Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates has a ski-resort.  It also has winter daytime temperatures in the 80′s.
It takes a huge amount of energy to cool an indoor ski resort in the Dubai “winter”.  The resort stays open in the summer, demanding a correspondingly more vast supply of cooling energy.  Dubai is not an oil-rich nation (though they had a spurt of it in the 60′s and 70′s); it is essentially a small kingdom on the shores of the Persian Gulf, with little in the way of natural resources.  Today, oil accounts for only 10% of Dubai’s economy.
This tiny nation, essentially a city-state, has a diverse economy and a very liberal society. The literacy rate is about 80%, women hold high positions in corporate and national governance, and religious social conflict is slight.  Dubai is currently (2007) building the tallest building in the world (at least until the next claimant comes along).
It takes a huge amount of energy to turn a patch of dessert into a modern paradise, replete with gardens, higways, posh residential islands, high-end shopping, luxury hotels, a ski resort and a thriving trading port (artificially dredged).  It also takes a huge amount of highly educated citizens to keep the capitalism, the engineering and the innovation racing into a self-determined bright future.

It also takes a huge amount of cheap and relatively unskilled labor, some of it coming from people stuck in effective slavery or surfdom.  Most of these laborers come from other contries, and exist as indentured servants to those who sent, or brought them.

I propose that Dubai is an almost perfect microcosm from which we can all learn important lessons about what makes a nation-state viable, prosperous and progressive.  Many of these lessons have been touched on previously, but Dubai provides a fantastic context in which to reiterate, delineate and summarize them.  To wit:

1) Energy – Every constructed thing in the whole world requires energy.  Such things include everything ranging from antibiotics, microcircuits, clothing fibers, plastics and fertilizers to steel skyscrapers, cars, rockets, baseball-mits, soda-cans, hair-nets, iPods and jingle-bells.  Absolutely every single thing that ever has been or will be built requires energy to dig, harvest, fabricate, cut, blend, shape, test, package and deliver.  Most things require yet more energy to continue functioning and to forestall or remedy breakdowns.  Energy provides the means to move and shape all things.  It is also fundamentally required to store and retrieve information by any means whatsoever – whether brains, books, computers, DNA or iPods.

2) Education – Knowing how, when, where and how much energy to apply in order to accomplish a goal is not nearly as trivial as it sounds. From which side of a nail to hit with a hammer, how to sharpen a pencil, which drill-bit to use, how much heat is needed for how long -  to where to lift a window, how to drive a train and which equations are needed to describe nuclear decay. Everything we do to bring energy (and matter) to bear presupposes an intent, and intents only come from creativity and education.  The more sophisticated the thinking and the more knowledge one has about what has worked (or not) before, the more likely is innovation and the more assured is effective execution of previously-discovered methods.
3) Infrastructure -  Without the means of providing education and basic physical necessities, the quality and quantity of: execution, innovation and construction via human hands and minds diminishes rapidly.  Similarly, means of communication, economic transfer (a special subset of communication), and physical transport must be available.

4) The Fair and Liberal Rule of Law -  Society must have both implicit and explicit expectations for the enforcement of property rights, the maintenance and accessibility of infrastructure, the protection of bodily well being and the freedom of inquiry and speech.  Essentially these things guarantee sufficient energy, education and infrastructure for all, plus an assurance of personal opportunity and reward (thus motivation) for each person’s role in building or maintaining “that which is known” as well as inventing “that which is yet undiscovered”.

5) Sufficient and Affordable Means of Construction – In order to build anything, one needs energy and (usually) tools.  The energy must then be intentionally directed to the required tool(s).  Sometimes the energy comes from human beings (cooks, carpenters, fishermen, programmers, bankers, lawmower repairmen, etc.), and sometimes the energy comes from ovens, ships, radio-towers and robots.  In cases where only humans can provide the dexterity and “intentional direction” of energy, sufficient labor must be avaialbe at such a cost as to make the end product (whether tennis-shoe, luxury hotel, diesel-locomotive or iPod) profitable.  As society has been able to create means of applying intentional energy while minimizing human labor, we have moved from (human) labor-intensive farming to labor-intensive manufacturing to labor-intensive service and information industries.  Ox-drawn carts, wind-driven sails, cotton-gins, earth-moving equipment, textile mills and auto-assembly plants have all freed whole populations of mankind from varying degrees of servitude, which servitude would otherwise be required to apply sufficient intentional energy.
That’s it.  That’s the way to build a progressive, properous, innovative (and as a tautological corollary, a free) nation-state.  Just look at Dubai.

Thursday, December 28th, 2006 @ 2:26 am Ecomomics and Thermodynamics, Energetics and Humanity, Towards a New Liberalism
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