Computers and Government

This morning I stumbled across an interesting article on the way to look at governments, civilizations, and computers, more specifically computer software called applications or "apps" for short.  It was written by Niall Ferguson 

Niall Ferguson

and published in the Daily Beast found at Click Here.  He talks about the rise and decline of nations.  Most seem to follow a pattern of cycles which might well be summarized as:

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. They have progressed through this sequence:

[Ascendancy Stage] 

1.      From bondage to spiritual faith;
2.      From spiritual faith to great courage;
3.      From courage to liberty;
4.      From liberty to abundance;

[Collapse Stage] 

5.      From abundance to selfishness;
6.      From selfishness to complacency;
7.      From complacency to apathy;
8.      From apathy to dependence;
9.      From dependency back again into bondage.

---Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian"

What Ferguson points out is that the steps are not equal in duration.  Some form rapidly, particularly those in the collapse stage.  He further points to what he calls "killer apps" that were instrumental in the rapid rise of Western Civilization over the rest of the world.  They are:

"Western Civilization's Killer Apps

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation."

European's cousins, the Americans, were in a position to create a new computer and operating system called The Constitution, in which it included all those killer apps.  This led to a dramatic increase in American prosperity.  


In fact he states that, "In [the year]1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese."
   
Hoarding those killer apps was not in the cards.  They were easily exported and to many Asian countries that was done.  It was a good thing as the more that prospered the merrier.  


But not so quick, we Americans seem to have been deleting some of those killer apps and now have found ourselves falling behind the Asians in many of the measures of prosperity.
    
How many of you have experience a new computer with the latest operating system and just those necessary applications to hum like a well oiled machine?   Then over time, pests from the outside, viruses, trojans and malware seeped in and the computer became ever more sluggish.  
    
That could be seen as an appropriate analogy to what has happened to our Federal government, a government originally founded on an excellent Constitution that has since been smothered by federal law and regulation to the point if the Constitution were animated and could think, it would no longer recognize itself being abided.
    
Are we at that stage of rapid collapse?  A better question is are we approaching that stage with yet time to wake up, time to restore, time to stave off the ravages of cultural decline and corruption that has spawned a youth devoid of appreciation for those killer apps?
    
That is yet to be seen.  


The Tea Party movement 

A movement based on the killer apps.

and the resultant reactionary Occupy Wall Street movement 

A movement of the lack of the killer apps.

at least shows an emerging national conscience that may, with some luck, see the victor of these two competing ideologies be the one that saves the Nation.   






NOTE: This article was adapted from a publication in the Daily Beast by Niall Ferguson.  He is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His Latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, will be published in November.