Hi there. No doubt you’re reading this because you saw my op-ed in the February 1st edition of The New York Times. Love it or hate it, I sincerely hope you’ll stick around long enough to learn a little more about why America needs to reinvest in aviation if it hopes to compete in a truly global era.

The full-length explanation is contained in my book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (with John D. Kasarda), which explores how air travel has shaped the fates of cities and regions more than anyone ever thought possible. The book comes out a month from now, on March 1st. If you’d like to learn more about it, please read this excellent summary/review by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of Great Powers and a contributing editor to Esquire. Or you can just skip straight to Amazon to pre-order it here (and yes, there’s a version for the Kindle).

If that’s not enough to convince you, please check out this interview about the book published in Surface magazine last year. Or just wait to hear me on tour – here’s a list of readings and events.

As for the arguments put forth in the op-ed, I wrote a piece about NextGen and its potential savings in terms of fuel and carbon emissions for Fast Company in May 2009. And to those who would argue that winning the future depends on cornering the market for high-speed rail rather than the air, think again. China, which has invested more heavily in HSR than anyone, is also making a bid to upset the Airbus-Boeing duopoly with a jumbo-jet company of its own – and has strong-armed General Electric into helping it. The most ambitious, most difficult, and most rewarding (in terms of exports) machine to build is an airliner, and China signals the ultimate aim of its ambitions by trying to corner that market as well.

But if you still think I’m crazy, you might be right. After all, there is that time I lived in airports for a month…

(Originally published in the February 1st, 2011 edition of The New York Times.)

IN his State of the Union speech last week, President Obama talked about why things like high-speed rail and faster Internet connections were critical to American prosperity. But he left out the fastest, safest mode of transportation available: aviation.

It may be hard to imagine flying as anything other than a nightmare of packed planes, crumbling airports, canceled flights and increasingly invasive security. But these are all signs of how far our system has fallen. In fact, of all the transportation options available, aviation is the one with the greatest potential to improve the economy and Americans’ well-being – though it will take major new investments to get there.

From 1975 to 2005, while global gross domestic product rose 154 percent and world trade grew 355 percent, the value of air cargo climbed 1,395 percent. Today, more than one-third of all goods by value, some $3 trillion, is carried in the bellies of planes. These goods are the high-tech, high-value products that Americans want to make – clean-energy technology, electronics and biomedical devices – and they are key to the president’s goals of doubling exports and revitalizing our economy.

(Read more at NYTimes.com)

Excerpt from Stephen Baker’s Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything presented without comment:

The real problems started when Watson found itself facing Greg Lindsay, a journalist and a two-time Jeopardy champion. Lindsay, thirty-two, spent much of his time at the University of Illinois on the Quiz Bowl circuit, where he occasionally ran into Ken Jennings. In order to spar with Watson, Lindsay had to sign David Shepler’s nondisclosure agreement. IBM wanted to keep Harry Friedman and his minions in the dark, as much as possible, about Watson’s strengths and vulnerabilities. And Friedman didn’t want the clues escaping onto the Internet before they aired on television. This meant that even if Lindsay defeated Watson, he wouldn’t be able to brag about it to the Quiz Bowl community. For his crowd, this would be the equivalent of besting Kobe Bryant in a one-on-one game of hoops, then having to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Even so, Lindsay came with a clear strategy to defeat Watson. He quickly saw that Watson mastered factoids but struggled with humor and irony, so he steered clear of Watson-friendly categories. He figured Watson would clean up on Name that Continent, picking out the right landmasses for Estado de Matto Grosso (“What is South America?”) and the Filchner Ice Shelf (“What is Antarctica?”). The category Superheroes Names through Pictures looked much more friendly to humans. Sure enough, Watson was bewildered by clues such as “X marks the spot, man, when this guy opens his peeper” (“What is cyclops?”). Band Names also posed problems for Watson because the clues, like this one, were so murky: “The soul of a deceased person, thankful to someone for arranging his burial” (“What is the Grateful Dead?”). If the clue had included the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia or a famous song by the band, Watson could have identified it in an instant. But clues based on allusions, not facts, left it vulnerable.

More important, since the currency they were playing with was worthless, he decided to bet the maximum on each Daily Double. If he blew it, he lost nothing. And since he wasn’t on national television, his reputation wouldn’t suffer. As he put it, “There’s no societal fear.” Yet if he won his big bets, he’d be positioned to withstand Watson’s inevitable charges through categories it understood. “I knew he would go on tears,” Lindsay said. “I had to build up big leads when I had the chance.” He aced his big bets and ended up thrashing Watson three times, once scoring an astronomical $59,999 of funny money. (The Jeopardy single-game record was $52,000 until Ken Jennings crushed it, winning $75,000 in his thirty-eighth game.)

