ST James,1970: A lot had happened since The Economist's centenary autobiography in 1943 coordinated by Geoffrey Crowther who had weekly edited The Economist for more than a decade either side of world war 2.
=============related Articles/Videos 2023/4
Help design AdamSmith.app gameboards of Very Good AI for King Charles AI world series
. | . |
Crowther had reveled in the luxury of having 100 years to report instead of practically speaking 3.5 weekdays of the weekly journalist of his time. Until advances in computing in 1980s, Wednesday evening would be the deadline for copy of The Economist in London; a sub-editor would stay up all night to see the paper printed by early Thursday morning. British readers' first chance to see the journal would be Friday morning whether they bought it with Friday's newspapers or possibly arrived as early as Friday's post. Typically British readers had the weekend to read The Economist. American businessmen (or presidents in case of Kennedy) would hopefully find airmail had arrived in time to start the next week.
The Economist had started as Queen Victoria's Royal Society Chatsheet 1843. There was a purpose which amused the then 20-someting Queen Victoria - London Scot founder James Wilson had become an MP aiming to end poverty and hunger. His commitment to Queen Victoria was seeing if a journal could help her mediate change in English constitution from presiding over slave making empire to celebrating Commonwealth. You could say The Economist had an early success obtaining the repeal of the corn laws but too late for the Irish rightfully hating the English as as many as one third staved when the potato crop failed and British landowners burnt corn rather than seeing it sold below a minimum price. Victoria assigned James Wilson a grand challenge - Charter Bank go tax the quarter of humans living on the Indian subcontinent to build the grand subcontinent by and for the peoples. The first year of the state of the subcontinent went amazingly well. The second badly : Wilson died Calcutta 1860, before his time. of diarrhea. It was to take over 112 years before women villagers built the then new nation of Bangladesh thanks to being trained in Infant Oral Rehydration during the first decade of their Rural Advancement commiteee- BRAC by Fazle Abed. More on this: part 2 of this article
Crowther concluded from the 100 years of Economist reporting that journalists and economists had failed to keep ahead of extraordinary innovation exponentials of engineers. So in 1951 he sent a rookie journalist, who had survived spending his last days as a teenager navigating airplanes allied bomber command Burma Campaign, to Princeton NY for a year. There John Neumann floated the idea that Economist journalists needed to survey what good would peoples unite wherever they got first access to 100 times more tech.
The NET (Neumann Einstein-Turing) as the world's greatest mathematicians were 3 generations apart. Sadly two died tragically young with all gone by 1957. Humans saw only a small bit of vision for Computers and Brains and Neural Networking that Neumann-Turing were on tipping point of celebrating with humanity But they had passed on their survey of 100 times more for economists to mediate- and by 1962 both Silicon Valley and Asia's Silicon Coastal Belt (Japan South through Korean Peninsula Taiwan (soon joined by Hong Kong and Singapore) were on the verge of 100 times more (Intel's programable computing chip in response to a Japanese calculator company's order) and satellite communications (death of cost of distance first evidenced by Tokyo Olympics 1964) witnessed by a teenage Prince Charles who luckily planted hi-trust relationship with the Japanese Royal Family and Sony's Akio Morita
Kennedy was an open fan of the Economist and its 1962 revelation that Japan could start all asian coastlines experimenting with 100 times more tech in parallel to the US valley from St Clare to St Francis via Stanford. He was the last world leader to sucessfully engage both youth and DC in decade long grand challenges - the moon race, the peace corps, integration of America's peoples, the need to map trading win-wins between America, Europe, Asia. So it was that The Net's surveys of 100 times more tech permitted imagineering across Pacific Ocean. As early as 1955 The Economist also fieldedfthe only journalist as Messina's birth of the EU- so there was a hope that English Language Royal Society chat sheet's 3rd hal century could live up to the gifts of computer, code and brain modeling that the NET distributed in Neumann's posthumous notes: Computer and the Brain 1957 delivered as Yale lectures by his wife and chief coder Klara Von Neumann. Both Neumann and Turing had in fact relied on a favorite woman to attend to detailed coding and recursive quality.
Part 2
In 1970 Abed barely escaped from being Assassinated by his employer Royal Dutch Shell and the occupying Pakistan army. He returned to new nation Bangladesh giving nearly 50 years to villager development by women entrepreneurs actioning a culture of Paulo Freire servant leadership. Seeing triple devastation of cyclone, war of independence and famine abed put his life savings of 1972 into rebuilding 15000 refugees homes in his home region. For the next 25 yeras he was developing life sustaining solutions (known from 2015 as SDGs 1 to 5) linking in 100000 person communities (average family size just under 7) for initially illiterate village mothers without electricity. Without rural rehydration, sustainable development would not have been possible either for 100000 people communities nor the 90% rural population of the 8th most populous nation. You can read all about this in the the extraoridary book (Quiet Entrepreneurial Revolution) by Harvard's Martha Chen who was also BRAC employee number 3. Within those early 1970s, three by 100000 person communities were open sourcing abed social busieness solutions. When Abed entered oral rehydration in Unicef's yyar of child - Rural Bangladesh women won. Unicef's James Grant committed to funding BRAC to word of mouth network the solution across all rural areas in exchange for Grant open sourcing this across other tropical areas especially China where his parents had been missionaries. The Chinese were so pleased by this late 1970s miracle that they swapped their best rice science with Fazle Abed.
In 2001, humanity's chaotic mix of hi-tech hi-trust hi-touch advanced another round. 1984's pioneers of personal computer networking's apple mac and microsoft code hosted silicon valley's 65th birthday party for Abed and envoy of bottom billion village mothers intelligence. You can ask several famous hi-tech families who were there in 2001 for their takeaways but we are excited by all reports of how the Gates and abed family (soon with Jim Kim, Boston & Antonio Guterres then Portuguese Red Cross) worked on foundations of global public health, and questions from the Jobs family turned into how can Stanford female graduate engines become best partners of village mother intelligence. On Abed's side he committed to starting up a future collaboration university; and within the next 4 years to 2005, contributions Steve Jobs mobilised and shared at stanford commencement together with yahoo founders progressively reinvesting their wealth on Stanford are magical to diarise. Eg yahoo Taiwanese american family started a chair of 100 times more tech at Stanford 2004- Prof Horowitz next 20 years also birthed AI100 from 2016 and United with Fe-Fei Li and 8 other engineering professors in Condokeeza Rice emerging tech transformational policy briefings out of Hoover from 2023.