August 2010 Gartner Research
July 2011 Gartner Research
July 2012 Gartner Research
What changed?
Technologies that were slated to reach peak productivity went from 5-10 years out to 2-5 year range, over the course of about 1 year.
Something I've been thinking about a lot - sometimes international events are much more predictable than domestic ones. Is it because of complexity or just because of the speed of operations? I'm not sure either way. And remembering the Zen of Python: "In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess." So instead we look for certainties.
Israel:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/featur ... 57494.html
Based on a system of proportional representation, where voters select a party instead of a specific individual, Israeli elections have always resulted in coalition governments. To win an outright majority, a party would need to win more than 60 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
The minimum required for a party to win a Knesset seat is two percent of the total votes cast.
The prime minister is normally - but not always - the leader of the party that wins the most seats. He or she then negotiates with other parties to form a governing coalition.
In the 2009 election, although the incumbent prime minister's party, Kadima, won the most seats in the parliament, the Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu was able to form a majority coalition government and become the new prime minister.
In order to secure the 2013 elections, the Likud party merged with Yisrael Beiteinu to ensure Netanyahu's reelection. They secured 31 seats, a small loss from their previous position.
The right-wing Haredi ultra-orthodox Jews are 10% of the population and have a voter turnout of closer to 80%, versus 59-65% for the rest of the population. The Haredi have a very high reproductive rate of about 8.9 children per couple, have a high unemployment rate of 65% (versus 8% for total population) and only give their children religious studies after primary school. This makes them very dependent on government aide as they have no modern skills but are also very predictable and loyal voters:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/10 ... e-20100511
Officially, Israel’s unemployment rate is about 8%. But that doesn’t include Israeli citizens who are not trying to find work, either because they feel disenfranchised, such as many Arab Israelis, or because they’ve chosen a life of state-subsidized religious study, such as many ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Nearly 27% of Arab men and 65% of ultra-Orthodox Jews don’t work, government figures show. The non-employment rate for ultra-Orthodox men has tripled since 1970, Ben-David said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... nt=2435777
Since it also has been traditional for most Haredi men not to work at making a living, but to devote themselves to religious studies, the political parties, often holding the balance of power in coalition governments, also became useful for extracting financial concessions from governments wanting to stay in power.
With a birthrate several times that of other Jewish Israelis, the Haredim have an average of 8.9 children per family and constitute more than 10 per cent of the population of seven million.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2 ... oblem.html
Most ultra-Orthodox Jews lack the skills to work in a modern economy, having studied little or no math and science beyond primary school (their curriculum focuses almost entirely on religious texts such as the Torah and Talmud). As a result, more than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent among non-Haredi Jews. Most also opt out of military service, which is compulsory for other Israelis. The net effect: as the Haredi community expands, the burden of both taxation and conscription falls on fewer and fewer Israelis.
…
According to pollsters, Haredim are consistently hawkish on the question of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, citing God’s covenant with Abraham granting Jews the land of Israel. Already the parties that represent them wield significant political power in Israel’s coalition-based system.
South Korea:
Essentially the entire country's economic output is from a few companies, which are directly managed and indirectly owned by less than a dozen families. What we would call "corruption" is standard operating procedure there. Even if a whistlerblower manages to avoid getting disappeared, they will never be able to get a regular job again because the companies are the economy. Any executives that get caught redhanded just get pardoned, life goes on.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/7/legacy-of-corruption-still-exists-in-south-korea/?page=all
In 2007, an appellate court suspended a three-year prison sentence given to Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Mong-Koo for embezzlement. The presiding judge said the auto tycoon was too important to serve time.
Samsung’s Mr. Lee was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, fined and handed a suspended prison sentence. He resigned as chairman after his indictment, but returned to the post last year after a nearly two-year absence.
Many convicted executives and officials, including Mr. Lee and Mr. Chung, have received special presidential pardons. The aim is usually to foster reconciliation or pave the way for people with key knowledge, experience and skills to continue to contribute to the country’s development.
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edit ... 40551.html
The populace was fractured between voting for various independent and left-wing candidates and Park Geun-hye, the dead dictator's daughter. All of the smaller candidates left the elections to back the civil rights lawyer Moon Jae-in. Park won out, 51.6% to 48% versus Moon Jae-in. While Park did win the largest share of votes for any election in the country, I figured the gap would be wider. Park is the living avatar of the status quo .
http://qz.com/40960/the-14-rules-for-pr ... al-events/
1. Muddle-along rule
On and off for several decades, knowing analysts have forecast state collapse for Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, and other nations. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have been said to be destined for economic ruin, and North Korea for the ash heap of history. Yet they have gone on—often with the help of the global community, but gone on they have. The lesson is that countries tend to muddle along regardless of the trouble, and not collapse.
2. Precipice rule
A corollary to Rule No. 1. Even the most violence-riven nations tend not to plunge over the precipice, as it seems they might, but to pull back if only at the last moment and not devolve into utter chaos and ruin. Often they need help—last year, Kenya sent troops to Somalia to break up the radical militia al-Shabab, for example. But absent the Precipice Rule, Kenya’s intervention would not have worked: Somalians in fact did not wish to dive into the abyss. So al-Shabab could be uprooted.
