What is wisdom ?

It was the poet who said that data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. But then what really is wisdom?

Scientists studying wisdom try and break it down into its smallest components to identify and test each component. They then attempt to figure out how each works, how to obtain it, and what it is. There are, according to these researchers, eight attributes of wisdom: Emotional Regulation, Knowing What's Important, Moral Reasoning, Compassion, Humility, Altruism, Patience, and Dealing with Uncertainty. Tests are designed, studies are lined up, and college undergrads short of cash or in need of class credit are then recruited as lab rats in the pursuit of study of wisdom.

The problem is that wisdom is elusive, and the act of reducing it down to a binary code seems ridiculous. Take a common test for moral reasoning: A trolley is out of control and will kill five people unless you pull the lever for the trolley to switch tracks, resulting in the death of one person. What do you do? Researchers later switched it up to find people's moral threshold: How far would you go to save those five people? How much would you participate in that one person's death? Would you kill him or her with your own hands? The problem with the test is that it has only two answer choices: yes and no. Life is messier than that. As is morality. There is no room on the survey to talk about survivor's guilt, or whether the value of life is equal for each individual, or finding alternatives to pushing someone to their death, like, say, yelling at the people on the track to get out of the goddamn way.

There is a danger in seeing this as a map of isolated points rather than a three-dimensional, pulsing, dynamic network of neural coordination, one that is constantly changing, and changeable, one that is weighted with different inputs depending on our previous experiences, our learning, our mood that day, the general uncertainty or anxiety we may be feeling, our life circumstances at any time, our age and stage of life — a network that is, in a word, idiosyncratic.

The problem with many behaviorists — and in particular this new splashy trend of the economist explaining society to us — is their simplistic reduction of our desires, motivation, and reasoning. And so while the neuro-imaging might teach us that our brains are much more complex than the standard self-reporting tests reveal, the experiments break down when they try to encompass all we bring to every decision, or when they figure out why knowing the wise or moral thing to do does not lead one to actually do that thing.

Some of the studies, however, have a wonderful sense of whimsy in their efforts to expose human nature. Take, for instance, a 2007 study at Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business, conducted by two economists. They wanted to know if there was a correlation between narcissism in CEOs and volatility in that company's performance. As they were unable to kidnap the various CEOs and put them through extensive personality testing, they examined "the size of the leader's photograph in company documents, the length of entries in Who's Who, the frequency with which the CEO was mentioned in corporate press releases, and the number of times the CEO used the first-person singular (I, me, mine, my, myself) in interviews." What they found was that the more narcissistic the CEO appeared to be, the more detrimental they were to the company!!

It is true that we all crave wisdom — worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves. But there's a difference between admiring wisdom and emulating it. That's perhaps the best illustration of the difference between knowledge and wisdom: We know the value of wisdom. We know that we should be caring for the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, but we don't want to pay higher taxes to do so, nor do we really want to donate much of our time or money. But perhaps the most crushing of all the studies was one that showed that a person will naturally act altruistically — until they see those around them behaving selfishly. Instead of pulling up the behavior of the others, the altruistic give up and become as greedy as everyone else.

Finally, to be wise is not to know particular facts but to know without excessive confidence or excessive cautiousness. Wisdom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a corpus of knowledge or information in some specialized area, or a set of special abilities or skills. Wisdom is an attitude taken by persons toward the beliefs, values, knowledge, information, abilities, and skills that are held, a tendency to doubt that these are necessarily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaustive set of those things that could be known.

Going on a diet

Going on a diet

We often go on a diet when we have over indulged and feel that our body is responding only sluggishly to any stimulus. We do not like the look of our silhouette or feel that we will not be attractive to the opposite sex unless we shape up. So we begin a regime of controlling our intake of food and drink and look away when too many sweets are put in front of us tempting us to once again indulge and fall into old patterns. Unfortunately we never quite think of our minds the same way. Are we over indulging if we spend all our time reading newspapers and magazines? Do we become hermits if all we can do is to quote the latest books from our favorite authors? Are our minds so filled with non-essential trivia that we can barely carry on a meaningful conversation? This malady of the mind has been made much worse with the internet. Now you have all the time “fast food of news” on the cable channels always available. You can gorge yourself on the latest news and essays. In short, you can avoid thinking by always wanting to read more and discover ever more esoteric facts.

