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Five reasons why China has the most interesting economy in the world

By John Knight

China is not only soon likely to have the largest economy in the world but it also has the most fascinating because of the challenges that it has successfully met and the challenges that lie ahead for this semi-industrialised economy.

(1)   China made a successful transition towards a market economy.

In 1978, China had a centrally-planned command economy dominated by state ownership in the cities and people’s communes in the countryside. Incomes were very low and there was much economic inefficiency, reflecting the lack of economic incentives and of markets. The new leadership, wishing to avoid discontent and restore political legitimacy, embarked on a process of economic reform, starting with the dissolution of the communes. Reflecting the determination of the Communist Party to stay in power, China’s reforms were gradual — unlike those in the Soviet Union, where ‘big bang’ economic transition was accompanied by political transition. China’s reform process was one of cumulative causation: each reform led on to the next. For the first 15 years it had to be ‘reform without losers’, in order to overcome vested interests. However, the success of the early reforms emboldened the reform coalition from the mid-1990s onwards to marketise and privatise the economy on many fronts. The reform process has been remarkably successful but it would be misleading to say that China now has a fully marketised economy. It remains a semi-marketised economy, in which the government continues to play a major role, for instance through the power of the remaining state-owned enterprises and the state’s domination of the financial system.

(2)   China has remarkable economic growth.

China’s economy has grown by an average of 10% per annum for more than three decades. Although a few other countries (such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) managed to grow nearly as fast for some time, they were unable to sustain their growth. China’s growth rate has indeed been remarkable. Rising incomes have taken more than 300 million people out of ‘dollar a day’ poverty. Research shows that the high rate of capital accumulation was very important for rapid growth — the share of investment in GDP rose to over 40%. Growth was assisted by the ready supply of surplus labour from the rural areas and by the policy emphasis placed on primary and secondary schooling. Productivity growth benefited hugely through the dramatic structural transformation of the economy from low-productivity to high-productivity activities — from agriculture to industry, from the state sector to the private sector, and from production for the home market to production for export. This previously closed economy was able through trade to specialise according to its comparative advantage in producing labour-intensive manufactures, so becoming the ‘workshop of the world’.

(3)   China is experiencing a remarkable rise in inequality.

Egalitarianism had been central to the command economy: such inequality as then existed was across regions of this huge country and between rural and urban areas. ‘Brain workers’ received no more pay than ‘hand workers’. The restoration of economic incentives and the creation of markets inevitably raised the inequality of incomes. For instance, as market forces increased the relative wages of educated and skilled workers, so wage inequality grew. However, some of the increase in inequality could not easily be justified by improved efficiency. For instance, bias in policies helped to increase regional inequality and also the rural-urban divide: by the late 2000s the ratio of household income per capita in urban and rural areas exceeded three to one. Moreover, the system of governance enabled well-placed or well-connected people to make fortunes. China’s ‘Gini coefficient’ (an aggregate measure of income inequality in a country) is now as high as 0.5, so making China the most unequal country in Asia. Will China’s income inequality continue to rise? There are two reasons why it might have peaked. Government is now concerned to reduce inequality, seeing it as a threat to social instability. The rapid growth of the economy has created an impending shortage of (previously abundant) labour from the rural areas: scarcity might bid up the market wages of unskilled labour generally and so reduce inequality from below.

(4)   China has a successful but fragile political economy.

China has centralised political governance but decentralised economic governance. This gives rise to what economists call a ‘principal-agent problem’: how to ensure that the many economic decision-makers pursue the objectives of the centre. The centre has used its control of appointments and promotions and its powers of patronage to secure its primary objective: the achievement of rapid economic growth. It has created a successful ‘developmental state’, and it is this which underlies China’s remarkable economic success. However, the system of governance gives rises to problems of accountability and of corruption. Rapid economic growth, pursued in order to avoid social instability, has produced a dramatic transformation of China’s society that has created new sources of social instability. China’s economic growth will inevitably slow down gradually over the decades as the economy matures and as resources, including labour, become more fully employed. However, it is the threat of social instability or of a serious financial crash that might bring China’s rapid growth to a premature end.

(5)   China encounters a puzzle of stagnant life satisfaction.

Various time series measures of life satisfaction are available for China. With household incomes rising rapidly, we would expect that life satisfaction (or happiness, or subjective well-being) also rose for the majority of Chinese people. Yet the average score of life satisfaction was no higher in 2010 than it had been in 1990. How can this puzzle be explained? Research suggests that life satisfaction in China is influenced by much more than simply people’s income levels. It depends also on their income relative to the income of the people with whom they compare themselves, and general prosperity has meant that relative incomes have not risen. It also depends on people’s sense of security — and insecurity grew as economic reform created millions of redundancies and the social security system was dismantled. China has experienced ‘the greatest migration in human history’ as over 100 million rural migrants have come to work in the cities. The migrants’ average happiness is lower even than that of those who remained in the rural areas. This is probably due to the discrimination they experience in the cities but also to the fact that they change their reference groups from the village to the city, where they are among the poorest. Subjective well-being is adversely affected also by growing perceptions of corruption and environmental degradation. In the last few years government has increasingly recognised that economic growth cannot be its only objective, and that policies to create a ‘harmonious society’ deserve more attention.

John Knight is emeritus professor of economics and emeritus fellow of St Edmund Hall in the University of Oxford. He has conducted research on China’s economy for over twenty years. Oxford University Press has published three of his (co-authored) books on China: The Rural-urban Divide: Economic Disparities and Interactions in China (1999), Towards a Labour Market in China (2005), and China’s Remarkable Economic Growth (2012). He is the author of “Inequality in China: An Overview” in the World Bank Research Observer, which is included in a special virtual issue from Oxford Journals.

Oxford University Press has compiled a virtual issue on China’s Economic Development (中国经济发展), which brings together content from across journals, books, and online products published by Oxford University Press on the topic of China’s Economic Development. We hope that you find it a useful and interesting resource. We will be producing more issues like this on a range of topics in the future, so don’t forget to sign up to our database to keep informed!

The World Bank Research Observer seeks to inform nonspecialist readers about research being undertaken within the Bank and outside the Bank in areas of economics relevant for development policy. Requiring only a minimal background in economic analysis, its surveys and overviews of key issues in development economics research are intended for policymakers, project officers, journalists keeping up to date, and teachers and students of development economics and related disciplines.

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Image credit: New constructed buildings at Shenzen China. © tekinturkdogan via iStockphoto.

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Watching Titus, feeling flesh

By Hester Lees-Jeffries

Last month I sat in my favourite theatre, the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, watching Michael Fentiman’s excellent Royal Shakespeare Company production of Titus Andronicus. Titus is one of my favourite plays, loose and messy, blackly comic and oddly beautiful. It’s great to teach, good for thinking about different critical and directorial approaches, theatrical tastes in the early 1590s, and race and gender, and about those strange collisions of words and bodies, violence and beauty, too easily taken for granted by the critically jaded. After all, the body is a cultural construct, isn’t it?

It depends whose body you’re talking about. Two years ago I wrote a short essay (unpublished, and destined to remain so) about a grimly improbable coincidence: the first of a series of earthquakes that largely destroyed my home town of Christchurch, New Zealand took place (give or take a time zone) on the same day as my diagnosis with breast cancer, 3-4 September 2010. The essay was nakedly, self-interestedly therapeutic, written less to make sense of my situation than to reawaken some faith in my chemically-dulled synapses, to remind myself that I still could write and think. One of its too-easy hooks was the connection between metaphor and metamorphosis, and the violence inherent in metaphor, a transformation of one thing into another without the safety-net of like or as. All metaphors are metamorphoses, thrown together in some stage-side linguistic quick-change area; part of their pleasure is seeing the joins and seams in their logic, or lack of it, as this becomes that.

Rose Reynolds as Lavinia in the RSC 2013 production of Titus Andronicus. Photo by Simon Annand.

