Shunya's Notes

The Last Empire

August afternoons in Shanghai, ambling down Nanjing Road with posh boutiques blasting chilled air through open doors into the sultry street, one might imagine that energy is free in China. At less than 5c per KWH, it is certainly cheap (10c in India and the US). But the real costs are hidden, though, increasingly, not very well. Most visitors to China are struck by its urban air pollution. A pall of sulphrous smoke hangs over towns and cities and even wafts through the countryside into neighboring countries. One new coal-fired power plant opens each week. Respiratory illnesses are common. In 2006, China surpassed the US to become the leading producer of green house emissions in the world.

This is not breaking news. Much has been written about China's environmental crisis in recent years: vanishing forests, encroaching desert, depleting ground water, acid rain, toxic chemicals in polluted rivers, etc. China has clearly prioritized economic growth over environmental health. But a part of the problem is inherent in the drivers of its economic growth -- China has become the industrial heartland of the world. The developed countries have, in effect, shifted their factories and pollution to China (this is one outsourcing no politician in the US complains about). As a result, as consumers, all of us are now a party to China's environmental crisis. Each time we buy a plastic toy, a blender, or an iPod, we send a puff of sulphrous smoke into China's air. And some of it is coming back to haunt us in our own backyards!

A decent survey of China's environmental malaise by Jacques Leslie recently appeared in Mother Jones:

World on Fire

I had planned to review Amy Chua's "World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" but I doubt I'll get to it. This review by Michelle Goldberg matches my own thoughts on this insightful book:

The case Amy Chua makes ... is so clear and persuasive it almost seems as if it had been obvious all along. Yet her argument, that rapid switches to majoritarian rule and free-market democracy in many Third World countries benefit certain ethnic groups over others and lead to vicious sectarian strife, is quite new... Writers such as Robert Kaplan have long argued that the Western obsession with exporting democracy to countries without the institutions to support it is naive and often dangerous, fostering demagogues and communal hatreds. Chua builds on this argument in an essential way, showing how expanding markets exacerbate the problem by enriching already-dominant minority groups even as democracy empowers angry majorities ...

She argues that when economic liberalization and democracy are rapidly introduced to countries with market-dominant minorities, the two forces necessarily come into conflict. "Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an 'outsider' minority, fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often chronically poor majorities," she writes. "Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded cocitizens in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country's wealth and identity be reclaimed by the 'true owners of the nation.'"

More here. Another decent review here.

Labor of Love?

Let's say you are a professional in the US. You love your job, make $100K, and pay $25K in taxes each year. Do you know how your taxes are spent? The US government summarizes this in a pie-chart in the 1040 tax instruction booklet each year (see left). The major slices include military spending (21%), Social Security (21%), Medicare (12%), health spending (10%), interest payments on the nine trillion dollars national debt (9%), etc.

These numbers have long been challenged by many watchdog and pacifist groups. They claim that interest payments for national debt hide the contribution to that debt from past military spending, that a chunk of the health and welfare slice is spent on war veterans, that the official budget is supplemented by "one-off" war spending bills, etc. One such group is the War Resisters League (WRL) which holds "war to be a crime against humanity ... founded in 1923, [it] advocates Gandhian nonviolence as the method for creating a democratic society free of war, racism, sexism, and human exploitation."

If the accounting is made honest, claims the WRL (read their analysis), the numbers turn out to be 51% for military-oriented spending, 49% for the rest. And with a 52% share of the global arms trade (2006 data), the big, blind economic forces in the US seem aligned to sustain not only the military-industrial complex that employs so many but also the arms trading industry (largely on the back of sales to emerging third world nations). I've wondered more than once: How do liberals reconcile buying retirement mutual funds that invest in missile/fighter jet makers with their apparent yearning for peace in the world? 

And if the WRL is right, you, as the professional above, fork over $12,500 each year to US military-oriented spending (a chunk of it currently for the Iraq war) and you labor 1-1/2 months each year to pay for it. Whatever your profession, it sure ain't no labor of love.

Free Market News

The newspaper business has changed radically in recent decades. Most newspapers are now owned by a handful of large corporations, even by "holding companies", with parallel interests in cement, telecom, real estate, etc. While profit was once a motive for running a newspaper, it has become the sole motive today. In this Darwinian jungle, allegiance to the reader has been replaced by allegiance to the shareholder. Socially engaged and public service journalism, to the extent it existed, is increasingly rare -- its practitioners have become dinosaurs, unfit for the new age.

Many, including Chomsky, have told us for decades that corporate media, as profit-driven institutions, tend to serve the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups in society. The "integration of the media into the market system has been accelerated by the loosening of rules limiting media concentration, cross-ownership, and control by non-media companies." And this trend has no national borders. The Times of India now sells editorial space, with not even the decency of adding a footnote to identify a commissioned write-up. A floundering old politician or a Bollywood starlet? An industrialist with a labor unrest problem? No worries. Just pay the Times for a series of flattering pieces on your wonderful human qualities. Want fries with that? Let the Times roll it out to its numerous other media "properties".

