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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (91209)	4/8/2003 12:59:18 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I admit to having very little knowledge of math or statistics but I know a flawed argument when I see one. Actually I am getting tired of being the one who does the googling, and would rather just give it a rest.

To: aladin who wrote (91209)	4/8/2003 1:07:58 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

Sigh...ok I drop the subject...btw, among other things, I have degree in Computer Engineering and in a past life actually designed communication modules for Allied Aerospace. The data you saw did not seem in order because it was by the order of men's suicide rate but I reported the aggregate...anyway, the start of this debate was related to some of the concepts presented in ASSIST paper (a project funded by the EC): Sun (don't ask me to defend everything that somebody else says) Tzu ...Given that some survive on $500 per annum and others are unsatisfied with less than $500,000 it can be seen that basic needs for food and shelter are a very small fraction of our total needs. Almost all of western GDP is devoted to culturally defined wants that are expressions of fundamental social needs such as status and identity. Such wants are essentially malleable through generational succession. Thus switching from paying millions of euros for an enormous stately home in the country to paying the same amount for a minimal apartment in the most fashionable part of the city contributes to global sustainability and also preserves status, and the status premium is not devoted in material extravagance but can contribute to better transport and services in the same city, benefiting both rich and poor alike. The rapidly dropping cost of IST based goods could lead to developing countries leapfrogging the West. Indeed South Africa is already starting to plan on this assumption and Cambodia was the first country in which the number of mobiles exceeded fixed lines. In the pre-sustainability past Europe leapfrogged the US in the adoption of cars by switching several decades later, when comfort and convenience could be achieved in smaller and more sustainable vehicles. Thus we can anticipate the developing world switching to truly sustainable IST-intensive satisfiers more quickly than a Europe that is embedded in an unsustainable but enjoyable culture of travel and consumer goods. A Wild West frontier mentality has characterised the last 30 years of cyberspace colonisation and trade globalisation. As on any frontier opportunity is the initial driver, not human values. In this 30 years aid to developing countries has halved and the level of inequity both within and between countries has doubled. The extremes have diverged, with more suicides and more conspicuous consumption. Given the weak correlation between standard of living and happiness and the positive correlation between equity and happiness the average quality of life in the West has hardly changed, a depressing result for so much hard work. In many developing countries the gap between rich and poor is already becoming unstable. Those caught in the no-mans-land between traditional values of the populace and the western values of the ruling class become alienated and resort to terrorism and even war. Growing inequity is a characteristic of any lawless frontier, not just the digital one. But our deeper human needs for fairness and equity, law and order, shine through as settlers move in. We could be at such a turning point now with the IST infrastructure shifting from the master-slave paradigm of lawless frontiers (and 500 channel one-way television), to the peer-to-peer paradigm of democracy, regulatory frameworks, trial by jury and two-way broadband multimedia communication with anyone, anywhere. Unfortunately the immature IST-intensive offerings of the past have damaged credibility, partly because they have been over-hyped but also because processors are still not powerful enough, user interfaces not natural enough and databases not rich enough to offer experiences that are truly better than the travel experiences and consumer goods of western culture. Once the IST infrastructure, the ambient intelligent environment and wearable networked intelligences have matured, this persistent digital ecosystem can provide a new glue to hold society together, both in self-contained local neighbourhoods and in global communities. This intermeshed networked society will make it impossible for groups to separate sufficiently for aggressive instincts to take over and demonise other groups, the first step on the exciting path to war. Our needs for competition and excitement will of course continue to find outlets through IST-enhanced competitive sports and other leisure activities.. The older generation are right to be wary of their children being seduced by novel integrated lifestyles. Rapid culture change risks destabilising global society (already a serious risk if global inequity continues to increase). Thus it is essential that the implications of future immaterialisation switches are modelled, simulated and tested in advance. This modelling must be based on the new understanding of the dependence of adult personality on attachment processes and belief system development in infancy that is now emerging from large scale longitudinal studies in the human sciences...

To: aladin who wrote (91209)	4/8/2003 1:12:29 PM
From: paul_philp	Respond to of 281500

John, Since we know there is a high correlation between the weather and suicide (did I mention my first degree was in Psychology) have you factored your data for sunshine? My first thought when I looked at the list of countries. Next consider nutrition, then employment level, then average age (or % of population over 60). The key fallacy in the entire debate is the assumption that there is a relationship between happiness/satisfaction rates and depression/suicide rates. The two are independent variables, there is some relation but it is not the straightforward one being assumed. Paul