In one of Titus’s most notorious moments, the appearance of Titus’s daughter Lavinia “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished,” the success of the theatrical transformation, whether stylized (as in Brook and Ninagawa) or realistic (as in Warner and Fentiman) is set against the failure of its counterpart in language. Lavinia’s uncle Marcus describes her mutilation in a speech of such vivid, luscious sensuousness (“Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, | Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, | Doth rise and fall between thy rosèd lips, | Coming and going with thy honey breath,” 2.4.22-5) that, on the page and in the ear, the bloody scenario is prettified, abstracted, obscured. On the stage, though, the body gets in the way. It’s the combination of words and their metamorphic, metaphoric promise with the boundedness of the body, its fixity and finiteness, that makes this such a potent moment. The actor cannot, of course, be handless, tongueless; she can only be transformed with stage blood, make-up, special effects. And the illusion of her transformation itself becomes a kind of metaphor, for the insufficiency of metamorphosis, of metaphor, itself. Lavinia cannot be metamorphosed into a bird or a bush, and the words which express that possibility simultaneously deny it when they are so powerfully juxtaposed with the reality of the body.

Despite what Ovid might suggest, in quality-of-life terms, becoming a nightingale or a flowering shrub is still a pretty poor substitute for being a real woman (whatever that might be). For handless, tongueless, ventriloquized Lavinia, even language mostly fails. Taught by literature and art, however, we cling to the thought that metamorphosis might console, make things a bit better, and that to become absorbed into the world and its processes is part of the natural order of things and therefore good. There is a narrative that suggests (let’s call it Ophelia’s, and picture Millais) that to be transformed into art-as-nature, nature-as-art makes the suffering better, that natural change is by default both benign and beautiful, somehow transcending or compensating for the pain and mess, tidy, emollient consolation. Gertrude gives Ophelia a woodland burial. Change is natural, growth is good (earthquakes are natural and so is cancer). Your body’s chopped and changed, biopsied, diagnosed, pathologised, but look, it could be a painting or a poem, or the Venus de Milo.

Lavinia isn’t a real person, of course, and her body doesn’t exist. But actors have real bodies, and so do audiences and readers and critics; theatre is the most obviously somatic of literary forms, but all metaphors, at least good ones, go beyond a detached intellectual recognition and calibration of fitness and into the body itself. They are (in George Herbert’s terms) “something understood,” understood in the knees, in the gut, in the hairs on the back on the neck. (As A. E. Housman famously observed in a lecture in Cambridge in 1933, “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” This probably holds true even if the critic lacks hair at the precise moment of the poetic encounter.) Whether carved in Roman letters or not (Titus 5.1.139), the most potent metaphors, the mots justes (not quite the same as the right words, so difficult to find when trying to talk about cancer, earthquakes, rape) are felt in the flesh. Others have written about the insidious effects of cancer on language (being introduced to pinkwash was a grimly cheering moment in the midst of chemotherapy); both cancer patients (victims, survivors) and those who have lived through earthquakes must come to terms with the new normal, capitulation to the anodyne phrase being part of the process of acceptance.

But where does this leave my flesh, my body, and what place can it have in my reading, my writing, my teaching? I must restrain my anecdotage: I don’t want to become a cancer-professional, confessional critic (while at the same time registering the suspicion that one woman’s confession is another man’s classic new historicist anecdote). I sit in the Swan, my body, my brain still the constant connecting all the performances I’ve seen in that little room, the means of summoning, with joy, gratitude, or regret, the ghosts of past companions, former selves. Lavinia’s hands are still there on the actor, and on the page. Words made flesh. And, if it isn’t too mawkishly obvious, vice versa.

Hester Lees-Jeffries is Lecturer in English at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College, where she teaches and researches on Shakespeare and other early modern literature; her research has a particular focus on performance and on visual and material culture. Her new book is Shakespeare and Memory.

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Image credit: Rose Reynolds as Lavinia in the RSC 2013 production of Titus Andronicus. Photo by Simon Annand. Do not reproduce without permission. Titus Andronicus is running in repertoire in The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 26 October.

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And the Nobel Prize goes to… Higgs and Englert!

By Jim Baggott

Earlier today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics to English theorist Peter Higgs and Belgian François Englert, for their work on the ‘mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles’. This work first appeared in a series of research papers published in 1964.

The announcement ends almost 15 months of intense speculation. Was there now enough hard evidence from CERN to justify the Prize for the theoretical work that had predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, 49 years earlier? And, if there was, just who would get it?

Peter Higgs

Timing is everything. On 4 July 2012 scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider declared that they had discovered a new particle ‘consistent’ with the Higgs boson, with a mass around 133 times that of a proton. Peter Higgs, then aged 83, was sitting in the lecture room at CERN listening attentively to the announcement. He declared: ‘It’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime.’

But for the Nobel Committee, ‘consistent’ clearly wasn’t strong enough to justify the Prize last October. However, just five months later, in March 2013, the results of the analysis of a larger data set gathered through 2011 and all of 2012 allowed the experimentalists to firm up their conclusion: ‘… we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.’In the ‘standard model’ of particle physics, particles are represented in terms of invisible quantum fields that extend through spacetime. Particles of matter, and the particles that carry forces between them, are interpreted as fundamental vibrations of different kinds of quantum fields. The electron is the ‘quantum’ of the electron field. The photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field, and so on.The quantum field theories of the early 1960s seemed to suggest that all force carriers should be massless. This is fine for the photon, which carries the force of electromagnetism and is indeed massless. But it was believed that the carriers of the weak nuclear force, responsible for certain kinds of radioactivity, had to be large, massive particles. How then did these particles acquire mass?

The solution was to invoke something called spontaneous symmetry-breaking. There are many examples of this phenomenon in everyday life. If we had enough patience, we could imagine that we could somehow balance a pencil finely on its tip. We would discover that this is a very symmetric, but very unstable, situation. The vertical pencil looks the same from all directions around it.

But tiny disturbances in the immediate environment, such as small currents of air, are enough to cause the pencil to topple over. When this happens, the pencil topples in a specific, though apparently random, direction. The horizontal pencil now no longer looks the same from all directions. The symmetry is spontaneously broken.

In this example, it is the barely detectable currents of air that trigger the symmetry-breaking. Theorists realized that they needed to add something to the background environment that would help to break the symmetry in their quantum field theories. Not surprisingly, they reached for another kind of quantum field, a special kind of ‘scalar’ field whose magnitude doesn’t reduce to zero in empty space.

Francois Englert

It is the power of this idea that has now been recognized by the Nobel Committee. In 1964 there appeared a series of papers detailing a mechanism for symmetry-breaking in quantum field theories, published independently by American Robert Brout and François Englert, and Peter Higgs at Edinburgh University. From about 1972, the mechanism has been commonly referred to as the Higgs mechanism and the scalar fields are referred to as Higgs fields. The quantum of a Higgs field is a Higgs boson, which the rather self-deprecating Higgs has himself referred to as ‘the boson that has been named after me’.

Ironically, Higgs’s first paper detailing the Higgs mechanism was rejected by the editor of the scientific journal to which he sent it in July 1964. Higgs was indignant: ‘I believed that what I had shown could have important consequences in particle physics,’ he wrote some years later. But at that time quantum field theory was out of fashion.

He made some amendments and re-submitted his paper a month later to another journal, by which time a similar paper had appeared by Brout and Englert. Higgs acknowledged their paper in a footnote, and added a new paragraph referring to the possible existence of a massive boson, the one that would become named after him.

Three years later Steven Weinberg used the Higgs mechanism to predict the masses of the carriers of the weak nuclear force: the W and Z bosons, sometimes referred to as ‘heavy photons’. These particles were found at CERN about 16 years later, with masses very close to Weinberg’s original predictions. This built confidence in the Higgs mechanism but, until the Higgs field could be shown to be real, its existence betrayed by its tell-tale field quantum, there would always be room for doubt (and room for alternative theories).

