The Futurist

"We know what we are, but we know not what we may become"

- William Shakespeare

How a Small Country Can Quickly Capture Gains from the Technological Economy

In the ATOM publication, we examine how the only way to address the range of seemingly unrelated economic challenges in a holistic manner is to monetize technological deflation.  For reasons described therein, the countries best suited to do this are small countries with high technological density.  Furthermore, we examine the importance of the first-mover advantage, where when a country can monetize the technological deflation in the rest of the world for the benefit of their domestic economy, the first $1 Trillion is practically free money.  

In Chapter 10, I outline a systematic program for how the US could theoretically transition to this modernization of the economy.  But I then identify the four countries that are much more suitable than the US.  These are two Western democracies (Canada and Switzerland) and two Pacific-Rim city states (Singapore and Hong Kong).  But it is possible to create custom solutions for more countries as well.  To determine how to do that, let us go back to a seminal event in the emergence of these ideas.  

What Japan Discovered for the Benefit of Humanity : Few people have any awareness of what an important event happened in April of 2013.  Up to that time, the US was the only country that had embarked on a program to engineer negative interest rates through monetary creation (rather than the punitive and reductive practice of deducting from bank accounts).  Japan decided that after two decades of stagnation and extremely low interest rates, something more drastic and decisive had to be done.  The early success of the US Quantitative Easing (QE) program indicated that a more powerful version of this could be effective against the even worse stagnation that Japan's economy was mired in.  

In April of 2013, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) decided to go big.  They embarked on a program of monetary easing in the amount of 30% of their annual GDP.  This was a huge upgrade over the US QE programs for two reasons.  Firstly, it was much larger as a proportion to the host nation's GDP, and secondly, it had no end date, enabling long-term decisions.  Since the formal economics profession in the West is burdened by a wide range of outdated assumptions about money printing, inflation, and technology, the Western Economists yet again predicted high inflation.  And yet again, they were wrong.  There was no inflation then at the start of the program.  Japan had correctly called the bluff of the inflation specter.  The third-largest economy in the world could print 30% of its GDP per year for five years, and still experience no inflation.  When I observed this, I drew the connection between technological deflation (worldwide) and the vanishing QE (also worldwide).  Most of Japan's QE was flowing outside of Japan (and indeed into the US, which had long since stopped QE, and has forestalled a major market correction only by drawing from overseas QE, mainly from Japan).  Hence, the combined QE of the world was merely offsetting the technological deflation worldwide.  Japan's big gambit proved this, and in doing so, they showed us how much QE can be done before world inflation even hits 3% (i.e. much more than formal economists thought).  

What is a Small, Prosperous Country to do?  While it is always better to be a prosperous country than an impoverished one, almost every small country (the size of Canada or smaller) is faced with a major vulnerability in the modern economy.  Their economy invariably depends on one or two major industries, and is hence vulnerable to a technological disruption that arises from somewhere else in the world.  The need to diversify against such external risks is obvious, but most countries are not on the best path to achieve this goal.  

These days, everyone I meet from the government of some foreign country seems to have the same goal for their country - to create an ecosystem of local technology startups.  This goal is not just extremely difficult to attain, but it is very misguided.  Technology is becoming increasingly governed by winner-take-all dynamics and capital concentration, which means even in the US, rival cities are unable to compete with Silicon Valley (which itself has concentrated into a smaller portion of the San Francisco Bay Area than was the case in the late 1990s).  Small countries with technology sectors, such as Israel and Singapore, started decades ago and have a number of unique factors in their favor, including a major Silicon Valley diaspora.  Hence, a country that thinks it is productive to create a tech startup cluster in their countries will almost certainly create a situation where young people receive training at local expense, only to leave for Silicon Valley.  So these initiatives only end up feeding Silicon Valley at the expense of the original country.  Even if a few tech startups can be forcibly created in the country, it is extremely unlikely that they will achieve any great size within even 15 years.

2000px-Flag_of_New_Zealand.svgTake, for example, a country like New Zealand.  It has many favorable characteristics, but certain disadvantages as well in an increasingly globalized.  It relies on agricultural and dairy exports, as well as the film industry and tourism.  It is too remote to easily plug into the well-traveled routes of tech executives (less than 30M people live within 3000 miles of New Zealand) or major supply chains.  It is too small to be a significant domestic market for tech (particularly when a functional tech ecosystem has to comprise of startups in multiple areas of tech in order to achieve rudimentary diversification).  New Zealand's success in getting Hollywood films shot in New Zealand cannot similarly translate into getting some Silicon Valley business, as an individual film project has a short duration and distinct ending, with key personnel on site for just a brief period.  Technology, by contrast, is inherently endless, and requires interdependency between many firms that have to have co-location.  Furthermore, no society is capable of placing more than 1-2% of its population into high-tech professions and still have them be competitive at the international level (most tech innovation is done by people in the top 1% of cognitive ability).  For this reason, a tech startup ecosystem does not create broad prosperity (it is no secret that even within Silicon Valley, only a fraction of people are earning almost all the new wealth.  Silicon Valley has among the most extreme inequality found anywhere).  

Now, from the research contained in the ATOM publication, we know that there is a far easier solution that can deliver benefits in a much shorter time.  New Zealand's fiscal budget reveals that as of 2018, it collects about $80 Billion in taxes and spends the same $80B per year.  The world was recently generating $200B/month in QE and is still doing an insufficient $120B/month.  The entire annual budget of New Zealand is well below one month of the world's QE - the QE that is needed just to halt technological deflation.  It would be very easy for New Zealand to waive all income taxes, and merely print the same $80B/year from their central bank.  A brief transition period can be inserted just to soften the temporary downgrades that international rating agencies deliver.  But the waiver of income tax will boost New Zealand's economy with immediate effect.  It can even enter and dominate the lucrative tax-haven industry until other countries adopt the same strategy.

Now, it is difficult for government officials, legislators, and statesmen to take such a drastic step, particularly when the entire Economics profession is still mired in outdated thinking about how QE will someday, somehow cause inflation (despite being wrong about this for 9 years and over the course of $20 Trillion in cumulative world QE).  For this reason, a second, less drastic option is also available for New Zealand.  That involves create what I describe as a Sovereign Venture Fund, where the New Zealand Central Bank creates a segregated account that is completely partitioned off from the domestic economy, and prints money to place into that account (say, $100 Billion).  It is crucial that this money not circulate domestically at first, as it would cause inflation.  The purpose of this $100B Sovereign Venture Fund is to invest in startups worldwide that might be disrupting New Zealand's domestic industries.  This model is extremely effective and flexible, as :

  • i) The money was not taken from New Zealand taxpayers, but rather generated for free by the New Zealand Central Bank.  Hence, it can invest in speculative startups across the world with far more boldness.
  • ii) The diversification achieved is immediate, and can always be adjusted with equal immediacy as needed.  
  • iii) The Fund is leveraging the rest of the world's technological deflation for New Zealand's domestic benefit.  
  • iv) Tech startups worldwide become extremely vocal advocates for the fund, and even the country itself.  It boosts New Zealand's branding (generating even more tourism).  
  • v) Fund gains can be used to offset government spending by replacement of income tax, or to fund training to enable citizens to modernize their skills.  It can also provide a greater social safety net to cushion industries buffeted by disruption, but without taxing those who are still working.  This is how to repatriate the money without inflation.  
  • vi) Even a larger fund of $800B can earn $80B/year from a 10% return, which exceeds the total taxes collected by the country.  

The Sovereign Venture Fund is an extremely effective, speedy, and versatile method of economic diversification.  It can be customized for any prosperous country (for example, an oil exporter should simply invest in electric vehicle, battery, and photovoltaic technologies to hedge their economic profile).  As a huge amount of worldwide QE has to be done just to offset technological deflation, there is no contribution to inflation even worldwide, let alone domestically.  As the winds of technological change shift, the Fund can respond almost immediately (unlike a multi-decade process of creating a tech startup ecosystem only to worry if the sectors represented are about to be disrupted).  

Since there is a very high and exponentially rising ceiling of how much world QE can be done before world inflation reaches even 3% (about $400B/month in 2018, as per my calculations), there is an immense first-mover advantage that is possible here.  The first $1 Trillion is effectively 'free money' for the country that decides to be Spartacus.  

New Zealand, in particular, has even more factors that make it a great candidate.  The NZ$ is currently too strong, which is crimping New Zealand's exports.  This sort of program may create a bit of currency weakening just from the initial reaction.  For this additional reason, it is a low-risk, high-return strategy for generating a robust and indeed indestructible safety net for New Zealand's citizens, hedging them from the winds of global technological disruption.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

Chapter 4 : The Overlooked Economics of Technology

Chapter 10 : Implementation of the ATOM Age for Nations

 

 

 

April 03, 2018 in Economics, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (26)

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ATOM Award of the Month, February 2018

image from www.gettysburgflag.comFor this month's ATOM AotM, we will address the sector that any thought leader in technological disruption recognizes as the primary obstruction to real progress.  When we see that sectors that are overdue for disruption, such as medicine, education, and construction all happen to be sectors with high government involvement, the logical progression leads us to question why government itself cannot deliver basic services at comparable costs to private sector equivalents. 

As just one example out of hundreds, in California and other high-tax states, the annual license plate registration can cost $400/year.  What does the taxpayer truly receive?  The ability to trace license plates to driver's licenses and insurance.  Why should such a simple system cost so much?  It seems that it should only cost $2/year under 2018 technological levels.  By contrast, note how much value you receive from a $96/year Netflix subscription.  By all accounts, many basic government services could easily implement cost reductions of 98-99%.  

While the subject of government inefficiency vs. the ATOM is perhaps the primary topic of this website and the ATOM publication, just one small example across the world demonstrates what a modernized government looks like.  The tiny country of Estonia contains just 1.3 million people.  A desire to catch up from decades of being part of the Soviet Union perhaps spurred them into a unique desire to modernize and digitize government services into a state that Americans would scarcely believe could exist.  Here are some articles by publication about Estonia's successful digitization, where you can read about specific details :

The New Yorker

The Atlantic

Fortune

Estonia has also taken early steps towards certain ATOM realities.  While it does have high consumption taxes, income tax is a flat 21%, thereby saving immense costs in complexity and processing (which cost the US over $700 Billion/yr).  If only it figures out the ATOM principles around monetization of technological deflation, it could reduce income taxes to zero.  

Now, for the unfortunate part.  When a country manages to produce a product or service that the rest of the world wants and cannot produce at the same quality and price themselves, the first country can export the product to the outside world.  From Taiwanese chipsets to South Korean smartphones and television sets to Italian cheeses, the extension of sales to exports is straightforward.  Yet in the governance sector, despite being a third of the world economy, Estonia has no market where it can sell its services to hasten the digitization of other governments.  Whether at the Federal, State, City, or County level, the United States has hundreds of governments that could simply hire Estonian consultants and implementation staff to rapidly install new services.  This could be lucrative enough to make Estonia a very wealthy country, and then attract competition from other countries (such as nearby Finland, which is attempting to follow Estonia's path).  Yet, unlike a private sector product or service, governance just does not value efficiency or productivity to this extent.  The State of California alone could save billions of dollars per year, and either spend the taxes on other things, or (preferably) pass the savings on to the taxpayers.

Before long, the ATOM will force even the largest nation states to improve their productivity of government services.  But that process will be messy, and government officials may take a scorched-earth approach to defending their own rice bowls.  Let us hope that Estonia inspires at least a few other countries into voluntary modernization.   

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

10. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Nations.

 

 

February 28, 2018 in ATOM AotM, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (20)

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ATOM Award of the Month, January 2018

With the new year, we have a new ATOM AotM.  This is an award for a trend that ought to be easy for anyone to recognize who is at all familiar with Moore's Law-type concepts, yet is greatly overlooked despite quite literally being in front of people's faces for hours a day.  

The most crude and uninformed arguments against accelerating technological progress are either of a "Word processing is no better than in 1993, so Moore's Law no longer matters" or "People can't eat computers, so the progress in their efficiency is useless" nature.  However, the improvements in semiconductor and similar technologies endlessly finds ways into previously low-tech products, which is the most inherent ATOM principle.  

1960s TVThe concept of television has altered cultures across the world more than almost any other technology.  The range of secondary and tertiary economies created around it are vast.  The 1960 set pictured here, for $795, cost 26% of US annual per capita GDP at the time.  The equivalent price today would be $15,000.  Content was received over the air and this was often subject to poor reception.  The weight and volume of the device relative to the area of the screen was high, and the floorspace consumed was substantial.  There were three network channels in the US (while most other countries had no broadcasts at all).  There was no remote control.  

There were slow, incremental improvements in resolution and screen-size-to-unit-weight ratios from the 1960s until around 2003, when one of the first thin television sets was available at the retail level.  It featured a 42" screen, was only 4 inches thick, and cost $8000.  Such a wall-mountable display, despite the high price, was a substantial improvement above the cathode ray tube sets of the time, most of which were too large and heavy to be moved by one person, and consumed a substantial amount of floor space.

image from assets.hardwarezone.comBut in true ATOM exemplification, this minimally-improving technology suddenly got pulled into rapid, exponential improvement (part of how deflationary technology increased from 0.5% of World GDP in 1999 to 1% in 2008 to 2% in 2017).  Once the flat screen TV was on the market, plasma and LCD displays eventually gave way to LED displays, which are a form of semiconductor and improve at Moore's Law rates. 

Today, even 60-inch sets, a size considered to be extravagant in 2005, are very inexpensive.  image from infographic.statista.comLike any other old electronic device, slightly out of date sets are available on Craigslist in abundance (contributing to the Upgrade Paradox).  A functional used set that cost $8000 in 2003 can hardly be sold at all in 2018; the owner is lucky if someone is willing to come and take it for free.    

Since once ATOM-speed improvements assimilate a technology, the improvements never stop, and sets of the near future may be thin enough to be flexible, along with resolutions of 4K, 8K, and beyond.  Sets larger than 240" (20 feet) are similarly declining in price and visible in increasing numbers in commercial use (i.e. Times Square everywhere).  This is hence one of the most visible examples of ATOM disruption, and how cities of today have altered their appearance relative to the recent past.  

This is a large ATOM disruption, as there are still 225 Million new sets sold each year, amounting to $105 Billion/year in sales.  

 

Related :

The Impact of Computing

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

 

January 21, 2018 in Accelerating Change, ATOM AotM, Computing, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (53)

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ATOM-Oriented Class at Stanford

I have been selected to teach a class at Stanford Continuing Studies, titled 'The New Economics of Technological Disruption'.  For Bay Area residents, it would be great to see you there.  There are no assignments or exams for those who are not seeking a letter grade, and by Stanford standards, the price ($525 for an 8-week class) is quite a bargain.  

35 44 students have already signed up.  See the course description, dates, and more.  

 

 

January 07, 2018 in Accelerating Change, Economics, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Recent TV Appearances

Inch by inch, the ATOM is reaching more people.  

I was invited back to Reference Point a second time to discuss the ATOM :


I was also back on FutureTalk a second time to discuss blockchain and cryptocurrencies :

Remember that older media content for the ATOM is here.

December 24, 2017 in Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (11)

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ATOM Award of the Month, November 2017

image from upload.wikimedia.orgFor this month, the ATOM AotM goes outward.  Much like the September ATOM AotM, this is another dimension of imaging.  But this time, we focus on the final frontier.  Few have noticed that the rate of improvement of astronomical discovery is now on an ATOM-worthy trajectory, such that this merited an entire chapter in the ATOM publication.  

Here at The Futurist, we have been examining telescopic progress for over a decade.  In September of 2006, I estimated that telescope power was rising at a compounding rate of 26%/year, and that this trend has been ongoing for decades.  26%/year happens to be the square root of Moore's Law, which is precisely what is to be expected, since to double resolution by halving the size of a pixel, one pixel has to be divided into four.  This is also why video game and CGI resolution rises at 26%/year.  

Rising telescope resolution enabled the first exoplanet to be discovered in 1995, and then a steady stream after 2005.  This estimated rate led me to correctly predict that the first Earth-like planets would be discovered by 2010-11, and that happened right on schedule.  But as with many such thresholds, after initial fanfare, the new status quo manifests and people forget what life was like before.  This leads to an continuous underestimation of the rate of change by the average person.

Histogram_Chart_of_Discovered_Exoplanets_as_of_2017-03-08Then, in May 2009, I published one of the most important articles ever written on The Futurist : SETI and the Singularity.  At that time, only 347 exoplanets were known, almost all of which were gas giants much larger than the Earth.  That number has grown to 3693 today, or over ten times as many.  Note how we see the familiar exponential curve inherent to every aspect of the ATOM.  Now, even finding Earth-like planets in the 'life zone' is no longer remarkable, which is another aspect of human psychology towards the ATOM - that a highly anticipated and wondrous advance quickly becomes a normalized status quo and most people forget all the previous excitement.   

1280px-KeplerHabitableZonePlanets-20170616The rate of discovery may soon accelerate further as key process components collapse in cost.  Recent computer vision algorithms have proven themselves to be millions of times faster than human examiners.  A large part of the cost of exoplanet discovery instruments like the Kepler Space Observatory is the 12-18 month manual analysis period.  If computer vision can perform this task in seconds, the cost of comparable future projects plummets, and new exoplanets are confirmed almost immediately rather than every other year.  This is another massive ATOM productivity jump that removes a major bottleneck in an existing process structure.  A new mission like Kepler would cost dramatically less than the previous one, and will be able to publish results far more rapidly.  

Given the 26%/year trendline, the future of telescopic discovery becomes easier to predict.  In the same article, I made a dramatic prediction about SETI and the prospects of finding extraterrestrial intelligence.  Many 'enlightened' people are certain that there are numerous extraterrestrial civilizations.  While I too believed this for years (from age 6 to about 35), as I studied the accelerating rate of change, I began to notice that within the context of the Drake equation, any civilization even slightly more advanced than us would be dramatically more advanced.  In terms of such a civilization, while their current activities might very well be indistinguishable from nature to us, their past activities might still be visible as evidence of their existence at that time.  This led me to realize that while there could very well be thousands of planets in our own galaxy that are slightly less advanced that us, it becomes increasingly difficult for there to be one more advanced than us that still manages to avoid detection.  Other galaxies are a different story, simply because the distance between galaxies is itself 10-20 times more than the diameter of the typical galaxy.  Our telescopic capacity is rising 26%/year after all, and the final variable of the Drake equation, fL, has risen from just 42 years at the time of Carl Sagan's famous clip in 1980, to 79 years now, or almost twice as long.  

Hence, the proclamation I had set in 2009 about the 2030 deadline (21 years away at the time) can be re-affirmed, as the 2030 deadline is now only 13 years away.  

2030

Despite the enormity of our galaxy and the wide range of signals that may exist, even this is eventually superseded by exponential detection capabilities.  At least our half of the galaxy will have received a substantial examination of signal traces by 2030.  While a deadline 13 years away seems near, remember that the extent of examination that happens 2017-30 will be more than in all the 400+ years since Galileo, for Moore's Law reasons alone.  The jury is out until then.  

(all images from Wikipedia or Wikimedia).  

 

Related Articles :

New Telescopes to Reveal Untold Wonders

SETI and the Singularity

Telescope Power - Yet Another Accelerating Technology

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

12. The ATOM's Effect on the Final Frontier

  

 

November 20, 2017 in Accelerating Change, ATOM AotM, Space Exploration, The Singularity | Permalink | Comments (122)

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ATOM Award of the Month, October 2017

For this month, the ATOM AotM goes to an area we have not visited yet.  Enterprise software and associated hardware technologies may appear boring at first, but there is currently a disruption in this area that is generating huge productivity gains.  

AWSAmazon Web Services (AWS) is an ever growing list of services that replaces computing, storage, and networking expenditures at client companies.  At present, over 90 different services are available.  Here is a slideshow of the various companies and sectors being disrupted by AWS.  

loud computing itself is relatively new, but this revolution by Amazon as taken direct slices out of the existing businesses of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, which were slow to deploy cloud-based solutions since they wanted to extend the lives of their existing product lines.  Their anti-technology behavior deserves to be punished by the ATOM, and Amazon obliged.  AWS is set to register $14 Billion in revenue for 2017, most of which has replaced a greater sum of revenue at competing companies.  

The biggest value is the lower cost of entry to smaller companies from the on-demand flexibility enabled by AWS.  Now that IT Security and Compliance is far more cost-effective through AWS, the barrier to entry for smaller firms is lowered.  This is particularly useful for clients in far-flung locations, enabling a decentralization that facilitates greater technological progress.  Upgrades across computing, storage, software, networking, and security are disseminated seamlessly, and since far less hardware is used, the upgrade process is far more materially efficient.  This removes a variety of smaller bottlenecks to technological progress, mitigating the corporate equivalent of the Upgrade Paradox.         

Another great benefit is elasticity, where a company does not have to worry about estimating hardware capacity needs in the future, which can often lead to overbuying of rapidly deflating technologies, or underbuying, which can cause customer dissatisfaction due to slow speeds.  All of this can now be scaled dynamically through AWS.  

For the productivity gains inherent to the scale and dynamism of AWS, it receives the October 2017 ATOM AotM.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

 

October 31, 2017 in ATOM AotM, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (12)

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ATOM Award of the Month, September 2017

For September 2017, the ATOM AotM takes a very visual turn.  With some aspects of the ATOM, seeing is believing.    

Before photography, the only image capture was through sketches and paintings.  This was time-consuming, and well under 1% were prosperous enough to have even a single hand-painted portrait of themselves.  For most people, after they died, their families had only memories via which to imagine faces.  If portraits were this scarce, other images were even scarcer.  When image capture was this scarce, people certainly had no chance of seeing places, things, or creatures from far away.  It was impossible to know much about the broader world.    

The very first photograph was taken as far back as 1826, and black&white was the dominant form of the medium for over 135 years.  That it took so long for b&w to transition to color may seem quite surprising, but the virtually non-existent ATOM during this period is consistent with this glacial rate of progress.  The high cost of cameras meant that the number of photographs taken in the first 100 years of photography (1826-1926) was still an extremely small.  Eventually, the progression to color film seemed to be a 'completion' of the technological progression in the minds of most people.  What more could happen after that?  

But the ATOM was just getting started, and it caught up with photography around the turn of the century with relatively little fanfare, even though it was notable that film-based photography and the hassles associated with it were removed from the consumer experience.  The cost of film was suddenly zero, as was the transit time and cost from the development center.  Now, everyone could have thousands of photos, and send those over email endlessly.  Yet, standalone cameras still cost $200 as of 2003, and were too large to be carried around everywhere at all times.  

CamerasAs the ATOM progressed, digital cameras got smaller and cheaper, even as resolution continued to rise.  It was discovered that the human eye does in fact adapt to higher resolution, and finds previously acceptable lower resolution unacceptable after adapting to higher resolution.  Technology hence forces higher visual acuity and the associated growth of the brain's visual cortex.  

With the rise of the cellular phone, the ATOM enabled more and more formerly discrete devices to be assimilated into the phone, and the camera was one of the earliest and most obvious candidates.  The diffusion of this was very rapid, as we can see from the image that contrasts the 2005 vs. 2013 Papal inaugurations in Vatican City.  Before long, the cost of an integrated camera trended towards zero, to the extent that there is no mobile device that does not have one.  As a result, 2 billion people have digital cameras with them at all times, and stand ready to photograph just about anything they think is important.  Suddenly, there are countless cameras at every scene.  

But lest you think the ubiquity of digital cameras is the end of the story, you are making the same mistake as those who thought color photography on film in 1968 was the end of the road.  Remember that the ATOM is never truly done, even after the cost of a technology approaches zero.  Digital imaging itself is just the preview, for now we have it generating an ever-expanding pile of an even more valuable raw material : data.  

Images contain a large volume of data, particularly the data that associates things with each other (the eyes are to be above the nose, for example).  Data is one of the two fuels of Artificial Intelligence (the other being inexpensive parallel processing).  Despite over a decade of digital images being available on the Internet, only now are there enough of them for AI to draw extensive conclusions from them, and for Google's image search to be a major force in the refinement of Google's Search AI.  Most people don't even remember when Google added image search to its capabilities, but now it is hard to imagine life without it.  

Today, we have immediate access to image search that answers questions in the blink of an eye, and fosters even greater curiosity.  In a matter of seconds, you can look up images for mandrill teeth, the rings of Saturn, a transit of Venus over the Sun, the coast of Capri, or the jaws of Carcharocles Megalodon.  More searches lead to more precise recommendations, and more images continue to be added.  In the past, the accessibility of this information was so limited that the invaluable tangents of curiosity just never formed.  Hence, the creation of new knowledge speeds up.  The curious can more easily pull ahead of the incurious.  

Digital imaging is one of the primary transformations that built the Internet age, and is a core pillar of the impending ascent of AI.  For this reason, it receives the September 2017 ATOM AotM.    

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

 

September 30, 2017 in Accelerating Change, Artificial Intelligence, ATOM AotM, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (80)

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ATOM Award of the Month, August 2017

For the August 2017 ATOM AotM, we will bend one of the rules.  The rule is that a disruption already has to have begun, and be presently underway.  

But this time, a conversation in the last month's comments brought forth a vision of a quad-layer disruption that is already in the early stages and will manifest in no more than 15 years time.  When fully underway, this disruption will further tighten the screws on government bodies that are far too sclerotic to adapt to the speed of the ATOM.  

To start, we will list out the progression of each of the four disruptions separately.

Batteries1) Batteries are improving quickly, and while electric vehicles are not yet competitive in terms of cost and charging speeds (partly due to the true cost of imported oil not being directly visible to consumers).  At the same time, an electric car has far fewer moving parts, and fewer liquids to deal with.  By many estimates, an electric car can last 300,000 before significant deterioration occurs, vs. 150,000 for an internal combustion engine car.  Now, under the current ownership model, a car is driven only 12,000 miles/year and is parked 90% of the time or more.  The second half of an electric vehicle's lifetime (150,001-300,000 miles) would only begin in year 13 and extend until year 25 of ownership, which is not practical.  If only there were a way to avoid having the car remain idle 90% of the time, occupying parking spaces.  It may take until 2032 for electric cars to compress the cost delta to the extent of being superior to ICE cars in total ownership costs for the early years, which then leads to the dividend available in the later years of the electric car's life.  

2) Autonomous vehicles are a very overhyped technology.  Stanford University demonstrated an early prototype in 2007.  Yet even a decade later, a fully autonomous car that operates without any human involvement, let alone the benefit of having a network of such cars, seems scarcely any closer.

Eventually, by about 2032, cars will be fully autonomous, widely adopted, and communicate with each other, greatly increasing driving efficiency through high speeds and far less distance between cars than humans can manage.  Uber-like services will cost 60-80% less than they do now, since the earnings of the human driver are no longer an element of cost, and Uber charges just 20-30% of the fare itself.  It will be cheaper for almost everyone to take the on-demand service all the time, than to own a car outright or even take the bus.  If such a car is driven 20 hours a day, it can in fact accrue 300,000 miles in just 5 years of use.  This effectively is the only way that electric cars can be driven all the way up to the 300,000 limit.  

Retail Square Footage3) The displacement of brick and mortar retail by e-commerce has far greater implications for the US than for any other country, given the excessive level of land devoted to retails stores and their parking lots.  The most grotesque example of this is in Silicon Valley itself (and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles), where vast retail strip mall parking lots are largely empty, yet are within walking distance of tall, narrow townhouses that cost $1.5M despite taking up footprints of barely 600 sqft each.  

As the closure of more retail stores progresses, and on-demand car usage reduces the need for so many parking spaces, these vast tracts of land can be diverted for another purpose.  In major California metros, the economically and morally sound strategy would be to convert the land into multi-story buildings, preferentially residential.  But extreme regulatory hurdles and resistance towards construction of any new housing supply will leave this land as dead capital for as long as the obstructionists can manage.  

But in the vast open suburbs of the American interior, land is about to go from plentiful to extremely plentiful.  If you think yards in the suburbs of interior cities are large, wait until most of their nearby strip malls are available for redevelopment, and the only two choices are either residential land or office buildings (there are more than enough parks and golf courses in those locations already).  Areas where population is already flat or declining will have little choice but to build even more, and hope that ultra-low real estate costs can attract businesses (this will be no problem at all if the ATOM-DUES program is implemented by then).  

This disruption is not nearly as much a factor in any country other than the US and, to a lesser extent, Australia, as other countries did not misallocate so much land to retail (and the associated parking lots) in the first place.   

Construction4) This fourth disruption is not as essential to this future as the first three, but is highly desirable, simply due to how overdue the disruption is.  It is quite shocking that the least productive industry in the private sector relative to 50 years ago is not education, not medicine, but construction.  US construction productivity has fallen over the last 50 years.  Not merely failed to rise, mind you, but outright declined in absolute terms.  

But remember, under ATOM principles, the more overdue a disruption is, and the more artificial the obstructions thwarting it, the more sudden it is when it eventually happens.  China is not held back by the factors that have led to the abysmally low productivity in US construction, and when there is so much retail land to repurpose, pressure to revive that dead capital will just become too great, even if that means Chinese construction companies have to come in to provide what the US counterparts cannot.  This pressure could be the catalyst of the long overdue construction productivity catchup.  This topic warrants a lengthy article of its own, but that is for another day.  

Hence, the first three factors, and possibly the fourth, combine by 2032 to generate a disruption that will be so comprehensive in the US that the inability of government to change zoning laws and permitting at anything close to the speed of market demand will be greatly exposed.

The first disruption, batteries, alone could be an ATOM AotM, but this time, the cumulative disruption from these multiple factors, even if it will take the next 15 years to accomplish, gets the award.

Related :

The End of Petrotyranny (and Victory)

Why I Want(ed) Oil to Hit $120 per Barrel

A Future Timeline for Automobiles

A Future Timeline for Energy

Why $70/Barrel Oil is (was) Good for America

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

11. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Individuals

 

August 27, 2017 in ATOM AotM, Economics, Energy, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (72)

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ATOM Award of the Month, July 2017

TaxiThe ATOM AotM for July 2017 reminds us of the true core principles of the ATOM.  Whenever anything becomes too expensive relative to value provided, particularly if done so through artificial government intervention in markets, a technological solution invariably replaces the expensive incumbent.  

Taxi medallions, particularly in New York City, are just the crudest form of city government corruption.  Drunk with its own greed, the city ratcheted up the price of taxi medallions from $200,000 in 2003 to $1M in 2013, which is far faster than even the S&P500, let alone inflation.  Note how there was no decline at all during the 2008-09 recession.  This predatory extraction from consumers, much like high oil prices artificially engineered by OPEC, created a market window that might otherwise have not existed until several years later.  This induced the ATOM to address this imbalance sooner than it otherwise might have. and gritty entrepreneurs swiftly founded companies like Uber and Lyft, which provided a dramatically better value for money.  As a result, the price of taxi medallions in NYC fell by 80% from the inflated peak.  The ATOM was at a sufficiently advanced level for the technological response to be as rapid as it was (unlike with, say, expensive oil in the 1973-81 period, when there was almost no ATOM of macroeconomic significance).  

Remember that the reduction in cost for a certain ride and demolition of a seemingly intractable government graft obstacle is just the first of several ATOM effects.  The second is the security of each driver and passenger being identified before the ride.  The third is the volume of data that these millions of rides generate (data being one of the two core fuels of Artificial Intelligence).  The fourth is the ability to dynamically adjust to demand spikes (the surge pricing that the economically illiterate malign).  The fifth is the possibility of new service capabilities altogether.  Recall this excerpt from Chapter 11 of the ATOM :  

Automobile commuters with good jobs but lengthy commutes have joined Uber-type platforms to take a rider along with them on the commute they have to undertake anyway. The driver earns an extra $200-$400/week (against which an appropriate portion of car and smartphone costs can be applied as deductions) with no incremental input time or cost.  Meanwhile, other commuters enjoy having one less car on the road for each such dynamically generated carpooling pair.  The key is that a dead commute is now monetized even by corporate-class people, increasing passengers per car and reducing traffic congestion, while replacing dedicated taxicabs.  For the macroeconomy, it also creates new VM where none existed before.

The creation of an entirely new sub-economy, with entirely new velocity-of-money (VM), is where new real wealth creation is the purest.  This effect of these ride-sharing platforms is still in its infancy.  When autonomous vehicles replace human drivers, the loss of driver income is matched (indeed exceeded in post-tax terms) by savings to passengers.  

It does not matter which company ultimately wins (Uber is having some PR problems lately), but rather that the disruption is already irreversible and woven into the fabric of the ATOM and broader society.  Maybe Uber and Lyft will just be to transportation services what Data General and Commodore were to computing.  The point is, this is a superb example of how the ATOM works, and how the transformation is often multi-layered.  

 

July 19, 2017 in ATOM AotM, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (27)

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Recent TV Appearances for The ATOM

I have recently appeared on a couple of television programs.  The first was Reference Point with Dave Kocharhook, as a two-part Q&A about The ATOM.


The next one was FutureTalk TV with Martin Wasserman, that included a 10-minute Q&A about The ATOM.

Inch-by-inch, we will get there.  The world does not have to settle for our current substandard status quo.

As always, all media coverage is available here.  

 

 

June 05, 2017 in Accelerating Change, Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Technology, The ATOM, The Singularity | Permalink | Comments (24)

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ATOM Award of the Month, May 2017

For May 2017, the award goes in a direction that not many associate with technological disruption.  Remember that the ATOM relates to not merely products that themselves have a rapidly improving cost/benefit profile, but also towards technological improvements in products, processes, and services that themselves may not be high-tech.  

