The Great Rupture
Viktor Shvets
Book Review
By Saam Shams,
March 5 2022
Summary
I really enjoyed reading this book, as it combines a lot of topics that I am interested in, history, finance, and geopolitics. It looks at the history of civilization and tries to look into what the future will bring. However, I did find the book a bit unorganized and sometimes repetitive. For example, some of the best quotes on the history of Russia occurred towards the end of the book which was supposed to focus on the future. This general lack of organization made writing this review a bit more difficult, but in general the book is divided into three general parts, 1) History, 2) The Present, and 3) the Future. The author’s sense of history and personal life experience is based in Eastern Europe as he is Russian by birth. Furthermore, the author seems to have a general lack of knowledge about the complexity of Middle Eastern history and prefers to just through the entire region under the bin of Islam, and has few mentions of Africa or the America’s. But nevertheless I think the book is a great read and really makes one think about the past, present, and future of humanity and civilization.
One of the key arguments of the book is that the fundamental reason why Western Europe, and now the U.S. have become the dominant centers of human civilization is due to critical decisions taken by eastern powers to become more inward and insulated from the world and trade in general, also a long period of time where power was decentralized with long periods of peace to allow the western civilizations to evolve and master skills in negotiating and compromising. He makes the case that freedom is ultimately necessary for innovation and a vibrant economy and this has allowed the U.S. to become the super power, but that freedom may or may not be as important in the future due to the current advances in technology and the progression of what is called “The Information Age”. I believe the authors general lack of optimism and “zero sum” mentality are a product of where he was born and raised.
Much of the review below is simply quotes from the book organized into the specific sections. I highlighted so many quotes that literally most of this review is just the reorganization of quotes rather than my own interpretation of the book. In many ways the quotes speak for themselves.
The Past
California V.S. Vladivostok
The book starts with a compare and contrast in the evolution of the west coast of the U.S. (California) to the east coast of Russia (Vladivostok). “Throughout the nineteenth century, the US and Russia viewed continental expansion as part of their respective ‘manifest destinies.’ For the US, the continent was mostly uninhabited, with the exception of scattered populations of Native Americans. But for Russia, “This expansion was helped by the collapse of the Mongols and the slow death of the Chinese Empire, with Russia exploiting the geopolitical vacuum. The first settlement on the Pacific Ocean (Okhotsk) was established in 1648.” “The US claimed California at the end of the US-Mexican War in 1846, and prior to the Gold Rush, San Francisco was a small settlement of less than 1,000 souls.” “By the 1800s, population of Vladivostok exceeded 10,000, broadly matching that of San Francisco amid the Gold Rush.” However, moving to the present day the population of Vladivostok is only 600,000 compared to the 39,000,000 population of the state of California, with the San Francisco metropolitan area holding roughly 7,000,000 people. So what caused the dramatic change in evolution, the author argues it was due to decisions made by the ruling powers of Russia to insulated from the world. The same is said of the Ottoman empire and China, “In a matter of several decades between 1433 and 1485, China, Russia, and the Ottomans independently decided that interactions with foreigners, trade, innovation, civil and property rights, education, and freedom to exchange views were all contrary to the interests of the state and societal cohesion.”
The Mongols
The Mongolian invasions lead by Genghis Khan and later his descendants dramatically affected China, the Middle East, India, and Eastern Europe. Despite this dramatic event in history, “Many argue that Mongols, unlike Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, or Chinese, had never left much in terms of legacy.” However the Mongols affected all peoples around, including their closest neighbors Turkish people; “if it were not for Turkish tribes that were trying to either avoid or escape Mongols, it is not clear whether Central Asia and large parts of Turkey and Iran today would be populated by Turkish-speaking people.” In the case of Iran, “The Safavids Empire was the direct outgrowth of one of four Mongol states that had emerged following the collapse of the unified Empire in the late 13th century (Il Khanate) and Mongol’s capital, Tabriz, became the birthplace of modern Iran.” The author argues that the Mongols “… hurled Russia away from more liberal tendencies that started to emerge in the West. As a result, Russia did not participate in the Age of Renaissance, exploration, or scientific and cultural revolutions that were reshaping the post-Mongol Western world.” “The Mongols’ expansion in the thirteenth century refashioned large tracts of Eurasia, hurling Russia, China, Central Asia, and the Middle East away from emerging trends, making it very hard for them to fully participate in the forthcoming scientific, cultural and industrial revolutions.” It is also believed the the Mongolian invasions of Europe were directly linked the the spread and devastation of the black death that swept much the world and particularly Western Europe. In 1347 Khan Jani Beg (the Great Khan of the Golden Horde) was besieging a the Genoese colony of Caffa on the Crimean Peninsula, as survivors of the siege escaped to Europe, they spread with them the plague that would eventually spread through the whole continent.
