The Last Mile

Rural electrification in Vietnam

This video, produced by the World Bank, documents the success story in rural electrification over the last decade where access improved from 55% in 1998 to over 95 % in 2008. But the real interesting story lies in how it was done and what lessons other developing countries can draw from this work.

As the primary author of this work, I was recently asked by the World Bank to examine the reasons for the success and also to delineate the lessons that may be of more universal relevance. Here are my preliminary findings:

Investment in preparation before designing a project is essential. This implies spending considerable time in the field talking and discussing with those who the project purports to help. We visited over 100 communes in 30 provinces over a period of nine months before finalizing the design of the project.

Participation of the local people needs to encompass all elements of the project - from design to operations. We required all communes to provide written commitments from the households in regard to bearing their share of initial investments and in regular payments of the operating costs.

Local commitment is the sina qua non of any work and it should be enshrined in some form of cost sharing. A basic principle of the work was that nothing would be given free though some amount of subsidies would be provided for the initial investments.

Once the project is completed, it should be clear that subsequent management would be the fundamental responsibility of the local people.

A design which ensure some form of early returns to the local community has a greater chance of success. This may be by providing opportunity for participation in construction contracts or making sure that adequate number of people join the project immediately after completion etc.

Training of local participants to take over management and operations needs to start early in the project work.

In rural electrification, it is essential also to focus on productive uses of power so that there are long term returns on the investments made by the local participants.

A more detailed note is under preparation ie after I have revisited Vietnam to talk directly to those whom this project benefitted!

Profiles in cowardice

Every year Profile in Courage Awards are given to recognize individuals who, by acting in accord with their conscience, risked their careers or lives by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state or local interest in opposition to popular opinion or pressure from constituents or other local interests. This award was created in 1989 to recognize and celebrate the quality of political courage and sought to make Americans aware of the conscientious and courageous acts of their public servants, and to encourage elected officials to choose principles over partisanship – to do what is right, rather than what is expedient

In recent days, though, one is increasingly forced to conclude that the present times require instead a different kind of award—a profile in cowardice award. This award needs to be given to politicians and public servants who betray the public trust, who refuse to stand up for their own beliefs, who cower behind platitudes and lies, and who find truth to be too uncomfortable to embrace.

It is not difficult to select them today—in the US it is the republican leadership who have been unable to stand up to the worst instincts of their followers, who have declined to uncover lies about death panels and health care and who have dragged the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to an abyss of nihilism and know-nothingness. Recent events have only further bared their cowardice as they refused to condemn their party representatives who called their President a liar and another member “ a baby killer”. By refusing to stand up and condemn these incidents as soon as they occurred they have become complicit in them, and indeed implicitly encouraged the environment of hate that seems to be enveloping the country today.

Despite their avowed commitment to the truth, media journalists recently have also fallen into the category of possible award winners. Under the guise of objectivity and “on the one hand and on the other hand” type of discourse, they have hewed so far away from the facts and truth, that they more resemble the journalists of the gutter press than a national newspaper. Indeed nothing has degraded the public discourse in the US than the TV networks- FOX TV and newspapers (even the Wall Street Journal) spawned by Rupert Murdoch. Yet main stream media are, with a few rare exceptions, afraid of calling these channels out on their outrageous assertions and instead cower under the flimsy pretext of being objective and presenting both sides of an issue. These too are deserving of the profiles in cowardice awards.

The fact is that as Dante once said that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality”.

In these times, it is also well to remember what Abe Lincoln said, and who President Obama quoted in his very eloquent address to his party of the eve of the vote on health care reform: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”

For the rest, his speech is a reminder of what it should mean to be a public servant and is worth listening to as well.

A Unique volunteerism

When my wife dialed 911 two weeks at midnight, our building was soon surrounded by fire engines with lights flashing and an ambulance from whence emergency medical technicians rushed to our apartment. These first emergency responders were there within ten minutes of the call. They were all young and they were all volunteers.

US is one of few countries that has volunteerism as an integral part of its social fabric. It was Alex Tocqueville, visiting the US in 1830, who concluded that "Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types–religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large, and very minute. These associations, according to him, formed bonds between people and helped people solve local problems locally. A volunteer garden club, for example, could plant flowers in public parks which helped beautify towns without costing the town money; it was a form of civic participation, in a sense, since it was related to the task of governing in a tangential way. Tocqueville thought town meetings were a "marvel of municipal freedom" and he was impressed how people could settle their affairs "with no distinction of rank”.

