The body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones. These are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease. However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster—rescuing loved ones or stranger, transporting people to a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals—utilize their stress hormones for their proper purposes and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized. (Nonetheless, everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.) Some violent transactions (id est, murder, assault, and rape) take shape as one-on-one conflicts between known acquaintances. This is not generally the case with robbery. The vast majority of robbery offenders and victims have no prior relationship. More than 75 percent of robbery victims describe their attackers as strangers. Men, African Americans, and the elderly are almost never attacked by known assailants. Furthermore, unlike other violent crimes, only 5 percent of all robberies occur between individuals who are related to one another by blood or marriage. Almost all robbery transactions involve a lone victim; however, it is not uncommon for multiple perpetrators to join in the attack. Victim reports reveal that 94.5 percent of the persons who were rubbered in 2022 were alone at the time of the attack. The offender dynamic is somewhat different. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

In 2022, 43 percent of all robbery victims claimed that they were attacked by multiple assailants. No other form of violent crime experiences this level of group offending. A number of observations can be made about the setting of the average robbery event. One, robberies are equally distributed across daytime and nighttime hours. Two, victim reports suggest that robberies take place in a variety of locales; about half of the robbery victimizations take place in open-air venues (exempli gratia, in streets, parks) and another 30 percent take place at or near the victim’s home. Keep in mind that the data focuses largely on personal victimizations. Those offenders who target commercial establishments are largely omitted from these data. Fortunately, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports solicits information on the robbery setting. While these data show that public streets remain the favorite setting for robbery (a little less than 50 percent of known cases), commercial and/or financial establishments are targeted in roughly 25 percent of the cases, and private residence comprise another 13 percent of the cases. Given the risks and complexities that go along with pulling off a robbing in an institutional setting, one might expert that robbers would target the most lucrative businesses. This is not the case. Only a small fraction of these robberies occur at banking establishments (average yield in 2022 = $5,000) while a surprising majority transpire in “low budget” convenience stores (average yield in 2022 $700). The participants in the robbery transaction are disproportionately young, men. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

In 2022, individuals between the age of 12 and 24 experienced a robbery victimization rate that exceeded five per 1,000 persons or households. That victimization rate was roughly double the one for persons between the ages 25 and 49 and nearly five time the rate for persons 50 years or older. A similar age pattern emerges among the offender population. Roughly three and ten robbery victims estimate that their attacker(s) were under the age of 20 and an estimated six in tend claim that they were attacked by a person(s) under the age of 30. These data indicate that robbery is an intra-aged crime. The majority of robbery victims and offenders are men. Males accounted for two thirds of the robbery victims in 2022. This translated into victimization rates for men (3.8 per 1,000) that more than doubled that for women (1.7). Most robbery victims claim that they were attacked by male assailants—a man was present in 99.2 percent of all multiple-offender robberies and 93.9 percent of all single-offender robberies that occurred in 2022. Clear racial disparities exist among robbery offenders and victims. In fact, 80 percent of the robbery victims were white and 16 percent black. A full 21 percent identify themselves as Hispanic. When one factors in relative representation in the U.S.A. population, the following robbery victimization rates emerge: 5.3 (per 1,000) for Hispanic, 3.6 for African Americans, and 2.6 for whites. A more extreme picture emerges among the offender group. African Americans accounted for more than half (55 percent) of the robbery arrests that were reported by law enforcement authorities. This means that the robbery arrest rate for blacks is more than 6 times that of whites. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