The Russian’s first deadly encounter with Mongols was recorded in 1222. “The Mongol invasion (1237-1241) was such a seminal event in Russia’s history that few structural and historical issues could be explained without reference to this key period. Mongols ended up controlling most of Russia, except the extreme northwest (Novgorod) and southwest (Volynia and Galicia, which were later destined to become the cradle of the Ukrainian and Belarus nations). People who we today call Russians lived in an area that was directly impacted by the Mongols, whereas the future Ukrainian and Belarus family branches came under the influence of Poland and Lithuania.”
The author argues, “… it was the Mongol invasion that perverted evolution of an earlier Kievan Russia and explains why the country has never developed more inclusive social and political orders.” “On December 6, 1240, Mongols occupied the entire city (Kiev), and the massacre began. It is estimated that out of as many as 50,000 inhabitants, less than 2,000 survived, and the entire city was burned to the ground.” “Unlike China, Mongols never actually settled in Russia proper. Instead, Russia was forced to endure two centuries of repetitive and destructive punitive raids, designed to ensure compliance with directive of the Golden Horde and full payment of the tribute.” “After the 1450s, Russia became effectively independent of the Mongols. Moscow’s Basil I (1389-1425) and Ivan III (1462-1505) reigns were the most critical periods in this transition, embedding Moscow’s political and social institutions into their expanding patrimony as they gradually overran, dominated, or acquired other Russian principalities.” However, Tatar and Turkish raids were still threatening Moscow as late as the seventeenth century.
15th Century Reawakening of Western Europe
The 15th century marked some major milestone in the development of Western Europe, “By the sixteenth century, the European Renaissance was in full swing.”
One of the major events of this period was the invention of printing. “… in fifty years after the invention of printing in 1450s, Europeans published more than 8 million books, or a greater number that what was produced (manuscripts) in 1,000 years prior.” This lead to an exponential rise in literacy, “The Western European literacy rate in the late fifteenth century was estimated at around 11 to 12 percent. By 1700 it doubles to 25 percent, and by 1800 it reached 32 percent, exceeding 95 percent in the early part of the twentieth century.” “As literacy and income levels rose, Western Europeans created private spaces, including bedrooms, and a habit of reading quietly and alone rather than aloud.”
The invention of double-entry bookkeeping is said to have originated in the pre-Renaissance Italian city-states, which enabled one to grasp a full picture on “whether a business or venture made or lost money, and whether it consumed too much or too little capital.” This was the beginning of the modern financial system in which investing places an important and key role.
The century saw European sailors discovering the Americas. “The collapse of the Byzantine Empire left the land routes to the east (and hence access to spices, silk, porcelain, and other oriental luxuries) in the hands of Muslim intermediaries. The Portuguese had in essence started the race for an alternative route to Asia.” “...Pedro Cabral was the first European to accidentally land in Brazil in 1500, and it was also the Portuguese Magellan who for the first time circumnavigated the world in 1518 (though on behalf of Spain).”
Russian History
Russia has a fascinating history, and it plays an important role between Europe and Asia. Early Russia appears to have been largely controlled by a warrior class of Vikings. These Vikings were a minority among the Slavic majority population. “The land was populated by Slavic and Finno-Ugrian tribes with Vikings imposing themselves elite warrior traders.” “Viking warrior-traders established Russia’s first large-scale settlements sometime in the late ninth to early tenth centuries.” “The earliest Russian towns (such as Novgorod, Starai Ladoga, and Kiev) were essentially goods collection points and service stations.” “Unlike Western Europe, Russia had never developed a culture of independent cities and self-regulating merchant guilds… the bulk of Russian cities and towns were not hubs of economic activity but ‘rather stunted and unpopulous administrative centers’…” Today, and in much of the past, the center of power was concentrated in Moscow. However, this was not always the case. Novgorod had a different evolution than Moscow, “… By the mid-twelfth century almost all offices in Novgorod were elected, including governor (posadnik) as well as the bishop...Novgorod’s progress paralleled that of other European trading towns at the time (such as Bruges, Bergen, and Venice), and all were far ahead of England…” “Novgorod’s traditions encourage private ownership of land, active political participation, and and impartial judiciary as well as constrained royal power.” However, eventually Novgorod was captured by Ivan III, the grand prince of Moscow, which marked a major turning point in the history of Russia. This defeat also marked the end of property rights and in many ways the rule of laws that could not be infringed upon. “… Ivan III’s elimination of the last vestiges of property and civil rights in 1477 cemented institutional and cultural settings that were deeply antagonistic to change and evolution.” “… the Russian nation was forged by Ivan III and his successors, following the conquest of Novgorod and that of several weakened Mongol khanates.”
