Could software-based mediation spread from divorce settlements and utility pricing to resolving political and military disputes? Game theorists, who consider all these to be variations of the same kind of problem, have developed an intriguing conceptual model of war. The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise. Belligerents fight to determine the military strength and political resolve of their opponents; when all sides have “converged” on accurate and identical assessments, a surrender or peace deal can be hammered out. Each belligerent has a strong motivation to hit the enemy hard to show that it values victory very highly. Such a model might be said to reflect poorly on human nature. But some game theorists believe that the model could be harnessed to make diplomatic negotiations a more viable substitute for armed conflict.

Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today's policy-makers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's influential advisor A.A. Berle that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield "substantial control of the world." And correspondingly, that loss of control would threaten the project of global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II, and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day.

Futuring Principle 1>> The future will be some unknown combination of continuity and change.

No historical event has ever occurred without antecedents and long chains of cause-and-effect relationships. Nor was there ever a time when decision makers did not have choices, including the simple option to do nothing. Yet, in the present moment, one can never be certain which chains of events will play out. While there are continuities in the past and the present, there are also changes, many of which cannot be anticipated. Sometimes these changes are extreme, resulting from high-impact, low-probability events known as “wild cards.”

Thus, the future always has been and most likely always will be an unknown combination of both trend continuities and discontinuities. Figuring out the precise combination is extremely difficult. Therefore, we must study the trends but not blindly project them into the future—we have to consider historical trends, present conditions, and imagined changes, both great and small, over time. You might say that trend analysis is “necessary but not sufficient” for futuring; the same goes for imagined changes, too.

Futuring Principle 2>> Although the future cannot be predicted with precision, it can be anticipated with varying degrees of uncertainty, depending upon conditions. Forecasts and plans are expectations for the future, and they are always conditional...

Futuring Principle 3>> Futuring and visioning offer different perspectives of the future—and these perspectives must complement one another...

Futuring Principle 4>>

All forecasts and plans should be well-considered expectations for the future, grounded in rigorous analysis.

Futuring methods fall into three broad, fundamental categories: trend analysis, expert judgment, and scenarios (also known as multi-optional or alternative futures). Historical research methods and criticism play well in all three categories.

Futuring Principle 5>>

There is no such thing as an immutable forecast or a plan for a future that is set in stone.

About the Author

Stephen M. Millett is the president of Futuring Associates LLC,

While the study of history has been rich in philosophy, it has lacked theories such as those found in the natural and social sciences. Most historians have not pursued such theories, because they see each period of history as being unique and as having little or no practical applications for problem solving today. Futuring as applied history, however, needs basic principles upon which to build forecasts that can be used for long-term decision making.

Chance Favors the Concentration of More Wealth in Fewer Hands

Wealth accumulation might be due to a number of factors: hard work, intelligence, lack of ethics, or all of the above. Wealthconcentration, on the other hand, is determined primarily by chance and the effect of compounding returns, according to a study published in the journal PLoS One.

The distribution of wealth is far more uneven than popular economic models would suggest, report researchers Joseph E. Fargione, Clarence Lehman, and Stephen Polasky. Given a situation where "all individuals have equal talent and begin with the same amount of capital," an increasingly smaller number of investors accumulated an ever larger share of wealth at the expense of the other investors.

The researchers also found that larger concentrations of wealth decrease diversity within the economy, which decreases the amount of additional wealth that economy is able to create.

A separate report from the liberal Institute for Policy Studies found that, of the 100 highest paid American CEOs of 2010, 22 made more in compensation and benefits than their companies paid in taxes.

Sources: “Entrepreneurs, Chance, and the Deterministic Concentration of Wealth” by Joseph E. Fargione, Clarence Lehman, and Stephen Polasky, PLoS One, PubMed Central.

Natural intelligence evolution starts from wormlike animals with a few hundred neurons occurring more than 570 million years ago. Very primitive fish that appeared 470 million years ago had about 100,000 neurons. One hundred million years later, amphibians with a few million neurons emerged from the swamps. One hundred fifty million years later, the first small mammals appeared and had brain capacities with several hundred million neurons. The bigger co-inhabitants at the time, the dinosaurs, had brains with several billion neurons.…

Futuring methods fall into three broad, fundamental categories: trend analysis, expert judgment, and scenarios (also known as multi-optional or alternative futures). Historical research methods and criticism play well in all three categories.

