A new paper from Barabasi and colleagues from Notre Dame and the Kennedy School.

Economies grow by upgrading the products they produce and export. The technology, capital, institutions, and skills needed to make newer products are more easily adapted from some products than from others. Here, we study this network of relatedness between products, or "product space," finding that more-sophisticated products are located in a densely connected core whereas less-sophisticated products occupy a less-connected periphery. Empirically, countries move through the product space by developing goods close to those they currently produce. Most countries can reach the core only by traversing empirically infrequent distances, which may help explain why poor countries have trouble developing more competitive exports and fail to converge to the income levels of rich countries.

Supplementary materials are available.

Tim Harford covered it for Slate:

One very plausible account of why at least some poor countries are poor is that there is no smooth progression from where they are to where they would be when rich. For instance, to move from drilling oil to making silicon chips might require simultaneous investments in education, transport infrastructure, electricity, and many other things. The gap may be too far for private enterprise to bridge without some sort of coordinating effort from government—a "big push."

The Product Space and the Wealth of Nations

Alun Anderson, former editor of Nature, Science, and New Scientist replies to Dyson's Heretical Thoughts.

Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States.

The Changing Arctic: A Response To Freeman Dyson

War in the twenty-first century will be very different from what we've come to expect. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare are rapidly evolving to allow nonstate networks to challenge the structure and order of nation-states. It is a change on par with the rise of the Internet and China, and will dramatically change how you and your kids will view security.

In Brave New War, the counterterrorism expert John Robb reveals how the same technology that has enabled globalization also allows terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions—like sabotaging an oil pipeline—that will generate a huge return. He shows how taking steps to combat the shutdown of the world's oil, high-tech, and financial markets could cost us the thing we've come to value the most—worldwide economic and cultural integration—and the crucial steps we must take now to safeguard our systems and ourselves against this new method of warfare.

The first chapter is available.

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

Practitioners of a strange trade, friends, enemies, ladies and gentlemen: Before starting with my talk, let me explain to you how it came into existence.

About a year ago I was short of funds. So I accepted an invitation to contribute to a book dealing with the relation between science and religion. To make the book sell I thought l should make my contribution a provocative one and the most provocative statement one can make about the relation between science and religion is that science is a religion. Having made the statement the core of my article I discovered that lots of reasons, lots of excellent reasons, could be found for it. I enumerated the reasons, finished my article, and got paid. That was stage one.

Next I was invited to a Conference for the Defence of Culture. I accepted the invitation because it paid for my flight to Europe. I also must admit that I was rather curious. When I arrived in Nice I had no idea what I would say. Then while the conference was taking its course I discovered that everyone thought very highly of science and that everyone was very serious. So I decided to explain how one could defend culture from science. All the reasons collected in my article would apply here as well and there was no need to invent new things. I gave my talk, was rewarded with an outcry about my "dangerous and ill considered ideas," collected my ticket and went on to Vienna. That was stage number two.

Now I am supposed to address you.

How To Defend Society Against Science

Presencing is a social technology for collectively leading profound change. It is based on Theory U, which illuminates a blind spot in leadership and social experience: the source of the inner place from which leaders and systems operate.

About the book:

In a world burdened with too much information, we are occasionally blessed with a genuinely new idea about how to perceive, think about, and act on our overly complex world. Scharmer's Theory U model of how to open our mind, emotions, and will to moments of discovery and mutual understanding is profound and much needed.

Otto Scharmer, Theory U, and Presencing

Locative art, a melding of global positioning technology to virtual reality, is the new wrinkle in Gibson's matrix.

It's locative art that leads spooks and counterspooks directly to the cash.

...

Gibson: I don't think "Neuromancer" was prescient. It's more like trend-spotting. ... The level I work at is at the juxtaposition, say, of Prada and Santeria. But it's not about Prada or Santeria. It's not about having ideas about either. It's about seeing what happens when the two are put together.

Q&A with William Gibson - The Boston Globe

Orthodox economics assumes that people know roughly what they are doing, that they are rational, and that rationality is unambiguous. But in financial markets, people often don’t know what they are doing. Recognising this helps to solve our puzzles.

Many hedge fund managers, for all their fancy jargon and maths PhDs, do what Nassim Nicholas Taleb accused them of in his book The Black Swan: they are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

The one question you must never ask an economist

Information may arrive instantly, but insight takes longer.

... It is sort of like a game of musical chairs in which the music stops and it turns out that all the chairs have vanished.

Why is the credit panic being played out in slow motion?

It has lately become clear that nothing burdens a life like an email account. It’s the old story: the new efficient technology ends up costing far more time than it ever saves, because it breeds new expectations of what a person can possibly do. So commuters in their fast cars spend hours each day in slow traffic, and then at the office they read and send email.

... You ask polite questions to which you pray there will never come an answer. Oh, but there will.

This link will last, but soon it will fail to point to the quoted content, which appears in n+1, Number Five, Winter 2007.

Against Email

The Internet revolution itself is not about hypertext, but the culture of participation and the sharing of knowledge.

Web 2.0 Won't Eat Your Mouse