Perspectives - Böcker

"The Geopolitical Aesthetic is a dazzling . . . distillation and application of the theoretical system he first presented in The Political Unconscious (1981)." —The San Francisco Bay GuardianTaking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson's sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard's Passion, Pakula's All the President's Men, Yang's The Terrorizer, Tahimik's The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky's Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson's seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.

Based on author David A. Grier's column "In Our Time," which runs monthly in Computer magazine, Too Soon To Tell presents a collection of essays skillfully written about the computer age, an era that began February 1946. Examining ideas that are both contemporary and timeless, these chronological essays examine the revolutionary nature of the computer, the relation between machines and human institutions, and the connections between fathers and sons to provide general readers with a picture of a specific technology that attempted to rebuild human institutions in its own image.

When Computers Went to Sea explores the history of the United States Navy's secret development of code-breaking computers and their adaptation to solve a critical fleet radar data handling problem in the Navy's first seaborne digital computer system - that went to sea in 1962. This is the only book written on the United States Navy's initial application of shipboard digital computers to naval warfare. Considered one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by the US Navy, the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) was the subject of numerous studies attempting to pinpoint the reason for the systems inordinate success in the face of seemingly impossible technical challenges and stiff resistance from some in the military. The system's success precipitated a digital revolution in naval warfare systems. Dave Boslaugh details the innovations developed by the NTDS project managers including: project management techniques, modular digital hardware for ship systems, top-down modular computer programming techniques, innovative computer program documentation, and other novel real-time computer system concepts. Automated military systems users and developers, real-time process control systems designers, automated system project managers, and digital technology history students will find this account of a United States military organization's initial foray into computerization interesting and thought provoking.

Housing matters a great deal. The present housing market has worked well for many of us (who have enjoyed the steeply rising values of our homes) which is why change, especially new building, is resisted. But for increasing numbers it now works less well as home ownership is out of reach, and for many years it has been commonly felt that there is a 'housing crisis' in Britain. Reforms are urgently needed to avoid a growing human cost. With so many conflicting views in evidence and a balance to be struck between growth and conservation, what housing market outcomes might be regarded as a success for policymakers? This short book attempts to give at least some answers, concluding with a list of criteria by which success might be judged along with a list of policy recommendations. Along the way a number of 'myths' are identified - either ideas about the UK housing market or possible solutions to the housing issue - that the author argues are mistaken. She argues that we need to be realistic, and not simplistic, about what mix of outcomes can be achieved.There are many national policy aims, including decent homes for all, protection of the green belt, better design of buildings and places, the avoidance of house price volatility, and intergenerational fairness.At the local level, planning provokes conflict and strong feelings. We also have an existing housing stock that is arguably, at least in part, wrongly located, and some of the housing we do have is of poor quality. For anyone with an interest in housing, this is an authoritative, accessible and constructive contribution to a debate that is likely to rumble on until the cows come home.

This book argues that identity is changing profoundly and that money is changing equally profoundly. Because of technological change the two trends are converging so that all that we need for transacting will be our identities captured in the unique record of our online social contacts. Social networks and mobile phones are the key technologies. They will enable the building of an identity infrastructure that can enhance both privacy and security - there is no trade-off. The long-term consequences of these changes are impossible to predict, partly because how they take shape will depend on how companies (probably not banks) take advantage of business opportunities to deliver transaction services. But one prediction made here is that cash will soon be redundant - and a good thing too. In its place we will see a proliferation of new digital currencies.

The idea that Brazil, Russia, India and China (The 'BRICs') are the economic stars of our times is now widely accepted. Jim O'Neill now introduces us to four new rising stars in the economic firmament: the 'MINT' countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey). However, the struggling 'old' developed nations have still not adjusted to the challenges posed by the new world order. This book looks closely at the role of China in this new order, and in particular at its influential role in Africa where more nations are beginning to emerge as significant economic players to be reckoned with. What is the scale of South-South trade and, crucially, how is this new aspect of globalization being accommodated in global economic governance? How should the world engage with the new economic powerhouses?

