Deep Currents

Leverage is a dirty word these days, since most of the world had never heard of it until it became public knowledge that our banks were gorging on it. But as Obama considers how to allocate his stimulus package, I’d like to invite you to take a step back and consider the basic idea from physics of using a fulcrum to get a powerful shove out of a small push. There are a number of ideas being tossed around about how the government could best spend a trillion or so to get the economy back on its feet, ranging from transit infrastructure to defense spending to clean energy. Continue reading

The Times’ Nick Kristof asks:

If a businessman rakes in a hefty profit while doing good works, is that charity or greed? Do we applaud or hiss?

Applaud, of course. They’re helping. But call them by a different name if you’re finding it confusing to put profit-takers and donation-takers in the same bucket. In his column, Kristof goes on to describe a number of profit-driven organizations whose operations help social causes. Continue reading

Browsing the New York Times, I came across an interesting article about the first serious malware infection to travel through the social networks, “Koobface.” The byline? Sarah Perez. Next to the byline? ReadWriteWeb, the blog where she’s one of a team of authors. Not just the words, mind you, but the logo, with a link to the blog. The article wasn’t a ReadWriteWeb post, so this doesn’t mean the Times is syndicating blog posts. But it is hiring bloggers as journalists and promoting them on the basis of their blogger fame. Not hugely surprising, of course, but I find it an interesting hybrid of the centralized newspaper and decentralized blogger models. Many people have blogged their way into a new career. Many journalists have picked up side jobs as bloggers, switched over to blogging entirely, or used blogging to build a personal brand separate from where they publish commercially. For bloggers to pick up jobs as part-time journalists just adds one new layer to that web. 

Here’s an interesting new model for producing news in a sputtering economy and a dying industry: do the writing in India. This does not bode well for American journalists. (Then again, not much does.) That’s what this guy did to streamline his local Pasadena paper:

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

This is the most revolutionary idea I’ve heard in news since I saw David Cohn’s new start-up spot.us, which is pioneering a community-funded model for local reporting. It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. Clearly quite a bit of reporting can be done from afar. As with any matter of outsourcing, the real question is: what can’t be done from India?

The result of the attacks in Mumbai could be a spike in the tensions between Hindus and Muslims that have dogged India for much of the last decade, reversing the recent progress with Pakistan and perhaps even resulting ina Hindu nationalist government in the next cycle, speculates Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic:

…the immediate result of the Mumbai terror attacks will be a further hardening of inter-communal relations within India. The latest attacks will also increase the likelihood that in national elections slated for early 2009, the result will be a BJP-led government, as Hindus, who comprise the overwhelming majority of Indian voters, take on another layer of insecurity.

Internationally, this event will further aggravate Indian-Pakistani relations, making it harder for the incoming Obama Administration to effect a rapprochement between the two countries, necessary for progress in Afghanistan, where the two subcontinental states are engaged in a proxy struggle that goes on behind the immediate conflict between the United States and al-Qaeda.

Providing massive economic growth has been the core strength of the Chinese Communist Party since Deng Xiaoping. But today the Chinese economy is faltering, and the World Bank just released a report detailing the many uncertainties that it faces as the world heads into what could be an extended downturn:

With global growth prospects for 2009 weaker than they have been in a long time, China’s economy is braced for a significant further slowdown, says the World Bank’s latest edition of the China Quarterly Update. Fortunately, China’s domestic economy has several sources of strength, including still robust growth in several parts and strong macroeconomic fundamentals that provide room for policy stimulus to dampen the downturn. What does this all mean, for China and the rest of the World?

Brad Setser at the Council on Foreign Relations sums up the following top 7 take-aways:

1. China was no workers’ paradise during the boom years.
2. China really is a manufacturing and investment driven economy.
3. China’s current slowdown was made in China, not in the world.
4. There is more bad news ahead.
5. The fiscal stimulus is real, but modest. 
6. The last thing anyone needs to worry about is fall in Chinese demand for US treasuries.
7. The way China manages its reserves matters immensely for the world not just China

Now that we know what the Boomers will be doing in the next 20 years, we can move on to the generation that is now the largest in America: the Millennials, those of us born between 1978 and 2000, who are already taking the reins. The new book Generation We (free online!) has a decidedly positive spin on what kind of attitudes we bring to the table: Continue reading

The Financial Times has a piece that neatly sums up the driving forces behind the drug war that rages on in Mexico, where the government’s control over its own territory now resembles swiss cheese and high-ranking police officers have been caught in the pay of organized crime:

• The cocaine market in the U.S. is maturing, leading to turf wars
• President Calderón allowed some of the barons to be extradited to the U.S., removing the executives from a number of operations and leading to succession battles
• President Calderón sent in the army to confront the gangs, which has stirred the pot

These gangs rank among the best example in the world today of the global guerrillas that John Robb has predicted. They’re on our southern doorstep, and we’re funding them with our weekend partying. 

The horrific attacks that occurred in Mumbai today–and may still be ongoing–were the first act of spectacular terrorism in quite some time. Not much is known just yet. The Times has a few photos, there are more on Flickr, Metroblogging Mumbai has ongoing commentary, and Dina is one of many local Tweeters who are providing moment-to-moment updates. GroundReport is doing a good job of aggregating citizen reports. Both Wikipedia and Mahalo have constantly updated pages with known facts. Continue reading

The numerous Boomers have made their mark on the world in every decade, and the next two will be no exception. The Institute for the Future just did a study on how they’re likely to be living in 2028, called “Boomers: The Next 20 Years, Ecologies of Risk.” Here are the top-line conclusions:

Continue reading