Designer Futures

I'm afraid I'm turning into one of those slightly fanatical Mac users that goes on and on about how great the design is etc. And I'm an even bigger fan of Steve Jobs, who is one of the very few business leaders whose leadership actually makes a significant positive difference to the success of the businesses he runs. But what really inspires me about the guy is his passion for design, as the quote above suggests (from InspireUX). Jobs - and Apple - have turned this into a way of doing business that really does buck the trend. And for an inspiring insight into Jobs the man, see his famous commencement speech at Stanford.

Design is at the heart of innovation, and innovation will be at the heart of Ireland's future success. I hope we have a few home grown Steve Jobs delivering our designer future.

Postscript - yet another delightful example of the interface between technology, design and play (not from Apple!):


Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.

An Inconvenient Cooling

The recent spell of global warming peaked in 1998 - a full decade ago - with each year subsequently recording cooler temperatures (and in the case of the recent winter in the Northern Hemisphere, extremely cold). There is an interesting debate taking place (even though we're told 'the debate is over') which suggests, according to Don Easterbrook, that we may have entered a thirty year cycle of cooling (with the next cycle of warming due some time after 2020).

The BBC's More or Less programme has got in on it with a wager between two climate watchers about whether we'll see a year warmer than 1998 by 2011. If we do then it will be pretty clear that we are still in a warming phase (with all the implications for human involvement in global warming and responsibility for doing something about it). If we don't then it suggests that the global cooling proponents may have got it right (this time).

Of course there are those who don't think we have the luxury of waiting until 2011 to see which side is 'right' - James Hansen and Bill McKibben among them. Personally I think they sound like the lyrics of David Bowie's Five Years - inciting panic when panic is unwarranted. If anything it looks like we are tracking the least threatening of the IPCC's illustrative marker scenarios (see table SPM.3 on page 13). Some prudent preparations for a less benign scenario are called for in my opinion - not least because the main beneficial side effect I foresee is that we will solve the energy and food crisis before we face a real environmental crisis.

But if I was going to a 'Five Years' moment it would be about the prospect of us flipping into another ice age (the next one is 1,000 years overdue). A colder climate is far, far deadlier than a warmer climate - the former means starvation, the latter means longer growth seasons. Time, as always, will tell.

It Won't Be So Bad

There's a nice post on PsyBlog about Impact Bias. This is:

our tendency to overestimate our emotional reaction to future events. Research shows that most of the time we don't feel as bad as we expect to when things go wrong. Similarly we usually don't get quite the high we expect when things go right for us.

We all suffer from impact bias of course, both in our private lives and sometimes in our public lives (think election manifestos). It also explains the wild fluctuations in business and consumer confidence indices which are based on what people expect for the economy and their own financial situation or business in the near future. Likewise, the bias can drive our capacity to think about the future, including the risks we face and the impact they could have.

Awareness of Impact Bias is kind of comforting: even if all the things that could go wrong do go wrong then it won't be so bad as we might fear. Then again, maybe not - especially when we think about global risks and threats. I recently read a remarkable essay by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and now a hedge fund president. Thiel places our current global uncertainties in a long run historical context, describing the ebb and flow of various 'heaves' towards globalisation over the past 500 years or so - of which the present one is perhaps the greatest and most likely the last.

He describes three 'bubbles' driving the current globalisation: the China Bubble, the Technology Bubble and the Hedge Fund Bubble. Likewise he brilliantly frames the context for much that challenges Ireland at present (though Ireland isn't mentioned) - including financial volatility, house price collapses and competition. As he says about China:

there is no good scenario for the world in which China fails.

Thiel describes the extraordinarily narrow path to the future we are now traversing: we either arrive at a globalisation that works (not just for the wealthy) or we fall off the path into failure and the last world war. It's sobering stuff, and the kind of impact we'll all be biased about.

Peace and War

Yesterday (8th May) was a public holiday here in France: Victory Day, commemorating the end of WWII. Today is Europe Day, when we celebrate Robert Schuman's vision of a European Union arising out of the ruins of the Second World War. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be much celebrating here in France; nor in Italy where the train drivers chose the occasion to go on strike.

