David Zach, futurist

Futurist Gets You Thinking article, South Bend Tribune

Nice article in the South Bend Tribune about a recent talk I gave in Elkhart, IN for local business, industry and labor attendees. With an 18.8% unemployment rate there, the future looms a lot closer than it might in other areas of the country. 

Quoting one attendee: "This was the first futurist I've heard that actually talked about a reliance on a tradition or the past." 

Instead of everyone in these economically depressed areas being recruited into the agency of change, we might just need a few of them to be agents of tradition - helping to safeguard the treasures of the past, be they communities, values or perhaps just even little bits of common sense.  

If we treat the past more like a toolbox instead of an outdated anchor, we might build better futures. 

Measuring Intangible Wealth

For a fascinating explanation of why so many Mexicans and others have come here illegally to work and live, see Where is the Wealth of Nations? from the World Bank. (Note: it's a several meg pdf that will download.)

A Mexican migrant to the US is five times more productive than one who stays home. The report is worth reading, especially the executive summary (is there a logical reason why executives don't have to read as much as the rest of us?) where they explain that it's the Intangible Wealth that explains why some countries get rich and others, despite great resource wealth, stay poor.

For the US, the average American (or illegal immigrant for that matter) has access to over $418,000 in intangible wealth, whereas the average stay-in-Mexico Mexican only has access to $34,000 in intangible wealth. Why wouldn't someone want access to our sort of wealth system?

What makes up Intangible Wealth? Well, it's things like the rule of law, educational systems, infrastructure and I would even include our cafes where so many idea people gather to talk. It's very much our system of freedoms, especially the freedom to trust. Trust is the foundation of freedom, because when you can trust others, you're free to do most anything If you always have to be watching those around you, it's rather difficult to focus on the task. Without the ability to trust, there is no freedom. Without freedom, there is no wealth.

So, has anyone noticed how we're not trusting each other as much as we used to? The terrrorists didn't just attack the buildings, they attacked our freedom to trust.

The Great (Information) Wall of China

It would seem that China can't quite keep a lid on the flow of information. Maybe (as Stewart Brand has said) information wants to be free, or at least not quite as unfree as a bunch of commie-capitalists would like it to be. More than that, people want to be free and that's probably where we should start. The Times of London article is cited on Tongue Tied explaining that despite China's best efforts, people keep finding away around the censors and this along with all sorts of other unexpected things keep messing with people's predictions for how China is going to take over the world.

They still might, but just not in the neatly paranoid scenarios that are so necessary in media, business and academia today.

Read David Wingrove's Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom: Book 1 (Chung Kuo) series on what the world will be like some 200 years in the future. Seven volumes of a well-crafted scenario of how China takes over the world. That would be a Confucian-styled China, by the way.

Let a 1000 txt msgs blm.

Never been good at statistics . . .

Tech Central Station, which is sort of a libertarian-conservative-technology website/blog has an article on The New Myths of Inequality, takes on expected (and current) statements from the left about the growing inequality in America.

Not wanting to get too political here, but I see an awful lot of data manipulation going on- by both sides- to show how things are either horrible or wonderful depending on who or what you're being asked to send money to. I am suspicious of concentration of wealth as much as I am suspicious of those who want a bunch of experts to sort it out for the rest of us, particularly when they use government bureaucracies to do that sorting out and redistribution. If only the rest of us had enough time to sort it out on our own.

Again, ask the question, Is there a profit motive behind the prophet motive? If we do as they suggest, do they get rich and powerful? If we don't do as they suggest, does someone else get rich and powerful? Why do we trust either side?

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.
Gregg Easterbrook