Juha I. Uitto's Blog, page 10

Off the main drag in Boudhanath

Sometime ago as I was strolling the main street in Kathmandu’s Boudhanath neighbourhood looking for things to shoot with my camera, I was accosted by a small woman with an even smaller girl in tow. Both were dressed in traditional Indian outfits. Their line was—as I heard it often is—we don’t want money from you, but can you please buy some milk for the child. This is supposed to be a scam. An unsuspecting foreigner buys the milk, but there’s an elaborate scheme by which the woman will then sell it further for a profit. Irrespective, I figured, these are poor people; if they turn a small profit, good for them! The child, Shalu, didn’t look like she was suffering from malnutrition because her mother traded away her milk. So I agreed to follow them to a convenience store and bought some milk powder for them. The lady, Kamala, professed thankfulness and said they lived in the nearby shantytown. If I would be so kind as to follow them, she would make me tea. I again agreed, this time also indicating that I had my camera and would like to take some photos there.
I followed  Kamala and Shalu to a side street down from the Boudhanath main drag and just within a couple of blocks we left the officially built area and entered an open field with makeshift shacks covered with tarpaulins. Just below the busy main street there was a shantytown where lots of people lived. Beyond the area was the Tribhuvan International Airport. Kamala led me to her hut. It was neat and tidy, with a variety of coloured posters on the walls. Some had Jesus Christ on them (others had Hindi models and Bollywood stars), so I asked her whether the family were Christians. Not at all; the pictures just looked attractive.


Other family members started showing up: Rakesh, a young man dressed in red jeans and a baseball jacket, said he was an art student; Rahul a smiley boy of 10; Kadjel, a beautiful young woman with an infant boy, Golu. Shalu made the promised tea, which I gladly accepted. Sitting down on one of the beds I heard the family story, which involved drunken and abusive husbands who consumed the money the ladies and the young man scraped together. The family was from Rajasthan and frequently made the trip between their home country in India and Nepal. They earned their living through shining shoes, doing some other odd jobs and, obviously, by getting foreigners to support their milk habit.
Kadjel offered to take me around the shanty. The place was rather well organized and orderly. In the centre opening there was a well with fresh water for the residents to use for cooking. Laundry was hung between the huts. One of the huts contained a small shrine. Kadjel told me that the land was owned by a Nepali landlady who collected Rs. 1,000 (about US$11) per month from each of the families, a significant amount in a country where almost a quarter of the population lives on less than the equivalent of $1.25 per day. There were rather many children, as could be expected, but nobody looked destitute. In fact, I saw one young man in white trousers and red shirt emerging from one of the abodes and walking determinedly towards the main street while talking to a cell phone.
Informal settlements, such as this—many much larger and much more messy—are springing up everywhere in the developing world as people move into towns. Despite the dire situation many countries face, with poverty, high unemployment, poor or non-existent social services, crime and other troubles, cities still provide more opportunities for people to improve their lives than the stagnating countryside. One of the greatest false myths of capitalism is that countries and people are poor because they are lazy.  People in the West would be hard pressed to work as much and to be as entrepreneurial as these slum dwellers.

Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan...

Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alex Kerr is angry. He’s angry at the Japanese bureaucrats, construction industry, media and, not least, education system that have all destroyed not only the natural beauty of the unique archipelago, but also the culture and psyche of the ancient country. The book is very well researched and Kerr knows his subject, the country where he has lived for decades. All in all, the book is an important antidote to the Japanophiles who look at the country through rose-tinted glasses—and as Kerr points out, there are many of those (and to a point I have to confess being one myself). At the same time, this is a rather tedious read because of its gloom and hopelessness. Furthermore, at 432 pages, it’s somewhat overlong and somewhat repetitious. Still, it’s an important book, which I hope many Japanese would read. However, there’s probably not much risk of that, for the very reasons that Kerr outlines in the book.

Kerr takes us through virtually all sectors of Japanese society, pointing out systematically what is wrong. He takes the title of the book from an old Chinese story where an emperor asked a painter: “What are the hardest and easiest things to depict?” The artist replied, “Dogs and horses are difficult, demons and goblins are easy” (pp. 145-146). The metaphor here is that focusing on small everyday things is difficult, but constructing new, big and expensive things is easy. Japan in the past half century has focused only on the latter and in the process destroyed the former.

It all comes down to an all-powerful and completely unaccountable bureaucracy that is unimaginative, undemocratic and tone deaf to alternative voices. It has been empowered by an education system that discourages free thinking and emphasizes rote learning and military style obeisance. Of course, no such system could stay in place for long unless there were powerful groups that benefited. Kerr shows the collusion between the bureaucrats, politicians and industry that by any Western standard could only be condemned as corrupt. The long-standing principle of ‘poor people, strong state’ was born after the American occupation when Japan was determined to catch up with the West at any cost. Which it did, but at an enormous cost to the environment, nature and, yes, the poor people.

