Archive Page 2
I attended the Economist’s World in 2010 conference this week. The economic outlook was cautiously positive.
Carmen Reinhart, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics, University of Maryland:
- A rapid V-shaped recovery is unlikely, as the conditions are not in place.
- The revenue hit inflicted by the recession will accelerate the arrival of problems associated with paying for rising health care and Baby Boom retirement costs in the US.
- There is no natural successor to the dollar in view. The dollar has Treasuries behind it, but the euro has no unified debt market.
- A “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions would have to be orchestrated globally, or it would simply push business to markets that declined to implement it.
Leo Abruzzese, Economist Editorial Director, North America:
- By the 3rd quarter of 2011, world economic growth will not be back even to 2003 levels.
- The US economy will reach its 2007 size by the 3rd quarter of 2011. It will have taken 16-17 quarters, much worse than other recessions in recent decades.
- The US banking crisis is not over, and many more small- and medium-sized banks will still get in trouble.
- In China, stock and property bubbles are forming, and are likely to pop within 2 to 3 years.
- China should overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy in the next few months.
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This week Brendan Borrell suggested in the New York Times that it was time to reconsider the status of Antarctica.
Antarctica is now effectively an international, stateless, demilitarized zone, on the basis of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Many countries have land claims, but they effectively put them aside when they sign the treaty, as most powers have.
Borrell advocates dropping the treaty and letting nations claim pieces of Antarctica, as he thinks that national interests would drive stronger environmental protection. This could lead to significant downsides, however:
- Opening up national claims could expand environmental abuses, both in the fisheries that concern Borrell and on land. Do we really want Chinese and Russian companies to have free rein in parts of the continent?
- Abandoning the treaty would mean stepping away from a system that has been remarkably successful in fostering cooperation and non-militarization, even at the height of the Cold War. Borrell himself notes the British and Argentines exchanged gunfire in Antarctica before the treaty.
- Letting the treaty lapse would open up Antarctica to competition just as climate change may make exploitation of polar resources more plausible, setting the state for more conflict.
Perhaps instead the treaty could be strengthened, especially those aspects dealing with marine conservation?
(Image courtesy Eli Duke, Flickr)
The WaPo reported today on a trend that could have impacts from African stability to the global food supply: companies and governments from developing nations are leasing or buying large swaths of agricultural land, especially in Africa, but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The WaPo article focuses on Ethiopia, which uses only about a quarter of its arable land despite facing chronic food shortages. Indian investment there has already reached $2.5 billion, and Saudi Arabian and Chinese firms are moving in as well, with active encouragement from the Ethiopian government.
This could have positive effects:
- This kind of project could increase global farmland and the global food supply.
- This could bring new flows of investment to poor nations, and improve their infrastructures.
- Access to inexpensive food might rise in the land-leasing countries.
- People could gain access to paid work, and learn modern farming skills.
However, the potential downsides seem serious:
- Land may be diverted from local food production to exports, increasing hunger.
- Poor locals might be deprived of land and water so that governments or elites can profit from it.
- This could extend the “resource curse” to agriculture, as it could enable elites to make money from farmland while largely excluding their own countrymen from the benefits. The WaPo article notes an Ethiopian river that is now to be used for irrigation, with locals banned from watering their cows in it.
- With many of the companies coming from India, Saudi Arabia, and China, the potential for serious ill-treatment of workers, and even human rights abuses, is vast. Indian and Chinese companies often treat their own workers abysmally, and Saudis sometimes revert to near-enslavement of foreigners, so the fate of African workers could be grim — especially if their own governments fail to protect them, which is likely in many poorly governed countries.
- The land leases run for as long as 99 years; exactly what this means, and how far the rights of the leasing country extend, could bring diplomatic clashes.
- The sum of the problems above points suggests that this trend could drive instability in some land-leasing countries.
