Could the credit crunch trigger a real global economy?

One of the problems of the world is the extreme concentration of highly educated, highly talented people in just a few major centres. It’s only obvious that spreading out the cream will be to the world’s benefit. And now it’s likely to happen.

In the USA and UK, there are still some derivative pigeons flying around aimlessly in the air. But the great big clouds of them that have already come home to roost will soon be kicking and pecking the rest of the economy to bits and pooing on the pieces.

A lot of short-sighted observers are proclaiming that the rest of the world will get off lightly. What a joke. The S&P 500 and the FTSE 100 are mostly global corporations. And most of the banks are global. So there’s going to be a big mess of horizontal dominoes fairly soon. But still, some economies will suffer less than others. Which will have a very interesting result.

Right now, London’s hottest newly unemployed bankers are heading off to Dubai. (Presumably the Arabs want their banks to go belly-up as well, I’m not sure.) And as sector after sector gets hit, more and more highly qualified people will jet off to wherever they can still scratch a living.

Back in 1929, there was no global economy to escape to. But this time around, hotshots who followed their natural career paths to New York, London, etcetera will end up all over the world map. Every age group, from middle-aged parents to young execs to grads. Because it’s a lot more fun to earn a living in some faraway place than it is to rot back home, waiting for your home to be repossessed or simply waiting in an unemployment office queue.

Places like New Zealand and Tasmania and Argentina and Chile and Tunisia and Panama and I don’t know, all kinds of places that ambitious people totally overlooked before can now expect huge injections of professional talent and can-do willingness to succeed. Even the less developed places will gain – anywhere where’s there’s enough people to constitute a market will be attractive: Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, Peru.

Many, many years, Scottish engineers sailed away from their home and kick-started all kinds of progress in unlikely places. Now it could happen again, but across every kind of economic endeavour. Most will have never lived abroad before. Others will actually be returning home to countries they left after school or graduation. Sure there’ll be plenty of failure along the way, but in ten years’ time, the global economy could just become a lot more level.

It’s the talent and knowledge diaspora that the international development quangos could have only dreamed about.

Nudity: the only answer to sweatshops

Mass-produced clothes are such an ethical minefield. The only way we can be absolutely sure about the conditions under which they‘re produced is if they actually have a label saying “Produced by under-aged pre-teens working 12 hours a day for a plate of gruel.”

So in the end we just kind of buy what we can afford and hope for the best. OK, I know that American Apparel is made in LA (I’ve seen the factory) and Xara is made in Spain but if the newspapers told us tomorrow that the stuff was being sneaked in the back door of the factory from containers imported from an underground child labour camp in Birmingham, we’d probably just shrug, sigh and reach for our Fairtrade cups of coffee which we’re pretty sure come from real hill farmers but may just be channeled through a hill farmer who’s really a front for a multinational drugs gang.

One way to get around the clothing guilt thing is to buy second hand clothes, which is fine except someone’s got to buy the stuff first hand to make it second hand for us ethical types. It’s really just a matter of deferring the guilt. Besides, what about the people in the developing world who’re getting most of the second hand clothing now? If the stuff stayed in our wardrobes or just ended up at the neighbours, what would they wear and what would all the middlemen around the globe who deal in second hand clothing do for a living?

(Well, there is the chance that all the textile companies that were forced to close down when their markets were swamped by the West’s discarded clothing could start up again, but it’s probably a bit late for that.)

No, the answer is to wear nothing. No guilt, no shame. Just the flesh you were born with. And if you’re arrested, your defence would be that of the environmental activitists who were acquitted from damaging the Kingsnorth power station in Kent: “I admit my crime but I committed it purely to prevent a greater crime.”

Coming soon to a news channel near you.

Get ready for a new world language

Given the enormous adaptability, flexibility and learnability of English, it seems unlikely that it won’t remain the lingua franca of the world. But that expression ‘lingua franca’ must be a big red flashing clue. French used to be the leading language in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and parts of America. Today? It’s fallen down the international language list - behind English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. (I’ve arbitrarily decided that Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali and Russian are regional rather than international languages, OK?)

Sure, French lost its place because, one, the French Empire disappeared and, two, there’s a whole bureaucracy devoted to keeping the language ‘pure’, meaning it simply can’t adapt to the modern world of gigabytes, tacoburgers and collateralized debt obligations.

With English, the political empire has disappeared but the British/American cultural empire is still supreme, led by Hollywood, Wall Street, Harry Potter, pop music and the internet. And English is utterly remarkable for the speed at which it adds new words and expressions, as well as new meanings and uses for existing words. Three noteworthy examples from the last few months would be ‘credit crunch’, ‘deleverage’ and ‘skiing’ (spending the kids’ inheritance - the logical result of the first two examples.)

