Ritik Dholakia

Come Together

2008-09-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Events large and small have gotten some thoughts about globalization and its consequences, good and bad, rattling around in my head. From the crisis in the financial markets and the amount of debt and liabilities our corporations and government owe to foreign governments, to the bombing in Pakistan that headlines today's news, to some humorous but melancholy interactions with young, recent immigrant workers in stores in downtown Manhattan, to the changing demographics of New York's outer boroughs, even to this video ostensibly about violence among ghetto youth in France. Since nothing particularly coherent or insightful has yet formulated, I'll only share some photos from a Flickr search, tagged with 'globalization.'

Gates + Seinfeld

2008-09-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, America can't handle 'elites.' On the other hand, this:

I tried to let the first one go, and I do like me some absurdity, but so far, this makes no sense as an advertising strategy. I have to assume that something is going to come together... Otherwise, someone's got some 'splainin to do...

BTW, in case you missed it, the first one:

Amount of Space...

2008-06-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Figure 2.6: Amount of space required to transport the same number of passengers by car, bus or bicycle. Click here for larger image.

Sze Tsung Leong

2008-06-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

The photography of Sze Tsung Leong is really a phenomenon document of the majesty and tragedy of our world. I wrote about it on the other blog, but feel the need to cross post. I highly recommend checking out the collection Horizons online, and recommend even more strongly seeing it in person, if you get the opportunity.

I'm Voting Republican

2008-06-17T16:24:00.001-07:00

Courtesy CC.

Method.com

2008-06-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

About 11 months ago, I joined Method, a brand experience firm with a strong focus on design and technology that has built an excellent reputation over the last 10 years of delivering sometimes beautiful, sometimes innovative print, web, and other interactive projects for a wide-ranging client base. As I mentioned a few posts back, Method has launched our new website:

www.method.com

Check it out, and tell us what you think!

Can The West Lead Us To A Better Place?

2008-06-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

An interesting article from Stanford Magazine, if slightly Stanford-centric, on the demographic changes that have shaped the American West in the past 140 years from Stanford professor David M. Kennedy, whose classroom lectures I would occasionally sneak into, not being a history major. The key themes of the article, briefly summarized: since the symbolic act of completing the Union-Pacific railroad, and more strongly pronounced since the onset of World War II the American West has undergone profound growth and demographic changes that act as both a model for an increasingly heterogeneous world and fundamentally relocate the centers of influence and power within the United States. A couple of minor notes:

- Kennedy suggests the immigrant mix of the American West as a potential model for other parts of the world (Sweden, Ireland) unaccustomed to the challenges of diversity. But is the American West, with an abundance of available land and a lack of centuries-old and strong cultural traditions, really a good model for the challenges of Europe and other nations trying to integrate new populations?

- Kennedy notes that in 1960, the last time an American president was elected from somewhere other than the South and the West, California had 32 electoral votes to New York's 45. Currently, California commands 55 votes, with New York's share having diminished to 31 -- and further, states that lie west of the 100th meridian cast 200 of the necessary 270 votes to elect a president. Kennedy speculates that, should demographic patterns hold, the West as a voting bloc may be able to elect American presidents on their own. Will the 200 year old precedents in the constitution hold under such drastic demographic changes?

- The environmental scarcity, particularly of water resources, that have always shaped the economies of the West (read Marc Reisner's excellent Cadillac Desert) will continue to determine the future of the West. With the growing economic influence of California, specifically, and the West's ability to foster and embrace large-scale technological change, perhaps one of the enduring legacies of the West will be in re-shaping the way large, demanding populations are able to thrive under environmental and resource pressures -- surely an enduring global challenge.

Photos above and below from a Flickr search for 'California.' Interesting, I suppose, that California in our imagination is still about the Pacific and mountains and expansive, magical vistas, and not the strip malls and subdivisions populated by the small shops owned by the Vietnamese and the Indians and the Mexicans and the huge, box-store malls where all the money goes. Or, as Thomas Pynchon envisioned it:

San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts: census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much.

Design and the Elastic Mind

2008-04-22T20:54:00.002-07:00

NOTE: In a few days, I'll announce the launch of our new www.method.com website. As part of the modern condition (and an up-to-date approach to extending our brand), we've got a corporate blog. Some of my thinking will be shifted there. I'll try to cross-post when appropriate. The following post is appropriate.

On Saturday, I took a trip up to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The purpose of my visit was primarily to see the "Colour Chart" exhibit, although I also went with every intention of spending a good bit of time in the "Design and the Elastic Mind Exhibit." Both exhibits were entirely worthwhile, so if you are in New York before May 12th, check them out. But what was remarkable, particularly in comparison to the extremely accessible Color Chart exhibit, was how complete the enthrallment of the capacity crowd streaming through the Design exhibit.

After taking an hour to wander through the exhibit, I took another 45 minutes to simply people watch, to observe how the Saturday afternoon tourist crowd engaged with the various pieces in the show. It was an amazing spectacle, as young and old, bearded and bespectacled, distinctly European and distinctly New Jersey-an were all poring over the tiny and numerous explanations of each installation, leaning over exhibit tables and pressing their faces up against cases to get closer looks at objects, and touching things that they were instructed clearly not to touch. Why? Not because the design objects were immediately and obviously cool. Many of them, in fact, were not obviously cool. They were not shiny metal things, but rather, took a bit of study and consideration to appreciate the value of the object itself..

What quickly became clear was that so much of the crowd was completely taken by the explanations of the design objects -- engaged with the thinking and leaps of imagination that informed the design, as documented in the attached descriptions, or as intuited by the curious museum-goers. As much as the objects themselves, people found delight in unraveling or having explained the smarts that went into making them. The product of design wasn't the only cool thing. Design was the cool thing, too.

So what? Well, working in a design firm, I think that one of the unique challenges we face is to find ways to engage the audiences of our design more deeply in our process. For both the consumers of the experiences we build and for our clients, part of the value that we can add (and part of the delight that we can stimulate) is by helping our audiences appreciate the thinking behind our design. This may be by actually including them in our process, or it might be by designing products and experiences that, in addition to being elegant and valuable, are themselves articulate about the analysis or inspiration or intuition from which they sprung.

Rational Choice: Carrotmob

2008-04-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

Two fundamental concepts of economics that have always frustrated me are the following:

1. An economic choice is fundamentally a value decision made by an individual. An economic actor is making an observable choice, revealing their values and preferences.

2. A market (or the market) uses price as a mechanism to efficiently allocate resources, based on supply and demand, fundamentally driven by the sum of the collective individual preferences of each of the actors in the market.

That may be an oversimplification, and it has been a while since I've taken an economics class, but the gist is right.

So, what's vexing? Well, two things. First, while so many of us claim to believe in one set of things (say, environmental responsibility, or justice, or equality) our revealed preferences show a clear priority in valuing a different set of things (say, comfort, or convenience, or entertainment).

Secondly, while we may truly believe in one set of things, we generally do not feel that our economic choices actually can influence the behaviors of "the market." While we are all supposed to be economic agents, who's behavior, in sum, matters, we feel a complete lack of agency, as far as our ability to make choices that will actually change markets.

With these two points running around the back of my head, I comment Carrotmob, both as an ingenious embodiment of these core economic principles, and as a very cool and innovative approach of connecting the individual economic choices that we might make with real world impact. While my understanding is that Carrotmob is just getting off the ground, I fully recommend taking a look at the organization, which has the potential to be a powerful and exciting change agent, and has, at its core, a possibly sustaining business model (probably not making anybody a millionaire, but perhaps sustaining the platform for change that Carrotmob may grow into...)

Thoughts?

GreenYour.com

2008-04-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a chance to read the remainder of the NYT's green-focused magazine, but I expect I may have more to say or share from that. One of the constant challenges in trying to be more green is knowing exactly what to do. There are a wealth of great resources out there and it seems one more has been added to the mix. I haven't yet spent much time on the site, but GreenYour.com is a personal reference service for making environmentally sound choices. I believe the service was started by some folks that I crossed-paths with a few jobs back, and I figure it's Web 2.0-take (judging by the look of it) on going green is at least worth a look. More on it later, most likely.

Why Bother?

2008-04-20T20:28:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollan with a wonderful essay in the New York Times arguing for the importance of personal choice in making a difference in the face of climate change (and an argument that can easily be extended to a wealth of other environmental, social, and economic factors). Pollan's essay touches on issues that have long troubled me. Among the positives are framing environmental responsibility as a fundamentally moral choice (albeit, in the positive sense of moral, not the finger-wagging, school-marmish sense) and framing environmentally responsible acts as pleasurable (for me, living in a city, for Pollan, planting a garden and growing your own food). More vexing is how to convince people to embrace personal change when confronted with the overwhelming sense that the problem is too large to impact, or when faced with concerns of developed countries somehow falling behind in a consumer arms race with their counterparts in China (the traditional bogeyman) or elsewhere. And kudos to Pollan for re-raising the profile of Wendell Berry, an essayist who deserves a much wider following. Read on:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

Of course, what made this sort of specialization possible in the first place was cheap energy. Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life. Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

Read the rest.

Flight Pattern

2008-04-16T17:11:00.001-07:00

Pretty cool data visualization of FAA flight data. Courtesy MM.

Siftables

2008-04-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to JJK and DM for a listing in Engadget. Siftables certainly aren't ready for the prime time yet, but I do count myself among the set who thinks that more analog/physical means for manipulating digital information is both cool, useful, and has a market. Keep pushing...

You Can Pay Me Later: Hello, World!

2008-04-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

Two ideas for you to steal and make:

An iPhone app where you can type in number, turn the phone upside down, and have them display like an old-school calculator with an LCD display. So, like MM says, you can pick up more nerdy girls. You can send me money for this whenever you like...

A contest for the best hack of an TI series graphing calculator. There must be in excess of several million of these floating around in the United States, for all the high school and college students who were required to buy these in the middle-90s. Are they still in use? And to be clear, the standard I am expecting would include augmented features like lasers or the ability to operate other, larger devices. Or time travel. The TI-85 was a pretty powerful package, as I recall.
And while I'm searching Flickr for photos of calculators, here is where I got my start. Little Perfesser, how I owe you...

We Were So Close!

2008-03-20T15:55:00.001-07:00

The Stand-Up Endorsement

2008-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

Tina Fey on SNL a few weeks ago, advocating Hillary Clinton:

And Tracy Morgan's response, in the Obama camp:

You Don't Miss Your Water...

2008-01-30T20:59:00.000-08:00

An interesting article from the NYT on how climate change, both in terms of current impact and projected impact, is creating challenges for conservation biologists. A few key paragraphs:

“We have over a 100-year investment nationally in a large suite of protected areas that may no longer protect the target ecosystems for which they were formed,” said Healy Hamilton, director of the California Academy of Sciences, who attended a workshop on the subject in November in Berkeley, Calif. “New species will move in, and the target species will move out.”
As a result, more and more conservationists believe they must do more than identify biologically important landscapes and raise money to protect them. They must peer into an uncertain future, guess which sites will be important 50 or 100 years from now, and then try to balance these guesses against the pressing needs of the present.
“It’s turning conservation on its head,” said Bill Stanley, who directs the global climate change initiative at the Nature Conservancy. He said the organization has a goal to protect 10 percent of major habitat types — like grasslands, forests and freshwater systems — by 2015.
“We are not sure exactly how to treat this yet,” Mr. Stanley said. “Areas that we preserved as grasslands are going to become forests. Does this mean we are going to have to have more than enough forest and less grassland than we had before? Or does it mean we should fight it — try to keep the forest from coming into those grasslands? Or should we try to find new areas that are least likely to change, that seem to be the least susceptible to change, and prioritize those areas?”

Interesting questions for me:

From an ecological perspective, if climate change is going to create massive and fundamental changes in local ecologies on a short time frame, how do you determine the ecological value of conserving a particular biome?

From an economic perspective, how do you make decisions on where to invest resources in conservation? How can you quantify the negative impact on a particular ecology, or the positive benefit, in the face of such overwhelming uncertainty in outcomes?

For people engaged in the public debate about conservation, be it advocacy or politics, how do you continue to make a compelling case for conservation when the ecological, economic, and for lack of a better word, spiritual arguments for conserving a place become harder to make with confidence, due to the impact of climate change?

What happens to that spiritual grounding of conservation, from Aldo Leopold to John Muir, when the constancy of a physical place is something that may become even more precious to us due to the effects of climate change?

And is there some heretical, futurist romance in being able to watch new ecologies rapidly transform in front of our eyes? Grasslands turning into forests? An underwater Everglades?

The UX Fund: Quantifying the Value of User Experience

2008-01-30T20:37:00.000-08:00

The ROI case for why a company should invest in design, particularly user-centric design, beyond simply market research, is often hard to make in terms of hard, bottom-line numbers. Often, the business sponsors or owners of projects either just believe in or don't believe in the importance of investing in design as a fundamental part of the development of products, services, and interfaces with customers. With this context, PG at work sends around a very interesting experiment in trying to quantify the value of user experience-focused design, by the design firm Teehan + Lax.

In brief:

The UX Fund was created to test our belief that companies who deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price. On November 1, 2006 we invested $50,000 in 10 companies we felt:
1. Demonstrated care in the design of their products and Web site
2. Has a history of innovation
3. Inspired loyalty in their customer base
4. Doing business with them was a positive experience

Obviously, this financial portfolio-based approach to trying to value a nebulous variable has precedents and is subject to many, many caveats. That said, the overall performance of the portfolio was compelling (certainly from an investment point of view), although Teehan+Lax' commentary indicates a certain definite caution in extrapolating too far.

One major observation that jumps out is how much more strongly those companies performed that have product design, user experience, or brand experience as central to their value (Apple, EA, Nike, Yahoo) when compared to those businesses (Target, Progressive, JetBlue) where design and brand may be important, but at the end of the day, there is a core business (retail, insurance, an airline) that has to be run, with management and competitive stresses that far exceed the influence of design.

Another factor may be the cycle-time for bringing design ideas to market, which is (or should be) much shorter for software, internet, and even consumer goods products, when compared to service industries and industries with deep investments in physical capital which are less subject to change.

Russian Beauties

2008-01-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

Apparently the trade-off between Communist tyranny and open markets is being stuck in a drab factory job in some backwater town versus being able to rocket on your cheekbones and backhand to fame and fortune in the West. Or so says Anne Applebaum:

And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

A good reminder why I generally dislike her columns -- interesting premises devolving into horribly oversimplified paeans to the promise of freedom and markets. Not that freedom and markets are bad (or that Communist tyranny was good), but isn't this a preposterous and unnecessary formulation? Does it also account for the French broker who loses your fortune? Or the multi-national pharmaceutical company who won't sell drugs at discount to third world countries?

Spin Cycle

2008-01-15T19:48:00.000-08:00

Or at least spinning you over to the other blog. In case you've stumbled upon this randomly, this blog has a (fraternal) twin. Where you should expect to find me skimming the surface of hard questions on this blog, you can find me diving deeply into simple ones over on The Quiet Quiet. If you never have, please take a look. If you don't know where to start, here are some recent highlights:

- Music, movie, and book recommendations from 2007
- Some thoughts on I'm Not There
- A review of Anatole Broyard's Kakfa Was The Rage
- The outstanding web video serial "Clark and Michael"
- Some photographs of rural, Soviet-era bus stops

As always, thank you for reading. I would always love to hear comments and feedback!

Photographs from a Flickr search for the most interesting photographs tagged "Spinning" And, yes, all of the adorable photos of children doing the helicopter made this cheating.

The Energy Bubble

2008-01-15T19:41:00.001-08:00

RM over at Informed Reader summarizes an article on the next economic bubble -- supposedly being created as capital is moved into research, development, and marketing of new technologies in alternative energy. (Caveat: I haven't read the Harper's article.) Thoughts?

The small fashion among economic commentators that our entire trajectory of economic growth is a (wink-wink) sanctioned Ponzi scheme, shifting capital and hype from one sector to another, is pretty terrifying. Particularly when the debts and assets left behind from one level to the next are being bought up by foreign interests.

In general, I guess it is a good thing that this capital is being moved into alternative energy. Even if there is an eventual collapse, the initial investment should yield dividends in terms of new technologies and markets. Casualties of the Internet boom aside, that Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia, and all the online media were wrought from that initial investment surely has been a significant and positive change in our lives.

If the bubble is starting now, I guess I'm going to be late to the party again. Damn my timing!

Financial Wizardry

2008-01-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

Unlike a lot of my peers and colleagues (but like, I imagine, a lot of my friends), I really do not enjoy managing my money (when I have money to manage). I don't pay attention to the market on anything less than a weekly basis, I invest in stocks based on believing in the company, not the expected short-term movement of the stock, I invest in mutual funds based on abstract faith in either a market sector or the reputation of the fund manager, and beyond that, I'm generally less attentive to both the market and my money than I know I should be. I wish I could be better, but it just seems like there are much more rewarding things to spend your time doing.

In addition to that streak of laziness, I am admittedly put off by the inaccessibility and general blow-hardness of the financial press. Also, I don't really trust them - not their motives, so much, but their ability to actually give any useful advice. Which is what has drawn my attention to Wikinvest (also here) and Motley Fool's embrace of social media and community trends in building out their website. I haven't yet placed any bets on the financial insights that might be garnered from each of the sights, but I do find both to be better entrees into understanding financial issues, both large and small, certainly when compared either to traditional financial media or my broker's website.

From a consumer perspective, Is this a good idea? Is this likely to make investing more attractive/less painful? Will it improve my returns?

From a software perspective, what features will be key to making this work? Reputation? Analytics that can accurately track information provided by users to performance? Or does this simply become another wild west of data which I have to navigate?

The Tata Nano

2008-01-15T19:06:00.000-08:00

A new "people's car," for a new era. India's Tata Motors unveiled the world's "cheapest car." From the NYT's automotive blog:

Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.

“They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”

The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.
“Today, we indeed have a People’s Car, which is affordable and yet built to meet safety requirements and emission norms, to be fuel efficient and low on emissions,” Mr. Tata added. “We are happy to present the People’s Car to India and we hope it brings the joy, pride and utility of owning a car to many families who need personal mobility.