I met Peter Higgs on a wet Thursday afternoon in Edinburgh, a little over two years ago in August 2011. Higgs retired in 1996 but has remained in Edinburgh close to the University department where he first became a lecturer in mathematical physics in 1960. ‘It’s difficult for me now to connect with the person I was then [in 1964],’ he explained, ‘But I’m relieved it’s coming to an end. It will be nice after all this time to be proved right.’

Now we have evidence that at least one kind of Higgs field does exist, and that Higgs was right.

The award of the Nobel Prize to just two individuals is somewhat controversial. Sadly, Robert Brout died in 2011, after a long illness, and the Prize is not awarded posthumously. But there was a third paper, published a little later in 1964 by American theorists Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen, and British physicist Tom Kibble, who were all gathered at Imperial College in London at the time. The Prize can be awarded to only three recipients, and if the Nobel Committee had decided to include this work its members would have had a bit of a problem. However, it seems that the Committee judged that Englert and Higgs had priority.

In a press release issued during the Prize announcement by Edinburgh University, Higgs remarked: ‘I am overwhelmed to receive this award and thank the Royal Swedish Academy. I would also like to congratulate all those who have contributed to the discovery of this new particle and to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their support. I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research.’

Jim Baggott is the author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ and a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to pursue a business career, where he first worked with Shell International Petroleum Company and subsequently as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Atomic: The First War of Physics (Icon, 2009), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2010), and Farewell to Reality (Constable, 2013). His next book, titled Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation, will be published by OUP in 2015. Read more from Jim Baggott on the OUPblog.

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Image credits: (1) Peter Higgs. By Gert-Martin Greuel [CC-BY-SA-2.0-de], via Wikimedia Commons; (2) François Englert. By Pnicolet [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Pragmatic preservation and the Vanderbilt Hotel

By Alodie Larson

The Vanderbilt Hotel in 1912, from Architecture, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, February, 1912.

As Grand Central Terminal celebrates its centennial this year, I have found myself admiring other accomplishments of the firm responsible for a significant part of its design, Warren & Wetmore. In my first days in the New York office of Oxford University Press, I noticed an imposing cadre of busts from the southeast windows of the building. These dour fellows crown Warren & Wetmore’s remarkable design for 4 Park Avenue, originally built as the Vanderbilt Hotel. The hotel has impressive origins, but it’s also worth considering its history in the ensuing decades. Grand Central famously avoided demolition thanks to hardworking preservationists and the outspoken support of people like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but how did an averagely outstanding structure like the Vanderbilt Hotel fare over a century amid New York City’s tumultuous architectural landscape?

When the Vanderbilt Hotel first opened in January of 1912, it was praised for its agreeable mix of flair and restraint, reflecting the combined influences of Mr. Warren’s study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the refined Adam style of 18th century England. The hotel was particularly subtle compared to some of Warren & Wetmore’s other commissions, like the maritime-festive New York Yacht Club (1901). The smooth planes and subtle relief in the midsection of the Vanderbilt Hotel offset the intricate terracotta detailing and ornamental brickwork on the upper and lower floors. The elegant façade at street level featured dramatic fluted fan arches, and the simple parapet was originally outlined in electric lights, illuminating the distinctive crown of enormous busts (speculated to be Bacchus and Hermes) who sport wry expressions and garlands of fruit.

The interior also showed unusual minimalism for hotels of the time, favoring smooth lines of Caen stone in bright, vaulted spaces, accented by carved stone friezes. (Well, imitation Caen stone, as the building’s plasterer Davis Brown noted rather bluntly in an advertisement for his services in the volume of The New York Architect dedicated to the hotel; this budget-friendly cement alternative was also used in Grand Central Terminal.) The furniture, too, was muted; The New York Architect noted that “quite a bit of black appears in the furniture” (and in a particularly New York postscript, added that this was “one of the few fads that has a sound basis of good taste”). Because the Vanderbilt Hotel catered to permanent residents, the architects could depart from the routine velvet and gold baroque ostentation of contemporary hotel style. The New York Architect commented that “the dignity and reserve of the building, free from the rather vulgar splendor of the typical American hotel, sounded a new note.”

Entrance lobby to the Vanderbilt Hotel, from The New York Architect, Vol. VI, no. 60, January-February 1912.

The building was commissioned by Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and the head of the family in his time. The 22-story hotel was his first building project, and he lived on the top two floors with his family. A man seemingly fated to perish at sea, Vanderbilt had escaped tragedy by cancelling plans to travel on the Titanic, only to die aboard the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by the Germans off the coast of Ireland in 1915.

Rooftop busts from The Brickbuilder, Vol. XXI, No. 3, March, 1912.

Architectural critics of the time managed to find all manner of stylistic elements in this Rorschach blot of a building. The American Architect noted, “There is an Oriental flavor and a Renaissance grace to be seen everywhere.” The Brickbuilder couldn’t be nailed down, gushing: “It is not enough to say that it is Oriental in spirit, that much of the detail and composition is doubtless due to the enthusiasm of the Moors whose conceptions of classical ideals are to-day to be seen in Renaissance Spain and the northern portion of Italy, because into this composition a whole host of other things appear.” One thing that could be agreed, however, was that the hotel represented the foremost in modern convenience and innovation. In addition to being fireproof, the building featured a pneumatic-tube message delivery system and one of the first hotel air-conditioning systems. The Brickbuilder ruled unequivocally: “Perhaps more than any other semi-public building in New York does this remarkable hotel stand for modernity in the realm of architecture.”

The hotel was one of the most fashionable hotels in its first few decades of operation. It survived foreclosure during the Great Depression, but business had declined by the 1960s and the hotel closed shortly after the New York World’s Fair. In 1967, the firm of Schuman, Lichtenstein & Claman converted the hotel into apartments, with offices occupying the first four stories. The architects completely stripped the façade from the hotel’s lower floors, replacing the delicate Adam-style design with a stark, utilitarian grid of travertine and glass. Most of the interior was gutted. They also removed almost a third of the distinctive busts crowning the parapet in order to improve the views from the newly added penthouse apartments. In a particularly profane move, a demolition crew removed the sculptures with jackhammers. The source of this depressing detail, the 1994 Landmarks Preservation Commission report, also noted that one of the supervising architects took possession of a number of the busts for personal use.

Ground floors today; good thing we got rid of those fan arches.

This brutal refitting is the reason it took me several weeks to recognize the bland commercial frontage I often pass along Park Avenue as the handsome building seen from the OUP office. It would seem, then, that the fate of New York’s run-of-the-mill architectural masterpieces falls far from the preservation success story of Grand Central.

But the greater truth for the Vanderbilt Hotel, like many architectural gems of New York, is compromise. The building has been forced to change, but not all is lost. Two of those manhandled busts now rest in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. And in addition to the majority of the beautiful façade, another jewel of this structure has been preserved.

Lobby of the Vanderbilt Hotel, from Architecture, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, February, 1912.

The original Vanderbilt Hotel featured a remarkable Grill Room and adjacent bar, occupying the lower floors of the hotel and separate from the formal dining room. This iconic space was frequented by characters like and Diamond Jim Brady, but more importantly, it was an outstanding example of Guastavino tile vaulting. This method of construction uses thin-shell terracotta tiles in an interlocking pattern to form load-bearing arches and vaults; the elegant technique uses its decorative form to accomplish its engineering function. Rafael Guastavino Moreno pioneered this design based on centuries-old Mediterranean techniques, and together with his son Rafael Guastavino Exposito, he designed tile vaults in hundreds of buildings around the world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Vanderbilt Hotel’s Grill Room and Della Robbia Bar (aptly named after the Renaissance family of artists) featured spectacular Guastavino vaulted ceilings with polychrome ceramic tile and terracotta detailing, including also the work of the Rookwood Pottery Company.

Preserved vaulting.

