08-11-2006, 05:32 AM
http://www.gurusonline.tv/uk/conteudos/naisbitt2.asp
http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/jul/25inter.htm
I assume that the rise of China will also be one of the subjects covered.
Most certainly. However, it won't be as meteoric as many experts would have us believe. All this hype about China is just crazy. You'd think the Chinese would be conquering the USA next Tuesday morning. But on sober reflection, it will take another 30 to 40 years before the catch-up race can really begin. Obviously China is becoming more and more of a production site for the rest of the world, and the Chinese will soon have a leading role in design or even research. But we should never lose sight of the actual state of the game, the facts. Which would bring us to another mindset. If I read in the newspaper that Arsenal won 3-2, then I'm pretty confident that that is in fact the case. That's also why I like reading the sports pages so much. The reports there are the most reliable in the whole newspaper. In principle, there would also be quite reliable facts in the political pages, but they're not so immediately obvious. For instance, when Schröder was in office he was speaking of a prospering economy even when the sobering facts were revealing growth of only 0.1 percent.
Of course, sports journalists also report on missed chances and adverse conditions, but at the end of the day the only thing we're interested in is the result. Translating that into terms of China: although the size of its economy, with a gross domestic product of just under 2 trillion US dollars, is already considerable, that of the USA is still six times bigger.
If you don't foresee an economic takeover by China, what other major changes do you expect by the middle of the century?
Nothing major will happen in the very near future. If we look back into the past, we see that revolutionary innovations appear in clusters. We saw the last proliferation at the end of the last century, which was when all the big breakthroughs in information technology and biotechnology occurred. Now we'll spend the next fifty to a hundred years further developing and perfecting these innovations. That takes time. Take the example of measuring time. From the first water-clock in China to the Swatch watch took around three thousand years of further development. Even the aeroplane was invented more than a hundred years ago now, and we're still flying in accordance with the same principle. The jet airplane was only one step in aircraft development, not a genuine innovation.
One the one hand we've got people in the western world living longer and longer, while the eastern world, with its large population of children, is becoming increasingly stronger economically. Will we soon be a bit pushed for space on Earth?
Not at all. As general prosperity grows, so the average birth rate contracts to the same extent. In Europe a woman gives birth to an average of less than 1.4 children. But we would need 2.1 just to replace ourselves. People like to talk of the sustainable use of natural resources; but we ignore our own sustainability completely and are also still very choosy about immigrants. If things carry on this way in Europe, in two generations the population will be only half the size it is today. That is an enormous problem, which hardly anybody talks about.
What other problems do you still see in store for Europe?
Earlier, I used to believe Europe had an identity crisis. Having lived here for the last six years, I'm talking nervous breakdown. It has no proper leadership, instead it's just got all the more rules and regulations that Brussels wants to impose from the top down. And something else that is utterly ridiculous is that Constitution that runs to more than 800 pages, which the French and the Dutch quite understandably rejected. Nobody knows what's in it. Depending on the paper size, the US Constitution is eight to twelve pages long and everybody can make something of those principles.
Is the idea of a united Europe doomed to failure then?
Europe will never become a federation. Despite all the regulations, it functions very well as a free trade area. But the move to a federation with a common foreign policy will never happen. What we have is 25 states with 25 different mindsets.
So the USA's economic and political world domination will still last a while longer, then?
America is a world empire just as the Roman Empire once was. And it doesn't look as though that is likely to change in the very near future. And I wouldn't even want to qualify that either. For me, what count are the facts, the state of the game. America has by far the strongest economy. In second place comes Japan, but only by a very wide margin. And the Japanese economy has been standing still for so many years it's as good as dead. Ultimately, there is only one serious contender on the horizon. And that will most definitely not be the EU, which can't even ensure order militarily in its own backyard.
Which brings us back to China.
Right. But the USA's not standing still either. Admittedly it's showing growth of only four percent compared to ten percent in China, but the US economy is six times bigger.
Now there are more and more experts in Switzerland as well who think this constant striving for growth is absurd.
