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AEE Nota Técnica Análisis Del Entorno
AEE Nota Técnica Análisis Del Entorno
EMPRESARIAL
Un entorno en mutación constante.
Materiales para pensar, dudar y actuar
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TABLA DE CONTENIDO
1 A MODO DE INTRODUCCIÓN ............................................................................. 6
1.1 ALGUNAS PREGUNTAS ............................................................................... 6
1.2 ¿RECUPERAR EL PENSAMIENTO CRÍTICO EN EL MUNDO DE LOS
NEGOCIOS? .................................................................................................................... 12
1.3 RESUMEN ................................................................................................... 13
1.4 ANOTACION PEDAGOGICA ........................................................................ 15
1.4.1 Cuestiones prácticas ............................................................................... 16
1.4.2 Para los participantes on line .................................................................. 16
1.4.3 Para el debate on line: el caso de China .................................................. 16
1.5 Una anécdota. ............................................................................................. 16
2 PRIMERA PARTE: tendencias de largo alcance.................................................... 18
2.1 ¿CUATRO TENDENCIAS DISRUPTIVAS? .................................................... 19
2.1.1 Urbanización........................................................................................... 19
2.1.2 Revolución Tecnológica .......................................................................... 21
2.1.3 Envejecimiento Población (Aging Society) .............................................24
2.1.4 Redes Globales (Globalización) ...............................................................28
2.2 ¿SISTEMA GLOBAL INTERDEPENDIENTE? ................................................ 30
2.3 ¿CRECIMIENTO Y PRODUCTIVIDAD EN CUESTION? ................................. 33
2.3.1 Los procesos de concentración: ¿Causa y/o Consecuencia del declive de la
productividad? ............................................................................................................... 39
2.4 EL DEBATE SOBRE LA DESIGUALDAD ...................................................... 44
2.4.1 Pregunta: ¿y qué es la desigualdad? ....................................................... 49
2.5 EL DEBATE SOBRE LA FLEXIBILIZACIÓN Y PRECARIZACIÓN DEL TRABAJO
....................................................................................................................50
2.6 EL DEBATE DE PRESENTE Y FUTURO: MEDIOAMBIENTE Y CAMBIO
CLIMÁTICO .................................................................................................................... 53
3 SEGUNDA PARTE: Análisis de casos concretos ................................................... 61
3.1 EL CASO DE CHINA. ¿INFLUENCIA GLOBAL O SIMPLEMENTE REGIONAL?
................................................................................................................... 62
3.1.1 ¿Otro polo de atracción global? ¿Global Shift? ....................................... 64
3.1.2 ¿Nuevo centro de producción-consumo global? .................................... 66
3.1.3 Nueva ruta de la Seda, ¿El Gran Proyecto de Futuro?............................. 66
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9.2 Why Western Digital Firms Have Failed in China ....................................... 138
9.3 “Death by a Thousand Cuts” ...................................................................... 139
9.4 Can They Get Back in the Game? ............................................................... 141
9.5 Winning in the New Digital Economy ........................................................ 143
9.6 Lenovo, la serpiente que se comió un elefante .......................................... 144
9.6.1 GARAJE ................................................................................................ 145
9.6.2 CONVIVENCIA ...................................................................................... 147
9.6.3 NUEVA LEGENDA ................................................................................ 148
9.6.4 EL FUTURO .......................................................................................... 149
9.7 La revolución de la logística china que deja a Amazon por los suelos ......... 150
10 Anexo IV: Reflexiones sobre la Desigualdad desde Harvard ........................... 153
10.1 Why America’s growing wealth gap spells trouble for the rest of the world 153
10.1.1 Are tycoons' tangled ties to blame for Hong Kong's anger? .................. 155
10.1.2 Trump can't make America great again with Reagan's script ................ 156
10.1.3 How much pain can China tolerate in the trade war? Trump will find out ...
............................................................................................................. 157
11 Anexo V. The New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan review – the present and
future of the world................................................................................................................ 157
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1 A MODO DE INTRODUCCIÓN
No cabe duda de que el sistema se encuentra en una fase crítica desde
hace muchos años. Su manifestación más reciente ha sido la gran crisis
financiera del 2007-2008.
1
Paul Krugman, How Did the Economists Get It So Wrong? New York
Times, 6 Sept. 2009
2
McKinsey Global Institute, 2006
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4
J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, 2002 (Traducción en
español: El malestar de la globalización, 2002). Desde entonces se ha convertido en
uno de los economistas que han liderado una vía alternativa o complementaria a la
corriente neoliberal predominante en el mundo anglosajón.
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5 Durante los últimos años la prensa occidental ha querido presentar una visión
demasiado optimista sobre la superación de la crisis del 2007-08. Ahora la realidad parece
imponerse y no hay razones para pensar que se hayan eliminado las raíces de la misma.
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adecuada. Ante el fin de la historia, parece más razonable hablar del Fin de
la clase media, posiblemente una de las columnas que sustentan el modelo
de crecimiento occidental a nivel sociopolítico y sin duda económico.
Por eso se habla del GLOBAL SHIFT. Por primera vez en muchas
décadas Occidente (Europa o Estados Unidos) dejan de liderar el dinamismo
económico, y emergen con fuerza nuevos espacios de futuro, principalmente
en Eurasia, China y su entorno de proximidad.
