Chapter One: Innovation, technology, education, globalization
- Peter Lorenzi
- Dec 12, 2023
- 21 min read
During my sabbatical in 2015-16, I completed a manuscript supporting my work, with the eponomyous title, "Managing sustainable development." For the first chapter of that manuscript and the first week of the course, here is my introduction.
Chapter One Overview: Innovation, technology, education and globalization
This chapter explores the foundation of sustainable development in the evolution of technology, education and globalization, primarily through the harnessing of carbon-based energy, the Industrial Age and modern transportation and communication, all facilitated by an increase in the general level of education worldwide, pure and applied research, and business innovation. More then ten thousand years of human existence demonstrated little progress or presence of technology, education or globalization. The evolutionary combination of these three sparked an accelerated advancement of the quality and sustainability of human life over the last two hundred years. These factors also had a dark side, especially due to the uneven application or availability of technology and education, which produced massive inequalities in income and well being within and across societies. They also produced an ability to both master and mangle the natural environment, reducing the environment’s short-term threats to human life while increasing long-term environmental risks. This history led to the study of and need for sustainability and, later, sustainable development strategies. The chapter sets the stage for key questions: How has our understanding of the environment and human progress evolved over the past two hundred years? Are people, technology and innovation a threat to the environment or are they the source of its sustainability?
Ten thousand years of misery, two centuries of progress
Consider these two reflections on the past, fate and future of man.
Dean Brackley, SJ, the Jesuit priest, educator, and writer moved to El Salvador, taught at the University of Central America, and dedicated his life to Salvadoran people following the murders of his Jesuit brothers in 1989. “The problem ... is that the new freedoms and economic security have distanced the non-poor from the kind of daily life-and-death struggle that has been the daily fare of the poor of all times right up to today. Maybe 90 percent of all the people who have ever lived have struggled every day to keep the household alive against the threat of death through hunger, disease, accidents, and violence.”
Niall Ferguson: “We know that about 106 billion peoplehave ever lived. And we know that most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today [2011]. We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.
If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States,controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. “[1]
Matt Ridley: “When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds.Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled.[2]
So what are we to understand as to the basic path of human progress, towards environmental sustainability and sustainable development? First, poverty is the natural state of man. Poverty has been the primary if not exclusive state of being for 99% of the existence of humankind. For thousands of years, for most of those 106 billion people, life has been “nasty, brutish and short.”[3] Second, for those same thousands of years, the environment has been a terrifying, mysterious, two-edged sword, the source of all natural wealth (generally fixed, limited or zero-sum) and a daily threat to human life as well as those same natural resources necessary for life. Third, it has only been the masteryof the environment, primarily through education and the application of technology, that has created the wealth and natural resources consumed on a daily basis by 7.5 billion people today.[4] To wit, sustainability of the natural, physical, non-human environment has long been a given; economic and human development is a recent concept, and sustainable development is a strategy for pursuing the balance between the sustainability of the natural environment and the economic and social development of a growing global population. As Matt Ridley noted, humans are the only species that become more prosperous as they have become more numerous. This is a unique feature of humankind, a feature unshared by any other species and it is only the point where humans gained significant control over the natural environment[5] did humanity flourish, by almost any serious measure of human progress and prosperity. And mankind began to achieve a biblical stewardship of the natural environment.
Before “climate change” or “global warming” became popular political issues, humans had achieved almost two hundred years of unprecedented improvements in managing and, at times, mastering the full resources of the natural environment. “Mother Nature” became an endearing term, recognizing the munificence of the natural environment without also appreciating the limits of man’s ingenuity or the potential damage manking could wreak of Mother Nature. However, before the Industrial Revolution, in the thousands of years of a basic agarian society, humans toiled incessantly – and often failed – to eek out an existience from the natural environment, to survive, to sustain humankind. Worse, Mother Nature was often quite unmotherly, not very maternal, and the threats to human life were near limitless: poisonous plants and creatures, wild, man-eating animals, vermin, locusts, and infectious diseases that prospered in nature, infections, unhygienic bacteria and microbes were just a start. On a larger, more powerful scale were droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, electrical storms, forest fires, fires that consumed the plains, mudslides, oppressive heat and killer cold spells, pollution from fires, including the practice of burning human dung. Absent scientific agricultural advances, fruits and vegetables were in limited and unstable supply. That is, until Mother Nature wiped out enough people to restore some equilibrium between agricultural supply and demand. Bubonic plague was just one example of the ‘great leveler’ that could bring human life to its knees, and the prospect of its continuing into question.
