Blue Gold, Revisited

An article in New Scientist about the emerging importance of aquifers as freshwater sources, the potential for conflict when such aquifers cross national boundaries, and a new UNESCO map of underground water worldwide.

Migration as Development, Revisited

The Economist on urbanization, migration, and development.

Short version: The world is getting more urbanized. Cities grow larger because they provide economic benefits. Governments can capitalize on the benefits of boom towns by linking them infrastructurally with lagging areas, to facilitate migration from rural poverty (as China is scrambling to do in its impoverished west).

On Cocaine and Kazaa

Fascinating article in Wired about the true nature of the "shadow internet" of media piracy.

Short version: It's not a "sharing network," but rather a highly sophisticated, hierarchical distribution network modeled on criminal narcotic syndicates. And it has the power to change media distribution forever.

Speed and the Modern Condition

"I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to savor that moment, to live in that moment for a week. But I couldn't stop it, only slow it." --Cashback (2006)

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting...In existential mathematics, the experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting." --Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)

Today, by serendipitous circumstance, I delved into two excellent, and complementary works of art. One a movie. The other a novel.



Speed and modernity. It is a subject that has enthralled artists since the early 20th Century, when the pace of the human condition suddenly accelerated with the first sputtering automobiles, and the realization of the elusive dream of heavier-than-air flight in Kitty Hawk, NC.



Geography was flattened and foreshortened. Man's reach broadened. His pace quickened. The future grew closer. The past further away. Time, always relative, became shorter. And so too, did memory...

Is this why we continue to stumble into the same mistakes, over and over? Can we slow life down for a moment, to reflect, to remember? Hopefully we can, because our future depends on it.

"The bad news is that time flies. The good news... is that you're the pilot." --Cashback (2006)

Markets and the Crisis of Knowledge

The New Yorker has an interesting article today on why the current financial market is similar to postmodern literature criticism. Short answer: market value (especially "mark-to-market" valuation) is as elusive as meaning in deconstructionism.

Aha! We all knew this was really a crisis of epistemology, didn't we? How do we know what we know? How can you determine value when it is merely what the market determines it is at any given time? This is not "objective value," but rather perceived value.

But lo! There's no difference! Value is always perceived.

There exists no objective value of gold. Yes, it has historically been prized by some cultures for its luster and malleability. But mostly, its value has been high because of its status (socially-constructed) as a luxury metal. The price of gold has risen and fallen not according to some price equilibrium reflecting its underlying objective value. Supply and demand curves can explain the current price, but even the economic law of supply and demand equilibrium leaves out a glaring unexplained factor. Why is gold demanded at a certain level at a certain time? What sets the demand curve?

And, since the demand and supply curves are reflexive, in that a change in one changes the other, even the supply is dependent upon the mysterious origin of demand. There is a certain amount of gold in the ground. Only the gold that people take the trouble to dig up will enter the marketplace as supply. The gold producers will only dig up this gold if the market price they can expect will make that enterprise profitable. If the price is high, they will dig deeper and deeper, willing to spend more and more on extraction of ever-more-elusive deposits. Since the gold ingots sitting in veins of exposed rocks are much cheaper to collect than gold buried miles under the ground, there are diminishing returns to scale in a given source. How deep the producer goes hits its limit when it costs more to extract that last marginal unit of gold than the gold will sell for back on the surface.

The same principle applies to oil. We'll "run out" of oil long before the actual petroleum deposits are exhausted. The deepest, dirtiest, hardest-to-get-at oil will sit down in its geological tank because it is economically unextractable. To do so wouldn't be worth the trouble, since you'd loose money. On the other hand, what are considered economically-extractable reserves expand with the market price of oil. Nobody considered the billions of barrels-worth of oil in the tar sands of Alberta until oil prices started approaching triple digits.

In short, though the interaction of supply and demand does predictably give rise to price, the whole dynamic cannot be considered scientific (or objective), since subjective demand is the root of supply, price, and market value.

This is the realm of psychology. The consumer demands gold (rather than silver, platinum, titanium, or stainless steel) for subjective reasons of perceived value. This perception of consumer utility is affected by economic conditions, personal taste, trends, Divine Influence, solar flare activity, and TMZ.com. Furthermore, the dynamic of a trend presupposes that the perceptions of other consumers have a compounding effect for the perceived value among all consumers. As more and more consumers desire the new "hot" good, their collective perception of increasing value creates a positive feedback loop, with the perceived values of individual consumers and the market value (derived from all consumers) expanding co-currently.

Even more removed from a hypothetical underlying value of gold is the precious metals investor. The gold he buys and sells he likely never sees, nor uses for his own consumption. The consumer utility derived from a certain quantity of the metal does not concern him directly. To him, the certificate of ownership of the gold is merely itself a tradeable commodity. The value of his ownership of the share of gold is twice-removed from the gold itself. And, too, like the consumer who fosters his own perceived value of gold, the gold investor perceives that the gold share has a certain value--which is socially-constructed. He is betting that other people think or will think that gold share is worth more than he does. In other words, he is exercising his theory of mind.

Again, we see that the behavior of an individual is related reflexively to the behavior of the market (being merely the sum of a group of individuals). By buying a share of gold, the investor himself has increased the value of that share. His perception of the value of that share--and his willingness to act on that perception--has in turn increased the market value of that share. If on balance, the other investors engaged in the market have the same perception of value of a gold share, they too will buy in. At the aggregate, their collective behavior shifts the stock price upward (if the net volume of trading is in a buy direction).

That last parenthetical is important, since one or a few participants (a hedge fund, for example) can drive the stock price up (or down) by merely buying a very high volume of the stock (or conversely, by betting against it by shorting it). Even if the minority of traders perceive that the shares are worth less, the sheer weight of high-volume purchasing can drive the market value upward. And with that, the smaller investors can respond to the gravity of the handful of high-volume investors by upgrading their perception of the stock's value. Like planets around a massive star, they are drawn into the orbit of trading behavior. This was seen in full effect when the infamous David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital publicly shorted Lehman Brothers, hastening that troubled investment banks demise (and arguably precipitating the entire financial crisis of late).

But wait, we can take this further... Merely the expectation that there will be a high volume of buying can be enough to convince traders to buy. Say, for example, Fast Money shouts to its audience one day that gold is a "must-buy." Odds are, the market price of gold will shoot up, as viewers rush to buy gold as low as possible before all the other people want to buy. At the tail end, some unlucky sap will be the last to the feeding frenzy, buying gold at a high higher than other people are willing to pay. This will then be the peak, when the market value of gold shares reaches its peak. People will stop buying, because they know that nobody else will be willing to pay more than the peak price (thus, they wont be able to sell profitably). The perception of value drops among individual traders, and so then does the market price. Fast Money goes on the next day saying gold is a "sell" now, and that silver has the best capacity for growth. And the process continues ad infinitum.

This is why market value is so volatile. Market value is reflexive and self-referential.
Market value is the aggregated future expected value of the current perceived value among investors of the future expected value of a firm or industry derived from the future expected value of all consumers toward its goods or services, determined in turn by individual consumers from the current perceived value among other consumers, which is determined by those other consumers from the future expected value among other consumers, etc. Any questions?