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Y es un combate para el que hay que prepararse todos los días a nivel
de las personas y de la empresa. Aunque hay que tener en cuenta el contexto
actual en el que nos movemos, donde el pensamiento crítico brilla por su
ausencia9.
1.3 RESUMEN
Por razones metodológica dividimos estas notas en dos grandes
bloques. En el primero se intenta exponer las tendencias de fondo que
condicionan la acción de los agentes socio-económicos, y en el segundo
hemos centrado el foco en algunos casos concretos que consideramos
prioritarios.
“In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15
minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing
mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks
to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to
be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative”. Varios Autores,
Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind, Science 4 July 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6192
pp. 75-77.
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Por último, se pretende ver cómo todos estos cambios postulan una
gestión diferente del mercado de trabajo, donde el concepto del empleo
puede haber sufrido metástasis importantes. En nuestras notas nos hemos
fijado en la relación compleja entre la Tecnología y el Empleo, por
considerar que es uno de las cuestiones claves para el presente y futuro de
nuestras sociedades occidentales, su modelo de desarrollo y la gestión de sus
empresas10.
10 Ver el importante libro de Thomas Piketty, Capital et Idéologie Ed. Seuil, Sept.
2019
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They both laughed; each one thought the other was a fool, and
was wasting their life”.11
11 Thomas Friedman, Thank You for Being Late,2016 (un bestseller del New York
Times)
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2.1.1 Urbanización
La Urbanización es una tendencia estructural que está alterando en
profundidad el conjunto de las sociedades modernas y ofrece oportunidades
nuevas tanto para las empresas como para los profesionales.
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asiática.
15 Ver por ejemplo World Economic Forum, 5 big challenges facing big cities of the
future, 29.X.19
16 Ver por ejemplo la ciudad bosque propuesta para China, propuesta por el estudio de
arquitectos italiano, que ya tiene experiencia en Milán: https://www.publico.es/viajes/la-
sorprendente-ciudad-bosque-de-liuzhou-que-combate-el-cambio-climatico/
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17 Para seguir la nominación del The Economist (tercera) y del World Economic Forum
(cuarta). Aunque no sean idénticos conceptos, básicamente coinciden en las tendencias de
fondo.
18 Nos parece oportuno recordar las dudas muy recientes de S. Hawking sobre el riesgo
que podemos correr con el desarrollo de la Inteligencia Artificial.
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“MIT Review has an ongoing chart of all the studies which have
predicted how many jobs automation will destroy. Their conclusion is
that "we have no idea how many jobs will actually be lost to the march
of technological progress”21.
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22 Para ver una descripción de la situación de los países europeos, The 2015 Ageing
Report, (2013-2060), EUROPEAN ECONOMY 3|2015
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23
Ver el reciente informe de la UE, The Silver Economy, 2018
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24
Hacemos referencia al best seller, The World is Plat…
25
Nos parece interesante observar cómo la maquinaria de propaganda
occidental puede funcionar con el fin de reducir el impacto de este gran proyecto de
desarrollo del siglo XXI.
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26 Ver Informe .del Foro Económico de Davos, Global Value Chains, 2018
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Gráficamente:
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Son estimaciones aproximativas.
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28
The Economist, Secular Stagnation, The long view, 3 Nov. 2014.
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29 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of
Living since the Civil War. Princeton University Press, 2016.
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30 Matt Philips, After 150 years, the American productivity miracle is over –
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31 Matt Philips, After 150 years, the American productivity miracle is over –
Quartz, 9.III.2016: http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-economy-doesnt-roar-anymore-
1476458742.
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33 Two Myths About Automation, Project Syndicate, Dec 12, 2017 Barry
Eichengreen
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35 Yuval Noah Harari, The rise of the useless class, Feb 24, 2017, ideas.ted.com.
“99 percent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance
of most modern jobs”
“There are some safe jobs: the likelihood that algorithms will displace archaeologists
is only 0.7 percent”
“Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they
are 40.”
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36
En las lecturas hemos colocado un PDF con los resultados modelizados
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.
El caso de los Estados Unidos nos permite tener una perspectiva de
largo alcance. Se pude resumir en tres fases distintas y diferentes: (1917-
1948), (1948-1972) y (1972-2013).
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40 Problema clave para entender los conflictos que están surgiendo en el mundo
occidental, pero que desborda el alcance limitado de este seminario.
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De acuerdo con los análisis del reciente Informe de la UNESCO 43, sigue
la creciendo la desigualdad, y España se ha unido a los Estados Unidos para
liderar esta tendencia.
42 MGI (McKinsey Global Institute), Poorer than their parents? Flat or Falling Incomes
in Advanced Economies, Julio 2016
43 Unesco, Octubre del 2016. Para los que quieran seguir el tema, podemos
recomendar los Informes de OXFAM, que parecen haber tenido cierta influencia en los debates
de Davos en los últimos años.
Since 2008, wonks, politicians, poets, and bankers have all started talking about
inequality. But are they interested in making us more equal? The Nation, Sept. 13,2018.
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el caso de España, por ser junto con los EE: UU donde parece que más ha
crecido la desigualdad en la última década.
Incluso hay quienes opinan que la política social de China puede ser
muy similar a la de Occidente45.
