This is from a review of Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure islands : tax havens and the men who stole the world – a book (aptly described as “exceedingly readable - more like a thriller than a work of economics”) which I, too, thoroughly recommend. I wish I had written as good a review myself; but I didn't, and being pragmatic I'll just refer you straight over to the man who has.“Tax havens profoundly affect the way that we live ... They have contributed to a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, both globally and within the richest countries ... ... ... Tax Havens have a huge impact on the developing world.”...and...
“To see how Tax Havens work, consider a banana. Every banana in your fruit-bowl has taken two simultaneous paths to be there. One is the path of the actual banana. ... At the same time the banana takes a more circuitous route, but only on an accountant's piece of paper.”
Steve Wheeler yesterday mused on the social implications of head up display (HUD) devices as a projected way of unifying all the various screens (TV, computer, games console, phone, eReader, etc) which we now use in our daily lives.
It’s an interesting question ... especially as such development seems very plausible. I wrote a quick comment at about half past ten last night ( in a nutshell: that technologies don’t cause processes of social cohesion or fragmentation, but are used by them), but went on thinking about it.
The application of HUDs, and of ICT carapaces in general, is a topic which has interested me for some time. Ray Girvan and I (in our Babbage and Lovelace alter egos), wearing science spectacles, visited it in a Difference of Opinion piece, twelve years or so ago. In his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson gives his cyborg mercenary character Molly the ultimate HUD by implanting it directly on the optic nerve. Some current thinkers, such as Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading, believe that this is a likely future. The implanting of technology raises a lot of issues of its own but, from the viewpoint of Steve Wheeler’s question, it makes little difference whether the technology is internally or externally worn.
In an unusual reversal, I found myself thinking about an issue which Steve hadn’t mentioned: not the broader social picture but the specific application to educational spaces.
The classroom now is, to state the blindingly obvious, a different place from the ones in which I was a child. The dominant information retrieval technology, then, was the book, backed up by collections of books in a library; now it is the web. The dominant medium for execution and recording of learners’ work, then, was paper; that’s still true to greater or lesser extent, depending on level of the education process, but digital media are rapidly replacing it across the board. Surreptitious interaction between students in my primary days was by notes passed from hand to hand or (more daringly) written on paper darts; now it is by SMS or Twitter. The most important educational discourse of all, between students outside the classroom, used to take place in small social huddles in a café or other gathering place; it still does, but is now also amplified by networked digital media.
In some rural African schools, however, I’ve also had the opportunity to see an earlier model still. With only one copy of a key book, or perhaps no books at all, information is delivered verbally from teacher to child. Slates provide a writing surface for working on, but not for storage of information, so the educational model is based very much on memorisation. There are no paper notes or darts, because there is no paper and because constant attention is essential in a single serial flow of unrecoverable information. Most interaction takes place outside, again in physical gatherings.
Between those rural African schools and my British, Irish and US students lie two distinct step changes. There have, of course, been processes constructed from numerous other changes, many of them radical ... from books as expensive investments to cheap mass publication, for instance; the arrival of radio and TV in schools ... but let’s keep it simple: from slate to book to networked digital information. Thanks to programmes such as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), some children in the developing world are leapfrogging the middle step: from slate directly to the constructivist possibilities of WiFi global interaction. (I said children. Older students too, of course, but the process often starts at the root, with children learning to read and type rather than read and write, using laptops as primers and learning to maintain them as well.) This sudden leap really does produce social tensions: primary school age children suddenly have access to an informational world which is not just incrementally different from that of their parents (and teachers), as has always happened, but an inconceivable leap in paradigm. Grandparents (parents, for teenaged students) in Europe and the US talk of a disconnect from their children’s educational processes because of the ICT explosion since their own school days; magnify that a millionfold for a physically and culturally isolated rural developing world community into which comes an OLPC powered educator bearing clockwork or solar powered laptops.
