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Recently in Salon Technology

Getting smart, the stupid Web way
AltaVista's new marketing campaign says smart is the new sexy. So why is the search engine coming off so dumb?
By Rose Martelli
[11/03/99]

Is the Net in your locker room?
Privacy abuses abound on the Internet -- but so far, the government doesn't appear to care.
By Maura Kelly
[11/02/99]

Technology: View from the top
The spam-master
Sunil Paul, CEO of Brightmail, explains what it takes to be a two-time winner in the Internet economy.
By Andrew Leonard
[11/01/99]

Talking 'bout a computer revolution
Speech recognition technology promises to transform how we interact with computers -- or turn us all into mindless gibbering automatons.
By Janelle Brown
[10/29/99]

Cannibal games
William Latham explains why players get to eat their enemies in his new game, Evolva.
By David Wilson
[10/28/99]

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This peculiar organization has two basic advantages. First, it allows the authors to experiment with a wide variety of type styles. Second, it makes it easy for the reader to see at a glance which sections could be safely skimmed or skipped over altogether. (Since I could not make heads nor tails of the "letters" or their function in the narrative, after a few chapters I simply stopped reading them.)

The first problem one notices with "The Long Boom" is the superficiality of its analysis. The main inspiration for much of it seems to be a breezy reading of major newspapers. Footnote after footnote refers readers to articles from the New York Times; in one discussion of the world's changing climate, the writers manage to get about four pages out of rewriting a Times magazine story. And when they don't come straight from the newspaper, the authors' insights most often are taken from a stew of received wisdom about national cultures. They tell us, in various places, that Brazilians live in racial harmony, that the Chinese maintain strong family links, and that the Russian people are able to endure a great deal of suffering.

This passage comes from a section about the coming economic ascendence of China: "The Chinese are the ultimate networkers. They have been working at this game of networking for a long, long time. They have sent out their spidery networks of traders across Asia and the world for centuries. Almost any small city in the United States and Europe is sure to have the beachhead of a Chinese network in the form of a Chinese restaurant or laundry or small shop of some sort."

Huh? I am not sure whether the writers support or oppose the proliferation of Chinese restaurants, but they seem to see it as surprisingly relevant to the course of world history.

From this kind of cultural analysis, "The Long Boom" blithely extrapolates a dizzying multitude of conclusions: the emergence of an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia (never mind that the House of Saud is an Islamic fundamentalist regime), the ascendancy of the European-style welfare state, and many, many others.

Schwartz and Leyden's original Wired article was an ebullient vision of the world's economic future that paid little attention to the warps in the fabric. The book, by contrast, goes hog-wild in creating mythical crises, only to explain how they will be brought to a speedy resolution. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it seems, will be countered by the dramatic emergence of Turkey as a Middle East peacemaker. The global warming crisis will be resolved by a worldwide switch to hydrogen-powered fuel cells. International poverty will be solved through a European-inspired system of global taxation on electronic purchases. (This last is one of my favorite predictions: the authors not only think that the global taxes will raise $300 billion a year for development starting in 2008, but that these taxes, like the pennies and half-pennies skimmed from bank accounts by the villain in the movie "Superman III," will be so small as to be imperceptible.)

In a world where poverty and disease are distant memories, these authors think that the only problems left will be the strange ethical quandaries of a science-fiction novel. Once we've cracked the genetic code and found the gene that controls intelligence, the authors ask, should we use that knowledge to raise our children's IQs to 250?

Who cares? Even for the most fervent new optimists, I suspect that "The Long Boom" goes too far -- we might be nearing the end of history as we've always understood it, but even in the best case we'll still have enough real concerns left that we'll have better things to do than worry about whether our children might be too smart.

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