Some more things to point out

• Stock markets aren't the economy. Getting the indices to go up slightly does not mean that it's clear sailing for politicians and that the problems have been solved. They shouldn't be used as proxies for that type of speculation.
• Regarding speculation, however, basically all of the trade done on stock exchanges is one form of speculation or another. There is plenty of discussion about whether investors are rational or not, but it is sufficient to say that when investing money, the investor must at least personally feel that the trade is good for him to proceed and ergo the equity is mis-priced. Due to the uncertainty in valuation, however, the positions are speculative by nature, regardless of the duration that the equity is held. Hence it is silly for politicians to think that "speculative" trading on exchanges should be curbed. And besides, short-term trading brings volume into the market and provides liquidity...
• ... however! There are certain things that should be kept an eye out for. When one leaves the realm of the real and tangible world and heads into the abstract world of derivatives, these are the more dangerous waters. It may be wise to look at derivatives trading where the derivatives aren't used to hedge real-world situations but are instead used as lottery tickets. Hence naked positions and complex chaining of derivatives may be something to look at regulating a bit more, at least until more about that world is understood.
• I'm also becoming more skeptical towards people whose jobs cannot be supposedly measured. Sure, we all live in a complex world, but you need to measure things to understand whether you're going in the right direction or not. Or whether you're even moving. Metrics can always be devised but creating good metrics may be difficult. But that should not mean that anyone should be allowed to hide behind the argument of "my job can't be measured because it is such a complex thing". If someone says that, then most likely they don't understand what it is that they are even doing.

Random thoughts

• We haven't even seen globalization yet; expats are still a minority and the inertia people face in relocating is still very large and a major part of international trade is done under the umbrella of big companies moving materials around and in accounts.
• What are often bemoaned as the failures of capitalism are in fact symptoms of corporatism and corruption, not capitalism itself.
• Capitalism shouldn't be unbounded and companies should be trusted to self-regulate; there are too many conflicts in interests, and besides, even in sports you always need someone to set and enforce the rules. I don't think there's an inconsistency here.

Evolution of technology

As technology builds on technology, an interesting proxy for seeing how different technological inventions relate to each other comes from looking at patents and their citations. The image above contains a visualization of all patents in USPTO patent classes 370, 375, 379 and 455 which have been cited more than 100 and have been granted between 1976 and 2006. So in essence that is the structure of the most central patents related to mobile phones. The coloring is arbitrary clustering of the patents, but what is interesting is that the green, blue, and brown clusters are in fact the 375, 455 and 379 classes respectively. The clusters at the bottom of the graph are essentially the patents from class 370.

Another interesting thing to do would be to create a time-lapse of the network's evolution over time as well as to dig deeper into the substance and see why the clusters exactly emerge. Also, using this data it will be interesting to see how exactly different companies fit into the picture.

Einaudi: Nuvole Bianche