It is easy for us all to get caught up in our lives. It is also very easy to think that times have never been worse in the world, that the world problems of ‘our time’ are more serious than in the past. As a futurist, I try to look closely at the present, but from the perspective of the rhythms or waves of history and recent history to best get a clear view of the near future.

Leaving a U.S. full of news stories about Korean missiles, new killings in the Middle East [no real surprise there], civil war and …

All the yellow cards, red cards, fake injuries and head butts aside, the recently completed World Cup was a magnificent global phenomenon. The world came together around the single biggest sporting event on earth. It has always been the quadrennial big event, but this time there was a certain amplification that was different.

The first thing to point out is that, in the four years since the World Cup of 2002, there has been a growing recognition that we are all part of a global economy. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” came out in 2005. Every day there seems to be …

Earlier this week I made a post on William Yeh, a man who personifies disintermediation, in this case the final step of disintermediation in the stock brokerage business.  Since that time, people have asked me about why he could do what he is doing, how he could stay in business with prices that are more than 50% lower that all the ‘low cost’ brokers.  Mr. Yeh gave an interview to a fellow blogger, Grant Wittenborn and his blog the other day.  I just read it and recommend it to those who have a curiosity about how William Yeh …

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been exploring the subject of disintermediation.  It is a dynamic force that has and will be reorganizing our culture and economy.  In an early post on the subject, I pointed out that in the late 1990s the Internet acted as the agent of disintermediation for the travel and stock brokerage business.  It became possible for people to buy and sell stocks on-line at a fraction of the cost they had incurred even years earlier.  This helped launch the day trading phenomenon.

Well, it now seems that the last bit of …