“Sometimes I Do Go A Little Bit Far”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Was anybody else put off by Maureen Dowd’s New York Times op-ed about Donald Trump, in which she allowed the hideous hotelier to run roughshod over her column space, while labeling him as a “braggart” or “cartoonish,” when a more accurate description would have been “vicious racist”? Does it seem that an attempt at a fun piece about a gutter-level racist is wrong?

Not only is he king of the Birthers, but the hideous hotelier has also said that “laziness is a trait in blacks” and described Mexicans as “rapists.” That’s not someone who should be treated as an amusingly undiplomatic blowhard who sticks his foot into it by boasting about his golf courses or denying Heidi Klum perfect-ten status. 

Dowd treated the whole sordid affair as if it was just harmless entertainment, an amusing sideshow (even featuring an extra-fun lightning round!), when Trump’s bigotry and those attracted to it are anything but a laugh. It’s unadulterated ugliness that should be called out by anyone who interviews him. Believing that the campaign is foolishness that will eventually blow away isn’t an excuse for a reporter to abdicate responsibility. In this instance, Dowd failed to be the equal of Megyn Kelly.

From her NYT piece:

The billionaire braggart known for saying unfiltered things is trying to be diplomatic. Sort of.

It has suddenly hit Trump that he’s leading the Republican field in a race where many candidates, including the two joyless presumptive nominees, are sputtering. He’s got the party by the tail — still a punch line but not a joke.

The Wall Street Journal huffed that Trump’s appeal was “attitude, not substance,” and the nascent candidate is still figuring out the pesky little details, like staff and issues, dreaming up his own astringent campaign ads for Instagram on ISIS and China.

The other candidates, he says, “have pollsters; they pay these guys $200,000 a month to tell them, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that, you use the wrong word, you shouldn’t put a comma here.’ I don’t want any of that. I have a nice staff, but no one tells me what to say. I go by my heart. The combination of heart and brain. When Hillary gets up there she reads and then goes away for three days.”

As he headed off this weekend to see the butter cow in Iowa — “Iowa is very clean. It’s not like a lot of places where you and I would go, like New York City” — Trump is puzzling over a conundrum: How does he curb the merciless heckler side of himself, the side that has won over voters who think he’s a refreshing truth teller, so that he can seem refined enough to win over voters who think he’s crude and cartoonish?

How does he tone it down when he’s proud of his outrageous persona, his fiery wee-hours Twitter arrows and campaign “gusto,” and gratified by the way he can survive dissing John McCain and rating Heidi Klum when that would be a death knell for someone like Scott Walker?

“Sometimes I do go a little bit far,” he allowed, adding, after a moment: “Heidi Klum. Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”•

 

 

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“Tesla Could Transition To A Fully Autonomous Service By 2025”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s a very big if, but if Tesla has an autonomous electric-car service on the roads by 2025, as Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas predicts, well, that would change everything. No one, though, can predict precisely what it would mean, except that it likely would be bad for Labor. Still, you have to bet it will take much longer to build such a global, robotic fleet.

From CNN Money:

Jonas believes that within the next 18 months, Tesla will share plans for an app-based, on-demand “mobility service.” Commercial introduction to this Uber-like service could occur in 2018, with the Model 3 serving as the backbone.

The first version of this service would be human-driven, just like today’s other ride hailing services. But then Tesla could move to a model where robots do virtually all the work even though real people sit at the driver’s seat just in case it’s required.

Jonas predicted Tesla could transition to a fully autonomous service by 2025, that it would have nearly 600,000 cars in its global fleet — or roughly the same size as Hertz today.

“The holy grail of shared mobility is replacing the mistake-prone, fatigued and expensive human driver with a robot that drives with greater accuracy and precision,” Jonas wrote.•

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“Sentient Beings Shouldn’t Harm Each Other”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If gene-editing was utilized to keep animals from wanting to harm one another–no more predators, no more prey–you think there might be a few unintended consequences? Some, right? David Pearce, a philosopher and Transhumanist, wants to engineer all suffering out of existence, from the ecosystem to the human brain. Given enough time, I suppose anything is possible. Excerpts follow from two interviews with Pearce.

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The opening of a 2014 i09 Q&A by George Dvorsky:

Question:

The idea of re-engineering the ecosystem such that it’s free from suffering is a radically ambitious project — one that’s been referred to as the “well intentioned lunacy” of a futurist. That said, it’s an idea rooted in history. From where do you draw your ideas and moral philosophy?

David Pearce:

Sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other. This utopian-sounding vision is ancient. Gautama Buddha said “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”. The Bible prophesies that the wolf and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Today, Jains sweep the ground in front of their feet rather than unwittingly tread on an insect.

My own conceptual framework and ethics are secular — more Bentham than Buddha. I think we should use biotechnology to rewrite our genetic source code; recalibrate the hedonic treadmill; shut down factory farms and slaughterhouses; and systematically help sentient beings rather than harm them.

However, there is an obvious problem. On the face of it, the idea of a pain-free biosphere is ecologically illiterate. Secular and religious utopians tend to ignore the biology of obligate carnivores and the thermodynamics of a food chain. Feed a population of starving herbivores in winter and we’d trigger a population explosion and ecological collapse. Help carnivorous predators and we’d just cause more death and suffering to the herbivores they prey on. Richard Dawkins puts the bioconservative case quite bluntly: “It must be so.” Fortunately, this isn’t the case.•

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From a 2007 interview by Ingo Niermann of the German edition of Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair:

You claim that it is possible to eradicate all suffering on earth, whether physical or mental. When?