The robbery victimization rate for the average American was estimated to be 2.8 per 1,000 persons or households in 2022. That same years, Hispanic males experienced a victimization rate of 7.9 percent; for black males, it was 6.4. In addition, black males between the ages of 16 and 19 were victimized at a rate of 27.6 per 1,000 persons or households. Most robberies unfold as extremely abrupt, but unmistakably volatile exchanges. Regardless of whether the attacks take form as a street mugging or bank robbery, it is in the offender’s best interest to move quickly and purposefully. Most robberies follow a set chronology of events. First, the attacker must get the victim’s undivided attention and clearly state his or her intentions—eight in ten (83.1 percent) robbery victims report that their attackers introduced some unprovoked threat or act of force into the equation. This defining moment is called the declaration of stick-up and can take on a variety of shapes, ranging from a verbal statement to the passing of a note to a bank teller. This initiating step is forceful, direct, and seeks to place the offender in complete control of the victim’s emotions and behavior. Next, the robber must go about his or her efforts to collect the desired money and/or valuables from the victim. This is clearly the most unpredictable stage of the game. Here, the attacker hopes that his or her threats and posturing will produce unwavering compliance from the victim. This is seldom without complication—only one third of all robbery victims simply submit to their attackers’ wishes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Once the robbery offender has successfully or unsuccessfully confiscated the victim’s valuables, he or she then goes about closing out the interaction. In addition to physically fleeing the scene, most offenders try to obscure their identity from any potential onlookers. Robbery offenders tend to have long, pronounced criminal careers. Criminal history checks revealed that 62 percent of the accused robbers had a prior felony rap sheet. Nearly one in three (29 percent) had at least five felony arrests to his or her credit. A full 40 percent of the robbers in the sample had been convicted of a prior felony. Furthermore, 70.2 of the released robbers in our recidivism study had been rearrested within 3 years. No other category of violent offenders lead such active criminal careers. It is tempting to think of robbers as offense specialists (id est, deal exclusively in robbery or similar offense). This is not an unrealistic suggestion given that would-be thieves have a host of targets from which to choose. There are clearly enough potential persons and financial institutions to keep a person busy in a one-dimensional criminal career. Recidivism explain that 20 percent of robbers who are released from prison are typically rearrested on another robbery within three years. However, interviews with known robbery offenders reveal the presence of a much broader criminal repertoire. Most robbers describe themselves as opportunists—persons who will pursue any course of action that is likely to yield desired ends. The drugs/crime connection serves to further solidify these individuals’ commitment to a diversified criminal portfolio. A survey of state prison inmates found that 30 percent claimed to have committed their most recent offense in an effort to get money to buy drugs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

On the whole, the available data suggest that most robbers are criminal generalists. They are individuals who grow accustomed to a certain way of life; a life that includes fast living, heavy spending, and habitual drug use. This Worldview requires offenders to seek a constant flow of cash that can be sustained only by a diversified and highly active commitment to crime. Few would disagree that there are instrumental motives resent in the mindset of the average robber. The most immediate goal of this type of offense is to deprive the victims of their valuables for personal consumption. Nonetheless, news reports are full of stories in which thieves expose themselves to high levels of risk in order to collect on very small sums of money. Convenience store robberies and/or the taxicab stick-ups are prime examples. The growing presence of these high-risk, low-yield robberies had led numerous researchers to conclude that expressive motives also play an important part in the cognitive aspect of robbery. For example, many robbers allege that they commit their crimes for emotional gratification or revenge. More importantly, these researchers have shown that inner-city street norms bestow a great deal of status onto individuals who are willing to live by the “survival of the fittest” credo. Many robbers commit their crimes while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Nearly 33 percent of persons robbed in 2022 had reason to believe that the assailant(s) was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the attack. Not surprisingly, the accounts of known offenders suggests that the actual percentages may be somewhat higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Interviews with a sample of imprisoned robbers revealed that 40 percent were under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they committed the violent theft that led to their incarceration. This impairment can limit the offenders’ ability to make sound and reasoned decision. This speaks further to the drugs/crime connections that impacts robbery. Planning does not appear to play a large role in most robberies. Most violent thieves operate as alert opportunists—when in need of cash, they head out into the streets with the necessary weaponry and a behavioral script for how they would like to see the robbery event unfold. At the same time, they