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anonymous

The history of inequality (by Peter Turchin) - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...peter-turchin-wealth-poverty

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth.
  • As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: ‘the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood’.
  • In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of wealth inequality in the US.
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  • He looked at the net wealth of the nation’s median household and compared it with the size of the largest fortune in the US. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and that’s what he tracked, touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present.
  • We found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures
  • From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold.
  • Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century.
  • From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      I'd like to pull this citation and superimpose another period-chart onto my timeline.
  • when looked at over a long period, the development of wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. And if it’s cyclical, we can predict what happens next.
  • Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t.
  • In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome.
  • And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.
  • Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.
  • Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      Cliodynamics - Another thing to learn a bit more about.
  • First, we need to think about jobs.
  • One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration
  • it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality.
  • Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.
  • This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust generalisations in history.
  • The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.
  • causing the population of London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000.
  • fourfold increase in food prices and a halving of real wages.
  • when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348, carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse.
  • The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but in practice it often is
  • Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate.
  • Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important new element was globalisation
  • an oversupply of labour tends to depress wages for the poorer section of the population. And just as in Roman Egypt, the poor in the US today eat more energy-dense foods — bread, pasta, and potatoes — while the wealthy eat more fruit and drink wine.
  • Falling wages isn’t the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up.
  • And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden Age for the aristocrats.
  • the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300.
  • Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000.
  • In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.
  • And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the population to 19 per million.
  • In our current cycle, the proportion of decamillionaires (those whose net worth exceeds 10 million in 1995 dollars) grew tenfold between 1992 and 2007 — from 0.04 to 0.4 per cent of the US population.
  • On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Don’t forget that most people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the social pyramid to become top-heavy.
  • As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.
  • The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.
  • So far I have been talking about the elites as if they are all the same. But they aren’t: the differences within the wealthiest one per cent are almost as stark as the difference between the top one per cent and the remaining 99.
  • very intense status rivalry
  • Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic shift towards luxury.
  • Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand (who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age.
  • Twilight of the Elites (2012): ‘defenders of the status quo invoke a kind of neo-Calvinist logic by saying that those at the top, by virtue of their placement there, must be the most deserving’. By the same reasoning, those at the bottom are not deserving. As such social norms spread, it becomes increasingly easy for CEOs to justify giving themselves huge bonuses while cutting the wages of workers.
  • Labour markets are especially sensitive to cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences.
  • the US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor.
  • Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).
  • In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980.
  • The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent.
  • In one era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.
  • How, though, can we account for the much more broadly inclusive policies of the Great Compression era? And what caused the reversal that ended the Gilded Age and ushered in the Great Compression? Or the second switch, which took place around 1980?
  • Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability.
  • We see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history — towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century.
  • Put simply, it is fear of revolution that restores equality. And my analysis of US history in a forthcoming book suggests that this is precisely what happened in the US around 1920.
  • The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920—21, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
  • Although it started as a workers’ dispute, the Mine War eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies.
  • Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.
  • The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it.
  • The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution).
  • The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.
  • while making such ‘categorical inequalities’ worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall economic inequality.
  • The co-operating group was mainly native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated against.
  • When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential elections, he couldn’t win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for their triumph.
  • But by the late 1970s, a new generation of political and business leaders had come to power. To them the revolutionary situation of 1919-21 was just history. In this they were similar to the French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution, who did not see that their actions could bring down the Ancien Régime — the last great social breakdown, the Fronde, being so far in the past.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      This heavily mirrors many aspects of Strauss & Howe's observations. Namely that generational cohorts roughly conform to archetypes precisely *because* memory of prior situations moves from accessible-memory (in those who have it) to history/myth once those who remember it have died.
  • It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era.
  • when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. It’s true that the Soviet economy could not compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity.
  • Yet the fall of the Soviet Union was interpreted as a vindication of free markets, period. The triumphalist, heady atmosphere of the 1990s was highly conducive to the spread of Ayn Randism and other individualist ideologies. The unwritten social contract that had emerged during the New Deal and braved the challenges of the Second World War had faded from memory.
  • all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous.
  • Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change.
  • Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.
  • Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      2020-2025 is a date-range that continues to pop up in my forecasting readings - and from quite a variety of sources.
  • In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.
  • anonymous on 21 Nov 13
     
    "After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we don't. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: 'the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood'. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism."
anonymous

How to Save the Global Economy: Get Better Data - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...3_get_better_data

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The Great Moderation was no accident; it was the consequence of the financial institution-building that began at Bretton Woods in 1944. Determined to avoid the devastating economic shocks of the interwar period, a generation of leaders designed a framework of strong institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, that could intervene when market forces alone could not maintain equilibrium.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Sep 12
       
      This is worth remembering the next time a free-marketeer trumpets how America was some pinaccle of the laisse-faire wet dream before [insert demon here] ruined it.
  • Beneath the calm, though, the growing complexity of the global economy meant that over time, the magnitude and frequency of institutional interventions increased. John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose ideas shaped the postwar economic order, himself never imagined that the powerful tools created in the Bretton Woods system would be used as frequently as they were, and by the early 1970s, more than a few economists began to wonder whether these measures were treating the symptoms of a problem and not its root cause. Perhaps the global economy was not an equilibrium system at all.
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 12
     
    "The 2008 crash was more than the start of a recession; it represented the end of what economists James Stock and Mark Watson labeled the "Great Moderation," a two-decade period of low business cycle volatility, moderate inflation, moderate unemployment, and steady industrial production. The Great Moderation lulled businesses into reducing their reserves and led some economists to speculate that perhaps we had moved beyond business cycles entirely. As Nobel laureate Robert Lucas proclaimed at the 2003 American Economic Association meeting, the "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes.""
anonymous

The Future Is Not Accelerating - 0 views

io9.com/...the-future-is-not-accelerating

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Unlike computers, which we invented, the Earth's processes are something we can only understand through observation. And we need time to do it. Maybe not millions of years, but certainly not just a century either.
  • There is another kind of slow time that we often ignore in our rush to hurtle into tomorrow at light speed. This is called species time. It is the amont of time that a species, like say Homo sapiens, is likely to exist.
  • This is particularly important when you start to think about a reasonable timeframe for the development of space travel and solar system colonization.
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  • What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.
  • Let's return to the one timeframe that we can all grasp easily: the length of a human lifespan, which under ideal circumstances is around 75-85 years.
  • I think it's obvious why we want to measure the pace of the future using technology, and make computer scientists our guides. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. We want to believe that other scientific and cultural changes can happen in similarly observable way because generally we think in human time, not species or geological time. Put another way: We all live in a hyper-accelerated timeframe. Slow time is essentially inhuman time. It is what exists before and after each of our individual lives.
  • That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.
  • Still, we can't expect all the efforts we make in our short lifetimes to pay off in our lifetimes, too. You will not live to be 200 years old. I repeat: You will not live to be 200 years old.
  • Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.
  • We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.
  • In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 12
     
