The Quiet Americans
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Since my daughter is graduating from college today, I am thinking a lot about the class of 2007 and the world they are about to enter. I’m not sure what they call this generation. Is it generation “X” or “Y” or “Zero” or “Me”? Having taken part in two other commencements this season, though, and knowing enough about what my own daughter’s friends are doing, I can say there is something quietly impressive about this cohort. In fact, if I were giving them a label I’d call them the “Quiet Americans” — not in the cynical way Graham Greene meant it, but in a very positive sense.
They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America they are about to inherit. They don’t take to the streets much — in part, I suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.
Four years ago, when my wife and I dropped our daughter off at college, I wrote that I was troubled that I was dropping her off into a world that was so much more dangerous than the one she had been born into — and I worried that she would not be able to travel in the carefree way that I had when I was her age. Her two summers teaching and researching in India have cured me of that misapprehension. Now I know how my mother felt.
“I don’t know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they read to them,” said Stephen J. Trachtenberg, the departing president of George Washington University.
“I’ve been a college president for 30 years, and these kids are more optimistic about the future than any I have seen — maybe more than they have reason to be,” he said. “They still believe that the world is their oyster and go abroad with abandon. Notwithstanding everything, they remain optimistic.”
In my previous column, I wrote about the number of foreign-born students who are dominating graduate science programs at our best schools, which I witnessed firsthand at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s commencement. But something else struck me at Rensselaer — the number of R.O.T.C. grads, including women, who came up and collected their degrees in full dress uniforms.
It was not only the pride with which they wore those uniforms that was palpable, but also the respect they were accorded by their classmates. I spoke to one young man who was going from graduation at Rensselaer right out to sea with the United States Navy. As bad as Iraq is, they just keep signing up. I have been equally impressed by the number of my daughter’s friends who have opted to join Teach for America.
And that can-do-will-do spirit is a good thing, because we will need it to preserve our democracy from those who want to steal the openness and optimism that make democracy work.
When I graduated in 1975, the world was dominated by interstate rivalries and conclusive wars. The class of 2007 is graduating into a world of state-versus-gang wars and gang-versus-gang wars that are often inconclusive. Look at the Middle East today. You have gangs fighting states and armies in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Gaza.
If the dominant clash of my generation was between communism and capitalism, the dominant clash of this generation is between “nihilism” — represented by suicide bombers who try to blow up hope from New York to Baghdad — and “optimism” that a better social and political order can be created, and therefore service matters. That’s why this generation’s willingness to continue venturing into the world, whether to repair it or do business with it, is so important. It is exactly the opposite of what the nihilists want.
“Triumphing over fear is the victory of the democratic citizen against the paralyzing effects of terror,” the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi observed. “It has to be done, though, at the level of each citizen. Just as the violence has been fragmented, so must the victory over this violence be done one by one. Leaders can help, but ultimately victory is about not letting the fear engendered by this new era paralyze you.”
We have to hope, though, that the determination that characterizes these Quiet Americans extends into their adulthood, and is also shared by those who choose to be doctors, consultants, lawyers and bankers. So many big problems are going to come due on their watch — from underfunded Social Security to health care to climate change — that the effort needed to fix them will require them to stay involved, redouble their resolve and raise their voices.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
More simply opt out of stream of endless e-mails
By Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post May 27, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Last month, venture capitalist Fred Wilson drew a lot of attention on the Internet when he declared a 21st-century kind of bankruptcy. In a posting on his blog about technology, Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the e-mail piled up in his inbox.
"I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an e-mail (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."
College professors have done the same thing, and a Silicon Valley chief executive followed Wilson's example the next day. Last September, the recording artist Moby sent an e-mail to all the contacts in his inbox saying he was taking a break from e-mail for the rest of the year.
The supposed convenience of e-mail, like so many other innovations , has become too much for some people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages -- the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to research firm DYS Analytics -- and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying, "Enough!"
Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.
E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research, said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. "A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day," he said. "They can't have it anymore."
So, some say they're moving back to the telephone as their preferred means of communication.
"From here on out, I am going back to voice communication as my primary mechanism for interacting with people," wrote Jeff Nolan, chief executive of the business software company, Teqlo, in his blog announcing his e-mail boycott.
The term "e-mail bankruptcy" may have been coined as early as 1999 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies the relationship between people and technology.
Professor Sherry Turkle said she came up with the concept after researching e-mail and discovering that some people harbor fantasies about escaping their e-mail burden.
Turkle, who estimated that she has 2,500 pieces of unread e-mail in her inbox, is one of those people. A book she has been working on for a decade is coming out soon. Turkle joked that it would have taken her half the time to write it "if I didn't have e-mail."
Some people who don't want to go through the drastic-seeming measure of declaring total bankruptcy say they are trying to gently discourage the use of e-mail in their communications in favor of more personal calls or instant messages.
"I am reachable, just e-mail is not a good way to do it," said Sean Bonner, chief executive of a news blog network who has automatic responses set up on his work and personal accounts warning he doesn't check e-mail as often as he used to.
If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice.
Stanford computer science professor Donald Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of missives .
"I'd get to work and start answering e-mail -- three hours later, I'd say, 'Oh, what was I supposed to do today?' " Knuth said.
The critics of e-mail themselves have critics, who say copping out is a reactionary and isolationist way of dealing with modern communications.
Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David J. Farber receives piles of e-mail as the administrator of the "Interesting People" technology news mailing list. He has no patience for e-mail bankruptcy.
"For a venture capitalist to say something like this -- he should get out of the technology field," Farber said.
Wilson, the venture capitalist, did not respond to a phone call placed to his firm -- or to an e-mailed request for comment.
By Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post May 27, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Last month, venture capitalist Fred Wilson drew a lot of attention on the Internet when he declared a 21st-century kind of bankruptcy. In a posting on his blog about technology, Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the e-mail piled up in his inbox.
"I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an e-mail (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."
College professors have done the same thing, and a Silicon Valley chief executive followed Wilson's example the next day. Last September, the recording artist Moby sent an e-mail to all the contacts in his inbox saying he was taking a break from e-mail for the rest of the year.
The supposed convenience of e-mail, like so many other innovations , has become too much for some people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages -- the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to research firm DYS Analytics -- and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying, "Enough!"
Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.
E-mail overload gives many workers the sense that their work is never done, said senior analyst David Ferris, whose firm, Ferris Research, said there were 6 trillion business e-mails sent in 2006. "A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day," he said. "They can't have it anymore."
So, some say they're moving back to the telephone as their preferred means of communication.
"From here on out, I am going back to voice communication as my primary mechanism for interacting with people," wrote Jeff Nolan, chief executive of the business software company, Teqlo, in his blog announcing his e-mail boycott.
The term "e-mail bankruptcy" may have been coined as early as 1999 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies the relationship between people and technology.
Professor Sherry Turkle said she came up with the concept after researching e-mail and discovering that some people harbor fantasies about escaping their e-mail burden.
Turkle, who estimated that she has 2,500 pieces of unread e-mail in her inbox, is one of those people. A book she has been working on for a decade is coming out soon. Turkle joked that it would have taken her half the time to write it "if I didn't have e-mail."
Some people who don't want to go through the drastic-seeming measure of declaring total bankruptcy say they are trying to gently discourage the use of e-mail in their communications in favor of more personal calls or instant messages.
"I am reachable, just e-mail is not a good way to do it," said Sean Bonner, chief executive of a news blog network who has automatic responses set up on his work and personal accounts warning he doesn't check e-mail as often as he used to.
If there is a downside to completely turning a back on e-mail, it's not one many former users notice.
Stanford computer science professor Donald Knuth started using e-mail in 1975 and stopped using it 15 years later. Knuth said he prefers to concentrate on writing books rather than be distracted by the steady stream of missives .
"I'd get to work and start answering e-mail -- three hours later, I'd say, 'Oh, what was I supposed to do today?' " Knuth said.
The critics of e-mail themselves have critics, who say copping out is a reactionary and isolationist way of dealing with modern communications.
Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor David J. Farber receives piles of e-mail as the administrator of the "Interesting People" technology news mailing list. He has no patience for e-mail bankruptcy.
"For a venture capitalist to say something like this -- he should get out of the technology field," Farber said.
Wilson, the venture capitalist, did not respond to a phone call placed to his firm -- or to an e-mailed request for comment.
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Catholic Boom
By DAVID BROOKS
The pope and many others speak for the thoroughly religious. Christopher Hitchens has the latest best seller on behalf of the antireligious. But who speaks for the quasi-religious?
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.
And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.
According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.
Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”
How have they done it?
Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.
Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.
The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.
On the one hand, modern Catholics have retained many of the traditional patterns of their ancestors — high marriage rates, high family stability rates, low divorce rates. Catholic investors save a lot and favor low-risk investment portfolios. On the other hand, they have also become more individualistic, more future-oriented and less bound by neighborhood and extended family. They are now much better educated than their parents or grandparents, and much better educated than their family histories would lead you to predict.
More or less successfully, the children of white, ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods have managed to adapt the Catholic communal heritage to the dynamism of a global economy. If this country was entirely Catholic, we wouldn’t be having a big debate over stagnant wages and low social mobility. The problems would scarcely exist. Populists and various politicians can talk about the prosperity-destroying menace of immigration and foreign trade. But modern Catholics have created a hybrid culture that trumps it.
In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.
First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.
This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.
The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”
By DAVID BROOKS
The pope and many others speak for the thoroughly religious. Christopher Hitchens has the latest best seller on behalf of the antireligious. But who speaks for the quasi-religious?
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.
And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.
According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.
Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”
How have they done it?
Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.
Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.
The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.
On the one hand, modern Catholics have retained many of the traditional patterns of their ancestors — high marriage rates, high family stability rates, low divorce rates. Catholic investors save a lot and favor low-risk investment portfolios. On the other hand, they have also become more individualistic, more future-oriented and less bound by neighborhood and extended family. They are now much better educated than their parents or grandparents, and much better educated than their family histories would lead you to predict.