The Della Robbia Bar and two adjacent bays of the upper part of the Grill Room have been preserved and remain today as Wolfgang’s Steakhouse (now the restaurant’s front and rear dining room, respectively). Although incomplete, the space is one of the most intricate surviving examples of the Guastavinos’ work, and it was designated an interior landmark in 1994. Earlier this year, MIT and the Boston Public Library launched the first major exhibition covering the Guastavino family and this unique vaulting, found also in the Ellis Island Registry Hall, the Boston Public Library, and the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. Currently at the National Building Museum, it will move to the Museum of the City of New York in early 2014.

The hotel’s preservation is imperfect, but perhaps fitting in a city of people adept at compromise. (As evidence of this competency, I offer the 2010 census calculation averaging more than 27,000 people per square mile in NYC.) Just as a diverse population coexists in New York, commercial and preservation priorities have managed to reconcile in the Vanderbilt Hotel’s present form. The fate of an ordinary magnificent building in New York reflects the pragmatism of the city itself.

4 Park Avenue today.

Alodie Larson is the Editor of Grove Art and Oxford Art Online. Before joining Oxford, she studied the architecture of Georgian England at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and worked for Random House and JSTOR.

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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Image credits: All photographs taken by the author; public domain sources noted where appropriate.

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Education depends on brains

By Philippe Grandjean

This time of the year, parents worry about what the new school year will bring for their children, teachers complain about school budget constraints, and politicians express ambitions that at least 90% of all children complete basic schooling and 50% or more pursue college degrees. We all want our kids to get the best educations that they can, and we want the next generation to be productive and successful to the benefit of society (including ourselves when we get old). Yet the statistics are not encouraging. Even when we invest heavily in education, kids still drop out of school, students fail or change their mind about vocational training or higher education, and even schools themselves are said to fail.

Are we right to blame negative influences in society, or inadequate funding for schools, or bad teachers for these problems, as we often do? Not necessarily. Recent research suggests that we have missed a crucial factor: chemical pollutants. Although it may come as a surprise, we already know the damage to brain development that can be caused by lead, mercury, arsenic, solvents such as toluene, and certain pesticides. They cause what I call chemical brain drain. It is insidious and silent, as it is usually not linked to any medical diagnosis, and it is serious.

Child performing a memory test (Faroe Islands). Image courtesy of Philippe Grandjean.

Our highly sophisticated brains start out as a tiny strip of cells. After they have begun to multiply, most cells do not remain in the same place, but move to specific locations, where they will attain specialized functions. All told, our brains rely on highly complex steps to happen in a specific fashion, in the correct order and at the right time. If some disruption occurs, brain development will be incomplete or abnormal, and there will be little, if any, opportunity for repair. Thus, chemical damage to a brain during its formation will likely remain throughout the complete lifespan.

Alarming findings of studies on this phenomenon show that developmental delays, cognitive deficits, and neurological dysfunctions occur in children exposed to brain-toxic chemicals during early development. Could chemical brain drain be part of the reason that the education system is not working as well as we had hoped?

Child attempting test on motor coordination. Image courtesy of Philippe Grandjean.

The best evidence refers to lead exposure during infancy or early childhood and how it impacts negatively on school performance. A report from Detroit, Michigan last year linked data on blood-lead concentrations to educational assessment scores of over 21,000 students from school grades 3, 5, and 8 from 2008-2010. At increased lead exposures, proficiency in reading, mathematics, and science declined, even at exposure levels below the limit used by the Centers for Disease Control. In Massachusetts elementary schools, elevated blood-lead concentrations adversely impacted student test scores in 3rd and 4th grade throughout the 2000-2009 study period. In Providence, Rhode Island, a study just released showed that increased blood-lead concentrations were associated with lower reading readiness at kindergarten entry. All of these studies adjusted for other factors and suggested that some of the detrimental effects traditionally attributed to poverty or ethnicity may rather be due to lead. These comprehensive data provide solid documentation that lead exposure adversely affects academic performance.

But cognitive skills represent just one aspect of the problem. What about motivation? Disciplinary problems are common in schools — one out of 14 US public school students are suspended each year. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, children exposed to excess lead were over twice as likely as children with lower exposure levels to be suspended from school. The lead exposures in these studies were not particularly high. Similar levels are prevalent worldwide. However, linkage between school performance and lead exposure is feasible only in the United States, where measurement of the amount of lead in children’s blood is a legal requirement. Even lower exposure levels may not provide much comfort, as the World Health Organization concluded in 2011 that there is no safe limit for lead exposure. The costs to society are substantial. Using data on lifetime income at different IQ scores, economists have calculated the value of lost brain functions. Lead exposure appears to cause worldwide losses worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

School children awaiting clinical testing (Ecuador). Image courtesy of Philippe Grandjean.

Chemical brain drain is not just a matter of a few dangerous substances like lead. When I scrutinized the scientific and medical literature, I was able to identify more than 200 industrial chemicals that had caused toxicity to the human brain one way or another. Hundreds of industrial chemicals are present in our blood. Many of them may well attenuate educational achievement.

Unfortunately, our research methods are inefficient tools to obtain the documentation we need to shed more light on chemical drain. It can take decades to gather sufficient evidence on each individual chemical. Our knee jerk demand that scientists provide ironclad and exhaustive proof before governments take action may leave the brainpower of the next generation at serious risk. On the other hand, we are too content to believe that if we invest in education, the problem will be solved.

School children worldwide may be affected by chemical brain drain (China). Image courtesy of Philippe Grandjean.

Having studied brain toxicity for 30 years, I realize that I must speak up. The adverse impacts of chemicals on developing brains demand attention — and the longer we wait to prevent these effects, the longer we put our children in danger. We get only one chance to develop a brain, and brain development therefore needs vigorous protection. As the Massachusetts study concludes, dollars spent on public health policy likely have a high return relative to dollars spent on education policy. As a starting point, we should no longer focus solely on schooling as a determinant of, e.g. PISA test scores and success rates. We need protection against chemical brain drainers to defend our children’s brains far before they even start school.

Philippe Grandjean is author of Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development – and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation. He is a professor and chair of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark and an adjunct professor of environmental health at Harvard School of Public Health. He has spent his career studying how environmental chemicals affect children’s brain development. His studies helped trigger an international response that led to a United Nations convention to control mercury pollution, to be signed this month.

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The sounds of American counterculture and citizenship

By Michael J. Kramer

We’re told many stories about the 1960s, typically clichéd tales of excess and revolution. But there’s more to the popular music of the 1960s. There are many ways in which rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging. Rock became a way for participants in American culture and counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. These songs continue to inform the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Here are just a few of the most influential songs of the modern American history and society.

1. Built to Spill, “You Were Right”

Doug Martsch of Built To Spill was born in 1969, a child of the children of the 60s like me. In this song, from the 1999 album Keep It Like a Secret, he chronicles the way in which the lyrics of 60s rock shaped those who came of age in the 80s and 90s in ways that were as troubling as they were inspiring. Frustrated hopes, annoying cliches, utopias gone sour, desires felt but unrealized, the whole shallowness of the 60s rock dream—they are all in this song, addressed to a “you” who is what: a parent? A cool older brother or sister? A lover? A friend? That old hippie down by the village square? The entire cast of rock star heroes who we felt betrayed us? Our own stupid belief in them in the first place? The song addresses all of these figures. But it’s the guitar playing that contains the real sting: angry, bitter, raging, it also sticks with the soaring guitar solo as expressive device, as if to say that despite all that rock has failed to live up to, something still pulls the singer back to the music—and to its elusive messages to love.

2. Neil Young, “Twisted Road”

Neil Young, an inspiration to Doug Martsch (just listen to Built to Spill’s version of “Cortez the Killer”), reminisces about the magic of rock—and about how hard it is to recapture that magic. It’s a happy song, but it’s also a twisted road, one where devils lurk and where things have gotten lost. It’s only “if I ever get home” that Young plans to “let the good times roll.” In the meantime, he’s listening to Bob Dylan and the Dead, playing where he once heard Roy Orbison perform. Lots of sadness in this song among the gladness. And there’s that guitar again, telling the story better than the words can.

