From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm 
Peter Scoones/Getty Images A school of bigeye trevally in Malaysia. November 13, 2007 From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants. Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock. Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible. "They build the bridges with their living bodies," said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. "They build them up if they're required, and they dissolve if they're not being used." The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. "We haven't evolved in the societies we currently live in," Dr. Couzin said. By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism. Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals. "No matter how much you look at an individual army ant," Dr. Couzin said, "you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that." To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action. Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. "In the next 10 years there's going to be a lot of progress." He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. "He's been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together," Dr. Grunbaum said. "He has a larger vision. If it works, that'll be a big advance." In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects. What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision. Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible. It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes. To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. "Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see," Dr. Couzin said. Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work. The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. "You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they're both liquids," he said. "They have fundamental characteristics in common. That's what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in." Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules. Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects. "Locusts are known to be around all the time," Dr. Couzin said. "Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?" Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. "We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day," he said. The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands. "We showed that you don't need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave," Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science. Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however. In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common. But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals. Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals. "Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition," Dr. Couzin said. "So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don't move, you're likely to be eaten." This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. "All these crickets are on a forced march," Dr. Couzin said. "They're trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they're trying to avoid being eaten from behind." Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together. "There's a swarm intelligence," Dr. Couzin said. "You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved." What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm's movement that steers it in a particular direction. "It doesn't necessarily mean you have the right information, though," Dr. Couzin pointed out. Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin's model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow. "As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority," Dr. Couzin said. "They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made." Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans. To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin's models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do. In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin's model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target. The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart. As Dr. Couzin's model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior. Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots. "These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature," he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. "If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally." The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish. "One of the really fun things that we're doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions," Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. "How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you're seeing?" Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.
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 | Racial and ethnic differences—affects our lives in society. Bowling with OthersJames Q. Wilson From issue: October 2007 In his celebrated book, Bowling Alone (2000), the political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued that America, and perhaps the Western world as a whole, has become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors. We once bowled in leagues; now we bowl alone. We once flocked to local chapters of the PTA, the NAACP, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars; now we stay home and watch television. As a result, we have lost our "social capital"—by which Putnam meant both the associations themselves and the trustworthiness and reciprocity they encourage. For if tools (physical capital) and training (human capital) make the modern world possible, social capital is what helps people find jobs and enables neighborhoods and other small groupings of society to solve problems, control crime, and foster a sense of community. In Bowling Alone, Putnam devised a scale for assessing the condition of organizational life in different American states. He looked to such measures as the density of civic groups, the frequency with which people participate in them, and the degree to which (according to opinion surveys) people trust one another. Controlling for race, income, education, and the like, he demonstrated that the higher a state's level of social capital, the more educated and affluent are its children, the lower the murder rate, the greater the degree of public health, and the smaller the likelihood of tax evasion. Nor is that all. High levels of social capital, Putnam showed, are associated with such civic virtues as greater tolerance toward women and minorities and stronger support for civil liberties. But all of these good things have been seriously jeopardized by the phenomenon he identified as "bowling alone." After finishing his book, Putnam was approached by various community foundations to measure the levels of social capital within their own cities. To that end he conducted a very large survey: roughly 30,000 Americans, living in 41 different communities ranging downward in size from Los Angeles to Yakima, Washington and even including rural areas of South Dakota. He published the results this year in a long essay in the academic journal Scandinavian Political Studies on the occasion of his having won Sweden's prestigious Johan Skytte prize. _____________ Putnam's new essay takes an in-depth look not at social capital per se but at how "diversity"—meaning, for this purpose, racial and ethnic differences—affects our lives in society. Such diversity is increasing in this country and many others, if for no other reason than immigration, and so Putnam has tried to find out how it changes the way people feel about their neighbors, the degree of their confidence in local government, their willingness to become engaged in community-wide projects, and their general happiness. The ethnic and racial diversity that Putnam examines is widely assumed to be very good for us. The more time we spend with people different from us, it is said, the more we will like and trust them. Indeed, diversity is supposed to be so good for us that it has become akin to a national mandate in employment and, especially, in admissions to colleges and universities. When the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case in 1978, the leading opinion, signed by Justice Lewis Powell, held that although a university was not allowed to use a strict numerical standard to guarantee the admission of a fixed number of minority students, it could certainly "take race into account," on the theory that a racially diverse student body was desirable both for the school and for society at large. As a result of this and similar court rulings, not only colleges but many other institutions began invoking the term "diversity" as a justification for programs that gave preferences to certain favored minorities (especially blacks and Hispanics). Opponents of these programs on constitutional and civil-liberties grounds were put in the difficult position of appearing to oppose a demonstrated social good. Did not everyone know that our differences make us stronger? But do they? That is where Putnam's new essay comes in. In the long run, Putnam argues, ethnic and racial diversity in neighborhoods is indeed "an important social asset," because it encourages people to form connections that can reduce unproductive forms of ethnocentrism and increase economic growth. In his words, "successful immigrant societies create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities." Whatever his beliefs about the positive effects of diversity in the long run, however—not only does he consider it a potentially "important social asset," but he has written that it also confers "many advantages that have little or nothing to do with social capital"—Putnam is a scrupulous and serious scholar (as well as a friend and former colleague at Harvard). In the short run, he is frank to acknowledge, his data show not positive effects but rather the opposite. "The more ethnically diverse the people we live around," he writes, "the less we trust them." Diversity, Putnam concludes on the basis of his findings, makes us "hunker down." Not only do we trust our neighbors less, we have less confidence in local government, a lowered sense of our own political efficacy, fewer close friends, and a smaller likelihood of contributing to charities, cooperating with others, working on a community project, registering to vote—or being happy. Of course many of these traits can reflect just the characteristics of the people Putnam happened to interview, rather than some underlying condition. Aware of the possibility, Putnam spent a great deal of time "kicking the tires" of his study by controlling statistically for age, ethnicity, education, income or lack of same, poverty, homeownership, citizenship, and many other possible influences. But the results did not change. No matter how many individual factors were analyzed, every measure of social well-being suffered in ethnically diverse neighborhoods—and improved in ethnically homogeneous ones. _____________ "Shocking" is the word that one political scientist, Scott Page of the University of Michigan, invoked to describe the extent of the negative social effects revealed by Putnam's data. Whether Putnam was shocked by the results I cannot say. But they should not have been surprising; others have reported the same thing. The scholars Anil Rupasingha, Stephan J. Goetz, and David Freshwater, for example, found that social capital across American counties, as measured by the number of voluntary associations for every 10,000 people, goes up with the degree of ethnic homogeneity. Conversely, as others have discovered, when ethnic groups are mixed there is weaker social trust, less car pooling, and less group cohesion. And this has held true for some time: people in Putnam's survey who were born in the 1920's display the same attitudes as those born in the 1970's. Still, Putnam believes that in the long run ethnic heterogeneity will indeed "create new forms of social solidarity." He offers three reasons. First, the American military, once highly segregated, is today anything but that—and yet, in the Army and the Marines, social solidarity has increased right alongside greater ethnic diversity. Second, churches that were once highly segregated, especially large evangelical ones, have likewise become entirely and peaceably integrated. Third, people who once married only their ethnic kin today marry across ethnic and religious (and, to a lesser degree, racial) lines. I can offer a fourth example: organized sports. Once, baseball and football teams were made up of only white or only black players; today they, too, are fully integrated. When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, several teammates objected to playing with him, and many fans heckled him whenever he took the field. Within a few years, however, he and the Dodgers had won a raft of baseball titles, and he was one of the most popular figures in the country. Today such racial and ethnic heckling has virtually disappeared. Unfortunately, however, the pertinence of the military, religious, or athletic model to life in neighborhoods is very slight. In those three institutions, authority and discipline can break down native hostilities or force them underground. Military leaders proclaim that bigotry will not be tolerated, and they mean it; preachers invoke the word of God to drive home the lesson that prejudice is a sin; sports teams (as with the old Brooklyn Dodgers) point out that anyone who does not want to play with a black or a Jew is free to seek employment elsewhere. But what authority or discipline can anyone bring to neighborhoods? They are places where people choose to live, out of either opportunity or necessity. Walk the heterogeneous streets of Chicago or Los Angeles and you will learn about organized gangs and other social risks. Nor are these confined to poor areas: Venice, a small neighborhood in Los Angeles where several movie stars live and many homes sell for well over $1 million, is also a place where, in the Oakwood area, the Shoreline Crips and the V-13 gangs operate. In many a neighborhood, ethnic differences are often seen as threats. If blacks or Hispanics, for whatever reason, are more likely to join gangs or commit crimes, then whites living in a neighborhood with many blacks or Hispanics will tend to feel uneasy. (There are, of course, exceptions: some, especially among the well-educated, prefer diversity even with all its risks.) Even where everyone is equally poor or equally threatened by crime, people exhibit less trust if their neighborhood is ethnically diverse than if it is homogeneous. Of Putnam's three or four reasons for thinking that ethnic heterogeneity will contribute to social capital in the long run, only one is compelling: people are indeed voluntarily marrying across ethnic lines. But the paradoxical effect of this trend is not to preserve but to blunt ethnic identity, to the point where it may well reduce the perception of how diverse a neighborhood actually is. In any case, the fact remains that diversity and improved solidarity have gone hand in hand only in those institutions characterized by enforced authority and discipline. The legal scholar Peter H. Schuck has written an important book on this issue. In Diversity in America (2003), he examines three major efforts by judges and government officials to require racial and income diversity in neighborhoods. One of them banned income-discrimination in the sale and rental of housing in New Jersey towns. Another enabled blacks who were eligible for public housing to move into private rental units in the Chicago suburbs. In the third, a federal judge attempted to diversify residential patterns in the city of Yonkers, New York by ordering the construction of public housing in middle-class neighborhoods selected by him. Although the Chicago project may have helped minorities to enter communities where they had never lived, the New Jersey and Yonkers initiatives had little effect. As Schuck writes, "Neighborhoods are complex, fragile, organic societies whose dynamics outsiders cannot readily understand, much less control." A court can and should strike down racist public policies, but when it goes beyond this and tries to mandate "diversity," it will sooner or later discover that it "cannot conscript the housing market to do its bidding." _____________ Taking a different