Times – June 6, 2012)
An arms race in cyberspace is a distinct reality. The existence of the Flame malware shocked computer security specialists. The fact that Flame has been going about its business for several years without anybody having noticed it means that millions of dollars must have been invested in creating the virus to ensure it remained undetected. In a second development, three days after the news about Flame, the White House revealed that the US had been behind the development and deployment of Flame’s most notorious predecessor, Stuxnet, which targeted Natanz, Iran’s uranium enrichment facility. The American admission will act as a starting gun: countries around the world can now argue that it is legitimate to use malware pre-emptively against their enemies. The pre-emptive act against Iran sets an ugly precedent. There is no legal framework restraining intelligence agencies or the military from investing in and then testing these weapons. The implications are grave. Recently, for example, Bavarian police unwittingly allowed some specialist surveillance software to slip on to the web. The program was so intrusive that Germany’s highest court had deemed it unconstitutional. It was almost immediately spotted and copied by Europe’s oldest hacking group, the Chaos Computer Club, a relatively benign organization. But there is no knowing who else has picked up the software or even started using it. See also: Germany has confirmed that its military maintains an operational cyberwarfare unit with offensive capabilities. Prof. Dr. Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, a professor of law at European University Viadrina Frankfurt in Germany, said that “the armed forces of many nations are probably building up an offensive cyber capability. The only difference is that Germany and (also recently) the Obama administration in the US are publicly talking about it.” He added that “cyber-espionage activities are not prohibited by codes of international law but only national criminal laws.” 

Will Our Kids Be a Different Species? – (TED – June, 2012)
Throughout human evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now? In this TED talk, Juan Enriquez sweeps across time and space to bring us to the present moment—and shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way. Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about profound changes that genomics will bring in business, technology, and society. His TED Book,Homo Evolutis, explores those changes. Enriquez was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter's marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world's oceans.

Fundamental change occurs most often in one of two ways: as a "fatal discontinuity," a sudden catastrophic event that is potentially world changing, or as a persistent, gradual trend. Global catastrophes include volcanic eruptions, viral pandemics, wars, and large-scale terrorist attacks; trends are demographic, environmental, economic, and political shifts that unfold over time. 

 The whole principle of academic freedom rests on the idea that knowledge is best advanced by allowing ideas to blossom and to be shared without restriction. In this way, good ideas can be validated and retained and bad ideas or conjectures can be scrutinized and eventually excluded. 

Now scientists themselves are looking at cognitive foundations of religion--and arriving at some surprising conclusions. Over the course of the past two decades, scholars have employed insights gleaned from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines to illuminate the study of religion. In Why Religion is Natural and Science Is Not, Robert N. McCauley, one of the founding fathers of the cognitive science of religion, argues that our minds are better suited to religious belief than to scientific inquiry. Drawing on the latest research and illustrating his argument with commonsense examples, McCauley argues that religion has existed for many thousands of years in every society because the kinds of explanations it provides are precisely the kinds that come naturally to human minds. Science, on the other hand, is a much more recent and rare development because it reaches radical conclusions and requires a kind of abstract thinking that only arises consistently under very specific social conditions. Religion makes intuitive sense to us, while science requires a lot of work.

As the world moves into the second decade of the 21st century, a new power rivalry is taking shape between India and China, Asia's two behemoths in terms of territory, population and richness of civilization. India's recent successful launch of a long-range missile able to hit Beijing and Shanghai with nuclear weapons is the latest sign of this development.

This is a rivalry borne completely of high-tech geopolitics, creating a core dichotomy between two powers whose own geographical expansion patterns throughout history have rarely overlapped or interacted with each other. Despite the limited war fought between the two countries on their Himalayan border 50 years ago, this competition has relatively little long-standing historical or ethnic animosity behind it.

The signal geographical fact about Indians and Chinese is that the impassable wall of the Himalayas separates them. Buddhism spread in varying forms from India, via Sri Lanka and Myanmar, to Yunnan in southern China in the third century B.C., but this kind of profound cultural interaction was the exception more than the rule.