The standard shipping container is just an inert box, and most people rarely ever see one.  It is not improving from one year to the next in any meaningful sense.  The real innovation was in the process technologies enabled through this standardization, and the immense deflation derived through these technologies.  

Malcolm McLean, a trucking tycoon, envisioned the idea of standardized container sizes, and generously decided to give his idea away for free rather than patent it and seek profit.  After the first experiment was a success, rapid adoption and port standardization followed.  

ShippingAs we can see from the table (click to enlarge), the introduction of the shipping container swiftly led to an almost 20-fold increase in unloading rates from 1965 to 1970, an unusually rapid improvement of any productivity metric for such an early era.  This increased speed led to larger ships, and this in turn led to larger and fewer ports.  From an ATOM perspective, these productivity gains introduced a great deal of deflation in the prices of the goods themselves.  A broader range of goods could be traded internationally, leading to many more countries being able to compete for the same export demand.  New countries could merely join existing supply chains, rather that build entire industries from scratch.  China's entry into international trade could not have been as rapid as it was, without the shipping container, and the advantages it conferred onto large countries over smaller ones, and to low cost production countries over expensive ones.  This advantage is ongoing, as countries poorer than China are still in the process of integrating the low-hanging fruits of benefit that the shipping container provides.  

Despite this introduction having begun almost 50 years ago, the full ATOM effect continues to increase.  The precise logistics of the entire container-shipping ecosystem demands more powerful computation, sensors, and other innovations like RFID tags and GPS tracking.  Furthermore, supply chains transporting trillions of dollars of goods each year generate a huge amount of data, which for the longest time was not even being utilized.  Any large and ever-growing collection of data will attract Artificial Intelligence onto it, and this AI will generate additional productivity gains for participants in the supply chain, and hence price reductions for end-users.  

Since shipping containers are produced in such volume, there are ideas emerging to use them elsewhere, such as a building block for modular construction, or as simple pop-in swimming pool enclosures.  

For this reason, the shipping container, an inert metal box that transformed the entire award, receives the May 2017 ATOM AotM.  

H/T : Geoman 

 

May 24, 2017 in ATOM AotM, China, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (11)

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ATOM Award of the Month, April 2017

It is time for the ATOM AotM for April 2017, for which we return to an article I wrote way back in 2009.  That article is titled 'The Publishing Disruption', and at the time of writing, we were on the brink of a transformation in content publication as seismic as the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.  Since that time, the anticipated sequence of events unfolded as expected.  

To excerpt from that article, consider how many centuries of background evolution occurred to get us to where we were in 2007 :

What a unique thing a book is.  Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume.  Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency.  Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions. 

Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monastaries knew how to read.  There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century.  Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate. 

But with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, it became possible to make multiple copies of the same book, and before long, the number of books in Europe increased from thousands to millions. 

But then, note how incredibly low-tech and low-productivity the traditional publishing industry still was well into the 21st century : 

Fast forward to the early 21st century, and books are still printed by the millions.  Longtime readers of The Futurist know that I initially had written a book (2001-02), and sought to have it published the old-fashioned way.  However, the publishing industry, and literary agents, were astonishingly low-tech.  They did not use email, and required queries to be submitted via regular mail, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope included.  So I had to pay postage in both directions, and wait several days for a round trip to hear their response.  And this was just the literary agents.  The actual publishing house, if they decide to accept your book, would still take 12 months to produce and distribute the book even after the manuscript was complete.  Even then, royalties would be 10-15% of the retail price.  This prospect did not seem compelling to me, and I chose to parse my book into this blog you see before you.

The refusal by the publishing industry to use email and other productivity-enhancing technologies as recently as 2003 kept their wages low.  Editors always moaned that they worked 60 hours a week just to make $50,000 a year, the same as they made in 1970.  My answer to them is that they have no basis to expect wage increases without increasing their productivity through technology. 

An industry this far behind was just begging to be disrupted.  As we have seen from the ATOM, the more overdue a particular disruption is, the more dramatic and swift the disruption when it eventually occurs, as the distance to travel just to revert to the trendline of that particular innovation, is great.  Proceeding further in the original article :

The Amazon Kindle launched in late 2007 at the high price of $400.  Many people feel that the appeal of holding a physical book in our hands cannot be replaced by a display screen, and take a cavalier attitude towards dismissing e-readers.  The tune changes upon learning that the price of a book on an e-reader is just a third of what the paper form at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, with sales tax, would cost. 

As of 2017, an entry-level Kindle 8 costs just $80 (with 3 GB of storage), yet is far more advanced than the $400 Kindle of 2007 (with just 250 MB of storage).  Cumulative Kindle sales are estimated to be over 100 million units now.  

BooksBut the Kindle hardware is not the real disruption, as it is a new purchase imposed on people who needed no such device to read paper books.  The real ATOM disruption is in books themselves.  Now, an author can publish directly on Kindle, and at a $10 sales price, immediately begins to receive a 70% royalty.  Contrast that with the 10-15% royalty on a $20 sales price in traditional book publishing, that too after a 12-month waiting period even after the manuscript is complete.  While bound books may still make sense for famous authors, the new market created by the Kindle has enabled the publication of many books that only expect to sell 10,000 copies.  There is no material involved, so the production and distribution cost of any such publication has literally fallen by a factor of millions.  A hefty cost is now no cost, precisely as the ATOM predicts.   

2017 is the year where e-book sales have surpassed print and audio book sales, as per the chart.  Since the previous article, brick and mortar bookstores have seen a torrent of closures.  Borders Bookstores has completely shut down all of its 511 bookstores in the US.  Barnes & Noble still exists, partly due to capturing the residual Borders revenue, but a growing share of B&N's in-store revenue is now from the coffee shop, magazines, and certain specialty book sales.   

The unshackling of the bottom 99% of authors and aspiring authors from the extreme inefficiency of the traditional publishing industry has unleashed more content than was ever possible before, and is a market upgrade just as significant as that of the Gutenberg press in the 15th century.  It is also a perfect demonstration of the accelerating rate of change, for while it took centuries for the diffusion of printed books to manifest, the e-book transformation was in mere years.  For this reason, the Amazon Kindle and e-book ecosystem are the winner of April 2017's ATOM Award of the Month.  I need more candidate submissions for future ATOM AotM awards.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

3 : Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

4 : The Overlooked Economics of Technology

 

April 30, 2017 in ATOM AotM, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (40)

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The Upgrade Paradox

There is an emerging paradox within the flow of technological diffusion.  The paradox is, ironically, that rapid progress of technology has constrained its own ability to progress further.  

6a00d83452455969e201bb090d6d28970d-320wiWhat exactly is the meaning of this?  As we see from Chapter 3 of the ATOM, all technological products currently amount to about 2% of GDP.  The speed of diffusion is ever faster (see chart), and the average household is taking on an ever-widening range of rapidly advancing products and services.    

Refer to the section from that chapter, about the number of technologically deflating nodes in the average US household by decade (easily verified by viewing any TV program from that decade), and a poll for readers to declare their own quantity of nodes.  To revisit the same thing here :

Include : Actively used PCs, LED TVs and monitors, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, VR headsets, digital picture frames, LED light bulbs, home networking devices, laser printers, webcams, DVRs, Kindles, robotic toys, and every external storage device.  Count each car as 1 node, even though modern cars may have $4000 of electronics in them.

Exclude : Old tube TVs, film cameras, individual software programs and video games, films on storage discs, any miscellaneous item valued at less than $5, or your washer/dryer/oven/clock radio just for having a digital display, as the product is not improving dramatically each year.

 
 
 The estimation of results that this poll would have yielded by decade, for the US, is :

1970s and earlier : 0

1980s : 1-2

1990s : 2-4

2000s : 5-10

2010s : 12-30

2020s : 50-100

2030s : Hundreds?

Herein lies the problem for the average household.  The cost to upgrade PCs, smartphones, networking equipment, TVs, storage, and in some cases the entire car, has become expensive.  This can often run over $2000/year, and unsurprisingly, upgrades have been slowing.  

The technology industry is hence a victim of its own success. By releasing products that cause so much deflation and hence low Nominal GDP growth and sluggish job growth, the technology industry has been constricting its own demand base.  Amidst all the job-loss through technological automation, the hiring of the tech industry itself is constrained if fewer people can keep buying their products.  If the bottom 70-80% of US household income brackets can no longer keep up with technological upgrades, their ability to keep up with new economic opportunities will suffer as well.  

This is why monetization of technological progress into a dividend is crucial, which is where the ATOM Direct Universal Exponential Stipend (DUES) fits in.  It is so much more than a mere 'basic income', since it is directly indexed to the exact speed to technological progress.  As of April 2017, the estimated DUES amount in the US is $500/month (up from $400/month back in February 2016 when the ATOM was first published).  A good portion of this cushion enables faster technology upgrades and more new adoption.  

 

April 16, 2017 in Accelerating Change, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (21)

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ATOM Award of the Month, March 2017

It is that time of the month again.  For our third ever award of the ATOM AotM, we return to an article I wrote over 10 years ago about the lighting revolution.  At that time, when the disruption was still in the future, I highlighted how the humble status of the light fixture leads to an associated disruption going widely unnoticed.  That continues to be true even today, despite the important product transition that most people have already undertaken.  

LightingSo the ATOM AotM award for March 2017 goes to the LED lightbulb.  Something that most people do not even notice is a major engine of the ATOM, as it has introduced rapid price/performance improvements into what used to be a stagnant product.

Charge of the Light Brigade :  Remember that the average household has about 25 light bulbs on average.  From the chart, we can see that light output per until of energy and cost per watt of LED lighting are both improving rapidly, leading to a double-exponential effect.  Lighting is hence now fully in the path of the ATOM and is seeing progress at a rate entirely beyond what the predecessor technology could have have experienced, and is indeed one of the fastest technology shifts ever (see the second chart).  Bulbs are now purchased in packs of 4-12 units, rather than the single-unit purchases of the recent past.  The expected electricity savings worldwide are estimated to be over $100 Billion per year in the near future.  

LED DiffusionThe domino effects of this are immense.  Follow the sequence of steps below :

  • LED bulbs are reducing the electricity consumed by lighting.
  • This reduction in demand more than accommodates the proliferation of electric cars.  The first 100 million electric cars worldwide (a level we are still extremely far from) will merely offset the loss of electricity demand for lighting.  
  • The spread of electric cars with no net rise in electricity consumption nonetheless reduces oil consumption and hence oil imports.  The US already has a trade surplus with OPEC, for the first time in half a century, and this force is strengthening further.  Even if the price per barrel of oil had not fallen through fracking, the number of imported barrels still would have plunged.  
  • So even though most lighting is not fueled by oil, it created a puncture point through which a second-degree blow to oil demand arose.  

That is truly amazing, making LED lighting not just a component of the ATOM but one of the largest disruptions currently underway.  

That concludes this month's ATOM AotM.  I need more reader submissions to ensure we have a good award each month.  

Related :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening.

The Imminent Revolution in Lighting, and Why it is More Important Than You Think

 

March 26, 2017 in ATOM AotM, Energy, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (21)

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Mortgages : The Ultimate FinTech Disruption

When people think of FinTech, they think of a few things like peer-to-peer lending, payment companies, asset management firms, or maybe even cryptocurrencies. But one of the most outdated yet burdensome costs in all of finance, spread across the widest range of people, is still overlooked. The mortgage lending process is heavily padded with fees that are remnants of a bygone age.

Enter the ATOM.  

First, we must begin with the effect of technology on short-term interest rates. The Fed Funds rate was close to zero for several years, and it is apparent that any brief increase in rates by the Federal Reserve will swiftly be reversed once markets punish the move in subsequent months. We are in an age of accelerating and exponential technological deflation, and not only will the Fed Funds rate have to be zero forever, but money-printing will be needed to offset deflation. This process has already been underway for years, and is not yet recognized as part of the long term trend of technological progress. 

A 30-year mortgage was the standard format for decades, with a variable-rate mortgage seen as risky after a borrower locks in a low rate on their 30-year mortgage. But when the Fed Funds rate was at nearly zero, the LIBOR (London Interbank Offer Rate) hovered around 0.18% or so. If you get a variable-rate mortgage, then the rate is calculated off of the LIBOR, with an additional premium levied by the lending institution. This premium is about 1.5% or more. When the LIBOR rate was over 3% not too many years ago, the lender premium was only a third of the mortgage, but now, it is 85-90% of the mortgage. So instead of paying 0.18%, the lender pays 1.7%. This huge buffer represents one of the most attractive areas for FinTech to disrupt, as what was once a secondary cost is now the overwhelmingly dominant padding, itself a remnant of a bygone age. 

When almost 90% of the interest charged in a mortgage merely represents the value that the lending institution provides, we can examine the components of this and see which of those could be replaced with a lower cost technological alternative. The lender, such as a major bank, provides a brand name, a mortgage officer to meet with face-to-face, and other such provisions. All of this is either unnecessary, or can be provided at much lower cost with the latest technologies. For example, blockchains can ensure the security aspects of the mortgage transaction are robust. Online consumer review services can provide an extra layer of reputational buttressing to any innovative new lending platform. The rationale for such a hefty mortgage markup over the underlying interest rate is just no longer there. 

If the lender premium in a mortgage falls from 85-90% down to, say, 50%, then the rate on an adjustable rate mortgage will decline to just twice the LIBOR, or about 0.4%. Even thought the Federal Reserve has recently increased the Fed Funds rate, this is very temporary, and 0% will be the Fed Funds rate for the majority of the forseeable future, just as it has been for the last 9 years. 

When this sort of ATOM-derived cost savings on interest payments percolates through the economy, it will cause a series of disruptions that will greatly reduce one of the last main consumer expenditures not yet being attacked by technology. Housing costs have risen above the inflation rate in many major cities, against the grain of technology. This is unnatural, since a home does not spontaneously renovate itself, get bigger, or otherwise increase in inherent value. On the contrary, the materials deteriorate over time, so the value should fall. Yet, home prices rise despite these structural forces, due to artificial decisions to restrict supply, lower bond yields through QE, etc. This artificial propping up of home prices masks the excessive costs in the industry, particularly in the mortgage-lending sector. As Fintech irons out the aforementioned outdated expenses in the mortgage-lending process, many fundamental assumptions about home ownership will change. 

Home ownership is a very emotional concept for many buyers (which is why there is a widespread misconception that a person 'owns' their home even while they are making mortgage payments on it, when in reality, ownership is achieved only when the mortgage is fully paid off). This emotion obscures the high costs of obsolete products and procedures that continue to reside in the mortgage industry. 

Amidst all the technological disruptions we have seen within the last generation, most people still don't understand that the central origin of most disruptions is an outdated, expensive incumbent system. But the FinTech wing of the ATOM has started the 'cracks in the dam' process against a very substantial and widely-levied cost, and this may be the disruption that brings FinTech's dividends to the masses. 

 

March 08, 2017 in Accelerating Change, Economics, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (16)

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ATOM Award of the Month, February 2017

After the inaugural award in January, a new month brings a new ATOM AotM.  This time, we go to an entirely different sector than we examined last time.  The award for this month goes to the collaboration between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity, and AT&T to provide a fully accredited Masters of Science in Computer Science degree, for the very low price of $6700 on average. 

The disruption in education is a topic I have written about at length.  In essence, most education is just a transmission of commoditized information, that, like every other information technology, should be declining in cost.  However, the corrupt education industry has managed to burrow deep into the emotions of its customers, to such an extent that a rising price for a product of stagnant (often declining) quality is not even questioned.  For this reason, education is in a bubble that is already in the process of deflating.  

What the MSCS at GATech accomplishes is four-fold :

  • Lowering the cost of the degree by almost an order of magnitude compared to the same degree as similarly-ranked schools
  • Making the degree available without relocation to where the institution is physically located
  • Scaling the degree to an eventual intake of 10,000 students, vs. just 300 that can attend a traditional in-residence program at GATech
  • Establishing best practices for other departments at GATech, and other institutions, to implement in order to create a broader array of MOOC degree programs

After a slow start, enrollment now is reported to be over 3300 students, representing a significant fraction of students presently studying MS-level computer science at equal or higher ranked schools.  The only reason enrollment has not risen all the way up to the full 10,000 is due to insufficient resourcefulness in shopping around and implementing ATOM principles to greatly increase one's living standards through ATOM means.  Aside from perhaps the top two schools like MIT and Stanford, there is perhaps no greater value for money than the GATech MSCS, which will become apparent as the slower adopters drift towards the program, particularly from overseas.  

Eventually, the sheer size of enrollment will rapidly lead to GATech becoming a dominant alumni community within computer science, forcing other institutions to catch up.  When this competition lowers costs even further, we will see one of the most highly paid and future-proof professions being accessible at little or no cost.  When contrasted to the immense costs of attending medical or law school, many borderline students will pursue computer science ahead of professions with large student debt burdens, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-more computer science and ATOM propagation.  The fact that one can enroll in the program from overseas will attract many students from countries that do not even have schools of GATech's caliber (i.e. most countries), generating local talent despite remote education.  

Crucially, this is strong evidence of how the ATOM always finds new ways to expand itself, since the field most essential to the feeding of the ATOM, computer science, is the one that found a way to greatly increase the number of people destined to work in it, by attacking both cost thresholds and enrollment volumes.  This is not a coincidence, because the ATOM always finds a way around anything that is inhibiting the growth of the ATOM, in this case, access to computer science training.  Subsequent to this, the ATOM can increase the productivity of education even in less ATOM-crucial fields medicine, law, business, and K-12, since the greatly expanded size of the computer science profession will provide entrepreneurs and expertise to make this happen.  This is how the ATOM captures an ever-growing share of the economy into rapidly-deflating technological fundamentals.   

As always, the ATOM AotM succeeds through reader suggestions, so feel free to suggest candidates.  Criteria include the size and scope of the disruption, how anti-technology the disrupted incumbent was, and an obvious improvement in the quality of a large number of lives through this disruption.  

Related :

The Education Disruption : 2015

11. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Individuals 

 

February 26, 2017 in Accelerating Change, ATOM AotM, Computing, Technology | Permalink | Comments (8)

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ATOM Award of the Month, January 2017

With the new year, we are starting a new article series here at The Futurist.  The theme will be a recognition of exceptional innovation.  Candidates can be any industry, corporation, or individual that has created an innovation exemplifying the very best of technological disruption.  The more ATOM principles exhibited in an innovation (rising living standards, deflation acting in proportion to prior inflation in the incumbent industry, rapid continuous technological improvement, etc.), the greater the chance of qualification.

Fracking BreakevensThe inaugural winner of the ATOM Award of the Month is the US hydraulic fracturing industry.  While 'fracking' garnered the most news in 2011-13, the rapid technological improvements continued.  Natural gas continues to hover around just $3, making the US one of the most competitive countries in industries where natural gas is a large input.  Oil prices continue to fall due to ever-improving efficiencies, and from the chart, we can see how many of the largest fields have seen breakevens fall from $80 to under $40 in just the brief 2013-16 period.  This is of profound importance, because now even $50 is a profitable price for US shale oil.  There is no indication that this trend of lower breakeven prices has stopped.  Keep in mind that the massive shale formations in California are not even being accessed yet due to radical obstruction, but a breakeven of $30 or lower ensure the pressure to extract this profit from the Monterrey shale continues to rise.  Beyond that, Canada has not yet begun fracking of its own, and when it does, it will certainly have at least as much additional oil as the US found.  

This increase, which is just an extra 3M barrels/day to US supply, was nonetheless enough to capsize this highly elastic market and crash world oil prices from $100+ to about $50.  Given the improving breakevens, and possibility of new production, this will continue to pressure oil prices for the foreseeable future.  This has led to the US turning the tables on OPEC and reversing a large trade deficit into what is now a surplus.   OPEC Trade DeficitIf you told any of those 'peak oil' Malthusians that the US would soon have a trade surplus with OPEC, they would have branded you as a lunatic.  Note how that ill-informed Maoist-Malthusian cult utterly vanished.  Furthermore, this plunge in oil prices has strengthened the economies of other countries that import most of their oil, from Japan to India.  

Under ATOM principles, technology always finds a way to lower the cost of something that has become artificially expensive and is hence obstructing the advancement of other technologies.  Oil was a premier example of this, as almost all technological innovation is done in countries that have to import large portions of their oil, while almost none is done by oil exporters.  Excess wealth accumulation by oil exporters was an anti-technology impediment, and demanded the attention of a good portion of the ATOM.  Remember that the worldwide ATOM is of an ever rising size, and comprises of the sum total of all technological products in production at a given time (currently, about 2% of world GDP).  Hence, all technological disruptions are interconnected, and when the ATOM is freed up from the completion of a certain disruption, that amount of disruptive capacity becomes available to tackle something new.  Given the size of this disruption to oil prices and production geography, this occupied a large portion of the ATOM for a few years, which means a lot of ATOM capacity is now free to act elsewhere.

This disruption was also one of the most famous predictions of mine here at The Futurist.  In 2011, I predicted that high oil prices was effectively a form of burning a candle at both ends and such prices were jolting at least six compensating technologies into overdrive.  I provided an equation predicting when oil would topple, and it toppled well in accordance with that prediction (even sooner than the equation estimated).  

This concludes our very first ATOM AotM to kick off the new year.  I need candidate submissions from readers in order to get a good pool to select from.  Criteria include the size and scope of the disruption, how anti-technology the disrupted incumbent was, and an obvious improvement in the quality of a large number of lives through this disruption.  

 

January 31, 2017 in Accelerating Change, ATOM AotM, Energy, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (35)

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Google Talk on the ATOM

Kartik Gada had a Google Talk about the ATOM :  

 

December 26, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Technology, The ATOM, The Singularity | Permalink | Comments (25)

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Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing Market Growth

3D Printing Market AI MarketI came across some recent charts about the growth of these two unrelated sectors, one disrupting manufacturing, the other disrupting software of all types (click to enlarge).  On one hand, each chart commits the common error of portraying smooth parabola growth, with no range of outcomes in the event of a recession (which will surely happen well within the 8-year timelines portrayed, most likely as soon as 2017).  On the other hand, these charts provide reason to be excited about the speed of progress seen in these two highly disruptive technologies, which are core pillars of the ATOM.  

This sort of growth rate across two quite unrelated sectors, while present in many prior disruptions, is often not noticed by most people, including those working in these particular fields.   Remember, until recently, it took decades or even centuries to have disruptions of this scale, but now we see the same magnitude of transformation happen in mere years, and in many pockets of the economy.  This supports the case that all technological disruptions are interconnected and the aggregate size of all disruptions can be calculated, which is a core tenet of the ATOM.   

Related :

3.  Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening 

 

November 21, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Why Do Job Searches Take Longer Than 30 Years Ago?

Job-FairI have recently come into contact with a few professionals in transition, many from the now-shrinking big semiconductor companies.  In speaking to them, one thing that stood out is how it takes them 9-12 months or more to secure a new position.  

Why is this the case, in an age of accelerating technological progress, as per the ATOM?  This is an instance of where culture has prevented the adoption of a solution that is technologically feasible.  

Where Cultural Inertia Obstructs Technology : Before the Internet age, if you wanted to research a subject, you had to go to the library, spend hours there, check out some books, and go back home.  Overall, this consumed half a day, and could only be conducted during the library's hours of operation.  If the books did not have all the information you needed, you had to repeat this process.  Even this was available only in the dozen or so countries that have good public libraries in the first place.  But now, in the Internet age, the same research can be conducted in mere minutes, from any location.  The precision of Google and other search engines continues to improve, and with deep learning, many improvements are self-propagating.  There is a 10x to 30x increase in the productivity of searching for information.  

If you feel that this example is imprecise, take the case of LinkedIn.  It has enabled many aspects of career research and networking that were just not possible before.  If a young person wishes to explore dozens of career paths and estimate common patterns, the utility of a certain degree, or the probability of reaching a certain title, LinkedIn has an endless supply of information and people you can identify and communicate with.  

Yet despite all of this, job searches are just as lengthy as in the days before the Internet, LinkedIn, and other resources.  If a candidate can match with three potential jobs in their search region at any given time, then the connection between employer and candidate should take mere weeks, not close to a year.  There is no other widespread transaction within society that takes anywhere near as long.  Despite new apps to organize the job search and new social media outlets that announce endless meetups and networking events, technology has clearly failed to generate any productivity gains in this process.  

UE DurationFor one thing, the Internet has reduced the marginal cost of an application to so little that each position receives hundreds of candidates, unlike three or four back when paper resumes had to be sent via the US Postal Service.  To cope with this, employers use software that searches resumes for keywords.  This method selects for certain types of resumes, with keyword optimization superceding more descriptive elements of the resume, and filtering out many suitable candidates in favor of those who know how to game the keyword algorithm.  

From this point, a desire to mitigate hiring risk combined with the lack of imagination inherent to most corporations defaults into a practice of increasing the number of interviewers that the candidate faces.  Three rounds and a dozen interviews is not uncommon, but by most accounts, job interviews are nearly useless as predictors of performance.  In reality, a candidate only needs to be interviewed by three people : the hiring manager, the manager above that, and one lateral peer.  If these three people cannot make an accurate assessment, adding several other interviewers is not going to add additional value.  Indeed, if the boss's boss cannot make accurate assessment of candidates, then they are failing at the primary skill that an executive is supposed to have. Reference checks are also a peculiar ritual, as a candidate will only submit favorably disposed references who have been contacted beforehand.  

Modernizing Hiring For the Information Age : Matching openings with candidates should not be so tedious in this age of search engines, emailed resumes, and LinkedIn.  Resistance to change and a miscalculation of risk and opportunity cost are the human obstacles standing athwart favorable evolution.  

To correct this obsolete situation, consider the mismanagement that occurs at the source.  Only after a hiring manager sees a persistent and pronounced need for additional personnel does the process of getting a requisition approved and advertised commence.  Hence, the job begins to receive resumes only several months after the need for a new hire arose.  After that point, the lengthy selection and interviewing process takes months more.  

Instead, what if the Data Analytics of a corporate setting could be gathered, mined, and processed, so that the AI identifies a cluster of gaps within the existing team, and identifies suitable candidates from LinkedIn?  Candidates with the correct skillset could be identified with a compatibility score such as '86% fit', '92% fit', and so on.  The entire process from the starting point of where a team begins to find itself understaffed to when a candidate deemed to be an acceptable fit is hired, can compress from over a year to mere weeks.  The hefty fees charged by recruiters vanish, and the shorter duration of unemployment reduces all the indirect costs of extended unemployment.  

For this level of dynamic assessment of gaps and subsequent candidate mapping, the capability of search and data analytics within a corporation has to evolve to a far more advanced state than presently exists.  Emails, performance reviews, and project schedules, etc. all have to be searchable across the same search and patterning capabilities.  Then, this has to interface with LinkedIn, which itself has to become far more advanced with the capability for a candidate to continuously re-verify skills and prove certain competencies (through tests, certified courses, etc.).  The platform has had no real improvement in capabilities in the last few years, and the obvious next step - generating a complex set of skill parameters for LinkedIn members, and matching that pattern to employers with similar needs, is quite overdue.  If this seems like added work for candidates, remember that this effort is far less than the amount of time and hassle it will save in the job search process.  

Of course, such a capability across LinkedIn and some pattern matching machine learning engine will not be adopted overnight.  After all, corporations still think university degrees and school rank are good indicators of candidate job performance, despite both evidence and common sense.  After that, the interface between some internal corporate software and LinkedIn will take a lot of work to become robust.  Finally, the belief that a greater number of interviews somehow reduces the risk of hiring a candidate is a belief that will be difficult to purge.  

But eventually, with technology companies leading the way, the massive hidden cost of current hiring practices may come to light, and give way to a system that uses AI to find more precise matches with much greater speed.  

Conclusion :  We now possess the machine learning capabilities to dynamically detect gaps within corporate teams and organizational structures that may be large enough to warrant an increase in headcount.  These gaps can be matched with parameters that can be mined from LinkedIn profiles, and provide candidates with an assessment of their approximate fit.  A percentage score calculated for each candidate is not only a more accurate indicator than the very imprecise interview process, but is far quicker as well.  It is high time that these tools were created by LinkedIn and others, and that corporate culture shifted towards their adoption.  

This application of AI is the second most necessary technological disruption that AI can deliver to our civilization at present.  For the first, check back for the next article.   

I do not have the time to pursue a company built around this type of machine learning product, but if someone else is inspired to take up this challenge, I would certainly like to be on your board of directors.  

 

Related ATOM Chapters : 

11. Implementation of the ATOM age for Individuals

 

November 13, 2016 in Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Technology | Permalink | Comments (9)

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The Federal Reserve Continues to Ignore Technological Deflation

Dot PlotThe recent FOMC meetings continue to feature a range of debate only around the rate at which the Fed Funds rate can be increased up to about 4% (which has not coincided with a robust economy since the late 1990s).  They actually describe this as a 'normal' rate, and the process of raising the rate as 'normalization'.  The 'Dot Plot' pictured here indicates the paradigm that the Federal Reserve still believes.  Even the most 'dovish' members still think that the Fed Funds rate will be above 2% by 2019.  

This is dangerously inaccurate.  At the start of 2016, the Federal Reserve expected that they will do four rate likes this year itself.  Now they are down to an expectation of just two (one more than the one early in this year), and may just halt with one.  How can a collection of supposedly the best and wisest economic forecasters be so consistently wrong?  A 20% stock market correction will lead to a swift rate reversal and a 25%+ correction will lead to a resumption of QE in excess of $100B/month.  

As we can see in the ATOM e-book, technological deflation is endless and exponentially increasing, and hence the Wu-Xia shadow rate indicates the natural Fed Funds rate for the US to be around the equivalent -2%.  Yes, minus two percent, achieved through the various rounds of QE that have been done to date in order to simulate a negative interest rate.  The US stopped its QE in 2014, but continues to be held afloat by a portion of the $220B/month of worldwide central bank easing that flows into the US. This is barely enough to keep US Nominal GDP (NGDP) growth at 3%, which is far below the level at which innovation can proceed at its trendline rate.  The connection between technological progress, technological deflation, and worldwide central bank action is still not being discovered by decision-makers.  

The -2% indicated by the Wu-Xia shadow rate might be as deep as -4% by 2025, under current trends of technological diffusion.  The worldwide central bank easing required to halt deflation by that time will be several times higher than today.  As per the ATOM policy reform recommendations, this can be an exceptionally favorable thing if the fundamentals are recognized.  

For the full analysis and thesis, read the ATOM e-book.  

 

Related ATOM Chapters :

4.  The Overlooked Economics of Technology

6. Current Government Policy Will Soon Be Ineffective

7. Government Policies Must Adapt, and Quickly

10. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Nations

 

September 22, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Economics, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (33)

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Invisible Disruptions : Deep Learning and Blockchain

In the ATOM e-book, we examine how technological disruption can be measured, and how the aggregate disruption ongoing in the world at any given time continues along a smooth, exponentially rising trendline.  Among these, certain disruptions are invisible to most onlookers, because a tangential technology is simultaneously disrupting seemingly unrelated industries from an orthogonal direction.  In that vein, here are two separate lists of industries that are being disrupted, one by Deep Learning and the other by Blockchain.    

13 Industries Using Deep Learning to Innovate. 

20 Industries that Blockchain could Disrupt

Technology-Adoption

Note how many industries are present in both of the above lists, meaning that the sectors have to deal with compound disruptions from more than one direction.  

In addition, we see that sectors where disruption was artificially thwarted due to excessive regulation and government protectionism merely see a sharper disruption, higher up in the edifice.  When the disruption arrives through abstract technologies such as Deep Learning and Blockchain, the incumbents are unlikely to be able to thwart it, due to the source of the disruption being effectively invisible to the untrained eye.  What is understood by very few is that the accelerating rate of adoption/diffusion, depicted in this chart here from Blackrock, is enabled by such orthogonal forces that are not tied to any one product category or even industry.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

The Overlooked Economics of Technology

 

September 13, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (9)

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New Telescopes to Reveal Untold Wonders

A number of new telescopes are soon going to be entered into service, all of which are far more powerful than equivalent predecessors.  This is fully expected by any longtime reader of The Futurist, for space-related articles have been a favorite theme here.  

To begin, refer to the vintage 2006 article where I estimated telescope power to be rising at a compound annual rate of approximately 26%/year, although that is a trendline of a staircase with very large steps.  This, coincidentally, is exactly the same rate at which computer graphics technology advances, which also happens to be the square root of Moore's Law's rate of progress.  According to this timeline, a wave of powerful telescopes arriving now happens to be right on schedule.  Secondly, refer to one of the very best articles on The Futurist, titled 'SETI and the Singularity', where the impact of increasing telescopic power is examined.  The exponential increase in the detection of exoplanets (chart from Wikipedia), and the implications for the Drake Equation, are measured, with a major prediction about extraterrestrial life contained therein.  

UntitledBuilding on that, in the ATOM e-book, I detail how accelerating technological progress has a major impact on space exploration.  Contrary to a widely-repeated belief that space exploration has plateaued since the Apollo program, technology has ensure that quite the opposite is true.  Exoplanet detection is now in the hundreds per year (and soon to be in the thousands), even as technologies such as 3D Printing in space and asteroid mining are poised to generate great wealth here on Earth.  With space innovation no longer exclusively the domain of the US, costs have lowered through competition. India has launched a successful Mars orbiter at 1/10th the cost of equivalent US or Russian programs, which has been in operation for two years.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

12. The ATOM's Effect on the Final Frontier

 

 

August 28, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Space Exploration, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (6)

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Artificial Intelligence Finally Disrupting Medicine

The best news of the last month was something that most people entirely missed.  Amidst all the distractions and noise that comprises modern media, a quiet press release discloses that a supercomputer has suddenly become more effective than human doctors in diagnosing certain types of ailments.  

