Matthew Yglesias sums up some interesting thoughts about the Parag Khanna New York Times Magazine piece on America's sunsetting hegemony we discussed earlier this week.

Yglesias admits to seeing a lot he likes in Khanna's analysis. He adds some interesting caveats about the periodic passing interest in the creation of America-in-decline stories:

What happens, I think, is that whenever the United States makes policy blunders such as Vietnam or Iraq, the fact that hegemony has been slowly slipping through our fingertips for decades suddenly becomes apparent. But we're still the most important country out there, our economy's still growing in absolute terms, and when our country implements sound policies the whole issue fades into the background.

The question, I guess, is why not? Why is it so difficult for big media outlets to ask readers or listeners or viewers to take a look at America as something other than the center of the entire known universe? My complaints about Khanna's piece were that it lacked substance in the policy prescriptions for addressing the author's vision of America's decline. Perhaps it is the very all-problem/no-solutions quandary that scares editors and producers away from these issues. If so, the fix is self-evident.

My instincts, however, tell me that the real issue is one of perception. In the view of many media gatekeepers, these problems seem so big and un-containable that they fear the public will be dazed or turned off by hearing about them. (Domestic issues of such ungainly magnitude -- say what to do about America's schools or the crippling partisanship in Washington -- are frequently referred to but rarely analyzed. Only one or two global issues at a time, like war in Iraq, or for a short time late last year Pakistan, receive the benefit of this insider shorthand.)

The result, of course, is an America that has less and less of an appetite and an acumen for delving into global issues that do, in fact, affect them and their country's future. And instead of digging in where these issues matter -- for instance, in the unfolding presidential contest -- we get distracted.

And with that, I get to type words I never thought I would: Ron Paul is making sense. Here's Dr. Rep. Paul (R-bottom tier) from last night's GOP debate, noting that Senator McCain and former Governor Romney were splitting hairs in the only foreign policy item getting attention in this year's campaign, Iraq:

They agreed with going in; they agreed for staying, agreed for staying how many years? And these are technicalities. We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policemen of the world, whether we should be running our empire or not, and how are going to have guns and butter?

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shadi Hamid at Democracy Arsenal pulled this bit from John Heilemann's long piece in New York Magazine about the Clinton vs. Obama histrionics:

The battle between Hillary and Barack has produced plenty of heat, with more to come, no doubt. But it has also generated considerable light, clarifying for many of us that the choice we'll be making on February 5 isn't mainly between two sets of policies or even two individuals. It's between two different ways of looking at the world.

If you find yourself drawn to the Clinton candidacy, you likely believe that politics is politics, that partisanship isn't transmutable, that Republicans are for the most part irredeemable. You suspect that talk of transcendence amounts to humming "Kumbaya" past the graveyard. You believe that progress comes only with a fight, and that Clinton is better equipped than Obama (or maybe anyone) to succeed in the poisonous, fractious environment that Washington is now and ever shall be. You ponder the image of Bill as First Laddie and find yourself smiling, not sighing or shrieking.

If you find yourself swept up in Obamamania, on the other hand, you regard this assessment as sad, defeatist, as a kind of capitulation. You're perfectly aware that politics is often a dirty business. But you believe it could be a bit cleaner, a bit nobler, a bit more sustaining. You think that paradigm shifts can happen, that the system can be rebooted. Most of all, an attraction to Obama indicates you are, on some level, a romantic. You never had your JFK, your MLK, and you desperately crave one: What you want is to fall in love."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Working with some of our clients and with colleague organizations like Net Centric Campaigns, we've been looking closely at different aspects of network theory. Often, the planning and evaluation work we do includes analyzing a network and a strategy for disseminating information through a network. Because I quickly grow cynical about any concept that inspires zealous attention from marketeers, I have carried around healthy skepticism about the so-called marketing strategy of using Influential super-vectors to spread a key message to the widest number of people.

Malcolm Gladwell revived this old trope in his book "The Tipping Point," memorably referencing a handful of interesting incidents in which super-influential people -- tastemakers, you might say -- adopted a new fashion and in so doing lit the fuse on a massive, viral chain of events that any PR professional would dream about.

Fast Company recently published a quite good debunking of the myth of the Influentials, "Is the Tipping Point Toast?" Basically, an Australian researcher named Duncan Watts has built model after model to simulate the power of the influential over the ordinary schlub to spread some new viral piece of information.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've known for the past several years that Americans are concerned about the U.S. image abroad, which continues to decline. A jointly-sponsored poll from World Learning and the Aspen Institute confirms this finding again. For instance:

• 66% believe that foreign governments are less likely to support us
  
• 63% worry that Americans themselves will be less welcome abroad
  
• 61% worry about a greater likelihood of terrorist attacks because of rising distrust of the United States.
  
• and 36 percent believe negative perceptions of the US could prompt boycotts of American products and retailers.

