Category: Economics
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Dharavi: India’s Model Slum?
Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is usually spoken of as a hell-hole and a shame for urban India. Here is a very different viewpoint. “Look beyond the stereotype,” says urban development consultant Prakash M. Apte, “and you’ll find a successful settlement with a vibrant community and economy. But developers want to raze it all and start again … Dharavi is a model that should be replicated, not redeveloped.”
The Indian megacity of Mumbai has an estimated population of about 14 million. Of those, only about 35% live in ‘regular’ permanent housing. The other 65% live in informal settlements, which for more than a third of those people means squatting on sidewalks and under bridges. The rest — nearly 6 million people — occupy settlements on private and public open lands, some of which are more than 50 years old. Dharavi is one of the most famous, but unlike all others and despite its common depiction as a “slum”, it is actually a successful work-cum-residential settlement. Developers have been trying to redevelop the area for years, but Dharavi is a model settlement that needs to be replicated, not replaced.Located in the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi has a population of more than 600,000 people residing in 100,000 makeshift homes, and one of the world’s highest population densities at more than 12,000 persons per acre. It is just across from the Bandra- Kurla Complex—a fast developing commercial center that has overtaken Nariman Point, the current downtown of Mumbai—and is also located close to Mumbai’s domestic and international airports. Despite its plastic and tin structures and lack of infrastructure, Dharavi is a unique, vibrant, and thriving ‘cottage’ industry complex, the only one of its kind in the world.
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Facebook vs. Google
An interesting account of the high-stakes rivalry between Facebook and Google for the future of the web:
Although Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and its CEO since April, was born just 11 years before Mark Zuckerberg, his counterpart at Facebook, the two belong to different Internet generations with different worldviews. In Page’s web, everything starts with a search. You search for news or for a pair of shoes or to keep up with your favorite celebrity. If you want to learn about a medical condition or decide which television to buy, you search. In that world, Google’s algorithms, honed over more than a decade, respond almost perfectly. But in recent years the web has tilted gradually, and perhaps inexorably, toward Zuckerberg’s world. There, rather than search for a news article, you wait for your friends to tell you what to read. They tell you what movies they enjoyed, what brands they like, and where to eat sushi.
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Peace in the Favelas
Here is a success story from the favelas, or shantytowns, of Rio de Janeiro. Plagued for years by violent crime, the favelas were awash in gangs, drug dealers, and high-end automatic weapons that even the local police didn’t have; thousands were killed during shootouts. The police were afraid to go in; kids growing up in the favelas idolized gang leaders; fear ruled the streets. The horrifying movie City of God, based on a true story, captured all this brilliantly well. However, with the soccer world cup and the Olympics coming up, the government recently adopted a whole new approach to addressing this problem and it is working out really well. Check out this report by Al Jazeera.
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An Indian-American in China
In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.
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Satz on the Limits of Markets
I attended a lecture yesterday by Debra Satz, Stanford Professor of Ethics in Society. It was titled “Why Shouldn’t Everything be for Sale?” Satz began by acknowledging that free markets, in general, promote greater efficiency and freedom of exchange than other systems. But markets do a lot more, and there is considerable debate over what limits should exist on markets and their intrusion into certain areas of life. Even many diehard libertarians have qualms about letting the market dictate some transactions, such as those involving child labor, organ trade, surrogate motherhood, life saving medicines, weapons trade, narcotic drugs, or exporting toxic waste to poor nations.
Why do people have these qualms? What moral intuitions might be behind our discomfort in letting the market govern such exchanges? And how might we devise social policy for such markets, knowing that prohibition at times can produce pathological side effects (e.g., banning child labor can increase child prostitution)? In her most recent book, Why some things should not be for sale, Satz tackles such questions. In her lecture, she presented four parameters that can make certain market-based transactions deeply problematic to us:
(a) The weak agency of a party, for instance, due to a significant lack of autonomy or knowledge (e.g., child labor, subprime lending, and organ trade; Satz cited a survey in which 75 percent of the kidney donors in Tamil Nadu—in the so-called “kidney belt”—did not even know how many kidneys they had left).
(b) The vulnerability and inequality of a party (e.g., prostitution, surrogacy, and organ trade).
(c) The likelihood of extreme individual harm to a party (e.g., surrogacy, drugs, and weapons trade).