Chinese History
Before the renaissance and age of exploration, China had the legacy of perhaps being the most knowledgeable civilization of the planet’s seaways. Most of this is due to a famous seaman by the name of Zheng He. “When the Portuguese and Europeans in general were still petrified that there was a “green sea of darkness” beyond Cape Bojador in southern Morocco, Zheng He was already sailing thousands of miles every year, across both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. However, by the end of the fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, the relative positions had violently reversed.” Zheng He was born in Bukhara, a town in central Asia, and came from a Muslim family. He became a famous explorer of the seas. “There is no doubt that Zheng He’s voyages were by far the longest recorded ocean explorations before the Western Age of Discoveries.” “Zheng He had access to centuries of information accumulated in interacting with Arab and Persian traders…” “...decades before Copernicus or Leonardo, the Chinese already knew that the world was round, and its mariners and engineers had extensive knowledge of mathematics and navigation.” “the first giraffe ever to be seen in China made an appearance in Beijing in September 1414, as a gift from the sultan of Malindi on the east African coast…” “The entire purpose of Zheng He’s voyages was not to solicit money or conquest territories but rather to ensure peace and tranquility and stimulate an uninterrupted flow of trade.” “Unlike Zheng He, the Portuguese did not come to the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific oceans bearing gifts and to safeguard existing trade routes. They came to disrupt, occupy, and monopolize trade in spices. They came to stay, anxious for money, souls, and slaves.”
However, China’s rulers turned inward after the era of Zheng He and “By the 16th to 17th centuries, the Chinese mechanic clock was forgotten, and it was the Jesuits who reintroduced it to China, and who also became responsible for resetting its calendar. The Chinese, who invented gunpowder and cannons centuries before, were forced to buy Portuguese cannons in Macao to defend the empire from Manchu tribes in the mid-seventeenth century, and indeed they even needed Western mercenaries to operate those cannons.” “… China never developed a culture of peer reviews, criticism, building on the shoulders of previous generations, or autonomous educational and research institutions.” “… even teaching foreigners to read and write Chinese was forbidden…”
“Unlike Western Europe, where kings and princes were reduced to negotiating with landowners and aristocratic clans for provision of troops and support during incessant conflicts, and hence had no choice but to concede ever-greater freedoms and rights to their vassals, Emperor Chin (Qin) eliminated hereditary aristocracy.” “...the concept of a centralized state with a top-down hierarchical order remained the core of China’s political and institutional system. It is still the best description of China today.” “This is the purest form of … a patrimonial state, in which the only person who owned everything was the emperor (as head of a large family) and his orders had to be obeyed.” As a result of this development, “… China never developed a culture of law.” and “… China continuously suffered from ‘bad emperor problems.’” The lack of respect for laws can be seen in this quote by Zhou Enlai (Premier of the Peoples Republic of China, 1949), “Why should we proletarians be restrained by laws?… It does not matter if we make a law today and change it tomorrow.”
Roman Empire Collapse
“In a later part of the Roman Empire, a desperate fight to control galloping inflation forced the emperors to lock the entire society into strata and occupations that were unalterable and determined by the accident of birth.” This is something I see happening even in the present day, out of control inflation is in many ways a sign that a civilization and society is collapsing, one of the results is the class mobility is slowed or even stopped.
The Ottoman Empire and Larger Middle East
Bayezid “the Just” decided to ban printing in Arabic character in 1485. The ban was not lifted in the Ottoman Empire until the 1720s, and even then it was limited to limited print shops. “It was only in the mid-nineteenth century, 300 years after the first printing presses in Mainz, that Arabic printing on a much larger scale finally arrived.”