But the real news from this poll centers on support for a citizen-led solution: Americans think they themselves can and should help improve perceptions of the U.S. around the world.

According to the new findings, many Americans believe that overseas experiences by average Americans, playing the role of citizen diplomats, can improve the United States’ image abroad. Nearly eight in 10 (77 percent) believe that studying or working abroad has a positive impact on Americans’ awareness and appreciation of other people and cultures. Conversely, 78 percent believe that when more Americans go abroad, they change local perceptions of our people and culture for the better. And when asked about the most effective means to improve relations with foreigners 39 percent believe that increasing business contacts with other countries is the best means of achieving that goal.

The World Learning/Aspen Institute survey found that young people (33 percent) and African Americans (36 percent) believe that studying abroad is the most effective means to improve relations with people in other countries. Yet today fewer than 1 percent of all college students study abroad, and of this small number, less than 8 percent are Hispanic or African American, even though these populations represent 25 percent of all college students.

Of course, while some American students, businesspeople, and professionals will act as citizen diplomats on their own initiative, these sorts of high-quality exchanges often take some doing. We're not talking about a holiday in Europe -- for the most part, one doesn't find opportunities for transformative citizen exchange on Expedia. (Respondents ranked travel lower than both business links and student exchange in rating its potential to impact views of the U.S.)

For a more immersive experience, most Americans turn to agencies like the Peace Corps and organizations like World Learning (which creates "high-road" exchanges in developing countries) or Bardoli Global (which brokers placements for minorities, who are near-absent in most exchange programs). These organizations are the vehicles that enlist and enable citizens to act as diplomats. And they have more to do with the United States' standing in the world than first meets the eye.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation offers a long-winded analysis of the shrinking American hegemony in this week's New York Times Magazine. For those afraid of 7,500-word big-think pieces on geopolitics (please teach me to not read these things), Khanna basically argues that the new world order -- mostly due to US inattention to global transformations these past few years while we were distracted in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is comprised of three superpowers, China, Europe and the US, and the conflicts aren't over ideology or religion but intellectual and economic influence.

The author marshals many solid examples, and the picture, though far from bleak, reveals darkening skies for America's current status as the world's only superpower.

It's a lot to bite off, and it flies in the face of more conservative views of the foreign policy future. The visuals that accompanied the piece seem dramatic in comparison to the story and the recommendations buried deep below 15 pages of text. (The piece is excerpted from a book, which I imagine could be longer still!) America as a tiny, alternately missing or microscopic bit of the world leaves a desperate impression. The real story is much less so. Khanna writes that these three superpowers, which he calls the Big Three will do battle over their resources, friendships and customers of the remaining nations in a decades-long struggle for hegemony over the Second World, incidentally the title of his forthcoming book:

The Big Three are the ultimate “Frenemies.” Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others’ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America’s backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe’s southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China’s growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.”

His analysis goes on like this for a while, repeating the tropes of supermodel Giselle Bundchen wishing to be paid in Euros (she didn't) and Jay-Z name-checking the EU currency in his comeback record as reasons why Europe, with its business-focused expansion and post-imperial organizing model, is a logical counterpoint to the US and China, rather than Russia. Russia is poor-mouthed, Islam is rarely mentioned, and smaller nations with surprisingly large impacts -- Venezuela, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey -- are presented as the powerful second-world nations who will be the major consumers in a new "geopolitical marketplace."

It is in this analogy -- where the nations of the world will be shopping for a new global best friend -- that Khanna's piece really finds its focus. He asserts that to make America an attractive commodity in this new global market, the next president should:

• "Channel your inner JFK," and leave the American interest, and all the accompanying bluster, by the wayside. American values, "democracy" and all the rest should be set aside in the interests of selling what America can do for these second-world consumer-nations.
  
• Reorganize the State Department to match the DOD's organization of the world into regional commands.
  
• Boost substantially the number of Foreign Service Officers, student exchanges, Peace Corps volunteers and the like, using corporate partners (see below).
  
• Create a "diplomatic-industrial complex," incorporating business into the functions of government like they do in Europe and China.
  
• Convene a G-3 of the big three and don't dictate the agenda.

Khanna's piece, and all its graphic treatment, seems to vacillate between "the war is lost" and "who cares anyway?" I found it unfulfilling, especially when useful treatments of these recommendations -- the solutions, not endless retellings of the problem -- would have been much more rewarding.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Can Mitt Romney really deport 12 million illegal immigrants? Does John Edwards really expect to seal the U.S. off from globalization and make our economy "fair"? Why, when talking about complicated problems like illegal immigration or rising income inequality, are the solutions we hear from presidential candidates -- all smart, well-connected people with abundant access to real answers -- so absurdly simplistic? Shankar Vedantam writes in today's Washington Post about the science behind this strange (if standard) rule in politics. It turns out that simplistic answers -- though disastrous once a candidate becomes an elected official -- really do win elections.