Read more: The India-China Rivalry by Robert D. Kaplan | Stratfor 

Atrocities occur in  wars. This is an observation, not an excuse. And they become more likely the longer a soldier is in combat. War is brutal and it brutalizes the souls of warriors. Some resist the brutalization better than others, but no one can see death that often and not be changed. Just as important, the enemy is dehumanized. You cannot fight and fear him for years and not come to see him as someone alien to you. Even worse, when the enemy and the population are difficult to distinguish, as is the case in a counterinsurgency, the fear and rage extends to everyone. 

There is another secret to American success -- both in controlling the oceans and taking advantage of European failures -- that lies in an often-misunderstood economic structure called Bretton Woods. Even before World War II ended, the United States had leveraged its position as the largest economy and military to convince all of the Western allies -- most of whose governments were in exile at the time -- to sign onto the Bretton Woods accords. The states committed to the formation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to assist with the expected post-War reconstruction. Considering the general destitution of Western Europe at the time, this, in essence, was a U.S. commitment to finance if not outright fund that reconstruction. Because of that, the U.S. dollar was the obvious and only choice to serve as the global currency.

But Bretton Woods was about more than currency regimes and international institutions; its deeper purpose lay in two other features that are often overlooked. The United States would open its markets to participating states' exports while not requiring reciprocal access for its own. In exchange, participating states would grant the United States deference in the crafting of security policy. NATO quickly emerged as the organization through which this policy was pursued.

Global history from 1500 to 1945 is a lengthy treatise of increasing contact and conflict among a series of great regional powers. Some of these powers achieved supra-regional empires, with the Spanish, French and English being the most obvious. Several regional powers -- Austria, Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Japan -- also succeeded in extending their writ over huge tracts of territory during parts of this period. And several secondary powers -- the Netherlands, Poland, China and Portugal -- had periods of relative strength. Yet the two world wars massively devastated all of these powers. No battles were fought in the mainland United States. Not a single American factory was ever bombed. Alone among the world's powers in 1945, the United States was not only functional but thriving.

Envisioning Technology | Envisioning emerging technology for 2012 and beyond 

http://envisioningtech.com/

The evolution of geopolitics is cyclical. Powers rise, fall and shift. Changes occur in every generation in an unending ballet. However, the period between 1989 and 1991 was unique in that a long cycle of human history spanning hundreds of years ended, and with it a shorter cycle also came to a close. The world is still reverberating from the events of that period. 

On Dec. 25, 1991, an epoch ended. On that day the Soviet Union collapsed, and for the first time in almost 500 years no European power was a global power, meaning no European state integrated economic, military and political power on a global scale. What began in 1492 with Europe smashing its way into the world and creating a global imperial system had ended. For five centuries, one European power or another had dominated the world, whether Portugal, Spain, France, England or the Soviet Union. Even the lesser European powers at the time had some degree of global influence. 

After 1991 the only global power left was the United States, which produced about 25 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) each year and dominated the oceans. Never before had the United States been the dominant global power. Prior to World War II, American power had been growing from its place at the margins of the international system, but it was emerging on a multipolar stage. After World War II, it found itself in a bipolar world, facing off with the Soviet Union in a struggle in which American victory was hardly a foregone conclusion. 

The United States has been the unchallenged global power for 20 years, but its ascendancy has left it off-balance for most of this time, and imbalance has been the fundamental characteristic of the global system in the past generation. Unprepared institutionally or psychologically for its position, the United States has swung from an excessive optimism in the 1990s that held that significant conflict was at an end to the wars against militant Islam after 9/11, wars that the United States could not avoid but also could not integrate into a multilayered global strategy. When the only global power becomes obsessed with a single region, the entire world is unbalanced. Imbalance remains the defining characteristic of the global system today. 

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/16/xi_jipings_overhyped_visit

First, as a good realist, I think that the basic state of Sino-American relations will be driven more by balances of power and configurations of interest than by the personalities of individual leaders. As I've noted before, if China continues to grow more powerful, Bejing and Washington will view each other with an increasingly wary eye and are likely to find more issues about which to conflict. A serious security competition -- especially in East Asia -- will be likely (which does not mean that war is inevitable or even likely, by the way). Again assuming China's continued ascent, I'm guessing this will occur no matter who is in power in each country.

