Dan Fogelberg 1951-2007

His life was always about music. He left a fine legacy of work behind. He did what he loved.

Mozart's Requiem

Transition to the Future

Welcome to the future, where city streets are war zones between drug gangs and sectarian militias. A world whose cities are like Beirut of the 1980s, where the sounds of firefights, car bombs, and bloody martyrdom greet one's ears more commonly than sounds of birds singing or children playing.Financially and morally depleted by the Obama administration of the early 2000s, the United States had lost all ability to keep trade routes safe, or to ride herd on trans-national criminal organisations and religious terrorist groups. At street level, it has become a free-for-all, worldwide.

The world's elites create cities in the sky, in an attempt to escape the cheapness of human life on the streets below. By paying "protection fees" to street-level gangs and militias, the sky-cities' street level foundations and access are protected, for the most part. The last sky city to be brought down by the gangs was in Singapore of 2059. The subsequent reprisals to the streets of Singapore by the triad owners of the felled Sky City, have left most of the island freehold uninhabitable to this day.The rise of China as world hegemon in the early 2020s paved the way for entrenchment of large-scale corruption across Europe, North America, and Oceania -- regions formerly supportive of property rights and rule of law. Then as China itself fragmented into warring factions in the late 2020s, the entire world became a place without law. The teeming masses of the third world discovered that the developed world lacked the will to defend its borders. Soon there was no distinction between third world and first world.

Crime lords and militia leaders have no use for space launches, so every year another irreplaceable satellite falls flaming back to Earth. During the 2030s, nuclear arsenals finally fell into the hands of the gangs, and a few short nuclear wars quickly thinned the ranks of would-be nuclear terrorists and warriors. Several warheads turned out to be duds, and a few thousand self-styled nuclear submariners took residence in Davy Jones' locker. They lacked the competence to safely pilot the aging sea monsters -- particularly the Russian death traps.

As the skies of the world once again grow dingy with coal and wood smoke, all pretense of protecting the water and air of the planet are abandoned. Any species that cannot fend for themselves will suffer the fate of the dodo. Rain forests are slashed and burned, and huge pit mines gouge the surface of every continent and large island. This is the rapidly poisoning world that the many leftist environmental movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made possible, through their quasi-terrorist tactics against the world of law -- a world that was quickly shrinking under their noses. It took only an Obama presidency and the lack of any credible opposition for the "Greens" to finish off human economic freedoms and any chance for a clean prosperity that might carry men to the stars.

And so the wealthy few -- many of them crime lords themselves -- huddle in the uncertain safety of the sky cities. Listening to the bombs and gunfire far below. Forgetting how close the world had come to climbing out of the primitivity of lower human nature -- but now mired in the stinking, choking future of perpetual sectarian and criminal warfare.

Originally published in Al Fin

H/T Inhabitat and Time

This is one song that I have shamelessly appropriated from Paul Simon for performing at small and intimate gatherings. I cannot tell you which is better: this performance by Paul, or a random performance by myself. He wrote it, but sometimes I am absolutely inspired!
;-)

Bees Rules of Order

The bees' rules for decision-making--

• seek a diversity of options,
• encourage a free competition among ideas,
• and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices

—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

Source

National Geographic brings us a fascinating article on natural "swarming", the behaviours of ants, bees, birds, bats, penguins and other citizens of the natural world. Scientists and engineers are hoping to learn from natural swarming behaviour, to design robots that swarm.

Commerce and Industry hope to learn from swarming behaviour to improve the bottom line--make their operations more efficient and profitable. Bureaucrats and department heads want to bring order to bureaucratic chaos. They want to learn from nature's swarms too.

"In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots, you need all three of those ideas."


....Within five years Kumar hopes to put a networked team of robotic vehicles in the field. One purpose might be as first responders. "Let's say there's a 911 call," he says. "The fire alarm goes off. You don't want humans to respond. You want machines to respond, to tell you what's happening. Before you send firemen into a burning building, why not send in a group of robots?"

Taking this idea one step further, Marco Dorigo's group in Brussels is leading a European effort to create a "swarmanoid," a group of cooperating robots with complementary abilities: "foot-bots" to transport things on the ground, "hand-bots" to climb walls and manipulate objects, and "eye-bots" to fly around, providing information to the other units.