Moral of the story: Every market entrant acts according to perceived values, which are socially-constructed. Their actions arising from their perceptions cannot be decoupled from the effects of their actions, which cannot be decoupled from their perceptions of those effects and subsequent actions. Perceptions and realities are inextricably-intertwined and reflexive. This leads to a crisis of understanding among market participants, since observing and acting upon those observations shifts the observed market, rendering the original observation obsolete. Even the shared observations of non-market participants affect the market. Thus, there cannot be any objective observation of the market. There cannot be any knowledge about the market. Market participants are mired in an epistemological Catch-22. The blind leading the blind...

What Happens When a Country Goes Bankrupt

A must-read glimpse into the heady future that awaits the many countries across the globe currently facing bankruptcy, and the effects for the rest of us (via SpiegelOnline).

Hint: The author has chosen to rename the erstwhile "emerging markets" darlings to the more tepid nomenclature: "threshold markets."

Could we have reached the end of double-digit growth in these eager young upstarts?

At least one economist foresees a hard landing for China (via NakedCapitalism).

The Army's Spooky Paranormal Research

Via DefenseTech...

It's like something out of "The Terminator." Self-aware virtual humans, regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding," mind controlled weapons - all the stuff of movie robots, comic heroes and otherworldly tomes.

But for some, this kind of higher-than-high tech is as real as life and death.

Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army's science and technology office, told military bloggers Nov. 3 that the Army is "making science fiction into reality" by creating realistic holographic images, generating virtual humans and diving into quantum computing.

....

Obama Wins! And the Villagers Rejoiced...

The change cometh...

The magnitude of this election is obvious, but you should've seen the effects on the street...

On 14th and U Street (downtown Washington, DC), up through and past 3am, there was a crowd of perhaps 2000+ people, laughing, cheering, high-fiving, hugging, and just staring in disbelief at the suddenly-new world having now unfolded before their eyes. There were drummer circles, with bustling rings of embrace swaying and flowing outward. There was a crew dancing on top of a bus-stop, waving a Kenyan and American flag. There was every race, background, age, and creed. There were young U Street blacks, Georgetown preppies, aging Counter Culture hippies, and downtown professionals with vestigal ties still hanging around their necks--artifacts of the old Dark Age when peope still had to go to work and worry about day-to-day realities.

Today, everything was new.

The most striking thing was the spontaneous, un-selfconscious, exhuberant outpouring of pure joy. People hugged total strangers. Black and white embraced on the same corner of the fiery and ruinous race riots a generation ago. There was none of the normal, unspoken awkwardness and hesitation between them. It was surreal.

Cars careened through the street, with revelers clinging precariously out the windows and sunroofs. Every driver, including my cabbie, navigated the carnival with his hand rapping horn to the beat of the onlookers. Its a wonder to me that many of these swerving celebrations on wheels didn't plow into crowds of the chaos. The police, normally triggerhappy to pile such madness into paddy-wagons, merely looked on with a mix of shock and bemusement.

Tomorrow, the afterglow begins to fade. Reality sets in once again. Those people in ties did have to go back to work, after all. Hanging out of a moving car or dancing on a lightpole will once again be illegal. Distance will once again set in between strangers. Obama will have to live up to his reputation as Holy Savior Return'd to the Earth.

But the memory will remain. And, after holding its breath for eight long, dark years, America can try once again to be its old, hopeful, naive, and amazing self...

Toxic Waste-Gobbling Superworms from Space!

...ok, not from space. From the United Kingdom. But they do eat toxic waste. A boon to Superfund?

Notebook Sales Surpass PC Sales

For the first time, notebook computer sales have surpassed PC sales in the United States this quarter.

Middle East Meltdown

Atoms for Peace

As if the Middle East wasn't already in a whole mess a' trouble, them Iranians done 'n introduced nu-cu-lar bombs into it. Well, actually, Israel already did that a generation ago, but don't tell anybody.

So now everyone from Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to Yemen is now lining up to join the nuclear club (with American aid and blessing). What is a non-proliferation regime to do?

Researchers at MIT have been partnering with the UAE to develop civilian nuclear plants that are less susceptible to having fissile material stolen by terrorists and other baddies. The UAE's nuclear strategy is to import fuel from abroad, thus avoiding weapons grade material being available for sticky fingers within the Emirates. These new plants under development would also require refueling far less often, reducing the opportunity for theft en route.

Will it be enough? Let's hope so, because the Gulf is inevitably going to be a nuclear club. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does not prohibit the development of civilian nuclear power, and explicitly recognizes the right of all sovereign nations to pursue the peaceful atom as long as they can demonstrate that their nuclear programs are not being used for the development of nuclear weapons.

So why would the most oil and natural gas rich countries on Earth want or need to pursue nuclear power? Is civilian nuclear power really just a cover to acquire the capacity to blow each other to smithereens? Maybe, but there are perfectly rational and pressing motivations at work here, too.

First off, oil and natural gas do not equal electricity. Iran, in particular, has an acute electricity shortage, owing to a lack of capitalization in its energy infrastructure (owing in turn to the three decades of embargoes placed on it by the United States). To transform these gallons into gigawatts requires the costly, technologically-advanced, sometimes decade-long construction of gas-fired turbine plants and the like.

Secondly, oil and natural gas-fired plants are dirty and inefficient. Before you scoff at the environmentalist motives of villainous oil sheikhs, consider this: Iran (Axis of Evil Member #2) currently has the highest percentage of domestic energy in the region produced from renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric dams. This year, that dependence on hydroelectric led to rolling blackouts during a severe drought. The UAE, in particular, is developing unprecedented efforts to groom clean energy systems and technologies, to turn back the clock on some of the most concentrated air pollution problems in the world. Tehran, too, with some of the worst traffic and air pollution of any world metropolis, is concerned about developing cleaner energy alternatives. In part, this is a recognition that oil is a one-time geological gift, and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East must plan for the post-oil era. Also, there is the need to keep up appearances for the newly environmentalist nations (and customers) of the West.

Thirdly, oil-producing countries want to save as much oil as they can for export. In many Middle Eastern nations, like Iran, Egypt and Yemen, gasoline is heavily subsidized by the government. Selling fossil fuels domestically--either refined as gasoline, or for use for electricity generation--is an extremely unprofitable enterprise. These resources fetch a much higher price on the market-driven global exchanges. More to the point, rents on fossil fuels are the primary if not the sole source of copious government revenues in these nations. Each barrel of oil diverted from export toward the needs of domestic electricity generation is another bale of petrodollars swiped from government coffers. Iran, in particular, is loathe to divert its oil and natural gas production towards domestic electricity requirements because fossil fuels are its primary exports and a valuable contributor to its current account and government revenue (owing again to the restrictions of American oil embargoes). With plentiful capital available for investment in nuclear infrastructure, petro-states are jumping at the chance to produce as much domestic electricity as possible with nuclear power.

Lastly, and perhaps most vitally, the truly finite resource in the Middle East (and increasingly worldwide) is fresh water. The Gulf States of Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE have almost entirely exhausted their freshwater aquifers. Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Syria all quibble over the Jordan River as their sole source. In a region not known for its rainstorms, the only option for fast-growing populations straining modest water reserves is desalinization of sea water. Desalinization is an extremely energy-intensive process, requiring massive and consistent imputs of electricity. Nuclear energy fits the bill perfectly.