Another key step in human progress was the advancement in sophistication of carbon fuel sources. After thousands of years of using wood as the primary if not exclusive fuel source, the development of coals and petroleum opened up considerable reserves of energy that alleviated much of the back-breaking, killing physical effort needed to survive and provided some control over extremes of temperature, first with heating fuel an, much later, with air conditioning and refrigeration. There is some irony in the fact that a renewable source of energy – trees – were threatened and then saved by human ingenuity in burning wood and then adapting an alternative, supposedly limited carbon source – petroleum. Today, the world is getting more forests and arable land, not less. As Ridley notes, “Fossil fuels are greening the planet.”[6]
By 2010, the result was a reduction in true human misery – absolute poverty – from 94% of the world’s people living quite precariously in absolute poverty, to less than 10% of 7.5 billion people living below the widely accepted poverty line.
Sustainability versus sustainable development
Sustainability and sustainable development are often confused, sometimes confusing terms. While they have scientific roots, they today often represent political and economic interests, often expressed in geopolitical and even theological terms. Thirty years ago, the term ‘climate change’ had no meaning, primarily because the term was not in use, not defined. Today, sustainability, climate change, and sustainable development are intertwined in often-heated political debate. The first two chapters will provide a basic understanding of the concept and role of the two terms most critical to the development of the rest of the book, sustainability and sustainable development. Human progress and environmental sustainability are symbiotic, not competing forces. Technology, globalization and education have allowed man to master and abuse the environment; more importantly, these factors allowed for the development of systems for wealth creation in the last two hundred years that have increased global wealth and incomes exponentially.
For tens of thousands of years, sustainability of the environment was a given; the issue was development and even the survival of humankind. Nature and the environment was more of a threat than a resource. No wealth was created. “Social capital” would have been a meaningless term; for the most part, social contacts outside a person’s relatively limited geographic sphere would more likely be threatening than comforting. Children and adults might be “afraid of the woods” and the wild creatures and mysteries it would present, yet a strange person would likely be perceived as more of a threat. “Survival of the fittest” does not refer only to the animnal kingdom; for most of civilized life, this rule applied to humans, when genetic defects, cancer, war, crime, and other forms of mayhem were prevalent. Wealth was rarely created; it was most often stolen or otherwise expropriated. Much of the natural environment was a fixed, limted resource; without the creation of wealth, humans could survice or maybe advance only at the expense of the natural environment.
Life really began to improve for humans when they learned to cooperate, to make us of use natural resources, and to trade. These simple, basic ideas formed natural if primitive markets, markets that required no government regulation or intervention, no Uniform Commercial Code, no money, no credit cards. And these basic ideas are at the foundation of what we could call ‘natural capitalism’ where the free mutual exchange of human labor and natural resources demonstrated the value of ‘comparative advantage’ in making the exchanges both voluntary and mutually advantageous. This led, in turn, to sustainable development, where the creation of wealth increased prosperity and provided insurance for the future, as well as a future, period.
Foundations
To better understand sustainable development, we first focus on the impact of history and technology on globalization and the way we live our lives, do our work, manage global yet always scarce resources, and lead ourselves as well as others. The world economic and social paradigms have shifted and expanded. We no longer live in a world dominated by mythology, monarchies or the military; rather, managers and markets, internal and external customers dominate the world. While the figure of a billion of people living in poverty has not changed much in the past 200 years, the number of people living above poverty has increased from a fraction of that bottom billion to more than five billion people, a rapid and ongoing increase in human development, driven primarily by the Industrial Revolution and the services and information economy that emerged from the twentieth century. Many traditional models for leading and managing are now obsolete. National borders and physical distance are decreasingly unimportant in an ever-flattening global economy. Yet those who fail to understand from whence we came are unable to understand the present, let alone lead us into the future. This leads us to forget our mistakes, to ignore reality, and to fail to learn from the past. The world needs a sustainable, prosocial leadership paradigm.