The 8th to 10th centuries saw scientific expansion in the Islamic Middle East, with discoveries of diseases such as smallpox and measles as well as mathematics with the invention of Algebra. However after this period there was a retreat. “Why did lands of Islam, which were the beacon of the world in the eighth to tenth centuries (and indeed one could argue all the way to twelfth or even thirteenth centuries), voluntarily decide to commit suicide and close their minds to science and inquiry?” In this region education was never allowed to emerge as an autonomous institution. “… in the lands of Islam, madrassas were established under the law of waqf (religious endowments) that monopolized education, and in some Islamic countries that is true even today.” “… in Islam there is no differentiation between private and public policies or between religion and politics.”
“As in China or Russia, the convention of building on the shoulders of previous generations, criticisms, experimentation, and inquiry never took root. Hence, inventions were forgotten (and would need to be reinvented centuries later) while the ability to criticize and debate was stifled.”
“… there were very few breakthroughs that occurred in Islamic science after 1250, and there were almost none after the 1500s.” This quote by the Persian polymath, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), exemplified the closure of Muslim minds, “Nature is entirely subject to God; incapable of acting by itself, it is an instrument in the hand of the Creator; sun, moon, stars and elements are subject to God and can produce nothing of themselves. In a word, nothing in nature can act spontaneously and apart from God.” In a way this quote suggests the same general concept as “destiny”, which is the path of life is per-ordained, and nothing has the power to change or alter this path. Furthermore, a culture of negotiating and compromise never developed as “Sultans never had to bargain with as many powerful agents as did Western kings…”
The Present
“Three factors were critical to success in this world: openness to ideas, trade, and the extension of rights to an ever-widening segment of the population.”
East V.S. West
“Both communist and Islamic states are now at a crossroads. Whether it is Russia, China, or the Islamic Middle East, the last 500 years witnessed their absolute and relative decline as well as a dreadful erosion of pride in one’s country.” “The question is whether the past laggards can recapture their historic glory and exact a terrible revenge on Western civilization.” The author argues that “… any nation that refused to accept the merciless logic of change and adaptation was left behind, gasping for air...”
Jobs
The author argues that the fourth major turning point of human history is the current transition into the Information Age. In a nutshell the author argues that this next revolution will make the majority of current jobs obsolete. Furthermore this change is occurring at an exponential rate, “McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the pace of change is at least ten times quicker than in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.” Today, “up to 40 percent of white collar employees in most developed economies already feel that they perform ‘bullshit jobs’”. “The author described an occasion when his taxi driver was stopped by the traffic police and was told that he must pay a bribe because “the taxi driver needed a license to carry a white person.” “Milton Friedman once asked a bureaucrat from on of the Asian countries why they used labor with shovels rather than modern equipment to build canals. When the bureaucrat answered that this is a job creation program, and hence using modern equipment would not be helpful, Friedman replied, ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it is jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.’” “a profession does not need to go extinct for people performing these duties to start feeling an erosion in satisfaction and marginal pricing power.”
Financialization
“Like termites, technology and financialization are hollowing out the core frameworks of our societies.” In the past there would have been one financial instrument linked to an asset, however today there are often three or more pieces of paper per asset. Think, derivatives, like options, futures contracts. So if the underlying asset goes to zero, there is a much larger fall in value due to the derivatives all going away. In a sense it is like a ponzi scheme. “… the value of financial instruments is now five to ten times the global economy…” “Whereas prior to the 1980s most people saved from salaries and wages, in the subsequent three decades, it has become abundantly clear that saving out of salaries was a recipe for poverty and oblivion and that the only way one could get ahead in this new financialized environment was through assets and leveraging.” “Central banks have essentially become slaves of the system they have created, and this tight connection between leveraging, asset prices, and real economic outcomes is no longer possible to break. Hence, we are condemned to generating more liquidity and capital than we need, in order to ensure not only that today’s economic outcomes are in line with societal expectations, but that there is enough surplus liquidity (beyond our current needs) to ensure that debt defaults and asset price volatilities are contained, and that over time, holistically defined assets continue to appreciate in value to lubricate the next cycle of economic growth.” “...instead of income, societies decided that wealth would be created through asset prices and leveraging.”
