A few weeks back a colleague here was going around the office saying: “I feel like reading a book about China. Does anyone know a good one?” At the time, I didn’t have an answer, but now I do: Jonathan Watts’s “When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It.”

The book is engagingly written account of the paradox that is China written in the form of an epic travelogue that starts in Shangri-La and ends in Xanadu. British journalist Watts has a good eye both for the big picture and the telling detail. Although he tries mightily to dish out the pessimism and optimism in equal portions, I think the dark side looms larger overall.

For instance, Watts notes that China is an authoritarian country whose leaders have staked their legitimacy on economic growth and nationalism rather than on a popular mandate. Many analysts, Watts says, argue that if China were more democratic, popular will would create a national climate (pardon the pun) for the kinds of limits needed to curb pollution and protect the environment. But Watts argues this matter is not so simple:

In short, China’s problem is the same as the rest of the world’s, only it is bigger because there are more Chinese and they have the money to make this dream/nightmare come true. Watts sums up the issue nicely in one sentence: “If the planets resources were priced properly for their long-term value to future generations, rather than their immediate accessibility, mankind might just be able to avoid a disastrous fight for what’s left.”

I recently had the chance to speak with U.S. philosopher and educator Martha Nussbaum about her recent book "Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs The Humanities."

"If we want freedom, we have to produce it -- and this is a recipe for doing that," she said, arguing that only a firm grounding in critical thinking and liberal arts can properly prepare citizens for the responsibilities of maintaining a democracy. It is also, she adds, good for economic competiveness.

Read the complete interview here. And let me know what you think.

One of the big problems that development specialists have with the “economic-growth” model that has dominated thinking for decades now (the idea that a country is healthy only if its economy is growing and the faster it grows, the better the country must be doing) is that it doesn’t take into consideration the problem of unequal wealth distribution.

And unequal wealth distribution is a problem that grows exponentially; after all, the old saying is definitely true that, all other things being equal, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Is it good news, as “The Economist” reports this week, that there are now more millionaires in the world (24.2 million) than there are Australians? Wealth tends to concentrate, and the globe’s tiny wealthy elite is taking more and more of the pie. That is the cover story of this month’s “Atlantic” magazine and it makes for some dismal reading.

“The Economist” – which cannot shirk its responsibility as one of the global cheerleaders for the blinkered thinking that got the world into a situation where billions suffer while a handful imagines ever more bizarre and disgusting ways to spend their money – reminds us this week of an image that the late Dutch economist Jan Pen used to help us visualize the state of the United States today:

(visualization by Russian Sphinx)

Do you imagine that in the future we will be driving emissions-free electric cars or hybrids powered by renewable biofuels?

When you think of cars, do you associate them with freedom, mobility, convenience, and opportunity?

When you think of road safety, do you think of seat belts, air bags, instructing children on how to safely cross streets, or cyclists wearing high-visibility clothes?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, it may be because the discussion of these issues has been dominated for decades by powerful interests in the automobile and hydrocarbon industries.

“There are different ways we can respond to the road-safety problem,” says Ian Roberts, a professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the 2010 book “The Energy Glut: Climate Change And The Politics Of Fatness.” “Some of those ways are very beneficial for public health and the sustainability of the planet. For example, redesigning urban environments so that they are safe for walking and cycling is the obvious thing to do.”

“But those aren’t the sorts of solutions that the car industry prefers because they are solutions that don’t promote the use of motor vehicles,” Roberts told me in a recent telephone interview from London. “Whereas solutions like getting cyclists to wear helmets and teaching children how dangerous the road is are very popular with carmakers. And you don’t have to be a genius to see why.”

When vested interests seize the agenda on issues like this, it is called “corporate capture.”

Take the example of breakaway street signs and streetlights. A few decades back, it was noticed that a lot of drivers were seriously injured or killed by plowing into rigid, fixed poles on streets and highways.

The “obvious” solution? Re-engineer the poles so that they break away on impact, of course. People inside the car are safer, of course, and it doesn’t much matter about the added potential danger to people outside the car, right? Or the cost of re-engineering the poles and replacing all the broken ones. Look at the pictures in this article and you can see that the two breakaway poles functioned perfectly and the driver escaped without injury.

In general, industry loves “engineering” and “technological” solutions to problems, especially when (as with biofuels and electric cars) developing the technology and promoting its adoption are heavily subsidized by the government.

But while these schemes could help reduce the operating emissions of road transport, they do nothing to respond to the public-health crisis, to the breakdown of communities, to the stress and congestion issues, and the intense carbon footprint involved in producing and disposing of automobiles, and so on. And the use of rare-earth metals for car batteries and precious arable land for fuel production create a host of new resource-related issues that could be as geopolitically destabilizing as the oil industry has been.

Take a look at the “Fortune” list of the world’s leading companies. Eleven of the top 20 for 2010 (even after the global economic crisis) are either oil and gas companies or automakers. Many of the other nine are electric companies (electric cars!) and insurance or financial companies that are heavily vested in the automobile. No. 13, General Electric, is also hot for the electric car market ("Charging ahead!").

