The idea that the globalising wave of the last quarter of a century was mostly built on cheap energy and easy money is one that we’re now getting the opportunity to test. So far, the hypothesis is holding up. In particular, according to a story in this week’s Daily Telegraph, high energy costs seem to [...]
The geographer Saskia Sassen is one of the sharpest analysts of the detail of globalisation - and I was able to see her speak on Thursday evening in London at an event organised by the RIBA ‘Building Futures’ programme. (I’ve posted before on her analysis of how different parts of government gain or lose from [...]
One of the observations of last year’s State of the Future report (which I blogged about here) was that organised crime was one of the the three biggest threats to global security and prosperity. Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia (’a journey through the global criminal underworld’ 
comes to a similar conclusion - arguing that [...]
I’ve been trying to stay away from the banking crisis, which is a big fast-moving story which has been well-covered elsewhere. But some of the events of the past few days have reminded me of the story about the definition of chutzpah: the boy who kills his parents and then throws himself on the [...]
A short paper by a couple of economists (one American, one Irish) takes a long view of the preconditions for periods of globalisation - and the circumstances in which it goes into reverse. It suggests, perhaps depressingly, that war (and military power) is often a precondition, and sometimes a consequence.
Just as we’ve got used to the idea that the moment of ‘peak oil‘ might be upon us (at the moment 2005 is the year of highest oil production) new figures suggest that the figures for world coal reserves might have been inflated. The widely held view that we are sitting on hundreds of years’ [...]
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the economics world about the impact of the cost of the Iraq war and on the US, following the publication of The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. Economic theory says it should have stimulated the US economy, but it doesn’t seem to have. [...]
This will mostly be familiar material to anyone who’s been following the arguments about sustainable economics, or is familiar with the critiques of the limitations of neo-classical economics, but nonetheless there’s a useful seven-point summary (really six) at the WorldWatch Institute site. Two points to highlight are the emerging potential of the commons as a [...]
We’ve recently finished some work for Yorkshire Futures on how Yorkshire and Humber might look in 2030. The reports - summary and full - have just been published, and there has been coverage in the Yorkshire Post. For various reasons, YF wanted a core scenario which represented “what if the prevailing trends continue to prevail [...]
I blogged at the start of the month on Martin Jacques’ observation on the extent to which China was now more significant than the US in the politics of Asia in all aspects other than military. Since then, I’ve noticed a post on the IFTF blog which argued that as China and India become the [...]
