It's a Flat World

UPDATE (19 April, 05):  I completely forgot to link this entry to my previous post, Geographical Distribution of Biological Technologies, in which I comment on William Hoffman's World Stem Cell Policy Map.  Biological technologies are spread all over the planet already, and our current economic and technological lead (if we are still in the lead) cannot be maintained without siginificantly more investment and hard work.

------

I don't always agree with Thomas Friedman.  Current affairs a la Friedman often seem to me oversimplified.  But in the last week or so he has a couple of very nice pieces about the economic status of the United States.

In "Bush Disarms, Unilaterally" (15 April, 05) he argues that the Bush administration is heading in the wrong direction with its policies on investment in science, education, and economic development.  To wit;

One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength.

...We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.

... Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex. Tax cuts can't solve every problem. This administration - which often seems more interested in indulging creationism than spurring creativity - is doing a very poor job of preparing the country for that next level.

In the Times Magazine a week ago Sunday, he made a broader argument about the state of global economic and technological competition in, "It's a Flat World, After All".  He writes;

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

...Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!

...When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

...We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.'' I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'' 

Indeed.  China and India aren't waiting around for people in the US to lay the groundwork for the next generation of technologies, whether new materials, new software, or biological technologies.  They have economic power, huge and highly educated populations, and a motivation to innovate themselves into the first world.  From my experience in both industry and academia, it looks to me like we are already at least a decade behind in our investments in education and R&D.

Environmental Heresies

Stewart Brand has an article, "Environmental Heresies", in the May, 2005 Technology Review, suggesting ways the environmental movement needs to adapt to changing demographics and technology.  I liked this piece so much I had to drop Mr. Brand a note to tell him so, along with a few questions.  I like what he responded with so much I asked if I could post it here.

At 2:47 PM -0700 4/14/2005, Rob Carlson wrote:

Dear Stewart,

Well done on the Tech Review piece.  I like and agree with most of what you said, though I am still on the fence about nuclear power.  Disposing the waste is the sticking point for me.  So is the tendency to offload the real costs onto the back end, which corporate interests tend to escape.  Everything near the reaction becomes deadly radioactive, so the fuel isn't the only problem.  The volume and the mass are not small.  I think the long term solution to this is the space elevator, but that is another conversation.

I do have a question about one of your points, however.  I appreciate the observations concerning urbanization, though my drives through California's Central Valley come to mind.  As you know, farmland, some of which is fallow, is being sacrificed for housing.  Wetlands are under threat all over the place.  This is the sort of sprawl we are fighting in the NW, too.  How densely can we convince people to live?  Sarah and I made the conscious choice to buy a small townhouse within walking distance of work, grocery stores, a kayak launching point (which I walk my boats to on a small cart), etc.  But I am not sure how many other people will choose to live like this.

Perhaps my scale is completely out of whack, as my lifestyle is much closer to the Central Valley McMansion than to that lived by all but the most wealthy in central and east Asia.  I suppose the question is how density in American cities is changing as a function of distance from the urban core.  That is, are people actually moving to the core, or are the tails of the distribution just reaching further away as people move to the burbs?  What do the figures look like for big Asian cities?  And are all those increasing numbers of city dwellers as well off as the generally well-educated Indian women, or are there just a lot more urban poor -- those billion urban squatters?  Is the number density of rural populations decreasing, or are we just getting a whole hell of a lot more people being born and living their lives in the cities?

More questions than answers, as usual.  Once I get going, it's hard to stop.

- Rob

Here is what Stewart responded with:

There's a fair amount in this summary of a talk I gave last week in San Francisco to the Long Now crowd.  Two books:  THE CHALLENGE OF SLUMS (from the UN), and SHADOW CITIES, by Robert Neuwirth.

##

I started with a spectacular video of a stadium in Philadelphia being blown up last year.  The announcer on the video ends it, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed history!"  Indeed demolition is the history of cities.

Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing.  Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years.  In the US and the developing world it's much faster.

Every week in the world a million new people move to cities.  In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities.  In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then.  In 1900 it was 14%.  In 2030 it's expected to be 61%.  This is a tipping point.  We're becoming a city planet.

One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more.  Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries.  With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities.  Every city is becoming a "world city."  Many elites don't live in one city now, they live "in cities."

Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold.  When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/woman, and keeps right on dropping.  Whereas children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city.  The remaining 2 billion people expected before world population peaks and begins dropping will all be urban dwellers (rural population is sinking everywhere).  And urban dwellers have fewer children.  Also more and more of the remaining population will be older people, who also don't have children.

I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates.  Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature.  The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb  shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain.  The fast parts get all the attention.  The slow parts have all the power.

I found the same diagram applies to cities.  Indeed, as historians have pointed out, "Civilization is what happens in cities."  The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn.  Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they "teach" society at large.

Speed of urban development is not necessarily bad.  Many people deplored the huge Levittown tracts when they were created in the '40s and '50s, but they turned out to be tremendously adaptive and quickly adopted a local identity, with every house becoming different.  The form of housing that resists local identity is gated communities, with their fierce regulations prohibiting anything interesting being done by home owners that might affect real estate value for the neighbors (no laundry drying outside!).  If you want a new community to express local life and have deep adaptivity, emphasize the houses becoming homes rather than speculative real estate.

Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades.  The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out.  Why?  I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing.  If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.  Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down."

So much for the romanticism of villages.  In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous.  Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe.

One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way.  Governments try everything to head them off, with total failure.  Squatter cities are vibrant places.  They're self-organized and self-constructed.  Newcomers find whole support communities of family, neighbors, and highly active religious groups (Pentacostal Christians and Islamicists).  The informal economy of the squatter cities is often larger than the formal economy.  Slum-laden Mumbai (Bombay) provides one-sixth of India's entire Gross Domestic Product.  The "agglomeration economies" of the burgeoning mega-cities leads to the highest wages, and that's what draws ever more people.

So besides solving the population problem, the growing cities are curing poverty.  What looks like huge cesspools of poverty in the slums are actually populations of people getting out of poverty as fast as they can.  And cities also have an environmental dimension which has not yet been well explored or developed.

There has been some useful analysis of the "ecological footprint" that cities make on the landscape, incorporating the impacts of fuel use, waste, etc. but that analysis has not compared the per-person impact of city dwellers versus that of people in the countryside, who drive longer distances, use large quantities of material, etc.  The effect of 1,000 people leaving a county of 1,000 people is much greater than that of the same 1,000 people showing up in a city of one million.  Density of occupation in cities has many environmental advantages yet to be examined.

At present there's little awareness among environmentalists that growing cities are where the action and opportunities are, and there's little scientific data being collected.  I think a large-scale, long-term environmental strategy for urbanization is needed, two-pronged.  One, take advantage of the emptying countryside (where the trees and other natural systems are growing back fast) and preserve, protect, and restore those landscape in a way that will retain their health when people eventually move back.  Two, bear down on helping the growing cities to become more humane to live in and better related to the natural systems around them.  Don't fight the squatters.  Join them.

###

Next month, Friday, May 13, Will Jarvis, author of TIME CAPSULES: A Cultural History, will speak on "Time Capsule Behavior."  There will be more about the vibrancy of squatter cities on Friday, June 10, with Robert Neuwirth, author of SHADOW CITIES, talking about "The 21st-century Medieval City."  Jared Diamond, author of COLLAPSE, will speak on a Friday this summer still being determined.

--Stewart Brand

I still wonder whether that increase in the urban population is from people "moving to cities", or whether they are being born there.  I guess I have some reading to do.

Here is the link to the Long Now Foundation Seminars.