More or less successfully, the children of white, ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods have managed to adapt the Catholic communal heritage to the dynamism of a global economy. If this country was entirely Catholic, we wouldn’t be having a big debate over stagnant wages and low social mobility. The problems would scarcely exist. Populists and various politicians can talk about the prosperity-destroying menace of immigration and foreign trade. But modern Catholics have created a hybrid culture that trumps it.
In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.
First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.
This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.
The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Rethinking Old Age
By ATUL GAWANDE
At some point in life, you can’t live on your own anymore. We don’t like thinking about it, but after retirement age, about half of us eventually move into a nursing home, usually around age 80. It remains your most likely final address outside of a hospital.
To the extent that there is much public discussion about this phase of life, it’s about getting more control over our deaths (with living wills and the like). But we don’t much talk about getting more control over our lives in such places. It’s as if we’ve given up on the idea. And that’s a problem.
This week, I visited a woman who just moved into a nursing home. She is 89 years old with congestive heart failure, disabling arthritis, and after a series of falls, little choice but to leave her condominium. Usually, it’s the children who push for a change, but in this case, she was the one who did. “I fell twice in one week, and I told my daughter I don’t belong at home anymore,” she said.
She moved in a month ago. She picked the facility herself. It has excellent ratings, friendly staff, and her daughter lives nearby. She’s glad to be in a safe place — if there’s anything a decent nursing home is built for, it is safety. But she is struggling.
The trouble is — and it’s a possibility we’ve mostly ignored for the very old — she expects more from life than safety. “I know I can’t do what I used to,” she said, “but this feels like a hospital, not a home.” And that is in fact the near-universal reality.
Nursing home priorities are matters like avoiding bedsores and maintaining weight — important goals, but they are means, not ends. She left an airy apartment she furnished herself for a small beige hospital-like room with a stranger for a roommate. Her belongings were stripped down to what she could fit into the one cupboard and shelf they gave her. Basic matters, like when she goes to bed, wakes up, dresses, and eats were put under the rigid schedule of institutional life. Her main activities have become bingo, movies, and other forms of group entertainment. Is it any wonder most people dread nursing homes?
The things she misses most, she told me, are her friendships, her privacy, and the purpose in her days. She’s not alone. Surveys of nursing home residents reveal chronic boredom, loneliness, and lack of meaning — results not fundamentally different from prisoners, actually.
Certainly, nursing homes have come a long way from the fire-trap warehouses they used to be. But it seems we’ve settled on a belief that a life of worth and engagement is not possible once you lose independence.
There has been, however, a small band of renegades who disagree. They’ve created alternatives with names like the Green House Project, the Pioneer Network, and the Eden Alternative — all aiming to replace institutions for the disabled elderly with genuine homes. Bill Thomas, for example, is a geriatrician who calls himself a “nursing home abolitionist” and built the first Green Houses in Tupelo, Miss. These are houses for no more than 10 residents, equipped with a kitchen and living room at its center, not a nurse’s station, and personal furnishings. The bedrooms are private. Residents help one another with cooking and other work as they are able. Staff members provide not just nursing care but also mentoring for engaging in daily life, even for Alzheimer’s patients. And the homes meet all federal safety guidelines and work within state-reimbursement levels.
They have been a great success. Dr. Thomas is now building Green Houses in every state in the country with funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Such experiments, however, represent only a tiny fraction of the 18,000 nursing homes nationwide.
“The No. 1 problem I see,” Dr. Thomas told me, “is that people believe what we have in old age is as good as we can expect.” As a result, families don’t press nursing homes with hard questions like, “How do you plan to change in the next year?” But we should, if we want to hope for something more than safety in our old age.
“This is my last hurrah,” the woman I met said. “This room is where I’ll die. But it won’t be anytime soon.” And indeed, physically she’s done well. All she needs now is a life worth living for.
Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of the new book “Better.” He is a guest columnist this month.
By ATUL GAWANDE
At some point in life, you can’t live on your own anymore. We don’t like thinking about it, but after retirement age, about half of us eventually move into a nursing home, usually around age 80. It remains your most likely final address outside of a hospital.
To the extent that there is much public discussion about this phase of life, it’s about getting more control over our deaths (with living wills and the like). But we don’t much talk about getting more control over our lives in such places. It’s as if we’ve given up on the idea. And that’s a problem.
This week, I visited a woman who just moved into a nursing home. She is 89 years old with congestive heart failure, disabling arthritis, and after a series of falls, little choice but to leave her condominium. Usually, it’s the children who push for a change, but in this case, she was the one who did. “I fell twice in one week, and I told my daughter I don’t belong at home anymore,” she said.
She moved in a month ago. She picked the facility herself. It has excellent ratings, friendly staff, and her daughter lives nearby. She’s glad to be in a safe place — if there’s anything a decent nursing home is built for, it is safety. But she is struggling.
The trouble is — and it’s a possibility we’ve mostly ignored for the very old — she expects more from life than safety. “I know I can’t do what I used to,” she said, “but this feels like a hospital, not a home.” And that is in fact the near-universal reality.
Nursing home priorities are matters like avoiding bedsores and maintaining weight — important goals, but they are means, not ends. She left an airy apartment she furnished herself for a small beige hospital-like room with a stranger for a roommate. Her belongings were stripped down to what she could fit into the one cupboard and shelf they gave her. Basic matters, like when she goes to bed, wakes up, dresses, and eats were put under the rigid schedule of institutional life. Her main activities have become bingo, movies, and other forms of group entertainment. Is it any wonder most people dread nursing homes?
The things she misses most, she told me, are her friendships, her privacy, and the purpose in her days. She’s not alone. Surveys of nursing home residents reveal chronic boredom, loneliness, and lack of meaning — results not fundamentally different from prisoners, actually.
Certainly, nursing homes have come a long way from the fire-trap warehouses they used to be. But it seems we’ve settled on a belief that a life of worth and engagement is not possible once you lose independence.
There has been, however, a small band of renegades who disagree. They’ve created alternatives with names like the Green House Project, the Pioneer Network, and the Eden Alternative — all aiming to replace institutions for the disabled elderly with genuine homes. Bill Thomas, for example, is a geriatrician who calls himself a “nursing home abolitionist” and built the first Green Houses in Tupelo, Miss. These are houses for no more than 10 residents, equipped with a kitchen and living room at its center, not a nurse’s station, and personal furnishings. The bedrooms are private. Residents help one another with cooking and other work as they are able. Staff members provide not just nursing care but also mentoring for engaging in daily life, even for Alzheimer’s patients. And the homes meet all federal safety guidelines and work within state-reimbursement levels.
They have been a great success. Dr. Thomas is now building Green Houses in every state in the country with funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Such experiments, however, represent only a tiny fraction of the 18,000 nursing homes nationwide.
“The No. 1 problem I see,” Dr. Thomas told me, “is that people believe what we have in old age is as good as we can expect.” As a result, families don’t press nursing homes with hard questions like, “How do you plan to change in the next year?” But we should, if we want to hope for something more than safety in our old age.
“This is my last hurrah,” the woman I met said. “This room is where I’ll die. But it won’t be anytime soon.” And indeed, physically she’s done well. All she needs now is a life worth living for.
Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a New Yorker staff writer, is the author of the new book “Better.” He is a guest columnist this month.
Pirates and Sanctions
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DONGGUAN, China
This is a city you’ve probably never heard of, yet it has a population of 10 million people who fill your dressers and closets. By one count, 40 percent of the sports shoes sold in the U.S. come from Dongguan.
Just one neighborhood within Dongguan, Dalang, has become the Sweater Capital of the World. Dalang makes more than 300 million sweaters a year, of which 200 million are exported to the U.S.
Keep towns like this in mind when American protectionists demand sanctions, after the latest round of talks ending yesterday made little progress. Some irresponsible Democrats in Congress would have you believe that China’s economic success is simply the result of currency manipulation, unfair regulations and pirating American movies.
It’s true that China’s currency is seriously undervalued. But places like Dongguan have thrived largely because of values we like to think of as American: ingenuity, diligence, entrepreneurship and respect for markets.
The people in Dalang, the Sweater Capital, used to be farmers, until a Hong Kong investor opened a sweater factory at the dawn of the 1980’s. After a few years, the workers began to quit and open their own factories, and both the bosses and the staff work dizzyingly hard. One factory worker here in Guangdong Province told me that she works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year, not even taking time off for Chinese New Year. She chooses to work these hours to gain a better life for her son. If protectionists want somebody to criticize for China’s trade success, blame that woman and millions like her.
Remember that China isn’t like 1980s Japan, which had a sustained huge surplus with nearly everybody. China’s global surplus has surged in the last five years, but traditionally its global trade position has been close to a balance, and it still has a trade deficit with many countries.
China imports components, does the low-wage assembly, and then exports the finished products to the U.S. — so the whole value appears in the Chinese trade surplus with the U.S., even though on average 65 percent of the value was imported into China. When a Chinese-made Barbie doll sells in the U.S. for $9.99, only 35 cents goes to China.
Sure, China pirates movies and software — but the U.S. was even worse at this stage of development (when we used to infuriate England by stealing its literary properties without paying royalties). Pirated DVDs are sold openly on the streets of Manhattan, while sellers in China can be far more creative. A couple of days ago, I dropped into a small DVD shop in Beijing to check its wares. Everything seemed legal.
Then the two saleswomen asked if I wanted to see American movies — and tugged at a bookshelf, which rolled forward on wheels. Behind was a door; one of the saleswomen whisked me into a secret room full of pirated DVDs. That’s piracy — but also capitalism at its harshest and hungriest. There are plenty of reasons to put pressure on China, including its imprisonment of journalists and its disgraceful role in supplying the weaponry used to commit genocide in Darfur. But whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism is beneath us.