This principle draws a distinction between futuring and visioning. Futuring looks at what is most plausibly, even likely, to unfold, given trends, evolving conditions, and potentially disruptive changes. It emphasizes conditions that are partially if not largely out of your own control.

Visioning, on the other hand, involves formulating aspirational views of the future based on what you want to see happen—in other words, how you would like events to play out. Of course, just because you want a certain future to happen does not guarantee that it will.

Strategic planning is a manifestation of visioning. If an organization does not engage in forecasting with all the rigor of historical criticism and good science, strategic planning can be just so much wishful thinking. I find that wishful thinking is alive and well in many corporations and institutions. Both futuring and visioning are necessary and they go hand-in-hand—just be careful to correctly identify which you are doing and why.

Thus, the future always has been and most likely always will be an unknown combination of both trend continuities and discontinuities. Figuring out the precise combination is extremely difficult. Therefore, we must study the trends but not blindly project them into the future—we have to consider historical trends, present conditions, and imagined changes, both great and small, over time. You might say that trend analysis is “necessary but not sufficient” for futuring; the same goes for imagined changes, too.

Futuring is an example of what I call “applied history,” or the use of historical knowledge and methods to solve problems in the present. It addresses the question “What happened and why?” in order to help answer the question “How might things be in the future and what are the potential implications?” Futuring, at least in a management context, combines applied history with other methods adapted from science, mathematics, and systems analysis to frame well-considered expectations for the future. This process will help us to make decisions in the present that will have positive long-term consequences

 As The Economist reports this week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on. At that rate, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by The Economist, it would take about 25 generations for Hong Kong’s female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one. Given that Hong Kong’s average age of childbearing is 31.4 years, it could expect to give birth to its last woman in the year 2798. (That is some time after its neighbour, Macau, which has a higher reproduction rate, but a much smaller population.) By the same unflinching logic, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain will not see out the next millennium. Even China, which has a recorded history stretching back at least 3,700 years, has only about 1,500 years left—if present trends continued unbroken.

We can look forward to bigger and more frequent financial catastrophes as well. Think of equity capital as land, industry segment as location, and financial risk as density. Concentrating all of these means greater productivity, but it also means that we are inviting ever more catastrophic financial hurricanes. How could the defaulted home loan of a strawberry picker in California wipe out $16 trillion in global financial market value and put so many people out of a job?

 As the World Bank observed in its 2009 World Development Report, half the world's GDP is produced on 1.5 percent of its land surface. Humanity's global migration toward ever denser urban living has added trillions of dollars to the global GDP every decade since at least the end of World War II.

Just as the mechanical innovations of the 19th century led to dramatic changes in our way of life, the still-evolving computing and communication innovations of the early 21st century will have a profound impact on the world's economy and culture. For example, even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago. If the late 20th century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micromultinational: small companies that operate globally.

The Future Is Now

What Will the World Look Like in 2025?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/the_future_issue

The financial and economic crises have not only been a defining trend in international affairs, but together have acted as  catalysts for both geoeconomic and geopolitical shifts that were already underway from West to East. If the US currently spends more than six times as much as China on defense, this equation is changing as a decade of modernization of China’s military is beginning to bear fruit, especially in terms of its expanding naval capabilities that allow it to gain a stronger hand in the Asia-Pacific. Other emerging markets will look to play a greater role to reflect growing economic ambitions. Europe is slowly waking up to the fact that a useful barometer for its own political clout has to be set against US-Asia relations. This plenary session discusses the implications of these developments for international security: How stable is the emerging multipolar international system? How will global governance play out in the future? Are the BRICS countries as cohesive as the acronym suggests? Will the US be able or willing to underwrite global security indefinitely? And what are the implications for American statecraft?

 Listen to Closing Plenary Session (Audio)

The world has grown too complex for us to understand it as individuals?

Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory, when tool making and meat eating co-evolved with brain development and social complexity. What is different now is that we have moved beyond external technological interventions to transform ourselves from the inside out—even as we also remake the Earth system itself. Coping with this new reality, say Allenby and Sarewitz, means liberating ourselves from such categories as "human," "technological," and "natural" to embrace a new techno-human relationship. Describing the- terms of this relationship, and exploring sociotechnical systems ranging from railroads to modern military technology, Allenby and Sarewitz ultimately locate individual authenticity in the quest for a new humility in the face of the rapidly disappearing moorings of the Enlightenment.

Where we are losing (credit: The Millennium Project)

It also alerts readers to major changes that seem inevitable. For example, the coming biological revolution may change civilization more profoundly than did the industrial or information revolutions. The world has not come to grips with the implications of writing genetic code to create new lifeforms. Thirteen years ago, the concept of being dependent on Google searches was unknown to the world; today we consider it quite normal. Thirteen years from today, the concept of being dependent on synthetic life forms for medicine, food, water, and energy could also be quite normal.

The Millennium Project’s 2011 State of the Future Report, due out August 1, finds that while people are getting richer, healthier, better educated, and living longer, and the world is more peaceful and better connected, half of the world is potentially unstable.

“Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime is increasing, environmental viability for life support is diminishing, debt and economic insecurity are increasing, climate change continues, and the gap between the rich and poor is widening dangerously,” the report says. “People voting in elections, corruption, people killed or injured in terrorist attacks, and refugees and displaced persons are also identified as key problems.

“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.”

 For thousands of years the environmental question was how to protect humans from the ravages of nature. Just in our lifetime, the issue has now become how to protect nature from the multiplying excesses of human beings. In one sense, we humans have declared war on all forms of Nature. The critical question now is, “Are we at—or have we passed—the ‘tipping point?’”

  Also for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. For the U.S., this emphasizes the need for non-Caucasians to enter into and assume greater responsibility for all aspects of national life, especially in diplomacy and national security.

The information environment in which the individual lives has been radically altered. Through history, the transmission of information, ideas and images took place slowly, taking weeks, even months, to move around the world. Such a slow pace of information travel gave people time to adjust psychologically to a new information environment. Today, we zap information, ideas and images across the globe in nanoseconds. People have no time to adjust, no time to assimilate the new information and shape it into coherent meaning. One result is disorientation and uncertainty.

 The modernization, urbanization and globalization of China, India and other Asian nations will be the most dynamic and convulsive events of the coming decades. Billions of people will have their personal and collective lives transformed to a greater degree, in a shorter space of time, than has been experienced by any people ever before. This will eventually have profound consequences for all nations.

  We have moved from a relatively slow pace of change to an exponential rate. The rate of technological change is estimated to double every decade. Thus, so much is happening so fast in every part of the world, we no longer have any frame of reference within which to understand contemporary events. Life has become a passing blur. Thus leaders lack any larger order of purpose and significance, any guiding narrative that transcends short-term objectives and might offer common purpose to disparate cultures. At such a critical moment, only America seems to have the global reach and structure required to suggest some common pattern of meaning offering collective human existence a modicum of intelligibility and coherence (if we can regain the trust of the world). Just as the Founding Fathers expressed new themes and concepts for a fresh stage of America’s development, so now must America offer a fresh vision for a new stage of the human experience.

Global Race on to Match US Drone Capabilities - (Washington Post - June 30, 2011)

Little is known about the actual abilities of the more than two dozen Chinese models of drones that were on display at Zhuhai air show, the premier event for China's aviation industry in November. But the speed at which they have been developed highlights how U.S. military successes with drones have changed strategic thinking worldwide and spurred a global rush for unmanned aircraft. More than 50 countries have purchased surveillance drones, and many have started in-country development programs for armed versions because no nation is exporting weaponized drones beyond a handful of sales between the United States and its closest allies. Defense spending on drones has become the most dynamic sector of the world's aerospace industry. A market study estimated that in the coming decade global spending on drones will double, reaching $94 billion. 

As a result, the Islamic population will rapidly increase its share in the world population. The world population will increase by 1.7 Billion between 2004 and 2030. On this amount, Muslims will bring 780 million ( 46% ). Today, Muslims represent 24% of world population ( One man out of four). This figure will attain 29% in 2030 ( One man out of three ).