    "H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."
anonymous

Relax! You'll Be More Productive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-youll-be-more-productive.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace.
  • Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.
  • Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.
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  • In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
  • Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
  • Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
  • The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
  • we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
  • The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.
  • Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
  • Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.
  • Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.
  • Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that's not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you'd like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?"
anonymous

After Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod, We Need a Slow-News Movement - 0 views

www.politicsdaily.com/...od-we-need-a-slow-news-movemen

media news criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.
  • Breitbart is just a symbol of a larger problem that transcends the poison-pen politics of ideological warriors (of both the right and left) and the slippery ethics of the blogosphere.
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 10
     
    A good case for why we need to kill the modern news-cycle. By Walter Shapiro at Politics Daily on July 28, 2010. Thanks to Dylan555 for the hat-tip (http://twitter.com/dylan555/status/19764594739).
anonymous

StratFor Annual Forecast 2013 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2013

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Generational shifts take time to play out and often begin with a period of denial as the forces of the international system struggle to preserve the old order. In 2013, that state of denial will persist in many areas. But we are more than four years into this cyclical transformation, and change is becoming more palpable and much harder to deny with every passing month.
  • In Europe, short-term remedies that are so far preserving the integrity of the European Union are also papering over the deep, structural ailments of the bloc.
  • China is not so much in denial of its current predicament as it is constrained in its ability to cope with a dramatic shift from high export-oriented growth to more sustainable development of its interior.
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  • The emerging economies of the post-China world will take time to develop, but 2013 will be an important year in determining which are best positioned to fill the growing void left by China.
  • Change will be primarily violent in nature -- and thus harder to miss -- in the Middle East.
  • The United States is also not immune to change. In this generational shift, and all the tumult that comes with it, Washington will be forced to learn the value of restraint in balance-of-power politics, preferring to lean on regional partners and encourage strategic competition as a way of preserving its own power.
  • The Arab world is moving uncomfortably between two eras. The post-World War II era, in which Arab dictatorships and monarchies supplanted colonial rule, is now roughly blending with -- or in some cases outright colliding with -- a fractured landscape of long-repressed Islamist forces.
  • This dynamic will be particularly visible in the northern Levant region this year as Syria and Lebanon continue coming apart. From Stratfor's perspective, the regime in Syria has already fallen and is giving way to a familiar state of warlordism, where militias and clan interests reign supreme. There is no longer a political entity capable of wielding control over the entirety of Syrian territory, nor will there be for some time.
  • once Syrian President Bashar al Assad is removed from power, whether through a negotiated deal or by force, the Sunni forces will fragment along ideological, ethnic and geographic lines, with Salafist-jihadist forces battling against a more politically minded Muslim Brotherhood and secular Sunnis.
  • As their grip over Aleppo slips, Alawite forces will try to hold Damascus while preparing a mass retreat to their coastal enclave. The battle for Damascus could extend beyond the scope of this forecast.
  • The potential use of chemical weapons by Alawite forces in a state of desperation could accelerate the unraveling of the region; a U.S.-led coalition would have to assemble in haste to contain the chemical weapons threat.
  • To be clear, the United States is not looking for a pretext to intervene militarily in Syria. On the contrary, the United States will make every effort possible to avoid another military campaign in the Islamic world this year.
  • A military conflict between the United States and Iran remains unlikely in 2013.
  • The growing disparity in the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions will largely relegate Iran to the role of regional spoiler. So long as Iran can create pain for its regional adversaries, it can slow its own descent.
  • Iraq remains Iran's primary regional imperative, however. The momentum building among Sunni forces in Syria will eventually spill into Iraq and challenge Shiite dominance.
  • Iran's presidential elections in June will reveal the declining relevancy of the clerical elite and the populist faction embodied by outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This creates a political void for the Revolutionary Guard to fill. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will try to check the Corps' growing influence by bolstering rival military and security agencies and backing a less controversial and more politically malleable ally from the pragmatic conservative camp for the presidency.
  • In Egypt, the military will adapt to an emerging Islamist political order. The military will remain the ultimate arbiter of the state and will rely on a number of factors -- including a fragmented judiciary, the military's economic leverage, a divided Islamist political landscape and the military's foreign relationships -- to check the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Egypt's consuming political transition will leave opportunities for flare-ups in the Sinai Peninsula and in Gaza, but we do not expect a significant breach between Israel and Egypt this year.
  • Jordan, the oft-overlooked casualty of the Arab Spring, will continue to destabilize quietly and slowly in 2013
  • Israel and Turkey are both greatly affected by the shifting political dynamics of the Arab world, but both have little means to influence the change. The two former allies will continue exploring ways to restore a quiet working relationship under these new regional stresses, but a public restoration of diplomatic ties is less likely.
  • Israel will struggle internally over how to adapt to a new regional framework in which the reliability of old working partners is called into question.
  • Turkey sees an opportunity in the rise of Islamist forces in the Arab world but Ankara's limited influences restrain its actions beyond Turkish borders.
  • A more aggressive Saudi role in Syria will aggravate the civil war and create competition with other regional stakeholders, including Turkey, Qatar and Jordan.
  • In 2012, the European Union took numerous steps to mitigate the financial impact of its ongoing crisis.
  •  These actions, which helped to keep the eurozone afloat in 2012, will remain effective in 2013, making it very likely that the eurozone will survive another year. But these tools do not solve three fundamental aspects of the European crisis. 
  • First, the European crisis is fundamentally a crisis of competitiveness.
  • Second, the crisis has a political aspect. The European Union is not a federation but a collection of nation-states bound together by international treaties.
  • Third, the European crisis is threatening the social stability in some countries, especially in the eurozone's periphery.
  • In 2013, the two largest economies of the eurozone (Germany and France) will face low growth or even stagnation. This will have negative effects across Europe.
  • In 2013, the crisis will keep damaging economic conditions in the eurozone periphery. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy will see their economies shrink and unemployment rates rise. In all these countries, the social unrest will grow and the year will be marked by permanent protests and strikes. 
  • The conspicuous divide between the ruling elite and the populations of the periphery will be a key element in 2013, and some governments could fall. But even if opposition parties take power, they will face the same constraints as the governments that preceded them. In other words, a change in politicians will not bring a substantial change in policies regarding the European Union.
  • The only country in the eurozone periphery that has scheduled elections is Italy (in February). If the next Italian government fails to achieve political stability and apply economic reforms, the increased market pressure on Italy will make Rome more likely to require financial assistance from Brussels.
  • Because of the fundamental contradictions in the national interests and foreign policy strategies of the EU member states, the European crisis will continue generating political and economic divisions in the Continent in 2013.
  • Outside the eurozone, the United Kingdom will seek to protect its sovereignty and renegotiate its status within the European Union. But London will not leave the European Union in 2013.
  • Domestic Issues After the political tumult of 2012, Russia will face another year of anti-Kremlin protests, tensions among various political factions and ethnic groups, crackdowns and government reshuffles. Overall, the political tensions will remain manageable and will not pose a serious challenge to Moscow's control.
  • Russia has made significant progress recently in re-establishing influence in its former Soviet periphery.
  • Russia's relationship with Ukraine could be its most important connection in the former Soviet Union in 2013. Russia has been pursuing integration with Ukraine, primarily by taking over its natural gas transit infrastructure and calling on Kiev to join the Customs Union.
  • Georgia will be Russia's main concern in the Caucasus in 2013. With the political emergence of billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream movement, Russia's position in the country strengthened at the expense of the anti-Russian camp of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
  • In the past year, Russia has changed its tactics toward Europe to preserve its presence and leverage for the future. Russia's primary link to Europe is the Europeans' dependence on Russia's large energy supplies, which Moscow knows will be threatened when more non-Russian supplies become available.
  • In 2012, Russia began shifting away from its aggressive stance on energy -- particularly its high prices -- to strike long-term deals that will maintain Russia's market share with its primary strategic customers, such as Germany, Italy and Turkey. Russia will continue this strategy in 2013 as it continues to build new infrastructure to directly link its supplies to Europe.
  • The United States and Russia will continue sparring over trade matters, negotiations for a new nuclear arms treaty and Russia's role in Iran and Syria. Stratfor does not expect major changes from Washington or Moscow that would break the gridlock in negotiations on these issues.
  • The low-level violence and instability that occurred throughout Central Asia in 2012 will continue in 2013.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia in 2013: Beijing's struggle to maintain social and political stability amid lower economic growth rates; China's accelerating military modernization and increasingly aggressive moves to secure its territorial and economic interests in the region; and varied efforts by other regional players, including the United States, to adapt to China's changes. 
  • In 2013, the Chinese economy will continue the gradual, painful process of moving away from high export-driven growth and toward a model that is more sustainable in the long run.
  • But barring another global financial meltdown on the scale of 2008-2009, China's coastal manufacturing economy will not collapse outright. The decline will be gradual.
  • The ongoing, gradual eclipse of coastal China as a hub of global manufacturing over the next several years will lead to higher unemployment and social dislocation as more of China's 250 million-strong migrant labor force returns inland in search of work. 
  • Shadow banking is by no means new in China. But it has grown significantly in the past few years from the geographically isolated informal loan markets of coastal cities to a complex network of semi-legal entities that provides between 12 and 30 trillion yuan (between $1.9 trillion and $4.8 trillion) in credit -- at interest rates of 20-36 percent -- to thousands of struggling small businesses nationwide.
  • The Party's growing sense of insecurity -- both internally and with regard to the social consequences of China's economic transition -- likely will be reflected in continued censorship of online social platforms like Weibo, crackdowns on religious or other groups perceived as threatening, and the Chinese military's growing assertiveness over China's interests in the South and East China seas and Southeast Asia.
  • The decline of low-end coastal manufacturing in China will present enormous opportunities for Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and potentially Myanmar -- all of whom will continue to push strongly for foreign investment not only into natural resources and raw materials industries but also into developing better urban, transport, power generation and materials processing infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines -- China's most vocal opponents in Southeast Asia -- will continue to push for greater integration among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and for U.S. business and military engagement in the region.
  • The Coming U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan Ahead of the 2014 drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, efforts will intensify to negotiate a settlement that gives the Taliban a place in a new government.
  • The negotiations will face numerous obstacles this year. There will be an upsurge in violence -- both in terms of officially sanctioned attacks designed to gain advantage on the negotiating table and spoiler attacks by Taliban elements allied with al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
  • Washington's intention to reduce its presence in the region will spur regional actors to fill the void. Pakistan will increase its interactions with Russia, Central Asia and Iran to prepare for a post-U.S. Afghanistan.
  • India will also turn its attention eastward, where the United States is quietly trying to forge a coalition of regional partners to keep a check on China in the Indo-Pacific basin. Myanmar in particular will be an active battleground for influence this year.
  • Preparing for a Post-Chavez Venezuela After a year of successful campaigning for re-election, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in questionable health. Although the ultimate outcome of December's medical treatment for the ailing leader is unpredictable, Chavez's decision to name Vice President Nicolas Maduro as a political successor at the end of 2012 indicates that there is significant concern for his ability to remain in power.
  • Although it remains possible that Chavez will stay in power through the year, for Maduro to capitalize on Chavez's recent political gains, elections may need to be called sooner rather than later, regardless of Chavez's immediate health status.
  • Throughout 2013, Colombia will continue the incremental process of negotiating an end to the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC.
  • This will be a year of significant transition for Mexico. Policy issues that were bottled up by intra-party competition in the waning years of the National Action Party's administration have begun coming to the fore and will dominate 2013. These include socio-political issues like education, tax and pension reform.
  • The most important issue facing Mexico in 2013 will be energy policy.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "At the beginning of 2012, we argued that the international system is undergoing a generational transformation -- the kind that occurs every 20 years or so. The cycle we are now in started in 2008-2009, when global financial contagion exposed the underlying weaknesses of Europe and eventually cracked China's export-oriented economic model. The Middle East then began to deviate from its post-World War II paradigm with an attempted resurgence by Iran, the regional rise of Islamists and the decline of age-old autocratic regimes in the Arab world."
anonymous