“The world for the first time in human history is drowning in capital, and I argue that we don’t even know what to do with it. The financial industry, instead of being a mere intermediary, has become the world’s largest industry itself, and ‘making capital out of capital for the sake of capital’ has over the last three decades bypassed in scale and scope and other human endeavor…”
“...the world of the first two Industrial Revolutions was a highly capital-intensive one…” “We are essentially starting to reside in ‘capital light economies’… or as Haskel and Westlake phrased it, our world could be characterized as ‘capital economies without capital.’”
Russia
“Like China, Russia does not have friends; surrounding lands are either vassals or enemies, and it is at its most dangerous when cornered.” “It was in fact developed countries that have become far more alike over the last five decades, rather than poorer countries catching up and converging.” “… if rights are not well-defined, individuals will fight hard and pay a very high price to acquire or maintain those rights rather than dedicating resources to more productive uses. It encourages maximization of rent-seeking and reduces long-term growth rates while effectively blocking change.” “… political fragmentation across Western Europe created a conducive climate of competition for ideas, goods, and wealth that was absent elsewhere.” “… there were always rights to property or personal freedoms that even in the darkest days had to be observed in Europe, but neither Russia nor China ever emerged as lands of laws.” “Russia to this day remains a petro and nuclear state with a grotesquely swollen military-industrial complex and a stifled private sector that is buffeted between conflicting state objectives and corrupt bureaucracy.”
Here is an example of how upper level opinions interfered with scientific inquiry in soviet Russia. “A typical example was an extended multi-decade campaign by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko against genetics as the basis of biology, which retarded development of most natural sciences in the Soviet Union. Lysenko argued against the concept of genes, and his views radically departed from the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. After a decade of debates, in 1948, genetics was officially declared ‘a bourgeois pseudoscience’ and all geneticists were fired from their jobs; many were imprisoned or executed. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, it was estimated that more than 3,000 Soviet biologists were deprived of an opportunity to pursue research, and the impact lasted until 1964, when Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev as the general secretary.”
China
“It is interesting to note that today, more than 90 percent of young people in China have a favorable view of Mao Zedong (higher than a 70 percent self-assessment by the Great Helmsman himself), even though he was arguably responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history.” In recent years China has significantly increased its influence on the world. China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, starting with 1 percent of global exports, and in 2017 controlled 15 percent. “Only Britain in the 1860s-80s and the US in the 1950s had a higher share of global trade than China does today. “between 2011 and 2013, China consumed more steel or cement than the US in the entire twentieth century.”
The Modern Middle East
Much of the modern middle east was carved out during the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. “This agreement also indirectly gave birth to Saudi Arabia, with one house (Saud) eventually prevailing over various other players in the 1920s to early 1930s. It also gave rise to the Kurdish problem, which remains unsolved to this day.”
“Since the creation of the new Turkey, its economy has violently zigzagged between extreme westernization to socialism and statism in various forms (1938-1980s) to free market philosophies (1990s-2000s) and back to statism and religious fever over the last decade. Turkey encountered multiple period of extreme inflationary pressures and corresponding currency crises, which in turn led to five military coups that attempted to break the deadlock between the disintegrating economy, rising populism, and/or religious fever and the army’s self-perceived role as the guardian of the state and its constitution.” “… since Erdogan’s 2014 elections, there have been ore than 66,000 “insult investigations,” resulting in more than 12,000 trials.”
“...there are more than 1.8 billion Muslims in the world today, scientists from Muslim countries have won only three Nobel Prizes in science, and forty-seven Muslim-majority states contribute just 1 percent of the world’s scientific literature, or roughly the output of Spain.”
Decay of the West
The Author gives a generally doomy picture of the current western world, one which I tend to agree with, although I maintain an irrationally optimistic mindset. “The same way as Roman theaters over time became bland and emptied versions of the great Greek theaters, contemporary entertainment is also being emptied, with shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills becoming the mainstay.” Millennials “… fully understand (far more than their parents) that their future is likely to be bleaker and more uncertain.” “It won’t surprise me if the current era will ultimately go down in history as one of the most toxic, perhaps on par with smoking. Whether rising loneliness (despite proliferation of social sites), growing suicide rates, declining literacy, rising digital addictions, or impaired analytical capacity, it is far from clear how much human behavior is changing, and whether there is anything we can do about it.” “… it seems irrefutable that our current capitalist system is dying.” “… it is quite possible that one or two human generations might need to be sacrificed on the altar of evolution as the world adjusts to a different economic, technological, and social model.”