(d) The likelihood of extreme societal harm (e.g., child labor and weapons trade). -
Another Pakistan
Christopher Lydon, host of Radio Open Source, has just done a valuable series of interviews with South Asians, nearly all Pakistanis. Called Another Pakistan, the people he speaks to about the state of the region include novelists, artists, singers, journalists, historians, activists, and others. Though they all seem to come from the region’s English-speaking upper crust, a lot of their perspectives and many-layered stories still find little or no room in the cramped narrative of Pakistan in the West, including on the pivotal role of the Partition in shaping so many of the pathologies in the region. The interviews run for many hours but a condensed two-hour version with selections from the longer interviews is a good place to start (I’m just starting to work my way through some others).One interview I enjoyed for the most part was with Ashis Nandy. He “has just made his own study, in 1500 interviews, of the wounds of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan — among the searing and decisive memories of his own boyhood in Calcutta. The snippet that leaps out at him now is that 40 percent of his sample called up stories of themselves and others being helped through that orgy of blood and death by “somebody from the other side.” In no other genocide, Nandy says, can he find a comparable measure of mercy. “There is that part of the story, too,” he is saying. “That is South Asia.” Click below to listen (via 3QD).
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The Skin Trade
Chloe Schama’s review of Pricing Beauty by Ashley Mears offers startling insights into the fashion industry and the road to supermodeldom.
What does it take to succeed in an intensely competitive, cutting-edge industry? You need to show ambition, clearly, while never exuding unbecoming eagerness. For the right kind of exposure, you may have to work for free—even go into debt. You need to be calculating with your acquaintances, but avoid close connections with possible competitors. Above all, you need to stay beholden to the unlikely dream of success and the rare moments of magic, building calluses and erecting blinders to the unpleasant and grueling realities.Such self-steeling is required for a career in any number of creative fields: journalism, novel-writing, acting, design, singing, dancing. But the world in which such demands come into perhaps the sharpest relief is that of the fashion model. The modeling world, with increased intensity in recent decades, has become one of freakish and outsized expectations—professionally and physically. Look no further than the apex of the industry, the high-end catwalk model, for the starkest example: she is often a size 00, with a waist that compares to a seven-year-old girl’s. For all the beauty it regularly displays, there is something deeply twisted about this industry. In her new book, the former-model and current professor of sociology Ashley Mears untangles just how crazy the fashion industry can be.
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India’s Silent War
From Imran Garda of Al Jazeera comes this rare, insightful, and truly heartrending report on the plight of the Adivasis. “A 40-year long civil war has been raging in the jungles of central and eastern India. It is one of the world’s largest armed conflicts but it remains largely ignored outside of India. Caught in the crossfire of it are the Adivasis, who are believed to be India’s earliest inhabitants. A loose collection of tribes … about 84 million of these indigenous people, which is about eight per cent of the country’s population. … The uprising by Maoist fighters and its brutal suppression by the Indian government, has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 1980, and displaced 12 million people.” But numbers do not reveal the larger tragedy, stories like this do, which we hardly ever find in the Indian media. (Via Usha.)
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Miss Representation
Go see the very well put together documentary film, Miss Representation, which explores “the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls.” While not in theaters (yet?), click on the movie website to locate a screening near you (trailer below).
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Gary Gutting on Corporations
Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, has an incisive piece on how to think about corporations. Must read, especially for leftists and liberals who tend to see corporations as evil, rather than as dangerous—a distinction that is really important to understand.
Far more important than questions about what corporations are [i.e., whether they are “people” or not] is the question of what attitude we should have toward them. Should we, as corporate public relations statements often suggest, think of them as friends (if we buy and are satisfied with their products) or as family (if we work for them)? Does it make sense to be loyal to a corporation as either a customer or as an employee? More generally, even granted that corporations are not fully persons in the way that individuals are, do they have some important moral standing in our society?My answer to all these questions is no, because corporations have no core dedication to fundamental human values. (To be clear, I am speaking primarily of large, for-profit, publicly owned corporations.) Such corporations exist as instruments of profit for their shareholders. This does not mean that they are inevitably evil or that they do not make essential economic contributions to society. But it does mean that their moral and social value is entirely instrumental. There are ways we can use corporations as means to achieve fundamental human values, but corporations do not of themselves work for these values. In fact, left to themselves, they can be serious threats to human values that conflict with the goal of corporate profit.
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The Chinese are Coming
This breezy BBC documentary (early 2011) explores the nature and impact of China’s rising influence around the world, especially in Africa, Brazil, and the U.S., and how China is reshaping the balance of power among nations.