The military is eager to acquire similar capabilities. On January 20, 2004, researchers released a swarm of 66 pint-size robots into an empty office building at Fort A. P. Hill, a training center near Fredericksburg, Virginia. The mission: Find targets hidden in the building.

Zipping down the main hallway, the foot-long (0.3 meter) red robots pivoted this way and that on their three wheels, resembling nothing so much as large insects. Eight sonars on each unit helped them avoid collisions with walls and other robots. As they spread out, entering one room after another, each robot searched for objects of interest with a small, Web-style camera. When one robot encountered another, it used wireless network gear to exchange information. ("Hey, I've already explored that part of the building. Look somewhere else.")

In the back of one room, a robot spotted something suspicious: a pink ball in an open closet (the swarm had been trained to look for anything pink). The robot froze, sending an image to its human supervisor. Soon several more robots arrived to form a perimeter around the pink intruder. Within half an hour, all six of the hidden objects had been found.

...."It's much harder for a predator to avoid being spotted by a thousand fish than it is to avoid being spotted by one," says Daniel Grünbaum, a biologist at the University of Washington. "News that a predator is approaching spreads quickly through a school because fish sense from their neighbors that something's going on."

When a predator strikes a school of fish, the group is capable of scattering in patterns that make it almost impossible to track any individual. It might explode in a flash, create a kind of moving bubble around the predator, or fracture into multiple blobs, before coming back together and swimming away.

Animals on land do much the same, as Karsten Heuer, a wildlife biologist, observed in 2003, when he and his wife, Leanne Allison, followed the vast Porcupine caribou herd (Rangifer tarandus granti) for five months. Traveling more than a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) with the animals, they documented the migration from winter range in Canada's northern Yukon Territory to calving grounds in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"It's difficult to describe in words, but when the herd was on the move it looked very much like a cloud shadow passing over the landscape, or a mass of dominoes toppling over at the same time and changing direction," Karsten says. "It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do, and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was."

One day, as the herd funneled through a gully at the tree line, Karsten and Leanne spotted a wolf creeping up. The herd responded with a classic swarm defense.

...For each caribou, the stakes couldn't have been higher, yet the herd's evasive maneuvers displayed not panic but precision. (Imagine the chaos if a hungry wolf were released into a crowd of people.) Every caribou knew when it was time to run and in which direction to go, even if it didn't know exactly why. No leader was responsible for coordinating the rest of the herd. Instead each animal was following simple rules evolved over thousands of years of wolf attacks.

That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting."

Social and political groups have already adopted crude swarm tactics. During mass protests eight years ago in Seattle, anti-globalization activists used mobile communications devices to spread news quickly about police movements, turning an otherwise unruly crowd into a "smart mob" that was able to disperse and re-form like a school of fish.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys billions of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes (the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable). The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun, each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Thomas Malone of MIT's new Center for Collective Intelligence. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

Self-organising behaviour of the hive depends upon individual behaviour, on a large scale. Each individual must know how to act responsibly and competently, or the entire group may be lost.

Understanding that principle helps us understand the importance of developing childhood competence, and avoiding excessive psychological neoteny and academic lobotomy. Parenting is vital, and competent education is important. There is no room for wasted generations.

Hallelujah

Several great artists have covered this song by Leonard Cohen. But as a singer-songwriter, I have a soft spot in my heart for performances by the person who actually sweated out and bled the music and lyrics.

Great music, literature, and art take the hard road. Life is ironic. By the time you learn life is laughing at you (instead of along with you), it may be too late.

But I digress.

For more versions of Cohen's Hallelujah, click on the screen above and go to YouTube.

Vincent

Now I understand what you tried to say to me . . .

Scarecrow's Dream

Between the worlds of men and make-believe, I can be found.

Drummer's High: Simon Phillips--Force Majeure

Brian Eno: First Light

Hat tip Cuanas.

Brian Eno is one of the grand old men of electronic music and soundracks. Relax and let him take you on a journey . . .

Return to Innocence

Enigma Return to Innocence

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before ....
Eagles: Hotel California

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

When a person becomes "stuck," it may be helpful for them to back up to an earlier period of their lives, and find the things that moved them strongly. You may find yourself reliving childish and unrealistic dreams. Or you may find the motive power you need right now, to get on with things.