approach, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate in economics, has shown in a stimulating essay that neighborhood homogeneity and even segregation may result from small, defensible human choices that cannot themselves be called racist. In fact, such choices can lead to segregation even when the people making them expressly intend the opposite. Suppose, Schelling writes, that blacks and whites alike wish to live in a neighborhood that is (for example) half-white and half-black. If one white family should come to think that other white families prefer a community that is three-fourths white, and may move out for that reason, the first white family is itself likely to move out in search of its own half-white, half-black preference. There is no way to prevent this. Schelling's analysis casts a shadow of doubt on Putnam's own policy suggestions for reducing the disadvantages and stimulating the benefits of ethnic heterogeneity. Those suggestions are: investing more heavily in playgrounds, schools, and athletic fields that different groups can enjoy together; extending national aid to local communities; encouraging churches to reach out to new immigrants; and expanding public support for the teaching of English. The first recommendation is based on the implicit assumption that Schelling is wrong and on the even more dubious assumption that playgrounds, schools, and athletic fields—things Putnam did not measure in his survey—will increase the benefits of diversity even when age, income, and education do not. The second is empty: Putnam does not say what kind of aid will produce the desired effects. If he is thinking of more housing, Schuck has already shown that providing this usually does not increase diversity. If he is thinking of education, in the 1970's federal judges imposed forced busing in an effort to integrate schools; it was an intensely unpopular strategy, both among those whose children were being bused and among those whose neighborhoods were being bused into. The third proposal, encouraging outreach by churches, might well make a difference, but how do we go about it? Require people to attend an evangelical church? Would Robert Putnam attend? I suspect not. And as for the final recommendation, teaching English at public expense to everyone, it is a very good idea—provided one could break the longstanding attachment of the education establishment to bilingual instruction. _____________ Whether we should actually seek to transform the situation described by Putnam's data is another question. I do not doubt that both diversity and social capital are important, or that many aspects of the latter have declined, though perhaps not so much as Putnam suspects. But as his findings indicate, there is no reason to suppose that the route to the latter runs through the former. In fact, strong families living in neighborhoods made up of families with shared characteristics seem much more likely to bring their members into the associational life Putnam favors. Much as we might value both heterogeneity and social capital, assuming that the one will or should encourage the other may be a form of wishful thinking. That is because morality and rights arise from different sources. As I tried to show in The Moral Sense (1993), morality arises from sympathy among like-minded persons: first the family, then friends and colleagues. Rights, on the other hand, grow from convictions about how we ought to manage relations with people not like us, convictions that are nourished by education, religion, and experience. People who celebrate diversity (and its parallel, multiculturalism) are endorsing only one part of what it means to be a complete human being, neglecting morality (and its parallel, group and national pride). Just as we cannot be whole persons if we deny the fundamental rights of others, so we cannot be whole persons if we live in ways that discourage decency, cooperation, and charity. In every society, people must arrange for tradeoffs between desirable but mutually inconsistent goals. James Madison, in his famous Federalist Number Ten, pointed to just this sort of tradeoff when he made the case for a large national government that would ensure the preservation of those individual rights and liberties that are at risk in small communities. When it comes to the competing values of diversity and the formation of social capital, as when it comes to other arrangements in a democracy, balance is all. |
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| Rodriguez Talks to Yankees Without Agent 
Barton Silverman/The New York Times Scott Boras, left, with his client Alex Rodriguez when the player joined the New York Yankees in 2004. November 15, 2007 Rodriguez Talks to Yankees Without Agent Alex Rodriguez said all season that he wanted to stay with the Yankees, and now he is backing up those statements. Rodriguez and his wife, Cynthia, met with Hank and Hal Steinbrenner yesterday in Tampa, Fla., and Hank Steinbrenner said Rodriguez wanted to return. "He has expressed a desire to stay a Yankee," Steinbrenner said in a telephone interview. "He's even willing to make certain sacrifices to do so." Rodriguez confirmed on his Web site that he had spoken with the Steinbrenners, saying that he believed he "had to respond to certain Yankees concerns." "Prior to entering into serious negotiations with other clubs, I wanted the opportunity to share my thoughts directly with Yankees ownership," the Web site statement said. "We know there are other opportunities for us, but Cynthia and I have a foundation with the club that has brought us comfort, stability and happiness." Rodriguez, who held the meeting without his agent, Scott Boras, added that he expected the dialogue with the Yankees to continue the next few days. The Yankees had hoped to have those discussions before Rodriguez opted out of his contract during Game 4 of the World Series on Oct. 28. The absence of Boras from yesterday's meeting could eventually lead to a new contract. "I'm not sure it's going to happen immediately, but it's going to happen," said a friend of Rodriguez's, speaking on condition of anonymity because Rodriguez had not authorized him to speak publicly. "It's a relief for Alex to know that the Yankees still want him, and now that he knows that, he's going to work something out. Whatever they have to do to work it out, they're going to do it. He was willing to eat crow, and he did." After Rodriguez opted out, the Yankees insisted they would not pursue him as a free agent. But within a week of his decision, Rodriguez began telling friends that he was dismayed at the public fallout and was considering giving the Yankees a discount to return. That feeling has grown stronger, and it is believed that Rodriguez is now willing to make up for the subsidy the Yankees lost from the Texas Rangers when he opted out. "There's a strong possibility that he'll come back, with the way the negotiations are now," said another friend of Rodriguez's, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There are just a few minor things to figure out." The Yankees are wary that Rodriguez's new stance may be a trap to lure them into negotiations and thus drive up Rodriguez's price in the marketplace. But they seem to believe he is sincere in his desire to return. Rodriguez is free to negotiate with other teams, but no team — except perhaps the Los Angeles Angels — has seemed willing to give Rodriguez a raise over the $32 million he could have made in 2009 and 2010 under his original Rangers deal. The lukewarm market was one of the reasons Rodriguez came back to the Yankees, and another was his business empire. Rodriguez has a real-estate business, a Mercedes-Benz dealership and endorsement contracts, and he believes he can maximize those assets by staying a Yankee. Boras, who did not return a telephone call, has been adamant that Rodriguez deserves a raise over the $32 million, though the Yankees are unwilling to go that high. Last month — in the offer Boras and Rodriguez would not let the Yankees make — the team was prepared to add five years and about $150 million to the existing three years and $91 million on his deal. The Yankees probably would have stretched the extension to seven years, through 2017. The Rangers would have paid $30 million of the $91 million covering 2008 through 2010. Because the Yankees want that money back from Rodriguez, they would probably re-sign him now for 10 years and about $270 million. That deal would eclipse Rodriguez's 10-year, $252 million contract given by the Rangers' owner, Tom Hicks, in 2000. Boras has argued that Rodriguez deserves far more now, given the increased revenues in the major leagues. But most people in baseball consider the Hicks contract to be drastically overpriced; in the seven years since, no player has topped an average salary of even $20 million on a multiyear deal. If he agreed to a deal with the Yankees for 10 years and about $270 million, Rodriguez (and Boras) could save face by breaking a salary record. Also, by living up to his words and returning to the Yankees, the image-conscious Rodriguez may be able to erase some of the stain on his legacy. Steinbrenner had tried to arrange a meeting with Rodriguez last month, but Rodriguez would not return his calls. Boras said later that he never allowed clients to talk about money with teams, and he was convinced that the Yankees would have presented an offer if they had met with Rodriguez before he opted out. The Yankees believed that Boras wanted a $350 million commitment before any meeting, a notion Boras has countered by saying he had not yet discussed money with the Yankees. In any case, while the Yankees understand that Rodriguez has a right to representation, the sign that he was willing to talk without Boras is encouraging to them. But it does not mean that Rodriguez will necessarily fire Boras. In 2001, another Boras client, Andruw Jones, reached an impasse in negotiations with the Atlanta Braves. Jones called General Manager John Schuerholz and arranged a meeting. With his father advising him, Jones worked out a six-year, $75 million deal, yet retained Boras as his agent. It is unknown who brokered the resumption of Rodriguez's negotiations with the Yankees. But the sudden twist seems likely to end the same way as Jones's negotiation did: with Rodriguez returning to his team. INSIDE PITCH Yankees left fielder Hideki Matsui had arthroscopic surgery on his right knee in New York yesterday and is expected to be ready for spring training.
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| The Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle is showing up in unexpected places, with unintended consequences. The New Girl Order
Kay S. Hymowitz
Autumn 2007 | After my Lot Airlines flight from New York touched down at Warsaw's Frédéric Chopin Airport a few months back, I watched a middle-aged passenger rush to embrace a waiting younger woman—clearly her daughter. Like many people on the plane, the older woman wore drab clothing and had the short, square physique of someone familiar with too many potatoes and too much manual labor. Her Poland-based daughter, by contrast, was tall and smartly outfitted in pointy-toed pumps, slim-cut jeans, a cropped jacket revealing a toned midriff (Yoga? Pilates? Or just a low-carb diet?), and a large, brass-studded leather bag, into which she dropped a silver cell phone. Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you'll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat. Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order. It's a man's world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much. Three demographic facts are at the core of the New Girl Order. First, women—especially, but not only, in the developed world—are getting married and having kids considerably later than ever before. According to the UN's World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21.2 in the 1970s to 23.2 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been considerably steeper—from 22.0 to 26.1. Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don't get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22 percent. That change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern Europe the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today's Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers' generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago. Nothing-new-under-the-sun skeptics point out, correctly, that marrying at 27 or 28 was once commonplace for women, at least in the United States and parts of northern Europe. The cultural anomaly was the 1950s and 60s, when the average age of marriage for women dipped to 20—probably because of post-Depression and postwar cocooning. But today's single 27-year-old has gone global—and even in the West, she differs from her late-marrying great-grandma in fundamental ways that bring us to the second piece of the demographic story. Today's aspiring middle-class women are gearing up to be part of the paid labor market for most of their adult lives; unlike their ancestral singles, they're looking for careers, not jobs. And that means they need lots of schooling. In the newly global economy, good jobs go to those with degrees, and all over the world, young people, particularly women, are enrolling in colleges and universities at unprecedented rates. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school more than doubled in the U.S., and enrollment in higher education doubled throughout Europe. And the fairer sex makes up an increasing part of the total. The majority of college students are female in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, to name only a few of many places, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. In a number of European countries, including Denmark, Finland, and France, over half of all women between 20 and 24 are in school. The number of countries where women constitute the majority of graduate students is also growing rapidly. That educated women are staying single is unsurprising; degreed women have always been more likely to marry late, if they marry at all. But what has demographers taking notice is the sheer transnational numbers of women postponing marriage while they get diplomas and start careers. In the U.K., close to a third of 30-year-old college-educated women are unmarried; some demographers predict that 30 percent of women with university degrees there will remain forever childless. In Spain—not so long ago a culturally Catholic country where a girl's family would jealously chaperone her until handing her over to a husband at 21 or so—women now constitute 54 percent of college students, up from 26 percent in 1970, and the average age of first birth has risen to nearly 30, which appears to be a world record. Adding to the contemporary SYF's novelty is the third demographic shift: urbanization. American and northern European women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might have married at 26, but after a long day in the dairy barn or cotton mill, they didn't hang out at Studio 54 while looking for Mr. Right (or, as the joke has it, Mr. Right for Now). In the past, women who delayed marriage generally lived with their parents; they also remained part of the family economy, laboring in their parents' shops or farms, or at the very least, contributing to the family kitty. A lot of today's bachelorettes, on the other hand, move from their native village or town to Boston or Berlin or Seoul because that's where the jobs, boys, and bars are—and they spend their earnings on themselves. By the mid-1990s, in countries as diverse as Canada, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Russia, women were out-urbanizing men, who still tended to hang around the home village. When they can afford to, these women live alone or with roommates. The Netherlands, for instance, is flush with public housing, some of it reserved for young students and workers, including lots of women. In the United States, the proportion of unmarried twentysomethings living with their parents has declined steadily over the last 100 years, despite sky-high rents and apartment prices. Even in countries where SYFs can't afford to move out of their parents' homes, the anonymity and diversity of city life tend to heighten their autonomy. Belgians, notes University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, have coined a term—"hotel families"—to describe the arrangement. Combine these trends—delayed