Tuesday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: Big data; expiry date for humans; half time between two lost decades; back to the future; waste; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10:00 am today in association with NZ Mint.

Bernard will be back with his version tomorrow.

We welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

1. Does Google make us stupid?
We love data. It's what our service is based on. But it's not only us who collect and analyses data, of course.

There has been a stunning explosion in the collection of data. Forget megabytes or even gigabytes. Now folks are talking about petabytes, exabytes, zettabyte, and now even yottabytes.

Here's a fact to wobble your brain - "Last year alone, the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours." Now that is stunning.

Should we be worried about big data? Don’t be. We fretted about the printing press, the encyclopedia, the dictionary. It’s how we use technology that matters, as Chad Wellmon points out:

The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world. In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies that humans form to engage the world come in turn to form us? What do these technologies that are of our own making and irreducible elements of our own being do to us? The analytical task lies in identifying and embracing forms of human agency particular to our digital age, without reducing technology to a mere mechanical extension of the human, to a mere tool. In short, asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable.

2. Do humans have carry an expiry date?
Matt Ridley sees indications the steady rise in lifespans may already have hit some kind of limit. Getting more than a handful of people past 120 may never be possible, and 150 is likely unattainable. He explains why in this WSJ opinion piece.

Thanks to healthier lifestyles, more and more people are surviving into old age. But that is not incompatible with there being a sort of expiration date on human lifespan. Most scientists think the decay of the body by aging is not itself programmed by genes, but the repair mechanisms that delay decay are. In human beings, genes that help keep you alive as a parent or even grandparent have had a selective advantage through helping children thrive, but ones that keep you alive as a great-grandparent - who likely doesn't play much of a role in the well-being and survival of great-grandchildren - have probably never contributed to reproductive success.

In other words, there is perhaps no limit to the number of people who can reach 90 or 100, but getting more than a handful of people past 120 may never be possible, and 150 is probably unattainable, absent genetic engineering.

3. Desperation
No one really knows how to solve the euro zone crisis. Monetary solutions aren't working, fiscal solutions aren't either (although I don't think either have been tried properly). So now we are starting to hear of some hare-brained ones. Here is Eric Reguly reporting on a "golden opportunity to save (or doom) the euro".

Germany’s idea is coyly named the European Redemption Pact and it is nothing if not creative. While details are scant, here is roughly how this gilded baby would work. Countries with debts greater than 60 per cent of gross domestic product – the (ignored) limit under the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty – would transfer those debts into a redemption fund, which would be covered by joint bonds. The scheme has been called “euro bonds lite.”

Here’s the catch. Countries using the scheme (most would, including Germany, because of generally high debt-to-GDP ratios) would have to cover 20 per cent of their debt with collateral, payable in gold or currency reserves. Default on the payments and you lose your gold. The “sinking” fund would retire the debt over 20 years.

As you can see from that table, that's a lot of gold but no-where near enough to settle the outstanding liabilities of all the euro nations (US$1.650 tln or  €2.064 tln). But there is a bigger problem - you may wish to sell that pile, but who would buy it, and why would they buy a metal that is seesawing in price. Besides, what do you think would happen to the price if 10,000 tonnes was dumped on the market? Or even 1,000 tonnes? At the first suggestion a big quantity was about to arrive on market we may see a sharp decline in the price. Are the gold bugs ready for that?

Or, of course, they could just 'agree' a non-market price and shuffle the can around and around. Gold would then just become a central bank plaything.

4. Half time between two lost decades
The recovery feels extraordinarily slow because we face an extraordinary three-part crisis: a financial shock compounded by a global slowdown and a demographic time bomb. Time to think big says Jack Goldstone. He sets out in detail what is going wrong and why we will be a long time in this depressed economic state.

So we cannot expect any sudden return to normalcy. The best we can hope for is to muddle-through for perhaps a decade, as the various structural crises are resolved in the midst of a long period of deleveraging. There is also a risk that we may see more shocks as severe as in 2008 with sovereign debt crises and political clashes. In the worst case, if policy blunders or sudden drops in confidence in banks or sovereign debt occur in the midst of political deadlock, we could get a true global depression.