This tradition of civic participation still survives and indeed flourishes even today.According to Volunteering in America 2009, the most comprehensive data ever assembled on volunteer trends and demographics, a total of 61.8 million Americans volunteered through an organization in 2008, up one million from the previous year. America’s volunteers dedicated more than 8 billion hours of service in 2008, worth an estimated $162 billion. While the formal volunteering rate in America remained relatively stable at 26.4 percent, other less-formal ways of serving in communities have dramatically increased. The number of people who worked with their neighbors to fix a community problem rose by 31 percent, from 15.2 million in 2007 to 19.9 million in 2008, suggesting an emerging trend of self-organized ‘do-it-yourself’ service. More surprisingly the report also found an increase in volunteering by young adults (age 16-24), rising from 7.8 million in 2007 to 8.2 million in 2008. The volunteer rate of women increased from 29.4 percent in 2008 to 30.1 percent in 2009, while the volunteer rate for men, at 23.3 percent, was essentially unchanged. By age, 35- to 54-year olds were the most likely to volunteer with their volunteer rates hovering at about 31 percent. Volunteer rates were lowest among persons in their early twenties (18.8 percent) and those age 65 and over (23.9 percent). Among the major race and ethnicity groups, whites continued to volunteer at a higher rate (28.3 percent) than did blacks (20.2 percent), Asians (19.0 per- cent), and Hispanics (14.7 percent). Volunteer rates were higher among married persons (32.3 percent) than those who had never married (20.6 percent). Parents with children under age 18 were substantially more likely to volunteer than were persons without children under 18 years of age, 34.4 per-cent compared with 23.9 percent. Individuals with higher levels of educational attainment were also more likely to volunteer than were those with less education. Among persons age 25 and over, 42.8 percent of college graduates volunteered, compared with 18.8 percent of high school graduates and 8.6 percent of those with less than a high school diploma.

But the most intriguing part is that volunteers in the US man an overwhelming majority of fire fighting and emergency medical services. This is indeed unique. In most countries, these critical emergency services are considered to be part of the obligations of the state as much as defense services are. It is rather strange to find that the first responders in a crisis of a fire or medical emergency are all people who may live next door and have another profession by day! A prime example of this is the rescue squad that came to my residence two weeks ago.

The Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad was founded in 1937 and has evolved into one of the nations most advanced and best trained volunteer rescue squads. What began as a one-ambulance department operating out of a tiny garage in Northwest Washington, D.C. some seven decades ago, has now grown into one of the best-trained, best-equipped rescue squads in the nation, providing compassionate, life-saving services to the community. A tradition of “Answering the Call” was born that continues to this day.

Today this squad serves about 100,000 households in the area and it responded to about 10,000 calls last year, including heart attacks, illnesses, vehicle collisions, house fires, and many other emergencies. The Squad’s 150 professionally-trained volunteers, a daytime staff, and two Montgomery County Paramedics respond to over 30 calls for help every day. What is even more interesting is that the squad is not funded by the government. Instead it derives almost all of its operating funds from generous community donations and occasional state and federal grants. Last year it had total expenses of $1.9 million of which individual contributions made up $1.2 million or almost two thirds of the total. Yet through the use of volunteers, this squad saved taxpayers $3.6 million in personnel costs.

It is not that these volunteers are not professional or well trained. They are, and quite rigorously. The squad takes in those who are at least 18 years old and have a high school diploma, and are willing to spend at least one day a week for three years working in rescue operations. Once accepted, and having passed the mandatory physical, the volunteers can also be given training to become an Emergency Medical Technician. This training program consists of over 131 hours of classroom time coupled with additional in-hospital clinical requirements and countless hours spent riding Rescue Squad ambulances on actual emergency calls. The volunteers learn about patient assessment; CPR; bleeding control; fracture management; and medical, environmental, and obstetrical emergencies. They also learn how to use an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) to restart a heart. Some volunteers can go on to become Firefighters and/or Paramedics by taking additional instructions. Paramedics are required to take a 532-hour EMT-I class which leads to a higher level of medical training for pre-hospital care providers at the Rescue Squad. This advanced training prepares them to administer drugs, offer intravenous therapy, and interpret EKGs using a cardiac monitor. The 120-hour firefighter's course consists of extensive classroom instruction as well as physically demanding practical training, including live firefighting exercises. Training includes not just how to extinguish fires, but also skills needed to address a variety of emergency situations involving hazardous materials, electrical equipment, fire alarm and sprinkler systems, and many others. The training and rewarding life experiences one gains--as well as the value to the community--make the Rescue Squad an organization that can change ones life and certainly save others lives.

These volunteers are a tight, elite group that makes a valuable contribution to the community. This volunteer tradition saves lives. It certainly did mine.