So why would such a useful language lose its top dog position?

Well, just take a look at how fast new slang (‘epic fail’ for example) spreads on the internet. Check out Lolcats (at icanhascheezburger.com) to see how freely grammar is being subverted purely for the hell of it. Up to now the ‘establishment’ has always been strong enough to drop a wet blanket on such deviance, or assimilate it if necessary. (No matter how people talk on the street, the mainstream media and bank statement speak tend to keep us toeing the line in business environments and at dinner parties. This is also why none of the synthetic languages like Esperanto or, er, Klingon, have got very far.)

But one day the latest slang may just get completely out of hand and set off on its own uncharted course, diverging further and further from the mother tongue. Especially as the ‘establishment’ is becoming more and more distant in terms of age from the people pioneering new language use.

On the internet, a ten year old’s user generated content is as valid as anyone else’s. You no longer need a PhD to sound off on what’s right and wrong. And remember, going against the grain is an end in itself for the young.

Add to that the fact that the centre of gravity of the internet is moving Eastwards. Eastern Europeans and Asians are all adding their voices – and words. And that the developing world has an enormous ‘youth bubble’ reaching the age of defiance.

They’ll be holding the keys to the world economy soon – and may just assert their power with a new language. 

Open source democracy, anyone?

So now we know that uncontrolled capitalism ends in tears. And you can be sure that leaders of less democratic countries like China, Iran and Venezuela will offer the opinion that it’s really Western-style liberal democracy that’s to blame, and really, the State has to control every walk of life to protect citizens from regular mass financial suicide.

And let’s be honest, democracy as it’s been practised lately hasn’t really worked. While it’s left the economy alone to boom out of control, we’ve somehow ended up with more and more state control of everything else anyway.

There’ll be a lot of pressure now to extend state control: firstly to the economy, and then to everything else too, particularly immigration, imports and protection of resources.

But the opposite is also quite feasible. A move towards an even more democratic system, made possible via the internet.

In the UK we’ve already seen a prototype version with the rise of e-petitions, whereby if enough people support a proposal, the government is forced to respond. So far it’s killed off the notion of government being allowed to satellite-track our car journeys, but Jeremy Clarkson still hasn’t emerged as a serious contender to Gordon Brown’s premiership, and we haven’t introduced cannabis laws in a “simular mannor” to Amsterdam.

But the basic idea is wonderful. Members of parliament are a waste of time and money: they simply follow their leaders like hungry dogs. When a bill of real importance comes up for voting, most of them have no better understanding of its implications than the man in the street and just vote as they’re told, if they bother to vote at all. In the UK, the upper house is often the only voice of reason, and they’re not even democratically constituted.

With e-democracy, e-mocracy, or wikiocracy, or whatever it might be called, everyone gets to vote on everything. Of course, to prevent a situation where only an organized elite bothers to vote, there would need to be economic incentives to vote – units in a national savings scheme would be sufficient. (And if that doesn’t particularly incentivise the rich, so much the better. They have far too much incentive to fund our politicians at the moment.)

Bills could be proposed by anyone, and others could second them or propose amendments wiki fashion. Perhaps a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote isn’t sufficient: one version of a bill might be worth a ‘7 out of 10’ and another only worth a ‘5’. People could comment on the bills online, just as they comment on news stories and washing machines at the moment, and others could rate the value of their comments. After all, it’s nothing we’re not doing already on hundreds of different websites.

There would also have to be security safeguards to stop other people from hijacking your vote, or from exposing how you voted. Some would say that’s impossible: but the fact is that real e-security is an absolute priority right now anyway to prevent Russian gangsters from destroying what’s left of our economy.

The fact that so many people still aren’t connected to the internet isn’t a big problem either: people could phone or text in their votes once the security problem is licked.

Then we could dissolve parliament, except for an upper house of some kind to act as a counterbalance in the event of some mass media-driven hysteria leading us to ban alcohol or something, and see how real democracy works.

GM, A.I. and my daughter's birthday

I’ve just ordered a unicorn foal to give to my daughter for her sixth birthday. Not one of those nasty bodge jobs where they graft on an ibex horn in the middle of a horse’s forehead, this is the real thing, gene spliced to perfection.

I can’t wait to see my little girl’s face. Especially when the baby unicorn speaks to her in its cute little voice. OK, the unicorn won’t actually have a proper voice box, it would need a human brain as well to do real speech and I’m not sure I’d want that even if it was legal, which, as we all know, it isn’t.

So they’re installing the latest voice synthesizer plus voice-recognition and speech AI into a jewel-like casing and implanting that on the forehead below the horn. It’ll have wi-fi functionality so the AI and voice can be upgraded as my daughter gets older.

