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Inkluderar namnen: 堺屋 太一, 太一 堺屋

Verk av Taichi Sakaiya

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I read this book around 1991 - almost 20 years ago. So this review will be rather imprecise! On the other hand, this book really changed my thinking and its ideas are still important for me.

My reaction to the book was undoubtedly colored by my background. In the mid-1970s I was introduced to the work of M. King Hubbert, who around 1960 had accurately predicted that the peak of petroleum production in the USA would occur around 1972. He also forecast a peak in world production to occur maybe 2020-2030.

Sakaiya builds on this model of the future. Energy is going to be scarcer! What will that mean? I'm not sure but I think the Japanese original book was written in the mid to late 1980s. It is amazing to see how accurate his basic prediction has turned out to be. I was just informed by our teenager that his Phillips MP3 player only has maybe 4 GB of memory and wouldn't a newer iPod have a lot more memory?

Sakaiya proposes that in every society status is displayed by conspicuous consumption of whatever resource is in plentiful supply, whereas it becomes an embarrassment to waste what is scarce. Of course it's what people perceive as being plentiful or scarce, rather that any sort of deep obscure underlying reality.

Sakaiya illustrates using labor. In pre-war Japan, labor was cheap. The wealthy would have big houses that required many servants to open and shut all their sliding panels. But nowadays when labor is scarce, nobody has servants.

What is cheap now is energy, so everybody drives around in big cars. This won't last either!

What will be plentiful in the future is... well, maybe knowledge is too grand. That's my big problem with this book - I think the translation was not very good. I think it would be better to say "Information-Value Revolution". And we have already gone a long way down that road since the late 1980s. All the teenagers have MP3 players with 4 GB, no, it's an iPhone with 8 GB, or don't ask me. But the superfluous sophistication of all the gadgets... that's what Sakaiya predicted, and that's where we are.

Except we probably have a lot further to go. Saikaya models our present process of collapse on that of the Roman Empire. Travel in the hinterlands is going to get dangerous, as the reach of the police force shrinks. Maybe the whole Somalia pirate thing is a first taste of that.

It's a great book. My one bit of advice - when you hit a term that sounds wrong, don't blame the author, blame the translator. Find a term in English that better fits the definition the author provides at its introduction. Just mentally substitute your improved term as you continue reading.
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kukulaj | Apr 16, 2010 |

Statistik

Verk
22
Medlemmar
83
Popularitet
#218,811
Betyg
½ 3.3
Recensioner
1
ISBN
25
Språk
3

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