IBM's Watson correctly diagnoses a patient after doctors are stumped.

This is exceptionally important.  As previously detailed in Chapter 3 of The ATOM, not only was a machine more competent than an entire group of physicians, but the machine continues to improve as more patients use it, which in turn makes it more attractive to use, which enables the accrual of even more data upon which to improve further.  

But most importantly, a supercomputer like Watson can treat patients in hundreds of locations in the same day via a network connection, and without appointments that have to be made weeks in advance.  Hence, such a machine replaces not one, but hundreds of doctors.  Furthermore, it takes very little time to produce more Watsons, but it takes 30+ years to produce a doctor from birth, among the small fraction of humans with the intellectual ability to even become a physician.  The economies of scale relative to the present doctor-patient model are simply astonishing, and there is no reason that 60-80% of diagnostic work done by physicians cannot soon be replaced by artificial intelligence.  This does not mean that physicians will start facing mass unemployment, but rather than the best among them will be able to focus on more challenging problems.  The most business-minded of physicians can incorporate AI into their practice to see a greater volume of patients on more complicated ailments.  

This is yet another manifestation of various ATOM principles, from technologies endlessly crushing the cost of anything overpriced, to self-reinforcing improvement of deep learning.  

Related :  Eight paraplegics take their first step in years, thanks to robotics.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

4. The Overlooked Economics of Technology

 

 

August 14, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Biotechnology, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Countdown to 2017 : The Budget Buffer is Gone

In the ATOM, I have written at length about why, barring a substantial increase in the size and directness of worldwide central bank money creation, we are going to enter a major financial crisis as soon as 2017.  Among the list of factors contributing to this impending crisis, one that the public seems to be in denial of is the perilous state of the federal budget balance.  

BudgetThe budget deficit governs the rate at which the national debt rises.  The interest on the debt is a component of federal expenditure and contributes to the deficit which gets added to the debt which generates more interest.  None of that is new, but what is new is how a -3% deficit exists even this late into the economic expansion, and after millions of jobs have been created.  This deficit looks good when compared to what it was during the depths of 2009, but that is not the correct apples-to-apples comparison, as we see in the chart.  

This is not a problem yet, but almost no one realizes that the buffer that the US has long enjoyed is now gone, and that if a shock were to arise, then it will hence be that much more severe.  The trend is towards a very ominous explosion in the deficit when the next recession hits.  Even worse, the traditional method of QE will not work this time.  A more direct form of QE is the only solution.  

Related ATOM Chapters :

6.  Current Government Policy Will Soon be Ineffective

7.  Government Policies Must Adapt, and Quickly

10. Implementation of the ATOM Age for Nations

 

 

July 28, 2016 in Economics, Politics, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Bond Yields Continue to Confirm ATOM Revelations

US 10-yrThe US 10-Year Treasury Yield is now just 1.55% and dropping.  Despite US QE (which has not been at a full $85B/month since 2013), this is evidence of future expectations of very little inflation.  

My research for the ATOM has revealed that pervasive technological disruption is the reason for this structurally declining inflation. Failure to recognize that this technological force is permanent and rising exponentially is the reason 'experts' are baffled as to where all the central bank money is going, and reforms towards a revamp of central bank monetary easing is not being discussed.  Remember that this fall in yield is across all countries with significant technology density.  German and Japanese 10-year bond yields are almost 0%.  

US Real Estate received a decades-long boost from lowering mortgage rates as long-term bond yields fell.  Few question how homes that used to be 2.5 times the household income of the area are now priced at 10 times the household income or higher.  With yields getting this low, and with property taxes now as large a contributor to home ownership costs as the mortgage payment, how much higher can home prices go?  How much of US GDP is dependent on not merely high, but rising home prices?  

Related ATOM chapters :

3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening

4. The Overlooked Economics of Technology

6. Current Government Policy Will Soon be Ineffective

 

July 17, 2016 | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Tesla's Rapid Disruption

MIT Technology Review has an article describing how Tesla Motors has brought rapid disruption to the previously staid auto industry, where there are too many factors precluding the entry of new companies.  But this is nothing new for readers of The Futurist, as I specifically identified Tesla as a key candidate for disruption way back in 2006.  In Venture Capital terms, this was an exceptionally good pick such an early stage.  

In ATOM terms, the progress of Tesla is an example of everything from how all technological disruptions are interlinked, to how each disruption is deflationary in nature.  It is not just about the early progress towards electric cars, removal of the dealership layer of distribution, or the recent erratic progress of semi-autonomous driving.  Among other things, Tesla has introduced lower-key but huge innovations such as remote wireless software upgrades of the customer fleet, which itself is a paradigm shift towards rapidly-iterating product improvement.  In true ATOM form, the accelerating rate of technological change is beginning to sweep the automobile along with it.  

When Tesla eventually manages to release a sub-$35,000 vehicle, the precedents set in dealership displacement, continual wireless upgrades, and semi-autonomous driving will suddenly all be available across hundreds of thousands of cars, surprising unprepared observers but proceeding precisely along the expected ATOM trajectory.  

July 12, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Energy, Technology, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, or is it?

Years ago from 2050-LinearChapter 2 of the ATOM e-book addresses the centuries-old accelerating trendline of economic growth.  Recall that this was the topic of an article of mine almost exactly 9 years ago as well.  

However, there may be more nuances to this concept than previously addressed.  It may be that since GDP is a human construct, it only happens to be correlated to the accelerating rate of change by virtue of humans being the forefront of advancing intelligence.  It could be that once artificial intelligence can advance without human assistance, most types of technology that improve human living standards may stagnate, since the grand goal of propagating AI into space is no longer bottlenecked by human progress.  Humans are certainly not the final state of evolution, as evidenced by the much greater suitability of AI for space exploration (AI does not require air or water, etc.).  

That is certainly something to think about.  Human progress may only be on an accelerating curve until a handoff to AI is completed.  After that, metrics quite different than GDP may be the best to measure progress, as the AI perhaps only cares about computational density, TERAFLOPs, etc.  

 

July 04, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Economics, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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The 2017 Crisis

Over in Chapter 6 of The ATOM, I provide a list of factors that are accumulating into the origins of the next major financial crisis, which is not years away, but merely months.  The factors are :

1) Insufficient, narrowly-concentrated central bank easing.

2) Fundamental ceiling of home prices, as explained in the chapter.

3) US National Debt crossing 100% of GDP, with total interest payments high despite low rates.

4) Unprecedented demographic transitions

5) ^vix volatility normalization is due.

6) China's growth will soon engineer shifts in the tectonic plates of the global economy.

Go there and read the detailed explanations of each.  Are you prepared for the crisis?  Discuss both there and below.  

 

July 01, 2016 in Economics, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Introducing 'The ATOM'

I am unveiling 'The ATOM', a 14-chapter e-book that contains novel concepts, research, and policy prescriptions about the various effects of technological progress on the economy and society.  You can go over to the e-book and start reading and commenting there.  Blog posts on The Futurist will now be related to ATOM-affiliated concepts.  

The e-book is published in blog format, so that comments can accrue underneath each chapter, and future blog posts can link to specific parts of the e-book.  Videos at the start of each chapter serve as summaries for those who do not wish to read a wall of text in order to get a synopsis.  Go over there and read it, chapter by chapter, up and down.  You will never see the world quite the same way again.  

ATOM Logo

 

June 28, 2016 in Core Articles, The ATOM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Changes

It is the end of an era here at The Futurist.  As long-time readers know, this has been a blog of two individual bloggers who did not distinguish themselves from each other.  This was a worthwhile experiment at the inception of the website in early 2006.  But now, the goals have changed.  The technology blogger will be the primary blogger here, taking a slightly different direction for this site.  The political blogger has, for the most part, retired from blogging, and has discontinued participation in some of his other online communities (such as anti-misandry).  

The technology blogger has been working on a related project of much more comprehensive scope, and will be linking it here to The Futurist.  Hence, this blog will be primarily devoted to technological and economic topics, with very little political content going forward.  Both bloggers will write under their real names.    

From Imran Khan (the political blogger) :

Many of my fans from the anti-misandry sphere have wondered why I drifted away from there in 2014.  Well, it was a combination of several factors :

1) My Work There Was Done : The predictions in The Misandry Bubble were solidified and part of the DNA of the 'androsphere'.  Existing bloggers keep up with current events and parse the news through the anti-misandry filter, but my contribution was just comments, after The Misandry Bubble over 6 years ago.  Over time, much of the content in the androsphere trends toward repetition.  When 2020 arrives, we will do an assessment scorecard of the predictions made a decade prior.  

2) Not Enough Activism : Anti-misandry ideas have spread to the mainstream through the effort of some great bloggers (like Dalrock and PM/AFT).  But too many of the other participants do far too little beyond Internet commenting.  I mentioned this in The Misandry Bubble about 'Why There is no Men's Rights Movement', and this continues to be true.  I even invented a strategy and campaign uniquely tailored to operate within the constraints of anonymity, cost, and decentralization that were needed for any real Men's Rights Activism, but only half a dozen men did the legwork despite everyone hailing it as highly effective.  To this day, there is minimal activism beyond about five key people, while far smaller causes immediately manage to get the apparatus of activism established. 

3) Too Much Infighting : The blogs I commented at do an admirable job of attracting and keeping civil commenters.  But elsewhere, some major figure in the androsphere is in an acrimonious battle with another almost every month.  The reasons are usually just poor communication between the two parties.  For a community of just 300 or so active participants that is up against an evil that outnumbers and outspends them by a ratio of several million to one, there is too much wasteful infighting among people who agree on 90% of their views.  Such a 'movement' makes little real movement.

4) Too Much Anger Towards Average Women : As The Misandry Bubble states, the hierarchy of misandric zeal is Hardcore 'Feminist' > Mangina > Average Woman.  The average woman does not seethe with a desire to harm any and all males the way a full-time 'feminist' does.  The average woman just wants to side with whoever is winning, which is an evolutionary mechanism that helped women survive.  I always maintained that ordinary women were being harmed by 'feminism' just as much as ordinary men, since what average women value most has been taken away from them by 'feminists'.  As I have maintained, it is impossible to harm one gender without harming the other.  

Some parts of the 'sphere have too much anger towards average women, and too little towards the sleazy men who think groveling to 'feminists' will improve their social status.  These 'manginas' are universally hated by normal men, normal women, and even hardcore 'feminists', yet do most of the heavy-lifting that keeps the hate-cult going.  If there is an Achilles heel that can be attacked to bring the edifice down, it is these manginas.  The inability of Men's Rights to focus on the weakest target ensures a lack of progress.  Speaking of manginas....

5) Too Many Neo-Nazis : The androsphere has been infested by a strain of Neo-Nazis (describing themselves as 'white nationalists') who are both racial supremacists and economic leftists.  Their views are wrong on both of those counts, but that is not even the worst thing about them.  They are antithetical to the notion of Men's Rights since they believe that a woman of their race is far more valuable than a man, to the extent of being a goddess.  It is apparent that any ethno-centric ideology will default to an obsession with fertility rates, and since women are the scarcer reproductive resource, such ideologies invariably become nothing more than fertility goddess cults.  This is true, of course, of any ethno-centric ideology, not just whites.  In fact, it is a testament to white maturity that 'white nationalists' never get any real traction among their own population.  This is precisely why whites are successful - they do a better job marginalizing their own degenerates than other groups do.  

My debates with the Neo-Nazis were funny.  I would routinely point out that 90% of American whites are just not racist, and they would counter that they indeed are, contrary to my observation.  In other words, I would insist that their group is not racist, which they see as a bad thing (as it explains their poor recruitment), leading them to insist that more whites are.  And I am not just brown, but a Muslim too.  

Remember that 'white nationalism' recruits only the least successful white men, almost entirely due to their desire to obstruct a white woman's choice to date outside her race.  This is leftist protectionism demanded by uncompetitive actors, nothing more.  The coup de grace I apply in such debates is to point out that there is almost zero female participation in 'white nationalism', despite it being an ideology wholly dependent on white women having more babies.  The hilarity of an ideology built around higher reproduction nonetheless finding itself to be 98-99% male is self-evident.  Women have a natural radar that steers them away from loserdom, and manginas (whether general or Neo-Nazi) always create this effect.  

Since the ideologies of Neo-Nazis and 'feminists' have substantial overlap, Men's Rights cannot advance without a purge of these Neo-Nazis.  Over time, this purge will happen, but my time is better spent elsewhere.  

6) The Futurist has a Different Destiny : My technology co-blogger has created something of grand purpose, something so profound that it has a higher significance.  It is valuable enough that this website should be devoted exclusively to it, without tangential distractions, given that he is more of a political moderate than I.  

For these reasons, my participation in the androsphere has drawn to a close.  The Misandry Bubble will remain where it is, but it should be seen as a time capsule of predictions, to be opened 10 years hence from original publication.  

 

May 15, 2016 in About | Permalink | Comments (15)

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The Technological Progress of Video Games, Updated

A decade ago, in the early days of this blog, we had an article tracking video game graphics at 10-year intervals.  As per that cadence, it is time to add the next entry to the progression.  

The polygons in any graphical engine increase as a square root of Moore's Law, so the number of polygons doubles every three years.  

Sometimes, pictures are worth thousands of words :

1976 :

Pong

1986 :

Enduro_Racer_Arcade

1996 :

Tomb_raider_tomb_of_qualopec

2006 :

Visiongt20060117015740218

I distinctly remember when the 2006 image looked particularly impressive.  But now, it no longer does.  This inevitably brings us to...

2016 (an entire video is available, with some gameplay footage) : 

 

This series illustrates how progress, while not visible over one or two years, accumulates to much more over longer periods of time.   

Now, extrapolating this trajectory of exponential progress, what will games bring us in 2020?  or 2026?  Additionally, note that screen sizes, screen resolution, and immersion (e.g. VR goggles) have risen simultaneously.  

 

April 01, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Computing, Technology | Permalink | Comments (6)

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The End of Petrotyranny - Victory

I refer readers back to an article written here in 2011, titled 'The End of Petrotyranny', where I claimed that high oil prices were rapidly burning through the buffer that was shielding oil from technological disruption.  I quantified the buffer in an equation, and even provided a point value to how much of the buffer was still remaining at the time.

I am happy to declare a precise victory for this prediction, with oil prices having fallen by two-thirds and remaining there for well over a year.  While hydraulic fracturing (fracking) turned out to be the primary technology to bring down the OPEC fortress, other technologies such as photovoltaics, batteries, and nanomaterials contributed secondary pressure to the disruption.  The disruption unfolded in accordance with the 2011 Law of Finite Petrotyranny :

From the start of 2011, measure the dollar-years of area enclosed by a chart of the price of oil above $70.  There are only 200 such dollar-years remaining for the current world petro-order.  We can call this the 'Law of Finite Petrotyranny'. 

Go to the original article to see various scenarios of how the dollar-years could have been depleted.  While we have not used up the full 200 dollar-years to date, the range of scenarios is now much tighter, particularly since fracking in the US continues to lower its breakeven threshold.  At present, over $2T/year that was flowing from oil importers to oil producers, has now vanished, to the immense benefit of oil importers, which are the nations that conduct virtually all technological innovation.  

The 2011 article was not the first time this subject of technological pressure rising in proportion to the degree of oil price excess has been addressed here at The Futurist.  There were prior articles in 2007, as well as 2006 (twice).  

As production feverishly scales back, and some of the less central petrostates implode, oil prices will gradually rise back up, generally saturating at the $70 level (itself predicted in 2006) in order to deplete the remaining dollar-years.  But we may never again see oil at such a high price relative to world GDP, as existed from most of 2007-14 (oil would have to be $200+/barrel today to surpass the record of $147 set in 2008, in proportion to World GDP).

 

March 08, 2016 in Accelerating Change, Economics, Energy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (21)

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Two Overdue Technologies About to Arrive

The rate of technological change has been considerably slower than its trendline ever since the start of the 21st century.  I wrote about this back in 2008, but at the time, I did not have quite as advanced techniques of observing and measuring the gap between the rate of change and the trendline, as I do now.

The dot-com bust coincided with a trend toward lower nominal GDP (since everyone wrongly focuses on 'real' GDP, which has less to do with real-world decisions than nominal GDP), and this has led to technological change, despite sporadic bursts, generally progressing at what is currently only 60-70% of its trendline rate.  For this reason, may technologies that seemed just 10 years away in 2000, have still not arrived as of 2014.  I will write much more on this at a later date.

But for now, two overdue technologies are finally plodding towards where many observers thought they would have been by 2010.  Nonetheless, they are highly disruptive, and will do a great deal to change many industries and societies.  

1) Artificial Intelligence : 

A superb article by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine describes how three simultaneous breakthroughs have greatly accelerated the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Most disruptions are usually the result of two or more seemingly unrelated technologies both crossing certain thresholds, and observers tend to be surprised because each group of observers was following only one of the technologies.  For example, the iPod emerged when it did because storage, processing, and the ability to store music as software all reached certain cost, size, and power consumption limits at around the same time.  

What is interesting about AI is how it can greatly expand the capabilities of those who know know to incorporate AI with their own intelligence.  The greatest chess grandmaster of all time, Magnus Carlssen, became so by training with AI, and it is unclear that he would have become this great if he lived before a time when such technologies were available.  

The recursive learning aspect of AI means that an AI can quickly learn more from new people who use it, which makes it better still.  One very obvious area where this could be used is in medicine.  Currently, millions of MD general practitioners and pediatricians are seen by billions of patients, mostly for relatively common diagnostics and treatments.  If a single AI can learn enough from enough patient inputs to replace most of the most common diagnostic capabilities of doctors, then that is a huge cost savings to patients and the entire healthcare system.  Some doctors will see their employment prospects shrink, but the majority will be free to move up the chain and focus on more serious medical problems and questions.  

Another obvious use is in the legal system.  On one hand, while medicine is universal, the legal system of each country is different, and lawyers cannot cross borders.  On the other hand, the US legal system relies heavily on precedent, and there is too much content for any one lawyer or judge to manage, even with legal databases.  An AI can digest all laws and precedents and create a huge increase in efficiency once it learns enough.  This can greatly reduce the backlog of cases in the court system, and free up judicial capacity for the most serious cases.  

The third obvious application is in self-driving cars.  Driving is an activity where the full range of possible traffic situations that can arise is not a particularly huge amount of data.  Once an AI gets to the point where it analyzes every possible accident, near-accident, and reported pothole, it can easily make self-driving cars far safer than human driving.  This is already being worked on at Google, and is only a few years away.  

Get ready for AI in all its forms.  While many jobs will be eliminated, this will be exceeded by the opportunity to add AI into your own life and your own capabilities.  Make your IQ 40 points higher than it is when you need it most, and your memory thrice as deep - all will be possible in the 2020s for those who learn to use these capabilities.  In fact, being able to augment your own marketable skills through the use of AI might become one of the most valuable skillsets for the post-2025 workforce.   

2) Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality : 

Longtime readers recall that in 2006, I correctly predicted that by 2012-13, video games would be a greater source of entertainment than television.  Now, we are about to embark on the next phase of this process, as a technology that has had many false starts for over 20 years might finally be approaching reality.  

Everyone knows that the Oculus Rift headset will be released to the consumer in 2015, and that most who have tried it has had their expectations exceeded.  It supposedly corrects many of the previous problems of other VR/AR technologies that have dogged developers for two decades, and has a high resolution.  

But entertainment is not the only use for a VR/AR headset like the Oculus Rift, for the immersve medium that the device facilitates has tremendous potential for use in education, military training, and all types of product marketing.  Entirely new processes and business models will emerge.       

One word of caution, however.  My decade of direct experience with running a large division of a consumer technology company compels me to advise you not to purchase any consumer technology product until it is in its third generation of consumer release, which is usually 24-48 months after initial release.  The reliability and value for money are usually not compelling until Gen three.  Do not mistake fractional generations (i.e. 'version 1.1', or 'iPhone 5, 5S, and 5C) for actual generations.  Thre Oculus Rift may be an exception to this norm (as are many Apple products), but in general, don't be an early adopter on the consumer side.  

Update (5/27/2016) : The same Kevin Kelly has an equally impressive article about VR/AR.  

Combining the Two :

Imagine, if you would, that the immersive movies and video games of the near future are not just fully actualized within the VR of the Oculus Rift, but that the characters of the video game adapt via connection to some AI, so that game characters far too intelligent to be overcome by hacks and cheat codes emerge.  

Similarly, imagine if various forms of training and education are not just improved via VR, but augmented via AI, where the program learns exactly where the student is having a problem, and adapts the method accordingly, based on similar difficulties from prior students.  Suffice it to say, both VR and AI will transform medicine from its very foundations.  Some doctors will be able to greatly expand their practices, while others find themselves relegated to obsolesence.  

Two overdue technologies, are finally on our doorstep.  Make the most of them, because if you don't, someone else surely is.  

Related :

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment 

Timing the Singularity

The Impact of Computing : 78%/year

 

December 21, 2014 in Accelerating Change, Computing, Technology | Permalink | Comments (28)

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The Education Disruption : 2015

I was not going to write an article, except that this disruption is so imminent that if I wait any longer, this article would no longer be a prediction.  Long-time readers may recall how I have often said that the more overdue a disruption is, the more sudden it is when it finally occurs, and the more off-guard the incumbents are caught.  We are about to see a disruption in one of the most anti-productivity, self-important, and corrupt industries of them all, and not a moment too soon.  High-quality education is about to become more accessible to more people than ever before.  

The Natural Progression of Educational Efficiency : The great Emperor Charlemagne lived in a time when even most monarchs (let alone peasants) were illiterate.  Charlemagne had a great interest in attaining literacy for himself and fostering literacy on others.  But the methods of education in the early 9th century were primitive and books were handwritten, and hence scarce.  Despite all of his efforts, Charlemagne only managed to learn to read after the age of 50, and never quite learned how to write.  This indicates how hard it was to attain modern standards of basic literacy at the time.  

Over time, as the invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of books, literacy became less exclusive over the subsequent centuries, and methods of teaching that could teach the vast majority of six-year-old children how to read became commonplace, delivered en masse via institutions that came to be known as 'schools'.  Since most of us grew up within a mass-delivered classroom model with minimal customization, we consider this method of delivery to be normal, and almost every parent can safely assume that if their child has an IQ above 80 or so, that they will be able to read competently at the right age.  

But consider what the Internet age has made available for those who care to take it.  I can say with great certainty that the most valuable things I have learned have all been derived from the Internet, free of cost.  Whether it was the knowledge that led to new incomes streams, new social capital, or any other useful skills, it was available over the Internet, and that too in just the last decade.  Almost every challenge in life has an answer than can be found online.  This brings up the question of whether formal schooling, and the immense pricetag associated with it, is still the primary source from which a person can attain the most marketable skills.   

Why Education Became an Industry Prone to Attracting Inefficiency : To begin, we first have to address some of the adverse conditioning that most people receive, about what education is, what it should cost, and where it can be obtained.  Through centuries of marketing that preys on human insecurity at being left behind, and the tendency to conflate correlation with causation, an immense bubble has inflated over a multi-decade period, and is at its very peak.  

Education, which in the bottom 99.9% of classroom settings is really just the transmission of highly commoditized information, has usually correlated to greater economic prospects, especially since, until recently, very few people were likely to overtake the threshold beyond which further education would no longer have a tight correlation to greater earnings.  This is why many parents are willing to spare no expense on the education of their children, even to the extent of having fewer children than they might otherwise have had, when estimating the cost of educating them.  Exploiting the emotions of parents, the education industry manages to charge ever more money for a product that is often declining in quality, with surprisingly little questioning from their customers.  We are so accustomed to this unrelenting rise in costs at all levels of education that few people realize how highly perverse it is.  

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, with his books 'The Higher Education Bubble' and 'The K-12 Implosion', has been the earliest and most vocal observer of a bubble in the education industry.  The vast corruption and sexual misconduct by faculty in K-12 public schools is described in the latter of those two books, but over here, we will focus mostly on higher education.  

Among the dynamics he has described are how government subsidization of universities directly as well as of student loans enables universities to increase fees at a rate that greatly outstrips inflation, which in turn allows universities to hire legions of non-academic staff, many of whom exist only to politicize the university experience and further the goals of politicians and government bureaucrats.    

Student-loans-home-equity-credit-lines-auto-credit-card_chartAs a result, university degrees have gotten more expensive, while the salaries commanded by graduates have remained flat or even fallen.  The financial return of many university degrees no longer justifies their cost, and this is true not just of Bachelor's Degrees, but even of many MBA and JD degrees from any school ranked outside the Top 10 or even Top 5.  

Graduates often have as much as $200,000 in debt, yet have difficulty finding jobs that pay more than $50,000 a year.  Student loan debt has tripled in a decade, even while many universities now see no problem in departing from their primary mission of education, and have drifted into a priority of ideological brainwashing.  Combine all these factors, and you have a generation of young people who may have student debt larger than the mortgage on a median American house (meaning they will not be the first-time home purchasers that the housing market depends on to survive), while having their head filled with indoctrination that carries zero or even negative value in the private sector workforce.  

When you combine this erosion of value with the fact that it now takes just minutes to research a topic, from home and at any hour, that previously would have involved half a day at the public library, why should the same sort of efficiency gain not be true for more formal types of education that are actually becoming scarcer within universities?

Primed For Creative Destruction : Employers want skills, rather than credentials.  There may have been a time when a credential had a tight correlation with a skillset that an employer sought in a new hire, but that has weakened over time, given the dynamic nature of most jobs, and the dilution of rigor in attaining the credential that most degrees have become.  Furthermore, technology makes many skillsets obsolete, while creating openings for new ones.  With the exception of those with highly specialized advanced degrees, very few people over the age of 30 today, can say that the demands of their current job have much relevance to what they learned in college, or even what computing, productivity, and research tools they may have used in college.  Furthermore, anyone who has worked at a corporation for a decade or more is almost certainly doing a very different job than the one they were doing when they were first hired.  

Hence, the superstar of the modern age is not the person with the best degree, but rather the person who acquires the most new skills with the greatest alacrity, and the person with the most adaptable skillset.  A traditional degree has an ever-shortening half-life of relevance as a person's career progresses, and even fields like Medicine and Law, where one cannot practice without the requisite degree, will not be exempt from this loosening correlation between pedigree and long-term career performance.  Agility and adaptability will supercede all other skillsets in the workforce.    

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them.  If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college.  If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree.  As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.           

The Disruption Begins at the Top : Since this disruption is technological and almost entirely about software, perhaps the disruption has to originate where the people most directly responsible for the disruption exist.  The program that has the potential to slash the costs of entry into a major career category is an online Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS) degree through a collaboration between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity, and AT&T.  For an estimated cost of just $6700, this program can enroll 10,000 geographically dispersed students at once (as opposed to the mere 300 MSCS degrees per year that Georgia Tech was awarding previously).  This is a tremendous revolution in terms of both cost and capacity.  A degree that can make a graduate eligible for high-paying jobs in a fast-growing field, is now accessible to anyone with the ability to succeed in the program.  The implications of this are immense.  

For one thing, this profession, which happens to be one with possibly the fastest-growing demand, has itself found a way to greatly increase the influx of new contributors to the field.  By removing both cost and geographical location, the program competes not just with brick and mortar MSCS programs, but with other degrees as well.  Students who may have otherwise not considered Computer Science as a career at all, may now choose it simply due to the vastly lower cost of preparation relative to similarly high-paying careers like other forms of engineering, law, or medicine.  Career changers can jump the chasm at lower risk than before, for the same reasons.  

As fields similarly suitable to remote learning (say, systems engineering, mathematics, or certain types of electrical engineering) see MOOC degree programs created for them, more avenues open up.  Fields where education can be more easily transmitted to this model will see an inherent advantage over fields that cannot be learned this way, in terms of attracting talent.  These fields in turn grow in size, becoming a larger portion of the economy, and creating even more demand for new entrants above a certain competence threshold.  

But these fields are still not the 'top' echelon of professional excellence.  The profession that is the most widespread, most dynamic, most durable, and has created the greatest wealth, is one that universities almost never do a good job of teaching or even discussing : that of entrepreneurship.  I have stated before that the ever-increasing variety of technological disruption means that the foremost career of the modern era is that of the serial entrepreneur.  If universities are not the place where the foremost career can be learned, then how important are formal degrees from these universities?  Since each entrepreneurial venture is different, the individual will have to synthesize a custom solution from available components.  

Multi-Faceted Disruption : As The Economist has noted, MOOCs have not yet unleashed a 'gale of Schumpeterian creative destruction' onto universities.  But this is still a conflation of the degree and the knowledge, particularly when the demands of the economy may shift many times during a person's career.  Udacity, Coursera, MITx, Khan Academy, and Udemy are just a few of the entities enabling low-cost education at all levels.  Some are for-profit, some are non-profit.  Some address higher education, and some address K-12 education.  Some count as credit towards degrees, and some are not intended for degree-granting, but rather for remedial learning.  But among all these websites, an innovative pupil can learn a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects and craft an interlocking, holistic education that is specific to his or her goals.  

When the sizes and shapes of education available online has so much variety, many assumptions about who has what skills will be challenged.  There will be too many counterexamples against the belief that a certain degree qualifies a person for a certain job.  Furthermore, the standardization of resumes and qualifications that the paradigm of degrees creates has gone largely unchallenged.  People who are qualified in two or more fields will be able to cast a wider net in their careers, and entrepreneurs seeking to enter a new market can get up to speed swiftly.  

Scale to the Topmost Educators : There was a time when music and video could not be recorded.  Hundreds of orchestras across a nation might be playing the same song, or the same play might be performed by hundreds of thespians at the same time.  Recording technologies enabled the most marketable musicians and actors to reach millions of customers at once, benefiting them and the consumer, while eliminating the bottom 99% of workers in these professions.  Consumers and the best producers benefitted, while the lesser producers could no longer justify their presence in the marketplace and had to adapt.

The same will happen to teachers.  It is not efficient for the same 6th-grade math or 8th grade biology to be taught by hundreds of thousands of teachers across the English-speaking world each year.  Instead, technology will enable scale and efficiency.  The best few lectures will be seen by all students, and it is quite possible that the best teacher, as determined by market demand, earns far more than one currently thinks a teacher can earn.  The rise of the 'celebrity teacher' is entirely possible, when one considers the disintermediation and concentration that has already happened with music and theatrical production.  This sort of competition will increase quality that students receive, and ensure renumeration is more closely tied to teacher caliber.  

Conclusion : It is not often that we see something experience a dramatic worsening in cost/benefit ratio while competitive alternatives simultaneously become available at far lower costs than just a few years prior.  When a status quo has existed for the entire adult lifetime of almost every American alive today, people fail to contemplate the peculiarity of spending as much as the cost of a house on a product of highly variable quality, very uncertain payoff, and very little independent auditing.  The degree of outdatedness in the assumption that paying a huge price for a certain credential will lead to a certain career with a certain level of earnings means the edifice will topple far more quickly than many people are prepared for.  

2015 is a year that will see the key components of this transformation fall into place.  Some people will be enter the same career while spending $50,000 less on the requisite education, than they may have expected.  Many colleges will shrink their enrollments or close their doors altogether.  The light of accountability will be shone on the vast corruption and ideological extremism present in some of the most expensive institutions (Moody's has already downgraded the outlook of the entire US higher education industry).  But most importantly, the most valuable knowledge will become increasingly self-taught from content available to all, and the entire economy will begin the process of adjusting to this new reality.  

See Also : 

The Carnival of Creative Destruction

July 23, 2014 in Accelerating Change, Core Articles, Technology | Permalink | Comments (58)

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A First Quarter Poll on The Misandry Bubble

- by Imran Khan

 

For those who recall, on 1/1/2010, I launched The Misandry Bubble, declaring that the first day of the ten-year series of 201x years during which pervasive societal misandry would be the dominant cultural issue, and how this misandry was itself a bubble that would pop by 2020.

Today, July 1, 2012, is exactly one-fourth into this decade.  In the 2.5 years that have elapsed, awareness of misandry has risen greatly, and the number of blogs devoted to shining a light on this has expanded by possibly an order of magnitude.

So at the point of this first-quarter intermission, I am going to post a simple poll, and embed that in the original article as well.  The reason I did not include a poll on 1/1/2010 itself was that the concepts introduced in that article were too novel and explosive for average people.  But since that time, awareness has risen, and the opposition has become more shrill and extreme.  There are still many deniers who refuse to admit that it is even possible for laws to be rigged against men.  Thus, a poll today would be more appropriate, with 75% of the decade in question still remaining.  

It is true that the first 400,000 visits to the original article did not have an opportunity to vote in the poll, but the traffic to the article is still quite steady, and starting the poll from this point would still have enough voters.    

So here it is (poll closed after 60 days) :

Misandry Poll

Quite simple.  Let us see how the results turn out.  For those of you who think there may be a sampling bias among voters, I encourage all of you to post the link of this poll on a misandry-heavy site to even out any such bias (the poll was in fact posted on DailyKos, only for the results to not be nearly as tilted in the favor of 'feminists' as they may have hoped).  You will be surprised at how many people are now awake to the pervasive presence of misandry in society.  

Poll Closure : It appears that Pollhost took it upon itself to twice delete this 'politically incorrect' poll (even though it is a poll, and hence an aggregate of reader opinions).  Fortunately, I saved the results after 60 days, showing a landslide in favor of the view that misandry is for real.  At over 6 to 1, the diverse readers of this size recognize misandry to be a real problem.  

Here is yet another poll built around this topic, with similar results from a relatively diverse reader pool.