3. Scott McKenzie, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”

It was cursed and lambasted by San Franciscans who had forged the psychedelic scene prior to the ill-fated Summer of Love in 1967. Written by John Phillips of Mamas and the Papas fame as the theme song for the Monterey International Pop Festival and sung by his pal from folkie days, Scott McKenzie, “San Francisco” is actually a magnificent pop song. Yes, the lyrics are a naive, even cynical call for vast numbers of young people to arrive in the City by the Bay with nary a plan or clue as to their survival. But listen a bit more carefully and uncertainty, hesitancy, and  disbelief seep into this generational anthem—the melody, which some might deem cloying, can also be heard as tender, a musical wish more than an assertion of fact. That’s what made the song so alluring in fantasy, and so damaging in reality. But pop music is like that.

4. The Grateful Dead, “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)”

The Dead’s version of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The last chord is a warning, but by then it’s hard not to want to follow the band, as many would for years to come after the heyday of the San Francisco Scene. This was the group’s attempt at a pop song, but for a better sense of their Acid Test-inspired mayhem, give a listen to this next track.

5. The Grateful Dead, “Viola Lee Blues (Previously Unissued Live in San Francisco 1966 Version)” on Complete Live Rarities Collection.

Introduced by promoter Bill Graham as “the oldest juveniles in the state of California,” the Dead ramble through their scruffy, rocked-up, garage band-on-acid version of this old jug band song from Gus Cannon. They hit wrong notes, the singing is out of tune, but there’s something thick and soupy about the music that sucks you in, makes you want to bob around like a jellyfish on a dance floor under the light show. Their endless, jammy take on the Martha and the Vandellas Motown classic “Dancing in the Streets” from this time period offers similar pleasures. Later they turned it into a disco song—yikes!

6. Jefferson Airplane, “We Can Be Together”

I suppose ”White Rabbit” or “Somebody to Love” was The Airplane’s version of “San Francisco,” but this song, which kicked off the 1969 album Volunteers, is a nice example of the kinds of hopes circulating around the Bay Area in 1969 during the time when the massive rock and arts festival Wild West, planned for Golden Gate Park, almost happened (but didn’t). What did it mean to get together, to get it together, to get it? The politics of the counterculture had grown more complex, more fraught by 1969. They were not just a simplistic message about peace, love, and flowers anymore. People in motion indeed.

Publicity photo of the Jefferson Airplane. 24 November 1970. RCA Records. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

7. Sly and the Family Stone, “Everyday People”

Another anthem for the San Francisco Scene, this one from Sly Stone, who had been a popular disc jockey on Oakland’s rhythm and blues radio station KSOL, where he would throw in recordings by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones among the greats of mid-60s R&B and soul. He also was on the staff of DJ Tom Donahue and Bobby Mitchell’s Autumn Records, where Grace Slick’s first band The Great Society and the Dead, among others, would record early tracks in the San Francisco Scene’s development. With his multiracial band, Stone criss crossed between white and black audiences at a time of growing racial separatism in the US as he chronicled the painful complexities of life in late 60s and early 70s. Over in Vietnam, meanwhile, as chapter five of Republic of Rock documents, the US Army’s Entertainment Branch organized a multiracial soldier rock band with the suspiciously derivative name Jimmy and the Everyday People. Performing for troops across the war zone, the band’s shows climaxed with…Sly and the Family Stone’s “(I Want to Take You) Higher.”

8. Sly and the Family Stone, “In Time”

“Harry Hippie is a waste….” One of Sly Stone’s many amazing tracks recorded in the aftermath of the counterculture’s decline. Featured as the climatic performer at Woodstock, Stone grappled with his own demons, but managed to show how those personal problems intersected with the larger challenges that hippies faced as they tried to make Woodstock Nation a reality, unsure if such a new configuration was possible or even a good idea. Once again, the guitar tells its own story.

9. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, “Who Needs The Peace Corps?”

“Think I’ll just drop out, I’ll go to Frisco, by a wig, and sleep on Owsley’s floor…Walked past the wig store, danced at the Fillmore…I’ll stay a week and get the crabs and take the bus back home…Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet, psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street…Go to San Francisco!” Frank Zappa’s great sendup of hippie hype, a perfect satire from the mock-Sgt. Peppers cover in “homage” to the Beatles to the brilliant songs about how alluring yet imperfect the counterculture could be. Also a reminder that critique of the counterculture was vibrant and sophisticated within rock music itself.

10. Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Combination of the Two”

The ever-present Bill Graham starts yet another recording here: “Four gentlemen and one great, great broad” is how he introduces Janis Joplin and her band. To wit, the problematic gender politics are present from the get go, and yet this song is so fun, so communal, so joyous, as if another kind of call for women’s liberation springs up right up out of its opposite. For more on this read Ellen Willis’s wondrous essay on Janis, one of the best on the rock and the sixties counterculture ever written. When Joplin takes her turn to sing “Yea, we’re gonna knock you, rock you, sock it to you now,” you know a leader has arrived, a representative from the republic of rock inviting you in to this strange new land where things might be different and the stakes are high for how you—being knocked, rocked, and socked—are going to respond.

11. Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”

Hendrix’s cover of this Bob Dylan composition took a cryptic whisper of a song and blasted off into the stratosphere. The tune blasted out over both the official airwaves of the United States Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam during 1968 and on countless cassette machines and record players in-country. To me it is soaked in the energies of Vietnam, with Hendrix’s guitar (he played bass on the track too) choppering, swooping, diving, darting, bombing, and crashing across a bewildering landscape of war. The lyrics are about a kind of imperial war of sorts too, told from the perspective of two “grunts” in the empire, unfortunate soldiers in the field, chatting, telling tales, shooting the breeze on the “bullshit band” (the unused radio frequencies that GIs would use as quasi-underground radio rock stations) as the elusive “enemy” lurks out in the darkness. As a former member of the 101st Airborne, Hendrix was a key figure for many young black and white soldiers who were drawn to the counterculture back on the home front as they served in the Vietnam War.

12. The Animals, “We Gotta Get Outta This Place”

It’s a song about working class lovers, a British take on the Brill Building classic “Up on the Roof.” But in Vietnam it was, reputedly, the song played on every jukebox and by every cover band: a great drunken howl of longing to escape the ‘Nam that became, ironically, the key tune in the soundtrack of the very place it bemoaned.

13. Grand Funk Railroad, “People, Let’s Stop the War”

The Vietnamese family rock band CBC performed this song in Saigon nightclubs in the earliest 1970s to audiences of GIs, young Vietnamese, and the polyglot mix of wartime internationals stationed in the capital of the Republic of Vietnam. They did so while wearing American flag t-shirts in a confusing swirl of pro and anti-American sentiment. Longing to rock their way to Woodstock Nation, they eventually would be headliners at the Saigon International Rock Festival in 1971 (yes, it really took place!). From the depths of war, they used rock to make sense of their lives, to join the hippie modernity of the West even as they used rock to keep their family—the root of traditional Vietnamese culture—intact. CBC is still playing, part of the global bar band sublime, in Houston, Texas, these days.

14. Caetano Veloso, “Tropicalia”

Rock had a global impact as the mobile soundtrack for what we might call not Woodstock Nation but the Woodstock Transnational, a a worldwide dream of reconfiguring politics through new, hybrid forms of culture. To join in to the song of the Woodstock Transnational was not to escape local issues in the postcolonial moment of the 1960s; rather, it was to try to forge new combinations of sounds that the openness of rock music and the counterculture seemed to make possible. Join in, everybody get together, but also do your own thing, be free. Many young people around the world, from The Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia (inspirations to Vaclav Havel when they were arrested by the communist state merely for wanting to play their own music) to the dancing social club teenagers in Bamako, Mali, as photographed by Malick Sidibe, to perhaps, most amazingly, the Brazilian musicians who were involved in the Tropicalia movement (some of them later imprisoned by the authoritarian right wing government for their mere weirdness despite also being criticized from the left as well for their interest in modern rock sounds and styles), made rock their own. In doing so, they made it so much more.

