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: (more…)

Introduction

From the first embers of the first fires, to the lasers, rockets and televisions of the modern world, our eyes have been alight with the delights of discovery. Each progress in human culture has been born of accumulating insight and a wiser manipulation of our physical world and interpersonal society. Better machines, better processes, better politics and better economies. Each discovery has led to increasing the specialization and complexity of society, which has in turn introduced the new opportunities, tools, toys and technology which drive cultural progress.

Indispensable to this progress has been the apprehension, comprehension and application of information. Information, interestingly enough has quite a lot to do with entropy, which cannot be discussed without considering energy – and both of these concepts are indispensable to understanding economics, as was discussed previously.

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Introduction

Economists say that economic transactions are not “zero-sum”. Zero sum transactions have a winner and a loser such that the benefits of the winner are exactly offset by the detriments to the loser. Many folks don’t understand economics well enough to know that economic development and transactions are not zero sum; in fact, too many mistakenly believe that for every winner and advancement, others must loose. A nice treatment of this topic by Warren Meyer on his Coyote Blog. My intention is to discover exactly why economic growth can be positive or net-sum. This line of thinking may not be new, but it was so fun to think through that I wanted to share it:

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