An unusually dry spell both in Singapore and in the Tebrau River area in Johor - a primary water source for the island - caused water stocks to plunge dramatically, leaving the authorities with little choice but to impose restrictions.

For four days a week, depending on which area you lived in, you were either deprived of water between 8am and 2pm or between 2pm and 8pm.

People who did not ordinarily read the newspapers or listen to the radio suddenly found themselves having to scan headlines or turn knobs at least once a week - to stay informed about rationing schedules.

Those who forgot to store water in pails at home during the allocated timings had to stand in queues to use public taps.

The cost of food went up.

A government advisory that called for the washing of cars and watering of gardens to be 'kept to a minimum' clearly did not stop some. A forum letter in The Straits Times on May 3 had one reader wondering 'why the gentleman living opposite me still finds it necessary to water his lawn non-stop for 14 minutes' a day.

Eerily, the spying on neighbours went further than that.

Another letter on May 17 read: 'At a time when the state is facing an acute water shortage, is it proper for a person to bathe three times a day? That is exactly what my neighbour and his six children are doing every day of the week.'

Eventually, the rain returned and the reservoirs filled up. Curbs were finally lifted on Feb 28, 1964 - ironically, on a day when heavy rainfall caused an 11-year- old boy to drown.

Singaporeans who lived through that angsty period learnt a lesson they never forgot: that water, or the lack thereof, was a major source of weakness for the island-state.

This week, a no less momentous milestone in Singapore's aquatic history was crossed, but with far less public interest. A 50-year water agreement signed in 1961 - one of just two between Singapore and Malaysia - drew to a close.

As a result, a catchment area in Johor more than five times the size of Singapore's Central Catchment Nature Reserve ceased to serve Singapore's water needs, but with nary an eyebrow raised.

Public indifference, however, can be seen in a positive light. It is arguably a testament to Singapore's success in overcoming its water vulnerabilities.

What has happened since 1963?

In the words of Dr Joey Long of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 'the tables have turned'.

'While in the initial years Singapore's access to adequate water was viewed through the lens of security and survival, Singapore's present circumstances should be viewed with more optimism,' he said.

In 50 years, a virtuous mix of visionary leadership, meticulous groundwork and scientific advancements has helped Singapore exorcise her hydro-demons.

A tiny island-state ranked 170th out of a list of 190 nations in fresh water availability appears to be leapfrogging its way into water independence.

A matter of life and death

BUT there was a time when the situation was a lot more tense - and not just because people had to line up at public taps and tolerate dirty cars.

In 1970, seven years after that depressing drought, water security continued to keep Singapore's leaders awake at night.

'If these chaps do not observe the agreements, it will be a very serious matter for us,' said then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, referring to the two Singapore-Malaysia water agreements, in a meeting with Professor S. Jayakumar before he took over as Singapore's permanent representative to the United Nations.

'It is a matter of life and death... it can lead to war,' he added.

Never far from Mr Lee's mind was the threat from Malaysian premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, relayed to him by the British, that 'if Singapore doesn't do what I want, I'll switch off the water supply'.

Coming just days after independence, the threat - though never acted upon - convinced him that 'as long as I was totally dependent on Malaysia's water supply, we would always be a satellite'.

That, combined with the Japanese blowing up water pipes that carried water across the strait from Johor in 1942, was what drove him to seek water self-sufficiency from the get-go, he later revealed.

The cards dealt to Singapore in 1965 were not promising.

The bulk of its water came from Johor. Two agreements signed in 1961 and 1962 allowed Singapore to buy water for 3 sen per 1,000 gallons (4,546 litres), excluding land rental costs in the catchment areas.

The expiry dates of the two water pacts were 2011 and 2061 respectively.

The 1961 agreement gave Singapore full and exclusive rights to draw water from Gunung Pulai, Pontian, Skudai and Tebrau. The 1962 agreement allowed Singapore to collect up to 250 million gallons of water a day from Johor River.

In exchange, treated water was sold back to Johor at the price of 50 sen per 1,000 gallons, which was below cost.

The two agreements were confirmed by both Singapore and Malaysia in their separation agreement and promptly lodged with the UN.

The British also left behind three reservoirs - MacRitchie, Peirce and Seletar.

At once, Mr Lee and his Government swung into action. One of his first initiatives: forming a unit under the Prime Minister's Office to coordinate water policy.

Singapore lacked natural aquifers and groundwater. But it did not lack rainfall, per se, receiving from the heavens 2,400mm annually, comfortably higher than the global average of 1,050mm.

Rather, what could not be found in abundance were water bodies and land that could 'catch' the rain.

In 1969, the capacity of Seletar Reservoir was enlarged and its catchment scope broadened.

The 1970s saw a flurry of activity.

The Government began studying the feasibility of various conventional and not-so-conventional water sources, and published in 1972 the Water Master Plan. This is seen by water experts as the first long-term blueprint for water resource development here.

Upper Peirce Reservoir was completed in 1975. That same year, Kranji River was dammed to separate seawater from freshwater. This created Kranji Reservoir - one of the first of several reservoirs formed this way.

But the Government also took chances with the not-so-likely. It constructed an experimental plant to recycle used water - a predecessor to Newater.

Unfortunately, the requisite technologies, such as reverse osmosis, were still premature. The tests failed to persuade policymakers that the idea was sufficiently economical or reliable and no permanent plant was built.

As the economy grew rapidly, it soon also became clear that Singapore could not simply expand reservoirs indefinitely. Industry was competing for land use.

A concerted effort at promoting conservation began. The first 'Water is precious' campaign, launched in 1971, reduced water consumption by 5 per cent.

Four decades on, the public education drive continues in schools, factories and the media, whether it is exemplifying 'water efficient homes' with toilets that use cistern water-saving bags or mandating self-shutting delayed action taps in buildings. To drive home the message, a water conservation tax was later introduced. It is levied today at a rate of 30 per cent for the first 40 litres per month. Beyond that, the tax rises to 45 per cent. The Government's aim is to cut per capita consumption from 155 litres today to 140 litres by 2030.

The 1980s and 1990s

THE 1980s saw both bright spots and dark ones in bilateral ties. From time to time, threats to fiddle with Singapore's water supply, whether serious or not, emanated from Malaysian society or officialdom or both.