What is exciting about this? First, that an Indian company (albeit a massive conglomerate) has developed a solution for the needs of the Indian market, in terms of cost, features, and fit to the physically crowded Indian urban landscape. Second, the opportunity for increased mobility that this provides the expanding middle class in India. The introduction of the automobile to the middle class fundamentally changed American culture. What will be the impact in India? Third, the commitment (if Tata's claims are true) to building a vehicle which takes environmental and basic safety concerns into consideration, not just cost:

"the 33hp engine meets current Euro 4 emissions standards and is cleaner than most of the scooters running around on Indian streets right now.” They also claim that the Nano can achieve 54 mpg (U.S.) and has passed frontal and side impact tests"

What is worrying about this? I make the assumption that, with or without this vehicle, there would be an explosion of personal-use vehicles by the rapidly expanding (in number and wealth) middle class in India. Still, the prospect of another million vehicles on the Indian roadways is deeply concerning -- for the local environment, in terms of smog and congestion, for the global environment, in terms of climate change and other atmospheric emissions, for public safety, of both the drivers of these tiny little death traps, and the massive number of Indian urbanites who use other means of transportation (pedestrians, bicyclists, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles) on Indian city streets, and to the political will that Indian governments will have to building public transportation infrastructure at the expense of more roads, widened roads, and highways. Perhaps not quite the head-on collision of anti-poverty versus environment that Slate suggests, but some interesting dilemmas will arrive if the Tata Nano takes off. And I bet it will.

The Lazy Environmentalist, part 2

2008-01-15T18:18:00.000-08:00

Based on nothing more than my armchair observations, I think that in the last ten years, it has become easier to live a little more "green." From household cleaners to cars, both choice and information on more environmentally responsible product alternatives have become more available to consumers. Whether you are buying local, organic, hemp, hybrid, or nontoxic, the market has certainly delivered more products, and of higher quality, to satisfy the eco-conscious consumer, and in consistently more mainstream channels. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

Josh Dorfman's book and website (and presumably, radio show, which I have never listened to), The Lazy Environmentalist, are great entry points into making consumer choices that can make you a little more green -- covering the territory from just a little more eco-conscious, without sacrificing much in terms of status or style (i.e., shop at Bed Bath & Beyond, wear Timberland, drive a Lexus) , to more significant commitments to brands or products which push the green envelope even a bit further. For anyone looking to inject a green perspective in to an upcoming buying decision, I highly recommend both the book and the website.

And as evidenced by the brands and resources highlighted by The Lazy Environmentalist, some companies are making both an ethical commitment and seizing a market opportunity to serve consumers who want to green their lifestyles. The movement of green products from the fringe into the mainstream of style, status, cost, and availability is a trend that I hope can be sustained.

Dorfman's book, in each of his chapters, which are organized (helpfully) like an enormous environmental department story might be, also broaches questions on what it would take to live a lot more green. The challenge in moving from a little to a lot is that the choices often take us out of our comfort zone. They are no longer simple consumer choices -- do I buy product A or product B, but lifestyle choices. Where should I live? How large should my house be? How often should I travel? Should I eat meat? While Dorfman does an admirable job opening the dialogue on some of these questions, his book, with its orientation as a consumer resource, is not really well-equipped to challenge these core values deeply (nor should it be).

But, as we understand the scope of global environmental challenges, like climate change or sustainable development, the depth and dimensions of the choices we are making in "going green" must change, as well. We can't simply become more conscious consumers. We need to make much more deeply considered personal choices, with respect to our lifestyle's impact on the environment and resource use, and political choices, which can help drive policy and market constraints to make both the small consumer choices and the big lifestyle choices easier and more feasible for a lot of people to make.

A bit of an abstract argument, I apologize, but one which always creeps to the fore when I think about how easy it is to feel good as a green consumer, without necessarily making significant impact. But a start is a start, and The Lazy Environmentalist is a good start, particularly if, like me, you are lazy.

And while we're at it, a second, separate UK-based resource also dubbed "The Lazy Environmentalist," is worth a visit...

Gulf War Photos

2008-01-15T18:06:00.000-08:00

Slate's daily photo gallery with some incredible photos capturing the damage done in the first Gulf War... which began 17 years ago this week.

Are Squatter Cities A Good Thing?

2008-01-10T20:16:00.000-08:00

"The city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany" - Stewart Brand, making the case that the trend to urbanization in developing countries is empowering the poor, enabling upward social mobility, helping to control population, and creating wealth. Certainly touches on a few interesting trends, and trends that won't reverse, but it seems a bit of a starry-eyed appreciation of human enterprise in poor, urban environments, rather than a real argument that squatter cities are actually a good thing...

Glassbooth, Project VoteSmart, and ForwardTrack

2008-01-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

An admission: I have no idea what the MSM (mainstream media) is saying about anything. I'm out of touch, at best. Certainly if I assume that other people still pay attention to the MSM. My political news comes from a handful of influential (if not mainstream blogs), the links and clips those blogs post from the MSM, listening (half-dazedly) to NPR in the morning, and occasional perusals of the NYT and Washington Post websites.

I note this as set-up to two points. First, in the wake of Clinton's New Hampshire win, I've seen a lot of second-guessing, back-tracking, and finger-pointing, on blogs and online sources, trying to figure out how the mainstream media and pollsters "got it so wrong." Among the speculative threads tied to this that I find curious are the notion that the MSM abdicated its responsibility to be faithful reporters of political news in favor of hyping narratives (Obama's running away with it! Clinton '08 is broke and in disarray! Hillary's a cry baby!) that, well, weren't actually that true.

More interesting is the notion that, deciding to continually whack Hillary, in columns, on talk shows, in debates, the MSM actually created a pro-Hillary groundswell of people who were, at some level, voting against the MSM's gleefully misogynistic biases. Not that its news, but its interesting that the MSM still plays a role in shaping the outcomes of campaign, but instead of being able to influence outcomes consistent with their perspective, people may be so fed up with the Chris Matthews' and O'Reilly's of the world, that the MSM is causing shifts in opposition to their perspective. Speculative, sure, but it would be great if it were true. Because it would be deserved, those solipsistic, self-serving bastards!

As for me, I'm sure for many others. The MSM has become almost irrelevant, and my political information comes from the "new media." I don't know if that's good -- am I getting better information or more insightful analysis? Or am I just getting it from people who aren't charismatic to have their own TV show?

Whatever the case, there is a wealth of great resources being made available to help better understand candidates and make informed choices. Are people using them? I don't know. Should they? Yes, I think so.

PK recommends (and I second) www.glassbooth.org, which has a great quiz for aligning your values to a candidate -- and then digging further into the records of candidates (apparently I'm a Kucinich man, but Obama and Edwards are considered acceptable choices, too).

A colleague forwarded Project VoteSmart, a little more red-white-and-blue, but still nice to have.

And related to the political arena, Forward Track, which made a nice splash in the 2004 election cycle, which helps you track political activism and donations, with very rich data and nice interfaces for exploration.

Gizmodo Mischief at CES

2008-01-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop. (And Panasonic, you're so lucky that 150-incher didn't have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.

Take a look.

Big Think + TED

2008-01-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

TechCrunch ran an article yesterday about BigThink, a new website where, um, "thinkers," get to share their opinions on subjects (presumably within their expertise). Although it rubs wrong some tiny classicist streak in me that thinks we should be reading about big ideas (or at least, listening for them on the radio), I do have to admit to being a big fan of the TED lectures (and continued big ups to my current giggers, Method, for designing the site!), and further, find video on the web to be a very consumable medium for engaging with big ideas. It is also nice (maybe even revelatory) to see the person presenting the idea. It makes it easier for me to judge them.

PS - I have no idea who David Patrick Columbia is, but apparently he is an "expert" qualified to answer the question "What is the most lavish party you have been to?" His answer kind of sucks, and in perusing the sight further, a lot of the experts kind of suck, and seem unqualified to answer the questions posed to them (Tommy Thomson on the Road to Iraq?). I'd rather see CC answer the question "What is the most lavish party you have been to?"

PPS - Dear BigThink, you should work on the ability of your embed code. Very hard to copy/paste, and I have neither the time nor the energy to actually inspect your code and figure out why Blogger thinks that the embed tag is not being closed properly...

Blogbharti

2008-01-08T20:30:00.001-08:00

Two topics of long abiding interest relating to India, which I may explore in greater depth in 2008:

1) Why does there not seem to be a counter-culture in India? Or, specifically, why isn't there a purely cultural counter-culture, a sex/drugs/rock 'n roll/art/fashion counter-culture, whose purpose it is to strike a pose of rebellion? This may seem like a ridiculous statement, but in my limited but not irrelevant experience with India, this seems to be true. There are deeply politicized "counter-culture" movements, steeped in issues as varied as sexuality and gender, to poverty and anti-globalization activism, to regional heritage. But, unlike Latin America, or Eastern Europe, or China, or Japan, or even to some extend, West Africa, in India, there hasn't been an abiding embrace of the global counter-culture (most keenly felt in art, music, and movies) that has maintained a long and evolving monopoly on "cool" (and, therefore, deeply influenced the shape of both mainstream cultural and consumer trends) since the end of WWII.
Why?

2) The emergence of a new, influential class of people in the world has been surprising well documented in the media in the U.S. This class of people is the young, independent, technologically-adept, status-savvy young Indian professionals who are in the ascendant in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, and on and on. Much richer than their parents ever were, aware (through cousins, travel, and television) of Western style, luxury, and mores, independent and increasingly feeling entitled, the notion that this class will be influential in the next 50 years, and that their influence will be felt globally, has been asserted. What they care about (beyond professional success and status) and how they will exercise their influence is much less certain -- and again, in my experience, the political and social agendas (beyond, simply, success) of these, my counterparts in India, has been underdeveloped. For a middle class that ranks 250 million strong, their values, politics, and engagement will be crucial in positively or negatively influencing issues like poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and public health, both within India, and, since India accounts for a billion people, globally.

I raise both of these issues partly to set the table for further investigation on my part, and partly because, until recently, I have found very few avenues for sounding out these issues. But a new website, www.blogbharti.com, holds the promise of being a locus for opinions from young Indians and non-resident Indians (NRIs), and warrants a few looks...

Who would've imagined, twenty years ago, that a thing called "the Indian blogosphere" would exist? Who knows, twenty years from now, what the relevance of that set of people might be ~ on global politics, on consumer trends, on innovation... that's where I'm going with this!

The Iraq Vote + The Primary Schedule

2008-01-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

I wasn't for the war in Iraq for two simple reasons:

1. It seemed impossible that they were actually a threat to our national security.
2. Invading other countries unprovoked has never been the right thing to do.

That said, with all the posturing and parsing about the 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq war, I wanted to refresh my memory on how the vote actually went down. Joining Ms. Clinton in voting Yes? Feinstein, Dodd, Biden, Tom arper, Max Cleland, Dick Lugar, Tom Harkin, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Charles Schumer, John Edwards, and Tom Daschle.

Notably voting No? Senators Boxer, Bob Graham, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone (RIP), Jon Corzine, Jim Jeffords, Pat Leahy, Robert Byrd, Russ Fiengold, and Senators Chaffee (R) and Reed (D) - RI. Good work Rhode Island!

For reference, the remaining political calendar for primaries and whatever the plural of caucus is...

Hillary's Laments

2008-01-07T18:11:00.001-08:00

A bit more politics. First, above, today's much talked about clip featuring Hillary's "tears" at a campaign event, which, if I read the blogs right, has brought all the sharks out. Oh, get over it. In fact, I thought Hillary responded very honestly and eloquently to the question posed, showed some emotion, and let's move on, people. The amount of dumb, fuck-up things candidates say on the road, as a result of campaign wear or sheer stupidity, Hillary should be allowed a moment of exhaustion and emotion.

Second, the clip below, in which Hillary vents a bit of frustration at being painted as the establishment candidate, versus the candidate(s) of change. One, I have to empathize with Clinton -- she's worked long and hard in her political career caring about the right issues, and working for positive change, and up against hard odds all the while, and in the narrow-vision game of politics, it must be just a nightmare to have worked the right side of the line, and one day wake up to find that your on the wrong side, through little fault of your own. Two, the one valid criticism of Obama that I think can continue to play out in the primaries is his actual inexperience in governance. It would be easier to palate, of course, if Hillary or Edwards had more than a couple of years experience on Obama, as executives or Senators, which they don't. But it is one of the very few lines of attack that would concern me about, say, a McCain-Obama match-up (and what a strange article about that very real possibility over at Slate.com!)

My favorite part of that clip? Bill Richardson running for the Vice President nod by amicably swiveling around in his chair like a ten-year old with ADD. But, Hillary, "false hopes!" Ooh, that'll get you in trouble sooner or later.

2007 in Photos

2008-01-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

A small but heartening token that the world we live in is cooler and more beautiful today than it was a yesterday: the ability to go to Flickr and do a search for any topic, and pull back a multitude of wonderful photos taken by people all over the world, seemingly as many annotated in Spanish or Mandarin or Russian as in English. A marvel of technology, globalization, freedom of expression, and artistic inclination, and good, also, to know that there are so many people documenting so many moments, good and bad, extraordinary and mundane. A selection of photos from a Flickr search tagged, simply, "2007."

And, finally, a good 2007 photo retrospective, from the NYT.

Proposed Antilia Building: More Green? Still Ostentatious

2008-01-05T21:29:00.000-08:00

I recently learned about the Antilia building, which is under construction in Mumbai, by Perkins + Will, for Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani. A couple of descriptive paragraphs:

Construction is underway, albeit with some delays, on one of India’s highest profile and most opulent projects—the Antilia, a 490-foot-tall corporate meeting facility and private residence in Mumbai. Chicago-based Perkins + Will designed the 24-story tower for business tycoon Mukesh Ambani, whose family will occupy roughly 35,000 square feet in its top floors.

Among its interesting elements, Antilia will feature a band of vertical and horizontal gardens that demarcates the tower’s different program elements. A garden level will separate the ground-floor parking and conference center from residential space above, for instance, and the outer walls on certain levels will be sheltered by trellises supporting panels that contain hydroponically grown plants.
In addition to signaling different space uses and providing privacy, these “vertical gardens” will help shade the building and reduce the urban heat island effect. “You can use the whole wall almost like a tree and increase the green area of the site by five or 10 times over what it would be if you just did a green roof,” Johnson observers. “It’s a prototype for buildings of the future.”

Oh, wow. What a crazy building, and while some of the architectural and green design aspects are interesting, it is difficult to see how this building either fits in with the development needs of Mumbai, in general, or a commitment to green design. I guess the rich get what they want, although if this building is a prototype for the future, it seems we're moving ever-closer to a Blader Runner-like dystopia, where the rich live comfortable lives in high-rises towering above the city floor, while discharging a disproportionate amount of waste to and depleting resources from those stuck on the ground, in the shadows below.

The Slate.com article which brought this building to my attention is interesting, as well, in dissecting how efforts to create standards for certifying green building design (specifically, the LEED certification standards) can be counter-productive for really achieving green design objectives. The main criticisms seem to be that LEED's check-list based system for evaluating building design give similar weight to disproportionate investments in green design, creating mis-aligned incentives, that the checklist oversimplifies many of the design objectives and fails to create baseline standards, and that the premium is placed on achieving efficiency and not on controlling scale.

I haven't really paid attention to the evolution of LEED in ten years, but the criticisms seem like pretty standard fare for most initiatives trying to bring standards for sustainability into commercially-driven enterprises. I don't disagree with any of Daniel Brook's analysis of LEED (to the extent that I am familiar with the standards and qualified to agree or disagree), but also it bears mention how difficult it is to create initiatives that both achieve sustainable objectives and will gain buy-in from the companies that need to be properly incentivized and to implement designs and programs according to those standards. Not an excuse, just highlighting the ongoing design challenge that people serious about sustainability will continue to face.

Democratic Stars

2008-01-05T20:53:00.001-08:00

Last political post of the night, I guess I'm just starting to get caught up in the season. The issues that I care about and foresee challenging us in the next forty years (of which, changing our approach in the next eight years is crucial) include:

Global Issues:
Iraq
Economic development in Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America
Climate Change
Energy policy (and global resource use, broadly)
Political and military engagement in asymmetrical conflicts (terrorist organizations and failed states)
Humanitarian intervention (genocide, famine, disease, natural disaster)
Basic health and sanitation services for the poorest 1 billion

Domestic Issues:
Education (primary and secondary)
Health Care
Sustained Economic Growth
Competitiveness in scientific and technological innovation
Managing national debt and trade balances
Increased energy efficiency and independence on foreign oil
Creating capabilities and opportunities for the poorest quarter of American society
Creating open political dialogues on race and class in America

In emailing with CC about the results of the Iowa caucus, I was impressed about how wide a range of political talent a Democratic President will have at his/her disposal to tackle these issues. From potential Vice Presidential candidates, to cabinet members, to high-profile statesmen who can be called upon to fulfill ambassadorships or special missions, the list is impressive, in political talent, in the problems that the individuals have chosen to focus on and care about, the approaches that they take to those problems, and the political standing they have both in the U.S., and globally. Consider a hypothetical Obama administration:

VP Candidates include Edwards (focus and credibility on domestic policy, including poverty issues and health care), Richardson (experience with Energy policy, engage Hispanic demographic, credibility on international issues, particularly N. Korea), and Biden (foreign policy, deep legislative experience).

As statesmen, you'd have Bill Clinton (imagine having him lead task-forces on global economic development, AIDS and other epidemics, and forging partnerships with China and India), Al Gore (climate change and energy policy), Edwards (poverty and health care), Wes Clark and Joe Biden on Iraq and global political crises, including terrorism and humanitarian crises.

Add to that the ability to select advisers from a whole cadre of smart, respected ex-active politicians with national profiles who you could potentially make use of (Gephardt, Bob Kerrey, Tom Daschle, Tom Harkin, Bob Graham), smart, senior Senators from "safe" states like Biden, Dodd, Jack Reed (RI), Boxer/Feinstein, Feingold, Durbin, Kerry, Schumer, Pat Leahy and Hillary to deploy as needed, a ton of smart, young politicians and policy wonks whom I've never heard of, and the ability to reach across the aisle, where appropriate, to the Olympia Snowe's and Chuck Hagel's and Mike Bloomberg's and Bill Cohen's of the world.

The potential for a Democratic president to really re-assert America's perceived and actual leadership well into the 21st century is massive. I can't see a Republican president doing anything but continuing the harm that his administration has done. And in terms of political talent available, there is nothing even close to comparable on the Republican side of the aisle (and there hasn't been in at least twenty years).

Biden Out

2008-01-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

Definitely sad to see Joe Biden bow out of the Democratic primaries, as he provides an intelligent perspective on most of our major national issues, and presents real solutions, beyond purely rhetorical, in terms that people can understand. The increased passion he showed in this season's debates, particularly when discussing American responsibility in confronting the crises in Iraq and Darfur, was very compelling. It is good to have an advocate in national debates that is willing to talk about America's role as a moral leader, and who can do so with authenticity, clarity, and impact, and also with an understanding of what the costs are of exercising that leadership in a complex world.

CC sent this brief post from the NYT's political blog, which praises Biden, and damns some part of our political process, although not quite clear which part (the media, for being too narrowly-focused and a hype machine? us, the electorate, for including the nebulous concept of 'electability' in our political calculus?, us, the electorate, for being so shallow? the system, for enabling all of the above and worse?). Given that I think Biden actually did an effective job adjusting his public persona for the national stage, and did a good job using new media (Interent, e-mail, YouTube) to convey his messages, it is interesting how these issues will continue to make Presidential politics a young, beautiful person's game. May be a good thing, may not.

