2015... NON-RECYCLABLE / OLD PLAYERS SHOULD PASS THE BATON..

Another year almost gone, another hangover staying.  Pessimists argue that this past year was one of the worse.  Optimists are hard to find nowadays.  Realists might argue that there is a need for "perspective"...good luck!  Indeed, there have been other years in history that were so much worse and any comparison risks looking almost indecent.  It is just that 2015 was so unbearably mediocre, if it had not been for the tragedies which extracted indignation out of the epidemic stupor.

The EU continued to look like a ship of fools. The US holds onto its reputation of being the worse poker player in town.  Russia is getting more and more enmeshed in its global Ponzi scheme. China is in full Qing replay mode.  The BRICS (remember?) are like a collapsing hedge fund.  The semi-states deflate.  The non-states roam.  Worse is that the "normal" states are also besieged by the "new normal":  unconvincing recovery, structural income inequality (Thomas Piketty's r > g big-bang), home-grown terrorism, cyber imbalance.

Are we doomed?  I don't think so. The private sector has never been as inventive. Technologies, upstarts, pharmaceuticals, ideas in architecture, climate, health care have seldom been as bold. States, for their part, look tired, bankrupt and unable to keep up with the myriad advances which shattered the old Keynesian mindset.  The former L'Etat c'est moi fell victim to the new innovators, financiers and entrepreneurs. The old behaviourist reflex has been dealt a fatal blow by the likes of Jobs, Bezos, Ma, Branson, etc.  The lab is ahead of the bureaucrats.

Amazon might actually be ISIL's most performing enemy!

This agonizing miserable year comes not alone to its inglorious end. The nation states, the post- WWII architecture, the accepted military strategies are in free fall.  So will the rag pack of zealots and killers who operate on borrowed time and largess.

While losers fight in the name of the absurd, the unknowns--space, social media, medicine, high-tech--become the fiefdom of the willing.  Other yet undiscovered incursions into the unimaginable will follow.  No longer will outsiders be the state's clients, the state will become the entrepreneurs' servant. Already the Neue saglichkeit in world affairs has dislodged ideology and weakened alliances. The already shaky old-fashioned power structures will have no other choice than to adapt. In a shipwreck one does not choose his or her lifeboat, the nearest will do.

The leaders in the multiple-G meetings, or the ones we have seen lately in Paris, look like a congress of losers, blind to evidence, late for urgency and timid in the face of innovation. Yesterday's "social contract" was a great achievement. The progress made should not be forgotten, neither should it be rolled back, where and if it works. A new contract is needed so that regulation no longer stands for strangulation. The future today happens outside of the political realm. There is no need to plead in favour of some Utopia however. One must readjust unfitting structures and enter new poles of excellence. When confronted with a new generation of life and death challenges, out-manoeuvered Fourth Republic modes, EU's sullen corridors, or delusional uni-polar terms, are out of place. 

Change is hard to come by.  The new "explorers" are waiting in the wings for their hour. A reversal of fortune becomes urgent when the Barbarians are no longer at the gates but among us.  Should we need another Lusitania or Pearl Harbor to wake up or shall we go for another Munich? Progress should receive a pole position rather than just the occasional accolade in Davos.   That yearly "magic mountain" retreat is no more than a temporary respite, after all.