In 1986, for instance, the visit of Israeli President Chaim Herzog to Singapore stoked anger across the causeway, prompting some to call for the treaties to be revoked or at least re-negotiated.

There was good reason for optimism in the late 1980s, when the two sides penned an agreement supplementing the 1962 one. Singapore was given the go-ahead to build a dam across Johor River and to buy water over and above the original limit of 250 million gallons a day.

A decade passed. As it considered its long-term water needs, Singapore's leaders decided to negotiate supplementary agreements to extend the supply of water from Johor beyond 2061.

In 1998, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, the two sides came close to an agreement on a 'water-for-funds' deal, which was later called off.

Another round of talks took place in 2000 but differences remained over the sale price of raw water from Johor. There was initial agreement to raise the price from 3 sen per 1,000 gallons to 45 sen, and later to 60 sen.

Malaysia then said it wanted to unilaterally revise the price to RM6.25 per thousand gallons, a move Singapore insisted was not legally sound. After rounds of strongly worded exchanges in various forms, the matter quietened.

Ambitious new strategy to add two big taps

Four big taps

THE Singapore Government had been hard at work exploring alternative sources of water.

Even as talks with Malaysia ran into an impasse, efforts on another front were headed for a breakthrough that would 'change the whole equation', in the words of Dr Lee Poh Onn, a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

After the failed 1974 experiment, Singapore decided to give recycled water another shot, sending two engineers to the United States in 1998 for a study trip.

Upon their return, they reported findings that suggested recycling had become viable, thanks to, among other things, advances in membrane technology. Subsequent studies corroborated the findings, prompting the Government to construct the first demo plant in Bedok in 2000.

The three-step process eventually adopted for the production of Newater involved filtration and reverse osmosis, removing particles as small as 0.001 microns before disinfecting the water under ultraviolet light. The water met US and UN standards and was, indeed, purer than tap water.

By May 2002, the Government was finally ready to go public with its bold new water strategy.

It was an ambitious plan to double the different types of water sources Singapore relied upon from two to four by 2011, the year the 1961 agreement with Malaysia expired.

Instead of relying only on water collected in reservoirs here and bought from Johor, there would be 'four big national taps' within 10 years. The two new 'taps' were desalination plants and Newater or water-reclamation plants.

In his speech to Parliament, then Environment Minister Lim Swee Say declared: 'Singapore certainly can become completely self-sufficient after 2061, if need be.'

The year 2061 was significant as it was when the 1962 water agreement with Malaysia would expire.

A toast to the future

FOR Newater to succeed, the public had to be willing to drink water that was previously sewage.

'Public acceptance is not guaranteed at the start. Recycled water has been rejected in Australia, where people term it 'yuck' water,' said Dr Eduardo Araral, assistant dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

'Singaporeans accepted it both because they are are pragmatic and because they trust the Government's promise that Newater is safe to drink,' he added.

Some 60,000 'toasted' with bottled Newater during the 2002 National Day Parade, including Mr Goh Chok Tong, who was then Prime Minister. Singapore now has five Newater plants, the largest of which is at Changi. Newater is used both in industries and indirectly for households, after it is mixed into reservoirs.

The next significant breakthrough came in desalination technology, although some call this success story a work in progress.

As the cost of desalting seawater fell by more than half in the decade leading up to 2002, PUB called for and received tenders to build a plant. In 2005, a desalination facility using reverse osmosis membranes was commissioned in Tuas. It was built by SingSpring, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyflux. A second desalination plant in Tuas should be ready by 2013.

Of the current daily consumption of 380 million gallons, Newater and desalination now make up 40 per cent. PUB aims to raise that to 80 per cent by 2061, when all agreements with Johor expire.

Meanwhile, work on other fronts continue.

The completion of Marina Barrage in 2008 increased Singapore's water catchment area from half of its total land area to more than two-thirds. Studies are under way on the possibility of increasing this in future to 90 per cent through the use of treatment plants that handle both salt water and fresh water. There are now 17 reservoirs - up from three in 1965 - including Marina, Punggol and Serangoon.

Less visible upgrades may not be any less important. PUB has an ongoing programme to replace leaky asbestos cement water pipes with more corrosion-resistant ones. Also, an underground system of pumps and pipes connecting Singapore's reservoirs was completed in 2007 to prevent wastage by transferring water from full reservoirs to less full ones.

Turning weakness to strength

'I NEVER imagined we could progress from a situation of crisis to the situation of opportunity today,' said Dr Lee.

A dramatic turn of events, which he ultimately puts down to political will, means the water issue is now more likely to evoke hope than anxiety.

Research and development projects are creating jobs and expertise that can be exported. The PUB expects the GDP contribution from the water sector to grow from $0.5 billion in 2003 to $1.7 billion in 2015, with the number of jobs doubling to 11,000 by 2015.

To be sure, some latent risks remain.

Dr Araral warns, for instance, that skyrocketing energy prices in the future may yet cause problems for the much-vaunted but relatively fuel-guzzling desalination project, although that may in turn spur the development of other sources of water.

Terrorism, too, could derail the most carefully constructed of systems.

'Security experts note that water reservoirs are attractive targets of terrorists,' he said.

Nevertheless, most agree that whatever happens in the future, the achievements as they stand today already exceed the wildest of expectations - not least among them those of the water rationing generation.

Singaporeans can rest with the firm assurance that their secure access to this life-giving commodity is no longer in the hands of others.

elgintoh@sph.com.sg

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The Straits Times

www.straitstimes.com

Published on Sep 3, 2011

The water story

1857: Philanthropist Tan Kim Seng donated $13,000 to construct Singapore's first waterworks and piped water supply.

1867: Singapore's first reservoir, MacRitchie, completed.

1927: Water agreement signed between British-controlled Singapore and Johor Sultan. This agreement is superseded by the 1961 agreement.

1961: First water agreement signed between Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore gets full, exclusive rights to draw water from Gunung Pulai and three other areas for 3 sen per 1,000 gallons.

1962: Second Singapore-Malaysia water agreement signed, allowing Singapore to buy water from Johor River at the same price.

1963: Public Utilities Board (PUB) set up to take charge of water supply. Also, start of 10-month-long water rationing due to drought.

1965: Singapore separated from Malaysia. Both countries agree to abide by 1961 and 1962 agreements.

1971: First water conservation campaign launched.