And while I'm eulogizing Biden's candidacy, may as well do the same for Christopher Dodd, who, along with Biden, is a great example of the qualities I wish all of our political leaders had: intelligent, informed, compassionate, moral, serious, principled, and committed to the big ideas that define our national interest.

Why We Fight

2008-01-04T18:39:00.001-08:00

I recently watched Eugene Jarecki's feature Why We Fight on DVD (trailer here), a documentary that attempts to trace the reasons for America's engagement in armed conflict, and the associated rise of the military industrial complex (a term popularized by no less than President Eisenhower). The basic premise of the film is that there are a lot of personal reasons for supporting or engaging in war, ranging from noble goals like "spreading freedom," to vengeance, to providing life with purpose, that there are a lot of national reasons that a country might go to war, including those above, as well as political interest. The film also asserts that there is a set of commercial and political interests (again, call it the military-industrial complex) that will drive a nation to war, by focusing the personal and national mood of the country into compliance with, if not active support of, a war agenda.

While Why We Fight traces American militarism in the last sixty years, the film's focus and the deepest resonance lies in our current war in Iraq. While I don't know that the film successfully answers the question "Why We Fight?" (the three common answers seem to be "I'm Not Really Sure" from individuals, political bromides like "For Freedom" from politicians and individuals, and "because the political and commercial interests which require war for their own self-preservation seized an opportunity for war and manipulated political and public opinion to allow for that war to be made" representing the film-maker's opinion), the three questions continually surrounding (and never discussed in simple terms) the Iraq war are raised in the film. How did we get in to this war in the first place? Why are we fighting the war? How do we know when we've won the war? (i.e., How do we know when we've accomplished what we expect to accomplish in this war?)

While the film doesn't lay these questions to rest (and I hope that the details surrounding the first question are re-examined with the election of a Democratic president, and the second and third firmly resolved by the actions of the new administration), it does a good job of surfacing them, and providing some historical context. In fact, the revelation of the entire documentary may be President Eisenhower's farewell address, which I had not previously read and will excerpt in parts:

Eisenhower addresses how to promote and maintain American ideals in an increasingly militarized and turbulent world. The rhetoric from fifty years ago sounds not so far removed from today (when we hear it coming from the more articulate and less jingoistic of our politicians:)

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches, and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension, or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily, the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But Eisenhower proceeds to warn against, in surprisingly explicit terms, the influence of the military industrial complex. It's amazing how, from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, there are a legacy of prescient speeches reflecting on American power, and how fundamentally our current leadership and their intellectual influencers, have chosen to ignore:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

The entire address can be found here. I would also highly recommend reading Christopher Hedges' War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning for anyone interested in this topic, particularly in trying to understand our impetus to war, in general (i.e., not as closely focused on the current mess we've made in Iraq).

First Step

2008-01-04T16:42:00.000-08:00

Welcome news to start 2008 -- Obama wins Iowa. As I've discussed, I think all three of the leading candidates on the Democratic side of the fence will make an excellent President and will pursue strong policy and lead the country in the right direction. But on the merits of his intellect, his policy positions, his policy team, his youth, vigor, and general with-it-ness, and, yes, by the symbolic act of electing a black man who embodies an immigrant experience, I think electing a President Barack Obama would demonstrate America's willingness to continue to be a leader in the world in the 21st century in a way that a President Edwards or a President Clinton simply would not.

Happy New Year

2007-12-31T13:48:00.001-08:00

The "in crisis" blog, as Moko calls it, has made it through year one. Hoping to evolve into deeper, more analytic, more data-driven, and more solution oriented posts on the environment, development, sustainability, global culture, technology, design, and other trends and areas of focus that interest me in 2008. Friends, thanks for reading. Enjoy your New Year's Eve!

Photos from Time Magazine's 2007 year in photos, which wasn't great, but was, surprisingly, among the better ones I found. Which leads me to wonder, where are the photos that show the wonderful and fucked up world in which we live?

Tocar y Luchar

2007-12-31T13:16:00.000-08:00

At TM's invitation, I went to see a sweet movie, Tocar y Luchar, documenting and promoting Venezuela's nation-wide program of using orchestral music lessons to engage youth, particularly poor, under-served, and at-risk youth. While I had not heard of the program previously, apparently the ascension of the young conductor Gustavo Dudamel to celebrity circles has brought the program to prominence. A brief description of the program (and link to full article:)

Somewhere around 250,000 children from all over the country, 90 percent of them from impoverished backgrounds, now participate in to El Sistema. Considering the country’s total population of 27 million, it means that one in every 100 citizens plays in an orchestra. Venezuela now has nearly 60 children’s orchestras (for children between 2 and 12), more than 150 youth orchestras (for players between 12 years old and young adulthood), 30 adult professional orchestras, more than 120 local núcleos (training centers) and countless chamber ensembles.

The program, started in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, is compelling and seems like a feasible approach to development that can be applied on larger or smaller scales in many countries (and seems, in that it shares models with many athletic programs, that it might be extended to disciplines other than orchestral music, as well). Of course, the current political context in which Venezuela is seen as an outsider to broader political dialogues makes it a bit hard to see through some of the commentary on this program, both positive and negative. While the movie is both sweet and inspiring, it does not tackle these political and pragmatic issues in much detail. Which leaves a host of questions, some practical, some philosophical, in the air:

How is the success of this program measured, in terms of development goals? The movie does an excellent job illustrating cases of poor, at-risk, and even disabled children who are empowered by the program, but the cases are necessarily a select few. Is the program successful in creating greater skills among the students, and opening up opportunities for advancement (outside of those super-achievers who get selected through the system to play in orchestras)?
What happens to the kids when they become adults? Does their training in music have any material impact on their well-being? Particularly, what happens to those kids who participate in the program, but aren't successful at progressing through the ranks?
Does having a population raised on orchestral music do anything in a grander sense to Venezuelan culture? Does the culture have a greater engagement and appreciation of music and art, writ-large, due to the experience of these children?

More questions abound, but the program is certainly inspiring and interesting, for what it has already accomplished, both in engaging at-risk youth, and re-invigorating the classical music world, in Venezuela and beyond.

What Happens In the Meadow At Dusk?

2007-12-29T17:58:00.000-08:00

I forget how charming and good and bizarre this movie is...

Chak De India

2007-12-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

If I had seen Chak De India, starring Shah Rukh Khan, in an American theater, with an American context, I would have walked out. Structured somewhere between The Mighty Ducks and Miracle, Chake De India relates the story of a disgraced, Muslim ex-captain of the Indian men's field hockey team (who is disgraced for allegedly throwing a World Cup championship game to Pakistan), who returns after eight years in exile to coach the under-funded and under-appreciated women's field hockey team as they attempt to compete in their own World Cup in Australia. Predictably, the women's field hockey team is comprised of a motley cast of characters - the jaded veteran, the strong, mean, fat girl, the brawling defenders, super-talented, aloof rich girl, the hard-luck, scrappy forward. What makes this film interesting is that, beyond embodying these sports film archetypes, each of these girls also represents a regional stereotype from within India. And one of the film's strongest motifs/morals is that, in order to succeed, each of the women must learn to play for India, and their unified identity as the Indian national team, rather than the regional identities which they more strongly identify with.

I write about this film not to recommend it. It's not a good movie. But it is interesting as an example of how social mores, even simple ones, can be advanced through film. Since, in India, film and television are such popular media, dominating so much of the popular cultural landscape, film and television become important conduits for conveying political and cultural messages. By embracing an essentially feel-good, nationalist story, starring one of the biggest stars of them all, Chak De India is able to broach questions of regionalism (particularly against the poorer and more backwards states), bureaucratic inefficiency, Hindu-Muslim prejudice, and sexism. All in one movie! All while India's women's field hockey team improbably wins the world championship! With the climactic scene, where the young women overcome their differences and recognize that they are more alike than dissimilar, taking place in a McDonald's!

Is such a movie successful in changing people's opinions about India? It isn't a particularly insightful or subtle treatment, but I'm not sure insightful and subtle are the ways to sway popular opinion in India. And, of course, it's hard for me to tell, sitting in New York.

The Lazy Environmentalist, part 1

2007-12-16T20:19:00.000-08:00

A small plug for checking out The Lazy Environmentalist, a show on NPR, a website, and a book that I am currently paging through. I'll have more to write once I finish leafing through the book and have some more time on my hands, but in the meantime, have a look...

Little Politics

2007-12-16T19:43:00.000-08:00

I haven't been paying much attention to politics the past few weeks, but as we are about to turn the year and really engage the political frenzy, I wanted to chip in with a few comments. First, I found the above clip of President Bill Clinton being interviewed on Charlie Rose on TPM, which I found interesting, for many reasons:

- Talking Points Memo characterizes the clip as Bill Clinton "taking the gloves off" in calling Obama's readiness to be president in to question. Somehow, I didn't actually read it that way. Although I haven't seen any of the remainder of the episode, so perhaps I lack context, I was surprised about how much concession Clinton made to Obama's political skill and the comparisons he made between himself in '88 and Obama in '08. The general impression I get is much more, I am doing my duty as part of the Hillary campaign to dis-credit Obama, but, "yeah, he really is good and could be really good for the country." Hitting a man as being "symbolic of change" and "risky" just don't seem like big political hits.

- Clinton makes the point that Obama would simply represent a "symbolic" change, and has not proven himself as an agent of change. But isn't that precisely what America needs? A symbolic change in leadership? While the domestic political problems that Clinton articulates (education, health care, focus on education and primary research to re-establish a competitive knowledge workforce) may be addressed by strong management, aren't the BIG international problems (America's standing in the world, climate change, terrorism) in need of a fundamental symbolic change, representing not only a new approach in politics and governance, but a declaration through vote by the American electorate that they get it about these problems?

- The role of thoughtful statesmen really suits Clinton well, allowing him to show off his intellect, his understanding of and genuine excitement for politics, and allows him to avoid some of the "Slick Willie" veneer that made him eminently electable but occasionally untrustable.

For full disclosure, my current stack-rank of the Democratic field is as follows, although I find everyone mentioned perfectly acceptable:

1. Obama
2. Biden
3. Edwards
4. Clinton

Additionally, I am sure I would have a better appraisal of Hillary if she weren't at all related to Bill -- mostly because I don't think elongating the 20 years of Clintons and Bushes in the White House is the right thing for the country, in its symbolism or in practice.

No Bubble!

2007-12-10T20:25:00.000-08:00

I wish I hadn't lived this dream before...

The Story of Stuff

2007-12-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

First, a bit of a goof on globalism that we pulled together back in the old SPR days. While our low-fi comedic ramblings may or may not be that funny, I am still constantly shocked at how much cheap, disposable stuff you can buy in New York, and how the economics of extraction, production, labor, and transport can scale to make a $3 umbrella a viable product.

With that silly context setting, I'd urge you to check out this animated movie "The Story of Stuff," which Professor ND forwarded to me. Annie Leonard touches on a number of powerful themes, that I think are constantly missed in public dialog about sustainability, civic responsibility, and the power that people have, as consumers, in influencing their world. Specifically, I think that while a lot of people feel trapped and fed-up with our consumerist culture -- the need to buy, the lack of durability of products, a keeping up with the Joneses mentality -- and I think Leonard does a good job articulating that, while you may feel trapped, there is a legitimate choice you can make, to opt out of the cycle of consumerism. Secondly, it is important to frame the materials economy as a cycle, recognizing that the choices that are made - by consumers, by politicians, by business people - all have impacts both upstream and downstream in the cycle. Positive choices can be amplified to be even more positive, and unfortunately, the same holds true for choices with negative consequences.

While I am not always enamored by the slight shrillness of people who are active advocates in the sustainability movement, and some of that occasionally bubbles to the surface in this video, I think, in general, The Story of Stuff is a very thoughtful and engaging overview of our consumer-driven materialist culture, and should be broadly forwarded, to people who care about these issues, and probably more importantly, to people who may not know to care about them.

Additional resources worth checking out:

Free Range Studios - the design firm responsible for the production of The Story of Stuff, who apparently have a very cool charter.
The Center for the New American Dream - I haven't kept close tabs on this non-profit, but when I was paying more attention five or six years ago, they were doing a great job communicating how the objectives of adopting a more sustainable lifestyle were very much aligned with quality of life aspirations that are core to the classic "American Dream"
The Global Footprint Network - Another non-profit that focuses on trying to raise the public and political awareness of how the material flows in our economy, driven by consumerism, impact global sustainability.

Planet of Slums

2007-11-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

Photograph of a painting by Walter Handro

Cities in the abstract are the solution to the environmental crisis: urban density can translate into great efficiencies in land, energy, and resource use, while democratic public spaces and cultural institutions likewise provide qualitatively higher standards of enjoyment than individualized consumption and commodified leisure. - Pp. 134, Planet of Slums.

Truly, in the abstract, cities appear the solution to a lot of things, in an increasingly populated and economically stratified world. From the Le Corbusien dreams of the master planners to the amplifying growth of real estate values in the center of so many megacities (New York, included), there is a prevailing, abstract logic that a well-planned city may bring order, meaning, and stability of the masses who aggregate in the city center. Mike Davis' Planet of Slums is an assault on this logic, providing an overwhelming onslaught of statistics, anecdotes, and analysis that indicates that the modern city, in its incarnation as slum, shanty town, ghetto, favela, fails to deliver its denizens from poverty, inequality, or hopelessness.

Chaos, economic blight, and false hope seem to be the driving forces in the cities of the developing world, forcing the urban poor into worse and worse scenarios -- under-served by public infrastructure, lacking economic opportunity or social mobility, beset by public health epidemics, and trapped by government policies wrought from the high ideals of academia and Western think tanks. Rather than organic, democratic institutions, the poor parts of cities, ever increasing in size and population, seem like traps, sinkholes which draw in larger and larger populations, and provide no ready way out.

I wish I could say that under the reams of data damning the world's cities there is a trap door, leading to a brighter future. Simply not the case. While not an uplifting heart-warmer, Planet of Slums is a necessary look at some of the key demographic and social trends that will dictate the next epoch of our forward march through history, describing in terrifying detail of data and history the cauldrons from which the next genius may hail, but more likely, the next epidemic, revolution, famine, or genocide. Scary, sobering, and impossible to ignore.

Money For Grades

2007-11-07T21:12:00.001-08:00

From an article in the New York Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he was considering a proposal to give some city students free cellphones and to reward high performance with free airtime, but emphasized that he had no intention of lifting the ban on cellphones in the schools.

“It’s something we’ll take a look at,” the mayor said of the proposal being pushed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who joined the Education Department this year as chief equality officer. But, he added, “We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of letting students use cellphones” in schools. “That’s not what that proposal was all about.”

Dr. Fryer is also the architect of the city’s plan to pay cash to students in several dozen schools who do well on standardized tests, a step connected to the mayor’s broad antipoverty efforts that give families money as a reward for certain behavior. Dr. Fryer spoke of the cellphone plan during a lecture to his undergraduate economics class last month.

Some commentary from Slate:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought only condemnation upon himself when he announced last Thursday that he is thinking about giving free cell phones and minutes to some public-school students who perform well on tests. The proposal is part of a larger effort (financed with private money and means-tested) to pay students in low-income schools for testing well.

The political spectrum united to oppose the whole idea. The Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern said paying for test performance undermined learning for its own sake. New York University historian Diane Ravitch called it "anti-democratic, anti-civic, anti-intellectual, and anti-social." Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers objected that "money can't buy you learning." On his show, Stephen Colbert teased city schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, "As long as you're going to be paying kids and making it seem like a job, why not just bring back child labor?"

In fact, Bloomberg is on to something. The cell-phone bribe and the pay-for-test-scores scheme, which provides up to $500 a year for seventh-graders who do well on 10 exams, are the brainchildren of black economist Roland G. Fryer. An assistant professor at Harvard who also serves as the New York City Education Department's chief equality officer, Fryer himself grew up in difficult circumstances (his mother left when he was very young, and his father spent time in prison for sexual assault). But Fryer succeeded, and he became interested in finding out what incentives would motivate more students growing up in like circumstances to do well. His ideas are an intriguing combination of tough and liberal approaches: tough because they take a hard-nosed rather than romantic view of education, and liberal in that the goal is to raise the achievement of low-income kids and foster social mobility.

A curious and innovative approach to education policy that provokes a lot of thoughts and mixed reactions from me, very few of which I'll bother to chase down in this post. One that reflexively comes to mind is about the different values and cultures to education and learning that are supposed to exist between (particularly) Asian cultures and America -- where young Asians, through a mix of necessity, shame, fear, competitiveness, and passion, supposedly value learning fundamentally differently than their American counterparts. But the more curious reaction is that, this idea doesn't seem like it's that bad, or even that crass, and I'm always impressed with Bloomberg's willingness to trot out and try new solutions, however odd they may appear. I say, give it a try. We could spend our money on worse things...

Anti-Social Networks

2007-11-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

The first thing I should say is that MF is a genius. Two or three years ago, MF and I had caught up for a drink in Noe Valley, and were walking around in the cool evening, talking about his new venture. While talking, we kicked around a few other ideas (or mostly, he did). One of them was "Foester" -- the website where you could make "friends" with your enemies. Oh, how we laughed. It was a genius idea, impractical and ridiculous. But still genius.

Fast forward to a week chock full of interesting news and articles about the wide-world of social networking (and a note, it is nice that the notion that social networking platforms are now "utilities" is starting to take hold, for whatever little or much that means to people). I won't pass much comment on recent news, other than to highlight:

- Google's announcement of OpenSocial last week, which is the right idea, and has genuinely disruptive potential in this relatively small corner of the online world. Most charming in the announcement of this initiative is exactly who was left out of the launch of this project:

There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

As anyone paying attention could have told you, it's exciting that we may actually have a real fight on our hands -- between a huge player who controls data and so many of the complementary utilities that a robust social network can bring value to, and a pretty big player who actually owns the current high value network, and more importantly commands the active, opted-in user base.

- Paul Boutin's article in Slate, which gets both what is exactly (and inherently) right and wrong about Facebook's ability to capitalize on their social network and user base through advertising.

- But most amusingly (and least importantly) an article from the Financial Times, that I first saw on David Byrne's blog, about Social "Hateworking." An idea whose time has arrived:

Enemybook
Goes under the strap line “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”. Set up as a riposte to the perceived bogus nature of many online friendships, Enemybook runs off the back of Facebook. It allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends, specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies.