45
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/02/06/china-is-the-best-implementer-of-
catholic-social-doctrine-says-vatican-bishop/
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solventes, como puede ser la del World Inequality Report (entre muchos
otros), para disponer de datos comparativos más fiables.
Para otros es más bien una cuestión de poder y de las ideas o ideologías
que la sustentan. Por eso nos permitimos hacer referencia a uno de los
economistas más reputados, y que en su último libro afirma sin ambages que
la desigualdad es ideológica y política. « L’inégalité est idéologique
et politique » 46
46 Ver Le Monde, 4.IX.19, haciendo referencia al libro del autor, Capital et Idéologie,
(Sept. 2019).
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Pero más allá del no retorno del empleo y la persistencia del paro, lo
que parece más preocupante es la progresiva PRECARIZACION DEL
MERCADO DE TRABAJO en las economías desarrolladas.
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47
Mi relación con el World Economic Forum viene de lejos, y considero
importantes sus reflexiones también para el mundo de la empresa, que desarrolla
una función central a nivel económico, político, geoestratégico en el mundo
occidental.
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Here again, the energy sector can serve as a model. The major
energy operators are taking responsibility and working toward a
desirable future, determined to be a part of the solution and not the
problem.
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Image: Reuters
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LA TUYA GUARDATELA”
(Antonio Machado)
Que es sin duda un camino difícil, como nos lo recordaba The New
Yorker en el 2007.
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Y por esos nuestros lectores habrán oído hablar del posible “hard
landing” de la economía china y del rating acordado por las empresas líderes
(en situación de oligopolio) de Wall Street50. El mismo enunciado de la BBC
para exponer el crecimiento chino, parece querer transmitir ese mensaje, a
pesar de seguir con tasas de crecimiento muy superiores a la media de los
países desarrollados.
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51 La llegada del tren chino a Madrid estos días, 09.XII.14, ha podido impresionar a
muchos en este país.
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Esta nueva ruta implica toda una serie de redes (clusters) productivos
que sin duda tendrán un impacto importante en la economía global, como lo
podemos ver de forma gráfica.
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Report submitted on vital 'Arctic railroad' link that could be part of a 'maritime silk
route in the north'
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Todo parece indicar que nos encontramos en una nueva etapa y las
Inversiones en Investigación y Desarrollo siguen incrementándose y pueden
superar a la de la Unión Europea.
Por eso el prestigioso Wall Street Journal no dudaba en hablar del auge
de la innovación en China: “THE RISE OF CHINA’S INNOVATION
MACHINE” (WSJ, 16.01.14)53
Y para los que aún tengan serias dudas sobre el potencial científico,
puede mirar de cerca los planes estratégicos del país en este campo. Y en
especial el plan de China 2025, que es en estos momentos uno de los focos
de conflicto con los USA, aunque todavía Estados Unidos sigue liderando en
muchos campos.
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China plans super collider. Proposals for two accelerators could see
country become collider capital of the world.55. Y ante la entrada de China en
el sector espacial, no es de extrañar que los líderes occidentales se pregunten
si la hegemonía occidental está en peligro también en este campo.
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“With $21 Trillion, China’s Savers Are Set to Change the World”
(Bloomberg Business, 26 Junio 2015)
56 http://www.worldbank.org/education
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57 Para los que quieran profundizar en esta pregunta les recomendamos ver los
análisis de uno de los intelectuales más influyentes de las últimas décadas en los procesos de
ajuste económico, primero en América Latina, luego en Rusia y países exsoviéticos…por no
hablar de la reciente ola de Austeridad en Europa. Jeffrey Sachs, The fatal expense of American
imperialism, Boston Globe 30 Octubre del 2016.
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/10/china-declared-war-on-
pollution-is-it-winning
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Otras empresas como Tesla, Nissan, Toyota, VW, BMW y Volvo están
presentes en este mercado chino.
59 China powers up electric car market, By Tim McDonald BBC News, Singapore
,11enero 2019
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Por eso nos parece urgente una puesta a punto de nuestra percepción
de la realidad y revisar nuestra historia eurocéntrica contada durante los
últimos siglos61.
61 Para los que quieran profundizar recomendamos el libro: de John Hobson Los
Orígenes Orientales de la Civilización Occidental, 2006.
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Pero, ¿Se puede romper el proceso? Por supuesto, como cualquier otro.
Y líneas de ruptura nunca faltan. Pero si miramos el pasado reciente, de más
de treinta años de crecimiento y transformación sin rupturas básicas, ¿No
podemos emitir la hipótesis de la capacidad del sistema para afrontar los
grandes retos del futuro?
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por la misma función del Euro, en cuanto instrumento más de división que de
integración como bien analiza el Nobel de Economía, Joseph Stiglitz64.
64 Joseph Stiglitz, THE EURO, How A Common Currency Threatens The Future of
Europe, Northong and Company, N.Y., 2018.
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3.3.1 FLEXIBILIDAD-PRECARIEDAD
La flexibilidad necesaria para responder a los retos de la globalización
de las últimas décadas y los procesos de deslocalización hacia zonas con
estructuras sociales, políticas y laborales mucho más laxas que en Europa (o
incluso en los EE. UU), no ha sido compensada con políticas compensatorias
a fin de garantizar la cantidad y la calidad del empleo, como se había conocido
en fases anteriores. Era lo que se definía como la FLEXI-SEGURIDAD en la
Unión Europea, y que en cierto sentido lideraban las economías del centro y
norte.
