China has become the world’s second biggest economy according to data released on Monday August 16th. Japan’s economy fell behind China’s at market exchange rates in the second quarter (it has been number three in PPP terms for some time). These numbers are not strictly comparable: Japan’s data have been seasonally adjusted while those for China have not. Quibbles aside, Japan will surely be eclipsed soon, if it has not been already. Data compiled by Angus Maddison, an economist who died earlier this year, suggest that China and India were the biggest economies in the world for almost all of the past 2000 years. Why they fell so far behind may be more of a mystery than why they are currently flourishing.
It started with the launch of Sputnik and ended with the Cuban missile crisis, but for a moment – so brief it has almost been forgotten – it looked as if the Russian dream of unrivalled prosperity would be realised. Francis Spufford on the lessons to be learned from the Soviet experiment 1962. At the airport, Harry Palmer – not yet played by Michael Caine, not in fact even named in Len Deighton’s original novel – stocks up on his reading. For the flight he buys the New Statesman and History Today. And then he adds a copy of the Daily Worker. Not just because our Harry (as we might as well call him) is a British spy, keeping up with the communist enemy, but also because Harry, unlike the uppercrust nitwits he works for, is classless and intelligent and up-to-the-minute, and so in a menacing way at this moment in the 20th century does communism seem to be, thanks to the public image of its homeland the USSR.
From Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket, in Prospect
In our book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and I demonstrated that, first, many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, that almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality. To some, however, these seem impossible notions. Writing in the August 2010 edition of Prospect, Matthew Sinclair from the Taxpayers Alliance claimed our research was “simply untrue.”
WHEN a book with the title Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us arrived on my desk, I figured it could go one of two ways. One possibility could be that the zombies were Keynesians, discredited in the 1970s but back in favour today. But the cover illustration of trickle-down economics and efficient financial markets illustrates that the Chicago school is deemed to be the haven of the undead.
It is an entertaining and thought-provoking book by an Australian academic John Quiggin, which also works as a good summary for non-specialists of how the economics debate has developed (NB the book will not be published until October).
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Global Studies Conference Conference in Hong Kong, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
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Celia Orboc, a cake-seller in the Philippines, spent her little stipend on a wooden shack, giving her five children a roof over their heads for the first time. In Kyrgyzstan Sharmant Oktomanova spent hers buying flour to feed six children. In Haiti President René Préval praises a dairy co-operative that gives mothers milk and yogurt when their children go to school.
These are examples of the world’s favourite new anti-poverty device, the conditional cash-transfer programme (CCT) in poor and middle-income countries. These schemes give stipends and food to the poorest if they meet certain conditions, such as that their children attend school, or their babies are vaccinated.
There are all sorts of things very poor people living in poor countries don’t have. They lack secondary-school educations, usually, and good medical care. They lack steady work and life insurance, bank accounts and competent legal representation, adequate fertilizer for their crops, adequate protein in their diets, reliable electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, low-interest loans, incubators for their premature babies, vaccinations and good schools for their children.
But the central thing they lack is money. That is what makes them, by definition, poor: International aid organizations define the “very poor” as those who live on less than a dollar a day.
On September 11, 2001 Megan K. Stack, the 25-year-old Houston bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, was in Paris visiting her sister. After the terrorist attacks on that day, the Times asked if she would be willing to go to Afghanistan. For the next six years, before becoming the paper’s Moscow bureau chief, she reported on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel and the West Bank. Her new book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar, describes all these places with a unique comparative perspective and moral engagement. n+1 spoke to her over Skype from Moscow.
How can the purportedly slowing rate of H-1B visa applications to the US State Department since April 2010 be interpreted? A recent article in Fortune magazine suggests that the reversal of the so-called “brain drain” points to a worrying trend related both to perceived long-term consequences of the current economic recession and the waning appeal of the specialised job market in the US.
Traditionally reserving a quota of 65,000 out of the millions of non-immigrant visas granted in the US each year, H-1B visas are granted to those with specialised knowledge - usually postgraduates taking jobs in science and industry, but also including professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
I believe that misconceptions play a large role in shaping history, and the euro crisis is a case in point.
Let me start my analysis with the previous crisis, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. In the week following September 15, 2008, global financial markets actually broke down and by the end of the week they had to be put on artificial life support. The life support consisted of substituting sovereign credit—backed by the financial resources of the state—for the credit of financial institutions that had ceased to be acceptable to counterparties.