Fighting corruption- some new tools

While corruption has always been with us, the corrosive effects on development have only been begun to be recognized in the past few years in any consistent way.International agencies like the World Bank, afraid of the word corruption, simply talked about governance. Other agencies like Transparency International sprang up to essentially shame public servants in different countries by providing an annual scorecard of " who is most corrupt".

I remember discussing this issue with senior ministers in Vietnam a decade ago where I argued that there were two levels of corruption in poor countries- one I called "retail" corruption which was the tea money bribes to low level functionaries to move files or get appointments, and the second, "wholesale" corruption which was about large government contracts that were awarded to selected contractors on payment of monies in the swiss bank accounts of politicians. As far as retail corruption was concerned, while it was irritating to deal with and lowered the morale and image of the public sector, it was not something that could be controlled easily if the economic level of the functionary was too low. With economic development, so the argument went, this would actually decline. However it was the wholesale corruption that really harmed the country but which was paradoxically easier to control if the political elite were so inclined through transparency and competitive bidding.

We are now seeing an outpouring of new stategies to tackle this age old problem. Here are some of some interest:

Some of the world's most baffling social problems, says Peter Eigen, can be traced to systematic, pervasive government corruption, hand-in-glove with global companies. At TEDxBerlin, Eigen describes the thrilling counter-attack led by his organization Transparency International.

Here is another approach
In another approach,5th Pillar,has developed a unique initiative to mobilize citizens to fight corruption. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. The idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. 5th Pillar took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative.

It seems that a number of factors contribute to the success of the zero rupee notes in fighting corruption in India. First, bribery is a crime in India punishable with jail time. Corrupt officials seldom encounter resistance by ordinary people that they become scared when people have the courage to show their zero rupee notes, effectively making a strong statement condemning bribery. In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight.

This last point—people knowing that they are not alone in the fight—seems to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to transforming norms vis-à-vis corruption. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realize that they are not alone, they also realize that this battle is not unbeatable. Then, a path opens up—a path that can pave the way for relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes to turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.

Who is Barack Obama?

Readers of my blogs will remember a piece I did on Obama in January arguing that it was premature to judge his achievements and that there was more to the man than the caricature shown in the main stream media around the world. Now I find that David Brooks, one of the most respected conservative columnist, makes essentially the same arguments in his recent piece in the New York Times

" If you ask a conservative Republican" he writes" you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.
If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.
Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.

Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."

How slums can save the planet

Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living. In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes.In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills.

The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power and constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.

Author Stewart Brand states in this provocative article that “Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.”

In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organize neighborhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.

Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.

In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings.

The idea of measuring environmental impact in notional acres was first introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in Our Ecological Footprint (1996) as a way to estimate the resource efficiency of cities and to condemn suburban sprawl. The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all.

Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.
The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.

The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.

***
More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. News of best practices spreads fast. Mayors travel, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s greenest—from Reykjavik to Portland, Oregon, and my hometown of San Francisco. But what we need is a new profession of active urban ecology, which figures out how to fix the problems of urban living (cockroach predation, waste from markets or sanitation, a persistent cause of disease in slums) and helps cities engage natural infrastructure (rivers and coastlines play a role similar to highways and sewer lines) with the same level of sophistication brought to built infrastructure.

One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”

Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.

Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together. Taxes can cut car use. Child-friendly policies and subsidised housing could bring down the high cost of city centre living, which drives families to the suburbs (and good schools follow them).
Finally, it is better infrastructure that makes cities possible—so what would infrastructure rethought in green terms look like? Some of it will surely look like the new mass transit systems being built in China, or the high-speed rail that is finally coming to the US. And all of this should be powered by smart and micro grids—allowing local generation and the distribution of electricity. The new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors being developed in the US and elsewhere, which provide less than 125 megawatts and are built offsite, could have an important role.

Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.
And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.
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Near death experiences

I had always heard of people having near death experiences. Some said that they saw a light, others that they felt as if they were floating, still others that they were filled with ineffable peace. When Deb Foster died in a La Jolla hospital, she found herself on a stairway surrounded by cats and dogs and mesmerized by a celestial blue sky, the likes of which she had never seen on earth. Mary Clare Schlesinger hovered above her bed in the intensive-care unit, watching her husband and daughter react in shock and fathomless grief at the thought of her passing. Beverly Brodsky said she went on a spectacular journey through a tunnel of intense light, a magic ride with angels and a shapeless God to a place of perfect knowledge, wisdom, truth and justice. Many patients -- a notable study says nearly one in five -- who are revived following cardiac arrest, report memories of their brief time at death's door. They undergo lucid, often indelible experiences, even though they were unconscious, which could be an acute awareness; or moving through a void or tunnel toward bright light; or meeting deceased relatives; or a life review; or feelings of intense joy, profound peace -- a feeling so blissful they longed to remain; and seeing a point of no return.

