Bhutan is trying to reconcile its pursuit of Gross National Happiness with the worries of a global economy. Mr. Penjor, as Director of the Royal Education Council, is charged with educational reform. I had a great conversation with Mr. Penjor about their interest in raising investments in technical research and development. Bhutan is currently recruiting students from Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education to teach in the country. The enthusiasm and informal diplomacy going on around here has been exciting to watch.

Let’s unpack this a little bit with respect to new ventures that depend on network protocols or a distributed services architecture. (No, I am actually not wearing a pocket protector right now.) At present, I am not quite sure how Mr. O’Connor actually defines infrastructure. Is he talking only about the physical layer of networks? Or could Fire Eagle, a location storing service, also be considered a form of infrastructure? The question matters, because if we believe Mr. O’Connor, we should never count on the development of any kind of infrastructure in our business plans. (Unfortunately, this happens to be a big problem in the United States of America.)

I have a hunch — just a hunch — that geolocation on the world wide web is about to explode. Half a year ago, I reported about Tom Coates’s presentation of Fire Eagle in San Diego. Meanwhile, Yahoo! officially launched the Eagle over the Summer. Mozilla is now getting into the act. And the World Wide Web Consortium is drafting an application programming interface. (If you understand it, please email me; I have an idea.) In short, it feels like lots of people are really busy trying to make something happen in this space.

But is it a trend, or just a fad?

Chief references for Fire Eagle: Wikipedia; Yahoo!

The great strength of living in the bordelands [sic] is the ability to be comfortable in a variety of different settings. The challenge is the feeling of never being comfortable in any one place. This is where I am most empathic towards Obama. As the first truly “borderlands” candidate, he has a great facility with a diverse range of audiences.

Meanwhile, I cannot help but notice a possible connection to Richard Florida’s terrific book, Who’s Your City?, which describes the thought-provoking research which has culminated in geographical personality mapping. I imagine that many of Obama’s strongest supporters are concentrated in the same few mega-regions that attract the “open to experience” personality, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, New York, and Boston. (Obama’s home of Chicago, of course, is an obvious exception.)

The original data for the maps, by the way, came from a large-scale survey in which respondents also identified their zip codes. Those maps are fun to ponder. However, I think Florida slightly overstates their profundity: Human differences are much more subtle and diverse than the Five Factor Model would have us believe. Florida seems to depend heavily on this Model for its ostensible explanatory power.

How exactly do personality, political attitude, and choice of city relate to each other? I am tempted to wonder if many of the individuals who were identified as being open to experience are the same people who, like Dr. Marichal, live in the borderlands. Perhaps some people move to those cities and vote for Obama for the same deep reasons. While they live geographically on the coasts, they live emotionally in the borderlands — or so I would conjecture.

Paradoxically, my program is probably the most open one offered here. Last week, when I asked the program’s director, Professor Appelbaum, whether Washington think tanks are considered part of global civil society, he replied plainly: “Everything is global.” I am hoping that that conceptual inclusivity will translate into some academic freedom.

Many countries around the world — United States and Australia included — are worried about their “competitiveness”. They worry about the abilities and inclinations of their students to produce value. We are often told that properly focused, public investments in education and in technical research and development will lead to progressive growth. Money spent on education and research leads to a stronger economy.

Most everyone in the United States agrees that a large number of American primary and secondary students are struggling to achieve what they ought to. As a result, policymakers develop new standards and strategies to address the problems. But teachers often feel that those policies are impractical or even ignorant of the real challenges in the classrooms. For whatever reason, policymakers, administrators, and teachers are not always truly working together. (I learned all of this a year ago at a meeting in Southern California. I am simply repeating what I heard from David Hopkins and teachers and school principals in California.) This is an important problem that deserves attention, but we also need to be clear about why it is important.

The idea of competition between states is a bad rhetorical starting point for supporting education. Why do we believe that the United States, Australia, China, and others are locked in a zero-sum game for economic strength? Even if they are, I, for one, don’t want to believe that competition in the international economic system provides the best reason to make educational opportunities available to all. People deserve education for reasons other than raising their state’s econometric values above others.

Nonetheless, international competition provides the verbal iconography that many people use when talking about education. To better educate is to better compete, they say. Can we please think of a better rhetoric for funding education?

The recent surge in home foreclosures, for instance, is due to poor economic choices on the part of borrowers, a conservative might think. Liberals, on the other hand, seethe at predatory lenders and lax government regulation of the mortgage industry.

The result: conservatives mix a martini and hit the country club, while liberals write angry letters and stage protests.

Stop and think for a moment: What goods do progressives ultimately demand, if not greater happiness for more people? Indeed, progress has no purpose if it does not result in more happiness. Good democratic governance is useless when it does not make the governed more happy. Thus, progressives, when they themselves are not as happy as they easily could be, are contradicting the progressive project in their own lives.