A group of six emerging market countries— Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Russia—will account for half of global economic growth in 2025, a new report from the World Bank said on Tuesday

How to control complex networks

May 13, 2011 by Editor

A new computational model developed by MIT researcher Jean-Jacques Slotine and colleagues allows better control of complex networks, such as the genes that regulate cellular metabolism, by identifying critical points that can be used tocontrol the entire system.

The number of points that need to be controlled to influence the system depends on whether the network is densely or sparsely connected, they report in the May 12 cover story of Nature.

The model predicts that controlling sparse networks like gene regulatory networks requires control more than 80% of all points in the network, while controlling dense networks like neural networks in the brain requires only 10%.

This latest improvement on the half-century old field of control theory will have diverse applications for controlling any network through carefully targeted inputs.

 

Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better

April 4, 2011

Author:

Dan Gardner

Published:

Dutton Adult, 2011

[+]

Amazon | An award-winning journalist uses landmark research to debunk the whole expert prediction industry, and explores the psychology of our obsession with future history.

In 2008, experts predicted gas would hit $20 a gallon; it peaked at $4.10. In 1967, they said the USSR would be the world’s fastest-growing economy by 2000; by 2000, the USSR no longer existed. In 1908, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe; we all know how that turned out. Face it, experts are about as accurate as dart- throwing monkeys. And yet every day we ask them to predict the future — everything from the weather to the likelihood of a terrorist attack. Future Babble is the first book to examine this phenomenon, showing why our brains yearn for certainty about the future, why we are attracted to those who predict it confidently, and why it’s so easy for us to ignore the trail of outrageously wrong forecasts.

In this fast-paced, example-packed, sometimes darkly hilarious book, journalist Dan Gardner shows how seminal research by UC Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock proved that the more famous a pundit is, the more likely he is to be right about as often as a stopped watch. Gardner also draws on current research in cognitive psychology, political science, and behavioral economics to discover something quite reassuring: The future is always uncertain, but the end is not always near.

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Singularity/Futures

The World Wide Web was born just over 22 years ago and now 2 billion people populate it.

 

Y RICHARD DOBBS, JAANA REMES, CHARLES ROXBURGH | MARCH 24, 2011

More and more each year, we live in an urban world. Half the global population already lives in cities and generates more than 80 percent of global GDP. And each week, the urban population increases by more than 1 million people, an amount equivalent to adding seven Chicagos to the face of the planet each year.

Futhermore, the center of gravity of the urban landscape is moving south and east, and growth is increasingly coming from second-tier cities. Companies looking for growth and governments engaged in diplomacy, need to build their efforts on an understanding of this urban world at a more granular level. Country-specific thinking may no longer be specific enough.

Of the European powers, only England and Denmark, in Dr. Fukuyama’s view, developed the three essential institutions of a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms to hold the ruler accountable. This successful formula then became adopted by other European states, through a kind of natural selection that favored the most successful variation.

Dr. Fukuyama emphasizes the role of China because it was the first state. The Qin dynasty, founded in 221 B.C., prevailed over tribalism, the default condition of large societies, by developing an official class loyal to the state rather than to family and kin.

Tribalism did not disappear in Europe until a thousand years later. It yielded first to feudalism, an institution in which peasants bound themselves to a lord’s service in return for his protection. So when kings emerged, they seldom acquired absolute power, as did rulers in China, because they had to share power with feudal lords.

Another impediment to absolute rule in Europe, in Dr. Fukuyama’s telling, was that the concept of the rule of law emerged very early, largely because of the church’s development of canon law in the 11th century. So when strong rulers started to build states, they had to take account of the emerging codes of civil law.

Warfare also forced the second major social transition, from tribe to state. States are better organized than tribes and more stable, since tribes tend to dissolve in fighting after the death of a leader. Only because states offered a better chance of survival did people give up the freedom of the tribe for the coercion of the state.

Much of Dr. Fukuyama’s analysis concerns how states develop from tribes. This transition, in his view, is affected by geography, history, and in particular by the order in which the different institutional components of the state are put in place. Depending on the order of events, several very different kinds of state emerged in China, India, the Islamic world and Europe, and even within Europe there have been several major variations on a common theme.