We are, in the liberal democracies, already looking at an educational landscape which is detaching itself from physical location. How far that detachment will go, we cannot yet guess. I am inclined to think that human beings are strongly gregarious, and the desire for some components of education to be sited within a mutual physical space is likely to persist; but there is no longer any absolute need for it to do so. There is certainly no future for a model which restricts education to the classroom or lecture hall, nor probably even for one which focuses it primarily there. Already, more than half of my students come into a physical campus very rarely and a small but significant (and growing) proportion never do so at all. Some colleagues in the Scottish Highlands and Islands (or in Scandinavia, or the Australian outback, or other areas of scattered population) reverse my position: they only ever meet a small minority of their students. Increasing use is made of virtual worlds. In that sort of world, too, there is no necessary reason to tie faculty into a physical location which their students no longer inhabit.
We are perched on the cusp of a dispersion about which we can only hypothesise imaginatively. And replacement of multiple screens by personal HUDs could, I suspect, be a trigger for the next step change. What essential need will there be for a student sit in a computer centre to study material which is as easily available lying on a grassy bank in the sunshine, or sitting with a cup of coffee in the kitchen at home, or even walking around the neighborhood like (as my nephew pointed out to me recently) Aristotle’s peripatetics?
One of the things about which I agree with Steve Wheeler (there are many, despite areas of difference) is his conviction that the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a dinosaur. It does have necessary functions. In the short term, it serves as a vehicle (admittedly very imperfect) by which old codgers of my own generation migrate from old ideas to new methods. More persistently, it is likely to remain an essential repository for some institution specific information for privacy and commercial sensitivity reasons. Those are, however, a very small rump of the functions which institutions, stuck well behind the rapidly expanding wavefront of socioeducational reality, presently try to cram into it. Ironically, though, I suspect that as education from the students’ point of view evaporates off into various mixes of physical location, the institutional VLE will gain a very modest second lease of life, as the management core for administrative interconnection of increasingly subdivided and diversified personal learning programmes.
I met a very interesting person, today.
It was seven in the morning, and the air was bitterly cold as I arrived at the bus stop. My bus was due in ten minutes. The man already standing there with no hat told me that he had been waiting for half an hour, he had given up on the bus he'd come for and was now looking forward to the next.
We got chatting, as people do when they stand for any length of time together in the dark and the cold. We compared notes on this and that, and eventually got around to what we do.
He is a doctor, a GP working in a practice at the other end of two bus routes. That already puts him above me in the scale of things; the world needs doctors more than it needs mathematicians. But as we talked, there was more. He is Senegalese. He trained at the University of California medical school at Davis. He runs a free clinic in Senegal.
Hang on ... wind back a bit ... if he runs a free clinic in West Africa, what is he doing at a bus stop on the western edge of Europe?
He is, I learned, one of several doctors at the clinic. Since free clinics generate no income, and since this one is unfunded, money has to come from somewhere to pay its running costs and to feed the families of the staff (medical and otherwise). So, the doctors take it in turns to take contracts in developed economies. The income from these contracts goes to maintain the clinic, its staff, and their dependents. My bus stop companion is in his sixties and half way through a two year contract, a year away from his family whom he misses desperately and with another year to go.
That this system is able to work depends, of course, on the same asymmetry which makes it necessary: the yawning gulf between first and third world economies. This doctor, and his colleagues, live and work at one end of an economic gravity well where money is scarce so costs and incomes are low. They have found a way to exploit that same gradient, using it to make a first world salary run a clinic, pay operating costs (including salaries), and provide pension provision for old age.
I've seen a fair amount of quiet heroism in the face of third world poverty and health needs. In the field, I've carried bedpans or washed bandages or ... but then I've always scuttled back to my comfortable first world billet. I've supported campaigns to fund third world medicine ... but never for even a day to the extent that this man and his partners do, across whole lifetimes. Any of them could stay permanently in our more comfortable settings, bring their families with them, reap the rewards of the hard work which gained them the qualifications and expertise which they now possess ... but they don't.
I didn't get around to asking where the pump priming finance came from, to put him through a US medical school in the first place. Wherever it came from, though, it wasn't used to buy his way out of hardship; it has been ploughed back over a lifetime into his roots.