marriage, expanded higher education and labor-force participation, urbanization—add a global media and some disposable income, and voilà: an international lifestyle is born. One of its defining characteristics is long hours of office work, often in quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications, and design—areas in which the number of careers has exploded in the global economy over the past few decades. The lifestyle also means whole new realms of leisure and consumption, often enjoyed with a group of close girlfriends: trendy cafés and bars serving sweetish coffee concoctions and cocktails; fancy boutiques, malls, and emporiums hawking cosmetics, handbags, shoes, and $100-plus buttock-hugging jeans; gyms for toning and male-watching; ski resorts and beach hotels; and, everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it's an ever more vexing subject, a husband. The SYF lifestyle first appeared in primitive form in the U.S. during the seventies, after young women started moving into higher education, looking for meaningful work, and delaying marriage. Think of ur-SYF Mary Richards, the pre-Jordache career girl played by Mary Tyler Moore, whose dates dropped her off—that same evening, of course—at her apartment door. By the mid-nineties, such propriety was completely passé. Mary had become the vocationally and sexually assertive Carrie Bradshaw, and cities like New York had magically transformed into the young person's pleasure palace evoked by the hugely popular TV show Sex and the City. At around the same time, women in Asia and in post-Communist Europe began to join the SYF demographic, too. Not surprisingly, they also loved watching themselves, or at least Hollywood versions of themselves, on television. Friends, Ally McBeal, and Sex and the City became global favorites. In repressive places like Singapore and China, which banned SATC, women passed around pirated DVDs. By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: no matter how exotic the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the American prototype. They shop for shoes in Kyoto, purses in Shanghai, jeans in Prague, and lip gloss in Singapore; they sip lattes in Dublin, drink cocktails in Chicago, and read lifestyle magazines in Kraków; they go to wine tastings in Boston, speed-dating events in Amsterdam, yoga classes in Paris, and ski resorts outside Tokyo. "At the fashionable Da Capo Café on bustling Kolonaki Square in downtown Athens, Greek professionals in their 30s and early 40s luxuriate over their iced cappuccinos," a Newsweek International article began last year. "Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course, relationships: men's reluctance to commit, women's independence, and when to have children." Thirty-seven-year-old Eirini Perpovlov, an administrative assistant at Associated Press, "loves her work and gets her social sustenance from her parea, or close-knit group of like-minded friends." Sure sounds similar to this July's Time story about Vicky, "a purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who . . . loves nothing better than a party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt." At the restaurant where the reporter interviews them, Vicky's friends gab about snowboarding, iPods, credit-card rates, and a popular resort off the coast of Thailand. Vicky, whose motto is "work hard, play harder," is not from New York, London, or even Athens; she's from the SYF delegation in Beijing, China, a country that appears to be racing from rice paddies to sushi bars in less than a generation—at least for a privileged minority. With no children or parents to support, and with serious financial hardship a bedtime story told by aging grandparents, SYFs have ignited what The Economist calls the "Bridget Jones economy"—named, of course, after the book and movie heroine who is perhaps the most famous SYF of all. Bridget Jonesers, the magazine says, spend their disposable income "on whatever is fashionable, frivolous, and fun," manufactured by a bevy of new companies that cater to young women. In 2000, Marian Salzman—then the president of the London-based Intelligence Factory, an arm of Young & Rubicam—said that by the 1990s, "women living alone had come to comprise the strongest consumer bloc in much the same way that yuppies did in the 1980s." SYFs drive the growth of apparel stores devoted to stylish career wear like Ann Taylor, which now has more than 800 shops in the United States, and the international Zara, with more than 1,000 in 54 countries. They also spend paychecks at the Paris-based Sephora, Europe's largest retailer of perfumes and cosmetics, which targets younger women in 14 countries, including such formerly sober redoubts as Poland and the Czech Republic. The chain plans to expand to China soon. According to Forbes, the Chinese cosmetics market, largely an urban phenomenon, was up 17 percent in 2006, and experts predict a growth rate of between 15 and 20 percent in upcoming years. Zara already has three stores there. The power of the SYF's designer purse is also at work in the entertainment industry. By the mid-1990s, "chick lit," a contemporary urban version of the Harlequin romance with the SYF as heroine, was topping bestseller lists in England and the United States. Now chick lit has spread all over the world. The books of the Irish writer Marian Keyes, one of the first and most successful chick-litterateurs, appear in 29 languages. The Devil Wears Prada was an international hit as both a book (by Lauren Weisberger) and a movie (starring Meryl Streep). Meantime, the television industry is seeking to satisfy the SYF's appetite for single heroines with Sex and the City clones like The Marrying Type in South Korea and The Balzac Age in Russia. Bridget Jonesers are also remaking the travel industry, especially in Asia. A 2005 report from MasterCard finds that women take four out of every ten trips in the Asia-Pacific region—up from one in ten back in the mid-1970s. While American women think about nature, adventure, or culture when choosing their travel destinations, says MasterCard, Asian women look for shopping, resorts, and, most of all, spas. Female travelers have led to what the report calls the "spa-ification of the Asian hotel industry." That industry is growing at a spectacular rate—200 percent annually. And now the maturing Bridget Jones economy has begun to feature big-ticket items. In 2003, the Diamond Trading Company introduced the "right-hand ring," a diamond for women with no marital prospects but longing for a rock. ("Your left hand is your heart; your right hand is your voice," one ad explains.) In some SYF capitals, women are moving into the real-estate market. Canadian single women are buying homes at twice the rate of single men. The National Association of Realtors reports that in the U.S. last year, single women made up 22 percent of the real-estate market, compared with a paltry 9 percent for single men. The median age for first-time female buyers: 32. The real-estate firm Coldwell Banker is making eyes at these young buyers with a new motto, "Your perfect partner since 1906," while Lowe's, the home-renovation giant, is offering classes especially for them. SYFs are also looking for wheels, and manufacturers are designing autos and accessories with them in mind. In Japan, Nissan has introduced the Pino, which has seat covers festooned with stars and a red CD player shaped like a pair of lips. It comes in one of two colors: "milk tea beige" and pink. Japan presents a striking example of the sudden rise of the New Girl Order outside the U.S. and Western Europe. As recently as the nation's boom years in the 1980s, the dominant image of the Japanese woman was of the housewife, or sengyoshufu, who doted on her young children, intently prepared older ones for the world economy, and waited on the man of the house after his 16-hour day at the office. She still exists, of course, but about a decade ago she met her nemesis: the Japanese SYF. Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Japanese women between 25 and 29 who were unmarried soared from 40 to 54 percent; even more remarkable was the number of 30- to 34-year-old females who were unmarried, which rocketed from 14 to 27 percent. Because of Tokyo's expensive real-estate market, a good many of these young single women have shacked up with their parents, leading a prominent sociologist to brand them "parasite singles." The derogatory term took off, but the girls weren't disturbed; according to USA Today, many proudly printed up business cards bearing their new title. The New Girl Order may represent a disruptive transformation for a deeply traditional society, but Japanese women sure seem to be enjoying the single life. Older singles who can afford it have even been buying their own apartments. One of them, 37-year-old Junko Sakai, wrote a best-selling plaint called The Howl of the Loser Dogs, a title that co-opts the term makeinu—"loser"—once commonly used to describe husbandless 30-year-olds. "Society may call us dogs," she writes, "but we are happy and independent." Today's Japanese SYFs are world-class shoppers, and though they must still fight workplace discrimination and have limited career tracks—particularly if they aren't working for Westernized companies—they're somehow managing to earn enough yen to keep the country's many Vuitton, Burberry, and Issey Miyake boutiques buzzing. Not so long ago, Japanese hotels wouldn't serve women traveling alone, in part because they suspected that the guests might be spinsters intent on hurling themselves off balconies to end their desperate solitude. Today, the losers are happily checking in at Japanese mountain lodges, not to mention Australian spas, Vietnamese hotels, and Hawaiian beach resorts. And unlike their foreign counterparts in the New Girl Order, Japanese singles don't seem to be worrying much about finding Mr. Right. A majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they'd be just as happy never to marry. Peggy Orenstein, writing in the New York Times Magazine in 2001, noted that Japanese women find American-style sentimentality about marriage puzzling. Yoko Harruka, a television personality and author of a book called I Won't Get Married—written after she realized that her then-fiancé expected her to quit her career and serve him tea—says that her countrymen propose with lines like, "I want you to cook miso soup for me for the rest of my life." Japanese SYFs complain that men don't show affection and expect women to cook dinner obediently while they sit on their duffs reading the paper. Is it any wonder that the women prefer Burberry? Post-Communist Europe is also going through the shock of the New Girl Order. Under Communist rule, women tended to marry and have kids early. In the late eighties, the mean age of first birth in East Germany, for instance, was 24.7, far lower than the West German average of 28.3. According to Tomá-- Sobotka of the Vienna Institute of Demography, young people had plenty of reasons to schedule an early wedding day. Tying the knot was the only way to gain independence from parents, since married couples could get an apartment, while singles could not. Furthermore, access to modern contraception, which the state proved either unable or unwilling to produce at affordable prices, was limited. Marriages frequently began as the result of unplanned pregnancies. And then the Wall came down. The free market launched shiny new job opportunities, making higher education more valuable than under Communist regimes, which had apportioned jobs and degrees. Suddenly, a young Polish or Hungarian woman might imagine having a career, and some fun at the same time. In cities like Warsaw and Budapest, young adults can find pleasures completely unknown to previous generations of singles. In one respect, Eastern European and Russian SYFs were better equipped than Japanese ones for the new order. The strong single woman, an invisible figure in Japan, has long been a prominent character in the social landscape of Eastern Europe and Russia, a legacy, doubtless, of the Communist-era emphasis on egalitarianism (however inconsistently applied) and the massive male casualties of World War II. Not that the post-Communist SYF is any happier with the husband material than her Japanese counterpart is. Eastern European gals complain about men overindulged by widowed mothers and unable to adapt to the new economy. According to The Economist, many towns in what used to be East Germany now face Frauenmangel—a lack of women—as SYFs who excelled in school have moved west for jobs, leaving the poorly performing men behind. In some towns, the ratio is just 40 women to 100 men. Women constitute the majority of both high school and college graduates in Poland. Though Russian women haven't joined the new order to the same extent, they're also grumbling about the men. In Russian TV's The Balzac Age, which chronicles the adventures of four single thirtysomething women, Alla, a high-achieving yuppie attorney, calls a handyman for help in her apartment. The two—to their mutual horror—recognize each other as former high school sweethearts, now moving in utterly different social universes. There's much to admire in the New Girl Order—and not just the previously hidden cleavage. Consider the lives most likely led by the mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on of the fashionista at the Warsaw airport or of the hard-partying Beijing actuary. Those women reached adulthood, which usually meant 18 or even younger; married guys from their village, or, if they were particularly daring, from the village across the river; and then had kids—end of story, except for maybe some goat milking, rice planting, or, in urban areas, shop tending. The New Girl Order means good-bye to such limitations. It means the possibility of more varied lives, of more expansively nourished aspirations. It also means a richer world. SYFs bring ambition, energy, and innovation to the economy, both local and global; they simultaneously promote and enjoy what author Brink Lindsey calls "the age of abundance." The SYF, in sum, represents a dramatic advance in personal freedom and wealth. But as with any momentous social change, the New Girl Order comes with costs—in this case, profound ones. The globalized SYF upends centuries of cultural traditions. However limiting, those traditions shaped how families formed and the next generation grew up. So it makes sense that the SYF is partly to blame for a worldwide drop in fertility rates. To keep a population stable, or at its "replacement level," women must have an average of at least 2.1 children. Under the New Girl Order, though, women delay marriage and childbearing, which itself tends to reduce the number of kids, and sometimes—because the opportunity costs of children are much higher for educated women—they forgo them altogether. Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries—Italy, Spain, and Poland—have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, according to the CIA's World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman. For many, fertility decline seems to be one more reason to celebrate the New Girl Order. Fewer people means fewer carbon footprints, after all, and thus potential environmental relief. But while we're waiting for the temperature to drop a bit, economies will plunge in ways that will be extremely difficult to manage—and that, ironically, will likely spell the SYF lifestyle's demise. As Philip Longman explains in his important book The Empty Cradle, dramatic declines in fertility rates equal aging and eventually shriveling populations. Japan now has one of the oldest populations in the world—one-third of its population, demographers predict, will be over 60 within a decade. True, fertility decline often spurs a temporary economic boost, as more women enter the workforce and increase income and spending, as was the case in 1980s Japan. In time, though, those women—and their male peers—will get old and need pensions and more health care. And who will pay for that? With fewer children, the labor force shrinks, and so do tax receipts. Europe today has 35 pensioners for every 100 workers, Longman points out. By 2050, those 100 will be responsible for 75 pensioners; in Spain and Italy, the ratio of workers to pensioners will be a disastrous one-to-one. Adding to the economic threat, seniors with few or no children are more likely to look to the state for support than are elderly people with more children. The final irony is that the ambitious, hardworking SYF will have created a world where her children, should she have them, will need to work even harder in order to support her in her golden years. Aging populations present other problems. For one thing, innovation and technological breakthroughs tend to be a young person's game—think of the young Turks of the information technology revolution. Fewer young workers and higher tax burdens don't make a good recipe for innovation and growth. Also, having fewer people leads to declining markets, and thus less business investment and formation. Where would you want to expand your cosmetics business: Ireland, where the population continues to renew itself, or Japan, where it is imploding? And finally, the New Girl Order has given birth to a worrying ambivalence toward domestic life and the men who would help create it. Many analysts argue that today's women of childbearing age would have more kids if only their countries provided generous benefits for working mothers, as they do in Sweden and France. And it's true that those two countries have seen fertility rates inch up toward replacement levels in recent years. But in countries newly entering the New Girl Order, what SYFs complain about isn't so much a gap between work and family life as a chasm between their own aspirations and those of the men who'd be their husbands (remember those Japanese women skeptical of a future cooking miso soup). Adding to the SYF's alienation from domesticity is another glaring fact usually ignored by demographers: the New Girl Order is fun. Why get married when you can party on? That raises an interesting question: Why are SYFs in the United States—the Rome of the New Girl Order—still so interested in marriage? By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in most SYF countries (including Sweden and France). The answer may be that the family has always been essential ballast to the individualism, diversity, mobility, and sheer giddiness of American life. It helps that the U.S., like northwestern Europe, has a long tradition of "companionate marriage"—that is, marriage based not on strict roles but on common interests and mutual affection. Companionate marriage always rested on the assumption of female equality. Yet countries like Japan are joining the new order with no history of companionate relations, and when it comes to adapting to the new order, the cultural cupboard is bare. A number of analysts, including demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, have also argued that it is America's religiousness that explains our relatively robust fertility, though the Polish fertility decline raises questions about that explanation. It's by no means certain that Americans will remain exceptional in this regard. The most recent census data show a "sharp increase," over just the past six years, in the percentage of Americans in their twenties who have never married. Every year sees more books celebrating the SYF life, boasting titles like Singular Existence and Living Alone and Loving It. And SYFs will increasingly find themselves in a disappointing marriage pool. The New York Times excited considerable discussion this summer with a front-page article announcing that young women working full-time in several cities were now outearning their male counterparts. A historically unprecedented trend like this is bound to have a further impact on relations between the sexes and on marriage and childbearing rates. Still, for now, women don't seem too worried about the New Girl Order's downside. On the contrary. The order marches on, as one domino after another falls to its pleasures and aspirations. Now, the Singapore Times tells us, young women in Vietnam are suddenly putting off marriage because they "want to have some fun"—and fertility rates have plummeted from 3.8 children in 1998 to 2.1 in 2006. And then there's India. "The Gen Now bachelorette brigade is in no hurry to tie the knot," reports the India Tribune. "They're single, independent, and happy." Young urbanites are pushing up sales of branded apparel; Indian chick lit, along with Cosmopolitan and Vogue, flies out of shops in Delhi and Mumbai. Amazingly enough, fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in several of India's major cities, thanks in part to aspirant fashionistas. If in India—India!—the New Girl Order can reduce population growth, then perhaps nothing is beyond its powers. At the very least, the Indian experiment gives new meaning to the phrase "shop till you drop." Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, Marriage and Caste in America, is a collection of her City Journal essays.
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| New Frontier casino-hotel imploded on the Las Vegas Strip
Nov 13, 2007 06:54 AM PST The New Frontier casino-hotel was imploded early this morning after a booming fireworks display, putting an end to the second property to open on the Las Vegas Strip. The 16-story hotel tower was felled with over 1,000 pounds of explosives before a group of reporters and bystanders to make way for a multibillion-dollar resort bearing The Plaza brand, which is set to open in 2011. Elad Group owner and Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva, who is partnering to build an $8 billion megaresort where the New Frontier stood, shook hands and gave hugs after the tower went down. An easterly breeze helped to quickly dissipate the dust cloud. The New Frontier opened back in October of 1942 when Las Vegas wasn't much more than a desert pit-stop on the way to California. When Howard Hughes bought the property in the 1960's, he took the "new" away, re-naming it simply "The Frontier." Later owners brought back the full name. And of course, The New Frontier was the centerpiece of the culinary union strike that went on for more than six years in the 1990's. The strike finally ended when developer Phil Ruffin bought the property in 1998. Source: The Associated Press
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| Evolutionary Psychology Strikes Again Home from Slate The trouble with evolutionary psychology is that there are no (or few) ways of testing its theorems. With enough ingenuity on the part of the researcher, nearly any finding about gender can be twisted to suit the evolutionary lens. Prime example, from Crooked Timber last week: the Times in London reported on a study in which men rated the "sexiness" of women's walks. The study found that men rated the women in the less fertile part of their cycle as sexier than the women in a more fertile part of their cycle, because the fertile women walked with "smaller hip movements." You might think that this finding would give evolutionary psychologists pause—might lead them to consider, for a moment, whether some other factor might be at work, such as culture (or tampons!). But no; instead, the Times goes on to say: That makes evolutionary sense, because it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility only to those men she believes would make a suitable mate. In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman's walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males whom she might not want to choose. Dr Provost said: "If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile."
But you can bet if the study had found that fertile women were seen to have the "sexiest" walks Dr. Provost would have thought that made evolutionary sense, too. There's just no control group here. via Crooked Timber.
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| To Know Us Is To Love Us Slate readers on how to improve America's image in the world.By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2007, a 5:58 P.M. E.T. Last week, in a column inspired in part by Karen Hughes' departure as the State Department's public diplomat and in part by Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock 'n' Roll, I asked readers for ideas on how to improve America's image in the world. During the Cold War, our freewheeling jazz, rock, and movies appealed to millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. Today, the vast phenomenon of anti-Americanism stems mainly from our government's policies. But if the next president changed some of those policies, is there anything in our culture that might restore our luster, or at least make us less hateful, not just to Arabs and Muslims, but also to the Asians and Europeans who were once our closest friends? I received 120 responses, nearly all of them from foreigners or from Americans living abroad. On the one hand, this is satisfying; here are ideas sent by people who know what they're talking about. On the other hand, it's a bit disconcerting; doesn't anybody stateside care what the rest of the world thinks? In any case, the letters are, for the most part, extremely thoughtful—and most of them make the point that American pop culture just isn't enough. Our music and movies are already omnipresent, through the Internet and satellite TV—yet there has been no payoff for America's popularity. Rhick Bose, an American studying in South Africa, notes that globalization has stripped pop culture of nationality. "Young people like Beyoncé," he writes, "but they don't associate her with America." To the extent that people do link the culture with the country, the effect is not always for the better. Foreigners watch shows like MTV's My Super Sweet 16 and think it reflects the way most Americans live. Bose's classmates, he says, "asked me what kind of car I got for my sweet sixteenth birthday party." Several readers emphasize that many foreigners, even those with high levels of education, have no concept of American life. They don't know that most Americans are religious people. They don't know that most of us aren't wildly rich. They're skeptical of reports that many black people live here—or dismiss them as not "real Americans." (This tendency appears to be true even of otherwise sophisticated world leaders such as the new French president, who, during his recent trip to Washington, marveled that our recent secretaries of state have come from other parts of the world. True, Madeleine Albright is the daughter of a Czech émigré, but Condoleezza Rice's American heritage goes back generations.) And so the most prominent suggestion on how to improve America's face in the world—a suggestion made by well over half of those who wrote me—is to send the world more American faces and to bring more of the world's faces into America. In other words, these readers say, there should be a vast expansion in the Peace Corps, in Fulbright fellowships, and, above all, in student-exchange programs. An American exchange student in Jordan writes of the foreigners he's met: "Once they see Americans—blacks, Jews, Asians, and 'real' Americans, as they call blonde-haired Caucasians—and hear their diverse opinions on issues from the War in Iraq to pop music, then people realize how much diversity there is in our country." With this same idea in mind, an American in Sudan adds that we should put particular emphasis on sending ethnically diverse Americans abroad. A Fulbright fellow in Budapest, Hungary, further adds that it would be good to brief these students in advance on the countries where they're going. Foreigners, he writes, "are quite impressed when they meet an American who knows at least a little something about their culture," who has "an appreciation for their pop entertainment, their great modern novels, movies, and music." The flip side—inviting more foreign students to spend a year in America (a practice that has been cut back since 9/11)—is no less valuable. A British journalist recalls that the pro-democracy and human rights activists that he's interviewed in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, and elsewhere have had one thing in common: They all spent some time studying on an American campus. But there are more commonplace benefits, as well. An American who teaches English in Egypt writes: "Many an Egyptian is shocked, on arriving in America, to find that we spend most of our time in humdrum routines of work, friends, and family. … Most come away with a greater respect for the American work ethic" and a realization "that we are not demons, nor are we angels." In short, our greatest selling point may be our sheer, mundane humanity. A Dutch student writes, "America must (re-)consider itself an ordinary country—special and of great importance, but not playing in a league of its own. If America joins the world … the world will gladly receive America." Along these lines is a letter from the aptly named Joshua Mensch, an American in the Czech Republic. When Mensch was a student in Prague in the late 1990s, the Czechs he met regarded him as cool, the arbiter of taste, the beacon of all that is desirable. "Being American," he writes, "gave you a certain cachet." In 2004, after the deterioration in Iraq and George W. Bush's re-election, the atmosphere changed. He wasn't shunned for being an American—not usually, anyway—but the "cachet" evaporated. Now, Mensch writes, he is polite to everybody; he speaks Czech as much as possible; he's always hoping to find lost wallets or cell phones, so he can return them to their owners, as a way of demonstrating that American people are decent. "Americans abroad in every city I visit," he continues, "are quietly re-appreciating their identities as American." They are openly and unashamedly American. But they also behave "in a manner that is worldly, attentive to the differences between the cultures and not brutish about it. … The Americans who act like America is part of the world and not the commander of it, not the evil ruler or the bane of it, and not the ultimate signifier of it, will be the Americans who make America look good." There were many other suggestions on how to open up the pathways between America and the rest of the world. Many readers seconded my points about the rudeness and paranoia on display at U.S. embassies and customs desks. Americans living in Europe say that some of their friends—even those who studied in American universities—refuse to come here anymore because they've been treated so horribly at the airports. Eric Henry, a doctoral student at Cornell who has spent much time in Shenyang, China, recalls that the U.S. Consulate used to open its libraries, film screenings, and Fourth of July celebrations. Now, he says, the consulate is a "razor-wired compound"; an American friend of his was recently arrested for taking pictures of the front gate. "Expats and Chinese who used to visit the consulate quite regularly now only grouse about the things that used to go on there," he writes. Certainly there are ways of staying on alert without tripping alarm bells on everyone who comes across the border. There are also ways to get the American message out there without making it seem like propaganda. One reason Karen Hughes' PR trip to the Middle East two years ago was such a disaster, besides the fact that she seemed so ill-suited for the mission, was that it was clearly a PR mission. She was, after all, a government official and thus by nature suspect. Several readers, including a few State Department officials, endorsed my idea of reviving the U.S. Information Agency as an independent entity that promotes American values and culture, not an administration's policies. One American stationed in south Asia writes that, during Gen. Musharraf's state of emergency and the blackout of independent news stations, many Pakistanis have appreciated Voice of America's news broadcasts—though he adds they will continue to be appreciated only if they are seen as straight news, free of any government's interference. "When tribal elites in Waziristan trust Voice of America to bring them the news," he writes, "it can't be a bad thing for the United States." A few common themes emerge from these suggestions: Government-sponsored PR has its limits, mainly because people see it for what it is; the important thing is to change policy, and part of that involves aligning America's approach to the world with the most attractive aspects of our culture (in the broadest sense of that word). One of those aspects is what the Bush administration constantly boasts about—our openness and our freedom. But those boasts ring hollow when the rest of the world sees us as closed down and locked shut. The first step, then, is to reopen the doors to the world. Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.