"Free market news" is in fact an oxymoron. Unlike in most professions, free market economics has been disastrous for journalism. Loyalty to shareholders only incidentally coincides with loyalty to readers. What we inevitably end up with is news that sells like any consumable, made palatable, which builds and affirms the myths of national greatness and benevolence. When aspirations devolve down to ratings and "eyeballs", news makers cater to the lowest common denominator. Dissent and disturbing stories tend not to be rewarded, sensational exposés and feel-good stories do. Soon, this spirals into frivolity or conformism, the latter best evidenced in the US right before the Iraq war.

To make matters worse, the juggernaut of the Internet has not been kind to newspapers. Circulation is down and so is print advertising. Too many newspapers are in the red. Alternate business models -- such as online versions with online ads -- have failed to stop the bleeding. The web has too much competition for advertising dollars, which simply follow the "eyeballs". Newspapers are therefore being sold off or shut down, concentrating corporate ownership even further. What will become of journalism? Should we worry about this?

In April 2006, John S Carroll, an eminent journalist and news editor, delivered an incisive and impassioned speech on the state of journalism at the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE):

A generation ago, we at the ASNE convention might have encountered such formidable editors as Gene Roberts, Ben Bradlee, Abe Rosenthal and Gene Patterson. With all due respect, there is no such pride of lions roaming among us today. This is not entirely our fault. Our jobs are harder than theirs. Our papers are shrinking, and so is our confidence.

How long has it been since an editor was so rash as to cite public service in justifying a budget? You might as well ask to be branded with a scarlet N, for naive. Our corporate superiors regard our beliefs as quaint, wasteful and increasingly tiresome. Even outside the corporation we have lost stature. We might see ourselves as public servants, but does the public see us that way?

(Do read the entire speech).
 

Camels in the Arctic

Climate change has emerged as a significant issue only in the last few years. Though evidence has been building for decades, it has taken this long to reach a point where Leno & Letterman can joke about it and be understood. Al Gore's remarkable documentary certainly went a long way in building this awareness, but what left me unsatisfied about it was the lack of a plan of action. What are our options now? Their costs. Probabilities of various outcomes. Etc.

Here is a calm and rational survey article, Warmer, Warmer, by John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, on how we got here, the politics of climate change, our realistic options, viable alternate energies, and the various possible scenarios for the future, including one which might include "breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic".

I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was.

Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ‘non-binding’ declaration which reflected ‘a real change of mood’. Just what the world needs – more hot air. And then the news moves on to other things, to contaminated Anglo-Hungarian turkeys and gang shootings and potential schisms in the Anglican Church. There is a kind of falsehood built into this; at the very least, a powerful degree of denial. If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else.

Warmer, Warmer continued

Land of the Free?

Which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world? The United States of course. The prison population in the US has more than quadrupled in the last quarter century. Some 2.2 million are behind bars in prisons increasingly packed to the hilt. The US, with 5% of the world's population, holds 25% of the world's prisoners. Writing in Mother Jones a few years ago, Gregg Segal offered an explanation: 

How did this happen? How did a nation dedicated to the principle of freedom become the world's leading jailer? The answer has little to do with crime, but much to do with the perception of crime, and how that perception has been manipulated for political gain and financial profit. From state legislatures to the White House, politicians have increasingly turned to tough-on-crime policies as guaranteed vote-getters. That trend has been encouraged by the media, which use the public's fearful fascination with crime to boost ratings, and by private-prison companies, guards' unions, and other interests whose business depends on mass-scale incarceration.

Prisons certainly aren't expanding because more crimes are being committed. Since 1980, the national crime rate has meandered down, then up, then down again -- but the incarceration rate has marched relentlessly upward every single year. Nationwide, crime rates today are comparable to those of the 1970s, but the incarceration rate is four times higher than it was then. It's not crime that has increased; it's punishment. More people are now arrested for minor offenses, more arrestees are prosecuted, and more of those convicted are given lengthy sentences. Huge numbers of current prisoners are locked up for drug offenses and other transgressions that would not have met with such harsh punishment 20 years ago.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies, 738 per 100,000 people in the US are in prisons (1 in 37 adults has served time) -- 5 times higher than W. Europe and 25 times higher than India. Singapore, infamous for its absurdly tough laws, incarcerates less than half that many. The number sentenced to prison in China is 118 per 100,000. Even factoring in the estimates of China's secret incarcerations provided by rights activists and dissidents-in-exile, its incarceration rate, despite its commie authoritarianism, is not much higher than in the US.