In a study that examined State of the Union speeches delivered by forty-one different U.S. presidents, researchers found that leaders need to walk a tightrope to stay elected yet get things done in office:

The study found that in the first three years after a new president takes office, his speeches displayed higher levels of complexity compared with addresses in the fourth year in office. In the first three speeches, presidents were more likely to acknowledge other points of view, potential pitfalls and unintended consequences. In the fourth year, however -- as they were about to run for reelection -- the complexity of their speeches plunged.

Not only that, but American presidents who showed a sharper decline in complexity were more likely to be reelected than those who continued to acknowledge that the challenges facing the nation were complex.

This even holds true for revolutionary leaders. Figureheads tend to win power with a simple message but quickly fail if they do not adapt to the complexities of their new role. The rush to over-simplify for the public is not really the fault of leaders themselves, Vedantam argues, but of the people who do the electing. This is a game built into the democratic mechanism.

So the next time you hear presidential candidates say simplistic things that people want to hear, remember that they are merely responding rationally to the incentives that voters give them. The disturbing question is not why politicians pander, but why pandering works -- and for that we need to look in the mirror.

This finding is dispiriting for advocates who champion listening to the public's voice on complex issues. It will, I suspect, always be an uphill battle to get public support and attention focused on more than the headline -- or the lede at best -- of a difficult issue. But it does seem that, while advocates for better immigration policies or climate change may never get the public to think through all the options and their implications, they can succeed at moving the headline itself away from vapid chatter and simple-minded bromide toward the makings of something worthwhile.

In other words, don't expect the public (or your political champion) to plumb the depths of your issue. Rather, focus on giving them something worthwhile, if straightforward, to work with.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm an absurdly late - but earnest - Facebook user. Credit (or blame) our friends at Netcentric Campaigns for convincing me to give it a try. I did the basics, omitting details such as how my wife of nearly 25 years and I "hooked up," for example. And I signed onto a couple of "groups" and "causes." (My favorite group remains "Over 40 is Facebook Creepy," a position our 17-year-old son loudly supports.)

If Facebook can help realize the potential of social networks for social change, the groups and causes are - presumably - where this can happen. Karen Showalter of Netcentric and her trusty intern Sarah helped me understand which is which:

"Facebook Causes and Groups...[b]oth facilitate distribution of news through the creation of an online community within Facebook that shares similar interests, passions, or social concerns.

Groups are established to bring awareness to an issue, connect a group, or just for fun, but have no affiliation with an organization.

Anyone on Facebook can create a Group. Groups can be open (anyone can join or invite people), closed (group membership must be confirmed by the administrator), or secret (only those in the group can see the groups’ webpage). Groups are monitored solely on the basis that they do not discriminate against people or organizations.

Causes are used to raise awareness, keep members up-to-date, and raise money for an American or Canadian [nonprofit]... The feature provides free marketing and access to a large pool of donors (Facebook members). Requests to start a Cause must be approved by Facebook administrators. Causes must be linked to nonprofit organizations.

Anyone can join or donate to any cause. Members of Causes can then donate money and recruit others to support [the] cause. Statistics of membership recruitment and donations are visible to members."

I'm touched that three or four people joined causes after I "recruited" them. And a few more may have kicked in their $10 to help a nice group in Burkina Faso gain ground in America's Giving Challenge. But I don't see a clear-cut advantage over just sending out an e-mail to tell my friends about my latest enthusiasms. What am I missing?

Maybe I need some cooler applications, and The Onion (America's Finest News Source) once again has the answers.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got to admit that I'm reveling in the set-to unfolding around "The Wire" creator David Simon's full-media blitz for 2008. Simon started the year by bizarrely responding to almost anything written about him and the show on the Internet. Then, as he takes on the media with the fifth and final season of "The Wire," he has turned his attention to the declining state of the newspaper industry in a long piece published Sunday in the Washington Post.

Yesterday, the Post ran a rebuttal from Sara Libby defending the newspaper reader and the journalists of today.

Did Libby even read what Simon wrote? Did the editors of the op-ed page read Simon's piece before running Libby's? Simon wondered if there was an elegy awaiting the newswriters inspired by the crusading journalism of the 60s and 70s who found themselves in a world where writing for a newspaper was mostly working for a corporation. He lamented the state of the business. He detailed the departure of the quality editors and crusading writers to wave after wave of management-driven cost-cutting budget cuts. He wondered aloud if anyone even cared about having a great newspaper to read. He wrote:

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

I didn't feel for a second that there was something wrong with the people in the newsrooms. They tried to cover the news they could cover, but they told me point blank that our issues required more explanation, education and exposition than they could commit in the current media and political landscape. Global issues fall into this category. These are the ones that are so easily dominated by fear and hopelessness and the ones that require an explanation, not a slideshow of devastation. A great newspaper would make the investment.