Recently I too had a near death experience. But I must confess I heard no heavenly choirs or bursts of light during the period I was lost to the world. Actually I felt nothing. From the moment when I was sitting on the edge of my bed wanting to go greet my daughter, who had just returned to our apartment after visiting her friends, to when I found myself lying next to my bed with an anxious para medic peering at me, the intervening period was a complete blank. When I woke up I found my wife and daughter hovering in the back of the room while a team of paramedics from the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue squad noted my blood pressure, stuck an intravenous needle in my arm, and repeatedly measured my blood sugar levels, trying to figure out what was wrong. They had responded within minutes of the call. But it had been well over fifteen minutes during which, I was told, I was not responding to any stimuli and was completely out of it; while the hands and eyes were moving, there was no reaction to any questions. It also seemed that my breathing had stopped a number of times and the para medics were preparing to do a last ditch CPR when I woke up. Those fifteen minutes were a complete blank! No bright lights or moving through a void or having my life flash before my eyes.

After a few minutes of dizziness, I was back to normal, quizzing them all about what had happened and why. “Low blood sugar”, I was told was the culprit. A measurement of 30 was a sure sign of hypoglycemia and was due either to an overdose of insulin or a lack of adequate carbohydrates in the day’s meals preceding that night.

Anyway it all ended well as these four very competent young professionals insisted that I go to the nearby hospital to make assurance doubly sure, and where their initial diagnosis of hypoglycemic shock was confirmed by various measurements, and I was released after a few hours of observation. Alas, though, I had no near death experience of mine own to report!

Dealing with young people

Time was that dealing with children was limited to debates about " spare the rod and spoil the child". But now things have changed radically and the state has started coming out with recommendations and strategies for controlling the young. But the most bizarre practices seem to originate in Britain, the cradle of democracy.

In recent years Britain has been churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.

An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass. While the ostensible object is surveillance for terrorists, it too often is also used to monitor the young - hooligans or others.

A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.

Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blind misbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beamed spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home.

And recently police in Liverpool boasted about making Britain’s first-ever arrest by unmanned flying drone. Inspired, it seems, by Britain and America’s robot planes in Afghanistan, the Liverpool cops used a remote-control helicopter fitted with CCTV (of course) to catch a car thief.

And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior.

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children were forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claimed it calmed them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable.

It seems that now all across the UK, local councils and other public institutions play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere. No, not because they think the public will appreciate these sweet sounds (they think we are uncultured grunts), but because they hope it will make naughty youngsters flee.Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations. The young people were “not getting up to criminal activities,” admitted Tyne and Wear Metro, but they were “swearing, smoking at stations and harassing passengers.” So the railway company unleashed “blasts of Mozart and Vivaldi.” Apparently it was a roaring success. The youth fled. “They seem to loathe [the music],” said the proud railway guy. “It’s pretty uncool to be seen hanging around somewhere when Mozart is playing.” He said the most successful deterrent music included the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninov, and Piano Concerto No. 2 by Shostakovich.

In many communities,local businesspeople encouraged the council to pipe classical music as a way of getting rid of youngsters who were spitting in the street and doing graffiti. And apparently classical music defeats street art: The graffiti levels fell.

Anthony Burgess’s nightmare vision of an elite using high culture as a “punitive slap on the chops” for low youth has come true. In Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, famously filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, the unruly youngster Alex is subjected to “the Ludovico Technique” by the crazed authorities. Forced to take drugs that induce nausea and to watch graphically violent movies for two weeks, while simultaneously listening to Beethoven, Alex is slowly rewired and re-moulded. But he rebels, especially against the use of classical music as punishment. Pleading with his therapists to turn the music off, he tells them that “Ludwig van” did nothing wrong, he “only made music.” He tells the doctors it’s a sin to turn him against Beethoven and take away his love of music. But they ignore him. At the end of it all, Alex is no longer able to listen to his favorite music without feeling distressed. A bit like that schoolboy in Derby who now sticks his fingers in his ears when he hears Mozart.

The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness. They’re so desperate to control youth—but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them—that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears.

Scams

It was Barnum Bailey who is reputed to have said that “there is a sucker born every minute.” Today’s scam artists operate on the basis of that old wisdom. Scams have really proliferated in the last few years both in numbers and the variety of approaches.

