Killer apps of prosperity

The graphic below shows that per capita income of China and India were similar with those of Britain and the US up to 1850, after which the income of US and Britain exponentially increased.


Nial Ferguson attributes the divergence between the West and the Rest to six institutions developed in the West, that using modern computer terminology, he calls, Killer Apps. The six killer apps are listed below.

The "killer apps" are:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. The Work Ethic

According to Ferguson, the development of these institutions in Western Europe answers the question: “Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”

Like the modern variety, these killer apps can be downloaded - they can be used by other societies. The developing societies are using some of them and the Great Divergence is re-converging.

Farewell Steve Jobs

There have been many obituaries for Steve Jobs today (for example here) and I am not going to add my laboured prose to that list, except to note:

As a nerd I thank Steve Jobs for making nerd-dom cool.

Here are some videos, featuring Jobs and Apple.

Unveiling the Macintosh, 1984

Commencement address, Stanford, 2005.

(Although this is longer than the other vids, he discusses how he found out about the cancer that eventually took his life.)

Here's to the crazy ones.

Here is a list of the people featured in the video:

Albert Einstein, smoking a pipe
Bob Dylan, moving to his harmonica
Martin Luther King, at the end of his Washington speech
Richard Branson, shaking champagne
John Lennon and Yoko Ono singing
Buckminster Fuller demonstrating the Bucky Ball
Thomas Edison thinking
Mohammed Ali dancing for the press
Ted Turner boxing the air with a smile
Maria Callas blowing a kiss
Mahatma Gandhi smiling
Amelia Earhart arriving
Alfred Hitchcock speaking
Martha Graham dancing
Jim Henson puppeteering
Frank Lloyd Wright walking by his home
Picasso painting
A child dreaming

Consuming the Planet

The video below is a new documentary compiled from lectures by William Rees, who is the co-creator of the Eco-Footprint concept. He is a Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Rees has measured humanity’s use of the planet’s resources, and has concluded - not surprisingly - that humans are using more resources of the Pale Blue Dot than the planet can supply us with sustainably.

Warning To the People of Earth from Bruce Mohun on Vimeo.

For more discussion by Dr. Rees of the issue of Ecological Footprints and their implications for the world follow this link

Here are some quotes from the link above:

Humankind now seems to be the victim of a global "catch-22" of its own making. More material growth, at least in the poor countries, seems essential for socioeconomic sustainability, yet any global increase in material throughput is ecologically unsustainable.

If just the present world population of 5.8 billion people were to live at current North American ecological standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the total productive land requirement would be 26 billion ha (assuming present technology). However, there are only just over 13 billion ha of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person). In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate the increased ecological load of people alive today. (Note the quotation above was written in 1994, the current world population is close to 7 billion people.)

Links

Follow this link for a Wikipedia article on Ecological Footprings

For another take on the issue of planetary boundaries see this post on the work of the Stockholme Resilience Center.

Professor Tim Jackson discusses the econimic and social implications of growth in a finite planet at this post.

Ecosystem services and biodiversity loss are issues related to the theme of this post - see this post for details.

Here is a link to an article from the Post Carbon Institute about the End Of Growth.

Simpsons and Banksy

This is the Couch Gag of a Simpsons episode that recently aried in the US:



It starts off dark and gets darker - Bart dolls stuffed with kitten fur and a chained unicorn used to punch holes in DVDs.

The sting in the tail: the sweatshop is in the basement of 29th Century Fox, the makers of The Simpsons!

It has been claimed that this sequence was inspired by reports that The Simpsons was animated in South Korea.

The opening sequence and couch gag were written by graffiti artist and political activist Banksy, whose tag appears prominently.

Banksy's identity is a closely kept secret. The following video investigates Banksy and attempts to discover who he is:



Banksy's work is edgy, ironic and creative, often with a strong message. This video shows many of Banksy's works ...



... and this link contains many photos ...

This is not the first association of Banksy with The Simpsons as this link shows.

My home town became briefly famous for painting out one of Banksy's works.

Here is a post with an interesting take on Banksy. The site is fun as it satarizes white, citified, liberals, like me.

Crises of Capitalism