Simon is going after the profiteers, not the journalists. But Libby ignores Simon's rhetorical broadside against the profit-taking shareholders and penny-pinching publishers and leaps to the defense of young journalists such as herself. She writes that Simon "suggests not only that the era of eager, dedicated journalists is over, but that nobody even cares about the news anymore." Simon may fear -- as I do -- that American's don't appreciate the value of thoughtful news reporting. But he didn't suggest that the era of good journalism was over. He said he believed that the era of great newspapers was over, and that the cause was greed over quality.

I have a lot of respect for David Simon, but I know he's a little bit of a jerk, in that he feels like he is alone in a world where everyone else goes along with terrible things happening and David Simon is the only one who can stop it. I don't know Sara Libby from Adam, but she appears to be a prolific if bland LA-based writer. Whatever. David Simon's argument was compelling to me, because a long time ago, I was one of those people who thought they could be a journalist. I wanted to go into that business for all the reasons Simon discusses. I believed we could do something, make a change, protect those less fortunate, put those in power in their place. My college paper closely chronicled a Godfather-esque putsch by our university president to purge his enemies including a high-profile dismissal of a beloved official while he lay convalescing in a hospital bed after a major auto accident. Soon after graduation, I learned that success in journalism in the 90s had little to do with your interest in doing good (and even less to do with your talent).

Simon decries the fact that it seems today our society is accepting a redefinition of the very idea of "the news" not as a public good, but as a commercial product to be packaged, advertised and profit-maximized. Simon argues that the inspired, motivated-by-the-public-interest journalist of yesteryear can find no place in the media of today. His assertion is borne out by the facts. The era of a talented beat reporter getting to know the inhabitants of his or her beat is over. Corporate newspapers can't afford and won't indulge a reporter becoming an expert whose coverage gives a reader the story behind the story precisely because there is such a depth-of-knowledge and an institution willing to make that investment. There's no time, and no room in the budget.

Simon's own Baltimore Sun -- a paper he has a justifiable axe to grind with -- couldn't find a way to justify a Russia bureau, choosing to close the office late last year.

The question Simon asks stands, but deserves more nuance, none of which is added by Libby's comments. Here's my take: Newspapering has always been a business and nobody operates a newspaper at a loss except Reverend Moon. Somewhere along the way, though, the balance of the public good inside the newspaper against the cost of doing business was upset.

Today, publishers and corporate overseers cite the Internet, mostly in the form of Craigslist, as the primary reason why they must continue to slash costs and, by most accounts not emanating from a publisher's desk, reduce the quality of the paper itself. That assessment is borne out by the assessment of many Americans, who say they can't trust the media and who find coverage of presidential elections focuses on the wrong issues (though they love their hometown papers).

So newspapers make more money for investors by cutting costs, reducing the quality of the paper which could well drive down circulation, threatening profits, leading to more cuts, and on and on. The reversal of Simon's theory, then, would be that more robust investment in newsrooms could lead to a higher quality product, and a product more people are willing to pay for, which could increase profits allowing a newspaper to further invest, increasing circulation again, and on and on. Surely, someone has tested this, right?

Yes. In a piece published last year, my old friend Robert MacMillan (who worked on that same college paper with me) tells of a study by the University of Missouri-Columbia showing that "news quality affects profit more than spending on circulation, advertising and other parts of the business."

“If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes,” Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said in a statement.

“If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money,” she said.

The researchers developed a mathematical model that showed how newspapers could rearrange their spending on distribution and circulation, advertising and newsrooms to achieve a higher profit, Thorson said in an interview.

U.S. publishers have been eliminating jobs at many newspapers as part of larger efforts to trim expenses amid falling profit margins and, in the case of publicly traded chains, declining stock prices.

[snip]

“Until recently, people have been doing it because the results looked good to investors on Wall Street, but it’s… ignoring the long-term aspects,” said marketing professor and study co-author Murali Mantrala.

[snip]

“I am delighted to see them post proof that quality precedes profit,” Philip Meyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book “The Vanishing Newspaper,” said of the study.

“I don’t share the authors’ confidence that the industry will appreciate the importance of their result and act on it,” he added. “Too many owners are more interested in harvesting than investing.”

