The Future (67 page)
Authors: Al Gore
1
efficacy, utility, and power with each passing year
Martin Ford,
Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
(N.p.: Acculant, 2009).
2
one million new robots within two years
“Foxconn to Replace Workers with 1 Million Robots in 3 Years,”
Xinhuanet
, July 30, 2011,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131018764.htm
.
3
New companies have emerged to connect online workers with jobs
Quentin Hardy, “The Global Arbitrage of Online Work,”
New York Times
, October 10, 2012.
4
Narrative Science, a robot reporting company
Joe Fassler, “Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?,”
Atlantic
, April 12, 2012.
5
Latin America is the rare exception
Jonathan Watts, “Latin America’s Income Inequality Falling, Says World Bank,”
Guardian
, November 13, 2012.
6
income inequality reached a twenty-year high
Natasha Lennard, “Global Inequality Highest in 20 Years,”
Salon
, November 1, 2012,
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/01/global_inequality_highest_in_20_years/
.
7
risen in the United States from 35 to 45
“Unbottled Gini,”
Economist
, January 20, 2011;
CIA World Factbook
,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html
, accessed January 20, 2012.
8
China from 30 to the low 40s
Data Set, University of Texas Inequality Project, Estimated Household Income Inequality Data Set (EHII). This is a global data set, derived from the econometric relationship between UTIP-UNIDO, other conditioning variables, and the World Bank’s Deininger & Squire data set (
http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/data.html
); World Data Bank,
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI
.
9
Russia from the mid 20s to the low 40s
Ibid.
10
United Kingdom from 30 to 36
Data Set, University of Texas Inequality Project, Estimated Household Income Inequality Data Set; “Growing Income Inequality in OECD Countries: What Drives It and How Can Policy Tackle It?,” OECD Forum on Tackling Inequality, May 2, 2011,
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/20/47723414.pdf
.
11
make compared to six times just two decades ago
“India Income Inequality Doubles in 20 Years, Says OECD,” BBC, December 7, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16064321
.
12
investment income at the lowest tax rate of all—15 percent
Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,”
Vanity Fair
, May 2011.
13
capital gains income goes to the top one thousandth of one percent
Paul Krugman, “We Are the 99.9%,”
New York Times
, November 24, 2011.
14
now has more inequality than either Egypt or Tunisia
Nicholas D. Kristof, “America’s ‘Primal Scream,’ ”
New York Times
, October 15, 2011.
15
have more wealth than the people in the bottom 90 percent
Ibid.
16
the 150 million Americans in the bottom 50 percent
Ibid.
17
have more wealth than the bottom 30 percent of Americans
Tim Worstall, “Six Waltons Have More Wealth Than the Bottom 30% of Americans,”
Forbes
, December 14, 2011.
18
up from 12 percent just a quarter century ago
Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.”
19
the top 0.1 percent increased over the same period by 400 percent
Krugman, “We Are the 99.9%.”
20
from 5 to 40 percent of the GDP in developed countries
UnctadStat, Statistical Database for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,
http://unctadstat.unctad.org/ReportFolders/reportFolders.aspx
.
21
capital flows are expected to continue increasing three times faster than GDP
International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, September 2011,
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/02/weodata/WEOSep2011alla.xls
; Peter Bisson, Elizabeth Stephenson, and S. Patrick Viguerie, “The Global Grid,”
McKinsey Quarterly
, July 26, 2011.
22
from 5 to 30 percent of GDP from 1980 to 2011
UnctadStat, Statistical Database for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
23
United States, paying them wages that are 20 percent higher
Daniel J. Ikenson, “Made on Earth: How Global Economic Integration Renders Trade Policy Obsolete,” Cato Trade Policy Analysis No. 42, December 2, 2009,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/tpa/tpa-042.pdf
.
24
for more than five million U.S. citizens
Ibid.
25
China of processed polysilicon and advanced manufacturing equipment
Steven Mufson, “China’s Growing Share of Solar Market Comes at a Price,”
Washington Post
, December 16, 2011.
26
largest economy in the world within this decade
Brett Arends, “IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End,”
Market Watch
, April 25, 2011,
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25
.
27
It now has twice the number of Internet users
“The Dating Game,”
Economist
, December 27, 2011,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/12/save_date
; “Survey: China has 513 million Internet users,” CBS News, January 15, 2012,
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57359546/survey-china-has-513-million-internet-users/
; Internet World Stats, “Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet Users,” August 7, 2011,
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm
.
28
productivity growth has been higher than in any decade since the 1960s
“Job-Devouring Technology Confronts US Workers,”
Financial Times
, December 15, 2011.
29
rates of increase while unemployment has barely declined
“U.S. Tax Haul Trails Profit Surge,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 4, 2012.
30
spending on private sector jobs increased by only 2 percent
Catherine Rampell, “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers,”
New York Times
, June 10, 2011.
31
new industrial robots in North America increased 41 percent
Robotic Industries Association, “North American Robot Orders Jump 41% in First Half of 2011,” July 29, 2011,
http://www.robotics.org/content-detail.cfm/Industrial-Robotics-News/North-American-Robot-Orders-Jump-41-in-First-Half-of-2011/content_id/2922
.