High-speed rail advocates love to point to China as an example of a country turning to trains instead planes or roads to move a billion people around – without realizing China’s leaders are ordering everything on the menu to keep its factories humming. China has laid as many miles of high-speed railroad track in the last five years as Europe did in the last two decades, sure, but it’s also adding 30,000 miles of highways – creating an interstate systems larger than the United States’—and building or expanding 200 airports… and the cities around them.

But which of these three things is the first among equals? I believe it’s the air, naturally. As ambitious as China is when it comes to exporting its high-speed rail expertise, it doesn’t quite compare to its intention to break the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing when it comes to large airlines. If that doesn’t strike you as that big of a goal, then keep in mind that Boeing is America’s largest exporter. China hopes to make inroads into that market with the Aviation Industry Corp.‘s C919, a Boeing 737/Airbus A320 competitor. AVIC unveiled the first life-sized mockup of the plane last month; it’s scheduled to enter service sometime in the middle of this decade.

The C919 and China’s aviation market is so huge that GE is willing to surrender its autonomy in China for a piece of it—which it believes is the key to unlocking the entire country. The lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal has the details:

General Electric Co. is finalizing plans for a 50-50 joint venture with a Chinese military-jet maker to produce avionics, the electronic brains of aircraft. The deal with Aviation Industry Corp. of China would give GE access to a Chinese government project aimed at challenging Boeing Co. and Airbus in the civilian-aircraft market…

General Motors Co. established a joint venture this year with SAIC Motor Corp., its longtime partner in China, to produce and sell their no-frills Wuling-brand microvans in India, and eventually in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets as well.

The two deals show China Inc.‘s growing international ambitions, as well as its increasing leverage over foreign partners. To make the GE deal happen, GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt made an extraordinary concession, agreeing to fold into the venture all of GE’s existing world-wide business in nonmilitary avionics…

...GE has such high hopes for China that Mr. Immelt has called it “our second home market.” Two years ago, Mr. Immelt said China revenue would double to $10 billion by 2010. But last year it reached just $5.3 billion.

GE saw working with AVIC as a chance to boost its avionics business, which has lagged behind Honeywell International Inc. and Rockwell Collins Inc. The planned venture, to be based in Shanghai, has been chosen to supply China’s planned C919 jet, which has the potential to grab a big slice of the Chinese civilian-aviation market. Boeing estimates that market will be worth more than $400 billion over the next 20 years, second only to the U.S…

GE executives say the AVIC deal is their closest cooperation ever with a Chinese partner. GE has 45 people in China on the project now, and it is hiring or moving several hundred more people there, even before final terms are hammered out.

AVIC, which makes fighter jets and helicopters in addition to civilian products, has ambitions outside of China. “For the aviation industry, there is no regional market, only the global market,” the company said in a statement. “AVIC’s strategy is to actively integrate itself into the industrial chain of the world’s aviation industry, and to become a truly global company.”

This is just the beginning. As I wrote in Aerotropolis: “General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt talks openly about using China’s airports as a trea sure map pointing the way to hundreds of billions of dollars in power, water, and rail projects to follow. “The Chinese are beginning to shift growth out of the major metropolitan cities like Shanghai and Beijing and move into tier- two cities,” explained GE’s point man in China, Steve Bertamini. “We figure in the next five- year period, the Chinese government is going to spend two trillion dollars on infrastructure projects. We think there’s probably a good chunk of that, let’s say at least half, that has some GE opportunity.””

Alfred Kahn, the economist, former Civil Aeronautics Board chairman, and the father of airline deregulation, died yesterday at the age of 93. It was Kahn who sold Congress (and especially Sen. Ted Kennedy) on the idea of ending the CAB’s government monopoly on airline routes and pricing, allowing any airline to fly wherever, whenever and for whatever price it chooses. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was time when Pan Am or TWA or Eastern had to lobby for the right just to start flights between New York and Mexico City—which Eastern won after its chairman Eddie Rickenbacher supposedly sent a man to Washington with $120,000 in cash for the GOP.

