World Global Trends

2012-04-26T10:43:00.001-04:00

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

2012-04-25T08:09:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

2012-03-20T08:36:00.001-04:00

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

2012-03-05T17:32:00.001-05:00

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

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

2012-03-05T17:29:00.001-05:00

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

2012-02-28T08:31:00.001-05:00

Envisioning Technology | Envisioning emerging technology for 2012 and beyond

http://envisioningtech.com/

2012-02-21T07:42:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

2012-02-17T09:09:00.001-05:00

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

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

2012-02-10T08:30:00.001-05:00

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

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

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

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

2012-02-09T11:13:00.002-05:00

Reclaiming the Republic

( Globalization of Politics )

Picture Credit: penguin.com

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

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

2012-02-09T11:06:00.001-05:00

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

( General Analysis on Nations & States )

Picture Credit:
operationbrokensilence.org

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

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

2012-01-28T11:07:00.001-05:00

Nathan Myhrvold

CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine

The Scientific Method—An Explanation For Explanations

Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.

However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned.

Somewhere along the line a very different meme got started. Instead of forbidding inquiry into stories about the world people tried the other extreme of encouraging continual questioning. Stories about aspect of the world can be questioned skeptically, and tested with observations and experiments. If the story survives the tests then provisionally at least one can accept it as something more than a mere story; it is a theory that has real explanatory power. It will never be more than a provisional explanation—we can never let down our skeptical guard—but these provisional explanations can be very useful. We call this process of making and vetting stories the scientific method.

For me, the scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. Indeed it is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified—the scientific method.

This seems quite obvious to us now, but it took many thousands of years for people to develop the scientific method to a point where they could use it to build useful theories about the world. It was not, a priori, obvious that such a method would work. At one extreme, creation myths discuss the origin of the universe, and for thousands of years one could take the position that this will never be more than a story—how can humans ever figure out something that complicated and distant in space and time? It would be a bold bet to say that people reasoning with the scientific method could solve that puzzle.

Well, it has taken us a while but by now enormous amounts are known about the composition of stars and galaxies and how the universe came to be. There are still gaps in our knowledge (and our skepticism will never stop), but we've made a lot of progress on cosmology and many other problems. Indeed we know more about the composition of distant stars than many questions about things here on earth. The scientific method has not conquered all great questions - other issues remain illusive, but the spirit of the scientific method is that one does shrink from the unknown. It is OK to say that we have no useful story for everything we are curious about, and we comfort ourselves that at some point in the future new explanations will fill the gaps in our current knowledge, as often raise new questions that highlight new gaps.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of the scientific method. Human culture contains much more than science—but science is the part that actually works—the rest is just stories. The rationally based inquiry the scientific method enables is what has given us science and technology and vastly different lifestyles than those of our hunter-gatherers ancestors. In some sense it is analogous to evolution. The sum of millions of small mutations separate us from single celled like blue-green algae. Each had to survive the test of selection and work better than the previous state in the sense of biological fitness. Human knowledge is the accumulation of millions of stories-that-work, each of which had to survive the test of the scientific method, matching observation and experiment more than the predecessors. Both evolution and science have taken us a long way, but looking forward it is clear that science will take us much farther.

2012-01-27T14:56:00.001-05:00

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

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

2012-01-20T15:01:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-18T07:54:00.001-05:00

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

Assassination of U.S. citizens

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

(read the whole article)

2012-01-18T07:50:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-12T06:39:00.001-05:00

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

The 2012 Centres of Gravity are:

- Chronic fiscal imbalances (economic)

- Greenhouse gas emissions (environmental)

- Global governance failure (geopolitical)

- Unsustainable population growth (societal)

- Critical systems failure (technological)

2012-01-11T11:45:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-11T11:44:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-27T10:03:00.001-05:00

Experts are making predictions for 2012 in a wide variety of technology, business, and economics areas. Here’s our pick of the most interesting. – Ed.

Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and beyond), CNET

5 gadget predictions for 2012, ComputerWeekly

Gartner Predicts 2012, Gartner, Inc.