In the fall of 2007, after two Bear Stearns-owned hedge funds trading in subprime debt suddenly went bankrupt, I sat down with a friend of a friend who worked in finance to see if he could explain it to me. That conversation became the first in a series, which we began publishing at n+1. The conversations continued through the crisis and after, following the trajectory of one financier facing the hardest days he’d yet seen. This week HarperPerennial is publishing Diary of a Very Bad Year, the book that resulted from those conversations. We hope it’s a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the crisis. All this week on the site we’ll be featuring excerpts and outtakes from the book. —KG
You may have read last month that the Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference location had still not been finalized. We have good news - the venue and dates have been decided!
Please join us in Rio de Janeiro from 18-20 July, 2011 at the JW Marriott for the Fourth Global Studies Conference. With a special theme on Latin America and Globalization: Emerging Societies and Emancipation, the conference promises to be as engaging as the city you will be staying in.
We are just now finalizing the website details but please keep visiting us online here for updates and at our blog for other important news.
The first intellectual consequence of the economic crisis was to undermine neoliberalism—or the belief in the sufficiency of markets to secure human welfare—as the age’s default ideology.
The second was to prompt a hasty resurrection of Keynes. “We are all Keynesians again!” the ghost of Richard Nixon might have declared as Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, leaders of the nations most squarely behind the neoliberal push of the last thirty years, changed the Anglo-American tune and, this past winter, begged their European colleagues to stimulate the Continental economy with borrowed money. The crisis also made the economists Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini into the ?rst Keynesian superstars since John Kenneth Galbraith. Their recommendations, on their invaluable blogs, of still vaster countercyclical spending and the temporary nationalization of banks were not taken up by the Obama administration, but they did confer new respectability on the idea of close state involvement in the economy.
This is the beginning of the end for the EU unless it can find the capacity to start again on radically new bases
Within a single month, we have witnessed Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece announcing his country’s possible default, an expansive European rescue loan offered to him on the condition of devastating budget cuts, soon followed by the “downgraded rating” of the Portuguese and Spanish debts, a threat on the value and the very existence of the euro, the creation (under strong US pressure) of a European security fund worth €750bn, the Central European Bank’s decision (against its rules) to redeem sovereign debts, and the announcement of budget austerity measures in several member states.
By Tony Judt, in Institute for Public Knowledge, Transformations of the Public Sphere
One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others. We are familiar with complaints about the ‘atomizing’ impact of the internet: if everyone selects gobbets of knowledge and information that interest them, but avoids exposure to anything else, we do indeed form global communities of elective affinity—while losing touch with the affinities of our neighbors.
In that case, what is it that binds us together? Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.
Tell me about your first book, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.
This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes.
It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book which I really love.
Why is it so important to you?
Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.
As the European debt crisis continues to unsettle financial markets, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Vanity Fair contributor, talked to VF Daily about why the measures taken so far have failed to stem the crisis, whether there is a moral hazard in bailing out nations, and how Wall Street has made the situation worse.
VF Daily: This crisis seems to be never-ending. Why, after a trillion-dollar aid package was settled on, are people still so uneasy?
Joseph E. Stiglitz: Well I think it’s understandable. First, owing to the size of the package. Second, there’s maybe a recognition that what Germany had demanded were austerity packages that would weaken Europe and therefore exacerbate the downturn. Third, given the magnitude of the problems and the austerity package that are being demanded, there’s considerable uncertainty whether there will be political and social unrest, and therefore whether packages will be accepted. Fourth, once you look at the numbers you realize that a trillion dollars probably isn’t enough if things don’t work out well, and there’s a significant probability that they won’t.
We are pleased to announce that a delegate information pack has been posted onto the Global Studies Conference website. This pdf document includes some helpful travel information as well as important conference information and can be found at http://onglobalisation.com/conference-2010/location/.
More information will be added to this document as it is made available so please check back for updates.
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A review of Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger by Fintan O’Toole
When I first came to the United States from Ireland in the early 1990s, Americans thought of my home country as a land of green fields, bibulous peasants, and perhaps the occasional leprechaun. Once, on a bus from Ann Arbor to Detroit, a fellow passenger heard my accent and asked if she could touch me for good luck. But something changed over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, as Ireland started to enjoy remarkable levels of economic growth. Blather about Guinness and the Little People made way for a new story line: the success of the Celtic Tiger economy. Between 1995 and 2007, Irish GDP grew at an average rate of 6 percent every year. Housing prices rose by 270 percent between 1996 and 2006. A country that had long been notorious for its high emigration rates started to import people instead. Gort—a tiny town in Galway—acquired a large population of South American immigrants, while Dublin supported no less than three Polish-language newspapers.