may have learned from past experience that most robberies are unpredictable, and thus view meticulous planning as a waste of time. Interviews with habitual robbers reveal that even the most seasoned thieves feel a need to invoke some sort of normative neutralization to help set themselves and other at ease about their behavior. Robbers often times blame the victim, claiming that the naïve fool had it coming. Others adopt a “survival of the fittest” mentality, asserting that they are simply doing what must be done to get by in life. Still others speak of a “natural order on the streets,” in which robbery is just another way of making a living. Regardless of the content, the message is clear: Robbers negotiate their identities like any other person. Among all the threats to man’s vital interests, the threat to his freedom is of extraordinary importance, individually and socially. And robbery certainly threatens these conditions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

In contrast to the widely held opinion that this desire for freedom is a product of culture and more specifically of learning-conditioning, there is ample evidence to suggest that the desire for freedom is a biological reaction of human organism. It is a remarkable fact that all human beings—the children of the powerful as well as those of the powerless—share the common experience of once having been powerless and of having fought for their freedom. While a person is struggling in lonely silence to find their way back to life again, to give birth to a new path that comes from within to restore one’s spirit and passion for life, one needs strong, unqualified affirming voices. When it seems, and indeed is true, that one’s life is dissolving around one, know that God is always there. In choosing yourself over your reflection of self, God will always be there. When one decides that, whatever the price, one has to be in touch with oneself, has to follow one’s own instincts, God will be there. God allows people to access their strong, unqualified, affirming voice. And many people are thankful for God. The Lord was always prepared to meet again the antagonist whom He has foiled in the wilderness, and who had left Him only “for a season” (Luke 4.13). So when He discerned Satan at work in Peter, He exposed him in one swift sentence, even mentioning his name (Matt. 16.23). Addressing the Jewish people, He likewise stripped aside the mask of the hidden foe and said, “Ye are of your father, the devil” (John 8.44); with keen-edged words He spoke of him as the one who was lying to them and prompting them to kill Him (John 8.40-41). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

And when, in the store on the lake, He is awakened suddenly, He is at once alert to meet the foe, and stands with calm majesty to rebuke the storm which the prince of the power of the air had roused against Him and the disciples (Mark 4.38-39). In brief, we find the Lord, right on from the wilderness victory, unveiling the powers of darkness as He went forward in steady mastery over them. Behind what appeared “natural,” He sometimes discerned a supernatural power which demanded His rebuke. He rebuked the fever in Peter’s wife’s mother (Luke 4.39), just as He rebuked the evil spirits in other and more manifest forms, while in other instances He simply healed the sufferer by a word. Now note the vast difference between the attitude of Satan himself to the Lord and that taken by the lesser spirits of evil. Satan, the prince, tempts Jesus, seeks to hinder Him, prompts the Pharisees to oppose Him, hides behind a disciple to divert Him, and finally takes hold of a disciple to betray Him and sways the multitude to put Him to death; but the spirits of evil bowed down before Jesus, beseeching Him to “let them alone” and not to command them to go into the abyss (Luke 8.31). The realm of this deceiver-prince is specifically mentioned by the Apostle Paul in his description of him as “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2.2), the aerial or “Heavenly places” being the special sphere of the activity both of Satan and his hierarchy of powers. Even the derogatory name “Beelzebub,” means “the god of the files,” suggestively speaks of the aerial nature of his powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

The Lord’s description of Satan’s working through “fowls of the air” (Matt. 13.4, 19) strikingly corresponds to these other statements, together with John’s language about the “whole World lying in the evil one” (1 John 5.19)—the atmosphere itself being the sphere of operation of these aerial spirits. And this realm in which the whole human race must move is said to be now “in the evil one.” The foundation of Christian belief is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of Christ. Existential experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—ultimate concern—is destined to play a role in advancing the holy experiences to the idea of God. God is the abyss and ground of being. The holy is liberated from the dominance of the ethically good. The relation of religion and morality is not an external one, but the religious dimension, source, and motivation that are implicit in al morality, acknowledge or not. The holy is first experiences as a numinous reality and only secondly as a moral demand. Religion is no longer seen by some to be confined to institutions, cult, and doctrine—in a word, to the churches—but religion is now the state of being ultimately concerned. There is religion in the narrow sense of institutionalized and formalized religion, and in the large sense of being grasped by an ultimate concern. Justification through faith rends every human claim in the face of Hod and every identification of God and man, and yet man is justified in the midst of his guilt and doubt. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