“So, for example, in 1990 GM, Ford, and Chrysler brought in $36
billion in revenue and hired over a million workers, Wallach said. The
big three today — Apple, Facebook, and Google — bring in over a
trillion dollars in revenue and only have about 137,000 workers, he
said”. 68
67
“But with research showing 84% of millennials look to leave their jobs within the
first two years, employers want to tailor their perks packages to their employees' need”,
Jessica Bown ,High-tech ways to keep employees happy, BBC 13.IX.19
68
Cadie Thomson, Business Insider, 3.V.15, haciendo referencia a Wallach, who
authored “A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control,”
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Sin embargo, los análisis más serios no confirman esa creencia, que a
lo sumo puede no haber afectado a más del 20% de los puestos de trabajo
(ver publicaciones de la OCDE) y se orientan mucho más por el amplio y
profundo proceso de MUTACIÓN TECNOLÓGICA, que en la expresión del
Foro Económico de Davos correspondería con la CUARTA REVOLUCIÓN
INDUSTRIAL.
Sin embargo, los análisis más serios no confirman esa creencia, que a
lo sumo puede no haber afectado a más del 20% de los puestos de trabajo
(ver publicaciones de la OCDE) y se orientan mucho más por el amplio y
profundo proceso de MUTACIÓN TECNOLÓGICA.
69 Ver por ejemplo una de las últimas encuestas en los EE.UU. The State of American
Jobs. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/the-state-of-american-jobs/
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Pero más allá de una visión a corto plazo nos podemos preguntar si
esta revolución tecnológica se traducirá al final por una extensión y cambio
del mercado de trabajo como en las anteriores:
70 Yantum Islam, Technology And The Future Of Work In Advanced Economies, Social
Europe, 23.IV.15)
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72
Asia Times, Sept. 19/2018
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IBM Study: The Skills Gap is Not a Myth, But Can Be Addressed
with Real Solutions
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Más allá del impacto de las nuevas tecnologías sobre el empleo, ¿No
estaremos asistiendo a una mutación profunda del sistema? Es lo que
podríamos llamar el The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
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Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into
our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking.
And although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big
deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way,
we’re as clueless about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the
citizens of Mainz were in 1495.
That’s not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under
the weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and
our world. Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about
this stuff. But they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant
in the old fable: everyone has only a partial view, and nobody has the
whole picture. So our contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel
Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed
bewilderment”.
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And now it has arrived – the most ambitious attempt yet to paint
the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we
are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.
The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of
digital technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has
found a way to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given
to the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing
free services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the
providers of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in
astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent.
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And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was
conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free –
territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every
book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would
photograph every street and house on the planet without asking
anyone’s permission. Facebook launched its infamous “beacons”,
which reported a user’s online activities and published them to others’
news feeds without the knowledge of the user. And so on, in
accordance with the disrupter’s mantra that “it is easier to ask for
forgiveness than for permission”.
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No parece que las promesas de las nuevas tecnologías de las TIC hayan
respondido al sueño de la “libertad total” en un espacio sin barreras y del
acceso sin cortapisas a la información y conocimiento. El incremento de la
Desigualdad parece contradecir esa promesa.
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Para ampliar el debate nos permitimos sugerir una lectura apta para
no expertos, y aborda desde la experiencia profesional y académica un campo
como el de la cultura ¿Tal vez demasiado olvidado en el mundo de los
negocios?
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75 World Economic Forum, Global trade is broken. Here are five ways to rebuild it, Sept.
12/2018
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Por eso se puede hablar del GLOBAL SHIFT, con un doble proceso de
decadencia (relativa) de Occidente y ascenso de Asia, y en especial de
China77.
77 Para los que quieran profundizar en perspectiva histórica seria recomendamos los
dos últimos libros del profeso de Oxford,
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads, A New History of the World, 2015 .
The New Silk Roads :The Present and Future of the World, 2019.
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Queda por ver si estamos ante una Ruptura que puede representar una
Alternativa, o simplemente una transformación que no pasaría de ser un
Alternancia al modelo neoliberal actual.
¿Aunque tal vez el modelo no hay podido superar la gran crisis de los
últimos años?79
78 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/5-fixes-for-the-world-trade-system
79 Es una cuestión que parece resurgir con fuerza en el seno de las instituciones
occidentales, así como en numerosas publicaciones de sus élites económicas, políticas o
intelectuales. Nouriel Roubini y Brunello Rosa, The Makings of a 2020 Recession and
Financial Crisis, Project Syndicate, Sep 13, 2018,
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81 Ver por ejemplo el libro: Kai-FU Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley,
and the New World Order, 2018
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82 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-organizations-and-work/ai-
automation-and-the-future-of-work-ten-things-to-solve-for.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/notes-from-the-
frontier-modeling-the-impact-of-ai-on-the-world-economy
83 http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1119786.shtml
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84 Acabamos de releer el best seller de Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast And Break Things,
How Facebook, Google and Amazon had cornered culture and undermined democracy, Pan
books, 22017.
Parece que está emergiendo una serie de acciones para regular de alguna forma estos
nuevos grandes grupos.
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6 ELEMENTOS BIBLIOGRAFICOS:
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After World War II, the international community came together to build a shared future.