Indians in Space!

"You haven't lived until you've done the Karma Sutra in Zero-G, baby!"

That's right, India's headed to the Moon!

...And that's not all! The Indian Space Research Organisation (or Bhāratīya Antariksh Anusandhān Sangaṭn, for short) hopes to land a motorized rover on the moon in 2010 or 2011. A real life astronaut might get thrown into the atmosphere on an Indian rocket by 2014 (Punjabi Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space when hitched a ride with the Russians in 1984). So, who'll be the first Asians on the moon for the Space Race Part II?


An early foray into South Asian spaceflight: Vishnu and Lakshmi riding Garuda, the Hindu patron deity of flight.

Any why? The London Telegraph's Andrew McKie puts it best:

But why would any country not be proud of attempting to add to our knowledge of the universe? For any nation, launching a rocket should not be seen as an exercise in pointless one-upmanship, but as perhaps the ultimate expression of optimism, ingenuity, bravery, and rational, long-term planning for the future. The West would do well to recover some of these qualities, which seem now to be attributes of Asian countries.

Scenarios Are Stupid

From the homophonic doppelganger of my own eponymous blog (sans the surname suffix "-e"), comes a report from Green Futures on the six possible forecasts for climate change that could come to fruition within this generation: "New Years Day 2030." These reports get a lot of coverage when they come out, because they give rise to snappy headlines like "Special report: How our economy is killing the Earth" (New Scientist). But how accurate are they, and are they useful?

This Green Futures report employs a very common technique that futurists use, known as "scenario building." Just like any good storyteller, a futurist knows that a narrative makes his point more evocative and memorable to the human ear, reared as it is on thousands of years of oral tradition. The potential scenarios are laid out for the audience, with one or more worst cases added (if we continue to disregard all that is holy, we're f*cked), one or more best cases added (if only you'd listen to me, things would be just peachy), and a "control" case (if everything continues as it has with no surprises, this should happen).


"Tell me, Spirit--how can I save money on my car insurance?"

The scenarios are not predictions, since that implies that the futurist knows with certainty what will happen (it definitely will rain tomorrow). They may or may not be forecasts, which like weather forecasts, are probability-based (there is a 60% chance of rain tomorrow).

The two most common applications of scenario-making are for climate change models and "peak oil" scenarios. The latter purports to determine when we will (or have) likely reached peak oil production, and when oil supplies will begin to dwindle. Such reports come annually from a variety of think-tanks, NGOs, governments, and oil companies themselves. There is even a (dubious-looking) Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. The very practice of scenario-making was developed early on by Shell Oil, through the efforts of in-house futurists like Jeroen van der Veer, and are still produced every three years. The IEA produces several annual reports, such as the World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives. The US Department of Energy produces its own annual Annual Energy Outlook. These reports have been quite variable in their accuracy over time.

The former, climate change, has fared no better. Global warming remains contentious in the public forum because climate change models have also proven to be fickle. The majority of mainstream scientists agree that climate change is a reality, and that it at least has some man-made causation. However, nailing how much and when is quite difficult. Extrapolating from current trends ("if we continue to pump this amount of CO2 into the air and the temperature rises this much per year, the earth will be X-percentage warmer in 25 years") is misleading. It disregards the fact that certain tipping points, once reached, could accelerate or decelerate trends, transforming geometric growth into exponential growth overnight.

Raising the temperature just a few degrees, for example, could melt enough polar ice to release a catastrophic amount of embedded methane from the ocean bed into the atmosphere, creating a catalytic negative feedback cycle of warming. This is known as the "Clathrate gun hypothesis," and as a theory is far from uncontroversial. Even so, it's just one example of the unforeseen variables that must be included into a model that seeks to project trends in something as complex as the global climate.


Here, we see a model for the cyclical movement of bullshit into the atmosphere.

For that matter, a current or future technical advance could just turn back the clock on climate change. Fusion nuclear power has been hanging on the edge of science for a half-century, promising endless wells of energy too cheap to meter, with no radioactive waste. Some ambitious folks in southern France think they might just be a decade away from this elusive wonder. But, we just don't know. Who predicted penicillin, the internet, or iPods? And just where are our damn rocket packs? Trying to factor disruptive technologies, paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries, or socio-political revolutions into future scenarios is fraught with error.


We've employed webcams for slightly different purposes than the Edwardians foresaw...

There is another, perhaps more important problem with scenario-making as a futurist methodology. Scenarios are narratives, and just like any story, they are the product of their author's biases and motives. It is no coincidence that energy scenarios from oil companies, governments, NGOs, and environmentalists carry wildly divergent conclusions. Depending on how optimistic or pessimistic the author is; what variables he chooses to include, emphasize, or deemphasize; or what givens are taken for granted (for example, there is a wide spectrum of opinion on how much oil is actually in the ground today), conclusions can be wildly different. There are the left-field theorists who question whether oil is really a limited resource after all. Each of these theories is inherently political, seeking as it does to affect public opinion, and by extension, public policy.

Scenario-makers, like science fiction authors or Utopians, seek to affect the behavior of their audience by piquing their imagination. One should be wary of the motives of both futurist Jerimiahs and Pollyannas. The only certainty about the future is that it's coming--anyone who tells you what will happen is either God or lying.

Voicemail is so Passe

"Man, I hate checking my voicemail..."

"Think Before You Voicemail" (TechCruch)

"Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back." Word.

The urban eco-commute of the future

Equal parts bicycle and moped,

Equal parts thrifty and stylish,

Equal parts eco-conscious and fashion-conscious...

...just like everything else in the Green Movement.

Ok, ok. I'm not gonna pretend I don't really want one.

$3,500 @ Derringer Cycles

Amtrack Back on the Rails

"I think I can, I think I can...finally turn a profit..."

Last year, I forecast that the increasing price of fuel would railroad America back to its 19th Century embrace of the train.

In yet another sign of the times, Amtrack has received its first commitment of Federal funds since 2002. Meanwhile, ridership has been up 10% since last year.

So get back on track with the cool kids and ride the rail, Joe Biden does.


"I LOVE AMTRACK!"

New World Order Part Deux at Hand?

"Hey Georgie, forget about that whole Iraq War thing--let's be friends."

Will George Bush and the next American president (yes, by that I mean The Obaminator) go along with a "Bretton Woods II" that would do for the world financial order what the original Bretton Woods did for global monetary and trade policy?

Will this take an individualist, free-market American flavor like the first, or swing closer to the European Dream of a multipolar world based on communalism, sustainability, and human rights?

You Can't Read this Year's Nobel Prize Winner

His name is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. He's almost entirely unknown and unavailable in the Anglosphere. Good luck finding any of his books on Amazon.

Except this one.

Is Mr. Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Nobel Committee, right in charging Americans with "insularity" and "ignorance" about world literature? Or has the Nobel Committee just continued to bend over backwards to exclude American writers (there have only been three in the last 52 years, with the last being Toni Morrison in 1993).


"Ain't never heared of no John-Mary Lay-Cleeezo, stranger..."

The Men's Lib Movement

Men of the future will be able to compliment each other on their sparkling eyes, well-manicured fingers, and supple new-gym-membership-fed muscles without shame!

"Your testicles are terrific"

Grand Paean to the Blog...

