thanks to: correspondents at youthmarkets.com worldrecordjobs.com abedmooc.com sdgscotland.com
To Be or Not To Be – that is the question -Shakespeare Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1 SDGsU.com[i]
JFK & MACRAE -J1
As you can see Irish American President Kennedy liked my Father Scottish Brit's 1962 survey in The Economist of the good news that not only was Japan rising from the ashes of nuclear war but had a win-win economic model around which the whole of Asia could rise. It seemed that the first 5 years of von neumann's legacy was going well:
JFK kennedy had challenged youth to an amzing goal- land on the moon - if technology could do that what might each next decade of youth deliver
an artificial intel lab had been set up on both us coasts - facing the pacific out of stanford and the atlantic - intel had recieved such a huge order from a japanese calculator company that it invented the prograable chip so as not to be beholden to one clint; and gordon moore had challenged networks around him to increase 100 fold every decade this new kind of engineering power- soon the whole region from santa clara to san francisco had rebranded itself silicon valley- there was a new nrew world to co-create far different from the mess that the first two industrial revolutions had produced through the conflicts of the 7 white empires britain france germany italy russia canada and america
back in 1962 my father norman macrae was celebratig, in his optimistic manner that he believed journalists must value- the permission to publish one named survey after 15 years sub-editing the economist- he chose japan. As a teenage scot serving in allied bomber command stationed in myanmar, father and so i would not have survived without american help. But father grew up in european embassies where his dad was trying to prevent both stalin and hitler from ever greater media and human abuse. So father thought of wars as systemically spiraled by historic mistakes- none more than slavemaking as a currency flow of empire (along with opium) which sadly london had accelerated with firstcomers access to smith and watt's engines. By 1939 continental Asians nearly two thirds of human beings had all but been left out of 185 years of access to machines let alone electricity grids; so dad was overjoyed to see japan was scaling solutions -mainly open sourced by american agricultural hero borlaug and engineering hero deming. not just for its peoples growth but potentially all over asia.As you can see jfk thought it would be great to learn from japan but when he was assassinated a year later all sorts of dismal things overwhelmed americans at home with failure to achieve black and white harmony; across nearby latin american borders where ussr an usa raced to sponsor rival ictators none of whom valued their peoples.
2010: When my father died the japanese ambassador to bangladesh kindly hosted 2 roundtables with chief guest fazle abed of brac. He had heard my father's two legacy wishes were about learning how to build sustainable communities -see 6 movement abed spent 50 years mapping - from the billion women who had just ended extreme poverty across asia and how the climactic decade of applying von neumann technologies that father had the privilege to be biographer of...
CHRIS MACRAE1 MA STATISTICS CANTAB
Norman Macrae Family Foundation
Washington DC, USA & Glasgow UK
INTRODUCTION SCOTTISH MINDSETS- AFORE YE GO TO OR FROM GLASGOW COP26
Although less than a four hundredth of our human race[ii], Scots' like the Irish, enjoy a reputation for being one of the most impudent[iii], collaborative and innovative of peoples. We seek to ask questions other so-called democracies forbid as politically incorrect. For example: what’s wrong with sustainably seeking to unite public servants instead of paying for fake media’s bipolar nationalist parties?
Where can innovation networks be audited to exponentially improve the human lot? As of summer 2019, why had 300 trillion dollars of western pension funds not valued any UN sdg networks as asset grade[iv]?
Why was JFK’s moon race 1960s the last time USA trusted 50000 youthful brains to actioning one goal as a network rather than a corporation or a government? If the younger half of the world linkin nearly 4 billion human brains, is it actually beyond our species and artificial intelligence to be celebrating global village survival of our species by 2030?
Back in 1984, I co-authored The 2025 Report[v] with my father The Economist’s Norman Macrae. We rehearsed the hypothesis - and mapped mathematically likely exponential timelines - that sustainability of our species would depend on transforming education so that children’s natural curiosity flourishes joyfully wherever the next wee lassie or laddie[vi] is born. queries welcome chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
On the minus side, we are disappointed with loss of youthful purpose at the BBC[ix] – at the margins of expensive entertainment, why not create digital channel with eg khan’s academy? For example, training on how to vaccinate people needs televisual support needs 24/7 fredom of access but not hi-cost production. With smart content, BBC could have virally inspired teachers to smoothly blend real and virtual learning instead of waiting for a pandemic. I can’t believe J Logey Baird[x] saw the sole purpose of tv as commercial entertainment, nor as instrument of politics. Please note from birth, the BBC was invested in by the peoples of Britain who paid the licence fee. By failing to represent people separately from government the BBC has done a worldwide dis-service. With www Tim Berners Lee, the BBC could have partnered in evolving 21st C English speakers’ antidote to drowning in fake media.