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eventually, someone would do a social map of the bible. Who knew it would be so pretty. (Via everybody, including Kottke and Fimoculous.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A looming possible recession could very well cut into philanthropic giving -- large and small -- writes Suzanne Perry on Give & Take. Perry notes that many nonprofits figured out creative ways to generate revenue during the economic doldrums of the 1980's. I wonder if the next couple of years will feature so-called "for-benefit" nonprofit business plans prominently in part because they will be more financially viable than donor income? An insider tip from Perry: nonprofits stand to gain talent from a tightening business environment during recessions. Time to beef up the board.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Speaking of Walmart's new social manifesto, we've had two interesting contributions to thinking about how corporations should view their responsibilities. The Economist ran a special report on the topic last week, advising companies not to try to do it all, but rather "do what comes naturally." Sounds like a cop-out, right? But hear them out:

If it is nothing more than good business practice, is there any point in singling out corporate social responsibility as something distinctive? Strangely, perhaps there is, at least for now. If it helps businesses look outwards more than they otherwise would and to think imaginatively about the risks and opportunities they face, it is probably worth doing. This is why some financial analysts think that looking at the quality of a company's CSR policy may be a useful pointer to the quality of its management more generally.

I had an economics professor in college who insisted that if businesses would just factor real social and environmental costs into their operations, we would solve a lot of problems that seem more complicated than they really are. I think the Economist is not far off the mark there.

A group of business school professors, writing in the The Stanford Social Innovation Review, has a different, though not contradictory, take the future of CSR. Put simply:

What does Tommy Hilfiger owe to Hong Kong, Bermuda, New York, and Mexico – not to mention to the countless malls where its goods are sold? What are Royal Caribbean’s responsibilities to Liberia, which few of its executives could locate on a map?

Although firms have changed drastically with globalization, their understandings of corporate social responsibility have not kept pace. This presents corporations with a paradox: At a time when more stakeholders than ever are calling them to account, firms have but a foggy notion of what, exactly, their obligations are.

The authors propose a mix of contributors, each of whom has a different comparative advantage in getting companies to meet global responsibilities -- from European Union product and environmental standards, to U.S.-mandated governance guidelines, to NGO-derived human rights and labor rules.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm no sworn enemy of Walmart. I do find the company vaguely distasteful. I certainly haven't grown accustomed to viewing the company as progressive. Perhaps that will have to change. Yesterday Walmart's CEO, H. Lee Scott Jr., delivered a rousing address -- more campaign speech than corporate announcement is how the New York Times describes it -- that sets out an ambitious "social manifesto" for the company. Walmart will pursue, among other things, products from its suppliers that are 25 percent more energy efficient within three years.

That's an ambitious goal -- but also very exciting. Think about it: this isn't Whole Foods (God bless them) we're talking about. Walmart has the capacity to re-engineer the appliances and products that everyday, working-class Americans -- people who shop for price, not for social responsibility -- fill their homes and offices with. “When Wal-Mart asks, suppliers jump,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There are positive ripple effects throughout the supply chain.”

The thing is, Walmart has been not only making such promises -- it has also been delivering on them for the past few years. One example: In the past three years, Wal-Mart has sold 145 million compact fluorescent light bulbs. Scott estimates that these new bulbs saved enough electricity to forestall the need for three coal-fired power plants in the United States.

Walmart will also digitize medical records for all its employees and bring its systematized approach to work with employers who need a better way to pay and manage prescription drug claims -- which is expected to shake up employer-based health care.

And Walmart is thinking even bigger for the future.

Mr. Scott said, for instance, that Wal-Mart is talking to leaders of the automobile industry about selling electric or hybrid cars — and might even install windmills in its parking lots so customers could recharge their cars with renewable electricity.

I'm just waiting for the next installment in the series: "Who resurrected the electric car?" Even if that doesn't work out, CSR proponents have done something right. Walmart is eager not to be counted among the laggards: Says Scott, “We live in a time when people are losing confidence in the ability of government to solve problems. But Wal-Mart does not wait for someone else to solve problems.”

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I referenced earlier that a super-powerful reminder of the GII's eponymous interdependence is unfolding in the world financial markets. Friday closed a week of domestic sell-offs in the US market as more evidence rolled in that we were about to experience a recession. Suddenly, that information (and, as a few commentators noted, a lack of any contravening information offering a ray of hope) broke across the Pacific while our markets sat out MLK day yesterday, sending Asian indexes into an alarming spiral. The shockwave washed over Europe yesterday as well, and today's Asian markets (many already closed) continued the bloodbath. That's essentially two days of losses for the US market to absorb. So far, (as of 10:17 am today) the Dow has lost 300 points. Hmm, I guess it is all connected.

A big message multiplier we've harped on for years is the concept of seeing the earth from space, and understanding we're all sharing the same big globe. Using this frame helps people sort of reset the boundaries of their thinking and allows a messenger using that frame to take advantage of this reset.

Browsing economic super-blogger (and fellow Northern Virginia ethnic food enthusiast) Tyler Cowen's "Marginal Revolution," I came across a post about the power of the banana. Cowen helpfully digests Dan Koeppel's book on bananas and informs us that the one's we're eating are all clones (which is why you have no mental picture when I write the words "banana seed" ). It turns out that America's most popular fruit is heading for a grim end. Cowen writes that "the world's supply of Cavendish bananas -- the ones we eat -- is endangered by disease (more here) and many experts believe the entire strain will vanish." This isn't merely fruit-fear-mongering. The previously most popular banana strain was wiped out by disease in the 1950s. And they tasted better.