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic (which has a spiffy new makeover) tells us...

Why I Blog

"...the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks."

Point taken, reader.

Links of the Day: October 20

Why the American appeal of the road hog displays contradictory individualism and conformity--speaking of which, despite political orientation or societal relation to the white colonial power structure, we're all postmodernists now, so keep on reading the written medium de jure of the deconstructed world we hath wrought: the blog .

I only play analog, dude...

From the ongoing "Hey dude, check out this link" email correspondence between Mr. Geoff Greene and Sheikh Khalil Hibri...

- - -

The link of the day today was an interesting aside in The Wall Street Journal (hidden under the apocalyptic Fall of the House of Lehman Brothers headlines) about the surprising jump in vinyl LP sales of late:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122126199207430275.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

It's disappointing to me, however, that they didn't bother to explicate this phenomenon a bit. Older album buyers have been driving the only growth in the industry for years now, sopping up Beatles and Rod Stewart titles as quickly as their blue Viagra pills. Is this a phenomenon of the old?

Or, is this an expression of a new vitality in the DJ business, with the "commodification" of music that the internet has spawned ironically fueling a new curiosity of the existing musical canon and media--and a retrograde desire for authenticity. Would I have learned to love Blondie or Janis Joplin without the internet? Perhaps, but Google and free MP3 downloads allow for a much lazier pursuit of discovery than the old system of album sifting in the dusty backs of offbeat record stores. In the age of the internet, everyone can be an enthusiast, and change their enthusiasms by the week. If this phenomenon is widespread, then the internet utopians are right and the litigation-happy record companies are painfully wrong--the banal proliferation of piracy may be actually sparking consumer interest in legitimately-purchased media, both old and new.

Perhaps even the vision that the article insinuates could be true. That there is a Romantic backlash against the ethereality of digital media. You can't see or touch the zeros and ones encoded on a CD, hard drive, iPod, or internet server. Even the fast-dying CD is not as much of a fetish object as the vinyl record, with its physical groves lending a satisfying causality to the medium (the hand-crank gramophone is the ultimate expression of this elegant causality of form and function--the flow of the needle bobbing over the undulating sea of groves, singing out through the honeysuckle-flower of the amplifying horn). Why else would people be turning out in ever greater numbers to spend $30 (or $3000) to see their artists performs live (even when "live" means lip-synching or pressing "enter" on the stage laptop)? This could be the musical equivalent of the "Whole Foods" phenomenon, the luxury status of "natural fiber" clothing, "green" household products, and the long and surprising endurance of bibliophilia in the wake of ebooks and Kindle.

We're all grasping for authenticity, for the dirt-in-your-fingernails Reality our ancestors supposedly enjoyed. The alienation from our world has gotten so bad that even copies of Reality, the mere simulacra of a vital primary exposure to life, strike us as relatively authentic and true. Compared to the HD-broadcast ersatz, the hyperreal Spectacle, the celebrity-cult Kabuki theater that is 21st-Century modernity, it certainly is.

If analog is only a copy, then at least it is the Master Copy. The analog LP is the signed first edition to digital's mass market paperback. Once it is stripped into a naked stream of zeros and ones, its tarnished by cheap and easy proliferation. The virgin is deflowered and reduced to a two-minute cumshot on YouPorn. Everyone booger-eating hack can have the new Radiohead album, downloading it literally for free from the comfort of their mother's basement. But, only the choice elect will have the enthusiast's $80 edition...

Which all makes me absolutely certain that I've been missing out on valuable cool points by not placing a gramaphone next to my Royal 10 typewriter, antebellum loveseat, and 100% organic kitchen. For shame!

P.S. I would suggest that the folks at Stuff White People Like add music-nerd record collecting to their anthropological findings...

American married couples try to bring sexy back...

"Quiet, dear, the kids will hear us..."

If you are American, and are to get married, it is your statistical destiny to have sex with your spouse only about once a week (every 5.5 days, to be precise).

If you are a hormone-drunk 18-year-old newlywed, your average is marginally better (every four-and-a-half days).

Why not make a New Year's resolution to get down with your (worse) half every day for the next year?

These couples did.

Oranges 2.0

Sorry for the long delay in blogging, folks, but Greene Futures will be online regularly henceforth...I promise.


Cezanne's "Pommes et oranges" (1899) -- Fast food?

From Harper's Weekly (a very entertaining email digest produced by Harper's magazine):

"For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit."

Geoff Greene's Genius Idea No. 83:

Develop GM oranges who's peels come off as easily as those of a tangerine. Because--admit it-- oranges are a pain to peel for we people on the go. This could do for oranges what Yoplait's Go-GURT did for yogurt...

Wireless Tribalism

A few days ago, I encountered Philip Carl Salzman's new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, in which he asserts convincingly that it is tribalism, and not Islam, which is the primary determinate of the modern society and culture of the Middle East. Serendipitous then that from the newest issue of the The Economist comes the suggestion of a return to tribalism for all of us. This neo-tribalism will not be laced together through bonds of blood, but rather through wireless networks.


"My TomTom says veer left, camel!

As the article notes, the "car was not just a faster horse," and indeed the advent of the wireless phone, laptop (and toaster) are not just speedier editions of the same. That the wireless world is a "revolution" is cliched through use and familiarity, so that we have forgotten just how strange it is to be able to walk down the streets of DC chatting to a friend in Paris. Or how revolutionary it is to be able to tap a few commands into the touch screen of your iPhone to Google a restaurant review, book a reservation, and then MapQuest your way there.

Culturally, the wireless revolution has reversed many of the fruits of the automobile revolution. Whereas the car--and the suburb--separated the temporal spaces of "work" and "home," wireless technology has squashed them together again. Don't believe it? Try to go on vacation without checking your email.


"God, this Blackberry outage is killing me..."

The ability to access people and information everywhere gives you more freedom, but also imposes a sort of slavery. A slavery I've alluded to with the "Facebook Panopticon" here earlier. There is no excuse now not to constantly be within email and mobile phone contact. Not answering your phone is now an intentional act, with social repercussions. Organizations--colleges, businesses, and even governments--consider email a legal form of communication, and are increasingly under a de facto requirement that you check your email daily, if not hourly. Again, failure to respond is intentional and has social, and even legal, repercussions.

This is the slavery of constant connectivity. Like a Brittany fleeing from the paparazzi, you can never escape the surveillance of friends, family, coworkers, bosses, and even strangers. You are now a member of a wireless tribe. Not rooted in clan or space, but tied inextricably to each other the world over.

Like all tribes, it imposes upon its members rigid standards and mores of behavior and identity. One wireless misstep: one accidentally forwarded email, unanswered text message or phone faux paux can reverberate throughout the clan, causing gossip, heartbreak, unrest, war and exile.

Think you've fooled your boss by taking out sick? Thanks to your cell phone's GPS, he knows you were at the golf course instead. Maybe you'll think twice before you take your mistress out to dinner when there are thousands of citizen journalists armed with cell phone cameras. Or perhaps you'd better password protect your wireless network at home, before a sidewalk dweller leeches that sex tape from your hard drive. Only a matter of time before those little RFID chips gain access to your very thoughts...

Go West, Young Man!