In the light of this principle, the cross of Christ is seen as the embodiment of the divine Yes and No against the World, an interpretation which forms the core of Tillichian Christology and dogma. A union of this Protestant principle with the historicocritical biblical research may led some to reject nineteenth-century liberal dogmatic theology which replaces the crucified Christ by the historical Jesus, and which dissolves the paradox of justification into moral categories. The substance of my religion is and remains Lutheran. It embodies the consciousness of the “corruption” of existence, the repudiation of every social Utopia, including the metaphysics of progress, the knowledge of the irrational demonic character of life, an appreciation of the mythical elements of religion, and a repudiation of Puritan legality in individual and social life. In personal dimensions of life and tastes, there are things that may exercise a certain influence upon one’s theology, though perhaps indirectly. The ones some may consider are the love of the sea, one’s preference for the city, one’s interest in art. From the age of eight, I spent several weeks, even months, at the seashore every year. The meeting of sea and the land means for some a boundary-experience of the infinite and the finite. The sea with its never-resting, limitless expanse and depths become a symbol for the absolute, the ground and the abyss. Its dynamism suddenly erupts in an ecstacy of storm and waves which aggressively break over the land that quietly rests in its self-sufficient finitude. The sea provides an element of phantasy that one may consider essential to living thought. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One’s love for nature, however, goes hand-in-hand with preference for the bustling life of the city. The city is indispensable for developing the critical side of intellectual and artistic endeavor. Furthermore, in a large urban center one finds concentrated all the important political and social trends. To the realism of the city, some attribute the escape from a romantic hostility against technology. And, strange to say, the experience of the city is analogous to the experience of the sea: The impression of the big city is somehow similar to that of the sea: infinity, openness, unrestricted space! However, beyond that it was the dynamic character of life in Berlin that affected me. The discovery of art (in the sense of the visual arts, but especially painting) is an event of far-reaching consequences. Turning to it by way of reaction during the fearful, ugly, destructive pandemic, allows one to discover the marvels of architecture. All the bookish church history in the World could never provide the kind of insights occasioned by the mosaics of the early Roman basilicas. For ultimate reality is experienced and expressed directly in religious symbols and myths, but the artists, while intending nothing but good art, cannot help but indirectly express ultimate reality. Besides being telescoped into the life of one man, these dimensions are linked together by other bonds of unity. In all of them one discerns the deep current of religious concerns—in the search for Christian community, in the theological view of history, in the quest for a philosophy that is realistic and open to the transcendent, and in a sensitivity to the presence of the holy in nature and art. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

One life can be unity because it unifies. It can unify by drawing together the conflicting elements of an age in transition: authority and autonomy, theory and practice, nature and technology, idealism and existentialism, World was and World unity. There is an urgent cry of human hope and despair not only in the thoughts of many people, but also in their experience as we deal with massive corruption, hyperinflation, and a president who does not represent the American people. Theology, as a function of the church, is the methodological interpretation of the Christian faith for the human situation. Thus, it mediates between two poles, the eternal and the temporal. The eternal pole is the Christian message, and one function of theology is to state its truth. The temporal pole is the human situation, and the other function of theology is to respond to its needs. The “situation” does not refer to the psychological or sociological condition of individuals or even of groups, as for instance, a feeling of uncertainty that demands an uncomplicated unequivocal reassurance. Rather, it signifies the totality of man’s creative self-interpretation in a special period, that is the sum of the artistic, the scientific, philosophical, economic, political, and ethical forms in which men of a certain era express their understanding of life. If one stresses