1977: Start of 10-year-long Clean Singapore River campaign.

1990: Signing of supplement to 1962 agreement, allowing Singapore to build a dam across Johor River and to buy water over and above original quota of 250 million gallons a day.

2000: The beginning of Singapore- Malaysia water talks that end in stalemate in 2003. The two sides could not agree on price.

2001: Restructuring of PUB so it took charge of not only water supply, but also drainage, water reclamation plants and sewerage systems.

2002: Launch of Newater - or recycled water - technology, which decisively paves the way towards water independence for Singapore.

2005: First desalination plant completed in Tuas. A second plant, also in Tuas, is expected by 2013.

2008: Inaugural International Water Week, which became an annual conference on water solutions. Also, Marina Barrage was completed, the first reservoir here in the heart of the city.

2011: 1961 water agreement with Malaysia lapsed. Singapore returns all land and facilities, saying handover does not affect adequacy of water supply.

ELGIN TOH

September 10, 2011 at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 24, 2011

FT: Big US chains begin to ‘shrink’ their stores

August 7, 2011 5:10 pm

Big US chains begin to ‘shrink’ their stores

By Barney Jopson and Andrea Felsted

Walmart wants to open 15 to 20 Walmart Express stores by the end of next year

American shops are getting smaller as retailers seek to reach consumers through new compact formats in the face of a stagnant economy, demographic shifts and a growing demand for convenience.

Retailers including Walmart, Office Depot and Best Buy are introducing smaller stores in urban areas, a departure from the “big box” stores on which they built their success at out-of-town sites in the past three decades.

On this story

Tesco, which has forged into the US with stores that are smaller than traditional supermarkets, is shrinking its format further with convenience stores that might be dubbed “micro-boxes” by US standards.

“The cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all doesn’t seem to work that well any more,” says Ira Kalish, director of global economics at Deloitte Research, who links the shrinking of stores to the diversification – or fragmentation – of consumer profiles and preferences.

But the convergence of so many retailers on small formats is creating stiff competition and exacerbating the difficulties of operating on expensive and unfamiliar plots, squeezed between the offices, car parks and apartment blocks of big cities.

Walmart, the discounter that dominates US retail, has opened three Walmart Express test stores in recent months and says it wants to open 15 to 20 by the end of next year.

At about 15,000 sq ft, the Walmart Express stores are just 8 per cent the size of Walmart’s trademark Supercenters, which are 185,000 sq ft and cover the same ground as two-and-a-half standard football pitches.

Tesco of the UK began its move into California under the Fresh & Easy brand with stores of between 7,000 sq ft and 10,000 sq ft. But to push deeper into urban areas it plans to open stores as small as 3,000 sq ft, roughly the size of a UK convenience store.

“We are always looking at different sizes of stores,” says Tim Mason, chief executive of Fresh & Easy.

The shrinking of stores is partly borne of the “age of convenience”, says Ken Berliner, president of Peter J Solomon, a boutique investment bank. “Consumers want more choices. Retailers need to offer whatever the consumer wants to buy, however they would like to buy it, whether in stores, through a catalogue or online.”

Cash-strapped shoppers are also less willing to fund long drives to big boxes given high gas prices.

That helps explain the post-crisis popularity of small-format dollar stores – Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar and 99 Cents Only – which between them already have more than 20,000 stores. They, too, are building more.

Consumers’ expectations for convenience have been raised by online shopping, an option that has harmed Best Buy, the US’s biggest traditional electronics retailer.

Part of its response has been to create small-format Best Buy Mobile stores, which sell telephones and tablet computers and will expand in number this year by 150 to 325.

Target, a Walmart rival, is next year planning to open five experimental City Target stores, which will be between 60,000 sq ft and 100,000 sq ft, compared with the typical 135,000 sq ft.

The downsizing also signals that retailers are adjusting to a higher concentration of people in urban areas – one result of the housing bust, which emptied new developments in the Sunbelt states of the south-western US.

John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, says two deeper demographic trends are also at play.

First, people in their 20s and 30s are living in urban areas longer than previous generations because they are marrying and having children later.

Second, baby boomers are moving back into city centres because they want to be able to walk to shops and entertainment.

But, in spite of retailers’ plans, city-centre stores are “typically not their first choice”, says Mark Keschl, national director of retail at Colliers, a property agency.

Retailers can run big-box stores off a single blueprint for inventories, staffing and fixtures.

But in each city location, they must adapt to a different set of constraints, ranging from narrow lanes for their trailer trucks to the existence of labour unions, he says.

Some retailers are not keen on the idea. Safeway, a grocery chain whose typical stores are half the size of a Walmart Supercenter, has two small shops in California but they are “a labour of love”, says Melissa Plaisance, head of investor relations.

“We are profitable in both, but it’s very hard … Hard to do enough volume to cover the costs.”

August 24, 2011 at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 25, 2011

FT: Book Review - Free Radicals

some of the biggest breakthroughs have comes from ruthless rogues

July 8, 2011 10:07 pm

Free Radicals

Review by Clive Cookson

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, by Michael Brooks, Profile, RRP£12.99, 312 pages

Fraud and data manipulation, suppression of rivals’ research, huge egos, intensive PR campaigns, drug-induced inspiration ... The world of science described by Michael Brooks is far from the image of sober, sedate rectitude long promoted by the scientific establishment.

On this story

David Pilling Reimagining Japan
James Crabtree reviews ‘Everything is Obvious’ by Duncan J Watts
John Lloyd ‘Ed’ by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre
Simon May’s ‘Love’
Tretower to Clyro

Free Radicals is fun to read. Brooks, a professional science writer, capers through the exploits of scores of brilliant and often ruthless rogues – some living, many long dead – who have won Nobel prizes or otherwise pushed science forward. Some of its biggest names turn out to be the dirtiest players.

Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius, crops up in several chapters – “a perfect example of the character that will produce great science and think nothing of the misdemeanours that such breakthroughs demand,” as Brooks puts it.

The author starts by reminding us of Einstein’s unappealing personal life – among other things making passes at his mistress’s daughter, breaking his promise to give all his Nobel prize money to his wife Mileva, evading tax and abandoning his schizophrenic son to die a “third-class” patient in a mental institution.

Then the book analyses the many “shady moments” in Einstein’s professional life: cherry-picking data to support his theories, appropriating advances made by others and, once he had made his name, using fame shamelessly for further self-advancement.

