February 2006

Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Small World Project (Thursday, 2/23/06)
Psychologist Stanley Milgram probably is best-known in academic circles because of his famous "obedience experiments" from the early 1960s. In these experiments, subjects drawn from the general population were led to believe that they were giving highly painful, potentially lethal electric shocks to complete strangers who had never done the subjects any harm. In reality, no one was getting shocked, but Dr. Milgram was interested in how many subjects would obey the experimenter's instructions under minimally threatening conditions and deliver what they thought were excruciating electric shocks to innocent strangers.

The results astonished everybody, including psychiatrists who had been asked to predict them ahead of time and had wildly underestimated the outcomes. To nearly everybody's surprise, approximately two-thirds of the subjects, despite agitation and apparent discomfort, were willing to administer what they were led to believe was maximum shock. When those few who refused to continue simply said "No," the experiment was terminated immediately, and a full explanation was provided.

The findings attracted a lot of attention, particularly because it had been only about 15 years after the end of the Nazi era in Germany. They also contradicted common cultural assumptions that an individual's behavior is mostly a result of attributes of the person, and, instead, called great attention to the powerful role played by situational variables. Scientific findings such as these have been essentially ignored by American institutions, however, because they are inconsistent with cultural attitudes that have been handed down through many generations.

Milgram died in 1984, but, before his departure, he also conducted his "small world" studies, which gave rise to "six degrees of separation" ideas in the popular culture, which became the name for a play and a Hollywood feature film. Among other things, these studies showed the extraordinary extent to which society is closely networked. For instance, the odds are fairly great that you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows any randomly selected celebrity, or, for that matter, someone chosen at random from the general population. If you know any single big-time political or show-biz figure, or know somebody who does, it's likely that only a few links connect you to most big-time political or show-biz figures, because many of them know each other.

Because of relatively inexpensive international telephone service and air travel now, as well as the Internet, it's likely that the entire world is becoming much more closely networked as well. How many "degrees" now separate you from a randomly-selected person on the other side of the world? At any rate, it's time for additional research that addresses more specific questions, and this is being conducted by Professor Duncan Watts in his Small World Project at Columbia University.

A new aristocracy? (Tuesday, 2/21/06)
History has demonstrated over and over from Homeric Greece through the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution and beyond, that, even if you don't care about people, the risk of destructive social upheaval increases as the gap between the increasingly ostentatious rich and the far greater number of poor increases. During recent years, the world's rich have been getting richer, as vast multitudes of poor have been getting poorer across regions of the world as well as within many countries.

The world's well-to-do tend to use their money to leverage their time by having others do things for them that they might otherwise have to do for themselves. They do this by taking greater advantage of the division of labor that a market economy provides, but, also, in a more visible or conspicuous way, by hiring others to do things for them.

For instance, it is no longer necessary to be royal or a member of Britain's landed aristocracy in order to have personal assistants. Julie Bick of the New York Times tells about people in New York City and elsewhere who employ people to help take care of their personal responsibilities. Along similar lines, Roger Yu tells about travelers who employ others to handle their bags.

Currently, with its booming economy, China may hold the record for ther greatest gap between rich and poor, with its fabulously wealthy entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and its hundreds of millions of impoverished people attempting to live on the equivalent of a U.S. dollar or two per day, on the other. However, Tan Ee Lyn reports that the gap also is widening between Hong Kong's rich and its middle-class.

Perspective on an apparently grim U.S. jobs picture (Friday, 2/17/06)
Paul Craig Roberts has been examining data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and doesn't like what he sees. He says that job growth in the United States over the past five years has been the weakest since records began. The American economy would have had to produce more than an additional 7 million jobs during this period just to keep up with population growth, he says, and this is one good reason for controlling immigration.

But, wait a minute--isn't it immigration that is mostly responsible for U.S. population growth in the first place? For years, American whites and blacks have not been reproducing sufficiently to replace themselves. Nonetheless, U.S. population growth contrasts greatly with demographic trends in Japan, Russia, and many Western European countries where populations are expected to shrink substantially over the decades ahead. A major consequence is that these populations are aging even more rapidly than the U.S. population and their aging workforces make up a diminishing proportion of their total populations. The U.S. is expected to have problems during the remainder of this century as fewer workers attempt to support themselves and an increasing number of older people. However, many other countries would greatly prefer to have America's problems along these lines rather than their own.