So here's the interdependent bit. India produces 23% of the world's bananas, and eats most of them, including in such bizarre foods as ketchup. Brazil and China are next, and they mostly consume their banana productions. But America feeds its seemingly bottomless demand for banana by importing massive numbers of bananas from Ecuador, and it's there and in the other major banana exporters, that the connection represented by this fruit comes into sharp relief. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the banana is a sort of super-fruit, feeding Americans, and conveying a surprising amount of resources to local and regional farmers and their families:

The banana industry is a very important source of income, employment and export earnings for major banana exporting countries, mainly developing countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Asia and Africa. According to FAO "while world banana exports are valued a total of over US$4,7 billion per year, making them clearly a vital source of earnings to many countries, it is at the local and regional level where a strong bond is established between banana-generated income and household food security. Export volume or price changes bring about income changes for those directly employed in banana production, both as smallholder farmers and as wage earners on banana plantations. In addition, secondary and tertiary industries and their employees also feel the impacts of those changes".

We're all connected. Enjoy your banana.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps the rest of the world is just catching on to what politicians in Louisiana have known for years, but this Newsweek item makes some hay about the recent trend in Indonesia, South Korea and South Africa wherein the very corrupt get elected (often over the slightly less corrupt, but whatevs).

What this reinforces (and Newsweek's Jonathan Tepperman obliquely references this) is that people have a tendency to elect the candidate or party they see as best able to do for them. In the upside-down world of many nations where corruption has thoroughly twisted politics, graft and mis-management have become the norm.

This new normal has been demonstrated in the Transparency International report mentioned, and the exceedingly dismal outlook many in developing nations hold about the prospects for defeating corruption. The statistics are staggering: 1 in 10 of ALL PEOPLE have paid bribes in 2007. 46% of Africans reported paying a bribe in the last year. (Here's a link to the complete Transparency International Global Corruption Index for 2007.)

All this dour news about corruption isn't a great way to start the day (nor is the lesson in interdependence global markets are about to teach my IRA), so let's close this post with the anti-corruption Pink Gang of Uttar Pradesh. Here's their outspoken leader explaining why the women in pink saris have taken up their quest to expose corrupt officials and boorish men:

"Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and the police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law in our hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers," says Sampat Pal Devi, between teaching a "gang" member on how to use a lathi (traditional Indian stick) in self defence.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tarek posted Friday about a Google Maps mash-up that tracks incidents of real-life piracy, mostly in predictable locales (Somalia, Indonesia, Nigeria). Hours of nervous Web browsing during the hours before (and even during) yesterday's glorious victory by my beloved New York Football Giants led me to a similar application that allows observers to report and track violent incidents in Kenya's post-election upheaval. The interactive map at Ushahidi.com brings the geographical patterns of the violence immediately to light. And the site - whose name means "testimony" or "evidence" in Swahili - offers citizens simple alternatives for reporting incidents via text message or e-mail. The reports "must be verified" before posting, though the site does not explain how. The categories for the incidents chronicled on the site are sobering, including: rapes, deaths, property loss. For those of us who traveled to Kenya in calmer times - which for me included being among the relatively few male delegates to the UN's 1985 World Conference on Women in Nairobi - it is deeply shocking.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The previously unheralded International Maritime Agency, whose mandate is to fight piracy (seriously!), has a nifty Google Maps mashup showing pirate attacks and attempted attacks in 2007. The bad news, after three years of winning the war on piracy, 2007 saw the buccaneers surging back with 10% increase in piratical incidents. Read more at The Lede.
Photo courtesy Flickr user ecstaticist is sleeping.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a late adopter, bordering on the proto-Luddite, as my paucity of contributions to this blog attests. (Also: my colleagues blog real good on their ownsomes). But as the daily presidential polls roll into my inbox, I am moved to comment on the downside to data.

Lots of commentators, including Tarek right here, have commented on the shortcomings of the New Hampshire Democratic polls and reluctance of The Best Political Team on Television (et al) to just say "we're sorry - we screwed up."

But now comes Simeon Djankov, creator of the World Bank's "Doing Business" scorecard, with a refreshing admission about how good indicators go bad. Djankov spoke earlier this week at the American Enterprise Institute on the value of indicator-based competition as a basis for foreign aid. (Y'know, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Millennium Development Goals, etc.) His team's efforts to highlight how hard or easy it is to start up a new business in developing countries have led to some useful competition and to dramatic decreases in the red tape hampering local businesses.