Dani Rodrik, a professor at Harvard University, has stated “… one cannot have deep economic integration, nation-states, and local democracy. We can combine any two of the three, but never all three simultaneously, and not in full.” He has argued that “… either we abolish nation states, or local politics have to perform global duties, or globalization has to go into reverse.”
Karl Marx had a term called “Lumpenproletariat”, which meant classes that lost their class consciousness and were no longer anchored in a society, and this “… is arguable as close to a definition of today’s environment as one can get.”
Industries are becoming commodified, where only the top 0.1% command the majority of profits. “… the top 0.1 percent of artists today command more than half of all music sales and streaming while the share of concert revenue going to the top 1 percent increased from 26 percent in 1982 to 60 percent in 2017.” “An ever-growing avalanche of news and reportage makes it impossible either to analyze or differentiate what is real or what is fake. The human brain was never designed to process so much conflicting information.” “The Industrial Revolution was a highly disorienting experience. Suddenly craftsmen no longer knew what they were, as giant factories were springing up on every corner. Aristocracy no longer felt that they knew what their social position and obligations were, while peasants no longer looked up to the lord of the manor.”
The Future
There are several major themes that are highlighted in the author’s view of the future.
1) The Information Age
2) Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a. Singularity)
3) Demographics
“… the new world is likely to resemble the old feudal societies more than familiar industrial capitalism.” “… 1971 is the most convenient starting point for the Information Age. This was the year when both computer technology and global financialization were born.”
“Singularity” refers to the moment when the Turing test is successful, or in other words, the inability to differentiate human vs non-human contribution, or ability of artificial intelligence to be at least at the level of humans.
Education
“Ultimately bachelor’s degrees will disappear and instead there will be regular update courses and certificates that will provide a farm more flexible platform from ongoing skilling, training, but more importantly broadening of human mind and experiences.”
Employment
“As physiologists (from Maslow to Myers-Briggs) highlighted, it is our perception of our worth and our relative positioning within the group that determines how we feel about ourselves, societies, and pretty much everything else.” “… beyond a narrow class of administrators and exceptionally gifted individuals who can still add value?”
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, has said “thirty years from now the best CEO could be a robot.” “… the first two industrial revolutions were complementing humans, the Information Age is aiming to replace them altogether.” This new area can also be thought of as “.. the Age of Declining Returns on Humans.” “Keynes recognized that the old biblical adage that ‘one does not eat, if one does not work,’ social pressures, and psychological need to be perceived as a useful member of community will take a long time to die.”
“...the idea of having long-living corporations that develop and market products for decades or centuries increasingly seems antiquated. If someone were to approach a person in the 18th century and suggest that in the future there would be large “corporations” that employ thousands of people and live in their own name and survive for centuries, it would have struck that person as a somewhat odd idea. While there were trading houses that existed for a considerable time, the most common forms of organization 300 to 500 years ago were small-scale partnerships, corp orates that were formed for a specific purpose and then dissolved after that objective was fulfilled, or small family-oriented units.” “...we are likely to see business and commercial life dominated by “temporary” arrangements that would flare up in the sky and go dark in a matter of months or years rather than decades…” “Hours worked is already down in most Western societies from 3,000 hours per annum in 1870 to less than 1,500 hours in Western Europe and 1,800 hours in the US. It seems fair to assume that in a decade or two, both labor participation and hours worked will be even lower.”
Demographics
“… geopolitical and immigration pressures around the world are likely to grow. As roman galleys could not hold back Franks and Saxons along the Rhine an Danube in the third through fifth centuries, and as Russians and Greeks could not keep out Mongols and Turks in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, the current waves of migration are unstoppable, as they are driven by the same economic forces...today’s migratory waves are mostly caused by a massive demographic bulge due to a collapse of infant mortalities in the least developed countries, while female fertility remains high. This bulge is particularly pronounced in Africa, and it is unlikely to crest there until the 2040s, while another bulge in the Middle East and South Asia is unlikely to crest for at least another decade.”
“The UN estimates that within twenty years, over 80 percent of people under the age of fifteen will be residing in less or least developed countries (excluding China), while the developed countries’ share of youngsters will plunge to well below 10 percent.”