Michael J. Kramer’s The Republic of Rock Countercultural History Playlist:

Michael J. Kramer teaches History and American Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. He writes about arts and culture at Culture Rover.

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Metro North disruption and “employer convenience”, double taxation – again

By Edward Zelinsky

 

Once again, those of us who depend on Metro North’s railroad commuter service found ourselves bereft of adequate transportation to travel to work in Manhattan. Once again, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA), which runs Metro North, urged us to avoid Manhattan by telecommuting from our homes for the duration of this service disruption. And, once again, New York State will double tax every Connecticut resident who followed the MTA’s advice by telecommuting from his home in the Nutmeg State.

New York’s double taxation of nonresident telecommuters has emerged as an issue of nationwide import as the Empire State sends income tax bills throughout the country, taxing individuals who work at their out-of-state homes for New York employers. Other states, seeing New York get away with its income taxation of nonresidents who work outside New York’s borders, are emulating New York by taxing nonresidents who work at home. The American Legion, at its 95th national convention in Houston, noted the deleterious impact of such extraterritorial income taxation on “service-disabled veterans who own home-based businesses.” The Legion joined other veterans, disability rights, and telecommuting groups in calling for federal legislation to prevent states from taxing individuals who work at home beyond the boundaries of the taxing state.

Last May, Metro North service was disrupted when two trains collided near Bridgeport, Connecticut. The most recent Metro North incident occurred on Wednesday, September 25th when a high voltage feeder cable failed without warning, cutting electrical service to eight miles of railroad track. This failure caused Metro North “to significantly reduce train service.” In response to this service reduction, the MTA, as it did in May, urged individuals to stay at home, telecommuting to work rather than burdening the limited train service Metro North could provide to Manhattan.

Unfortunately, New York State, pursuant to its so-called “convenience of the employer” doctrine, will double tax every Connecticut resident who followed the MTA’s advice by working from home in the Nutmeg State. Under the employer convenience doctrine, the Empire State taxes the income of any nonresident who telecommutes from his out-of-state home for a New York employer, even though on such a day the nonresident never sets foot in the Empire State.

Cross-platform transfer between Metro-North Railroad (left) and Shore Line East trains at New Haven Union Station

On a day I work at home, it is Connecticut which legitimately taxes the income earned on that day. As a Connecticut resident, I am subject to Connecticut’s jurisdiction to tax all of my income. Moreover, on the days I telecommute from my home, I receive all of my public services from Connecticut. If, for example, I need an EMT on a day I work at home, it is Connecticut and its localities, not New York, which provides that service.

However, New York taxes the income earned on such a work-at-home day even though such income is earned outside New York’s borders. New York provides no tax credit to the nonresident telecommuter to avoid double taxation of that income. Typically, the home state doesn’t provide a credit either – and shouldn’t because the home state (rather than New York) provides public services to the telecommuter on the day he works at home.

The result is double taxation — which is what will happen to any Connecticut resident who followed the MTA’s advice and worked at his home in the Nutmeg State during the Metro North service disruption. New York will tax the income earned by these telecommuters at their homes in Connecticut while providing no credit for the income taxes Connecticut legitimately imposes for the income earned that day within the borders of the Nutmeg State.

New York’s aggressive projection of its taxing authority beyond its boundaries is not confined to the states adjacent to New York nor is such extraterritorial taxation imposed only by New York. In two well-known cases, New York taxed Mr Thomas Huckaby on the income he earned working at his home in Nashville, Tennessee and taxed Mr Manohar Kakar on income he earned working at his home in Gilbert, Arizona. In yet another case of extraterritorial taxation under the employer convenience banner, Delaware taxed Dorothy Flynn’s income for the days she worked at her Pennsylvania home, even though Ms. Flynn did not set foot in Delaware on these work-at-home days.

This kind of extraterritorial taxation unfairly penalizes individuals who work at home. Home-based work is desirable for many individuals including persons who live far from metropolitan areas, parents of young children, and individuals who have trouble traveling. The deleterious impact of double taxing those who work at home explains why groups representing veterans, military spouses, persons with disabilities and other telecommuters oppose the employer convenience rule and the burden this rule unfairly causes when a state penalizes work at home by taxing income actually earned outside that state’s boundaries.

In addition to the American Legion, groups opposing “convenience of the employer” taxation of nonresidents’ work at home now include the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, Caregiver Action Network, The Military Spouse JD Network, and the Telework Coalition.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo correctly notes that New York cannot continue to be the “tax capital of America.” However, New York will deserve that moniker as long as it pursues policies like the “convenience of the employer” doctrine which taxes nonresident telecommuters on days such telecommuters work at their out-of-state homes and never set foot in the Empire State. To implement his commitment to improved New York tax policy, the Governor should declare the most recent Metro North disruption the last straw and permanently eliminate New York’s extraterritorial taxation of nonresident telecommuters on the days they work at their out-of-state homes.

Senator Blumenthal and Representative Esty of Connecticut have called for hearings about the most recent Metro North service disruption. Given our experiences this year, it appears that such disruptions (and resulting calls for Connecticut commuters to work at home) will persist for some time. Accordingly, such hearings should address federal legislation to preclude any state from taxing nonresidents’ work-at-home via the convenience of the employer doctrine or any similar rule which projects a state’s taxing authority beyond its boundaries. For the next service disruption, those who follow the MTA’s advice to work at home shouldn’t be double taxed by New York State.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Cross-platform transfer between Mertro-North Railroad (left) and Shore Line East trains at New Haven Union Station. Photo by Pi.1415926535, Wikimedia Commons.

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Place of the Year: Through the years

Next week we launch our annual Place of the Year Contest (POTY), where we reflect back on the world’s hits and misses. Our OUP geography committee is hard at work compiling a list of places that have made an impact felt around the world in 2013. Only one place can be chosen as the winner. While they compile the most newsworthy locales, we wanted to reflect back on past years’ winners.

Last year’s 2012 Place of the Year threw us a curveball when Mars was chosen. How did Mars make it into the mix you may be wondering? Well, back in the summer of 2012 all eyes were on NASA’s Curiosity Rover when it landed on the planet. On 6 August 2012, NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars’ Gale Crater, and transmitted findings back to Earth. It  swallowed some Martian soil, and helped discover new findings on the planet that included an ancient stream bed. While scientists have been mapping Mars from afar since the 19th century, it still represents the new and unknown. Maybe one day we’ll have an Atlas of Mars, but until then it remains a mystery as it sits perched at the highest peak in the Solar System.

In 2010, interestingly, the place of the year was a country that seemed to be on the brink of collapse. Yemen emerged as a home base for terrorist plots. Nearly depleted of its leading export, oil, Yemen was one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, and was facing a water shortage that  heightened the country’s addiction to qat, a mildly narcotic leaf. The stakes were high, and still are, for Oxford’s 2010 Place of the Year. The future remains unclear for the country as it continues to grab headlines. Once a promising experiment in Muslim-Arab democracy, Western opinion now recognizes Yemen to have all the features of a failed state. Will it make the cut for this year’s nominations as it continues to find itself in the news three years later?

The honor went to South Africa in 2009, as it was given the opportunity to host the World Cup that year. While that may not sound all that monumental, it was the first international event hosted in the country since becoming a post-apartheid, democratic nation only 15 years earlier. This reportedly brought over 55.7 billion to the South African economy, which translated to 415,400 jobs and 19.3 billion in tax income to the government. This reflected a huge transformation to a country that had been marked by violence and danger for years.