There is power in the purity of the innocent mind. It is still in there somewhere.

Third and Final Rooftop Vid--So Long Boys

Like a time machine--put it up on the big screen, lean back with a Guiness, and smile.


"What's that, lad? The girls? Laddy, if you're living right, the girls just seem to show up, sooner or later."

I wouldn't want to be the Bobby to pull the plug on that gig. I remember some late night gigs of my own that got closed down hours earlier than they would have ended on their own. Vive le music!

Beatles Rooftop Concert 2

Imagine how London or New York would react if the Beatles could magically re-unite for one afternoon, and put on a rooftop concert. How many people would complain about the "imposition?" Show me the constable who would want to put a stop to the disruption of the daily routine?

What would be a comparable phenomenon today? Paris Hilton? 50 cent? Popular culture seems to have fallen out of the hands of visionary artists and into the hands of money-grubbing, soulless, "youth culture industry" ghouls. Most kids growing up in the '00s are probably not capable of understanding what the Beatles represented to their generation, since big money interests have smothered most of the music and entertainment scene.

One can only hope that the de-centralised technologies offered by the internet will breed a new generation of genuine musical and cultural revolutionaries.

Beatles Rooftop Concert

This is Part I of the rooftop concert. The Beatles are together at their peak, and as they perform from the rooftop, London stops to take notice.

I could not help but wonder at the peaceful way that Londoners of that time were able to gather on the streets, window sills, and rooftops, to listen to what was already at the time a musical phenomenon. If anything equivalent were to happen in today's London, there might be the need to call out the Royal Marines to keep order. In addition, the performers would probably receive incoming mortar fire from a neighboring mosque. No, the entire thing would be much too risky today.

Hat tip Cuanas.

Understanding Society In Order To Survive

The decline of western civilisation makes perfect sense, given how humans within societies function and interact. Almost all children survive childhood now, so there is not the need to "over-produce" children. Modern societies are oriented around college educated professions and occupations--and the "slots" for those professions and occupations can be easily saturated in many communities. This saturation of high level jobs also suggests that there is not a need for more children.

But actually, there are several reasons why western parents need to produce more children. Besides the significant dearth of skilled craftsmen, skilled maintenance persons, skilled construction workers, skilled technicians and technologists, and particular areas of engineering and information science with a shortage of trained people, there are other needs for more intelligent and educated humans. The needs are dictated by the future, which will present many openings for intelligent and well-educated humans that have not yet been imagined.

You cannot expect most modern westerners to understand how successful societies are organised, and they do not. That is one reason why universities emphasize obsolete and worthless areas of study, while neglecting others that are vital for the future.

It is no surprise that most modern westerners have little understanding of how a society--or civilisation--is structured and maintained. Societies evolved over time, and with specialisation of labour people only understand their own small piece of societal reality. The public acquires its understanding of society by way of school teachers, university professors, journalists, popular media, and their peers.

The schools, universities, news media, and entertainment media are all dominated by leftists. Leftists are particularly ignorant about how society works, due the top-down elitist nature of how leftist ideas are propagated. The elitists on the left have specialised into a niche that has very little competence-testing, and very little interaction with most of the real world.

In emergency situations, most leftists are of little use because they are so dependent upon governmental services that they have no concept of self-help. New Orleans and Louisiana, after a recent hurricane, were under the control of leftist governments, and were virtually helpless until the federal government was able to take over total control of the situation. The next large emergencies may not be so localized or so mild. Contrast that incompetence in Louisiana, with the extreme competence demonstrated in Florida during recent natural disasters.

It is not necessary to understand modern leftism other than to know that it is controlled and propagated from inbred cloisters of ideologues who have lost touch with the reality beneath the reality of civilisation. These ideological mutants are incapable of comprehending a threat to civilisation, nor would they have the least idea how to respond to a threat once it was so blatant and horrific that they could no longer deny its existence.

That is why you see leftists paradoxically rushing both to the banner of "climate change catastrophe" and to the banner of "peak oil catastrophe"--while they vehemently deny any threat to the civilisation that has given them their freedom to mutate for over two hundred years. Leftists appear to secretly cherish the hope that islamist fanatics will bring the downfall of mainstream governments, and pave the way for leftists to finally preside over the Internationale. For such a prize, these ideologues will allow the cracking of a few eggs, to make the omelette.

