December 2005

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: RIETI (Tuesday, 12/27/05)
RIETI stands for Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry. Since 2001, RIETI has been examining and advising on ways Japan can break with convention in order to reinvigorate governmental policy and the Japanese economy following a decade of economic struggle.

Over the years ahead, it's likely that Tokyo's subways will become far less crowded, but the bad news is that Japan's population will be shrinking overall, with an increasing proportion of it made up of people who are beyond their working years. Fewer younger people will be supporting more older people, and there will be an overall labor shortage that will inhibit economic growth.

Russia and several Western European countries are facing the same prospects. In fact, the rich industrial nations as a group are no longer part of the population explosion, even though global population is expected to increase from about 6 billion to about 9 billion during the 21st century. The world is likely to be a very different an unfamiliar place by the end of this century for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that it is becoming increasingly polarized with poor nations with high fertility rates, on the one hand, and rich nations with low fertility rates, on the other.

Native-born American whites and blacks haven't been replacing themselves either, but the U.S. population is still growing, in large part because of a high degree of immigration.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Ripples of Genocide: Journey Through Eastern Congo (Sunday, 12/18/05)
It may be hard to believe, but, even though the instruments of violence have become far more potent--e.g., dropping an atomic bomb can require no more exertion than pressing a button, but can destroy far more lives than rocks or swords--it does appear that humanity has become somewhat less violent over the past tens of thousands of years.

For instance, there is evidence that genocide was common during prehistoric times. But, once cities began to appear, violent impulses became less functional as people had to live together in close proximity within fairly large groups. Wars between geographically separated groups have remained popular, though, because the separation has helped people within "in-groups" to develop perceptions of those in "out-groups" as being very different from themselves, maybe even hardly worth bothering about, even to the point of perceiving people in other cultures as equivalent to different species, as Lorenz and Tinbergen have asserted with their concept of "pseudospeciation."

In a world in which geographical distance has become increasingly irrelevant and nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else--meaning that people, even if separated by thousands of miles, are interacting daily as if they were interacting face-to-face--there is reason to hope that the overall incidence of violent impulses will subside to an even greater extent over time.

We've hypothesized that traditional structure tends to dissolve in a world in which nearly everything is connected to nearly everything else, and there appear to be examples of this all around us. Of course, the collapse of space also amounts to a collapse of time, given the greatly different rates of change in the world. When cultures, which, previously, had been separated by thousands of miles of thousands of years, come into daily collision, it can be like bringing matter and anti-matter together. We're seeing examples of this all around us as well. We still don't know enough about the conditions under which the one thing happens as opposed to the other.

Even though there have been multiple examples of genocide during recent decades, there continue to be people who deny that these things have happened. For instance, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been in the news a lot during recent days for saying that the Holocaust is a "myth." Incidentally, several of the American hostages held in Iran a quarter century ago still insist that Mr. Ahmadinejad was one of the ring-leaders, but the American Department of State has chosen not to accept the idea, at least in public.

At any rate, similarly, despite overwhelming evidence, there are people who still deny that humans have ever visited the Moon. In fact, a poll a few years ago found that more Americans believed that we had been visited by extraterrestrial beings than believed men had ever set foot on the Moon. How much evidence is there for the one type of event, as opposed to the other?

It all simply illustrates that the great majority of people still do not understand WHAT IT TAKES to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all types, including those having to do with the origin and development of ancient documents. The modern era has been characterized by an enormous explosion of knowledge which some members of humanity understand, but most still do not.

If you believe that the attitude of the majority of Americans about the foundations of modern biology are exceptional, do you really believe that most people who believe that biological evolution doesn't happen really have greater understanding of organic chemistry, or archeology, or astrophysics, or calculus, or statistics, or any of the dozens of other fields in which the knowledge explosion of recent history has been so conspicuous? Overall, the knowledge explosion has left many aspects of culture and most human institutions far behind, creating a novel and highly dangerous global situation in the process.

If you're interested in recent examples of genocide, you will want to examine Ripples of Genocide: Journey Through Eastern Congo from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Business Plan Archive (Friday, 12/16/05)
During the late 1990s, the "dot-com bubble" wasn't the only thing filled with hot air. In retrospect, lots of heads seemed to be filled with the same stuff. You may remember the competition for who had the greatest "burn rates" and why earnings weren't important. For a brief period, there were dot-com startups which hadn't made a single dollar profit yet but nonetheless had greater market capitalizations than General Motors, General Electric, and several other major companies put together. All this should have alerted nearly everybody that something goofy was going on. In fact, you may recall that, when AOL and Time-Warner merged, many people were astonished to hear that it was AOL that bought Time-Warner, rather than the other way around. That "bloody merger" resulted in the loss of $200 billion in shareholder value in only three years.

If business students don't continue to study the great debacles of only a few years ago for decades, if not centuries, they will be damned fools, although it appears that the majority of people in American society already are forgetting about World War II, so maybe anything can happen. The Library of Congress, the Center for History and New Media, and the University of Maryland Libraries have joined forces in documenting that heady and irrational "dot-comedy" with their Business Plan Archive.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Center for Immigration Studies (Thursday, 12/15/05)
The Center for Immigration Studies says that it is pro-immigrant and favors fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those who are admitted to the United States. It claims to be the only "think-tank" in the United States exclusively committed to research on the "economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States."