Moses and his weary Chosen tromping through the desert toward Canaan, Puritans in moldy ships sailing to the New American Israel, Conestoga-wagoning Homesteaders heading to Oklahoma, Dust Bowl "Oakies" headed further to California--now supplanted alongside the Napa vines by Mexicans and Ecuadorians. To pack up your life onto the back of your donkey or Datsun in search of greener pastures is a story as old as humanity itself. It is how restless and hungry little Homo Sapiens wandered out of Kenya and Ethiopia to colonize every corner of the earth in the first place.


"Darling, the banana harvest has not been kind this year. Time to pack up and head north..."

But yet, economists seem to ignore the phenomenon of migration when computing Gross Domestic Product. Yes, unconstrained labor, like capital, will tend to flow across national boundaries in Ricardian economics. What wages do return to the motherland are considered in the macroeconomic financial account as transfers. However, why does the Cuban cease to be a Cuban once he leaves Cuba? When a large portion of his wages return to Cuba in the form of remittances to family members, when he retains a dominant Cuban identity and culture in exile and when he is connected to home via overlapping layers of telecommunication?

Under the conventional macroeconomic model, a country becomes less developed when its citizens find a better life elsewhere. Why not instead think of migration as development? Why not measure the Gross Domestic Product per natural? Count the children of a nation no matter where they tread. The Internal Revenue Service of the United States does implicitly, at least, by charging expatriate American citizens income tax.

Measuring GDP and GNI per natural instead of per resident is the idea proposed by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett at the Center for Global Development in their recently-published paper Income Per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places. According to the two economists, "almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident."

Over a decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, China pulled 130 million people out of poverty, the largest single leap in human welfare in history. This was achieved almost entirely by allowing migration from the impoverished western interior to the bustling coastline cities. The Chinese diaspora continues to form the backbone of the South East Asian economies (and have for centuries), inextricably linked in a tight, informal network with the Middle Kingdom. Singapore, for example, is majority Chinese, with a Sino-Singaporean population of 3.5 million.



There are currently four times as many Lebanese people outside Lebanon than inside (there are two-and-a-half times as many Lebanese in Brazil, in fact, than in Beirut). Young Arab men from all over the Middle East flock to Saudi Arabia to earn the nest egg required for an apartment, satellite television and marriage. Only 20 percent of the population of the "United Arab Emirate" of Dubai, meanwhile, is Arab (the most common colloquial languages are English, Hindi and Urdu).

It goes without saying that migrant labor in the United States is an essential source of welfare for Hispanics across the Americas. In 2006, Latin America hosted a flow of remittances totaling $63 billion (exceeding the combined total of all Foreign Direct Investment and Overseas Development Assistance to the region). For the communities who depend upon these wire transfers, the industry of their countrymen is certainly a palpable factor in their gross national welfare.

Clemins and Pritchett conclude their paper with an intriguing meditation:

The bottom line: migration is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development.

The Art of the Future Uses Lead-Based Paint

"Mao," Andy Warhol, 1972 (the same year as Nixon's famed Beijing visit)

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. - Andy Warhol

At the apex of his career, Andy Warhol, that most famous of pop artists, was enlisting the help of dozens of assistants at his studio ("The Factory") to crank out copy after copy of his iconic silk-screen prints. It was the very reproducibility of his work which formed the statement of his oeuvre. He would furiously roll out variated prints--sometimes hundreds--in every different shade of vivid Technicolor, of Hollywood dons and divas, of shrill crimes stories and gory tragedies, of the wide-eyed imagery of the American imagination. He would feed the vast maw of celebrity and sensationalism with every imaginable perspective of every glowing little interest to fall before the eyes of a rabid and adoring audience public.

In fact, it was the interchangeability of the artist himself which Warhol implied with his famous quote: "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." He had shown the world that even an "ugly Polish queer from the Midwest" (of negligible formal talent) could ensconce himself within the iridescence of New York City and its most beautiful people. Today, the image of Warhol, like his multicolored prints of Marilyn Monroe, has outshone and outlasted its subject.

What do we then make of Shenzhen, in southern China’s Guangdong province? A former fishing village, Shenzhen was chosen as the first of the country’s Special Economic Zones by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Today, this gushing city of eight million is the fountainhead of most reproduced art in the world. For less than $100, the global art consumer can commission a Rembrandt, Monet or Jasper Johns--or just a oil-painted copy of their graduation photo. It will be available at the doorstep of their similarly-reproduced colonial, Cape Cod or Tudor-style 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath. A copy of a copy....


Photo Credit: Spiegel Online

According to the UN, bulk US imports of Chinese oil paintings totaled over $64 million dollars in 2006, more than double the figure recorded two years earlier.

Are these millions of stretched canvases the ultimate realization of Warhol's postmodern dream, or are they a travesty of the artistic process? Wretched bastard children of automatons laboring away for 12-hour-days in sweatshop "art factories," as if they were sewing Nike's or lead-painted toys?


Photo Credit: Spiegel Online

And what do we make of the buyers of such paintings? Do they consider these works of human hands "art?" Though aforementioned figure $64 million worth of reproduced paintings shipped to American living rooms and hotel lobbies seems large, it's dwarfed by the price of a single painting, Jasper John's 1959 False Start, which sold for a record $80 million that same year.

Would anyone be willing to spend $80 million on a modern, original Chinese work (i.e. not a copy of Flemish realism or a porcelain vase dating from the Ming Dynasty)?


"What crap, this will never sell, Kim! The client wanted a Mona Lisa with her face on it...and for God's sake, make her look thin, man!"

I have an inkling that that will have much to do with the relative socioeconomic power and international standing to which China can lay claim to at point of sale. Perhaps the delicate brush-strokes, and graceful minimalism of the Middle Kingdom's indigenous style will demand their own dominant cache in years hence. Perhaps Chinese art will go the way of Japanese auto manufacture: from cheap, inferior knock-offs of Western designs, onward to internationally-acknowledged standards of excellence.

Since fashion is art now, and Chinese is in fashion, I could make a lot of money. -Andy Warhol, 1971 (one year before his "Mao" print series)

Hee-Haw! Wi-Fi Headin' Out to the Country

Intel has developed a long-distance Wi-Fi platform, Intel (r) Rural Connectivity, allowing a wireless internet signal of roughly 10 megabits-per-second to hopscotch its way between nods 60 miles apart. From a city edge, internet connectivity can be projected far out into the countryside cheaply, and with minimal fuss. Each of the transmission towers can run on a mere six watts of electricity, allowing them to be independently solar powered.


(Far superior to previously existing Wi-Fi boosting technology)

From the Intel blog article:
One of the research projects connected rural villages in India with the Aravind Eye clinic to provide medical eye exams via the wireless antenna relay system. In Panama, it is bringing the interent (sic) to a remote village in the rain forest.

Click here for a geekier technical analysis from Daily Wireless blog.

Implication: Practical and economically feasible internet connectivity for users both in the developing world, and the rural corners of developed nations like the United States to address the severe rural/urban broadband internet divide.