All that said, the Chinese development model is running out of steam.
Labor shortages are growing and pushing up wage costs. Factories are having to spend more money to improve worker safety and curb pollution. The environment is such a disaster that 16 of the world’s most polluted cities are now in China.
China will also be forced to appreciate its undervalued currency, further pushing up costs. The “China price” will no longer be the world’s lowest, and millions of jobs making T-shirts and stuffed toys will move to lower-wage countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.
So if China is going to continue its historic rise, it will have to move up the technology ladder and shift to domestic consumption as its economic engine. Yet the share of consumption in China’s economy has fallen significantly since 2000.
So as one who has been profoundly optimistic about China for the last 25 years, I think it’s time to sober up. President Hu Jintao is China’s least visionary leader since Hua Guofeng 30 years ago, and China has the burden of unusually weak leadership as it navigates a transition to a new economic model as well as a political transition to a more open society.
I’m betting China will pull it off, but I don’t think the world appreciates the risks and challenges ahead.
You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. Also, Mr. Kristof has been filing regular video reports from his journey across China. The latest video, "Factory of the World," is from his visit to a sweatshop in Guangdong Province.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DONGGUAN, China
This is a city you’ve probably never heard of, yet it has a population of 10 million people who fill your dressers and closets. By one count, 40 percent of the sports shoes sold in the U.S. come from Dongguan.
Just one neighborhood within Dongguan, Dalang, has become the Sweater Capital of the World. Dalang makes more than 300 million sweaters a year, of which 200 million are exported to the U.S.
Keep towns like this in mind when American protectionists demand sanctions, after the latest round of talks ending yesterday made little progress. Some irresponsible Democrats in Congress would have you believe that China’s economic success is simply the result of currency manipulation, unfair regulations and pirating American movies.
It’s true that China’s currency is seriously undervalued. But places like Dongguan have thrived largely because of values we like to think of as American: ingenuity, diligence, entrepreneurship and respect for markets.
The people in Dalang, the Sweater Capital, used to be farmers, until a Hong Kong investor opened a sweater factory at the dawn of the 1980’s. After a few years, the workers began to quit and open their own factories, and both the bosses and the staff work dizzyingly hard. One factory worker here in Guangdong Province told me that she works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year, not even taking time off for Chinese New Year. She chooses to work these hours to gain a better life for her son. If protectionists want somebody to criticize for China’s trade success, blame that woman and millions like her.
Remember that China isn’t like 1980s Japan, which had a sustained huge surplus with nearly everybody. China’s global surplus has surged in the last five years, but traditionally its global trade position has been close to a balance, and it still has a trade deficit with many countries.
China imports components, does the low-wage assembly, and then exports the finished products to the U.S. — so the whole value appears in the Chinese trade surplus with the U.S., even though on average 65 percent of the value was imported into China. When a Chinese-made Barbie doll sells in the U.S. for $9.99, only 35 cents goes to China.
Sure, China pirates movies and software — but the U.S. was even worse at this stage of development (when we used to infuriate England by stealing its literary properties without paying royalties). Pirated DVDs are sold openly on the streets of Manhattan, while sellers in China can be far more creative. A couple of days ago, I dropped into a small DVD shop in Beijing to check its wares. Everything seemed legal.
Then the two saleswomen asked if I wanted to see American movies — and tugged at a bookshelf, which rolled forward on wheels. Behind was a door; one of the saleswomen whisked me into a secret room full of pirated DVDs. That’s piracy — but also capitalism at its harshest and hungriest. There are plenty of reasons to put pressure on China, including its imprisonment of journalists and its disgraceful role in supplying the weaponry used to commit genocide in Darfur. But whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism is beneath us.
All that said, the Chinese development model is running out of steam.
Labor shortages are growing and pushing up wage costs. Factories are having to spend more money to improve worker safety and curb pollution. The environment is such a disaster that 16 of the world’s most polluted cities are now in China.
China will also be forced to appreciate its undervalued currency, further pushing up costs. The “China price” will no longer be the world’s lowest, and millions of jobs making T-shirts and stuffed toys will move to lower-wage countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.
So if China is going to continue its historic rise, it will have to move up the technology ladder and shift to domestic consumption as its economic engine. Yet the share of consumption in China’s economy has fallen significantly since 2000.
So as one who has been profoundly optimistic about China for the last 25 years, I think it’s time to sober up. President Hu Jintao is China’s least visionary leader since Hua Guofeng 30 years ago, and China has the burden of unusually weak leadership as it navigates a transition to a new economic model as well as a political transition to a more open society.
I’m betting China will pull it off, but I don’t think the world appreciates the risks and challenges ahead.
You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. Also, Mr. Kristof has been filing regular video reports from his journey across China. The latest video, "Factory of the World," is from his visit to a sweatshop in Guangdong Province.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Here’s the sad truth: 9/11, and the failing Iraq war, have sucked up almost all the oxygen in this country — oxygen needed to discuss seriously education, health care, climate change, competitiveness, globalization, and civil behaviors within our own communities.
ProfTom
ProfTom
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
America’s Admissions System
By DAVID BROOKS
Harvard is tough to get into. To be admitted to a school like that, students spend years earning good grades, doing community service and working hard to demonstrate their skills. The system has its excesses, but over all it’s good for Harvard and it’s good for the students beginning their climb to opportunity.
The United States is the Harvard of the world. Millions long to get in. Yet has this country set up an admissions system that encourages hard work, responsibility and competition? No. Under our current immigration system, most people get into the U.S. through criminality, nepotism or luck. The current system does almost nothing to encourage good behavior or maximize the nation’s supply of human capital.
Which is why the immigration deal reached in the Senate last week is, on balance, a good thing. It creates a new set of incentives for immigrants and potential immigrants. It encourages good behavior, in the manner of a demanding (though overly harsh) admissions officer. It rewards the bourgeois virtues that have always been at the heart of this nation’s immigrant success, and goes some way to assure that the people who possess these virtues can become U.S. citizens.
Let’s look at how this bill would improve incentives almost every step of the way.
First, consider the 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here. They now have an incentive to think only in the short term. They have little reason to invest for the future because their presence here could be taken away.
This bill would encourage them to think in the long term. To stay, they would have to embark on a long, 13-year process. They’d have to obey the law, learn English and save money (to pay the stiff fines). Suddenly, these people would be lifted from an underclass environment — semi-separate from mainstream society — and shifted into a middle-class environment, enmeshed within the normal rules and laws that the rest of us live by. This would be the biggest values-shift since welfare reform.
Second, consider the millions living abroad who dream of coming to the U.S. Currently, they have an incentive to find someone who can smuggle them in, and if they get caught they have an incentive to try and try again.
The Senate bill reduces that incentive for lawlessness. If you think it is light on enforcement, read the thing. It would not only beef up enforcement on the border, but would also create an electronic worker registry. People who overstay their welcome could forfeit their chance of being regularized forever.
Moreover, aspiring immigrants would learn, from an early age, what sort of person the U.S. is looking for. In a break from the current system, this bill awards visas on a merit-based points system that rewards education, English proficiency, agricultural work experience, home ownership and other traits. Potential immigrants would understand that the U.S. is looking for people who can be self-sufficient from the start, and they’d mold themselves to demonstrate that ability.
Third, consider the people who are admitted to the U.S. under the bill’s guest-worker program. By forcing these workers to spend a year away after two years of work here, this section encourages them to think of the U.S. as a place to earn some money before building their long-term futures back home. It encourages these young workers to be as flexible as possible, to go wherever the jobs are, so they can maximize earnings during each two-year window.
Nobody can like all aspects of this compromise bill. It has needless complexities and touchback mechanisms. The guest-worker part threatens to set up a permanent and un-American divide between temporary and skilled workers. But, over all, this bill finally gives this meritocratic nation a meritocratic immigration system.
Personally, I’d like to see it go farther. I’d prefer a system in which potential immigrants were admitted on an audition basis. An engineer from China who ran a neighborhood association would get citizenship. A construction worker from Mexico who was promoted to crew chief would get citizenship. This would be a system that rewarded hard work and perseverance as much as it rewarded I.Q. and advanced degrees. People who qualified could bring their nuclear families with them, since families are the foundries of responsible behavior.
In the meantime, this bill is a step. Despite its ramshackle and unforgiving nature, there’s still a little of the spirit of Ben Franklin flickering inside. There is still enough encouragement for the ambitious young striver, desperate to make good.
By DAVID BROOKS
Harvard is tough to get into. To be admitted to a school like that, students spend years earning good grades, doing community service and working hard to demonstrate their skills. The system has its excesses, but over all it’s good for Harvard and it’s good for the students beginning their climb to opportunity.
The United States is the Harvard of the world. Millions long to get in. Yet has this country set up an admissions system that encourages hard work, responsibility and competition? No. Under our current immigration system, most people get into the U.S. through criminality, nepotism or luck. The current system does almost nothing to encourage good behavior or maximize the nation’s supply of human capital.
Which is why the immigration deal reached in the Senate last week is, on balance, a good thing. It creates a new set of incentives for immigrants and potential immigrants. It encourages good behavior, in the manner of a demanding (though overly harsh) admissions officer. It rewards the bourgeois virtues that have always been at the heart of this nation’s immigrant success, and goes some way to assure that the people who possess these virtues can become U.S. citizens.
Let’s look at how this bill would improve incentives almost every step of the way.
First, consider the 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants who are already here. They now have an incentive to think only in the short term. They have little reason to invest for the future because their presence here could be taken away.
This bill would encourage them to think in the long term. To stay, they would have to embark on a long, 13-year process. They’d have to obey the law, learn English and save money (to pay the stiff fines). Suddenly, these people would be lifted from an underclass environment — semi-separate from mainstream society — and shifted into a middle-class environment, enmeshed within the normal rules and laws that the rest of us live by. This would be the biggest values-shift since welfare reform.
