Future of Global Industrial Development

Large hypersonic passenger plane being designed in E.U.

Major Countries Will Have a Mission: To become a key piece in a "spinal cord" of world management. 

Their Method: International alliances will become increasingly centered on specific long term goals of industrial production and distribution and less on military or ideological needs as was the case in the 20th century.



The essence of 21st century competition is competition in efficient product output and jockeying for position to be the main link in a global state directed heavy industry chain. Countries with highest capacity to mass produce and distribute complex infrastructure related things will be most able to provide structure for planetary unification/governance and acquire popular legitimacy for it. Individuals in relevant capitals of the world will go to great lengths to have their states be as indispensable within this spinal cord as possible. This involves creating links between so called "national champions" and national industrial sectors in general (and thus political units themselves as public sectors increasingly get involved in the long term planning and funding).

For example, elites in Mexico City may realize that the rapidly growing Mexican industrial sector may not take leadership in the northern hemisphere by itself. BUT if they integrate it sufficiently with Canadian and American sectors then their ability to make influential decisions far up the spinal chord gets dramatically increased. Their psychological ego drive to get better and better seats at collective decision making table will thus drive the countries they manage towards merger.

One might argue that this isn't any different from the process that has happened for the last 400 years as various cartels pushed their governments into cooperation/merger, into international or supranational alliances, and occasionally into warfare with each other over surplus production. One might also argue that the post-hegemonic fragmentation into a multipolar world is also a seemingly cyclical typical occurrence. However, the current process of financial and industrial cartels influencing supranational mergers will take place in an environment that differs from a previous multi polar period of the early 20th century. That is since:

1) Dogmatic economic and political ideology in general has been discredited (with decline of the last two major ideological powers: USSR and US)  
2) Nationalism has been discredited in its older forms by technological globalization and by major migratory flows of humans
3) There is tendency towards continental political blocks that build on and improve on the EU model  
4) Warfare between cartels (and thus the governments they control) is prevented by the existence of nuclear weapons
5) World is now in a fragile situation where:
_____a) Due to accelerating technological progress and the Internet, world's rich find it increasingly difficult to maintain/create artificial scarcity (on at least light industry level) to prevent major profit collapse and corresponding social unrest
_____b) Major transnational cooperation is constantly required (on at least continental level) to coordinate fiat money generation and banking-monetary policy in general to prevent major profit collapse and corresponding social unrest
_____c) Capital intensive heavy industrial production (of fission reactors, high speed trains, etc) cannot really be fully managed and funded by individual cartels anymore and requires constant state/tax payer subsidy, support, and assistance
_____d) Ramping up capital intensive heavy industrial production/infrastructure is required to resolve and manage rapid population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. This is needed in order to prevent civil unrest stemming from these 3 key global issues (civil unrest = major profit collapse = civil unrest).

Although the factors that create current cartel driven tendency towards political merging are not always stated this clearly, they nevertheless direct this process for the most part.   

What is apparent is that powerful egos cannot compete in the old ways via violence or in a free for all technologically enabled resource depletion. Financial speculation has also proven as inadequate to provide a long term release valve for psychological competition. The process of elimination leaves world leaders with a rather novel benign (and rather difficult!) way to compete via production and welfare generation for the people they oversee. 

To help visualize what is needed, what is happening, what will increasingly continue to happen, and what needs to be ingrained in global consciousness as needing to happen, think of this example:

[ There are 5 continents in the world with multiple countries each. 4 of these continents have at least 2 strong industrial countries with industrial monopolies that are cozy with their respective governments. Elites of 3-4 of the continents (North and South American companies may merge on this one) decide to create supranational "Japans on steroids" for each specific heavy industry. With state aid and coordination, a beefed up equivalent to European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) is created on each continent for energy, high speed rail transport, bridge/tunnel equipment, air/space transport, modular housing, and a few others related to resource extraction to feed the new "continental champions".]