More from Generation Distraction

Serendipitously, just happened upon this piece by The Boston Globe's Carolyn Y. Johnson, which explores the ennui of Generation Distraction, arguing that "boredom is essential for creativity" and that the quick and easy access to stimuli is the mental equivalent of the overabundance of calories that has lead to the obesity epidemic. It seems our "mental fatness" is clogging our arteries of innovative endeavor, after all. "The most creative people...are known to have the greatest toleration for long periods of uncertainty and boredom." She summons the patron saint of boredom, Marcel Proust, to elucidate the edifying power of idleness:

Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake," Proust wrote. "And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.


"I'm not bored, I'm profound"

Kathleen Cumiskey, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island, is quoted echoing my metaphor to drug addiction: "Our society is perpetually anxious, and a way to alleviate the anxiety is to delve into something that's very within our control, pleasurable, and fun. . . .It feels like it has all the makings of addiction." Paradoxically, the more stimuli people receive to alleviative boredom (email, Facebook updates, funny videos), "people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next." Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness suggests a dosage of boredom shock therapy, to reacquaint the patient with "a comfort level with not being linked in and engaged and stimulated every second."



So, Generation Y, I prescribe that you sit down on a park bench outside for two hours ruminating on the petals of a nearby flower, and call me in the morning.

Or, maybe just read The Affected Provincial's Companion.

Talkin’ Bout My Generation

Forget the nomenclature of “Generation Y,” the “Echo Boom,” the “Internet Generation (iGen)” or the “Millenials,” my generation is Generation Distraction. We are they born between the years 1980 and 1990. Reared amongst cell phone chatter, SMS, Facebook wall posts, Twitter updates, AOL instant messages, MySpace messages, blog updates, and 700 channels of glowing digital cable. A vast churning stream of flickering, buzzing, shouting, singing, pinging assaults our eyes and ears at all hours of the day and night. Like newborns victims of fetal alcohol syndrome, we’ve become so bathed in this plenum of media and communication that any abrupt break triggers instant withdrawal. Witness the life-threatening Blackberry blackout last month.

Is there a codeine for the media fiend?

I was close enough to the 1980 end of my generational spectrum to see Generation Distraction to become deeply and inextricably linked to a nascent early-internet culture. The World Wide Web inaugurated the “internet superhighway” (my how quaint that term seems today!) in the late 1980s, and the Mosaic browser kicked off the mass-consumption of the Internet in 1993. Came AOL in 1991; Yahoo, Amazon.com and eBay in 1995; AOL Instant Messaging in 1997, MySpace in 1998, and finally Google in 1999. “The Facebook” launched in 2004, with my alma matter Georgetown being among the first outlets. In college, Facebook so permeated the social sphere that whole nights out were given purpose through the quest for a funny-awesome-sexy profile picture to be uploaded the following Sunday morning (or early afternoon, rather).

Yes, today, Generation Distraction not only consumes every available hour through various media of telecommunication, but we sort and define our very lives and identities through them.

Who am I? I am Geoffrey Daniel Greene, and I’m friends with (…), I like (…) genre of music, I’ve read the following books (…), my favorite TV show is (…), I support (…) for president, I think this link of (…) is funny, last weekend I was at (…) party—here are the pictures… But, then again, are all these things true in real life? I have, after all, carefully crafted my online persona for certain ends.

“Maybe I hated Ulysses, but I want to seem smart, and I know that cute girl from my literature theory course is watching. Better put up a profile picture of me with two girls, it will make me look desired. I hope my ex isn’t checking my profile these days, she’ll leave another snarky wall post. Better block her. But what if she finds out I blocked her? Oh damn, wasn’t I supposed to be writing my paper?”

Instead of facilitating “social networking,” the social network technologies themselves are the end. You don’t Facebook to socialize, you socialize to Facebook. Everything you do is documented, uploaded, and given instant feedback. The number of friends one tallies; the frequency of messages, posts, and comments; the intangible “cred” garnered through one’s online personality—these are the social currency that we desperately accrue. You are being watched, but not just by The Government. In the sequel to Orwell’s dysptopic dream, you are watched not by Big Brother, but by your peers. You voluntarily and desperately submit to constant surveillance and judgment. Thus is Generation Distraction also known by its other avatar, Generation Panopticon.

“Panopticon” referring to English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's 1785 prison design allowing an observer to observe (“-opticon”) all (“pan-“) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In the parallel life of Facebook, you are aware of being watched, but the magic is you can never tell by whom. You are judged and sorted hierarchically instantly and decisively, but it’s not clear who populates your jury. It’s vitally important to “win,” however. The Economy of Attention--discussed earlier here--values “eye-hours” above all things, and he who garners the greatest share of a discrete amount of attention is the “richest.”


Bentham's “Panopticon” design

Obviously, there is a sizable dark side to Generation Distraction. Ironically, the overdose of communication has suffocated our communication ability itself. Flooding our receptors with stimuli has deadened their sensitivity. Generation Y is widely reported by managers to be deficient at workplace communication, suffering especially poorly from deplorable writing ability, nonexistent spelling, and whimsical notions of grammar. Nor does this end at the page. Face-to-face contact has ironically been rendered rather quaint by the efficiencies and global reach of personal communication technologies. Generation Panopticon is very comfortable with the reciprocal surveillance of watching and being watched—from a distance.



Do an experiment. Sit down several of your favorite Generation Y members in a room…without a television or a computer. See what happens. (Clue: awkward silence and fidgeting immediately set in). On a long enough time scale, your chosen group will begin to whip cell phones out of their pockets like asthma inhalers for a Content fix. Then they will carry on phone conversations in the hallway or Google sports stats on their iPhone, en lieu of facing the terrifying intimacy of a room full of fleshed people and no screens.


(If aliens visit earth tomorrow, they might assume that the tiny black things we hold tightly over our ears whenever we're walking are protective earmuffs, intended to shield the delicate inner ear from the elements)

The only solution a sudden and unexpected drought of digital Content is liberal portions of light beer (or weed) to deaden the pain of withdrawal from Content. Even then, what conversations transpire will inevitably veer to Grey’s Anatomy or the last funny YouTube video watched. Again, the plenum of Content has among my generation completely replaced actual interpersonal experience with vicarious media representation and disembodied communication.

This inability to converse obviously makes dating difficult, and that practice seems to have subsided as well—with reverberative effects to rates of marriage and childbearing. I wonder too how my generation will handle the challenges of creativity and innovation. If you are under constant reciprocal surveillance, and constantly consumed with the requirements of instant peer validation, how can you truly create something unique and revolutionary? How will you have the space to develop as an individual when you are diluted in a soup of impersonal co-dependency? Will the omnipresent Facebook Panopticon be an even more efficient tool for enforcing conformity than centralized Big Brother? Will this generation inherit an America that has lost its unique character as a nation of kooky basement tinkerers and cultural revolutionaries?

Why Muslim-Christian Understanding is Stupid

Georgetown University, like many other religiously concerned academies across the nation, has taken up the standard of “interreligious dialogue,” in a well-intentioned effort to heal the theological rift that supposedly divides our world. There is a well-funded Muslim-Christian Understanding program, which offers undergraduates a certificate once they've proven to understand Muslims and Christians sufficiently.

As the standard line goes, ethnic and religious conflict are the new fault lines inherited by the 21st Century, threatening the very success of globalization and harmonious interconnectedness. This threat crops up in the acrimony between the Jews and the Muslims in the Holy Land, the Hindus and the Muslims in Kashmir, or the Christians and the Muslims in the Philippines, Nigeria, Chechnya, Bosnia, Lebanon, and countless other worldwide flashpoints. Furthermore, as evinced by the previous sentence, this “clash of civilizations” usually falls into the template of Muslims vs. (insert any other religion here).