I was only made aware of the latter when we went this morning to Monaco. SNCF were very apologetic about the difficulties the strike was causing (a lot of the train services round here are cross-border so if the trains don't leave Italy it does reduces the service somewhat). But they got us to Monaco eventually and it was well worth the visit (just to breath the free air of a land where there is no income tax!)

It did though get me thinking about the forthcoming referendum in Ireland. I do find the hectoring style of the 'Yes' camp annoying - a touch too much of what did the Romans do for us about it as we are reminded over and over again about how much Ireland has gained from EU membership. As if guilt should be a good enough reason to vote yes. To be sure the people of Europe are not exactly holding their breath in anticipation of our decision next month. The French will go ahead and do whatever it is they want to do anyway (militarily as well as taxation wise), and as for the Italians - well they'll just keep on being Italians I guess. Somehow I think Victory Day will always loom larger in the French psyche than Europe Day.

So I am undecided about which way to vote in June: if I was thinking strategically I would probably vote yes; if I was thinking tactically I would probably vote no. The former is simply a recognition that much of the Lisbon Treaty is sensible 'house keeping' for a venture as big as the EU; the latter is mostly about showing La Grande Republique that La Petite Republique doesn't take too well to Gallic condescension.

I guess I've time to make up my mind yet.

Chien Méchant

As I noticed on my last visit to France, you don't meet many Eastern Europeans here. Okay, there are a few Russians but they seem to keep themselves to themselves in well protected villas with chien méchant notices on the gates ...

Of course this is due to France's decision not to allow the recent waves of countries joining the EU access to its labour market. It does mean that you meet French people in every restaurant and shop you visit - in marked contrast to Ireland. You would also expect it to mean that France has a low unemployment rate (if that was the intention of their decision) but it doesn't. The latest Eurostat data shows France having the fourth highest unemployment rate of the EU 27 countries, as shown in the chart. Incredibly, youth unemployment (under 25s) is also very high in France (18.1%) despite the availability of the kind of low skilled, entry level jobs 'exclusively' for French people.

Ireland and the UK chose a different path - allowing the first wave of Eastern European entrants free access to our labour markets. Though the jury is still out on whether there has been a net benefit to the host countries (and will be for at least another turn through the business cycle I reckon) we do not seem to have suffered the high youth unemployment in particular that the French obviously feared. Nor are we likely to: I'm with Brendan Keenan in today's Irish Independent when he suggests that even if Irish unemployment goes as high as 8% in the next year or two we'll still have fared much better than expected given the scale of the global economy's problems.

Still, I can't help noticing that France's unemployment rate is going in the right direction (down from 8.6% in March 2007 to 7.8% in March 2008), whilst our's is going in the wrong direction: from 4.6% to 5.6% over the same period. There's no Irish demand for the economic equivalent of the chien méchant just yet vis-a-vis immigrants: but don't be surprised if it nevertheless surfaces as a major issue in the next general election as we get closer to a French level of unemployment.

An Absence of Choice

I've been using the local train services here in Antibes to get about on trips to Cannes, Nice and Monaco. The trains are all electric and the services are both cheap and efficient, i.e.: they run on time every time. Interestingly the price of diesel and petrol locally is much higher than back in Dublin - at least €1.35-€1.40 a litre. An added incentive I guess to use the public transport system.

There is no doubt that the seemingly inexorable rise in the price of oil will act as a further curb on people's use of private transport. So also will plans to ban cars from city centres - as is now being proposed for Dublin and Cork. As illustrated for the German city of Münster in the photo, getting people out of cars and onto buses or bicycles does make a hugh difference to traffic congestion.

But getting from here to there (the presence of real transport options) is the tricky part. Dublin is neither Boston nor Berlin (both of which have excellent metro systems). Right now we have an absence of choice in relation to transport in Dublin relative to the needs of the population. Frankly if a lot more of us left our cars at home and took the bus, Dart, train or Luas the system couldn't handle it.

But the rising oil price will drive more and more consumers to seek alternatives, and they won't be waiting patiently for the Dublin metro to arrive. The logical (though politically unpalatable) thing to do is to end Dublin Bus' monopoly of a key element of the transport system; get rid of our ludicrous legislation from the 1930s controlling bus services; and let anyone with a licence and insurance provide a bus service. Then build the power stations that will allow us to migrate to a mainly electric transport system (private and public).