The equation most closely associated with Einstein, E=mc2, did not come as a surprise to those in the know when he first proposed it in 1905, Brooks claims. And Einstein failed in eight attempts to prove E=mc2 during the next 41 years, though others succeeded – yet he had appropriated the equation as his own and he dismissed attempts to set the record straight, with aggressive assertions of his “priority”.

Although Brooks denies doing his own cherry-picking by focusing on a series of celebrated scientists who blatantly cut corners and promoted their own careers, I do not accept his assertion that such behaviour runs through the whole of science. There may, indeed, be extensive low-level cheating among the scientific grassroots, as Brooks maintains, but to compare this with what happens at the top is like equating the fiddling of expenses among junior commercial staff with serious disregard for business ethics by senior executives.

All we can really conclude, if we accept the accuracy of the stories in Free Radicals, is that brilliance alone is not sufficient to shine in science, any more than in other fields. In science, just as in business, politics, sport and the arts, you also need ambition and self-promotion. It’s very rare to win honours and gain recognition if you’re spending decades quietly in the scientific wilderness.

Charm and charisma help, too. So do persistence and hard work. Honesty is more important in the more open and transparent, and I would say more moral, scientific world of today than it was in the past, though even now really clever deception can get you a long way.

Brooks believes that scientists must let their “secret anarchy” come into the open if research is to advance at the pace society needs to solve an overwhelming set of problems during the 21st century.

He is right to some extent. Scientists have been too quiet for half a century, complying with Winston Churchill’s famous observation that they “should be on tap but not on top”. They need to mobilise, agitate and kick up more of a stink on important issues, as Brooks says.

But encouraging selfish determination to succeed at any price, as exhibited by Newton, Einstein and some other great names of the past, will not help the cause of science, or society.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

July 25, 2011 at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: Book Review - Everything is Obvious

The result is a profound confusion in our judgments of where we can predict the future and where we cannot. To most people, brain surgery seems unfathomably complex, while social or business problems seem relatively straightforward; such things are not rocket science, after all. But, as Watts calmly points out, rocket science itself is a perfect case of a relatively easy task: machines the size of small cars are reliably landed on distant planets, while supposedly tractable problems – such as unemployment or crime – prove persistently tricky.

July 8, 2011 10:07 pm

Everything is Obvious

Review by James Crabtree

Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails , by Duncan J Watts, Atlantic, RRP£18.99, 352 pages

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao looked supremely confident during his visit to Europe late last month. And so he should. While the west struggles to escape the clutches of the financial crisis, China’s rise has become a byword for quiet efficiency and global ambition. Whether the focus is on plans to lay 30,000km of new railway, build 45 airports or divert 6,000bn gallons of water to the country’s parched north, western leaders can only look on enviously as China’s ruling cadre of engineers cement their reputation as the world’s new master planners.

On this story

David Pilling Reimagining Japan
John Lloyd ‘Ed’ by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre
Clive Cookson on ‘Free Radicals’ by Michael Brooks
Simon May’s ‘Love’
Tretower to Clyro

Yet, for all that, might China’s grand schemes still end in disaster? Duncan Watts thinks so, and has written a fascinating attack on the perils of grandiose planning in both business and politics. Watts is a research scientist at Yahoo and a pioneer of “experimental sociology”, a developing field that uses large online experiments to pick apart complex social phenomena. In Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails, he argues convincingly that our overconfidence in the power of human reasoning in general leads all too often to catastrophic and avoidable errors.

Watts begins by noting the way in which individuals use common sense to fill in the gaps of a baffling world. That this is problematic seems odd initially: common sense is useful, and those who lack it seem hapless. But that, Watts thinks, is just the problem: “bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life causes us to put more faith in it than it can bear”.

This is partly because we are unaware of the myriad hidden biases that shape our decision-making. Experiments show that shoppers are more likely to buy German wine if German music is playing in the background, for instance. We process data in equally skewed ways: information that supports existing views is welcomed, while that which does not is rejected – a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. More generally, the human mind is adept at thinking up explanations for what it observes, and in turn convincing itself that these explanations must be correct.

These problems grow greater in the world of complex social and economic systems – meaning those whose outcomes are unpredictable and non-linear, and which “emerge” from the interplay of their parts. The snag is that almost everything that matters – from firms and families to political parties and whole economies – turns out to be part of just such a complex system. And it is this that leads Watts to be so deeply pessimistic about the ability of experts to predict the future, and to develop plans accordingly.

Even so, most experts and analysts (and perhaps even a few journalists) soldier on, content in the delusion that they can understand the complex chains of causality that lead to a pop song becoming a hit, or a government policy flopping or flying. In turn, it is this feeling that breeds the overconfidence that results in what Watts calls “extreme planning failures”, ranging from disastrous public housing programmes to catastrophic corporate mergers – and which could yet see China’s engineers also head towards hubris and disaster.

Everything is Obvious is engagingly written and sparkles with counter-intuitive insights. Its modesty about what can and cannot be known also compares favourably with other “big idea” books. But it is his message about planning that is especially chastening, given that the greatest challenges of the global era – from the growth of China to climate change – call more than ever for grand plans.

Watts doesn’t avoid this entirely, and has intriguing thoughts on the potential of what he calls “measure and react” strategies. The high street fashion chain Zara is one example: here managers cheerfully admit that they have little idea what customers will buy. Instead they carefully monitor sales, and use speedy supply chains to react accordingly. Drawing on his sociological background and his day job at Yahoo, Watts is also excited by the potential of internet experiments to road-test policies.

Even so, Watts’ views on the poverty of planning remain excessively fatalistic, mostly because he fails to weigh up the relative risks of action and inaction. China’s leaders will make mistakes, some of which will turn into disasters. Yet given the scale of the challenges they face, such grim outcomes are probably more likely if they sit on their hands. A better path would be to adopt the experimental techniques Watts promotes, and the modest attitude his book embodies, to lessen the risk of failure for those large-scale planning tasks that cannot be avoided. Supremely confident though he might be, it is a lesson even Wen would do well to take on board.