July 01, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (101)

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Why Baby Boomers Will Have a Troubled Retirement

Amongst people under the age of 35 in America, a predominant view that I see emerging is how the Baby Boom generation in the US (born 1946-64) is consuming the future of the younger generation in an attempt to finance an opulent retirement.  While this may indeed be the political goal of at least some Boomers and the core mission of many retiree organizations, the fiscal situation in the US is far worse for the Boomers than they realize, even for those who don't seek to extract from younger people.

Boomers and Entitlements : While the first Baby Boomer turned 65 in 2011, the median Boomer (born in 1955) turns 65 in 2020, and the last ones turn 65 in 2029, which indicates that their big harvesting of Social Security and Medicare from the government has not even begun yet.  Given rising life expectancies, the peak years of Boomer harvesting will be 2015-2035 or so, which means that a huge level of withdrawals are anticipated for this 20-year window.  

193843_5_But alas, someone got to the goodies first.  This chart shows how US Federal Debt went from 65%  of GDP in 2008 to almost 100% today.  That 35-point rise was supposed to be consumed by Boomers seeking to finance their retirement, but now, with debt already so high well before Boomers can get their, the future payouts to Boomers have been crowded out.  There is certainly no room for another 35-point rise in Federal Debt as a percentage of GDP (credit downgrades and a capital exodus would happen long before debt could ever reach 135% of GDP), and given that the big debt spike began in 2009, it appears that President Obama and the Democrat Senate have already expended the funds that were supposed to sustain the Boomers.  

As debt thresholds that were not meant to be reached until many Boomers were well into their retirement have been pierced ahead of schedule, the squeeze will cause some very ugly intra-Boomer conflicts as each group seeks to secure a portion of the diminished pie, which we will examine later in the article.  

Q3FlowPercentEquityBoomers and Home Equity : But it gets worse for the Boomers, even for those who have resources that makes them less dependent on Social Security.  The housing market has been in a slump (which I predicted at the very height of the boom in April 2006), and this will, at best, tread water for the next several years.  Ultra-low mortgage rates have merely arrested a further decline, and even that deep well has been fully consumed (chart from Calculated Risk, click to enlarge).  

While some Baby Boomers believe they still may have enough time to recoup substantial home equity with which they may seek to finance a portion of their retirement, in order to retain their equity, they need a steady flow of first-time buyers to enter the housing market,in numbers greater than the rate at which retiring Boomers want to sell.  

Who are these new first-time buyers?  Why, the endless supply of young people starting their careers and forming families, of course.  But alas; the many members of this generation, born after 1990, will not be in any position to buy the houses that Boomers are seeking to sell.  

Crazy student loans 2011-q2To cultivate a new generation of home buyers who can take on a mortgage, it is imperative that they do not already have a mortgage-sized debt before that.  But the higher education industry got to this generation before the mortgage industry could, and many members of this generation have already signed away the first several years of their earnings to servicing their student loans in a rapidly inflating bubble (chart from The Atlantic, click to enlarge), amounting to some $867 Billion in indebtedness that is yet to abate.  It may be unfortunate that this upcoming generation was unavoidably destined to take on debt, and that it was only a question of whether the student loan industry or the mortgage industry yoked them in first.  But it appears that student loans won the race to reach their prey, which is bad news for Boomers seeking to sell their homes in 2015-20.  

On top of the student loan burden postponing their home purchases, there are more sinister cultural forces that are moving this upcoming generation towards apartments and condos, and away from the single-family homes that Boomers will seek to sell.  The US legal system severely disincentivizes young men from family formation by subjecting them to preposterously unfair laws if they enter a modern marital contract, and while those who profit from this status quo have done their best to conceal the risks of marriage and family from young men, the anti-misandry sphere continues to expose the truth, particularly to these younger generations of men.  Fewer young men are willing to take on the risk of entering such a lopsided contract.  

In desperation, Boomers will turn to the last remaining source of new blood - skilled immigration.  Skilled immigrants not only do not have student debt to the degree that American youths do, but are usually from countries that have not been ravaged by misandry.  I am strongly in favor of increasing skilled, legal immigration and will go so far as to say America cannot prosper without it, but even here, Boomers are behind the curve, as by the time this bright idea gets favored, a new generation of skilled foreigners will be far less interested in coming to America than their predecessors in the 1990s and 2000s.  The opportunities in India and China are much more than they were in the 1990s when America could attract the very best and brightest in the world.  But by 2015, the immigrants America can attract will be diminished in quality and number.  So financing their retirements on the backs of skilled immigrants as a substitute for a generation of Americans disincentivized from family formation is a scheme the Boomers will find to be too little, too late.  

If selling their homes at a price that retains some of their home equity was important Baby Boomers, they should have pre-emptively blocked laws that would greatly inhibit family formation and the resultant purchases of single-family homes, among the next generation of Americans.  Boomers let this tragedy happen right in front of them, and will pay for it with their home equity.  

All Boomers Are Not Equal : Lest you think I am being harsh to Baby Boomers, there is another level of scrutiny here that cannot be exposed often enough.  As I have established elsewhere, 70-80% of all government spending is a transfer from men to women, a default state almost every democracy will revert to over time, and this is especially true of entitlement programs.  Since women live 5-7 years longer than men, their average post-65 lifespan is thus about twice as long as a man's.  Add to this the fact that women use more healthcare per year than men anyway, and we get the heavily unidirectional transfer from men to women that is Medicare.  

As it has become apparent that SS and Medicare are not sufficiently funded to meet the needs of Boomers, many women (in the NYT, no less) are openly rooting for men to die early so that they don't consume the funds that would otherwise be collected by women (nevermind that the taxes paid into the system were mostly from men).  Expect this demand that men die when it is financially optimal for women to become increasingly frequent and shameless.  If women are wondering why more and more men don't see the need to put their own well-being behind that of women they don't know, they should contemplate their own contribution to how it has become typical for men to be treated as disposable commodities, rather than human beings.  

This is, of course, an opportunity for Boomer men to finally fight back.  When it is considered acceptable for the mainstream media to say the lives of men are a burden when they have outlived their earning years, and Obamacare, with the power to ration healthcare along political lines, is already prepared to fund women's health at the expense of men's, don't think for a minute that the legislative bias will stop there.  An additional surtax on men only, greater defunding of male health procedures, etc. are all being discussed.  Perhaps this will finally be enough to provoke a reaction from men.  

Conclusion : Overall, the fiscal cliff and non-cooperation of younger Americans and immigrants will bring great calamity to any Baby Boomers with a net worth under $2 Million.  Only the Boomers wealthy enough to not be dependent on either entitlement programs or home equity will go unscathed, and, unless Boomer men start fighting for their rights, they will find that an entire apparatus has been built to minimize their access Social Security and Medicare that they have paid into.  At the same time, despite an organized attempt to disenfranchise men, Boomer women will just not be able to extract more than they are already getting, since even the deepest wells of funding will be exhausted given the unprecedented number of women seeking to live off of the state.  While the excess spending has been the work of Democrats, do not think for one minute that Republicans will cut spending even if they win every election they stand in.  

Perhaps this event will be necessary in the process of dismantling many archaic and unjust structures.

Related :

The Housing Bubble : 20-Year Gains May Never Be Repeated

Recessions and Depressions

 

March 09, 2012 in Economics, Political Debate, Politics | Permalink | Comments (57)

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Recessions vs. Depressions

It is time for an economics lesson that most actual professors of economics will never deliver, because the contradiction in what I am about to explain is often not visible to those immersed within the orthodoxy of their field.

We often hear of 'recessions' as small events and 'depressions' as major events, however the two are defined in a very apples-to-oranges way, that is about to become exposed as we are entering a period that does not fit within either.

A recession only counts the period of the decline, but not the period that it takes for the economy to climb back to the previous high water mark.

A depression counts not only the decline but also the period it takes to return to the high water mark.  

Thus, recessions are defined by a definition that is incomplete and deceptive for not accounting for whether the recovery is rapid or slow, while depressions have a more accurate and complete definition.  The governments of the US and other nations have gotten away with this since almost every recovery out of a recession since 1948 was rapid enough that this flaw was not noticed.  But no longer.

EmploymentThe last recession was deemed by the NBER to have ended in June 2009.  However, note this chart from Calculated risk (click to enlarge), which indicates that payroll employment will take several more years to reach its high water mark from before the recession, far longer than any prior recession.  That we may be heading into another recession now extends this process even longer.  

Now, about depressions, there are some myths that have to be corrected.  Some depressions are shallow but very long (like the 'Long Depression' from 1873-96), while others are very deep but shorter.  Naturally, when the term 'depression' arises, GD GDPmost people think of the most recent one, which was the Great Depression from 1929-39, which a few people still alive today are old enough to remember.  However, a closer look at the Great Depression reveals that the sharp downturn that started in 1929 ended in 1933, and that from 1934 onwards, there was rapid improvement.  For all the 'Grapes of Wrath' imagery, anyone who managed to survive until 1934 saw continuous and persistent improvement in economic conditions from the deep bottom. 

Now, if we measure this period by the standards that recessions are measured by, there was a steep recession from 1929-33, followed by a recovery, and a much smaller recession in 1937-38.  The two recessions would seem unrelated, and the entire 1929-39 period would not be combined into one event.  Clearly, the failure to recapture the 1929 high water mark is the determinant of the depression classification lasting until 1939.  

Will the present period from 2008 to ~2017(?) be classified as a shallow depression?  Perhaps, but this will not be declared such until several years after it is over.  Rather, the proper way to assess this economic episode is to measure its deviation from the long-term exponential trendline, and not for the US, but rather in relation to World GDP.  

GDPSince the start of 2008, US nominal GDP has grown a mere 7%, while a combination of differences in inflation and real GDP growth has ensured that the nominal $US GDP of China has grown 99% and India 60% (source : IMF).  Never in the last 140+ years has the GDP of the US lagged so much in relation to any other large economies, and shrank so much as a percentage of total world GDP.  If the US were to measure itself based on the rate at which other large countries are gaining ground, then this is the worst period since the Great Depression. Europe, as usual, is doing even worse than the US.  

1820 GDPThis leads to the longer-term assessment, which is that perhaps we are in a midst of seeing Asia correct to a historically normal percentage of world GDP.  As this chart from The Economist shows (click to enlarge), at no time before 1820 was India + China less than 45% of world GDP on a PPP basis, and this chart ends in 2008, before most of the aforementioned India-China surge that I discussed earlier.  While India began to decline in 1700, China was at a very high point as recently as 1820.  Perhaps the rapid gains that India and China are seeing now is merely a reversion back to historical norms established over 5000 years, where these two nations were always at least 45% of world GDP.  If that is the case, the 1820-2020 period was an atypical 200-year golden era for the 'West'.  Indeed, the major European powers have already shrunk below any relative size they have been since 1500.  The US, of course, is a nation that did not exist for most of the period this chart covers, and thus may not shrink away the way that Europe has, and despite a classification of being part of the 'West' (a grouping Japan is also often shoehorned into), may align closer to Asia due to sheer gravitional pull.  

Since economic growth is exponential and accelerating, we now live in an age when it is possible to have such a large deviation from the trendline, while still experiencing minimal absolute growth.  This may not be called a 'depression' according to the way this was defined in the 20th century, but for the US it is a departure of a similar magnitude as the 1930s.  

Lastly, as I want to keep all articles consistent and with a minimum of contradictions, everyone should also remember that the US economy will not reach its full potential again until there is a substantial confrontation of state-backed misandry.  A Republican ouster of Obama will do very little to change this.  As various economists are baffled about 'why' the economy remains sluggish, their unwillingness to violate an increasingly absurd umbrella of 'political correctness' prevents them from seeing the blindlingly obvious root causes.  

Related :

A Future Timeline for Economics

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating 

 

December 02, 2011 in Economics | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0)

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The End of Petrotyranny

As oil prices remain high, we once again see murmurs of anticipated doom from various quarters.  Such fears are grossly miscalculated, as I have described in my 2007-08 articles about how oil at $120/barrel creates desirable chain reactions, as well as my rebuttal to the poorly considered beliefs of peak oil alarmists, who seem capable of being sold not one, but two bridges in Brooklyn.  Today, however, I am going to combine the concepts in both of those articles with some new analysis I have done to enable us to predict when oil will lose the economic power it currently holds.  You are about to see that not only are peak oil alarmists wrong, but they are just about as wrong as those predicting in 1988 that the Soviet Union would soon dominate the world, and will soon be equally worthy of ridicule.

Unenlightened Punditry and Fashionable Posturing :

As I mentioned in a previous article, many observers incessantly contradict themselves on whether they want oil to be inexpensive, or whether they want higher oil prices to spur technological innovations.  One of the most visible such pundits is Thomas Friedman, who has many interesting articles on the subject, such as his 2007 piece titled 'Fill 'Er Up With Dictators' :

But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide, or ignore an Iranian leader who says from one side of his mouth that the Holocaust is a myth and from the other that Iran would never dream of developing nuclear weapons, or to indulge a buffoon like Chávez, who uses Venezuela’s oil riches to try to sway democratic elections in Latin America and promote an economic populism that will eventually lead his country into a ditch.

But Mr. Friedman is a bit self-contradictory on which outcome he wants, as evidenced across his New York Times columns.

Over here, he says :

In short, the best tool we have for curbing Iran’s influence is not containment or engagement, but getting the price of oil down

And here, he says :

So here’s my prediction: You tell me the price of oil, and I’ll tell you what kind of Russia you’ll have. If the price stays at $60 a barrel, it’s going to be more like Venezuela, because its leaders will have plenty of money to indulge their worst instincts, with too few checks and balances. If the price falls to $30, it will be more like Norway. If the price falls to $15 a barrel, it could become more like America

Yet over here he says :

Either tax gasoline by another 50 cents to $1 a gallon at the pump, or set a $50 floor price per barrel of oil sold in America. Once energy entrepreneurs know they will never again be undercut by cheap oil, you’ll see an explosion of innovation in alternatives.

As well as over here :

And by not setting a hard floor price for oil to promote alternative energy, we are only helping to subsidize bad governance by Arab leaders toward their people and bad behavior by Americans toward the climate.

All of these articles were written within a 4-month period in early 2007.  Both philosophies are true by themselves, but they are mutually exclusive.  Mr. Friedman, what do you want?  Higher oil prices or lower oil prices?  Such confusion indicates how the debate about energy costs and technology is often high on rhetoric and low on analysis. 

Much worse, however, is the fashionable scaremongering that the financial media uses to fill up their schedule, amplified by a general public that gets suckered into groupthink.  To separate the whining from the reality, I apply the following simple test to verify whether people are actually being pinched by high oil prices or not.  If a large portion of average Americans have made arrangements to carpool to work (as was common in the 1970s), then oil prices are high.  Absent the willingness to make this adjustment, their whining about gasoline is not a reflection of actual hardship.  This enables us to declare that oil prices are not approaching crisis levels until most 10-mile-plus commuters are carpooling, that too in groups of three, rather than just two.  Coordinating of carpools is thus the minimum test of whether oil prices are actually causing any significant changes in behavior. 

Fortunately, $100 oil, a price that was considered a harbinger of doom as recently as 2007, is now not even enough to induce carpooling in 2011.  This quiet development is remarkably unnoticed, and conceals the substantial economic progress that has occurred.   

Economic Adaptations :

Trade Deficit The following chart from Calculated Risk (click to enlarge) shows the US trade deficit split between oil and non-oil imports.  This chart is not indexed as a percentage of GDP, but if it were, we would see that oil imports at $100/barrel today are not much higher of a percentage of GDP than in 1998, when oil was just $20/barrel.  In fact, the US produces much more economic output per barrel of oil compared to 1998.  We can thus see that unlike in 1974 when the US economy has much less demand elasticity for oil, today the ability of the economy to adjust oil consumption more quickly in reaction to higher prices makes the bar to experience an 'oil shock' much harder to clear.  US oil imports will never again attain the same percentage of GDP as was briefly seen in 2008. 

World Oil Consumption Per Capita-Downey-Oil 101 Of even more importance is the amazingly consistent per capita consumption of oil since 1982, which has remained at exactly 4.6 barrels/person despite a tripling real GDP per capita during the same period (chart by Morgan Downey).  This immediately deflates the claim that the looming economic growth of China and India will greatly increase oil consumption, since the massive growth from 1982 to 2011 did not manage to do this.  At this point, annual oil consumption, currently at around 32 billion barrels, only rises at the rate of population growth - about 1% a year. 

This leads me to make a declaration.  32 billion barrels at around $100/barrel is $3.2 Trillion in annual consumption.  This is currently less than 5% of nominal world GDP.  I hereby declare that :

Oil consumption worldwide will never exceed $4 Trillion/year, no matter how much inflation, political turmoil, or economic growth there is.  Thus, 'Peak Oil Consumption' happens long before 'Peak Oil Supply' ever could. 

This would mean that oil would gradually shrink as a percentage of world GDP, just as it has shrunk as a percentage of US GDP since 1982.  Even when world GDP is $150 Trillion, oil consumption will still be under $4 Trillion a year, and thus a very small percentage of the economy.  Mark my words, and proceed further to read about how I can predict this with confidence.   

The Carnival of Creative Destruction :

There are at least seven technologies that are advancing to reduce oil demand by varying degrees, many of which have been written about separately here at The Futurist : 

1) Natural Gas : Technologies that aid the discovery of natural gas have advanced at great speed, and supplies have skyrocketed to a level that exceeds anything humanity could consume in the next few decades.  The US alone has enough natural gas to more than offset all oil consumption, and the price of natural gas is currently on par with $50 oil. 

2) Efficiency gains : From innovations in engine design, airplane wing shape, reflective windows, and lighter nanomaterials, efficiency is advancing rapidly, to the extent that economic growth no longer increases oil consumption per capita, as described earlier.  There are many options available to consumers seeking 40 mpg or higher without sacrificing too much power or size, and I predicted back in early 2006 that in 2015, a 4-door family car with a 240 hp engine would deliver 60 mpg (or equivalent) yet still cost no more than $35,000 in 2015 dollars.  People scoffed at that prediction then, but now it seems quite safe.   

3) Cellulose Ethanol and Algae Oil : Corn ethanol was never going to be suitable in cost or scale, but the infrastructure established by the corn ethanol industry makes the transition to more sophisticated forms of ethanol production easier.  But fuels from switchgrass and algae are much more cost-effective, and will be ramping up in 2012.  Solazyme is an algae oil company that went public recently, and already has a market capitalization of $1.5 Billion. 

4) Batteries : Most of the limitations of electric and hybrid vehicles stem from shortcomings in battery technology.  However, since batteries are improving at a rate that is beginning to exceed the traditional 5-8% per year, and companies such as Tesla are able to lower the cost of their fully electric vehicles, the knee of the curve is near. 

5) Telepresence : Telepresence, while expensive today, will drop in price under the Impact of Computing and displace a substantial portion of business air travel, as described in detail here.  By 2015, geographically dispersed colleagues will seem to be closer to each other, despite meeting in person less often than they did in 2008.   

6) Wind Power : Wind Power already generates almost 3% of global electricity consumption, and is growing quickly.  When combined with battery advances that improve the range and power of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, we get two simultaneous disruptions - oil being displaced not just by electriciy, but by wind electricity.    

7) Solar Power : This source today generates the least power among those listed here.  But it is the fastest growing of the group with multiple technologies advancing at once, and with decades of steady price declines finally reaching competitive pricepoints.  It also has many structural advantages, most notably the fact that it be deployed to land that is currently unused and inhospitable.  Many of the countries with the fastest growth in energy consumption are also those with the greatest solar intensity. 

Plus, these are just the technologies that displace oil demand.  There are also technologies that increase oil supply, such as supercomputing-assisted oil discovery and new drilling techniques.  Supply-increasing technologies work to reduce oil prices and while they possibly slow down oil demand displacement, they too work to weaken petrotyranny. 

The problem in any discussion of these technologies is that the debate centers around an 'all or none' simplicity of whether the alternative can replace all oil demand, or none at all.  That is an unnuanced exchange that fails to comprehend that each technology only has to replace 10% of oil demand.  Natural gas can replace 10%, ethanol another 10%, efficiency gains another 10%, wind + solar another 10%, and so on.  Thus, if oil consumption as a percentage of world GDP is lower in a decade than it is today, that itself is a huge victory.  It hardly matters which technology advances faster than the others (in 2007, natural gas did not appear as though it would take the lead that it enjoys today), what matters is that all are advancing, and that many of these technologies are highly complementary to each other.     

What is also overlooked is how quickly the pressure to shift to alternatives grows as oil becomes more expensive.  If, say, cellulose ethanol is cost-effective with oil at $70, then oil at $80 causes a modest $10 dollar differential in favor of cellulose.  If oil is $120, then this differential is now $50, or five times more.  Such a delta causes much greater investment and urgency to ramp up research and production in cellulose ethanol.  Thus, each increment in oil price creates a much larger zone of profitability for any alternative. 

The Cost of Petrotyranny :

Map01_1024 This map of nations scaled in proportion to their petroleum reserves (click to enlarge) replaces thousands of words.  Some contend that the easy money derived from exporting oil leads to inevitable corruption and the financing of evil well beyond the borders of petro-states, while others lament the misfortune that this major energy source is concentrated in a very small area containing under 2% of the world's population.  Other sources of energy, such as natural gas, are much more evenly distributed across the planet, and this supply chain disadvantage is starting to work against oil.   

However, as we saw in the 2008 article, many of these regimes are dancing on a very narrow beam only as wide as the span between oil of $70 and $120/barrel.  While a price below $70 would be fatal to the current operations of Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, even a high price leads to a shrinkage in export revenue, as domestic consumption rises to reduce export units to a greater degree than can be offset by a price rise.  Furthermore, higher prices accelerate the advance of the previously mentioned technologies.  For the first time, we can now estimate how long oil can still hold such an exalted economic status. 

Quantifying the Remaining Petro-Yoke :

For the first time, we can make the analysis of both technological and political pressure exerted by a particular oil price more precise.   We can now quantify the rate of technological demand destruction, and predict the actual number of years before oil ceases to have any ability to cause economic recessions, and regimes like Iran, Venezuela, and Russia no longer can subsist on oil exports to the same degree.  This brings me to the second declaration of this article :

From the start of 2011, measure the dollar-years of area enclosed by a chart of the price of oil above $70.  There are only 200 such dollar-years remaining for the current world petro-order.  We can call this the 'Law of Finite Petrotyranny'. 

Allow me to elaborate. 

Through some proprietary analysis, I have calculated that the remaining lifetime of oil's economic importance as follows :

  • From the start of 2011, take the average price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), Brent, or NYMEX oil, and subtract $70 from that, each year. 
  • Take the number accumulated, and designate that as 'X' dollar-years.
  • As soon as X equals to 200 dollar-years, then oil will not just fall below $70, but will never again be a large enough portion of world GDP to have a significant macroeconomic impact. 
     

Oil Price You can plug in your own numbers to estimate the year in which oil will cease to exert such power.  For example, if you believe that oil will average $120, which is $50 above the $70 floor, then the X points are expended at a rate of $50/year, meaning depletion at the end of 2014.  If oil instead averages just $100, then the X points are expended at $30/year, meaning it will take 6.67 years, or until late 2017, to consume them.  Points are only depleted when oil is above $70, but are not restored if oil is below $70 (as research projects may be discontinued or postponed, but work already done is not erased).  For those who (wrongly) insist that oil will soon be $170, the good news for them is that in such an event they will see the X points depleted in just two short years.  The graph provides 3 scenarios, of oil averaging $120, $110, and $100, and indicating in which year such a price trend would exhaust the 200 X points from points A, B, and C, which is the area of each of the three rectangles.  In reality, price fluctuations will cause variations in the rate of X point depletion, but you get the idea. 

Keep in mind the Law of Finite Petrotyranny, and on that basis, welcome any increase in oil prices as the hastening force of oil replacement that it is.  My personal opinion?  We average about $100/barrel, causing depletion of the X points in 2017 (scenario 'C' in green). 

Conclusion :

So what happens after the Law of Finite Petrotyranny manifests itself?  Let me pre-empt the strawmen that critics will erect, and state that oil will still be an important source of energy.  But most people will no longer care about the price of oil, much as the average person does not keep track of the price of natural gas or coal.  Oil will simply be a fuel no longer important enough to cause recessions or greatly alter consumer behavior through short-term spikes.  Many OPEC countries will see a great reduction in their power, and will no longer be able to placate their citizens through petro-handouts alone.  These countries would do well to act now and diversify their economies, phase in civil liberties while they can still do so incrementally, and prepare for a future of much lower leverage over their current customers.

So cheer oil prices higher so that the X points get frittered away quickly.  It will be fun. 

 

Related :

A Future Timeline for Energy

A Future Timeline for Automobiles 

July 01, 2011 in Accelerating Change, Core Articles, Economics, Energy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (76) | TrackBack (0)

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It is Time to Expose Misandry

- by Imran Khan

 

This is a different sort of article, unlike any other written on The Futurist.  It is no coincidence that this article is written on 1/1/2011, exactly 365 days after The Misandry Bubble was posted on 1/1/2010.  While this website normally discusses and predicts the future, in this instance, I would like to enlist people to help alter the trajectory of one aspect of the future.  A year ago, I did say that I would not become an activist of any sort, but what I have seen over the last year makes me unable to let such lopsided and egregious injustice go unchallenged. 

We have completed the first year of the decade of The Misandry Bubble, and I remain as convinced as ever that The Misandry Bubble will correct by 2020 no matter what due to the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation.  However, there is much to lose if the correction is turbulent, rather than orderly.  Millions of innocent men and women can be saved from wrenching misfortune if we act now to fight the culture of misandry that is cancerously pervading the entire Western world. 

So why is so much injustice met with so little opposition?  It is a combination of i) a lack of awareness about the complexity of various laws and the perverse incentives they create, ii) an overwhelming cultural bias to crush any questioning of the increasingly tyrannical bent of 'feminism', iii) insufficient time or resources at the disposal of the very small anti-misandry community, iv) a shortage of any prior experience in political activism, and v) simply not knowing where or how to begin.  There thus exists a need for a simple, low risk solution that enables this small civilian force to wage asymmetrical warfare against misandry within the above constraints. 

It takes an extreme amount of research to learn that, for example, the Federal Government, under 'feminist' pressure, pays grants to police departments in proportion to the number of men jailed under VAWA legislation, leading to an incentive for police to expand the defintion of 'domestic violence' to absurd extremes.  Or that 'feminists' lobbied to steer money away from disabled veterans towards able-bodied women.  But before one can digest such intracacies, we must take a step back, and contemplate what it might take to get more men reading, discussing, and eventually opposing such convoluted mechanisms for tyranny. 

At the moment, the only notable anti-misandry activity underway is the production of blog articles.  Many great articles have been written, and there are a number of subjects that I myself would not have known about without the Internet authorship of anti-misandrists.  However, this is only a small fraction of the total blogosphere, which is itself frequented by only a small fraction of the adult population.  My five years of running this blog, and commenting on others, leads me to estimate that in the US, the number of people who are active denizens of the blogosphere (as defined by visiting multiple blogs per day, every day) is no greater than 50,000.  Blogs with very high traffic are still sparsely viewed relative to television programs that may receive millions of viewers.  For this reason, while the creation of new anti-misandry web content is essential, the trajectory of that tactic has already reached a saturation point.   

So let us take a top-down approach.  Men over the age of 18 fall in three broad groups in their capacity to grasp the concept of misandry :

C) Drones : Men who just do what they believe everyone else does.  They don't think very far beyond their own social group, and cannot comprehend complex concepts that span a variety of subjects.  They don't go out of their way to live by a code of needy chivalry, either.   

B) White Knights/Pedestalizers/Girlie-Men : These 'men' are a very major force propagating misandry on both sides of the mainstream political spectrum.  As detailed in The Misandry Bubble, they have a misguided belief that appeasing women is the way to succeed with women, despite the overwhelming evidence that contradicts this, and the vast amount of Internet material that describes why the act of appeasing women makes a man repulsive to women.  As more men are awaking to the excesses of 'feminism', these pedestalizers are doubling down in their support of female supremacism and male disenfranchisement. 

A) Men Who Could Grasp the Concepts, if Introduced to Them : Virtually all men who currently have a deep understanding of the various topics discussed in anti-misandry blogs started out by observing anecdotes in real life that seemed askew, did some web searching, and discovered the ocean of content leading to a multi-month digestion process.  After a vast amount of reading, they became aware of all sorts of subjects that took a 17,000-word article just to summarize. 

Our target audience is Group A.  While we do not know exactly what percentage of men fall into each category, it is safe to assume that Group A amounts to tens of millions of men in the Anglosphere countries.  We only need to get a small fraction of them to become aware of the sinister agenda of VAWA, the Bradley Amendment, the drugging of little boys in schools, etc. to generate real momentum against misandry.  These are also the men who are the most capable of recognizing that beyond men, average women are being greatly damaged by the modern incarnation of 'feminism'. 

Piercing the Matrix

The Location : Male restrooms in public buildings have urinals.  When a man is using a urinal, he has no choice but to see the blank wall that is directly in front of his face above the urinal at eye-level.  Every man taller than 5'2", whether young or old, rich or poor, is a captive audience for that brief passage of time.  A urinal in a crowded location might be used hundreds of times in a single day.  Yet, to this day, I have almost never seen this valuable advertising space used. 

The Seeds of Thought : A lot of men from Group A above have either experienced in their own lives, or observed in the lives of other men, situations that seem inexplicably unfair to good men.  They somehow sense that something is fundamentally wrong, but they never had anyone tie together these separate anecdotes to put the broader picture of societal misandry into focus.  This process can, and often does, happen quickly if such a man is shown the right reading material, and is placed into a setting where he can ask plenty of questions to others who became aware before him. 

If a man sees a flyer that provokes a jolting thought where he leasts expects it, he will remember it for a long time to come.  Those of us who have studied and practiced Neuro-Linguisting Programming (NLP) will recognize this as a very strong anchor, and thus ensure that he will remember the seed planted in his mind in many future instances of standing in front of a urinal.  The periodic recollection will be unshakeable, due to such a strong anchor being planted.  Whenever he hears of yet another such situation again, he will think back to the thought evoked by the flyer he saw on that day. 

Moving on to the optimal content of each flyer, it should ideally ask a question that sounds mainstream and hard to condemn, yet be sufficiently strong as to cause the aforementioned jolt.  It should also have a simple URL directed the reader to further information, or a couple of words that can be Googled.  For example, a flyer could ask "Why do 4 times more commit suicide than women?", followed by "Visit www.the-spearhead.com to learn why".  Or maybe "Why are little boys being drugged in schools?  Visit www.the-spearhead.com".  Or perhaps something like "Are you tired of being called a 'misogynist' for no reason?  If so, Google "The Misandry Bubble"". 

I recommend websites that have a professional appearance and clean format, and are written in language that can pass the PG-13 test.  The reason for this is that we want to draw in Group A men in gradual increments, without anything that will trigger a revulsion reflex.  For this reason, some of the websites most suitable for this type of flyer are :

  • Dalrock (dalrock.wordpress.com) : Dalrock is the only blog deeply exposing how much misandry has pervaded US Christianity, the Republican Party, and 'Conservatives' who miss no chance to grovel to 'feminists'.  
  • Wedded Abyss (weddedabyss.wordpress.com) : This single-page website is simple and lucid, but discusses the horrors of Marriage 2.0 laws in a gender-agnostic way.  If you know any young man considering marriage, you have a moral duty to direct them to this 10-minute read. 
  • Approach Anxiety (www.approachanxiety.com) : If you believe, as I do, that ethical practice of seduction arts ('Game') are beneficial to both men and (attractive) women, then this website is a good one to drive visibility towards.  Websites like Citizen Renegade, while invaluable, should not be the very first website a newcomer sees.  That material is best reserved for a bit further in the learning (and un-learning) process, after contextual preparation. 
  • Lastly, if you found The Misandry Bubble to be a useful read, note that I did structure it to act as a gateway to the subject for a reader with no prior exposure.  I would be honored if you felt inclined to select that article for any of your flyers. 

There are many other good websites as well, of course, and you can choose whichever you think has the most useful content.  If you wish to pay homage to any of the long-time authors of Men's Rights, or the luminaries of Game, this is a great channel through which to do so.  Just err on the side of those websites that maintain a professional appearance and PG-13 language, in order to keep the tent big.  If the URL is straightforward, include the URL itself in the flyer.  If the URL is longer, instruct the reader to Google the title (e.g. 'For more, Google "The Misandry Bubble" or "Wedded Abyss").  Here is a powerpoint file with a few examples of simple flyers. You can make your flyers colored and more graphically impressive as well.

The Viral Campaign : We don't want to post these flyers in low-traffic locations, but rather where the most men will see them, and specifically where the men who stand to lose the most from misandry are likely to be present.  Therefore, the locations of maximum impact are :

i) Convention Centers and Hotels : A major conference might have tens of thousands of attendees, and these are often professional men working extremely hard to support their families, yet who know of men just like them who have been mysteriously driven into poverty, imprisonment, or suicide.  Since the modern state depends heavily on the productivity of these career men, who are a very small percentage of the population, they should have a chance to learn about why so many men just like them, who appeared to do everything right, find themselves ruined and criminalized for seemingly mysterious reasons.  Go to the website of the biggest convention center in your city, and make a note of which dates that center hosts a major conference likely to be full of male attendees. 

ii) Medical, Business, and Graduate Engineering Schools : These locations are filled with men in their mid-late 20s, who are both contemplating marriage and about to embark on lucrative careers.  They have much to gain from learning about the differences between Marriage 1.0 and Marriage 2.0, the importance of pre-nuptial agreements, etc.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

iii) Military Locations : Any place full of either current military personnel or older veterans is highly appropriate, as these men are often prime targets of predatory campaigns that legislative misandry enables.  The US Government claims to care about reducing the suicide rate of active duty military personnel, but stops short of taking corrective action when reducing the suicide rate would involve a confrontation with 'feminism'.  It is our duty to intervene on behalf of our fine soldiers, and inform them of what sequence of events takes place that enables the foulest of parasites to prey on them. 

iv) Mosques and Islamic Centers : Muslims in the West do have the right to be informed about laws that they might not be aware of, and plan their lives accordingly.  After that, let the chips fall where they may.   

