Chris Anderson and Michael Arrington: Back-to-Back on Charlie Rose. the end piece of the anderson interview on the competitive advantage of the usa is an interesting one.

The supposed ‘clash of cultures’ is in reality nothing more than a manifestation of mutual ignorance
- The Aga Khan

Chavez Gains Free Rein in Venezuela. danger danger will robinson.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta. interesting tool to graph socioeconomic trends per country over time. this is related to talk given at last year’s ted conference.

define rich

The other day I pointed out an article that mentioned that the richest 2% of the world’s population owns half of everything but I was even more suprised by some of the additional stats that were pointed out on Greg Mankiw’s Blog (directly from the report)…

The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.

The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.

Microcredit pioneer criticizes globalization at Nobel ceremony - IHT “Yunus said that glorification of the entrepreneurial spirit had led to “one-dimensional human beings” motivated only by profit.”

OpEd by Senator-Elect Jim Webb on Class Struggle. “The most important–and unfortunately the least debated–issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century.”

the physical internet

The Economist has a fascinating survey article this month about logistics. Clearly, shipping and supply-chain management isn’t the sexiest topic to discuss. But the article does bring to life how tightly connected our world has become with stories like:

Zakaria: How Long Will America Lead the World? “More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees,” says Immelt. “So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way.”