SDGSU.com : 2021 is the 37th year that our friends have done at least a small probono survey
aimed at discovering problems with demanding that the older half of the world
-parents and grandparents - value the younger half of the world’s collaborative[xi] opportunity to be the
first sustainability generation
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Examples from 37 years of debating
Transformation of Education – See more at zoomuni.net and educationopen.com ·
2016
Brookings Washington DC executive director of Scot Gordon Brown’s education
commission – would you willingly go for brain surgery to an institution that
hasn’t changed in over 100 years?- that’s what we do every day we send kids
to classrooms ·
2011
Sir Fazle Abed : MOOCs could change everything but why not C for
collaboration; why not a collaboration of universities who share their
sustainability alumni with at least one under 30s moonshot network for planet earth every year from
now on? ·
2009
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’ director of Grameen technology Bangladesh –
our research shows half of children everywhere whatever stage they leave education- will need
to entrepreneur their own jobs[xii] ·
2000
16 years after interviewing Norman Macrae at London Office of The Economist,
New Zealander Gordon Dryden sells 10 million copies of The Learning Revolution
in China |
OPTIMISTIC RATIONALISM
Five generations of my family’s number 1 belief : never mediate
system problems pessimistically. Those who use government service to big
brother over people destroy that nation’s credibility to adance human rights
let alone survival of our species.
DIASPORA NATIONS AS GLOBAL VILLAGE NETWORKERS
Xglasgow.com EconomistRefugee.com. May I clarify a paradox which
applies to Scots and many geographically isolated nations: 80% of us Scots have lived worldwide since the
middle of the 19th century.
We became a mainly Diaspora nation seeking to love each others’
peoples partly because we were colonised by London from early 1700s. This was
when our nation was bankrupted by a dumb investment in the Panama Canal, which
most of our 1700s clans-folk did not even know had happened. Scots at Glasgow U
also invented engines in 1760s – the birth of humans and machines. Industrial
Revolutions seemed to our first entrepreneurial brothers Smith and Watt- far
too big for one small island not to share equally with the rest of the world.
Scots therefore welcome all to Cop26 who want to take on the third
and last best chance[xv] to sustain humanity –
come ye -or zoom in[xvi] to- Glasgow November
2021. And we welcome the younger half of the world to continuing a relay of
leap forward summits mapped at EconomistDiary.com including Asia’s hosting in
December 2021 of the 3 most exciting summits education has ever conceived :
Dubai’s Rewired[xvii],
Qatar’s WISE twinned brilliantly by the first lady of Qatar with WISH[xviii], Hong Kong’s Yidan
Prize hosted by TenCent’s former co-founder Charles Yidan[xix].
Economistsports.net: we also want to help celebrate the decade
long marathon that edutech wizards like Jack Ma seek to EdTech bring to 2020s
Olympics[xx] and the late great Kobe Bryant
aimed to turn into exciting goals wherever lives matter to communities. In
valuing sustainable developmet: we cherish systems mapped round valuing goal 3 health and goal 4 education grow
economies across generations not vice versa.
Humanity’s second best chance of sustaining our species was born
with the United Nations in 1945 - a stage in human development which we will revisit
as a main focus of this paper.
But first consider, in a bit more detail, the first best chance : valuing
exponential opportunity and threats to human development the way Glaswegian
Adam Smith journalised around 1760, and another Scottish brother mediated round
London’s Royal Societies of the mid 19th century. We pay homage to Diaspora
Scot James Wilson who gave birth to The Economist in 1843 as the first media
whose editors aimed to celebrate transforming nations around sustainability
development goals 1 end poverty, 2 end hunger.
Wilson was purposefully an alumni of his fellow Scot Adam Smith
and probably a follower of Frenchman JB Say who had coined the term
entrepreneur to debate how to empower the future of a nation that has just
taken back productive assets from monopoly rule by all the King’s men.
Those who read Adam Smith[xxi] contextually distinguish
between his text Moral Sentiments written before the start of the machine age
and his work on nations which became Smith’s pre-occupation once he had seen
his Glasgow University co-worker James Watt had started up the age of humans
and machines.
Smith thought in terms of systems: man-made markets and their
interaction with machines were new systems he was trying to map to constructively
interface with nature’s systems as well as local cultural and global health
systems. As already mentioned, Scotland was 50 years into being colonised by
London. Smith advocated that machines should be shared all over the world and
that London capitalists as then epicentre of slave-making empire were not to be
trusted to lead this. Indeed, Smith sought to unite Scots and Irish engineers
with the United States. His only plea: as machines reached a new state, regional
leaders should not just repeal slavery but buy out at a fair price owners of
business models depending on slave labour and redesign the business model so that
all lives matter. Imagine the consequences of applying the Smithian
Proposition. Imagine if everywhere the Louisiana Purchase extended the States had
developed along Smith’s lives-matter states of being. Imagine if the far west
coast of USA had extended the same values. And next when Americans started
sailing west to Hawaii and Japan, what if these inter-hemisphere mapmakers had
extended win-win greetings of trade not the colonial empire’s smash and grab?
