08 November 2001

The View from the Limousine Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times, writes about how the attacks on 9/11 have exposed how costly and dangerous it has been to exclude most of the world's population from the high table: "In short, the world's elite enjoys vastly superior incomes and absorbs a correspondingly disproportionate proportion of the world's resources. Its ability to do so is the fruit of the physical, human, social and intellectual capital accumulated by its forebears over centuries. These ancestors did a remarkable job in seizing their opportunities. But they also enjoyed a favourable environment and first-mover advantage in exploiting the world's resources, from the Americas to oil and the atmosphere. Naturally, the elite has no intention of giving up what it has. Which elite ever has? The domestic politics of elite countries are about obtaining still more. It is no accident that the Kyoto targets for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions were virtually irrelevant to global warming or that redistribution of incomes within rich countries exceeds cross-border redistribution by up to two orders of magnitude. Yet this pampered global elite is shrinking. In 1950, today's high-income countries had 32 per cent of world population. Today, this is just over 19 per cent. By 2050, according to the US Bureau of the Census, it will be down to 13 per cent. The share of western Europe in world population is forecast to shrink from 6.4 per cent today to 4.0 per cent in 2050, while Japan's is set to fall even more sharply, from 2.1 per cent to 1.1 per cent. Ninety nine per cent of the 3bn increase in world population forecast for the next 50 years is expected to be in the developing world." The article is here. Via Lance Knobel's Davos Newbies, which started out in life as a weblog centred on the annual meeting of world movers and shakers in the Swiss mountain village of Davos, but has long since broadened in scope to cover political and economic issues. Thoughtful, provocative and highly recommended. Apple's iPod Here's a link for my brother Richard, musician and Mac user: the new Apple iPod portable music player, reviewed in the Seattle Times by journalist and weblogger Glenn Fleishman. Although it's pricey at $400, the iPod's way ahead of the flock of mp3 players that have preceded it. I hope that Apple pulls its finger out and produces a PC version soon, as it has promised. 7:06:20 AM