Pew Study: Americans Abandoning News Outlets, Citing Lower Quality - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...s-outlets-citing-lower-quality

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Nearly a third of those surveyed, or 31%, said they had ceased relying on a particular news outlet because it no longer provided them with the sort of news they were used to getting.
  • To learn exactly what respondents meant by that, Pew asked whether the issue was quantity — ie. fewer stories — or quality. Overwhelmingly, they chose the latter, with 60.7% citing “less complete” coverage as the reason for turning away, versus 23.5% who chose “fewer stories.”
  • Yet as sensitive as they are to the declining quality of news, Americans aren’t particularly perceptive about the financial pressures underlying the trend. A full 60% said they knew nothing whatsoever (36%) or very little (24%) about the economic forces disrupting the news business, although awareness was somewhat higher among the affluent and educated.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Curiously, even among those who claimed to know at least a little about the situation, a majority of 57% didn’t believe news outlets’ economic woes limited their ability to produce quality coverage.
  • With newspaper newsrooms employing 28% fewer journalists than they did in 2001 (fewer than 40,000 nationally), that’s a bizarre finding. How could anyone, you might wonder, not see the link between a dramatic reduction in the number of people producing the news and the thoroughness of that product?
  • Consumers are sending a message: They want the same quality of news they’ve always known, not excuses, and they’ll punish news outlets that fail to meet that standard by taking their business elsewhere.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 13
     