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| Today’s Papers Too Many ShotsBy Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2007, 6:08 A.M. E.T. The New York Times leads with the first glimpse into the FBI's investigation of the Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving Blackwater security guards that killed 17 civilians. And it doesn't amount to good news for the government contractor, as federal agents have found that at least 14 of the killings were unprovoked and unjustified. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with, and almost everyone else fronts, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto calling on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to resign. Bhutto made a clear break with the president and seemed to quash all possibilities of a power-sharing deal by saying that she wouldn't serve in his government. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how rising gasoline prices will affect the wider economy. It's not just that people will have to spend more on fuel but also higher gasoline costs are increasing prices on a variety of products. USA Today leads with news that Bank of America will devote $600 million to support its money market funds to ensure they don't fall below the $1-a-share mark. Other institutions have also taken similar steps but this move was seen as particularly significant since it came from the nation's second-largest bank. Bank of America also announced it will write down $3 billion of its debt and warned it could face bigger losses in the future. The Washington Post leads with more from "the biggest corruption case in local government history" and says the multimillion-dollar scam involving employees of a Washington, D.C., tax office could be larger than authorities have publicly acknowledged. The paper analyzed city records and discovered $31.7 million "in questionable property tax refunds" during the last seven years. Although the FBI investigation of the shooting is still ongoing, the NYT got word of some initial findings that have already been forwarded to the Justice Department. It seems at least five Blackwater guards opened fire because they mistakenly believed they were under attack when they heard shots that were actually fired by other members of their unit. The FBI agents said that three of the killings may have been justified because guards could have felt legitimately threatened. But an official who was part of an earlier military review that found all 17 killings unjustified said FBI investigators were clearly giving Blackwater guards the benefit of the doubt. "I wouldn't call it a massacre, but to say it was unwarranted is an understatement," a government official tells the NYT. The findings are now being reviewed by Justice Department officials and the NYT says that deciding whether to prosecute the killings "could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael Mukasey," the new attorney general who was sworn in a few days ago. Since emergency rule was declared in Pakistan, there have been suspicions that Bhutto continued to negotiate with Musharraf on a possible power-sharing deal. But yesterday she clearly stated that "Pakistan and Musharraf cannot co-exist" and started to seek alliances with other political parties to oppose the president. Although the opposition is fractured and has been largely ineffectual, Bhutto's participation might give it the support and leadership it needs, reports the LAT. Everyone notes the Bush administration will send John Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, to Pakistan for talks with Musharraf later in the week. The NYT got an interview with Musharraf and fronts the encounter. Notably, Musharraf met the reporters wearing a suit and not his military uniform, which makes for a very nonthreatening Page One picture. Although he doesn't say anything that's really surprising, the interview does give some insight into Musharraf's way of thinking, much of which could be funny if it weren't so tragic. Musharraf strongly believes that the majority of people support his emergency decree. "Their view, is why have I done it so late," he said. He also chastised Western media and governments for spending too much time with human rights advocates who "sleep on the day of elections." When asked about closing down private television channels Musharraf insisted "the media is independent" and all he wants to do is "bring some responsibility to them." While the Post lends space in its op-ed page to yet another piece by Benazir Bhutto that gives us quotable, but ultimately meaningless, sentences like "[t]he only terror that Musharraf's regime seems able to confront is the terror of his own illegitimacy," the LAT makes things more interesting by publishing a piece by her niece, Fatima Bhutto. Fatima notes that the "most bizarre part" of the emergency rule "has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt." She's hardly an objective source, but the piece is notable because she writes about how Bhutto has been accused of "massive corruption" at a time when many are portraying her as Pakistan's savior and it's a good reminder of why so many Pakistanis can't get around to trusting her. Although the price of oil went down yesterday and, as the WSJ details in a Page One article, it seems increasingly unlikely that the much-talked about $100 price tag will be reached in the near future, the cost of gasoline will probably keep increasing for now. The big concern is for lower income households that spend a significant part of their budget on gasoline and will have to cut back on other expenses right at the start of the shopping season. The NYT fronts an interesting counterintuitive column by David Leonhardt that attempts to throw a little bit of cold water on all the hyperactive economic coverage. Barring a major catastrophe, Leonhardt argues that falls in the stock market, home prices, and the dollar really aren't so bad. And for all those who are not close to retirement, "a market correction is your friend." The urge to treat the economy "as a local sports team that is either winning or losing, up or down" fails to capture the many levels in which it operates and how some people always benefit when others lose. The NYT notes that controversy has hit the "genteel world of bridge" because one of the women in a team of players that won the Venice Cup in Shangahi held up a sign at an awards dinner that read, "We did not vote for Bush." Some bridge players have called it "treason" and a few of the team members could face suspension, probation, and community service. Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
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Monday, November 12, 2007 | All They Are Saying Is Give Happiness a Chance November 12, 2007 Editorial Observer
By EDUARDO PORTER The framers of the Declaration of Independence evidently believed that happiness could be achieved, putting its pursuit up there alongside the unalienable rights to life and liberty. Though governments since then have seen life and liberty as deserving of vigorous protection, for all the public policies aimed at increasing economic growth, people have been left to sort out their happiness. This is an unfortunate omission. Despite all the wealth we have accumulated — increased life expectancy, central heating, plasma TVs and venti-white-chocolate-mocha Frappuccinos — true happiness has lagged our prosperity. As Bobby Kennedy said in a speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968, the nation's gross national product measures everything "except that which makes life worthwhile." The era of laissez-faire happiness might be coming to an end. Some prominent economists and psychologists are looking into ways to measure happiness to draw it into the public policy realm. Thirty years from now, reducing unhappiness could become another target of policy, like cutting poverty. "This is another outcome that we should be concerned about," said Alan Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton who is working to develop a measure of happiness that could be used with other economic indicators. "Just like G.D.P." It might be a bit of a political challenge to define happiness as a legitimate policy objective. Imagine the Republican outrage when the umpteenth tax cut didn't do the trick. Democrats would likely slam the effort as regressive, distracting from efforts to improve the lot of the less fortunate by more conventional measures — like income. Happiness is clearly real, related to objective measures of well-being. Happier people have lower blood pressure and get fewer colds. But using it to guide policy could be tricky. Not least because we don't quite understand why it behaves the way it does. Men are unhappiest at almost 50, and women at just after 45. Paraplegics are not unhappier than healthy people. People who live with teenagers are the unhappiest of all. Happiness seems fairly cheap to manipulate. In one experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about personal satisfaction after Xeroxing a sheet of paper. Those who found a dime lying on the Xerox machine reported substantially higher satisfaction with their lives. Most disconcerting, happiness seems to have little relation to economic achievement, which we have historically understood as the driver of well-being. A notorious study in 1974 found that despite some 30 years worth of stellar economic growth, Americans were no happier than they were at the end of World War II. A more recent study found that life satisfaction in China declined between 1994 and 2007, a period in which average real incomes grew by 250 percent. Happiness, it appears, adapts. It's true that the rich are happier, on average, than the poor. But while money boosts happiness, the effect doesn't last. We just become envious of a new, richer set of people than before. Satisfaction soon settles back to its prior level, as we adapt to changed circumstances and set our expectations to a higher level. Despite happiness' apparently Sisyphean nature, there may be ways to increase satisfaction over the long term. While the extra happiness derived from a raise or a winning lottery ticket might be fleeting, studies have found that the happiness people derive from free time or social interaction is less susceptible to comparisons with other people around them. Nonmonetary rewards — like more vacations, or more time with friends or family — are likely to produce more lasting changes in satisfaction. This swings the door wide open for government intervention. On a small scale, congestion taxes to encourage people to carpool would reduce the distress of the solo morning commute, which apparently drives people nuts. More broadly, if the object of public policy is to maximize society's well-being, more attention should be placed on fostering social interactions and less on accumulating wealth. If growing incomes are not increasing happiness, perhaps we should tax incomes more to force us to devote less time and energy to the endeavor and focus instead on the more satisfying pursuit of leisure. One thing seems certain, lining up every policy incentive to strive for higher and higher incomes is just going to make us all miserable. Happiness is one of the things that money just can't buy. |
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| The Coup at Home OP-ED Frank Rich NYT. 