David Pearce: 

It will technically be possible to get rid of all suffering within a century or two. Its abolition would be practical only if it were agreed in the sense of something like the moon program or the human genome project – if there was a degree of social consensus. There are certainly technological obstacles, but they are dwarfed by the ethical-ideological ones. Many people’s negative reaction to the idea of a world without suffering comes from a fear that someone is going to be manipulating and controlling them. Partly, too, the abolition of suffering seems to make a mockery of one’s life projects. Most of us spend the greater part of our lives seeking happiness for ourself and others we care about. But we do so in extremely inefficient and in many cases self-defeating ways. This is a problem with existing human society. Even though we have made extraordinary progress technologically and medically, we aren’t any happier than our ancestors. Even if we could arrange society in the most utopian way imaginable, there would be some people who would still be depressed and anxious. There would be some people who would be consumed by jealousy or unhappy love affairs. No amount of environmental reform or manipulation is going to get rid of suffering. Only biotechnology can eradicate its neural substrates.

Vanity Fair: 

Statistics say that on the average people in Bangladesh are happier than in the Western World.

David Pearce: 

In Bangladesh, if you lose a child through malnourishment or disease it’s absolutely dreadful, just as it is if you lose a child here. But yes, statistically the hedonic set-point around which our lives fluctuate is pretty similar whether you live in London, Berlin or Bangladesh. If someone offers you a million dollars, for instance, you get a quick boost in the same way that (to use a more extreme example) crack-addicts do. Even though crack-addicts know that the drug is going to make them awfully miserable in the long-term, they still strive for their next hit. Here in the rich West, we know money won’t make us happy, but we strive for it compulsively.

If you take suffering seriously, the only way to eradicate it is by biological reprogramming. In the short run, this may involve superior designer drugs. In the long run, the only realistic way to abolish suffering is through genetic engineering.

Vanity Fair: 

There would be a very simple method to make all people happy straight away: by putting electrodes in their pleasure centres.

David Pearce: 

Wireheading is offensive to human dignity, to our conception of who we are. The real value of wireheading is that it serves as an existence-proof for people who are sceptical that it is possible to be extremely happy indefinitely. Wireheading shows there is no tolerance to pure pleasure. The normal process of inhibitory feedback doesn’t seem to kick in. We don’t understand why this is the case. When we do, it will be a very important discovery.

Vanity Fair: 

The anaesthetist Stuart Meloy discovered accidentally that by putting an electrode in a certain area of the spinal cord a woman could experience endless orgasms. But he had a hard time finding enough people volunteering for a trial.

David Pearce: 

I can’t see wireheading as an evolutionary stable solution. Wireheads will not want to have children, or want to look after their children.

Vanity Fair: 

But what is your idea of paradise engineering? What should an ever-happy life be like?

David Pearce: 

It is not a uniform happiness but a world with a motivational system based entirely on gradients of well-being. Think of your ideal fantasy. With the right biological substrates, the reality could be millions of times better.•

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Old Print Article: “He Shot Twice To Kill Two,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

August 17, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Col. William “Billy” Breakenridge was tossed into the belly of the beast in 1879 when he became Assistant City Marshal of the hell-raising, often-lethal city of Tombstone, Arizona. Somehow he lived to tell the story, which he did quite literally nearly 50 years later, soon before his death, when he published his autobiography, Helldorado. Even this literary effort, far removed from the gun-slinging madness, caused conflict, as Wyatt Earp, portrayed in its pages as a low-down scoundrel, protested its verity. An article about the book was published in the June 12, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“The Remaining Employees Would Just Need To Learn How To Operate The Machines”

August 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Like many in postwar America, Ray Kroc found it rather easy to make money. It’s different today for the franchise, struggling in a much more competitive global economy. The typical McDonalds restaurant has half the staff it did 50 years ago, and there’s a chance that number could go much lower, owing to automation.

How much of the human element can be sacrificed from the Hospitality Industry (restaurants, hotels, etc.)? Probably a good deal, enough to hollow out staffs peopled by low-skill workers as well as novices and retirees. The push for a national $15 minimum wage (which workers dearly need) has some wondering if the process will be hastened.

From Lydia DePillis at the Washington Post:

Of course, it’s possible to imagine all kinds of dramatic productivity enhancements. Persona ­Pizzeria’s [Harold] Miller predicts that drone delivery systems will eventually get rid of the need to come into a restaurant at all, for example. [Middleby Corp COO Dave] Brewer has a bold prediction: He thinks that all the automation working its way into restaurants could eventually cut staffing levels in half. The remaining employees would just need to learn how to operate the machines and fix things when they break.

“You don’t want a $15-an-hour person doing something that the person who makes $7 an hour can do,” Brewer said. “It’s not downgrading the employees. It’s that the employees become managers of a bunch of different systems. They’ll become smarter and smarter.”

The value of a human touch

Not everybody, however, agrees that machines could make that much of a dent in labor costs. Implementing new systems is expensive, and mistakes can be devastating. And for some concepts, it’s possible that the presence of employees is actually a restaurant’s competitive advantage. Compared with grocery stores and gas stations, many people come to restaurants exactly because they want some human interaction.•

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An industrial video from 50 years ago about AMF, which brought automation and computers to bowling, trying to make fast food even more inhuman.

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“In Terms Of Books Or Things Written On Paper, Nothing Much Is Going To Change”

August 17, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

In 1999, Michael Crichton played what he knew to be a fool’s game and predicted the future. He was not so successful about culture. Things he got wrong: Printed matter will be unchanged, movies will soon be dead, communications will be consolidated into fewer hands. Well, he did foresee YouTube.

Crichton, who was fascinated by science and often accused of being anti-science, commenting in a 1997 Playboy interview on technology creating moral quandaries we’re not prepared for:

I think we’re a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We’ve never caught up. When I was in medical school—30-odd years ago—people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren’t going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or—or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims—some of whom were very young—who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific.

