I have a new friend!

It is with unbridled pleasure that I have finished reading a most wonderful and thought-provoking book of economic theory, Jane Jacobs paramount work “Cities and the Wealth of Nations“.

Her economic theory is founded upon the absolute requirement of cities. No city, no foundation for economy, other than a very basic subsistence form of economy. At the heart of her theory is the replacing of imports; a place that starts replacing imported goods with locally created ones automatically becomes a city. As it keeps doing this, the city grows, eventually giving birth to a region dominated by this city.

Expanding on this, she analyzes economies and draws several conclusions from this; that all schemes to support regions without import-replacing cities are doomed to failure; that efficiency improvements in rural economies can be disastrous for the economy in terms of unemployment. Her vision of an economy is not a functional system ruled by regulations and laws, but a living organism, growing and expanding on its own. Trying to transplant factories and foreign economic factors into this organism may, in fact, kill it.

The thing that stands out in her analysis is that there is no alternative to local small business. This is the very lifeblood upon which any economy lives or dies.

Another interesting point she makes is about currency: How the value of the currency is proportional to the strength of the city economy. (Forgive me if I misquote.) A nation’s currency is dominated by the largest city regions; and it will suit them the best. However, for smaller cities growing, the currency will provide what she calls “faulty feedback”, as they are out of sync with the dominating economy. As a result, nations will gradually begin concentrating their economic life to one, large city region. She takes France as an example, which is almost entirely dominated by Paris. Italy is dominated by the industrial north, Japan is increasingly dominated by Tokyo, and so on.

This gives birth to financial transactions, aimed at restoring the weaker regions and provide jobs and development; these transactions are, however, foreign aid to these smaller cities, and, like transplants, fail to stimulate the economy in a permanent way: they do not stimulate import-replacing businesses. Moreover, they sap the economic strength of the city region that provides the national economic growth; the further this process develops, the more stressing this situation will become. The nation will continue to be dominated by a large city region, who increasingly carries the burden of the rest of the nation out of sync with the currency valuation, and further and further “transactions of decline” are initiated.

Building on this, it is easy to show how all empires must fail, due to systemic economical difficulties built into the very structures of an empire. In this light, the implementation of the Euro is a bad idea: It will gradually become dominated by a fewer and fewer economical regions inside the EU, requiring all the more financial transactions to be made to “equalize” the lesser developed regions inside the EU, sapping the strength of the main city regions and ultimately dooming them to failure.

What is the answer to this? She sees one possible solution – a highly theoretical one, she admits, and rarely, if ever, tried in history.

As a nation grows and becomes stronger, building on a city region, and before too heavy support transactions come into play for its underdeveloped regions, the nation should split: Divide itself into two, with separate currencies, and, if necessary, tariffs to protect its internal markets in their infancy. As the new region grows stronger, the need for tariffs disappear. When this economy, in turn, becomes too large, it should split again, repeating the process as necessary. Their local currencies will always be in direct relation to the economic strength of their regions. Of course, pitfalls abound, but this way it will counteract the negative forces in play when the synchronization fails.

As controversial as it sounds (and I have little hope for its practical feasability), I find it attractive, because it provokes a vision of the world as a living organism, growing organically, and multiplying as cells do – by splitting. And in doing so, it is directly at odds with romantic dreams of uniting the whole world under one government and a single, worldwide economic system.

And that is why I want to believe in it. :)

Last Tuesday, we went to see Jean Michel Jarre’s indoor concert in Gothenburg.

Jarre is one of the musicians I remember from my childhood; I bought almost every record (and then subsequently CD) with him and listened to over and over.

This concert was a smaller one, he is otherwise known for his huge and spectacular concert in Houston, Paris, Lyon, London etc. This was inside the Scandinavium arena, and it was just one night – he played in Malmö the day before, and Stockholm the day after.

It was quite a remarkable concert though. It featured a lot of old songs, as well as some newer ones. And, of course, spectacular effects with lights and lasers and a few other oddities thrown in. It was also unbelievably loud – I should bring earplugs the next time. Lesson learned. Then again, I think that goes for most concerts.

