Provocations

Die Hard: Wet and Wild

GOOD — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:00:00 PST

Detective John McClane has taken on terrorists before, but you know what's an especially hard way to die? Diarrhea. The symptoms of water-related disease aren't very fun in general. Check out our trailer for Die Hard: Wet and Wild.

How Carbon Trading Hurts the Poor

Jenny Price — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:30:42 PDT

Pollution is a global problem, but the costs are paid neighborhood by neighborhood.

Now that California has adopted an ambitious, cover-all-bases greenhouse gas reduction plan, it is being widely touted (this happens to us a lot in California) as the model for a national plan. Most of the provisions would bring tears of joy to any environment-loving person who's waited out the last eight years. Unfortunately, the plan relies on cap-and-trade to achieve the largest share of reductions-despite vehement objections from low-income communities and a raft of public health professionals, along with a blistering response from the state Air Resources Board's own environmental justice advisory committee.

Note to the Obama administration: Nearly every environmental justice group in the United States and abroad opposes carbon trading.

Why? The strategy allows industries to pollute as much or more in some places if they pay to reduce pollution elsewhere-anywhere-and it's just not that difficult to predict that these "some places" will be the low-income areas that already suffer the worst industrial pollution. While the CO2 itself isn't toxic, every carbon source also emits a standard toxic list of co-pollutants-the sulfur dioxide, mercury, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter that have wreaked such havoc on people's health in these communities.

So why are so many wonderful, principled, justice-loving environmentalists brushing aside these objections? Well, cap-and-trade is rooted deeply, and counter-productively, in environmentalism's enduring "we" problem.

"We are all in this together" rhetoric dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the environmental movement as we know it powerfully came of age. It remains one of the basic pillars of environmentalist culture-of the fundamental, practically instinctive, ways we understand the causes of environmental problems. We, as a species, are destroying the earth, and we, homo sapiens, must fix it. Humanity is the problem, right? How many times did An Inconvenient Truth inform us that Humanity is destroying the Environment?

The "we" rhetoric has always tended to obscure a few sub-planetary inequalities in who creates pollution, where it happens, and where it gets cleaned up. It has encouraged the assumption that any environmentally destructive act-anywhere-is bad for all of us, and that any environmentally positive act is good for everyone. And it's encouraged a great many of even the most enlightened environmentalists to continue to see inequities as a secondary, or at best separate, problem.

And that's why the "we" problem has helped to perpetuate the vast environmental devastation.

Because the problem, on a planetary level, isn't that we aren't all in this together. The problem is that to clean up the whole planet we share, you have to recognize the sub-planetary ways in which we are not.

Historically, "we" have always concentrated our environmental messes in the low-income areas where people have the least power to object and the least money to escape. Our toxic hotspots have always been powerfully enabled by the ability of the most affluent homo sapiens to escape the most hazardous consequences of their environmental actions-to move away from the factories, clean things up in the suburbs where they live, and dump out there.

Just imagine how fast we'd clean up the industrial quadrants of Los Angeles, for example, if everyone in the city had to breathe the emissions next door, equally.

Now imagine how slowly we'll clean up this beautiful orb if we embrace strategies that continue to legitimate the use of the lower-income areas on the earth as places to stash the worst pollution.

Which is exactly what carbon trading does. It sets out to reduce emissions on a global scale by reducing them anywhere at all. It ignores inequities and geography, with a great blast of "we" enthusiasm.

Call it trickle-down environmentalism-which works about as effectively you would expect. In the short and medium term, many communities that are battered by widespread health problems will become either minimally cleaner or even more polluted. In the long term, any strategy that encourages the continued use of some areas as dumps for toxics is a strategy that dooms progress on a global scale to a tortoise's pace. You cannot clean up this planet by ignoring geographic inequities. It cannot be done.

Carbon trading doesn't have to be so geographically witless. One can envision a new, improved cap-and-trade version 2.0 that's regulated to clean up the pollution hot spots preferentially. But whether trading, or just the more direct regulation by taxes and mandatory reductions, the dominant strategy should understand how environmental inequities perpetuate the problems we're trying to tackle.

As we sail forth boldly into the New Green Age, a national environmental policy will have to recognize that the fastest route to sustainability is the most equitable. We need to share the costs of pollution, and benefit from our greening initiatives, equally. For all our sakes.

Photos for illustration from flickr users tboard and November girl, licensed under Creative Commons

The New Orleans Project

Graeme Wood — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:00:42 PDT

Let's fight hurricanes like we're waging a war

Every year, the United States suffers attacks on American soil so brutal, our military can do little more than rebuild our wrecked cities, and console the wounded once the enemy has withdrawn.

This enemy is the Atlantic hurricane system, and the price of its damage, in dollars spent and in lives lost, rivals that of man-made war. Hurricane Katrina, which totaled nearly $100 billion and 1,800 dead in 2005, cost only slightly less than a year of the occupation of Iraq, and killed more Americans in a day than the Iraq war claimed in over two years. Last year, Hurricane Ike claimed only 177 lives, but still wreaked $31 billion of damage.

If this enemy were human-imagine, if you can, a rogue Canadian government-we would long since have funded a massive military and civilian project to defend our border, raid enemy bases, and reduce Ottawa to puddle of hot slag. But since hurricanes are inanimate, we resign ourselves to the inevitable destruction.

We can do better.

For decades, meteorologists have studied ways to strangle hurricanes. Their efforts have not been much rewarded: colleagues shun them, tending to eschew the voodoo-meteorology involved in weather tinkering. But the anti-hurricane scientists are serious, and their efforts, while underfunded, have produced an ingenious array of new tactics.

Hurricanes develop when hot air near the sea's surface rises to meet the cold air above. If the rising hot air differs enough in temperature with the cold layer, cold gas rises in spirals and churns, and a hurricane is born. To reduce the heat near the ocean surface, some scientists propose dipping enormous buckets deep into the ocean and hauling frigid seawater up to cool the surface. They've also considered scattering materials into the ocean to reduce or change the sea-spray, which may be a factor in the violence of the churn. And higher up in the atmosphere, scientists propose to scatter huge quantities of carbon-black-a substance so dark it can absorb enough solar radiation to heat up the cold upper reaches of the nascent hurricane.

Skeptics claim that these schemes won't work. To date, weather modification has managed only a few modest victories: we can get rid of fog (cold airports, such as Thule Air Base in Greenland, do this regularly), and if conditions are right, we can seed clouds and marginally increase the chance of rain. But to try to change a hurricane is to enter an Olympic steeplechase when we've barely learned to toddle. Other quixotic government-backed science crusades have failed more often than they have triumphed. (Witness Nixon's "War on Cancer.") Even the most eager anti-hurricane crusaders, like Moshe Alamaro of MIT, acknowledge that their work is a long-shot, and fraught with dangers.

But it's a bargain compared to other war efforts, and it will yield benefits even if it fails to beat the hurricane. The Manhattan Project cost about $24 billion, in today's dollars; hurricane fighters say the bulk of their work could be done for a very small fraction of that sum. More powerful computer models alone, they claim, would drastically improve our ability to predict hurricane behavior. Higher-precision forecasting would save huge sums, since we'd know which cities to evacuate and when. And many of the proposed interventions into the hurricanes themselves would be quite cheap. Seeding nascent storms with smoke particles-a process for which Daniel Rosenfeld, a distinguished Israeli meteorologist, published a patent this summer-requires only 10 cargo planes full of smoke.