But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, ‘pulling the plug’ actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn’t going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die—whether it’s a legal or religious issue—and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren’t being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us—in this case, by the pneumococcus.

This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you’re knowledgeable about biotechnology, it’s possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don’t even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they’re too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don’t believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it’s the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn’t be checking my e-mail, because there’s an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you’ll get it. Well, I won’t get it. I’m not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: “You’ve gone offline?” People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who’s calling, and who cares?•

“I See A Time When Every Home Will Have A Drone”

August 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I can’t find a transcript of the recent address by NASA’s Parimal Kopardekar at an unmanned aerial systems conference at the Ames Research Center, but there’s some coverage of it by Elizabeth Weise at Stuff.co.nz. The aviation expert thinks we’ll all soon–very soon–have a drone to do our bidding, conducting research and running errands. Of course, once they’re ubiquitous, it will be easy to introduce mayhem into the system, easier than it is with the traditional postal system. That’s something we’ll have to work on.

Weise’s opening:

Forget getting the latest, greatest cell phone. The next indispensable tech tool may be a drone of your own. And daily life may never be the same.

“I see a time when every home will have a drone. You’re going to use a drone to do rooftop inspections. You’re going to be able to send a drone to Home Depot to get a screw driver,” said Parimal Kopardekar, manager of Nasa’s Safe Autonomous System Operations Project at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

And this won’t happen in some long-distant future. “This is in five or 10 years,” Kopardekar said.

Kopardekar gave a keynote talk at a conference on Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management hosted by Nasa and the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International last week.

“We can completely transform aviation. Quickly,” said Dave Vos, lead of Google’s secretive Project Wing, which is working with Nasa – as are some 100 other companies – on an air traffic control system for small, low-altitude drones.

An effective air traffic system – needed to keep the skies under 500 feet from turning into a demolition derby – will play a major role in turning drones from a plaything into an engine of the economy, one affecting package delivery, agriculture, hazardous waste oversight and more.•

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“Probably The Biggest Factor Is, There Were No Formulas”

August 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Sometimes life takes a sharp turn for the better and it seems like progress, like we’ve moved onward and upward for good. Probably more often than not, these jolting victories are transient, a brief interlude. So it was for American cinema in the late ’60s and ’70s, a fascinating time of personal filmmaking that disrupted and then dissipated. 

That’s not to say the Studio System that preceded it or the globalized Blockbuster Era which has replaced it haven’t turned out great movies, but damn, that auteur period had soul. It’s not unfair to say that those producers and directors pushed envelopes and their successors push product. 

One of the greats of that golden era, William Friedkin, was interviewed by Mike Fleming Jr. of Deadline. The opening:

Question:

Today’s executives and filmmakers say they revere the 70s, but they are under pressure for formulaic global blockbusters that lack edge and authorship. What made that era possible that isn’t in place today?

William Friedkin:

There were a number of factors. Studios were run by guys who really loved films, and many of them had been producers. Probably the biggest factor is, there were no formulas. A studio did not have to turn out a number of films that had to be formulaic, like they do today. A whole movement back then was spurred by the release of Easy Rider. Studios felt that if a couple of hip filmmakers could go out, without a script, with a small crew and make a film like that with very few resources, then the directors must know what they were doing. This benefited the younger guys of my generation. The studios just felt that maybe we had some formula.

Question:

Did you?

William Friedkin:

We didn’t. We were mostly influenced by the European films of the ‘60s. The French New Wave. Italian neo-realism. Kurosawa and other Japanese filmmakers. We were inspired by them and not bound to any formula. The French Connection, for all its success, was a real departure for a cop film, which was why it took us two years to get it made. Every studio turned it down. Many of them turned it down two or three times over a two year period.

Question:

Why?

William Friedkin:

They didn’t get it. The chase scene was never in a script. I created that chase scene, with the producer Philip D’Antoni. We just spit-balled ideas. We walked out of my apartment, headed South in Manhattan and we kept walking until we came up with that chase scene, letting the atmosphere of the city guide us. The steam coming off the street, and sound of the subway rumbling beneath our feet, the treacherous traffic on crowded streets. We didn’t have a lot of time, because Dick Zanuck, who had already turned it down, told us that he would make the film for a million and a half dollars if we could get it done right away, because he knew he was going to get fired. And he was right. That’s why we settled on Gene Hackman who was not our first choice. We walked 55 blocks and came up with a chase. Nobody ever asked to see a script. We went three hundred thousand over that million and a half dollar budget, and they wanted to kill me every day for that. Nobody spent the kind of money they do today. You had groups of guys running the studios who were afraid they might be out of touch, and young filmmakers who had fresh ideas that were more like what indie film is today than what fit the classic Hollywood movie, which was the musicals of the ‘40s and the ‘50s like Singing in the Rain. What prevails in American film today that didn’t then was, if a film succeeds and seems to represent a formula, it will be repeated over and over, with more and more computer-generated images. I can’t think of any superhero film that existed in the 70s. None come to mind. No formulas and the start was the fear of those executives back then that Easy Rider caused in the hearts of guys running the studios back then.

Question:

Were you aware you were working in a special time for the movie business? What was the best thing about working in movies back then, with so much freedom?

William Friedkin:

We were not aware that it was a golden era.•

 

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“Many Workers Called It A River Of Intrigue And Scheming”

August 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Things deemed inconvenient if you are employed at Amazon: getting cancer, having a relative get cancer, miscarriages. If you are “selfish” enough to engage in these activities, you’ll be put on notice and likely reduced to tears. Jeff Bezos’ gigantic success has long been reported to be a ridiculously bruising and demanding workplace only a sociopath could love, a place that attracts the highest achievers and routinely lays them low. 

