From Der Spiegel via Matt Yglesias: Hasbro is planning to launch the first global version of Monopoly, and they’re canvassing votes for which cities should be included. As Der Spiegel puts it, cities all over the world are urging residents to “vote early and vote often”: for
Forget a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The place where the citizens of the world can really play with the big boys is actually within reach: a place on the new global Monopoly board.
Nor is this just a game – not by a long shot:
The marketing potential of being included on the board has not escaped tourist authorities. Edinburgh, currently ranked 14th [but sliding – at the time of posting it’s fallen to 18th], is hoping to attract more visitors with the Monopoly midas touch. VisitScotland marketing manager Kathryn Macdonald told the BBC that it will give the already popular tourist destination a boost. “This is a fantastic opportunity for Scotland’s capital city,” she said on Tuesday, adding: “We encourage everyone to take the time to vote for their favorite city.”
A quick visit to the leaderboard shows that London is in the top two, and hence on track for one of the two coveted navy blue slots – along with Paris.
But here at GD, we like to think we’re above these narrow parochial concerns. What we’re interested in is who gets to be the two utilities. One’s the United Nations, obviously. But the other?
The BBC’s Tim Weber is in Davos, listening to Al Gore and Bono search together for the Holy Grail – a policy framework that can integrate development and climate objectives. Now read on…
Mr Gore and Bono have been discussing these issues since last October, bringing together aid experts and climate scientists in a series of 8 sessions and workshops. [But] while they have identified the issue, and sort of have identified an answer, they are still short of a solution.
Al Gore once again called for a revenue neutral way of putting a price on the cost of carbon, where the negative impact of carbon is added to its price, and the tax revenue is used to release money elsewhere. Bono, for his part, demanded an “adaptation fund”, programmes that would provide “social protection for farmers and prepares them for floods”. Education was the second tool, he said, because “providing people with a chance” was the best albeit “counter-intuitive way of controlling the growth of population”.
But was that the promised “unified earth theory”?
Somebody shoot me, please. I mean, Al, Bono, thanks for ringing the alarm bell and everything, but please, if the pair of you still don’t have a development-climate synthesis that extends beyond vague murmurings about carbon tax and aid volume, couldn’t you just, like, take a bow? I mean, if climate safety demands a safe global emissions budget, but developing countries want equity and the right to develop their economies, and need finance for development too, don’t you think you could make that little jump to… Well, you’re bright guys; go figure it out. It’s not rocket science.
You might remember Adbusters, the Canadian collective who published satirical spoofs of advertisements, which they called ‘subvertisements’. The Yes Men go one step further: rather than ripping off brands, they pretend to be representatives of the company in question. At conferences; on television; in the street.
So, for instance, we find one of the intrepid impostors on BBC World, passing himself off as a spokesman for Dow Chemical – parent company of Union Carbide, which was responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster. And, no doubt to the consternation of any real Dow staff who may have happened to be watching, the spokesman takes full responsibility for the disaster. As the Yes Men themselves later recount,
We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it’s done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of 2 billion dollars on the German exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day.
A propos of Charlie’s post about Oxford Analytica’s spanking new Global Stress Points Matrix, reassuring to see that they rank “increasing climate regulation” as the 13th biggest risk in the world – ahead of civil war in Lebanon, war with North Korea or indeed any of the impacts of climate change…
Staying with the futures theme – I’ve just come across a great looking project at CSIS called 7 Revolutions. The project’s aim is to promote strategic thinking and long term planning by identifying and analysing the most significant global trends out to the year 2025 and beyond. Do the quiz (some of the answers will undoubtedly surprise you). 7 Revs is quite similar to Tad Homer-Dixon’s 5 tectonic stresses, which in turn has similarities to James Martin’s chunky book on The Meaning of the 21st Century.
It’s become fashionable to think about the future. The UK Government has been doing interesting work on international futures up to 2020; the US National Intelligence Council are beginning their project on global trends to 2025; Chatham House is holding a conference on Security and Defence Futures; a new report ‘Uncertain future’ from the Oxford Research Group is published tomorrow (will blog about it); and there is a conference at Oxford University on different approaches to futures thinking later this year. By December, we may have the future all wrapped up.
Yet herein lies the problem. Scenario planning, futures thinking may be all very exciting, with academics and policy wonks becoming animated when some earnest character near the back row asks nervously about the growth of tupperware sales in the Asian market in 2013. But unless scenario planning exercises are actually used to inform government / business strategy, they become fruitless exercises in speculation. We need to move beyond the scenario planning work and begin to use these interesting and insightful exercises to inform current and future strategy.