A Manichean struggle exists between two diametrically opposed forces. Such framing is similar to the Cold War framing of free capitalist democracy vs. International Communism. And indeed, in the War on Terror, the forces of Islam have inherited the dark mantel of the Bolsheviks as the new enemies of freedom. This new Enemy has many now-familiar names: al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamo-Fascism, etc. Conversely, in the Muslim world, this duality is now embraced in reverse, with the standard of Islam as the Good, and the Other (Zionism, the Great Satan, etc.) as the Evil.

Which brings us back to “Muslim-Christian dialogue.” It is an effort by progressive religious authorities and intellectuals to bridge this bipolar divide. If only the two faiths could understand and empathize with each other, then peace would reign. If only Christendom understood that Jesus is the second most important prophet in Islam. If only the Muslim umma recognized its common pan-Mediterranean history with European Christianity. If only Westerners knew what contributions to the “Western” arts and sciences Medieval Islam made, how the Andalusian scholars preserved the works of Plato and Aristotle to reintroduce Dark Age Europe to its own Greek heritage. If only all three Abrahamic faiths would recognize their common God and patriarchs. Jews and Muslims alike consider Ishmael the father of the Arab people, and his brother Isaac the father of the Jewish people. Could not the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions exist side-by-side as brothers—distinct, yet tied by blood?

Yes, they could! Once the Archbishop of Canterbury and the erudite ulama at Cairo’s al-Azhar Madrassa offered up enough “understanding,” coexistence will be magically achieved...

This project is a failure for two reasons. First, and most importantly, it acknowledges and internalizes the fiction of the aforementioned “clash of civilizations.” Notions of difference are socially constructed, and change over time. Religion, much like race, takes on very different identities, depending upon how it is framed. Secondly, it labors under the fallacy that people hate each other for academic theological reasons—reasons that can be reconciled through civil debate and “understanding.”

Kosovo is now the seventh nation wrenched from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia. Less than a generation ago, Kosovars, Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Slovenians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians simply self-identified as “Yugoslavs.” There was very little religion to be seen amongst Tito’s citizens. Then, in the mid-1990s with Tito and the Soviet Union a distant memory, they all miraculously became sorted as Muslim “Bosnians,” Catholic “Croats,” and Orthodox “Serbs.” Some politicians rose using ethnic power bases and decided that each newly-coined group needed its own land. Some European diplomats agreed and immediately gave their official recognition to the breakaway nations. Lines were drawn on paper, and labeled with their proper ethno-religious label. In Bosnia would go the Muslims, in Croatia would go the Catholics, and in Serbia would go the Orthodox. But, as it turned out, there were some Serbs in Bosnia, some Bosnians in Croatia, and a bunch of Albanians in Serbian Kosovo. The rest is history. Suffice to say, there weren't many Bosnians shouting "Allahu Akbar" or Serbs with giant Crusader crosses in that particular conflict. The crucible of killing in among the southern Slavs was only religious in the nominal sense, and theological understanding will be unlikely to extinguish the still-smoldering landscape.

For over a century under British colonial rule, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians were “Indians.” Then, miraculously during the 1940s, they became Muslim “Pakistanis” and Hindu “Indians.” Later, in 1971, “East Pakistanis” magically became “Bangladeshis.” Never mind that “Hindu” India had more Muslims than “Muslim” Pakistan (India has the third highest number of Muslims of any other nation on earth, except Indonesia and Pakistan). In 1948, a line was drawn on paper, about two million people were slaughtered in the mad dash to find their way into their proper new religio-national space. Six decades hence, Muslims and Hindus take turns burning whole trains full of innocent people to death. Perhaps the two groups could reach common ground over their mutual love of setting commuters on fire.

Almost all of Iraq’s Christians—and most other religious minorities—have suddenly since 2003 found that their millennia of lineage in the Fertile Crescent doesn’t matter anymore. People who were all Iraqis in 2002 are now Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Kurdish, etc. Lines are being drawn in paper and in blood, and hundreds of thousands are now casualties of the new scramble for classification and power. Was this a failure of “dialogue?” Did the Sunnis and Shi’a live in relative peace for twelve centuries in Iraq through theological discussion? Or perhaps, was theological debate the very culprit for perceived difference and resulting strife?

In the United States, we think of people with light skin as “white.” At the turn of the century, Irish immigrants were “black.” The term “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is a carry-over from the age when “Catholic” was a derogatory “racial” category, used pejoratively like “Jew” often still is. Polish people were “Pollocks,” Ukranians were “Bohunks,” Germans were “Krauts,” Italians were “Wops,” Jews were “Kikes,” and Canadians were “Canucks.” Did we heal these rifts by having Catholic-Protestant dialogue? Did the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope call a symposium?

The truth of the matter is that most Christians haven’t read the Bible, even those who attend weekly Church. It’s pretty darn long. A large proportion hasn’t skimmed more than a few pages. If asked, they would completely fail to explain the nuances of the Holy Trinity, the degree of divinity and humanity constituting the identity of the Christ, the relative importance of faith verses good works, the relationship between Original Sin and Divine Grace, or the weight given to free will and determinism. Do most Christians know that women should wear a hijab-like veil in church?

The Qur’an is just as long, and perhaps more opaque to the untrained eye. It has no traditional narrative format, parts seem contradictory, its revelatory maxims often shift according to when they were received by the Prophet (the prohibition against drinking alcohol is only the most interesting example). For this reason, the reader can cherry-pick the Qur’an as a work of peace or of war, see Allah as a God of stern punishment or tender grace, and frame their relationship with other faiths as being between the common dhimmi (“Peoples of the Book”), or the arch-enemy kuffir (“refuser”) who must be converted or slain.

Open the Old Testament and randomly point to a passage. If you do this enough, you will eventually find something very troubling. Perhaps a passage filled with Divinely-sanctioned genocide, incest, rape, or a whole host of other subjects that tend not to make it into sermons at Church or Temple.

So where does a through understanding of these texts leave us? Will a rich Lebanese Maronite Christian banker really get along with his Shi’ite unemployed neighbor because they both like Jesus? Will the fact that both trace their religious ancestry to Abraham help the young Hezbollah fighter to reapproach with the radical Zionist settler? Will the Pat Robertson suddenly change his tone toward the Muslim enemy if her knew that the Bible and the Qur’an both sanction polygamy?

Whenever I mention Pakistan or Pakistanis to my mother, she drifts to the same warm impression she has of a Pakistani co-worker she’s enjoyed working with for years at her college. With a smile, she eagerly relates what intelligence and integrity he has. She’s never been to Pakistan, knows almost nothing about it, knows even less about its majority-Muslim religion, and this co-worker is just about the only Pakistani she has ever known. But for the rest of her life, perhaps, she’ll associate Pakistan and its sons and daughters with positive notions of “intelligence” and “integrity.” In this way, she’s like most Beiruti shopkeepers, Indian farmers, and Iraqi lawyers. Until all the politicians and academics stepped in to tell them what to think about certain people, their neighbor was simply the simple man with the charming smile, who’s daughter went to school with theirs, and who’s wife made great hummus.