It should be said that the flood of immigrants into the United States recently is not unique in American history, nor is the present migration unique to the United States. We've reported recently that, while all of the numbers have gotten larger as global population has expanded enormously during recent decades, a larger proportion of the U.S. population was foreign born in 1910 than presently. Also, many other wealthy countries have had large numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants during the past several years. Resentments and conflicts have been widespread in a variety of locations including places such as Western Europe and Australia.

Current global migrations appear to be exacerbated by the widening gap between rich and poor, combined with the continuing population explosions in poorer countries, as well as the growing irrelevance of geographic distance when it comes to communication and even transportation.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: France in America (Monday, 12/12/05)
If you believe that all that American stuff about "freedom fries" a while back and all the jokes about France's presumed ineptness militarily, and so on, were simply stupid, you must know something about history.

True, the United States and its allies saved France during the 20th century. On the other hand, without French assistance during the late 18th century, there clearly would not have been any United States of America. The principal reason that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown was that he looked out and saw the French fleet poised in Chesapeake Bay.

Also, Napoleon's willingness to sell Louisiana to the U.S. during the Jefferson administration doubled the size of the Untied States at that time and probably prevented North America from becoming a patchwork of countries, much like Europe, with the continuing series of wars on North American soil over the past two centuries that this is likely to have generated.

France has played a long and important role in the history of the Americas. Here's France in America, which is a product of a partnership between the America Library of Contress and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Library of Economics and Liberty (Friday, 12/9/05)
The Liberty Fund foundation has provided much of the financial support for the Library of Economics and Liberty, an information- and idea-rich site from smart people whose orientation seems more libertarian than "conservative."

Incidentally, both major American political parties are complex coalitions made up of people with varying interests, including persons with ideas which are intellectually incompatible or even contradictory. Nonetheless, as columnist Dr. George Will has pointed out, despite this, both Democratic and Republican parties are relatively stable, although both have evolved greatly over the course of American history, even during the past several decades.

Currently, the Republican coalition is heavily influenced by social conservatives, which include many religious conservatives, as well as by secular conservatives or libertarians. The two groups have an uneasy relationship with one another, which helps explain the current schisms and conflicts within the party, but, for the moment, at least, members of neither feel they have anyplace else to go once they're in the voting booth other than to vote Republican.

A sign of growing regional autonomy in China? (Monday, 12/5/05)
Many of the people who live in Hong Kong had long experience with one of the world's great democracies, even though the 19th century events that led to its becoming a British colony in the first place were a bit unsavory. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have turned out to demonstrate that the democracy movement in Hong Kong is still very much alive.

In addition to Hong Kong, China's economic boom has been centered in regions around Guangzhou (Canton), Chongqing, Shanghai, and Beijing. During the past year or two, with the exception of Beijing itself, there have been growing signs that rich regions of the country have been going their own way a bit more, less under the centralized control of the Beijing government. And, oh yes, there is also Taiwan, which has become an industrial giant in recent years as well as increasingly democratic, even though it is still regarded as part of China by mainland Chinese leaders.

Sony attempts to get smaller (Monday, 12/5/05)
Hiroko Tabuchi writes from Tokyo about Sony's plans to cut 10,000 jobs around the world. Workers are being encouraged to take early retirement, for instance.

Over the nearly 10 years that NewWork News has been summarizing and analyzing economic events, we've commented now and than about Steve Jobs and Apple Computer's likely role in the new world economy.

For instance, some years ago, some observers of major business were saying that they thought that Stephen Jobs might end up dominating Hollywood by becoming head of Disney. What has happened, though, is that Jobs' Pixar Corporation, which produced "Toy Story" for Disney, the first full-length animated feature film done entirely with computers, as well as a series of additional film hits, has been riding high, while Disney has been struggling. Jobs has become a major force in Hollywood, but not in the way that many had expected.

Also, over the years, some observers have speculated that Apple Computer Corporation, which Steve Jobs also heads, would eventually come to dominate the consumer electronics sector as some sort of digital version of old analog Sony.

That may be happening. The iPod has become a huge international success with its own industry growing up around it. In addition, Apple is quickly establishing itself as a major consumer electronics and entertainment company in other ways, and seems to have taken some of the glow away from Sony as well as Disney. Moreover, Apple has become a major distributor of music online, and, with the latest video version of its iPod, seems poised to do the same for the distribution of video or "television" programming. Moreover, given that Steve Jobs is CEO of both Pixar and Apple, what synergies lie ahead?

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Russia and the Information Revolution (Sunday, 12/4/05)
When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the old Soviet Union into fifteen separate countries, instead of fifteen Soviet republics, there was great optimism among some in the West that Russia would become a capitalist democracy following many centuries of authoritarian political and economic centralization. Over the years since, though, the results have been mixed, to say the very least.

Nonetheless, the world has learned through long, painful experiences, that it is a very bad idea to ignore, exclude, or try to isolate Russia. As a consequence, the G7 often become the G8 at meetings by giving Russia a place at the table.

Even though Russia became poorer following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, at least for a while, there have been some recent signs that its open market economic experiment might succeed in the long-run, even while President Putin has consolidated and centralized power, making himself appear more like simply the latest Czar, rather than a freely-elected president in a vital democracy.

Digital technology is reorganizing the world and is likely to be a key determinant of economic success in the future. The famed RAND Corporation has been studying Russia and the information revolution.