As Alain Bottom point out "One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible."

The obsession with current events is relentless. We do not need to wait for the weekly magazines to distill the essence of the daily happenings. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows or the world. Every little occurrence anywhere in the world seems to have a cataclysmic quality about it. The cable news chattering pundits boost even minor events into world shattering dangers which we must pay attention to or we could miss out. That of course is their job, they are paid to keep our eyes glue on the TV so that advertisers can tempt us with new fangled goods. But what about us? Why do we fall into this trap? It is worth thinking about that perhaps ten years ago, we read our daily newspaper and perhaps a magazine and saw the news on the TV for perhaps half an hour a day. But today, the TV is on all day lest we miss anything.

We are continuously searching for new works of arts and culture. New artists come an go with an alarming frequency. Authors need to keep on producing books and then going on book tours to promote them. And, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution, like so much of what once impressed us in the past.

Is it not time that the need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting. And just as in diets, we need to look for specialists who will tell which foods are good for us in the long term. Should we only gorge ourselves on the products of chefs like Paul Krugman, Eugene Robinson, EJ Dionne? Or should we mix them up with fare from the right chefs like George Will, David Brooks and Katherine Parker? Would it not be wise to sprinkle in a bit of Tom Friedman—just a sprinkle will do- to really give your mind a heady dish?

Think about it – it is time to go on a diet!

Vietnam - new impressions

Few countries have grown so rapidly as Vietnam has in the last two decades - the average economic growth rate has been over 8 % per annum. Fewer countries have faced down not one but three dominant powers of the day, in war - China, France and US- and emerged triumphant. Yet in my visit over the past two weeks, I found an undercurrent of anxiety in the mood of the country reflected in its leadership and in the media. It was vague and unformed and very rarely explicitly discussed but to me it was an ever present ghost at the party. The very success of the country seemed to leave many puzzled and sometime confused as if the success had come too easily and the future seemed undefined when there seemed no more mountains left to climb.

I had first come to Vietnam over 20 years, lived here for over 8 years during the nineties and was now returning after an absence of five years. It was a completely different world that I encountered. Streets were filled with the latest model of cars, there were gleaming shopping malls everywhere, restaurants were packed not with expatriates but locals. There were signs of prosperity everywhere with multi storied buildings and five star hotels coming up at every corner of the two cities I visited- Hanoi and HCMC. When I first came here twenty years ago, there were no taxis, no hotels and certainly no cars on the streets. Perhaps all that provided me some perspective and some ability to decipher the vague issues that existed but were left undiscussed.

The dominant ones were- the feeling of rapid development without values. It recalled for me the dilemna that Gandhiji had illuminated over a half a century ago: that there could be no " politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice." And that every nation must enshrine some core values in their national life and character. The passionate nationalism of the past few decades had yet to find a new definition in the new era of economic development.

All recent politics and policies seemed without a clear vision. Where was the country headed? Did they want to be another China, Korea or did they want to emulate the US? What were the choices and which ones did the leadership seek? What were the trade offs that needed to be made and could the country get by without calling for any sacrifice from their citizens? The absence of clarity of vision underlay an anxiety about the future that their present prosperity belied.

While the future vision was blurred, the path to advancement required choices that few in leadership seemed to relish making. Thus the recognition that the system needed much greater efficiency in governance was matched by an equal reluctance to tackle the "culture of entitlement" in the bureaucracy. Administration grew in size even as there was increased recognition that the civil services were the key constraints to change and any growth.

Agressive organizational changes were designed and implemented but unmatched by any effort to bring in new blood. So the organizational blocks became ever more complicated, helped along by international donors and consultants, yet the chairs were still occupied by the old guard, the very ones whose whose lack of expertise and initiative had created the problems in the first place. The young were reluctant to enter public service except for the careerists but the government was reluctant to trust the open market system for its recruitment of the talent it sorely needed for the new challenges that lay ahead.