James Crabtree is the FT’s comment editor

July 25, 2011 at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 18, 2011

FT: BMW - Benefits of a showroom bypass

Benefits of a showroom bypass

By John Reed

Published: May 2 2011 21:32 | Last updated: May 2 2011 21:32

Built-to-order: the BMW X3 in production in Spartanburg, South Carolina

Last November, Mike Romano went to BMW’s website and, with a few clicks of a mouse, assembled his own car.

Mr Romano, a salami factory production manager who lives in Lodi, New Jersey, speaks lovingly of the features he chose for his X3 compact sport utility vehicle: a titanium silver exterior, with dark Vienna wood trim and chestnut-coloured leather inside. The car arrived built to order from BMW’s factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in mid-January.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

BMW unveils ‘i’ sub-brand - Feb-21

BMW invests €530m to build electric car - Nov-05

Mercedes-Benz and Audi outshine BMW - Nov-03

Swiss probe BMW for blocking sales - Oct-26

BMW seals engine supply deal with Saab - Sep-29

BMW wary in spite of rise in earnings - Aug-03

But the high point of the experience – which Mr Romano still talks about – was the film he received in the mail . It showed the SUV at various points on the line, from the installation of its “moon-roof” and wiring to the attachment of its trademark twin-kidney front-end grille.

“It shows the vehicle identification number in the corner, so you know it’s your own car,” Mr Romano said recently, talking via the vehicle’s speakerphone. “Without paying a dime extra, this gives you the chance of building your own car.”

BMW has long built cars to order for its German customers – who are closer to its main plants – as have its premium competitors Mercedes-Benz and Audi, although none of them yet offers the added perk of a film of the car being built. But in the US, where Henry Ford famously made the Model T only in black for a decade, there is a longer tradition of buying cars from what the dealer has available. Even BMW’s high-luxury Rolls-Royce brand, known for its handcrafted, bespoke limousines that sell for £200,000-£300,000 and more, has US dealers ordering cars ahead to allow for a bigger number of impulse purchases from the showroom floor.

Now BMW is seeking to wean Americans off this culture of instant gratification with its “Dream it. Build it. Drive it” programme, timed to coincide with the recent production launch in Spartanburg of the X3.

The Munich carmaker is pushing the concept hard. In December, BMW invited Martha Stewart, the US television lifestyle guru, to design her own X3 on air, using its “Build Your Own” design tool. Ms Stewart chose a sparkling bronze metallic exterior for the car and sand beige Nevada leather seats, with “fineline” wood trim – one of 70m possible configurations BMW says customers can choose for the car.

In April, Ms Stewart handed the keys of the car to Jody Lunsford of Roanoke, Virginia, a crafter of felt animals who won her “Simply ReMarthable” talent contest. (BMW will not discuss financial terms of its deal under which the service appeared on Ms Stewart’s show.)

Factory tours and premium cars

While BMW’s films of its X3s being “born” take custom-built carmaking to new levels, the premium end of the industry has been building cars to order for several years.

As part of their service, top-end marques – not just the German brands but Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin too – typically offer a full programme to customers picking up their cars, including factory tours.

Volkswagen’s famous “glass factory” in Dresden crafts the brand’s top-end Phaeton before the eyes of visitors. VW’s Audi brand offers people picking up cars from its plant in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, a full programme, including a factory tour and a visit to the company museum.

Rolls-Royce says that an increasing number of customers visit its plant at Goodwood, England, and some come several times during the production process to see their cars being built.

Behind the high-profile product placement, BMW has some less glamorous but very powerful back-office commercial considerations relating to inventory management as it prods more Americans to customise their own cars.

“The situation today is determined by: ‘Here’s a car, where’s the customer for it?’” says Holger Groitzsch, a BMW executive. “We want to turn it round and say: ‘Here’s the customer, where’s the car for him?’”

Building cars to order is easier than ever these days, thanks to the high degree of flexibility at automobile plants – not just BMW’s – which can cope with seemingly endless variety. Any state-of-the-art car factory can roll vehicles with sharply different vehicle specifications – or, increasingly, entirely different models – down the same production line.

While BMW does not charge extra for building to order, the company says customers who use it tend to order more extras on their vehicles, and thus pay more overall. Mr Romano went for optional features including a premium navigation package, and paid $49,000 for his car.

The US culture of buying from car lots saddles retailers with steep costs, too. A good dealer learns to anticipate what customers will want but, if he makes the wrong bet on, for example, a red convertible that sits too long on the lot, he will need to discount it to move it on. “The average dealer in the US has 300 cars in stock – you figure out the capital tied up in that,” Ian Robertson, BMW’s global head of sales, told the Financial Times recently. “We need to change the mindset that this is good.”

But BMW’s Spartanburg factory makes only the brand’s larger “X” SUVs, and cannot cope quickly with an off-the-cuff order for, say, a 3-Series saloon, made only in Germany.

To cater to US customers who want personalised vehicles that the brand does not build locally, BMW has since 2009 offered a “virtual” build-to-order service via more efficient management of its pipeline of cars in stock.

Under this, BMW in effect allows dealers to pool their stock on a nationwide basis. A car that has not found a buyer in Iowa, for example, goes into a “Dutch auction” and will be dispatched to Florida if a dealer there receives a customer order for a similar car. Mr Groitzsch describes this process as “liquefying” BMW’s pipeline of cars in stock. “It gives the customer the impression of getting an individualised car without us having to build it individually.”

He learnt the difficulty of anticipating what customers might want at Rolls-Royce, which makes just a few cars a day and thus faces even higher risks relating to inventory.

BMW and its German premium rivals are reporting record sales but they also fight hard for customers. In this context, the company’s build-to-order film is a powerful tool in its arsenal.

“Watch while the German-engineered powertrain is married to the body of your vehicle,” an assertive male voice says on the clip. The script is standard but the films do, in fact, feature original footage of individual cars being made.

Conrad Meyer, a credit risk manager at an investment bank and another early customer of BMW’s new US build-to-order service, says he recently chose the X3 over Audi’s rival Q5 because he could get it sooner.

Mr Romano, also the proud owner of a new customised X3, liked the service so much that he recommended it to two friends who have since ordered cars. He says he would not go back to buying off the lot. “You wouldn’t have the pleasure of saying: ‘This is the car I built,’” he says.

May 18, 2011 at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 14, 2011

Stewart Brand - Matt Ridley - Undeniable Progress

Hominids had upright walking, stone tools, fire, even language but still remained in profound stasis. What led to humanity's global takeoff, Ridley argues, was the invention of exchange about 120,000 years ago. "That's ten times older than agriculture."