(Image courtesy mrflip, Flickr)
In an attack on the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance,” Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal make an interesting point
“Strategic reassurance” seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline. Yet nothing would do more to hasten decline than to follow this path. The British accommodation of America’s rise was based on close ideological kinship. British leaders recognized the United States as a strategic ally in a dangerous world — as proved true throughout the 20th century. No serious person would imagine a similar grand alliance and “special relationship” between an autocratic China and a democratic United States.
Leaving aside that the writers are straining to detect how Obama differs from his predecessors — some see unusual continuity — it is true that the US lacks a natural protege. Brazil and India come much closer than China, as multicultural, democratic countries strongly shaped by Western culture, but real “kinship” is absent.
In any case, having a protege offers no guarantees: the US actively worked to deprive Britain of its chief global-power asset, its empire, even as the “special relationship” formed.
Given the strong odds that China and other countries will singly or collectively surpass the United States, the lack of proteges reinforces the value of the embedding the rising powers in an international system that Americans find amenable. It also argues for vigorous pursuit of soft power, converting rising powers to think more like us. Both of these tools were battered by the Bush administration, but Obama is pursuing them.
It should also be noted that an “autocratic China” is not forever. In many respects China is already less oppressive than South Korea and Taiwan were 50 years ago, when they were bastions of “the free world.” China may follow a similar course, and Kagan and Blumenthal imply that that matters. (Pure realists might object. After all, the US and Britain spent the first 100 years of their relationship warring or talking about warring with each other.)
Decline can be gradual: Britain remains a great power, 120 years after losing its place as the world’s largest economy. By that math, America will still matter in 2150.
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Getting rid of Ahmadinejad or the current regime may not greatly change the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program, as some seem to assume.
As Iran vacillates — or appears to — on the uranium stockpile deal, the opposition is accusing Ahmadinejad of giving away too much to the West.
The WaPo reports that
The strongest criticism has come from Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition presidential candidate in Iran’s June 12 election. Even though the two-term government of his political partner, former president Mohammad Khatami, tried several times to reach a compromise with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, Mousavi charged that the current proposal would lead to disaster. “The discussions in Geneva were really surprising, and if the promises given [to the West] are realized, then the hard work of thousands of scientists would be ruined.”
Iran’s approach to security is not just about Ahmadinejad, nor about “extremism.” It has structural drivers as well, and those will not change rapidly.
The Center for American Progress has released a new report on using technology to fight human rights abuses.
Sarah K. Dreier and William F. Schulz write about how mobile phones, social networks, satellite imagery, and DNA forensics can all be deployed to enhance and protect people’s rights.
Cell phones with photo capabilities convey images of human rights violations at a moment’s notice. Internet social networking tools enable activists to connect with one another and with sympathetic audiences to build worldwide networks for change. Electronic data analysis tools allow for vast amounts of information about human rights crimes to be collected and analyzed.
Among other measures, they call for Congress and the Obama administration to
- “Increase funding for scientific research and technology development that link to human rights.”
- “Increase the effectiveness of satellite imagery to document abuses by updating publicly available mapping databases” and increase “NGO access to commercial satellite imagery.”
- Develop “an ongoing, comprehensive effort to facilitate community monitoring. The U.S. government should commit to making satellite imagery of high-risk locations publicly available on a weekly basis.”
- “Support international prohibition of restrictions on cryptography.”
The authors also suggest that predictive modeling could provide early warning: “Scientists can … use advanced sensing technologies in tandem with predictive studies to identify regions at risk before they explode into conflict.”
Technology does not have to be cutting-edge to be highly useful:
Even a recycled, dated cell phone can be a significant boon to human rights and development. Every voter who believes that she or he has been inappropriately turned away from the polls can report that experience to the groups monitoring election violations.
It is clear from the report that creating more tools that support distributed human rights monitoring will be crucial, so that ordinary people can safely, secretly, and readily send calls, text, and images from mobile phones, which will shortly be truly ubiquitous.
To increase affordability, the report suggests that mobile networks in developing countries should provide “text messaging services to social change projects for little or no cost.”