London has enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth in the past generation, symbolised by the towers of Canary Wharf built on the skeleton of the old docks. Finance had a lot to do with it, but its day is now over. The infrastructure-driven regeneration of Kings Cross and the Olympic boroughs show what the next stage of London's growth will look like, with an economy driven by accountants and geeks, not bankers. But the question is whether this more modest success will be enough for the next 30 years - and the answer depends on openness, improved global links (given that the capital's main airport is full to capacity) and decent housing for the people who live and work in London.

The difficult economic climate in Europe and the US is set to continue for many years, despite desperate efforts to stimulate growth. The long phase of expansion in western economies that lasted from the 1980s until 2008 was driven by easy money, cheap imports and confidence - all gone. And the shift of geopolitical power to Asia is permanent. Western economies face huge political obstacles to reforms that would boost productivity and growth - continuing stagnation is far more likely. Businesses and policymakers need to adjust to the new reality. And the quicker they do so, the more likely it is that economic prospects will eventually improve.

Poverty, and calls to end it, date back centuries. Even in prosperous modern times, despite the huge transformation of society, poverty has persisted. The challenge is getting harder, not easier, because of more recent changes in society such as the social distance between people in poverty and others, changing family structures (and our mixed views about them) and changing community patterns. The recent economic crisis seems set to leave us with a very different economy in which some may never work. This book looks back at the struggle to rid the country of poverty and asks if the struggle is worth it. What would a poverty free country be like if we could overcome the obstacles which impede progress?

Consumers in Britain face a curious mix of taxes and duties that are messy, opaque and out of date. They are also unfair: the poorer you are, the more of your income goes to pay these taxes. At the same time, we are ceaselessly bombarded by marketing information that is very one-sided. The foods that make us fat, for example, are promoted a great deal more than the foods that could keep us healthy - and again it is mainly the poor that bear the brunt. This book draws on insights from behavioural economics, participative decision-making and the author's twenty-five-year research career to take a fresh look at these issues. It concludes that there is a fair, inclusive, adaptable, affordable and resilient way of enabling us to eat healthily and to tackle the obesity crisis. The book proposes that negative VAT should be charged on healthy foods and high VAT should be charged on unhealthy foods. It sets out a four-step process to actually implement this new regime, each step of which depends on mechanisms that have already been used by government. It is a bold yet practical proposition for tackling one of the most costly and damaging challenges we face.

The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier. Greater well-being and better health should be the goals - rather than wealth maximization. We need to value health-care more than hedge-funds, caring above careers, relationships more than real-estate. Happiness is the avoidance of misery, the gaining of long-term life satisfaction, the feeling of fulfilment, of worth, of kindness, of usefulness and of love. The book is about what makes most of us happier, but it is also about the collective good. We cannot truly be happy if those around us are not happy. Individualist attempts at self-improvement - or only looking after yourself and your family - do not work in the long-run. This book looks at the evidence for a successful politics that would promote happiness and health. It suggests policies that take account of this evidence. Government can and should work to make us happier.

We all use some form of transport almost every day of our lives. It is one of the most important factors in determining the economic wellbeing of a town or city. And it is also one of the major sources of environmental damage to our planet. Yet, Britain has never had a coherent transport policy. Transport ministers are regarded as insignificant compared with their colleagues in other ministries. Successive governments have failed to get to grips with the twin challenge of getting people around cheaply and safely while safeguarding the environment. In this entertaining polemic, Christian Wolmar, a former national newspaper journalist who has written about transport for over two decades, explains why politicians have never got to grips with the issue, sets out the problems this has caused and points to a few rational solutions.