But most people are not leftist ideologues, despite all educational attempts to make them so. Most people in western societies possess ample intelligence and curiosity to learn basic skills of living, and the basic underlying workings of a society and a civilisation.

Even in the undeveloped third world regions, people have the innate sense to deal with the environment, as long as they are not expected to maintain a technological infrastructure. It is the relative sophistication and wealth of the west that has motivated the islamist drive for conquest of the west. All of that technology and wealth makes Islam and Allah look bad--inferior. That can not be allowed to happen, at least if the mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs have anything to say about it. They will spend the last drop of muslim blood in proving the superiority of the desert moon god, if they must.

Idiocracy Sampler

This video sampler starts with Joe trying to make sense of his disorientation by going to a hospital for help. As Joe struggles with his new post-hibernation society, he inevitably ends up incarcerated. But that is only the beginning of Joe's adventure in his new world.

If you like these, you can click on either video screen to go to YouTube, where other short cuts from Idiocracy are available for viewing.

Sex for the Virtuous Virtual Couple

This really is a fascinating concept--using data-linked artificial sex organs, a man and a woman can pleasure each other over great distances. They can even record a "pleasure session" using the artificial sex organ interface and a data storage device, then transfer the "pleasure file" to their partner, who then replays the session using his or her own artificial sex organ as the interface.

Hat tip Wired News.

Riding the Poop Rocket To The Moon

Most of you already know that manure can produce methane via microbial digestion. In fact many dairy farmers are taking advantage of this process to create much of their own electricity with methane powered generators.

But why should we settle for simple electricity from manure, when we can use it to fly to the moon? I believe that we need to get our priorities straight. Using animal poop to power a moon rocket displays a certain savoir faire, and ambitious resourcefulness, that modern "woe-is-me-the-world-is-coming-to-an-end" media and academia seems to lack. In fact, I challenge the new US Democratic Congressional leadership to grab the manure with both hands, and march into the future with their eyes on the prize--regaining the moon.

Anything less would be letting us all down.

Best 50 Life Hacks from 2006

"Life Hacks" are simply personal shortcuts for getting the job done. Some may be elegant, others may be quick and dirty, but the end result is what is important.

Lifehack.org has compiled a list of 50 best Life Hacks from 2006. The topics include communications, creativity, goal setting, entrepreneurship, and motivation--among others.

Other life hack sites include Lifehacker.com and Businessballs. These sites, and others like them, are meant to give individuals the tools to succeed in spite of their natural failings. We all need a little help occasionally.

Islam--Is It Only For Countries With Low IQ?

Hong Kong (PRC)	107	Russia	96	Fiji	84
South Korea	106	Slovakia	96	Iran	84
Japan	105	Uruguay	96	Marshall Islands	84
Taiwan (ROC)	104	Portugal	95	Puerto Rico (US)	84
Singapore	103	Slovenia	95	Egypt	83
Austria	102	Israel	94	India	81
Germany	102	Romania	94	Ecuador	80
Italy	102	Bulgaria	93	Guatemala	79
Netherlands	102	Ireland	93	Barbados	78
Sweden	101	Greece	92	Nepal	78
Switzerland	101	Malaysia	92	Qatar	78
Belgium	100	Thailand	91	Zambia	77
China (PRC)	100	Croatia	90	Congo-Brazzaville	73
New Zealand	100	Peru	90	Uganda	73
United Kingdom	100	Turkey	90	Jamaica	72
Hungary	99	Indonesia	89	Kenya	72
Poland	99	Suriname	89	South Africa	72
Australia	98	Colombia	89	Sudan	72
Denmark	98	Brazil	87	Tanzania	72
France	98	Iraq	87	Ghana	71
Norway	98	Mexico	87	Nigeria	67
United States	98	Samoa	87	Guinea	66
Canada	97	Tonga	87	Zimbabwe	66
Czech Republic	97	Lebanon	86	Congo-Kinshasa	65
Finland	97	Philippines	86	Sierra Leone	64
Spain	97	Cuba	85	Ethiopia	63
Argentina	96	Morocco	85	Equatorial Guinea	59

Table courtesy of Wikipedia
Map courtesy of R. Pongett

The tabular data above comes from Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. For a good review of Richard Lynn's more recent and comprehensive Race Differences in Intelligence, look here.
Here is another fine analysis of the concept of GDP vs. IQ--with the element of free market rules thrown in.