Now, it must do so again. Owing to the slow and uneven recovery in the decade since the global
financial crisis, a substantial part of society has become disaffected and embittered, not only with
politics and politicians, but also with globalization and the entire economic system it underpins.
In an era of widespread insecurity and frustration, populism has become increasingly attractive
as an alternative to the status quo.
But populist discourse elides – and often confounds – the substantive distinctions between
two concepts: globalization and globalism. Globalization is a phenomenon driven by technology
and the movement of ideas, people, and goods. Globalism is an ideology that prioritizes the
neoliberal global order over national interests. Nobody can deny that we are living in a globalized
world. But whether all of our policies should be “globalist” is highly debatable.
After all, this moment of crisis has raised important questions about our global-
governance architecture. With more and more voters demanding to “take back control” from
“global forces,” the challenge is to restore sovereignty in a world that requires cooperation.
Rather than closing off economies through protectionism and nationalist politics, we must forge
a new social compact between citizens and their leaders, so that everyone feels secure enough at
home to remain open to the world at large. Failing that, the ongoing disintegration of our social
fabric could ultimately lead to the collapse of democracy.
Moreover, the challenges associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are
coinciding with the rapid emergence of ecological constraints, the advent of an increasingly
multipolar international order, and rising inequality. These integrated developments are ushering
in a new era of globalization. Whether it will improve the human condition will depend on whether
corporate, local, national, and international governance can adapt in time.
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Meanwhile, a new framework for global public-private cooperation has been taking
shape. Public-private cooperation is about harnessing the private sector and open markets to
drive economic growth for the public good, with environmental sustainability and social
inclusiveness always in mind. But to determine the public good, we first must identify the root
causes of inequality.
For example, while open markets and increased competition certainly produce winners
and losers in the international arena, they may be having an even more pronounced effect on
inequality at the national level. Moreover, the growing divide between the precariat and the
privileged is being reinforced by 4IR business models, which often derive rents from owning
capital or intellectual property.
Closing that divide requires us to recognize that we are living in a new type of innovation-
driven economy, and that new global norms, standards, policies, and conventions are needed to
safeguard the public trust. The new economy has already disrupted and recombined countless
industries, and dislocated millions of workers. It is dematerializing production, by increasing the
knowledge intensity of value creation. It is heightening competition within domestic product,
capital, and labor markets, as well as among countries adopting different trade and investment
strategies. And it is fueling distrust, particularly of technology companies and their stewardship
of our data.
The unprecedented pace of technological change means that our systems of health,
transportation, communication, production, distribution, and energy – just to name a few – will
be completely transformed. Managing that change will require not just new frameworks for
national and multinational cooperation, but also a new model of education, complete with
targeted programs for teaching workers new skills. With advances in robotics and artificial
intelligence in the context of aging societies, we will have to move from a narrative of production
and consumption toward one of sharing and caring.
Globalization 4.0 has only just begun, but we are already vastly underprepared for it.
Clinging to an outdated mindset and tinkering with our existing processes and institutions will
not do. Rather, we need to redesign them from the ground up, so that we can capitalize on the
new opportunities that await us, while avoiding the kind of disruptions that we are witnessing
today.
As we develop a new approach to the new economy, we must remember that we are not
playing a zero-sum game. This is not a matter of free trade or protectionism, technology or jobs,
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immigration or protecting citizens, and growth or equality. Those are all false dichotomies, which
we can avoid by developing policies that favor “and” over “or,” allowing all sets of interests to
be pursued in parallel.
To be sure, pessimists will argue that political conditions are standing in the way of a
productive global dialogue about Globalization 4.0 and the new economy. But realists will use
the current moment to explore the gaps in the present system, and to identify the requirements for
a future approach. And optimists will hold out hope that future-oriented stakeholders will create
a community of shared interest and, ultimately, shared purpose.
The changes that are underway today are not isolated to a particular country, industry,
or issue. They are universal, and thus require a global response. Failing to adopt a new
cooperative approach would be a tragedy for humankind. To draft a blueprint for a shared global-
governance architecture, we must avoid becoming mired in the current moment of crisis
management.
Specifically, this task will require two things of the international community: wider
engagement and heightened imagination. The engagement of all stakeholders in sustained
dialogue will be crucial, as will the imagination to think systemically, and beyond one’s own
short-term institutional and national considerations.
These will be the two organizing principles of the World Economic Forum’s upcoming
Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, which will convene under the theme of “Globalization 4.0:
Shaping a New Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Ready or not, a new
world is upon us”
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explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key
questions
John Naughton
Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into our
revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. And
although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal and
that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we’re as clueless
about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the citizens of Mainz were
in 1495.
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That’s not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the
weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our world.
Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about this stuff. But
they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant in the old fable: everyone
has only a partial view, and nobody has the whole picture. So our
contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel Castells, the great scholar
of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed bewilderment”.
Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big
event. Many years ago – in 1988, to be precise – as one of the first female
professors at Harvard Business School to hold an endowed chair she
published a landmark book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of
Work and Power, which changed the way we thought about the impact of
computerisation on organisations and on work. It provided the most insightful
account up to that time of how digital technology was changing the work of
both managers and workers. And then Zuboff appeared to go quiet, though
she was clearly incubating something bigger. The first hint of what was to
come was a pair of startling essays – one in an academic journal in 2015, the
other in a German newspaper in 2016. What these revealed was that she had
come up with a new lens through which to view what Google, Facebook et al
were doing – nothing less than spawning a new variant of capitalism. Those
essays promised a more comprehensive expansion of this Big Idea.
