An example of not working with nature can be found in the food you eat today. Jared Diamond teaches in Guns, Germs, and Steel that the true innovation of agriculture was that is was the first time that humans could store energy from the sun and concentrate it for their use.

The rise of great civilizations came from timing human activities to the natural cycle of the seasons, adding small impulses, and reaping great rewards over time. Today the total energy rate the Sun delivers to the Earth an estimated renewable usable energy of 120PW. In 2008 total worldwide energy consumption was 15TW, with 80%-90% coming from fossil fuels. That 8000:1 ratio means that in 66 minutes the earth experiences more renewable energy flux than all the fuel we burn in a year.

Sounds like a nice balance of power, until you realize that the US food system, which used to be almost 100% solar powered, consumes 10x more fossil fuel energy than it produces in food energy. The engine that created the great wonders of antiquity is now running full-throttle in reverse, despite the 8000:1 advantage that nature gives us for free. And that's not even counting the cost of burning up or eroding away 40-50 years worth of topsoil every year.

By ignoring, or worse, fighting the natural systems in which we live, the industrialist creates more work for themselves and devastation for the rest of us.

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Creativity doesn't come from the Sun or the soil, it comes from the mind and its conversations with nature. Linus Pauling teaches that the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. One way to have a lot of ideas is to stop rejecting ideas that didn't come from you (or your company). When you successfully adopt new ideas from the outside, I call that “exonovation”.

Most importantly, and this is a key idea: lots of little ideas, if permitted to freely combine, can themselves be understood to be a really great idea.

The world wide web did not come into existence fully formed; in fact, there were dozens of systems with far greater functionality than what Tim Berners-Lee offered in 1990. But his was the first system to openly permit user-driven innovations, and myriad small impulses, shared, improved, distributed, and amplified led to system we think of today as a defining technology of the 20th century. And research from Harvard is finding more and more evidence that “quantitative studies of user innovation document that many of the most important and novel products and processes commercialized in a range of fields are developed by users” yet these triumphs of innovation occur mainly in spite of, rather than because of, the legal fiction that inventions are property.

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The lamentable quality of software is now daily news, yet the industry players who own it sees no need, on average, to improve it. Do you want to know why? Or do you wonder instead why so many—millions by some estimates—who own no such property are nevertheless producing 100x better quality and are continuing to make double-digit improvements every year?

It is because we have discovered something about nature: It is easier to make a small change that is right than to make a work-around for something you can't fix. It is much easier to maintain something that is properly fixed than something that's jury-rigged to avoid the latest bug from a vendor who won't share.

And paradoxically this system works best when people don't care whose idea it is, just that the best ideas win. And that's a really big idea you can take home today. Radical decentralization works on global-scale software projects!

Al final de una década de fuerte desarrollo, las clases medias de países tan relevantes como China o Rusia siguen pareciendo más aquiescentes ante regímenes autoritarios que garanticen estabilidad, que ansiosas por conquistar nuevas parcelas de libertad. ¿Por qué no siguen el camino de sus antecesores occidentales?

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Cada país tiene sus características, y los obstáculos al camino democrático en un país islámico no son los mismos que en un régimen comunista o una dictadura militar. Pero existen rasgos comunes en un grupo social que, en el fondo, persigue los mismos intereses en todas partes. La preocupación de los neoburgueses por conservar los logros recientes, por ejemplo, es un esquema clásico. Como señala James, oficinistas y profesionales chinos, rusos o vietnamitas deben de sentir ahora algo muy parecido a lo que muchos españoles sintieron en los años sesenta.

Los neoburgueses, sin embargo, tienen un potencial obstáculo ulterior en el camino a la plenitud democrática y al Estado de derecho. Las burguesías occidentales que arrollaron inexorablemente un régimen tras otro son cuerpos sociales dotados de una profunda espina dorsal, que tiene su raíz en el pensamiento griego y el derecho romano; continúa con la Carta Magna británica, el Renacimiento y la Ilustración; y culmina con las revoluciones francesas y americanas. La falta de ese bagaje podría complicar el viaje de los nuevos burgueses.

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Con inteligencia, muchos regímenes han ablandado puntos de fricción con esas clases que pueden arrasarlos con la fuerza de una oleada. La exitosa fase de expansión de la democracia en Europa del Este tras la caída del muro de Berlín -en la que el número de países democráticos pasó de 76 a 118 entre 1990 y 1996- fue un abrazo deseado durante décadas de opresión y penurias. Ahora, una mezcla hábil de creciente bienestar y formas de control menos opresivas pueden garantizar a los regímenes autoritarios que las clases medias se queden mansas en el plano político.

Historias positivas no faltan, las clases medias tienen mucho que ver con el admirable rumbo democrático seguido por grandes países como Brasil o Indonesia, pero el dato estadístico de Freedom House pesa como una piedra: 116 democracias hoy, igual que en 1996. Entonces, había 600 millones de burgueses menos en el mundo.

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.