If you believe the papers, a lot of people think there’s going to be another Lehman. Only this time, it will come not from the recklessness of American finance, but from a sovereign debt default, the result of the infamous profligacy of the European welfare state. And given all the headlines—“The End of the Euro,” “The Death of the European Dream”—you would think these were the end times for the Eurozone itself.
The gloomy chorus has been building for months now: it is the leitmotif of the hyper-powered fund managers who are, as I write this, wagering on the demise of the euro, or profiting off the fear of its demise, or even, perversely enough, the fear of that fear. A February piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Hedge Funds Try ‘Career Trade’ Against Euro,” summed up the fervid atmosphere.
The Global Studies Conference is fast approaching and the draft conference schedule is now online.
While the program is subject to some slight changes, the parallel sessions will not likely be moved to a different time.
Please feel free to contact the conference secretariat at support@onglobalisation.com should you have any questions or concerns about your presentation session.
Not the least striking revelation of Michael Lewis’s excellent book, The Big Short, is that this author of financial best-sellers has changed his mind. In a column for Bloomberg News in early 2007, he praised the rapidly expanding market for derivatives. Visiting the annual meeting of financiers and policymakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that year, he was exasperated by the fears of some of the participants. “None of them seemed to understand that when you create a derivative you don’t add to the sum total of risk in the financial world,” he wrote, sounding arguments very similar to those made by Alan Greenspan. “You merely create a means for redistributing that risk. They have no evidence that financial risk is being redistributed in ways we should all worry about.”
Suicide bombing is one of the most passionately debated topics in academia, the government, and the intelligence community. The secondary literature on this subject has convincingly demonstrated that suicide bombing is sui generis in its historical contingency (rather than in its essence), that al-Qaeda’s practice of suicide bombing takes place in a globalized landscape which is at once moral and political, and that even the most murderous terrorists appropriate and objectify modern notions of humanity in describing their actions.
The Senate just voted, 96-0, to audit the Federal Reserve. Soon, we will know what the Federal Reserve did with the trillions of dollars that it handed out during the financial crisis.
A few months ago, such a vote would have been unthinkable. One senior Treasury official claimed he would fight to stop an audit ‘at all costs’. Senator Chris Dodd predicted that an audit would spell economic doom, while Senator Judd Gregg attacked accountability for the Fed as “pandering populism”.
Today, both the Treasury Department and Senator Dodd support this amendment. As for Judd Gregg, he was just on the floor of the Senate discussing — of all people — 19th century populist Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.
What happened?
People Power is what happened. We built a coalition of people on the right and the left, ordinary citizens and economists, ex-regulators and politicians, all with one question for which we demanded an answer: “What happened to our money?”
Translated from the Spanish by David Noriega. Read the original here.
According to Andy Warhol’s maxim, in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. This utopia of visibility makes sense in a society of the spectacle. Mexican political culture promises happiness in the opposite way: what is important is not what is seen, but what is hidden. A life of accomplishment doesn’t culminate in celebrity; it is achieved in secret. The Mexican utopia has consisted of enjoying your fifteen minutes of impunity.
Managers across Japan were stunned last month when a factory belonging to Ogihara, a Japanese diemaker, was sold to BYD, a Chinese carmaker that boasts Warren Buffett as an investor. In a sign of the sensitivity of the matter, the Japanese firm tried to keep the transaction quiet, never issuing a press release and refusing all interview requests.
Japan has a long history of resisting foreigners who seek to buy their way into the country. But most recent squabbles have at least been with firms from America, a political ally. Deals involving firms from the Chinese mainland are touchier because of the two countries’ uneasy relations. This has kept the number of Sino-Japanese mergers and acquisitions low, even as China surpassed America in 2007 to become Japan’s largest trading partner.
Today the Global Studies Conference Newsletter will be relaunched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Global Studies Community. The Global Studies Newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
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The 2010 Global Studies Conference will be held in Busan, South Korea at Pusan National University from June 21-23. For more information, please visit http://www.GlobalStudiesConference.com
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Global Studies Conference, see: http://onglobalisation.com/conference-2010/register/.
As a student during the 1980s, I gave the “European Union” section in the library a wide berth. The pall of soporific technocracy that hung over it made the adjacent shelves of books on law and political science enticing by comparison. A lot more has been written on the EU since then, most of it perpetuating that same “mortal dullness,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Perry Anderson. Dullness, on the other hand, is one charge no one has ever levied at Anderson, whose new book, The New Old World, is as insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. Given Anderson’s long and intimate engagement with Europe, both as an editor of the New Left Review and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for the past two decades, one looks forward to what one gets–a bracing assault from somewhere on the left on the conventional Europieties, and new perspectives on the evolution, and likely future trajectory, of one of the most important political and cultural experiments of our time.
