97% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that is authoritarian, communist, doesn’t support same sex marriage, does not allow abortion, supports capital punishment or has seen over ten thousand deaths in recent armed conflicts. Good luck!

From part 1 of 2 of Good Luck Being Born Tomorrow which includes some. The statistics within are eye opening.

The meat is in part 2.

300 million years ago, a supercontinent called Pangaea was formed, that later broke apart into continents that we inhabit today. Modern technology has turned the world back into Pangaea – a world where everything is connected. You can have a live video call with someone across the world in seconds (you’re welcome!) or you can find yourself on the next continent in 10 hours if the need be. Yet we’ve built these imaginary borders around us that limit human potential. These borders are a direct result of historic military conflict. And allowing your fate to be determined by things that took place before your birth feels like accepting defeat before you even get started.

This all brings me to the third option of what to do when the environment is not favorable – you can change it! As weird as it sounds, one of the means to cause change is actually also to migrate (for those who already have that freedom). As opposed to a slow democratic process of giving your marginal vote every four years in the hope of changing something you care about, you can vote with your feet already today. You have a choice between expressing your needs at a popularity contest twice a decade or putting constant pressure on places.

Not only will you find yourself in a place where your problem is already fixed (remember – that’s why you moved!), you’re also putting real budget pressure on the old place by taking your taxes elsewhere (will hurt every month). With enough people doing that, the competition for taxes forces incumbent states to fix their environments.

In positive political theory, this is described as the Tiebout hypothesis.

Living in the Silicon Valley media bubble, with its insatiable need to produce some minimum volume of news coverage every day, can lead to a surplus of technology naysaying in one's diet. I believe it's a useful corrective to have sites like Gawker and Valleywag and that ilk of gadfly to point out when the emperor has no clothes, even if the level of trolling is on the high side.

Still, climb up to higher vantage point and it's hard to disagree that technology is perhaps the greatest hope for lifting the standard of living for the most number of people in the world, whether directly or indirectly.

Yes, the tech industry has its problems, and it has its share of ridiculous douchebags, some of them with absurd amounts of wealth. And yes, perhaps some of our technology is too addictive, and maybe it is transforming some of us into intolerable social-network-preening narcissists.

Visit other parts of the world, though, and see what a life-changing event it is to get a cell phone and internet access. Observe people making a living selling goods on social networks, or watch people coordinate protests against authoritarian governments, and on and on. I'll continue to take the bad with the good for the net gain to society.

It’s not hard to imagine the invention of blockchain (the core of Bitcoin) having remarkable implications in the developing world through enabling micro-transactions and possibly helping eliminate corruption through blockchain based electronic voting. There’s stuff coming that we haven’t even thought of yet.

Technological innovation is finally making it possible to meet the assumptions of the Tiebout model (mobile consumers, complete information, abundant choices, telecommuting etc.). Bringing transparency into the world of basic freedoms, taxes, government services, public goods and reducing the cost/pain associated with moving will be the way to give us a future, where every nation state will have to compete for every citizen. Can you imagine that world?