Britain does not have a coherent transport policy, and conventional transport economics has reached a dead end. A transport policy should incorporate systematic thinking about the travel needs of society. However, in Britain, public investment in the transport system has been extraordinarily volatile. We closed under-used railways and then experienced a doubling of passenger numbers that has prompted huge new investment. We gave up making substantial investment in motorways, but now have chosen to revive the road construction effort in a big way. We vacillate on road pricing, introducing congestion charging successfully in London, but backing off because of local opposition elsewhere. We have delayed for decades the decision about whether and where to build additional airport capacity. The environmental impacts of transport infrastructure - global and local - have been a key focus, but now are not. This mess has come about because policy has focused on big construction projects and time-saving, instead of on the part people and places play in economic development. This book sets out the principles that could underpin a strategic policy for transport.Instead of focusing piecemeal on trying (and failing) to get from place to place ever faster, we need to think about how and where we want the economy to develop, and about how new the digital technologies can help achieve this.

Britain invented the modern industrial city in the nineteenth century. But by the late 20th century most British cities had become basket cases. Today London overshadows the rest of the country, as the UK's only 'world city'. No other large country is anything like as economically and politically centralized. This concentration of power damages Britain's economy and fuels the sense of discontent felt by the millions of people for whom the capital seems like another planet. Yet it is cities that are fuelling economic growth around the world. Mike Emmerich looks at the DNA of cities and how it expresses itself in their institutions, governance, public services, religion and culture. He argues that the UK needs a devolutionary ratchet, allowing major cities the freedom to seek devolution of any area of public spending that is not inherently national in nature (such as defence). Cities should have powers to raise some of their own taxes including business, property and sales based taxes and to increase them. He calls for sustained investment in transport and infrastructure, and also training.An innovation-centric industrial policy would also have an emphasis on the social fabric of cities and - crucially - their institutions.

Money is changing, and this book looks at where the technology of money might be taking us in the future. Technology has moved our concept of money from physical things, to unseen bits of information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin, it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone can identify you for security - and also enable information about you to be associated with your money (think for example of store 'points' cards). To understand all of this and to see where we might be going, the author first of all looks back over the whole history of money, which spans thousands of years. He sees evidence for possible futures in the past, both recent and ancient. After all, not all 'future' starts from today. For example, it can be argued that the future of money began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by commodities of any kind. At this point, money became bits. Looking much further back to a world before cash and central banks we see multiple 'currencies' operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter.The newest technologies will take money back to where it came from: a substitute for memory, to record mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities.This time though money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.

Trade is being weaponized - and this isn't good. As politicians on both sides of the Atlantic raise the stakes, trade is increasingly a tool of coercion to achieve strategic influence. Although trade, wars and foreign policy have been interwoven throughout history, the belligerence of the language today means trade is becoming predominantly political and strategic, rather than economic.This book looks at why politicians have resorted to economic nationalism, using the rhetoric of conflict to recapture the lost territory of global leadership and to win the hearts and minds of their `populist' electorates. The authors also present new data on unseen trade in arms and dual-use goods that are used to fight proxy wars, wreaking havoc with beneficial trade and increasing migration, which in turn further fuels the fear and the febrile atmosphere at home. They present policy recommendations for reversing these trends: increasing trade finance, promoting the benefits of globalization and controlling the export of weapons. We are at an historical juncture as globalization itself is called into question. The political, economic and technological progress of the last 30 years is under threat. Unless governments retreat from their current rhetoric, the scope for mistrust and retaliation will grow. There will be no winners.

Money is changing, and this book looks at where the technology of money might be taking us in the future. Technology has moved our concept of money from physical things, to unseen bits of information. With the arrival of smart cards, mobile phones and Bitcoin, it has become easier than ever to create new forms of money. Crucially, money is also inextricably connected with our identities. Your card or phone can identify you for security - and also enable information about you to be associated with your money (think for example of store 'points' cards). To understand all of this and to see where we might be going, the author first of all looks back over the whole history of money, which spans thousands of years. He sees evidence for possible futures in the past, both recent and ancient. After all, not all 'future' starts from today. For example, it can be argued that the future of money began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by commodities of any kind. At this point, money became bits. Looking much further back to a world before cash and central banks we see multiple 'currencies' operating at the level of communities, and the use of barter.The newest technologies will take money back to where it came from: a substitute for memory, to record mutual debt obligations within multiple overlapping communities. This time though money will be smart. It will be money that reflects the values of the communities that produced it. Future money will know where it has been, who has been using it and what they have been using it for.

