Some Very Dark Numbers

 

1. Scary stuff. I think the outcome will be the death of the the dollar to be replaced by the “new yankee dollar” which will only be used internally. The rest of the world will have to just suck it up. I don’t see any way out for the US unless you want large parts of North America to resemble South America. Hard to believe that this has happened really. Where did the money go?

   Drew I don’t know if it will be available in the US as it is a Channel 4 show in the UK but Niall Ferguson has just made an excellent tv program called “Is the West History” in it he describes what he calls the West’s “killer Apps”

   1. Competition: a decentralisation of political and economic life, which created the launch pad for both nation states and capitalism.

   2. Science: a way of understanding and ultimately changing the natural world, which gave the West (among other things) a major military advantage over the Rest.

   3. Property rights: the rule of law as a means of protecting private owners and peacefully resolving disputes between them, which formed the basis for the most stable form of representative government.

   4. Medicine: a branch of science that allowed a major improvement in health and life expectancy, beginning in Western societies, but also in their colonies.

   5. The consumer society: a mode of material living in which the production and purchase of clothing and other consumer goods play a central economic role, and without which the Industrial Revolution would have been unsustainable.

   6. The work ethic: a moral framework and mode of activity derivable from (among other sources) Protestant Christianity, which provides the glue for the dynamic and potentially unstable society created by apps 1 to 5

   His ultimate analysis is not good unless things change rapidly. Though my view is also rather bleak and I suspect a large scale war is in the pipeline involving the West against islam in one form or another.

   http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/niall-ferguson

   Posted by LyndonB       04/12/2011  at  03:40 AM  

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