Four of the charity links at the top left of this page point to organisations concerned with the third world; two of them are medical; one is dedicated to helping communities meet long term health issues and thus escape a cycle which they can't afford to break on their own. If you have money which you are inclined to donate, any one of those charities (and many more besides) would be a worthy recipient – but, after my bus stop conversation, Health Poverty Action (formerly Health Unlimited) is the one that will get any extra that I have available this festive season. And if you want to combine a lifeline with present giving, they have a selection of ideas starting from as little as US$8/€6/£5 (a contribution to child health monitoring) running up by easy increments ($16/€12/£10, $24/€18/£15...) through a set of surgical instruments ($160/€120/£100) to the top whack installation of a life saving water system ($630/€470/£400).
It’s fashionable to scoff at Thomas Robert Malthus’ predictions, two hundred years ago, that human populations would grow until stopped by famine, disease or ‘moral restraint’. He wrote before the arrival of modern scientific crop research or contraception, and it’s unfair to blame Malthus for not foreseeing those breakthroughs. However, he was essentially right: the food supply expanded but remains finite, and contraception has not fundamentally disrupted the shape of the population growth curve, which is asymptotically approaching the vertical.
What to do about it is a matter of vigorous debate. To simplify: in the red corner are those who focus on means of increasing supply; in the blue, those who emphasise a dietary shift away from inefficient use of that supply. An Isaac Asimov short story[1] did suggest exploiting the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum physics to disperse a trillion-strong population by placing every family on its own otherwise uninhabited Earth, but that one is a little beyond the reach of even today’s scientific computing power. In the long run, if the upward population curve continues, neither red approach nor blue will do more than defer the problem; in the meantime, pragmatically, both are needed. [More]
1. Isaac Asimov, “Living space”, in Science Fiction. 1956, New York (NY, USA): Columbia Publications.
A TTMF post sent me to a Santa Fe Reporter article which is interesting to a European reader for the unusually European (as opposed to USAmerican) cast of its analysis. That's not why I mention it, however. What made be stop and think was the following interesting and thought provoking para in relation to a textbook:
“Should she get it from Amazon or download the Kindle version? Bowles quickly rules out the Kindle because it makes the text impossible to share. Reading between the lines, Bowles’ choice reveals the hidden symbolism of each medium: If the paperback is Karl Marx, the Kindle is Ayn Rand.”
I've always made my book format selections on personal and/or practical bases. I generally prefer paperbacks to hardbacks because they are lighter, more compact, easier to use on the fly. I æsthetially enjoy reading paper books more than electronic ones, which is important to me. Electronic text offers mass portability, instant access, powerful searching, so has the edge for reference. Though I have a Kindle, I never use it; other electronic platforms work better for me.
I've not considered, before, the impact of electronic texts on inequality of access to literacy (I use the word literacy, rather than literature, deliberately). I shall, in future, do so. The advantages of electronic access remain and, in the case of (for example) Gutenberg Project texts, sharing is in many important ways enhanced; but the restrictive downside will from now on be a factor on the other side of the scales.
In the course of work, recently, I ran across the following paragraph:
“So, what does 107 million underweight children under the age of five really mean? Before you can answer that, make the child come alive. Give her a name. I call mine "Esperanza". It means that little Esperanza has probably gone to bed hungry for each or most of the 1825 nights that she has lived so far. And, there are 107 million Esperanzas in Asia.”
“the responses required to counter the potentially disastrous consequences of the wealth-poverty divide interacting with an ecologically constrained global system are truly radical. ... ... ... The war on terror has been a disaster, but recognising its failure might at least help us develop our understanding of global security in a manner appropriate to the 21st Century.”
In his October briefing, when Obama's decision on extra troops was still uncertain, Paul Rogers said if it went in favour of a McChrystal surge:
“It is therefore possible that US policy will move in the direction of bypassing Karzai and working more consistently with local and provincial administrations. If this were to be emulated by other ISAF contingents, and if foreign development assistance was to be substantially increased, along with a greater willingness to engage with some insurgent actors, then the beginnings of a new approach might start to emerge. If not, then a war of many years duration remains likely.”
Well; now we have the surge.
Though it was published three months ago, I'm afraid I have only just read Solidar's Briefing paper #11.