The beginnings of trade encouraged specialization and innovation, which encouraged further innovation, specialization, and trade, and the unending virtuous cycle of progress was set in motion. The quality and speed of the progress depends on the size of the population doing the exchanging. "It's not how clever we are but how much in contact we are with each other." Thus the 5,000 Australians who became isolated on Tasmania 10,000 years ago didn't just stop progressing, they forgot how to make and use bone tools and even how to clothe themselves against cold weather. Their individual brains were fine, "but there was something wrong with their collective brains."

What really is being exchanged is ideas. The Pill-cam (for shooting video of your gut) was invented, Ridley points out, when a gastroenterologist had a conversation with guided missile designer.

The acceleration of progess can be measured in objective terms such as the amount of labor it takes to earn an hour of reading light. In 1997, with CF bulbs, it was half a second. In 1950, with incandescent bulbs, eight seconds. In 1880, with kerosene lamps, fifteen minutes. In 1800, with candles, six hours. In every decade various intellectuals keep saying that progress has stopped or is about to stop, but Ridley showed chart after chart chronicling constant improvement in everything we care about. Life expectancy is increasing by five hours a day. IQ keeps going up by three points a decade. Agriculture gets ever more productive, leaving more land to remain wild. Even economic inequality is decreasing, with poor countries getting rich faster than rich countries are getting richer.

On the subject of climate change, Ridley has a similar set of detailed charts showing that sea level has been rising slowly for a long time, but it is not accelerating. The same with the retreat of glaciers. Overall global warming is proceeding slower than was predicted. Humanity has been decarbonizing its energy supply steadily for 150 years as we progressed from wood to coal to oil to natural gas. A few years ago it was thought that only 25 years of natural gas was left, but with the invention of hydrofracking shale gas, the supply is suddenly 250 years worth, and it is a hugely cleaner source than coal. (Among nuclear innovations, Ridley is particularly intrigued by thorium reactors.)

"The story of history is of more for less." Paul Ehrlich's formula (I=PAT--- environmental Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology) is better stated as I=P/AT--- Impact equals Population divided by Affluence times Techology. As affluence and technology increase, and population levels off, environmental impact can go ever down.

An historian once wrote, 'On what principle is it that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" That was English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, even before the industrial revolution.

--Stewart Brand

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April 14, 2011 at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 23, 2011

FT: The new power of the press

Put excerpts here

The new power of the press

By John Lloyd

Published: January 7 2011 17:50 | Last updated: January 7 2011 17:50

Jon Stewart, Vince Cable, Julian Assange and newspaper headlines

Jon Stewart, host of ‘The Daily Show’, business secretary Vince Cable and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

In the past year journalism, which in the west sees itself as beset by decline, has vastly increased its power. Three large developments have made the implicit, yet huge, claim that journalism, our way of knowing what is happening in our complex world, is essentially a matter of competing high-decibel political dispute and total transparency.

Taken together, these developments – the takeover of US politics by the broadcast media; the revelations about governments around the world from the WikiLeaks website, and The Daily Telegraph exposé of business secretary Vince Cable’s true feelings about the UK coalition government – ensured that the media ended the year with large victories over politics and politicians. What’s more, all three were claimed in the public interest. Yet it could as easily be said that they were morally indefensible. At the very least, each demonstrated that the line between public interest and moral indefensibility is thin and getting thinner.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Britain: what lies ahead? - Jan-07

Being Marco - Dec-17

On the edge - Dec-17

Oprah Winfrey: out on her own - Dec-10

Arianna Hufﬁngton: new media entrepreneur - Dec-10

Wangari Maathai: Africa’s green star - Dec-10

These journalistic innovations are seen by their champions as greatly expanding the scope and power of journalism. This is correct. But they can also be seen as three great reducers; each reducing the worlds it describes to simple formulas and ignoring a complexity that journalism, by its nature, already struggles to capture. What are the effects of these new sources of power? And can such power, used in such a way, really be said to be in the public interest?

. . .

Journalism began to exert real power from the mid-19th century and from the first its ethics were held in low regard. Fictional representations, such as those found in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) were particularly scathing. Its ethical norms, fraught at the best of times, were and are most tested in its coverage of politics and politicians, subjects that lie at the core of the democratic mission it claims for itself. The two professions were bound to clash. They fish in the same pond, civil society, for the same fish – called voters by politicians, the audience by the media. Both now also fight, with increasing intensity, for the right to define the public interest.

The public interest is often defined as that which aids the citizen to be more fully a citizen – from information on votes cast and public money spent to revelations of state or corporate corruption. In more than 30 years of journalism, mostly for this paper, I’ve seen this concept develop; from a view that ferreting out as much information as possible was good for society (as well as for one’s career), to one framed in much more aggressive and polemical terms. In the labour and industrial correspondents group of the 1980s – a club of reporters covering British industrial relations and policies – three of my colleagues were Peter Hitchens, Trevor Kavanagh and Richard Littlejohn. As their careers moved from reporting to comment, each developed popular, highly charged newspaper columns that worked best when skewering ministers and other public officials, generally of the left. Their opinions expressed a depth of contempt that, in modern times at least, was unprecedented. But they became models to be followed.

During this period, investigative journalism became in some hands – John Pilger’s in the UK and Michael Moore’s in the US – not just revelation but condemnation. I was at a meeting of Guardian journalists when a distinguished investigative reporter, with a record of revelations that on any criteria were in the public interest, argued that British parliamentarians should, in principle, be regarded with suspicion. The public interest has, more and more, come to be defined as that which can be shown to damage public figures.

. . .

The first of last year’s great reducers did not begin its work in 2010 but did reach a kind of apogee then. In the US, a journalism of extreme polemics has, under the heading of free speech, progressively built broadcasters such as Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart into major political figures. Political discussions for broadcast, once characterised by polite if insistent interviewing, developed under ratings pressure into a forum in which “shock jock” presenters would encourage guests into frenzied mutual denunciation.

In August last year, Glenn Beck, the most prominent of the rightwing talk-show hosts on Fox News, organised a “Restoring Honour” rally in Washington for his followers, aimed at reviving pride in America and its values. In October, Jon Stewart, liberal comedian and host of The Daily Show, organised a “Rally to Restore Sanity” as a counter to Beck. The interventions by these two contrasting media figures into the nation’s capital, still the world’s most potent political centre, made for a quite unsubtle joint statement: these broadcasters, more than the parties or the leading politicians, perhaps even more than the president, represented the masses and their interests.