Second, consider the millions living abroad who dream of coming to the U.S. Currently, they have an incentive to find someone who can smuggle them in, and if they get caught they have an incentive to try and try again.
The Senate bill reduces that incentive for lawlessness. If you think it is light on enforcement, read the thing. It would not only beef up enforcement on the border, but would also create an electronic worker registry. People who overstay their welcome could forfeit their chance of being regularized forever.
Moreover, aspiring immigrants would learn, from an early age, what sort of person the U.S. is looking for. In a break from the current system, this bill awards visas on a merit-based points system that rewards education, English proficiency, agricultural work experience, home ownership and other traits. Potential immigrants would understand that the U.S. is looking for people who can be self-sufficient from the start, and they’d mold themselves to demonstrate that ability.
Third, consider the people who are admitted to the U.S. under the bill’s guest-worker program. By forcing these workers to spend a year away after two years of work here, this section encourages them to think of the U.S. as a place to earn some money before building their long-term futures back home. It encourages these young workers to be as flexible as possible, to go wherever the jobs are, so they can maximize earnings during each two-year window.
Nobody can like all aspects of this compromise bill. It has needless complexities and touchback mechanisms. The guest-worker part threatens to set up a permanent and un-American divide between temporary and skilled workers. But, over all, this bill finally gives this meritocratic nation a meritocratic immigration system.
Personally, I’d like to see it go farther. I’d prefer a system in which potential immigrants were admitted on an audition basis. An engineer from China who ran a neighborhood association would get citizenship. A construction worker from Mexico who was promoted to crew chief would get citizenship. This would be a system that rewarded hard work and perseverance as much as it rewarded I.Q. and advanced degrees. People who qualified could bring their nuclear families with them, since families are the foundries of responsible behavior.
In the meantime, this bill is a step. Despite its ramshackle and unforgiving nature, there’s still a little of the spirit of Ben Franklin flickering inside. There is still enough encouragement for the ambitious young striver, desperate to make good.
Monday, May 21, 2007
A Short American Life
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
How’s this for a glimpse into America’s health care mess:
The student winner I’ve chosen to accompany me on a reporting trip to Africa next month is a superb medical school student named Leana Wen. She receives her M.D. this month, and will research health care access this summer at a Washington think tank.
I asked Leana about her health insurance coverage, just in case she catches leprosy on the Africa trip.
“Actually, I was going to become one of the 45 million uninsured for the summer,” she said. “The think tank does not provide insurance for ‘temporary’ employees, and my school did not allow extension of health insurance post-graduation. I still haven’t found a reasonably priced insurance plan for this period.”
Aaaaargh! When a newly minted doctor investigating Americans’ access to medical care has no insurance — then you know that our health care system is truly bankrupt.
Let’s hope that the presidential campaign helps lead us toward a new health care system. John Edwards has set the standard by proposing a serious and detailed plan for national health care reform, and other candidates should follow.
The medical and insurance lobbies have been busy blocking national health care programs since they were first seriously proposed back in the 1920’s — and the result has been millions of premature deaths in this country because of people falling through the cracks. Doctors fighting universal coverage have been saving lives in their day jobs while costing lives with their lobbying.
Over all, a person without insurance is less likely to have diseases diagnosed early, less likely to get routine preventive care — and faces a 25 percent greater chance of dying early.
Americans with good jobs and complex needs receive superb medical care. But a child in Costa Rica born today is expected to live longer than an American child born today.
The U.S. now spends far more on medical care (more than $7,000 per person) than other nations, yet our infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and longevity are among the worst in the industrialized world. If we had as good a child mortality rate as France, Germany and Italy, we would save 12,000 children a year.
It is disgraceful that an American mother has almost three times the risk of losing a child as a mother in the Czech Republic. According to a new report from Save the Children, a woman in the U.S. has a 1-in-71 chance of losing a child before his or her fifth birthday.
Some speculate that America’s high infant mortality rate is partly a result of greater honesty about neonatal deaths or of more in vitro fertilizations. But even if those are factors, they don’t explain why a woman is 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth in the U.S. than in Europe.
The existing medical financing system also creates perverse incentives for expensive procedures; that may be why Americans are far more likely than Europeans to get C-sections. Meanwhile, the burden of paying for these second-rate statistical outcomes is crippling American business. By next year, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care than it earns in net income, according to Steve Burd, the head of Safeway. Mr. Burd and other executives have formed the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, creating a corporate constituency for national health reforms.
There’s evidence that the most efficient financing system would be a single-payer structure, such as that found in most Western countries. Some 31 percent of U.S. health spending goes to administration, more than twice the rate in Canada.
So bravo to Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of 14,000 doctors and other health professionals that favors a single-payer system.
But universal coverage is only part of the answer. We also need far greater attention to public health programs focusing on prevention. Two of the most important life-saving health interventions in recent decades weren’t medical at all: the cigarette tax and laws mandating air bags and seat belt use. A national public health campaign on obesity (similar to the one Gov. Mike Huckabee started in Arkansas) should be an essential component of health care reform.
Even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now, universal coverage is feasible through other mechanisms — as Massachusetts has shown. We need to hold the presidential candidates accountable, for universal coverage is an idea whose time came in the 1920s. We should insist we get it before the 2020s.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
How’s this for a glimpse into America’s health care mess:
The student winner I’ve chosen to accompany me on a reporting trip to Africa next month is a superb medical school student named Leana Wen. She receives her M.D. this month, and will research health care access this summer at a Washington think tank.
I asked Leana about her health insurance coverage, just in case she catches leprosy on the Africa trip.
“Actually, I was going to become one of the 45 million uninsured for the summer,” she said. “The think tank does not provide insurance for ‘temporary’ employees, and my school did not allow extension of health insurance post-graduation. I still haven’t found a reasonably priced insurance plan for this period.”
Aaaaargh! When a newly minted doctor investigating Americans’ access to medical care has no insurance — then you know that our health care system is truly bankrupt.
Let’s hope that the presidential campaign helps lead us toward a new health care system. John Edwards has set the standard by proposing a serious and detailed plan for national health care reform, and other candidates should follow.
The medical and insurance lobbies have been busy blocking national health care programs since they were first seriously proposed back in the 1920’s — and the result has been millions of premature deaths in this country because of people falling through the cracks. Doctors fighting universal coverage have been saving lives in their day jobs while costing lives with their lobbying.
Over all, a person without insurance is less likely to have diseases diagnosed early, less likely to get routine preventive care — and faces a 25 percent greater chance of dying early.
Americans with good jobs and complex needs receive superb medical care. But a child in Costa Rica born today is expected to live longer than an American child born today.
The U.S. now spends far more on medical care (more than $7,000 per person) than other nations, yet our infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and longevity are among the worst in the industrialized world. If we had as good a child mortality rate as France, Germany and Italy, we would save 12,000 children a year.
It is disgraceful that an American mother has almost three times the risk of losing a child as a mother in the Czech Republic. According to a new report from Save the Children, a woman in the U.S. has a 1-in-71 chance of losing a child before his or her fifth birthday.
Some speculate that America’s high infant mortality rate is partly a result of greater honesty about neonatal deaths or of more in vitro fertilizations. But even if those are factors, they don’t explain why a woman is 50 percent more likely to die in childbirth in the U.S. than in Europe.
The existing medical financing system also creates perverse incentives for expensive procedures; that may be why Americans are far more likely than Europeans to get C-sections. Meanwhile, the burden of paying for these second-rate statistical outcomes is crippling American business. By next year, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care than it earns in net income, according to Steve Burd, the head of Safeway. Mr. Burd and other executives have formed the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, creating a corporate constituency for national health reforms.
There’s evidence that the most efficient financing system would be a single-payer structure, such as that found in most Western countries. Some 31 percent of U.S. health spending goes to administration, more than twice the rate in Canada.
So bravo to Physicians for a National Health Program, a group of 14,000 doctors and other health professionals that favors a single-payer system.
But universal coverage is only part of the answer. We also need far greater attention to public health programs focusing on prevention. Two of the most important life-saving health interventions in recent decades weren’t medical at all: the cigarette tax and laws mandating air bags and seat belt use. A national public health campaign on obesity (similar to the one Gov. Mike Huckabee started in Arkansas) should be an essential component of health care reform.
Even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now, universal coverage is feasible through other mechanisms — as Massachusetts has shown. We need to hold the presidential candidates accountable, for universal coverage is an idea whose time came in the 1920s. We should insist we get it before the 2020s.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Free Trade's Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me
By Alan S. BlinderSunday, May 6, 2007; B04
I'm a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I'm being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.
When I say this, many of my fellow free-traders react with a mixture of disbelief, pity and hostility. Blinder, have you lost your mind? (Answer: I think not.) Have you forgotten about the basic economic gains from international trade? (Answer: No.) Are you advocating some form of protectionism? (Answer: No !) Aren't you giving aid and comfort to the enemies of free trade? (Answer: No, I'm trying to save free trade from itself.)
The reason for my alleged apostasy is that the nature of international trade is changing before our eyes. We used to think, roughly, that an item was tradable only if it could be put in a box and shipped. That's no longer true. Nowadays, a growing list of services can be zapped across international borders electronically. It's electrons that move, not boxes. We're all familiar with call centers, but electronic service delivery has already extended to computer programming, a variety of engineering services, accounting, security analysis and a lot else. And much more is on the way.
Why do I say much more? Because two powerful, historical forces are driving these changes, and both are virtually certain to grow stronger over time.
The first is technology, especially information and communications technology, which has been improving at an astonishing pace in recent decades. As the technology advances, the quality of now-familiar modes of communication (such as telephones, videoconferencing and the Internet) will improve, and entirely new forms of communication may be invented. One clear implication of the upward march of technology is that a widening array of services will become deliverable electronically from afar. And it's not just low-skill services such as key punching, transcription and telemarketing. It's also high-skill services such as radiology, architecture and engineering -- maybe even college teaching.