Other locations (like sports stadiums) can also be useful.  The main objective is to get as many men as possible anchored to the thought of societal misandry at future visits to a urinal, and to get them to visit a website and perhaps step through the gateway into the substantial education he may choose to undertake.  Just make sure that you are not violating any laws against flyer-posting in restrooms (as ludicrous as such a law would be). 

Now, this being 2011, not only do we benefit from the existence of the Internet, but from the existence of a mobile Internet.  I have written about the explosion of mobile Internet connectivity since 2006, and we now live in an age where people have Internet access in their pockets.  The advantage here is that he does not have to wait until he goes home to check the URL, but could do so on his iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc. right after he leaves the restroom while the thought is fresh.  If a flyer that provokes his thoughts about divorce, drugging of boys, or male suicide is sufficiently relevant to past events he has seen or experienced, he might very well go to the website he saw.  If he likes the content, he might even send the URL to his friends via Twitter or Facebook.  We are thus using elements that are both high-tech and low-tech in nature, to maximum effect. 

Let's give this campaign a name.  I will call it 'URLs @ Urinals', for that is exactly what it is.  That tagline has a symmetric flow, and is easy to remember.  It also sounds a little annoying, and that is exactly what we want.  If you find the slogan 'URLs @ Urinals' to be both accurate and annoying, imagine how irritated the misandrists will become. 

Actually, as of 1/1/2011, we have not even begun to annoy them yet. 

1000 Man-Hours to Restore Civil Rights : In 2010, this website received over 250,000 visits averaging about 3 minutes each, most of which were for The Misandry Bubble.  That is 750,000 minutes, or 12,500 hours, that went into reading just this modest website.  For just a fraction of that time, we can initiate a sequence of events that eventually curbs one of the great evils of this age. 

All I request is for people reading this to each spend a couple of hours preparing and posting the flyers of their choice, at strategically valuable locations such as those described above.  Time spent should include only the preparation of flyers, and actual taping of them over selected urinals, but not the transit time of going to the target location.  This means that an hour of effort would translate into 10 to 60 restrooms being hit.  But again, these must be well-visited restrooms. 

If everyone reading this article can collectively muster up just 1000 hours of volunteer activism, as measured above.....

We can get the urinals of 10,000 to 60,000 high-traffic men's rooms flyered.

Which could make over 1 million men see the flyers.

Which could plant a seed in the minds of hundreds of thousands of them.

Which could lead to tens of thousands of them reading the websites introduced in the flyers.

Which could result in several thousand more men becoming fully educated about the various dimensions of misandry that are silently enslaving them. 

Several thousand new men would be a major expansion from the few hundred that exist today.  From these new men will arise new ideas, new activism, and shifts in the cultural flow of society.  There will be more challenges to unspoken misandric assumptions, and more pressure to question 'feminist' falsehoods. 

The Tea Party went from zero to a dominant political force in under two years.  I see anti-misandry as the next stage of the Tea Party's goal of small government, as there can be no reduction in government spending without a direct confrontation of 'feminism'.  This also means that anti-misandry can spread as fast as the Tea Party did, and possibly shield the Tea Party from Republican feminists seeking to co-opt it.  1000 Man-Hours to start an avalanche.  On this day, 1/1/2011, go and take action. 

The Reaction from Misandrists : The reaction that 'URLs @ Urinals' will provoke is alone worth the effort, if their belligerence upon my use of the term 'fatocalypse' in The Misandry Bubble is any indication.  Already in a stupor of castrative bloodlust, 'feminists' will be tipped into hysteria by the thought of more men being sent information from outside the plantation.  Their reactions will span the whole range of derangement, from demands for taxpayer-funded armed guards to apprehend flyer posters, to feminists barging into men's rooms to inspect for evidence of 'misogyny', to calls for outright bans on urinals themselves as 'male supremacist' appliances, to increasingly bold statements regarding the need to reduce the male population to a fraction of what it currently is (yes, they actually do say this).  The good news is that by baiting them, their reactions will do a fair amount of our work for us, and other men in Group A will see this and begin to recoil in revulsion.   

Pedestalizers will see these flyers, and tear them down.  But that action is futile as due to the viral nature of 'URLs @ Urinals' they have no idea where or when the next flyers will be posted.  They will, as mentioned before, double down on their repellent pedestalization of women.  But they can only double down so many times, and this will accelerate the process of them cracking under the burdens of their ignorance.  If you would like to see the costs of misandry accumulate onto the pedestalizers/girlie-men who sustain it, put in a few hours into 'URLs @ Urinals'.  Assume that each hour you spend posting a compelling flyer in the right place is collectively costing pedestalizers money. 

Remember that all we are doing is asking men to go to certain websites, some of which have female authors.  After that, any opinions these men form, or decisions they make, are their choice, and I would not have it any other way.  For those who oppose 'URLs @ Urinals' as 'misogynist', know that they are actually opposed to men knowing what divorce and child custody laws are, what sorts of mechanisms can land them in prison without due process that they think they are protected by, and that little boys are being drugged in schools in order to make them less masculine.  What type of creatures would oppose the act of individuals informing themselves about the laws they live under?  Keep that in mind as you set out to post flyers.

The Ripple Effects : I do not in any way claim that 1000 hours of 'URLs @ Urinals' will by itself topple the massive legislative-industrial complex of misandry. I do, however, think that 1000 hours of this can expand the number of men who are both well-informed about misandry and seriously troubled by it, by two orders of magnitude more than what it is now.  If, by the end of 2011, the number of men who are have awareness is a hundred times higher, then from that platform, many new leaders and ideas will emerge. 

Always remember the following characteristics of revolutions :

  • Information wants to be free, and technological progress makes it more and more free
  • The regime that is dependent on restricting access to information always loses to the movement that strengthens with greater information flow.
  • The side that has not innovated any new weapons or tactics in a long time, will lose. 

It appears that all of those points are in favor of justice and freedom, and are working against misandry.  There has been no ideology in the West in the modern era that has been more dependent on keeping people uninformed about the laws they live under.     

About myself, my career exists in the medium between Silicon Valley and High Finance.  I have participated in the creation of disruptive technologies and asymmetrically competitive business models, and longtime readers know about my track record of predictions.  I have an eye for how to do a lot with a little, and I believe this tactic will change society quickly.  Never aim low.   

Who Should Participate in 'URLs @ Urinals'? 

  • Anyone who has read The Misandry Bubble, and is keen on engineering an orderly unwinding of it, rather that the default outcome of a turbulent, seismic unwinding. 
  • Anyone who dislikes how 'feminism' harms women.  It is impossible to oppress one gender without also damaging the other, and 'feminism' has created a legion of unmarried, childless, impoverished older women who were sold outright falsehoods.
  • Anyone who recognizes that the US economy will not become robust again until a reduction in misandry, as explained in the 'Economic Thesis' portion of The Misandry Bubble. 
  • Anyone who opposes the expanding size of government.  I repeat again that government spending will not reduce until small government advocates figure out that there is no way around a direct and fierce confrontation with 'feminism'. 
  • Anyone who believes that the US Constitution has valuable protections in it.  Nowhere else is the Constitution more bypassed and ignored than in the misandric shadow state.  Why is there a second legal system that operates outside the Constitution? 
  • Anyone who still wants Western civilization to be vibrant and powerful.  If you are concerned about India and China catching up, at the very forefront of your concerns should be the fact that in India and China, almost all children grow up with both biological parents living in the same home, while in the US, more than half of the children born today will not.  The rise and fall of civilizations often does come down to very basic elements. 
  • Anyone who would enjoy toppling a regime heavily dependent on concealing and restricting information. 

In closing, let me add that this is also a test of the anti-misandry-sphere.  Hundreds of men comment on blogs about the evils of misandry, but point out (correctly) that they don't know where to begin, and that their numbers and resources are too few, and that they have to remain anonymous.  'URLs @ Urinals' greatly reduces those disadvantages, and is fully decentralized.  1000 hours is very little, and if this nascent community cannot muster even this minimal amount of effort, then, well, the right to complain would become much lower.  Debate this strategy, critique it, scoff at it, yes.  But do that after have put in an hour or two of your own.  If there is to eventually be a real movement against misandry, mobilizing 1000 hours of activism is a minimal prerequisite. 

Rise to action, men, and make it happen.  Get out and start posting flyers (such as these). 

Do it now!!

Note on Comments : The usual pre-emption applies : misandrists have no debate tactics other than to call their opponents 'misogynists' and 'losers'.  See The Misandry Bubble for a deconstruction of the inherent projection behind those slurs, particularly since misandry is far more common than misogyny.  I continue to be amused by how many 'feminists' are unable to spell the most important word in their vocabulary.  

January 01, 2011 | Permalink | Comments (165)

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Why Republicans Will Not Shrink Government

- by Imran Khan

 

Here we are, on the eve of a red wave that will see the GOP wrest over 60 House seats, 8 Senate seats, and 7 Governorships away from the Democrats.  As a free-market, small government advocate, I greet this development with only minimal enthusiasm.  In fact, on a scale of 1 to 10, while I certainly rate the Democrats as a shameful 1, I cannot give the Republicans a score any higher than a 4.  My ratings of 1 and 4, interestingly, offend not just Democrats but Republicans as well.  Allow me to elaborate.

Republicans have held the Presidency for 28 of the last 42 years.  They have also held majorities in Congress for substantial periods of time.  Yet, no one can dispute that the US is far more left-leaning than it was in 1968.  Government spending as a percentage of GDP is much higher, incidence of single motherhood is vastly higher, free enterprise is less respected, individual liberties are lower, and popular entertainment has become vulgar, disgusting, and immoral.  These are all things Republicans do not desire, yet it has happened under their noses anyway.  We can thus conclude that :

Republicans winning elections does not counter leftism, it merely postpones the inexorable advance of leftism.     

So why are Republicans unable to advance what their voters want, while the left can advance their agenda whether they are in office or not?  The reasons for this are as follows :

Marketing Ignorance : Longtime readers are aware of how I strongly emphasize that one must never refer to leftists as 'liberals'.  In reality, they are illiberal, intolerant, and rigid.  By allowing them to assign a positive word like 'liberal' or 'progressive' to themselves, the right already concedes the battle before it has even begun.  Would you want to enter into a public debate with someone under the agreement that they get to call themselves the 'smart/good person' while you have to be known as the 'dumb/evil person'?  Yet this is what the right readily agrees to, and they appear to be incapable of learning from their errors.  In 8 years, I have seen just two articles by a Republican describing why it is unwise to refer to totalitarian leftists as 'liberals', while every other article posted daily continues with this foolishness. 

But it goes further.  For years and years, the left has behaved with extreme hypocrisy on issues of race, ethics, and pro- vs anti-American stances.  The response that the right delivers is to point out this hypocrisy in a polite manner, expecting the left to acknowledge their error and not repeat it in the future.  Needless to say, the left has no problem with hypocrisy and projection, and has no intention of changing this.  Yet, the Republicans still fail to notice that pointing out such examples of hypocrisy has no effect on the debate.  The definition of insanity, or at least stupidity, is repeating the same action a number of times, and expecting a different result, but Republicans fail to see that the character of their opponents is far too uncivilized for the toothless tactics that Republicans restrict themselves to.

Take, for example, the African-American vote, which usually goes 90-96% for Democrats.  This is true even if the Republican candidate is black and the Democrat is white (as was the case in 3 major races in 2006).  An examination of recent history quickly reveals this loyalty towards Democrats as more than a little odd.  George Wallace ran for President as a Democrat on a segregationist platform as recently as 1976 (note that this was after Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' approach).  Furthermore, Robert Byrd, a senior leader in the KKK, was a US Senator in the Democratic party until 2010.  These facts would make it less surprising for blacks to vote 90% Republican than the current reality of the opposite.  But this yet again shows how poor Republican messaging is.  The party of George Wallace and Robert Byrd still manages to get 90% of the black vote, due to the left's tireless propaganda in black neighborhoods, and historical revisionism in school textbooks in inner-city public schools.  As a result, the black vote is not even remotely available to Republicans, and with African Americans being 11% of the US population, for a Democrat to win a nationwide election, he only has to get 40 out of the remaining 90% of votes to be cast.  The Republican, by contrast, has to get 50 out of the remaining 90%.  That is correct, for a Republican to win, he has to get not 50 out of 100%, but 50 out of 90%. 

And while Democrat tactics have been underhanded, the Republicans can only blame themselves for being so weak, inobservant, and slow to comprehend what they are up against. 

The Judicial Battlespace, Where Only One Side Shows Up : Elections are only half of the battlefield.  The other half is the legislative/judicial landscape where laws are discreetly created and enacted without voter approval.  The left tirelessly pushes its agenda through an army of lawyers and judges, with the right not even noticing.  This unchallenged activity from the left is the reason that they have managed to reduce their dependence on the electoral process, easily duping Republicans into thinking that winning elections is a 'victory against leftism'.  That Republicans be distracted from even noticing this crucial other half of the battlespace is quite acceptable to the left. 

As just one example, this is why the left is easily able to distract Republicans with inconsequential side issues like 'gay marriage', while not a single 'social conservative' protested that New York became the final state out of 50 to replace fault-based divorce with 'no-fault' divorce.  For 'socons' who claim to care about preserving the institution of marriage, yet not utter a single word about a legal system that has been rigged to increase lawyer revenues by making it easy and profitable for women to get divorces, is shockingly dim.  To put it even more plainly, the number of straight men avoiding marriage to women due to gay marriage legislation is zero, whereas the number of straight men avoiding marriage due to brutally anti-male laws is sizable.  The socon reaction to this, in their strategic brilliance, is to attack gay marriage and ignore what really disincentivizes marriage. 

Aren't conservatives supposed to be the people who understand how economic incentives work?  This socon behavior would be the equivalent of an astronomer being unaware of the existence of the Moon, and is the reason that most 'socons' do not deserve to be taken seriously. 

This is why a massive form of brutal redistribution in America today is not even noticed by those who claim to oppose socialism.  Alimony is awarded to a divorcing wife on a 'no fault' basis, putting the husband into a 70% marginal tax rate.  Even if he did not want a divorce, failure to pay this 'no-fault' alimony carries possible imprisonment.  Thus, he is placed into near-slavery, and certainly has no incentive to invent new technologies or start new businesses.  10-30% of the male workforce being under a 70% tax rate during their peak earning years cannot be good for the economy, yet not one 'conservative' is fighting this, as pedestalization trumps capitalism in the conservative ideological hierarchy. 

Republican Appeasement of 'Feminists' : As I explained in The Misandry Bubble, a lot of men, both left and right-leaning, have an extremely inobservant belief that groveling to women and excusing them of wrongdoings that no man would be excused for, is the way to get women to like them.  In reality, women have the opposite reaction to a man who is too willing to appease, and find such a man to be a useful puppet at best.  What makes it worse when a conservative Republican does it, is that in being a white knight, he tosses aside every other principle he claims to advocate. 

Most would consider Steve Forbes to be a prominent, central representative of conservative Republican ideology.  However, in Forbes magazine he has taken to publishing frequent articles that are decidedly misandric.  I had the opportunity to ask him about this online, and he surprisingly gave the unthinking answer, "As a man with 5 daughters, I am concerned about women's issues.".  How nice of him, but surely someone as intelligent as Steve Forbes would recognize that caring about the enviroment does not equate to an endorsement of the most fringe lunatic enviromentalists.  So why can't he make such a distinction with 'feminism', rather than declare that he endorses any and all 'feminists' without questioning the possibility of extremism (which certainly harms his daughters) in their midst? 

It goes deeper.  The need for many conservatives to pedestalize women is so ingrained, that when someone points out to them how (and why) serial killers receive a torrent of love letters from an army of swooning women, the conservative gets angry not at the women, but at the messenger who points out this inconvenient reality.  Flat-earthers do not like seeing evidence that the Earth is a sphere, and conservative pedestalization of women is precisely the same psychology. 

Now, for any leftist reading this, I am going to reveal a secret to you.  The secret is : it is easy to get a conservative to support any and all government programs as long as it is packaged as 'chivalry'.  Do you want more government-subsidized daycare for unwed mothers to get them to vote Democrat?  Tell a conservative that supporting this is 'chivalrous' while opposing this is 'misogynistic'.  Do you want conservatives to support another tax on the wealthy to finance Obamacare?  Tell him that women will suffer without Obamacare.  Do you want more money to go towards teachers unions so that they can indoctrinate public school students even more deeply into Marxism?  Tell a conservative that female teachers are underpaid (even though they aren't), and need a higher wage.  Do you want cap-and-trade or any other Al Gore legislation passed?  Find some convoluted way to show conservatives that women would suffer more than men if more carbon dioxide were produced.  Yes, they really can be duped that easily.  The typical conservative will jump at the chance to out-left a leftist when the prospect of appearing like a hero to women (again, refusing to learn that this actually repels women) presents itself.  Try it, and see how every other principle, from small government, to free markets, to support for two-parent upbringings, to adherence to the US Constitution, will be jettisoned in their rush to be a pedestalizing white knight.   

My Republican friends get angry when I give away this weakness to the other side.  My answer to them is that if your side is so weak and needy that you are afraid of this weakness being revealed, how can you possibly support such useful idiots?  Reform your side instead, and even I would subsequently rejoin. 

Steven Baskerville discusses how conservatives who think they are 'tough on crime' have little understanding of the tyranny they have enabled, by building the left's Trojan horse for them.  Over here, Ferdinand Bardamu describes how Democrats and Republicans unite to form the Misandry Party.  For example, both parties are under the belief that innocent 'single mothers' were abandoned by 'deadbeat dads', and a typical debate between left and right would constitute an argument about who has done more to punish 'deadbeat dads'.  In reality, it is usually the mother who has discarded the father's presence, while seizing his money, and is further using the state to prevent him from receiving joint custody or even visitation rights.  But this reality is such a departure from the prevailing narrative that such a man can go to neither party for any sort of Father's Rights support.  Many conservative women are not sympathetic to the oppression of men under state-backed misandry, and only seek to replace the leftist brand of 'feminism' with a slightly more religious version of their own. 

These three reasons are why we see conservatives rarely driving an agenda, but rather only opposing what the left dangles before them as a distraction.  Hence, the right keeps falling back and falling back, ceding more and more ground with each cycle.  The alternating of power between Democrats and Republicans constitute a two-steps-back, one-step-sideways descent into leftism, so pardon me for not being too excited about the sideways step, the mere postponement we are about to take through the party earning a 4 taking seats from the party earning a 1 out of 10.  Their inability to distinguish between insignificant side issues and the topics that actually matter, combined with the needy chivalry that trumps every other principle that they claim to hold, makes the current conservative/Republican mainstream fatally flawed. 

While I was in strong agreement with the GOP during the crisis of the last decade, the War on Terror, I see them as very much in a 'useful idiot' role in the crisis of this decade, The Misandry Bubble.  Symbol

This brings us to the core mismatch in US politics.  As the emergence of the Tea Party has shown, at least 70% of the electorate wants lower taxes and lower spending.  The approval ratings of the last 3 Presidents all rose and fell in tandem with the level of government spending.  All this is established, yet the voters can't seem to figure out how to achieve it. 

201002_blog_edwards3 Back to The Misandry Bubble, where I establish that 70-80% of all government spending is a transfer of wealth from men to women in some form or the other.  Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are mostly financed by taxes paid by men, but are mostly consumed by women, who live 7 years longer than men, thus creating a reality where a woman's post-65 lifetime is twice as long as a man's (7 years for a man, 14 years post-65 for a woman).  Most of the increase in public sector employees have been female.  Through unopposed 'feminist' lobbying, most of the $800B stimulus was diverted away from infrastructure projects since too few women work in those, and instead diverted to the already bloated healthcare and education sectors in order to employ more women.  Teachers are not just well-paid, but it is a profession that men are mostly barred from.  Extreme subsidization of single motherhood has created an America where 41% of all babies are born out of wedlock.  

Therefore, if the electorate is truly interested in shrinking the size of government, they first have to confront the artificially created absurdities in American society that are currently considered normal.  There is a reason that all traditional societies, whether European or Asian, shamed unwed mothers and recognized them to be parasites.  There is a reason the word 'homewrecker' was common until recently.  There is a reason there were no jobs for 'court appointed visitation supervisors' to be employed by the state to oversee the actions of a man who has had his children taken from him on a 'no fault' basis.  There is a reason that any successful society defended the institution of marriage fiercely by making marriage at attractive arrangement for the man, which in turn ensured that the woman was better off as well.  No successful society has replaced the family unit with government, yet America is attempting to do this with taxpayer funds. 

To even the most strident Tea Partier, I ask, how badly do you want to trim government spending?  Badly enough to cut single mothers off from the trough, and thus prevent the creation of future single mothers and their spawn?  Badly enough to lay off thousands of teachers, and fight teacher's unions attempts to prevent merit-based performance reviews?  Badly enough to be far more courageous than needy socons, and work to crush the predatory divorce industry, that strives to increase divorces in order to employ more people in the divorce ecosystem?  Badly enough to phase out major elements of SS and Medicare (and Obamacare), even if 'women will suffer from the cutbacks'?  Badly enough to be called a 'misogynist', 'loser', and 'worse than Hitler'?  Badly enough to receive every form of shaming language they can fling at you? 

If the answer to any of the above questions is 'no', then you are not ready to do what it takes to reduce government spending.  There is no return to the non-defense spending levels of 1960 or even 2006 without curing this culture of the disease currently killing it, and the Tea Party will not be able to take their cause to the next level without such courage.  To make this even more clear :

There will be no reduction in Federal, State, or Local government spending in the US without a fierce and pervasive detection, confrontration, and reduction of state-supported misandry, currently propped up by both Democrats and Republicans.   

Do you, the American voter, have what it takes to save America? 

As a Futurist, it is my job to bring attention to topics that will become more widely discussed several years from now.  When the points detailed here are discussed more openly in 2017-18, remember who defined the heart of the challenge in 2010.   

Is the GOP likely to slash government spending to a level that voters seek?
Yes
They will make moderate reductions
They will make no reductions, or worse
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Note on Comments : As I already explained in The Misandry Bubble, any Pavlovian utterance of the word 'misogynist' takes very little probing to quickly reveal itself as just projection of anti-male bigotry outward, and is an admission of such bigotry.  Although I am amused that 'feminists' still can't even spell the most important word in their vocabulary. 

November 02, 2010 in Economics, Political Debate, Politics | Permalink | Comments (98)

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Carbonara

Observers have been waiting for carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and graphene to transform the world for quite some time, and the wait has been longer than they expected.  Enthusiasts for this new miracle material had all but vanished.  Is this warranted?  Where does the state of innovation in various forms of carbon, that could yield ultra-strong, ultra-light materials and superfast computing really stand? 

CNET had an article just last month about the multiple disruptions that the various allotopes of carbon are about to make.  That is quite exciting, except that CNET also had a similar article in 2003.  Similarly, Ray Kurzweil extolled carbon nanotubes as a successor to silicon quite heavily in 1999, but not quite as much now, even though that supposed transition would be much closer to the present.  This does not mean that Kurzweil's estimation was in error, but rather that the technology was unexpectedly stagnant during the early 2000s.  So let us examine why there was such an interruption, and whether progress has since resumed.    

Graphene I wrote in 2009 about how we had undergone a multi-year nanotech winter, and how we were emerging from it in 2009.  As anticipated, carbon nanotubes are now finally lowering in price, and being produced at a scale that could start making an impact.  Sure enough, activity began to stir right as I predicted, and the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to research in graphene.  Just like CNETs article, Wired also has an article about the diverse applications that graphene could revolutionize.  Combining the two articles, we can summarize the core possibilities of carbon allotopes as follows :

Ultra-dense computing and storage : Graphene transistors smaller than 1 nanometer have been demonstrated.  Carbon allotopes could keep the exponential doubling of both computing and storage capacity going well into the 2030s. 

Carbon Fiber Vehicles : This lightweight, ultrastrong material can save vast amounts of fuel by reducing the weight of cars and aeroplanes.  While premium products such as the $6000 Trek Madone bicycles are already made from carbon fiber, greater volume is reducing prices and will soon make the average car much ligher than it is today, increasing fuel efficiency and reducing traffic fatalities. 

Energy Storage : Natural Gas is not only much cheaper than oil per unit of energy (oil would have to drop to about $30 to match current NG prices), but the supply of NG is more evenly distributed across the world than the oil supply.  The US alone has an enormous reserve of natural gas that could ensure total energy independence.  The main problem with NG is storage, which is the primary reason oil displacement is not happening rapidly.  But microporous carbon can effectively act as a sponge for natural gas, enabling safe and easy transport.  This could potentially change the entire energy map.

There are other applications beyond these core three, but suffice it to say, the allotopes of carbon can perform a greater variety of functions than any other material available to us today.  Watch for indications of carbon allotopes popping up in the strangest of places, and know that each emergence drives the cost down ever lower. 

Related :

Nanotechnology : Bubble, Bust,.....Boom?

Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico

November 01, 2010 in Accelerating Change, Nanotechnology, Science, Technology | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Taxation and Recession

On October 23, 2009, I wrote that if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire at the end of 2010, the US would experience another recession.  That ultimatum is now squarely facing the US economy, and I have a few assorted thoughts on some major areas that are being under-discussed. 

a) I find it revealing that leftists are quick to parrot some memorized garbage about why taxes should rise back to what they were during the Clinton era, yet the same leftists have no interest in returning to the spending levels of the Clinton era.  I am perfectly fine with returning to Clinton-era tax brackets if we also return to Clinton-era spending.  Any takers?  Come on, any takers? 

(crickets chirping as leftists flee to avoid having to address the contradiction between wanting Clinton-era tax levels but not Clinton-era spending levels). 

How+much+did+the+Iraq+war+cost If cornered, a leftist will change the subject and say that the Iraq War is the reason spending is high (note that this does not address the point of why they do not wish to return to Clinton-era spending levels).  However, contrary to leftist propaganda, the Iraq War actually cost less than the Obama stimulus, as per the chart below from the Washington Examiner.  In fact, exclude the Iraq War, and the budget deficit was all but erased by 2007.  At least the Iraq War was ultimately successful.  But from 2011 onwards, the deficit is set to widen further if the tax rates rise.  GDP will shrink below the current projections, causing tax revenue to shrink despite the higher rate of taxation.  Republicans winning a few seats in the 2010 Congressional election may halt the tax increase, but will not reduce spending, as Republicans are far too politically uncreative to overturn this increased spending. 

b) How a person feels about the capital gains tax is an intoxicating test of how true to free market principles a person is.  The fact that capital gains are far more concentrated among the wealthy than wage income is drives socialists into a crazed frenzy that will have them vehemently demanding that capital gains be taxed at 80% or more.  However, raising the tax rate of capital gains is the way to inflict the greatest economic damage for the least increase (in fact, often a decrease) in tax revenue.  This is simply because of the fact that capital is highly mobile.  Russia, China, and India all have long-term capital gains tax rates of 0%, and short term rates no higher than 15%.  By contrast, the US long term rate in states like New York and California currently approaches 25%, will rise to 30% with the expiry of the Bush tax cuts, and rise further to 34% under an Obamacare supplemental tax.  Capital, thus, finds a better climate in Russia, China, and India than in the US, and trillions of dollars have already departed from the US.  Who won the Cold War again?  Or rather, is that the wrong question, with the right question being "Where has the traveling disease of socialism migrated towards?". 

There should be no capital gains tax at all.  This is for the simple reason that if a person sells an appreciated asset, and then pays a capital gains tax, they no longer can buy back the same asset that they had just sold.  For those who screech about the 'rich' making too much, remember that taxing capital gains makes them invest less, which means they will employ fewer people.  Everyone is either employed by a rich person, or sells to people employed by a rich person, so punitive capital gains taxes always trickle down to people who are not rich. 

c) This brings us to the original question of a new recession in 2011.  Since the technical definition of a recession is quite limited, it is easy to concoct a 'stimulus' that pulls demand forward, causes a technical 'end' to the recession (in Q309 in the most recent case), and then is concluded by a lengthy hangover that comes perilously close to a new recession in its own right, discussed under the term of a 'double dip'.  All of this is a greatly distracted discussion.

EmployRecessionJuly2010 The most important measure of economic health, jobs, has not only not seen any recovery since the end of the prior recession in Q309, but is destined to languish through the end of 2011 and possibly much later.  This chart from Calculated Risk (click to enlarge) shows that only has the current recession been deeper than all others in the last 60 years, but it has kept jobs at a very low level for over a year.  Not only has this recession extended the vertical axis in this chart, but it is certainly destined to extend the horizontal axis as well (unless you believe that 8 million jobs will be created in the next 18 months).  So aside from mention of a 'double dip', this recession is already at least 3 times worse than the average post-war recession.  There is no chance of a full recovery to breakeven in the remaining 18 months of the existing horizontal axis of this chart, and it is improbable even by 2013, extending the employment recession to a full 6 years at least.  The Techno-sponge keeps liquidity lower than policy-makers realize it is, and a rise in tax rates could dry up what little trickle of job growth is currently being seen. 

d) Socialism is much more rigged in favor of the ultrawealthy than capitalism is.  This is because in capitalism, there is continuous churn in the ranks of the wealthy, and anyone can be displaced by a new technology or new business model.  Everyone has a chance to rise, and everyone at the top needs to continue to compete to stay in place. 

In socialism, however, only the ultrawealthy can afford to bypass the oppressive rules placed on everyone else (by hiring lawyers, bribing judges and government officials, etc.).  The ultrawealthy thus can erect a wall between them and the rest, and make it nearly impossible for an upper-middle-class person to become wealthy on the merit of innovation or business savvy.  Hence, any attempt to create a socialist utopia ends up making it easy for the ultrawealthy to build large moats around their incumbent positions. 

e) Let me also add a dash of gender psychology here, and explain why many men are capitalistic, while many women are socialistic.  As explained before, female hypergamy dictates that women are biologically driven to share their genes with only the best possible man, and women would rather share a top man with other women than have a lesser man all to themselves.  If it is clear that the men at the top will remain there (socialism), there is much less risk in the decision-making process for women.  In a capitalistic environment, the men at the top today may not be there in a decade, and there is a far riskier 'stockpicking' aspect to choosing which man's genes are going to have long-term value.  Thus is further complicated by the fact that a 'valuable' man in the past usually was so due to fighting skill and capacity for violence, while a 'valuable' man today is one with analytical/entrepreneurial skill, which was not easily monetized in the past.  But the human brain does not evolve as fast as it needs to, and if you wonder why a serial killer immediately gets love letters from a large number of women (including educated, married women), but the founders of Google and Facebook do not, this is why.  The serial killer has proven himself to be a 'valuable' man as per metrics women are evolved to respond to, that were determinants of male power, before modern society existed.  By appearing in the media for having been a serial killer, has received a resounding stamp of validation on his credentials, and is certified as an apex male. 

Along the same vein, women are also driven to extract resources from lesser men while cutting them off from the better things that society has to offer.  Thus, I find it necessary to mention that of all the socialist policies that are obstructing market forces and preventing job creation, organized misandry is a greatly overlooked one.  'Feminist' groups like NOW have lobbied for stimulus dollars to be diverted towards themselves, and away from areas where fewer women work (such as infrastructure and manufacturing).  Passage of the 2009 'stimulus' immediately led to an unprecedented chasm between male and female unemployment rates.  This sort of shameless vote-purchasing and disenfranchisement of men, zealously enacted by Democrats and almost as zealously condoned by whiteknighting Republicans, will prove to be very corrosive to the long-term economic health of the US economy.  This is where Republicans are fatally flawed - they completely fail to see how they themselves undermine their own goals.  I will have much more to say on this before election day. 

These five thoughts, though not quite related to each other, have been overlooked among the oceans of ink expended in commentary about the current malaise.  Perhaps we are on the brink of a breaking point, where government wastage will soon cause visible declines in quality of life, where overburdening productive workers (men in particular) causes a long overdue backlash, and where the little-understood technological deflation quickens in the absence of much-needed liquidity injections.  Let us see how far this unique blend of government incompetence and corruption can go.  

Related :

Eight Ways to Supercharge the US Economy

September 01, 2010 in Economics, Political Debate, Politics | Permalink | Comments (72) | TrackBack (0)

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The TechnoSponge

After years of thinking about this, I have come up with a term that can describe the thoughts I have had about the new, 'good' type of deflation that is evading the notice of almost all of the top economists in the world today.  This changes many of the most fundamental assumptions about economics, even as most economic thought is far behind the curve. 

First, let us review some events that transpired over the last 2 years.  To stave off the prospect of a deflationary spiral that could lead to a depression, the major governments of the world followed 20th-century textbook economics, and injected colossal amounts of liquidity into the financial system.  In the US, not only was the Fed Funds rate lowered to nearly zero (for now 18 months and counting), but an additional $1 Trillion was injected in. 

However, now that a depression has been averted, and the recession has ended, we were supposed to experience inflation even amidst high unemployment, just like we did in the 1970s, to minimize debt burdens.  But alas, there is still no inflation, despite a yield curve with more than 3% steepness, and a near-0% FF rate for so long.  How could this be?  What is absorbing all the liquidity?   