Human Rights Watch has pointed out that prisoners in the US also suffer from neglect, poor medical care, and rampant sexual abuse,

Most inmates had scant opportunities for work, training, education, treatment or counseling because of taxpayer resistance to increasing the already astonishing U.S. $41 billion spent annually on corrections and because of the prevailing punitive ideology that applauds harsh prison conditions. Idle inmates with long sentences, little hope of early release (and hence little incentive for good behavior) and jammed into poorly equipped facilities, sometimes became violent: in 1998 (the most recent year for which data was available), fifty-nine inmates were killed by other inmates, and assaults, fights, and rapes left 6,750 inmates and 2,331 correctional staff injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Rivalry and tension between race-based prison gangs lay behind many individual assaults and sometimes escalated into violent riots.

Men in prison were subject to prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, whose effects on the victim's psyche were serious and enduring. Inmate victims reported nightmares, deep depression, shame, loss of self-esteem, self-hatred, and considering or attempting suicide. Victims of rape [do visit this link], in the most extreme cases, were literally the slaves of the perpetrators ... "rented out" for sex, "sold," or even auctioned off to other inmates. Despite the devastating psychological impact of such abuse, few if any preventative measures were taken in most jurisdictions, while perpetrators were rarely punished adequately by prison officials.

The True Cost of Our Gadgets

The next time we whip out our Blackberries, cell phones, gaming consoles, iPods, and laptops, we would do well to remember their true cost, beyond what we paid for them at the store. Each of these gadgets use an ore called coltan. About 80% of the world supplies of coltan lie in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the UN says is subject to "highly organized and systematic exploitation."

 

Coltan is “the colloquial African name for columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore used to produce the elements niobium and tantalum. In appearance, coltan is a dull black mineral. The exportation of coltan helped fuel the war in the Congo, a conflict that has resulted in approx. 3.8 million deaths.” [Wikipedia]

     

In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. Johann Hari reports from the killing fields of central Africa.

Amartya Sen on Globalization

Where does "our own" Nobel laureate in economics stand on globalization? Earlier this year, I reviewed The Argumentative Indian by A Sen. A wide ranging book with sixteen essays on Indian culture, history, and identity,  it often brims with that perennially precious thing: commonsense. It also reveals his abiding love of India. Here, too, Sen tackles globalization from his unique vantage point as an economist. Below is an extract from my review that examines his views on the topic.

 

Some fears about globalization, Sen says,

 

make it sound like an animal—analogous to the big shark in Jaws—that gobbles up unsuspecting innocents in a dark and mysterious way ... Globalization is neither new, nor in general a folly. Through persistent movement of goods, people, techniques and ideas, it has shaped the history of the world. India has been an integral part of the world in the most interactive sense. The forces of ideological separatism may be strong in India at present, as they are elsewhere, but they militate not just against the global history of the world, but also against India's own heritage.

 

He warns us against the temptation to see globalization as a "one-sided movement that simply reflects an asymmetry of power which needs to be resisted." Throughout history, "different regions of the world have [benefited] from progress and development occurring in other regions." He points out that a millennium ago this movement occurred in the reverse direction—with "paper and printing, the crossbow and gunpowder, the wheelbarrow and the rotary fan, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge, the kite and the magnetic compass," zero, the decimal system, and advances in mathematics—but he is conspicuously silent about how the unprecedented scale of today's globalization, with its pace and engine of change, instant flights of capital, rapid demographic shifts, and powerful corporations, might differ from that of an earlier age.

 

Sen acknowledges that economic globalization poses risks to the vulnerable and the disadvantaged and his prescriptions appear close to the neo-liberal line: It's inescapable, so let's try to make it more humane and just. Rather than isolating itself or blaming the "shark" of globalization, India should get behind it and, through smart public policies, tackle specific ills that arise from it, as well as invest in education, health care, micro-credit, land reforms, women's education, and infrastructure (like energy, communication, transportation). He favors safety nets and well conceived social welfare programs that do less harm than good (who can disagree, but here Sen betrays no awareness that this old problem is known to ensnare even the best kind of reasoning). He has used part of his Nobel Prize money to fund development research in India and Bangladesh. He has persuasively argued that development should be measured not by GDP but in terms of "real freedoms people can enjoy."

 

But Sen's analysis is not without its flaws. He writes: "Global economic interactions bring general benefits, but they can also create problems for many, because of inadequacies of global arrangements as well as limitations of appropriate domestic policies." If (a big if) these were addressed—Sen seems to suggest—economic globalization should create few problems. This is simplistic at best. Problems can also come from a culture's unpredictable response to it. What novel set of beliefs will it provoke? Will they be broadly liberal, rational, and conducive to economic success? Can we say how the dust will settle? The patient may get worse, or trade one serious illness for another. This recognition, far from turning us against globalization, makes us more realistic about its effects. Factoring in culture, Amy Chua, in her World on Fire, provides sobering examples that contrast with many of Sen’s sanguine assumptions about "the crooked timber of humanity".