Of muslim nations, Malaysia has the highest average IQ, 92. Malaysia's population contains 30% ethnic Chinese. Turkey has the second highest average IQ of muslim nations at 90. All other muslim nations have average IQ's of less than 90--some of them much less.

It is possible that some individual nations are misplaced on the above table, with average IQs either a bit higher or a bit lower than stated. But it is possible to detect trends by looking at different groupings of nations and their average IQ.

Given that population average IQ needs to be at least 90 for a modern technology based nation to function, immigration policy should be oriented toward inviting high value immigrants.

Observing what happened to Zimbabwe's prosperity after Robert Mugabe drove the most prosperous (and presumably most intelligent) farmers from their land, provides a good example of what NOT to do. Idi Amin's actions in Uganda provide another example. Fidel Castro's actions in Cuba provide a third. You don't want to drive out your intelligent and resourceful groups.

Update (26Dec06): Visit this Fourmilab page for a graphic illustration of the change in average global IQ with projected population trends. Accompanying the animated graphic is a thoughtful discussion of some of the issues involved in projecting trends in global intelligence.

Thanks to an Audacious Epigone commenter.

Lecture Prank

This is a great prank if your professor has a sense of humour. It's good for a belly laugh or two. No doubt this kind of prank is pulled at madrasas every day.

North Korea report by BBC July 2006

Living la vida loca in the worker's paradise, courtesy of fearless leader. This sounds like Jimmy Carter's idea of the perfect world. No Billy Beer, though.

My Favourite Carnivals

What is a Blog Carnival, you ask? A Blog Carnival is simply a blog posting that brings together in one place links to some of the best recent blog articles on a given topic.

My Favourite Blog Carnivals are:

Tangled Bank Science Carnival
Encephalon Neurocarnival
Grand Rounds Medical Carnival

Blog Carnivals typically travel from blog to blog, which is an excellent way of getting to know new blogs. Following the carnival links themselves is a fine way to acquaint oneself with new and worthy blogs.

Carnivals come and go. The Carnival of Tomorrow is a fine blog carnival for futurist and singularitarian bloggers that is temporarily in stasis. Al Fin was fortunate to be included in a few COTs during COT's vibrant phase.

Go ahead and look at lists of carnivals here and here. You may very well find carnivals that suit your taste, and that might become your favourites. Or, you may discover a carnival for which you are uniquely suited as a contributor.

Enjoy.

Arabs--Caught in a Trap of Illiteracy and Primitiveness

The causes of Arab underdevelopment identified in the report are lack of freedom, marginal participation of women in public life and educational backwardness.Arab people enjoy least freedom compared to any other region in the world — less than even the countries bordering southern Sahara. Civil rights are mostly ignored though they are incorporated in constitutions and legislations in those countries. There are several impediments for the free functioning of the agencies that are supposed to ensure these rights. Arab women get the least opportunity to participate in the economic and political activities compared to any other place in the world. The level of education among Arab women is the lowest in the world. More than 50 percent of them are illiterate. One of the most alarming facts revealed by the report is the backwardness of Arabs in the field of science. The level of education in the region is falling while the per capita spending on scientific research and development is the lowest in the world. In 1996, it was 0.4 percent of the GNP which is one-third of what Cuba spent on scientific research. In 1994, Israel allocated 6.35 percent for the GNP for research programs while in Japan it was 6.9 percent. Naturally, the educational backwardness increases the rate of illiteracy among Arabs. More than 65 million people, which accounts for 43 percent of the Arab population, are illiterate.Source.

* Islamists who do not recognize that humanistic ideas can serve as a basis for society. In their view, everything has existed in the past, and is present in the holy text [the Koran]. The present and future are not in our hands, but in the hands of a force that propels us like puppets. According to these Islamists, the proper way to live is to return to the times of our forefathers, in the seventh century, and to adopt the principle of the Shura [the consultative council] of early Islam.