And now it has arrived – the most ambitious attempt yet to paint the
bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we are now
experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.
The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of digital
technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has found a way
to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given to the new variant is
“surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free services that billions of
people cheerfully use, enabling the providers of those services to monitor the
behaviour of those users in astonishing detail – often without their explicit
consent.
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Viewed from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks
rather different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired magazine. What one
sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which John D Rockefeller would
have been proud. First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’
behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the
use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had
explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were
opaque by design and fostered user ignorance.
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And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was
conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free – territory.
Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed,
regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and
house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission. Facebook launched its
infamous “beacons”, which reported a user’s online activities and published them
to others’ news feeds without the knowledge of the user. And so on, in
accordance with the disrupter’s mantra that “it is easier to ask for forgiveness
than for permission”.
When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the
business model of the internet” he was really only hinting at the reality that
Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its
capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens
in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and
unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for
democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of
power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of
oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory
oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.
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capitalist mutant rampaging through our societies then we will only have
ourselves to blame, for we can no longer plead ignorance.
8.2 Ten questions for Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Larry Page saw that
human experience could be Google’s virgin wood’
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Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing
cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus,
and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.
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The sailors could not have imagined that they were writing the first
draft of a pattern that would echo across space and time to a digital 21st
century. The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by declaration. They
simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for
translation into data for their private ownership and their proprietary
knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical camouflage, with secret
declarations that we could neither understand nor contest.
Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was its
to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in a second
declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from
telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses. In both cases, it took
without asking. Page [Larry, Google co-founder] foresaw that surplus
operations would move beyond the online milieu to the real world, where data
on human experience would be free for the taking. As it turns out his vision
perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live
outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market
commodities.
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peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would
flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of thin air
waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean people, we
faced something truly unprecedented.
JN: So the big story is not really the technology per se but the fact that
it has spawned a new variant of capitalism that is enabled by the technology?
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SZ: Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin
wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost
out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital the
experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and
blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests
before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these
processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we
are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over
knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge,
authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely
“human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to
self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.
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The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the
most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of
action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually
modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial outcomes. We saw
the experimental development of this new “means of behavioural
modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated
augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
Shoshana Zuboff
SZ: During the past two decades surveillance capitalists have had a
pretty free run, with hardly any interference from laws and regulations.
Democracy has slept while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented
concentrations of knowledge and power. These dangerous asymmetries are
institutionalised in their monopolies of data science, their dominance of
machine intelligence, which is surveillance capitalism’s “means of
production”, their ecosystems of suppliers and customers, their lucrative
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JN: Our societies seem transfixed by all this: we are like rabbits
paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
JN: Doesn’t all this mean that regulation that just focuses on
the technology is misguided and doomed to fail? What should we be
doing to get a grip on this before it’s too late?
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Instead it will produce smaller surveillance capitalist firms and open the field
for more surveillance capitalist competitors.
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Huawei is the poster child for China's dynamic tech sector. It has grown
phenomenally in recent years, from a small manufacturer of telephone
exchange switches, to become a global leader in the tech industry.
While the brand is familiar to many from its mobile phone handsets,
Huawei has its finger in many other pies - from cloud services to artificial
intelligence.
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Most noticeably for consumers, Huawei has swept into the market for
consumer electronics, in particular with smartphones.
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But it's in telecoms network equipment, which forms the largest part
of Huawei's business, that Washington's opposition to the firm is having its
greatest impact.
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With the US pressing for other governments to follow suit, that raises
questions over whether the firm's global expansion is set to be curtailed in
some regions in the near future.
Currently though, Huawei is holding its own in one of the largest parts
of its business, the sale of mobile telecommunications infrastructure
equipment, such as that needed to support the roll-out of faster 5G networks.
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But how much Huawei continues to grow, won't depend only on political
attitudes in Western capitals.
It will depend on how well the Chinese tech giant's products compare
with its competitors. In the past, the firm has been accused - like many
Chinese companies - of copying technology developed in the West and then
undercutting rivals on prices.
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Prospects may not be as bright for Huawei now as they used to be,
given the political squeeze from the West.
But, the firm went through the financial crisis unfazed thanks to a
powerful domestic market in China, IHS Markit industry analyst Stephane
Teral points out.
The same could happen again if it loses more contracts in the West.
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The widely touted reasons for these failures include censorship by the
Chinese government and cultural differences between China and the West.
While these factors undoubtedly have played a role, such explanations are
overly simplistic. Google, for example, has succeeded in dominating many
foreign markets that have radically different political systems and cultures
(including Indonesia, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia). And these factors have not
stopped Western multinationals from succeeding in China in car
manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods, and even sectors where culture
plays a key role, such as beer, coffee shops, fast food, and the film industry.
There are deeper reasons behind the systematic failure of Western digital
firms in China. (The term “digital firms” refers to those companies that from
their inception have focused on digital services enabled by the internet and
related technologies, including mobile. It does not include traditional IT
firms that rely on sales of hardware or software as their main source of
revenue.)