Kahn argued that what we fondly, if erroneously remember as the “golden age” of travel—of lobster thermidor and coffee-tea-or-me at 30,000 feet—was a case of massive mispricing, and that consumers would be best served by competition between the airlines. Their service was too good and too expensive, and they had little reason to innovate. Sen. Kennedy – and eventually President Jimmy Carter – listened, the latter signing the Airline Deregulation Act into law on October 24, 1978. With the exception of Prohibition, never had an industry been so upended overnight. As I wrote in Aerotropolis:

The government would no longer set fares or assign routes, and had removed all legal barriers to competition. The immediate effect was to drive down prices as new entrants forced the incumbents to match their discounts. Even today, after oil spikes, baggage fees, and hundreds of grounded planes, the cost of flying on a per-mile basis is barely half of what it had been, adjusted for inflation. Estimates of passengers’ annual savings range as high as $20 billion. The airlines’ massive losses have been our personal gain.

Deregulation made the triumph of the plane over all other means of long- distance travel inevitable. The price of air travel compared to trains and driving has declined steadily since 1960, when it cost twice as much as either. By 2000, however, air travel had thoroughly beaten both on a per-mile basis. Our travel preferences had been erased and were being rewritten: the shortest distance between any two points in America was the path to the nearest airport.

This arrangement has its pluses and minuses. The Wall Street Journal captured the latter nicely with the headline on its insta-obit: “Stuck in an Airport? Blame Alfred Kahn.” But one of the quotes included in the obit captures precisely what’s wrong with American aviation and why it can’t compare to the foreign carriers leapfrogging ours every day, whether Emirates or Jet Airways or Cathay Pacific, or why flying from Asian to American airports “is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones” as Tom Friedman complains on a regular basis. Kahn explained why in his testimony to Congress in 2000:

“There are, I think, two things to be said about the fact that [a deregulated airline industry] has also been accompanied by a marked increase in discomfort and congestion: first, that it was precisely the failure of regulation to offer travelers a low-cost/lower-quality product that was its greatest failure; and, second, that this deterioration in the quality of the air travel experience is a consequence, in important measure, of the failure of government to provide the optimal infrastructure – specifically, air traffic control and airport capacity – and to price it correctly.”

In other words, we are still flying every day in a system designed for regulation, despite the fact that hasn’t been true for more than thirty years. Kahn’s point makes perfect sense when you stop to consider how many hubs in America have been opened since deregulation (the answer: one, Denver’s in 1995) and that we use GPS receivers on our iPhones to get us around while airlines make do with air traffic control technology that’s more or less unchanged from 1938.

Despite what the WSJ says, this week’s post-holiday travel nightmare isn’t Kahn’s legacy, but the result of the airlines’ attempt to circumvent it. As U.S. Airways CEO Doug Parker cheerfully explained last month to a roomful of several hundred frequent fliers, the surviving legacy carriers have adopted cartel tactics in order to survive, tacitly agreeing to keep a lid on seat capacity and matching each other’s fees. The former is the reason why thousands of travelers will be spending New Year’s Eve with their families, even if they never intended to. It’s a shame Kahn had to live long enough to see that.

(Author, analyst and Esquire contributing editor Thomas P.M. Barnett reviewed Aerotropolis in his weekly column for World Politics Review on December 6th, 2010.)

H.G. Wells’ futuristic 1933 classic, “The Shape of Things to Come,” predicted a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity’s recovery would depend on the airplane as the primary mechanism for both travel and political rule—the benevolent “dictatorship of the air.” The book reflected Wells’ prescient fears of catastrophic world war and his faith in technology’s capacity to tame mankind’s worst instincts.

A book due out in March entitled, “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next,” is the closest thing to a real-world vision to rival that of Wells. The book, written by journalist Greg Lindsay, is based on the visionary ideas of business professor John Kasarda, a latter-day Wells who dreams of building future cities around airports instead of the other way around.

At first blush, it’s easy to be repulsed. Who wants the noise and the architectural “charm” of the hotels, office buildings and warehouses that congregate around such transportation hubs? The simplest answer is jobs. What rules in today’s globalized economy is accessibility and speed, and modern airports are its fastest connection points—the physical embodiment of our increasingly e- commerce-driven world. Yes, the vast bulk of trade still goes by sea, but already one-third of its value travels by air. Indeed, the value of air cargo has grown more than four times faster than global trade over the past several decades.

When you think about it, there’s plenty of evidence from America’s own historical experience to support Kasarda’s vision. Prior to the Civil War, railroads were built between existing cities in the region east of the Mississippi river. But check out the map west of the Mississippi and you’ll spot a far different pattern, with cities clustered along railroad lines. Modern bedroom communities and suburbs likewise reflect this logic, with towns that sprang up primarily by virtue of their commuting distance—by car—from the downtowns of central cities.