the unchangeable truth of the message (kerygma) over against the changing demands of the situation, the theology is kerygmatic. Such a theology preserves the Christian faith from the relativities of mundane exigencies. The drawback, however, is that kerygmatic theology hurls the message at the situation like a stone. It establishes no common ground with those in the situation, and so runs the risk of being irrelevant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If, on the other hand, one first listens attentively to the questions implied in the temporal situation and then responds with the power of the eternal message, that theology is “apologetic.” Apologetic theology is “answering theology.” It bears no semblance to the discredited relic that has borne the name in the past. Apologetic theology searches for the common ground between the message and the situation by listening to the questions that the situation poses before answering in terms of the message. The danger in such a procedure is that the word of the message may be distorted amid the clamor of the questions. However, apologetic theology is important for two reasons, one is because it is a fact, and because of the conviction. The fact is that for the last three hundred years the central problem of theology has been the adaption of the Christian faith to the modern mind. For instance, we no longer stone the unfaithful. We pray for them, send them to counseling or separate from them. With such an evolutionary synthesis, it is possible—and necessary—if Christianity is to avoid becoming a fossilized curiosity and if civilization is not to lose one of its most powerful stimulants. The Gospel records refer repeatedly to the workings of evil spirits. They show that wherever the Lord moved, the emissaries of Satan sprang into active manifestation in the bodies and minds of those they indwelt, so that the ministry of Christ and His apostles was directed actively against them. Again and again we read: “He went into their synagogues through all Galilee, preaching and casting out demons” (Mark 1.39; He “cast out many demons, and He suffered not the demons to speak, because they knew Him” (Mark 1.34). #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Why have socialist economic systems failed so miserably? The best laid Five Year Plan of Stalin and his successors “gang agley” because the workers and the managers lacked adequate incentives. Most importantly, the system offered no reward for doing a good job rather than a merely adequate one. People had no reason to show initiative or innovation, and every reason to cut corners wherever they could—fulfilling quantity quotas and slacking on quality, for example. A market economy has a better natural incentive mechanism, namely the profit motive. A company that succeeds in cutting costs, or introducing a new product, makes a greater profit; one that lags behind stands to lose money. However, even this does not work perfectly. Each employee or manager in a company is not fully exposed to the chill wind of competition in the market, and the top management of the firm has to devise its own internal carrots and sticks to obtain the desired standards of performance from those below. When two firms join forces for a particular project, they have the added problems of designing a contract that will share the incentives between them in the right way. We bring out the important idea for the design of incentive schemes through a series of examples. Imagine yourself as the owner of a high-tech company in California trying to develop and market a new computer chess game, Wizard 1.0. If you succeed, you will make a profit of $200,000 from the sales. If you fail, you make nothing. Success or failure hinges on what your expert player-programmer does. One can either put one’s heart and soul into the work, or just give it a routine shot. With high-quality, effort, the chances of success are 80 percent, but for routine effort, the figure drops to 60 percent. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Chess programmers can be fired for $50,000, but they like to daydream, and will give only their routine effort for this sum. For high-quality effort, you have to pay $70,000. What should you do? Low-Quality Effort: Chance of success is 60 percent, average revenue is $120,000, salary payments are $50,000, and average profit = revenue – salary which is $70,000. High-Quality Effort: Chance of success is 80 percent, average revenue is $160,000, salary payments are $70,000 and average profit = revenue – salary, which is $90,000. A routine effort will get you $200,000 with a 60 percent chance, which comes out to $120,000 on average. Subtracting the $50,000 salary leaves an average profit of $70,000. The corresponding calculation if you hire a high-effort expert is 80 percent of $200,000 minus $70,000, that is, $90,000. Clearly you do better to hire a high-effort expert at the higher salary. However, there is a problem. You cannot tell by looking at the expert’s working day whether one is making routine effort or quality effort. The creative process is mysterious. The drawings on your programmer’s pad may be the key to a great graphics display that will ensure the success of Wizard 1.0, or just doodles of pawns and bishops to accompany one’s day dreaming. Knowing that you cannot tell the difference between routine effort and quality effort, what is to prevent the expert from accepting the salary of $70,000 appropriate for high effort, but making routine effort just the same? Even f the project fails, that can always be blamed on chance. After all, even with genuine quality effort, the project can fail 20 percent of the time; this was just that kind of bad luck. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