Snubster
Similarly to Enemybook, Snubster derides the notion of social networking sites, and can run off Facebook. Users can build lists of personal enemies from their Facebook contacts, who will then be sent a snub and will be alerted that they are either “On notice” or “Dead to me”.

Hatebook
Modelled on the Facebook concept, and with an almost identical layout, Hatebook offers a less friendly approach to the world of social networking. You can befriend “Other haters”, and your homepage alerts you when “Other fricking idiots” contact you. The site also provides you with an “Evil Map”, marking the locations of other users. The antithesis to Facebook’s emphasis on making friends, this is an open forum for abuse and aggression.

The Design In-Joke Crowd

2007-11-04T20:57:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted much about my current job, but it is certainly interesting working at a firm (albeit a small one), where a large number of my colleagues are creative people - visual and user experience designers. One of my favorite parts of this are the email exchanges, somewhere between arch and snarky, where the designers make fun of the products/ websites/ad-campaigns that some other set of designers were (presumably) compelled to do by their no-taste marketing minders. Often these exchanges are peppered with real insight or inquiry, but sometimes they're just mean (though rarely mis-guided). Some examples:

- JM sends out a site for Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
- An incredibly bad, so-bad-its-funny, ad for some sort of flu medicine.
- A possibly very good (?) marketing campaign for a futuristic toilet (sometimes, you can't tell if the designers are pro/con...)

The other side benefit, of course, is getting turned on to some very cool stuff happening, both from a design and technology perspective. Surely more fun than lawyers:

- Perceptive Pixel, bringing Minority Report one step closer to reality.
- The World Clock Project.
- Stixy, another attempt to solve the on-line collaboration problem (although looks to be a good one...)

Biking as Business

2007-11-04T20:34:00.000-08:00

An article in today's New York Times, along with an accompanying video story, discuss efforts made by the city of Portland, OR, in supporting both bike culture and local businesses. Notable as a small example of how a combination of individuals embracing a change in behavior (from cars to bicycles), combined with civic support can help move a community towards more sustainable ways of living. The scale of change and overall consequence may not yet be huge, but building a city that supports bicycle culture is one of those changes that manages to neatly entwine a positive environmental impact, a clear improvement in quality of life in embracing a change in behavior, and a very tangible example to those people who are further back on the adoption curve that embracing sustainable behavior can be both the right thing to do and the pleasurable thing to do.

A couple of side comments that struck me while watching the video:

- It is interesting that while some American cities are slowly embracing bike culture (Portland, San Francisco), urban centers in developing countries that were built around bicycle and pedestrian traffic are shifting away from those modes of transportation (due largely to increased income of the middle class and status-driven changes in behavior).
- Is it a necessary condition of cities moving towards sustainability in the U.S. that they be populated by goofy white people? An un-serious phrasing of a serious question: how does the culture of sustainability become appealing to minorities, people in the inner cities, people with more conservative/traditional visions of success and status, new immigrants?
- Can anyone recommend me a good model of bike to buy, for casual city use? I'm looking for low maintenance, sturdy, relatively light-weight, and built right for my somewhat shorter (5'6") frame.

Photos from a Flickr search for 'bicycle.' Actually, quite worth a look-see.

What the Hell -- Heck Are We Talking About Here?

2007-10-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Kucinich, Richardson, and Biden for having a sense of humor. What is it going to take to get Matthews and Russert fired, for being humorless jerks? (Less Russert than Matthews, but...)

Happiness Is...

2007-10-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

An article from the New York Times a few weeks ago, about a growing gap in "happiness" between men and women, caught my eye. An excerpt:

Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist working with four psychologists on the time-use research team, figures that there is a simple explanation for the difference. For a woman, time with her parents often resembles work, whether it’s helping them pay bills or plan a family gathering. “For men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad,” said Mr. Krueger, who, when not crunching data, enjoys watching the New York Giants with his father.
This intriguing — if unsettling — finding is part of a larger story: there appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.
Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

I don't have much to say about the article itself, except that I found in generally interesting and I thought it rendered the challenges of achieving happiness a little too simplistically (not in a deeply philosophical sense, but in terms of achieving basic life goals, and as expressed through the necessary activities that men and women need to do). But the article did re-raise an interesting question that I had thought about in the past, although not much recently.

How can we measure happiness, and how can we make it useful as a way to make choices, and measure the impact of those choices? Can we make happiness a useful notion both for guiding personal decisions as well as political decisions? Or is it to subjective and ephemeral a notion?

Darren McMahon's Happiness: A History, a philosophical and historical investigation into what happiness means is an interesting launching point for this discussion, but one which I will avoid (see this brief review) except for a) recommending his book, and b) citing it as a reference for the otherwise obvious point that 'happiness' as a defining goal of human existence has been important through all of documented history, pretty much, although the relative meaning and importance of 'happiness' has not been held constant.

More recently, two attempts to measure happines, at varying degrees of quantitative precision, for use as a high-level indicator of human progress are interesting and worth checking out. I'll link only to the basic resources, and may revisit this topic in the future. But in the meantime, check out the Gross National Happiness indicator, put forth by the strange and progressive kingdom of Bhutan as an alterntive understanding of how a society is progressing, and the more economically viable Genuine Progress Indicator, created as an alternative to GNP which tries to properly value economic externalities (like environmental impacts) and 'negative' wealth (like the economic activity created by crime or ill health [think insurance company premiums increasing]). See also the World Database of Happiness, which I'm still trying to figure out, and a dense white paper from the OECD on the use of happiness as a political/policy metric of value. And perhaps another post to follow.

Photos from a Flickr search for 'happiness.' (Although you might get the impression that happiness is disproportionately the province of children...)

Supply and Demand: Energy and Food Policy

2007-10-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I went to a lecture arranged by the Stanford alumni association by Professors Roz Naylor and David Victor at NYU. Professor Naylor, who I studied with briefly, is an economist who has long focused on food economics and other issues inter-relating environmental and developmental policy, and Professor Victor, whom I did not cross paths with at Stanford, is a law professor focused on energy policy. The lecture was good, although brief and, as such, handled some very complex issues very simply. A few modest comments that have been kicking around in the back of my head for the past few weeks:

- Professor Victor made an interesting comment in response to a question about whether small-scale "clean energy" solutions constitute an effective energy policy. Specifically, the question seemed tied to a lot of success stories coming out of India and China where distributed energy producers (like local solar-powered batteries are loaned out at the village-level) are emerging to meet the burgeoning energy demand that is occurring in areas not well served by existing energy grids. The substance of Professor Victor's comments was that while such trends were interesting, distributed/point solutions to supplying energy would simply never scale -- and therefore, couldn't be a central part of a sustainable energy policy. He suggested, as I understood, focusing on large capacity production that could be made "cleaner," including nuclear, natural gas, and the cleaner forms of coal burning. While I agree that the magnitude of our energy problems require large scale solutions, I am always curious at how quickly distributed solutions are dismissed as being a component of an overall policy solution. Unfortunately, the session was too abbreviated to really push the issue.

- Professor Naylor forced me to an interesting, if unintended, connection between food policy and energy policy. I'm still sorting the thinking out on this, but it basically works like this:

1. We are confronting a supply problem in the world energy markets. The increasing demand for energy, driven by growing economies and growing populations, can not be met by our current, known energy production capacities. We need to innovate on the ability of the world economy to deliver energy (and when you tie in climate policy, clean energy) to the marketplace.

2. In the 1940s and 1950s, the world confronted a supply problem in food markets. Population growth created greater demand for food than was immediately available. Investments were made in food technology, specifically fostering the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was successful in increasing world food supply, which, in turn, certainly staved off a lot of human destitution. However, simply addressing the supply problem did not address the challenge of world hunger. Massive logistical problems, failure of political will and infrastructure (notably, corrupt/incompetent third-world governments failing to deliver on food aid provided by incompetent/corrupt multinational aid and relief agencies, including UN and GATT), failures in wealth distribution to the poorest segments of economies, and disproportionate population growth at the bottom of the demographic pyramids (from both an income and a poverty level) thwarted a purely supply-side solution to the food problem.

So, the question I have, with this history of food policy behind us, is why do we continue to think of the energy problem as strictly a supply issue?

Not that I have a pat answer to this question, but the inability of the political, economic, and academic leaders to address either the demand side of the equation or the equality issues bound up in how resources get consumed fails to take our analyses of these problems off charts and graphs and into the human dimensions of the real world.

Still, a very compelling talk, with a lot of interesting issues to follow up on.

An Inconvenient Truth

2007-10-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth on DVD the other night. Overall, I thought the movie was quite good - although I find Al Gore to be a trying representative for the issue (particularly as the face/voice who is used to personalize the issue), even while I recognize that as a political champion of climate change, he has done an outstanding and tireless job. I should also add that I think he is dead right on the issue, and represents the science, the politics, and the moral imperatives of the debate extremely well. That said, a few further comments on the film, and a few related articles that have recently caught my eye:

- I thought An Inconvenient Truth conveyed various facets of the very complex and staggeringly large-scale issue of climate change extremely well. I was pleased at how well, in general, the film did in representing the science of climate change, including the core physics of how greenhouse gases work, the methods, data, and conclusions of long-term observation of key indicators of climate change (primarily temperature and atmospheric CO2 levels), and the relationship between human behavior and greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, I thought the film struck the right balance between scientifically-grounded projection of the impacts of climate change and sensationalism when trying to illustrate what the consequences might be in human and visual terms (ice shelves dissipating, threats to polar wildlife, shifts in local weather patterns, increased frequency and intensity of catastrophic weather events, etc.).

- In framing the question of political will (particularly, in America), I thought the movie was effective at illustrating the human consequences of climate change, drawing analogies to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, presenting time-lapse projections of Lower Manhattan, invoking the impact on sub-Saharan Africa and tying in geo-political and humanitarian tragedies that will be second-order impacts, like Darfur. I also thought that the movie did a good job explaining the non-linear nature of climate change. The shift in understanding of the impact of climate change from higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and melting ice caps to increased incidence of catastrophic natural disasters, increased intensity of resource-driven human conflict, and the potential for massive human casualty is the only way to really drive home the moral dimensions of this issue that will confront us in the coming generations.

- Acknowledging the disproportionate impact that America, specifically, has in creating and failing to address climate change (thus far) was a necessary angle, and one the film did well. Calling out the lack of political will and the need for political and moral leadership on this issue may bask Al Gore in a kind light, but it is also absolutely necessary.

- By communicating the economic opportunity and loss of competitive and technology advantage created by the obstinacy of our political and business leaders on tackling energy efficiency as core priorities of economic policy and business innovation helps to frame the economic debate that is inextricable from climate change in the proper terms.

- I thought Al Gore did a particularly good job of aligning the political choice of taking meaningful action to address climate change, by individual Americans, as well as by America as a whole, with the legacy and self-image America has of making heroic political choices, from the founding of the nation, to the abolition of slavery, through the confrontations with fascism and totalitarianism in World War II and the Cold War. As a political narrative, I think this is the strongest positioning of the climate change issue that can be broadly understood and supported by the country, at large.

My few quibbles with the movie:

- While the movie represented the science of climate change well, it also managed simultaneously to undermine the seriousness of the analytics by presenting baffling and simplistic cartoons immediately after two of the more compelling scientific segments. I don't know if this was a direction necessitated by making the movie accessible to a young audience, but it struck me as doing a dis-service to the science in the rest of the movie.

- The closing credits of the movie highlighted choices and actions available to individuals to change their behavior to positively impact climate change, although they were strangely muted, both in the credits and on the movie's website (which has a disappointing focus on self-promotion equal to education and advocacy...) What continually shocks me is how the movie, and Gore, while very clearly calling climate change a moral issue, refuse to focus the responsibility of every individual in contributing to this crisis, and the need for, yes, sacrifice. If people really believe that climate change will be a global crisis of the magnitude being described, than it is disappointing that so many advocates seem comfortable leaving their audiences with the impression that this is a crisis that can be addressed by changing your lightbulbs, weather-proofing your windows, and sending an email to your Senators and Representatives.

Tackling the question of material sacrifice, understanding that we may have to engage in less freedom to travel, to buy big houses and big cars, consume lots of things, is the hardest question in helping us to address our environmental problems. With the exception of a handful of people with a deep faith in technology innovation to address climate and sustainability issues, I don't know anybody who has thought deeply about these issues who believes that individual consumer behavior in America (now being replicated throughout the world, whenever economically possible) can continue on pace without increasing the stress on the Earth's environmental systems.

An Inconvenient Truth was a useful movie, but I remain skeptical that the necessary changes in behavior (and, consequently, political and market dynamics) can be invoked in America until a line connecting the human consequences of climate change to the fundamental lifestyle choices made by individuals. It's a difficult question, surely, but one that cannot be left by the wayside in an attempt to assure everybody that, although everything is not all right, everything will be all right.

A couple of recent articles related to climate change that bear comment:

- Salon summarizes a spate of articles in the wake of the San Diego wildfires that try to use the fires as an illustration of the consequences of climate change, even though the ability to link such specific local tragedies to an issue like climate change is quite difficult:

Fire, flood, drought, hurricanes: In a world where climate change is predicted to usher in an era of extreme weather events, the temptation for impatient activists to treat each new unsettling outburst of Mother Nature as proof that the end is no longer nigh, but busting in the door, is irresistible.

For some crusaders, giving in to that sensationalist urge isn't just a guilty pleasure, but a strategic necessity, a way of evening up the rhetorical playing field. For example, writing in Grist, Glenn Hurowitz urges urges environmentalists not to be shy in exploiting the Southern California wildfires. The right wing, he notes, rarely demonstrates any compunctions about taking advantage of disaster to score political points. Case in point: JunkScience.com's Steven Milloy is already asserting that timber-management practices, i.e., restrictions on logging, are to blame for the loss of thousands of homes in Southern California.

A good idea, to seize upon this very emotional and current news item as a means for talking about a pressing, but long-term and abstract issue like climate change? I'm not sure, particularly given how important it is to establish beyond impeachment the scientific credentials of climate change within the political consciousness of the country, but we'll surely see if it works or backfires.

- An almost impossibly simplistic and mis-guided back-and-forth between Steven Landsburg and Joe Romm on the economic decision-making that might influence climate change policy on Slate.com. So many poor arguments, I'm not sure where to begin.

With Landsburg's original article, I actually agree with his premise and believe that it is important: a central question in how we view our options with respect to climate change is how much a person values their own right to certain material privileges versus the right of any other person (whether an abstract future person or an abstract person living in a 3rd world country right now) to life, health, a basic standard of living, and opportunity in life. It's often incredible to me how few people who study economics in the context of either environmental or social externalities understand this question. And Landsburg, having articulated the question, also clearly does not, either. His rhetorical framing of the trade-off occurring between you, now, and some stranger born 1000 years in the future fails to understand either the science or the moral dimensions of the climate change issue. His "modeling" of economic growth and the potential for "good" to come out of climate change demonstrates an understanding of economics that fails to leave the spreadsheet, dealing without insight into the uncertainty of economic growth (forget about growth necessarily bound to stability of ecological and economic conditions) or to the human consequence of massive upheavals and changes in the economy.

Romm, in his rebuttal, lands one great point, and then immediately undermines it. Romm is able to draw out the real concern of climate change - that it will have significant impact on human life and livelihoods within the span of one or two generations, and the uncertainty and magnitude of impact on human life is likely to escalate unless we can change the dynamics of our current carbon emissions patterns.. We probably aren't in a great position to change the immediate consequences, the damage is probably done. But without a very significant change in our carbon emissions and energy policy, we are likely to lose control of our ability to improve the chances of future generations to address and adapt to the consequences of climate change, as well as our own ability to manage the crises that will arise within the next fifty years. After making this point Romm inexplicably decides that the right way to frame climate change is by suggesting that we won't have to make changes to our lifestyles. Unfortunately, the equation here just doesn't map, unless you somehow believe that world population is going to magically stabilize, that new carbon-neutral technologies are going to materialize on large scales without a changed consumption pattern driving demand, and that the rest of the world is going to freeze their quality of lives at relatively lower level so we can preserve ours at a much higher level. Bullshit. I'm consistently confused whether this demonstrates a lack of understanding by the political leaders of this movement, or a calculation that the message of sacrifice won't sell, but unfortunately, without broaching that conversation, we don't change the political and economic dynamics necessary to face up to climate change.

If you recognize the magnitude and uncertainty of the human damage that a changing climate may create then you recognize the need to change fundamental behaviors in response.

Failure

2007-10-22T19:39:00.000-07:00

As advertising embraces the absurd with greater fervor each day (or so it seems), will it also reach out to pathos? Can you predicate a successful advertising campaign on failure? Is the advertisement above about failure?

Recycling Is Stupid

2007-10-16T21:43:00.001-07:00

A headline from a Businessweek article that caught my eye:

Green Guru Calls PC Recycling 'Stupid'

Should we hang the editor for mis-representing the article entirely, or give him a raise for getting me to read it? Salient excerpt:

Recycling IT equipment is "stupid" and should not be the top concern within a company's eco-agenda, according to an environmental expert.

Instead, companies should focus on finding kit that can be reused, with accessible parts that can be replaced easily, rather than recycled, according to a representative of the UK government's Envirowise project - which hands out free advice to businesses on green issues.

Rest of the article here.

The Left in The Middle East?

2007-10-16T21:37:00.000-07:00

Quick question: can anybody point me to a good history of what happened to the left in the Middle East? I know it was a casualty of the geo-political struggles of the Cold War, at some level. But isn't a fundamental political issue we should be concerned with the fact that the poor and disenfranchised in the Middle East (or in the Islamic world, more broadly) have no one to speak for them but the Imams?

I Ran So Far Away

2007-10-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

First, enjoy a light-hearted moment courtesy of SNL, before the copyright police make them take it down. Let it go, Richard D. James!

Next, a couple of random thoughts. KS is giving me a hard time about a previous post, so let me try to re-cast my thinking on this one:

In 2003, there were two trains of thought that I could follow on why it would make sense to invade Iraq. Again, let me iterate that I did not buy into either of these. But I could trace the arguments from end to end and understand how, for someone with a fundamentally different set of values and beliefs about how the world works (call it a more "optimistic" outlook), these arguments might lead you to believe that an invasion of Iraq was a viable enterprise which might achieve real strategic goals.

The first rationale was the Saddam is a Bad Man rationale - which bundled the threat of WMD, the state-sponsor of terrorism classification, and the Saddam is a murderer and a danger to his own people indictment into an argument that essentially boiled down to, Saddam is a Bad Man who may potentially be dangerous and we need to remove him at any cost. This argument half-embraced a moral/humanitarian-imperative for the war, and half a defensive/strategic rationale. Neither really stood up at the time (why not apply more diplomatic pressure? wasn't containment working?), but were arguments that could be embraced broadly, across party lines in the U.S., palatable by heads of states of foreign governments. It's the floppy rationale that Christopher Hitchens still so lamely props up.