The No. 1 company is Wal-Mart, whose entire business model is based on the car (what percentage of Wal-Mart customers walk or cycle to do their shopping? Just getting from the street to the store is exhausting and nerve-racking.).

In “The Energy Glut,” Roberts gives the powerful example of the Commission for Global Road Safety (CGRS) that was set up in 2006 by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). The blue-ribbon panel was originally chaired by former UK Defense Secretary and former NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson (Robertson is also a member of the board of directors of the Russian oil company TNK-BP).

The commission includes one representative from each of the G8 countries, and, as Roberts puts it, “if you wanted to represent the interest of motoring classes, you could not put together a more able group of commissioners.” Canada: executive director of General Motors. Japan: a board member of the Bridgestone Corporation, a major tire producer. Russia: the president of the Russian Automobile Federation. Italy: a former president of the Automobile Club of Italy. Germany: retired Formula-One driver Michael Schumacher. And so on.

(The FIA has responded to Roberts's criticism by asserting "the FIA Foundation has no relationship with industry whatsoever and plays a leading role in promoting higher automobile safety standards worldwide, for example through independent consumer crash test programmes.")

Although automobiles kill more than a million people each year globally and cause billions of dollars worth of damage and public costs, the commission’s main recommendations have been to hold a “ministerial-level conference on road safety” (which took place in Moscow in 2009) and to ask the United Nations to declare 2011-20 the “decade of action for road safety.” The commission has also urged the World Bank to “ensure that at least 10 percent of their road budgets are dedicated to road safety measures.”

According to Roberts, the words “speed limit” appear only once in the main CGRS report, while the words “buses” and “cyclists” do not appear at all.

In large part, as a result of corporate capture at the political, economic, and public-relations level, imaging a world where cars are not the primary mode of transportation is practically impossible for many people.

Likewise, they can’t understand that cars restrict freedom as much or more than they enhance it, by turning our towns and cities into empty parking lots and clogged, uncrossable roadways.

They can’t think that road safety can best be enhanced by offering people a choice of modes of transport, reducing traffic speeds, and producing smaller, less powerful, less “sexy” cars that are treated as tools instead of toys (What, for example, is the message behind this kind of BBC programming?).

And so the destructive march goes on despite the clear logic behind reducing global automobile dependency. Governments around the world continue to prop up the automobile industry and to subsidize driving on an unfathomable scale. At a major auto industry show in the dying city of Detroit this month, General Motors introduced the Chrysler 300. “It is an unapologetically large car that [a spokesman] predicted would appeal to consumers not interested in downsizing,” “The New York Times” reported.

What is needed is a major paradigm shift, Roberts says, such as when the world changed its mind about slavery. There was a time when “you couldn’t possibly imagine a world without slaves,” he says, “but such a world came to pass, and it came to pass quite quickly once the abolitionist movement got started.”

He also compares the issue to the development of public sanitation. There was a time when “we always threw our sewage into the streets. And there were problems about it, but we thought: ‘Well, we’ve always done it this way.’ But it changed. And that's another one that changed quite quickly. Sorting out the sewage was considered one of the great public-health advances of the last 200 years, and I think sorting our decarbonization of transport and society more generally will be the next great public-health advance.”

Tellingly, in 1848, “The Economist” editorialized (see page 61 of this link) against the installation of public sanitation, writing: “Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.”

That same august publication earlier this month expressed pessimism about changing mentalities in London on driving: “Economists might recognise a phenomenon called ‘path dependency’; London has for so long been dominated by cars that installing proper cycle lanes might mean demolishing some buildings and closing busy roads for long periods. With cycling accounting for only one trip in 50, it would be a brave mayor who did that.”

Books like “The Energy Glut” have to potential to help people break away from the “corporate capture” of these crucial questions. Roberts says part of that corporate capture has been the spreading of the idea that decarbonization means “darkness and coldness and toil.”

But as a pediatrician and a public-health expert, Roberts has a completely different perspective. “I think that decarbonization could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity,” he says. “We could be healthier, happier, fitter, leaner, with stronger communities, safer urban environments, socially useful jobs. It could be the best thing to happen to us.”

And, in closing, another exercise in perspective. At the recent Detroit auto show, Volvo crashed one of its new electric cars to show “that its electric cars are just as safe as every other Volvo on the road.” For the person inside the car, maybe. For the people outside the car, it is clearly just as dangerous as every other car on the road. (Volvo is also big on promoting the use of bicycle helmets.)

Here's a graphic video of a traffic incident in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2010:

In a recent post, I wrote about the role of universities in fostering the “liquid networks” that many sociologists believe are necessary for fostering innovation (to say nothing of personal satisfaction).

I wrote about how four post-Soviet countries have made dramatic progress in fighting corruption and moving beyond other Soviet-era governance habits by including large numbers of foreign-educated people into the highest levels of government. At the same time, Russia and the other 10 post-Soviet countries have very closed government circles and have made little progress in reshaping their political cultures. (To be fair, perhaps it would be best to put Ukraine and Moldova somewhere in the middle.)