    "Like all vicious cycles, the relationship between the declining fortunes of news outlets and the shrinking of their audiences is a difficult one to untangle, a chicken-and-egg problem. Newspaper circulations have been sliding for decades, starting well before digital media started siphoning off ad dollars and forcing widespread newsroom cutbacks that, inevitably, resulted in a poorer editorial product."
anonymous

Eight Silly Data Things Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired. - 1 views

www.kaushik.net/...data-strategy-metrics-mistakes

analytics google analytics marketing

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • It turns out that Marketers, especially Digital Marketers, make really silly mistakes when it comes to data. Big data. Small data. Any data.
  • two common themes
  • 1. Some absolutely did not use data to do their digital jobs.
  • ...74 more annotations...
  • 2. Many used some data, but they unfortunately used silly data strategies/metrics.
  • Silly not in their eyes, silly in my eyes.
  • A silly metric, I better define it :), is one that distracts you for focusing on business investments that lead to bottom-line impact.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      Within the context of my current project, the bottom-line impact would be increased engagement (in the form of donations, clinical study participation, and blood/fluid donation to scientific research).
  • Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • 1. Real-time data is life changing.
  • A lot of people get fired for this. Sadly not right away, because it takes time to realize how spectacular of a waste of money getting to real-time data was.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is some REALLY FUNNY SHIT to me. But I'm a nerd.
  • I want you to say: "I don't want real-time data, I want right-time data. Let's understand the speed of decision making in our company. If we make real-time decisions, let's get real time data. If we make decisions over two days, let's go with that data cycle. If it take ten days to make a decision to change bids on our PPC campaigns, let's go with that data cycle." Right-time.
  • Real-time data is very expensive.
  • It is also very expensive from a decision-making perspective
  • even in the best case scenario of the proverbial pigs flying, they'll obsess about tactical things.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      I get this completely. We get hung up on the tactical and lose sight of the strategic.
  • So shoot for right-time data.
  • That is a cheaper systems/platform/data strategy.
  • (And remember even the most idiotic system in the world now gives you data that is a couple hours old with zero extra investment from you. So when you say real time you are really saying "Nope, two hours is not enough for me!").
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      THIS is probably the best argument for our using Google Analytics and Google Search to collect data instead of paying large costs to firms that will offer questionable results.
  • That is also a way to get people to sync the data analysis (not data puking, sorry I meant data reporting) with the speed at which the company actually makes decisions (data > analyst > manager > director > VP > question back to manager > yells at the analyst > back to director> VP = 6 days).
  • The phrase "real-time data analysis" is an oxymoron.
  • 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate.
  • The difference between a KPI and a metric is that the former has a direct line of sight to your bottom-line, while the latter is helpful in diagnosing tactical challenges.
  • Bounce rate is really useful for finding things you suck at.
  • Along the way you also learn how not to stink. Bounce rate goes from 70% to a manageable 30%. Takes three months.
  • Stop obsessing about bounce rate.
  • From the time people land on your site it might take another 12 – 25 pages for them to buy or submit a lead. Focus on all that stuff. The tough stuff. Then you'll make money.
  • Focus on the actual game. Focus on incredible behavior metrics like Pages/Visit, focus on the Visitor Flow report, obsess about Checkout Abandonment Rate, make love to Average Order Size.
  • 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness.
  • it does not take a very long time for your Senior Management to figure out how lame the Likes metric is and that it drives 1. Zero value on Facebook and 2. Zero squared economic value or cost savings to the business.
  • many spectacular reasons
  • Here's one… We are looking at two consumer product brands, the tiny company Innocent Drinks and the Goliath called Tide Detergent.
  • Even with 10x the number of Likes on Facebook the giant called Tide has 4x fewer people talking about their brand when compared to the David called Innocent.
  • As no less than three comments mention below, Innocent is 90% owned by Coca Cola. Fooled me!
  • In a massively large company they've carved out an identity uniquely their own. They refuse to be corrupted by Coca Cola's own Facebook strategy of constant self-pimping and product ads masquerading as "updates." As a result pound for pound Innocent's fan engagement on its page is multiple time better than Coca Cola's - even if the latter has many more likes.
  • 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success.
  • Not going to happen.
  • as all decent SEOs will tell you, is that search results are no longer standardized. Rather they are personalized. I might even say, hyper-personalized. Regardless of if you are logged in or not.
  • When I search for "avinash" on Google I might rank #1 in the search results because I'm logged into my Google account, the engine has my search history, my computer IP address, it also has searches by others in my vicinity, local stories right now, and so many other signals. But when you search for "avinash" your first search result might be a unicorn. Because the search engine has determined that the perfect search result for you for the keyword avinash is a unicorn.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      This is crucial to understand. I will be sharing this, at length, with my boss. :)
  • Universal search for example means that personalized results will not only look for information from web pages, they also look for YouTube/Vimoe videos, social listings, images of course, and so on and so forth.
  • Then let's not forget that proportionaly there are very few head searches, your long tail searches will be huge.
  • Oh and remember that no one types a word or two, people use long phrases.
  • There are a ton more reasons obsessing about the rank of a handful of words on the search engine results page (SERP) is a very poor decision.
  • So check your keyword ranking if it pleases you.
  • But don't make it your KPI.
  • For purely SEO, you can use Crawl Rate/Depth, Inbound Links (just good ones) and growth (or lack there of) in your target key phrases as decent starting points.
  • You can graduate to looking at search traffic by site content or types of content you have (it's a great signal your SEO is working).
  • Measuring Visits and Conversions in aggregate first and segmented by keywords (or even key word clusters) will get you on the path to showing real impact.
  • That gives you short term acquisition quality, you can then move to long term quality by focusing on metrics like lifetime value.
  • 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!!
  • You should judge the success of that showing up by measure if you made money! Did you earn any profit?
  • Friends don't let friends use CPC as a KPI. Unless said friends want the friend fired.
  • 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more!
  • Content consumption is a horrible metric. It incentivises sub optimal behavior in your employees/agencies.
  • If you are a news site, you can get millions of page views
  • And it will probably get you transient traffic.
  • And what about business impact from all these one night stands ?
  • If you are in the content only business (say my beloved New York Times) a better metric to focus on is Visitor Loyalty
  • If your are in the lead generation business and do the "OMG let's publish a infographic on dancing monkey tricks which will get us a billion page views, even though we have nothing to do with dancing or monkeys or tricks" thing, measure success on the number of leads received and not how "viral" the infographic went and how many reshares it got on Twitter.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 May 13
       