And outright success isn't the point. Think of the moon missions. They cost five times as much as the Manhattan Project, and produced almost no knowledge about the moon that NASA couldn't have found out more cheaply with unmanned spacecraft. Nevertheless, Apollo 11 remains the signature scientific accomplishment of the last century, and in pursuit of a moon-shot science learnt a great deal about rocketry, missiles, computers, and physics.

The phrase "Manhattan Project" has long descended into cliché-what we need is a New Orleans Project. Ideally, this would yield a way to stymie an actual hurricane, and pay for itself with increased property values from Galveston to Miami. But even if it failed, it will have produced vast leaps forward in our understanding of weather systems. This is how government-funded science progresses-in fits and starts, framed by benchmark schemes with crazy-sounding goals. These schemes start as mad science, slowly morph into fringe science, and eventually become standard practice. Harnessing nuclear energy for clean power generation didn't start with tentative inquiries into how uranium might turn electrical turbines. It started with a grand attempt to make the largest explosion in the history of man.

Inspiration is the beginning of scientific progress. At the moment, there are few academic journals more inspiring than the Journal of Weather Modification.

Photos from the NOAA and flickr users Army.mil, laffy4k, and Bart & Jill.

Get Your DNA Tested, But Don’t Expect a Party

Ariana Green — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:00:54 PDT

Are genetic testing companies making us obsess about the stupid stuff, while we forget to test for what matters?

Spit parties, online social networking built around DNA similarities, catchy details about which celebrities you most resemble-what fun! These are just some of the things one of the major genetic testing companies, 23andMe, offers to anyone who can pay to play.

And playfully paying we are. But there's a catch: the information these companies offer can make people worry about the wrong things-or give them a false sense of security-without giving them the information they really need. A tiny increase in a person's likelihood of developing a non-fatal disease can make them overly preoccupied about a negligible risk, when real harms might lurk in their spit-cup.

For between $399 and $2,500, four prominent companies allow a person to purchase genetic data about their disease proclivities and personal traits. Big names including Google co-founder Sergey Brin (whose wife is a co-founder of 23andMe) have participated, as have numerous reporters and regular folks. With the cost of tests decreasing, even Main Street can join the fun.

What the mainstream genetic testing companies do not do-for cost and ethical reasons-is test for the scarier, highly predictive genetic predispositions. This is the DNA data you actually need to know.

To learn whether you have a significantly elevated risk of developing breast cancer, for example, you would likely go to your hospital, which would send your blood to a laboratory, neither of which offers you social networking, folders full of random fun facts, or other perks. The most important genetic tests make a lousy game.

Companies like 23andMe, Navigenics, and DeCODEme have good reason to steer clear of the breast cancer test in particular. To start with, most medical professionals agree that it should always be accompanied by genetic counseling. If a woman carries the so-called BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation (BRCA for "breast cancer"), her lifetime risk of developing breast cancer can be as high as 80 percent, and her risk of ovarian and uterine cancer also goes up. The fun-loving genetic profile purveyors recognize that they are ill-equipped to guide women through decisions about how to handle and act on this information.

At a time when companies are making genetics gimmicky, we risk losing sight of which genetic data is actually useful. The more predictive tests, like those for breast cancer, and as of last year, prostate cancer, help people decide whether to get aggressive screenings and take precautionary measures. And while some of those measures are invasive, they can be lifesavers.

Removing breasts is thought to bring breast cancer risk down to two percent, and removing ovaries can lower the risk of developing the disease by up to 50 percent. Men with a family history of prostate cancer and four or five DNA variants have a cancer risk ten times higher than men with no risk factors. These men will benefit from more intensive monitoring that could detect cancer at an earlier, treatable stage.

Some people fear that health insurance companies might use genetic information against them by denying health coverage or raising premiums, and that employers could discriminate. But now that the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was signed into law in May, there is less reason for people to avoid the more telling tests. GINA makes genetic discrimination illegal.

In fact, having your DNA scrutinized can be a wise financial decision. Most insurance companies will pay for a BRCA-positive woman to undergo yearly MRI screenings starting at age twenty-five, saving the woman thousands of dollars and allowing her to catch developments that a mammogram would miss. Insurance also covers breast removal and reconstruction for women with a mutation.

It's not that DNA testing should be taken lightly. Rather, it should be taken more seriously than your neighbor's spit party. Testing for cancer is not easy on the emotions, especially for young people. Several academic studies have shown that women under 35 confront unique fears when they learn they carry a BRCA mutation.

My own study showed that young women with elevated cancer risks often feel stressed about finding and sustaining relationships once they know they carry a mutation and are considering surgery. These women fret over the possibility of passing a genetic mutation on to their progeny and feel pressured to finish having children so they can remove their ovaries soon thereafter.

It is lamentable that the best options for women with BRCA mutations may involve removing body parts. But preventive surgery is less disruptive than surgery after cancer has developed and spread.

Remember this the next time you find yourself spitting into a cup at one of the trendy DNA parties sweeping the nation: there's a big difference between genetic profiles and the kind of genetic information that can help people make decisions that could save their lives.

The U.S. Needs a Department of Development

Michael Kleinman — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 19:01:56 PST

Foreign assistance isn't only a moral gesture, it's also essential to our national security.

The United States spends more than $20 billion a year in foreign assistance, yet it's an open question what we're receiving in return. In the words of the official Help Commission Report on Foreign Assistance Reform, "Our foreign assistance system is broken."

The answer is to establish a new Department of Development. Only a cabinet-level agency has the clout to coordinate U.S. foreign assistance funding across and throughout the Government, while also ensuring that our development spending takes a suitably long-term, strategic approach.

The case for reform comes down to the idea that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure-foreign assistance isn't only a moral gesture, but also essential to our national security. Providing assistance to keep countries from becoming failed states makes much more sense than trying to deal with them afterward. Especially as failed states provide the perfect environment in which terror threats can metastasize.

The problem, however, is that we're not very good at this kind of prevention. Our foreign assistance spending is chaotic and uncoordinated, which makes the development and implementation of a coherent strategy almost impossible.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is meant to be the lead agency within the government for distributing and coordinating foreign aid. Yet between 1998 and 2006, USAID's share of total government spending on development fell from 64.3 percent to 45 percent. Overall, a total of 28 different U.S. government departments and agencies provided overseas aid in 2006. It's as though a room full of doctors are arguing as the patient dies.

At the same time, more and more foreign assistance is being channeled through the Department of Defense, which presents an entirely new set of difficulties.

In Iraq, I remember walking through a small village that had recently been devastated by a truck bomb. The force of the explosion had leveled houses and the local school, leaving a rough circle of rubble and little else. As we surveyed the damage, the lieutenant in charge of the Civil Affairs Team responsible for the area pointed out all the projects that he'd like to do, all the buildings he'd like to rebuild.

Yet while soldiers are trained to do many things, overseeing third-world development projects is not one of them. The Lieutenant had the money he'd need to hire local contractors to construct a school, or dig a well. It was far more complicated, however, to ensure that these projects were sustainable. Wells that run dry and schools that sit empty for lack of teachers don't do much good.

USAID, however, cannot provide much support. Due to Congressional and Administrative indifference stretching back decades, USAID has become a shell of its former self-there are now half the number of USAID staff as there were in the early 1980s.