No one seriously denies that the state has a role to play in economic life. The question is what that role should be and how it can be performed in ways that simultaneously enhance economic efficiency and minimize the kind of rent-seeking behavior -- "corruption" in all its shapes and forms -- that tends to arise wherever the public and private sectors meet.

We are all state capitalists now -- and we have been for over a century, ever since the modern state began its steady growth in the late 19th century, when Adolph Wagner first formulated his law of rising state expenditures. But there are myriad forms of state capitalism, from the enlightened autocracy of Singapore to the dysfunctional tyranny of Zimbabwe, from the egalitarian nanny state of Denmark to the individualist's paradise that is Ron Paul's Texas.

The real contest of our time is not between a state-capitalist China and a market-capitalist America, with Europe somewhere in the middle. It is a contest that goes on within all three regions as we all struggle to strike the right balance between the economic institutions that generate wealth and the political institutions that regulate and redistribute it.

The character of this century -- whether it is "post-American," Chinese, or something none of us yet expects -- will be determined by which political system gets that balance right.

Reclaiming the Republic

( Globalization of Politics )

Picture Credit: penguin.com

Acclaimed author Lawrence Lessig denounces institutions corrupted by moneyed interests - Congress, accounting, financial services, healthcare, academics and the media. He compares institutional corruption with a disease for which the body cannot develop a sufficient immune response. Slowly but surely, corruption as an invidious, systemic wrong destroys the body politic. In this Boston-Review interview, Lessig presents concrete solutions to what he believes to be one of the most dangerous forms of corruption, namely the US campaign-finance system.   

http://www.globalpolicy.org/globalization/globalization-of-politics/general-analysis-on-globalization-of-politics/51252-reclaiming-the-republic-.html?itemid=id#651

the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It

( General Analysis on Nations & States )

Picture Credit:  operationbrokensilence.org

The US military has positioned many drone bases “offshore,” making it easier for drones to cross nation-state boundaries. It has also increased its CIA backed special operations force, which often uses drones. The merge of special operations forces with drone technology has hidden US military operations from public scrutiny. Allowing US drones to cross boundaries is a step towards establishing a free reigning and literally dehumanized US military empire.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations-a-states/general-analysis-on-states-and-their-future/51257-offshore-everywhere-how-drones-special-operations-forces-and-the-us-navy-plan-to-end-national-sovereignty-as-we-know-it.html?itemid=id#708

Nathan Myhrvold CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine The Scientific Method—An Explanation For Explanations Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything. However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned. Somewhere along the line a very different meme got started. Instead of forbidding inquiry into stories about the world people tried the other extreme of encouraging continual questioning. Stories about aspect of the world can be questioned skeptically, and tested with observations and experiments. If the story survives the tests then provisionally at least one can accept it as something more than a mere story; it is a theory that has real explanatory power. It will never be more than a provisional explanation—we can never let down our skeptical guard—but these provisional explanations can be very useful. We call this process of making and vetting stories the scientific method. For me, the scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. Indeed it is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified—the scientific method. This seems quite obvious to us now, but it took many thousands of years for people to develop the scientific method to a point where they could use it to build useful theories about the world. It was not, a priori, obvious that such a method would work. At one extreme, creation myths discuss the origin of the universe, and for thousands of years one could take the position that this will never be more than a story—how can humans ever figure out something that complicated and distant in space and time? It would be a bold bet to say that people reasoning with the scientific method could solve that puzzle. Well, it has taken us a while but by now enormous amounts are known about the composition of stars and galaxies and how the universe came to be. There are still gaps in our knowledge (and our skepticism will never stop), but we've made a lot of progress on cosmology and many other problems. Indeed we know more about the composition of distant stars than many questions about things here on earth. The scientific method has not conquered all great questions - other issues remain illusive, but the spirit of the scientific method is that one does shrink from the unknown. It is OK to say that we have no useful story for everything we are curious about, and we comfort ourselves that at some point in the future new explanations will fill the gaps in our current knowledge, as often raise new questions that highlight new gaps. It's hard to overestimate the importance of the scientific method. Human culture contains much more than science—but science is the part that actually works—the rest is just stories. The rationally based inquiry the scientific method enables is what has given us science and technology and vastly different lifestyles than those of our hunter-gatherers ancestors. In some sense it is analogous to evolution. The sum of millions of small mutations separate us from single celled like blue-green algae. Each had to survive the test of selection and work better than the previous state in the sense of biological fitness. Human knowledge is the accumulation of millions of stories-that-work, each of which had to survive the test of the scientific method, matching observation and experiment more than the predecessors. Both evolution and science have taken us a long way, but looking forward it is clear that science will take us much farther.