The second driver is the entry of about 1.5 billion "new" workers into the world economy. These folks aren't new to the world, of course. But they live in places such as China, India and the former Soviet bloc -- countries that used to stand outside the world economy. For those who say, "Sure, but most of them are low-skilled workers," I have two answers. First, even a small percentage of 1.5 billion people is a lot of folks. And second, India and China will certainly educate hundreds of millions more in the coming decades. So there will be a lot of willing and able people available to do the jobs that technology will move offshore.
Looking at these two historic forces from the perspective of the world as a whole, one can only get a warm feeling. Improvements in technology will raise living standards, just as they have since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And the availability of millions of new electronically deliverable service jobs in, say, India and China will help alleviate poverty on a mass scale. Offshoring will also reduce costs and boost productivity in the United States. So repeat after me: Globalization is good for the world. Which is where economists usually stop.
And where my alleged apostasy starts.
For these same forces don't look so benign from the viewpoint of an American computer programmer or accountant. They've done what they were told to do: They went to college and prepared for well-paid careers with bountiful employment opportunities. But now their bosses are eyeing legions of well-qualified, English-speaking programmers and accountants in India, for example, who will happily work for a fraction of what Americans earn. Such prospective competition puts a damper on wage increases. And if the jobs do move offshore, displaced American workers may lose not only their jobs but also their pensions and health insurance. These people can be forgiven if they have doubts about the virtues of globalization.
We economists assure folks that things will be all right in the end. Both Americans and Indians will be better off. I think that's right. The basic principles of free trade that Adam Smith and David Ricardo taught us two centuries ago remain valid today: Just like people, nations benefit by specializing in the tasks they do best and trading with other nations for the rest. There's nothing new here theoretically.
But I would argue that there's something new about the coming transition to service offshoring. Those two powerful forces mentioned earlier -- technological advancement and the rise of China and India -- suggest that this particular transition will be large, lengthy and painful.
It's going to be lengthy because the technology for moving information across the world will continue to improve for decades, if not forever. So, for those who earn their living performing tasks that are (or will become) deliverable electronically, this is no fleeting problem.
It's also going to be large. How large? In some recent research, I estimated that 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. These include scientists, mathematicians and editors on the high end and telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end. Obviously, not all of these jobs are going to India, China or elsewhere. But many will.
It's going to be painful because our country offers such a poor social safety net to cushion the blow for displaced workers. Our unemployment insurance program is stingy by first-world standards. American workers who lose their jobs often lose their health insurance and pension rights as well. And even though many displaced workers will have to change occupations -- a difficult task for anyone -- only a fortunate few will be offered opportunities for retraining. All this needs to change.
What else is to be done? Trade protection won't work. You can't block electrons from crossing national borders. Because U.S. labor cannot compete on price, we must reemphasize the things that have kept us on top of the economic food chain for so long: technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, adaptability and the like. That means more science and engineering, more spending on R&D, keeping our capital markets big and vibrant, and not letting ourselves get locked into "sunset" industries.
In addition, we need to rethink our education system so that it turns out more people who are trained for the jobs that will remain in the United States and fewer for the jobs that will migrate overseas. We cannot, of course, foresee exactly which jobs will go and which will stay. But one good bet is that many electronic service jobs will move offshore, whereas personal service jobs will not. Here are a few examples. Tax accounting is easily offshorable; onsite auditing is not. Computer programming is offshorable; computer repair is not. Architects could be endangered, but builders aren't. Were it not for stiff regulations, radiology would be offshorable; but pediatrics and geriatrics aren't. Lawyers who write contracts can do so at a distance and deliver them electronically; litigators who argue cases in court cannot.
But even if we do everything I've suggested -- which we won't -- American workers will still face a troublesome transition as tens of millions of old jobs are replaced by new ones. There will also be great political strains on the open trading system as millions of white-collar workers who thought their jobs were immune to foreign competition suddenly find that the game has changed -- and not to their liking.
That is why I am going public with my concerns now. If we economists stubbornly insist on chanting "Free trade is good for you" to people who know that it is not, we will quickly become irrelevant to the public debate. Compared with that, a little apostasy should be welcome.
Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics at Princeton University, vice chairman of Promontory Interfinancial Network and vice chairman of the G7 Group.
By Alan S. BlinderSunday, May 6, 2007; B04
I'm a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I'm being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation.
When I say this, many of my fellow free-traders react with a mixture of disbelief, pity and hostility. Blinder, have you lost your mind? (Answer: I think not.) Have you forgotten about the basic economic gains from international trade? (Answer: No.) Are you advocating some form of protectionism? (Answer: No !) Aren't you giving aid and comfort to the enemies of free trade? (Answer: No, I'm trying to save free trade from itself.)
The reason for my alleged apostasy is that the nature of international trade is changing before our eyes. We used to think, roughly, that an item was tradable only if it could be put in a box and shipped. That's no longer true. Nowadays, a growing list of services can be zapped across international borders electronically. It's electrons that move, not boxes. We're all familiar with call centers, but electronic service delivery has already extended to computer programming, a variety of engineering services, accounting, security analysis and a lot else. And much more is on the way.
Why do I say much more? Because two powerful, historical forces are driving these changes, and both are virtually certain to grow stronger over time.
The first is technology, especially information and communications technology, which has been improving at an astonishing pace in recent decades. As the technology advances, the quality of now-familiar modes of communication (such as telephones, videoconferencing and the Internet) will improve, and entirely new forms of communication may be invented. One clear implication of the upward march of technology is that a widening array of services will become deliverable electronically from afar. And it's not just low-skill services such as key punching, transcription and telemarketing. It's also high-skill services such as radiology, architecture and engineering -- maybe even college teaching.
The second driver is the entry of about 1.5 billion "new" workers into the world economy. These folks aren't new to the world, of course. But they live in places such as China, India and the former Soviet bloc -- countries that used to stand outside the world economy. For those who say, "Sure, but most of them are low-skilled workers," I have two answers. First, even a small percentage of 1.5 billion people is a lot of folks. And second, India and China will certainly educate hundreds of millions more in the coming decades. So there will be a lot of willing and able people available to do the jobs that technology will move offshore.
Looking at these two historic forces from the perspective of the world as a whole, one can only get a warm feeling. Improvements in technology will raise living standards, just as they have since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And the availability of millions of new electronically deliverable service jobs in, say, India and China will help alleviate poverty on a mass scale. Offshoring will also reduce costs and boost productivity in the United States. So repeat after me: Globalization is good for the world. Which is where economists usually stop.
And where my alleged apostasy starts.
For these same forces don't look so benign from the viewpoint of an American computer programmer or accountant. They've done what they were told to do: They went to college and prepared for well-paid careers with bountiful employment opportunities. But now their bosses are eyeing legions of well-qualified, English-speaking programmers and accountants in India, for example, who will happily work for a fraction of what Americans earn. Such prospective competition puts a damper on wage increases. And if the jobs do move offshore, displaced American workers may lose not only their jobs but also their pensions and health insurance. These people can be forgiven if they have doubts about the virtues of globalization.
We economists assure folks that things will be all right in the end. Both Americans and Indians will be better off. I think that's right. The basic principles of free trade that Adam Smith and David Ricardo taught us two centuries ago remain valid today: Just like people, nations benefit by specializing in the tasks they do best and trading with other nations for the rest. There's nothing new here theoretically.
But I would argue that there's something new about the coming transition to service offshoring. Those two powerful forces mentioned earlier -- technological advancement and the rise of China and India -- suggest that this particular transition will be large, lengthy and painful.
It's going to be lengthy because the technology for moving information across the world will continue to improve for decades, if not forever. So, for those who earn their living performing tasks that are (or will become) deliverable electronically, this is no fleeting problem.
It's also going to be large. How large? In some recent research, I estimated that 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. These include scientists, mathematicians and editors on the high end and telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end. Obviously, not all of these jobs are going to India, China or elsewhere. But many will.
It's going to be painful because our country offers such a poor social safety net to cushion the blow for displaced workers. Our unemployment insurance program is stingy by first-world standards. American workers who lose their jobs often lose their health insurance and pension rights as well. And even though many displaced workers will have to change occupations -- a difficult task for anyone -- only a fortunate few will be offered opportunities for retraining. All this needs to change.
What else is to be done? Trade protection won't work. You can't block electrons from crossing national borders. Because U.S. labor cannot compete on price, we must reemphasize the things that have kept us on top of the economic food chain for so long: technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, adaptability and the like. That means more science and engineering, more spending on R&D, keeping our capital markets big and vibrant, and not letting ourselves get locked into "sunset" industries.
In addition, we need to rethink our education system so that it turns out more people who are trained for the jobs that will remain in the United States and fewer for the jobs that will migrate overseas. We cannot, of course, foresee exactly which jobs will go and which will stay. But one good bet is that many electronic service jobs will move offshore, whereas personal service jobs will not. Here are a few examples. Tax accounting is easily offshorable; onsite auditing is not. Computer programming is offshorable; computer repair is not. Architects could be endangered, but builders aren't. Were it not for stiff regulations, radiology would be offshorable; but pediatrics and geriatrics aren't. Lawyers who write contracts can do so at a distance and deliver them electronically; litigators who argue cases in court cannot.
But even if we do everything I've suggested -- which we won't -- American workers will still face a troublesome transition as tens of millions of old jobs are replaced by new ones. There will also be great political strains on the open trading system as millions of white-collar workers who thought their jobs were immune to foreign competition suddenly find that the game has changed -- and not to their liking.
That is why I am going public with my concerns now. If we economists stubbornly insist on chanting "Free trade is good for you" to people who know that it is not, we will quickly become irrelevant to the public debate. Compared with that, a little apostasy should be welcome.
Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics at Princeton University, vice chairman of Promontory Interfinancial Network and vice chairman of the G7 Group.
Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education
By TYLER COWEN
The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.
The extent of outsourcing, for instance, is not yet high enough to have much effect on American wages. Even if a call center is set up in India, this helps American business expand at home. Most generally, the net flow of investment is into the United States, not away from it. It appears that more American jobs are “in-sourced” than outsourced.
Nor should we be distracted by the gains of the top 1 percent. The goal should be to elevate the poor, not knock down the tall poppies. Microsoft has created cheap software and many jobs, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, is giving away most of his fortune.
For the economy as a whole, labor’s share of national income has stayed roughly constant at just above 70 percent. What has changed is that highly skilled laborers earn more labor income than low-skilled workers.
Many of the very wealthy have built their fortunes by taking companies private, buying the right securities at the right time or running successful hedge funds. Arguably, these activities improve the allocation of capital and thus enhance productivity.
But even if these individuals perform no socially useful function, their gains reallocate wealth from one class of investors to another. That is, one group of investors reaps profits by buying in first and bidding up equity prices, thereby causing later investors to pay more for the same companies. This process transfers value from the relatively wealthy to the extremely wealthy, but it doesn’t much hold back the poor.
Nor are recent changes in equality about the tax system. Whatever one thinks of President Bush’s reductions in marginal tax rates, pretax incomes also show greater inequality.
Immigration has a smaller influence on wages than is often believed as well. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard, estimate the numbers in their recent paper, “The Race Between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005,” soon to be expanded into a book.
College graduates have been gaining relative to high school graduates. But competition from immigrant labor accounts for only 10 percent of the change in the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the skilled, since 1950.
Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more.
The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America’s Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high.
Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder.
Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn’t so much capitalism as it is that American lower education does not prepare enough people to receive gains from American higher education.
Bottlenecks currently keep more individuals from improving their education. Professor Katz has suggested changes at multiple levels, including additional college aid, more-accessible community colleges, easier financial aid forms, more serious attempts to identify and retain top teachers in high schools and school voucher experiments.
It doesn’t suffice simply to increase the number of people in college; rather the new students must be prepared to learn. There is, however, no single magic bullet.
Pessimists like Charles Murray, co-author of the much-debated 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” have argued that only so many individuals are educable at a high level. If that were the case, current levels of inequality might be here to stay.
But the evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.
Nonetheless it will, sooner or later, become increasingly difficult to deliver the gains from college — not to mention postgraduate study — to the entire population. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate. So even if inequality declines today, it may well intensify in the future. Even if American education improves at every level, the largely not-for-profit educational sector may simply be less dynamic than the progress of new technologies.
The lesson is this: Economists are homing in on the key to the inequality problem, but don’t think any solution will necessarily last for long.
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and co-author of a blog at www.marginalrevolution.com.
By TYLER COWEN
The most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.
The extent of outsourcing, for instance, is not yet high enough to have much effect on American wages. Even if a call center is set up in India, this helps American business expand at home. Most generally, the net flow of investment is into the United States, not away from it. It appears that more American jobs are “in-sourced” than outsourced.
Nor should we be distracted by the gains of the top 1 percent. The goal should be to elevate the poor, not knock down the tall poppies. Microsoft has created cheap software and many jobs, and its co-founder, Bill Gates, is giving away most of his fortune.
For the economy as a whole, labor’s share of national income has stayed roughly constant at just above 70 percent. What has changed is that highly skilled laborers earn more labor income than low-skilled workers.
Many of the very wealthy have built their fortunes by taking companies private, buying the right securities at the right time or running successful hedge funds. Arguably, these activities improve the allocation of capital and thus enhance productivity.
But even if these individuals perform no socially useful function, their gains reallocate wealth from one class of investors to another. That is, one group of investors reaps profits by buying in first and bidding up equity prices, thereby causing later investors to pay more for the same companies. This process transfers value from the relatively wealthy to the extremely wealthy, but it doesn’t much hold back the poor.
Nor are recent changes in equality about the tax system. Whatever one thinks of President Bush’s reductions in marginal tax rates, pretax incomes also show greater inequality.
Immigration has a smaller influence on wages than is often believed as well. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard, estimate the numbers in their recent paper, “The Race Between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005,” soon to be expanded into a book.
College graduates have been gaining relative to high school graduates. But competition from immigrant labor accounts for only 10 percent of the change in the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the skilled, since 1950.
Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more.
The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America’s Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high.
Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder.
Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn’t so much capitalism as it is that American lower education does not prepare enough people to receive gains from American higher education.
Bottlenecks currently keep more individuals from improving their education. Professor Katz has suggested changes at multiple levels, including additional college aid, more-accessible community colleges, easier financial aid forms, more serious attempts to identify and retain top teachers in high schools and school voucher experiments.
It doesn’t suffice simply to increase the number of people in college; rather the new students must be prepared to learn. There is, however, no single magic bullet.
Pessimists like Charles Murray, co-author of the much-debated 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” have argued that only so many individuals are educable at a high level. If that were the case, current levels of inequality might be here to stay.
But the evidence suggests that when additional higher education becomes available, it offers returns in the range of 10 to 14 percent per year of college, at least for the first newcomers to enroll.
Nonetheless it will, sooner or later, become increasingly difficult to deliver the gains from college — not to mention postgraduate study — to the entire population. Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate. So even if inequality declines today, it may well intensify in the future. Even if American education improves at every level, the largely not-for-profit educational sector may simply be less dynamic than the progress of new technologies.
The lesson is this: Economists are homing in on the key to the inequality problem, but don’t think any solution will necessarily last for long.
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and co-author of a blog at www.marginalrevolution.com.
Friday, May 11, 2007
The Human Community
By DAVID BROOKS
The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.
Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.
Blair’s worldview began to take shape when he was 11 and his father suffered a debilitating stroke. That sent him off on an intellectual journey that led him to the theologian John Macmurray. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Blair once said. “It’s all there.”
Blair absorbed from Macmurray a strong communitarian faith. As prime minister, he tried to remove the class and political barriers that divide the British people. Abroad, his core idea was also communitarian: “Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.”
In April 1999, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago in which he ran down all the features of the globalized world that cross borders and unite humanity: trade, communications, disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration. “Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater,” he argued. “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.”
This meant moving away from the Westphalian system, in which the world and its problems were divided into nation-states. “The rule book of international politics has been torn up,” he argued in a speech last year. What’s needed instead are multilateral institutions that act “in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice.” The economics of globalization are mature, he concluded, but the politics are not.
In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.
He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.
The crucial issue now is: Is this human community real? Is Iraq merely an intervention that was botched? Or are interventions inherently doomed because people in other cultures don’t want what we want, and will never see the world as we do?
Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.
If Huntington turns out to be right, then Blair will be seen as one of the most naïve communitarians of all time. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. It could be that over the long term, and despite the disaster in Iraq that he co-authored, his vision of a human community will be vindicated. Or it could be that Blair’s vision of that community was right — except in the Middle East, the region where he most aggressively sought to apply it.
By DAVID BROOKS
The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.
Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.
Blair’s worldview began to take shape when he was 11 and his father suffered a debilitating stroke. That sent him off on an intellectual journey that led him to the theologian John Macmurray. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Blair once said. “It’s all there.”
Blair absorbed from Macmurray a strong communitarian faith. As prime minister, he tried to remove the class and political barriers that divide the British people. Abroad, his core idea was also communitarian: “Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.”
In April 1999, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago in which he ran down all the features of the globalized world that cross borders and unite humanity: trade, communications, disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration. “Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater,” he argued. “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.”
This meant moving away from the Westphalian system, in which the world and its problems were divided into nation-states. “The rule book of international politics has been torn up,” he argued in a speech last year. What’s needed instead are multilateral institutions that act “in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice.” The economics of globalization are mature, he concluded, but the politics are not.
In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.
He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.
The crucial issue now is: Is this human community real? Is Iraq merely an intervention that was botched? Or are interventions inherently doomed because people in other cultures don’t want what we want, and will never see the world as we do?
Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.
If Huntington turns out to be right, then Blair will be seen as one of the most naïve communitarians of all time. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. It could be that over the long term, and despite the disaster in Iraq that he co-authored, his vision of a human community will be vindicated. Or it could be that Blair’s vision of that community was right — except in the Middle East, the region where he most aggressively sought to apply it.
The Human Community
By DAVID BROOKS
The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.
Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.
Blair’s worldview began to take shape when he was 11 and his father suffered a debilitating stroke. That sent him off on an intellectual journey that led him to the theologian John Macmurray. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Blair once said. “It’s all there.”
Blair absorbed from Macmurray a strong communitarian faith. As prime minister, he tried to remove the class and political barriers that divide the British people. Abroad, his core idea was also communitarian: “Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.”
In April 1999, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago in which he ran down all the features of the globalized world that cross borders and unite humanity: trade, communications, disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration. “Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater,” he argued. “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.”
This meant moving away from the Westphalian system, in which the world and its problems were divided into nation-states. “The rule book of international politics has been torn up,” he argued in a speech last year. What’s needed instead are multilateral institutions that act “in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice.” The economics of globalization are mature, he concluded, but the politics are not.
In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.
He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.
The crucial issue now is: Is this human community real? Is Iraq merely an intervention that was botched? Or are interventions inherently doomed because people in other cultures don’t want what we want, and will never see the world as we do?
Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.
If Huntington turns out to be right, then Blair will be seen as one of the most naïve communitarians of all time. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. It could be that over the long term, and despite the disaster in Iraq that he co-authored, his vision of a human community will be vindicated. Or it could be that Blair’s vision of that community was right — except in the Middle East, the region where he most aggressively sought to apply it.