During his second term, President Bush tried to improve overall coordination by integrating USAID more closely with the State Department, mandating that the USAID Administrator also simultaneously fill the role of Director of Foreign Assistance at the State Department.

This however, is exactly the wrong approach. First, these reforms do nothing to address the fragmented nature of U.S. foreign aid. The combined position of USAID Administrator and Director of Foreign Assistance still controls only 55 percent of all U.S. foreign assistance. Second, and even more problematic, these reforms ensure that U.S. development spending is subordinated to the short-term political and diplomatic concerns of the State Department.

Yet foreign assistance is most effective when it takes a long-term approach, prioritizing pro-poor development policies. The current reforms instead give us the opposite, which further undermines our ability to help stabilize failing countries.

National security is often described in terms of the three D's-diplomacy, defense and development. There's a Department of State and a Department of Defense, yet there's no Department of Development. And then we wonder why our development policies are so ineffective.

China Should Bail Out the West

Josh Kurlantzick — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:30:49 PST

Beijing should bankroll a new "global rescue fund" to help countries hit hardest by the economic collapse.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, most countries are looking to the United States to stabilize markets and prevent a second Great Depression. "Americans don't have a choice, they must absolutely have a global plan," the head of France's central bank told reporters. But rather than asking Washington to save the day, the world should choose a wiser strategy-pass the buck east, to the only nation benefiting from the crisis, and the one with the resources to bail out the world.

For years, Western nations have criticized China for its state-controlled model of development, in which Beijing protects certain strategic industries, refuses to let its currency float on world markets, and uses capital controls in part to ensure its citizens save a high percentage of their incomes. "China is a manipulator [of its currency]," New York Senator Charles Schumer, a frequent China critic, charged at the Senate Banking Committee hearing last year.

Since the late 1970s, though, this strategy has brought China the fastest growth in modern history, and now Beijing's decision looks even wiser than ever. Because of its currency restrictions, China's renminbi cannot be attacked by speculators and traders. Because of its capital controls, it has amassed one of the largest pools of savings in the world, since its people have few options other than saving. If China's economy cools down-it is still growing by 9 percent, even during the global crisis-the government can inject massive amounts of capital to bail out the Chinese economy.

While China saves, Western nations struggle to gain any traction against the global fiscal meltdown. And if their giant rescue packages fail-thus far they have failed to stop the wild market fluctuations-the American and European governments will eventually be tapped out, running such huge deficits they can no longer afford massive state interventions. The other major world economy, Japan, has little to contribute to the rescue either-it still has barely recovered from its own devastating crisis, during the 1990s.

That leaves China. With as much as $2 trillion in currency reserves-by far the most on earth-China could save the day. It could become a lender of last resort to distressed banks and other financial firms across the world, or could funnel some of its money to the International Monetary Fund, which helps stabilize debt-ridden countries. Beijing could even bankroll a large, new "global rescue fund" to help countries hit hardest by the crisis, an idea proposed at one recent world summit.

A rescue would show that Beijing's model of development-one that doesn't involve messy things like democracy-can stand up to the Western democratic gospel preached since World War II.

A Beijing bailout would not be pure altruism; it would benefit China greatly as well. By taking the lead, China would put itself in position to pick through Western financial firms and other companies for the best assets. Already, China's state-controlled fund has invested in Morgan Stanley, and has started recruiting people to work for the Chinese fund as American investment firms lay off workers en masse. Beijing also has negotiated new deals with Russia, possibly providing at least $20 billion in loans to Russian petroleum firms in exchange for oil, a resource vital to China's energy-hungry economy.

Bailing out the West also could prove the final capstone in China's global ascendancy, signaling, like the United States's dominance of the post-WWII globe, that Beijing has arrived as a power-and even has lessons to teach other nations. A rescue would show that Beijing's model of development-one that doesn't involve messy things like democracy-can stand up to the Western democratic gospel preached since World War II. And once shy of promoting its model, China now may be ready to play the leader. In recent years, Beijing has started touting its success to other nations through annual training programs for thousands of officials from across the developing world.

Some in Beijing already have begun crowing over this power shift. As one Chinese state media outlet put it, in slightly less diplomatic terms than some of the Chinese officials I've met: "The United States is no longer the omnipotent savior and global protector of American values."

But passing the buck to Beijing would have benefits for other countries, too. By relying more on Chinese capital, Western countries would not have to run as large deficits, and could use their state funds for other desperately needed initiatives, like ensuring workers hurt by the crisis still have some form of health care or reforming retirement benefits, since most Western nations have aging societies. Many of these countries already have decimated their state treasuries: Between the $700 billion financial rescue package and the $787 billion stimulus bill, America's deficit will run over $1.5 trillion this year.

Even better, passing the buck will help cement China into the international system, which would be an enormous relief for the United States and other Western nations. Right now, many Chinese leaders seem unsure whether Beijing should play nice with the world-by helping resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis, for example-or go it alone, as China has for decades, by continuing internationally frowned-upon activities like shipping arms to Zimbabwe even as Robert Mugabe's government brutalizes its opposition. Many American officials I've spoken with fear that, in the long run, a go-it-alone China will become angrier and more aggressive, like Japan before WWII, with few links to the world to restrain it.

By investing in a global financial rescue, China could no longer go it alone; its fortunes would now be closely tied to the health of the world. A nation that has helped bail out, say, South Africa-a country hit hard by the global financial crisis-could hardly also continue backing Zimbabwe, where the ongoing political warfare destabilizes its neighbors by sending thousands of refugees streaming into South Africa. A nation investing all over the globe could no longer avoid joining the clubs of major powers, like the G-8 summit of industrialized nations, to which China does not yet belong. And a country that, eventually, might wind up using its massive savings to rescue much of America's financial institutions would find it harder to, one day, turn around and attack the United States.

Make Public Education Work for Everyone

Marya Cohn — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:44:54 PST

My husband is a Dutchman who moved to America to be with me. We have experienced many things together over the last seven years that have made me feel the need to apologize for my country. But, navigating the American education system on our children's behalf has made me sorrier than anything else.

When I first explained the options available to a kindergarten student in America, my husband was completely baffled. The first private school in Holland opened just this year. I had to explain that American parents who can afford to do so have to weigh the many benefits of private school education against the costs of elitism. Since we happen to live near a good public school, our decision was relatively simple.

Then we discovered that our son has a learning disability. The public school classroom choices available to America's more than 6 million disabled children are fairly limited. The Board of Education decides which type of class it deems most appropriate for your child. If you disagree with its placement recommendation, you have two choices: You can either let your child suffer in the wrong classroom while you fight for reassignment, or you can pre-emptively place your child in a special private school and sue the Board for reimbursement for failing to provide the legally mandated free and appropriate education.

Wouldn't it be smarter to invest in making public-school education in America meet all students' needs?

My husband and I watched as our self-confident, friendly 4-year-old became isolated and insecure in the wrong kind of classroom; we didn't know if he would dare to be fully present again. So when a group of experienced teachers and psychologists who knew our son told us that they believed he would feel lost and inadequate in a collaborative team teaching classroom-the placement the Board of Education had given him-my husband and I rejected it. When the Board responded by offering us the exact same type of placement in a different neighborhood, we put our son in a private school for children with learning disabilities-which costs $40,000 a year. And then, like 70,000 other parents of special needs children in America, we fought the Board of Education. The Board would not settle with us, so we requested an impartial hearing.