Colin Marshall talks to B.R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters”, in 3 Quarks Daily
Brian Reynolds Myers is contributing editor to the Atlantic and professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his new book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters, he examines North Korean propaganda meant for both internal and external consumption and through it constructs the closed country’s view of itself, its relationship to other countries and the Kim dynasty that has controlled it for 60 years.
Westerner to get the impression that everything a North Korean citizen might see or read or hear, every piece of culture they might encounter — paintings, stories, sitcoms — is, in some way, propaganda. How true is that notion?
I think it is true. Of course, the information cordon that used to isolate the country from the outside world has deteriorated steadily since the mid-1990s, when North Koreans began to leave the country to look for food. You have a lot of people who are smuggling into the country things like South Korean DVDs or Chinese TV sets — even cellphones, which can be used to call people outside the country. Average citizens now have some access to unorthodox sources of culture and information, but for the average North Korean on a daily basis, everything they encounter really is propaganda.
Compiled by Christian Lorentzen and Keith Gessen, in n + 1
[The government report is admirably lucid and bears a formidable textual apparatus, including 115 pages of endnotes. But it lacks an index. The result is a volume that repeats the very compartmentalization it's been charged with analyzing. To remedy this, and following the cue of n+1 friend Caleb Crain, we have assembled a team of indexers. Our approach has varied—sometimes tending toward the "zone defense" style of the CIA, elsewhere favoring the "man-to-man" coverage practiced by the FBI.]
IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.
The number of applications from prospective international students to American graduate schools has increased for the fifth consecutive year. In a report released last week, the Council of Graduate Schools says the 7% growth in 2010 is the largest since a 9% gain three years ago.
In what the council calls an “initial snapshot of graduate applications” taken in the American autumn, those from China were up 19% following a 14% increase in 2009. Similarly, applications from prospective graduate students from the Middle East and Turkey also rose by double-digits for the fifth consecutive year, by 18%.
The council represents more than 500 institutions of higher education in the US and Canada engaged in graduate education, research and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees.
Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack’s worldview contained elements of the tea party’s anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with “the Left” (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
“I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual” . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
International development agencies faced a “diminishing market” unless they partnered large emerging economies to bring development to the world’s poorest countries, Helen Clark, the head of the United Nations Development Programme, warned on Tuesday.
Ms Clark said the New-York based UNDP was seeking a global partnership with India, China and Brazil to deliver investment, technology and expertise to other developing countries.
It had already worked alongside India in a solar energy investment in Guinea-Bissau, efforts to boost agricultural productivity in Rwanda and civil and public service training in Afghanistan.
These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to Western imperialism in modern times. But the Far East was always another matter. Too far away to be a military or religious threat to Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled according to merit, not birth. Even those sceptical of the more extravagant claims for the Middle Kingdom – Montesquieu or Adam Smith – remained puzzled and impressed by its wealth and order.
The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb believed the West — in particular the United States — posed an existential threat to Islam. He feared that globalization, spearheaded by the American colossus, might eventually destroy Islam by tempting pious Muslims with freewheeling capitalism, the separation of religion from government and the unleashing of decadent “animalistic desires.” Qutb, in word and in deed, took up the sword against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular government. Nasser hanged him in 1966, but Qutb’s ideas transformed the world by inspiring Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda theology.
Vali Nasr, in his outstanding new book “Forces of Fortune,” shows that Qutb was at least half wrong. Globalization, free trade and market economics aren’t a threat to Islam per se. What they are a threat to is the totalitarian vision of Islam that Qutb’s followers hope to impose.
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
On Monday, the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, unveiled the much-anticipated Burj Dubai in a spectacular ceremony. The tower immediately took its place in the record books as the tallest manmade structure ever built.
Standing at 828 metres tall, the tower surpassed the previous record-holder, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, by more than 300 metres. It has 164 floors containing more than 1,000 apartments, 49 floors of office space and an Armani hotel. The observation deck on the 124th floor is the highest in the world, providing a view for about 80 kilometres on a clear day. The building has state-of-the-art lifts that can go from the ground to the top in about 50 seconds, reaching a speed of more than 40 kilometres per hour. The tower also has the highest swimming pool in the world and the highest mosque. At the ceremony, Sheikh Mohammed renamed the tower Burj Khalifa, after the president of the United Arab Emirates and emir of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahayan, who helped with a financial bailout.
From Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times
One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high — the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties — and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai’s busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.
Designed by Adrian Smith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Burj Dubai is an impossible-to-miss sign of the degree to which architectural ambition — at least the kind that can be measured in feet or number of stories — has migrated in recent years from North America and Europe to Asia and the Middle East. It is roughly as tall as the World Trade Center towers piled one atop the other. Its closest competition is Toronto’s CN Tower, which is not really a building at all, holding only satellites and observation decks, and is in any case nearly 900 feet shorter.
Had William Hazlitt written his essay “On Persons with One Idea” today, he would surely have found room for the field of postcolonial studies. It is a field with only one idea: namely, that imperialism and racism are such dominant features of modern life, and had such a foundational role in the construction of our present society, that they inform every aspect of our ideas, culture, and history. Postcolonialism is, in theory, anti-hierarchical and anti-oppressive. But because it has only one idea, it can easily become oppressive in practice, and to quite a large extent. To show that this is true within the context of one postcolonial scholar’s book, The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy, is the purpose of this essay.
Ashis Nandy might seem an unlikely candidate for such an accusation. He is a political activist and a major commentator on contemporary affairs, known for his championing of nonviolence and tolerance. One of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals, he has written about communal violence, particularly Hindu-Muslim riots and the emotionally charged landscape of nationalism. He is no friend to the Hindu right, which he has accused of being itself a product of British colonialism. All varieties of chauvinism are subjected to fierce criticism at Nandy’s hands, and he is a member of numerous human rights and civil liberties groups.
These views are decent and humane, and Nandy is no friend to injustice. Yet he is very much a member of the postcolonial movement, and it often leads him to support a blinkered traditionalism for no other reason than that it seems to be anti-Western and anti-modern.
His book, The Intimate Enemy, appeared in 1983, at a time when postcolonialism was flourishing and when its arguments must have appeared fresh and controversial, although they have now gone quite stale. In essence, Nandy is making a case against modernity, and against the entire project of secular liberal rationalism, which he sees as more or less inseparable from colonialism, capitalism, and all the aspects of modernization and development he finds objectionable.
Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time.
Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accoutrements, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.
If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country’s hereditary ruler.
It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.
From George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, in Project Syndicate
BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.
But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.
Behavioral economics, for example, emphasizes that market participants often act in ways that cannot easily be reconciled with rationality. Similarly, modern information economics shows that even if markets are competitive, they are almost never efficient when information is imperfect or asymmetric (some people know something that others do not, as in the recent financial debacle) – that is, always .
From an interview with Tariq Ali by Mara Ahmed and Judith Bello, in Counter Punch
Mara Ahmed and I were given the opportunity to interview Tariq Ali when he spoke at Hamilton College in Upstate New York on November 11, 2009, during his recent speaking tour of the United States. Tariq, a native of Pakistan who lives in England, is a well known writer, intellectual and activist. He has traveled all over Southwest Asia and the Middle East while researching his books. Mara, who is working on a film highlighting the opinions of the Pakistani people regarding the current situation in Pakistan and the Western initiated ‘Global War on Terror’, had a lot of questions for Tariq about the internal state of Pakistan. I wanted to ask Tariq for his opinion about the effects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what alternatives he thought might be available. –JB
Mara: What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror. Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?
Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we’re just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they’re not like us, they’re Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.
It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and the Judeocide of the Second World War is having an impact. What sort of education is it if they can’t relate what happened then to some of the things that are happening now. Education which just centers on one atrocity and that’s all, where people feel very opposed to that [one atrocity], but they can support other atrocities, is in my opinion not a proper education. And some of the level of ignorant comment on Islam and the Islamic world in the United States is deeply shocking. That’s all it is. It’s ignorance.
From The Economist
From Jule Treneer, in n + 1
by Jeff Madrick, in The New York Review of Books
by Omar Sarwar, in 3 Quarks Daily
Location and Date
By Mark Mazower, in The Nation
Colin Marshall talks to B.R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters”, in 3 Quarks Daily
From The Economist
The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb believed the West — in particular the United States — posed an existential threat to Islam. He feared that globalization, spearheaded by the American colossus, might eventually destroy Islam by tempting pious Muslims with freewheeling capitalism, the separation of religion from government and the unleashing of decadent “animalistic desires.” Qutb, in word and in deed, took up the sword against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular government. Nasser hanged him in 1966, but Qutb’s ideas transformed the world by inspiring Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda theology.
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high — the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties — and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai’s busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.
From George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, in Project Syndicate
A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labour
From Johann Hari, in The Independent
To read more…