So you're saying that humanity is worse off today than it was in the past?
Anyway, I think Dubai is shit, but the reason for this is that it's based on retarded, backwards, muslim laws and regulations where you can't go bankrupt and also a culture of corruption and racism where companies are allowed and encouraged to discriminate based on race and nationality (I guess I just did that myself). I know many oil-sheikh-kids from UAE and I understand their culture, and basically it's shit and I'm not surprised Dubai is turning it to be a huge "selling sand in a desert" scam.
A charter city would, because of the guarantor/host/source model have different rules and a different culture than the country in which it is created. In the Charter City it won't be the nephews of greedy oil sheikhs that will be in charge of persecuting corruption, it will be Norwegian or Canadian officials.
This is a good response. I haven't actually commented on the OP yet, I will once I have read the blog post.
Your question is a good one as well. I think we're definitely better off than we were 100 years ago or before that. Technology has allowed us to reach higher levels of abundance for regular people, in most places. Living is easier, for sure. The problem is that in the last 40 years or so our technology is continuing to improve at a fast rate, but it's not improving the quality of our lives anymore. The western world is a good example because it is most "advanced".
If you look at almost any Western country and check the stats for how people view their own happiness, stress etc. and then look at the stats for crime, social mobility, education, disease, depression, suicides etc. it looks like we're actually
declining. The peak was decades ago. One of the reasons for this is inequality and this is shown well in a study made by British sociologists:
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidenceThis is a very biased perspective, and those metrics are highly subjective. You can't honestly tell me that people today would be happier if thier tech was banned from civil life, now that they have it. You're more likely to start a riot among the OWS'ers by blocking Internet access on their phones than by razing the park. If they didn't prefer their technological lifestyles, they wouldn't adopt them in the first place.
This is just the social side of things, from an environmental perspective we're doing a hell of a lot worse than we have ever done. Humans have only managed to destroy individual societies in the past due to environmental neglect, now we are capable of doing much worse. The whole world is at stake. Not only from environmental issues but we also have the weapons to destroy everything.
This is total bullshit. Modern societies are much better at managing the environment today than in the past, mostly because we are commonly
aware of the problem. There was a time, within living memory, that an American river not only caught on fire,
but we were incapable of putting it out! Just think about that for a minute, the water was so polluted, it was freaking flammable! And this wasn't even an accidental spill!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_RiverTo this day, there are many local events and groups that mark the event with names like "Burning River Park".
It's difficult for Western people to see the big picture because we currently live in a system where our prosperity comes at the expense of people living in poorer countries. They are suffering from environmental degradation and human rights abuse. So that we can get our cheap iPods. But people don't care much because they are just "random people somewhere far away". And we have a global monetary-market paradigm built to require constant growth, constant consumption, more and more consumption.
Also total bullshit! Where do you people come up with this crap! It's people like you who murdered hundreds of thousands of African children over the 'Silent Spring' scam!
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2010/02/the-green-death-the-silent-spring-legacy/Honestly, how do you people sleep at night?
We are living in a very unsustainable world right now, all the efforts that are being done are only delaying the inevitable, the big collapse. Unless something more radical is done. Simply printing more money to fix our debt problems won't help but for a short time. It will only make the debt problem worse next time around. Not only that, the money is fueling the machine of cyclical consumption, which is currently at a very unsustainable level.
Money doesn't 'fuel' anything, regardless if the world's work is unsustainable or not.