We spent four days in a stiflingly hot room in Brooklyn listening to people who had never met our son testify that they understood his needs better than we did and imply that we were elitists who would never send our child to public school no matter what the circumstances. I had to testify under oath that I did not think that my beautiful boy could learn alongside "typically developing children." I am sure that both the Board of Education lawyer who impugned us, and the special education teacher who said, "when I think of your son," without having ever laid eyes on him, hoped to help disabled students when they took their jobs. But the existing system has turned them into our son's adversaries.

And we are the lucky ones. The parents of disabled children who do not know the laws, who cannot afford a lawyer or the cost of a private school, do not have the option of challenging their child's placement or suing for reimbursement. Nor do the parents of "typically developing children" who think that the public schools are not providing appropriate education for their children. School vouchers have been proposed as a solution to this problem, but I fear that school vouchers merely make American education even more segregated than it is now. Allowing a few parents to buy their way out of a broken system is no way to fix it.

Wouldn't it be smarter to invest in making public-school education in America meet all students' needs? Dutch citizens spend 30 percent of their tax
revenues on education, compared to the less than 5 percent we spend in the United States. The Dutch spend more tax revenues on education than on any other sector of their society. The Dutch educational system ranks ninth in the world. America's did not even make the top 20.

But what if we did make education a priority? What if we provided all American students with those things that wealthy parents are buying when they send their children to private schools: smaller class sizes, better resources, better-trained teachers, and more inventive curricula? I, for one, would have a lot less apologizing to do.

Cohn is a writer, writing teacher, and mother who lives in New York City.

Author Portraits by Forrest Martin

Change Congress

Lawrence Lessig — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:30:53 PDT

For a very brief moment earlier this year, I considered a run for Congress. My Congressman had announced his retirement. Shortly thereafter, he passed away. A special election was called. Friends pushed me to consider a run. A "Draft Lessig" website was launched; a Facebook group to the same end quickly grew into the thousands. So I agreed to think about the idea.

We ran a poll. The poll revealed two extraordinary facts (after the not-so-extraordinary fact that I had exactly zero chance of winning): first, that 88 percent of the voters in my district believed money buys results in Congress; second, that less than 16 percent had a favorable view of Congress. Six months later, even 16 percent is probably too high. In July, Rasmussen reported that, for the first time in its history, favorable views of Congress had fallen into the single digit range-9 percent, to be precise.

These two numbers are related. Whether 9 percent or 16 percent, our contempt for Congress comes from the fact that most of us believe its decisions follow not common sense, but campaign dollars: that the institution too often cares not for what is right, but for what will raise the funds necessary to secure its own tenure. In that, at least, the system has succeeded: Incumbents who seek re-election succeed more than 95 percent of the time. Tenure in the United States Congress is safer than it was in the Soviet Politburo. It is almost safer than the life tenure guaranteed to federal judges.

As we come to the end of this quadrennial cycle of political energy, we need to recognize that the biggest problem in American politics is not whether a Democrat or Republican should occupy the White House. The biggest problem for democracy in America is how we restore confidence in this, the framers' favorite institution of American democracy. For as faith in Congress wanes, power shifts to the president and to the courts. And with that shift, democracy weakens. All presidents aspire to be monarchs, and no court could adequately represent the people. If our nation is to remain the democracy our framers envisioned, we must find a way to restore the sense that the core institution in that democracy-Congress-actually works, and works for us.

Tenure in the United States Congress is safer than it was in the Soviet Politburo.

How we do this, however, is not an easy question. At its base, the skepticism that Congress inspires comes from a feature that seems to define the politician: its actions seem inauthentic. Members of Congress say they represent one end; we are suspicious they actually represent another. We fear they act not for the ends that would serve "the People." Instead, we fear, they act for the ends that serve "the Contributors." Money guides the results, or so we are likely to believe whenever Congress acts in ways we don't like and money is in the mix.

This skepticism will end only when the cause of this skepticism-private funding of public campaigns-ends. Yet the only institution that can do that-Congress-is terrified that removing the incumbents' advantage in raising funds for office will remove the incumbents' guarantee of tenure.

Maybe it will. But at some point, Congress as an institution must come to recognize the extraordinary cost that this dependency on private funds has created. In the only sense relevant, the institution is bankrupt. Yet none seem troubled with the fall of the institution as a whole, at least so long as the popularity of individual members remains high.

For those who read this presidential election as a referendum for change, the standing of Congress means this change can only be the first step. No president alone can effect significant change in the way government works, or does not work. To do that, and to restore confidence in the core institutions of our federal democracy, will require something that most now imagine is just impossible: changing Congress.

But changing Congress is not impossible. There is an increasing number of members and candidates who have committed to fundamental reform guided by four simple principles: 1) accept no money from lobbyists; 2) vote to end earmarks; 3) increase Congressional transparency; and 4) support publicly funded campaigns. By contributing, volunteering, and voting to support their commitment, each of us could make that change one step more likely.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

Author Portrait by Forrest Martin

Give Women Guns

Reihan Salam — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:46:06 PDT

In the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court found that banning handguns is an unacceptable infringement on our Second Amendment right as individuals to keep and bear arms. Whatever you think of the decision, it's clear that the debate over gun rights has changed forever. There aren't quite enough privately owned firearms in the United States for every man, woman, and child, but there are almost enough-an estimated 280 million guns. And you can't throw guns in a landfill: unlike your iPod, these deadly devices are built to last. Getting rid of guns is a fantasy, and even the most ardent gun controllers know it. So instead, the gun control movement is scaling back its ambitions by, for example, focusing on gun trafficking and tightening restrictions on who can buy guns. The idea is to reliably guarantee that criminals and crazy people have a hard time getting their hands on dangerous weapons, which is fair enough.

But if we accept that we're going to live in an armed society, we should be sure that there are guns in the right hands-in women's hands. The gun rights crowd has long proclaimed that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Which is a partial truth. It is male people who kill people, and who also assault and maim and rob people. That's not to say that women don't kill, or that women are incapable of killing. But we know that females are far less likely to resort to violence than males, and we know that's true for other species, as well.

We should be sure that there are guns in the right hands-in women's hands.

Take chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimp societies are male dominated, hierarchical, and defined by violence. Bonobos are defined by high levels of social cooperation, egalitarianism, and strong female leadership. When we think of bonobos, we generally think of their pansexual, polymorphously perverse lifestyles, which certainly help mitigate conflict. Yet the relative strength of bonobo females is perhaps more important in explaining why bonobo societies are, as a general rule, so much healthier than their chimpanzee counterparts. Bonobo females form tight bonds with each other, which allow them to resist and even dominate their less sociable male counterparts. Any violence against bonobo females is met by a stinging counterattack.

There is a lesson here for humans. If more women were armed, and if men were legally forbidden from packing heat, thus tipping the relative strength imbalance, we'd live in a far safer world.

In Bare Branches, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, who together studied how emerging gender imbalances in Asia will shape the future security environment, argue that so-called "surplus males"-the product of the preference for boys in many traditional societies-tend to be even more violent than men in general, and that societies with a large number of surplus males are more inclined toward aggressive behavior. Arming women could help keep these tendencies in check.