Economy
“… only half of Americans born in 1980 are economically better off than their parents, compared to 90 percent in 1949.” “The bottom 50 percent of US households have almost no exposure to equities and only a limited one to financial assets, while the top 50 percent of US households have almost half of their assets in various financial instruments. Also, as Marx predicted, the bottom of the pyramid finds it increasingly difficult to keep up, and hence, gradually sink to a ‘debt slavery’, with the bottom 50 percent of households having a debt-to-assets ratio of 75 percent while the top 10 percent is almost debt-free” “… forty-two billionaires today control as much wealth as the bottom 3.7 billion people, while in 2009, we needed 380 billionaires to have the same relative weight.” “… zero (or negative) productivity occupations, such as tax lawyers, publicists, lobbyists, most bankers, ‘flash traders,’ flat-flippers, and other rentier classes are becoming more dominant and extract an every higher rent from the economy.”
“The current trends, unless corrected, will inevitably lead to the end of conventional capitalism and democracy and fuel a continuing rise of populists, demagogues, and other charlatans from both extreme left and right.” “… the self-reinforcing pressures of slower growth, inequality, and financialization are unstoppable.” “Unfortunately, today’s societies are still structured around the idea of a job and active human contribution and participation, as well as hierarchical relatively efficient political and administrative systems that have served the West so well over the last three centuries. For example, today’s social and welfare programs have been created to encourage people to work and have not changed much since the days of the Iron Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880s, who introduced the first ever unemployment and healthcare benefits.” “...societies must consider alternative ways to liberate humanity from the hell of declining usefulness and the destruction of self-respect that goes with it.” “Ultimately, perhaps only 5 percent of the population might still be making a major contribution, and the real question is how to make the other 95 percent feel happy and satisfied.”
The West
The author suggests the following to avoid a dystopia and build a world that is better than what we used to have:
a) basic or universal income guarantees;
b) changes in competitive regulations;
c) a radical overhaul of education and skilling; and
d) a massive new Marshall Plan for the least developed parts of the world.
“In the West, it has been taken for granted that scientists should be free to pursue whatever course of inquiry they feel will yield the best answers…” “The clear lesson over the last five centuries is that without freedom there can be no progress, discovers, or wealth.”
“The new world coming into view will emphasize fairness, equality, and the interests of the society rather than individualism, choice, and freedoms of the Baby Boomer generation.”
China
“China’s razor-sharp focus on AI could fundamentally reshape the world and its geopolitical map.” “… China’s electronic and mobile commercial transactions are already more than twenty times larger than those in the US, and it has more internet users than the US and Europe combined.” “Essentially the entire life of every Chinese citizen is now online and open to surveillance.” “Recently, a Chinese university suspended a student’s enrollment because of his dad’s poor social score…” “China still looks like a teenager who is trying to figure out the world.” “...China continues to depend far more on global intellectual expertise than what it contributes to the world.” “...neither Russia nor China have ever been a land of laws; this is true when both were empires and it is still true today.”
Select Quotes
“Most people work because they must, rather than for a sense of fulfillment; but life without work is also torture, as much psychological as it is financial.”
“...learning how to think is becoming far more important than being taught what to think about.”
“Argentina in 1913 was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and it took less than a century to completely destroy its wealth.”
“In just one conflict (Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century), more than 30 percent of Germans perished.”
“… if a question is asked whether it is right to argue that ‘whenever science disagrees with religion, religion is always right.’ In the Islamic world, the positive answers are around 75 to 100 percent, while in the Western World, the answers are almost always negative.”
“...imagination is not as highly valued in Islamic countries and only moderately so in Russia, with generally a greater desire for obedience.”
“… behavioral sciences have conclusively proven that we suffer from a multitude of anomalies and inconsistencies when assessing and analyzing the future.”
“Islam cannot be reformed; that is to say, reformed Islam is Islam no longer; it is something else.” - Lord Cromer, British governor of Egypt.
“… there are no free men in Russia except for beggars and philosophers.” - Michael Speransky, 1809
“In time of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.” J. Paul Getty
“Ironically, as medieval clowns and entertainers, most artists can only make a living today by traveling from “village to village” to entertain.”
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” Senator Patrick Moynihan
“One cannot have a coherent society unless one agrees on what constitutes the truth…”
“Karl Marx once described religion as ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless conditions...it is the opium of the people.”
“...there has never been strong evidence of a link between levels of taxation on the one hand and innovation or prosperity on the other.”
“Clark Kerr, the late chancellor UC Berkeley, once eloquently described that the key to a happy college is to ‘have plenty of sex for the students, football for the alumni and parking for the faculty.’”