I think the most amazing thing with Jarre is that he is not using synthesizers to emulate the sound of “real instruments” – which they are rather poor that, but that he is using them as instruments in themselves. He has always pioneered ways of using them and producing sound with them that goes quite beyond everything else.

It was quite evident as he was playing some more avant-garde pieces, featuring quite an unusual sound (especially from the theremin) and evoked rather strange moods, that would have been impossible with normal acoustic instruments.

All in all, well worth seeing, although it is evident that the highlight of his career probably was in the past; the audience were mostly people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.

Imagination is a wonderful thing; that dreamy world where a thousand different worlds unfold. What amazing stories that take place there, when one is allowed to just dream a little. And, with a snug satisfaction, all those adventures can be experienced without ever leaving your comfortable home. For instance…

• …I have walked down the busy streets of New York and London in the morning, feeling the air of busy commerce and traffic. I have taken the El to work, Starbucks coffee cup in hand, a hundred mornings in Chicago. Seen the sun rise over Lake Erie from Sears Tower, and stood on the pier of a little village in Maine looking out over the ocean. I have been the captain of fishing boats steaming out towards open sea.
• I have traveled through Japan, taking the off-road path through little towns far outside of Tokyo or Osaka. I have visited small villages and photographed the countryside. I’ve been in Morocco, Egypt and Israel, taking pictures with my camera. I have seen the mysteries of Nepal.
• I’ve been the friend of movie stars, presidents, famous preachers and foreign kings. I have worked with secret service, protected dignitaries, and led uprisings in far off countries. I’ve been a mercenary, secret agent, benevolent dictator, upheld the law; I’ve conquered nations, established justice, gone to war and fought for peace. I’ve led armored brigades against Napoleon and Alexander the Great.
• I have traveled in time and seen the early days of Egypt. I was there when the pyramids were built (in fact, I had quite a hand in the building process). I was there when Jesus died, I was a part of Columbus expedition to the New World, and I spoke in the senate of the empire of Rome. I saw the first barbarian tribes that moved into Scandinavia, and I stood on the Danube the day that Attila came.
• I’ve been a man of the world; romanced women, crushed their hearts and said “c’est la vie, ma chérie – it was never meant to be”. I’ve professed my love in a thousand ways, written poems and symphonies to put eloquent words to magical feeling, and I’ve sung duets with my wife at my wedding – to spontanous applause. I have received the Nobel prize; and I have given the Nobel prize to others.
• I’ve stood on the moons of Saturn and beheld the sky filled with gleaming rings; and I’ve watched the tiny blue dot that is Earth from the plains of Mars. I’ve seen the millions and billions of stars that is our galaxy. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate.

All of this is part of me, of the world I make for myself. Inside, in my thoughts, there are no boundaries for anything; I am king, servant, ruler of the universe, or humble saint. I have a grand palace with fifty rooms, and yet I sleep with the homeless on the street. I build intelligent robots that can love, and I shoot soldiers on the Eastern front. What a dramatic life I lead!

And then I wake up again, and realize that I still haven’t finished that little PHP function I was supposed to build. Oh, well, back to work ….. *sigh*

I’ve found a new great blog, Gustavo Duarte’s blog, where he talks about hardware, operating system kernerls, and other fun items.

I liked his comparison of how fast different types of memory is.

The first thing that jumps out is how absurdly fast our processors are. Most simple instructions on the Core 2 take one clock cycle to execute, hence a third of a nanosecond at 3.0Ghz. For reference, light only travels ~4 inches (10 cm) in the time taken by a clock cycle…

Normally when the CPU needs to touch the contents of a memory region they must either be in the L1/L2 caches already or be brought in from the main system memory … To put this into perspective, reading from L1 cache is like grabbing a piece of paper from your desk (3 seconds), L2 cache is picking up a book from a nearby shelf (14 seconds), and main system memory is taking a 4-minute walk down the hall to buy a Twix bar…

[...] Even main memory is blazing fast compared to hard drives. Keeping with the office analogy, waiting for a hard drive seek is like leaving the building to roam the earth for one year and three months. This is why so many workloads are dominated by disk I/O and why database performance can drive off a cliff once the in-memory buffers are exhausted …

Subscribed. :)