If you haven't yet read it either, in my opinion it's worth getting a round to.
“...before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the jitters on Wall Street, the developing world was already suffering from a massive lack of affordable food and fuel. In addition, the challenges of climate change, HIV/AIDS and the attainment of almost all of the Millennium Development Goals were already combining to make an urgent revision of our economic modus operandi a necessity. The latest financial crisis, its impact on the real economies of developing and developed countries alike and the strain this will put on aid budgets have transformed this from an urgent task to an urgent necessity.”
Why do I insist on mentioning this, each year?
Not because I particularly wish to warn against nuclear weapons. That moment is long past.
Nor because I wish to continue emphasising a particular act of war (amongst many) from sixty four years ago.
Because it is an occasion to remember that we have gone on creating and using ever more effective ways to kill civilians. A good occasion to think about napalm, perhaps. Or the many Iraqi civilian deaths (something like a hundred thousand so far) which we ignore as we note on our television screens only the relatively tiny numbers of our own military losses. Or those in the ongoing mess which is Palestine.
And perhaps also the deaths by negligence while we pour funding into means of killing. Like the nearly ten million children under age five who die every year from causes which we could prevent by diverting just a small fraction of our military spending.
That's why I insist on mentioning Hiroshima Day.
Two posts this morning touch on a single (in my mind, at any rate) theme. First, TTMF's "Altair – the next Eagle"; second (though posted earlier, I read it later) Unreal Nature's "Health warning". One is about the future of the space programme, and mentions the collateral implications of such intensely funded projects. The other is about "the art world", and doesn't mention the huge sums of money spent there but does reference the arenas for them – a Christie's auction, for instance.
Being lazy, I'll recycle my comment on Jim's space programme post:
“I, too, have very mixed feelings about spending on space travel when there are so many in dire need here on earth. I'm not willing to say "we aren't likely to spend the money to address the earthbound mission, so..." But I do know that human beings must be stretched if they are to survive and that ultimately my argument would mean no science, no arts, no collective challenge. And I would rather see space research as the R&D engine than warfare. If I am going to use up my energies battering my head against a wall, trying to get money switched away from one objective towards earthbound deprivation, I would rather direct them towards the military sponge.”
I've not commented on Julie's art world post, so will have to write something new.
Historically, there has always been a link between wealth and art; but until comparatively recent times it was directly linked to production. Michelangelo produced great art because he was paid to do so by wealthy people who wanted the results. Michelangelo got his start because wealthy people wanted great art at bargain basement prices and went to new, unknown talents who were cheaper.
There were, of course, many down sides (including the complete erasure of women from art history) to this arrangement. I am not getting idealistic or romantic about it, simply noting it.
Now it's different. There are, of course, still patrons: people like Charles Saatchi, for instance, who buy new work and thus elevate it to fashionable and collectable status. For the most part, however, the arrangement is that the artist invests in her/his own work and future while the art world waits to cash in later. It's a cliché, but true, that Vincent van Gogh sold not one painting (if you prefer one, or two, sales it doesn't affect my point and I'm not concerned to argue minutiae here) but his work now changes hands for millions.
I'm not idealistic enough to think that it's possible to dent that megabucks art market. Perhaps, though, it would be possible to levy a percentage of the money and divert it to public art expenditure. Then that expenditure could be targeted at the bottom of the tree. One percent of the price paid in 1987 for van Gogh's Garden at the Saint-Remy would pay for two young artists, just starting out, to spend a year in residence at schools in deprived areas – thus supporting their production of early work and simultaneously feeding the minds of hundreds of their potential successors.
Gough Whitlam, in a foreword to Germaine Greer's The obstacle race, points out that a cultured society doesn't arise because it has a few high profile geniuses: it arises from a widespread foundation of culture. He was talking about art, but it applies to science too. I have seen how inspired young people are by the presence amongst them for even a day of real scientists. There are charities (for example, to choose one which I've encountered personally, Clifton Scientific Trust). Imagine how many young minds would get that opportunity if anyone working on the space programme, in any capacity at all, was required to spend one day per year (roughly 0.4% of their working life) in a school. Or, if the equivalent amount of money was spent on placing recent graduates as "scientists in residence" for longer periods. Or, the same equivalent amount of money devoted to employing young scientists on finding ways to apply emerging technologies in aid of the most deprived societies.