To be sure, this proposal would be unconstitutional and would probably strike most politicians as utterly insane. The idea of treating women and men differently offends our understanding of gender equality at a deep level. But treating women and men as though they are identical-as though women are as violent, dangerous, and abusive as men-isn't treating them equally. Rather, it is pretending that ignoring their deep differences is the best policy, even if that means that people will die or suffer as a direct result.

Basing policy on enduring differences between women and men has applications far beyond fighting crime. Earlier this year, the economists Alberto Alesina, Andrea Ichino, and Loukas Karabarbounis suggested that women ought to be taxed less than men, to induce them to supply more labor. Because of entrenched gender norms, women tend to take on the bulk of household duties, whether they find them fulfilling or not. Men, in contrast, have been socialized into putting their careers first. By easing the tax burden on women, you could, in theory, counteract these powerful biases that work against women's interests. The end result just might be a world in which women's life horizons really are the same as men's.

Salam is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He is the author, with Ross Douthat, of Grand New Party.

Portrait by Forrest Martin

Tricking People into Doing the Right Thing

CassSunstein — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:54:26 PDT

Anyone who has studied psychology knows just how puzzling human behavior can be. Busy people are trying to cope in a complex world, and this means they simply cannot afford to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The bottom line is that people are, shall we say, nudge-able. With subtle hints, you can convince them to do things they otherwise might not be able to do for themselves. And we think private and public institutions ought to offer carefully planned nudges-designing choices that are less heavy-handed and more effective than mandates and bans.

Here are a few possibilities:

Quit smoking without a patch. Committed Action to Reduce and End Smoking is a savings program offered by the Green Bank of Caraga in Mindanao, Philippines. A would-be nonsmoker opens an account with a minimum balance of one dollar. For six months, the client deposits the amount of money she would otherwise spend on cigarettes into the account. After six months, the client takes a urine test to confirm that she has not smoked recently. If she passes the test, she gets her money back. If she fails the test, the account is closed and the money is donated to a charity. MIT's Poverty Action Lab found that opening up an account makes those who want to quit 53 percent more likely to achieve their goal. No other antismoking tactic, not even the nicotine patch, appears to be so successful.

Stop compulsive gambling. Over the past decade, several states, including Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, have enacted laws enabling gambling addicts to put themselves on a list that bans them from entering casinos or collecting gambling winnings. The underlying thought is that many people who have self-control problems are aware of their shortcomings and want to overcome them. Sometimes recreational gamblers can do this on their own or with their friends; sometimes private institutions can help them. But addicted gamblers might do best if they have a way to enlist the support of the state.

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Disulfiram causes alcohol drinkers to throw up and suffer a hangover as soon as they start to drink.

Dollar a day. Teenage pregnancy is a serious problem, and girls who have one child, at, say, 18, often become pregnant again within a year or two. Several cities, including Greensboro, North Carolina, have experimented with a "dollar-a-day" program, by which teenage girls with a baby receive a dollar for each day that they are not pregnant. Thus far the results have been extremely promising. A dollar a day is a trivial amount to the city, even for a year or two, so the plan's total cost is extremely low, but the small recurring payment is just enough to encourage some teenage mothers to take steps to avoid getting pregnant again. And because taxpayers end up paying a significant amount for many children born to teenagers, the costs appear to be far less than the benefits. Many people are touting "dollar a day" as a model program.

No Bite? No Drink. Those who want to stop biting their nails can buy bitter nail polishes such as Mavala Stop and Orly No Bite. A more extreme version of this concept is a drug called Disulfiram, which is given to some alcoholics. Disulfiram causes alcohol drinkers to throw up and suffer a hangover as soon as they start to drink. For some people suffering from chronic alcoholism, Disulfiram has had a strong and positive effect as part of a treatment program.

Stop men from peeing on the floor. Authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can't help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

We Are Making al-Qaeda Stronger

Emran Qureshi — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:00:36 PDT

Despite any efforts on the part of the United States, the Middle East remains awash in violence. In July, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously described the moment as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," but that seems to have been wishful thinking. A recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate states that al-Qaeda has regrouped and is more powerful than at any time in recent history. A 2007 report from the National Counterterrorism Center is starkly titled "Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West." The United States seems to be locked in an endless occupation of Iraq, and meanwhile the true perpetrators of September 11th have been largely ignored.

What went wrong? How did the war on terror fail so disastrously?

It might be instructive to place this moment in historical context. The modern Muslim world was shaped during the days of European colonialism. Then, as now, Western liberalism was a handmaiden to the imperial project. It was permissible to subjugate other peoples as long as one came bearing the ideals of the European Enlightenment. Even noted liberal Alexis de Tocqueville-involved in bringing the Enlightenment to French colonial Algeria in the mid-19th century-reveals in his correspondence a sentiment that is remarkably illiberal. Criticizing squeamish French officers, he wrote, "I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children. These are in my view, unfortunate necessities."

Today's internationalists claim that America can bring liberalism to the Muslim world, beginning with Iraq. Sadly, their policies have produced the opposite result. They have strengthened sectarian identities as well as Islamist movements, and they have weakened democracy and the rule of law.

Right now, al-Qaeda is less a terrorist group than a brand-a multinational organization competing in the global marketplace of ideologies. Jihadism is commonly believed to be an expression of religious fanaticism. There certainly is an element of truth to this, in that the cult of religious martyrdom provides for cheap human cannon fodder. But it belies an important truth: Suicide bombers use a political rather than a religious calculus. The first suicide bombers were not Muslim; the explosive vest was popularized by secular Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, has developed the most detailed profiles of jihadis. In his book, Leaderless Jihad, he argues that the second generation of jihadis is motivated by the belief that Islam is under attack by the West. Thus, the rhetoric of a new world war, Islamofascism, and the playing out of imperial fantasies strengthens jihadis not only in terms of recruitment but also in terms of solidarity. There is a curious symmetry between the rhetoric of bellicose Western conservatives and bloody jihadis. Jihadis agree with their Western counterparts: Yes, the West is at war with Islam. But in this war, the jihadis are defending Muslim lands. For the West, a war on these terms cannot be won.

The British have largely eschewed the belligerent rhetoric of their American cousins (there is little talk in Britain of Islamofascism). They have instead shrewdly criminalized jihadism. Jihadis are not Islamic, nor are they defending Muslims, they are merely criminals. How does one defend a common criminal, a murderer? One doesn't. Sadly, such wisdom has not reached the shores of the New World, where an apocalyptic vision of World War IV (the title of a recent New York Times best seller by the neocon Norman Podhoretz; he counts the Cold War as World War III) and fantasies of a liberal empire empower the very enemy they claim to fight.

How was the war on terror lost? The recipe was simple: Ignore the jihadis who attacked America. Instead invade a foreign Muslim-majority country or two. Position NATO troops in a number of Muslim-majority countries spanning Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Support authoritarian Muslim regimes that suppress their citizenry and hold sham elections. Talk up the need for democracy. Support torture abroad-especially of Islamists. At the same time, talk up the need for human rights. Promote rhetoric about fighting Islamofascism. Continue ignoring the jihadis. Simmer slowly, and wait for everything to boil over.

Give Iraqis the Vote. Our Vote.