By DAVID BROOKS
The conventional view of Tony Blair is that he was a talented New Labor leader whose career was sadly overshadowed by Iraq. But this is absurd. It’s like saying that an elephant is a talented animal whose virtues are sadly overshadowed by the fact that it’s big and has a trunk.
Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.
Blair’s worldview began to take shape when he was 11 and his father suffered a debilitating stroke. That sent him off on an intellectual journey that led him to the theologian John Macmurray. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Blair once said. “It’s all there.”
Blair absorbed from Macmurray a strong communitarian faith. As prime minister, he tried to remove the class and political barriers that divide the British people. Abroad, his core idea was also communitarian: “Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work.”
In April 1999, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago in which he ran down all the features of the globalized world that cross borders and unite humanity: trade, communications, disease, financial markets, human rights and immigration. “Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater,” he argued. “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community.”
This meant moving away from the Westphalian system, in which the world and its problems were divided into nation-states. “The rule book of international politics has been torn up,” he argued in a speech last year. What’s needed instead are multilateral institutions that act “in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice.” The economics of globalization are mature, he concluded, but the politics are not.
In his 1999 speech, Blair maintained that the world sometimes has a duty to intervene in nations where global values are under threat. He argued forcefully for putting ground troops in Kosovo and highlighted the menace posed by Saddam Hussein.
He saw the terrorists of Sept. 11 as extremists who sought to divide humanity between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb — the House of Islam and the House of War. “This is not a clash between civilizations,” he said last year in the greatest speech of his premiership. “It is a clash about civilization. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence.” He concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community, even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.
The crucial issue now is: Is this human community real? Is Iraq merely an intervention that was botched? Or are interventions inherently doomed because people in other cultures don’t want what we want, and will never see the world as we do?
Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.
If Huntington turns out to be right, then Blair will be seen as one of the most naïve communitarians of all time. But I wouldn’t count him out just yet. It could be that over the long term, and despite the disaster in Iraq that he co-authored, his vision of a human community will be vindicated. Or it could be that Blair’s vision of that community was right — except in the Middle East, the region where he most aggressively sought to apply it.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
May 7, 2007, 5:44 pm
When Order Creates Itself
By Mark Buchanan
An anonymous commenter, responding to my previous column, suggested that my title “Our Lives as Atoms” is “more than a little puzzling,” and wondered “Where will all this lead us?” I’ve written about the amplified polarization of opinion in the political blogs, and about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which had a disturbingly eerie resemblance to famous experiments at Stanford University 36 years ago. What does any of this have to do with atoms? Fair question. I’d like to start my answer by telling you about a strange phenomenon in Spitsbergen.
Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago. It has spectacular mountains, abundant glaciers and desolate tundra, where stones are littered over a flat and mostly featureless terrain. In places on this tundra, the stones are arranged in a remarkable way; they lie not in a chaotic, haphazard jumble but in an ordered array of hauntingly beautiful, nearly perfect circular piles. You really have to look at a photo to believe it.
Where do these stone circles come from? Some might suspect the activity of intelligent agents, the local people, perhaps. But in fact, these circular piles arise all on their own by a natural process, with no human intervention. As geophysicists Mark Kessler and Brad Werner first explained a few years ago, forces associated with freezing and thawing push the stones into stretched-out piles, and then curve the long piles around (at least sometimes) to form complete rings.
Our human intuition is ill-prepared to understand such “spontaneous order” in the physical world. Suppose you put some sand in a shallow box with a lid and shake it up and down. Will anything interesting happen? Most people think not. But when physicist Harry Swinney and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin did this experiment a few years ago – O.K., they used millions of tiny ball bearings rather than sand – they found something very surprising. When the frequency of shaking speeds up and exceeds a certain limit, beautiful wave-like patterns form in the box.
Such spontaneous order is caused by feedback. A little pattern, even if it arises quite by accident, sets up forces that reinforce the pattern. A little clumping of stones on the tundra triggers physical reactions that lead to more clumping, and eventually to stone piles.
This still says nothing about what our lives have to do with atoms. But bear with me a tiny bit further.
The physical world contains lots of kinds of stuff – liquids and solids, metals that conduct electricity and rubber that doesn’t, semiconductors and superconductors, liquid crystals and magnets. These things are made of different kinds of atoms, but that’s not the only reason why they’re different from one another. One of the most important lessons of modern physics is that the way things are organized sometimes matters more than what they are made of. The same carbon atoms that make soft, dull graphite also make sparkling and super-hard diamond. Organization matters.
Which returns me to the mysterious title, “Our Lives as Atoms.” It may be a crude analogy, but people are akin to “atoms” in that we are the elementary building blocks of the social world. Although we tend to think of ourselves as individuals making up our own minds, we’re obviously influenced by what others around us do. Social patterns routinely emerge that have little to do with the character of individual people.
In June 2000, on the afternoon of the opening of the London Millenium Bridge, the first pedestrian bridge built across the Thames River in central London for more than a century, a policemen noticed the bridge begin to sway from side to side. Authorities quickly herded the people off and shut the bridge. What had caused the problem? The best explanation is that people’s feet, simply by walking, had set up a weak vibration in the bridge, a gentle swaying, which created feedback.
To keep their balance, people found it easier to adjust their gait and walk in time with the sway. But this amplified the motion. The more the bridge swayed, the more people adjusted their gait, making the bridge sway even more, until it was swinging several inches to either side. It was spontaneous order indeed, and of a rather dangerous kind.
This is a nice metaphor for how individual actions work together to create larger social forces. We don’t ordinarily think this way, I suspect, because our inner voice usually explains things in terms of narratives that refer to peoples intentions, thought processes and so on.
But it would be a very strange world indeed if the basic logic of spontaneous order didn’t affect us – possibly at many levels – in the way we think, the opinions we have, the clothes we wear, our political beliefs, what we do for a living and so on. In my first two columns, I looked at how individual psychology feeds into the mechanisms of the Web to create and amplify polarized opinions, and how the situation at Abu Ghraib prison, like situations in thousands of other prisons worldwide, set up the preconditions that made abuse more likely, perhaps even predictable.
I hope that clears up the connection to atoms, for Anonymous or anyone else. Maybe this column should have been the first one, but then, that’s the way the human mind works – trial and error. And ideally, correction.
When Order Creates Itself
By Mark Buchanan
An anonymous commenter, responding to my previous column, suggested that my title “Our Lives as Atoms” is “more than a little puzzling,” and wondered “Where will all this lead us?” I’ve written about the amplified polarization of opinion in the political blogs, and about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which had a disturbingly eerie resemblance to famous experiments at Stanford University 36 years ago. What does any of this have to do with atoms? Fair question. I’d like to start my answer by telling you about a strange phenomenon in Spitsbergen.
Spitsbergen is a Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago. It has spectacular mountains, abundant glaciers and desolate tundra, where stones are littered over a flat and mostly featureless terrain. In places on this tundra, the stones are arranged in a remarkable way; they lie not in a chaotic, haphazard jumble but in an ordered array of hauntingly beautiful, nearly perfect circular piles. You really have to look at a photo to believe it.
Where do these stone circles come from? Some might suspect the activity of intelligent agents, the local people, perhaps. But in fact, these circular piles arise all on their own by a natural process, with no human intervention. As geophysicists Mark Kessler and Brad Werner first explained a few years ago, forces associated with freezing and thawing push the stones into stretched-out piles, and then curve the long piles around (at least sometimes) to form complete rings.
Our human intuition is ill-prepared to understand such “spontaneous order” in the physical world. Suppose you put some sand in a shallow box with a lid and shake it up and down. Will anything interesting happen? Most people think not. But when physicist Harry Swinney and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin did this experiment a few years ago – O.K., they used millions of tiny ball bearings rather than sand – they found something very surprising. When the frequency of shaking speeds up and exceeds a certain limit, beautiful wave-like patterns form in the box.
Such spontaneous order is caused by feedback. A little pattern, even if it arises quite by accident, sets up forces that reinforce the pattern. A little clumping of stones on the tundra triggers physical reactions that lead to more clumping, and eventually to stone piles.
This still says nothing about what our lives have to do with atoms. But bear with me a tiny bit further.
The physical world contains lots of kinds of stuff – liquids and solids, metals that conduct electricity and rubber that doesn’t, semiconductors and superconductors, liquid crystals and magnets. These things are made of different kinds of atoms, but that’s not the only reason why they’re different from one another. One of the most important lessons of modern physics is that the way things are organized sometimes matters more than what they are made of. The same carbon atoms that make soft, dull graphite also make sparkling and super-hard diamond. Organization matters.
Which returns me to the mysterious title, “Our Lives as Atoms.” It may be a crude analogy, but people are akin to “atoms” in that we are the elementary building blocks of the social world. Although we tend to think of ourselves as individuals making up our own minds, we’re obviously influenced by what others around us do. Social patterns routinely emerge that have little to do with the character of individual people.
In June 2000, on the afternoon of the opening of the London Millenium Bridge, the first pedestrian bridge built across the Thames River in central London for more than a century, a policemen noticed the bridge begin to sway from side to side. Authorities quickly herded the people off and shut the bridge. What had caused the problem? The best explanation is that people’s feet, simply by walking, had set up a weak vibration in the bridge, a gentle swaying, which created feedback.
To keep their balance, people found it easier to adjust their gait and walk in time with the sway. But this amplified the motion. The more the bridge swayed, the more people adjusted their gait, making the bridge sway even more, until it was swinging several inches to either side. It was spontaneous order indeed, and of a rather dangerous kind.
This is a nice metaphor for how individual actions work together to create larger social forces. We don’t ordinarily think this way, I suspect, because our inner voice usually explains things in terms of narratives that refer to peoples intentions, thought processes and so on.