There was a desire to grow globally and become a global player, yet an extreme reluctance to permit open competititon of any kind in the system, except under very controlled circumstances and except for the low level business retail efforts. There was a growing facade of competitive frameworks but without development of the key ingredients- meaningful competitors functioning under an independent regulatory system.

Despite the almost universal education the country enjoyed and relatively open access to internet and TV, there was still a degree of insularity that seemed to persist. There were few attempts to inculcate public service - domestically or overseas- as the intelligensia still struggled with the fact that they were "developed" but still felt "developing".

There were signs of enthusiastic consumption everywhere- but with the older generation that had lived through the war, there was only cautious hedonism, while the younger generation pursued pleasure and money in a Gekko like greed with the creed that " money was good".

Many had, however, started to recognize that Armani and Dunhill shops in hotel arcades and ever growing new shopping malls- however unoccupied they may be- were really not an accurate measure of the country's growth or development. The issue that bedevilled them was what should be a truer measure of their forward progress. Should it be the US constitutional guarantee of " right to happiness" for all its citizens or should it be the European quest for universal equality? Should they set their sights on the Indian version of democracy and secular governance or the Chinese version of a modern day " big brother" government ? How should the transition from the authoritarian leadership to a greater measure of local democracy take place? Was the national parliament an adequate measure of popular participation in public life?

These were all questions that will need to be answered as Vietnam moves forward-- as it surely will. And their answers will be of immense interest to the world and not the least to me as well. That Vietnam will emerge from its latest travails triumphant, I have no doubt. What I am really curious about is the path they will finally take.

When children become parents

It happens slowly. It creeps up on you gradually and you are not even aware that it is happening. And then one day, out of the blue, you find your daughter on the phone asking agitatedly " Where were you ? I have been calling and calling. I almost called 911. Why are out so late?"

That is the moment you realize that now your children have become your parents. She is reading from a script that we parents wrote some decades ago when your children were out late partying and not informing us where they were!

A group of us elderly parents were bewailing our lot. One wailed, " my son wont let me eat a dessert". Another complained of constant lectures from her children about not sticking to a diet. " Have you taken your pills today? Really, Mom! Must I come there to make sure you follow your doctors orders?"

Yes the transition is complete- the children are now our parents. Time was when we would threaten them when they were particularly recalcitrant " Just you wait. I hope I live long enough to see your children give you the same trouble you are giving me now!"

Little did we realize that there was going to come another phase in between - when even before our children had their children they would find an opportunity to berate us parents for our supposed failings.

"Honestly, Dad" said my daughter one day in good humored exasperation, " I can not leave you alone for even a little while. Every time I turn my back, you create a new problem".

That was at least partly true- unfortunately so I could not argue with her - the last time she had had to call the emergency services.

"Taking care of babies is hard, for sure, but add to the baby a parent who has somehow, so strangely and suddenly, become childlike, and you are quite abruptly in charge of two generations. Big and little people with needs that you must answer." writes Elizabeth Cohen, " Extreme parents get to zip everyone’s zippers, tie everyone’s shoes, make sure everyone has gone to the bathroom, and sometimes change the diapers of our babies and parents as well."

While it is a natural part of life, and happens so often in our society, it still feels strange and wrong somehow when children charge of their parents. It is counter-intuitive.

"But there are silver linings to the extreme parenting job" continues the writer, "One is you get to spend time with your parents at the end of their lives. There is something precious and lovely about that time, because it is so fleeting and finite."

I asked another of these ambitious young women about her plans for the next ten years. She replied blithely " Oh! marriage, children and build my career". Little did she realize that looking after her aging parents would be added, inadvertently to her repertoire. And she would be left juggling these four balls for years to come.

To me it has becoming increasingly evident, that the " sandwich" generation that I wrote of some time ago, is rapidly becoming a "Houdini" generation juggling marriage, children, career and aging parents all at the same time. It is also a constant source of wonder and amazement that this generation is still able to function despite these pressures.

As one of this generation asked me ruefully one evening., " I honestly dont know which is more difficult, looking after my children, my parents or working at my career? How should I handle it?"

I had no advice to give her.

