8. Lost & Forgotten
According to a 2013 Harvard Law Review by Law Professors Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig, and candidate Kendra Albert, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The phenomenon, known as “link rot,” is part of a much larger set of issues. In the digital era, we no longer maintain “hard copy” versions of draft correspondence, literature, policy papers, artistic sketches and renderings, music manuscripts, architectural plans, or other documentation of our age. Instead, we rely upon the digital formats of the day, and the storage devices of the decade. In time, these formats and devices become obsolete, and although they may be readable by labs for a few decades, after that time, the contents will be, mostly, lost or forgotten. This is not a new problem. Gone are the lost works of Aristotle and King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Won, two of Bach’s Passions, most of Adam Smith’s writings, nearly all of the letters between George and Martha Washington, pictures of people before photography was invented, sketches and cartoons by DaVinci and Marco Polo, Viking maps. In fact, most of what humans have produced is no longer available. We have fragments, pieces of the past, but our understanding of context is limited. Some families can trace their past through several generations—but information about most of the people on the family tree is extremely limited. Images of a first kiss, a daughter's first steps, a family dog’s bark—gone forever. Despite attempts, we haven't figured out how to communicate with the deceased, to learn secrets of the ages. Maybe someday, but for now, the human lens cannot focus on details more than a century, or several centuries, old. We’re been around for tens of thousands of years. Is the past really lost to us?
7. The Future of Europe & the U.S.
After centuries of dramatic success, funding and implementing extremely large-scale endeavors—the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, The British Empire, Manifest Destiny (clearing half a continent of its native people), the Third Reich—Europe and the U.S. are well-established as the global leaders in economic and political power. In the 21st century, they will continue to dominate, but a more powerful Asia and Latin America will share the wealth. The U.S. will continue to rely upon the evolution of its demographic mix—Hispanics and Asians are on the ascendant, as are women—and Europe will learn to cope with greater influence from a growing African population. In addition to a changing climate, both regions must manage through safety and security issues on a large scale because aggressor nations and terrorist threats will continue to express dissatisfaction with their success and their cultural dominance. They do not share military philosophies: the U.S. spends a great deal on large, well-equipped armed forces, but taxpayers in many European nations are less passionate about the need to invest large amounts in defense. They also differ in energy dependence: the U.S. has its own sources, but Europe must import most of its fuel. Europe leads in the provision of social services to citizens; for more than a century, the U.S. has moved toward the more compassionate, and costly, European systems, including Social Security and medical care. The U.S. was Europe’s offspring; although the regions markedly differ in attitudes, they share more with one another than they do with other parts of the world.
6. The Future of Russia
Parag Khana in The Second World: Empires and Influence in a New World Order: "Russia is experiencing a twenty-first century version of the nineteenth century debate...with a similar lack of clarity over whether Russia is part of the West or apart from the West." Much of the future is controlled by Gazprom, which controls oil and pipelines, and is also "Russia's urban and rural landowner, builds roads, and hospitals and sponsors sports centers--all the things the Kremlin never did…Russians today are consumers, not citizens...Three quarters of Russia's economy is centered in Moscow, one of the most expensive cities in the world, with more billionaires than New York…Russia has become the archetypical petrocracy, with profligate spending, skewed development and elite struggles over vast natural resources while the nontaxpaying public's demands go unnoticed." The author concludes, "Russia's superpower days are over. Even as the world's largest pet roseate, its economy is still smaller than France. And even as it becomes rich on paper, its politics all but confirm that the wealth will not be sustained." So that's one point of view...
5. The Future of Brazil & Latin America
Parag Khana in The Second World: Empires and Influence in a New World Order: “The blessed climate of Brazil's lush central and southern regions makes it the world's largest exporter of beef, oranges, sugar, coffee, poultry, pork, and soy. Yet with exports nearing $100 billion per year, agriculture actually accounts for only 10 percent of Brazil's economy.” Excepting Toulouse (home to Airbus) and Seattle (headquarters of Boeing), São Paolo is the world's most important center of airplane design and production." He goes on, "Guided by the national mythology of coequal status with the United States, Brazil has always looked multi-directionally, persevering in its quest to become the anchor of Latin diplomacy (despite its Portuguese language).” “With its population close to two hundred million, Brazil maintains the Southern Hemisphere's melting pot. It is at once the largest African country after Nigeria...the largest Italian country after Italy, the largest Japanese country after Japan. Whereas America's ethnic groups are hyphenated--Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Indian-Americans, Arab-Americans--Brazilians identify themselves as just that, sharing a belief in the unrealized potential of their country.” And: “If the world is an organism, the Amazon is its lungs. But deforestation has cost the Amazon 20 percent of its size; the earth is losing its capacity to breathe.”
