Growth, jobs and more

July 20 1969 is one of those dates that many of us remember. I was 7 then. We had a black and white TV with a cherry wood casing and yellowish buttons and dials. There was only one TV channel and most of the time it was airing not Slovenian but Yugoslav programs. However, TV Ljubljana was perhaps the only TV station from behind the iron curtain that had a live transmission of the moon landing. One of the commentators was an engineer, a colleague of my father, otherwise specializing in geology and earthquakes. Yes, it was a big step for mankind. Are we still making steps or do we prefer sitting in the pub? In June I visited the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Hollywood has this ability to show space travel, rockets, and shiny equipment as if they were out of this world. But in a museum you see the real stuff. A computer that has less capacity than the processor in my microwave. The knobs, the buttons, the wiring, the clothing and zippers, primitive even compered to my skiing outfit. It al...

France passed a law on digital piracy.  FT reports : Internet users who download films and music without paying for them would get three warnings before being cut off for up to a year. Until now action against illegal file sharing has been a matter for the French courts. The debate in Europe is not if Internet piracy is legal or not, but whether we uphold the rule of law and make sure that a court has to decide to block a person off the internet, or this can be done by some other authority. Imagine that the highway toll collectors could ban people from using the highways if they though they are transporting fake Gucci bags: Lawyers say France’s move to cut the courts out of the issue of internet access may contravene the European Convention of Human Rights and could spark conflict with Brussels. Long awaited reform of EU telecoms regulation has been held up by disagreements over whether the courts should be involved. The bigger issue at stake here is   are courts fit for the s...

  Speaking of Global Governance and ideas on how new financial regulation will make future crises impossible, a quote from the movie “ Other People’s Money ” comes to mind: Kate Sullivan : Someday, we’ll smarten up, change some laws, and put you  out of business . Lawrence Garfield : You can change all the laws you want.  You can’t stop the game . I’ll still be here. I adapt.

The world is in a transition from industrial and information economy into conceptual economy. Value is in meaning, not in function. The resource of this economy are talents. They are empowered by information and communication technologies.  The game is how to make use of all this talent. Businesses do open innovation, governments should do open government. It does not end with transparency, it is about how decision-making in a society would rely on as many good brains as possible. You do this by (a) letting people, individuals, not governments decide and (b) when government has to make decisions, it should do it in an open way – provide a platform for reaching decisions and agreements among stakegolders. Governments must take steps to support this conceptual economy. They should (a) create, attract, retain and empower talent, (b) provide technical infrastructure (internet for all) such that does not stifle innovation and competition and (c) think what kind of intellectual property ...

  On his blog,   Daniel Pink is writing   about the   CNN poll   that is finding, that people have a much more positive view on their personal situation than on the state of economy in general. And concludes: If enough people think everyone else is doomed, eventually they’ll doom themselves. How true. A Eurobarometer study reports the same story as the CNN survey. Note the huge discrepancy between the perceived financial situation of a household (64% at least rather good) and that of the economic situation in the World (only 20%), the EU (33%) and the home country (29% very good or rather good). This crisis is a result of many different factors and it will not be resolved by a single silver bullet. Many things will have to be addressed, in a coordinated way. The general fear and pessimism is one of them.

Since the young in the West take peace between Germany and France for granted, and the young in the East got used to democracy without a fear of communism, the European Union and its institutions seems to be running out heroic missions. To be relevant to the “citizen” the EU needs to provide useful services that are making life easier for the businesses and improving the quality of life the people rather than make history. The European institutions are permanently looking for ways to present themselves useful and relevant to the citizen, so that he or she would eventually improve its attitude towards the European project and look up to Brussels with a similar admiration as when the idea of a common market helped the continent out of the ashes. And there are plenty of ways being offered by all kinds of NGOs, pressure groups and lobbysts. A few days ago  Euractiv reported  on dangers of iPods: Consumer groups have asked the Commission to “revise existing safety standards” to pro...

In a  letter to Michelle and Barack Obama, NASA’s Jim Hanson  makes some valid critique of the “cap and trade” approach to the reduction of CO2 emissions that we also embraced in Europe: Policies being discussed in national and international circles now, which focus on ‘goals’ for emission reduction and ‘cap and trade,’ have the same basic approach as the Kyoto Protocol. This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity. “Cap and trade” generates special interests, lobbyists, and trading schemes, yielding non productive millionaires, all at public expense. The public is fed up with such business. The physics of the matter, together with empirical data, also define the need for a carbon tax. Alternatives such as emission reduction targets, cap and trade, cap and dividend, do not work, as proven by honest efforts of the ‘greenest’ countries to comply with the Ky...