Also, if the AI starts talking complete nonsense, it can be rebooted – I can even send it things to say, which could work out brilliantly if my daughter’s having a hissy fit about having a bath or doing her homework or whatever. Imagine. “I eat grass, you should eat your broccoli.”

There’s a power supply built in somehow, works off the horse’s, sorry, unicorn’s, body heat in some ingenious way.

OK, so it’s all costing me an arm and a leg but it’s going to be worth it when the neighbours see it strutting by. It’ll knock their griffin right off its perch. The stupid thing hasn’t even learnt how to fly, gets a broken leg every time they give it a go.

Could unemployed bankers kick-start an invention revolution?

Where have all the inventions gone? Ask people what the most exciting inventions of the past twenty years were and they’ll talk about iPods and Blackberries and, er, memory sticks and Skyboxes and Xboxes and um, wi-fi and broadband.

And while all those inventions are wonderful and have arguably improved our quality of life, they’re hardly on the same level of wow as the inventions of the phone, radio, TV, semi-conductors, X-rays and space rockets. Even the internet was invented quite some while back.

Of course, you can’t deny that innovation has accelerated. Everything’s better, faster, smaller, cheaper and uses less power. But 99% of it is just tweaking what we have already or sticking more and more things together in one box.

Given the tools we have nowadays and the VC money available, and given that modern economies are based on constant innovation and universities churn out design engineers by the thousand, you’d think that there’d be a world-changing invention every other year.

Why on earth isn’t there?

Perhaps the most creative engineers are being offered too much money to design upgrades to bother with true breakthroughs. Or perhaps the real geniuses are too eccentric to gain support from today’s dull, conformist boardrooms.

I don’t know. But I do know that we need grand inventions like never before. The world’s in a hell of a mess and governments, whether democratic or totalitarian, have proved to be utterly ineffective at doing anything about it.

We need inventions that produce and store energy affordably and efficiently on a domestic scale. We need smart clouds that reflect sunlight at the right time and let it through at the right time. And I’d be happy with self-cleaning boot soles that shed dog poo before it smeared itself all over my doormat.

Well, maybe there’s new hope. We’ve suddenly got thousands of wealthy, risk-addicted and highly competitive individuals thrown out of their jobs, looking around for another way to make a buck. They’re not going to invent anything themselves (except for a new financial bubble if we let them) but some of them are quite likely to set themselves up as VCs and invite proposals from the people who can. Some of them may even put a priority on “better world” inventions, as a way to redeem their guilt-ridden souls (well, maybe). 

Perhaps we have even more reason to cheer their redundancies than we thought.

The Large Hadron Collider: the ultimate question generator

The Large Hadron Collider, we’re told, will help scientists solve some of the mysteries of the universe. But while I’m agog with fascination at the whole thing, I have my doubts that the LHC will achieve its stated mission, or even whether the scientists who designed the LHC expect it to.

So far, every time scientists look deeper into quantum scale events, they fill their textbooks with more mysteries than they started with. Why should the LHC change this?

We’re told that the LHC may help resolve the fundamental incompatibility between the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Supposedly gravity can be explained by relativity – in terms of a warping of space-time. Quantum theory, which explains things by a warping of the brain, somehow contradicts the relativity explanation.

So the idea is that colliding the two theories with tiny particles will either get them to shake hands or gravity will cease to exist and Wonderbra sales will go into freefall.

I think this is all a bit optimistic. The last time I looked, there were two theories of relativity (the second one to explain the bits that didn’t quite work in the first one) and umpteen different quantum theories (and that’s just in this universe, which some of the theories claim is just one of an infinite number). To extrapolate, it’s far more likely that the LHC will lead to ever more incompatible theories than it is to resolve the issues they have with each other.

The other weird thing to bear in mind is that the results produced by the LHC may be specific to LHC conditions and to nowhere else. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds.

Using really, really simple apparatus that you can put together yourself in a few minutes, you can show that photons decide how to behave depending on whether and how they’re being observed, like naughty investment bankers. (Try it yourself, it really is mindboggling.)

So how on earth (or under it) do we know that gravitons and gluons and quarks and Higgs Bosons won’t alter their behaviour when they realise that they’re finally under scrutiny? Right now we barely know the first thing about dark energy and dark matter. Putting the stuff under the LHC microscope could just alter its behaviour, with profound results.

Thing is, there’s no way we can know that until we give it a try. And after we’ve done it, we’ll probably never know whether our surveillance has altered the properties of the stuff that fills up 94% of the universe or not.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t fiddle with the basic building blocks of reality. It’s going to be utterly thrilling. All I’m saying is that I expect the universe to be a lot more incomprehensible next year than now.