The second rationale, which was rarely engaged at the level of public policy, was a new application of the Domino Theory. Basically, we had an opportunity to rationalize an invasion of Iraq, we believed it would be easy to win the invasion and maintain a peace. There was a willing population in Iraq who would work to build a stable, pluralistic state that would be enriched by oil revenues which would (conveniently) flow to the West. In essence, we were rolling the dice in hopes of achieving the dual strategic goals of securing access to one of our major energy sources and fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the Middle East. I think this approach was strategically flawed to begin with, but its a moot point, since we've undermined any strategic opportunity through botched tactics.

What concerns me about the recent posturing with respect to Iraq (by the current Bush administration, by the Republican front-runners, by the lack of ferocious disavowals by certain leading Democrats, by resonant comments by certain Western European leaders) is that neither of the rationales provided above, nor any other discernible rationale, warrants a military engagement with Iran (or anybody else). War has not been effective in disrupting terrorist activities, not from the perspective of diminishing the consequence of terrorism on Western lives (in the sense of dying), not from the perspective of making our lives less full of terror (in the sense of being paranoid), not in winning hearts and minds of future terrorists or non-terrorists, not even in disrupting the flow and organization of terrorist networks. War has not been effective in changing the short-term or long-term political dynamics in the Middle East. So what rationale could such a large collection of people have in posing such a fundamentally unsound strategy?

What I reject, and to short-circuit KS's reply, is that this is driven by the power and greed of a handful of cronies. I don't think this explains the behavior of such a wide swath of people engaging in this debate, and if it does, then either all people in power or corrupt, or the corrupt people have so much power that it makes any concern or action about the issue irrelevant. So we'll just walk past that particular argument.

What concerns me more is a deeper line of thinking that basically says the population growth of Islam, both in terms of international demographics, as well as within many western countries, is an alarming force that we (leaders of Western countries) are in no position to stop. There is nothing within the fundamentally pluralist/capitalist view of the world that would allow us to squelch this growth. Moreover, Islam is fundamentally incompatible with our pluralist/capitalist view of the world. This is why, even though we are worried about the demographic shifts posed by India, China, and Latin America, we are not worried as concerned about those trends -- India, China, and Latin America have proven that they can embrace a pluralist/capitalist view of the world. We can work with those people. We can compete with those people on common terms.

So the issue here isn't racism, per se, or even a religious conflict, in terms of Christianity vs. Islam. But what it also isn't is a narrow war on terrorism, or on radicalized Islam. It is an effort to fundamentally destabilize any strong or coherent Islamic identity -- because if we cannot slow the rate of growth of Islamic populations, perhaps we can weaken the influence of Islam over those populations.

That's my crack-pot theory.

But it maybe explains nutty commercials like this one from the Romney campaign, which purposefully and cravenly conflates varying aspects of Islam -- setting the table for a us vs. them conversation not far off in our political future.

Fear of A Muslim World?

2007-10-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

From Flickr user Luke Robinson

I read Seymour Hersh's October 8th story in the New Yorker warning of an ascending view within the Bush Administration that a confrontation with Iran is a possible, even necessary, strategic initiative. An excerpt:

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

There is no level at which I understand such a set of actions as being a good idea, and at a personal level, if America were to act out against Iran without material provocation, I believe that I would have to leave the country, as the government's behavior, and our complicity in its acts, do not reflect any value or ideal that I cherish about America.

I say this as someone who, in 2003, could at least intellectually rationalize the invasion of Iraq as a massive geo-political gambit - one that has clearly failed. Not that I ever supported or believed in the war -- I thought it was wrong to begin with. But the "domino theory" at play in the build-up to the war, however divorced from reality, could, at least, be sophistically pursued to a logical end.

Not so any action against Iraq. We are militarily incapable of sustaining an engagement with Iran, and more so, I would expect opening a second front for our current armed forces might materially impact our capacity for preserving our national security (of course, I'm not expert in this). Strategically, attacking Iran will do nothing to dismantle the terrorist networks who may actually act out through violence in the short term. In the long term, entering a conflict with Iran will only reaffirm the impression, through the Muslim world and well-beyond, into much of the developing world, generally, that America is a capricious and violent power which carries neither logic nor empathy into its engagements with the non-white rest of the world. As has happened in Iraq, it will beget more antipathy for America, and "create" more terrorists. While saber-rattling may be happening in France and the UK, as well, such actions will no doubt strain the credibility of the US with the other international actors who are growing in importance, like China, India, or Brazil. Truthfully, these exercises in short-sighted bravado will leave a legacy of distrust, which we had only recently come close to mending in the aftermath of Vietnam and our fiascos in Latin America.

So what drives this? Honestly, I am confused, and, although this is rampant speculation, I am reminded of a conversation I was party to with some Indian relations and their friends in an out-of-the-way rental hall (for a baby shower) one afternoon last month in New Jersey. In this conversation, a lone young man, eating a plate of Indian food, rattled on about how "the Democrats were all corrupt," and "Bill Clinton was an idiot, would you rather live under Clinton's presidency or Bush's!" and "George Bush is the only guy who has the fucking balls to stand up to the Muslims!" All of this fairly insane ranting was informed, as far as I could tell, by an over-healthy dose of right-wing talk radio, a misguided machismo, a belief that Republicans were more likely to not tax this guy's money, and rooted in the very complex relationship that some Indian Hindus have with Muslims, derived from the particular political and cultural experiences of India. From this incoherence, one theme struck me, in the form of the somewhat apocryphal argument that became a reprise: "Do you know what the number one name for a baby in Engalnd is? Mohammmed!"

Is this the rub? Are we really enacting a war of civilizations? Is there a fear at work, at some conscious or sub-conscious level, of a Muslim world? Are we not at war with "the terrorists," or "radical Islam," but simply the whole of Islam itself? Not because we are in opposition to it, or it to us, but simply because it is not us?

Rampant speculation, I know, but as the perversity of our political discourse heightens, and as a truly fateful political act looms, I don't really know what else to think...

You've Got To Want It

2007-10-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

I took an interest in a couple of armchair analyses of Barack Obama's psyche and its impact on his political campaign strategy, posted by Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

Obama isn't so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He's trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn't snark, he's really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.

But that's not how it works in this country. I don't know if it really works otherwise anywhere else. But you have to really want it, come out and say it, take it. I thought about qualities that describe what is at issue. 'Toughness' seems to bound up in meta-national security mumbojumbo. 'Ruthlessness' sounds too, well, ruthless. You have to want it enough that you reach out and take it. Which isn't always pretty and admirable. But that's what it takes.

At the level of remove from which I am observing this, I can't say that I entirely disagree. And, in fact, what makes Obama appealing to me is exactly this integrity (shall we call it that?), which isn't really an effective way to succeed at political campaigns (and, too often, not a recipe for succeeding in many of the competitive aspects of life itself). Maybe Chris Matthews is right, after all...

We Feel Fine + Universe

2007-10-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

While he was still posting earlier in the summer, JA posted Jonathan Harris' talk from the TED website about his very cool data mining and visualization projects, notably We Feel Fine and Universe. As with most of the TED lectures, I recommend you watch Harris' talk, as it speaks for itself. If you need a little context before spending twenty minutes listening to the lecture, well, OK. We Feel Fine and Universe are both projects that collect data from the Inetrnet in near real-time (blogs containing the words "I feel fine" in one case, news articles in another), analyze the data for both statistical and semantic information, and then present them in cool, artful, if a bit high-concept, interfaces that allow you to immerse yourself in the information, and explore in a number of ways. In each case, I find the projects compelling for similar reasons:

- For the artful visualizations, which function at the level of candy -- to explore and play with;
- For the networks of meaning that are made transparent and accessible through the data mining and various applications that enable you to interact with the data;
- For the basic, underlying notion that we can learn something about the world and make connections by understanding the patterns and connections implicit in the mass of individual, distinct pieces of information that the Internet allows people to contribute and make findable;

My only criticism of the projects (which I'm sure the designers aren't terribly concerned with), is if they are useful? Clearly, the information surfaced from the data analysis has value, in creating relationships between people, in highlighting connections between ideas and events. Can these projects, or some similar application, make this information relevant?

Eat or Drive?

2007-10-08T21:08:00.000-07:00

A spate of articles in the past few weeks have called into question whether the 'Ethanol boom' is going bust. Judged largely from the downward trends of the stock performance of many ethanol biofuel companies, but drawing also from long-standing criticisms of ethanol subsidies as a deeply flawed government policy, there has been a clamor that ethanol, in America, at least, has been a failed energy policy. The reason for this failure is laid partly at the feet of the policies themselves, in creating subsidies for a fuel that has not yet found sufficient use, and partly at the implementation of the policies, specifically, in the lack of investment made in fostering the demand side of the market for ethanol, and in creating the delivery infrastructure for bringing ethanol to the consumer. Every critique of ethanol has, at some level of subtext, a questioning of the motivations of the public policy. Was it driven by smart energy policy, or simply to satisfy the powerful agribusiness constituencies which control so much of the farmland in the US? As observers like Daniel Gross in Slate have concluded:

Critics of ethanol have long argued that ethanol production subsidies are a half-baked industrial policy scheme intended to reward politically powerful farmers in the Midwest. The gulf between the rich incentives for creating ethanol supply and the poor incentives for creating wholesale and retail distribution suggest the critics were absolutely right.

An early death-knell, perhaps, but one made the more interesting by a complementary article in the New York Times that emerged at the same time, describing how the diversion of corn crops into biofuels have driven up the price of the commodity, essentially pricing buyers, trying to secure corn for food aid programs, out of the market. One ill-advised, if well-intentioned public policy inadvertantly gutting another (as foreshadowed in a lengthy Foreign Policy article from earlier in the summer).

Not that this most recent set of concerns signals that giant of a catastrophe. Unfortunately, neither food air nor ethanol have proven to be fundamental solutions to the problems of hunger and energy supply that they are trying to address. The silver lining, in this case, is that the situation is more bleak.

Green Monsters

2007-10-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

Flipping through a magazine the other evening, I stopped on a two page advertising spread by Chevron entitled "Chevron Presents: Energyville." Billed as an "energy game," Chevron asks "This is your city. How will you power it? How do we meet growing global demand? What new kinds of fuels and power sources should we develop? And how do we safeguard the environment at the same time?" The reader is then directed to play the game, hosted at the website www.willyoujoin.com.

Now, it is easy to be dismissive of the efforts of massive energy companies to engage in fundamentally changing the dynamics of our energy economy. Their generally upbeat and eco-friendly advertising campaigns, which cheerily suggest that we've got a problem, but, hey, together we can fix it are a little to, well, cheery and upbeat. And I have no illusions that the extremely rich and extremely powerful people who run these companies are concerned as much about tackling global sustainability problems as they are about finding new markets in which to create better margins (after all, when they send the lucky one percent into space after we've despoiled this lovely planet, no doubt the heads of oil companies and their antecedents will be first in line at the launching pad).

But it can't be denied that each and every energy company, whether on the exploration/ production-side or the delivery-side, has a distinct strategic interest in understanding the dynamics of energy in coming years, influencing the market to align with the investments in technology that they are making, and innovating more efficient (and, consequently more eco-friendly, one would hope) solutions to our collective energy needs. Nor can it be denied that the actors most readily positioned to dramatically influence our energy economies are the energy companies themselves. And outside a small coterie of academics and advocacy groups, no one has been forced to think quite so deeply as the energy companies.

Which all sounds like a resounding defense of the Goliaths! Not meant to be. But what has caught my interest is the effort made, in advertising and public relations, at least, by energy companies to engage the public in a dialogue about our energy future. And with the resources available to them, energy companies have been able to provide slicker tools to help the conversation move forward, and often are doing quite a good job at putting out worthwhile information and analyses. Take the aforementioned game at www.willyoujoinus.com, BP's Carbon Footprint Calculator or Statistical Review of World Energy site, or ConEd's more humble, but useful campaign to educate consumers on household energy conservation tips.

Are my fundamental concerns about energy consumption allayed? No. Do I think that these resources are actually useful in furthering questions about looming energy problems into our consumer consciousness? Yes.

Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib

2007-10-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

On Friday night, I went to the Director's Guild of America theater to listen to Errol Morris and Phillip Gourevitch discuss Abu Ghraib as part of the New Yorker Festival. Errol Morris is apparently making a documentary centered on the photographs that exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal, which, after watching a few clips of footage and listening to the talk, I think is much needed. The discussion itself wasn't terribly enlightening, but I found three points engaging:

1. Errol Morris raised a particular interest in the inability of photographs to convey the truth of the scenario they depict, because the focus on the subject matter within the frame of the photograph, and the lack of context for what is taking place outside of the frame (both literally, who is outside the frame, and more figuratively, in the sense of, how did this scene come to take place). While this is philosophically an interesting line of inquiry, it is drawn into sharp focus in the case of Abu Ghraib, where the seven soldiers, the seven "bad apples," who were brought to task for the photos at Abu Ghraib as a result of the photos they took and were captured in, while very little else about the system of torture and administrative neglect that apparently exists and is endorsed in our current war has really resonated in the culture, broadly. In fact, for much of the horror depicted in the photos, many of the seven soldiers wre directly involved. They only happened to get caught, by virtue of the photos they took and leaked. And as Morris highlighted the irony: these same photos, taken not by a low-level enlisted soldier, but by a photojournalist, would have been cause for international recognition.

An essay on Morris' site details the case in more depth.

2. The more compelling takeaway, for me, which was effectively, if implicitly, forwarded by Gourevitch during a couple of impassioned rhetorical flourishes in their conversation, drew attention to how truly deep the moral stain of the "interrogation" techniques employed by our government when considered against our self-image as a nation. And a greater sin than the actual acts of physical and psychological brutality and wanton and reckless policing that is enforced in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere in the name of our defense, or perhaps a sin that simply inculpates us more broadly, is our refusal to really acknowledge these acts of torture for what they are. The case made by Gourevitch and Morris is not only that the seven soldiers responsible for the photos were essentially scapegoated, deflecting scrutiny from the military policies and governance that allowed the scenes of torture to become real, but that the media, and the public, in focusing on those photos which showed these seven soldiers acting out stupid acts of ugly Americanism, further tainted with revolting/fascinating sexual overtones, failed to look hard at all of the other photos released at the same time, which were simple documents of brutality. Our fixation with the sensational allowed us to glide right past the real issue -- that we're (once again) enacting random and inhumane violence against helpless people (not good people, just helpless).

Watching this program on a Friday night, I found myself not necessarily learning anything new, but simply being reminded about how low we've fallen as a nation, and in terms of our national conscience, how little we seem to care.

If you are reading this and find yourself wondering what you missed through the week-long sensationalist coverage of Abu Ghraib that's faded into the background, check out the photos on Salon (some of which I've posted as an unwelcome but necessary reminder as part of this post), as well as the Wikipedia posting, which provides a number of useful references on the scandal.

As a coda, I post a video from TalkingPointsMemo, where the White House press secretary engages in the current political standard of prevarication, non-statements, and circular definitions as a smokescreen to avoid engaging in meaningful discourse. While the political actors and institutions drift further into meaninglessness and immorality, I am only left wondering how each of the individual's acting out these absurd roles manage to continue. What happened to shame?

Not Enough? Doerr on Green Tech

2007-09-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

KPCB is a remarkable organization. They have been incredibly effective at identifying, investing in, and cultivating truly revolutionary ideas over the past 30 years. I have worked within the KPCB family, at a low enough level not to be noticed conspicuously, but at a high enough level to have some visibility into how Kleiner does things. Fundamentally, the ability of KPCB to marshal talent to create markets and solve problems through innovation in technologies and services has been impressive. And in the past few years, Kleiner's increasing attention on "green tech" and questions of long term environmental sustainability has been a positive development - even if a $200M net investment is, to steal John Doerr's reprise, "not enough." Not that I'm really knocking the investment and, heck yes, I'd love to be involved in another Kleiner company tackling green tech problems..

So I was very curious to hear what Mr. Doerr, the talisman of Kleiner's success in the last fifteen years, had to say about green technology and our looming environmental problems. Mostly, I'd suggest that you watch the video, as I think it speaks for itself - and the message is clear: while many actors, from Wal-mart in reducing its energy footprint to Brazil shifting to biofuels, have been able to successfully innovate to mitigate their environmental impact, the scale of change is simply not big enough yet. And I whole-heartedly agree with that basic analysis.

Beyond that, I do have some comments:

- Doerr identifies four agents of change ("four lessons") that can be influenced by entrepreneurs: Companies, Individuals (i.e., Consumers), Policies, and Radical Innovation. While I agree with his implicit commentary, that the efforts of any given influential individual (i.e., TED audience member) might be best targeted at a company, a government policy, or invested in innovation, and not targeted at changing consumer behavior, I think that Doerr, and most of the policy makers, innovators, technocrats, and academics give short shrift for the need to change the behaviors of individuals, and the need to address individuals directly through politics and cultural dialogue. I'll come back to this;

- Doerr frames the market opportunity of addressing the world's energy crisis as a $6 trillion dollar market. I agree. This market is huge. I also firmly believe that market forces, and disruptive innovation to meet market needs can radically change both the supply side economics of meeting a market need and the demand side behaviors in creating that need. What I do find curious, however, is framing the energy market as the market that needs to be satisfied to address the world's sustainability crisis (or put another way, isn't sustainability a much bigger question than a looming energy crisis)? Isn't energy always an input to other goods and services? Like transportation, primary industrial processes, commercial and residential electricity, etc. Don't we need to start thinking about how to fundamentally change the dynamics of those markets, not just focus on how to more efficiently solve the energy supply question?

- Selling a vision is a key part of what any entrepreneur must do, particularly entrepreneurs trying to market disruptive technologies. Do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? What kind of house will I live in? What kind of car will I drive? What will the place that I live in look like? I think some of the symbolic examples that are drawn forth in the current conversation on green tech are useful in selling this vision: electric vehicles, biofuels, carbon markets. But do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? And are we effectively communicating that vision?

- At the end of his speech, Doerr urges his audience with a few calls to actions, exhorting them to "really think outside the box." His suggestions are all good: make going green "your gig," get carbon neutral (and buy carbon credits), join other leaders in lobbying for cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gases, use your personal power or rolodex to "go green."

But what about the potentially most seismic change: consume less?

Why is this meme never engaged by the business, political, and academic leaders who claim to be serious thinkers about the environment?

Personally, I don't think it is either a naive conversation to engage, nor one that necessarily a compromise in quality of life or achievement. There are abundant reasons to believe that a less materially-driven life and culture will not only improve our ability to change market dynamics and address the salvo of "not enough," but will actually improve our quality of life, as well. But if our business and political leaders refuse to engage in this conversation, then the core dynamic driving the demand side of our market equations, and the A in our good old IPAT formulation, that dynamic will never change.