Smith made one more plea that was way ahead of his time. He sought
to rid the world of the Colonial Empire’s system of higher education which he
observed at oxford of the 1760s as being designed for the convenience of
professors and bureaucratic masters of administration not of valuing youth.[xxii] Smith’s transformation
of education was to be designed around empowering life-long learning
opportunities- particularly for factory workers – to the extent that their work
involves drudgery they most of all need support in artistic and other education
geared to enjoying their free time. When Scots share readings of Smith we
celebrate that joyful school of economics mapped round valuing all lives matter
especially ahead of times of unprecedented innovation,170 years after Smith and
70 years after Wilson you can also read the same argument being made in the
last chapter of Keynes – general theory – of employment, money and interest
In turn, Wilson’s success in applying Smithian ideology to mediating
transformation was less than his life had hoped for but kept alumni of The
Economist one of the globe’s most curious networks at least for its first 150
years. Over its first decade, The Economist went viral among London’s Royal
Society of the mid 19th century. Wilson succeeded in repealing The
Corn Laws but not before they had contributed to starvation of many in Ireland
leading to a hundred and fifty years of troubles with the Irish. Queen Victoria
took a shine to the idea of ruling over commonwealth instead of slave-making.
She sent Wilson to charter a bank in India aimed at transforming India peoples
lives. Wilson died of diarrhea 9 months after reaching Calcutta. Instead of
ending British control of Asia the British sailed on to the south China coast
where they demanded the Chinese accept opium as a currency for the much desired
Chinese teas and silks. The Chinese refused, and their trade with the rest of
the world was effectively closed for 110 years confining the once wealthiest
and most consciously civilised[xxiii] fifth of the world to
poverty[xxiv]. Wilson’s son-in-law
Walter Bagehot took on as second editor- he is credited with changing the English
constitution towards commonwealth.
We can see how The Economist tried to maintain Wilson’s purpose at
the autobiography of its first centenary published in 1943[xxv].To the extent that the
root cause of the world wars was the way white empires plus Japan had colonised
the world, clearly The Economist still had a lot more to mediate to start its
second century of journalism for humanity. Today around the SE borders of the
EU it has ever more now questions to air such as how did the med sea become a
sea of refugees?
Section 2
I was asked by Adam Smith scholars and the editor of journal of
social business to compile a section on what my father as a follower of Smith
and Wilson contributed to the 3rd half century of The Economist
1943-1993.
Norman’s joy of reporting
peoples who are freeing themselves from history’s fault-lines has a lot to do
with both his father’s and his student days were interrupted by world wars.
His father Duncan Macrae had been doing post-graduate studies at Heidelberg
when world war 1 started -as a relatively rare Brit speaking German grandad
became a spy for Britain and then a British consular instead of the family business
as a Scottish missionary! In Norman’s case after an adolescence spent in places
like British embassy in Moscow, he spent
his last days as a teenager as a navigator in allied bomber command stationed
in modern-day Myanmar. Norman’s log book diaries have an almost weekly entry –
another right old mess today: another young crew failing to return from that
day’s mission.
Having the good fortune to survive the war, Norman was determined
never to publicly show pessimism on anything else. He saw the systemic challenges
of the 1945’s birth on UN like this:
1)
Unite the leading
empires (eg 7 of the G8 with exception of Stalin’s) to reboot their advanced
economies
AND
2)
Reconcile wherever they-
mainly the white race representing 13% of our species= had done damage to
colonies or native people- in total about 70% of the world’s population in 1945
AND
3) Outlast Stalin
.Surviving the war made Norman Macrae optimistic but realistic
about the challenges facing the world which he tried to help mediate over the
next 40 years through 3000 anonymous Economist articles (in line with the
paper’s collegiate culture) and 30 named surveys- Typically one Norman Macrae[xxvi] survey per year from
1962. His start as a temporary intern at The Economist in 1949 was good timing-
he had enough breathing space as a still young curious man to have enjoyed
being in Cambridge’s last class mentored by Keynes in Cambridge and doing
enough research to launch 2 definitive practitioner books London Capital Market,
Sunshades in October[xxvii]
His experience of an itinerant childhood as the son of a British Embassy
man assigned to projects collecting intel on the evils of Hitler and Stalin,
Norman never made the assumption that worlds biggest organisations were good ones.
Purposeful gets more purposeful is good; big gets bigger isn’t the way nature’s
evolutionary systems work. Like Peter Drucker , Norman chronicled hundreds of
cases on how managing big organisations was less entrepreneurially beneficial
for the human lot than small medium enterprises or community-deep service
franchises.
At his 1950s desk at The Economist Norman relentlessly
debated how to escape the Orwellian big brother scenario that the human race -its constitutions and political strategy got
stuck in the first two eras of Adam smith machine revolutions From an
agricultural age: to that which energetic machines add to human power: To that
with machines for telecommunications and space interconnect locally to globally
Fortunately clues to tech-transformational systems
challenges came from an interview with John von Neumann whose legacy Norman later
became the biographer of. Thus Norman kept on inter-generating back from
the future ideas of humans and machines – how might these bring peace and
sustainable generation to
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A united Europe |
economistEUROPE.com |
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A uniting Asia and Africa |
economistASIA.net economistAFRICA,com |
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A United America |
economistAMERICA.com |
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A United Triad |
economistJAPAN.com economistSCOTLAND.COM |
|
Norman is credited by his co-workers as turning The Economist
into the first global viewspaper. That meants integrating/adapting to diversity across hemispheres not
over-standardising one perfectly right way. North-East-West-South
Uniting economistYOUTH.com economistWOMEN.com economistBLACK.com economistGREEN.com
economistAI.com economistUN.com normanmacrae.net 2025report.com sdGsu.com G4 economistLEARNING.com G3 economistHEALTH..com
G2 economistFOOD.com G1 economistBANK.com |
|
|
EUROPE 1955-1962 Norman was the only journalist at the Messina birth
in 1955 of the European Union. You can hear how well he got on from the founding
Frenchman Jean Monnet, Italian and German at this video[xxviii]. However any hope that
the EU would lead the freedom of former colonies -especially med sea facing -
was dashed by the protective common agricultural policy in 1962. Norman never
gave up with Europe- for example he celebrated when a young Romano Prodi
translated 1976’s Entrepreneurial Revolution into Italian but top-down
bureaucratics were in conflict with mapping small-enterprise networks as the
way to community-built sustainability. As can indeed be seen by Norman’s 1982
survey of silicon valley[xxix] in the days when it
built rather than exited from future-youthful purposes WHAT ABOUT THE TRIAD : USA & THE 2 pesky
island empires Norman’s 1962 survey of Japan celebrated
breakthroughs exactly opposite to the wall the EU had run into. Japan had
found the two American post-War innovations that all of Asia needed most: ·
Borlaug’s village
agriculture revolution – this offered at least 5 times more rice food
security wherever rice is grown in Asian provided Borlaug’s solutions are microfranchised- ie knowhow adapted how Borlaug
alumni recommended the value stayed with the local producer ·
Deming improvement in
engineering . If you were going to use bullet trans or container shipping or
build cities where 25 million people thrive or depend on electronics to
calculate, or measure time or to machine tool you needed absolute
reliability. For reasons that remain murky, America’s biggest engineering
companies didn’t believe in Deming and so Asia got first chance in how
industrial revolution’s smart manufacturing bridges to IR2, IR3, IR4. By 1962
when Macrae published his first named survey “consider japan” in the
economist this roadster capital model was already spreading in SME
just-in-time value chains which South Korea and Taiwan wanted to join and which traders/financiers
in Hong Kong and Singapore were happy to merge into world class trade. When
Price Charles saw this happy leap forward at 1964 Olympics he asked Sony CEO Akio Morita and Japan
Emperor to inward invest in wales as Japan’s first European entry; sadly the
assassination of JFK in 1993 prevented him from uniting USA UK and Japan. |
Unexpectedly just as the EU began to stumble, Macrae’s 1962 survey consider japan went
globally viral with JFK writing this review -from then on Norman in his 13th
year of sub-editing The Economist was permitted to sign one annual survey
What happened next? As far as I can find out American Intelligence
never followed up the idea that Japanese Korean and Chinese diaspora were
growing win-win economies. This lost momentum may have been personally due to
the sad assassination of Kennedy, but more systemically it appears that while the
world was cheering on Americans right stuff for the space race- USA social
fabric was being torn asunder with assassinations of black and white leaders
and ever more sensationalist tv media. My diaspora Scottish and Irish friends so
wish Kennedy had survived to be off camera at the 1964 Olympics where Prince
Charles picked up the baton of east-west reconciliation by asking Sony to come be
one of japans first inward investors in Europe in his country wales. This year
also started to bridge the 3 old-world empires Britain , Japan and Netherlands
whose colonial orbits had most trapped half of all humans (living inland on the
continent of Asia) in next to zero modern infrastructure
Norman’s Economist surveys continued mediating how to design a
sustainable world celebrating where the biggest youth populations were to be
developed - particularly Asia where two thirds of millennials live. Norman
sought out Good news stories of Asians escaping the walls of poverty that the British
empire’s colonial age had spiraled . Here’s
a review of his survey of Asia 15 years after Kennedy’s appraisal.