The effect of their prominence on politics is clear. It reduces government by comparison. The implicit message, especially from Beck, is that governance is a simple matter of political will. Once this is in place, reform can be achieved with ease. In this environment, journalism becomes a high-decibel slate of complaint and tenuous assertion, much of it directed at President Barack Obama. Its protagonists constantly assert that it is a way of holding power to account and, therefore, in the public interest. There is no question that these rival polemics have stirred up much public interest. But as representative politics is itself represented as a betrayal of a free people, politicians in the centre must worry that they are being displaced not just in rhetoric but in function.

. . .

In November, the WikiLeaks website, which earlier in the year revealed huge numbers of documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, published its latest data on the workings of US diplomacy. The material provided fascinating glimpses into the views of diplomats and those on whom they reported.

WikiLeaks, which was launched in 2006, is not journalism but it works under its rubric – of free speech, the benign effects of revelation, holding power to account – and it depends on established institutions, such as The New York Times and The Guardian for publication of its material. The ideology that inspires this not-for-profit “media organisation”, developed by its founder Julian Assange, also claims the high ground of the public interest. Officials and politicians, Assange has written, work “in collaborative secrecy to the detriment of the population”: the weapon with which to fight them is exposure. Yet in the case of the diplomatic cables, the revelations blew apart the convention that some diplomacy must be secret because it pursues ends that cannot be spelt out until all the actors involved are marshalled, separately and secretly, into the possibility of an agreement. Michael Fullilove, the Australian foreign policy commentator, argued that “with this dump WikiLeaks is not uncovering a particular secret; it is outlawing secrets altogether ... Would the world be safer, saner or more pleasant if nothing could be held in confidence? How could wars be averted in such a world? How could peace negotiations take place? Would news sources talk to journalists?” That last question is more than rhetorical: journalism has depended on a web of private comments, understandings and leaks. Without these, it withers.

Investigative reporting has been one of the strongest developments of postwar journalism, illuminating government deceit, corporate fraud and criminal activity. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for The Washington Post in the early 1970s on the illegal efforts of Nixon’s White House to destabilise the Democratic party remains its defining moment: but through exposures such as The Sunday Times on the effects of Thalidomide in the 1970s, The Guardian on bribery scandals in British Aerospace in 2003 and The New Yorker’s revelations about abuses in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, there is a long roll of honour that has produced huge public revulsion and government reforms. Now, WikiLeaks publishes confidential information on the grounds that government is a conspiracy, and publication redresses the balance in favour of the public. By its sheer volume, however, it reduces investigative journalists to bit players whose job is to redact the output and provide context. More, it gives itself the right to decide what might or might not be dangerous for the individuals named or identifiable in the revealed documents. This is a perilous power to have.

. . .

WikiLeaks also sets a high bar for ordinary journalism – tempting it to shock and awe through more intimate revelation. Last month The Daily Telegraph revealed that Vince Cable, the business secretary, had given frank and pejorative assessments of his Conservative coalition partners. He also declared himself “at war” with media mogul Rupert Murdoch. These, like WikiLeaks, were undeniably interesting – but perhaps not as interesting as the fact that Cable’s thoughts were given to two young women reporters posing as constituents of his. Their journalism invaded a space assumed to be largely private – that occupied by MPs and the people they directly represent.

Journalists have used undercover disguises before. The most well known case is The News of the World’s Mazher Mahmood, who is known as the fake sheikh after frequently posing as a wealthy Arab businessman to embarrass and expose those under investigation. But the disguised intervention into the relationship between a member of parliament and his constituents pushes these tactics further into the upper levels of political power than Mahmood ever went. In doing so it asked politicians a question more urgently than before: to whom can I say what I think?

The newspaper, and others, argued that to know a senior government member’s private views is in the public interest, since it allows citizens to understand what the real tensions are within the government that they elected and pay for. The grounds for this view have been prepared – for politicians private space has already shrunk to a few defensible areas, such as family grief. But the Cable episode is still an innovation: editors and political writers have historically understood and accommodated some wriggle room between the public statement and the private sigh. Not now, though. The implication of the Telegraph’s journalism is that having its reporters lie about their identity is justifiable where it reveals that a politician’s semi-private statements clash with those made in public. The further implication is that private doubts, boasts and assurances ought always to accord exactly with public ones, and that when they do not it is shocking enough to require exposure. This definition of the public interest would hold that we – the public – should not only know as much as possible but as many facets of our representatives as possible. After all, everything that is private could be shown, under certain conditions, to have some public consequence.

In one view, both the revelations of WikiLeaks and of the Telegraph would, if they became the norm, encourage a more truthful public sphere. Conscious that everything was potentially transparent, we – and especially our leaders – would develop into super-rational beings uncomprehending of the notion of mendacity. Politicians would give the whole range of their thoughts on every subject, in support of their party or otherwise; officials would make public their plans at every stage; diplomats would reveal all conversations and the public would have the maturity to understand and take no unfair advantage of these disclosures. But no conceivable society could live in such transparency. It is more likely that a transparency culture simply causes a displacement of the semi-private into the wholly private – with public figures relying more on public relations to act as a shield, and turning an increasingly bland face to the outside word.

There is no question that WikiLeaks and Cable’s indiscretions engrossed a vast audience: Whatever you say about the public interest, they interested the public. In conversations about these revelations – especially those on Cable – I was struck to find that almost no one criticised the journalism that produced them. The interest was in the content. With this discovery journalism has struck a mother lode, which at a time of falling audiences, it surely needs. These innovations will not go away.

. . .

Journalism is, of course, a great reduction to begin with. Any journalist not too full of himself to admit it realises, sooner or later, that the trade demands a facility for simplification that squeezes the most complex events, trends and characters into a limited form with limited, stereotypical narratives.

Within that 1980s labour and industrial correspondents’ group, there was a self-deprecating joke, adapted from the concluding line in an old US cop series: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” it went, “and we can’t get one of them.” It was wry recognition of the smallness of our efforts in the face of a deluge of facts, claims, declarations, private discussions, secret understandings and contradictory data.