Daniel Pepper — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:27:11 PDT

Most Iraqis agree on one thing: Regardless of a political shift in the White House, U.S. policy in Iraq is on a set course, determined by special interests. So if we're going to rebuild Iraq, we need to rebuild our credibility among Iraqis-a constituency largely lost in the yawning gap between the rhetoric in Washington and the reality in Baghdad. There is one real and radical way to make sure this happens: We should offer the Iraqi people the opportunity to vote in the 2008 American presidential election.

Letting Iraqis vote in our election would tether us to the fate of the Iraqi people and force us to own this war in a way that-despite the ultimate sacrifice of more than four thousand American soldiers-we haven't as a country. It would change the dynamic between Iraqis and Americans working on the ground in Iraq for a better, more stable, lasting democracy. And it would have a tremendous impact on our credibility in the region, perhaps even persuading some of the estimated 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries to return home to rebuild their country.

I don't mean to suggest that Iraq should become America's 51st state. This would be a one-off, temporary measure. But its impact could be enormous. Iraq has a population of about 28 million-that's more than Texas but less than California, the most populous state in the union. Perhaps McCain and Obama would go to Iraq to campaign in Fallujah and Samarra, Basra and Erbil. This would allow them to hear from Iraqis directly, and it would bring news coverage of Iraq back to the front page.

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McCain and Obama would come to Iraq to campaign in Fallujah and Samarra, Basra and Erbil.

Giving Iraqis the vote would shatter conceptions of the United States as an aloof, imperialistic force, and instead demonstrate to the world our commitment to democracy in the region by sharing with Iraqis the process we cherish so deeply at home. This would be more than just a public-relations stunt aimed solely at improving our reputation-though it would be that as well. We should let Iraqis vote in the election because we invaded their country and broke open sectarian tensions, religious animosities, and deep-buried hatreds. And as long as our forces are the only ones strong enough to hold the country together, we should give Iraqis a say-not the final say, but a say-in how those forces are deployed. It's not just that we owe Iraqis the chance to vote for our president, it's that any Iraq watcher today knows that our presence there is unquestionably intertwined with Iraq's own damaged political process. The American embassy in Baghdad feels like no other embassy in the world not because it's in one of Saddam's former palaces, but because it is the nerve center of Iraq's future, the ultimate seat of power.

Americans must be disabused of the false notion that Iraq is on an independent path to freedom and democracy at peace with itself and its neighbors, as was stated time and again by Bush administration lackeys in the early days of the war. That goal was always "just around the corner," a refrain to justify our continued presence. It was a lark.

When I was in Iraq earlier this year, most people hadn't heard of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton was a familiar name, but conventional wisdom stated that the Republicans would maintain power for the next four years. In one of the more absurd moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, Senator Clinton told Tim Russert that Iraqi politicians "follow everything that I say." Not quite. But Iraqis know that their fate is tied to that of the American presidential candidates. Let's make it explicit.

Forget About 100-mpg Cars

Cliff Kuang — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:30:43 PDT

There are noble projects afoot in the field of fuel-efficient cars. One of the boldest, the automotive X Prize, recently made the cover of Wired: "1 Gallon of Gas, 100 Miles-$10 million: The Race to Build the Supergreen Car." Reading stories like these, it's hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

But if you really think about it, the 100-miles-per-gallon innovation isn't as immediately effective as making a simple switch from a Suburban to a Civic. Just do the math: If you raise a guzzler's fuel efficiency from 15 miles per gallon to 35 miles per gallon, you save almost four gallons per 100 miles. But boost a fairly efficient car from 35 mpg to 100 mpg, and you save less than two gallons in the same distance. More importantly, the technology for all cars to reach 35 mpg is already here. The same innovations that in the last 30 years have made family cars into muscle cars can be easily deployed to save gas rather than boost performance.

So why is so little attention being paid to getting better fuel efficiency right now?

Part of the problem is that America's big automakers are peddling a future-forward myopia that encourages feel-good complacency. Witness Chevy's commercial for the Volt, a concept car that isn't yet on the market: A pack of kids put their ears to the hood of a sexy silver car. A man standing nearby explains that the mysterious humming they hear is the car's "lithium-ion battery pack," which will allow the Volt to get 40 mpg.

This is disturbing, and not just because the kids may have just piled out of a Chevy Suburban (14 mpg) off screen. Instead of a more fuel-efficient car right now, we get a "miracle," from the "future." In the meantime, why not just refuel the Suburban?

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So why is so little attention being paid to getting better fuel efficiency right now?

To its credit, Chevy is trying to bring the Volt to market by late 2010, and it has begun pursuing hybrid technology. But my concern is a rhetorical one: What happens when advancements in cars are eternally linked-through marketing and special prizes-with big innovations, rather than tangible results right now? Fuel efficiency gets its urgency sapped: Someone's working on it, with results TBD. Wait and see.

Detroit argues (as always) that innovation brings growing pains. Ford's recent response to new federal guidelines is telling. In June, the Big Three told Congress that increased fuel efficiency would be too painful for the auto industry, and would require layoffs. (The United Auto Workers, meanwhile, largely supports the changes, as long as the manufacturing is domestic.) Despite the automakers' protests, Congress just passed the first increase in fuel-efficiency mandates in 34 years-from an average of 25 mpg now to 35 mpg by 2020. A month later, Ford introduced the EcoBoost engine, which delivers a 20-to-30-percent increase in fuel efficiency via turbo-charging and direct injection. It will be on the market by 2009. That wasn't so painful, was it?

There is obviously a place for futurism in car development-averting the most disastrous climate-change scenarios will involve tripling fuel efficiency by 2050. But our current fuel standards are so low that this doesn't require us to invent trash-fueled, flying DeLoreans. Futurism should not command an outsized share of dollars and attention. We should focus on the now, and we should be figuring out how to institute gas-saving measures at a scale where they can actually effect change.

Many options exist to ensure across-the-board improvements in fuel efficiency. Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, advocates turn-in programs for gas-guzzlers, subsidies for carbon-neutral biofuels and electric cars, and aggressive regulation of the fuel-efficiency "floor," so that gains don't stall if gas prices decline. The Natural Resources Defense Council has proposed that revenues from future carbon credit sales go into a "trust fund" that would promote the rapid uptake of sustainable technology. The point is that there is no silver bullet-not supercars, not biofuels. Ignoring or overemphasizing any one piece ensures failure.

These measures don't give off a hum that will make the kids coo. But they're here now. We can't keep staring at the horizon and still avoid the dangers right under our noses.

Save the Earth with Dirty Towels

Dan Heath — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 13:14:08 PDT

"Save our planet! Every day tons of detergent and millions of gallons of water are used to wash towels that have been used only once. PLEASE DECIDE FOR YOURSELF. A towel on the rack means, ‘I'll use it again.' A towel on the floor or in the tub means, ‘please exchange.'"
-MESSAGE IN A HOTEL BATHROOM

With this letter, we welcome you to the Welton Inn, the world's first sustainable eco-motel! At the Welton, you will be an honored guest as well as our partner in the fight against environmental degradation!

Many perceptive guests inquire about our lack of a parking lot. Every year, millions of acres of natural land are paved over to make room for cars. We are committed to fighting this. Please decide for yourself: Simply give up your car altogether, or park at the Bennigan's across the street. (The hostess can't see you if you park in the back.)

As you walk into the Welton, you will enter our dramatic lobby, with its environmental theme and odors. You will be delighted to encounter our "Sustaina-Kennel," where we play temporary host to actual creatures from the native ecosystem, such as German shepherds and a lively ferret. Don't worry, their cages are made of biodegradable plastic! And every Thursday, we allow the dogs to stretch their legs in the Bennigan's parking lot-please join us as our guest!