Well, you tell these people: "If you don't grow, you die!" That applies equally to people, trees, companies or economies. If Europe doesn't manage to crank up its growth, sometime or other it will become an historic open-air museum with a high standard of living for rich Asians and Americans. That is not a bad thing in itself. After all, I live here, too, and I think it's great. But that can hardly be the EU's ultimate objective, can it?
On the other hand, I don't find the idea of unrestrained global growth, bringing us millions of new stinking exhaust-pipes in Asia year after year, exactly alluring either.
That's a problem for which I don't have a solution to hand.
But I'm still keen to hear what you think.
Basically, the Chinese think we've got a nerve, wanting to give them any advice on protection of the environment, let alone making demands. After all, the West has done exactly the same thing itself. Hence my proposal now for each additional car that appears on the street in China we take one out of circulation here. Of course no-one here will find that so very funny. For that reason we have to find cleaner alternatives to today's carbon-fuelled engine. We can't withhold from others what we don't want to do without ourselves.
What will be the clean energy of the future?
Ultimately, there will probably be no getting around nuclear energy. In terms of waste gas emissions, it is still the cleanest solution.
Do you see any crucial changes in the financial system ahead of us?
One of my biggest hobby-horses of all is the privatization of national currencies. We are just not aware of how much money we are losing year after year through this monopoly position of governments. In principle, there is nothing new in private currencies either. Once upon a time we had seven or eight banks with their own currencies in the USA. Currencies are commodities or goods just like potatoes or refrigerators. Why should a government have a monopoly on them?
25 years ago you were the first person to coin the term "globalization". How is this trend progressing?
I speak today of a globalization of talents. Sport has already gone a long way down this road. When Real Madrid, just a couple of years ago, was indisputably the best football team in the world, there were only two Spaniards playing in the team. Today there are over a hundred Brazilians under contract in the football leagues of Europe, and most of them are earning huge amounts of money. But unlike the managers, this does not appear to bother anybody as far as the footballers are concerned. Another example: the new CEO of Sony, one of the rocks on which the Japanese economic miracle was founded, is the American Howard Springer, who does not speak Japanese and does not have his office in Tokyo but in New York.
http://emagazine.credit-suisse.com/app/art...d=29567&lang=EN
http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/jul/25inter.htm
I assume that the rise of China will also be one of the subjects covered.
Most certainly. However, it won't be as meteoric as many experts would have us believe. All this hype about China is just crazy. You'd think the Chinese would be conquering the USA next Tuesday morning. But on sober reflection, it will take another 30 to 40 years before the catch-up race can really begin. Obviously China is becoming more and more of a production site for the rest of the world, and the Chinese will soon have a leading role in design or even research. But we should never lose sight of the actual state of the game, the facts. Which would bring us to another mindset. If I read in the newspaper that Arsenal won 3-2, then I'm pretty confident that that is in fact the case. That's also why I like reading the sports pages so much. The reports there are the most reliable in the whole newspaper. In principle, there would also be quite reliable facts in the political pages, but they're not so immediately obvious. For instance, when Schröder was in office he was speaking of a prospering economy even when the sobering facts were revealing growth of only 0.1 percent.
Of course, sports journalists also report on missed chances and adverse conditions, but at the end of the day the only thing we're interested in is the result. Translating that into terms of China: although the size of its economy, with a gross domestic product of just under 2 trillion US dollars, is already considerable, that of the USA is still six times bigger.
If you don't foresee an economic takeover by China, what other major changes do you expect by the middle of the century?
Nothing major will happen in the very near future. If we look back into the past, we see that revolutionary innovations appear in clusters. We saw the last proliferation at the end of the last century, which was when all the big breakthroughs in information technology and biotechnology occurred. Now we'll spend the next fifty to a hundred years further developing and perfecting these innovations. That takes time. Take the example of measuring time. From the first water-clock in China to the Swatch watch took around three thousand years of further development. Even the aeroplane was invented more than a hundred years ago now, and we're still flying in accordance with the same principle. The jet airplane was only one step in aircraft development, not a genuine innovation.
One the one hand we've got people in the western world living longer and longer, while the eastern world, with its large population of children, is becoming increasingly stronger economically. Will we soon be a bit pushed for space on Earth?