Tremendous job by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York Times for the deepest profile yet of a company that’s the envy of the business world and a pretty horrible place to work. How can Amazon get away with such practices, a seeming social experiment that preys on workers psychologically? “Unfairness is not illegal,” is the way one lawyer in the piece puts it. The question is whether some of the tools used to quantify employees at the online retail behemoth will become common. Probably.

An excerpt about Elizabeth Willet, a former Army Captain who discovered a new kind of combat during her brief employment at Amazon:

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.•

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A Note From 1869 About An Impractical Invention

August 16, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 19, 1869 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

August 15, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. dana goodyear’s julian wasser article
  2. howard hughes at the end of his life
  3. robert matthias new york messiah
  4. edmund hillary searching for abominable snowman
  5. old time explorers hunting mummies
  6. donald trump’s anus mouth
  7. reyner banham’s los angeles
  8. ludwig wittgenstein on technology
  9. recent camille paglia comments
  10. wernher von braun werner erhard

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

August 15, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Donald Trump's behavior shockingly wasn't the ugliest thing in the country.

This week, President Trump’s behavior shockingly wasn’t the ugliest thing in the country.

 

  • Garry Wills thinks William F. Buckley’s political influence was overstated.
  • The water crisis, not terrorism, is likely the biggest threat to global peace.

“She Says Their Brilliance Tells Only Part Of The Story”

August 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Anyone who’s studied Silicon Valley for about five minutes knows that community’s shocking success is a hybrid of public-private investment, not just some free-market dream realized. Before the Y Combinator, there’s often an X factor, namely a government incubator like DARPA which births and nurtures ideas until they can crawl into the arms of loving venture capitalists. The Internet, of course, is the most obvious example. Even the transistor itself sprang from Bell Labs, which was essentially a government-sanctioned monopoly.

The economist Mariana Mazzucato hasn’t been shy about shooting down the excesses of the sector’s mythologizing, which boasts that brilliant upstarts with startups simply think (ideate!) their way into billions. Not quite. These lone creators don’t only lack the funds to develop an Internet or transistor, Mazzucato doesn’t believe they have the time or stomachs for such risks, either. The market demands corporations opt for safer short-term gain or the shareholders will revolt. (Look at the blowback Google’s received for its moonshot investments, perhaps one reason it reorganized itself into Alphabet this week.) The companies aren’t, then, caged lions held back by regulation, but, as Mazzucato sees it, usually kittens unable to roar on their own.

From John Thornhill at the Financial Times:

Even Silicon Valley’s much-fabled tech entrepreneurs are not as smart as they like to think. Although Mazzucato lavishes praise on the entrepreneurial genius of the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, she says their brilliance tells only part of the story. Many of the key technologies used by Apple were first developed by public-sector agencies. Most of the key technologies that do the clever stuff inside your iPhone — including its geo-positioning system, the Siri voice-recognition service and multi-touch screen — were the offspring of state-funded research. “Government has invested in basic research, it has invested in applied research, it has invested in concrete companies [such as Tesla] all the way downstream, doing what venture capital should be doing if it was really playing the role it says it plays,” she says. “It is an incredibly active, mission-oriented role.”

One of the original engines of Silicon Valley’s creativity, she argues, was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), founded by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 following the alarm caused by the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik rocket. Darpa, run by the US Department of Defense, has since pumped billions of dollars into cutting-edge research and was instrumental in developing the internet. According to Mazzucato, the publicly funded National Institutes of Health has played a similar role in nurturing the US pharmaceuticals industry. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E), set up by President Barack Obama and run by the US Department of Energy, is designed to stimulate green technology.

Mazzucato points to the critical role played by government agencies in other economies, such as China, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, and Israel, where the state is not just acting as a market regulator, it is actively creating and shaping markets. For instance, the Yozma programme in Israel that provided the funding and expertise to create the so-called “start-up nation”. “My whole point to business is, ‘Hello, if you want to make profits in the future, you had better understand where the profits are coming from’. This is a pro-business story. This is not about socialism,” she says.

Her arguments stray into more radical territory as we discuss how the fruits of this technological innovation should be distributed. If you accept that the state is part responsible for the success of many private sector enterprises, she says, should it not share in more of their economic gains?•

 

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“Any Of Us Could, Of Course, List The Differences Between The Two Cities Of Mirages”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

How different would the world be if everyone could write as immaculately as Pico Iyer?

In a NYRB essay, he meditates on Las Vegas and Pyongyang, two vastly different symbolic cities that are each rooted in a denatured fantasy, both of them oases or mirages, depending on if your wager can conquer the long odds or not. In the former, you’ll likely get taken, and in the latter you might get killed. An excerpt:

Any of us could, of course, list the differences between the two cities of mirages. The one is a shameless efflorescence of capitalism that is, for its enemies, a glittering symbol of the decadence and emptiness of the West; the other the world’s last by-the-book, state-controlled monument to Stalinist brutality, whose forty-story blocks are consciously designed to cow citizens and remind them that it’s a privilege never to leave their hometowns without permission or to be executed simply for glimpsing a foreign newspaper.

The one is a sort of adolescent’s Girls Gone Wild vision of freedom run amok, in which visitors are encouraged to believe that you can do and be anything you like, for a night; the other is a terrifying model of order and regimentation in which even the woman who chatted me up on a showpiece subway train might well have been a prop set there by the government. While drunken frat boys get themselves photographed next to bikini-clad showgirls dressed as flamingoes on Las Vegas Boulevard, in Pyongyang every visitor—on every visit—is obliged to get up in jacket and tie, pass through a dust-cleaning machine, and bow before the embalmed figures of the nation’s two departed leaders. When Hunter Thompson wrote, “For the loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth,” he hadn’t been to Pyongyang, where even the sometime-winners are abruptly sent before the firing squads.