Barry Blitt
November 11, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist The Coup at Home By FRANK RICH AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America's two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general. So what if America's chief law enforcement official won't say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You're either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you're with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf's crackdown in Islamabad. In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that's not exactly news. It's been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden. General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda" and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be "regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized "ally" came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually "honor bound" to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn't stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated "truce" to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman "looks me in the eye" and says "there won't be a Taliban and won't be Al Qaeda," the president said, "I believe him." Sooner than you could say "Putin," The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this "truce." Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever. Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America's $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution. But there's another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated. In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we've propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We've become inured to democracy-lite. That's why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug. This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf's. More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he's championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word "freedom" 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a "Celebration of Freedom" concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government's embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values. Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte. Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America's major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove's political agenda. Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush's example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan's Supreme Court with language mimicking the president's diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln's Civil War suspension of a prisoner's fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That's like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that "there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution." To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal. This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They're falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York's term-limits law. What makes the Democrats' Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy's bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he's not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they'll say things they know are false just to move on. In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make "an outstanding attorney general," Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already "illegal under current laws and conventions." But then he vowed to support a new bill "explicitly" making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a "signing statement." That's what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees. That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey's pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this. Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That's almost as low as the United States' rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent). Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
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| Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire 
Misha Erwitt for The New York Times Bonnie Brown joined Google when it had 40 employees. November 12, 2007 Google Options Make Masseuse a Multimillionaire SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny. After five years of kneading engineers' backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value. "I'm happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it's been pouring," said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, "Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google." When Google's stock topped $700 a share last week before dropping back to $664 on Friday, outside shareholders were not the only ones smiling. According to documents filed on Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google employees and former employees are holding options they can cash in worth about $2.1 billion. In addition, current employees are sitting on stock and unvested options, or options they cannot immediately cash in, that together have a value of about $4.1 billion. Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than $5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options. One founder, Larry Page, has stock worth $20 billion. The other, Sergey Brin, has slightly less, $19.6 billion, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm in Redwood Shores, Calif. Three Google senior vice presidents — David Drummond, the chief legal officer; Shona Brown, who runs business operations; and Jonathan Rosenberg, who oversees product management — together are holding $160 million worth of Google stock and options. "This is a very rare phenomenon when one company so quickly becomes worth so much money," said Peter Hero, senior adviser to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which works with individuals and corporations to support charitable organizations in the region. "During the boom times, there were lots of companies whose employees made a lot of money fast, like Yahoo and Netscape. But the scale didn't approach Google." Indeed, Google has seemed to exist in its own microclimate, with its shares climbing even as other technology stocks have been buffeted by investor skittishness. The stock touched an all-time high of $747.24 on Tuesday before falling more than $83 a share during the week to close at $663.97 on Friday. But even after that sell-off, the stock has risen more than 44 percent, or $203 a share, this year. The days are long gone when people like Ms. Brown were handed thousands of Google options with the exercise price, or the pre-determined price that employees would pay to buy the stock, set in pennies. Nearly half of the 16,000 employees now at Google have been there for a year or less, and their options have an average exercise price of more than $500. But those who started at the company a year ago, or even three months ago, are seeing their options soar in value. Several Google employees interviewed for this article say they do not watch the dizzying climb of the company's shares. When it comes to awareness of the stock price, they say, Google is different from other large high-tech companies where they have worked, like Microsoft, where the day's stock price is a fixture on many people's computer screens. At Google, the sensibility is more nuanced, they say. "It isn't considered 'Googley' to check the stock price," said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company's culture. As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter, said the engineer, who did not want to be named because it is considered unseemly to discuss the price. Others admit that, when gathered around the espresso machine it is hard to avoid the topic of their sudden windfalls. "It's very clear that people are taking nicer vacations," said one Google engineer, who asked not to be identified because it is also not Googley to talk about personal fortunes made at the company. "And one of the guys who works for me but has been there longer showed up at work in a really, really nice new car." The rise in Google's stock is affecting the deepest reaches of the company. The number of options granted to new employees at Google usually depends on the position and the salary level at which the employee is hired, and the value is usually based on the price of the stock at the start of employment. The average options grant for a new Google employee — or "Noogler" — who started in November 2006 was 685 shares at a price of roughly $475 a share. They also would have received, on average, 230 shares of stock outright that will vest over a number of years. The Nooglers might not be talking about second homes in Aspen or personal jets, but they are talking about down payments on a first home, new cars and kitchen renovations. Internal online discussion groups about personal finance are closely read. Google, like many Silicon Valley companies, gives each of its new employees stock options, as well as a smaller number of shares of Google stock, as a recruiting incentive. The idea of employment at a place with such a high stock price is appealing, but it can also make the company less attractive to a new hire. Jordan Moncharmont, 21, a senior at Stanford University who was given stock options after he started working at Facebook part time, said Google's high stock price can be a disincentive to a prospective hire as it translates to a high exercise price for options. "You'd have to spend a boatload of cash to exercise your options," he said. Mr. Moncharmont said he did not join Facebook to get rich, though he knows his Facebook options could make him wealthy someday. When Ms. Brown left Google, the stock price had merely doubled from its initial offering price of $85. So Ms. Brown is glad she ignored the advice of her financial advisers and held onto a cache of stock. As the stock continues to defy gravity, Ms. Brown, whose foundation has its assets in Google stock, can be more generous with her charity. "It seems that every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again," she said. "It's like an overflowing pot." The wealth generated by options is giving a lot of people like Ms. Brown the freedom to leave and do whatever they like. Ron Garret, an engineer who was Google's 104th employee, worked there for a little more than a year, leaving in 2001. When he eventually sold all his stock, he became a venture capitalist and a philanthropist. He has also become a documentary filmmaker and is currently chronicling homelessness in Santa Monica, Calif. "The stock price rise doesn't affect me at all," he said, "except just gazing at it in wonderment."
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| My Network, My Cause 
Saleh Majid/Oxfam America FACE TO FACE Nick Anderson (far right) in Darfur, after he helped organize a Facebook page to raise money for victims of the crisis. 
Nick Anderson/Oxfam America Mr. Anderson visited the Abu Shouk refugee camp in Darfur, above, this summer. 
Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times NET WORKERS Using a page out of Facebook, Nick Anderson and Ana Slavin started a campaign to help Darfur refugees November 12, 2007 My Network, My Cause IN 2003, as Howard Dean's presidential bid surged, the Internet was hailed as a decisive new factor in electoral politics. In 2007, the explosive growth of online social networks seems poised to drive a similar upheaval in the world of philanthropy. A flood of new ventures — like Bill Clinton's MyCommitment.org and Dollars for Darfur, an initiative by two high-school students — aim to use Web-based communities to raise money for charitable causes. So far, the amounts raised online are relatively tiny. But they are increasing rapidly, paralleling the expansion of social networks themselves. The research firm Datamonitor estimates that by the end of this year sites like Facebook and MySpace will have more than 230 million members. Until recently, philanthropic groups could accomplish little online beyond highlighting problems and trumpeting goals and programs, said Allison Fine, a senior fellow at Demos, a policy research group in New York, and the author of "Momentum: Igniting Change in the Connected Age." "Web 1.0 was a broadcast phenomenon; the Clinton Global Initiative would have just told us what it was doing," Ms. Fine said. "Now, in this new interactive world, it's a two-way conversation." MyCommitment.org, which was introduced in September, aims to forge connections among people who make commitments of time or money to political or social causes and want to encourage friends, online and off, to do the same. "Giving is something that we can all do, but too often people don't know where or how to give," Mr. Clinton said by e-mail. "MyCommitment.org is a portal that inspires people to give and makes it easy to do so." More than 750 people around the world responded in its first month. "The commitments range from working with students to foster intercultural dialogue to an 8- and 6-year-old brother and sister team who have pledged to raise more than $200,000 to help blind children in India," Mr. Clinton said. Dollars for Darfur began after Nick Anderson, a high-school senior in Mount Hermon, Mass., visited South Africa on a school trip last year and became interested in the humanitarian crisis. He and a classmate, Ana Slavin, decided to use the Web to raise awareness among other students and money for the cause. "We were using these social networks every day," Mr. Anderson said. "It was a big part of our lives. And we knew there were millions of other teenagers checking them two or three times a day, too." Their campaign, now part of the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella group of national religious organizations, raised $306,000 during the last school year. Mr. Anderson, who is now a youth ambassador for Oxfam America, visited the Abu Shouk refugee camp in Darfur this summer. A second Dollars for Darfur drive, aiming to raise $375,000, is under way. SaveDarfur.org is one of the top draws at the Causes on Facebook Project, added to Facebook, the social networking site, when it was opened to outside software developers in May. Causes allows Facebook users to set up Web pages to promote charitable or other activist goals. Perhaps more important, Causes pages can be used to solicit and keep track of donations. In its first five months, Causes was downloaded by 6.3 million of Facebook's 51 million users, with another 75,000 or so registering daily, said Sean Parker, 27, who developed it. While some 25,000 causes have been created and $600,000 raised, Mr. Parker said, his priority was to demonstrate the platform's potential. "We want to help charities raise money," he said. "But at this point we're focusing on making people realize the power of the tool." Mr. Parker, a founder of the early file-sharing service Napster, said sites like Causes offered philanthropists a new way to build momentum because they take social pressures into cyberspace. "Your Facebook profile is seen by many more people every day than you are," he said. Social networking also gives charities a chance to lessen their reliance on big donors, a trend that began 30 years ago. "In that sort of world, young people are left out of the equation," Mr. Parker said. "If you can engage them, you can engage a much larger population." Engagement is helped by the fact that people go online to get news and information, especially "at times of crisis," said Susan P. Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an expert on Internet law and technology. "And just as people rush to the Web to get news about crises, they rush to the Web to help out." Ms. Crawford said that sites like Causes allow people to voice support, make a donation and encourage others to join in, all with a few clicks. While agreeing that the Web offers a sense of immediacy "that very few if any other fund-raising strategies provide," Timothy L. Seiler, director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, said it would be a mistake to assume that the Web has "revolutionized" philanthropy. Since the Web's early days, he added, "what we've seen is that the reality has never matched what people perceived to be the potential." About a third of the nonprofit groups surveyed recently by the Center on Philanthropy reported success with Internet fund-raising, about double the rate in 2000. But 24 percent of those that received donations online said the average gift was under $10. A recent survey of 103 organizations by The Chronicle of Philanthropy also put the trend in perspective, suggesting that online gifts totaled less than 1 percent of donations. Raising money online, meanwhile, raises sticky questions, especially for larger charities. "Trust issues are still a big factor," said Michael Schreiber, chief technical officer at United Way of America, which this year expects to raise about $400 million (out of $4.1 billion) through various online channels but is undecided about whether to undertake a Facebook-style social networking initiative. "You really have to understand how your donors will feel about it," Mr. Schreiber said, "and how you are going to make sure that you're stewarding the information and transactions in a way that everybody is comfortable with. I don't believe the sector is there yet." Matthew Hale, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University who studies the interaction of the news media and the nonprofit sector, drew a parallel with another Web phenomenon. "No one could touch Howard Dean online, yet he still lost," he said. "This is an important trend, and one that is clearly going to continue to grow. But it is not going to wipe away the ways that philanthropy has happened for hundreds of years." Still, no one is denying that the Internet has provoked new thinking. "It was really the teenagers across the country that did most of the work for us," said Mr. Anderson. "People need a forum to get involved."