Beyond the material in this report, use of technology for human rights might also be enhanced by:
- crowdsourced monitoring and research — enlisting remote volunteers to go through documents, monitor visual databases or live feeds, and other tasks (building on some early efforts by Amnesty International and others)
- crowdsourced geolocation tools to fill in more of the holes in global mapping they identify
- use of small, inexpensive UAVs in human rights work and related journalism
- deploying a dedicated NGO satellite — expensive but well within the budgets of, for instance, the Gates Foundation
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Io9 has a useful review of George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years.
We’re in for the return of Cold War politics, the rise of new dominant powers, and a full-blown space war, according to a new book. What are the chances his dire predictions will come true?
In the details, the chances are virtually nil, of course. But this book should be judged more on the broad outlines than on the scenario particulars.
Suspiciously, it is the same future that Friedman always sees: 19th-century style realpolitik, with great powers contending violently for position. That is hardly inevitable, as ideological, economic, and military factors that enabled that environment are no longer in place. Great powers have not fought each other directly for over 50 years, a gap that cannot be found in previous centuries. Indeed, a variety of factors could tip the world toward full-blown peace in coming decades.
As for the details:
Conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.
Friedman’s casual dismissal of China, India, and Brazil should raise some eyebrows. He plausibly explains why Russia might falter, but seems to drop the others either to be deliberately contrarian, or out of deep faith in the determinative power of geography.
It is geography which seems to anoint Turkey, Japan, and Poland. Turkey bears watching, as this blog has noted. As for Poland and Japan, they suffer from the same demographic malady as Russia. Poland is embedded in the pacifying embrace of Europe, and is expected to lose two million people by 2030. Japan cannot be counted out, but is also shrinking already.
How will countries fight at mid-century?
Warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view.
That is not a bad forecast for conflict, though other paths are possible. Some would point to nanotechnologies and biotech weapons.
As for the overall book, as Io9 suggests, it is a better introduction to “realist” thinking than an actual guide to coming developments.
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Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It, spoke at New America Foundation this afternoon.
In discussing the deep mutual dependence of the US and Chinese economies, he suggested that two pathways are likely:
- China and the US might be like future EU members at mid-century, in proto-partnership, though no one is acting with that intention.
- China might be playing the role of the US in its relationship to the UK in early-mid 20th century, with the US fighting irrelevant fights (Iraq, Afghanistan) while China grows in power; it was ultimately the US that supplanted Britain, not Germany.
Other ideas of interest:
- It is not clear if global resources –- steel and oil, for instance –- could even support a much more prosperous China. Chinese demand is likely to drive up oil, copper, etc. prices in a few years.
- The chances are “almost nil” that China will follow Japan’s path, falling into stagnation. Japan was never as open to global commerce than China is; India is not as open as China either.
- China may be pleased with the American obsession with Iran, because that is something that it hardly cares about at all — it is always great to have one’s adversaries expending their energies at something that doesn’t matter to you.
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Radiolab recently asked the question, “Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all?” Passerby confronted with this query were skeptical, citing “human nature.”
Now, “once and for all” is an extreme criterion, but most people seem to take the question to mean, “Is peace possible? Might wars stop?” And a variety of factors suggest that this could happen, possibly within decades.
The drivers are diverse:
- Decline of violence — Violence is less tolerated globally, within cultures and between them. Behaviors in warfare that were routine a few decades ago — such as targeting civilians — are now deeply controversial. The number of states that engage in large-scale, serious human rights violations has also greatly declined, and abusers receive global attention. (See this Stephen Pinker article for more.)
- Decline of state-to-state warfare — The Catholic Church itself was more likely to engage in armed violence only a few centuries ago than are most dictatorships now. Even “civilized” states routinely attacked each other in the recent past, but this happens more and more rarely. (This is one reason the US invasion of Iraq was widely seen as such an aberration, and as morally repugnant.)
- Democracy and freedom — Both have been spreading in recent decades; even authoritarian states such as China have far more social freedom than they did in the past. This trend reduces pent-up frustration against governments that can result in violence, and provides outlets for self-determination, one of the more common causes of war.