In The Impact of Computing, I discussed how 1.5% of World GDP today comprises of products where the same functionality can be purchased for a price that halves every 18 months.  'Moore's Law' applies to semiconductors, but storage, software, and some biotech are also on a similar exponential curve.  This force makes productivity gains higher, and inflation lower, than traditional 20th century economics would anticipate.  Furthermore, the second derivative is also increasing - the rate of productivity gains itself is accelerating.  1.5% of World GDP may be small, but what about when this percentage grows to 3% of World GDP?  5%?  We may only be a decade away from this, and the impact of this technological deflation will be more obvious. 

Most high-tech companies have a business model that incorporates a sort of 'bizarro force' that is completely the opposite of what old-economy companies operate under : The price of the products sold by a high-tech company decreases over time.  Any other company will manage inventory, pricing, and forecasts under an assumption of inflationary price increases, but a technology company exists under the reality that all inventory depreciates very quickly (at over 10% per quarter in many cases), and that price drops will shrink revenues unless unit sales rise enough to offset it (and assuming that enough unit inventory was even produced).  This results in the constant pressure to create new and improved products every few months just to occupy prime price points, without which revenues would plunge within just a year.  Yet, high-tech companies have built hugely profitable businesses around these peculiar challenges, and at least 8 such US companies have market capitalizations over $100 Billion.  6 of those 8 are headquartered in Silicon Valley. 

Now, here is the point to ponder : We have never had a significant technology sector while also facing the fears (warranted or otherwise) of high inflation.  When high inflation vanished in 1982, the technology sector was too tiny to be considered a significant contributor to macroeconomic statistics.  In an environment of high inflation combined with a large technology industry, however, major consumer retail pricepoints, such as $99.99 or $199.99, become more affordable.  The same also applies to enterprise-class customers.  Thus, demand creeps upwards even as cost to produce the products goes down on the same Impact of Computing curve.  This allows a technology company the ability to postpone price drops and expand margins, or to sell more volume at the same nominal dollar price.  Hence, higher inflation causes the revenues and/or margins of technology companies to rise, which means their earnings-per-share certainly surges.

So what we are seeing is the gigantic amount of liquidity created by the Federal Reserve is instead cycling through technology companies and increasing their earnings.  The products they sell, in turn, increase productivity and promptly push inflation back down.  Every uptick in inflation merely guarantees its own pushback, and the 1.5% of GDP that mops up all the liquidity and creates this form of 'good' deflation can be termed as the 'Technosponge'.  So how much liquidity can the Technosponge absorb before saturation? 

At this point, if the US prints another $1 Trillion, that will still merely halt deflation, and there will be no hint of inflation at all.  It would take a full $2 Trillion to saturate the techno-sponge, and temporarily push consumer inflation to even the less-than-terrifying level of 4% while also generating substantial jumps in productivity and tech company earnings.  In fact, the demographics of the US, with baby boomers reaching their geriatric years, are highly deflationary (and this is the bad type of deflation), so the US would have to print another $1 Trillion every year for the next 10 years just to offset demographic deflation, and keep the Technosponge saturated. 

A Technosponge that is 1.5% of GDP might be keeping CPI inflation at under 2%, but when the techno-sponge is 3% of GDP, even trillions of dollars of liquidity won't halt deflation.  Deflation may become normal, even as living standards and productivity rise at ever-increasing rates.  The people who will suffer are holders of debt, particularly mortgage debt.  Inflating away debt will no longer be a tool available to rescue people (and governments) from their errors.  The biggest beneficiaries will be technology companies, and those who are tied to them. 

But to keep prosperity rising, productivity has to rise at the maximum possible rate.  This requires the Technosponge to be kept full at all times - the 'new normal'.  Thus, the printing press has to start on the first $1 Trillion now, and printing has to continue until we see inflation.  Economists will be surprised at how much can be printed without seeing any inflation, and will not be able to draw the connection about why the printed money is boosting productivity. 

Related :

The Impact of Computing

Timing the Singularity

July 01, 2010 in Accelerating Change, Computing, Economics, Technology, The Singularity | Permalink | Comments (104)

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The Carnival of Creative Destruction

Words like 'disruption' and 'destruction' usually have negative meanings, and one may strain to find any good ways in which to use the terms.  But today, the accelerating rate of change ensures that more technologies alter more aspects of life at an ever-quickening rate.  A little-understood dimension of this is the concept of Joseph Schumpeter's 'Creative Destruction', where the process of technological change topples existing norms and replaces them with new ones, often quite rapidly. 

Technological diffusion was in a lull in 2008, as I pointed out at the time.  But now, in 2010, I am happy to report that the recess has passed, and that the accelerating rate of change is rising back to the long-term exponential trendline (although it may not be fully back at the trendline until 2013, when people who have not been paying attention will be wondering why they were taken by surprise).  The Impact of Computing continues to progress, infusing itself into a wider and wider swath of our lives, and speeding up the rate of change in complacently stagnant industries that never thought technology could affect them.  Silicon Valley continues to be 'ground zero' for creative destruction, and complacent industries thousands of miles away could be toppled by someone working from their bedroom in Silicon Valley. 

Just a few of the examples of creative destruction that is presently in process have been covered by prior articles here at The Futurist.  These, along with others, are :

1) Video Conferencing is poised to disrupt not just airline and hotel industry revenues (which stand to lose tens of billions of dollars per year of business travel revenue), but the real-estate, medical, and aeronautical industries as well.  Corporations will see substantial productivity gains from successful adoption of videoconferencing as a substitute for 50% or more of their travel expenses.  Major mergers and acquisitions have happened in this sector in the last few months, and imminent price reductions will open the floodgates of diffusion.  Skype provides a form of video telephony that is free of cost.  This is described in detail in my August 2008 article on the subject, as well as in my earlier October 2006 introductory article. 

2) Surface Computing, which I wrote about in July of 2008, has begun to emerge in a myriad of forms, from the handheld Apple iPad to the upcoming consumer version of the table-sized Microsoft Surface.  This not only transforms human-computer interaction for the first time in decades, but the Apple 'Apps' ecosystem alters the utility of the Internet as well.  All sizes between the blackboard and the iPad will soon be available, and by 2015, personal computing, and the Internet, will be quite different than they are today, with surfaces of varying sizes abundant in many homes. 

3) The complete and total transformation of video games into the dominant form of home entertainment will be visible by 2012 through a combination of technologies such as realistic graphics, motion-responsive controllers, 3-D televisions, voice recognition, etc.  The biggest casualty of this disruption will be television programming, which will struggle to retain viewers.  Beyond this, the way in which humans process sensations of pleasure, excitement, and entertainment will irrevocably change.  Thus, the way humans relate to each other will also change.  I have written about this in April 2006, with a follow-up in July 2009. 

4) The book-publishing industry has been stubbornly resistant to technology, as evidenced by their insistence as late as 2003 that manuscript queries be submitted by postal mail, and that a self-addressed stamped envelope be enclosed in which a reply can be sent.  A completed manuscript would take a full 12 months to be printed and distributed, and the editors didn't even find this to be odd.  Fortunately, two simultaneous disruptions are toppling this obsolete and unproductive industry from both ends.  Print-on-demand services that greatly shorten the self-publishing process and entry-cost, such as iUniverse and Blurb, are now flexible and easy, while finished books can further avoid the paper-binding process altogether and be available to millions in e-book format for the Kindle and other e-readers.  Books that cost, say, $15 to print, bind, and distribute now cost almost zero, enabling the author and reader to effectively split the money saved.  When e-readers are eventually available for only $100, bookstores that sell paper books will be relegated to surviving mostly on gifts, coffee table books, and cafe revenues.  This is a disruption that is happening quickly due to it being so overdue in the first place, resulting in a speedy 'catchup'.  I wrote about this in more detail in December of 2009.

5) The automobile is undergoing multiple major transformations at once.  Strong, light nanomaterials are entering the bodies of cars to increase fuel efficiency, engines are migrating to hybrid and electrical forms, sub-$5000 cars in India and China will lead to innovations that percolate up to lower the cost of traditional Western models, and the computational power engineered into the average car today leads to major feature jumps relative to models from just 5 years ago.  The $25,000 car of 2020 will be superior to the $50,000 car of 2005 in every measurable way. 

By 2016, consumer behavior will change to a mode where people consider it normal to 'upgrade' their perfectly functioning 6-year-old cars to get a newer model with better electronic features.  This may seem odd, but people did not tend to replace fully functional television sets before they failed until the 2003 thin-TV disruption.  The Impact of Computing pulls ever-more products into a rapid trajectory of improvement. 

By 2018, self-driving cars will be readily available to the average US consumer, and will constitute a significant fraction of cars on the highway.  This will revise existing assumptions about highway speeds and acceptable commute distances, and will further impede the real estate prices of expensive areas. 

6) The Mobile Internet revolution, which I wrote about in October of 2009, is already transforming the way consumers in developed markets access the Internet.  The bigger disruption is the entry of 1 billion new Internet users from emerging economies.  While many of these people have relatively little education compared to Western Internet users, as the West shrinks as a fraction of total Internet mindshare, many Western cultural quirks that are seen as normal might be seen for the minority positions that they are.  Thomas Friedman's concept of the world being 'flat' has not even begun to fully manifest. 

7) The energy sector is in the midst of multiple disruptions, which will introduce competition between sectors that were previously unrelated.  Electrical vehicles displace oil consumption with electricity, even while the electricity itself starts to be generated through nuclear, solar, and wind.  The electrical economy will be further transformed by revolutions in lighting and batteries.  Cellulostic ethanol will arrive in 2012, and further replace billions of gallons of gasoline.  I wrote in October 2007 why I want oil to surpass $120/barrel and stay there (it subsequently was above that level for a mere 6-week period in 2008).  This leads to why I claim that 'Peak Oil', far from being fatal for civilization, will actually be a topic few people even mention in 2020.  The creative destruction in energy will extend to the geopolitical landscape, where we will see many petrotyrannies much weaker in 2020 than they are today. 

8) Despite the efforts of Democrats to create a system unfavorable to advancement in healthcare and biotechnology, innovation continues on several fronts (partly due to Asian nations compensating for US shortfalls).  One disruption is robotic surgery, where incisions can be narrow instead of the customary practice of making incisions large enough for the surgeon's hands, which in turn often necessitates sawing open the sternum, pelvis, etc.  Intuitive Surgical is a company that already has a market cap of $14 Billion. 

The biggest disruption, however, is that the globalization of technology is enabling medical tourism.  In the US, about twice as much is spent on healthcare per person as in other OECD countries.  If manufacturing and software work can be offshored, so can many aspects of healthcare, which is much more expensive than manufacturing or software engineering ever became in the US.  This will correct inflated salaries in the healthcare sector, return the savings to consumers, and force innovations and systemic improvements in all OECD countries. 

Genome 9) By all accounts, the cost of genome sequencing has plunged faster than any other technology, ever (it is less clear how this was accomplished, and whether the next 4 years will see a comparable drop).  I tend to be skeptical about such eye-popping numbers, because if something became so much cheaper so quickly, yet it still didn't sweep over the world, then maybe it was not so valuable after all. 

But it is also possible that while the raw data is now available cheaply, there is not yet enough of a community that instructs people why they should get their genome sequenced, and how to use their data.  The Economist has a special report on the implications of inexpensive genome sequencing. 

10) Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly inundated with the trivialities of young people, or of older people who never matured, who think they have an audience far larger than it is.  However, these mediums have been used to horizontally organize interest groups and movements for political change that know no distance barriers or boundaries. 

Blogs have shattered the hold that traditional media had on the release of information and opinions, and the revenues of newspapers, magazines, and network television have tumbled.  The Tea Party movement in the US was started by a very small number of people, but has surged with a momentum that has reshaped the American landscape in just one year, and, irony of ironies, the Tea Party is spreading to overtaxed Britain.  The next Iranian revolution will not only use Twitter and YouTube, but will have millions of collaborators outside of Iran, operating out of their own homes. 

11) The financial services industry is overdue for disruption, and this was the cover story of Wired Magazine for March 2010, and was a structure established in an era when computing power needed to process transactions was expensive.  Today, several startups are seeking to change the way money is transacted to eliminate this cut that incumbent companies take.  Major financial services companies will see shrinkages in revenue, and will have to innovate and create new value-added services, or accept a diminishment. 

Aside from this effectively being a sizable 'tax cut' for the economy, this is particularly valuable as a complement to mobile Internet penetration in poorer regions, as the capacity to conduct web micro-transactions without fees will be an essential element of human development.  The highly successful concept of micro-finance will be augmented when transaction fees that consumed a high percentage of these sub-$10 transactions are minimized. 

12) 3-D Printing will soon be accessible to small businesses and households.  This transforms everything from commodity consumer goods to the construction of buildings.  An individual could download a design and print it at home, rather than be restricted to only those products that can be mass produced.  It is quite possible that by 2025, construction of basic structures takes less than one-tenth the time that it does today, which, of course, will deflate the value of all existing buildings in the world at that time. 

So we see there are at least 12 ways in which our daily lives will shift considerably in just the next few years.  The typical process of creative destruction results in X wealth being destroyed, and 2X wealth being created instead, but by different people.  For each of the 12 disruptions listed, 'X' might be as much a $1 Trillion.  As a result, the US economy might be mired in a long-term situation where vanishing industries force many laid off workers to start in new industries at the entry level, for half of their previous compensation, even as new fortunes created by the new industries cause net wealth increases.  The US could see a continuation of high unemployment combined with high productivity gains and corporate earnings growth for several years to come.  Big paydays for entrepreneurs will make the headlines frequently, right alongside stories of people who have to accept permanent 50% pay reductions.  This would be the 'new normal'. 

Income diversification is the golden rule of the early 21st century.  Those that fail to create and maintain multiple streams of income are imperiling themselves.  The hottest career one can embark on, which will never be obsolete, is that of the serial entrepreneur. 

 

June 01, 2010 in Computing, Energy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (43)

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The Misandry Bubble

 
- by Imran Khan
 
Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that mediocrity and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive?  What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant wages and rising crime, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the economic decline of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?

Today, on the first day of the new decade of '201x' years, I am going to tell you why that is.  I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with.  What you are about to read is the equivalent of someone in 1997 describing the expected forces governing the War on Terror from 2001-2009 in profound detail. 

This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist.  As it is a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife, it is not meant to be read in one shot but rather digested slowly over an extended period, with all supporting links read as well.  As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.   

Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that has tainted the interaction between men and women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to inflict great harm onto their own families, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.

Now, the basic premise of this article is that men and women are equally valuable, but have different strengths and weaknesses, and different priorities.  A society is strongest when men and women have roles that are complementary to each other, rather than of an adverserial nature.  Furthermore, when one gender (either one) is mistreated, the other ends up becoming disenfranchised as well.  If you disagree with this premise, you may not wish to read further.  

Symbol 

The Cultural Thesis

The Myth of Female Oppression : When you tell someone that they are oppressed, against all statistical and logical evidence, you harm them by generating discouragement and resentment.  This pernicious effect is the basis of many forms of needlessly inflicted female unhappiness, as well as the basis for unjustified retaliation against men.  

All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence, and that this was pervasive, systematic, and endorsed by ordinary men who did not face hardships as severe as what women endured.  In reality, this narrative is entirely incorrect.  The average man was forced to risk death on the battlefield, at sea, or in mines, while most women stayed indoors tending to children and household duties.  Male life expectancy was always significantly lower than that of females, and still is.  

Warfare has been a near constant feature of human society before the modern era, and whenever two tribes or kingdoms went to war with each other, the losing side saw many of its fighting-age men exterminated, while the women were assimilated into the invading society.  Now, becoming a concubine or a housekeeper is an unfortunate fate, but not nearly as bad as being slaughtered in battle as the men were.  To anyone who disagrees, would you like for the men and women to trade outcomes?

Most of this narrative stems from 'feminists' comparing the plight of average women to the topmost men (the monarch and other aristocrats), rather than to the average man.  This practice is known as apex fallacy, and whether accidental or deliberate, entirely misrepresents reality.  To approximate the conditions of the average woman to the average man (the key word being 'average') in the Western world of a century ago, simply observe the lives of the poorest peasants in poor countries today.  Both men and women have to perform tedious work, have insufficient food and clothing, and limited opportunities for upliftment.  

As far as selective anecdotes like voting rights go, in the vast majority of cases, men could not vote either.  In fact, if one compares every nation state from every century, virtually all of them extended exactly the same voting rights (or lack thereof) to men and women.  Even today, out of 200 sovereign states, there are exactly zero that have a different class of voting rights to men and women.  Any claim that women were being denied rights that men were given in even 1% of historical instances, falls flat.  

This is not to deny that genuine atrocities like genital mutilation have been perpetrated against women; they have and still are.  But men also experienced atrocities of comparable horror at the same time, which is simply not mentioned.  In fact, when a man is genitally mutilated by a woman, some other women actually find this humorous, and are proud to say so publicly.  

It is already wrong when a contemporary group seeks reparations from an injustice that occurred over a century ago to people who are no longer alive.  It is even worse when this oppression itself is a fabrication.  The narrative of female oppression by men should be rejected and refuted as the highly selective and historically false narrative that it is.  In fact, this myth is evidence not of historical oppression, but of the vastly different propensity to complain between the two genders.  

The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below (click to enlarge), which will be relevant if you are older than 30.  All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade.  They are all certainly very different from one another.  But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.  

Misandry As diverse and imperfect as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity.  They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector.  They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys.  Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage. 

At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear.  Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent.  Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes.  Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones.  But where are the new characters?  Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia?  A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging. 

Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong.  Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices.  Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas. 

This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon.  This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal.  It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are. 

The Primal Nature of Men and Women : Genetic research has shown that before the modern era, 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did.  The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all.  Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'.  Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males.  The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context. 

Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous.  This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous.  In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man.  There is significant turnover in the ranks of alpha males, which women are acutely aware of. 

As a result, women are the first to want into a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out.  This is neither right nor wrong, merely natural.  What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment' due to some 'Peter Pan complex', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women.  Furthermore, when women destroy the commitment, there is great harm to children, and the woman demands present and future payments from the man she is abandoning.  A man who refuses to marry is neither harming innocent minors nor expecting years of payments from the woman.  This absurd double standard has invisible but major costs to society. 

To provide 'beta' men an incentive to produce far more economic output than needed just to support themselves while simultaneously controlling the hypergamy of women that would deprive children of interaction with their biological fathers, all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each.  This institution was known as 'marriage'.  Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive.  Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty.  When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'. 

All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation, and it is quite remarkable how similar the nature of monogamous marriage was across seemingly diverse cultures.  Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced.  This 'contract' between the sexes was advantageous to beta men, women over the age of 35, and children, but greatly curbed the activities of alpha men and women under 35 (together, a much smaller group than the former one).  Conversely, the pre-civilized norm of alpha men monopolizing 3 or more young women each, replacing aging ones with new ones, while the masses of beta men fight over a tiny supply of surplus/aging women, was chaotic and unstable, leaving beta men violent and unproductive, and aging mothers discarded by their alpha mates now vulnerable to poverty.  So what happens when the traditional controls of civilization are lifted from both men and women? 

The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women.  Others have presented versions of the Four Sirens concept in the past, but I am choosing a slightly different definition of the Four Sirens : 

1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization.  Contraception made it possible for females to act on their urges of hypergamy. 

2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part.  Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come.  This incentivizes destruction because it enables women to transfer the costs of irresponsible behavior onto men and children. 

3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce.  These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less.  There was never any organized male opposition to women entering the workforce (in China, taxes were collected in a way that mandated female productivity), as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers.  However, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity. 

Female entry into the workforce is generally a positive development for society, and I would be the first to praise this, if it were solely on the basis of merit (as old-school feminists had genuinely intended).  Unfortunately, too much of this is now due to corrupt political lobbying to forcibly transfer resources from men to women. 

4) Female-Centric social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women, which happens just as often), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own. 

These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women.  The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous.  Feminist laws have done a remarkable job of shielding women from the consequences of their own actions.  Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males without any reciprocal obligations to them.  Despite all the new freedoms available to women that freed them from their traditional responsibilities, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities. 

Marriage 2.0 : From the West to the Middle East to Asia, marriage is considered a mandatory bedrock of any functioning society.  If marriage is such a crucial ingredient of societal health, then the West is barreling ahead on a suicidal path.

We earlier discussed why marriage was created, but equally important were the factors that sustained the institution and kept it true to its objectives.  The reasons that marriage 'worked' not too long ago were :

1) People married at the age of 20, and often died by the age of 50.  People were virgins at marriage, and women spent their 20s tending to 3 or more children.  The wife retained her beauty 15 years into the marriage, and the lack of processed junk food kept her slim even after that.  This is an entirely different psychological foundation than the present urban norm of a woman marrying at the age of 34 after having had 10 or more prior sexual relationships, who then promptly emerges from her svelte chrysalis in an event that can best be described as a fatocalypse.

2) It was entirely normal for 10-20% of young men to die or be crippled on the battlefield, or in occupational accidents.  Hence, there were always significantly more women than able-bodied men in the 20-40 age group, ensuring that not all women could marry.  Widows were common and visible, and vulnerable to poverty and crime.  For these reasons, women who were married to able-bodied men knew how fortunate they were relative to other women who had to resort to tedious jobs just to survive, and treated their marriage with corresponding respect. 

3) Prior to the invention of contraception, female promiscuity carried the huge risk of pregnancy, and the resultant poverty and low social status.  It was virtually impossible for any women to have more than 2-3 sexual partners in her lifetime without being a prostitute, itself an occupation of the lowest social status. 

4) Divorce carried both social stigma and financial losses for a woman.  Her prospects for remarriage were slim.  Religious institutions, extended clans, and broader societal forces were pressures to keep a woman committed to her marriage, and the notion of leaving simply out of boredom was out of the question. 

Today, however, all of these factors have been removed.  This is partly the result of good forces (economic progress and technology invented by beta men), but partly due to artificial schemes that are extremely damaging to society. 

For one thing, the wedding itself has gone from a solemn event attended only by close family and friends, to an extravaganza of conspicuous consumption for the enjoyment of women but financed by the hapless man.  The wedding ring itself used to be a family heirloom passed down over generations, but now, the bride thumbs through a catalog that shows her rings that the man is expected to spend two months of his salary to buy.  This presumption that somehow the woman is to be indulged for entering marriage is a complete reversal of centuries-old traditions grounded in biological realities (and evidence of how American men have become weak pushovers).  In some Eastern cultures, for example, it is normal even today for either the bride's father to pay for the wedding, or for the bride's family to give custody of all wedding jewelry to the groom's family.  The reason for this was so that the groom's family effectively had a 'security bond' against irresponsible behavior on the part of the bride, such as her leaving the man at the (Eastern equivalent of the) altar, or fleeing the marital home at the first sign of distress (also a common female psychological response).  For those wondering why Indian culture has such restrictions on women and not men, restrictions on men were tried in some communities, and those communities quickly vanished and were forgotten.  There is no avoiding the reality that marriage has to be made attractive to men for the surrounding civilization to survive.  Abuse and blackmail of women certainly occurred in some instances, but on balance, these customs existed through centuries of observing the realities of human behavior.  Indian civilization has survived for over 5000 years and every challenge imaginable through enforcement of these customs, and, until recently, the Christian world also had comparable mechanisms to steer individual behavior away from destructive manifestations.  However, if the wedding has mutated into a carnival of bridezilla narcissism, the mechanics of divorce are far more disastrous. 

In an 'at will' employment arrangement between a corporation and an employee, either party can terminate the contract at any time.  However, instead of a few weeks of severance, imagine what would happen if the employer was legally required to pay the employee half of his or her paycheck for 20 additional years, irrespective of anything the employee did or did not do, under penalty of imprisonment for the CEO.  Suppose, additionally, that it is culturally encouraged for an employee to do this whenever even minor dissatisfaction arises.  Would businesses be able to operate?  Would anyone want to be a CEO?  Would businesses even form, and thus would any wealth be created, given the risks associated with hiring an employee?  Keep these questions in mind as you read further. 

So why are 70-90% of divorces initiated by women (she files 70% of the time, and the other 20% of the time, she forces the man to file, due to abuse or adultery on the part of the woman)?  Women have always been hypergamous, and most were married to beta men that they felt no attraction towards, so what has changed to cause an increase in divorce rates? 

Divorce lawyers, like any other professional group, will seek conditions that are good for business.  What makes attorneys different from, say, engineers or salespeople, is that a) they know precisely how to lobby for changes to the legal system, bypassing voters and the US constitution, that guarantees more revenue for them, and b) what benefits them is directly harmful to the fabric of society in general, and to children in particular.  When they collude with rage-filled 'feminists' who openly say that 90% of the male gender should be exterminated, the outcome is catastrophic. 

The concept of 'no fault' divorce by itself may not be unfair.  The concepts of asset division and alimony may also be fair in the event of serious wrongdoing by the husband.  However, the combination of no-fault divorce plus asset division/alimony is incredibly unfair and prone to extortionary abuse.  The notion that she can choose to leave the marriage, yet he is nonetheless required to pay her for years after that even if he did not want to destroy the union, is an injustice that should not occur in any advanced democracy.  Indeed, the man has to pay even if the woman has an extramarital affair, possibly even being ordered to pay her psychiatric fees.  Bogus claims by 'feminists' that women suffer under divorce are designed to obscure the fact that she is the one who filed for divorce.  Defenders of alimony insist that a woman seeking a divorce should not see a drop in living standards, but it is somehow acceptable for the husband to see a drop even if he did not want a divorce.  I would go further and declare that any belief that women deserve alimony on a no-fault basis in this day age is utterly contradictory to the belief that women are equals of men.  How can women both deserve alimony while also claiming equality?  In rare cases, high-earning women have had to pay alimony to ex-husbands, but that is only 4% of the time, vs. the man paying 96% of the time.  But it gets worse; much worse, in fact. 

Even if the woman chooses to leave on account of 'boredom', she is still given default custody of the children, which exposes the total hypocrisy of feminist claims that men and women should be treated equally.  Furthermore, the man is required to pay 'child support' which is assessed at levels much higher than the direct costs of child care, with the woman facing no burden to prove the funds were spent on the child, and cannot be specified by any pre-nuptial agreement.  The rationale is that 'the child should not see a drop in living standards due to divorce', but since the mother has custody of the child, this is a stealthy way in which feminists have ensured financial maintenence of the mother as well.  So the man loses his children and most of his income even if he did not want divorce.  But even that is not the worst-case scenario. 

The Bradley Amendment, devised by Senator Bill Bradley in 1986, ruthlessly pursues men for the already high 'child support' percentages, and seizes their passports and imprisons them without due process for falling behind in payments, even if on account of job loss during a recession.  Under a bogus 'deadbeat dads' media campaign, 'feminists' were able to obscure the fact that women were the ones ending their marriages and with them the benefit that children receive from a two-parent upbringing, and further demanding unusually high spousal maintenence, much of which does not even go to the child, from a dutiful ex-husband who did not want a divorce, under penalty of imprisonment.  So the legal process uses children as pawns through which to extract an expanded alimony stream for the mother.  Talk about a multi-layer compounding of evil.  The phony tactic of insisting that 'it is for the children' is used to shut down all questions about the use of children as pawns in the extortion process, while avoiding scrutiny of the fact that the parent who is choosing divorce is clearly placing the long-term well-being of the children at a very low priority. 

So as it stands today, there are large numbers of middle-class men who were upstanding citizens, who were subjected to divorce against their will, had their children taken from them, pay alimony masked as child support that is so high that many of them have to live out of their cars or with their relatives, and after job loss from economic conditions, are imprisoned simply for running out of money.  If 10-30% of American men are under conditions where 70% or more of their income is taken from them under threat of prison, these men have no incentive to start new businesses or invent new technologies or processes.  Having 10-30% of men disincentivized this way cannot be good for the economy, and is definitely a contributor to current economic malaise, not to mention a 21st-century version of slavery.  Sometimes, the children are not even biologically his. 

This one-page site has more links about the brutal tyranny that a man can be subjected to once he enters the legal contract of marriage, and even more so after he has children.  What was once the bedrock of society, and a solemn tradition that benefited both men and women equally, has quietly mutated under the evil tinkering of feminists, divorce lawyers, and leftists, into a shockingly unequal arrangement, where the man is officially a second-class citizen who is subjected to a myriad of sadistic risks.  As a result, the word 'marriage' should not even be used, given the totality of changes that have made the arrangement all but unrecognizable compared to its intended ideals.  Suicide rates of men undergoing divorce run as high as 20%, and all of us know a man who either committed suicide, or admits seriously considering it during the dehumanization he faced even though he wanted to preserve the union.  Needless to say, this is a violation of the US Constitution on many levels, and is incompatible with the values of any supposedly advanced democracy that prides itself on freedom and liberty.  There is effectively a tyrannical leftist shadow state operating within US borders but entirely outside the US constitution, which can subject a man to horrors more worthy of North Korea than the US, even if he did not want out of the marriage, did not want to be separated from his children, and did not want to lose his job.  Any unsuspecting man can be sucked into this shadow state. 

Anyone who believes that two-parent families are important to the continuance of an advanced civilization, should focus on the explosive growth in revenue earned by divorce lawyers, court supervisors, and 'feminist' organizations over the past quarter-century.  If Western society is to survive, these revenues should be chopped down to a tenth of what they presently are, which is what they would be if the elements that violate the US Constitution were repealed. 

Marriage is no longer a gateway to female 'companionship', as we shall discuss later.  For this reason, as a Futurist, I cannot recommend 'marriage', as the grotesque parody that it has become today, to any young man living in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.  There are just too many things outside of his control that can catastrophically ruin his finances, emotions, and quality of life. 

At a minimum, he should make sure that having children is the most important goal of his life.  If not, then he has insufficient reason to enter this contract.  If this goal is affirmed, then he should conduct research by speaking to a few divorced men about the laws and mistreatment they were subjected to, and attend a few divorce court hearings at the local courthouse.  After gaining this information, if he still wants to take the risk, he should only marry if he can meet the following three conditions, none of which can substitute either of the other two : 

1) The woman earns the same as, or more than, he does.  

2) He has a properly done pre-nuptial arrangement with lawyers on each side (even though a pre-nup will not affect the worst aspect of divorce law - 'child support' as a cloak for stealth alimony and possible imprisonment).

3) He is deeply competent in the Seduction Arts (Game), and can manage his relationship with his wife effortlessly.  Even this is a considerable workload, however.  More on this later. 

There are still substantial risks, but at least they are somewhat reduced under these conditions.  If marriage is a very important goal for a young man, he should seriously consider expatriation to a developing country, where he ironically may have a higher living standard than in the US after adjusting for divorce risk. 

So, to review, the differences between Marriage 1.0 and Marriage 2.0 are :

  • a) No fault asset division and alimony, where the abandoned spouse has to pay if he earns more, even if he did not want a divorce, and even if he is a victim of abuse, cuckolding, or adultery.  There are rare instances of high-earning women getting caught in this trap as well.   
  • b) Women marrying after having 5 or more sexual partners, compared to just 0-1 previously.  This makes it harder for the woman to form a pair bond with her husband. 
  • c) Women marrying at an age when very few years of their peak beauty are remaining, compared to a decade or more remaining under Marriage 1.0.
  • d) Child custody is almost never granted to the man, so he loses his children on a 'no fault' basis. 

Traditional cultures marketed marriage with such punctilious alacrity that most people today dare not even question whether the traditional truths still apply.  Hence, hostility often ensues from a mere attempt to even broach the topic of whether marriage is still the same concept as it once was.  Everyone from women to sadistic social conservatives to a young man's own parents will pressure and shame him into marriage for reasons they cannot even articulate, and condemn his request for a pre-nup, without having any interest in even learning about the horrendously unequal and carefully concealed laws he would be subjected to in the event that his wife divorces him through no reasons he can discern.  But some men with an eye on self-preservation are figuring this out, and are avoiding marriage.  By many accounts, 22% of men have decided to avoid marriage.  So what happens to a society that makes it unattractive for even just 20% of men to marry? 

Women are far more interested in marriage than men.  Simple logic of supply and demand tells us that the institution of monogamous marriage requires at least 80% male participation in order to be viable.  When male participation drops below 80%, all women are in serious trouble, since there are now 100 women competing for every 80 men, compounded with the reality that women age out of fertility much quicker than men.  This creates great stress among the single female population.  In the past, the steady hand of a young woman's mother and grandmother knew that her beauty was temporary, and that the most seductive man was not the best husband, and they made sure that the girl was married off to a boy with long-term durability.  Now that this guidance has been removed from the lives of young women, thanks to 'feminism', these women are proving to be poor pilots of their mating lives who pursue alpha males until the age of 34-36 when her desirability drops precipitously and not even beta males she used to reject are interested in her.  This stunning plunge in her prospects with men is known as the Wile E. Coyote moment, and women of yesteryear had many safety nets that protected them from this fate.  The 'feminist' media's attempt to normalize 'cougarhood' is evidence of gasping desperation to package failure as a desirable outcome, which will never become mainstream due to sheer biological realities.  Women often protest that a high number of sexual partners should not be counted as a negative on them, as the same is not a negative for men, but this is merely a manifestation of solipism.  A complex sexual past works against women even if the same works in favor of men, due to the natural sexual attraction triggers of each gender.  A wise man once said, "A key that can open many locks is a valuable key, but a lock that can be opened by many keys is a useless lock."

The big irony is that 'feminism', rather than improving the lives of women, has stripped away the safety nets of mother/grandmother guidance that would have shielded her from ever having to face her Wile E. Coyote moment.  'Feminism' has thus put the average woman at risk in yet another area. 