And yet Western digital firms haven’t given up on trying to tap into
China’s rapidly growing market. Google is reentering China by setting up new
offices and an AI center, signing new deals with retail heavyweights JD.com
and Tencent, rolling out new products (including a controversial local mobile
search app that would strictly censor results), and investing in promising local
startups. Airbnb, LinkedIn, and WeWork are also expanding their presences
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The question is, will this be sufficient? What could these firms do
differently this time to succeed?
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Despite the differences between the inside view and the outside view,
these factors have converged in three clusters: (1) poor understanding of the
business environment, (2) ineffective strategy making and communication,
and (3) underperformance in operation and execution. The Western firms’
failures in China were not due to one specific factor, but rather to the
cumulative effects of multiple factors over time. “It’s death by a thousand
cuts!” remarked a former senior executive from eBay.
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Take Uber. Before entering China, Uber senior leaders did their
homework carefully to avoid the mistakes that had derailed many other
(digital and not) multinational firms. Uber set up a highly autonomous
Chinese subsidiary; partnered with China’s largest search engine, Baidu;
committed significant capital and paid out $2 billion in subsidies to win market
share; and offered services specially tailored to the Chinese market. Uber’s
founder and CEO at the time, Travis Kalanick, took a hands-on role and spent
over 20% of his time in China.
Despite all this, Uber wound up retreating from the Chinese market.
What went wrong? It is hard to pinpoint any individual failure on Uber’s part.
One notable challenge, however, is that for the first time, Uber met a genuine
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competitor: Didi Chuxing, which was more determined, had a larger cash
reserve, and focused exclusively on China at that time. Uber sold its operation
to Didi Chuxing. This case suggests that simply addressing each of the known
mistakes made by other multinationals in the past is often not enough to
guarantee success in the future. A more holistic approach is needed.
In the “winner takes all” digital market, where usually only one or two
players survive in each market niche, incremental advantages can snowball
and have increasing returns to scale. The cumulative effect from any such
advantage can become what separates winners from losers.
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Expansion,04/09/2019
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9.6.1 GARAJE
En octubre de 1984, 11 ingenieros del Instituto de Tecnología de la
Computación de China se reunían para discutir la constitución de una
empresa. Contaban con 40.000 dólares y un cobertizo que se usaba para
guardar bicicletas: la versión vernácula del garaje de Silicon Valley. No tenían
plan de negocios y el nombre que eligieron tampoco fue muy afortunado:
Compañía del Departamento de Nueva tecnología del Instituto de Tecnología
de la Computación de la Academia de Ciencias de China. Como contaría más
tarde uno de los fundadores y futuro presidente, Liu Chuanzhi, en The Lenovo
Affair (Wiley, 2006): "Éramos científicos y no entendíamos de mercados". Al
final, acabaron refiriéndose a sí mismos como el Grupo Lianxiang, un término
que significa "leyenda", o sea, Legend.
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Hemos dicho que eran ingenieros, pero tampoco se crean que eran
unos genios de la electrónica. Le compraban los equipos a un competidor
llamado AST y, a base de desmontarlos y volverlos a montar, fueron
aprendiendo hasta crear su propia línea: los Lianxiang Q286. A los clientes
les ofrecían los dos modelos y, poco a poco, contagiaron a los suyos la imagen
de fiabilidad de los AST.
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9.6.2 CONVIVENCIA
"Tenemos un porfolio muy variado", dice Ruano. En 2014 Lenovo
adquirió a Google los móviles Motorola y está presente en un montón de
campos: desde el internet de las cosas al almacenamiento en la nube,
pasando por la telefonía y las televisiones, "pero lo que nos da de comer es
el PC".
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9.6.4 EL FUTURO
"La tecnología me sorprende constantemente", reconoce con cierta
impotencia Ruano. Así y todo, tiene que planificar y apostar y, en su opinión,
la fase de convivencia aún va a durar y el próximo dispositivo que
adoptaremos será el asistente personal. "Lo primero que haremos por la
mañana será preguntar: Ok, Google, dame el tiempo, el tráfico y las noticias
más importantes. Al principio, habrá un aparato en la cocina o el cuarto de
estar, pero llegará un momento en que cada miembro de la familia tenga el
suyo".
Y esto apenas son unas breves pinceladas, porque luego están el 5G,
los móviles plegables, la IA. "Va todo tan deprisa..." Como para que nadie se
ponga a profetizar que tal sector está muerto o que una serpiente jamás
podrá comerse un elefante.
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Zigor Aldama
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Comprar a través del móvil es ahora lo habitual. Sobre todo entre los
jóvenes. No solo en plataformas de comercio electrónico al estilo de Amazon,
como Taobao o JD, sino en comercios de todo tipo y tamaño. Tampoco es
una transformación exclusiva de las grandes ciudades, como sucede a
menudo en occidente: la red logística Cainiao, propiedad de Alibaba, llega ya
a 40.000 pueblos. En 2018 se enviaron en China 50.000 millones de
paquetes, cifra que se espera que crezca hasta los 71.000 millones el año
que viene. Emarketer también prevé que en 2020 el comercio electrónico en
China alcance los 2,5 billones de dólares, casi un billón más que la suma del
resto del mundo.
