The following extracts were taken from an Audrey Pollnow review of ‘The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite’ by Daniel Markovits Markovits, a professor of law at Yale, argues that a system that once promoted social mobility has created a self-perpetuating class of elites – …
Category: 03. Past, Present & Future
May 09
21C to be greatest century in history
According to Ian King, banyanhill.com, we were promised flying cars by now but got Facebook – not to mention Google, Twitter and Skype He admits Facebook has its uses but the utopian future expected has yet to arrive – all these new technologies have not yet led to widespread prosperity In 1930, John Maynard Keynes …
Sep 15
A short history of productivity improvement
Lydia Dishman wrote an article for Fast Company outlining steps taken over time to improve productivity – it’s not comprehensive but interesting nevertheless According to her, there’s no definitive source for the start of productivity improvement efforts but there are historical mentions of it in Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776). Smith contended that there were …
Apr 02
International trends in main sectors
As economies develop, their three main sectors – agriculture, manufacturing and services – tend to follow the same broad patterns viz: The agriculture sector shrinks as a % of the economy The manufacturing sector grows to dominate the economy (~ 80%) but, once there, its % begins to decline in favour of the services sector …
Oct 14
Immortality and galactic living beckon?
Recently, some mathematicians claimed to have proved that it is impossible for we humans to live forever, despite what some optimists from the stem cell, genome or cloning camps might say According to Professor Joanna Masel, University of Arizona: “Ageing is mathematically inevitable” – we complicated animals are fated to follow one of two opposing …
Sep 04
Future lives of leisure, not work?
Technological advances mean that many workers will lose their jobs to automation – but billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates say increasing the potential output of every human being is always a good thing Buffett says: “The idea that more output per capita should be harmful to society is crazy: If one person could push …
Jul 27
Inequality is on the move
The proportion of rich to relatively poor keeps changing as more and more of any nation’s people benefit from the huge productivity gains made since the Agricultural and then Industrial Revolutions which started in the 1700s Clearly, most of the poor in most developed G20 nations are a lot better off than their counterparts in …
Jul 12
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The following sweeping pearls of wisdom are 100% from Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum I could not, indeed would not dare, try to improve on them but they surely deserve to be widely read We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way …
Jul 11
Five forces to reshape civilisation by 2030
Peter Morici, economics professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, USA, recently published some interesting views on changes he expects world-wide by 2030: A reworking of democracy – Democratic societies outperformed all others in the 20th century – however, recent populism (ideas which appeal to ordinary people) has led their governments to …