Examples of quasi-aerotropolises in the U.S., writes Lindsay, can already be found in the business corridors that surround Chicago’s O’Hare airport (half a million jobs within a five-mile radius), the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (400,000 jobs) and Dulles International Airport (200,000 jobs) in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Cities and regions that make the monumental commitment to building and maintaining an international air hub will prosper. Take Atlanta, for instance, whose Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is the largest employer in the state of Georgia. But cities that take a pass—like Boston did in the 1980s, when it rejected the idea of a Dulles-style behemoth out in the sticks—suffer competitively.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on December 27th, 2010.)

IBM is announcing this morning an agreement with the city of Rio de Janeiro to build a “Single City Operations Center,” or what amounts to a control room for the sprawling megalopolis. The center will draw upon data from dozens of municipal departments and public agencies.

While the system will initially focus on predicting the kinds of mudslides and floods that killed hundreds last April and left 15,000 homeless, it’s designed, ultimately, to monitor and respond to any type of emergency—just in time for the city to host both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

The deal is IBM’s most ambitious smarter city project to date; previous efforts have tended to be single-purpose programs in developed cities, such as a congestion pricing scheme for London or water management in Dubuque. But Rio is a different situation—a bona fide megacity in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, in the midst of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrade ahead of the World Cup. Although financial terms were not disclosed, the deal illuminates just how indispensable IBM hopes to become to the daily operations of Rio—and how it plans to do the same for cities everywhere.

The company’s involvement began in May at the behest of Rio mayor Eduardo Paes, who admitted after April’s mudslides that the city’s preparedness had been “less than zero.” The disaster cost roughly $13 billion in damage, while another 10,000 homes in Rio’s favelas were considered to still be at risk. “[Paes] was very nervous about a repeat the following year,” said Guru Banavar, CTO of IBM’s Smarter Cities group. “He said, ‘Help me deal with these floods before the next rainy season,’ which meant right now.”

IBM’s consultants were happy to help, although they had more than just software in mind. To make the most of their solutions, they recommended an overhaul of how the city’s weather, geological, and civil defense agencies operate, essentially forcing them to work together.  “The ideal situation would be to appoint a sort of chief operation officer who would coordinate across multiple agencies,” Banavar said. “To my surprise, the mayor took that advice very seriously, and within a couple of days had appointed a COO.”

“This is a very special thing for IBM, because we’re seen as a trusted advisor by the mayor—not a vendor, not even a partner,” Banavar continued. “He absolutely takes us with him for most of the city-related decisions. It’s a very close relationship that has pretty much transformed the organization model for the city of Rio.”

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on December 16th, 2010.)

Who will own the brains of smart cities—citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of “gov 2.0” champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.”

Those are some of the conclusions of “The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion,” a 10-year forecast commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and published this morning by the Institute for the Future. “Without this catalyst for cooperation,” the authors conclude, “we may repeat the devastating urban conflicts of the 20th century that pitted central planners like Robert Moses against community activists like Jane Jacobs.” Befitting the Foundation’s focus on the world’s poorest and what it calls “smart globalization,” the report’s emphasis is on smartening up cities in the developing world—cities that lack both data about their swelling populations and the tools needed to make sense of it. The roster of expert contributors comprises a who’s who of ubiquitous computing and gov 2.0 types, including MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti, Everyware author Adam Greenfield, the Santa Fe Institute’s Nathan Eagle, Intel Labs Director Genevieve Bell, Microsoft Research’s Jonathan Donner, and San Francisco CIO Chris Vein.

Together, they highlight five “technologies that matter” for cities in 2020: mobile broadband; smart personal devices, whether they’re dirt-cheap phones or tablets; government-sponsored cloud computing (modeled on the U.K.’s national “G-cloud” initiative); open-source public databases to promote grassroots innovation, and “public interfaces.” Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures.

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(One of my fall projects was a special report for Advertising Age on media habits around the world. What belows below is from the Introduction. The complete report is available for $249 from AdAge.com.)

The first thing you should know is that the name of this report is the Global Media Habits survey. While we’ve been obsessed with the carnage in the American and, to a lesser extent, European media markets, for the last couple of years the global media landscape has mirrored the broader economic one–which is to say, developed nations are fragmenting while developing ones are booming across the board. This is as true for television and newspapers (newspapers!) as it is for online video and mobile phones, the latter of which is poised to become the most ubiquitous media device in history.