When it is argued that the Shura never convened in the early Islamic era, that its representatives were appointed and not elected, that the idea of a society like that of the forefathers is imaginary with no basis in historical fact... they have no answer except to curse those raising these questions and to accuse them of heresy.

Al-Houni concludes that there is no point in arguing with Islamists so long as the starting points are different. The Islamists consider the past to be the pinnacle of humanity, whereas Al-Houni's starting point is human experience and history as an unending process.Source.

Arabs seem to be caught in their own traps of illiteracy and primitive modes of thinking. There may be no escape whatsoever. Sadly, the young generation is huge, illiterate, and oddly drawn to violent and irrational strains of Islam. It does not look good for the arab world, and anyone who must deal with it.

What is Wrong With Arabs?

Arabs are lagging in education, economy, democracy and freedom of expression, and computers. 2003—In Arab countries, with a combined population of 284 million, a “best seller” may have a print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and other constraints on independent publishers. Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind figures in the rest of the world: five times more books are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53 newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the global average of 78 per 1,000.

The first Arab Human Development Report in 2002 was a bombshell dropped onto the entire arab world. The report notes that while oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains "richer than it is developed." Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant.

Intellectuals flee a stultifying -- if not repressive -- political and social environment, it says.

Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.

The followup report in 2003 showed the situation to be no better. A group of Arab intellectuals issued a report yesterday that found the Arab world lacking in three areas they deemed fundamental to development: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and women's rights.
The group, criticized by Arab officials for a similar report last year, said the challenges caused by the deficiencies "may have become even graver" since 2002.
After dismal reports in 2002, 2003, and 2004, the UN HDR appears to have given up on the arab world. Who can blame them? Since World War II, the Arab world has lagged the rest of the planet in economic growth. For example, 300 million Arabs, and all that oil, generate less economic activity than Spain, and its population of 40 million. The main problem has been bad government. Too many dictators, and too much government restrictions on the economy. Too much corruption and waste. Even higher oil prices don't help, as it simply provides more money to be wasted on consumption, rather than business investment.

An Economist article, titled "Self-Doomed to Failure," captures the pathetic state of the arab world. The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

•Freedom. This deficit, in the UNDP's interpretation, explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment.

The area is rich in all the outward trappings of democracy. Elections are held and human-rights conventions are signed. But the great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right.


....•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.

One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

....•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women's desire to be allowed to get on.

...With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

Meanwhile in an ethnically divided Iraq with sectarian divisions, the first tentative steps have been taken toward democracy, as the rest of the arab world looks on with a wary curiousity. A few cautious voices believe that, in time, the Iraqi elections will put pressure on neighboring countries to democratize.

In Cairo, Hisham Qassem, chairman of a human rights organization and chief executive officer of a new Arab daily newspaper, believes that both the Iraqi and Palestinian elections have given impetus to democratic reform.
"Once people feel there are positive effects from the democratic process, they will want the same. Especially countries like Egypt who felt they were ahead of Iraq but are now lagging behind,” he said. Many arabs must be wondering if it takes an emasculating invasion from abroad and low level civil war to bring democracy to an arab country.

It takes more than democracy to bring the arab world out of the stone age. It will take economic reform. Since Saddam was tossed out in 2003, the economy has been governed by Western rules. As a result, GDP per capita doubled by the end of 2005, and the GDP is expected to grow another 49 percent by 2008. All this despite continued attacks by Sunni Arab rebels on oil facilities and other economic targets. It's much easier to start a business in Iraq now, even though there's still a lot of corruption. The big change is that now the corruption is illegal, and there is even progress in prosecuting the government officials who take bribes or try to shake down businessmen. Lebanon is the only other Arab state to run its economy in a Western fashion, and they have thrived.

It takes education reform and freedom of expression and the press. It will take implementation of full freedoms for women. Finally, it will take religious reform. Stone aged customs, traditions, and religious restrictions virtually guarantee that arabs will remain backward, laggards of the world.

Update: Here is more from a recent UN ILO report. Arabs living in the middle east and north africa are oddly resistant to modernisation and transitioning out of the stone age. Very strange, when you see how successful arabs can be when they migrate to a free environment. I suppose blaming the US and Israel will gain them at least another half century of stone age existence.