Would it be fair to say that more wealth makes us less spiritual. The “Wealth and Religiosity” graph seems to depict so. With the spread of freethought, scientific skepticism, and criticism of religion; secular theology has gathered a more specific meaning. What’s your say?
Chris Anderson has written a great article on the future of business — moving to freeconomics, a freemium business model. A must read!
The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we’re surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).
Well, the pyramids were built without money, (as far as we know,) yet we would consider the pharaohs very rich.
Update (27th Feb): ReadWriteWeb highlights two issues that make the “free” economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.
Mark Twain once said “it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.” He sure had something more to convey than what the casual eye might gather.
I often wonder why do we all fancy success? I don’t necessarily need to ask this question to the wealthy bloke at Wall Street, the startup hacker, a sensational porn star, or, Obama or Clinton for that matter. Why do we fancy winning over losing? It’s like skipping a step on the ladder, learning to walk before we learn to crawl. And I’m gradually starting to believe that its got nothing to do with a social propaganda, or a “that’s-how-it-is” sense of hibernation.
If success is so important to us then why do we take decisions that are fundamentally incorrect more than often. If success was so important to all of us, then a general sense of human behavor dictates that we all would be taking the best of the decisions without much contemplation. If success is what we all were destined to accomplish, all the time, then genetically we should have been smart enough to take the best decisions in order to succeed, all the time. Clearly, failure is the best option. Maybe the best option, to gain success. You lose, you learn, you gain.
In one of the scenes of the sci-fi movie “War of the Worlds”, when the aliens are investigating the junk in the basement, one of them intriguingly plays with a bicycle wheel. As per the book on which this film is based, it is tied to the fact that with all the advanced technology the aliens possess, they don’t use any wheels. The alien life form had skipped the invention of the wheel. What a failure for an advanced alien race to have skipped such a revolutionary invention. What next, skipping baked bread, or an umbrella.
As America’s finest news source reports:
In a stunning reversal of more than 200 years of conventional wisdom, failure — traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals — is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success …
I don’t feel like encashing my $10 lottery ticket anymore.