Game (Learned Attraction and Seduction) : The Four Sirens and the legal changes feminists have instituted to obstruct beta men have created a climate where men have invented techniques and strategies to adapt to the more challenging marketplace, only to exceed their aspirations.  This is a disruptive technology in its own right.  All of us know a man who is neither handsome nor wealthy, but consistently has amazing success with women.  He seems to have natural instincts regarding women that to the layperson may be indistinguishable from magic.  So how does he do it? 

Detractors with a vested interest in the present status quo are eager to misrepresent what 'Game' is, and the presence of many snake-oil salesmen in the field does not help, but as a definition :

The traits that make a man attractive to women are learnable skills, that improve with practice.  Once a man learns these skills, he is indistinguishable from a man who had natural talents in this area.  Whether a man then chooses to use these skills to secure one solid relationship or multiple brief ones, is entirely up to him. 

The subject is too vast for any description over here to do it full justice, but in a nutshell, the Internet age enabled communities of men to share the various bits of knowledge they had field tested and refined (e.g. one man being an expert at meeting women during the daytime, another being an expert at step-by-step sexual escalation, yet another being a master of creating lasting love, etc.).  The collective knowledge grew and evolved, and an entire industry to teach the various schools of 'Game' emerged.  Men who comprehended the concepts (a minority) and those who could undertake the total reconstitution of their personalities and avalanche of rejections as part of the learning curve (a still smaller minority) stood to reap tremendous benefits from becoming more attractive than the vast majority of unaware men.  While the 'pick-up artist' (PUA) implementation is the most media-covered, the principles are equally valuable for men in monogamous long-term relationships (LTRs).  See Charlotte Allen's cover story for The Weekly Standard, devoted to 'Game'. 

WStandard_15-21_Feb15_cover__0 Among the most valuable learnings from the body of knowledge is the contrarian revelation that what women say a man should do is often quite the antithesis of what would actually bring him success.  For example, being a needy, supplicative, eager-to-please man is precisely the opposite behavior that a man should employ, where being dominant, teasing, amused, yet assertive is the optimal persona.  An equally valuable lesson is to realize when not to take a woman's words at face value.  Many statements from her are 'tests' to see if the man can remain congruent in his 'alpha' personality, where the woman is actually hoping the man does not eagerly comply to her wishes.  Similarly, the 'feminist' Pavlovian reaction to call any non-compliant man a 'misogynist' should also not be taken as though a rational adult assigned the label after fair consideration.  Such shaming language is only meant to deflect scrutiny and accountability from the woman uttering it, and should be given no more importance than a 10-year-old throwing a tantrum to avoid responsibility or accountability.  Far too many men actually take these slurs seriously, to the detriment of male rights and dignity. 

Success in internalizing the core fundamentals of Game requires an outside-the-box thinker solidly in the very top of Maslow's Hierarchy, and in my experience, 80% of men and 99.9% of women are simply incapable of comprehending why the skills of Game are valuable and effective.  Many women, and even a few pathetic men, condemn Game, without even gaining a minimal comprehension for what it truly is (which I have highlighted in red above), and how it benefits both men and women.  Most of what they think they know about Game involves strawmen, a lack of basic research, and their own sheer insecurity. 

For anyone seeking advice on learning the material, there is one rule you must never break.  I believe it is of paramount importance that the knowledge be used ethically, and with the objective of creating mutually satisfying relationships with women.  It is not moral to mistreat women, even if they have done the same to countless men.  We, as men, have to take the high road even if women are not, and this is my firm belief.  Nice guys can finish first if they have Game.  

'Feminism' as Unrestrained Misandry and Projection : The golden rule of human interactions is to judge a person, or a group, by their actions rather than their words.  The actions of 'feminists' reveal their ideology to be one that seeks to secure equality for women in the few areas where they lag, while distracting observers from the vast array of areas where women are in a more favorable position relative to men (the judicial system, hiring and admissions quotas, media portrayals, social settings, etc.).  They will concoct any number of bogus statistics to maintain an increasingly ridiculous narrative of female oppression. 

Feminists once had noble goals of securing voting rights, achieving educational parity, and opening employment channels for women.  But once these goals were met and even exceeded, the activists did not want to lose relevance.  Now, they tirelessly and ruthlessly lobby for changes in legislation that are blatantly discriminatory against men (not to mention unconstitutional and downright cruel).  Not satisfied with that, they continue to lobby for social programs designed to devalue the roles of husbands and fathers, replacing them with taxpayer-funded handouts. 

As it is profitable to claim victimhood in this age, a good indicator is whether any condemnation by the supposedly oppressed of their oppressor could be similarly uttered if the positions were reversed.  We know that what Rev. Jeremiah Wright said about whites could not be said by a white pastor about blacks, and we see even more of a double standard regarding what women and men can say about each other in America today.  This reveals one of the darkest depths of the human mind - when a group is utterly convinced that they are the 'victims' of another group, they can rationalize any level of evil against their perceived oppressors.   

Go to any major 'feminist' website, such as feministing.com or Jezebel.com, and ask polite questions about the fairness of divorce laws, or the injustice of innocent men being jailed on false accusations of rape without due process.  You will quickly be called a 'misogynist' and banned from commenting.  The same is not true for any major men's site, where even heated arguments and blatant misandry are tolerated in the spirit of free speech and human dignity.  When is the last time a doctrinaire 'feminist' actually had the courage to debate a fair woman like Camille Paglia, Tammy Bruce, or Christina Hoff Somers on television? 

Ever-tightening groupthink that enforces an ever-escalating narrative of victimhood ensures that projection becomes the normal mode of misandrist thought.  The word 'misogynist' has expanded to such an extreme that it is the Pavlovian response to anything a 'feminist' feels bad about, but cannot articulate in an adult-like manner.  This reveals the projected gender bigotry of the 'feminist' in question, which in her case is misandry.  For example, an older man dating women 10 years younger than him is also referred to as a 'misogynist' by the older bitterati.  Not an ageist, mind you, but a misogynist.  A man who refuses to find obese women attractive is also a 'misogynist', as are gay men who do not spend money on women.  The male non-compliance labeled as 'misogyny' thus becomes a reaction to many years of unopposed misandry heaped on him first, when he initially harbored no such sentiments.  Kick a friendly dog enough times, and you get a nasty dog. 

There are laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that blatantly declares that violence against women is far worse than violence against men.  VAWA is very different from ordinary assault laws, because under VAWA, a man can be removed from his home at gunpoint if the woman makes a single phonecall.  No due process is permitted, and the man's Constitutional rights are jettisoned.  At the same time, half of all domestic violence is by the woman against the man.  Tiger Woods' wife beat him with a blunt weapon and scratched his face, only to be applauded by 'feminists' in a 'you go girl' manner.  Projection can normalize barbarism. 

Rape legislation has also bypassed the US Constitution, leaving a man guilty until he proves himself innocent, while the accusing woman faces no penalty for falsely sending a man to prison for 15 years, where he himsef will get raped.  The Duke Lacrosse case was a prominent example of such abuse, but hundreds of others occur in America each year.  The laws have been changed so that a victim has 1 month to 'decide' if she has been raped, and such flexibility predicatably leads to instances of a woman reporting rape just so that she does not have to tell her husband that she cheated on him (until it becomes profitable to divorce him).  40-50% of all rape accusations are false, but 'feminists' would rather jail scores of innocent men than let one guilty man get away, which is the exact opposite of what US Constitutional jurisprudence requires. 

But, unimaginably, it gets even worse. Polls of men have shown that there is one thing men fear even more than being raped themselves, and that is being cuckolded.  Men see cuckolding as the ultimate violation and betrayal, yet there is an entire movement among 'feminists' to enshrine a woman's right to commit adultery and use the resources of her husband to dupe him into thinking the child is his.  These misandrists even want to outlaw the right of a man to test the paternity of a child. 

So, to review, if a woman has second thoughts about a tryst a few days later, she can, without penalty, ruin a man financially and send him to prison for 15 years.  'Feminists' consider this acceptable.  At the same time, even though men consider being cuckolded a worse fate than being raped, 'feminists' want to make this easier for a woman to do, by preventing paternity testing.  They already have rigged laws so that the man, upon 'no fault' divorce, has to pay alimony, to a woman who cuckolded him. 

This is pure evil, ranking right up there with the worst tyrannies of the last century.  Modern misandry masking itself as 'feminism' is, without equal, the most hypocritical ideology in the world today.  The laws of a society are the DNA of that society.  Once the laws are tainted, the DNA is effectively corrupted, and mutations to the society soon follow.  Men have been killed due to 'feminism'.  Children and fathers have been forcibly separated for financial gain via 'feminism'.  Slavery has returned to the West via 'feminism'.  With all these misandric laws, one can fairly say that misandry is the new Jim Crow.

Shaming Language and Projection as a Substitute for Rational Debate : As discussed previously, any legitimate and polite questions about the fairness of anti-male realities in the legal system and media are quickly met with Pavlovian retorts of 'misogynist' and 'loser'.  Let us deconstruct these oft-used examples of shaming language, and why misandrists are so afraid of legitimate debate. 

Contrary to their endless charges of 'misogyny' (a word that many 'feminists' still manage to misspell), in reality, most men instinctively treat women with chivalry and enshrine them on exalted pedestals.  Every day, we see men willing to defend women or do favors for them.  There is infinitely more chivalry than misogyny exhibited by the male population.  On the other hand, we routinely see anti-male statements uttered by 'feminists', and a presumption that all men are monsters guilty of crimes committed by a small number of people of the same gender.  When well-known 'feminists' openly state that 90% of the male population should be exterminated, the unsupported accusation of 'misogyny' is a very pure manifestion of their own misandric projection. 

On the second charge of being a 'loser who cannot get laid', any observation of the real world quickly makes it obvious that men who have had little experience with women are the ones placing women on pedestals, while those men who have had substantial sexual experience with women are not.  Having sex with a large number of women does not increase respect for women, which is the exact opposite of the claim that 'feminists' make.  Again, this charge of 'loserdom' is merely the psychosexual frustration of 'feminists' projected outwards, who express surprise that unrelenting hatred by them towards men is not magically metabolized into love for these particular 'feminists'.

That misandrists are so unchallenged is the reason that they have had no reason to expand their arsenal of venom beyond these two types of projection.  Despite my explanation of this predictable Pavlovian response, the comments section will feature misandrists use these same two slurs nonetheless, proving the very point that they seek to shout down, and the very exposure they seek to avoid.  My pre-emption will not deter them from revealing their limitations by indulging in it anyway.  They simply cannot help themselves, and are far from being capable of discussing actual points of disagreement in a rational manner. 

Men, of course, have to be savvy about the real reason their debate skills are limited to these two paths of shaming language, and not be deterred.  Once again, remember that this should be taken no more seriously than if uttered by a 10-year-old, and there is no reason to let a 'feminist' get away with anything you would not let a man get away with.  They wanted equality, didn't they? 

'Feminism' as Genuine Misogyny : The greatest real misogyny, of course, has been unwittingly done by the 'feminists' themselves.  By encouraging false rape claims, they devalue the credibility of all claims, and genuine victims will suffer.  By incentivizing the dehumanization of their ex-husbands and the use of children as pawns, they set bad examples for children, and cause children to resent their mothers when they mature.  By making baseless accusations of 'misogyny' without sufficient cause, they cause resentment among formerly friendly men where there previously was none.  By trying to excuse cuckolding and female domestic violence, they invite formerly docile men to lash out in desperation. 

One glaring example of misandry backfiring is in the destruction of marriage and corresponding push of the 'Sex in the City/cougar' fantasy.  Monogamous marriage not only masked the gap between 'alpha' and 'beta' men, but also masked the gap between attractiveness of women before and after their Wile E. Coyote moment.  By seducing women with the myth that a promiscuous single life after the age of 35 is a worthy goal, many women in their late 30s are left to find that they command far less male attention than women just a decade younger than them.  'Feminism' sold them a moral code entirely unsuited to their physical and mental realities, causing great sadness to these women.   

But most importantly, 'feminists' devalued the traditional areas of female expertise (raising the next generation of citizens), while attaching value only to areas of male expertise (the boardroom, the military, sexual promiscuity) and told women to go duplicate male results under the premise that this was inherently better than traditional female functions.  Telling women that emulating their mothers and grandmothers is less valuable than mimicking men sounds quite misogynistic to me, and unsurprisingly, despite all these 'freedoms', women are more unhappy than ever after being inflicted with such misogyny. 

So how did the state of affairs manage to get so bad?  Surely 'feminists' are not so powerful? 

Social Conservatives, White Knights, and Girlie-Men : It would be inaccurate to deduce that misandrists were capable of creating this state of affairs on their own, despite their vigor and skill in sidestepping both the US Constitution and voter scrutiny.  Equally culpable are men who ignorantly believe that acting as obsequious yes-men to 'feminists' by turning against other men in the hope that their posturing will earn them residual scraps of female affection. 

Chivalry has existed in most human cultures for many centuries, and is seen in literature from all major civilizations.  Chivalry greatly increased a man's prospects of marriage, but the reasons for this have been forgotten.  Prior to the modern era, securing a young woman's hand in marriage usually involved going through her parents.  The approval of the girl's father was a non-negotiable channel in the process.  If a young man could show the girl's parents that he would place her on a pedestal, they could be convinced to sanction the union.  The girl herself was not the primary audience of the chivalry, as the sexual attraction of the girl herself was rarely aroused by chivalry, as the principles of Game have shown. 

Hence, many men are still stuck in the obsolete, inobservant, and self-loathing notion that chivalry and excess servility are the pathways to sex today, despite the modern reality that a woman's sexual decisions are no longer controlled by her parents, and are often casual rather than locked in matrimony.  Whether such men are religious and called 'social conservatives', or effete leftists and called 'girlie men', they are effectively the same, and the term 'White Knights' can apply to the entire group.  Their form of chivalry when exposed to 'feminist' histrionics results in these men harming other men at the behest of women who will never be attracted to them.  This is why we see peculiar agreement between supposedly opposed 'social conservatives' and 'feminists' whenever the craving to punish men arises.  A distressingly high number of men actually support the imprisonment of innocent men for false rape accusations or job loss causing 'child support' arrears merely because these 'men' don't want to risk female disapproval, incorrectly assuming that fanatically vocal 'feminists' represent the official opinion of all women.  These men are the biggest suckers of all, as their pig-headed denial of the effectiveness of Game will prevent them from deducing that excess agreeability and willingness to do favors for the objects of their lust are exactly the opposite of what makes women sexually attracted to men.  No woman feels attraction for a needy man. 

For this reason, after lunatic 'feminists', these pedestalizing White Knights are the next most responsible party for the misandry in Western society today.  The average woman is not obsessively plotting new schemes to denigrate and swindle men, she merely wants to side with whoever is winning (which presently is the side of misandry).  But pedestalizing men actually carry out many dirty deeds against other men in the hopes of receiving a pat on the head from 'feminists'.  Hence, the hierarchy of misandric zeal is thus :

Strident 'feminist' > pedestalizer/white knight > average woman.

For reasons described earlier, even a declaration that many men are bigger contributors to misandry than the average woman will not deter 'feminists' from their Pavlovian tendency to call articles such as this one 'misogynist'. 

Lastly, the religious 'social conservatives' who continue their empty sermonizing about the 'sanctity of marriage' while doing absolutely nothing about the divorce-incentivizing turn that the laws have taken, have been exposed for their pseudo-moral posturing and willful blindness.  What they claim to be of utmost importance to them has been destroyed right under their noses, and they still are too dimwitted to comprehend why.  No other interest group in America has been such a total failure at their own stated mission.  To be duped into believing that a side-issue like 'gay marriage' is a mortal threat to traditional marriage, yet miss the legal changes that correlate to a rise in divorce rates by creating incentives for divorce (divorce being what destroys marriage, rather than a tiny number of gays), is about as egregious an oversight as an astronomer failing to be aware of the existence of the Moon.  Aren't conservatives the people who are supposed to grasp that incentives drive behavior?  An article worthy of being written by The Onion could conceivably be titled 'Social conservatives carefully seek to maintain perfect 100% record of failure in advancing their agenda'. 

Why There is No Men's Rights Movement :  At this point, readers may be wondering "If things are this bad, why don't we hear anything about it?".  Indeed, this is a valid question, and the answer lies within the fundamentals of male psychology.  Most beta men would rather die than be called a 'loser' by women (alpha men, of course, know better than to take this at face value).  White Knights also join in the chorus of shaming other men since they blunderously believe that this is a pathway to the satiation of their lust.  So an unfairly ruined man is faced with the prospect of being shamed by women and a large cohort of men if he protests about the injustice, and this keeps him suffering in silence, leading to an early death.  We have millions of fine young men willing to die on the battlefield to defend the values enshrined in the US Constitution, but we don't see protests of even 100 divorced men against the shamefully unconstitutional treatment they have received.  The destruction of the two-parent family by incentivizing immoral behavior in women is at least as much of a threat to American safety and prosperity as anything that ever could have come out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.  Men being too afraid to be the 'squeaky wheel' even when they have lost their children and their present and future assets is a major contributor to the prevailing status quo.  Alpha men have no incentive beyond altruism to act as they benefit from the current climate, and thus my altruism will be limited to putting forth these ideas. 

Any serious movement has to start a think tank or two to produce research reports, symposiums, and specific policy recommendations, and the few divorce lawyers who were compelled by their conscience to leave the dark side have to be recruited as experts.  Subsequently, televised panel discussions have to be conducted at top medical, business, and graduate engineering schools (where young men about to embark on lucrative careers are approaching marriage age, but know nothing about the law), documentary films have to be produced, prominent victims like Mel Gibson, Paul McCartney, Hulk Hogan, and Tiger Woods have to be recruited as spokesmen, and visibly powerful protests outside of divorce courts have to be organized.  In this age of Web 2.0/social media/viral tools, all this should be easy, particularly given how quickly leftist groups can assemble a comparable apparatus for even obscure causes. 

Instead, all that exists are Men's Rights Authors (MRAs) that run a few websites and exchange information on their blogs.  'Something is better than nothing' is the most generous praise I could possibly extend to their efforts, and this article I am presenting here on The Futurist is probably the single biggest analysis of this issue to date, even though this is not even a site devoted to the subject and I am not the primary author of this site.  Hence, there will be no real Men's Rights Movement in the near future.  The misandry bubble will instead be punctured through the sum of millions of individual market forces.

The Faultline of Civilization :  After examining all the flaws in modern societies, and the laws that exacerbate them, it becomes apparent that there are two realms of legal/judicial thought that stand alone in determining whether our civilization is going to be ever-improving or merely cyclical.  These two legal areas are a) the treatment of paternity rights, and b) the treatment of due process in rape accusations.  The human brain is wired to value the well-being of women far higher than that of men (for reasons that were once valid, but no longer are today), which is why extending due process to a man falsely accused of rape is not of particular interest to people who otherwise value due process.   Similarly, there is little resistance to 'feminist' laws that have stripped away all types of paternity rights from fathers.  The father is not seen as valuable nor as worthy of rights, as we have seen above.  These two areas of law are precisely where our society will decide if it ascends or declines.  All other political sideshows, like immigration, race relations, and even terrorism are simply not as important as none of those can destroy an entire society the way these laws can.  

 

The Economic Thesis

Ceilings and Floors of Glass : Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women.  What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men.  If these outcomes are the results of the actions or choices of men who suffer from them, then is that not the same reason that determines who rises above the 'glass ceiling'?  The inability of misandrists to address these realities in good faith tells us something (but not everything) about the irrational sense of entitlement they have.   

One of the most dishonest myths of all is the claim that 'women earn just 75% of men for the same job'.  Let me dispense of this myth, in the process of which we will see why it is profitable and seductive for them to broadcast this bogus belief. 

It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do.  It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds.  Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination? 

If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors.  Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit?  When the 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness.  That a nun congregation pays a recession-proof salary to someone as a 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' is itself an example of a pampered existence, and I was unaware that convents were now advancing secular Marxist beliefs. 

Deaths Furthermore, women entrepreneurs could hire other women and out-compete any male-dominated business if such a pay gap existed, but we do not see this happening in any country in the world.  Market forces would correct such mispricings in female compensation, if they actually existed.  But they do not, and those who claim that they do are not just advertising an extreme economic illiteracy, but are quite happy to make similarly illiterate women angry about an injustice that does not exist.  I notice that women who actually are/were CEOs of publicly traded companies never claim that there is a conspiracy to underpay women relative to their output. 

I am willing to pass laws to ensure that 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women, if we also legally mandate that 50% of all imprisonments are of women, and 50% of the jobs that involve working with heavy machinery, being outdoors in inclement weather, inhaling toxic fumes, or apprehending dangerous criminals are also occupied by women.  Fair is fair.  Any takers? 

The 'Mancession' and the 'Sheconomy' : I would be the first to be happy if the economic success of women were solely on the basis of pure merit.  For many of them, it is.  But far too much has been the result of not market forces or meritocracy, but political graft and ideology-driven corruption. 

In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate.  If this was simply due to market forces, that would be fine.  However, 'feminist' groups have lobbied hard to ensure that government stimulus funds were steered to boost female employment at the expense of assistance for men.  The leftist Obama administration was more than eager to comply, and a forcible transfer of wealth was enacted, even though it may not have been the best deployment of money for the economy. 

Maria Shriver, a woman who has the most fortunate of lives from the vast wealth earned first by her grandfather and then by her husband, recently published 'A Woman's Nation : The Shriver Report', consisting of gloating about how women were now outperforming men economically.  The entire research report is full of all the standard bogus feminist myths and flawed statistics, as thoroughly debunked here, as well as the outright sexism of statements like 'women are better managers' (imagine a man saying the reverse).  Furthermore, the report reveals the typical economic illiteracy (evidenced by, among other things, the ubiquitous 'women are underpaid' myth), as well as belief that businesses exist to act as vehicles of social engineering rather than to produce a profit. 

Mancession1All of this bogus research and organized anti-male lobbying has been successful.  As of today, the male unemployment rate is worse than the female unemployment rate by an unprecedented chasm.  The 'mancession' continues as the US transitions to a 'sheconomy', and among the millions of unemployed men, some owe prohibitive levels of 'child support' despite not being the ones wanting to deprive their children of a two-parent household, landing in prison for lack of funds.  Furthermore, I emphasize again that having 10-30% of the US male workforce living under an effective 70% marginal tax rate will kill their incentives for inventing new technologies or starting new companies.  It is petty to debate whether the top federal income tax bracket should be 35% or 39.6%, when a slice of the workforce is under a 70% tax on marginal income.  Beyond the tyranny of this, it also costs a lot of taxpayer money to jail a growing pool of unemployed men.  Clearly, moving more and more men out of a tax-generating capacity and into a tax-consuming capacity is certainly going to do two-fold damage to governmental budgets.  The next time you hear someone say that 'the US has the largest prison population in the world', be sure to mention that many of these men merely lost their jobs, and were divorced against their will.  The women, in the meantime, are having a blast. 

The Government Bubble : While public sector vs. private sector workforce distribution is not highly correlated to gender, it is when the focus is on women earning over $100,000 or more.  Cato This next chart from the Cato Institute shows that when total compensation (wages + benefits) are taken into account, the public sector has totally outstripped the private sector this decade.  Has the productivity of the typical government employee risen so much more than that of the private worker, that the government employee is now paid twice as much?  Are taxpayers receiving value for their money?   

It goes further.  The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average).  That is not troubling by any means, but the fact that women consume two-thirds of all US healthcare, despite most of this $2.5 Trillion annual expenditure being paid by men, is certainly worthy of debate.  It may be 'natural' for women to require more healthcare, since they are the ones who give birth.  But it was also 'natural' for men to finance this for only their wives, not for the broader community of women.  The healthcare profession also employs an immense number of women, and not just in value-added roles such as nursing, but even in administrative and bureaucratic positions.  In fact, virtually all government spending except for defense and infrastructure, from Medicare to Obamacare to welfare to public sector jobs for women to the expansion of the prison population, is either a net transfer of wealth from men to women, or a byproduct of the destruction of Marriage 1.0.  In either case, 'feminism' is the culprit. 

201002_blog_edwards3 This Cato Institute chart of Federal Government spending (click to enlarge) shows how non-defense expenditures have steadily risen since 1960.  The decline in defense spending, far from being a 'peace dividend' repatriated back to taxpayers, was used to fund more social programs.  No one can seriously claim that the American public receives better non-defense governance in 2010 than in 1960 despite the higher price, and as discussed earlier, most of this increase is a direct or indirect result of 'feminism'.  When state and local government wastage is added to this, it would appear that 20% of GDP is being spent just to make the government a substitute for the institution of Marriage, and yet still has not managed to be an effective replacement.  Remember again that the earnings of men pays 70%-80% of all taxes.

The left has finally found a perfect Trojan Horse through which to expand a tyrannical state.  'Feminists' can lobby for a transfer of wealth from men to women and from private industry to the government, while knowing that calling any questioner a 'misogynist' will silence him far more effectively than their military fifth columnist and plain socialist brethren could ever silence their respective opponents.  Conservatives are particularly vulnerable to such shaming language, and most conservatives will abandon their stated principles to endlessly support any and all socialism if it can be packaged as 'chivalry', the opposition to which makes one a 'misogynist'.  However, there is reason to believe that tax collection in many parts of the US, such as in states like CA, NY, NJ, and MA, has reached saturation.  As the optimal point has already been crossed, a rise in tax rates will cause a decrease, rather than an increase in revenue, and the increase in Federal tax rates exactly one year from today on 1/1/2011 is likely to cause another recession, which will not be so easily transferred to already-impoverished men the next time. 

When men are severed from their children with no right to obstruct divorce, when they are excluded from the labor market not by market forces but rather by social engineering, and when they learn that the society they once believed in and in some cases joined the military to protect, has no respect for their aspirations, these men have no reason to sustain such a society. 

The Contract Between the Sexes : A single man does not require much in order to survive.  Most single men could eke out an adequate existence by working for two months out of the year.  The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community.  Young men who exhibited high economic potential and favorable compatibility with the social fabric would impress a girl's parents effectively enough to win her hand in marriage.  The man would proceed to work very hard, with the fruits of his labor going to the state, the employer, and the family.  80-90% of a man's output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status in return, so he was happy with the arrangement. 

The Four Sirens changed this, which enabled women to pursue alpha males despite the mathematical improbability of marrying one, while totally ignoring beta males.  Beta males who were told to follow a responsible, productive life of conformity found that they were swindled. 

Men who excelled under the societal rules of just two decades ago are often left totally betrayed by the rules of today, and results in them refusing to sustain a society heavily dependent on their productivity and ingenuity.  Women believed that they could free themselves from all their traditional obligations (only to find, amusingly, that they are unhappier now than they were then), while men would still fulfill all of their traditional obligations, particularly as bankrollers of women and protectors of women.  Needless to say, despite the chivalry ground into men, eventually, they will feel that chivalry requires a level of gratitude that is not forthcoming.

To see what happens when the role of the husband and father is devalued, and the state steps in as a replacement, look no further than the African American community.  In Detroit, the average home price has fallen from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today.  The auto industry moved jobs out of Detroit long before 2003, so the decline cannot be attributed to just industrial migration, and cities like Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are in scarcely better shape.  For those who believe that this cannot happen in white communities, have a look at the white underclass in Britain.  The lower half of the US white population is vulnerable to the same fate as the black community, and cities like Los Angeles are perilously close to 'Detroitification'. 

Additionally, people seem to have forgotten that the physical safety of society, particularly of women, is entirely dependent on ratio of 'aggressor' men to 'protector' men staying below a certain critical threshold.  As more men get shut out of the labor market, crime becomes an alternative.  Even highly educated men who feel betrayed can lash out, and just about every shooting spree and every recent terrorist attempt in the West was by men who were educated and had good career prospects, but were unloved.  

While professional men will certainly never resort to crime, what they could resort to is an unwillingness to aid a damsel in distress.  More men will simply lose interest in being rescuers, and this includes policemen who may also feel mistreated by the prevailing misandry.  Safety is like air - it is only noticed when it is gone.  Women have a tremendous amount to lose by creating a lot of indifferent men. 

Patriarchy works because it induces men and women to cooperate under their complementary strengths.  'Feminism' does not work, because it encourages immoral behavior in women, which eventually wears down even the durable chivalry of beta men, making both genders worse off.  It is no secret that single motherhood is heavily subsidized, but it is less understood that single spinsterhood is also heavily subsidized through a variety of unsustainable and unreciprocated means.  The default natural solution is for the misandric society to be outcompeted and displaced.  

Population Displacement : So we have arrived at a society where 'feminists' feel that they are 'empowered', 'independent', and 'confident', despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and 'child support' from men, an infrastructure maintained by men, technologies invented by men, and a level of safety that men agree to maintain.  So exactly what has society received from this population of women who are the most privileged class of humans ever to have lived? 

DisplacementNow, let me be clear; I believe a woman should get to decide how many children she bears, or even whether or not to have any children at all.   However, a childless old woman should not then be able to extract resources from the children of other women.  Fair is fair, and the obligation of working-age people to support the elderly should not be socialized in order to subsidize women who chose not to reproduce.

Let us take a hypothetical example of three 20-year-old single women, one who is an urban lefto-'feminist', one who is a rural conservative, and one who is a devout Muslim.  The following table charts the parallel timelines of their lives as their ages progress in tandem, with realistic estimates of typical life events.  When people talk about falling birth rates in the West, they often fail to account for the additional gap caused by having children at age 23 vs. at age 33.  As the table shows, a 1:1:1 ratio of three young ladies takes only 40 years to yield a 12:4:0 ratio of grandchildren.  Consider, also, that we are already 20 years into this 40-year process, so each of these women are 40 years old today.  

Children So how do we estimate the value society will ultimately receive from organizing itself in a manner that young women could choose a life of bar-hopping, shopping for $300 purses, and working as government bureaucrats to make the government a more complete husband substitute?  If the sight of a pitiful 60-year-old Code Pink harpy lecturing 12 Muslim adolescents that 'gender is a social construct' seems amusing, then let us move on to the macro chart.  This world map(click to enlarge) shows how many children under the age of 15 existed in the major countries of the world in 2005 (i.e. born between 1990 and 2005), in proportion to the country with the most children.  Notably, Mexico and the US have the same number of children, while Pakistan and Bangladesh each have about as many as all of Western Europe.  While developing countries are seeing their fertility rates converge to Western levels, the 1990-2005 births already seal certain realities.  Needless to say, if we move time forward just 15 years, the proportions in this chart reflect what the proportions of adults aged 20-35 (the female reproductive years) will be per nation in the year 2025.  Even the near future belongs to those who show up. 

Lefto-'feminists' will be outbred and replaced very quickly, not by the conservatives that they hate, but by other cultures antithetical to 'feminism'.  The state that lefto-'feminists' so admire will quickly turn on them once the state calculates that these women are neither producing new taxpayers nor new technologies, and will find a way to demote them from their present 'empowered' position of entitlement.  If they thought having obligations to a husband was such an awful prospect, wait until they have obligations to the husband-substitute state. 

 

The Fabric of Humanity Will Tear

Humans like ourselves have been around for about 100,000 years, and earlier hominids similar to us for another 1-3 million years before that.  For the first 99.99% of humanoid existence, the primary purpose of our species was the same as that of every other species that ever existed - to reproduce.  Females are the scarcer reproductive resource, since the number of babies that can be produced does not fall even if most men die, but it does fall for each woman that dies (humans did not live much past age 40-45 in the past, as mentioned earlier).  For this reason, the human brain continued the evolutionary hardwiring of our ancestors, placing female well-being at a premium while males remain expendable.  Since funneling any and all resources to women closely correlated with the survival of children, both men and women evolved to see this status quo as normal.  The Female Imperative (FI) was the human imperative.  

As human society progressed, priorities adjusted.  For one thing, advances in technology and prosperity ensured that child mortality fell from about 50% to very low levels, so 12 births were no longer needed to produce 6 children who reach adulthood.  Secondly, as humans moved away from agriculture into a knowledge-based economy, the number of children desired fell, and almost all high and middle-income countries have birth rates lower than 2 as of today, with many women producing zero children.  Thirdly, it has become evident that humans are now the first species to produce something more than just offspring; humans now produce technology.  As a result, the former direct correlation between funneling resources to women and the survival of children, which was true for 99.99% of our existence, now no longer is.  

Yet, our hardwired brains have not adapted to this very recent transformation, and perhaps cannot adapt.  Women are programmed to extract resources endlessly, and most men are programmed to oblige.  For this once-valid but now obsolete biological reason, society still unquestioningly funnels the vast majority of resources to women.  But instead of reaching children, this money now finds its way into consumer products geared towards women, and a shadow state designed to transfer all costs and consequences away from women.  Most people consider our existing society to be normal, but they have failed to observe how diverting money to women is now obsolete.  In the 21st century, there is no reason for any resource distribution, if there must be one at all, to be distributed in any manner other than 50-50.  

Go to any department store or mall.  At least 90% of the products present there are ones no ordinary man would consider buying.  Yet, they occupy valuable shelf space, which is evidence that those products do sell in volume.  Who buys them?  Look around in any prosperous country, and we see products geared towards women, paid for by money that society diverted to women.  From department store products, to the proliferation of take-out restaurants, to mortgage interest, to a court system rigged to subsidize female hypergamy, all represent the end product of resources funneled to women, for a function women have greatly scaled back.  This is the greatest resource misallocation ever, and such malinvestment always results in a correction as the bubble pops.  