Despite these limitations, journalism has acquired a great power in our lives. But it is also embattled by technological change, the loss of long-profitable business models and the fracturing of audiences.

In its search for new sources of power and influence, it has produced a more reductive vision of itself, and of politics, than previously.

One common claim of the three great reducers I have discussed here is that the public can gain a greater grip on the actions that are taken in their name through being an audience for untiring media polemic and huge revelations. In different ways, each also holds conventional politics in contempt, either explicitly or implicitly. As such, they are all very much the product of contemporary media mores, even while they appeal directly to the classic, centuries’ old ideas that underpin journalism – the right to freedom of speech and the press, the duty to expose falsehood in public figures. In doing so they are redefining the relationship between political and media power, and giving a new and radical interpretation of how the public interest is served by journalism.

John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor and director of journalism at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford

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January 23, 2011 at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 31, 2010

FT: Why the West Rules – For Now

Why the West Rules – For Now

Review by Harold James

Published: December 17 2010 22:06 | Last updated: December 17 2010 22:06

Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris, Profile RRP£25 768 pages

Recently, science has profoundly transformed almost every aspect of life, and as a result we look quite differently at medicine, communications, even our network of friends. But until now, the discipline of history has not been greatly affected by the advance of technical possibilities. Indeed, a great deal of historical writing in universities has denied the importance of science, economics and politics.

Ian Morris, an archaeologist and historian at Stanford University, has written the first history of the world that really makes use of what modern technology can offer to the interpretation of the historical process. The result is a path-breaking work that lays out what modern history should look like.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

American Colossus - Dec-17

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas - Dec-17

Palmerston - Dec-17

Edith Cavell - Dec-17

The London Train - Dec-17

A Kind Man - Dec-17

Morris’s story is focused around a thesis of challenge and response. Societies develop and populations move as a response to climatic change that shapes the yield of crops and the nature of disease. Regular crises, driven by disease and famine as well as war, constitute a cyclical mechanism, in which human advance stalls and prosperous societies and complex political regimes simply collapse. Such crises form the “patterns of history” and they have so far occurred at repeated intervals: 2200 BC, 1750 BC, 1200 BC, 800 BC, 540 AD, 1250 AD, or 1645 AD. Every 400 years or so, climate change and drought set off migrations and state failure.

For Morris, the breakthroughs of the first millennium BC – Confucianism, Buddhism, the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy – were simply a response to greater prosperity, more long-distance trade and the stronger states that regulated it. Society, in Morris’s formulation, gets the culture it needs.

Morris is especially interested in the relation of the eastern and western end of the Eurasian landmass. For most of human history, the west’s response proved more innovative; only from around 550 AD to 1776 (the year of the steam engine, of Adam Smith and of the American Declaration of Independence) was the east dominant and more prosperous.

The book tells us that we should not look back to very distant origins of the west-east divergence, nor to very recent origins, since the calculation of levels of social development show long-term continuities. Instead, we need to think of the middle-term explanation, which covers a couple of thousand years.

The thousand years of Chinese superiority were the result of a period of trade and intellectual openness that followed a political collapse. The Roman Empire and the Han Empire both fell because temperatures and rainfall were declining. In the third century, both the Roman and Chinese cities shrank, literacy declined and military power was eroded. But in the east, migration produced a move into fertile areas where new ways of growing rice allowed a rise in living standards and led to a new possibility for political advance. The last real Roman emperor, Justinian, failed because he lacked those productive paddy fields.

At this point, China grew because it was open to foreign influences and could blend them into a new synthesis. There was a Chinese Renaissance in the 11th century that preceded and paralleled the European development of the 15th. Decline set in when China’s rulers were so convinced of their superiority that they had no need to turn to foreign barbarians.

Morris’s writing is full of entertaining anecdotes as well as references to popular science and pseudoscience – but he also uses high-tech archaeological evidence that includes the analysis of pollen and other plant remains to give an indication of climatic change, and of DNA to show the migrations that occurred over tens of thousands of years. This is a history driven by close attention to every archaeological remnant, in which buried animal bones tell a story about the prosperity of the society that bred and then killed and consumed them. The latest confirmation of Morris’s thesis of constant and intense interchange between east and west is the 2010 discovery of bones, probably from a farm slave, buried in the second century AD in southern Italy; mitochondrial DNA suggested that his maternal ancestors came from east Asia.

Statistics, psychology and history might allow societies to plan the future. But then Morris shows how grim the future could be. The comforting conclusion for western readers implied in his title – that westerners are still top dogs – is dramatically undermined by the bleak last chapter. The book ends with a scary account of the likely – in his eyes, certain – impact of global warming that will lead to what he calls “global weirding”: extreme climatic occurrences, increased struggle over resources, failing states.

This entertaining and plausibly argued book in the end tells us that debates about the rise of China or the fall of the west are ultimately a side-show. Nature will bite back at human society, and we don’t yet have a psycho-history that can plan out an adequate response.

Harold James is professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and author of ‘The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle’ (Harvard University Press)

December 31, 2010 at 05:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

December 18, 2010

FT: USA demographics/Trends

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/817d6cca-00ce-11e0-aa29-00144feab49a.html#axzz17trniFGA

There is “a deep crisis in the lives of millions of people”; a middle class that has been “shorted” by the delirium of sub-prime derivatives; a whole generation now forced to deal with downward social mobility, the blighted hopes of their unemployed children; the assumption that cuts the heart out of the American dream – that the lives of the next generation look certain to be less fortunate than those of the last. Reflectively, she looks out of the window but her mind is further off surveying the wrecked landscape of the middle and working classes: 27 million unemployed or under-employed, five million foreclosures by the end of this year.

December 18, 2010 at 04:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

An Experiment. Learning From Scratch.

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The new power of the press

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Britain: what lies ahead? - Jan-07

Being Marco - Dec-17

On the edge - Dec-17

Oprah Winfrey: out on her own - Dec-10

Arianna Hufﬁngton: new media entrepreneur - Dec-10

Wangari Maathai: Africa’s green star - Dec-10

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Why the West Rules – For Now

EDITOR’S CHOICE

American Colossus - Dec-17

The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas - Dec-17

Palmerston - Dec-17

Edith Cavell - Dec-17

The London Train - Dec-17

A Kind Man - Dec-17

December 18, 2010