With an enormous population and a growing economy, China is poised to play a major role in shaping the future. China’s population is roughly 1.35 billion people, comprising nearly 20 percent of the global population. The country’s gross domestic product was $8.2 trillion in 2012 and continues to grow at a rate of 7.7 percent. With low unemployment and poverty rates relative to US statistics, China has relied on its economic success to improve the lives of its citizens and gain influence in foreign affairs.
China, along with other developing nations, is largely misunderstood by the Western word. This creates a problem for the West, as Chinese culture and values will continue to expand along with the Chinese economy and population. The result will be a world that grows increasingly unfamiliar unless the West begins to learn about and understand the Chinese system. A major concern for the global society as China assumes a more influential role in the world relates to human rights. On the whole, China has neglected to provide its citizens with the same types of basic rights granted to citizens of Western countries. The state enjoys unchallenged power, making forward progress difficult. As China expands its influence and spreads its values to the rest of the world, these human rights violations will need to be addressed and resolved.
A major issue facing India today concerns the idea of market fundamentalism; which states that market growth must be accompanied by attention to social capabilities, such as health, education, and gender rights. Unfortunately, the lawmakers in India are only focusing on free trade; which means that they are only concentrating on economic growth of India. India has gone through multiple obstacles to be where it is now.
Specifically, India had to free itself from British rule in order to ever have a chance of being a successful country. Unfortunately, when the British took over the land, they divided the population into groups (the Caste system); this is one of the reasons why India is socially unable to provide some of the same opportunities that other countries are. Although India’s economical status is beginning to thrive, in order to have a resilient and successful country, it both needs to have a strong and flourishing economically, and must be socially resilient.
In this chapter, we focus on the impact of technology, innovation and globalization on the way we live, work and lead. Some traditional methods and theories for leading are now obsolete, as global economic and social paradigms have changed. New conditions call for new leadership, not just “more” old leadership. National borders, natural resources, and physical distance mean less in the economic and social wealth equation than they did fifty years ago. Prosocial leadership offers a leadership model for managing in a global economy.
Globalization is not a recent phenomenon but growth in population, capitalism, and free markets over the past two hundred years magnified its impact dramatically. Basically, globalization is the expansion of trade beyond local, domestic and regional markets, based on capitalism and free markets. Free markets refer to the limited use of taxes and tariffs, regulations and restrictions on trade by governmental bodies and agencies other than the buyer and seller. And capitalismrecognizes the rights to own goods and to trade them.
Globalization is capitalism without borders, or global free markets.
Globalization
Globalization has produced an unprecedented era of political and economic freedom. These advances in freedoms have generated their own, new set of problems. There is more wealth than ever, perhaps more equally (or equitably) distributed than less wealth was distributed two hundred years ago, but the magnitude of global wealth makes arguments for “fair” or “equitable” distribution of wealth all the more problematic. And the tension produced by disparities in wealth around the globe can have an incendiary effect, threatening not just commerce, but world piece. As absolute poverty has declined around the world, relative poverty has increased in developing countries. Economic growth and wealth creation have been unevenly distributed. There are winners and losers in globalization, at least in the short term. Traditional political models and government corruption further distort the differences and increase the gap between the rich and the poor; it is more difficult today to label a country as “rich” or “poor”. Relative comparisons are no longer with the neighbors next door (“keeping up with the Jones’” has long been a marketing issue), people all over the world compare their lives to six billion other people. And some of those comparisons create some very angry – if not so poor – people.
Globalization -- the name we give to this expansion of markets, finance, and migration across previously less permeable national borders – has produced phenomenal (if unevenly distributed) wealth and prosperity for billions of people. Around the world, average personal income has increased, the percentage of people living on less than a $1 a day has declined dramatically,[7] and life expectancy has improved markedly.[8]
Unfortunately, some people have fallen behind while others moved ahead, and some people have not moved at all. While absolute poverty had generally decreased, relative poverty has been exacerbated by differences in the quality and quantity of life between the wealthy and the less wealthy. For this first group, those falling behind, globalization has meant tough economic competition and this, in turn, led to the decline in prosperity for many workers in prosperous nations who have seen their jobs “shipped overseas.” In fact, more jobs are lost due to productivity improvements and technological enhancements than to outsourcing, but the visible loss of work and wages, coupled with the new jobs in developing countries has created resentment among formerly well-to-do workers.