Selling the Absurd, part 1 of Infinity

2007-09-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

Advertising is on the march. Yes, if there is one thing that is on the march, it is advertising -- far out-pacing anything else that might be on the march. From the subway to the bus shelter to the elevator to your mailbox to your e-mail box to your Google search results to your blogs to my blog, there it is, another opportunity to sell. So no wonder we've run out of ideas, of how to sell, of what to sell, and advertising has, once again, embraced the absurd.

Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the artfulness of this go round with the absurd. I just wanted to mention two recent offenders that have caught my attention.

If you ride the subway in New York City, you cannot avoid Windorphins. Brightly colored signage adorning the insides of cars, in bus shelters, on billboards - showing happy-looking Pokemon-like characters and bearing slogans that mean absolutely nothing. Nauseating? Yes. Cynical? Absolutely. Effective? Totally. I don't know how many subway cars I've been in when some young New Yorker asks, in that ever-flattening accent that young New Yorkers are increasingly seeming to have, "What Are Windorphins?" to which his/her friend might respond "I think we learned about it in class," and a third says, "Let's look it up on the Internet when we get to so-and-so's apartment." So, winner for Ebay. And, of course, I did come home one night to look up exactly what it is. So cheers to whatever ad agency fucker came up with this annoying campaign.

Next, the more charming and less invasive woot.com. What is woot? A website, that apparently sells only one product a day that popped up in the modest banner above my Gmails one day. Reluctantly, but unfailingly, I clicked on it. And, apparently, selling one product a day is an effective way of doing business. Per Woot's own site:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.

So, I guess the engine of innovation chugs on, fueled increasingly by banner ads and billboards. To badly appropriate a morbid Townes Van Zandt track, well, I guess its better than waitin' around to die...

No Child Left Behind: Measuring Progress

2007-09-26T19:39:00.001-07:00

"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured."— President Bush, New York, Sept. 26, 2007

Alright, so we'll start with a cheap shot. But, following that, a serious question. Yesterday's NYT published an article on the most recent round of national standardized test scores, which may or may not prove the success (or lack of success) of the No Child Left Behind act:

America’s public school students are doing significantly better in math since the federal No Child Left Behind law took effect in 2002, but gains in reading achievement have been marginal, with performance declining among eighth graders, according to results of nationwide reading and math tests released today.

The results also showed that the nation has made only incremental progress in narrowing the historic gaps in achievement between white and minority students, a fundamental goal of the federal law.

The tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and administered by the Department of Education, will be carefully scrutinized by lawmakers and educators debating whether to reauthorize the law this year, and if so, what changes to make.

They offer ammunition to both sides of the issue: the business leaders and other groups who support the law’s renewal, and the teachers’ unions and groups who say the law’s emphasis on standardized testing hurts schools.

So, given this ambiguous assessment of the impact of a public policy, and given the increasingly bizarre political environment surrounding education reform (no sane person can deny that we need it, but it's hard to figure who's got the right intentions in these battles...), can anyone point me in the direction of any meaningful evaluations of No Child Left Behind, or other efforts, national or local, at education reform? And more broadly, any interesting discussions on how the impact of educational policy (or techniques) can be effectively measured?

Silent Debate

2007-09-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, Harry Shearer, whose commentary on the absurdities of American life embrace that very absurdity...

India: The Coming Malaise?

2007-09-17T20:46:00.001-07:00

Victoria Station in Mumbai

Over dinner in Kolkata last January with my parents and a professor friend of theirs, a fact was casually dropped that was actually quite stunning: the size of India's middle class ranks 200+ million strong, and growing. To put it in context, that is about two-thirds the population of the United States and just less than half the size of the EU. And while this middle class may not be quite as rich as their Western counterparts, their parity in purchasing power is not quite as far a cry as it was even twenty years ago. To paint a picture, a middle class in India may not own a free-standing house, two cars, and a computer, but they are likely to have a scooter, a TV, and a cell phone.

In terms of access to media and connection with global cultural references, they are quickly and noisily arriving at the same status as their global peers. In terms of material possessions, they may be lagging, although given the population density of India (and since most of these middle class are urban-dwellers), their net impact, both positive on the economy, and negative on the environment, are within the realm of comparison to their peers, at a local scale (of course, in terms of global impact, nobody can touch us Americans...) And when you consider the potential for upward mobility, the sky is the limit.

Consider this framing paragraph from a recent article in Prospect magazine:

As the actual Mother India celebrates the 60th anniversary of her independence, there is—as in Jaya Mary's life—both surging optimism and crushing despair about her future. As the saying goes, everything and its opposite is true in India. The seven Indian Institutes of Technology rank near the top of global surveys, and job offers to graduates from the Indian Institutes of Management rival those to graduates of the famous US business schools; yet a third of the country is still illiterate. Three hundred million Indians live on less than $1 a day—a quarter of the world's utterly poor—yet since 1985, more than 400m (out of a total population of 1bn) have risen out of relative poverty—to $5 a day—and another 300m will follow over the next two decades if the economy continues to grow at over 7 per cent a year. Population growth, even at a slower pace, will mean that there will still be millions below the poverty line, but the fall in number will be steady. At the other end of the scale, India has the largest number of dollar billionaires outside the US and Russia.

While this is both a true and somewhat poetic discussion of the poles that characterize modern Indian society, the article is not interesting in its celebration of India's diversity, or in its praise of the rise of India's middle class. Rather, what draws my attention, and a thesis to which I subscribe through limited personal experience, is that as India's middle class grows richer, and just plain grows, it fails to become a politically conscious or engaged class. Rather than assume the mantle of leadership to tackle the nation's myriad ills, members of the middle class become concerned with consolidating their gains, exercising the benefits of their new status and wealth, and persevering forward on their personal and family journeys to wealth.

From the article:

Among the middle class, in much of the media, in the malls and airports, in houses (however small) with water and electricity, there is still a commitment to an India which plays a decisive role on the international stage—but now, instead of through "non-aligned" solidarity and ancient history, it is through software and finance. Ten years after the buzz caused by the nuclear tests, the middle classes take India's new status for granted; they simply assume it is India's due to be treated as the "equal" of the US and the rest, and move on to talk of economic opportunities. This commitment to their own idea of India and their central role in its economic rise makes the middle classes sure of themselves. But at the same time, their sense of citizenship is weak: they do not, on the whole, extend a sense of solidarity to the poor; they often do not acknowledge the role of the state in their own rise or its capacity to solve any of the country's problems; and they are, in general, politically apathetic.

What explains this introversion? Middle classes at all stages of development, whether in 19th-century Europe or now, distrust those who have not risen with them. Yet in more homogeneous societies, the better off are more likely to care for the worse off. Highly diverse societies, like India, find it more difficult to institutionalise such fellow feeling.

The key to the diversity of Indian society is the jati system—intermarrying among consanguineous groups with hereditary (if often notional) occupations. But these groups are also placed within the ancient hierarchy of the varna, or "caste," system—the fivefold division of society on the axis of ritual purity from priests to warriors to merchants to labourers to those beyond the possibility of purity and therefore untouchable. Over the centuries, there have been many efforts to extend a sense of common humanity across castes. The caste system has also allowed for unparalleled pluralism of belief and practice; according to the logic of purity, the Brahmin priest has no control over practices beyond his realm, making for a thrilling diversity of temples, festivals and deities. Nonetheless, the varna concept that people are intrinsically pure or impure has blighted the idea of citizenship on the subcontinent. And while the 1950 Indian constitution sought to end such division (which the British had exploited), caste sentiment still drives rural violence and the separation of privileged groups.

The social distance of caste is echoed in religious difference—above all in the existence of a large Muslim minority which makes India the largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia. While some hostile Hindus still question the Indianness of Muslims, the middle class contains about the same percentage of Muslims as does the population as a whole: about 13 per cent. (Caste distinctions that combine older Hindu divisions with newer Islamic social stratification prevail in Indian Islam, and middle-class Muslims tend to come from the traditional ashraf or "noble" sections of Muslim society.) But despite—or because of—constitutional guarantees of special rights for Muslims, there is a perennial worry over Muslim economic progress.

Aside from some extreme Hindu nationalists, I have never met a middle-class Indian who did not acknowledge the political equality of all Indians. The pride that middle-class Indians take in their democracy requires them to have an inclusive sense of Indianness, but not of citizenship. Middle-class Indians who feel little obligation to the poor tend to believe that they have made their contribution simply by becoming middle class. They focus on their own needs because they have overcome a great deal to get where they are and still fear slipping back. Moreover, they say, why give to the state when the money will just be wasted by corrupt politicians?

I would suggest reading the rest of the Prospect article, as it is interesting, and while I don't agree with all of its assertions, I think the core thesis has merit. Moreover, I think that the evolution of the Indian middle class (and true of China, as well) will be among the most influential factors in shaping the world we live in twenty years from now. And, as a word of caution against reading too much into the Prospect article, it is worth noting how young the Indian middle class is, both in terms of the relative brevity of the recent Indian economic expansion, dating to the early 1990s, and the age of the constituents of the class itself. Hardly a generation has elapsed, and perhaps it will be the call of the next generation of Indian middle class, those born into relative ease, to be more civic-minded, as this article in the New York Times suggests.

NYC - Green Master Plan

2007-09-17T20:35:00.001-07:00

I was not in New York this past Earth Day, so I guess I missed the detailed news about New York City's "Green Master Plan," as advocated by Mayor Bloomberg this past April. I have nothing but grudging respect for what Mr. Bloomberg has been able to accomplish in the city, and am intrigued by the scope of his plan, as well as some of the messaging being used to promote it (although I don't know how visible it actually is...)

I haven't read enough yet to have an opinion, but for more information, check out this official site.

Sustaining Junk

2007-09-14T21:53:00.001-07:00

In college, I studied economics and environmental science and policy. The two disciplines are very rarely harmonized, and people who think seriously about sustainability from an ecological perspective have been able to challenge a lot of assumptions core to economic modeling. When we consider the global ecological system, we are forced to account for behaviors, constraints, and outcomes that are generally ruled out-of-bounds for the purpose of economic decision making - for example, performing cost-benefit calculations and making rational choices where the consequence must be spread over long time horizons, recognizing and valuing all externalities in a system, creating an accounting system for resources, like air and water, than aren't traditionally paid for with money, but which are fundamental to all economic transactions, understanding scarcity in situations like extinction, and so on.

For all the challenges that environmental thinking can pose to economics, a key vexing question that economics posed to ecological systems was the ability of the market, through demand, competitive advantage, and ultimately price, to foster technology innovations that would, at the right time and over time, allow us to address environmental problems through technological solutions. A key example of this has always been in energy, where one line of thinking projects that, as soon as the market conditions exist that make innovation in alternative energy feasible, that market need will be filled. And perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of such a set of innovations in green energy today.

A recent Slate.com article got me thinking again about this issue:

In an act of macroeconomic karma, materials thrown out by Americans—broken-down auto bodies, old screws and nails, paper—accounted for $6.7 billion in exports to China in 2006, second only to aerospace products. Junkyards may conjure up images of Fred Sanford's ratty collection of castoffs. But these days, scrap dealers are part of a $65 billion industry that employs 50,000 people, who together constitute a significant arc of a virtuous circle. The demand of China's factory bosses for junk—which they recycle to make all the junk Americans buy from China—creates jobs, tamps down the growth of the trade deficit, and might help save the planet.

Is it possible that one nation's folly in managing resources can be another nation's opportunity, and that on a global scale, the market will be efficient in distributing resources (and managing the impact on those natural resources need to sustain economies and fuel innovation?) It seems folly to blindly say yes, although I believe many business decision makers believe this to be true, if not in this exact framing, then as evidenced by the way they behave.

Where this strikes me as folly is that it fails to create the right incentives, culture, or organization (switching from economics to business) to address more efficient use of resources. It puts us in the wishful position of hoping that the market will create conditions to clean up its mess, rather than avoiding the mess in the first place. Put another way, it puts the burden of sustainability on policy makers, influencing the outcomes of a business system, rather then as a design challenge, influencing the initial objectives and processes of the system.

It is as a design challenge that sustainability becomes a truly influential idea for business and the economy, and while I'd like to return in further detail to this topic, I will leave off by highly recommending you watch the Bill McDonough video hosted on the TED site, above, as well as reading a bit about McDonough's Cradle 2 Cradle design philosophy - which can be consumed as a very interesting book (in both the intellectual and physical sense, the book itself having been designed according to the Cradle 2 Cradle principles), as well as on many websites, including McDonough's own website.

Joe Biden Writes Me Every Day

2007-09-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

Do I think Joe Biden is going to be elected President in 2008? Not really. Do I hope he has a major voice in the shaping of national policy, particularly foreign policy, our role in Iraq, and how we communicate American values to the world at large, from 2008 until he chooses to retire from public life? Absolutely.

I hope Biden's focus and investment in Iowa will pay dividends, and that he can stay a vital voice longer through the 2008 campaign cycle. I have been enamored with the directness, conviction, and clarity with which he has been able to address Iraq and other issues (notably, also Sudan) through the missives and videos that his campaign is producing. Will he prevail in Iowa? I certainly don't know politics well enough to predict.

But should he falter, in Iowa or later in the campaign cycle, I expect that he should play a major role in any Democratic administration - as a Secretary of State, Ambassador to the UN, or maybe even VP. Go Joe!

Sao Paolo: The Clean City

2007-09-14T19:16:00.000-07:00

Ignore for a moment that the clip above is an advertisement for Sky Movies, and focus on the small distortions in the landscape present throughout - no billboard advertisements. Empty canvases throughout Sao Paolo. As described in Businessweek:

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist's dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

In September last year, the city's populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the "visual pollution" caused by the city's 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city's streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted, their signs limited to 1.5 metres for every 10 metres of frontage. "It is hard in a city of 11 million people to find enough equipment and personnel to determine what is and isn't legal," reasoned Kassab, "so we have decided to go all the way."

Ah, Brazil. So what are the consequences? Still unclear, as far as I can tell, but a thoughtful post on an interesting blog (with links off, including photos), and another post in Adbusters, both worth a look.

Can we do this in the United States? Yeah, probably not.

Class Matters

2007-09-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

I want to whole-heartedly recommend the collection of New York Times essays and reporting that has been published under the title Class Matters. Ranging from fairly data-driven studies of how people's perception and the economic reality of class has changed in America over decades, to closely studied features of a wide range of archetypes that populate the current understandings of class in America. The reporting and analysis is excellent, and paired with often moving personal accounts that give weight and texture to the more abstract data, make this collection very compelling. The Times has also made much of the reporting available online, here, a site which I have not yet explored in detail. I expect to address many of the specific themes raised by different articles in the collection on their own terms, when I am a little less side-tracked by work, but definitely recommend this book - perfect subway or airplane reading, and thought-provoking through and through.

His Favorite Cartoon

2007-08-31T10:41:00.000-07:00

I expect TalkingPointsMemo will push this story to the level of scandal, and it seems to merit it:

This story in this morning's Post about Green Zone authorities putting out 'tip sheets' about visiting Democratic lawmakers that read like they were written by the RNC is a really big deal. It's all par for the course for this administration, how they've politicized every branch of the government and every agency, eroding democratic institutions in American while they pretended to build them in Iraq. In fact, from the start the White House tried to stock the Green Zone and the US occupation authority with GOP operatives. But I thought that had changed a little. This latest incident, though, should trigger a number of forced retirements and resignations.

But aside from the issue of politicizing the Green Zone, isn't this little tid-bit from the Post story even more odd?

But even such tight control could not always filter out the bizarre world inside the barricades. At one point, the three were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. Rubaie was watching children's cartoons.

When Moran asked him to turn it off, Rubaie protested with a laugh and said, "But this is my favorite television show," Moran recalled.

Porter confirmed the incident, although he tried to paint the scene in the best light, noting that at least they had electricity.

"I don't disagree it was an odd moment, but I did take a deep breath and say, 'Wait a minute, at least they are using the latest technology, and they are monitoring the world,' " Porter said. "But, yes, it was pretty annoying."

Now, depending on what cartoon it was ("Itchy & Scratchy," "The Road Runner"), I suppose there might

Random Economic Follow-Up

2007-08-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Still on the great Harvard magazine article, which among things, is serving as a great Econ 52 refresher:

Money flowing into the United States injects purchasing power into the economy unevenly—it affects certain sectors, such as housing, more than others. “Assume the world is divided into things that are tradable and things that are not,” says Jeffry Frieden. Hard goods, clothing, and most foods are tradable: they are transported easily across borders and are therefore subject to international competition. Haircuts, housing, medical care, restaurant food, and public transportation, on the other hand, are consumed where they are produced. Because these kinds of goods and services can’t be exported or imported, they are considered non-tradable. When foreigners are buying our currency, the dollar appreciates, making international goods relatively inexpensive. That leaves consumers with even more money to spend on non-tradables, such as housing and land. And because housing and land are not subject to foreign competition, their price goes up.

Is it plausible, through a combination of an increasingly global distributed base of high-value knowledge workers, that some of the services (hair cuts, medical care, restaurant food) described as non-tradable become tradable? To borrow from the Greeks, what if the best barber lives in Italy, and technology enables him to cut your hair remotely, let's say with robotic arm? Is that simply far-fetched? Does it matter, in terms of how capital flows, and how we value services?

No Reincarnation Allowed

2007-08-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

It's so crazy, it's funny. If it wasn't so sad. I need to make it to Tibet:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

And I need to move to China. The audacity of their insane policies is a little awe-ing.

By the way, are we all agreed that if the Dalai Lama chooses to reincarnate in America, he's fucked? I mean, how is that kid going to see his way clear of Grand Theft Auto, junior high, and McDonald's. This is not the place to find enlightenment. This is the place to invent a crazy religion out of nothing.

How Are We Paying For All Of This Stuff???!!!

2007-08-29T20:51:00.000-07:00

Through all of the economics courses I took, there have been a set of first principles that have never exactly sat well with me - maybe because I just didn't get them or maybe because they aren't taught well because they are fundamentally impractical questions. Generally, these questions occupy the outer bounds of economic questions - extremely microeconomic questions, like how assumptions about rational actors could really be used when considering, you know, humans, to macroeconomic questions, like how is wealth created, how do you value good & services that aren't financially accounted for, or whose value must be factored over long periods of time, or what happens when societies fundamentally consume more than they produce over long periods of time.