Simeon pointed out that indicators are tough to get right, especially when we're still figuring out what to measure and why. And even well-established indicators can go kaflooey - if you plug in the wrong data. You don't have to re-visit the New Hampshire polls for proof - thank goodness. Just stroll downtown to the World Bank and inquire about the size of the Chinese economy. Turns out, data used to calculate inflation was off. A lot. So much, in fact, that when the Bank recalculated the size of China's economy using the new (and presumably more accurate inflation measures) the Chinese economy shrank 40%. Ooops. That knocks China back a trillion or so.

Others have criticized the accuracy of the Chinese government's economic statistics, and by extension those anaylsts who depend on official stats. But a gaffe this big is awkward. Give some credit to the Bank for reporting it, and to Simeon for puckishly bringing it up.

With my advocacy evaluation hat on, I cite it as a useful reminder beyond our usual mantra about the need for advocacy indicators that are meaningful and measurable. Turns out, it's better if they are measured accurately.

Posted by David Devlin-Foltz at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Facing staggering inflation owing to Robert Mugabe's breathtaking mismanagement and justified international isolation, the central bank of Zimbabwe has issued $10 million bills. Ethan Zuckerman tells me they are worth about 4USD, and you can buy a kilo of sugar and a newspaper. Also, they won't be worth four bucks for long, because inflation in Zimbabwe is believed to be 50,000% annually.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Heather Hamilton at Connect US wrote in their latest newsletter about using Twitter for advocacy during the Iowa Caucuses. I just had to weigh in, arguing that Twitter has much more obvious utility as a weapon to inform rather than activate. I talk myself out of that conclusion eventually: "Of course, these informing and activating aren't mutually exclusive. Giving people valuable information is a big part of the relationship-building that will allow an organization to mobilize folks for advocacy efforts when the time comes."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm still digesting it, and I'll post any thoughtful analysis I come across here, but Google.org just released its "plans for philanthropy." The announcement includes "more than $25 million in new grants and investments to initial partners" under five initiatives: 1) Predict and Prevent, 2) Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services, 3) Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, 4) Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, 5) Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT).

Learn more here.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This video from al-Jazeera, about the life of a sex slave in Italy, is a tragic but typical story revealing the horrors of trafficking and slavery. In some of the work we're doing evaluating a coalition of anti-slavery and anti-trafficking organizations, I've been thinking about the ways ordinary, or potentially involved citizens understand the problem of slavery today. Interestingly, this group had a bunch of pre-conceptions about the public's understanding of the issue.

There were some typical curse-of-knowledge type issues, such as believing everyone knew about the problem, knew the extent of the problem, etc. But there were also some surprising incidents of under-estimating people's reaction to slavery. The coalition decided to do some public opinion research to get a handle on how folks comprehend the slavery problem, and the response was impressive. This is by no means a formal review of the research. But people didn't conflate the idea of modern slavery with America's past slavery. People were more open to the fact that slavery existed in their country (some advocates felt the heavy lifting would be around convincing folks that the problem was real). And many respondents agreed that a solution, usually involving some kind of government action, was possible.

This isn't all heartening. As we've learned from working with this coalition, there are lots of fractures in the larger universe of trafficking and slavery. Organizations separately work with domestic victims of slavery, international victims trafficked into the US and victims in slavery overseas. Organizations aim to combat slavery through changes in US law, changes in US trade policy, public pressure, international labor standards, pressure applied through United Nations programs, and through international partnerships. The demonstrated public understanding of the issue doesn't come within a country mile of comprehending all these folds and ripples in the movement opposing slavery and trafficking. These complexities present obstacles even to the members of the coalition finding common cause to get their work done. At times, it feels the only thing everyone agrees on is that we all want slavery to end. It's a start, I guess.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was listening to NPR coverage of President Bush's recent trip to various (mostly undemocratic or quasi-democratic) Middle Eastern nations when I heard the reporter discuss how the president was studiously avoiding talk about the election unfolding here, even as his hosts were asking him what he thought would happen. The president's status as a lame duck has been a major talking point in this late-to-the-party push for peace and unity around the Arab/Israeli conflict.

It got me to thinking about how the campaign is being viewed by folks around the world. This idea sat in my head for three days and then I came across a Bloggingheads TV item in the New York Times on exactly this topic. The discussants are Daniel Drezner from his eponymous blog and Henry Farrell from the Crooked Timber group blog. (A longer version of the dialogue is available here.)

I have generally been resistant to videoblogs. Some of this can be attributed somewhat to a recently rescinded soft-headed policy where I work discouraging streaming video. But mostly, I rarely find the video part of video blogs that interesting. I like to read. I like to skim.

But I also love radio, and that's how I came to enjoy videoblogs. I start the stream, and toggle over to some other window to continue working. The image of two white men talking about something is hardly compelling (though I hope to catch a glimpse of whatever cat/small child is making weird noises in the background of Farrell and Drezner's chat). Listening to them is far more interesting. As an experiment, I went back and watched this chat after doing my standard listen-only run-through.