Back to Vietnam

It was exactly 20 years ago that I first landed at the Noibai airport at Hanoi for my first visit to Vietnam. I was leading an international group of experts to try and map the energy sector of the country. We landed at the darkened airport in the evening and drove past a line of fighter planes before stopping at the terminal. The terminal was a simple shed and we soon cleared the formalities, exchanged a hundred dollars for a million dong in local currency and climbed into the only vehicle outside the terminal- a government van. The van drove us past the countryside and into the city of Hanoi to its only hotel- Hoa Binh hotel- which we were told meant Peace. It was an old building with large rooms but few creature comforts except a few forlorn mice. There were telephones but no one seemed to know how to operate them. Next morning, we trooped down for breakfast, only to find very spartan fare- the local soup. From then, one of the team was deputized to wake up early to get a few of the hot bagels from the street vendors. All visits to the government offices were in cyclobs-- we were quite a site every morning as the six of us climbed into a separate cyclob and led this parade from one government office to another.

But what a change twenty years makes. This time we landed at the gleaming international terminal which was far superior to most terminals in the west. We went through the customs and immigration in about ten minutes and were greeted by a line of taxis from at least three different operators. The road from the airport was well lit and broad signs on both sides advertised the latest wares. The Hilton hotel was one of seven five star hotels now operating in Hanoi and you were lucky to find a room such was the crush of tourists and businessmen. In the morning, we could dine on the most succulent of breakfasts. As we walked out of the hotel, we could see the grand Opera House next door which was advertising an opera that evening and a symphony performance sponsored by the Spanish embassy next week.

It is difficult to believe that a country can make such a major transition in just two decades. Vietnam is after all a country of 80 million and to take them into modernity within years is a real tribute to the policy makers and the politicians.

I wonder why at least in a few of our states in India this transition could not be made!

The limits of multi tasking

I had always been skeptical of people who claimed that they could multi task. So it was gratifying to find some research bolstering my instincts.

But the real clincher in my case came from my own experience-- of course, I may be someone constitutionally unable to multitask. I was, as my regular readers, would vouchsafe writing two columns a week in my blog and have been doing it for more than a year. Yet when a few weeks ago, I was urged to complete my book on heart disease " Straight from the heart", I thought it would not be a major issue and that I could continue writing my blogs. Alas, I could not keep these two projects going on at the same time. And when the world bank asked me to write a report on rural electrification in Vietnam, the fat was really in the fire and my writing suffered.

But all is now back to normal. The book is published and is available on the internet both as a regular paper edition and also as a Kindle book. The report on Vietnam will be ready by the end of the month after I visit Vietnam starting next week. So come June, the writing should resume and my limit of multitasking lapse.

Ten emerging technologies that will shape the future

Each year, Technology Review, a magazine published by my alma mater, MIT, selects what it believes are the most important emerging technologies that have the potential to change the future. The winners are chosen based on the editors coverage of key fields. The question that the editors asks is simple: is the technology likely to change the world?

This years picks are a mix-- four are in the area of information technology, three in the medical breakthroughs, two in energy, one in environment. Some of these changes are on the largest scale possible: better biofuels, more efficient solar cells and light trapping photovoltaics. Others like green concrete will help solve the global warming in the years ahead. Other changes will be more local and involve how we use technology: D-screens on mobile devices, new applications for cloud computing, social TV and improved real time search. And new ways to implant medical electronics, engineered stem cells and dual action antibodies will affect us on the most intimate level of all, with the promise of making our lives healthier.

The choices this year are the following:

Real time search

Social TV

Cloud programming

Mobile 3 D

Solar fuel

Light trapping photovoltaics

Green concrete

Implantable electronics

Engineered stem cells

Dual action antibodies

Non conventional power

Ben Harder explores a fascinating new world of piezo-electrics and finds a wealth of possibilities to solve our energy problems. Read on...

" Wind, water, solar . . . Who needs the tired, old elements? Each of those energy sources has had its proverbial day in the sun. It's time to move aside, ye olde renewables, and make way for a truly abundant and unceasing power source: our limbs, our clothes, our cars.

The world is a frenetic, kinetic kaleidoscope that hums with the constant motion of 6 billion people and their accouterments. Take a good look at the crushing multitudes on K Street at rush hour or at the vehicles rumbling around the Beltway. There's energy in them thar commuters. All that motion might well hold a key to much-sought energy independence. We just need to bottle some of that juice.