These abstract economic questions take on puzzling forms in my day to day life. For example, commuting on the subway in Manhattan, it's apparent that everybody, everybody - ghetto kids, grandparents on social services, day laborers, NYU students with no jobs and lots of debt, teachers! - have upwards of $500 dollars worth of products on them at any moment, every day. Cell phones, iPods, shoes, handbags, designer clothes, digital cameras. It's crazy. Where is all the money coming from to buy all of this? To wit, Harvard magazine has an interesting article tying our macroeconomic troubles, in terms of foreign accounts balances and national debt, with our individual consumption habits:

“When a country gets a capital inflow [such as the United States has now], generally speaking things are pretty good,” observes Jeffry Frieden, Stanfield professor of international peace. “It allows you to invest more than you save, and consume more than you produce. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that,” he notes. Firms do it all the time, and so do households. They borrow on the expectation that they will be more productive and better able to pay the money back in the future. The United States, for example, was “the world’s biggest debtor for a hundred years,” Frieden notes, “but the money was used to build the railroads and the canals and the factories and to improve the ports and to build our cities. It was used productively, and it worked. The question to ask now is not, ‘Is the country living beyond its means?’ The question is, ‘Is the money going to increase the productive capacity of the economy?’ Because if it just goes to getting everybody another iPod,” he warns, “then unless iPods make people more productive, there is going to be trouble down the road when the debt has to be serviced.”

Well worth the read.

Adorable Do-Gooders

2007-08-24T09:46:00.001-07:00

I cannot say enough good things about MF and JJF's incredible project, Kiva.org. And the good press just keeps rolling in. Check out the adorable video on Yahoo.

The Rich Have Inherited the Earth

2007-08-21T20:18:00.000-07:00

And we are them. Or so goes my simple reading of this New York Times review of a new book being published by UC-Davis economic historian Gregory Clark. The central thesis of Clark's work, based on analysis of economic data from the Middle Ages, is that demographic trends in those years lead to a downward social mobility where the progeny of the rich, imbued with a certain psychological disposition and value set, began to form a larger portion of society, fostering the shift from a cycle of subsistence to economic cycles where wealth was created, consolidated, and enhanced:

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

I won't form an opinion from the review alone, and hopefully will get to the book in the near future. In the mean time, you can read along with the folks at the Marginal Revolution blog.
Thanks to DL for forwarding the original article.

Happy 60th!

2007-08-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

India celebrates 60 years of independence. Amazing how far she's come.

Read the New York Times article covering celebrations in India and an accompanying essay by the historian Ramchandra Guha reflecting on and warning of the 60 year old conflicts betwen the two twins, India and Pakistan

Photos from Flickr Most Interesting search for "India Independence 60"

The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis

2007-08-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

I am a fan of Michael Lewis the writer, from Liar's Poker and Moneyball and the occasional essay. I am a fan because stylistically, he is a simple, direct writer, observant and funny. But I am more a fan because thematically, Lewis engages topics like work, business culture, and sports, the substance of both life and dreams for so many people, myself included, and renders them with clarity, honesty, intelligence, and humor. Writing about work and business culture, Lewis treats it not just as a diminishing, soul-crushing exercise foisted upon us, but as occupation, something we do, and some of us, some times, with tenacity, zeal, and inspiration. He conveys jobs and entire industries truly as livelihoods, pulsing, consuming, informed by both biography and history. But with perspective throughout, chronicling his subject's mania with an offset balance of dry humor and an eye for the absurd.

That said, The New New Thing was an entertaining read, brisk, but not particularly insightful. Ostensibly chronicling the culture of entrepreneurship that drove the growth of Silicon Valley from the late 1970s through to the end of the 1990s, The New New Thing is basically a character study of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape adorned with some half-drawn conclusions about character of entrepreneurship that was the spirit of the times. Jim Clark, as portrayed by Lewis, is an immensely interesting personality, and as much as business in the Valley is driven by cults of personality, I suppose it makes sense to latch on to that as anything else. It is disappointing, however that Lewis is not able to draw much by way of insight into what makes Silicon valley tick as a hot-bed of innovation, beyond a few obvious sentiments like technology is a young man's game, timing is everything, and California is a place where you can re-invent yourself.

I will transcribe one passage that I find modestly interesting:

[B]ack in 1921 [Thorstein] Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule in the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution. After all, the engineers only needed to refuse to fix anything, and modern industry would grind to a halt. Veblen rejoiced at this prospect. He didn’t much care for financiers and captains. He thought they were parasites.
When I told Clark about Veblen, he did a good imitation of a man who was bored out of his skull. When he didn’t ant to seem too interested, he pretended he wasn’t paying attention. Now, his head splitting, he was particularly keen on the idea of the engineer grabbing power from the financier. “That’s happening right now,” he said. “Right here. In the Valley. The power is shifting to the engineers, who create the companies.”
That, Clark thought, was only as it should be.

Certainly a nice sentiment. Truer than before. yes. True, absolutely? Not yet. Thoughts?

The Turtle Theory of Diversity

2007-08-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

Excellent article about a new study from Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, challenging much of the conventional wisdom regarding how diversity functions in communities. Excerpt:

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the "contact" theory and the "conflict" theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.
Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.
"Diversity, at least in the short run," he writes, "seems to bring out the turtle in all of us."

Well worth the read. Don't have much to say about it, but a lot to mull over. And I definitely appreciate both Putnam and the article's acknowledgement of the need to balance objective research with civic engagement.

Investors Helping Investors

2007-08-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

Can qualitative data provided by a community of investors help you beat the market? Out perform the experts? Motley Fool has created a service that does just that - and it will be very interesting to see the results. Although my exploration of the service has been cursory so far, I am impressed by the approach. Check out the Motley Fool's explanation here, and I'll see if I can dig up more reviews and a more substantial evaluation in the coming days.

The Energy President?

2007-08-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

The reviews that I have seen of Bill Richardson's record on energy and the environment over the years have always been fairly mixed. I should qualify that: mixed from the perspective of advocates of environmental policies -- but always reasonably good in the context of mainstream politicians. Grist magazine is running a series of interviews of (Democratic) presidential candidates, focusing on the environmental and energy policy planks of their respective platforms. While the aesthetic of Grist is pretty crunchy, there features can be decently substantive, and the few interviews I have scanned are worth a read. Grist also hails Bill Richardson's climate and energy plan as the "boldest and most visionary."

From Bill Richardson:

Right now, the most important domestic and national-security issues involve America becoming energy independent and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. I believe it's going to take an "energy president" who will lead this country toward these goals by asking all Americans to sacrifice for the common good and be more energy-efficient and promote a green style of living.

At the end of the day, it is still just rhetoric, but I am impressed that Richardson has proposed substantive targets in reducing emissions and increasing energy efficiency, broached the question of nuclear and biofuels, cited Brazil as an exemplar in energy policy, and invoked the 'S' word - Sacrifice - when discussing energy policy. Also curious to me that the twin messages of climate change and energy independence don't seem to be playing a major role in the Democratic primaries to-date.

The other candidates?

John Edwards, long on rhetoric:

The thing that I am certain is true is that our dependence on oil has an incredibly negative effect in trying to stop the forces of terrorism. It props up bad governments, particularly in the Middle East, who don't educate their kids, don't reform their governments, don't economically develop, and in many cases are largely isolated from the rest of the world, and the main reason is because they are on drugs, and that drug is oil. So long as they are mainlining oil, they will never reform.

Which is why America needs to make a switch from our addiction to oil and carbon-based fuels to wind, solar, safer biofuels, and cleaner renewable energy, which will have positive impacts far beyond economic impacts. No. 1: It will create at least 1 million "green-collar jobs" in this country. No. 2: When we drive down the price of oil, it creates an environment where these countries that are mainlining oil all of the sudden have no choice, and they have to reform, they have to educate their kids, they have to economically develop.

Hillary Clinton, lots of names dropped and a win-win rhetoric, but not sure if there is a real plan in there:

I have worked to pass the Brownfields Revitalization Act and the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act. I've taken many actions specific to New York, like pushing for the Hudson River cleanup by GE. I have been very committed on health-related effects -- that is why I've got legislation to try to deal with asthma and other respiratory diseases and to reduce pollution from power plants. Time and time again I have tried to protect public lands, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I cosponsored the Roadless Area Conservation Act to try and get back what my husband had done as president to protect the National Forest system. I believe strongly in supporting the "polluter pays" principle, and I am going to work to try to reinstate that.

Barack Obama, the right rhetoric, a solid approach, but is the depth of analysis really there:

I consider energy to be one of the three most important issues that we're facing domestically, along with revamping our education system and fundamentally reforming our health-care system. And the opportunities for significant change exist partly because awareness of the threat of climate change has grown rapidly over the last several years. Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for that, as do activists in the environmental community and outlets like Grist. People recognize the magnitude of the [climate] problem and are ready to take it on.

Obama: The Speech, part 2

2007-08-13T22:23:00.000-07:00

ENW posted this great, "behind the scenes" look at the making of Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. I've previously written about how much I like this speech. I wanted to briefly articulate why.

I think most liberals/progressives and most Democrats get fired up about Obama for three reasons. First, he has done a superb job articulating liberal values in a way that reflects clarity of moral purpose, thoughtfulness, and a rational grounding. I think most liberals, true or not, like to view their values in this way - not as warm compassion, but as very much as a set of values bundled with how those values were cultivated - by examining facts, making considered opinions, and centered morally. Second, Obama projects strength, even forcefulness, in his face, through his eyes, in his physical posture, and through his words and arguments - this strength is lacking in many other candidates. Finally, Obama is stylish and a sexy candidate, but in a cagey and tough way, something missing from the remainder of the field, and not embodied by either Kerry or Gore. Even Clinton's sex appeal, I think, was different - warmer, and less dangerous.

I get fired up about Obama for all those reasons, as well. But what really drew my attention to his speech when he first delivered it was another element, far out-stripping each of the above. What resonated for me was the immigrant narrative that Obama used to frame his father's experience, and from which Obama derived much of his values and sense of purpose. Now whether this is contrived or genuine, I don't know, but it is a powerful narrative which I think will have political consequence in this election, or an election soon to come.

Specifically, I think there are two major implications of a presidential candidate who can claim an immigrant narrative (has this been done before? Dukakis?). The first is that the candidate can relate and draw in that wide swath of first- and second-generation immigrants in this country, from the children of seasonal and manual laborers, to political and war refugees, to the shopkeepers and taxi drivers of the inner city, to the high-achieving sons and daughters of well-educated professionals. Through fortunate circumstances and hardship, pretty much every immigrant shares a set of experiences when coming to America - in terms of learning a new language, grappling with a new culture, trying to carve a niche in a community, connect with their "American" neighbors while maintaining connections with their native country and culture, and so forth. Moreover, the values of achieving, of hoping better for your children, and the broad, empowering narrative of the American dream are still vigorously resonant for these populations (of which, of course, I am one). Obama, as a candidate, can speak in a uniquely resonant way to this portion of the electorate, which may otherwise have diverging political allegiances.

The second implication is more subtle, but perhaps interesting. An American president who maintained some identification with a foreign country, particularly, a poor, non-white foreign country would send an interesting signal to the rest of the world. No longer does the American government represent the distant will of some rich, white people, but rather, it becomes the provenance of a distinctly more identifiable persona. Symbolically, an immigrant president might restore the deteriorated perception of America as a land of opportunity and diversity - as well as a country where globalization happens, not just the place where globalization comes from.

It will be interesting to see, of course, how this all plays out - particularly in light of the current hot-button immigration debate. For me, the more interesting political narrative will be in watching how the unspoken tension resolves between that swath of America who has no connection with any other country and that swath of America who does feel a connection, either through an immigrant heritage, or by living in ethnically diverse communities, or simply through travel and a global perspective. Will a symbolic divide be exposed, and potentially exploited, like race has in the past? Or is this distinction inconsequential?

Giuliani Takedown

2007-08-13T22:02:00.001-07:00

Having lived in New York City from 2000, I have a remarkably vague impression of Rudy Giuliani. On the one hand, his "leadership" in those post-9/11 days always struck me as being blown out of proportion - isn't it the job of elected officials to act like adults? - and not half as genuine or inspiring as David Letterman, on whose late night coattails I think he was able to ride a bit. His public policies and civic relations, particularly with minorities, the poor, and the downtrodden in New York seem drastic and lacking in compassion. He seems every bit the politician, smug, self-satisfied, and calculating. Additionally, his public persona is that of a genuinely nasty and self-serving person. And liberal New Yorkers have always maintained a special vitriol for Giuliani, which stems from before the start of my tenure in the city.

On the other hand, New York City did clean itself up between the beginning of his tenure and the end, to the point where it is an absurdly safe and permissive place to live these days, and it is hard to call it a coincidence, right? His stated positions on social issues like abortion and gay rights are the best that can be hoped for from a Republican candidate these days. And I do like the fact that he is willing to cross-dress and poke fun at himself on national television.

So, I've been a little surprised at the venom that has been thrown at Giuliani, above and beyond that targeting the other collection of fakers and nut-jobs who comprise the Republican primary field at the moment (not that I would vote Republican, but Huckabee is my favorite candidate by a fair distance at the moment). Where have you gone, dignified curmudgeons?

For examples, check out this worthwhile Village Voice takedown.

Kiss of Death

2007-08-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

The last six years of international politics in the Middle East have placed in stark contrast the questions of democracy in the Middle East. Specifically, it seems that democratic political institutions may be taking hold in parts of the region, but with results that are not congruent with the hopes and intents of the Bush Administration, and perhaps, mis-aligned with the national interests of the United States. From Friday's New York Times:

There has been talk of the Christian vote and the Armenian vote, of history and betrayal, as each side sought to claim victory. There is one explanation, however, that has become common wisdom in the region: Mr. Gemayel’s doom seems to have been sealed by his support from the Bush administration and the implied agendas behind its backing.

“It’s the kiss of death,” said Turki al-Rasheed, a Saudi reformer who watched last Sunday’s elections closely. “The minute you are counted on or backed by the Americans, kiss it goodbye, you will never win.”

The paradox of American policy in the Middle East — promoting democracy on the assumption it will bring countries closer to the West — is that almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose.

Now, I don't know enough in depth about the Middle East, history, culture, politics, or people to comment on any of the speculation that goes on among American political commentators about if/how/when/by whom should democracy find its way into practice in Middle Eastern countries. I do firmly believe, however, that the purpose of democratic institutions is to express the will of the people, the electorate, and not to acquiesce with American foreign policy or install pro-American governments. I also believe that other countries have the right to national interests that may differ from the United States. Not controversial statements, I know, but at the same time, they are the curiously unstated sensibilities that under-gird so much of American foreign policy and opinion, particularly in the current Bush administration.

Those broad-brush sentiments aside, what is of particular concern to me is how closely aligned the perception of America has become to the actions of the Bush Administration, and more specifically, how difficult will it be to distance the image of the United States from the legacy of this administration in the Middle East? I am hoping to visit Egypt, and perhaps Jordan and Turkey (and maybe Lebanon?) over the winter. It would be my first visit to the region and my hope is that I will be able to gauge some sense of the sentiment there towards the United States government, and towards Americans as people. My unfortunate expectation is that the perception of both the United States government and its people will be greatly damaged, and that the unwillingness or ineffectiveness of average Americans to broadly communicate their displeasure with some of our actions abroad will fundamentally undermine perceptions of "Good people, bad government" that have held sway in many parts of the world at length. Thoughts?

Millionaires

2007-08-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

From Flickr user chuckp

Except for maybe the most disconnected of college students or deeply radical of environmentalists, it is difficult any more to really argue against wealth as a social good. Still, questions like how a person becomes wealthy, how a society becomes wealthy, what defines wealth, how wealth can be sustained, and how wealth should be distributed through a population are interesting and contentious. As such, the NYT series on the theme of the "Gilded Age" holds great intrigue and promise. The basic premise, as I understand i, is to profile basic archetypes of varying strata of wealth in contemporary America, with the underlying understanding that the current era is a particularly wealthy one.

The first in the series of articles profiled a handful of America's richest businessmen - those who comprise the "upper one-one-hundredth of a percent" of American families who control a full five percent of the national wealth. The second installment took a step down the status ladder, looking at a few of California's technology entrepreneurs - millionaires by definition, but still working, without a feeling of having "made it."

Both articles are shallow, providing a surface picture of America's rich, but neither really tackle at depth interesting social questions (What makes these people special, in terms of creating or achieving wealth? Are these people uniquely positioned or capable of sustaining wealth for the economy as a whole? Has the increased concentration of capital at the upper echelons of society successfully facilitated improved quality of life at the lower echelons?) or challenging psychological questions (What drives the extremely rich to keep getting richer? What drives the moderately rich to stay in the rat race?) Nevertheless, it is interesting that the Times has chosen to broach the subject, and it will be curious to see where the series goes. Moreover, it is much more interesting to see what the rich think about the rich, rather than the sniping poor or middle class.

The Heartbeat of the Left?

2007-08-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I neither regularly read nor participate at the Daily Kos website. Talking Points Memo tends to be my blog of choice for left-leading political news and analysis. I have been following with modest interest the coverage over at TPM of the Yearly Kos convention, which has attracted the attention and participation of the Democratic establishment, in the form of the attendance of each of the presidential hopefuls. The convention coverage hasn't provided any momentous insight in to either politics or policy, but is still probably worth a look. My meager comments:

- Most impressive to me about the political left "blogosphere" has been their consistent and innovative appropriation of new technologies in engaging with political thinkers and actors, in broadcasting this content, and ultimately, in shaping the debate within the Democratic party. The post-panel informal interviews posted on TPM are a great case in point.
- While I think my politics are still consistently "progressive," I am less certain if I actually identify with the current community that is the political left -- particularly at the grassroots/blogosphere level. It is a horrible thing to say, but the still somewhat wonky, over-earnest, indignant, and slobbish political culture of the grassroots left isn't a great fit with my self-perception. Why does this image and these beliefs seem to be hand in glove?
- Since I practice my politics exclusively in bars, around kitchen tables, and at the ballot box, it is hard for me to really sense whether the political left is as energized and focused as commentators from this conference seem to think it is. Harder still is for me to have any idea how this measures up to the Republican political organization. But if the enthusiasm at the convention translates into political success, then wonderful.
- Steve Clemons' point, above, that the legacy of the Bush administration is to change the international order from one based on trust, to one based in fear is one that has been preoccupying me lately, though not in as precise a formulation. Will a turn over in 2008 be sufficient to restore some of the trust and reputation of our government, and of us as Americans abroad? Or is there deeper damage that needs to be undone, in our fundamental relationship with other countries?

We Flee Again

2007-07-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal's Informed Reader website highlights an interesting article by Joel Kotkin asserting that the demographic shift of 20-somethings into city centers like San Francisco and New York in the 90s is being reversed, as these same people settle down, have kids, and move to suburbs and secondary cities like Houston and Phoenix. While I don't dispute any of the factual assertions that Kotkin makes, and the underlying drivers for this demographic data are all too sensible and intuitive, I do take issue with some of Kotkin's explicit and implied analyses.