There were some added benefits. Drezner makes some dismissive facial expressions when he clearly feels Farrell is bashing the GOP. Farrell seems to half be wondering why he's bothering with this conversation.

The points they make are interesting, to come back to the subject. The world is watching this campaign, and closely. For many nations in Europe, a sincere run at US leadership by a woman is viewed as long overdue. Some of the early conversations in the campaign, about the expansion of Guantanamo and some equivocation on torture, made some of America's friends abroad cringe at the thought of more of the same from a new generation of US president. Drezner makes the valid point that as far as trade protection, the Democratic candidates seem to be more effusively protectionist, though I can't say I've heard any candidate talking about doing the real heavy lifting to make US trade policy fair (since that necessarily means ending lucrative subsidies to farmers and all kinds of other folks in middle America).

As the campaign focus sharpens and as the names at the top of the tickets become clear, we would do well to check back with global viewpoints about how these candidates are representing America abroad.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The GOP presidential candidates just finished trying to outdo each other with promises to right the wrongs of globalization in the lead-up to the Michigan primary. Next week the Democrats will be at it. I often think, during such moments, about the fact that we advocates for the world's poor should be clapping and shouting in jubilation: here is firm evidence that Asia is fending for itself, that it's no longer a matter of the Have's in America helping out the Have Not's in China, India, Vietnam, etc. Theoretically, we're all just people, trying to do the best job we can (since we all have jobs now). Sometimes an American will do it best, other times not. That's okay, as long as we're all moving more or less toward a better life.

But alas, it's more complicated than that. Michael Gerson (no stranger to the "scandal of global poverty and disease") notes in his Washington Post column today that both liberals and conservatives will need to face up to "The Prosperity Dilemma" in different respects. In practice, not only do those who escape poverty around the world stand to threaten American livelihoods, but those new members of the up-and-coming aspire to a better life the same way you and I do: cars, air conditioners and more meat. Writes Gerson,

In 1975, about 2.5 billion people were at "medium human development" -- supplied with the basic necessities of life. Today, by the accounting of the United Nations, that figure exceeds 4 billion.

China's booming businesses need an enormous amount of energy; the country is building about one coal-fired plant a week. "The rising billions want clean water for showers, dishwashers and washing machines, creating a groundwater crisis in much of the world," writes Gerson. And people of better means want to eat better; that means they want to eat meat. The much-discussed rise of commodity prices over the past year mostly has to do with the fact that more people are consuming things Americans consider commodities -- the building blocks of a comfortable life.

This, in many ways, is the world as we wished it. One of Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was "freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world." And we have come closer to that goal than many would have predicted. Through most of history, poverty, squalor and early death were nearly universal outside the courts of kings -- expected and justified as part of the natural order. Now more than 2 billion people in China and India alone are becoming upwardly mobile consumers.

It is often recounted, in fits of prosperous self-hatred, that America has only 5 percent of the world population while consuming 30 percent of global resources. But this comparison is misunderstood. The rest of the world has been underconsuming, because too many have lived in poverty. That is now changing as Asia buys oil and cars and air conditioners -- and we should want it to change.

At first Gerson seems to be arguing that Americans have set an acceptable standard of consumption for people around the world. But this is really the core of his dilemma: the poor do underconsume; Americans do overconsume. Americans aren't just going to cut back to give others a chance to ramp up (see Michigan). Others aren't going to stay put so that Americans can continue to live in the manner to which we've become accustomed. Something's got to give.

In fact, several things have to give, according to Gerson:

Liberals need to understand that the eventual answer will come from technology -- ethanol from nonfood sources, dramatically increased automobile efficiency and coal-fired plants that can collect and store the carbon they produce.

Conservatives need to understand that there is a relationship between reasonable regulations and the development of technology. Right now, carbon emitters face no financial cost. A cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax would give businesses a financial incentive to invent new methods of trapping carbon -- technologies that could then be transferred to China and India.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was reading something about Ron Paul's vaguely racist newsletter when I thought jumped into my head. What the hell happened to the crunchy conservative?

You remember the old crunchy con, don't you? He wrote a book a few years back all about how this mysterious hybrid of hippie and Republican was going to take over the world with its love of America and its sensible, conservative policies about nature and home-schooling, or something. I didn't read the book.

But I heard the Crunchy Conservative himself, Rod Dreher, explain the "movement" on NPR, the naturally counter-culture (for conservatives) spot on the dial for this to take place. The interview made me wonder, "Seriously, this guy is espousing all these beliefs and supports this administration?"

Apparently not.

But whatever. I got to wondering (before I even found out that he was losing faith in the Bush White House in the face of its myriad stumblings in Mesopotamia) who the Crunchy Conservative supports in the current presidential contest. I assumed he was more closely following the Republican candidates, and I was right about that. He's got an eponymous blog at Beliefnet, and he finds himself standing astri