It's not realistic to talk of shutting down spending in the science and art (or any other) markets while other needs exist. But it is realistic to talk of ways in which that money can be made to work for what Jim calls "the earthbound mission".
I've been playing with Wolfram's Alpha computable data search (or "computational knowledge") engine.
It's an educational gift. Try typing in:
...or...
So ... the long civil war in Sri Lanka is apparently over, with military victory of the government over the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) insurgency.
No tears for the LTTE, which has shown the worst excesses of human rights abuse over its quarter century campaign. But let's not forget, in the shadow of that blight, that the government has its own grim history of abuses. Nor the tens of thousands dead, nor hundreds of thousands injured and displaced.
And let's not forget, in the longer term, that the origin of this human disaster lay (as it almost always does) in repression and injustice. Unless the Tamil population are, in the aftermath of military victory, embraced as full and equal parts of a single civil society, their legitimate grievances fully and effectively addressed, the whole cycle will just start over again.
Always and everywhere, if "we" push "them" to the point of desperation where "they" take up arms against "us", then "we" carry much of the burden of responsibility for what follows.
As this appears in print, a new US president will be in his first weeks at the head of an administration informed by respected earth scientists including John Holdren, Jane Lubchenco, and Steven Chu. The words ‘earth science’ usually evoke those disciplines concerned with the lithosphere (particularly geology, seismology, and vulcanology), but public concern is rising about the effects of human interaction with the other three spheres as well – and all sectors of the earth sciences are intensive consumers of computing resources.
Computational science began with water. Societies dependent upon fertile flood plains surrounded by arid regions needed advance knowledge of when their rivers would ebb and flood; and from that arose everything from algebra to astronomy. Today, from acute surges in the Thames to chronic vulnerability in Bangladesh, from one-off disasters such as the 2004 tsunami to the global rise in sea level, flooding remains a primary concern. A tsunami is not only a hydrospheric phenomenon, it is also in the class of seismic events. Sea levels are rising due to many causes, but one significant influence is melting of old ice as a result of changing climate – which also affects the crust beneath it, and the flow of Coriolis currents. Scientific computing in these areas embraces collection, assembly, and analysis of huge, complex data sets. There are other data associated with the human impacts of earth science events: mortality, economic dislocation, rescue, recovery, and medical demand. [more...]
Though an uncompromising nonbeliever myself, I'm not deaf to the wisdom of others who frame their ethics in faith terms. For that reason, I usually find the BBC's "Thought for the day" slot worth listening to. To quote the BBC:
"A unique reflection from a faith perspective on topical issues and news events. Speakers from across the world’s major faiths offer a spiritual insight rooted in the theology of their own tradition."
It doesn't always deliver, but an investment of three minutes is a small price to pay for the many times when it does.
Akhandadhi Das, in particular, is usually excellent value. So is Rabbi Lionel Blue, who also provides a bonus in the form of good jokes. Both of them, and others besides, enlarge my humanity.
Today's thought came from Canon Lucy Winkett (of St Paul's cathedral, in London. It was interesting throughout, starting from the calorific and locomotion requirements of Homo neanderthalensis , passing through reference to Valentine's Day excess, and finishing with the observation which caught me to spark this post: "eating is a moral issue in a hungry world".
When it becomes available, I'll add a link to the MP3 file download. Here, after a delay of a week because something happened at the BBC's site, is the player link.
Response to events like the Isra'eli assault on Gaza should not obscure the ongoing, everyday violence inflicted on a majority of our world ... of which hunger is both a significant component and an avoidable foundation.
One of the best statistical analysis packages around* is GenStat from VSN International (VSNi). It also has the most comprehensive data source support I have seen. Added to that is the company's enlightened approach to growing their market, with free products available to both developing world users (GenStat Discovery) and education (GenStat for Teaching).
