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 [...]
A short post to note the latest UN refugee data (pdf), which shows a worldwide increase in 2007 of 3m – almost 10% -in the number of refugees forced from their home by conflict. It is a second successive increase after a period of decline. The UN describes the data as ‘unprecedented’, and says it [...]
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 [...]
Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, [...]
The ‘grand problematique’ is a phrase sometimes used in futures works to describe that coming collision of population increase, food supply issues, energy shortage, and climate change impact - which, it’s said, could be making our lives hell by 2030. (Colin Mason called it the ‘2030 Spike‘). There has been a wave of related [...]
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 [...]
I posted a couple of weeks ago on a paper by a couple of economists which argued in brief, that globalisation - taking a historical view - tended to fail for political reasons: effectivedly, those who lose from it put the brakes on. Cross-posting this to Shaping Tomorrow’s Foresight Network prompted a long and considered [...]
Fifteen years ago, or more I was on the board of the physical theatre company the David Glass Ensemble. At the time, physical theatre was still emerging from the shadow of mime. But going to two rather different productions recently, it’s clear that physical theatre is now right in the mainstream.
I’ve written here from time to time on the evolution of Britain as a surveillance society, and the trends embedded in it. Now the journalist Henley Porter, in a submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, has produced a list of the ways in which surveillance has been increased in the UK since the [...]
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. [...]
