We live in the age of discoveries
Our times might be considered as the rerun of the early decades of the 1500s where scientific and technological breakthroughs are replacing geographical discoveries made about 500 years ago. This is the very reason why John Thornhill is absolutely right in saying that the time has come to bet big on fusion energy (FT, 19 November 2021). In the next 20 years, human ambitions will successfully drive new discoveries that will provide an answer to our main challenges. The single most important of all these challenges is to save Gaia – to save our planet. In order to overcome our destructive habits, we must create the ultimate carbon-free energy source from water and lithium. This is fusion energy.
Published on 15 December 2021
We should go an extra mile with GDP
All economists and politicians are right about GDP not being an ideal – to say the least – indicator of human progress. Ruchir Sharma is also right in seeing that an interim fix is at hand: replace GDP with per capita GDP as the main key measure of progress (FT, 8 November 2021). Why don’t we go an extra mile by using the per capita purchasing power parity GDP figure, as we do in central bank analyses? What’s more, why don’t we use a mix of several social and environmental factors – agreed upon by the IMF, OECD, BIS, Eurostat and the United Nations – to supplement the improved GDP figures? Taking a practical step-by-step approach is really better than doing nothing.
Published on 8 December 2021
Learn from the 2020 GDP data
A professor of political arithmetic urges us to scrap 2020 GDP data, regarding it as totally useless (Daniel Mügge, FT, 4 January 2021). Not at all – instead, let us learn a lot from 2020. For sure, the West failed to handle any of the three crises of pandemic, fear and economic loss efficiently. Asia fared much better. Both individuals and governments handled all sort of crises better in Asia, than in Europe or the US. One of the culprits is Western liberal thinking, where individual freedom is set above all other values. In Asia, common good trumps all other values. Also culpable is the perception of time. Western thinking tends to be short sighted; the Eastern horizon tends to be much longer. Hence, Western crisis management focused on safeguarding incomes while the Asian version concentrated on launching investments. Digital and green transition, electrification, robotics and all other disruptive technologies gained momentum via the pandemic in Asia. The West is trying to save the present, i.e. the past – in the meantime, the East is aiming to win the future. No wonder…
Published on 27 January 2021
Uncertainty fuels creativity
I perfectly agree with Perpetua Kirby (and Rebecca Webb) that being open to uncertainty supports curiosity, deep thinking and hope (FT, 8 March 2021). The pandemic ended the quest for a bubble of certainty. We all entered the weird quantum world where the name of the game is uncertainty. However, this is the new world of creativity, visions, big dreams, big projects and talented people. The information technology revolution that started in the 1970s seems to be a permanent revolution that will finally replace money and capital with talent and creativity. It is precisely uncertainty that fosters talent and creativity by strengthening curiosity, deep thinking, dreams and hopes. Uncertainty, like the universe, is our friend, but sometimes both seem to be frenemies.
Published on 7 April 2021
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