Developing world analysis is a particular hobbyhorse of mine, so the Discovery edition raises thoughts about how this important provision of a (Windows) software package will coëxist with the UN's promotion of open, nonproprietary (particularly Linux based) systems in that arena. Education is another of topic on which I frequently bore people to tears, and there are increasing numbers of Linux equipped personal machines appearing in that market. Then again. we have the substantial minority of users (particularly, but not exclusively, in the arts) who swear by their Apple Macs. Me, I don't use a Mac but I approve of plurality – and, besides, Mac OS is UNIX compliant.
Rumour has it that use of GenStat on Linux platforms is in the pipeline. In the meantime, according to another rumour , a PhD student is successfully running GenStat Discovery on a Leopard Mac using CrossOver Mac. Although there is no official confirmation, a little bird close to the heart of VSNi tells me that both rumours are true.
Nearly four years back, a colleague (more determined and technally savvy than I) got GenStat Discovery running for me on a Linux machine using the WINE compatibility layer, which was good news but not as simple to repeat as I might have wished. CodeWeavers, writers of CrossOver Mac (and its sibling CrossOver Linux) have based their product in the WINE project, but a lot of work has been done in the past four years: while I haven't witnessed GenStat running on crossover, I can vouch for a smooth and effortless experience with a couple of other Windows application products. Like WINE, CrossOver is not an emulator but an open source Windows API implementation running your application under your chosen OS.
So, the best of all possible words would seem to be within reach: Discovery and Teaching versions of GenStat available to the user bases which can most benefit from them – on whichever platform they find most appropriate.
*I notice that somebody has described it as "One of the industry's most serious packages" ... on closer examination, that someone was me. By way of a disclaimer, I have no vested interest in VSNi or Genstat (in fact,for historical reasons, my own data analysis is usually done in another product entirely). I say that GenStat is superb simply because, objectively, it just is.
In a recently filed article for Scientific Computing World (appearing next month: plug!) I mention in passing a general consensus that hexapods are the best compromise between stability and data analytic complexity in "walker" robots. Gayle Reynolds, however, points out that MIT spin off Boston Dynamics, with DARPA funding, have chosen to make a quadruped named BigDog their centrepiece.
It looks like a spider that's missing four legs, sounds like an enormous bee, and it's certainly something I wouldn't want to see coming at me in the dark. (Gayle Reynolds)
Watch the video here to see what she means – especially the bit about sounding like an enormous bee.
I dislike military robots, and money poured into military programmes, though I doubt than my distaste will change anything. From a practical military point of view, Gayle's comment about the noise (result of running on an internal combustion engine) is significant: if I were a soldier in the field, I would want to put considerable distance between myself and anything attracting attention with that sort of racket. At the same time, I can't help being intellectually interested. In particular, I am deeply impressed by the way it recovered its footing after slipping and skidding on ice halfway through the video.
This is obviously intended to be an intelligent mechanical load carrier, accompanying infantry over terrain inaccessible to wheeled or tracked support, and it could be extremely good at that. I can only hope that, once developed, the technology will also be applied to more socially useful contexts like disaster relief. In the rubble of an earthquake stricken city, for example, BigDog could serve as a heavy equipment carrier for search, rescue and paramedic teams. It could be a mobile instrument platform searching hazardous partially collapsed structures for survivors, perhaps ferrying in quantities of RHex (or even appropriately equipped RiSE) hitch hikers to penetrate smaller and less accessible spaces. It could even mount equipment to start digging for those survivors, or prepare the ground for human rescuers.
I realised, this morning, on reading an untitled post by Thinking Through My Fingers, that I'd been sloppy in my writing of "End of Empires" a few days ago.
My starry eyed "shining house on the hill" comment (quoting, of course, former US president Ronald Reagan) was intended as reference to a very particular delusion suffered by imperial centre populations everywhere and everywhen. This delusion convinces them that the empire is built upon moral principles, maintained by reason and goodness, from the foundations upwards to the fluttering pennants on the soaring towers. They, the citizens of the imperial centre, are a beacon of sweetness and light in a dark world uplifted by the existence of its glow. The reality towards which they need to move is realisation that empires are built upon the subjection of others, maintained by misery and pain, with any benefit to the empire being a coincidental side effect of self interest at the centre.
