Dewey had a crystal ball?

So many of the points Dewey made since hold true today. In fact, I wonder how he might react today knowing that his predictions have come through. This book was no easy read for me, but here's a few things I got from it:

- The public is often an incoherent, almost non-existent force.
- It is likely to remain that way unless some significant situation/turmoil, a.k.a. negatively externality brings it together.
- Dewey believes in the public's ability to protect and deliberate correctly over important matters, but there are too many special and private interests that influence and deter the public's ability to do so, because the public does not get all the pertinent information.
- There is a need for improved communication for the public to come together.
- Democracy must begin at the level of the local community. It is important for people to get actively involved and express their opinions about matters that concern everyone in the community.
- Politics has to compete for people's attention with other things like technology, etc. which people find to be more desirable topics worth discussing.
- Policies need to be flexible rather than rigid.
- Policies also need to be tested properly to study their effectiveness.
- Dewey touches on the issue of how one should live with one's neighbors responsibly and how without doing so, one cannot be a part of "Great Community"

Mr. Bush should have a passage from this book read to him every night...even if it is too late to undo the mess.

Dyson et al.

There were three phases of the economy:

* The first wave, where the main engine for growth is farmers and laborers who toil to produce goods.

* The second wave, which revolved around major industries like packaged foods, oil, etc. and still largely dominate the scene today. All the land that was previously used for agriculture is now used by these industries.

* The third wave, is largely technological and is based on the creation of knowledge.

Every wave has learned to adapt from every subsequent wave. So farming techniques have improved due to industrialization leading to larger crop yields. Industries today have learned to adapt from the technological wave to increase quantities of mass-produced goods. Yet, the third wave will largely remain untapped while second wave thinking remains in place. The ability for technology to change people's lives will remain largely untapped for the time being.

And yet, I wonder if it is the melding of the second and third waves alone that will propel the discovery of new abilities of the third wave, as has been the case until now. Technological innovation has thusfar been facilitated by technological need.

The Information Society

"The global society reaches out to the entire planet, but it is not planetary."

As humanity and technology advance, there is a need for skilled labor to connect different parts of the world and conduct business as part of a global production cycle. To do so requires education and migrating to major commercial, financial and technological centers, where such skills would be implemented. As the reading puts it, the people without such skills become "structurally irrelevant" because they no longer have a place to stand or earn a good living in this new economy where there existing skills have no demand.

Thus, the monetary gains are earned by the skilled laborers who live in the major centers. And referring back to last week's Appadurai reading, this is why the BJP lost the 2004 elections in India. While it was true that India was fast becoming a part of the global economy, with the exporting of jobs and services to India from other countries, the ordinary village farmer saw none of the benefits or money that modern India, which lived in the major cities, had come to enjoy. It was this frustration with the financial divide between the urban and rural areas that prompted the Indian voter to bring the more populist, center-left leaning Congress coalition into power, with the hope that the new government would improve road and communications infrastructure across the country, better connecting the rural economy with its global counterpart.

Appadurai

I enjoyed reading the part about how the existence of nation-states through the centuries created vertebrate systems and how the development of advanced communications and IT networks have now led to the creation of cellular networks. But despite evidence to the contrary, I do wonder if nation states will exist in another couple of centuries, providing the backbone for commerce that they have done so far. The creation of the European Union, and its potential to become the economic rival of China in the years to come suggest this. Individual European nations realized the need to merge their trading regulations with a larger body, virtually dissolving their own independent ones....and in effect, also sacrificed a part of their national identity to be globally competitive.

How long before all countries merge into regions? And how will this affect globalization going forward?