      In other words, use that odd-one-off to redirect attention to the source of that one-off. I'll have to ponder that given our different KPI needs (nonprofit, we don't sell anything).
  • Don't obsess about page views.
  • Then measure the metric closest to that. Hopefully some ideas above will help get you promoted.
  • 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat!
  • My hypothesis is that TV/Radio/Magazines have created this bad habit. We can measure so little, almost next to nothing, that we've brought our immensely shaky GRP metric from TV to digital. Here it's called impressions. Don't buy impressions.
  • Buy engagement. Define what it means first of course .
  • If you are willing to go to clicks, do one better and measure Visits. At least they showed up on your mobile/desktop site.
  • Now if you are a newbie, measure bounce rate. If you have a tiny amount of experience measure Visit Duration. If you are a pro, measure Revenue. If you are an Analysis Ninja, measure Profit.
  • Impressions suck. Profit rocks.
  • If the simple A/B (test/control) experiment demonstrates that delivering display banner ad impressions to the test group delivers increased revenue, buy impressions to your heart's content. I'll only recommend that you repeat the experiment once a quarter.
  • You can buy impressions if you can prove via a simple controlled experiment that when we show impressions we got more engagement/sales and when we don't show impressions we did not get more engagement/sales.
  • But if you won't do the experiment and you use the # of impressions as a measure of success
  • 8. Demographics and psychographics. That is all I need! Don't care for intent!
  • This is not a metric, this is more of a what data you'll use to target your advertising issue.
  • Our primary method of buying advertising and marketing is: "I would like to reach 90 year old grandmas that love knitting, what tv channel should I advertise on." Or they might say: "I would like to reach 18 to 24 year olds with college education who supported Barack Obama for president." And example of demographic and psychographic segments.
  • We use that on very thin ice data, we bought advertising. That was our lot in life.
  • Did you know 50% of of TV viewership is on networks that each have <1% share? Per industry.bnet.com. I dare you to imagine how difficult it is to measure who they are, and how to target them to pimp your shampoo, car, cement.
  • Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always.
  • if you have advertising money to spend, first spend it all on advertising that provides you intent data.
  • Search has a ton of strong intent. It does not matter if you are a grandma or a 18 year old. If you are on Baidu and you search for the HTC One, you are expressing strong intent. Second, content consumption has intent built in. If I'm reading lots of articles about how to get pregnant, you could show me an ad related to that
  • The first intent is strong, the second one is weaker.
  • There is a lot of intent data on the web. That is our key strength.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    This is a really great read by Avinash Kaushik at Occam's Razor. Volunmuous highlights follow.
anonymous

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities - 0 views

grist.org/...ies-according-to-u-s-utilities

shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
  • Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
  • You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money.
  • Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.”
  • The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits.
  • Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
  • First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product.
  • (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
  • It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.”
  • Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
  • This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
  • Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”
  • What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
  • As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
  • One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers.
  • (“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
  • So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
  • The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies.
  • In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
  • Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.
  • This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground."
anonymous

Keeping Terrorism in Perspective - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...keeping-terrorism-perspective

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 12 - Cached
  • By design, terrorist attacks are intended to have a psychological impact far outweighing the physical damage the attack causes. As their name suggests, they are meant to cause terror that amplifies the actual attack. A target population responding to a terrorist attack with panic and hysteria allows the perpetrators to obtain a maximum return on their physical effort.
  • One way to mitigate the psychological impact of terrorism is to remove the mystique and hype associated with it. The first step in this demystification is recognizing that terrorism is a tactic used by a variety of actors and that it will not go away, something we discussed at length in our first analysis in this series.
  • Another way to mitigate the impact of terrorism is recognizing that those who conduct terrorist attacks are not some kind of Hollywood superninja commandos who can conjure attacks out of thin air. Terrorist attacks follow a discernable, predictable planning process that can be detected if it is looked for.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A third important component in the demystification process is recognizing and resisting the terror magnifiers terrorist planners use in their efforts to maximize the impact of their attacks.
  • let's first examine the objective of terrorist planners.
  • In the late 1960s and early 1970s, modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of broadcast media.
  • Today, the proliferation of 24-hour television news networks and Internet news sites magnifies such media exposure.
  • Such theatrical attacks exert a strange hold over the human imagination. The sense of terror they create can dwarf the reaction to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For example, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami compared to fewer than 3,000 people on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks spawned a global sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that had a profound and unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade.
  • As noted, the media magnifies this anxiety and terror. Television news, whether broadcast on the airwaves or over the Internet, allows people to experience a terrorist event remotely and vicariously, and the print media reinforces this. While part of this magnification results merely from the nature of television as a medium and the 24-hour news cycle, bad reporting and misunderstanding can build hype and terror.
  • The traditional news media are not alone in the role of terror magnifier. The Internet has become an increasingly effective conduit for panic and alarm. From hysterical (and false) claims in 2005 that al Qaeda had pre-positioned nuclear weapons in the United States and was preparing to attack nine U.S. cities and kill 4 million Americans in operation "American Hiroshima" to 2010 claims that Mexican drug cartels were smuggling nuclear weapons into the United States for Osama bin Laden, a great deal of fearmongering can spread rapidly over the Internet.
  • Website operators who earn advertising revenue based on the number of unique site visitors have an obvious financial incentive to publish outlandish and startling terrorism stories.
  • Sometimes even governments act as terror magnifiers. Certainly, in the early 2000s the media and the American public became fearful every time the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raised its color-coded threat level. Politicians' statements also can scare people. Such was the case in 2007 when DHS secretary Michael Chertoff said his gut screamed that a major terrorist attack was imminent and in 2010 when the head of French internal intelligence noted that the threat of terrorism in France was never higher.
  • The world is a dangerous place. Everyone is going to die, and some people are certain to die in a manner that is brutal or painful. Recognizing that terrorist attacks, like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, are part of the human condition permits people to take prudent, measured actions to prepare for such contingencies and avoid becoming victims (vicarious or otherwise). It is the resilience of the population and their perseverance that determine how much a terrorist attack is allowed to terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny the practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 12
     
    "As we conclude our series on the fundamentals of terrorism, it is only fitting that we do so with a discussion of the importance of keeping terrorism in perspective."
anonymous