American-Chinese relations have long contained elements of rivalry and co-operation. But, increasingly, the rival elements are coming to the fore. This is not yet a new cold war. However, the state of relations between the United States and China -- the sole superpower and its only plausible rival -- are likely to set the tone for international politics in the coming decade.

In fact, the increasing rivalry between Washington and Beijing is an important contributor to the third major manifestation of the spread of zero-sum logic through the international system -- the increasing deadlock in multilateral diplomacy, from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to climate-change negotiations to the G-20's stalled efforts at global financial regulation.

The authors make a compelling case for optimism. We are introduced to dozens of innovators and industry captains making tremendous strides in healthcare, agriculture, energy, and other fields: Dean Kamen’s “Slingshot,” a technology that can transform polluted water, salt water, or even raw sewage into incredibly high-quality drinking water for less than one cent a liter; the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize, which promises a low-cost, handheld medical device that allows anyone to diagnose themself better than a board-certified doctor; and Dickson Despommier’s “vertical farms,” which replace traditional agriculture with a system that uses 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, and 100 percent fewer pesticides, with zero transportation costs.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company. 

Assassination of U.S. citizens 

Indefinite detention 
Arbitrary justice 
Warrantless searches 
Secret evidence 
War crimes 
Secret court 
Immunity from judicial review 
Continual monitoring of citizens 
Extraordinary renditions 

(read the whole article) 

The Washington Post had this article yesterday. 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free. Law professor Jonathan Turley began this way:

Those risks perceived by survey respondents to be of greatest systemic importance. For risk-related planning, Centres of Gravity should serve as focal points to guide strategic interventions.

The 2012 Centres of Gravity are:

- Chronic fiscal imbalances (economic)

- Greenhouse gas emissions (environmental)

- Global governance failure (geopolitical)

- Unsustainable population growth (societal)

- Critical systems failure (technological)

China, invariably mentioned as America's prospective successor, has an impressive imperial lineage and a strategic tradition of carefully calibrated patience, both of which have been critical to its overwhelmingly successful, several-thousand-year-long history. China thus prudently accepts the existing international system, even if it does not view the prevailing hierarchy as permanent. It recognizes that success depends not on the system's dramatic collapse but on its evolution toward a gradual redistribution of power. Moreover, the basic reality is that China is not yet ready to assume in full America's role in the world. Beijing's leaders themselves have repeatedly emphasized that on every important measure of development, wealth, and power, China will still be a modernizing and developing state several decades from now, significantly behind not only the United States but also Europe and Japan in the major per capita indices of modernity and national power. Accordingly, Chinese leaders have been restrained in laying any overt claims to global leadership.

The leaders of the world's second-rank powers, among them India, Japan, Russia, and some European countries, are already assessing the potential impact of U.S. decline on their respective national interests. The Japanese, fearful of an assertive China dominating the Asian mainland, may be thinking of closer links with Europe. Leaders in India and Japan may be considering closer political and even military cooperation in case America falters and China rises. Russia, while perhaps engaging in wishful thinking (even schadenfreude) about America's uncertain prospects, will almost certainly have its eye on the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Europe, not yet cohesive, would likely be pulled in several directions: Germany and Italy toward Russia because of commercial interests, France and insecure Central Europe in favor of a politically tighter European Union, and Britain toward manipulating a balance within the EU while preserving its special relationship with a declining United States. Others may move more rapidly to carve out their own regional spheres: Turkey in the area of the old Ottoman Empire, Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere, and so forth. None of these countries, however, will have the requisite combination of economic, financial, technological, and military power even to consider inheriting America's leading role.