Yet I do expect capitalism to survive and adapt, as it has done before. I expect a new round of progressive legislation to improve the position of workers, coming after 2014; I expect a new round of education (perhaps internet driven) and emphasis on personal and craft skills to reshape labor markets in advanced economies; I expect an adaptation to population aging that involves greater integration of global labor markets and rich/poor country labor exchanges; and I expect China will shift to greater democracy, better conditions for its workers, and a healthy internal market. Europe is harder to predict, as we are too close to the peak of the crisis; but one way or another Europe will go on. We should also get some technical breakthroughs in medical care, clean energy, lighting, pharmaceuticals, and other areas now under intensive research. And currently small but fast-growing economies in Africa and southeast Asia should continue to grow and make greater contributions to the global economy.

5. GDP
"Gross domestic product (GDP) refers to the market value of all officially recognised final goods and services produced within a country in a given period." It has few defenders however, and when its results don't fit people's rigid social or political narratives it tends to get a veritable thrashing. But it survives because no-one can come up with a better substitute. Alternatives all seem wooly, biased, or both. Eric Crampton recently took the pulse of some recent criticism. I think GDP will survive as the 'best measure' of the real economy. We will just need to be better informed about what it doesn't measure, and that a good thing in itself. People seem to want bumper-sticker summaries that cover every last exception - 'truth' with no work, no effort, no understanding. Perhaps basic economics should be a compulsory high school subject?

6. Wishing for a future imagined in the 1960s
We have quite a few commenters in the glass-half-empty category; you know, the-world-is-about-to-end types. GOMs. (I've never thought the profile of our commenters is anything like the profile of our readers - and our research shows that clearly.) However, this one is for you. David Graeber was once certain a new age was dawning. Jet-packs, antigravity shoes, flying cars – all within reach. He wasn’t alone. How did we get the future so wrong, he asks. He wants to change the world so his imagined 'future' can come true.

About one conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen within the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism - or any form of capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power - one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs - to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

ps: I don't buy the argument at all; the spurt of innovation in the 1950's and 1960's was basically confined to huge public investment executed by huge public bureaucracies. It generated 'wow' results precisely because it was out there alone. But today, these advances would seem ho-hum because the rate of innovation has expanded to such a degree that we expect miracles every day, and we are getting them. Instead of research being confined to a few glorious campuses, it is now going on worldwide in millions of garages as well. And the winning feature today is that the best innovation is material-lite. Thank you Gordon Moore and servo motors.

7. Luck
I know Bernard has already linked to the Michael Lewis graduation speech at Princeton. Not everyone goes for Lewis' brand of storytelling and he has made a few stumbles, but, this one is well worth watching to the end - I especially think the 'extra cookie' point is very well made. 

8. What America spends on groceries
NPR has summarised some work analysing how the American grocery bill has changed over the years. We know that New Zealanders are getting a good deal when they shop, and we will be releasing our weekly grocery tracking update soon, after one full year of weekly monitoring of supermarket prices both here and in Australia. (It will be a good-news story, so it is unlikely to be featured much.) But in the meantime, here is another perspective on the shifts in spending over 30 years. Lots of price decreases here, not many increases. You have to say that on price at least, consumers have been getting a better deal. (This chart may represent changes in price as much as changes in volume. Click on the chart for more detail.)

9. What a waste
Come again? In trying to scare you about the huge volume of the world's trash, a journalist actually reveals how small it really is (I think). In one year he claims, the world generates "2.6 trillion lbs of garbage". Well, that is about 1.7 bln m3 (assuming a density of 0.7) - and that is way, way less than I thought it might be. (The data is from the World Bank.) Heck, you could loose that in one modest valley somewhere - one hundred modest valleys would take care of a century's worth of the world's garbage. One small country could stump up for that, so that the rest of the planet is trash-free. Seems like a good deal to me, and it seems like an infinitesimally small amount of trash from a global scale.

I have to say, as someone who has traveled quite a bit it always amazes me how clean most countries actually are - but how it is the exceptions that stick in your mind. Certainly in the developed world at least, they are a lot cleaner now than they were a generation ago. And as someone who was deeply involved in the business of recycling for many years, I now have the view that most people have a pathetic understanding of 'volume' and a similar mis-understanding of the relative sizes of everything. No wonder kids grow up sceptical and 'green' messages don't stick - the world we observe turns out to be quite different to the ideas planted in childhood by naive educators.

10. The last laugh(s)
"You are not special" - another pretty damn fine graduation speech ...

and there's this ...