This bifurcation in media reflects another in the world at large. Not just marketers, but governments (e.g., in Britain, France, Greece, etc.) are slashing budgets and announcing austerity measures while ministers in New Delhi and Beijing (not to mention their corporate counterparts in Mumbai and Shanghai) are calling for massive increases in spending to reach a middle-class consumer who literally did not exist 20, 10 or even five years ago.

In a country like India, for example, two middle classes actually co-exist–a prosperous middle class by any measure (with an average income between that of the typical Brazilian and Italian) and an emerging middle class earning anywhere between $10 and $100 a day per person. The group making up that middle class accounted for one-third of the world’s population in 1990, but 57% by 2006, according to Indian economist Surjit Bhalla. That growth hasn’t been linear. If one graphs the average income of the world’s consumers, the middle earners comprise a large bell curve, while the top 1% and “bottom billion” form long tails on either side. That bell curve is moving en masse into the emerging middle class, creating a media boom in the unlikeliest of places….

In the new issue of The New Yorker, David Owen dredges up “the Jevons Paradox,” named for the Victorian era British economist William Stanley Jevons, who worried about “peak coal” a century before Americans began fretting about peak oil. Owen’s story is still behind the paywall at the moment, so if you’d like to learn more about the Jevons Paradox (and you should), here’s a brief excerpt from Aerotropolis:

Six years later, the British economist William Stanley Jevons declared another long emergency. The Coal Question, published in 1865, was An Inconvenient Truth for Victorian England– a clear- eyed description of Britain’s looming peak coal reckoning, complete with a sobering analysis of the country’s coal reserves cross- referenced with its ravenous consumption. The country would run out of coal in less than a hundred years, he estimated, and the result would be cataclysmic. “It is the material energy of the country– the universal aid– the factor in everything we do,” he wrote with spooky prescience. “With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.” Once Britain had run out, its ability to sustain 10 percent population growth each decade (as it had done for the previous seven) would collapse under its inability to grow or transport enough food. Worse, there appeared to be no alternatives– no fuels to replace it, in Jevons’s estimation– and any increases in the steam engine’s efficiency would only make it cheaper and easier to use, thus stoking greater demand and faster depletion.

These were not the ravings of a fringe theorist. Jevons was as sober and as mainstream an economist as any Nobel- winning member of the Chicago School today. His suggestion made its way on to the floor of the House of Commons, where no less than future prime minister William Gladstone– then chancellor of the exchequer– referred to the looming peak coal crisis in his bud get speech of 1866. A “coal panic” ensued, leading to the appointment of a blue- ribbon royal commission. Five years later, it published the first detailed estimate of Britain’s coal reserves but managed to sidestep Jevons’s conclusions altogether. The public went back to sleep. Britain’s coal did not run out, and the isles didn’t become fully reliant on oil until after World War I.

The “Jevons Paradox” still troubles us: The more efficiently you use a resource, the more of it you will use. Put another way: The better the machine, the broader its adoption. And there has never been a better machine for transportation than the jet engine. A pair of General Electric GE90- 115B turbofans mounted on a 777 are capable of generating 230,000 pounds of thrust between them– enough to propel four hundred passengers between New York and London in six and a half hours, with gas mileage equivalent to fifty five miles per gallon per passenger. But the aggregate cost is still staggering: twenty five thousand gallons of fuel ignited in the upper atmosphere. Fifty years of refinements have yielded engines cleaner by an order of magnitude, but any gains in efficiency have been far outpaced by exponential growth in the number of passengers– the inevitable result of falling costs and ticket prices.

The Jevons Paradox illustrates why infinitely renewable, zero- carbon fuels are a necessity– because merely efficient solutions only postpone the day of reckoning. Peak whale teaches us how an entire way of life underpinned by a single source of energy can be transformed or vanish overnight thanks to timely substitution. If you had told Herman Melville in 1851 that whaling would be a historical footnote within a decade–replaced by viscous tar oozing out of the ground– he would have been dumbfounded. “One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil,” he wrote in Moby-Dick, and the next day, they were gone. How could he have imagined the sweet crude yielding light, flight, locomotion, and the Green Revolution?

Peak whale ended when whalers “ran out of customers before they ran out of whales,” quipped the environmentalist Amory Lovins, who was charting paths to a renewable future before Jimmy Carter wore cardigans in the White House. So how will peak oil end?