3. Conspiracy rule
When you find a simple explanation for an event, the safest bet is to embrace it. To be sure, conspiracies exist—what would war be without them, for instance? But they are much rarer than many suppose. Generally speaking, groups of people do not successfully conceive and execute dastardly schemes; even if they want to, they are typically confounded by the compound physics of too many moving parts and human fallibility. (You can think of this as the Occam’s Razor of geopolitics.)
4. Economic/health/injustice rule
A desire for these three things—economic success, good health and justice—is the big driver in political revolt and revolution. The inflection point is when a critical mass of individuals despairs for the future of its children, and youths feel they can succeed only under a different circumstance. Governments generally do not fall over questions of liberty and political expression, which are not nearly as potent as a collective sense of injustice, helplessness or outrage over the security or health of their children. To battle this rule, a regime will try to change the subject (using the potent factors of Rule No. 14—nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism and fear of instability) and, if that fails, to scare the wits out of its population.
5. Idea rule
The most over-rated of the drivers of change. Political ideas and theories, even when they are brilliant, only very rarely gain the critical mass to move events. But occasionally they do. A case in point is the Arab Spring. Originally triggered by Rule No. 4, the Spring has spread and been sustained by the idea of the right to rise up.
6. Caesar rule
When states are muddling along, staying away from the precipice and not at the stage of revolt, as described in Rules No. 4 and 5, the only other way that dictators are typically ousted is defection or assassination. Generally speaking, a key ally or a few will either pull away from a ruler, causing an apparently strong edifice of power to crumble, or kill him outright.
7. Staying in power rule
The ultimate objective of almost every leader in the world. Governments including dictatorships may seem sclerotic, but can become among the most nimble of things when under existential threat. Keep this in mind when you are tempted to say, “He will never change. He has always been that way.”
8. Territory rule
Among the most powerfully visceral forces in politics. A threat to even the slenderest sliver of land can arouse the primal and uncontrolled indignation of a people. When territory is involved, common sense can vanish even among otherwise worldly and balanced leaders and their people, leading to brittle diplomacy and, if Rule No. 2 is not invoked, a drift toward war.
9. The rule of averages
As with most matters in life, events tend toward the average, the local version of the moderate middle. There can be periods of wild, insane extremism. But then people are prone to calm down, do business and seek strong, stable and bright futures for their children.
10. Big personality rule
What would Venezuela have been during the 2000s without Hugo Chavez? Libya during the last quarter of the 20th century without Moamar Gadhafi? Russia for the last dozen years without Vladimir Putin? For that matter, Great Britain in 1939 without Winston Churchill, and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s without Ho Chi Minh? In politics, personality matters, and big, idiosyncratic personalities move and dominate events.
No. 10 has symbiosis with the following two rules.
11. True-believer rule
While people and countries tend toward the middle, events can turn on exceptions operating on the extremes. Hitler’s Germany is an example. Today, Khamenei’s Iran, Afghanistan’s Taliban, Kim’s North Korea and Chávez’s Venezuela punch above their weight in influencing the geopolitical landscape.
12. Mountain rule
Like Rule No. 10, this is a direct carryover from the energy indicators. That is, certain countries are so large and their behavior so singular that their actions can create and disrupt economic and geopolitical trends. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States are among the Mountains. When one or more of them step into the picture, they can and do create news.
There are three corollaries to the Mountain Rule:
The future superpower corollary: China is not yet a military or economic power of the stature of the US, but since most assume it will be, it is more or less already treated and behaves as one. As a Mountain, it can and does shape and shift economic and political trends.
The former colonial/great power corollary: When you formerly were a great power, it is hard to give up the mantle. Such is the lot of countries like France and Great Britain. Though well past their great-power prime—and not Mountains in either case—both from time to time play outsized roles in big events, such as France’s 2011 intervention in Libya. A problem comes, however, when inflated former great-power thinking conflicts with current powers, in which case it is regarded as a nuisance. Such is the case of Russia, a Mountain whose often countervailing policies seem to be Moscow’s strategy for staying in the great-power game (see next corollary).
The perceived great power corollary: India, Iran and Turkey all perceive themselves as great powers (and in the latter two cases actually were a long time ago, and as such also fall under the previous corollary). So they can and do behave in ways that impact events far beyond their shores. India projects its weight around the Indian Ocean and the Subcontinent, Turkey around the Mediterranean and into Central Asia, and Iran around the Persian Gulf and into the Levant. Russia, having lost its great-power status in 1991, interjects its leverage wherever it sees a useful opening.
13. Getting-rich rule
Why do leaders act as they do? Often, look no further than personal enrichment.
14. Local politics rule
Most geopolitics begin at home. Whether deliberate or inadvertent, domestic politics are a crucial contextual determinant of future events. Among key local influences are xenophobia, nationalism and jingoism.
Statistics: Posted by General Patton — Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:38 pm