Annual Forecast 2012 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2012

annual forecast stratfor

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - Cached
  • In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.
  • Our forecast for 2012 is framed by the idea that we are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
  • the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Normally, we would predict failure for such an effort: Sacrificing budgetary authority to an outside power would be the most dramatic sacrifice of state sovereignty yet in the European experiment -- a sacrifice that most European governments would strongly resist. However, the Germans have six key advantages in 2012.
  • First, there are very few scheduled electoral contests, so the general populace of most European states will not be consulted on the exercise.
  • Second, Germany only needs the approval of the 17 eurozone states -- rather than the 27 members of the full European Union -- to forward its plan with credibility.
  • Third, the process of approving a treaty such as this will take significant time, and some aspects of the reform process can be pushed back.
  • Fourth, the Germans are willing to apply significant pressure.
  • Fifth, the Europeans are scared, which makes them willing to do things they would not normally do -- such as implementing austerity and ratifying treaties they dislike.
  • The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012.
  • The economic deferment of that pain is the sixth German advantage. Here, the primary player is the ECB. The financial crisis has two aspects: Over-indebted European governments are lurching toward defaults that would collapse the European system, and European banks (the largest purchasers of European government debt) are broadly insolvent -- their collapse would similarly break apart the European system.
  • In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe.
  • Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES).
  • This larger institution will allow the scope of Russia's influence over Minsk and Astana, as well as new member countries such as Kyrgyzstan and possibly Tajikistan, to expand from the economic sphere into politics and security as Moscow lays the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Eurasian Union, which it is hoping to start around 2015.
  • In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies
  • Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe.
  • Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.
  • Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year.
  • Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012.
  • In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor.
  • Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult.
  • Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq.
  • Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
  • While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012.
  • As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society.
  • The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.
  • The most important development in South Asia is Pakistan's ongoing political evolution.
  • Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west.
  • Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    "There are periods when the international system undergoes radical shifts in a short time. The last such period was 1989-1991. During that time, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Japanese economic miracle ended. The Maastricht Treaty creating contemporary Europe was signed. Tiananmen Square defined China as a market economy dominated by an unchallenged Communist Party, and so on. Fundamental components of the international system shifted radically, changing the rules for the next 20 years. We are in a similar cycle, one that began in 2008 and is still playing out."
anonymous

The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-indifference-foreign-affairs

shared by anonymous on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs.
  • The United States was founded as a place where private affairs were intended to supersede public life.
  • Public service was intended less as a profession than as a burden to be assumed as a matter of duty -- hence the word "service."
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • In many European countries, the state is at the center of many of the activities that shape private life, but that is less true in the United States.
  • The American public is often most active in public affairs when resisting the state's attempts to increase its presence, as we saw with health care reform. When such matters appear settled, Americans tend to focus their energy on their private lives, pleasures and pains. 
  • Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives.
  • There is nothing particularly American in this. People everywhere care more about things that affect them than things that don't.
  • People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them.
  • The United States' geography, obviously, shapes American thinking about the world. The European Peninsula is crowded with peoples and nation-states. In a matter of hours you can find yourself in a country with a different language and religion and a history of recent war with your own. Americans can travel thousands of miles using their own language, experiencing the same culture and rarely a memory of war. Northwestern Europe is packed with countries. The northeastern United States is packed with states.
  • Passing from the Netherlands to Germany is a linguistic, cultural change with historical memories. Traveling from Connecticut to New York is not.
  • American interest is cyclical, heavily influenced by whether they are affected by what goes on. After 9/11, what happened in the Islamic world mattered a great deal. But even then, it went in cycles.
  • It's not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it's that their interest is finely calibrated. The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat.
  • The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria
  • Context is everything. During times of oil shortage, events in Venezuela might well have interested Americans much more than they did last week. During the Cold War, the left-wing government in Venezuela might have concerned Americans. But advancements in technology have increased oil and natural gas production in the United States. A left-wing government in Venezuela is simply another odd Latin government, and the events of last week are not worth worrying about. The context renders Venezuela a Venezuelan problem.
  • It is not that Americans are disengaged from the world, but rather that the world appears disengaged from them. At the heart of the matter is geography.
  • The American reality is that most important issues, aside from Canada and Mexico, take place across the ocean, and the ocean reasonably is seen as a barrier that renders these events part of a faraway realm.
  • During the Cold War, Americans had a different mindset. They saw themselves in an existential struggle for survival with the communists.
  • One thing that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent 20 years taught the United States was that the world mattered -- a mindset that was as habitual as it was reflective of new realities.
  • Starting in the late 1980s, the United States sent troops to Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait. The American public was engaged in all of these for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some bad. Whatever the reasoning, there was a sense of clarity that demanded that something be done.
  • After 9/11, the conviction that something be done turned into an obsession. But over the past 10 years, Americans' sense of clarity has become much more murky, and their appetite for involvement has declined accordingly.
  • More recently, the standards for justifying either type of intervention have become more exacting to policymakers. Syria was not a matter of indifference, but the situation lacked the clarity that justified intervention.
  • The United States seemed poised to intervene and then declined. The American public saw it as avoiding another overseas entanglement with an outcome that could not be shaped by American power.
  • We see the same thing in Ukraine. The United States cannot abide a single power like Russia dominating Eurasia. That would create a power that could challenge the United States. There were times that the Ukrainian crisis would have immediately piqued American interest. While some elements of the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, did get deeply involved, the American public remained generally indifferent.
  • From a geopolitical point of view, the future of Ukraine as European or Russian helps shape the future of Eurasia. But from the standpoint of the American public, the future is far off and susceptible to interference.
  • (Americans have heard of many things that could have become a major threat -- a few did, most didn't.)
  • This is disconcerting from the standpoint of those who live outside the United States. They experienced the United States through the Cold War, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 era. The United States was deeply involved in everything. The world got used to that.
  • I spoke to a foreign diplomat who insisted the United States was weakening. I tried to explain that it is not weakness that dictates disengagement but indifference. He couldn't accept the idea that the United States has entered a period in which it really doesn't care what happens to his country.
  • The diplomat had lived in a time when everything mattered and all problems required an American position. American indifference is the most startling thing in the world for him.
  • This was the position of American isolationists of the early 20th century.
  • The isolationist period was followed, of course, by the war and the willingness of the United States to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty," in the words of John F. Kennedy. Until very recently, that sweeping statement was emblematic of U.S. foreign policy since 1941.
  • The current public indifference to foreign policy reflects that shift. But Washington's emerging foreign policy is not the systematic foreign policy of the pre-World War II period. It is an instrumental position, which can adapt to new circumstances and will likely be changed not over the course of decades but over the course of years or months.
  • The sense that private life matters more than public is intense, and that means that Americans are concerned with things that are deemed frivolous by foreigners, academics and others who make their living in public and foreign policy.
  • They care about some things, but are not prepared to care about all things.
  • Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable. To me, it is simply becoming a fact to be borne in mind. I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.
  • Americans might not be interested in the world, but the world is interested in Americans. Until this luxury comes to an end, the United States has ample assistant secretaries to give the impression that it cares.
  • anonymous on 18 Feb 14
     
    "Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and deadly protests. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains. "
anonymous

Sussing Out Patterns in American History - 0 views

www.miller-mccune.com/...erns-in-american-history-19190

generations

shared by anonymous on 30 Jul 10 - Cached
  • authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) suggest that throughout the 500-year span of Anglo-American history, a more or less predictable cycle has played out, a cycle in which generational types are in a certain stage of life at any given time.
  • According to Strauss and Howe’s model, we’re currently in an Unraveling, with the aging prophet Baby Boomers moving into elder mentorship roles, the middle-aged nomad Gen Xers assuming the highest leadership positions, and civic-oriented Millennials coming of age to become the doers and institution-builders of the next High.
  • While we may be a bit different than our forebears, history suggests that even they were not without their faults, and that we have more in common with them than we’ve given ourselves credit for. If they could dig themselves out of catastrophes like the Civil War and the Great Depression, why can’t we?
  • anonymous on 30 Jul 10
     