Obviously a far greater amount of state capitalism and state funding/management is required to create these continental champions. This is made palatable to tax payers via sharing half or more of the profits with government treasuries the way Gazprom does. This rapidly builds on, combines, and goes further than European Coal and Steel Community, Euratom, EADS, Gazprom, and others.

The main goal is not only to rapidly streamline and take advantage of economies of scale in heavy industrial production of energy plants, large energy power plants parts, trains, planes, modular housing, and resource extraction/recycling. The main goal is to turn every continent into a supranational factory making 5-6 broad categories of things needed to prevent global social unrest AND to maintain competition, evolution, and diversity of product within global industry. The beauty of this process is that each country can increase or decrease the level of state ownership/(macro socialism or state capitalism however you'd like to call it) as it sees fits while maintaining the country within the industrial chain. Being part of the chain also creates incentives to boost technological, infrastructural, and social development in all spheres to remain part of and embed further into the chain. The incentives to make holistic improvements are greater than those driven by neoliberal emphasis on reform since success and failure is more obvious. The public can easily tell if their country doesn't have what it takes to design and cheaply construct a large part for a next generation transatlantic hypersonic heavy passenger plane. To catch up and enter the chain, the production capabilities of military industrial complexes should be converted to civilian use when possible and utilized to the maximum.

Additional positives of this arrangement is that a lot more capital intensive experimentation can now be allowed due to pulling of resources and supranational tax payer guarantees. Macro Gazprom type build up in production inefficiencies is more than compensated by introduction of new generations of hypersonic aircraft, mass production of MagLev transport and passenger train wagons, fission reactors, etc.

There is also an Orwellian twist to this new global competition (although a positive one). One can see the 6 continents entering into a triangular macro competition where not even 2 beefed up EADS type super companies can ever hope to fully win. Lets be more obvious. Say there is Oceania Rail, Eurasia Rail, and EastAsia rail all developing newer, better, and differentiated MagLev train products (ranging from magnetic heavy loader factory chain carts, to city subway cars, to transcontinental passenger, etc). Triangular competition like this tends to produce simultaneous launches of product by all 3 entities. This has been observed in product ranging from flat screen television to next generation fight airplanes. We see first seeds of what's to come in the Boeing and Airbus rivalry with China working on its own super heavy transcontinental passenger plane.

click to enlarge

If triangular competition reaches total planetary scale then the cost of the new products, time to make them, and time in between each successive generation of product falls. Yes, there will be entire continents filled with monopolies fused into supranational continental monopolies but it is small price to pay for macro level technological progress. New experimental continent scale protectionist policies and competition over guiding/exploiting the development of African Union should prevent any 2 supranational factories from totally overcoming the triangular arrangement. Tripolar world is dramatically more dynamic as elites within each industrial cluster need to always be focused to prevent indirect strategic collusion between 2 rivals while working and competing with each rival indirectly as well. Anybody who played 3 way chess knows this. Some projects like manned mission to Mars may require occasional industrial unipolarity but for the most part the tripolar arrangement described has sufficient economies of scale to really benefit humanity.


CONCLUSION:

To finish off, these days when evaluating the strength of a country one should overlook non-industry sectors within GDP and focus on 1) nominal value of industrial sector as % of GDP and 2) efficiency within this sector.

Industrial Sector By Nominal Dollar Value and Industrial Growth in 2010

China____________$3.3 trillion______(growth of 11%)
United States______$3.3 trillion______(growth of 3.3%)
Japan____________$1.4 trillion______(growth of 15.5%)(highest before quake hit)
Germany_________$862 billion______(growth of 9%)
Brazil____________$677 billion_____(growth of 11.5%)
Russia___________$666 billion______(growth of 8.3%)
UK______________$521 billion_____(growth of 1.9%)
France___________$519 billion______(growth of 3.5%)
India____________$484 billion______(growth of 9.7%)
South Korea______$458 billion______(growth of 12.1%)

Nominal industrial sector of US empire and key satellites____________$7.06 trillion

Nominal industrial sector of BRIC______________________________$5.127 trillion

The world is a lot more balanced now when it comes to making and distributing large physical objects. Increasingly transnational and amoral corporations like General Electric and Siemens can strangely become a source of transnational pride for billions of humans if they merge into a state fused productive arrangement described above.