32
GDP of advanced economies for the first time in the modern era
“Special Report: Developing World to Overtake Advanced Economies in 2013,”
Euromonitor
, February 19, 2009,
http://blog.euromonitor.com/2009/02/special-report-developing-world-to-overtake-advanced-economies-in-2013-.html
.
33
growing much faster than the developed countries
Mark Mobius, “Emerging Markets May See More Capital Flow, Away from Assets and Currencies of Countries Burdened with High Debt,”
Economic Times
, September 27, 2011.
34
Some analysts doubt the sustainability of these growth rates
Ruchir Sharma, “Broken BRICs: Why the Rest Stopped Rising,”
Foreign Affairs
, November/December 2012.
35
wealthy investors to encourage them to build more factories in the West
Don Lee, “U.S. Jobs Continue to Flow Overseas,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 6, 2010.
36
resulted in the loss of 27 million jobs worldwide
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
The Report on the World Social Situation: The Global Social Crisis
, 2011,
http://social.un.org/index/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=cO3JAiiX-NE%3D&tabid=1562
.
37
notional value twenty-three times larger than the entire global GDP
“Why Derivatives Caused Financial Crisis,” Seeking Alpha, April 12, 2010,
http://seekingalpha.com/article/198197-why-derivatives-caused-financial-crisis
.
38
daily trades in all of the world’s stock markets put together
Ibid.
39
thirteen times larger than the combined value of every stock and every bond on Earth
Ibid.
40
it represented more than 60 percent of all trades
Nathaniel Popper, “High-Speed Trading No Longer Hurtling Forward,”
New York Times
, October 14, 2012.
41
ability to complete a transaction in 124 microseconds
Donald MacKenzie, “How to Make Money in Microseconds,”
London Review of Books
, May 19, 2011.
42
according to some experts will further increase
Ibid.
43
“financial market of which we have virtually no sound theoretical understanding”
Brandon Keim, “Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire,”
Wired
, February 16, 2012.
44
“mystery algorithm”
John Melloy, “Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week,” CNBC, October 8, 2012,
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49333454/Mysterious_Algorithm_Was_4_of_Trading_Activity_Last_Week
.
45
enabling them to make a fortune by shorting French bonds
Christopher Steiner, “Wall Street’s Speed War,”
Forbes
, September 27, 2010.
46
make a similar fortune by shorting bonds from the Confederacy
Ibid.
47
to transmit information over the 825 miles
Ibid.
48
what many economists call the financialization of the economy
Ibid.
49
1980 to more than 8 percent at present
Thomas Philippon, “The Future of the Financial Industry,” Stern on Finance blog, October 16, 2008,
http://sternfinance.blogspot.com/2008/10/future-of-financial-industry-thomas.html
.
50
6 percent are based on credit derivatives
“America’s Big Bank $244 Trillion Derivatives Market Exposed,” Seeking Alpha, September 15, 2011,
http://seekingalpha.com/article/293830-america-s-big-bank-244-trillion-derivatives-market-exposed
.
51
value of actual commodities
Ibid.
52
fourteen times the value of all the actual barrels of oil traded on that same day
Roderick Bruce, “Making Markets: Oil Derivatives: In the Beginning,”
Energyrisk.com
, p. 31, July 2009,
http://db.riskwaters.com/data/energyrisk/EnergyRisk/Energyrisk_0709/markets.pdf
.
53
because banks hold collateral equal to a large percentage
But see Mazen Labban, “Oil in Parallax: Scarcity, Markets, and the Financialization of Accumulation,”
Geoforum
41 (2010): 546 (“Although financial derivatives allowed investors and traders to manage risk and hedge against the volatility of financial markets, the ‘aggregate impact’ of trading in derivatives was to increase risk and contribute to the volatility of the market”), citing Adam Tickell, “Unstable Futures: Controlling and Creating Risks in International Money,”
Global Capitalism Versus Democracy
, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), pp. 248–77; Adam Tickell, “Dangerous Derivatives: Controlling and Creating Risks in International Money,”
Geoforum
31 (2000): 87–99.
54
implicitly reflected in the collective behavior found in the market (it isn’t)
Peter J. Boettke, “Where Did Economics Go Wrong? Modern Economics as a Flight from Reality,”
Critical Review
11, no. 1 (1997): 11–64; Al Gore and David Blood, “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 14, 2011.
55
Joseph Stiglitz says that high-speed trading produces only “fake liquidity”
Personal conversation with Joseph Stiglitz.
56
combined total of all of the reserves in the central banks
Morris Miller, “Global Governance to Address the Crises of Debt, Poverty and Environment,” background paper prepared for the 42nd Pugwash Conference, Berlin, Germany, September 1992,
http://www.management.uottawa.ca/miller/governa.htm
.
57
one another’s simultaneous operations rather than underlying market realities
Donald MacKenzie, “How to Make Money in Microseconds,”
London Review of Books
, May 19, 2011.
58
all in the time span of sixteen minutes—for no apparent reason
“Dow Falls 1,000, Then Rebounds, Shaking Market,”
New York Times
, May 7, 2010.