Flashing back to 2008, Kosovo was deemed the place to take notice of as major change unfolded. On February 18, 2008, Kosovo, a former Yugoslav state, declared its independence from Serbia a decade after the start of a violent separatist war that cost 10,000 lives.  While many nations including the United States were quick to recognize Kosovo as an independent nation, others such as Serbia, Russia, and Spain refused to accept it. The two million Kosovars occupying the small part of southeastern Europe posed a challenge for cartographers as they had to contend with their new status as a sovereign state. This meant maps had to be changed and updated. Cartographers continue to monitor Kosovo, as the political, social, and physical boundaries are still at stake.

What would make your place of the year for 2013? We’ll have the nominations from our geography committee next week, but until then feel free to voice your opinion. What countries, cities, and even planets piqued your interest as the year unfolded?

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The milestone Twentieth Edition is full of crisp, clear cartography of urban areas and virtually uninhabited landscapes around the globe, maps of cities and regions at carefully selected scales that give a striking view of the Earth’s surface, and the most up-to-date census information. The acclaimed resource is not only the best-selling volume of its size and price, but also the benchmark by which all other atlases are measured.

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Image credit: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took the picture of Mars on June 26, 2001, when Mars was approximately 68 million kilometers (43 million miles) from Earth From NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.


Image credit: Waving the South Africa flag in support of the national team Bafana Bafana. Photo by Steve Evans. Source: World Cup South Africa fans. Provided with permission by Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

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Ten constitutional preambles you may not know

How do nations across the globe declare their intent in the formation of a new government? To celebrate the launch of the innovative, new platform Oxford Constitutions of the World, we have highlighted a broad range of preambles from several jurisdictions below and the full constitutions freely available on the Oxford Constitutions of the World site for a limited time. Take a look and let us know your favorite preamble!

United States of America

WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

France

The French people solemnly proclaim their attachment to the Rights of Man and the principles of national sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789, confirmed and complemented by the Preamble to the Constitution of 1946, and to the rights and duties as defined in the Charter for the Environment of 2004.

By virtue of these principles and that of the self-determination of peoples, the Republic offers to the overseas territories which have expressed the will to adhere to them new institutions founded on the common ideal of liberty, equality and fraternity and conceived for the purpose of their democratic development.

Brazil

We the representatives of the Brazilian People, convened the National Constituent Assembly, to institute a democratic state destined to ensure the exercise of social and individual rights, liberty, security, well-being, development, equality and justice as supreme values of a fraternal, pluralist and unprejudiced society, founded on social harmony and committed, in the domestic and international orders, to the peaceful solution of disputes, promulgate, under the protection of God, the following CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL.

Russian Federation

We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation, united by a common destiny on our land, asserting human rights and freedoms, civil peace and accord, preserving the historic unity of the State, proceeding from the universally recognized principles of equality and self-determination of peoples, honoring the memory of our ancestors who have passed on to us their love and respect for the Fatherland and faith in goodness and justice, reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia and asserting the strength of its democratic foundations, striving to secure the well-being and prosperity of Russia, proceeding from a sense of responsibility for our Fatherland before the present and future generations, and conscious that we are part of the world community, do hereby adopt

Republic of India

WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a [SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC] and to secure to all its citizens:

JUSTICE, social, economic and political;

LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;

EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;

and to promote among them all

FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the [unity and integrity of the Nation];

IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.

The People’s Republic of China

China is one of the countries with the longest histories in the world. The people of all nationalities in China have jointly created a splendid culture and have a glorious revolutionary tradition.

Feudal China was gradually reduced after 1840 to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country. The Chinese people waged wave upon wave of heroic struggles for national independence and liberation and for democracy and freedom. Great and earth-shaking historical changes have taken place in China in the 20th century. The Revolution of 1911, led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, abolished the feudal monarchy and gave birth to the Republic of China. But the Chinese people had yet to fulfill their historical task of overthrowing imperialism and feudalism.

After waging hard, protracted and tortuous struggles, armed and otherwise, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the Communist Party of China with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism, won the great victory of the new-democratic revolution and founded the People’s Republic of China. Thereupon, the Chinese people took state power into their own hands and became masters of the country.

After the founding of the People’s Republic, the transition of Chinese society from a new- democratic to a socialist society was effected step by step. The socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production was completed, the system of exploitation of man by man eliminated and the socialist system established. The people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants, which is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat, has been consolidated and developed. The Chinese people and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have thwarted aggression, sabotage and armed provocations by imperialists and hegemonists, safeguarded China’s national independence and security and strengthened its national defense.

Major successes have been achieved in economic development. An independent and fairly comprehensive socialist system of industry has in the main been established. There has been a marked increase in agricultural production. Significant progress has been made in educational, scientific, cultural and other undertakings, and socialist ideological education has yielded noteworthy results. The living standards of the people have improved considerably.

Both the victory of China’s new-democratic revolution and the successes of its socialist cause have been achieved by the Chinese people of all nationalities under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and by upholding truth, correcting errors and overcoming numerous difficulties and hardships. China will stay in the primary stage of socialism for a long period of time. The basic task of the nation is to concentrate its efforts on socialist modernization along the road of Chinese-style socialism. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important Theory of “Three Represents,” the Chinese people of all nationalities will continue to adhere to the people’s democratic dictatorship, follow the socialist road, persist in reform and opening-up, steadily improve socialist institutions, develop a socialist market economy, advance socialist democracy, improve the socialist legal system and work hard and self-reliantly to modernize industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology step by step, promote the coordinated development of the material, political and spiritual civilizations to turn China into a powerful and prosperous socialist country with a high level of culture and democracy.

The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated in our country. However, class struggle will continue to exist within certain limits for a long time to come. The Chinese people must fight against those forces and elements, both at home and abroad, that are hostile to China’s socialist system and try to undermine it.

Taiwan is part of the sacred territory of the People’s Republic of China. It is the lofty duty of the entire Chinese people, including our compatriots in Taiwan, to accomplish the great task of reunifying the motherland.

In building socialism it is imperative to rely on the workers, peasants and intellectuals and unite with all the forces that can be united. In the long years of revolution and construction, there has been formed under the leadership of the Communist Party of China a broad patriotic united front that is composed of democratic parties and people’s organizations and embraces all socialist working people, all builders of socialism, all patriots who support socialism and all patriots who stand for reunification of the motherland. [As amended by the Fourth Constitutional Amending Law of March 14, 2004] This united front will continue to be consolidated and developed. The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference is a broadly representative organization of the united front, which has played a significant historical role and will continue to do so in the political and social life of the country, in promoting friendship with the people of other countries and in the struggle for socialist modernization and for the reunification and unity of the country. The system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation led by the Communist Party of China will exist and develop in China for a long time to come.

The People’s Republic of China is a unitary multi-national state built up jointly by the people of all its nationalities. Socialist relations of equality, unity and mutual assistance have been established among them and will continue to be strengthened. In the struggle to safeguard the unity of the nationalities, it is necessary to combat big-nation chauvinism, mainly Han chauvinism, and also necessary to combat local-national chauvinism. The state does its utmost to promote the common prosperity of all nationalities in the country.

China’s achievements in revolution and construction are inseparable from support by the people of the world. The future of China is closely linked with that of the whole world. China adheres to an independent foreign policy as well as to the five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence in developing diplomatic relations and economic and cultural exchanges with other countries; China consistently opposes imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism, works to strengthen unity with the people of other countries, supports the oppressed nations and the developing countries in their just struggle to win and preserve national independence and develop their national economies, and strives to safeguard world peace and promote the cause of human progress.

This Constitution affirms the achievements of the struggles of the Chinese people of all nationalities and defines the basic system and basic tasks of the state in legal form; it is the fundamental law of the state and has supreme legal authority. The people of all nationalities, all state organs, the armed forces, all political parties and public organizations and all enterprises and undertakings in the country must take the Constitution as the basic norm of conduct, and they have the duty to uphold the dignity of the Constitution and ensure its implementation.