For the second group, those not moving forward, a lack of education, health care, and opportunity has kept many people off the global juggernaut. To compound this problem, some people convey the issue of globalization and wealth creation as a “zero sum game,” erroneously assuming that one country’s or one person’s gain in wealth can only come at a loss to another person or country. But wealth is not finite, nor is the number of jobs. A prosocial leader knows and embraces this fact. More important, a prosocial leader learns from history, masters and understands the nature of technological change, and appreciates the costs as well as the benefits of globalization.
This knowledge of history, these skills with technology, and these global values are the underpinnings of prosocial leadership. For many people, globalization is misunderstood and, with this misunderstanding, political and business leaders are either asked to do things that are counterproductive, or they misinterpret globalization and make poor leadership decisions.
Prosocial leadership is prosocial behavior based on a set of knowledge, skills, and values that recognize and balance economic reality with social capital. To be a prosocial leader, one cannot manage political influences or respond to public opinion polls to serve the common good. The common good must be broad, sustainable and real. Understanding and valuing the reality and benefits (and costs) of globalization underlies good leadership. And being able to detect patterns, truths, and looming changes separates the gifted prosocial leader from the pack.
Consider the genesis of globalization forces as they impact gasoline stations. Historically, automobiles were domestic (produced locally) and unreliable enough that an auto owner needed a trained mechanic or service person to check oil, water, and tires each time she purchased gasoline. Prior to globalization, a lack of information technology required an untrained attendant just to take your cash payment and make change. Gas stations were once ‘service stations,’ and customers needed someone to routinely fill the oil, check the battery, and inspect the radiator. But today such routine service is not needed; the quality of cars is better.[9] Today, cars need no such regular mechanical attention or service; customers don’t need a person to count out the money and return change. The credit card transaction may be handled overseas. And the driver of the vehicle insourced the work of pumping gasoline once performed by a station attendant. The customer has taken on pumping gas and settling the charges, neither of which is a lengthy, complicated, or dirty job.
Customers drive globalization, not capitalists, not companies, and not governments. Customer creation drives wealth creation; customers are the source of wealth for an organization and loyal customers are a sustainable comparative advantage. Outsourcing serves customers. Governments can facilitate or resist globalization, but to whose benefit? Globalization, like democracy, is the ‘worst’ economic paradigm, other than all the other forms that have been tried from time to time. Just as customers led the interest in large, gas-guzzling vehicles, they can lead the interest in smaller, hybrid, and gas-sipping vehicles. Customer needs and wants are the driver s of globalization.
With globalization, prosocial leaders face the immediate, domestic challenge of addressing the concerns of those local, displaced workers. Yet the global perspective required of a prosocial leader requires a broader view, and attention to long-term and competitive issues. And while a local loss of jobs may reduce local wealth, outsourcing may increase wealth even more in another country. The primary “loser” in outsourcing is the local and domestic government. With a decision to outsource, the loss of tax revenues will be significant and, with no small irony, these high taxes may best explain why the business chooses to outsource. A similar effect occurs when a local government raises income and/or property taxes to the point that individuals move outside the local jurisdiction to reduce their cost of living. The prosocial leader must look at global economies.
Global leaders
Consider five major economic countries or regions around the world: the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and India. Together, these five regions represent half of the world’s population (China and India alone represent one third) and almost two-thirds of global GDP. They are not representative of the world economy as much as they are (the largest economic actors of) the world economy. Together these areas alone had about half of the world’s population and almost two-thirds of its economic activity.
More wisdom and understanding may be possible were we to consider the past and future global grids. Figure Y shows historic shares of the world economy produced by China, India, and America over the past two hundred years. Note that in 1820, the economy of China dwarfed the economic size of America, with a global share of over 30%, compared to an American share of about 3%. America’s economic global share peaked right after World War II. Over the last fifty years, China’s share has once again increased while America’s share has declined. Figure X provides a more detailed summary of share of world GDP across six major countries or regions since 1820.
Figure Y. World shares of GDP, 1820 to 1998, selected economies[10]
Figure X. Share of world GDP, 1820-1998[11]
Interesting image of nominal global GDP, 2014.
Outsourcing
The combination of globalization, technology, and economic freedom has led to further expansion of global markets. These markets are not just customers; as the following case illustrates, the global labor market has just as pronounced effect on business decisions, and the issue of outsourcing is of critical importance to prosocial leaders.