Consider two regions in Los Angeles: Santa Monica and Skid Row. If it were possible to rank small urban regions on the Human Development Index, then Santa Monica’s score would far exceed that of Skid Row. If Napier and Tost are correct, then progressives in Santa Monica should be falling short of their own potential for happiness because of their sensitivity to the systemic injustices that have kept Skid Row and its inhabitants in such a horrible, unhappy condition. In other words, some people believe so strongly in happiness that their own happiness is compromised when other people are unhappy. Do you sense the contradiction here?

Even if the research results do not lead decisively to these inferences, we can confirm them anecdotally by speaking with liberals — wealthy or not. Just ask them how they feel about the poor. And I am not trying to make a universal truth claim about all progressive people in Santa Monica. But thinking in terms of real examples often makes things easier.

Think about the tremendously costly investments that have been made in order for life in the U.S. to be good enough to score in the top fraction of the H.D.I. If, like me, you have a relative who died in the Second World War, then you probably know what I mean. When we live in a high-H.D.I. society and make personal choices that compromise our own happiness, those costly investments are effectively delivering lower returns. Public investments in infrastructure, education, and economic opportunities pay off when we are happy as a result. The fact that people have often sacrificed their lives for various liberal democratic societies, and the fact that many of those deaths have contributed favorably to human development in those societies, all suggests to me that their residents have a responsibility to be as happy as possible.

If happiness is so important, then be happy. If you are lucky enough to live today in a high-H.D.I. environment, then make the most of it.

I. Origins

I studied philosophy of biology under militant atheist David Marcey, to whom I owe a great debt. Dr. Marcey is an enthusiastic acolyte of zoologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher Daniel Dennett, whose works I read with equal enthusiasm. I have come to disapprove of Dawkin’s and Dennett’s reductionism, which attempts to apply the criteria and protocols of science in non-scientific categories of belief. However, because these books about the modern evolutionary synthesis have left a permanent mark on my understanding of self and world, I respect them deeply.

1. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (01986)
2. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (01995)

II. Culture

How do we begin to make sense of what we feel? There are many ways of addressing life’s big questions, and I have begun to favor some over others. The indispensable books in this category have illuminated my experience as an actual person in actual times and places. The outstanding author here is Jaan Valsiner, who brings old German psychology, pre-Socratic and pragmatist philosophy, and cultural anthropology together in his mind-blowing textbook, Culture and Human Development. The book offers a general framework for understanding moment-to-moment (microgenetic) and long-term (ontogenetic) changes in how humans make sense of everything they encounter, feel, and talk about. The other books illuminate my confrontations with globalism, language, physical objects, plurality, nationhood, competition, cooperation, and urbanism.

1. Culture and Human Development by Jaan Valsiner (02000)
2. Beyond Solidarity by Giles Gunn (02001)
3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty (01998)
4. Evocative Objects edited by Sherry Turkle (02007)
5. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (01855)
6. Precarious Life by Judith Butler (02004)
7. Games in Economic Development by Bruce Wydick (02007)
8. Who’s Your City? by Richard Florida (02008)

III. Possibilities

As Bruce Schneier explains in Beyond Fear, the particular mode of future-building that has prevailed in the U.S. since September, 02001 is fearful, wasteful, and intellectually impoverished. Schneier offers his readers better mental habits for security decision-making. Next, Bruce Sterling and Daniel Pink invite us to help build a world wherein the practices of humane and beautiful design are more common. Sterling’s and Pink’s design discourses are also a fitting springboard for diving into Yochai Benkler’s manifesto. His book, The Wealth of Networks, urges us to fight the Big Media establishment in order to enable the flourishing of p2p media. Finally, the extraordinary philosopher Richard Rorty gives us his grand vision of U.S. social progress in his deceptively small book, Achieving Our Country.

1. Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier (02003)
2. Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (02005)
3. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (02005)
4. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler (02006)
5. Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty (01998)

And then oil became more expensive.

Harvard’s Dani Rodrik speculated last month in Emirates Business 24|7 about what high oil prices mean for globalization. Global trade, he said, is unsupported by any institutions of governance strong enough to make it resilient against new threats — peak oil, financial crises, and climate change. He explained: “There is no global anti-trust authority, no global lender of last resort, no global regulator, no global safety nets, and, of course, no global democracy.” Rodrik warned, to the disappointment of a reader expecting a more provocative conclusion, that the unequivocal success of globalization can no longer be taken for granted.

Mais, bien sûr! Of course.

The urbain, goat-cheese-eating Jean Baudrillards among us have long been fed up with the utter sameness of what industrialization and globalization have brought us. Those tables made in China, it seems, are all the same. What would it take to cultivate more diversity and local talent in the global industries of design? Larry Rohter’s more recent article in The New York Times hints at the potential for energy prices to favor craftsmanship closer to home.

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.

But with transportation costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.

Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month.

The questions Mr. Rohter are asking pertain to where production happens, not what is produced. But will all of this new furniture made in the U.S. convey any sense of local flavor? Or will they still be made according to the strict specifications of a culturally homogenized global economy?

Photo by Allen