Certain materials produce an electrical current whenever they're flexed, bent or otherwise deformed. This occurs because these so-called piezoelectric materials -- which are as diverse as quartz crystals, leaded ceramics and bone -- contain pockets of positive and negative charge. When the material is flexed, those charges shift around, creating the potential for electrical current. Thanks to this piezoelectric effect, such materials can be used to convert the motion that distorts them into electricity.

A few piezoelectric-based devices have been around for years, including pedal-powered bicycle lights and hand-held and flintless gas-grill lighters. The science behind them dates back to 1880, when 21-year-old Pierre Curie, who would later share a Nobel Prize in physics with his wife, Marie, co-discovered the piezoelectric effect with the help of his older brother.

But engineers are only now beginning to see piezoelectricity as a source of abundant energy. They're using novel materials and techniques to harvest the "free" (i.e., untapped) energy that people generate when they move. Think of it as a giant energy recycling program. And it literally uses flex fuel.

A journey of a million kilowatt-hours begins with simple footsteps. Engineering teams worldwide are embedding piezoelectric materials in flooring and paving materials so the ground can absorb the energy from our moving feet. One company claims that five hours of busy pedestrian traffic over a portion of sidewalk could power a dim streetlight all night.

Some engineers have designed backpacks, shoes and other wearables that draw energy from the wearer's motions. Two years ago, in the journal Science, Canadian researchers described a modified knee brace that produced five watts when worn walking. That's enough to power several cellphones. Before long, though, phones may effectively charge themselves.

This year, Nokia filed a patent for a piezoelectric device that could let a phone battery draw a small charge each time it gets jostled in your pocket. If your phone still somehow conks out? In theory, just shake it and dial.

Engineers are also weaving piezoelectric fibers into clothing and other textiles. Some are experimenting with microscopic piezoelectric wires of zinc oxide. When flexed, these wires generate currents that could charge a battery or power portable electronics connected to the garment. Other researchers have embedded piezoelectric materials in silicone rubber that can be stretched, say, across someone's chest to draw power from the rise-and-fall motion of his lungs.

You don't have to get all out of breath about it, either. Even couch potatotes like me produce free energy. It's called body heat. Thermoelectric materials, which are akin to piezoelectric ones, can produce electricity in response to temperature changes within the material rather than from shape changes. That means the radiant warmth of my skin is a potential source of power.

Perpetua Power Source Technologies, for instance, is working to create garments that use such heat to support a "wireless body area network" capable of, for example, monitoring a sick person's vital signs. By the time I develop hypertension from sitting around too much, my clothing may be capable of alerting me to my high blood pressure.

Of course, my body heat is nothing compared with the furnace that is a car's engine. That's one place where thermoelectric power could really come into its own. Some experts estimate that only a quarter of the fuel a typical car consumes is utilized to power the vehicle. (Hybrids do a bit better in this department, thanks to their electrodynamic regenerative braking, which produces energy when vehicles slow down, a form of energy harvesting.) Researchers are testing systems that could salvage some of that heat emitted by the engine and convert it back into usable energy.

A particularly interesting breakthrough was reported last month when Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology published a study of two tiny piezoelectric generators that they had created. Each is about the size of a paper clip. When squeezed, one produces roughly the same voltage as an AA battery. The other does the same when it's bent. Together, these devices are the first that engineers have been able to create that can pack so much voltage in such a small package. Such generators could be used to operate small sensors powered by sources as simple, Wang said, as sound waves, vibrations or even the flutter of a flag.

In other words, there's free energy in the brave wave of the Star-Spangled Banner. When it comes to energy independence, you can't get more patriotic than that."

Is Marriage good for your health?

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Farr found that married people weathered diseases far better than their unmarried counterparts but the worst affected were the widowed partners.

We have always known this intuitively but this new research reassures us that these observations were no “old wives tales”. In the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people. Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia.

But before many of you rush off to get married in order to live longer, pay need to new research that says that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit! The “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. The women who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger.

Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60 which found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.

Some research now says that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced. So just because you are married is not enough: you have to be happily married, your fights have to be full of warmth even when angry and you need to remain married - to enjoy a long and healthy life.