Technology and globalization have changed where and how the work is done. The need for wealth creation remains the same: The difference between the customer service provided and the cost of providing that service produces wealth. While technology and global market forces can each positively affect both the benefits and the costs of the operation, the “bottom line” focus should remain on wealth creation.
One visible element of globalization’s impact has been outsourcing, where firms contracts with an outside firm to do work formerly done by the firm’s employees. Taking this outsourcing across international borders becomes “offshoring”, or global outsourcing. In this case you need to understand the accounting of the current and proposed alternative methods for delivering this service. However, you must first understand the value of customer service. Low hourly cost (“cheap”) labor is expensive if the workers’ labors fail to satisfy customers. Creating a positive difference between the value of the customer service you provide and the costs to deliver that is wealth creation. Wealth comes from creating more (of something of value) than you consume or cost, not from simply minimizing costs.
From the accounting analysis, transferring the operation to India appears to have significant cost savings. Maintaining or increasing wealth creation will require maintaining or increasing the level of customer service and satisfaction, as well as avoiding any unexpected or long-term financial costs associated with the distance between customers and workers. The final determination as to where to locate the call center must focus on net benefits, value-added, or wealth creation. And considerations beyond short-term financial must be addressed, namely social capital, intangible wealth and the long-term financial wealth. What are appropriate measures of success for the customer services operation center? Customer surveys help. More important would be customer retention and referrals. These calculations are difficult and beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that there are likely to be non-trivial costs and lower benefits than a simple, one-year accounting analysis will show. The ‘outsourcing decision’ must remain a wealth creation decision.
Critics of outsourcing rarely recognize that American workers benefit from ‘insourcing’, or foreign firms having work done in the United States. Honda and Toyota are prominent examples. American labor today is often less expensive (in basic hourly wage rates) and more productive or wealth-creating (producing value well in excess of the cost of labor’s compensation) than Japanese or Western European labor.
The strategy needs to be achieving sustainable, prosocial customer service. What options provide the necessary level of customer service? And there are alternatives to outsourcing, primarily in reducing costs lower or increasing productivity. Cost savings would include reducing tardiness, absenteeism or turnover. The center could reduce facilities costs by offering telecommuting. Other cost savings ideas include reducing turnover (by better screening, managing associates, better pay), reducing training replacement costs, reducing the number of managers or levels of management, adding telecommuting and/or flextime, and adding retention bonuses or on-site day care to improve employee retention and attendance.
Critics of globalization and outsourcing fail to note that globalization and outsourcing are nothing new and probably inevitable; they just are more prevalent today than recent, remarkable changes in travel and technology. And, with productivity enhancements driven by technology, globalization and outsourcing options, manufacturing jobs are disappearing worldwide. “U.S. manufacturing employment has been dropping for many years, but that's not primarily due to foreigners taking these jobs. Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002, 22 million factory jobs had disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11% of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16% of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20% decline, China a 15% drop.”[12]
Critics claim that outsourcing only benefits companies, managers and profits. Few critics recognize the value that accrues to customers, stockholders, and workers in the communities that add new, domestic jobs. While critics claim that company profit-seeking drive outsourcing, customers drive outsourcing by making firms to do a better job of creating value. Less direct but perhaps more compelling evidence of the power of wealth creation under globalization is the tens of millions of immigrants to the United States who, rather than remain underemployed or impoverished in another country, immigrate to America for work; they go where the jobs are, in the United States.[13]
Outsourcing is not a recent or only a corporate phenomenon. And we all outsource. Families could grow their own food, educate their children, make products in their homes, and raise their young. Overlooked examples of outsourcing include day care centers and university study abroad. Figure F presents a cogent summary of truths about outsourcing.
Figure F Truths About Trade: Hard facts about offshoring, imports, and jobs[14]
1. The number of jobs grows with the population. People create jobs, not government.
2. Jobs churn constantly; this is creative destruction.
3. Challenging, high-paying jobs are becoming more plentiful, not less.
4. Deindustrialization is a myth. Fewer workers produce more goods than ever.
5. Imports have not been a major cause of recent manufacturing job losses.
6. Offshoring is not a threat to high-tech employment.
7. Globalization of services creates opportunity for American industry.
8. Offshoring creates new jobs and boosts economic growth.
9. The digital revolution has been eliminating white-collar jobs for many years.
10. Predictions that the U.S. economy is running out of jobs are nothing new and they have always been wrong.
The future of globalization
Politics continue to cloud globalization. The recent global financial crisis provoked some shortsighted political leaders to insist upon creating new import restrictions, on reducing foreign trade and competition, and in “protecting” domestic jobs at a time of unemployment, exactly the type of legislation that accelerated the last great world economic depression eighty years ago. Yes, there are indirect, significant social costs to any loss of a job yet there would be an even greater, long-term financial and social cost to restrictions on capitalism, free markets, continuous improvement, and wealth creation.