- Transparency — Formal or crowdsourced media have an ever-growing reach, and fewer and fewer things will happen outside the reach of the camera lens. In a couple of decades, 80-90% of the world’s population will be carrying the equivalent of their own broadcast stations, upping the price to be paid in public opinion for those engaged in conflict or oppression.
- Rising wealth — Wealthy states are less violent, internally and externally. Middle classes are more educated, less likely to support authoritarianism, and have much more invested in stability. Setting aside artificial oil economies, no countries with a per capita income of more than $30,000 have significant human rights issues — and many countries are headed for that level of wealth in coming decades.
- Human nature — It is not a prohibitive obstacle. We need look no farther than Scandinavia: the same genetic pool that produced the Vikings, who engaged in savage violence from Greenland to Russia only a millennia ago, now yields peoples with essentially zero chance of waging aggressive war. Their genomes have probably barely changed: it is their social and physical environments that have shifted.
Peace is hardly inevitable, of course. Any number of factors could produce more rounds of wars:
- New or resurgent scarcities could pit nations against each other, fighting over energy or water, for example. Many forecast that climate change and population pressure could drive this result.
- Western values that have slowly evolved to make war less likely might be replaced in the international system by other perspectives as the 21st century wears on.
- A sufficiently serious calamity — peak oil combined with a severe climate shift, for instance — might rip away the social underpinnings of more peaceful societies, setting humanity back centuries.
- Humanity may begin to modify itself, creating new divisions; willingness to use genetic enhancement is one possibility.
Still, peace might break out, and it might do so relatively soon.
(Image courtesy cell105, Flickr)
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Marian Salzman asked me and others to talk about re-branding the United States. These are extracts from two of her blog posts, about challenges and solutions.
My remarks:
Brand America is suffering from the hangover of the Bush years, which intensified perceptions of the U.S. as arrogant, violent, greedy, ignorant and self-interested. One of the tragedies of the Bush administration’s missteps was that about a billion people came of age during those eight years, forming their first impressions of the U.S.
One path to future reputation is making an impression on the vast cohorts of young people growing up now. We don’t want to battle the BRICs with our legacy strengths, the size of our economy and our military power, which are declining or sullied advantages. We can fight the challengers in areas where they have weaknesses and we are admired: freedom, egalitarianism, creativity and opportunity, for instance.
As Davids says below, diversity is another area of comparative advantage over the BRICs.
Keith Reinhard:
We have become an unwelcoming brand—with visa policies that discourage the best and the brightest from coming to study … We are not taking the lead in addressing challenges the global “market” most cares about—climate change being an important current example. America is still the leading nation brand. Surveys on innovation and competitiveness still rank us as No. 1. But other nation brands, like China, are gaining on us.
Our position as the world leader did not come overnight, and our brand recovery will take some time—maybe a generation.
Axle Davids:
A smart marketer would push diversity and inclusiveness for Brand America. Show us how you are a world nation, instead of acting like the standard-bearer for all nations.
N. Sedef Onder:
A global audience watched as we failed the most basic test of our authenticity during the recent financial crisis. A country built on the premise of capitalism, or the ability of anyone with any background to succeed based on individual effort, hard work and innovation simply failed to deliver on that promise.
Brand America was, and is still, a bit “drunk” on its faded glory as the pinnacle of opportunity and invention during the industrial age. We’ve yet to reinvent ourselves for the Brave New World. Understanding our role as international partners and working in collaboration with other nations will be critical to regaining respect and credibility.
Joy Donnell:
It seems all my overseas acquaintances felt America had gone rogue during the Bush administration and hoped our new president would signal a return to the world stage.
Michael Margolis:
What “big story” initiatives might the government introduce that bring to life how our country continues to fulfill the larger promise? What about a global entrepreneurship competition sponsored by the U.S. government, with both monetary prizes and immigration visas?
Several of those interviewed wisely point out that it is not about PR — real-world actions matter.
(Image courtesy Ctd 2005, Flickr)