When you cannot observe the quality of effort, you have to base your reward scheme on something you can observe. In the present instance that can be only the ultimate outcome, namely success or failure of the programming effort. This does have a link to effort, albeit an imperfect one—higher quality of effort means a greater chance of success. This link can be exploited to generate an incentive scheme. What you do is offer the expert a remuneration that depends on the outcome: a larger sum upon success and a smaller sum in the event of failure. The difference, or the bonus for success, should be just enough to make it in the employee’s own interest to provide high-quality effort. In this case, the bonus must be big enough so that the expert expects a higher effort will raise one’s earnings by $20,000, from $50,000 to $70,000. Hence the bonus for success had to be at least $100,000: a 20 percent increase in the chance of getting a $100,000 bonus provides the necessary $20,000 expected payment for motivating high-quality effort. It remains to find the separate sums to be paid in the event of success or failure. That needs a little calculation. The answer is that you should pay the employee $90,000 for success, and one should pay you a find of $10,000 in the event of failure. With this incentive scheme, the programmer’s incremental reward for success is $100,000, the minimum necessary for inducing quality effort. The average payment to one is $70,000 (an 80 percent chance of $90,000 and a 20 percent chance minus $10,000). This leaves you, the owner, an average profit of $90,000 (an 80 percent chance of $200,000 minus the average salary of $70,000). If you could observe quality of effort by direct supervision, this is exactly what you could have gotten. The incentive scheme has done a perfect job; the unobservability of effort has not made any difference. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

In essence, this incentive scheme sells 50 percent of the firm to the programmer in exchange for one’s effort. One’s net payments are then either $90,000 or -$10,000, and with so much riding on the outcome of the project it becomes in one’s interest to supply high-quality effort in order to increase the chance of success (and one’s profit shares of $100,000). The only difference between this contract and the fine/bonus scheme is in the name. While the name may matter, we see there is more than one way to achieve the same effect. However, these solutions may not be possible, either because assessing a fine on an employee may not be legal or because the worker does not have sufficient capital to pay the $10,000 for one’s 50 percent stake. What do you do then? The answers is to go as close to the fine solution or equity-sharing as you can. Since the minimum effective bonus is $100,000, the worker gets $100,000 in the event of success and nothing upon failure. Now the employee’s average receipt is $80,000, and your profit falls to $80,000. With equity-sharing, the worker has only one’s labor and no capital to invest in the project. However, one still has to be given a 50 percent share to motivate one to supply high-quality effort. So the best you can do is sell one 50 percent of the company for one’s labor alone. The inability to enforce fines or get workers to invest their own capital means that the outcome is less good from your point of view—in this case, by $10,000. Now the unobservability of effort makes a difference. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Another difficulty with the fine/bonus scheme or equity-sharing is the problem of risk. The worker’s incentives arise from one taking a $100,000 gamble. However, this large risk may not be evaluated by the statistical average of the outcomes. In this case, the worker has to be compensated both for supplying high-quality effort and for bearing risk. The bigger the risk, the bigger the compensation. This extra compensation is another cost of a firm’s inability to monitor its workers’ efforts. Often the best solution is a compromise; risk is reduced by giving the worker less than ideal incentives and consequently this motivates less than an ideal amount of effort. In other instances you may have other indicators of the quality of effort, and you can and should use them when designing your incentive scheme. Perhaps the most interesting and common situation is one in which there are several such projects. If there are more observations, even though success is only an inexact statistical indicator of the quality of effort, it can be made more precise. There are two ways in which this can be done. If the same expert works for you on many projects, then you can keep a record of one’s string of successes and failures. You can be more confident in attributing repeated failure to poor effort quality rather than the working of chance. The greater accuracy of your inference allows you to design a better incentive scheme. The second possibility is that you have several experts working on related projects, and there is some correlation in the success or failure of the projects. If one expert fails while others around one are succeeding, then you can be more confident that one is a shirker and not just unlucky. Therefore rewards based on relative performance—in other words, prizes—will generate suitable incentives. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