Five predictions for the communications world in 2012, The Guardian

Worldwide System Infrastructure Software 2012 Top 10 Predictions, IDC

Security Predictions for 2012, InfoWorld

6 Crazy Tech Predictions for 2012, Mashable

12 predictions for 2012, NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts)

Smart Guide 2012: 10 ideas you’ll want to understand, New Scientist

Five big data predictions for 2012, O’Reilly Radar

Tech highlights of 2011. Predictions for 2012, Smarter Computing Blog

The Definitive Guide To HTML5: 14 Predictions For 2012, TechCrunch

Predictions for 2012: economic recovery, The Telegraph

Four Personal Finance Technology Trends for 2012, Time Techland

2011-12-14T08:31:00.001-05:00

Output shifts

Despite two decades of outsourcing and globalisation, the US remains the world’s largest manufacturer in 2009. However, its share of world value-added in manufacturing declined from around 22.7% of the total in 1990 to less than 20% in 2009. China’s share rose from a minute 2.7% to 17.5% over the same period, taking over Japan, hitherto the world’s second largest manufacture, whose share dropped from 17.7% to 11.4% over the two decades.

China’s increase was a fillip to the share of emerging markets in general, with BRIIC countries (which as well as China include Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and South Africa) accounting for a quarter of value-added in manufacturing in 2009 compared with less than 10% in 1990.

This is in contrast with the fall in the share of several other OECD countries has also fallen, notably in Germany by three percentage points to just over 6% of the total. The EU now accounts for only 17.5%. Two OECD countries that saw slight increases include Australia, whose share edged up to 1% of the total, as it gained from the Asian boom, and Mexico, whose share reached 1.8%, up from 1.3%, reflected this economy’s emerging status.

2011-12-14T08:25:00.001-05:00

Markets and state-managed institutions are not always well suited to managing common-pool resources, such as water catchments, river fisheries or nearby pasture lands. Resources have to be managed sustainably over time, and market prices and government rules might not be able to deliver the most effective solutions.

2011-12-13T09:34:00.002-05:00

As a strategic power that is intent on rivaling the United States, China is naturally an economic power with a GNP that is projected to surpass that of the United States at the nominal level in 2025. By dint of the simple fact that it has become the second greatest economic power in the world, China has seen its economic relations with the other BRICS significantly increase. China is the primary trade partner of Brazil, India, and South Africa. The interdependence among BRICS is thereby considerably deepening. This development should be interpreted with caution, however. The closer economic ties among the BRICS have more to do with additional bilateral agreements than with any integration among these countries. For all the BRICS, the region remains the preferred level for economic integration processes.

2011-12-07T08:06:00.001-05:00

Forecasting Asia's Growing Pains

Asia’s growth will strain the resources of the entire globe by mid-century, according to Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center. Morrison told business leaders at an Asia-Pacific Business Symposium that, by 2050, Asia will own more than half the world’s automobiles and more than half of global GDP.

With all the development come vulnerabilities. Asia’s most rapidly growing cities will be more susceptible to natural and human-made disasters, Morrison warned. Also, large human and animal populations living close together raises the risks of new disease pandemics.

Meanwhile, by 2050, 40% of Japan’s population will be over 60 years old, and less than 9% will be younger than 15, creating a future demographic disaster as fewer young people will be able to support their elders. And environmentally, water scarcities already afflict parts of Asia due to increased farm and livestock production.

“There are uncertainties about how to handle the enormous challenges Asian countries face,“ said Morrison, who called for more dialogue among the region’s nations.

2011-11-30T17:57:00.001-05:00

Chinese Ratings Agency Threatens US with New Debt Downgrade - (Guardian - November 11, 2011)
The head of China's biggest ratings agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating, is warning that it may downgrade the US's sovereign debt rating again because of Washington's failure to tackle the federal budget deficit. Dagong, which has maintained a pessimistic outlook on US fiscal policy, has been leading the charge to downgrade US debt over the last 12 months, lowering the US rating from AA to A+ a year ago.