Yet both cities are products of a mid-twentieth-century spirit that saw what power and profit could be found in constructing mass fantasies ab nihilo—in the deserts of the West, out of the rubble of the Korean War.•

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“It Is Raising Questions Of Privacy And Concerns About Potential Misuse”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As we witnessed with horror in Ferguson, the tools we create to fight wars overseas find their way back to the home front, free markets taking over where DARPA and other Defense departments trail off. Beyond guns and drones, surveillance equipment is the latest boomerang returning, and there are few rules in place to moderate their use, the technology, as usual, outstripping legislation. 

From Timothy Williams at the New York Times:

SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.

Law enforcement officers say the technology is much faster than fingerprinting at identifying suspects, although it is unclear how much it is helping the police make arrests.

When Aaron Harvey was stopped by the police here in 2013 while driving near his grandmother’s house, an officer not only searched his car, he said, but also took his photograph and ran it through the software to try to confirm his identity and determine whether he had a criminal record.•

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“‘Instant Newspapers’ Will Be Printed In U.S. Homes By Electromagnetic Waves”

August 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Hugo Gernsback may have been America’s first professional futurist, and while he wasn’t always right he was always interesting. Gernsback invented the first home radio kits right after the turn of the nineteenth century and sold his gadgets by mail order from his Brooklyn offices. He loved science fiction as much as science–saw them as complements, really–and published some of the earliest examples of the form in his publications, including Amazing Stories. He coined the term “television,” and when he wasn’t explaining the concept to 1920s newbies, he was conducting early broadcasts, an expensive endeavor that helped bankrupt him.

Just four years before his death, the July 26, 1963 issue of Life profiled the man in “Barnum of the Space Age,” which reported his prophecies for the future. The opening:

Science is now so big, so flamboyant and so barnacled with politicians, press agents, generals and industrialists that Hugo Gernsback, who invented it back in 1908 (and has re-invented it, annually, since) can scarcely make himself heard above the babble of the late-comers. Although he is now 78, Gernsback is still a man of remarkable energy who raps out forecasts of future scientific wonders with the rapidity of a disintegrator gun. He believes that millions will eventually wear television eyeglasses–and has begun work on a model to speed the day. “Instant newspapers” will be printed in U.S. homes by electromagnetic waves, in his opinion, as soon as U.S. publishers wrench themselves out of the pit of stagnant thinking in which Gernsback feels they are wallowing at present. He also believes in the inevitability of teleportation–i.e., reproducing a ham sandwich at a distance by electronic means, much as images are now reproduced on a television screen.Gernsback pays absolutely no attention, while issuing such pronunciamentos, to the fact that the public is rapidly becoming inured to scientific advance and that scientists themselves may not actually stand in need of his advice and counsel. He paid as little attention to the head-tapping some of his announcements set of in the 1920s–a period in which he was often considered nuttier than Albert Einstein himself.

Gernsback, in fact, has felt himself impelled to preach the gospel of science ever since his youth in Luxembourg–not so much, apparently, for the good of science as for his own satisfaction and the delights of seeing his name in the papers. In 55 years as a self-appointed missionary, he has stiffly ignored both the cackling of the heathen and the cries of competing apostles. Moreover, as founder, owner, and guiding spirit of Gernsback Publications, Inc., a New York-based publishing enterprise which has produced a succession of scientific and technical books and magazines (among them Amazing Stories, the first science-fiction monthly), he has not only provided himself with a method of firing endless barrages of opinion, criticism and augury but the means of making a good deal of money as well.

Neither Gernsback’s instinct for the unorthodox, however, nor his unabashed sense of theater has prevented his full acceptance as a member of the science community. Dozens of today’s top scientists were attracted to their calling by reading his magazines as boys, and a good many–including Dr. Donald H. Menzel, director of the Harvard Observatory– earned money for college tuition by writing for them. He is heralded as the “Father” of modern science fiction (the statuettes which are annually awarded to its top writers are, in his honor, known as Hugos, but he is simultaneously a member of the American Physical Society and a lecturer before similar learned groups. The greatest inventors and scientists of the early 20th Century–among them Marconi, Edison, Tesla, Goddard, DeForest and Oberth–corresponded freely with him and came, in many cases, to admire and confide in him as well. The Space Age caused no diminution of this cozy relationship with the great; RCA’s General David Sarnoff is among his friends and pen pals, and so are former Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss and President Kennedy’s science adviser, Dr. Jerome Wiesner.

This admiration is solidly based. Gernsback, in his unique career, has not only done his best to prepare the public mind for the “wonders” of science but has sometimes managed to tell science itself just what wonders it was about to produce. for instance, he conceived the essential principles of radar aircraft detection in 1911–a year when the airplane itself was barely able to stagger off the ground. This early concept was so complete that Sir Robert Watson-Watt, whose radar tracking devices helped save London in the Battle of Britain, considers him the original inventor.

Gernsback not only coined the word “television” (he refuses to accept credit for that since he has discovered a Frenchman used an equivalent of the word a little earlier) but in 1928, as owner of New York’s radio Station WRNY, actually instituted daily telecasts with crude equipment. His list of successful scientific prophecies is almost endless and the perspicacity with which he has reported scientific thinking on the part of others is remarkable. In the 1920s, to make the point, he was force-feeding his readers all sorts of crazy stuff about atomic energy and about the problems of weightlessness and orbital rendezvous to be encountered in “space flying.”