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10.1 Why America’s growing wealth gap spells trouble for the rest
of the world
Dani Rodrik
Since the 1980s, inequality has increased within rich countries even
as poor countries get richer quicker. This reversal of a historical trend might
have contributed to the rise of nationalism in the West – and harmful trade
policies
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Let's narrow the focus to incomes and assume that people care only
about their own consumption levels (disregarding inequality and other social
conditions). "Rich" and "poor" are those in the top and bottom 5 per cent of
the income distribution, respectively. In a typical rich country, the poorest 5
per cent of the population receive around 1 per cent of national income.
Data is a lot sparser for poor countries, but it would not be too much
off the mark to assume that the richest 5 per cent there receive 25 per cent
of national income.
Similarly, let's assume that rich and poor countries are those in the top
and bottom 5 per cent of all countries, ranked by per capita income. In a
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10.1.1 Are tycoons' tangled ties to blame for Hong Kong's anger?
But as the West developed in the 19th century, the world economy
underwent a "great divergence" between the industrial core and the primary-
goods-producing periphery. During much of the post-war period, income gaps
between rich and poor countries accounted for the greater part of global
inequality.
From the late 1980s on, two trends began to alter this picture. First,
led by China, many parts of the lagging regions began to experience
substantially faster economic growth than the world's rich countries. For the
first time in history, the typical developing-country resident was getting richer
at a faster pace than his or her counterparts in Europe and North America.
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10.1.2 Trump can't make America great again with Reagan's script
Given patchy data, we cannot be certain about the respective shares
of within- and between-country inequality in today's world economy.
Cosmopolitans in rich countries " typically the wealthy and skilled "
could claim to hold the moral high ground when they downplayed the
concerns of those complaining about domestic inequality.
But the rise of populist nationalism throughout the West has been
fuelled partly by the tension between the objectives of equity in rich countries
and higher living standards in poor countries. Advanced economies' increased
trade with low-income countries has contributed to domestic wage inequality.
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10.1.3 How much pain can China tolerate in the trade war? Trump will find
out
And probably the single best way to raise incomes in the rest of the
world would be to allow a massive influx of workers from poor countries into
rich countries' labour markets. That would not be good news for less-
educated, lower-paid rich-country workers.
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights
reserved.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the British empire spanned
a sixth of the world, the geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture to the
Royal Geographical Society laying out a theory of global power. “The pivot
region of the world’s politics” was not in Britain or its seaborne empire, but
“the vast area of Euro-Asia” that stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze. He
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called it the “heartland”, and whoever controlled it, he argued, controlled the
world.
Mackinder’s vision stood at odds with the political map of his times.
Britain, notably, did not control the heartland; nor did the next biggest
territorial empire, that of the French; nor did the emerging rivals Britons were
worried about, Germany and the US. A century later, Mackinder has enjoyed
a revival for his apparently prescient insights into today’s power politics.
Peter Frankopan doesn’t mention Mackinder, but this was the terrain
he chronicled in his sweeping 2015 history The Silk Roads. In The New Silk
Roads, he offers an extended epilogue that argues for the heartland’s
continuing centrality to 21st-century trade and security. It cannot be a
surprise to many readers that the balance of economic power today is tilting
east – or that relative decline is having disruptive, polarising effects on the
west. (Though just in case you have missed the news for the last couple of
years, Frankopan quotes liberally from Donald Trump to make the point.)
What The New Silk Roads contributes is a concise illustration of this shift from
a Eurasian vantage point. Breezy and accessible, it seems perfectly pitched
for a young student curious about globalisation, or for a passenger flying to
China for the first time on business.
After a long preamble on how the world has changed over the past 25
years, Frankopan travels to central Asia to explore its economic salience
today. Iran provides a third of India’s oil, Azerbaijan pumps gas to south-
eastern Europe, Afghanistan is building a pipeline into Pakistan and India. A
“dry port” at Khorgos, on the Chinese border with Kazakhstan, acts as a giant
dispatch centre for goods shipped in from coasts well over 1,000 miles away,
while a spanking new seaport sits on the Caspian shores of Turkmenistan.
It’s the world’s largest port below sea level, and – the kind of unfamiliar detail
Frankopan wields at his best – one of a host of Turkmen world records
including the “largest handmade woven carpet, the largest indoor Ferris
wheel … the largest star-shaped roof on a building and the largest symbol of
a horse in the world”.
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The term “empire” scarcely appears in this book, but the concept is
pervasive. From the Atlantic-Pacific canal in Nicaragua to the Cape-to-Cairo
railway in Africa, Chinese-led infrastructure projects mirror those undertaken
by western investors and engineers 150 years ago. These may well be purely
economic ventures, at least in their inception,, at least at their inception,
rather than bids for territorial or political control: Xi has insisted that China’s
investments in sub-Saharan Africa are guided by a policy of “no interference
in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African
countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no
seeking of selfish political gains”. Yet it was often to secure economic assets
– the trading posts of Bengal and Canton, the mines of the Rand, the Suez
Canal – that the British empire advanced across Africa and Asia, despite
professed intentions to the contrary.
Then again, one doesn’t need to find analogies in order to gauge the
transformations of the present world. We are at the beginning of an epochal
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shift, but the forces disrupting the world order now are far bigger than specific
nation states. They are the digital revolution and, pre-eminently, climate
change. To modify Mackinder, whoever controls water supplies will control
the world – and China’s rulers seem to know it.
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