This, and not academic dialogues, is how people have understood and related to each other since the beginning. And so it shall be for the future.

Capitalism≠Democracy

This week, I've been waist deep in a project on undemocratic capitalism...


In somewhat unrelated news, lighting struck the world's biggest Jesus yesterday. More on Brazil below...

To that end, I've reveled in a mass of indicators on a gargantuan Excel spreadsheet from various sources for economic, financial, and democratic indicators. I've only scratched the surface, and already some pretty delicious revelations. Firstly, among the commonly-referred to BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), there is no data to support the conventional thesis that democracy breeds GDP growth (neither net GDP nor per capita). I measured democratization according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index.


Economist Intelligence Unit's 2007 Democracy Index Map (lighter blue indicates higher democracy)

In fact, within this group, the non-democratic states (Russia and China) edged out the democratic states (Brazil and India) in growth, both net and per capita. There is no correlation between degree of democratization and level of economic freedom either (as measured by the Heritage Foundations Economic Freedom Index). Nor is there a strong connection between economic freedom and growth, since all four registered in toward the bottom of all nations in terms of economic freedom.


Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index Map (darker blue indicates higher economic freedom)

There does, however, seem to be a correlation between poverty rates (self-reported, and thus somewhat unreliable) and the UN Human Development Index, and democratization. I'm still working on crunching the Gini Coefficient for economic inequality, but I have an inkling I'll find no real correlation between democracy and economic equality. If that turns out to be the case, this will all make for a true bombshell.

I next examined the "Next Eleven" (N-11) economies (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam) which were slated in 2005 by Goldman Sachs to be the next nodes of emerging market high-growth.

These nations ranked even lower than the BRICs in terms to democratization. Shockingly, among the N-11s, the more-nuanced correlation between lack of democracy and GDP growth was far more pronounced. The "authoritarian regimes" of Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam together clocked rates 5.05% higher net GDP growth than the "flawed democracies" of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and South Korea (the "hybrid regime" of Turkey fit in the middle, but didn't skew the rates toward either camp since its indicators were all almost exactly average). However, the democratic states did beat out the un-democratic states in per capita GDP growth (by 3.58 %). Perhaps then we have a wash here. Again, with static analysis of the Gini Coefficient, it will become clear whether this translates into higher degrees of economic equality among the democracies.


World map of Gini Coefficient for 2007/2008 (a lower Gini Coefficient correlates with a lower inequality, with yellow nations having the lowest inequality and fushia nations having the highest). Data source: United Nations Human Development Report 2007-2008.

Fascinatingly, the democratic states among the N-11 did show a strong correlation between democracy and growth in economic freedom, but one counter to conventional thinking. The un-democratic regimes grew an average of 5.5 percent over the last decade in the Economic Freedom Index, compared to the democratic regimes, which declined 3.9 percent in economic freedom. Bangladesh and Indonesia declined the most sharply, falling 7.1 and 9.5 percent respectively. The strongest increase in economic freedom was witnessed in the least democratic state among the N-11, Vietnam, with a 9.4 percent increase (albeit from a low starting point).

Next, I've moved to a master spreadsheet of every economy in the world with reliable data (161 at present). Last night I finished entering the indicators for the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, Freedom House's Freedom in the World Survey Combined Freedom Status (for 1996-2006), the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index (for 1996-2008), and UN Net GDP Growth Rates (for 1996-2006). Remaining is to enter the UN and/or World Bank Per Capita GDP Growth Rates, the Gini Coefficient, the Transparency International World Corruption Index, and the UN Human Development Index. After I crunch all those, looking for linear relationships, I'm going to tease out trends within subcategories--by region, religion, labor force, and energy-exporter vs. non-energy-exporter. I'll publish my findings tomorrow.

On of the hypotheses I hope to test is the "Dutch disease" thesis holding that economies (like Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the Gulf states) reliant upon energy exports for their economic growth will tend to suffer from stunted democratization.


Map of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Algeria, Angola, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Ecuador)

If a more labor-intensive export-led economy like China's spreads the fruits of its growth more widely than a non-labor-intensive export-led economy like Saudi Arabia, then perhaps we'll see a much more rapid journey toward democracy in the Middle Kingdom. Perhaps it will even surpass Russia, reliant as it is today on a rentier economy, and state-led energy export for its economic growth. China shares many characteristics with the Four Asian Tigers of the 1960s and 70s (export-driven growth, high US Treasury Bond holdings, favorable balance of trade, high domestic savings rates, cheap-but-educated labor force, sustained double-digit GDP growth, trade with industrialized nations, etc.). Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia all transitioned toward democracy from authoritarian regimes along a very similar path.

I'm foreseeing a picture wherein the development model works best as it goes through incremental states of political-economy. At first, there is authoritarianism, providing the stability and cohesion necessary to till a infrastructural and macro-economic soil fertile for growth. However, within this authoritarian framework, there is rule of law, economic freedom, and declining corruption. The citizens have legal and economic freedom, but not yet political or civil freedom. As the economic fundamentals are set into place, growth occurs rapidly. The industries responsible for the growth should be labor-intensive and value-added (raw commodity exports won't do the trick), employing the citizenry, giving them "ownership" of the growth, and avoiding the great hoarding of the wealth into government coffers or into the hands of oligarchs (avoiding "Dutch disease"). Entrepreneurship is encouraged, a middle class arises, and the economy becomes increasingly diversified. Thus does a professional citizen class arise: self-sufficient, economically independent, with a stake in the political-economy of the nation. Once this occurs, associative freedom can and does liberalize, allowing these professional stake-holders to inherit the reigns first of civil society and then political society. This is where populism goes astray, allowing too much power in the hands of a mob of people who neither have the stake-holder mentality nor the education and independent means to progress beyond zero-sum identity politics.

This is the path I can foresee for China especially. I think the Beijing government have been responsible stewards, avoiding and attempting to stem the corruption of the provinces (and leaving party leaders who line their pockets hanging from the gallows). They've invested wisely in infrastructure, and allowed metropolitan clusters along the coast to thrive autonomously. They've avoided smothering this growth through either burdensome taxation or statism, but China does not share the same levels of economic freedom that characterized the Four Asian Tigers (and the trend has been static for the past decade, even declining slightly by 0.3% from 1998 levels). Then again, neither do the other BRICs, and the N-11s measure lower than average. A middle class that is projected to be double the population of the United States by 2015 has arisen, and they've been cautious stake-holders in the growth. Beijing has allowed a transition of an enormous number out of poverty in the interior to prosperity on the coast, without allowing the floodgates to open too wide (leading to the urban poverty of so many other Third World slum cities like Lagos). Chinese people have a domestic savings rate of a whopping 50% (large stores of domestic capital liquidity), the government has sizable U.S. Treasury Bond holdings, a very favorable balance of trade (even despite its voracious appetite for energy and raw commodities imports), counts industrialized nations as its largest trading partners, and has reported double-digit growth for the past decade. Once more, its pursued a increasingly popular non-interventionist "just business" strategy in foreign affairs. If the Asian Tiger model is any indication, Chinese Democracy will not just be the title of the upcoming Guns N' Roses album.



Stay tuned...