It is, therefore, difficult not to believe that U.S. science has been influenced in many ways as a result of Gernsback’s extraordinary career in evangelism…•

“Is A Cambrian Explosion Coming For Robotics?”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The future usually arrives gradually, even frustratingly slowly, often wearing the clothes of the past, but what if it got here today or soon thereafter?

The benefits of profound technologies rushing headlong at us would be amazing and amazingly challenging. Gill Pratt, who oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge, wonders in a new Journal of Economic Perspectives essay if the field is to have a wild growth spurt, a synthetic analog to the biological eruption of the Cambrian Period. He thinks that once the “generalizable knowledge representation problem” is addressed, no easy feat, the field will speed forward. The opening:

About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the “Cambrian Explosion.” Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, with one of the most provocative being the evolution of vision, which allowed animals to dramatically increase their ability to hunt and find mates (for discussion, see Parker 2003). Today, technological developments on several fronts are fomenting a similar explosion in the diversification and applicability of robotics. Many of the base hardware technologies on which robots depend—particularly computing, data storage, and communications—have been improving at exponential growth rates. Two newly blossoming technologies—“Cloud Robotics” and “Deep Learning”—could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth. In Cloud Robotics— a term coined by James Kuffner (2010)—every robot learns from the experiences of all robots, which leads to rapid growth of robot competence, particularly as the number of robots grows. Deep Learning algorithms are a method for robots to learn and generalize their associations based on very large (and often cloud-based) “training sets” that typically include millions of examples. Interestingly, Li (2014) noted that one of the robotic capabilities recently enabled by these combined technologies is vision—the same capability that may have played a leading role in the Cambrian Explosion. Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?

How soon might a Cambrian Explosion of robotics occur? It is hard to tell. Some say we should consider the history of computer chess, where brute force search and heuristic algorithms can now beat the best human player yet no chess-playing program inherently knows how to handle even a simple adjacent problem, like how to win at a straightforward game like tic-tac-toe (Brooks 2015). In this view, specialized robots will improve at performing well-defined tasks, but in the real world, there are far more problems yet to be solved than ways presently known to solve them.

But unlike computer chess programs, where the rules of chess are built in, today’s Deep Learning algorithms use general learning techniques with little domain-specific structure. They have been applied to a range of perception problems, like speech recognition and now vision. It is reasonable to assume that robots will in the not-too-distant future be able perform any associative memory problem at human levels, even those with high-dimensional inputs, with the use of Deep Learning algorithms. Furthermore, unlike computer chess, where improvements have occurred at a gradual and expected rate, the very fast improvement of Deep Learning has been surprising, even to experts in the field. The recent availability of large amounts of training data and computing resources on the cloud has made this possible; the algorithms being used have existed for some time and the learning process has actually become simpler as performance has improved.•

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“What Is The Greatest Social And Economic Risk Of The Coming Decade?”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It amazes me that California’s water shortage seems to be viewed in this country as a regional problem for them, when it’s clearly a grave concern for us. As farmers in that state search deeper and deeper for the scarce liquid hoping to stave off personal disaster, we all near a collective one. If California dying of thirst isn’t a national emergency, I don’t know what is. Globally, the water crises may be the most serious threat to world peace. From the Spiegel report “World Without Water“:

“Water is the primary principle of all things,” the philosopher Thales of Miletus wrote in the 6th century BC. More than two-and-a-half thousand years later, on July 28, 2010, the United Nations felt it was necessary to define access to water as a human right. It was an act of desperation. The UN has not fallen so clearly short of any of its other millennium goals than the goal of cutting the number of people without this access in half by 2015.

The question is whether water is public property and a human right. Or is it ultimately a commodity, a consumer good and a financial investment?

The world’s business leaders and decision makers gathered at the annual meeting in snow-covered Davos, Switzerland in January to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. One of the questions was: What is the greatest social and economic risk of the coming decade? The selection of answers consisted of 28 risks, including wars, weapons of mass destruction and epidemics. The answer chosen by the world’s economic elite was: water crises.

Consumers have recognized for years that we need to reduce our consumption of petroleum. But very few people think about water as being scarce, even though it’s the resource of the future, more valuable than oil because it is irreplaceable. It also happens to be the source of all life.•

 

“I Fear For The Future Of Capitalism In Our Country And Around The World”

August 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from a New York Times op-ed written by Peter Georgescu, the Young & Rubicam chairman emeritus, who believes wealth inequality must be remedied by corporations (not particularly likely) or we’ll have social uprisings and ginormous tax increases. Well, something’s got to give.

The essay touched a nerve, leading to a raft of Facebook questions directed at the writer. He answered some of them for the Times. Unfortunately, none address automation potentially adding to the short- and medium-term woes with technological unemployment. 

One exchange about what the questioner and Georgescu see as the precarious position of contemporary capitalism:

Question:

A quick prelude is that I fear that our capitalist model is in danger. In the early days of capitalism (here in the US and elsewhere) companies were mostly family owned and run even for generations. Now we have the board, stockholders and CEO model, which appears very flawed. The stockholders often are just looking for short term gain, the board has no real ties to or ‘skin’ in the company, and the CEO is often colluding with the stockholders for short term gain.

After that long-winded lead in, do you share those fears? Any thoughts on improving the current public corporate model? How about the German system of requiring public corporations to have a union representative on the board?

Peter Georgescu:

I fear for the future of capitalism in our country and around the world. Capitalism really means free enterprise. The name came from the resource that once drove the free-market engine. Capital no longer plays that prominent role. Creativity and innovation drive global business today. Capital is just one resource, important, but no longer the major differentiator. Historically, this so-called capitalist free-enterprise engine achieved extraordinary results. It propelled America into the superpower that is it today. It lifted hundreds of millions of people from deep poverty to a more humane standard of living. (Think China, India, Brazil, countries in Africa and more.)