Meanwhile, Mary Dalrymple reports from Washington that investigators are calling for greater coordinated action on the part of government agencies to remove incentives for people who are hiring illegal immigrants.

More on China's growing presence on the world stage and what it all may mean (Friday, 2/17/06)
Barry Peterson of CBS News reports that companies have to be willing to "play by China's rules" if they want to do business in a country that expects to become increasingly dominant in the new world of the 21st century. Jim Puzzanghera writes from Washington for the San Jose Mercury News about the "Great Firewall of China" and the Chinese government's efforts to block its citizens' access to taboo topics on the Internet. Tom Zeller reports that representatives of four major U.S.-based hi-tech companies have been called to explain to a Congressional committee why they are assisting the Chinese government in its great censorship effort. Here's more about that from Elizabeth Millard in the U.S. capital.

We should point out once again that BraveNewWorkWorld was one of the sites that the Chinese government specifically blocked within the country several years ago. After a time, Chinese censors apparently gave up and allowed our site to be freely accessible once again. We have not heard recently whether this accessibility has continued.

On the CBS Evening News recently, reporter Barry Peterson demonstrated the very different results when doing a Google search on the "Tiananmen Square protests of 1989" in Tokyo as opposed to doing the same search in Beijing. In Tokyo, everything on the topic is freely available; in Beijing, it's as though those protests never occurred.

Does our site come up on a Google search within China at this point? We don't know. If there were a Mandarin version of BNWW, we're almost certain that it would not, and Google's American executives have played a key role in making this sort of selectivity possible.

Why should Americans care about all of this? It appears that free inquiry and free expression are under siege from a variety of directions, only a few of which we will mention here. It's important for many reasons, not the least of which is that humanity's ability accurately to assess reality depends on free inquiry.

There is a very real question as to whether democracy as we understand it will survive the century on Earth. Keep in mind that the U.S. population now amounts to about 4.5 percent of the global population, and that the populations of other major industrial democratic countries, such as Japan and those in Western Europe, are shrinking. Also, keep in mind that China contains about 1.3 billion persons--about a billion more than the U.S.--and that it has the world's fastest-growing economy.

Remember, too, that there are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam has not had any strong liberal democratic traditions. Like many Christians throughout the world, many Muslims believe they already have the truth, so there's no reason to maintain conditions which can enable scientists, historians, or journalists to search for it. The knowledge revolution of recent years has not yet produced general populations that understand WHAT IT TAKES to develop trustworthy answers to empirical questions of all kinds. It would not be a good time for free inquiry or expression to disappear from the Earth. In fact, there is no good time for that.

Current public opinion polls clearly indicate that a majority of Americans care more about their security than about freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Among other things, this means that a nuclear attack on the United States by radical Islamic terrorists, for instance, could, in effect, destroy the American Constitution, not by incinerating parchment copies in the National Archives building, but by permanently altering American minds, which, in turn, could permanently alter the country's political culture.

Keep in mind, too, that the people who win wars or otherwise come to dominate write the history books. What will histories during the 22nd century have to say about the principal events of the preceding three or four centuries? Will there be reference to the American Bill of Rights, or will it disappear as Nikita Khrushchev did from Soviet history textbooks and as the Tiananmen Square massacre has from Google searches?

If you think this is highly unlikely, given the ubiquity of increasingly dominant electronic records, have you tried to play any of those old 8-track tapes lately? Or, how about those old reel-to-reel audio tapes in your closet or the Betamax video cassette of the "miracle on ice" game between the U.S. and Soviet hockey teams only about a quarter century ago? Incidentally, that was the same year that the large 5.25 inch floppy disks were introduced. Do you still have any copies of encyclopedias on those disks? When's the last time you were able to find a machine that would play them? In fact, how readily can you play the smaller "floppies" that have been disappearing more recently?

Incidentally, when the new Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified in Congress a few days ago, lawmakers had many questions about whether China now holds enough U.S. dollars to threaten the American economy. The Chairman attempted to reassure them, but the fact that well-informed American politicians were asking the questions is instructive in itself. And, if China is not a threat to the U.S. economy now, how about a week from Thursday or soon after?