Over a million Chinese now live and work in Africa, running high-yield chicken farms to giant mining operations, selling goods, lending money, building infrastructure. Inevitably, they have also brought with them a range of cultural values and economic practices that cause friction at times. Pop pundit Tom Friedman says of the chinese: “what’s most unsettling to most Americans is not their communism, it’s their capitalism”. That said, you can also see this two-hour documentary as a series of human stories from a rapidly changing world—from Angola, Zambia, Congo, Tanzania, Brazil, and the U.S.—and ponder the role each of us plays in the unfolding of the world as it does.
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The State of Solar Energy
An encouraging report on the current state and outlook for the solar energy industry. “The cost of solar panels has dropped significantly. Thanks to that and to new financing, the rooftop solar business is going gangbusters.” Listen to the audio report, or read the transcript.
Recent reports of solar companies going bankrupt and stories about alleged federal loan scandals have cast long shadows on the entire solar industry. But the sun is far from setting on photovoltaics. In fact, in 2010 – solar panels that could generate 17 gigawatts of energy – that’s equal to about 17 nuclear power plants – were sold worldwide. And this year, the US industry expects to double its production, and companies are growing fast to meet the demand for roof top panels. Living On Earth’s Ingrid Lobet reports. -
Battling Bad Science
“Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.” If you like this, check out another related performance by Goldacre from last year.
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Regime Change Doesn’t Work
In the Boston Review, a well-argued opening piece by Alexander B. Downes that is a “part of Regime Change Doesn’t Work, a forum on the use of military intervention to overthrow foreign governments”, followed by variously interesting responses from others in this forum.
Beyond the question of whether it is wise for the United States to seek regime change in yet another country while it continues to clean up the mess from the last two, the Libya adventure begs a reconsideration of the wisdom of regime change in general. Focusing on consequences, I will steer clear of issues of legality and moral justification. Rather, I ask what the historical record tells us about the capacity of externally imposed regime change to bring peace, stability, and democracy to target countries. Is the bloody aftermath of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq the exception or the rule? Does regime change work?The short answer is: rarely. The reasons for consistent failure are straightforward. Regime change often produces violence because it inevitably privileges some individuals or groups and alienates others. Intervening forces seek to install their preferred leadership but usually have little knowledge of the politics of the target country or of the backlash their preference is likely to engender. Moreover, interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting. Regime change generally fails to promote democracy because installing pliable dictators is in the intervener’s interest and because many target states lack the necessary preconditions for democracy.
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Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.
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A Decade of War Costs
A look at what the wars of the post-9/11 decade cost the American economy (more data here):
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On Equality vs. Growth
What should a country emphasize more: a more equitable income distribution or macroeconomic growth? Most people tend to assume that the two are opposed to each other. Research however reveals a very different picture. Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry explain why.
In his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). The late Yale University and Brookings Institution economist said that not only can more equal distribution of incomes reduce incentives to work and invest, but the efforts to redistribute—through such mechanisms as the tax code and minimum wages—can themselves be costly. Okun likened these mechanisms to a “leaky bucket.” Some of the resources transferred from rich to poor “will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich”—the result of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.Do societies inevitably face an invidious choice between efficient production and equitable wealth and income distribution? Are social justice and social product at war with one another?
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How Terrorists Are Made
Anthropologist Scott Atran, compelling as usual, talks to Robert Wright about what creates terrorists, the subject matter of his book a year ago, Talking to the Enemy (via 3QD). Additionally, here is an audio interview (click on Listen near the top), and another video interview.
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Is Inflation the Answer?
Who among us hasn’t heard of the mounting U.S. national debt and the threat it poses to this country’s future? There are really only three ways of bringing this debt under control: (a) by collecting more taxes, whether by raising the tax rate or increasing the GDP at the current tax rate, (b) by cutting government expenditure, and (c) by printing money to pay off debt, an inflationary measure. More liberals favor the first, more conservatives the second—both are harder to justify in recessionary times. The third option works rather differently and is not any more popular. Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, takes a closer look at this option.
Recently, a number of commentators have proposed a sharp, contained bout of inflation as a way to reduce debt and reenergise growth in the United States and the rest of the industrial world. Are they right?To understand this prescription, we have to comprehend the diagnosis. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue, recoveries from crises that result from over-leveraged balance sheets are slow and typically resistant to traditional macroeconomic stimulus. Over-levered households cannot spend, over-levered banks cannot lend, and over-levered governments cannot stimulate.
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9/11 and the Cycle of Revenge
Last week a flood of articles commemorated the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not surprisingly, I was nauseated by all the self-love and self-absorption on display—including among American liberals, most of whom seem to me Americans first before they are liberals. I have just found a viewpoint that’s close to my own take on 9/11 and its aftermath. It is by Simon Critchley. I only wish he had developed it further!
I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence with no apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.