 

The book traces the development of political order from the earliest human societies, which were small groups of hunter-gatherers. The first major social development, in Dr. Fukuyama’s view, was the transition from hunter-gatherer bands to tribes, made possible by religious ideas that united large numbers of people in worship of a common ancestor. Since a tribe could quickly mobilize many men for warfare, neighboring bands had to tribalize too, or be defeated.

 

Almost 30% of the global population now uses the Internet, which grew 14% in 2010, putting it on track to exceed 2 billion users by the end of this year.

The Internet reached 1.97 billion users worldwide in 2010, according to market research by Internet World Stats. Among the chief areas of growth were Twitter and Facebook, which saw 100 million and 250 million new users, respectively.

According to Twitter’s internal data, 25 billion “tweets” were sent in 2010. Asia led the world in Internet users, with some 825 million people online compared with 266 million in North America. However, North America led in percentage of population online, with 77% of Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans having access to the Internet, versus 21% of Asians.

US will no longer dominate science and research, says Penn State researcher

February 21, 2011 by Editor

A shift in the global research landscape will reposition the United States as a major partner, but not the dominant leader, in science and technology research in the coming decade, according to a Penn State researcher. However, the U.S. could benefit from this research shift if it adopts a policy of knowledge sharing with the growing global community of researchers.

“What is emerging is a global science system in which the U.S. will be one player among many,” said Caroline Wagner, associate professor of international affairs, who presented her findings Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

The entrance of more nations into global science has changed the research landscape. From 1996 to 2008, the share of papers published by U.S. researchers dropped 20 percent. Wagner attributes much of this output shift not to a drop in U.S. research efforts, but to the exponentially increasing research conducted in developing countries, such as China and India.

Ethnic conflicts and civil wars are becoming rarer. Incidents of human rights violations are on the decline, and this is at a time when we're adding more people than ever before. We have three times the people on the planet that we had before World War I, and there are fewer people dying, and human rights violations are down.

Life is better politically for the majority of people on the planet. A higher percentage live in peace than ever before, and that’s likely to continue.

In the nineteenth century, power vacuums used to draw powers in. Nowadays they don't. Countries tend to stay away from them. They don’t want to even send troops into peacekeeping missions. I don’t think invading Iraq has made us safer or less safe. It's just been a mess.

Afghanistan is the same thing. I don’t think it matters much to U.S. security either way. They may well end up having their own civil war. But will it spill over into other countries? Probably not.

We hear that Iran is a threat to the region. But the Iranians have never shown any sign of wanting to attack any of their neighbors. They don’t want to rule Iraq. They don’t want to extend into Pakistan. They're not going to “wipe Israel off the map,” because they know it would be the last thing their government ever does. It's not a good outcome if the Iranians get nuclear weapons, but it won't be the worst thing in the world.

The twenty-first century will probably be the most peaceful hundred years in human history, according to Christopher Fettweis, Tulane University political scientist and author of Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace. He considers ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other global hotspots exceptions to—rather than rules of—modern geopolitics.

Futurist Reading for 2011

What follows is a selection of new and forthcoming books that have been selected for inclusion in the Global Foresight Books project (www.globalforesightbooks.org) by Michael Marien. and includes titles on medicine, economics, the environment, education, business, and technology. Marien has also included subcategories for later reference.
http://www.wfs.org/content/new-and-forthcoming-fallspring-2010-2011

More-Populous World May Demand 16 Times More Energy by 2050

If the global population rises to 9.5 billion by 2050, and every one of those people adopts the American standard of living, global energy demand could increase by a factor of 16 according to a recent paper by a team of University of New Mexico biologists and other researchers.

The article published in the journal BioScience finds that that low infant mortality, electronics consumption per person, and various other high-standard-of-living variables are closely correlated with energy consumption per person.

“The vast majority of nations we analyzed (74%) increased both energy use and GDP from 1980 to 2003 and exhibited positive correlations [in standard of living] across the 24 years. For example, from 1850 to 2000, while the global human population grew fivefold, world energy use increased 20-fold and fossil fuel-use rose more than 150-fold,” the authors write.