Lower prices, more choices, few carbon emissions. I would have thought that could be sold to the increasingly angry commuters of the Greater Dublin Area. Their counterparts in the Great Nice Area seem happy with the outcome.

Nuclear Holidays

Every year hundreds of thousands of Irish people holiday in France, as I am this week. And every year we experience the deep down dread in our Irish eco-souls as we lie awake in our gites wondering if the nuclear power station next door will explode. Actually, I made that last bit up. Let's face it, 99.9% of Irish holiday makers in France don't give a second thought to French nuclear power, blissfully ignorant of the risks they are taking. Myself, I'm here in Antibes, well within the fallout zone from not one but four nuclear power stations at Tricastin in idyllic Provence. Strange how you get used to things ...

Back in Ireland we are embarking on an 'energy first' of our own: ramping up the share of renewable energy (i.e.: wind, for all practical purposes) beyond anything tried anywhere else in the world. As the ESRI noted in a recent paper on the Government's energy and climate policies, the current target requires that wind delivers 20-25% of all our electricity generation by 2020, which is "a large multiple of the level of wind penetration actually achieved in any functioning power system with weak interconnection, and is also a multiple of targets enunciated in other countries."

Moreover, such a level of exposure to an intermittent power source demands a significant backup or baseload power generation resource. Nuclear is ideal for this purpose (regardless of its other limitations), so is gas. So maybe we need to build an interconnector to France before 2020; or outsource our electricity generation requirements to EdF? Of course, if the lights start going out over Ireland on a frosty, winter's day when the wind doesn't blow (as on February 16th this year) then we might all be happy to move to France to cuddle up to a nice nuclear power station ...

Dirigiste Economics

I'm in France this week on holiday so the posting frequency may be a bit low (especially if the sun keeps shining like it is ;-)

As always there's value in seeing Ireland as others see us - or don't. The first thing that strikes me is how well the public sector works in France. You can actually see where your taxes are spent. It costs €1 to get the bus from Antibes into Nice, a journey of about 15 kilometres. The train is €3. Both run on time for about 20 hours a day. Not quite your Dublin Bus/Irish Rail pricing structure (or service level).

This is upsetting to my libertarian instincts, but still I do admire value for money; whether it's from the private sector or the public sector. And no, I don't want to pay French levels of tax either. Which is why the recent OECD report on Ireland's public sector is so damning. Instead of focusing on a better, more efficient public sector, our political leaders have embarked on an act of national vandalism called decentralisation - carrying home entire government departments to their constituencies like some kind of hunting trophy. I think only the Khmer Rouge went further ...

So we get the worst of both worlds: high (and hidden) taxes; poor and inefficient public services. So should we go one way or the other: dirigisme ou laissez faire? By the way, there's a notice on the OECD's web site announcing that they are closed from 8th May to 12th May for the Victory Day and Pentecost holidays. While in France ...

Minor Emergencies

We got our copy of Preparing for Major Emergencies through the letterbox the other day. It would be easy to knock it as a communications exercise, so I will. There is simply no point to this so called handbook. We are treated to lightweight advice about a mish-mash of topics - from foot & mouth disease to flooding - with no obvious rationale for the selection.

The web site more or less replicates the booklet, with audio files for the visually impaired. But the reality is that in the event of a real emergency (say a serious leakage in a UK nuclear power plant) nobody is going to go looking for their handbook. We'll switch on the radio or television or computer to find out what's happening. Which really does beg the question: why did the Government go to the cost of distributing this booklet (half of it in Irish which doubles the expense)?

The depressing thought is that it simply an exercise in politicians making themselves seem important and indispensable. Focusing on scary things that frighten us sure gets our attention. Unfortunately we can expect a lot more of this sort of thing. As societies and individuals become more important they just don't need the clientelism that characterises political interactions in poorer countries. So politicians have to dream up even more fantastic reasons to get our attention and our taxes.

Still, it could be worse: they say Karl Rove dreamt up the invasion of Iraq as a midterm election strategy for George Bush back in 2003. Now that's what I call scary.

A Beautiful Future

Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that a sufficiently advanced technology will look like magic. Now I think that a sufficiently advanced technology will look like art. As technology advances then form is compromised less and less for function.

See what I mean (from TFIA of course):