    "If the past is any guide, argues historian Neil Howe, the institution-building Millennial generation will take America to a new era of good feelings." By Ben Preston at Miller-McCune Online on July 23, 2010.
anonymous

A Few Election Thoughts - 0 views

earlywarn.blogspot.com/...few-election-thoughts.html

economics election America

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 10
     
    "What I see happening is this: the public is aware, rather inchoately, that things are going badly wrong and that the life they are accustomed to is under threat, but they have no idea what to do. The parties, by and large, have failed to diagnose the roots of the problem, and instead are reflexively proposing to relive their greatest hits of the past. Since the problems of the past are not the problems of the present, these approaches are not working. This is leading both parties into a cycle of over-promising what they can deliver, thus leading to bitter disappointment. " By Stuart Staniford at Early Warning on November 4, 2010.
anonymous

The Palinization of America - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ation-of-america_b_871528.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 08 Jun 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Jun 11
     
    "For many years America has been sliding into a dark abyss... ... succumbing to the lowest common-denominator -- spurning intelligence for 'cool.'" A good contribution to the notion that we're in the pre-crisis-portion of the Generational cycle.
anonymous

Darpa Searches for Life's Master Clock - 0 views

www.wired.com/...darpa-life-master-clock

longnow longevity cycles timescale

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • If the effort succeeds — and, boy, is that a big if — the recently announced Biochronicity program could help us understand why cancer is so hard to beat, how stem cells self renew and why cells are programmed to die. In other words, it’ll be one of the biggest breakthroughs Darpa has ever had.
  • it’s clear that all life processes depend on some internal time keeping.
  • Darpa wants to find the master regulator, and then use that knowledge to develop “predictive models of molecular-timed events, cell-cycle progression, lifespan, aging, and cell death, response to stress, and useful treatment strategies and drug delivery.” The key word is predictive. Darpa is no longer content with biology as a descriptive enterprise, watching cells and enzymes do their thing. Now, it wants mathematical models and algorithms and theories to tell what they’ll do next.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Scientists know that certain bits of DNA on the end of chromosomes called “telomeres” shorten each time the cell divides, playing a role in cell aging and eventual cell death
  • New research has uncovered how stress levels and diet can affect the biological age of an organism as opposed to chronological age, or calendar years.
  • For years scientists thought that sequencing DNA would uncover the “gene-for” almost everything, unraveling the mysteries of disease and resulting in new drugs and gene-specific treatments. It didn’t exactly pan out that way.
  • So to uncover the calculus within the genome, it might take some looking beyond the genome. Genes may contribute a few elements to the inner clock, but they interact within a larger scaffolding of cell processes and environmental factors.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    "There's a hidden clock that underlies every process of every living thing - from when our cells start dividing to how quickly we age. Researchers at Darpa, the Pentagon's extreme science agency, believe they can find it, using a mash-up of biology, code-cracking, mathematics and computer science."
anonymous

The Gen-X Nostalgia Boom - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-gen-x-nostalgia-boom.html

generations nostalgia Gen-X

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 11 - Cached
  • We bristled when we heard them wax self-congratulatory about ending segregation and war
  • We resented their monopoly on cultural space, realizing that “boom” also described what their collective voice would always be, compared with our demographically feeble squeak.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I was a late bloomer in this regard. When I finally had a small degree of cultural awareness, I began to note things. Mainly that my music sucked, we sucked, and everything was better before I was around.
  • And when they did briefly notice us, in the Generation X media frenzy of the mid-1990s, it was only to reduce diverse people and experiences to catchwords like “slackers” and “grunge” and dismiss paralyzing economic and ecological anxiety as privileged extended-adolescent angst.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I had that TIME Magazine. I used to read P.J. O'Rourke bitching about my generation. I bristled at being called a gen-x'er (I only ever tolerated grunge). As quickly as that media fascination came, it went. I guess maybe we were 'dealt with'.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us.
  • it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism
  • Meanwhile MTV is exhuming “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Pop-Up Video,” while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-themed block of late-night programming with old shows like “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” presumably to help herbally sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      With our beer bongs and our hula hoops.
  • Most kids who entered college this year weren’t even born when grunge broke. If it’s too soon, you’re too old.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      Ouch.
  • But of course we are not just the unwilling victims of the 20-year cycle of resuscitation. We are its architects, as a few of us have been able to wrest culturally influential posts away from baby boomers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      S&H would (probably) argue that this is because Gen X is a reactive one (like Silents). 
  • One of The Onion’s most biting headlines this year: “Winona Ryder finally agrees to sleep with Generation X.”
  • This is the sting in the rising buzz of 1990s nostalgia: It feels like retroactively giving in to those reductive media representations.
  • At that time, the sharpest articulation of generational pique was found in The Baffler
  • Now we’ll get to see how The Baffler dissects the rise of Gen-X-Squared
  • age can prompt even the most cynical to realize not only nostalgia’s sickly-sweet temptation but also its usefulness.
  • What is nostalgia good for, then?
  • it runs search-and-rescue missions against the disposability of consumer capitalism
  • And it raises exception to the great leveling effect of the Internet
  • In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      And that's one reason why, as much as I railed against the Gen X label, I certainly was part of a peer group with shared experiences.
  • Today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers seem less apocalyptic if you remember that the last time a Democratic president battled Republicans over health care and federal budgets, he was being smeared as a conspiratorial murderer.
  • So how can an anti-nostalgic generation honor its past without becoming the thing it hated?
  • One answer is the old standby: Gen X’s endemic, possibly pathological, sarcasm.
  • Rather than the 1990s being, as the demoralizing claim went, the “end of history,” it turned out to be more like a mix-tape pause of history between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, a kind of break from big convulsions while humankind mainly figured out how to work the Internet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      That's a great bit.
  • There’s a model here for nostalgia that doesn’t wish away the distance between past and present; doesn’t romanticize the past as tragic and heroic; and doesn’t simply trivialize it (as so much 1980s nostalgia did) as trite and silly.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 11
     
    Long before we had much life to look back on, North Americans my age knew that nostalgia was a sickness. It's not that we were aware the term was coined to describe the crippling melancholia that overcame many 17th-century Swiss soldiers when war took them away from the bucolic mountain landscapes of home. It was that, being in our teens and 20s in the early 1990s, we had grown up in the penumbra of the great eclipsing nostalgia of the baby boomers
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    And here I could swear I've been toying with nostalgia my whole life. Mind you, it was always nostalgia for previous countercultural movements.
anonymous