But it would be a very strange world indeed if the basic logic of spontaneous order didn’t affect us – possibly at many levels – in the way we think, the opinions we have, the clothes we wear, our political beliefs, what we do for a living and so on. In my first two columns, I looked at how individual psychology feeds into the mechanisms of the Web to create and amplify polarized opinions, and how the situation at Abu Ghraib prison, like situations in thousands of other prisons worldwide, set up the preconditions that made abuse more likely, perhaps even predictable.
I hope that clears up the connection to atoms, for Anonymous or anyone else. Maybe this column should have been the first one, but then, that’s the way the human mind works – trial and error. And ideally, correction.
May 2, 2007, 6:13 pm
Turning Human Beings Into Monsters
By Mark Buchanan
It is three years and a few days since CBS News published the first photos documenting the systematic abuse, torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The Bush administration and the American military have worked hard to firmly establish the “few bad apples” explanation of what happened. Eight low-ranking soldiers were convicted, and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II, who was found guilty of assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of detainees, is now halfway through his eight-year prison sentence.
But there are very good reasons to think that Frederick and the others, however despicable their actions, only did what many of us would have done if placed in the same situation, which puts their guilt in a questionable light. Can someone be guilty just for acting like most ordinary human beings?
In a famous experiment back in the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo and other psychologists at Stanford University put college students into a prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department. Some of the students played prisoners and others guards, with uniforms, numbers, reflecting sunglasses and so on. The psychologists’ aim was to strip away the students’ individuality and see what the situation might produce on its own.
What happened was truly disconcerting — the guards grew increasingly abusive, and within 36 hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, crying and screaming. The researchers had to stop the experiment after six days. Even normal kids who were professed pacifists were acting sadistically, taking pleasure in inflicting cruel punishments on people they knew to be completely blameless.
These were ordinary American college kids. They weren’t monsters, but began acting monstrously because of the situation they were in. What happened was more about social pattern, and its influence, than about the character of individuals.Emeritus professor at Stanford, Zimbardo has argued in a recent book, “The Lucifer Effect,” that what happened in these experiments is also what happened at Abu Ghraib. As he points out, in lots of the photos the soldiers weren’t wearing their uniforms; they were anonymous guards who referred to the prisoners with dehumanizing labels such as “detainees” or “terrorists.” There was confusion about responsibility and little supervision of the prison at night.
The more the soldiers mistreated the prisoners, the more they saw them as less than human and even more worthy of that abuse. In both the experiments and at Abu Ghraib, most of the abuse took place on the night shift. In both cases, guards stripped prisoners naked to humiliate them and put bags over their heads. In both cases, the abuse involved the forced simulation of sexual behavior among the prisoners.
Frederick hooked up wires to hooded detainees, made them stand on boxes and told them they’d be electrocuted if they fell off. He stomped on prisoners hands and feet. He and others lined up prisoners against the wall, bags on their heads, and forced them to masturbate. His actions were indeed monstrous.
But when Zimbardo, as an expert witness, interviewed Frederick during his court-martial, these were his impressions:
He seemed very much to be a normal young American. His psych assessments revealed no sign of any pathology, no sadistic tendencies, and all his psych assessment scores are in the normal range, as is his intelligence. He had been a prison guard at a small minimal security prison where he performed for many years without incident. … there is nothing in his background, temperament, or disposition that could have been a facilitating factor for the abuses he committed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
If someone chooses to commit an illegal act, freely, of their own will, then they are plainly guilty. Conversely, the same act performed by someone acting without free will, compromised by mental illness, perhaps, or the coercion of others, draws no blame. Far less clear is the proper moral attitude toward people who do illegal things in situations where the social context exerts powerful, though perhaps not completely irresistible, forces.
Can a person be guilty of a crime if almost everyone, except for a few heroic types, would have done the same thing? This is a question for legal theorists, and one likely to arise ever more frequently as modern psychology reveals just how much of our activity is determined not consciously, through free choice, but by forces in the social environment.
But the more immediate question is why those who set up the conditions that led to Abu Ghraib, or at least made it likely, haven’t also been held responsible. When Frederick arrived at Abu Ghraib, abusive practices, authorized from above, were already commonplace. Prisoners were being stripped, kept hooded and deprived of sleep, put in painful positions and threatened with dogs. On his first day there, Frederick recalled, he saw detainees “naked, handcuffed to their door, some wearing female underclothes.”
The conditions cited by Zimbardo, the situational recipe for moral disaster, were already in place.
The conclusion isn’t that Frederick and the others didn’t do anything wrong, or that they somehow had an excuse for their actions. They could and should have acted better, and Frederick has admitted his own guilt. “I was wrong about what I did,” he told the military judge, “and I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it was wrong at the time because I knew it was a form of abuse.”
But you and I cannot look at Frederick and the other guards as moral monsters, because none of us can know that we’d have acted differently. The evidence suggests that most of us wouldn’t have. The coercion of the social context was too powerful.
The second conclusion is that those really responsible for the abuse, on a deeper and more systematic level, still should be brought to justice. They’re in the upper tiers of the military chain of command and its civilian leadership; they’re in the White House.
Today, Frederick will wake up in prison, have his breakfast, take some exercise and face the daily monotony of prison life, something he can expect for the next 1300 days or so. He can be justifiably angry that those responsible for putting him in that setting at Abu Ghraib, where almost anyone would have done the same thing, are today walking around free.
Turning Human Beings Into Monsters
By Mark Buchanan
It is three years and a few days since CBS News published the first photos documenting the systematic abuse, torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The Bush administration and the American military have worked hard to firmly establish the “few bad apples” explanation of what happened. Eight low-ranking soldiers were convicted, and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II, who was found guilty of assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty and maltreatment of detainees, is now halfway through his eight-year prison sentence.
But there are very good reasons to think that Frederick and the others, however despicable their actions, only did what many of us would have done if placed in the same situation, which puts their guilt in a questionable light. Can someone be guilty just for acting like most ordinary human beings?
In a famous experiment back in the 1970s, Philip Zimbardo and other psychologists at Stanford University put college students into a prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department. Some of the students played prisoners and others guards, with uniforms, numbers, reflecting sunglasses and so on. The psychologists’ aim was to strip away the students’ individuality and see what the situation might produce on its own.
What happened was truly disconcerting — the guards grew increasingly abusive, and within 36 hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, crying and screaming. The researchers had to stop the experiment after six days. Even normal kids who were professed pacifists were acting sadistically, taking pleasure in inflicting cruel punishments on people they knew to be completely blameless.
These were ordinary American college kids. They weren’t monsters, but began acting monstrously because of the situation they were in. What happened was more about social pattern, and its influence, than about the character of individuals.Emeritus professor at Stanford, Zimbardo has argued in a recent book, “The Lucifer Effect,” that what happened in these experiments is also what happened at Abu Ghraib. As he points out, in lots of the photos the soldiers weren’t wearing their uniforms; they were anonymous guards who referred to the prisoners with dehumanizing labels such as “detainees” or “terrorists.” There was confusion about responsibility and little supervision of the prison at night.
The more the soldiers mistreated the prisoners, the more they saw them as less than human and even more worthy of that abuse. In both the experiments and at Abu Ghraib, most of the abuse took place on the night shift. In both cases, guards stripped prisoners naked to humiliate them and put bags over their heads. In both cases, the abuse involved the forced simulation of sexual behavior among the prisoners.
Frederick hooked up wires to hooded detainees, made them stand on boxes and told them they’d be electrocuted if they fell off. He stomped on prisoners hands and feet. He and others lined up prisoners against the wall, bags on their heads, and forced them to masturbate. His actions were indeed monstrous.
But when Zimbardo, as an expert witness, interviewed Frederick during his court-martial, these were his impressions:
He seemed very much to be a normal young American. His psych assessments revealed no sign of any pathology, no sadistic tendencies, and all his psych assessment scores are in the normal range, as is his intelligence. He had been a prison guard at a small minimal security prison where he performed for many years without incident. … there is nothing in his background, temperament, or disposition that could have been a facilitating factor for the abuses he committed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
If someone chooses to commit an illegal act, freely, of their own will, then they are plainly guilty. Conversely, the same act performed by someone acting without free will, compromised by mental illness, perhaps, or the coercion of others, draws no blame. Far less clear is the proper moral attitude toward people who do illegal things in situations where the social context exerts powerful, though perhaps not completely irresistible, forces.
Can a person be guilty of a crime if almost everyone, except for a few heroic types, would have done the same thing? This is a question for legal theorists, and one likely to arise ever more frequently as modern psychology reveals just how much of our activity is determined not consciously, through free choice, but by forces in the social environment.
But the more immediate question is why those who set up the conditions that led to Abu Ghraib, or at least made it likely, haven’t also been held responsible. When Frederick arrived at Abu Ghraib, abusive practices, authorized from above, were already commonplace. Prisoners were being stripped, kept hooded and deprived of sleep, put in painful positions and threatened with dogs. On his first day there, Frederick recalled, he saw detainees “naked, handcuffed to their door, some wearing female underclothes.”
The conditions cited by Zimbardo, the situational recipe for moral disaster, were already in place.
The conclusion isn’t that Frederick and the others didn’t do anything wrong, or that they somehow had an excuse for their actions. They could and should have acted better, and Frederick has admitted his own guilt. “I was wrong about what I did,” he told the military judge, “and I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it was wrong at the time because I knew it was a form of abuse.”
But you and I cannot look at Frederick and the other guards as moral monsters, because none of us can know that we’d have acted differently. The evidence suggests that most of us wouldn’t have. The coercion of the social context was too powerful.
The second conclusion is that those really responsible for the abuse, on a deeper and more systematic level, still should be brought to justice. They’re in the upper tiers of the military chain of command and its civilian leadership; they’re in the White House.
Today, Frederick will wake up in prison, have his breakfast, take some exercise and face the daily monotony of prison life, something he can expect for the next 1300 days or so. He can be justifiably angry that those responsible for putting him in that setting at Abu Ghraib, where almost anyone would have done the same thing, are today walking around free.
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