Newberry, Stirling. “The four great realizations.” The blogging of the president, August 1, 2005.

Summary: The “four great challenges of the twenty-first century” are the exhaustion of non-renewable resources; the collapse of government-subsidized corporate capitalism; the decline in the value of information -- i.e., fewer opportunities for making a fortune by knowing and acting on exactly the right single piece of information at exactly the right time; and the rise in the availability of cheap labor.

To avoid being harmed by these changes, we should replace extractive industries with industries that treat resources as capital (hence favoring renewable resources); shift from an information-based economy to one that is knowledge-based -- i.e., built on communal, holistic, ideologically neutral services (Wikipedia, free software); abandon ideologies of competition, which are counter-productive in a world of scarcity; and re-establish and strengthen the social contract.