Bill Ford: If you look at what happened to Detroit when the automobile came into being, there are probably no cities in the world that underwent such a rapid transformation and creation of wealth.
Moreover, the juggernaut of the most primitive form of capitalist transformation – creating wealth through mass dispossession of the poor – has tacit global support, including from the World Bank and other agencies that have failed to guide agrarian economies towards fairer, if slower, paths to growth.
David McWilliams, head of wealth management transformation at UBS Wealth Management, sees it as the next point on an evolutionary chart.
Such a transformation would require a massive redistribution of wealth and resources.
What had happened, rather, was a transformation of the understanding of what wealth was: it was "given a higher purpose", in his words, swept up into a new imagery of the church as the shepherd of the local congregation.
We observe a broad variety of microstructure formation mechanisms including diffusion driven allotropic phase transformations as well as shear and/or diffusion dominated modes of martensitic transformations, enabling a wealth of effective microstructure design options even in such a simple binary Ti alloy.
Yet the happy version of global transformation was coherent and persuasive, and the magnificent expansion of wealth and freedom after 1991 swept all doubts away.
Furthermore, major transformations driven by demographic changes and the unequal distribution of wealth will generate crucial political and social debates.
The transformation of sheds from necessary storage facilities to spaces for hobbies or displays of wealth probably says something about how humans can devote more time to leisure, and less time to feeding themselves.