Historical trends suggest that globalization will continue despite current setbacks, political bickering, and turf protection. Prosocial leaders, aware of exogenous factors, act to create wealth under changing conditions and paradigms. Although inventions such as wireless communication have made the world faster and more competitive, life is no more ruthless, violent[15] or uncertain now than when plagues, expansive military conquest, disease, poor hygiene, inbred monarchies, and wealth-by-acquisition ruled the world as they have for most of human existence. New technologies have increased the pace, but each generation seems to think that the last generation had it slow and easy, and that has never been the case. The poor villager who wandered too far away from his hut 1,500 years ago experienced no less a shock than today's global traveler stepping off a plane in Mumbai.
And the outsourcing 'problem' is not new and it is not based simply on information technology. For as long as man has tried to better his life and to leverage his advantages, he has hired someone else to produce the things he needs, be it food, cooking, child care, or production. Like services, outsourcing is not new. That villager from 1,500 years ago thought that outsourcing crop production to the next village over was no less daunting or distant than Americans importing oranges from Israel or roses from Brazil. And you can bet the other villagers were mad as hell at him for taking away 'their' work.
Just How Good Is Globalization?
Question Is Pondered By Key Leaders Amid Workers' Worries
Marcus Walker
Wall Street Journal
January 25, 2007; Page A10
The business and political leaders who gather every year at the World Economic Forum have long shared a creed: Globalization is good. That still is generally true. But this year, many of them are questioning whether it is good for the ordinary wage-earning people they employ -- or in many cases, no longer employ -- at their companies.
A new refrain is emerging in Davos this year: Globalization isn't working for everyone. Stagnating wages and rising job insecurity in developed countries are creating popular disenchantment with the free movement of goods, capital and people across borders. If unchecked, popular fears could turn into a political backlash that could lead to protectionism -- or at least make broad free-trade agreements harder to achieve in the future. "The anxiety is there, because we have competitors that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago," German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who arrived in Davos yesterday, said in an interview last week. Governments in the developed world, she said, have to persuade their own middle class -- a group used to a relatively stable economy in the postwar decades -- to embrace a life of constant change and challenge. Others support programs like the Scandinavian-style retraining of workers who lose their jobs. "Paradoxically, we need a bigger role of the public sector in the economy to make markets work better," says Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an online economic-advisory service.
[3] Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 1651.
[4] There is no small irony that while some decry the disappearance of natural resources for consumption, world health is more negatively impacted by obesity and its related lifestyle-induced disease than it is impacted by a shortage of foodstuffs. Most hunger or starvation today is the product of the misallocation or mal-distribtuion of sufficient foodstuffs, not to any overall lack of same.
[5] We will use the term, “natural environment” to describe the physical (organic and non-organic) elements of the world, less humans. That is, basically the planet without people.
[7] Using standard, globally accepted and adjusted measures of absolute poverty, world poverty fell from 44 percent of the global population in 1980 to 13 percent in 2000, its fastest decline in history. See http://www.iie.com/publications/newsreleases/newsrelease.cfm?id=83
[8] For a dynamic illustration of the past 50 years of life expectancy around the world, see http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=2;ti=1950$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0TAlJeCEzcGQ;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=lin;dataMin=0.842;dataMax=8.7$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=18;dataMax=83$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=
[9] These views are problematic: http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009036.php. See also http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/storyboard/sb_disconnectedness.htm.
[10] Source: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html Also see http://www.theworldeconomy.org/publications/worldeconomy/maddisontableB-18.pdf
[12] Robert B. Reich. Nice Work If You Can Get It. Wall Street Journal. December 26, 2003.
[14] Source: Brink Lindsey, for more details, see http://www.freetrade.org/node/301.
[15] For a fascinating talk on the subject of violence and death over the last hundred years, see http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html.
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