Mass Extinction Easier to Trigger Than Thought - 0 views

www.wired.com/...mass-extinction-methane

longnow layscience

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.
  • Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.
  • “It could happen again. It’s only the boundary conditions that we don’t know.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In what scientists call the end-Triassic mass extinction, at least half of all living species simply disappear from the fossil record. The die-off didn’t merely cause ecological disruption. It was so sudden and profound that planetary chemical cycles went haywire for the next several million years.
  • The leading explanation for the extinction invokes extended, climate-altering volcanic activity caused by splitting continental plates, but earlier research by Ruhl suggested a more nuanced and jarring narrative.
  • “A small release of CO2 from volcanoes triggered a small change in the global climate, raising land and ocean temperatures. That led to the release of methane from the seafloor,” said Ruhl.
  • Scientists have raised the possibility that rising global temperatures could release trapped methane into the atmosphere, further raising temperatures and releasing more methane in a feedback loop of warming and planetary disruption. That’s apparently what happened during the end-Triassic extinction.
  • Exactly how much warming would be needed to start the loop anew, and how much methane would flow forth, are open questions. “We could potentially trigger a small increase in ocean temperatures, which triggers methane release,” said Ruhl. “But it’s difficult to quantify how much methane is in the ocean these days. Maybe we have less methane in seafloors now. Maybe we have more.”
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 11
     
    What a lovely headline! Anyway, humans could have an easier time doing stuff that could obliterate us. Viva evolution!
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

Vortex motion: Viral video showing Sun's motion through galaxy is wrong. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...n_through_galaxy_is_wrong.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
  • Normally I wouldn’t bother debunking stuff like this; wacky claims are made all the time and usually disappear on their own. But in this case I’m getting a lot of people telling me about it, so clearly it's popular—probably because it seems superficially right, and it has very nice graphics. I’m also seeing it spread around by people who do understand science, but missed the parts of it that are way off. With stuff like this, it always pays to dig a little deeper.
  • Heliocentrism is the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and the planets orbit around it (there are also important details, like the planets orbit on ellipses, and these orbits are tilted with respect to one another).
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Sadhu is claiming that heliocentrism is wrong, and that the motion of the planets around the Sun actually makes a vortex. What he actually means is a helix, not a vortex. They’re different in more than just name; they’re actually very different physical motions with different properties—you can get helical motion without the particles in it interacting, like in the solar system, but in a vortex the particles interact through drag and friction.
  • But let's not argue over semantics. Look at the video again: Sadhu shows the Sun leading the planets, ahead of them as it goes around the galaxy (he makes this even more obvious in a second video; see below). This is not just misleading, it’s completely wrong.
  • I’m not arguing some small detail here. The idea that the planets trail behind the Sun as it moves through the galaxy is fundamental to what Sadhu is saying about the helix—as I’ll explain below (in the section “Where Do All These Ideas Come From?”). But first, there’s a bit more to see.
  • Look carefully at his animation of heliocentric motion. He shows the direction of the Sun's motion around the galaxy as the same as the plane of the planets' orbits. But this is not the case. The solar system's plane is tipped with respect to the galaxy by about a 60° angle, like the way a car's windshield makes an angle with respect to the car's forward motion.
  • This is actually critical: In the helical model, he shows the planets as orbiting around the Sun perpendicular to the motion of the Sun around the galaxy; "face-on", if you like. This is wrong. Because the orbits of the planets are tipped by 60°, not 90°, they can sometimes be ahead and sometimes behind the Sun. That right there, and all by itself, shows this helical depiction is incorrect. In the real model, heliocentrism, you do get that sort of ahead-and-behind motion, exactly as we observe in the real sky.
  • If you are slightly above the disk you feel an overall pull down, toward the disk. Imagine the disk is just a huge slab of matter, and the Sun is above it. The gravity of the disk would make the Sun plunge down into it. Since stars are so far apart, the Sun would go right through the disk and out the bottom. But then the disk would be pulling it up, once again toward the disk. The Sun would slow, stop, and reverse course, plummeting into the disk once again. It gets about 200 or so light years from the midplane of the galactic disk every time its bobs; the disk is 1000 light years thick, though, so we always stay well inside it. But these oscillations would go on forever, the Sun moving up and down like a cork in the ocean.
  • Since the Sun is also orbiting the galaxy, the combined motion makes that lovely waving pattern, up-and-down as it goes around, like a horse on a carousel. So Sadhu has that part (more or less) right.
  • Mostly. But he then adds a third component, a twisting spiral around the Sun’s path he attributes to precession. That part is wrong, very wrong.
  • His video shows the Sun corkscrewing around the galaxy, sometimes closer to the galactic center and sometimes farther away over and over again. To go back to the carousel analogy, its like the horse is circling the center, moving up and down, and also left-to right. But that's not what the Sun really does. There is no left to right motion (toward and away from the galactic center multiple times per orbit). That corkscrew pattern Sadhu shows is wrong.
  • In that video and its notes Sadhu confuses coordinate systems, forces, and motions pretty often.
  • In his videos and on his page, Sadhu says that he learned all this from a man named Pallathadka Keshava Bhat.
  • Seriously, none of it makes any sense. Bhat claims heliocentrism is wrong, but then uses one fallacious idea after another to back this up. I could write pages debunking his claims, but I'll try to keep this short.
  • Also, we have multiple space probes that have visited other planets, many of them still in orbit. If heliocentrism were wrong in the way Bhat describes, then those probes never would have made it to those planets. The calculations used to send them there would've been wrong. We don't have to account for the Sun's motion around the galaxy at all when calculating these spacecraft paths, so Bhat cannot be correct.
  • The claim that the Sun is at the tip of the solar system with the planets trailing behind is also demonstrably wrong. The Sun does not really lead the solar system through the galaxy like the tip of a bullet as Bhat apparently claims (and as Sadhu’s videos show). The planets go around the Sun, and the whole shebang moves around the galaxy as a unit, tipped by that 60° angle. That means sometimes the planets are ahead of the Sun, and sometimes behind it along that galactic orbit.
  • given Sadhu's misapplication of the Earth's precession, I tried to read what Bhat had to say about it. But it's so garbled (and plain wrong; he claims the precession cycle is 225,000 years long, when it's actually 26,000 years) it's like trying to untie the Gordian knot. And there's much more.
  • And that's what Sadhu was basing his (lovely, if incorrect) videos on, mind you. I'll note that if you poke around Sadhu’s site, you’ll find links to all sorts of, um, odd conspiracy theories, from 9/11 Truthers to chemtrails to the ravings of David Icke (who claims—seriously— that reptilian aliens live under Denver airport and control the world), just to name a few. To me, that puts his other ideas into perspective.
  • It seems right, or looks cool, or appeals to some sense of how things should be. But how things should be and how they are don’t always overlap. The Universe is a pretty cool place, and works using a fairly well-regulated set of rules. We call those rules physics, they’re written in the language of math, and trying to understand all that is science.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "I've been getting lots of tweets and email from folks linking to a slick-looking video, a computer animation showing the motion of the planets around the Sun as the Sun orbits around the Milky Way Galaxy. It's a very pretty video with compelling music and well-done graphics."
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