Probably the strongest part of the book focuses on the power of the construction industry and the Ministry of Construction, which have systematically destroyed the natural beauty and ecological balance of this unique archipelago. By the mid-1990s, Japan used about 30 times more concrete per square kilometre than the United States, channelling virtually every river and stream, constructing ‘erosion control’ measures on the most remote uninhabited mountainsides, building roads into the forest to allow for logging, destroying most of its shoreline with ‘coastal protection’ works, and paving over virtually anything that can be paved. This construction frenzy has been a huge boon to the industry and to the bureaucrats who benefit from it, not least in the form of amakudari—cushy post-retirement jobs in the industry. It’s been enabled by many factors. Importantly, the huge government subsidies flowing to rural areas, but only if they accept construction works determined in Tokyo. These are in many smaller towns and villages the main sources of employment and income (although Kerr shows how many a town has also ended up in unsustainable debt because of the demons that have been brought upon them).

The government propaganda has been effective in making many Japanese genuinely believe that theirs is a small (semai) country with not enough of space for the population (in reality, Japan is by far larger than any country in Europe, barring Russia; it’s a third larger than France or Spain and has a lower population density than Holland or Germany). Another aspect that the propaganda has been successful in is instilling the fear of danger into the population: everything is abunai (dangerous) and anyone doing manual labour (including, e.g., ambulance drivers) wear helmets. Although the Japanese culture traditionally admires nature, it has also been seen as something to be controlled.

The education system has been consciously devised to create an obedient, unquestioning and hard-working labour force for Japan’s industry. Inquisitive minds are discouraged from the beginning and authority is to be respected. My wife remembers from her Japanese childhood being punished when she asked questions from the teachers at school. Education is centred on discipline and group think—starting with the school uniforms: strictly militaristic for boys, sailor outfits for girls. One story from the time I lived in Tokyo in the 1990s has stuck in my mind as typical. It was about a boy who was expelled from school on the grounds that he had dyed his hair. The parents got a doctor’s certificate that the poor boy actually had been born with brown hair. The school authorities reluctantly reversed the decision, on the condition that the boy dyed his hair black. School bullying is rampant in Japan and the victims often are kids who are somehow different. All this has resulted in a complacent public. For instance, environmental NGOs are few and far between, their members considered radical outliers.

If school is tough, university is not. On the contrary, once you’ve secured a place in a prestigious university, the four years spent in higher education are commonly the only time in a person’s life when you can slack off freely. Employers hire graduates on the basis of which university they went to, not their grades or field of study. That’s because the next stage of socialization is at work: the employer wants to re-educate the new staff member and mould him to fit the company culture. Only those intent on becoming academics go to graduate school. Unfortunately, graduate schools are equally hierarchical, as young scholars get affiliated with one senior professor who has complete authority over their research and lives. Peer review is basically unheard of in Japanese academia; it would be a logical impossibility, as it would involve a critique of a researcher who is affiliated with an unassailable senior professor. In the West, peer review is the foundation that guarantees academic quality. A Japanese friend of mine who did his doctorate in the States, but got hired by one of the better private universities in Tokyo, told me that his publications in the best international journals have no bearing for his career or status; the university only requires him to write two pieces per year, in Japanese, to its own non-peer reviewed journal. Another acquaintance, an American professor in a recognized university in the Kansai region strongly discouraged me to join the faculty, as I remember him telling me, “these are the stupidest professors in the world.”

Of course, Japan is well-known for its technological progress and the situation in hard sciences and engineering is much better than in social sciences or even medicine. Japan is essentially a handicraft culture and, as such, it is extremely detail-oriented and aiming for perfection. It’s not that the Japanese invented the camera, the computer or the car; they just perfected them. Kerr elaborates on this: “Total dedication drives Japan’s self-sacrificing workers, and underlies the quality control that is the hallmark of Japanese production. But the tendency to take things to extremes means that people and organizations can easily get carried away and set out to ‘improve’ things that don’t need improving” (p. 45). I believe he is right when he sees a connection between this tendency and the constant desire to ‘improve’ on the rivers, mountainsides, ancient cities, and the like—if you think of it, even the famed Japanese gardens and bonsai trees are attempts to improve on what the nature has created. Kerr extrapolates further, stating that “there is an unstoppable extremism at work that is reminiscent of Japan’s military buildup before World War II” (p. 45). There is something to this, which can explain the continued destruction of Japan by a single-minded bureaucratic mass not governed by any democratically accountable political leadership.