Not at all. As general prosperity grows, so the average birth rate contracts to the same extent. In Europe a woman gives birth to an average of less than 1.4 children. But we would need 2.1 just to replace ourselves. People like to talk of the sustainable use of natural resources; but we ignore our own sustainability completely and are also still very choosy about immigrants. If things carry on this way in Europe, in two generations the population will be only half the size it is today. That is an enormous problem, which hardly anybody talks about.
What other problems do you still see in store for Europe?
Earlier, I used to believe Europe had an identity crisis. Having lived here for the last six years, I'm talking nervous breakdown. It has no proper leadership, instead it's just got all the more rules and regulations that Brussels wants to impose from the top down. And something else that is utterly ridiculous is that Constitution that runs to more than 800 pages, which the French and the Dutch quite understandably rejected. Nobody knows what's in it. Depending on the paper size, the US Constitution is eight to twelve pages long and everybody can make something of those principles.
Is the idea of a united Europe doomed to failure then?
Europe will never become a federation. Despite all the regulations, it functions very well as a free trade area. But the move to a federation with a common foreign policy will never happen. What we have is 25 states with 25 different mindsets.
So the USA's economic and political world domination will still last a while longer, then?
America is a world empire just as the Roman Empire once was. And it doesn't look as though that is likely to change in the very near future. And I wouldn't even want to qualify that either. For me, what count are the facts, the state of the game. America has by far the strongest economy. In second place comes Japan, but only by a very wide margin. And the Japanese economy has been standing still for so many years it's as good as dead. Ultimately, there is only one serious contender on the horizon. And that will most definitely not be the EU, which can't even ensure order militarily in its own backyard.
Which brings us back to China.
Right. But the USA's not standing still either. Admittedly it's showing growth of only four percent compared to ten percent in China, but the US economy is six times bigger.
Now there are more and more experts in Switzerland as well who think this constant striving for growth is absurd.
Well, you tell these people: "If you don't grow, you die!" That applies equally to people, trees, companies or economies. If Europe doesn't manage to crank up its growth, sometime or other it will become an historic open-air museum with a high standard of living for rich Asians and Americans. That is not a bad thing in itself. After all, I live here, too, and I think it's great. But that can hardly be the EU's ultimate objective, can it?
On the other hand, I don't find the idea of unrestrained global growth, bringing us millions of new stinking exhaust-pipes in Asia year after year, exactly alluring either.
That's a problem for which I don't have a solution to hand.
But I'm still keen to hear what you think.
Basically, the Chinese think we've got a nerve, wanting to give them any advice on protection of the environment, let alone making demands. After all, the West has done exactly the same thing itself. Hence my proposal now for each additional car that appears on the street in China we take one out of circulation here. Of course no-one here will find that so very funny. For that reason we have to find cleaner alternatives to today's carbon-fuelled engine. We can't withhold from others what we don't want to do without ourselves.
What will be the clean energy of the future?
Ultimately, there will probably be no getting around nuclear energy. In terms of waste gas emissions, it is still the cleanest solution.
Do you see any crucial changes in the financial system ahead of us?
One of my biggest hobby-horses of all is the privatization of national currencies. We are just not aware of how much money we are losing year after year through this monopoly position of governments. In principle, there is nothing new in private currencies either. Once upon a time we had seven or eight banks with their own currencies in the USA. Currencies are commodities or goods just like potatoes or refrigerators. Why should a government have a monopoly on them?
25 years ago you were the first person to coin the term "globalization". How is this trend progressing?
I speak today of a globalization of talents. Sport has already gone a long way down this road. When Real Madrid, just a couple of years ago, was indisputably the best football team in the world, there were only two Spaniards playing in the team. Today there are over a hundred Brazilians under contract in the football leagues of Europe, and most of them are earning huge amounts of money. But unlike the managers, this does not appear to bother anybody as far as the footballers are concerned. Another example: the new CEO of Sony, one of the rocks on which the Japanese economic miracle was founded, is the American Howard Springer, who does not speak Japanese and does not have his office in Tokyo but in New York.
http://emagazine.credit-suisse.com/app/art...d=29567&lang=EN