4. The Future of Africa
Long a confounding puzzle for economic development, Africa was brutalized by colonizers and their successors. Coping with extreme poverty, AIDS, genocide, corruption, wars fought by child soldiers, dictators, malaria, Ebola and seemingly impossible economic hardship made messier by a rabid black market, some nations are emerging as candidates for real and sustained growth in the 21st century. As local traditional beliefs attempt to hang on for the long-term, investment in infrastructure has begun in a serious way (much of it from China). The theory, which has worked so well elsewhere: infrastructure enables trade, and trade enables an improves standard of living. But it only works if the government is stable, and if the people support its laws. Pride of place is a powerful force; Africa’s people have been denied control over their own resources, and confounded by extremely inefficient government and business practices. Intellectual property laws do not guide the economy, so piracy is common, and creative people cannot earn a living, but a creative community is growing in many African cities. There is hope, and there is considerable interest in investment beyond infrastructure. But that hope comes with a tremendous human challenge: how to make it all work without killing the hippos and the rhinos, without turning Africa into a theme park, without destroying the tribal structure while, at the same time, dramatically improving health and human services, telecommunications, literacy, employment practices, opportunities for the creative community, and enabling women. All of this on a continent that’s home to more than a billion people, 55 nations (56, with Somaliland), and over 400 tribes. Imagine a place includes 20 percent of all of the land in the world, our second largest land mass, roughly the size of China, India, the U.S. and much of Europe combined. It’s a complicated place with vast diversity. Fortunately, the rest of the world is beginning to pay meaningful attention—of the 1.1 billion tourists traveling abroad in 2014, 56 million visited Africa, double the number in 2000 (a growth rate shared only by Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East). A mixed blessing, but given some African nations’ reliance upon tourism, an economic step in the right direction.
3. Progress can be measured by the cost of light
“Ask how much artificial light you can earn with an hour of work at the average wage. The amount has increased from twenty-four lumen-hours in 1750 BC (sesame oil lamp) to 186 in 1800 (tallow candle) to 4,400 in 1880 (kerosene lamp) to 531,000 in 1950 (incandescent light bulb) to 8.4 million lumen-hours today (compact fluorescent bulb). Put another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light. Or turn it around and ask how long you would have to work to earn an hour of reading light – say, the light of an 18-watt compact-fluorescent light bulb burning for an hour. Today it will cost you less than half a second of your working time if you are on the average wage: half a second of work for an hour of light. In 1950, with a conventional filament lamp and the then wage, you would have had to work for eight seconds to get the same amount of light…“A tallow candle in the 1800s: over six hours’ work. And to get that much light from a sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC would have cost you more than fifty hours’ of work. From six hours to half a second – a 43,200-fold improvement – for an hour of lighting” — Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
2. What is Progress?
“Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.” — Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
1. Give me the simple life!
“There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquillity, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too…“Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window…” Oh please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of the smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet […]” —Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
The quick and sometimes accurate answer is: “the people with the money, the people with the power!” Certainly, those who control the resources, the laws, the economic systems, these are the ones who are in the best position to make big decisions. And yet, it’s not that simple (nor has it ever been that simple). Large numbers of people who behave in favor of their common good, or in a support of shared beliefs, can and often do affect the whole system (shutting down the Vietnam War is a good 20th century example). Does 21st century digital technology place progress in the hands of two billion connected people—or does digital technology centralize the power and information essential to progress? Is the answer consolidated, distributed, or otherwise? And for those of us who are just trying to get through each day, is control and ownership of progress important—or is it sufficient to benefit from progress controlled by others?
3. Who Owns Progress?