It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect or unintended consequence.These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us – but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data and even identity theft. How do we understand and frame these debates, and work out strategies at personal and governmental levels?Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics addresses one of today’s most pressing problems: how to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms?Drawing on the author’s experience as a technologist, political risk analyst and historian, the book offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account.

Trade is no longer just the ships, planes and lorries that move the goods we buy around the world or the services we consume either physically or digitally. While trade still plays a fundamental role in achieving economic targets and promoting growth, it is also, in the modern era, an instrument of state strategy in the contest for international influence and power. With powerful states increasingly reluctant to engage one another through conventional military means, questions about how to build power and protect national interests arise. Today, influence and power are not achieved solely through hard, soft or sharp power, but also through a state’s ability to operate at the intersection of all three. This `all means’ approach to power politics is characterized by a blending of conventional military force with other means, such as cyber- and information warfare, and, increasingly, through trade.Trade is the delivery mechanism through which technology is transferred and, as such, it has become a proxy in the global struggle for power and hegemony. This book examines the US, Chinese and Russian approaches to `strategic trade’ and argues that Europe must adapt or lose out. The authors call on world leaders and international organizations to stop focusing on what drives their own power and to look instead at the root causes of populism – unregulated technology, inequality, disadvantage and environmental destruction – to ensure that multilateralism survives and that a return to the mutually beneficial aspects of trade can be realized.

The way that money works now is a blip. It’s a temporary institutional arrangement agreed in response to specific political, technological and economic circumstances. As these circumstances change, so money must change. Many people think that it will undergo a pretty significant change in the very near future and we need to start planning for the coming era of digital currency. The historian Niall Ferguson wrote in 2019 that “if America is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments”. Competing for this new currency dominance could mean a new cold war in cyberspace with, for example, Facebook’s private currency facing off against China’s public currency facing off against a digital euro. Or would a digital dollar win this new space race?This is not just the concern of wide-eyed technologists obsessed with Bitcoin. In a 2019 speech the governor of the Bank of England said that a form of global digital currency could be “the answer to the destabilising dominance of the US dollar in today’s global monetary system”. But which digital currency? Will we really be choosing between the Federal Reserve and Microsoft (between dollar bills and Bill’s dollars)? Or between Facebook’s Libra and the Chinese Digital Currency/Electronic Payment system “DC/EP”? Between spendable SDRs and Kardashian Kash? It would be a mistake to see this as a technical debate about cryptocurrencies and blockchains, about hash rates and key lengths. It matters far beyond the virtual boundaries of the new age. The dollar’s dominance gives America the ability to exert soft power through the International Monetary and Financial System. A serious implication of replacing existing monetary arrangements with new infrastructure based on digital currency is that this power might be constrained. How might America respond to losing its hegemony?Now that the technologists, the business strategists, the economists and the national and international regulators are beginning to glance in the direction of these alternatives, the whole topic of digital currency needs to be explored. In this book, industry expert David Birch sets out the economic and technological imperatives, discusses the potential impact, and highlights a series of tensions—between public and private and, most importantly, between East and West—to contribute to the high-level debate that we must have to begin to shape the International Monetary and Financial System financial system of the near future.

Driverless cars are the future – just around the corner. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. But closer inspection reveals that we are much further from that driverless utopia than we are led to believe by newspaper headlines and by the hype from firms with vested interests. In a post-Covid-19 economic environment motor manufacturers now face bigger problems. Christian Wolmar argues that autonomous cars are the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Even if the many technical difficulties that stand in the way of achieving a driverless future can be surmounted, autonomous cars are not the best way to address the problems of congestion and pollution caused by our long obsession with the private car. This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits.