novelresearch ...archive.worldmapper.org/articles/the_age.pdf · tractor. the net in-tourism map...

NAA B08

By P. J. O’ROURKE

Mapping a future for the worldNOVEL RESEARCH When a political satirist decides to apply a new way of charting trends to helpidentify which nations will become the world’s leading innovators the results are, well, less than rigorous.

LINKwww.worldmapper.org

A new way of seeing the world:Worldmapper is a collection of maps inwhich countries look fat or thinaccording to their share of whatever isbeing analysed, such as education,wealth, population.

Copyright 2006 SASI Group (Universityof Sheffield) and Mark Newman(University of Michigan).

PREDICTING innovation is some-thing of a self-cancellingexercise: the most probable inno-vations are probably the leastinnovative. The history of

humankind’s development can be summedup as the story of surprise. Adam Smithfailed to forecast the Industrial Revolutiondespite his friendship with James Watt,inventor of the steam engine that poweredit. And who would have prophesied MySpaceor Oprah in quantities greater than 100mls?

But even if we can’t see what innovationsare around the corner, maybe we can atleast predict what places are likely to be themost innovative in the future. An innovativetool called Worldmapper might help.

Worldmapper was created by geographersfrom the University of Sheffield’s Social andSpatial Inequalities Research Group (There’san innovative college major!) and by MarkNewman, a physicist at the University ofMichigan. It allows them to turn all sorts ofobscure statistical information into vivid pic-tures. Countries look skinny or fat accordingto their share of wealth or trade or popu-lation, but retain their familiar nationalboundary shapes. The results are often car-toonish, but nonetheless scientificallyprecise. Perhaps a decidedly unscientifictour through a few of Worldmapper’s morethan 200 maps will help us see which coun-tries are best endowed with the stuff offuture innovation.

Mother is the necessity of inventionNo place can be innovative without children.This is not because of the platitudinous linkbetween youth and creativity; the children’sart on my refrigerator suggests there isn’tany. Ben Franklin was no kid when heinvented bifocals. Henry Ford, by allaccounts, seems never to have been youth-ful. But countries with children,demographers predict, will have adults.India, China and the nations of Africa andSouth Asia are in the lead, as the Total Chil-dren map shows. Note, however, that thereare adequate numbers of children elsewhere,even in supposedly child-proof Europe andJapan, and plenty in the United States. Andnot every child will grow up to be aninnovative adult.

Each child is biologically required to havea mother. Fatherhood is a well-regardedtheory, but motherhood is a fact. What kindof woman is best at lovingly fostering thepotential in children? Let us sidestep socio-logical, economic and feminist argumentsand posit simply a woman who is herselfbeloved. Quantification of that is difficult,and Worldmapper hasn’t tried. But two of itsmaps, one almost the exact inverse of theother, are nonetheless telling: Women inAgriculture (the number of female farmlabourers) and Tractors Working. It’s goodwhen a society values women, not so goodwhen it values women because they arecheaper than a John Deere.

The US and Western Europe excel in theratio of farm machinery to women farmworkers. They also excel — as do Japan,South Korea, and South Africa — in anotherstatistic: Female Managers. A country ismore likely to be innovative when 100 percent of its population, instead of 50 per cent,has an opportunity to innovate.

Obviously innovativeThere is a kind of thinker known as aMOTO, a ‘‘Master of the Obvious’’. MOTOsare hired by the hundreds as editorialwriters and news commentators. Thoughalways boring, they aren’t always wrong.And it would be a violation of MOTO prin-ciples to ignore research and developmentas a predictor of innovation.

In per capita R&D spending, the UnitedStates, the wealthier Western Europeannations, Israel, Japan, and South Korea aregiants. In gross spending (see Total R&DExpenditures), China is Brobdingnagianenough, and Brazil and South Africa are

mid-sized titans on otherwise rather unin-novative continents. But what are theresearchers researching and the developersdeveloping? Cold fusion or YouTube? A curefor malaria or flatulence? We can’t know thefuture worth of a country’s R&D. We can,however, inspect that country’s track record.The map of Royalties and License FeeExports gives a picture of where past R&Dhas been valuable enough that other coun-tries buy it. Gangway for the United States ofAmerica! Sorry about that, Japan. Way to go,feisty runners-up Great Britain, Sweden, andFrance.

A little education . . .Education is another MOTO indicator, albeitan occasionally dubious one. More years ofeducation do not always yield more

innovative thinking, as anyone who has suf-fered through a Harvard cocktail party canattest. Thomas Edison dropped out ofschool at seven. Whoever invented thewheel had no school out of which to drop.Socrates didn’t go to a university; he wasone.

Education, however, does change minds.And a new mentality is a more significantinvention than the moldboard plow or thesemiconductor. Not much was reallyinvented during the Renaissance, if youdon’t count modern civilisation.

Currently, spending on education linesup about as you’d expect: rich countriesspend more than poor ones. But for pur-poses of futurism, growth in educationalspending may be more to the point. TheSecondary Education Spending Growth map

shows total increases for children aged 11 to17 — the time kids start getting a mind oftheir own (necessary to innovation, howeverannoying it is to parents). Here the futureseems to belong to Western Europe, SouthKorea, Thailand, Malaysia, China, LatinAmerica, the northern and southern (butnot the central) parts of Africa, and NewZealand. By comparison, America and Aus-tralia are idling or stalled.

But another map, Primary EducationSpending Growth, gives Yanks and Aussiessome hope. Expenditures shown hereinclude preschool programs. Some educatorsclaim that that’s when the mind is trulyformed. But do you want to hear the engin-eers building your high-speed particleaccelerator say, ‘‘Everything I need to knowI learned in kindergarten’’?

Blessed are the innovative in spiritInnovation is necessary to progress, andprogress is, we tend to think, necessarilylinked to prosperity. But if we look at themost innovative nation in history to date —the USA — we see that the most distinctiveAmerican innovations were the products ofpoverty. Bluegrass, gospel, jazz, rhythm andblues, country and western, rock’n’roll, andhip-hop are the music of poor people.American slang, American style, Americanfashions and fads have their sources amongthe least affluent. America’s car culture,teen culture, sports culture (and drug cul-ture and gun culture) were shaped by what,in other countries, would be called the lowerclasses.

One secret to this sort of innovation isrich poor people. To be on the poverty

threshold in the United States ($US9973 peryear for a single adult) is to be richer thanmost people in the rest of the world (percapita global average GDP is $8229). Anation’s poor can’t be innovative if they’refamished. Famine takes too much time andenergy.

The other secret is what sociologistswould call agglomeration and what we’d calla ghetto, inner city, or slum. Poor peopleare creative by themselves, but put a lot ofthem together and the result is brilliant —African-American artistic genius in the Har-lem Renaissance, Jewish intellectual geniuson New York’s Lower East Side, Irish politi-cal genius among the ward heelers andblock captains of Boston’s South End.

Innovating with their feetThe poor are an especially importantresource for innovation when they have thebravery and pluck to get out of the poorplaces in which they’re living. Our speciesspread from Africa into the cradle of civilis-ation (a very messy crib at the moment).Mongols with nothing but a few horses totheir name swept across Asia. Hungrymammoth-hunters migrated to Americafrom one end of the Earth, and their gold-hungry cousins ‘‘discovered’’ it from theother. The results have been innovative inthe extreme.

The Net Immigration map gives a fairlypredictable prediction of future innovation.People are moving to places that have thegood life from places where life is not sogood. The United States, Canada, WesternEurope, Israel, and the posher and morepeaceful areas of the Arabian Peninsulaaccount for almost 80 per cent of the world’snet immigration. Hong Kong, Singapore andAustralia are also gainers.

And certain unprepossessing countries ineven less prepossessing regions —Venezuela, Costa Rica, Russia, South Africaand Tanzania — are acquiring brave, pluckyinnovators.

But other movements in human popu-lations are far less innovative. These are thewaves of tourists. To be a tourist is toexpress rank conservatism. Tourists seek the‘‘unspoiled’’.

No one is as offended as a tourist whena warren of crumbling adobe is levelled tomake way for a KFC or when a colourfulpeasant woman is replaced by a workingtractor. The Net In-Tourism map showsplaces where visits from tourists exceed thetourist travel of the residents. Thus is sappedthe innovative potential of France, Spain,Austria, Italy, Mexico, the Caribbean, south-ern Africa, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore,the United Arab Emirates, and China.

Attitude-adjustment hourGiven all the very rigorous research com-piled by Worldmapper, what totallyunrigorous conclusions can we draw? Arough tally of quick impressions of arbitrarilychosen criteria indicates that only about adozen countries or regions are likely to beinnovative in the near future. Perhapsunsurprisingly, the United States andEurope loom largest. But South Korea andSouth Africa keep popping up strongly aswell, and so do Japan, Australia, New Zea-land, and a few other places.

All of which is mirrored, at least tolerablyclosely, by the Alcohol and CigaretteImports map. That’s one more thing aboutinnovation: it’s very stressful. And who,among the world’s innovators, are sostressed that they have to bring in stressrelief from overseas? That would be theAmericans, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, theSouth Koreans, and the Continentals inWestern Europe.

You folks look like you need a drink.Innovation is a damn big job. Congratulat-ions. Have a cigar. ATLANTIC MONTHLY

P. J. O’Rourke is an American political satirist.

Total population

Net immigration

Spendingon researchanddevelopment

Spendingonprimaryeducation

Net inbound tourism

Royaltiesand licence feeexports

Spendingonsecondaryeducation

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