Human Herd Dynamics

The fields of psychology, sociology, and political science should be fused into the field of human herd dynamics (with biology and engineering serving auxiliary roles).

"A riot is the language of the unheard." Martin Luther King Jr.




The chaos engulfing London currently would not come as a surprise to anybody looking at human (domesticated primate) migration patterns. Until recently England had a colonial release valve for the aggressive intuitive humans on the home islands. They simply picked up and left to escape the intolerable, stifling, and pretentious exploitation by depraved hereditary mafia.

The more "cooperative" breeds, those physiologically predisposed to conservative status quo mindset (SJs) thus became a bit more represented in the population as they bred. They remained behind and further fortified the societal structure. Social pressure within bottom castes of the herd hierarchy was effectively and continuously relieved.

That is until the adventurous ENTJs/ENTPs/ENFPs/ESTPs from former colonies began to migrate to England in the second half of the 20th century. They bred and produced a couple of generations of children that were radicalizing and destabilizing by their very existence (much like sending a team of dog breeds deemed "disloyal" by their masters into a group of "loyal" breeds).

[sidenote: It is very well possible that experiment-prone, novelty seeking, intuitive, and aggressive breeds leaving acted as a brain drain for the lower and middle classes of 1880s-1960s England. Drawing mostly from the "posh" semi-inbred higher society for scientists and theorists may have contributed to technological and ideological stagnation in 20th century England. Not mentioning the social mobility rankings that are even worse than in US and Mexico.]

Why Human Herd Dynamics (HHD)?

None of this analysis would be possible without interdisciplinary integration of social-psychology and other fields. It is 2011 AD. The time is ripe to:

1) Do a dissective and pragmatic "audit" of various major soft science fields to see which deserve to exist at all
2) Strip away the fluff from those that should exist to make them easier to relate to each other in an interdisciplinary manner, "modularize" them
3) Fuse the reformed stripped fields into one field where possible

Lets do an opening shot in this long overdue process.

The field of economics should not exist anymore and should be replaced by engineering completely (president or prime minister having a panel of engineering advisors instead of economic ones). Engineering IS real economics. Additionally, engineering deals with expanding the material power of the herd (unlike the obsolete 20th century pseudo-science of economics). Finally, lets kick this worthless discipline while its down one more time and say that "auditing" economics will do a lot more good than auditing entities like the federal reserve. We'd be treating the root of the problem rather than the symptoms.

This brings us to dealing with another economy, the economy of power within the multiplicity of the human herd. This means a) political science (the science of perception creation/management, a sister field to marketing as it is known in eastern Europe), b) sociology (the healthy kind that studies the entire herd with focus on movers and shakers rather than current sociology which serves as a spying apparatus for power elites) and c) psychology (positive psychology aided by biology rather than the current corporate quackery that is negative psychology).

Perhaps our old friend Nietzsche can help us somewhat with this since he was one of the first to describe the social world in a purely physical and biological way. A couple quotes naturally:

"All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation--just as a human community is a unity--as opposed to an atomistic anarchy, as a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity." 561 (1885-1886)

"In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination. In place of "society," the culture complex, as my chief interest (as a whole or in its parts)." 462 (Spring-Fall 1887)

We can see how sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science can be merged into one as they're all fused on their periphery already. What's left and doesn't fit is to be swallowed up by fields like history and marketing. Political Ponerology and Between Two Ages are good examples of how all encompassing disciplinary fusion can be done. HHD would naturally have a human as the smallest unit of analysis and total planetary population as the largest.