Do not approach the ferret.

Kindly take our gleaming silver elevator to your floor. But wait-have you considered an aerobic walk up the stairs instead? Did you know that, for a machine to lift two people and their luggage up four floors, it requires 15 watts of energy? This is energy that otherwise might have gone toward life-support systems for children in African hospitals. Whichever option better suits your personal preference is the one we support!

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To make ice, fill your ice bucket with water and wait for winter.

Your room is fully appointed with distinctive eco-contemporary flair. Your pulse will quicken as you spy the queen-size mattress with Egyptian polyester sheets. It is the ideal oasis after a hard day's work! And we are proud to announce that we have launched a program called Dirty Sheets for the Earth, and we invite you to participate! Every month, we waste many cups of detergent and hundreds of gallons of water in order to wash sheets that have been slept on by only 14 guests. We believe this is tragic. If you wish to join us in this crusade, simply wrap yourself in the complimentary Saran Wrap before going to bed at night.

The Saran Wrap is offered as part of our Dirty Plastic Wrap for the Earth program. Stand with us!

As you explore your room, you'll notice the exquisite faux-plywood armoire. Inside it is a fully stocked minibar, filled with a natural harvest of tasty and exotic treats such as Skittles and Peeps, as well as more than 20 tiny bottles of Popov vodka. The minibar is a 100-percent organic appliance, by the way-just add ice to cool down your goodies! To make ice, fill your ice bucket with water and wait for winter.

But might we urge you not to drink the vodka? As you may know, thousands of potatoes are needlessly slaughtered every day, and where will it end? Please decide for yourself: Leaving a fully stocked minibar for the next guest means, "I oppose tubercide." Passing out with 20 empty bottles of Popov vodka scattered around you means, "Please take my wallet."

Checkout is a breeze at the Welton! As part of our commitment to preserving the rainforests, we do not print bills as a record of your stay here. Instead, simply accept our assurances that your credit card will be charged appropriately. Our word is our bond, and you can cancel the resulting adult website subscriptions at any time.

When you're ready to depart the eco-motel, simply slide your room key under the door in the lobby marked "Private." Then, leave your minibar Peeps for one of the dogs (please decide for yourself) and move quickly toward the exit.

Do not look at the ferret.

Thank you for being our guest-and for helping to make the world a better place for your grandchildren and ours! If you find that you've been towed from Bennigan's, maybe it's a hint that you should be reducing your carbon footprint.

Poor People Unite!

Reihan Salam — Thu, 5 Jun 2008 12:54:03 PDT

In theory, there are almost 200 sovereign countries in the world. In practice, however, only a small handful of countries-the United States, the rich nations of Europe and East Asia, and possibly China-truly have the power to determine their own fate. Almost all of the rest are at the mercy of these economic superpowers, which set the rules of the game and rig them in their own favor. What the world needs is an economic superpower that represents the interests of the world's poor: Call it Pooristan. Stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to central and south Asia to the islands of the Pacific to the Americas, this mega-state would include all those people the economist Paul Collier calls "the Bottom Billion." But rather than see this vast population as a burden, Pooristan would recognize it as the world's greatest untapped resource.

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What the world needs is an economic superpower that represents the interests of the world's poor: Call it Pooristan.

Whereas so much of today's divided developing world is plagued by war, whether between states or within them, Pooristan would establish a Pax Pooristana, enforced by a civilian-led multinational volunteer army. Like the Roman and British Empires before it, Pooristan would constitute a vast zone of free trade and migration that would eventually give rise to a polyglot culture. Just as London gathers the world's most impressive financial minds and Silicon Valley attracts extraordinary tech talent, sprawling cities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, would be transformed by the influx of talented "foreigners"-fellow Pooristanis-searching for opportunity. Yes, there would be ethnic conflict, particularly early on. But competition between groups would take the form of friendly economic competition, not bloodshed. To be sure, any state of this size would have to be extremely decentralized. Different regions and provinces and cities would pursue radically different policies. Yet no Pooristani would be prevented from settling anywhere within the borders of Pooristan.

Clearly, Pooristan won't emerge in our lifetime. But as long as poor-country citizens are barred from the rich world, they need to think seriously about joining forces. The great advantage the big emerging markets have over small submerging markets is their bigness. China doesn't have as high a proportion of Ph.D.s as South Korea or the United States. But it has a huge absolute number. That makes an enormous difference. A large absolute number of skilled professionals means you can create economic agglomerations (like London and Silicon Valley) that can serve as engines of economic growth. More often than not, immigrants and foreign capital fuel these engines-the key reason open economies beat closed economies every time.

So why do we need Pooristan? A few microstates like Singapore and Mauritius have flourished as free-trading entrepots at the crossroads of major trading routes. Resource-rich Dubai is trying to beat the world's financial centers at their own game. But for every Singapore or Dubai there is a Central African Republic or a Laos-tiny, poor, often landlocked countries racked by disease. For these countries, their only real resource is their people. As Lant Pritchett argues in his brilliant book Let Their People Come, we could free all trade in goods and services and the economic benefits to the developing world would be pretty modest. That's because, to their credit, key rich countries have already lowered their trade barriers dramatically since the Second World War.

What would make a huge difference for poor countries would be slightly more labor mobility. Every year, rich countries send roughly $70 billion in development aid to poor countries. But if the number of immigrants from poor countries in rich-country workforces increased by just 3 percent, those workers would send $300 billion in benefits to poor-country citizens and their families back home. And yet rich countries are growing ever less inclined to reduce immigration restrictions, often for good reasons. To understand the end result, think about what would happen if residents of riot-scarred inner cities were banned from finding jobs anywhere else. Pritchett calls the world's least fortunate countries "zombies." Because their people are trapped by the lack of economic prospects, they are the equivalent of the living dead.

Pooristan would change all that. It would allow the poor to break out of the little prisons that masquerade as nation-states. And eventually the world's rich would clamor to get in.

Invest in International News

Alisa Miller — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:26:35 PDT

There's money to be made for commercial media in the business of global news.

Sure, news audiences appear to be shrinking, the big media companies have spent the years since the Cold War cutting news staffs and foreign bureaus, and American consumers still appear more interested in the latest travails of Britney and Paris than in what's happening in China. But there is mounting evidence of an audience-and not an insignificant one-for international news.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the U.S. news industry is struggling. In response to the rise of the internet and the disappearance of traditional revenue streams, most media outlets have cut expenses by laying off staff and closing international bureaus. Television news networks have reduced the number of foreign bureaus by more than 50 percent over the past two decades. Similarly, the number of foreign correspondents working for U.S. newspapers dropped 25 percent between 2002 and 2006.

Even worse, the global coverage that does appear is increasingly restricted to a few high-profile topics. A 2004 study found that only 12 percent of local television news was international, and of that, 81 percent was devoted to the so-called war on terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The paltry remainder-49 minutes out of 48 analyzed hours-was spent on all other international issues.

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If the market for global news is growing, why is the delivery of it shrinking?