When an employer designs incentives to motivate a worker, the problems are only one-sided. More complicated and more interesting are the problems of joint ventures in which each side has to provide the right incentives to motivate the other. Ubiquitination is the systematic spread of the new media system around the World and down through every economic layer of society. A potential nightmare facing high-tech governments derives from the split-up of populations into the info-rich and the info-poor. Any government that fails to take concrete actions to avoid this division courts political upheaval in the future. Yet this dangerous polarization is hardly inevitable. In fact, one can imagine considerable equality of access in the emerging society, not because of compassion or political good sense on the part of the affluent elites, but because of the workings of what might be called the Law of Uniquity. This law holds that strong commercial, as well as political, incentives will arise for making the new electronic infrastructure inclusive, rather than exclusive. In its infancy the telephone was regarded as a luxury. The idea that everyone would someday have a phone was simply mystifying. Why on Earth would everybody want one? The fact that almost everyone in the high-tech nations now has a phone, rich and poor alike, did not stem from altruism but from the fact that the more people plugged into a system, the more valuable it became for all users and especially for commercial purposes. The same proved true, as we have seen, in the early development of postal services. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The industrial economy needed a way to send bills to, or advertise to, or sell newspapers and magazines to everyone, not just the rich. And today, once more, as fax machines and email have replaced the industrial-era post office, similar pressures are accelerating the spread of the new technology. There were 2.5 million fax machines in the United States of America in 1989, churning out billions of pages of faxed documents per year. There are no 43 million fax machines in operation. The more faxes out there, the greater the value of the system to all concerned. It is, therefore, in the distinct self-interest of the affluent to find ways of extending the new systems to include, rather exclude, the less affluent. DVDs and Blu-ray discs and players are being replaced by streaming services. Video streaming services are used by nearly 2 billion people Worldwide, while music streaming platforms have 524 million users. Their combined numbers of users total to more than 2.3 billion. Such a level is more than half of the total number of internet users globally which currently stands at 5.03 billion. Cable television is also being left in the past. As of September 2002, 65 percent of adult pay for cable and 82 percent of USA adults claim that streaming shows provide more entertaining shows than cable does. Streaming services now provide a wider variety of entertainment compare to cable, cater batter to the busy schedules of today’s younger populations and are also producing better quality television due to higher budgets. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The widest diffusion of communication capabilities is an inseparable part of the new system of wealth creation. The direction is almost inevitably toward what the old Bell phone company called “universal service”—id est, ubiquity—combined with interactivity, mobility, convertibility, and connectibility. Finally, the new infrastructure is global in scope. As capital flows electronically across national borders, zipping back and fourth from Zurich to Hong Kong, Hong King to Norway, Norway to Tokyo, Tokyo to Wall Street in milliseconds, information traces equally complex pathways. A change in U.S.A. T-bill rates or the yen-deutsche mark ratio is instantly known around the World, and the morning after the big event in Los Angeles, youngsters in Ho Chi Minh City discuss the latest Grammy winners. The mental borders of the state become as permeable as its financial frontiers. The combination of these six principles produces a revolutionary nervous system for the planet, capable of handling vastly enlarged quantities of data, information, and knowledge at much faster transmission and processing rates. It is a far more adaptable, intelligence, and complex nervous system for the human race than ever before imagined. However, what is amazing, is technology is so advanced, but public WiFi is still hard to find in most cities. Traffic is still a major problem. And a lot of old technology is still being used. For instance, there are touch screen elevators and voice command elevators, but many new construction projects are still going with the traditional push button. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22