In essence HHD would look at:

1) How various breeds originate, develop, maintain, and expand clusters of force within the total herd
2) How these clusters of force interact with each other and the rest of humanity, what basic patterns of power arrangements occur
3) How clusters of force should be arranged within regional political units and the global unit as a whole. In this we would be guided by biology and engineering as they show us the needs of humans and the most efficient way to fulfill these needs via a 21st century version of utilitarianism (one which takes into account not just the individual's need for pleasure but also for personal autonomy and power)

HHD makes it harder to get volunteers for WW3

Before the reader accuses the Human Herd Dynamics study as something Aldous Huxley would dream up, it is key to know that our rulers already research and make practical use of HHD informally. Currently, the fusion of various fields is well on the way and we're just speeding up the existing processes via an organizational and linguistic streamlining. Of course it would also unleash mass popular dissemination of "forbidden" knowledge as key intuitive connections that scholars make will be sped up due to merging of the fields. In turn, we'll see healthy and major transformative ripple effects on society, political institutions, shared values, individual's self-appraisal, popular movements, etc. Considering the challenges and evolutionary leaps that await us in the decades ahead, the simplification, streamlining, holistic merging, popularization, and democratization of the soft sciences is a top priority for peacefully building the technocratic world of tomorrow. HHD can thus become a self referential discipline that affects and is affected, that illuminates yet evolves with us in a mutually enriching way.

Third Industrial Revolution

Nanotechnological manufacturing will have more impact on humanity in a few decades than agricultural/industrial revolutions had over thousands of years. Such rapid change in production/distribution will push towards global unification to prevent potentially devastating occurrences




As of today, every major state power in the world is actively pursuing nanotechnological breakthroughs to give itself a geopolitical advantage. Public and private enterprises are seeing sharp increases in financial and logistical support. Although the global economic depression weighs down the hands of many civilian branches (legislative/executive) by increased centrifugal pulls of populist and oligarchic factions, military leaderships and intelligence services understand that allowing foreign powers to make a nanotech leap can be disastrous. Whichever society is able to produce the first fabricator is but a few steps away from being able to cheaply and exponentially produce advanced weaponry and weapons systems in bulk. Even Iran is dabbling with nanotech lately by giving Ministry of Agricultural Jihad (ministry name not a joke, check the link) some money for agricultural product research. Whether they'll be making better fertilizer or better fertilizer bombs remains to be seen. Supposedly there's already been some nanotech use in an explosive device that had more destructive power than US's MOAB while being lighter in weight.

In recent years we saw an increasing number of breakthroughs in manufacturing processes of nanoscale parts. The advancements stand to produce larger quantity as well as better quality of objects on the scale needed to build the first fabricator. This video shows a visual sketch to give a person an idea of how an advanced fabricator (one made a number of version generations after the first proto fabricator is created) in mid 21st century can produce publicly approved items.

The processes shown in the video might seem fantastical and impossible but a number of scientists (such as the polymath Richard Feynman a few decades ago) have shown that there is nothing standing in the way from the side of physics. As of 2009, dozens of very optimistic research papers have not been shown to be completely wrong yet. We also have plentiful evidence of advanced nanotechnological systems working splendidly due to the presence of self replicating machinery such as cells in plants, animals, bacteria, and human beings. There is also not one single manufacturing process (to assemble parts for the first crude fabricator and put them together) to be derailed since a number of roads within biology and chemistry can lead to same desired results.



I have written how existing non-nano mass production technology is already capable of feeding and providing a basic material stipend to all people in the world and how that is slowly and painfully leading to global unification efforts. Creation of the first factory producing product on nano level will put a nail in the coffin of defining economics as a study of allocating scarce resources. Although different branches of economics try to parade themselves as empirical science, economics has been estranged from empirical research into human welfare for over half a century. Nanotechnology will reunite economics with research into material logistics of how much energy is needed to constantly raise the minimum human welfare (and correspondingly how many more fabricators are needed to mass produce parts of new energy plants to power production of new material goods for all). Technocratic societal organization as a concept will re-emerge again after having been stifled under the disastrous ideological jihads of the 20th century. Both varieties of state capitalism in Soviet Union and United States overlooked the empirically proven possibilities of providing for their people.