The post also described a new Russian effort to attract foreign-educated Russians back to Russia to push forward that country’s “modernization effort.”

As a follow-up to that post, I noticed today on the website of the Russian business daily “Vedomosti” this piece on Russian business education. It seems to capture the futility of working within the closed system of Russia (I remind you that not a single member of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s cabinet has any foreign education at all).

Sergei Aleksashenko, who is director of macroeconomic research at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, was asked to recommend a good business school in Russia. This is his response in full:

It is a familiar story by now. A perfectly functioning iPod with a jagged crack across the glass. I take it to an Apple dealer and am told they don’t fix such things and that, in general, it would be “cheaper” just to buy a new one.

And the new one is even better, featuring Bells And Whistles 2.0 and a countdown app that will ring an alarm in exactly 18 months when my new device is hopelessly out of date.

After getting the same story at several places, I finally find a place that will replace my faithful friend’s cracked visage. And, as I was told, it would have been “cheaper” to get a new one. Feeling like a fool, I make the stupidly uneconomical choice of buying about 40 square centimeters of glass for the price of one of the latest achievements of Western civilization.

Of course, buying a new iPod is only “cheaper” if one ignores the cost of dumping the old one into the landfill and cleaning up (eventually) or paying for the health consequences of the toxins that will inevitably leak out of it. And if we don't count the lost opportunity costs of the resources consumed. Much has been written about how modern gadgets are intentionally “designed for the dump” (see the video above), but no one seems to be taking this seriously.

In an article pegged to the holiday buying binge, “The New York Times” reported that Americans alone own over 3 billion electronic devices and the turnover rate for these toys is 400 million units a year. Less than 14 percent of them are recycled at all. And one recycling scheme featured in the article is from retailer Best Buy, which will accept your items and even give you a nice gift certificate so you can turn around and buy a new one. Are the electronics being re-cycled, or are the consumers?

Fastcompany.com has a similarly bleak report – 140 million mobile phones are discarded in the United States each year and just 10 percent are recycled at all. One cell phone contains enough toxins to contaminate 40,000 gallons of water, but just 24 states have laws banning them from being dumped in landfills. (Sadly, we can't eat them yet, but Japan is working on that.)

At the same time, the life cycle of each product gets shorter and shorter. The iPod touch has come out with a new, “improved!” model each September since 2007. The iPhone  4 has rendered the 3G, which just a few weeks ago was all the rage, obsolete. The iPad 2 (two cameras! USB port!) is on its way in April, probably timed in such a way as to allow Apple to come out with the iPad 3 in time for next Christmas.

A lot has been written about the promise and pitfalls of technology as a solution to poverty and underdevelopment. The “Boston Review” recently published a provocative series of essays on this very topic, including one by Nicholas Negroponte, who heads the well-known One Laptop Per Child project. Two million laptops distributed in 40 countries and counting.

Negroponte writes:

Impressive numbers, of course, but they don’t really show whether such projects are doing anything to “end poverty.” Isn’t it possible that distributing bicycles to everyone in Peru or Rwanda or Uruguay might be even more effective at reducing isolation, stimulating local economic development, making it safer and faster for children to go to school, improve access to health care, and so on? Maybe that’s a technology that can really reduce poverty.

Who is going to upgrade all those kids to One Laptop Per Child 2.0 when the developed world moves on and the skills they are gaining with their old laptops are about as useful as being able to operate an eight-track player? French journalist Jean-Christophe Laurence has made this funny, but disturbing video of  kids confronted with a kaleidoscope of  technologies that were the cutting edge at one time or another over the last three or four decades (h/t to RFE/RL’s Tangled Web blog).

Environmental activist Colin Beavan (No Impact Man) described the dilemma in a short essay on “progress” that is worth quoting at some length:

It is believed Azerbaijan’s name came from the ancient Persian phrase “land of fire,” an early tribute to the country’s prodigious reserves of oil.

The latest tribute to this natural bounty comes in the form of a snappy techno tune called “Petrol” by pop diva Aygun Kazimova and popular rapper Miri Yusif. The official video was filmed at a gleaming gas station owned by Azpetrol, which controls about 50 percent of the country’s gas market. It is full of gleaming automobiles and motorcycles.

On the surface, the lyrics, though, match the upbeat rhythms and, not coincidentally, the official line of the Azerbaijan government:

But is this poppy hymn really so straightforward? The night shoot of the video and the overall black tones give it a distinctly dystopian feel.


The legions of faceless, helmeted motorcycle riders pulling through the gas station evoke Iran’s oppressive Basij militia or Azerbaijan’s own notorious riot police.

The moronic-looking station attendants mechanically pumping gas are equally disturbing.

And could the line about making “our cold days warmer” be a nod to the link between oil dependence and climate change?
And what about the ending? Since independence, Azerbaijan’s economy has been something of a one-hit wonder based on oil. The government has been criticized for doing little to pave the way for the time when the wells run dry. The “Petrol” video ends abruptly, without warning, on a close-up shot of Kazimova with a wry smirk on her face. I’m not so sure she loves gasoline quite as much as it seems.