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Sunday, November 11, 2007 | Today’s Papers The Loyal OppositionBy Jesse Stanchak
Posted Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007, at 6:52 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times leads by arguing that Pakistani President Perez Musharraf will weather the current political storm, at least in the short term, due to the opposition's inability to galvanize support for an ouster. The New York Times leads with an investigation into the corruption and mismanagement that allowed U.S. forces to lose 190,000 guns in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. The Washington Post leads locally, with federal agents' investigation of corruption at a D.C. tax office. The LAT says Musharraf has managed to avert disaster by pitting his foes against each other and diffusing the opposition's momentum with strategic crackdowns. Musharraff is also emboldened by a lack of international pressure, particularly from the United States, though all that could change down the line if he doesn't follow through on promises to lift emergency rule and hold elections. Not sure what to make of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto? The NYT says no one can really be sure what she's up to, as she seems to be fighting Musharraf and brokering peace with him simultaneously. Whether that flexibility ends up preserving or destroying democracy in Pakistan is anyone's guess. And amid all that turmoil, the WP would like to take a moment to remind you that Pakistan is a nuclear power. Pakistan's track record of secrecy with the United States and proliferation of nuclear technology with al-Qaeda makes maintaining the country's stability all the more vital, even as it constricts U.S. policy options. An accompanying feature traces the history of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan. The NYT adds its two cents on the matter in its "Week in Review" section. The NYT's Iraqi guns story doesn't lay blame upon a single person or group for the proliferation of ill-gotten arms in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency. It instead paints a picture of a time and place where small-arms distribution was a fool's errand rife with illicit opportunities. Even more unsatisfying is the piece's conclusion that no one will ever know exactly where all those guns went or how they've affected the war in the years since. Federal law enforcement authorities believe more than $20 million may have been stolen from a Washington D.C. tax office by five employees who were arrested last Wednesday. Even though the investigation had been going on since July, the secrecy surrounding the case was so tight that even Mayor Adrian M. Fenty wasn't told about the probe until after the arrests had been made. Everyone fronts a feature on Norman Mailer, an American novelist who died Saturday of renal failure at the age of 84. The papers' assessments of Mailer are stunningly uniform: As a novelist, critic, provocateur and demagogue, Mailer was a man defined as much by the tone of his voice as by what he was trying to say. The NYT fronts a feature on the collapse of a secret spy-satellite program that cost the government $18 billion between 1998 and 2005. The paper says the program was crippled from the get-go by unrealistic expectations and a lack of oversight. The piece focuses on the naive promises made by Boeing to secure the contract and the financial costs of the program's failure. The heart of the story, however, is something the paper can just barely hint at: the strategic cost of forcing intelligence agencies to rely on outdated technology. Democrats are increasingly divided on immigration, says the LAT. Democratic candidates have met with electoral success by taking tougher stances on immigration issues, but some officials worry the party could alienate Hispanic voters if it moves too far to the right. The article suggests, however, that the debate's importance lies less in choosing a particular position and more in keeping Republicans from defining the issue ahead of the 2008 elections. A stagehand strike has hobbled Broadway and could cost the city millions of dollars a day in lost tourism revenues, reports the NYT. The paper says the strike occurred with little warning, despite the union's promises not to "blindside" producers with a work stoppage. While tourists and producers alike are dismayed, the strike is a boon to at least one group: scalpers, who are jubilant at the prospect of higher prices for the eight Broadway shows unaffected by the strike. The WP teases a piece on the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam War memorial, an event that drew thousands of aging Vietnam veterans to the district. The NYT examines the possible impact of genetic tests that highlight the differences between one racial group and another. Like sushi? The growing global popularity of bluefin tuna is threatening both the species and its culinary legacy, says the WP. In a late-breaking story, the NYT covers a Democratic presidential campaign event in Iowa that turned into the most combative campaign stop yet. A writer from The Daily Show keeps a diary of picket line experiences from the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike for the NYT. Apparently writing about not writing doesn't violate any union rules. Jesse Stanchak is an assistant documents editor at Congressional Quarterly . He covers elections in Oregon and Idaho for CQpolitics.com.11:23 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove |
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| Oil Price Rise Causes Global Shift in Wealth
Iran, Russia and Venezuela Feel the Benefits
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 10, 2007; A01
High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone. The consequences are evident in minds and mortar: anger at Chinese motor-fuel pumps and inflated confidence in the Kremlin; new weapons in Chad and new petrochemical plants in Saudi Arabia; no-driving campaigns in South Korea and bigger sales for Toyota hybrid cars; a fiscal burden in Senegal and a bonanza in Brazil. In Burma, recent demonstrations were triggered by a government decision to raise fuel prices. In the United States, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers already anemic consumer savings rates, adds to inflation, worsens the trade deficit, undermines the dollar and makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to balance its competing goals of fighting inflation and sustaining growth. High prices have given a boost to oil-rich Alaska, which in September raised the annual oil dividend paid to every man, woman and child living there for a year to $1,654, an increase of $547 from last year. In other states, high prices create greater incentives for pursuing non-oil energy projects that once might have looked too expensive and hurt earnings at energy-intensive companies like airlines and chemical makers. Even Kellogg's cited higher energy costs as a drag on its third-quarter earnings. With crude oil prices nearing $100 a barrel, there is no end in sight to the redistribution of more than 1 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Earlier oil shocks generated giant shifts in wealth and pools of petrodollars, but they eventually faded and economies adjusted. This new high point in petroleum prices has arrived over four years, and many believe it will represent a new plateau even if prices drop back somewhat in coming months. "There's never been anything like this on a sustained basis the way we've seen the last couple of years," said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Oil prices "are not spiking; they're just rising," he added. The benefits, to the tune of $700 billion a year, are flowing to the world's oil-exporting countries. Two of those nations -- Iran and Venezuela -- may be better able to defy the Bush administration because of swelling oil revenue. Venezuela has used its oil wealth to dispense patronage around South America, vying for influence even with longtime U.S. allies. And Iran could be less vulnerable to sanctions designed to pressure it into giving up its nuclear program or opening it to inspection. The world's biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, is using its rejuvenated oil riches to build four cities. Projects like these are designed to burnish the country's image, develop a non-oil economy and generate enough employment to maintain social stability. One is King Abdullah Economic City, a mega-project on the kingdom's west coast. According to Emaar, a real estate development firm in Dubai, the city will cost $27 billion and be spread across an area three times the size of Manhattan. A contractor who works there said a wide, palm tree-lined boulevard cuts a dozen miles across an ocean of sand and ends at the Red Sea. Construction workers in hard hats are navigating excavators, dredging land and digging foundations for a power plant, a desalinization plant and a port. The project will eventually include an industrial district, a financial island, a university and a residential area, and is expected to house 2 million people. Despite mega-projects like this, Saudi Arabia is running a budget surplus. It has paid down much of the foreign debt it accumulated in the late 1990s and is adding to its foreign-exchange reserves. Russia, the world's No. 2 oil exporter, shows oil's transformational impact in the political as well as the economic realm. When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, less than two years after the collapse of the ruble and Russia's default on its international debt, the country's policymakers worried that 2003 could bring another financial crisis. The country's foreign-debt repayments were scheduled to peak at $17 billion that year. Inside the Kremlin, with Putin nearing the end of his second and final term as president, that sum now looks like peanuts. Russia's gold and foreign-currency reserves have risen by more than that amount just since July. The soaring price of oil has helped Russia increase the federal budget tenfold since 1999 while paying off its foreign debt and building the third-largest gold and hard-currency reserves in the world, about $425 billion. "The government is much stronger, much more self-assured and self-confident," said Vladimir Milov, head of the Institute of Energy Policy in Moscow and a former deputy minister of energy. "It believes it can cope with any economic crisis at home." With good reason. Using energy revenue, the government has built up a $150 billion rainy-day account called the Stabilization Fund. "This financial independence has contributed to more assertive actions by Russia in the international arena," Milov said. "There is a strong drive within part of the elite to show that we are off our knees." The result: Russia is trying to reclaim former Soviet republics as part of its sphere of influence. Freed of the need to curry favor with foreign oil companies and Western bankers, Russia can resist what it views as American expansionism, particularly regarding NATO enlargement and U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, and forge an independent approach to contentious issues like Iran's nuclear program. The abundance of petrodollars has also led to a consumer boom evident in the sprawling malls, 24-hour hyper-markets, new apartment and office buildings, and foreign cars that have become commonplace not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg but in provincial cities. Average income has doubled under Putin, and the number of people living below the poverty line has been cut in half. But many economists have called petroleum reserves a bane, saying they enable oil-rich countries to avoid taking steps that would diversify their economies and spread wealth more equally. Russia, for example, has rising inflation, soaring imports and a lack of new investment in the very industry that is fueling the boom. 'Our Oil Wealth Is a Curse'
The problems are worse in Nigeria, which is battling an insurgency that has curtailed output in the oil-rich Niger River Delta. The central government has been disbursing its remaining oil revenue, though corruption has undermined the program's effectiveness. The government has also cut domestic gas subsidies, raising prices several times over in the name of improving health, education and infrastructure. "Our oil wealth is a curse rather than a blessing for our country," said Halima Dahiru, a 36-year-old housewife, as she waited for a bus near a Texaco station in Kano, the commercial capital of northern Nigeria. Billows of dust enveloped the gas station as vehicles frenetically cruised along the laterite-covered road, adding to the harmattan haze that blankets the city. "You go to bed and wake up the next morning to hear the government has increased the price of petrol, and you have to live with it," she said. "The only sensible thing to do is to adjust to the new reality because nothing will make the government listen to public outcry." Newly oil-exporting countries such as Sudan and Chad and the companies operating there -- including Malaysia's Petronas and France's Total -- are winners. Sudan's capital, Khartoum, is booming, with new skyscrapers and five-star luxury hotels, despite U.S. and European sanctions aimed at pressuring the country to halt attacks against people in the western Darfur region. Chad's government has used some of its oil revenue to buy weapons rather than develop the country's economy. In eastern Chad, there are hardly any gas stations; people buy their gas -- often for motorcycles, not cars -- from roadside stands that sell it out of glass bottles. Oil-importing countries face their own challenges. The hardest hit are the poorest. Last year, Senegal's budget deficit doubled, inflation quickened and growth slowed. The cash-strapped state-owned petrochemical business had to shut down for long periods. In China, the government increased domestic pump prices on Oct. 31 by nearly 10 percent with shortages, rationing and long lines throughout the country. Violence broke out at some gas stations, including an incident last week in Henan province in which one man killed another who had chastised him for jumping to the front of a line for gas. A scarcity of diesel fuel even hit China's richest cities -- Beijing, Shanghai and trading ports on the east coast -- which in the past have been kept well supplied. In Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, the wait at some gas stations this week was more than three hours, and lines stretched more than 200 yards. Rumors circulated that gas stations or the government was hoarding fuel in anticipation of further price increases, prompting the official New China News Agency to warn that anyone caught spreading rumors about fuel-price increases will be "severely punished." Li Leijun, 37, a taxi driver, said he was so angry that he was unable to buy fuel that he argued with gas station attendants and called the police. "I still didn't get any diesel," he said. Since shedding orthodox Maoist economic policies, China's leaders have unleashed decades of pent-up demand. China consumes 9 percent of world oil output, up from 6.4 percent five years ago, according to the International Energy Agency. Yet it still subsidizes fuel. As a result, consumption this decade has skyrocketed at an 8.7 percent annual rate despite soaring prices and concerns about the environmental impact of profligate fuel use. Consumption in South Africa is also defying high prices as long-impoverished blacks join the middle and upper classes. Cars are a status symbol, and gasoline consumption jumped 39 percent in the decade after the end of apartheid in 1994. New-vehicle sales last year rose 15.7 percent over 2005. Highly developed consumer nations have been better able to adapt. In Japan, which relies on imports for nearly 100 percent of its fuel, nearly everyone is a loser -- with the big exception of Toyota. Yet Japan has been weaning itself off oil for years. It now imports 16 percent less oil than it did in 1973, although the economy has more than doubled. Billions of dollars were invested to convert oil-reliant electricity-generation systems into ones powered by natural gas, coal, nuclear energy or alternative fuels. Japan accounts for 48 percent of the globe's solar-power generation -- compared with 15 percent in the United States. The adoption rate for fluorescent light bulbs is 80 percent, compared with 6 percent in the United States. Still, rising fuel prices are pushing up the prices of raw and industrial materials, as well as food, which relies on fertilizers and transportation. Because of rising wheat prices, Nissin Food Products, the instant-noodle industry leader, will increase prices 7 to 11 percent in January, the first price hike in 17 years. Greasing Toyota's Gears