Republic of Korea

We, the people of Korea, proud of a resplendent history and traditions dating from time immemorial, upholding the cause of the Provisional Republic of Korea Government born of the March First Independence Movement of 1919 and the democratic ideals of the April Nineteenth Uprising of 1960 against injustice, having assumed the mission of democratic reform and peaceful unification of our homeland and having determined to consolidate national unity with justice, humanitarianism and brotherly love, and

To destroy all social vices and injustice, and

To afford equal opportunities to every person and provide for the fullest development of individual capabilities in all fields, including political, economic, social and cultural life by further strengthening the basic free and democratic order conducive to private initiative and public harmony, and

To help each person discharge those duties and responsibilities concomitant to freedoms and rights, and

To elevate the quality of life for all citizens and contribute to lasting world peace and the common prosperity of mankind and thereby to ensure security, liberty and happiness for ourselves and our posterity forever,

Do hereby amend, through national referendum following a resolution by the National Assembly, the Constitution, ordained and established on the Twelfth Day of July anno Domini Nineteen hundred and forty-eight, and amended eight times subsequently.

The Republic of Côte D’Ivoire

The People of Côte d’Ivoire,

Conscious of their liberty and national identity, of their responsibility before history and humanity;

Conscious of their ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, and desirous to build one nation unified in solidarity and prosperous;

Convinced that union with respect for diversity assures economic progress and social well-being;

Profoundly attached to constitutional legality and to democratic institutions;

Proclaims its adherence to the rights and freedoms as defined in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1948 and in the African Charter of the Rights of Man and of Peoples of 1981;

Expressing its attachment to democratic values recognized to all, the free people, notably:

— The respect and the protection of fundamental freedoms, individual as well as collective,

— The separation and the equilibrium of powers,

— Transparency in the conduct of public affairs,

Committed to the promotion of regional and sub-regional integration, in view of the constitution of African Unity,

Gives freely and solemnly as the fundamental law this Constitution adopted by Referendum.

Ireland

In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

We, the people of Éire,

Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial,

Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation,

And seeking to promote the common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained, the unity of our country restored, and concord established with other nations,

Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.

Papua New Guinea

WE, THE PEOPLE OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA—

—  united in one nation

—  pay homage to the memory of our ancestors—the source of our strength and origin of our combined heritage

—  acknowledge the worthy customs and traditional wisdoms of our people—which have come down to us from generation to generation

—  pledge ourselves to guard and pass on to those who come after us our noble traditions and the Christian principles that are ours now.

By authority of our inherent right as ancient, free and independent peoples

WE, THE PEOPLE, do now establish this sovereign nation and declare ourselves, under the guiding hand of God, to be the Independent State of Papua New Guinea.

AND WE ASSERT, by virtue of that authority

—  that all power belongs to the people—acting through their duly elected representatives

—  that respect for the dignity of the individual and community interdependence are basic principles of our society

—  that we guard with our lives our national identity, integrity and self respect

—  that we reject violence and seek consensus as a means of solving our common problems

—  that our national wealth, won by honest, hard work be equitably shared by all

WE DO NOW THEREFORE DECLARE

that we, having resolved to enact a Constitution for the Independent State of Papua New Guinea

AND ACTING through our Constituent Assembly on 15 August 1975

HEREBY ESTABLISH, ADOPT and GIVE TO OURSELVES this Constitution to come into effect on Independence Day, that is 16 September 1975.

IN SO DOING WE, THE PEOPLE OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA, SET BEFORE OURSELVES THESE NATIONAL GOALS AND DIRECTIVE PRINCIPLES THAT UNDERLIE OUR CONSTITUTION:—

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Image credit: Constitution of India, 1948-49. Beohar Rammanohar Sinha illuminated, beautified and decorated the original manuscript calligraphed by Prem Behari Narain Raizada. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Mr Leggy has left the building (for a while)

By Ali Sparkes

You might think this is just Children’s Book Week but it’s also another significant week on the calendar. It’s National Spiders Come In Week.

So there I was, just the other night, settling down in my nice tidy hotel room, just about to nod off. I had a visit to a school the next day and needed a good eight hours’ sleep.

And then I saw it. Creeping across the ceiling. A HUGE black spider. Like this:

Now, as you may know, I am the author of SWITCH: Spider Stampede. I know a bit about spiders after all the research I’ve done on creepy crawlies (my heroes, Josh and Danny, get SWITCHed into them in book one, you see).

So, when I see a spider I do not panic. I do not scream. I catch it in a glass and carefully put it outside.

And yes, I know it’ll probably just come back in again as soon as it’s good and ready, but I like the idea that it’s outside and not inside at least for a while.

For as much as I marvel at what an amazing creation a spider is (and they really are amazing) I still can’t quite get over the CREEP OUT factor. It’s too deep in my bones.

So. Back to the hotel room. This was a biggie. And it was up high on the ceiling, casually ambling about and showing no sign of coming down. I grabbed a glass and a bit of card but it was too high to reach – and exactly the right size and weight to suddenly drop with a sinister pat on my bed in the night. Mwahhhaameeergallurg. If you know what I mean.

So, thinking fast, I dug a long cardboard foil roll holder out of my case (it’ll take too long to explain why I carry such a thing) and encouraged the spider down to the floor.

And I SWEAR it made an angry noise as it fell. A sort of clicky buzzing sound as it plummeted through the still air of my quiet hotel room. I dropped the roll and hit the floor, ready with my glass and my card.

But the spider had VANISHED. In an instant. I had no idea where it had gone, so spent several goosebumpy minutes searching the carpet, the lower walls, the undersides of all the furniture. NOTHING. It was clearly spider with super powers, able to slip through the fabric of space and time as easily as through a crack in the wall.

I like to think that it emerged in a parallel universe just as the parallel Ali Sparkes (who’s much more beautiful, rich and successful than me) was raising a glass, awaiting some champagne to toast her latest runaway bestseller.

Then Mr Leggy (as I’ve come to remember him) suddenly shot through the rip in the space-time continuum and just went PLOP into her glass instead.

As it was, I spent the night in a state of intermittent shudder. Every hour or so I’d wake up and freak out at the sensation of my own HAIR on my shoulder.

I wish I could get over this kind of nonsense. Next spider I see, I’ll try to imagine it’s Josh or Danny, temporarily SWITCHed into an eight legged beasty. Try to like it. Care about it. Look at life from its point of view.

Or maybe imagine it’s a mum with kids.

And a husband. Oh no. Scratch that. She most likely ate her husband…

I think we shudder because somewhere deep, deep in the ancient animal part of our brain, we know that some spiders are dangerous. If you live in Australia, you’ve every reason to get a bit jumpy if a black widow wanders across your ceiling. They’re venomous enough to kill a human.

In the UK, where I live, the most we have to fear is a false widow which can cause a bit of a reaction in the kind of person who’s allergic to bee stings. So not much of a threat. We have them in our house and nobody’s been bitten yet. Although my teenage son was quite freaked out when one fell on his head recently… This is what I found in the kitchen the next morning:

So we really should all just CALM DOWN about spiders.

They’re a vital part of the ecosystem. They’re graceful and acrobatic. They create the most amazingly beautiful silken webs, particularly gorgeous and glittering in the dewy month of October. They’re astonishing feats of nature’s engineering, They’re AAAAAAARGH THERE’S ONE ON ME AAAAARGH! GETITOFFGETITOFFGETOOOOOOOOOOFFMEEEEEEEE!

Ali Sparkes is a journalist and BBC broadcaster who regularly exploits her sons as an in-house focus group for her children’s novels. She reckons it’s a fair trade for being used as a walking food and drink vending machine. Ali’s stories capture the imagination of children everywhere, and her novel Frozen in Time won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award in 2010. She is the author of SWITCH: Spider Stampede, amongst many others.

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Image credits: Both images by Ali Sparkes.

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