A new approach to terrorists

A new article in the financial times has an interesting approach to dealing with young terrorists.

"First, demystify terrorist lives and deaths. The average day in the life of an Islamic extremist is similar to that of a petty criminal: tedious, lonely and punctuated by fear. Terrorists’ incompetence and narcissism must be highlighted. There is no shortage of material. One cell could not remember the name of the prime minister they were planning to kill; intelligence services report that many are avid consumers of pornography. Humour is a potent weapon here; remember how the British Fascist party in the 1930s was undermined by satire, not least by P.G. Wodehouse. Chris Morris’s forthcoming film satire of British jihadis, Four Lions, will be worth a dozen official anti-terrorism messages.

Second, expose al-Qaeda’s ideology as thin and unable to withstand sustained criticism. Far from being afraid of radical messages, we should let them circulate freely. Young people will be drawn to them regardless; better that it is in the open. Young Muslims who turn to violence tend to be less well-read than those who remain peaceful. Liberal values of free speech and dissent are central to the destruction of the al-Qaeda brand.

Finally, western governments should welcome non-violent forms of radicalism. Young people need to vent their frustrations, and participation in demonstrations is much higher among the non-violent. Young radicals can be drawn away from violent activity by the chance to work on charity programmes in Palestine or Afghanistan: a real Peace Corps."

The death of outrage

The past few months have seen a level of vitroil, smears and outright lies from senior politicians in the US which has come as a total surprise. But even more astonishing has been the lack of outrage at this descent into a culture of hate and calumny. There was always a level of courtsey in discourse at even the most difficult of times in the US but the past few months have shaken that belief in civility.

Imagine two governors of US states stating that slavery did not matter "diddly" or that the Civil war was fought for states rights. This from the party of Lincoln and in the year 2010. Or take a senator who says he never said he was a maverick while standing next to his published biography whose title is my life as a maverick. Or the leader of the opposition, Mitch McConnell, blandly lieing about the import of a financial regulation bill. Or the tea partiers still demanding Obamas birth certificate and hanging him in effigy. Or people spitting on black congressmen or calling some faggots in the House.

That there will always be fringe elements that will go beyond the bounds of decency occurs in every country. But the fact that it arouses so little outrage or revulsion is the real surprise. The main stream media cover it as if it was a soap opera and they were mere onlookers recording the event for posterity. They are afraid to label these efforts for what they are - disguised racism and bigotry. If many of these media were to cover the Nazi pogroms, I presume they would still manage to hide their real feelings and be objective and dispassionate.

But there are a few brave souls who do speak out : Paul Krugman is not afraid to call McConnell an ignorant liar; Friedman is willing to challenge Bibi Netanyu; Frank Rich is not afraid to call the tea partiers by their real name - racists and bigots; David Brooks is willing to make an objective evaluation of Obama's first year in power. Yes, these are the few left with any integrity in their public professions. For the rest, it seems like profiles in cowardice seeking shelter behind a non existent press objectivity.

The ones who are really missing in action is this ugly period of american life are the elders in the Republican party. After all do GW Bush, ex senators Warner and Danforth really approve of their party allying itself with the worse elements of the racist south? Do they not feel any obligation to speak out against challenges to the legitimacy of the President or the hanging of nooses or labelling slavery "diddly"? Should they not speak out?

The fact is that just as Pakistanis had to realize the dangers Taliban posed to their country before they finally moved to action to isolate and eliminate them, so it will have to be with the republicans. Only they can move to remove this tea party led cancer now gnawing at their party. But until they are willing to realize and accept the danger this racism poses to their party and their country, it is futile to expect any lowering of temperature or any future rise in civility in public discourse. Surely the republicans must realize that it is the soul of their party that is at stake.

Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage

In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others. Ubuntu sees people less as individuals than as part of an infinitely complex web of other human beings. It is the idea that we are all bound up with one another, that me is always subordinate to we, that no man is an island.