Correlation is not the same as causation. The researchers acknowledge the possibility that future technologies may make the U.S. standard of living less energy intensive. Regardless, the correlations they point out are compelling in the light of continued global dependence on fossil fuels.

Sources: http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/110107_study_finds_energy_limits_global_economic_growth.html

At least two broad trends are important to keep in mind. First, while renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, receive a great deal of attention, they will remain minor contributors to our overall energy mix. Nearly all our energy is derived from fossil fuels, whether petroleum, natural gas, or coal, and that will remain true for at least the next few decades. Second, demand for energy will continue to grow, keeping prices high. Although industrial energy consumption fell in 2009 as a result of the worldwide recession, by 2017 or so the industrial sector will consume more energy than all other users combined. That will not change for decades to come.

Wars involve the use of force to achieve political goals, and they end when the belligerents stop using force. But that can happen in several ways. Sometimes one side simply loses the ability to continue, because it has been completely defeated (Nazi Germany in World War II). Sometimes one side can choose to walk away from the fight and does so, giving up whatever was at stake (the United States in Vietnam, considering 1973-75 as a single case). And sometimes the key belligerents on both sides agree to stop and call it a draw (essentially what happened in Korea in 1953). At some point, every war, with the general outcome starting to become clear, enters what might be called its endgame, which is best thought of as a discussion over what the details of the final settlement will be and what will happen after the shooting stops. In my book, How Wars End, I tell the stories of the endgames of American wars over the last century.

The number of Internet users worldwide has mushroomed to reach the two billion mark, the head of the UN's telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, said on Wednesday.

WORLD ON THE EDGE: Quick Facts
www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/wote_quickfactsThere will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates.

If the 2010 heat wave centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago, it could easily have reduced the U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons by 40 percent and food prices would have soared.

Winter temperatures in the Arctic, including Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia, have climbed by 4-7 degrees Fahrenheit over the last half-century. This record rise in temperature in the Arctic region could lead to changes in climate patterns that will affect the entire planet.

Half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted. Since 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation, water shortages translate into food shortages.

In Sana'a, the capital of Yemen—home to 2 million people—water tables are falling fast. Tap water is available only once every 4 days; in Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.

Virtually all of the top 20 countries considered to be "failing states" are depleting their natural assets—forests, grasslands, soils, and aquifers—to sustain their rapidly growing populations.

The indirect costs of gasoline, including climate change, treatment of respiratory illnesses, and military protection, add up to $12 per gallon. Adding this to the U.S. average of $3 per gallon brings the true market price closer to $15 per gallon.

Algeria has enough harnessable solar energy in its vast desert to power the entire world economy.

US population trends:
South-shifting population: More than half of the nation’s population growth during the past decade (51.4 percent) occurred in Southern states, driven in part by an in-migration of an estimated 2.3 million newcomers from nearly all demographic groups – blacks, Hispanics, the elderly and the foreign born – and high fertility rates among some, particularly Hispanics.
“Browning” of America: Nonwhites accounted for an estimated 85 percent of U.S. net population growth during the past decade. Non-Hispanic whites represented 65 percent of the U.S. population in 2009 compared to 76 percent in 1995.
Intermarriage increase: Marriage across racial and ethnic lines has doubled since 1980, further contributing to the browning trend, with 41 percent of all intermarriages in 2008 between Hispanics and whites; 15 percent between Asians and whites; 11 percent between blacks and white; and both parties nonwhite in 16 percent of intermarriages.
“Graying” of America: The first baby boomer born in America turned 65 on Jan. 1, sparking a “silver tsunami” of 79 million baby boomers who will exit the U.S. workforce over the next 20 years. About 8,000 Americans will turn 65 every day over the next five years, and they will live longer than previous generations because of advances in health care and lifestyles that are more active.
Gender shift: Women now hold nearly half of all paid U.S. jobs (49.8 percent), own 40 percent of all businesses and hold 43 percent of executive, administrative and managerial positions in the U.S. economy, narrowing the male-female wage gap to its lowest point in history.
More grandparent-headed households: The number of children living in grandparent-headed households increased by 26.1 percent between 2001 and 2010, compared to 3.8 percent for all U.S. household types. One or both parents also live in about two-thirds of the grandparent-headed households.