Ideas 2008, according to Time

Time Magazine features 10 ideas that they claim are changing the way we live.  You can see the complete series here, the list is as follows:

#10 Re-Judaizing Jesus
#9 Mandatory Health
#8 The New Austerity
#7 Synthetic Authenticity
#6 Geoengineering
#5 Kitchen Chemistry
#4 Reverse Radicalism
#3 The Post-Movie-Star Era
#2 The End of Customer Service
#1 Common Wealth

The articles are worth a read, I find the first interesting since it calls for solutions “beyond the market”.  Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University’s “Earth Institute” says that “the key (is to) make the right choices in our public investments and to find ways to harness, and channel, market forces”.  Sachs claims that “the challenges of sustainable development–protecting the environment, stabilizing the world’s population, narrowing the gaps of rich and poor and ending extreme poverty — will render passé the very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources”.

While it may be true that the realist view of the world will be shortly obsolete, markets are certainly not passé, and the ideas defining the future should address this distinction.