Let us start with the “soft scams” of the TV ads. Here the sucker is drawn in by the tall claims made in the ad be it for high returns on investments or longer endowments. You just need to put down your credit card number and you will soon be on your way to a lovely body or be the proud owner of the latest doodad which does less than it promises in the ad when you actually hold it in your hand. At least in the US there is a modicum of regulation which requires these ad makers to also broadcast the various caveats to the unsuspecting buyers. Of course most of these caveats are in extremely small print or spoken at three times the normal speed during the TV ad. But these caveats do exist for the wary.

At altogether another level are the scams which have brought Nigeria some prominence.Here is how this famous scam works: letters (or, nowadays, e-mail messages) postmarked from Nigeria (or Sierra Leone, or the Ivory Coast, or almost any other foreign nation) are sent to addresses taken from large mailing lists. The letters promise rich rewards for helping officials of that government (or bank, or quasi-government agency or sometimes just members of a particular family) out of an embarrassment or a legal problem. Typically, the pitch includes mention of multi-million dollar sums, with the open promise that you will be permitted to keep a startling percentage of the funds you're going to aid in squirreling away for these disadvantaged foreigners. But when you agree to participate in this international bail-out, you soon find that something is always going wrong: paperwork will be delayed, new questions are being asked, officials will need to be bribed. All of them require money from you — an insignificant sum, really, in light of the windfall about to land in your lap — to get things back on track. You pay, you wait for the transfer ... and all you'll get in return are more excuses about why the funds are being held up and assurances that everything can be straightened out if you'll just send a bit more cash to help the process along. Once your bank account has been sucked dry or you start making threats, you'll never hear from these Nigerians again. As for the money you've thrown at this, it's gone forever.

In another form taken by the Nigerian scam, a church or religious organization is contacted by a wealthy foreigner who says he desires nothing more than to leave his considerable fortune to that particular group. Maybe he says he's led a life of sin and is now trying to make good, or maybe he claims that as a devout Christian he heard about their good works and wants to leave his money to help continue them, but whatever the backstory, it's just a tale. Once again, there will be delays, each of them necessitating the "beneficiary" to spend a few thousand here and a few thousand there in an effort to collect money that never materializes.

In an earlier version of the same con, the victim is informed that he has just won an important prize in a foreign lottery he doesn't remember entering. Only when he tries to collect the money is he approached for payment of facilitation fees to get his winnings to him. Of course, it's the same con, with just a few elements unimportant to the execution of the thievery changed about. This Nigerian Scam has been emptying the pockets of victims for decades — first through letters, then with faxes, and now via e-mail.

In its earliest incarnation, which dates to at least the 1920s, it was known as 'The Spanish Prisoner' con. In that long-ago version, businessmen were contacted by someone trying to smuggle the scion of a wealthy family out of a prison in Spain. But of course the wealthy family would shower with riches those who helped secure the release of the boy. Those who were suckered into this paid for one failed rescue attempt after another, with the fictitious prisoner continuing to languish in his non-existent dungeon, always just one more bribe, one more scheme, one more try, away from being released. These days it's trapped funds not errant sons of well-to-do families that are the objects of these global wild goose chases, but the con is the same.

Then there is Bernie Madoff, who ran the latest version of a Ponzi scheme for people who wanted high returns on safe investments during good times and bad. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering returns other investments cannot guarantee, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going. Of course the system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments to investors. While the system eventually will collapse under its own weight, the example of Bernard Madoff illustrates the ability of a Ponzi scheme to delude both individual and institutional investors as well as securities authorities for long periods. Madoff's variant of the Ponzi Scheme stands as the largest financial investor fraud in history committed by a single person and prosecutors estimate losses at Madoff's hand totaling about $64.8 billion.

Finally there are the scams that affect the innocent bystanders. I was subject to one recently when I examined my telephone bill from Verizon. Here a company called Mindsprings had been charging me $ 20 a month for some services that I had not asked for and had never used. Verizon pointed out in the bill that if I did not pay these charges, my phone would not be cut almost asking me to not pay these charges. When I called them and asked them why they allowed these very obvious scammers and why they were becoming their collection agents, I was told that FEC required them to permit competition and to collect these charges if the company provided at least two identification for each member. Clearly the company had stolen some of these identities hoping to make a bonanza before enough people cottoned on to their chicanery. Verizon did offer to return the money and also to place a ban on such third party collection efforts if I so requested.

At the heart of a scam- except the last one- is the desire to obtain returns without effort or work. Scams normally take in people who have a touch of larceny in them. They want to take short cuts and feel that they can outwit the scammer. Sad to say, that rarely happens.