In the more general case I am, in fact, very much in favour of idealism, and grateful to TTMF for reminding me of the fact. I am (probably with justice) frequently accused of being too much of a starry eyed dreamer myself. (I also, incidentally, approve of trying to "grow freedom everywhere" ... but grow, please note - not ram forcibly into the first available orifice.)
I don't think there is a necessary conflict between the two stances. I would like the people in the imperial centre to abandon their delusion, yes ... but then, having looked with open and clear eyes at what they are, to start demanding that actions be retargetted to the benefit of human beings (regardless of society or geography) instead of empire.
Very often, that will mean leaving well alone - letting others sort out their own affairs. Very often, though, it will mean acting. TTMF offers one example: genocides.
The US could, with a fraction of the (financial or human) cost expended in Iraq, intervene to prevent some instances.
A less fraught example is disease. The cost of supplying mosquito nets to every person in Africa would be a pinprick compared to the cost so far in Iraq. A month's US military expenditure (or, if you prefer, just under two months for the EU, nine for the UK), if reallocated, could eliminate 95% of preventable disease across the globe - and illiteracy too.
Everything, as TTMF rightly says, starts with a dream. But it has to be the right dream. The problem with empires is that they start with dreams of greed and power, so they continue in the same vein and everything is downhill from there on.
A legitimate question thrown at idealists like me is: "that's all very well ... but, in the real world where you want us to live, why would rich populations pay out for the good of strangers the sort of money they currently pay for a combination of defence and the securing of further wealth?" Fair enough, and it deserves an answer. My reply would be that a world rescued from starvation and disease, given education and clean water, would be a better and more profitable community of trading partners ... and would also contain many fewer enemies against whom defence and security were needed. As my fifth grade teacher, Mrs Fatchen, told us: you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar[1]. It would achieve the same ends, for a fraction of the economic cost.
The reduction in social cost would not be chicken feed either. To no longer live in constant fear of another 9/11 on the one hand, or the attention of Homeland Security on the other is not to be sneezed at.
Then there are all those young men and women who, instead of dying in remote countries, can become business people or teachers or pop singers or grocers or footballers or realtors or just layabout bums but still alive. I'm not so starry eyed as to think that the military can be dispensed with in my brave new world; but it could be smaller, cheaper, more focussed on defence rather than long range implementation of imperial power, and (who knows) play a rôle in the occasional stopping of genocide.
I share TTMF's advocacy of starry eyed dreams, and look forward to more of them. It's self delusions of sainthood as fig leaves for rapaciousness that we need to grow away from.
I say less about such things in here than I ought to. I don't know why ... as everyone who knows me will tell you, I refuse to shut up about them in person, and am very tedious company as a result.
It's not just in Iraq, or just in war zones, that such imbalances occur. Across Africa, twelve percent of children die before their first birthday and twenty percent before their fifth. Most of those need not die if we spent ridiculously small amounts. Many of them die of diarrheal dehydration, which kills three million children a year globally but can be countered by oral rehydration with solutions of sugar and salt.
Oxfam used to have a poster, in the 1980s, pointing out that all of humanity could have clean water, free health care, and primary education, for an amount of money equivalent to two weeks' global military expenditure. I don't know whether that exact equivalence still holds, but take it as a working approximation to be ashamed of. And remember that "world military expenditure" is not something distant and amorphous: half of all world arms expenditure is US arms expenditure and four percent of it is British. That means that the US could remove poverty on its own in a month out of its defence budget, Britain (or Japan, or China, or Isra'el) in one year.
That's still big money, though. Let's think smaller. Rough calculations show that Dr C's per capita contribution to global military spending is somewhere around US$3000, mine US$2000. Let's be cautious, and say an average of US$2000 per capita across our two countries. How much sugar and salt could be supplied for US$2000? How many rehydrations could be funded if both our countries put just 0.1% of their military expenditure into it?
And for all our talk of information revolutions and information explosions and information superhighways, how many citizens of our vaunted information societies actually receive the information to make such comparisons?