This is not to suggest that we should go back to birth rates of 12, for that is neither desirable nor necessary.  The bigger picture here is that a major aspect of the human psyche is quite obsolete, with men and women both culpable.  When this situation corrects, it will be the most disruptive event humanity has ever faced.  Some call this a variant of the 'Technological Singularity', which will happen much later than 2020 (more like 2060-65), but even prominent thinkers steer clear of any mention of the obvious correction in gender-tilted resource flows that will occur.  

 

The Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation

We earlier examined how the Four Sirens of Feminism unexpectedly combined and provided women with choices they never could have dreamed of before.  Some women made positive contributions to society, but quite a few let misandry and unrestrained greed consume them, and have caused the disastrous situation we presently see.  Technology always causes disruption in the status quo, always creating new winners and losers with each wave.  In centuries past, Gloria Steinem would be a governess and Mystery would be a court jester. 

The title of this article is not the 'Misandry Crisis' or even 'The War on Misandry'.  It is 'The Misandry Bubble', because the forces that will ensure the demise of the present mistreatment of men are already on the horizon.  So allow me to introduce the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation as a coalescence of many of the forces we have discussed, which will shred the present, unsustainable hierarchal order by 2020 :

1) Game : Learning the truth about how the female mind works is a precious and transcendant body of knowledge for any man.  Whether he uses it to become a fully immersed pick-up artist, to create a soulmate bond in a lifelong monogamous marriage, or even to engage in only infrequent yet efficient trysts with women, a man is free from the crushing burdens that uninitiated beta men are capitulating under. 

When a man learns that there is no reason for him to buy a $50,000 car, $20,000 ring, $50,000 bridezilla festival, overpriced house contrary to any logical financial analysis, or a divorce lawyer to save him from ruin even though he was the victim of spousal abuse, there is no greater feeling of liberation and jubilation, equating to a windfall of $2 Million for all objective and subjective purposes.  When a man realizes that reducing his income by half will now have little detriment to his sexual prospects, he can downsize to an easier job with a shorter commute and lower stress.  When a man learns that appeasing a woman is the exact opposite of what he should be doing during the process of romancing and seducing her, that entire humiliating gauntlet of rituals can be jettisoned. 

The ecstasy of two or even three concurrent relationships with women of substantially above average beauty are quite attainable to a man who has scaled the summit, which further deprives the hapless betas (again, male attractiveness to women is zero-sum in a way that female attractiveness to men is not).  Thus, while 80% of men have no intellectual capacity to grasp and master Game, if the number of solid practitioners even begins to approach 20%, multiple parasitic beasts, from female moochers to the tax-swilling state to the corrupt real-estate and divorce lawyer industries, can be effectively starved. 

2) Adult Entertainment Technologies of 2020 : What of the 80% of men who cannot conceptualize or master the core skills of Game?  Won't they be condemned to live a life of frustration, humiliation, and near-slavery as second class citizens?  Thankfully, these poor souls will experience a satisfactory release through technology, just like women did through technologies such as contraceptive pills, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. 

For a number of reasons, Internet pornography is substantially more addictive to the male brain than the VHS cassette or 'Skinimax' content of the 1990s.  When yet another generation of technology diffuses into the market, the implications will be profound enough to tear the current sexual market asunder. 

This site has written in the past about how haptic, motion sensing, and graphical technologies would elevate video games to the premier form of entertainment by 2012.  3-D/holographic images with haptic interfaces and sufficient AI will make rudimentary 'virtual sex' a technology available to many men well before 2020, but by 2020 we will see this cross certain thresholds that lead to a dramatic market impact far greater than contraceptive pills and Internet pornography combined.  A substantial portion of the male population will drift into addiction to virtual sex without even realizing it. 

For those (mostly women) who claim that the VR sex of 2020 would not be a sufficient substitute for the real thing, that drawback is more than superceded by the inescapable fact that the virtual woman would be made to be a 10/10+ in appearance, while the real women that the typical beta male user has access to would be in the 4-7 range.  Real 10 > VR 10 > Real 7, making irrelevant the claim that a virtual 10 is not as good as a real 10 (under 1% of all women), when the virtual 10 is really competing with the majority of women who are 7s and lower.  Women are largely unaware how vastly different the male reaction is to a 10 relative to a 7, let alone to women of even lower scores.  As single men arrive home from work on Friday evening, they will simply default into their VR immersion, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of 'beta testing'.  These sequestered men will be conspicuously absent from the bars and nightclubs that were the former venues of expenditure and frustration, causing many establishments to go out of business.  The brains of these men will warp to the extent that they can no longer muster any libido for the majority of real women.  This will cause a massive devaluation in the sexual market value of most women, resulting in 8s being treated like 5s, and 35-year-old women unable to attract the interest of even 55-year-old men.  The Wile E. Coyote moment for women will move a few years ahead, and the alphas with Game competence will find an even easier field of desperate women to enjoy. 

Another technology making advancements in Japan is that of lifelike female robots.  I do not believe that 'sexbots' will be practical or economical relative to software/gaming-derived solutions, simply because such a robot is not competitive with VR on cost, privacy, versatility, and upgradeability. 

Some 'feminists' are not blind to the cataclysmic sexual devaluation that women will experience when such technologies reach the market, and are already moving to seek bans.  Such bans will not be possible, of course, as VR sex technologies are inseparable from broader video game and home theater technologies.  Their attempts to lobby for such bans will be instructive, however. 

Another positive ramification of advanced adult entertainment technologies is that women will have to sharpen the sole remaining attribute which technology cannot substitute - the capacity to make a man feel loved.  Modern women will be forced to reacquaint themselves with this ancient concept in order to generate a competitive advantage.  This necessity could lead to a movement of pragmatic women conducting a wholesale repudiation of misandry masquerading as 'feminism' that has created this state of affairs, and thus will be the jolt that benefits both men and women. 

3) Globalization : The Third Horseman is a vast subject that contains many subtopics.  The common theme is that market forces across the world eventually find a way around legislative fences constructed in any one country :

a) Islam : Aside from the higher birthrates of Muslims living in the same Western cities that 'feminists' reside in, an Achilles heel of leftists in general and misandrists in particular is their unwillingess to confront other cultures that actually do place restrictions on women.  In Britain, Islamic courts are now in operation, deciding cases through Sharia principles.  British divorce laws are even more misandric than US divorce laws, and so many British men, in desperation, are turning to Sharia courts in order to avoid the ruin that British law would inflict on them.  The Islamic courts are more than happy to accomodate these men, and 'feminists' dare not protest too loudly.  By driving British men to Sharia courts, misandry is beautifully self-defeating.  The irony is that the group that was our enemy in the crisis of the prior decade are now de-facto allies in the crisis of this decade.  I do not say this simply because I am a Muslim myself.   

b) Expatriation : While America continues to attract the greatest merit and volume of (legal) immigrants, almost every American man who relocates to Asia or Latin America gives a glowing testimonial about the quality of his new life.  A man who leaves to a more male-friendly country and marries a local woman is effectively cutting off a total of three parasites in the US - the state that received his taxes, the potential wife who would take his livelihood, and the industries he is required to spend money on (wedding, diamond, real estate, divorce attorney).  Furthermore, this action also shrinks the number of available men remaining in America.  The misandrists who project their pathology outward by calling such men 'misogynists' are curiously troubled that these same men are leaving the US.  Shouldn't 'feminists' be happy if 'misogynists' are leaving?  We thus see yet another example of 'feminists' seeking to steal from men while not providing them any benefit in return. 

The more unfair a place becomes, the more we see talented people go elsewhere.  When word of US divorce laws becomes common in India and China, this might even deter some future taxpayers from immigrating to America, which is yet another reason the government is losing money to misandry. 

c) Medical Tourism : The sum total of donor eggs + IVF + surrogacy costs $150,000 or more in the US, but can be done in India for just $20,000 at top-quality clinics that are building a strong track record.  While most customers of Indian fertility clinics are couples, there have been quite a few single men opting to create their own biological babies this way.  While this avenue is not for everyone, the ability to have a child for $20,000 (and even two children in parallel with two different surrogates in a two-for-one bundle deal for $35,000) now exists.  The poor surrogate mother in India earns more than she could earn in 10 years in her prior vocation of construction or housecleaning.  It is a win-win for everyone involved, except for the Western woman who was priced out of the market for marriage to this man. 

Medical tourism also prices the US healthcare system out of contention for certain procedures, and the US healthcare system employs a large number of women, particularly in administrative and bureaucratic roles that pay them over twice what they could make in the private sector.  Such women will experience what male manufacturing workers did a generation earlier, despite the increasinglly expensive government bubble that has kept these women's inflated salaries safe for so long. 

So as we can see, the forces of globalization are far bigger than those propping up the current lop-sided status quo. 

4) Male Economic Disengagement and Resultant Tax-Base Erosion : Earlier passages have highlighted how even the most stridently egomaniacal 'feminist' is heavily dependent on male endeavors.  I will repeat again that there will never, ever be a successful human society where men have no incentive to aspire to the full maximum of their productive and entrepreneurial capabilities. 

The contract between the sexes has been broken in urban America (although is still in some effect in rural America).  The 'progressive' income tax scale in the US was levied under the assumption that men who could earn 10 times more than they needed for themselves would always do so, for their families.  A man with no such familial aspirations may choose an easier job at lower pay, costing the state more than he costs himself.  Less tax revenue not just means fewer subsidies for single mothers and government jobs for women, but less money for law enforcement.  Less tax revenue also means fewer police officers, and fewer court resources through which to imprison men.  The 'feminist' hypergamous utopia is not self-financing, but is precariously dependent on every beta man working at his full capacity, without which the government bubble, inseparable from the misandry bubble, collapses.  Misandry is thus mathematically impossible to finance for any extended period of time.  A state with a small government is far more sustainable than a state seeking an ever-expanding government, which then cannot be financed, and descends into a mass of contradictions that is the exact opposite of what the statists intended.  See the gangster capitalism that dominates contemporary Russia. 

These Four Horsemen will all converge at the end of this decade to transfer the costs of misandry from men onto women, and on 1/1/2020, we will assess how the misandry bubble popped and the fallout that women are suffering under for having made the mistake of letting 'feminists' control their destiny.  Note that I did not list the emergence of any Men's Rights Movement as one of the Four Horsemen, as this is unlikely to happen for aforementioned reasons.  

For those who dispute the Four Horsemen (I'd like to see their track record of predictions to compare against my own), women had their Four Sirens, and now the pendulum has to swing at the same amplitude in the other direction.  Keep the Four Horsemen in mind throughout this decade, and remember what you read here on the first day of 2010.

 

Who Should Care?

As we leave a decade where the prime threat to US safety and prosperity was Islamic terrorism and enter a decade where the prime threat is misandry, anyone concerned with any of the following topics should take heed :

  • Anyone with a son, brother, nephew, or mentee entering marriage, particularly without the partial protection of a pre-nuptial agreement. As described earlier, he can be ruined, separated from his children, and jailed in a manner few would suspect could happen in any advanced democracy. The suicide rate of divorced men is shockingly high.
  • Anyone who agrees that a civilization where most adults are part of two-parent families will always outcompete and displace a civilization where a large portion of adults are not leading two-parent families. 
  • Anyone with minor grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or great-grandchildren. The divorce laws incentivize using children as pawns during divorce, and no serious thinker can dispute the trouble that haunts the children of divorce for years thereafter. 'Feminists' concoct bogus research about the role of the father being superfluous, but observation of real-world examples proves otherwise.
  • Anyone who owns an expensive home in a community of families. The growing aversion of men for marriage will create fewer new families, and thus fewer buyers for those homes. I remind everyone that if they have 20% equity in their home and an 80% mortgage, even a 20% decline in home prices is a 100% decline in your equity, which might be all of your net worth. Detroit, the first major US city to see a loss of beta male employment prospects, saw the average home price drop from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. A decline smaller than this would devastate the net worth of remaining home owners, and can happen in any community of single-family homes.  If you own a home, your net worth is inseparably tied to the formation and preservation of two-parent families.
  • Anyone concerned about rising crime. 72% of African American children are born to single mothers, and the number among white children is approaching 30%. Furthermore, the 'mancession' will eventually ensure that the only means of survival for many men is to form gangs and take valuables by force.  Unloved men, who in the past would have been paired with wives, are easy for both gangs and terrorist organizations to recruit.
  • Anyone concerned about the widening federal and state budget shortfalls and medicare/healthcare costs, for which the state continues to insist on raising taxes rather than cut spending. Fewer men choosing to work the long hours needed to earn high incomes will break the model of the top 10% paying 75% of taxes, and more men being jailed for alimony arrears, not being good enough in bed, or defending himself from spousal violence will drain tax coffers. It costs $60,000 a year to maintain a prisoner.
  • Anyone who thinks the US Constitution is a valuable document.  'Innocent until proven guilty' does not apply in many areas of feminist-heavy law.  The previously discussed shadow state is using 'feminism' to conduct all sorts of horrible tyranny against innocent men, which greatly compromises America's ability to claim that it is still the land of the free. 
  • Anyone concerned about national security. As more men feel that this society is betraying him, fewer will risk their lives in the military only to find that divorce lawyers have been persuading his wife to leave the marriage while he is deployed.  Coming home from one battlefield only to be inserted in another is a shameful betrayal of our finest young men. Furthermore, I have already mentioned how British men are turning to Islamic courts in the hopes avoiding ruin at the hands of British misandrist laws. Quite a few men may conclude that Islam offers them more than their native society that has turned against their gender, and will act towards self-preservation.
  • Any woman who is appalled by the treatment of any woman who deviates from 'feminist' doctrine, and who is troubled by the words and actions of self-proclaimed 'feminists' today.  If you believe that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you should worry about what 'feminists' are courting by kicking a friendly dog too many times. 
  • Lastly, anyone with a young daughter or sister, who is about to enter a world where it is much harder for all but the most beautiful women to marry, where the costs of crazed 'feminism' are soon going to be transferred away from men and onto women, even if she had no interest in this doctrine of hate. As stated in the Executive Summary at the start, 'feminists' are leading average women into the abyss.

I could list even more reasons to care, but the point is clear.  The biggest challenge of the decade is summarized before us. 

Update (7/1/2012) : On this day, July 1, 2012, exactly 25% of the decade described in this article has passed.  I did not include a poll on the original launch date of 1/1/2010, as the concepts described here were too radical for the majority of readers.  But now that these ideas have become more mainstream, I can include a simple poll on the subject of whether we are indeed in a Misandry Bubble (poll closed after 60 days).  

Misandry Poll

 

Conclusion

I am just an observer, and will not become an activist of any sort, although, as described earlier, being an 'inactivist' in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi is also powerful.  As a Futurist, I have to predict things before they become obvious to everyone else.  Regular readers know of my track records of predictions being accurate, and heed my words when I say that the further inflation and subsequent precipitous deflation of the misandry bubble will define the next American decade.  So here, on the first day of the '201x' decade, I am unveiling the article that will spawn a thousand other articles. 

As mentioned at the top, what you have just finished reading is the equivalent of someone in 1997 predicting the entire War on Terror in vivid detail.  The level of detail I have provided about the collapse of the Misandry Bubble will unfold with comparable accuracy as when this site predicted the real estate bubble two years beforehand, and the exact level the stock market would bottom at, 6 months before the fact.  I know a bubble when I see one, and misandry is the premier one of this age.  Bet against my predictions at your own risk.

This website has predicted that the US will still be the only superpower in 2030, and while we are not willing to rescind that prediction, I will introduce a caveat that US vitality by 2030 is contingent on a satisfactory and orderly unwinding of the Misandry Bubble.  It remains to be seen which society can create economic prosperity while still making sure both genders are treated well, and the US is currently not on the right path in this regard.  For this reason, I am less confident about a smooth deflation of the Misandry Bubble.  Deflate it will, but it could be a turbulent hurricane.  Only rural America can guide the rest of the nation into a more peaceful transition.  Britain, however, may be beyond rescue. 

I want to extend my thanks to Instapundit, Dr. Helen, Kim du Toit, The Spearhead, RooshV, and many others for their support of this article. 

Symbol

Required Reading :

Democrats and Republicans Unite to Form Misandry Party

The Sixteen Commandments of Game

No Country for Burly Men

The Medicalization of Maleness

The Feminist War on Everything Civilized

Feminists : Filthy and Feral

Feminist Gulag : No Prosecution Necessary

Decivilizing : Human Nature Unleashed

Lust Story

F Roger Devlin articles

Wedded Abyss

Love

Note on Comments : Just because I linked to a particular blog does NOT mean that I endorse all of the other views of that author.  Are 'feminists' all willing to be responsible for all of the extremism that any other feminist utters (note that I have provided links to 'feminists' openly calling for slavery, castration, and murder of men without proving him guilty of anything)?  Also, you will see Pavlovian use of the word 'misogyny' dozens upon dozens of times, so remember what I wrote about the importance of not taking that at face value, as it is merely a manifestation of projected misandry, as well as a defense mechanism to avoid taking responsibility for genuine wrongdoings of 'feminists'. 

 

January 01, 2010 in Core Articles, Economics, Political Debate, Politics, The Misandry Bubble | Permalink | Comments (807)

Tags: MGTOW, misogyny, MRA, opposite of misogyny, PUA

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The Publishing Disruption

What a unique thing a book is.  Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume.  Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency.  Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper possessions. 

Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monastaries knew how to read.  There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century.  Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate. 

But with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, it became possible to make multiple copies of the same book, and before long, the number of books in Europe increased from thousands to millions. 

Fast forward to the early 21st century, and books are still printed by the millions.  Longtime readers of The Futurist know that I initially had written a book (2001-02), and sought to have it published the old-fashioned way.  However, the publishing industry, and literary agents, were astonishingly low-tech.  They did not use email, and required queries to be submitted via regular mail, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope included.  So I had to pay postage in both directions, and wait several days for a round trip to hear their response.  And this was just the literary agents.  The actual publishing house, if they decide to accept your book, would still take 12 months to produce and distribute the book even after the manuscript was complete.  Even then, royalties would be 10-15% of the retail price.  This prospect did not seem compelling to me, and I chose to parse my book into this blog you see before you. 

The refusal by the publishing industry to use email and other productivity-enhancing technologies as recently as 2003 kept their wages low.  Editors always moaned that they worked 60 hours a week just to make $50,000 a year, the same as they made in 1970.  My answer to them is that they have no basis to expect wage increases without increasing their productivity through technology. 

In the meantime, self-publishing technologies emerged to bypass the traditional publishers' role as arbitrers of what can become a book and what cannot.  From Lulu to iUniverse to BookSmart, any individual can produce a book, with copies that can be printed on demand.  Instances where an individual is seeking to go it alone without being saddled with a huge upfront inventory production and storage burden, or is otherwise marketing to only a tiny audience, have flourished.  But print-on-demand is not the true disruption - that was yet to come. 

Kindle The Amazon Kindle launched in late 2007 at the high price of $400.  Within 2 years, a substantially more advanced Kindle 2 was available for a much lower price of $260, alongside competing readers from several other companies.  Many people feel that the appeal of holding a physical book in our hands cannot be replaced by a display screen, and take a cavalier attitude towards dismissing e-readers.  The tune changes upon learning that the price of a book on an e-reader is just a third of what the paper form at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, with sales tax, would cost.  Market research firm iSuppli estimates that 5 million readers have been sold in 2009, and another 12 million will sell in 2010.  Amazon estimates that over one-third of its book sales are now through the kindle, greatly displacing sales of paper books. 

Imagine what happens when the Kindle and other e-readers cost only $100.  Brick and mortar bookstores will consolidate to fewer premises, extract profits mainly from picture-heavy books and magazines, and step up their positioning as literary coffeehouses.  Many employees and affiliates of the publishing industry will see their functions eliminated as part of the productivity gains.  College students forced to pay $100 for a textbook produced in small quantities will now pay only $20 for an e-reader version.  But even this is not the ultimate endgame of disruption. 

Intel Reader Intel now has a reader for the visually impaired that scans text from paper books, and reads them in an acceptable audio voice.  It is reported that with practice, an audio rate of 250 words per minute can be coherent.  While the reader costs $1500, and requires a user to turn pages manually, it is a matter of time before not only the reader's price drops, and more and more books are available as text files similar to those contained in e-readers like the Kindle.  There are already books available as free downloads of text files under the ironically named Project Gutenberg. 

Therein lies the crescendo of disruption.  The Intel Reader is a $1500 device for the visually impaired, but will soon evolve into a technology that interfaces with Kindle-type e-readers and chatters off e-books at 250 words/minute, from the full e-book library that is vastly larger than any traditional collection of audiobooks.  A 90,000-word novel could be recited in just 6 hours, enabling a user to imbibe the whole book during a single coast-to-coast flight, even if the lights are dimmed.  People could further choose to preserve their vision at home, devouring book after book with the lights out.  As the technology advances further, the speech technology will allow the user to select a voice of his choosing to be read to in, perhaps even his own voice. 

Thus, without many people even noticing the murmurs, we can predict that the next 3 years will see the biggest transformation in book production and consumption since the days of Johannes Gutenberg.  That is a true demonstration of both the Accelerating Rate of Change and The Impact of Computing.   

December 13, 2009 in Computing, Technology | Permalink | Comments (25)

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The Winds of War, The Sands of Time, v2.0

300pxww2_iwo_jima_flag_raising_2This is a version 2.0 of a legendary article written here back on March 19, 2006, noticed and linked by Hugh Hewitt, which led to The Futurist getting on the blogosphere map for the first time.  Less than four years have elapsed since the original publication, but the landscape of global warfare has changed substantially over this time, warranting an update to the article. 

In the mere 44 months since the original article was written, what seemed impossible has become a reality.  The US now has an upper hand against terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, despite the seemingly impossible task of fighting suicidal terrorists.  As regular readers of The Futurist are aware, I issued a prediction in May of 2006, during the darkest days of the Iraq War, that not only would the US win, but that the year of victory would be precisely in 2008.  As events unfolded, that prediction turned out to be precisely correct.  As readers continue to ask how I was able to make such a prediction against seemingly impossible odds, I claim that it is not very difficult, once you understand the necessary conditions of war and peace within the human mind. 

Given the massive media coverage of the minutia of the Iraq War, and the fashionable fad of being opposed to it, one could be led to think that this is one of the most major wars ever fought.  Therein lies the proof that we are actually living in the most peaceful time ever in human history. 

Just a few decades ago, wars and genocides killing upwards of a million people were commonplace, with more than one often underway at once.  Remember these?

Second Congo War (1998-2002) : 3.6 million deaths

Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) : 1.5 million deaths

Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89) : 1 million deaths

Khmer Rouge (1975-79) : 1.7 million deaths from genocide

Bangladesh Liberation War (1971) : 1.5 million deaths from genocide

Vietnam War (1957-75) : 2.4 million deaths

Korean War (1950-53) : 3 million deaths

This list is by no means complete, as wars killing fewer than one million people are not even listed.  At least 30 other wars killed over 20,000 people each, between 1945 and 1989.

If we go further back to the period from 1900-1945, we can see that multiple wars were being simultaneously fought across the world.  Going further back still, the 19th century had virtually no period without at least two major wars being fought.

We can thus conclude that by historical standards, the current Iraq War was tiny, and can barely be found on the list of historical death tolls.  That it got so much attention merely indicates how little warfare is going on in the world, and how ignorant of historical realities most people are. 

Why have so many countries quitely adapted to peaceful coexistence?  Why is a war between Britain and France, or Russia and Germany, or the US and Japan, nearly impossible today?  Why are we not seeing a year like 1979, where the entire continent of Asia threatened to fly apart due to three major events happening at once (Iranian Revolution, Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Chinese invasion of VietNam)? 

300pxusafb2spirit750pix We can start with the observation that never have two democratic countries, with per-capita GDPs greater than $10,000/year on a PPP basis, gone to war with each other.  The decline in warfare in Europe and Asia corelates closely with multiple countries meeting these two conditions over the last few decades, and this can continue as more countries graduate to this standard of freedom and wealth.  The chain of logic is as follows :

1) Nations with elected governments and free-market systems tend to be the overwhelming majority of countries that achieve per-capita incomes greater than $10,000/year.  Only a few petro-tyrannies are the exception to this rule. 

2) A nation with high per-capita income tends to conduct extensive trade with other nations of high prosperity, resulting in the ever-deepening integration of these economies with each other.  A war would disrupt the economies of both participants as well as those of neutral trading partners.   Since the citizens of these nations would suffer financially from such a war, it is not considered by elected officials. 

3) As more of the world's people gain a vested interest in the stability and health of the interlocking global economic system, fewer and fewer countries will consider international warfare as anything other than a lose-lose proposition.

4) More nations can experience their citizenry moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, allowing knowledge-based industries thrive, and thus making international trade continuously easier and more extensive. 

5) Since economic growth is continuously accelerating, many countries have crossed the $10,000/yr barrier in just the last 20 years, and so the reduction in warfare after 1991 years has been drastic even if there was little apparent reduction over the 1900-1991 period. 

This explains the dramatic decline in war deaths across Europe, East Asia, and Latin America over the last few decades.  Thomas Friedman has a similar theory, called the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, wherein no two countries linked by a major supply chain/trade network (such as that of a major corporation like Dell Computer), have ever gone to war with each other, as the cost of losing the presence of major industries through war is prohibitive to both parties.  If this is the case, then the combinations of countries that could go to war with each other continues to drop quickly. 

To predict the future risk of major wars, we can begin by assessing the state of some of the largest and/or riskiest countries in the world.  Success at achieving democracy and a per-capita GDP greater that $10,000/yr are highlighted in green.  We can also throw in the UN Human Development Index, which is a composite of these two factors, and track the rate of progress of the HDI over the last 30 years.  In general, countries with scores greater than 0.850, consistent with near-universal access to consumer-class amenities, have met the aforementioned requirements of prosperity and democracy.  There are many more countries with a score greater than 0.850 today than there were in 1975.

Let's see how some select countries stack up.

War  

China : The per-capita income is rapidly closing in on the $10,000/yr threshold, but democracy is a distant dream.  I have stated that China will see a sharp economic slowdown in the next 10 years unless they permit more personal freedoms, and thus nurture entrepreneurship.  Technological forces will continue to pressure the Chinese Communist Party, and if this transition is moderately painless, the ripple effects will be seen in most of the other communist or autocratic states that China supports, and will move the world strongly towards greater peace and freedom.  The single biggest question for the world is whether China's transition happens without major shocks or bloodshed.  I am optimistic, as I believe the CCP is more interested in economic gain than clinging to an ideology and one-party rule, which is a sharp contrast from the Mao era where 40 million people died over ideology-driven economic schemes.  Cautiously optimistic. 

India : A secular democracy has existed for a long time, but economic growth lagged far behind.  Now, India is catching up, and will soon be a bulwark for democracy and stability for the whole world.  Some of the most troubled countries in the world, from Burma to Afghanistan, border India and could transition to stability and freedom under India's sphere of influence.  India is only now realizing how much the world will depend on it.  Optimistic.

Russia : A lack of progress in the HDI is a total failure, enabling many countries to overtake Russia over the last 15 years.  Putin's return to dictatorial rule is a further regression in Russia's progress.  Hopefully, energy and technology industries can help Russia increase its population growth rate, and up its HDI.  Cautiously optimistic.

Indonesia : With more Muslims than the entire Middle East put together, Indonesia took a large step towards democracy in 1999 (improving its HDI score), and is doing moderately well economically.  Economic growth needs to accelerate in order to cross $10,000/yr per capita by 2020.  Cautiously optimistic.

Pakistan : My detailed Pakistan analysis is here.  The divergence between the paths of India and Pakistan has been recognized by the US, and Pakistan, with over 50 nuclear warheads, is also where Osama bin Laden and thousands of other terrorists are currently hiding.  Any 'day of infamy' that the US encounters will inevitably be traced to individuals operating in Pakistan, which has regressed from democracy to dictatorship, and is teetering on the edge of religious fundamentalism.  The economy is growing quickly, however, and this is the only hope of averting a disaster.  Pakistan will continue to struggle between emulating the economic progress of India against descending into the dysfunction of Afghanistan.  Pessimistic.

Iraq : Although Iraq is not a large country, its importance to the world is disproportionately significant.  Bordering so many other non-democratic nations, our hard-fought victory in Iraq now places great pressure on all remaining Arab states.  The destiny of the US is also interwined with Iraq, as the outcome of the current War in Iraq will determine the ability of America to take any other action, against any other nation, in the future.  Optimistic.

Iran : Many would be surprised to learn that Iran is actually not all that poor, and the Iranian people have enough to lose that they are not keen on a large war against a US military that could dispose of Iran's military just as quickly as they did Saddam's.  However, the autocratic regime that keeps the Iranian people suppressed has brutally quashed democratic movements, most recently in the summer of 2009.  The secret to turning Iran into a democracy is its neighbor, Iraq.  If Iraq can succeed, the pressure on Iran exerted by Internet access and globalization next door will be immense.  This will continue to nibble at the edges of Iranian society, and the regime will collapse before 2015 even without a US invasion.  If Iran's leadership insists on a confrontation over their nuclear program, the regime will collapse even sooner.  Cautiously optimistic. 

So Iraq really is a keystone state, and the struggle to prevail over the forces that would derail democracy has major repurcussions for many nations.  The US, and the world, could nothave afforded for the US mission in Iraq to fail.  But after the success in Iraq, all remaining roads to disastrous tragedy lead to Pakistan.  The country in which the leadership of Al-Qaeda resides is the same country where the most prominent nuclear scientist was caught selling nuclear secrets on the black market.  This is simply the most frightening combination of circumstances that exists in the world today, far more troubling than anything directly attributable to Iran or North Korea. 

But smaller-scale terrorism is nothing new.  It just was not taken as seriously back when nations were fighting each other in much larger conflicts. The 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 241 Americans did not dominate the news for more than two weeks, as it was during the far more serious Cold War.  Today, the absence of wars between nations brings terrorism into the spotlight that it could not have previously secured. 

Wars against terrorism have been a paradigm shift, because where a war like World War II involved symmetrical warfare between declared armies, the War on Terror involves asymmetrical warfare in both directions.  Neither party has yet gained a full understanding of the power it has over the other. 

Flag_1A few terrorists with a small budget can kill thousands of innocents without confronting a military force. Guerilla warfare can tie down the mighty US military for years until the public grows weary of the stalemate, even while the US cannot permit itself to use more than a tiny fraction of its power in retaliation.  Developed nations spend vastly more money on political and media activites centered around the mere discussion of terrorism than the terrorists themselves need to finance a major attack on these nations. 

At the same time, pervasively spreading Internet access, satellite television, and consumer brands continue to disseminate globalization and lure the attention of young people in terrorist states.  We saw exactly this in Iran in the summer of 2009, where state-backed murders of civilian protesters were videotaped by cameraphone, and immediately posted online for the world to see.  This unrelentingly and irreversibly erodes the fabric of pre-modern fanaticism at almost no cost to the US and other free nations.  The efforts by fascist regimes to obstruct the mists of the information ethersphere from entering their societies is so futile as to be comical, and the Iranian regime may not survive the next uprising, when even more Iranians will have camera phones handy.  Bidirectional asymmetry is the new nature of war, and the side that learns how to harness the asymmetrical advantage it has over the other is the side that will win.

It is the wage of prosperous, happy societies to be envied, hated, and forced to withstand threats that they cannot reciprocate back onto the enemy.  The US has overcome foes as formidable as the Axis Powers and the Soviet Union, yet we managed to adapt and gain the upper hand against a pre-modern, unprofessional band of deviants that does not even have the resources of a small nation and has not invented a single technology.  The War on Terror was thus ultimately not with the terrorists, but with ourselves - our complacency, short attention spans, and propensity for fashionable ignorance over the lessons of history. 

But 44 months turned out to be a very long time, during which we went from a highly uncertain position in the War on Terror to one of distinct advantage.  Whether we continue to maintain the upper hand that we currently have, or become too complacent and let the terrorists kill a million of us in a day remains to be seen. 

November 21, 2009 in Accelerating Change, Core Articles, Economics, Political Debate, Politics | Permalink | Comments (73) | TrackBack (0)

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Energy vs. Financials, FINAL RESULTS

Many of you may be familiar with this sectoral strategy that I have presented, which was due to the unusually wide extreme to which these two sectors had diverged from each other as of April 22, 2008. To review :

On April 22, 2008, I decided to go short on Energy (XLE) and long on Financials (XLF).

Then, on May 20, 2009, I decided to cover the Energy short, and use the proceeds to double down on Financials.  Up till that point, the trade had earned a loss of -5.36%, vs. a loss of -32.20% for the S&P500.

Now, it is time to sell the Financials position, and assess the final performance over the entire 18-month period, against the S&P 500.

Enerfin

The purple line indicates the May 20, 2009 transition from being short XLE to covering that short and using the full proceeds to double down on XLF.  Note that the short of XLE was profitable, so that the amount that was redeployed to XLF was more than the existing value of the XLF position. 

Therefore, the final results are (with all dividends reinvested) :

Enerfin2 
This strategy yielded a gain of 21.92% vs. a loss of -17.19% for the S&P500.  This is a huge gap of almost 40 points, and means that $10,000 deployed to this strategy would have yielded $12,192, vs. just $8,281 if placed in the S&P500 over this period.  Also note how the gap widened from what it was on May 20, 2009. 

This continues our track record here at The Futurist of collectively beating the market by a wide margin, with portfolios that beat the market greatly exceeding the deficit of those that do not.  Of course, these trades are for entertainment purposes only, and should not be taken as professional advice. 

Related :

A History of Stock Market Bottoms   

November 12, 2009 in Economics, Energy, Stock Market | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

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