But that extraordinary engine has been hijacked by a rogue philosophy that says that shareholders’ interests come first and which threatens to destroy both this magnificent engine and our very way of life. The misguided philosophy says that one of a corporation’s stakeholders, the shareholders, deserves to have their value maximized in the short term. The three other vital stakeholders are not adequately represented at the decision-making table and inadequately compensated. First, the employees — who are the real value creators. They have been turned into a cost to be squeezed. Then, the corporation itself, where investment in R&D and innovation is grossly inadequate. Finally, a business’s customers, who should be a corporation’s prime stakeholder — not the shareholders.

Even the moral justification that the shareholder is the owner and an owner gets what they want when they want it is a myth. In fact the shareholder is a mentor at best. They come into stock when they want and leave at their will. And they are of course immune from any corporation liabilities. That’s not ownership. The preponderance of legal opinion is clear. The corporation owns its own assets, not the shareholder.

So yes, we must rebalance a business’s incremental value returns among the key stakeholders — the employees, the shareholders and the corporation itself. And we must always put the customer’s interests first.

If we do that, we can liberate free enterprise from its present-day shackles.•

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“This Is Very Near Tomorrow”

August 13, 2015 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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To generate hoopla for the 1950 sci-fi film Destination Moon, the principals of the film, including writer Robert Heinlein, did on-set interviews with KTLA the year before. The author, who makes his entrance near the 12-minute mark, explains that a real space mission only needed money and will, not any new science, to be completed. About 20 years later, he was interviewed as part of Walter Cronkite’s CBS coverage of the actual moon landing.

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“Since Then The Computer Has Progressed So Fast, With Computers Working Their Own Evolution”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

This is very cool: A 1971 Life magazine report about a Manhattan computer expo in which IBMs wowed visitors by merely playing games of 20 Questions, no chess expertise even necessary. Better yet, the exhibition was curated by Charles Eames, who, along with his wife and business partner, Ray, was as comfortable with computers as he was with furniture. From “A Lively Show with a Robot as the Star,” written by Fortune editor Walter McQuade:

The stroller steps off the sidewalk and into the IBM display room on 57th Street in Manhattan and approaches one of the four shiny input typewriters of an IBM System 360 computer. The game is ’20 Questions.’ The computer ‘thinks up’ one of the 12 stock mystery words, like “duck,” “orange,” “cloud,” “helium,” “knowledge.” The stroller has 20 chances to guess and if, perhaps, the mystery word is “knowledge,” the typical conversation could start like this:

Stroller: “Does it grow?”
Computer: “To answer that question might be misleading.”
Stroller: “Can I eat it? Is it edible?”
Computer: “Only as food for thought.”
Stroller: “Do computers have it?”
Computer: “Strictly speaking, no.”

Twenty Questions is only the pièce de resistance in what is probably the canniest and most successful exhibition on computers ever devised. It should be: its deviser, the protean Charles Eames–poet, architect, painter, mathematician, toymaker, furniture designer and film maker–has had ample exposure at expos. Here, he and his collaborators reach back into the history and prehistory of computers to show how and why calculating machines came about.

Most of the story evolves on a gigantic, 48-foot, three-dimensional wall tapestry. Woven into it are hundreds of souvenirs from 1890 to 1950, the computer’s gestation period. Here are artifacts, documents and photographs, dramatizing six decades of striving, when information began to explode on the world and nobody knew quite what to do with the fallout.

The devices range from “The Millionaire,” one of the first calculators, made of brass, to Elmer Sperry’s gyroscope, to Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer. Included are the work of such elegant minds as Alan Turing, Wallace Eckert, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann. Even L. Frank Baum and his “clockwork copper man,” Tik-Tok of Oz, is represented.

The military imperative to handle information quickly is underlined with a Norden bombsight and with ENIAC, an Army ballistics calculator and predecessor of UNIVAC. There are beautifully selected pieces of cultured debris to date it all; election literature in the years each of the Roosevelts ran for President, and one of the big old dollar bills, when they were worth 100 cents. Best of all are the evocations of mental battles fought and sometimes lost. Early in the century an English scientist, Lewis Fry Richardson, devoted many years to developing numerical models in which equations simulated physical systems to predict the weather. He was a dedicated visionary, but his widow wrote, “There came a time of heartbreak when those most interested in his ‘upper air’ research proved to be ‘poison gas’ experts. Lewis stopped his meteorological researches, destroying such as had not been published.”

The wall closes with the birth of the UNIVAC in 1950. Since then the computer has progressed so fast, with computers working their own evolution, that the souvenirs would be just print-out sheets. But Eames demonstrates with models and film displays that if this be witchcraft, there are no witches involved–just the 350,000 full-time programmers (in the U.S. alone) and about two million other nonwitches who operate the machines; in a multiple, rapid-fire slidefilm; they chew gum, scratch themselves, dye their hair and do their work.

And when the stroller, no warlock himself, wanders in off the street with his family (it’s a great show for kids) and confronts the System 360, he is well advised to watch his language and frame his questions well. Eames’ finale to the exhibition can be fairly cheeky. System 360, Model 40, is not above printing out, in response to a muddled thought: “Your grammar has me stumped.”•

A Brief Note From 1911 About Hair Tonic

August 12, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“This David Foster Wallace Is Completely Erased”

August 12, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

David Foster Wallace overdid it in many ways, and his journalism seemed to conveniently descend into fiction when need be, but he was genuinely brilliant, certainly far superior to Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote, oy gevalt, Less Than Zero. That ersatz-J.D. Salinger-makes-a-snuff-film literary stain is so deeply ingrained on the sheets that you have throw away the whole bed.