The sheer transformative potential of the first fabricator (to change human condition more in a few decades than agricultural and industrial revolutions did over thousands of years) makes control over nanotechnology development top issue for world's power elites. The most likely scenario will be creation of international protocols concerning non-proliferation of dangerous nano technologies. The protocols can only extend further with time since:

1) knowledge of fabricator production may be easier to spread than that of nuclear warheads
2) energy needed for fabricator production and then energy to feed the fabricators may be a lot lower than uranium refining
3) fabricators will be able to mass produce deadly viruses and explosives to be used by non-state actors

It is thus logical that key technologically advanced countries will follow their eventual economic unification with political unification. This in turn will be followed with the North Hemispheric block (EU, North American Union, Europe, Russia, Japan, China) extending into global political unification of either imperial non-exploitative nature (Soviet model of unification), imperial exploitative nature (Anglo-Saxon model of unification), or most likely an imperial hybrid of both (EU model).

This will be to keep tight control over nanoscale production and to prevent large scale violent crime by non-state actors that is motivated by either luddite, ideological, or religious reasons. Western elites have been blabbing their mouths for some time now about economic global unification under the guise that "only international cooperation can solve global problems". Gordon Brown ( the leader of a country that is in much worse debt situation than United States proportional to its population) has had the nerve recently to say world needs to work together to solve things like hunger. Such blatant attempts by Anglo-Saxon leaderships to weasel out of national bankruptcies and acquire greater control over south hemispheric natural resources will fail. Economic and then political global unification will occur however with Eurasia in the political driving seat. Only this backdrop can properly release the third industrial revolution of nanotechnology manufacturing while greatly reducing potential for violence.

China and Russia have been funding large scale crash programs in nanotech development (Moscow is now determined to match US in annual public investment dollar for dollar). They however lack the benefits that years of investment has brought to nanotech research in the West. They also don't have the benefit of decentralized nanotech laboratories with enormous private funding. It is thus logical that the rapid construction of centralized nanotech centers by Chinese and Russians is to make use of the nanotech intelligence acquired through industrial espionage (or mass hiring of foreign talent after economic crisis deepens in the West). They will be prepared to rapidly emulate efforts in case breakthroughs occurs in Japan, South Korea, Western Europe, or United States.

Some give the name of third industrial revolution to the rapid increase in globalized capitalism. That is a historically incorrect way of looking at advances in manufacturing and agricultural processes. Globalization just changed the location of production whereas the second industrial revolution rapidly changed the quality and quantity of industrial products through better technological application of technology such as the assembly line. Having cars made abroad by former peasants to save money is not revolutionary when it comes to material progress. Neither is it revolutionary to use technology to move capital investments around rapidly to places where these peasant workers are willing to labor more to survive. Nothing evolutionary industrial in moving capital where the proles are under more crude coercion.

Nano level assembly will usher in such an exponential technological increase in manufacturing productivity that all socioeconomic systems we're familiar will rapidly disappear from sight. There will be a much larger break between a post scarcity world than one between a hunter gatherer world and an agricultural world (not mentioning the rather small differential jump from feudalism to capitalism).

Amidst these dark economic times and convulsions of inefficient market systems, there is a lot of optimism to be had. Economic depression is more likely to drive a company to try to offer an advanced product that is not just a tiny incremental difference over the old version. Nokia for example recently had refocused its research money towards luxury high end phones (demand for luxury items doesn't really dip during bursting of bubbles unsurprisingly). People are less likely to buy an object that is just a mild improvement such as a Pentium 4 was over Pentium 3. Hard economic times lead to greater application of new technology and pushes companies to offer something new enough to be worth buying. The more misery that this shrinking economy creates the more hopeful and amazing the possibilities of nanotech production will seem.