To be fair, not all global news has faded away. Some of it has migrated online. But even on the internet, the most heavily trafficked sites-like Google News or Yahoo!-are not necessarily offering more global content than the traditional news outlets. They merely offer the illusion of abundance. A recent study analyzed a day's worth of stories on Google News' front page. The 14,000 stories all covered the same 24 news events. Similarly, a study featured in EContent magazine indicates that much of the international news available from leading U.S. news providers consists mainly of recycled stories from the wire services.

But according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which has measured Americans' interest in global news, the number of Americans who say they follow overseas news closely most of the time grew from 37 percent in 2002 to 52 percent in 2004. The increase was especially notable among women, African-Americans, and people without college degrees. In addition, the percentage of Americans who follow international news very closely grew from 14 percent to 24 percent from 2000 to 2004, the largest increase in any category of the study.

So, if the self-identified market for global news is sizeable and growing, why is the delivery of global news shrinking?

art of the explanation comes from the fact that covering celebrities is cheaper than having traditional foreign news bureaus. But it is also due to the fact that media companies are still looking at the market through "old media" lenses. Even today, traditional media-industry market reports continue to segment the market by delivery mechanism-radio, TV, print, online-rather than by the type of specialized news beat, such as international news across radio, TV, print, and the web.

Hopefully we can learn from the British, whose websites and magazines (like the BBC and The Economist, respectively) have seen a big boost in business from American audiences eager for international coverage. There are some positive signs: ABC News recently announced that it will establish mini-bureaus in Seoul, Dubai, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Nairobi. These will not replace larger bureaus around the world, but they can provide important news reportage for digital platforms without much overhead. Even more recently, CNN announced plans to open new offices in nine countries, including Afghanistan and Vietnam, in order to decrease its reliance on the Associated Press and Reuters.

If these trends don't intensify, this one will: Americans will know less and less about the world they inhabit. Knowledge about international affairs has declined significantly over the past 20 years. In 2007, college graduates knew less about the world than their peers did in 1989; the same goes for high school graduates. The result is that these laggards will be less competitive globally, just as their jobs are being shipped overseas.

Companies can give Americans the international news they want, or we can continue our precipitous slide into national ignorance. Investing in international news makes sense.

Africa Needs to Know the Weather

Ryan Bowman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:22:03 PDT

Weather in East Africa is a myth. Limited access to mass media plus simple and predicable meteorological patterns have conspired to make the climate inherent, social knowledge. December to February of each year is a dry season, as is June to October. The rest of the year is wet. "These patterns have always been reliable, so much so that the burgeoning newspaper industries in Uganda and Kenya did not bother to print even the most cursory of weather maps-until now.

Years riddled with misplaced climate disasters-including last year's disastrous floods in the usually dry month of August that displaced thousands in Uganda-have convinced the Daily Monitor, the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, and the Daily Nation, Kenya's paper of record, to revisit the weather map question. I know because they asked me to design the map.

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It is a difficult proposition, drafting a weather map for a country that has never seen one.

It is a difficult proposition, drafting a weather map for a country that has never seen one. Not that it is a bad idea. Uganda is a fundamentally agrarian society-over 80 percent of its 30 million citizens are involved in agriculture-so the people are more dependent on the vagaries of the heavens than many places in this world. But I can't help but feel the hefty irony of making a map for a country the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently included on a list of the 100 most vulnerable countries. My bright and relentlessly cheery "sunny" icon belies the depth of desperation of a third-world country bearing the brunt of what the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, calls an "act of aggression" perpetrated by the rich world against the poor world-in other words, drought caused by global warming brought on by the first-world's excessive use of resources. My lovingly detailed "partly cloudy" icons could just as easily portend the flooding of thousands of mud homes and attendant displacement, famine, and death just as easily as an afternoon shower.

I felt, and still feel, overwhelmed by the inadequacy of it all. I started to think about the perfect weather map of the continent, an utterly honest map that takes into account sub-Saharan Africa's unique but perilous position in the world. I think it would look a little something like the map below.

The Next Century

SAHARA DESERT: 5-7% increase in arid/semi-arid land by 2080 as Saharan dunes shift south

MT. KILIMANJARO: Ice fields, already reduced more than 80%, are likely to disappear between 2015-2020

WEST AFRICA: With more than 40% of the population living in coastal cities, predicted flooding in 2080 in the Accra/Niger delta could put more than 50 million people at risk

SOUTH AFRICA: A Kruger Park study estimates a 66% loss of zebra and nyala

It’s Time to Flee the Country

Chalmers Johnson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:08:04 PDT

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the mid-1950s, my teachers included many brilliant refugees from Hitler's Germany. Sometimes, when we got to know them personally, we would ask them when they had bailed out. In some cases it was quite late. My professor Reinhard Bendix was a student at the University of Chicago in 1938 when his parents told him not to come home. Others left even later, some first heading to Cuba and others leaving only when it was almost too late.

My wife and I used to puzzle over these decisions (my wife herself had survived four years of Nazi occupation in Holland), and we toyed with constructing what we called a "Fascistograph"-a sort of checklist of social and political phenomena that might tell someone when to leave. I wish we had pursued our intellectual game more seriously, because I have the feeling that such a checklist might come in handy right now.

I see very little hope for America regardless of who is elected in November. All the candidates remaining in the race have said they will not "cut and run" in Iraq and Afghanistan. One may speculate that once in office, one or another candidate may be more flexible, but this is actually unlikely. The Republicans have swallowed both wars hook, line, and sinker, and the Democrats know that if they propose any sort of pullout they will be labeled "defeatists" and blamed for the miserable outcome. And, as many pundits have pointed out, the outcome is bound to be miserable either now or later. More civilians will be killed; more regions, tribes, or towns will turn to their own leaders-instead of to the elected national officials-for protection; more weapons will fuel whatever hatreds are being nursed against others in the region and most certainly against the United States. Isn't it ironic that we came to Iraq to "free" its people from a Sunni minority dictatorship, and we're now arming these same Sunnis against a Shiite majority? Isn't it ironic that the hated Taliban did a much better job of controlling the cultivation of opium poppies than the government we put in place in Kabul?

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The disasters we've visited on the people of the Middle East are something for which we're ultimately responsible.

The disasters we've visited on the people of the Middle East are something for which we're ultimately responsible, much as blame for the Holocaust belongs to the Nazi regime and the Rape of Nanking to the wartime Japanese government. But I fear much worse is to come domestically. The lies of the Bush government that got us into these two wars, and the propaganda and public misinformation that continue to keep us there have had a corrosive effect on public trust. Many people no longer believe anything the government or the media tells them. So far this cynicism has not penetrated deeply into the ranks of the armed services. But I suspect that before long it will. As the wars drag on and the deployments stretch out, as the casualties continue with no end in sight, and as it becomes clear how poorly these casualties are cared for once they come home, our military-including the National Guard-will become demoralized and very angry. They should be angry for being used as they are; we should be angry for them.

In addition to our moral bankruptcy, there is fiscal bankruptcy. The Bush government talks about the burst housing bubble but says nothing about the obscene military budgets that are driving our entire economy deeper into debt. It will probably take a major financial crisis on par with the Great Depression to reorient our economy in a more productive direction. Unfortunately, I don't hear any viable candidate talking like FDR.

In short, I think our ship of state is heading for a mammoth iceberg. Just as many people in 1930s Germany were, I'm too old to leave and will probably go down with the ship. But if I were younger, I would be thinking of bailing out. Vote, if you must, in November, but don't expect that things will change much, let alone get better.