Ellis uses a new Medium essay to yet again disapprove of his late contemporary and also to take aim at the new Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour. He is correct that such films almost universally reduce their subjects with hagiography, meaning to make them more likable but instead robbing them of their humanity. An excerpt:

The David in this movie is the voice of reason, a sage, and the movie succumbs to the cult of stressing likability. But the real David scolded people and probably craved fame — what writer isn’t both suspicious of literary fame and yet curious in seeing how that game is played out? It’s not that rare and — hey — it sells books. He was cranky and could be very mean and caustic and opportunistic, but this David Foster Wallace is completely erased and that’s why the movie is so resolutely one-note and earnest. There’s so much handwringing about doing one dumb book tour and being “terrified” by a magazine profile — and this is looked on as a sign of pure integrity in the movie — that at some point you may want to tell the screen: “Just don’t finish the tour, dude, if it hurts so much, and shut up about it. Don’t talk to freakin’ Rolling Stone. Get over it. Chill.”

This is not the David Foster Wallace who voted for Reagan and supported Ross Perot, the David who wrote a scathing and deliciously cruel put-down of late-period Updike, the David who posed for glamour-puss photos in Interview magazine (years before Infinite Jest) and appeared on Charlie Rose numerous times — all of which the movie strongly suggests was probably absolute agony for David who keeps naively fretting about his real self being co-opted by a fake self, as if a man as intelligent as Wallace would really care one way or the other, but the movie insists this was the case which perversely reveals Wallace to be the world-class narcissist so many people (even Jonathan Franzen, a close friend, and Mary Karr, an ex) always assumed he was.•

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“How Could We Maneuver Akin Into The GOP Driver’s Seat?”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

American politics aren’t merely an endless horserace as many pundits seem to think it is, but you don’t get to effect real change unless you wind up in the winner’s circle. Claire McCaskill, Democratic Senator in the red state of Missouri, realized this when running for reelection in 2012. In a Politico piece she penned, McCaskill confirms something suspected at the time: She consciously and audaciously helped the most extreme and defeatable GOP opponent, Todd Akin, win the Republican nomination, giving herself the best chance of general-election victory. She even advised Akin about which of his TV ads were working and should be continued. “This was the most fun I’d had in a long time,” she writes.

It was a risky gambit since the state could have been left with a wingnut nonpareil in the Senate, but it worked. Not even McCaskill could have anticipated Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments, a despicable bit of reasoning and a monumental political gift. An excerpt:

Akin’s track record made him my ideal opponent. Many of his votes in Congress contradicted his claim of being a fiscal conservative. While he opposed President Barack Obama’s authority to raise the debt limit, during the Bush administration, in 2004, he had voted to raise the limit by $800 billion. A vocal opponent of the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts, in 2001 Akin had voted in favor of a $25 billion stimulus package that mostly benefited large corporations and the wealthy. And he was a big earmarker: in one fiscal year he sponsored or cosponsored $14 million worth of pork and once sought $3.3 million in a special appropriation for a highway near nine acres he owned and was planning to develop. While opposing spending money for child nutrition programs, veterans’ health benefits, and disaster relief, he repeatedly voted to raise his own salary.

His extreme positions on social issues and ridiculous public statements made him anathema to many independent voters. He sponsored an amendment that would define life as beginning at conception, thereby outlawing common forms of birth control. He voted against repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, he stood on the House floor and asked for God’s help in keeping the nation from “socialized medicine.” In 2008, he claimed in a House floor speech that it was “common practice” for doctors to conduct abortions on women “who were not actually pregnant.” He had made speeches calling for America to pull out of the United Nations and claiming the government had “a bunch of socialists in the Senate” and a “commie” in the White House.

So how could we maneuver Akin into the GOP driver’s seat?•

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“The Extent Of The Plunge In Childbearing Is Startling”

August 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The only thing trickier than predicting future population is interpreting what those people will mean for the world and its resources. From Malthus to Ehrlich, population bombs have defused themselves, even proved beneficial. Down deep, most likely think there’s a tipping point, a tragic number, but, of course, development of technologies can rework that math, stretch resources to new lengths. And a larger pool of talent makes it easier to create those new tools.

It would seem to make sense that immigrant nations can ride the wave of fluctuations best, not being dependent on internal fertility numbers. Robotics may reduce that advantage, however. Japan is certainly banking on that transformation.

In a Financial Times piece, Robin Harding writes that fertility seems to be on a steep decline globally, leveling off. If so, the ramifications will be many, including for Labor. The opening:

The extent of the plunge in childbearing is startling. Eighty-three countries containing 46 per cent of the world’s population — including every single country in Europe — now have fertility below replacement rate of about 2.1 births per woman. Another 46 per cent live in countries where the birth rate has fallen sharply. In 48 countries the population will decline between now and 2050.

That leaves just 9 per cent of the world’s population, almost all in Africa, living in nations with pre-industrial fertility rates of five or six children per woman. But even in Africa fertility is starting to dip. In a decade, the UN reckons, there will be just three countries with a fertility rate higher than five: Mali, Niger and Somalia. In three decades, it projects only Niger will be higher than four.

These projections include a fertility bounce in countries such as Germany and Japan. If more fecund nations follow this path of declining birth rates, therefore, a stable future population could quickly be locked in.

That would have enormous consequences for the world economy, geo­politics and the sum of human happiness, illustrated by some of the middle-income countries that have gone through a dramatic, and often ignored, fall in fertility.•

 

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