A winner is Toyota. Soaring gasoline prices have buffed the image of the hybrid Prius and Toyota's other fuel-efficient models, such as the Camry and Corolla. Although stagnant in Japan, sales were strong in North America, Europe, Asia and emerging markets. In October, Prius sales stood at 13,158 vehicles, up 51 percent from 8,733 in October last year. Worldwide, the number of hybrid cars sold by Toyota surpassed 1 million in May. Britain's national average gasoline price topped 1 pound per liter, or about $8 a gallon, for the first time this week because of record oil prices. "But there is very little publicity about it -- you don't see many headlines saying, 'Oil at all-time record high,' " said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a published by the Energy Institute in London. "It's different from the United States. Here, everyone has just accepted that it is expensive." While British drivers are feeling the pinch, the government is gaining revenue, Skrebowski said, because about 80 percent of the cost of gas is tax. Because Britain produces almost all the oil it consumes, its economy has been cushioned against increasing oil prices, Skrebowski said. But Britain's North Sea oil production is dwindling, having peaked in 1999 at 2.6 million barrels per day. Today, production is 1.4 million to 1.6 million barrels per day, Skrebowski said, while domestic oil consumption is about 1.7 million barrels a day. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took office in June, has made energy independence a priority. Meanwhile, analysts said, Europeans buying oil priced in dollars are finding the rising prices somewhat cushioned by the strength of their currency. The value of the dollar has been sliding to record lows against the euro and the British pound. Argentina has tried to keep fuel prices for consumers at artificially low levels. President N¿stor Kirchner in recent years has leaned heavily on energy companies to keep prices down, going so far as to call for a public boycott of Royal Dutch Shell when the company raised pump prices. Individual suppliers -- wary of attracting the ire of the government -- have adopted a policy of raising prices gradually and by small amounts. As the market pressures have mounted, Kirchner has signed a series of agreements with Venezuelan President Hugo Ch¿vez. This year, the two created a project called Petrosuramerica, a joint venture designed to promote cooperative energy projects and provide energy security to Argentina. In Brazil, the region's largest economy, high oil prices have had a different political effect. Last year, the country became a net oil exporter, thanks to major increases in domestic oil exploration and the country's broad use of sugar-based ethanol as a transport fuel. But new oil wealth can trickle away even more easily than it comes. Last month, Standard & Poor's downgraded Kazakhstan's credit rating after the country's banks lost billions on purchases of subprime mortgages. Correspondents Peter Finn in Moscow, Blaine Harden in Tokyo, Ariana Eunjung Cha in Shanghai, Kevin Sullivan in London, Craig Timberg in Johannesburg, Stephanie McCrummen in Nairobi, Monte Reel in Buenos Aires and Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, and special correspondents Aminu Abubakar in Kano, Nigeria, and Alia Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report. |
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Friday, November 09, 2007 | The Little Gold Man Made Me Do It The Oscars 
From left, Gary Hershorn/Reuters; Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press; Timothy A. Clary/Agence France--Presse Touched by Oscar gold, from left: Charlize Theron, best actress for "Monster" (2003); Philip Seymour Hoffman, best actor for "Capote" (2005); and Halle Berry, best actress for "Monster's Ball" (2001). November 4, 2007 The Little Gold Man Made Me Do It SERIOUS moviegoers tend to view the Oscars as a sideshow, and a déclassé one at that, with little relation to quality cinema. Important Films, the convention holds, do not don a revealing frock and traipse the red carpet, risking a fondling by Isaac Mizrahi. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' growing tendency to nominate and vote for ambitious, risky films — movies that reside outside the forest of studio blockbusters — suggests that the annual bacchanal actually nurtures important work. In a business that is almost always about the money, the appeal to vanity — a shot at the most coveted prize in almost any industry — has yielded the so-called Oscar film, a movie aimed at adults that makes its debut late in the year with an eye toward getting a date with the statue. The current season is thick with such releases: "Atonement," "Charlie Wilson's War," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "Into the Wild," "Lars and the Real Girl," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood" and many others. Oscar hopes undoubtedly played a role in the executive decision to approve these movies, which are not exactly going to have hordes of teenagers lining up at the multiplex. That is not to say that absent gold-plated dreams, some of these films wouldn't have been made, only that more of them made it to a significant number of theaters, and did so with the kind of budgets and stars that can make for great movies. If the conceit holds true — industry insiders say the word "Oscar" comes up in serious movie pitches as much as "and" and "the" — people who care about serious "fil-lims" should skip the marathon of Iranian documentaries on Feb. 24 and assemble some friends and nachos to watch this year's Oscars, with Jon Stewart as host. It would be nice if there were a pot of gold statues at the end of this particular holiday season, because after healthy summer box-office grosses it's been brutal out there. All sorts of serious movies have collided and then collapsed in the fight for audiences. The filmgoing public is all the better for all these movies, but the dreary financial numbers will go down a little better if film companies are in the hunt for an Oscar, the kind of recognition that could provide a boost for movies that still have a ways to go to recoup their costs. The general formula for most filmmaking could be broken down thusly: Concept + stars + brute-force marketing = hoped-for payday. The studio system, with a need to appeal to plenty of people with huge opening weekends, does not generally lead to great cinema. But when the hydraulics of prestige are introduced into that equation, odd and wonderful things can happen. Big paydays are forgone by actors, directors work with (and for) far less money, and studios put money and promotion into films that have limited financial horizons. Actors, producers and directors know that when all is said and done, their obituaries are not going to mention their lifetime box-office tallies. The Oscars, by forcefully acknowledging artistic excellence, help people access the angels of their better natures. "Oscar movies can be a kind of check and balance that can produce innovation, movies that break new ground and point the way for the future," said David Poland of the Web site Movie City News (moviecitynews.com). Making movies is a trying collective endeavor, and attempting to make one that contains difficult subject matter — the best-picture nominees in 2005 tackled journalism, homophobia, racism and terrorism — can be Sisyphean. No one ever got chased off a studio lot for not failing to back, say, a multilingual triptych about the vagaries of human communication like "Babel," a movie that Paramount Vantage backed last year to a best-picture nomination. John Lesher, president of Paramount Vantage, Paramount's specialty film division, said the film was made because it was a good idea, not because it might win awards. But once "Babel" was in the hunt, "it helped brand the film," he said. "It is less about making a prestige film than the fact that actors want to do good work in addition to making blockbusters. The best, most interesting careers do both." And if generating great big box-office returns were the only consideration, how much work would we be seeing from Philip Seymour Hoffman, the anti-movie star who hardly meets the studio standard for "relatability" but seems to be one of the best actors on the planet and won the best-actor Oscar for the 2005 film "Capote"? As it is, he is present this season in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and "The Savages." "Think of how many projects get made because their backers think or hope or dream that they are going to be Oscar movies," said Sasha Stone, the longtime Academy blogger who runs Awards Daily (awardsdaily.com). "The answer this year, and most, is a lot." Much of the Oscar appetite is coming from the actors themselves. After Halle Berry revealed much of herself in "Monster's Ball" for a best-actress win for 2001 and Charlize Theron disappeared under mounds of makeup in "Monster" to similar effect for the 2003 award, actors realized that more than ever, forgoing a big check in the short run for a vivid turn in a high-quality movie could lead to long-running credibility and perhaps bigger roles down the road. "Actors and directors say the word to their agents, and their agents say it to them to get them to do a movie," said Mark Gill, chief executive of the Film Department, a new independent company. "It may not be the sun — the be-all and end-all — but it is certainly the moon, with a significant gravitational pull." Industry executives said that the Oscars have become part of the lexicon of making deals, with contracts that offer bonuses for nominations and awards, even getting down to the specifics of an Oscar campaign in support of the movie. And a financial calculus of another sort is entering the picture along with some of the newer players in the industry. "There's a lot of fresh money coming into our business," said David T. Friendly, who received a nomination last year as a producer of "Little Miss Sunshine." "Most of these investors have already made their fortunes. So what are they really after? A lot of them are trying to make films that make a difference and movies that might land them that ultimate prize." And say what you want about the Oscars, there is no sure-fire way to game the Academy process, other than finding great directors and giving them the resources to make an ambitious film. Cynics and outsiders like to suggest that Academy members are too far removed from the cultural mainstream to reflect the best of contemporary cinema. But a look at the choices for best picture in recent years suggests that they don't always play it safe. In 2005 "Million Dollar Baby" came out of nowhere to win, and "Crash" took the same route in 2006. Like them or hate them, they still represented fully realized visions that had nothing to do with selling action figures. The allure of the Oscar is precious precisely because there are so few of them — one best movie, one best actor, one best actress — and because the award maintains fundamental integrity. The Academy process, for all its excesses, still carries great weight in the industry in part because it represents the will of 5,800 members from all branches of the industry, both active and retired. "A lot of us in the Academy take our membership as a kind of fiduciary responsibility," said Robert Shaye, co-chief executive of New Line Cinema. "We are being asked what we want the world to see of our industry, and that inspires respect and even some awe from those who accept the responsibility." Sure, there are occasional outrages — few would argue in retrospect that "Dances With Wolves" is a better movie than "Goodfellas," as the Academy did in 1990 — but things started to change in the mid-1990s, most especially in 1996. That's when four small movies — "The English Patient," which won, "Fargo," "Secrets and Lies" and "Shine" — all became best-picture finalists, along with a single big-studio picture, "Jerry Maguire." And under Harvey Weinstein, Miramax proved that a specialty division, albeit with Disney's backing, could fight from the hills and win it all, as it did with "Shakespeare in Love" in the awards for 1998. James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features, Universal's boutique division, pointed out that many of the current Academy members came of age professionally in the '60s and '70s during an explosion of ambitious cinema. Their reflex, he said, is toward taking artistic risks. "The Academy has stepped out of the mainstream in many of their choices over the past few years because many of the people who are voting have that rebel spirit from those days," said Mr. Schamus, whose offerings this Oscar season include "Atonement" and Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution." "But there is no sure way to make that happen. You can't put the cart before the horse. We all have dreams of holding a statue and thanking all the little people, but you have to do the work on a great movie that succeeds in a very certain way. And that's no simple matter."
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