First, Kotkin notes some trends and makes assertions that I don't dispute:

- People who moved into dense urban centers like SF and NYC in their twenties are moving out to suburbs and exurbs. While I don't have the data, I can't dispute this. People get older, people have kids, people want to own not rent, people want more space, a backyard, a garden, a lawn. This is certainly deeply buried in the American psyche, if not a fundamental desire of wealthy societies. What is more suspicious, or perhaps just curious, is if these emigrating 30-somethings aren't being replaced by an equal crop of 20-somethings (particularly given that the 20-something echo-boom cohort should be larger than their elders). My experience in New York doesn't signal this to be true. 30 somethings may be leaving the city but they are being replaced by 20 somethings -- and the city is growing both denser and sprawling outwards. But if it is a trend, that as a generation is leaving the cities, they are not being replaced, then why is a fascinating question.

- People actually enjoy living in the suburbs, more than in cities. I think this is entirely plausible, although I would guess that most of the studies that find this to be true are asking questions that pose false choices. For example, asking whether people are more likely to identify their suburban neighborhood as "home," where they have settled down for the rest of their lives, versus an urban neighborhood, where some significant portion of the population will be necessarily moving on at some point in their lives doesn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps a more telling question would be to find out whether those "lifers" who have chosen to live suburban and urban areas have stronger identifications with their homes. I've got a good idea what Brooklyners and New Yorkers would say, even through their complaining and misery.

- People are moving to suburbs and the SunBelt for job opportunities. Fair enough, I imagine the economic data sees this through.

- People are moving to suburbs and exurbs because they get more value for their money. Undoubtedly.

Where I think Kotkin's article weakens is in failing to address the following questions:

- First, the too-cute opening gambit of the article, that the "increasingly trendy theory holds that the ticket to attracting and retaining the educated and upwardly mobile is a big dose of urban cool" doesn't hold up is neither proved nor dis-proved by any of the data or studies that Kotkin cites. In fact, I'm quite sure that the increasing availability of much of the consumable elements of urban cool being readily available in suburbs and exurbs (thanks to Starbuck's, an increasingly de-centralized retail economy, urban planning efforts by smaller municipalities) makes the move to the suburbs a much softer landing for ex-urbanites. You can still get a good latte. You can have your books and CDs delivered to you by Amazon.com. So those creature comforts that a city could offer become less valuable.

- Second, the same argument above I think mis-represents the premise of cities investing in "urban cool." It is not that cities don't need to invest in energizing their cores to draw in residents - they certainly do. The problem is, even when doing so, dense cities still may lose out to suburbs and exurbs. So cities need to figure out how to address other issues - like becoming more kid friendly, creating more opportunities for young families to own property, and providing better access to open space and green space. Otherwise, what's the alternative? Should cities dismantle their infrastructure and orient themselves to suburban development? I feel like we've seen that movie before...

- The biggest question I have is if the economic and demographic growth that Kotkin cites stimulates the kind of innovation that the "Creative Class" is responsible for, and which allows for sustained growth in the long term? In the Bay Area, the increasingly sprawling and exurban Silicon Valley has been effective at driving technology innovation in the last thirty years. At the same time, cities throughout Silicon Valley, from San Jose to Palo Alto to San Francisco to Oakland to Danville have invested in bringing some elements of "urban cool" into their neighborhoods. And New York's recent resurgence is surely spearheaded by the twin draws of an incredibly engaging and active city life paired with an increasingly safe, clean, and in some respects, suburbanized Manhattan. I have less experience with Phoenix or Houston but I would be curious to see what the patterns of innovation are with respect to economic and job growth. Are the economies in these region creating the sorts of new products and services that can motivate and sustain the rest of the economy? Or is the regional growth in these areas simply the scaling of innovation (i.e., no longer the locus of innovation, but places where cheaper capital, labor, and operating expenses allow for more efficient scaling of product and service delivery) happening in other areas?

- A final quibble is that I think Kotkin falsely suggests that people move to suburbs, exurbs, and Sunbelt cities because of job opportunity. It is not as if jobs are natively growing in those regions - except perhaps in the energy sector. Rather, I think a more fair assertion would be that both job growth and demographic shifts are occurring because these regions offer competitive advantages in terms of capital, labor, and resource costs -- to both individuals and families, and to industry.

All in all, I don't take issue with most of Kotkin's positions. The demographic trends and assertions that follow-on make sense. It seems a perfectly plausible explanation of what is happening. The question, as always, is if what is happening is what should be happening. Are the outcomes of increased growth, economic and demographic, in suburbia, at the expense of dense cities good for cities in the long run - either those being left behind or those being choked by sprawl and outward development? Are those outcomes the best way for fostering innovation in the economy? Does suburban life make people happier in the long run, compared to investing in vibrant cities? Does it create a sufficiently common set of experiences and interests to maintain and enrich a national character? The answer to all of these may be yes, they may be no, but I think they are vital questions to ask before suggesting that the investment in vital urban life is a failed policy.

Let the Mirror Reflect the Room

2007-07-26T08:29:00.001-07:00

I imagine most people who visit this site are familiar with the fact that I write another blog, The Quiet Quiet. But, just in case, I wanted to point it out. The difference between the two blogs, generally, is this: the blog that you are on focuses on technology, environment, development, politics, and similar topics. The Quiet Quiet will have posts on art, architecture, books, movies, music, random stuff I find on the internet, food and drink, and things my friends do. So, if you happen to have stumbled upon this blog, feel free to check out the other one.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you are enjoying!

Pictures above and below are from Flickr, searching for "Convex Mirror." See more here.

How Advertising Runs The World, part II

2007-07-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

Seth Stevenson's Ad Report Card feature in Slate.com is generally interesting and occasionally great. Given how pervasive and influential advertisements are in our daily life, I'm glad that someone is taking the time to be thoughtful about them.

Of the higher-ups in the advertising world that I've met personally or gained an impression of through some print or video interview have come across as smart and competent about how to use the tools of their industry to achieve their objectives - communicate brand identities, introduce new products, and sell you things. But the vast majority of the advertising world seems to be made up of uninspired, dull, and misguided people.

This is, of course, an overly harsh judgment. Harsher still has been my impression that beyond a few geniuses, a slightly bigger handful of expert manipulators, and some successful copy cats, most advertising professionals have no fucking clue what they are doing. Advertising, as an industry, seems like an elaborate and extremely well-funded crapshoot. Theories abound, few of them good. Disciplines on only vaguely sounder footing, including psychology, marketing, visual design, creative writing, and even neuroscience get dragged into the tawdry discussion.

All this, I suppose, as a long-winded way to convey my ill-informed impression that few of the practitioners of advertising are as thoughtful as the handful of people who critique the industry. With that said, the current article/video essay in the Ad Report Card feature is worth a look, as it summarizes one industry veteran's identification of archetypal ads that are successful. From Stevenson's introduction:

In 1978, Donald Gunn was a creative director for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. Though his position implied expertise, Gunn felt he was often just throwing darts—relying on inspiration and luck (instead of proven formulas) to make great ads. So, he decided to inject some analytical rigor into the process: He took a yearlong sabbatical, studied the best TV ads he could find, and looked for elemental patterns.

After much research, Gunn determined that nearly all good ads fall into one of 12 categories—or "master formats," in his words.

See the essay here, with a lot of embedded video examples.

Tickle Me, Elmo

2007-07-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

When the day comes, long after we humans succeed in wiping each other off the face of the Earth, and the aliens finally come, I hope they find a land filled with Tickle Me Elmos, laughing uproariously, slapping their thighs, falling over. At least we will have accomplished something.

I leave the deep thinking about how our brains work and what are the evolutionary reasons for why we do the things we do to my smarter friends, like current roommate EZ or PK. Existential questions that I just haven't got the chops to tackle. So I don't have too many comments on this article, although it is worth a read. First my comments, then excerpts of key phrases that I found amusing or charming, if not poignant:

Examinations of the question "Why is something funny?" are invariably unfunny, tiresome, and tend to belie the author's lack of a sense of humor and general failing to get the point. The quick pivot in the focus of this article from humor to laughter made for a more engaging read, and bolstered my confidence that the underlying science might be on to something, instead of nothing.

Isn't it incredibly difficult to study humor, given that most people don't have any idea what's funny, and even fewer are actually funny? Isn't trying to understand why a person getting hit in the crotch is "funny" just as misguided as trying to prove that dinosaurs roamed the Earth sometime between the Flood and modern times? Not that the article broaches either topic.

Thank goodness we're more like chimpanzees than lizards. Imagined how horrible the world would be if we were more like lizards...

Key passages:

"a British research group who claimed they had determined the world’s funniest joke. Despite the fact that the researchers sampled a massive international audience in making this judgment, the winning joke revolved around New Jersey residents: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, 'OK, now what?'"

"Speakers, it turned out, were 46 percent more likely to laugh than listeners—and what they were laughing at, more often than not, wasn’t remotely funny."

"At one point Provine stops two waste-disposal workers driving a golf cart loaded up with trash bags. When they fail to guffaw on cue, Provine asks them why they can’t muster up a chuckle. “Because you’re not funny,” one of them says. Then they turn to each other and share a hearty laugh."

"The limits of our voluntary power over laughter are most clearly exposed in studies of stroke victims who suffer from a disturbing condition, known as central facial paralysis, that prevents them from voluntarily moving either the left or right side of their face, depending on the location of the neurological damage. When these individuals are asked to smile or laugh on command, they produce lopsided grins: One side of the mouth curls up, the other remains frozen. But when they’re told a joke or they’re tickled, traditional smiles and laughs animate their entire faces."

"According to Fouts, who helped teach sign language to Washoe, perhaps the world’s most famous chimpanzee, the practice is just as common, and perhaps more long-lived, among the chimps. “Tickling . . . seems to be very important to chimpanzees because it continues throughout their lives,” he says. Even at the age of 41, Washoe still enjoys tickling and being tickled. Among young chimpanzees who have been taught sign language, tickling is a frequent topic of conversation."

Which, of course, begs a final question: what are other frequent topics of conversation among chimpanzees? And shouldn't this knowledge be widely known? Perhaps in place of Lindsay Lohan mugshots?

Read the article.

Iraq Into Asian Cup Finals

2007-07-25T07:45:00.001-07:00

Iraq beats South Korea 4-3 on penalty kicks, and await the winner of Saudi Arabia-Japan. An improbably run by the Iraqis, I wonder what the reaction is on the ground in Iraq...

UPDATE: Ah, fuck. The nihilism currently in Iraq, whether it is foreign terrorists, sectarian violence, or whomever, is numbing. Today's headline: "Baghdad bombers target soccer celebrations, killing at least 50." Between regular attacks on weddings, religious festivals, and national sporting triumphs, it is impossible to see how hope or joy can exist in Iraq. How incredibly sad.

Get Green: Design Leads the Way

2007-07-24T15:32:00.001-07:00

In my mind, there are three keys to solving the "green equation" of how we can live more sustainably, particularly with respect to energy and natural resource consumption. The first is driven by science and public policy, and has to do with our ability to discover and develop fundamental advances in our ability (as a society/economy) to get the goods and services we need out of the primary inputs we consume, with minimal adverse impact. Clearly, research and development efforts in fields as disparate as biofuels, solar/fuel cells, genetic engineering, carbon sequestration and other core science and technology initiatives are targeting these fronts. To my inexpert eye, the investments we are making here are limited to-date, and the initiatives, though encouraging, are insufficient.

The second piece of the puzzle is cultural, and lies with the willingness of individuals, as consumers and political actors, to make decisions that take into consideration environmental consequences. These decisions include choosing to consume less, pay market premiums for goods and services that provide greater dividends in protecting environmental and natural resources, and promote, through voting and civic engagement, a political climate that supports policies targeting sustainable development. A political and economic climate created by an environmentally conscious public could more effectively create market opportunities for alternative, efficient technologies, fund research in core sciences and technology, re-aligning tax policy to create incentives environmentally responsible behavior, and create a baseline understanding of the values and ethics of "sustainable development." While the cultural sensitivity to certain issues like global warming and a potential energy crisis have been heightened in recent years, I don't think that a true ethic of sustainability is anywhere near close to existing in the U.S. Additionally, as a sometimes student of economics, I'd mention that much 0f what I discuss above is somewhat anathema to parts of economic theory - in that, I believe that people as consumers will have to make economic choices that aren't rational w.r.t. price because of a deeper core set of values, ethics, or understanding about environmental consequences. Consumers will have to shape the market, not vice versa.

The third piece of the puzzle is very much design-driven, and have to do with the ability of architects, engineers, product designers, and policy makers to create appealing consumer choices - in terms of what car to drive, where to live, what to buy, and so on - that align environmentally-positive consequences with benefits that appeal to other values, like status, cost efficiency, comfort, quality of life, aesthetics, and so on. Where I have a dim view of the progress we're making on each of the previous two fronts, I am excited about the cool new products, across all facets of life, that seem to come out every day. While the impact on the bottom line may be modest, it is tangible. And the further impact of these "green" products and policies, if successful may be a heightened environmental consciousness for individuals and greater investment from government and private capital in the fundamental technologies that can allow us to take big steps forward.

I lay out this somewhat abstract framework for two reasons: first, simply to put it out there, to solicit feedback, and to reference in future posts. I hope it is a useful framework. Second, as an excuse to post about a handful of interesting innovations in technology and design recently published in Wired magazine:

- A proposed new dorm at Stanford University, whose theme will be eco-efficiency, but which also proposes to be the "most desirable housing on campus." Thankfully, having gone through Stanford's undergraduate housing lottery, that claim is readily falsifiable. See here for more detailed plans;
- A Jetsonian plan for improving transportation efficiency and quality of life in San Diego, through the deployment of "robot buses." Cool if it works, and a great example of how environmental efficiencies and quality of life improvements can be made in one fell swoop;
- A proposed residential tower in Chicago that falls back on pre-Columbian building design to create a more energy efficient and more pleasant living environment. The simple decision to angle the buildings Southern exposure to maximize passive solar heating in the winter, and minimize direct sunlight in the summer helps keep electricity and heating costs down while letting more natural light in. Not the first time such a dwelling was built in the Americas, and hopefully not the last.

YouTube Debate

2007-07-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

As mentioned, I didn't get to watch last night's debate, due to the whole no TV thing. In truth, I don't really enjoy the debates, and its interesting to see the candidates themselves bristle against the format more and more often. The inclusion of "user-generated content" was a novel twist in the YouTube debate, and the reviews I've read have been pretty encouraging - particularly in citing the more cogent questions, while noting that the format, like YouTube itself, allowed a few average Americans to make fools of themselves. The consensus seems to be coalescing around the trio of Clinton, Edwards, and Obama winning the debates - which is encouraging, in terms of seeing the potential nominees performing well, but a little discouraging, in terms of feeling like all of the elements of the nomination process are like an echo chamber. It would be nice to see someone (Biden? Richardson?) make a serious challenge from within the pack...

Below are some links to coverage that I found interesting. Anyone see the debates and have opinions?

TalkingPointsMemo put together a "highlights video"
John Dickerson at Slate.com seems to score it: Clinton, Obama, Edwards
Roger Simon at Politico.com explicitly gives the win to Edwards, then Clinton, then Obama

Notes on Obama

2007-07-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, RM and I went up to JWW's new place in Cold Spring, NY for lunch. To our pleasant surprise, JWW's father, step-mother, and sister were there, as well - all three of us, RM, JWW, and I have a great deal of fun talking to his father, who never fails to be engaging while relating his opinions and experiences, covering forty-odd adult years in the New York area. During the course of our gin and hamburger-fueled conversation, Mr. W cast out an interesting aside - that he found Obama to be an intriguing candidate, generally very likeable, and would consider voting for him. This counts as an interesting aside as Mr. W has a certain amount of disdain for any politician, it seems, equally reviles Clinton and Bush, one for his equivocation, the other for his sheer incompetence, and maintains a laughing distaste for "that Catholic president." So is this a small bellwether for the Obama candidacy?

Being without TV, I missed tonight's debate - and I'll catch up to it tomorrow on the news sites, Slate, and TPM. I am, in general, very pro-Obama. My only concern is that winning the 2008 presidency might not be the best presidency to win. What with our problems, and all. But that's a discussion for another day.

Today, I wanted to re-visit Obama's speech from the 2004 Democratic convention, nominating John Kerry. Previous to that speech, I did not know much of Obama, and I found the speech electrifying. I'll get into the whys in a subsequent post, but I distinctly remember forwarding the text of the speech to all my friends who vaguely care about politics immediately after Obama finished. An excerpt of the speech is below, with a link to the full speech following:

OBAMA: [...] Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.
My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

OBAMA: But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that's shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.

(APPLAUSE)

While studying here my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas.

(APPLAUSE)

Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor, my grandfather signed up for duty, joined Patton's army, marched across Europe. Back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA and later moved west, all the way to Hawaii, in search of opportunity.

(APPLAUSE)

And they too had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream born of two continents.

OBAMA: My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.

(APPLAUSE)

They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential.

(APPLAUSE)

They're both passed away now. And yet I know that, on this night, they look down on me with great pride.

And I stand here today grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my two precious daughters.

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy; our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...

(APPLAUSE)

... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

That is the true genius of America, a faith...

(APPLAUSE)

... a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution; and that our votes will be counted -- or at least, most of the time.

Full text of the speech here.

Also, Obama has a Flickr site. It's sort of crazy. You should check it out.

Leave Those Kids Alone

2007-07-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

A strange study cited in an article on www.boston.com focuses on the work of Utah State University anthropologist David Lancy, who appears to be making the argument that encouraging of parent-child play in developed societies is a potentially dangerous to child development. Lancy's rationale, the best as I can grasp it from a brief article, is that historically, and in contemporary tribal societies, parent-child play is not characteristic. Children play with their peers and on their own. Excerpt:

"...parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world's current population would still find that mother's behavior kind of dotty.
American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries -- a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy, Lancy argues in a recent article in American Anthropologist, the field's flagship journal in the United States.

"Adults think it is silly to play with children" in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, "but adults aren't part of the picture." Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans -- abetted, he says, by psychologists -- are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

Needless to say, this analysis makes little sense to me, and smacks, unfortunately of that evil of academia, particularly in the social sciences - to be shamelessly sensationalist and willfully perverse in your conclusions. But I'm neither a social scientist nor an anthropologist. The article seems to contain an adequate rebuttal, by Yale's Jerome Singer:

"I'm not clear what's bothering this guy," he says, referring to Lancy. "We are not talking about the parents playing all day long with the children. We're just saying that children need to play, and particular kinds of play -- imaginative play that has a storytelling element to it -- are very useful" in our culture.

But I'd be interested in other thoughts. People with kids? Anthropologists? Psychologists?