Richard Stengel spent two years with Mandela and has now published a book on the fifteen lessons on life, love and courage that he gleaned from the great man’s life. The book itself is worth reading but the few snippets below give a glimpse of the greatness of the man. First the lessons:

Courage is not the absence of fear

Be measured and calm at all times

Lead from the front and the back

Look the part

Have a core principle

See the good in others

Know your enemy

Keep your rivals close

Know when to say no

It’s a long game

Love makes the difference

Quitting is leading too

Its always the both

Find your own garden

Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s learning to overcome it. None of us is born courageous, he would say; it is all in how we react to different situations. He loved to quote Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.” A coward might select that passage to give the impression that he was courageous, but for Mandela the passage is not bravado, but a simple statement of reality. Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave.

Mandela sees almost everyone as virtuous until proven otherwise. He starts with an assumption that you are dealing with him in good faith. He believes that, just as pretending to be brave can lead to acts of real bravery, seeing the good in other people improves the chances that they will reveal their better selves. It is extraordinary that a man who was ill-treated for most of his life can see so much good in others. In fact, it was sometimes frustrating to talk with him because he almost never had a bad word to say about anyone. He would not even say a disapproving word about the man who tried to have him hanged. It is not that Mandela does not see the dark side of someone like John Vorster; it is that he is unwilling to see only that.

He knows that no one is purely good or purely evil. We were talking one day about a prisoner who had been a rival of Mandela’s on Robben Island and who had actually put together a list of grievances about Mandela. When I asked him about the fellow, Mandela did not address the man’s hostility but said, “What I took from him was his ability to work.”

He chooses to look past the negative. He does this for two reasons: because he instinctively sees the good in people and because he intellectually believes that seeing the good in others might actually make them better.

By behaving honorably, even to people who may not deserve it, he believes you can influence them to behave more honorably than they otherwise would

But Mandela believes in and takes emotional risks. He goes out on a limb and makes himself vulnerable by trusting others. We sometimes do that by confiding in others we don’t know well. Yet we rarely equate risk with trying to see what is decent, honest, and good in the people in our daily lives.

He had always appealed to people’s minds, but he knew that his ultimate victory would only come when he won over their hearts.

“The liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.”

The time of your greatest triumph is the time when you should be most merciful.

Mandela would say we need to do a better job of expecting the expected, that we often do not prepare for those things we know are likely to be coming.

Mandela is not a man of maybes. He may be silent. He may be evasive. He will sometimes delay and postpone and try to avoid you. But in the end, he will not tell you what you want to hear just because you want to.

He almost always saw both sides of every issue, and his default position was to find some course in between, some way of reconciling both sides. In part this came from his deep-seated need to persuade and win people over, but mostly it came from having a nonideological view of the world and an appreciation for the intricate spider’s web of human motives..

Trust is a foundation of leadership. We trust that a leader is honest, able, and has a vision of where to go.

As he would say, you must reflect the goal in the way you seek it. He would sometimes quote Gandhi: “Be the change that you seek.” Mandela was tolerant of everything but intolerance. He would never discriminate in his goal to end discrimination. A noble goal should not be pursued by ignoble means.

Mandela’s example shows the value of forming as complete a picture as possible before taking action. Most of the mistakes he has made in his life came from acting too hastily rather than too slowly. Don’t hurry, he would say; think, analyze, then act.

“It is absolutely necessary at times for the leader to take on independent action without consulting anybody and to present what he has done to the organization.”

In his life, Mandela has often changed his mind when circumstances change. To him, that is simple common sense. When he sees what he regards as the inevitable, he will alter his point of view.

When Mandela became president, he presided over cabinet meetings in the same way. He did his best to see that opposing views were aired, if not always adhered to. He almost always spoke last, and more briefly than anyone else.

He was impressed by the way Lincoln used persuasion rather than force in managing his cabinet. He once told me an anecdote he recalled about Lincoln talking someone out of being in his cabinet and ended by saying, “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it is their own idea.”

Since boyhood he had understood that collective leadership was about two things: the greater wisdom of the group compared to the individual, and the greater investment of the group in any result achieved by consensus. It was a double win.

Samuel Johnson once said there was nothing more relaxing than concentrating on a pleasant task that engages the mind but does not tax it too much. For Mandela it was his love of gardening.

In many ways, Mandela’s greatest act of leadership was the renunciation of it.

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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