The wanton way in which the environment has been destroyed in the name of progress is sad. After the war, in the effort to rebuild Japan and to catch up with the West, everything was sacrificed to the altar of industrial development. Minamata, a fishing village with considerable natural beauty on the island of Kyushu, became synonymous to industrial pollution in the 1950s and 1960s. The stunning thing about Minamata—and several other similar, if less publicized cases—was that, for decades, it was the victims who were shunned and ostracized for hampering industrial progress. One might say that Minamata took place half a century ago, but the case has barely been closed now. Perhaps more importantly, similar disregard for human health and life—not to mention ecosystem health or aesthetic values—continues to be demonstrated today, when Japan is rich and there is absolutely no justification for it (if there ever was). It was only in 1997 when the government started half-hearted regulation of dioxins after the publication of extremely high concentration levels of this poison around incinerators. The meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the tsunami of 11 March 2011 revealed stupendous breaches in security at the plant, with the government watchdog clearly in collusion with the industry to bypass even the weak regulations.

Taking Kyoto as a prime example, Kerr—understandably and correctly—lambasts the destruction of old neighbourhoods and the cultural patrimony in ancient urban centres. Again, at work are the bureaucrats and construction industry on autopilot and a complacent public with a misguided understanding of progress and modernity.

Had Kerr left it to examining environment, construction and education the book might have read better. But he decided to cover many more areas, including the bubble economy, manga, ikebana, the poor state of Japan’s museums, the movie industry, just to name a few True, he does tie the miserable state of Japanese cinema and other arts to the same root causes, stating how “Japan’s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children” (p. 312). Similarly, the critique of ‘internationalization’ of Japan is right on the money. Japan is likely the least international of any industrialized nation. Since the Edo period, foreigners have been isolated in their own ghettos, like the historical Dutch and Chinese merchants off Nagasaki. Today, foreigners (gaijin) have been largely relegated to the position of low-level workers in companies or language teachers with no chance of career advancement. As for unskilled workers, authorities have encouraged primarily ethnically Japanese people from places like Brazil and Peru to take up work in the country. Just a few years ago, I was having dinner in Tokyo with a senior government official. When I mentioned that, given the aging population and dearth of manual workers, Japan would be forced to ease up immigration laws, his answer was (seriously): “No, not at all; that’s why we’re investing so much in the development of robots.” Xenophobia is alive and well in Japan.

Kerr also talks about creative Japanese people who choose to leave the country. Japan has never appreciated the maverick, even if the person was a genius.  He mentions leading scientists (like Shuji Nakamura, inventor of important breakthroughs in blue lasers; Dr. Ken Kakere, a cancer specialist long with NIH in the USA), business people (Nobuya Okabe who makes SciFi effects for movies and TV) and musicians (Seiji Ozawa, Ryuichi Sakamoto) who all have decided to go abroad. “In Japan’s medical world, young people, women, the outspoken, and the inventive stand no chance of recognition” (p. 339). The same could be said of many other fields. At the same time, many young people decide to leave for studies abroad where they can “enjoy” life and study, rather than just “endure” like in Japan (p. 357).

This book was published more than a decade ago, in 2001, and its examples come largely from the 1990s. One could therefore expect it to be outdated. Many things have changed since the publication and, perhaps, things are no longer equally bleak. In fact, Kerr himself sees some hopeful signs for change, although he does have his doubts: “Change will get harder, not easier, as the population ages. At the very moment when Japan needs adventurous people to drastically revise its way of doing things, the population has already become the world’s oldest, with school registrations on a strong downward curve … Meanwhile, youths, whom one would ordinarily expect to be full of energy and initiative, have been taught in school to be obedient and never to question the way things are” (p. 367). Kerr points out that Japan has demonstrated an ability to abruptly change course, twice, but both times there was an external impetus: first in the late-Edo period when Commodore Perry forced Japan open to outsiders; the second time after World War II with an American instigated new constitution. This time Japan is on its own: “Nobody outside Japan is concerned about the fate of its mountains and rivers; nobody will arrive in a warship to demand that Japan produce better movies, rescue bankrupt pension funds, educate its children to be creative, or house its families in livable houses. The revolution will have to come from within” (p. 360).

But many things have indeed happened. The recession has shaken up the lifelong career structure and unemployment has risen. More young people have been forced into self-employment or have even dropped out. At the time when Kerr wrote his book a dozen years ago, Japan’s economy was still larger than the combined economy of the rest of East Asia, including China. Since then, China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy. Then there was the tsunami and the nuclear disaster, which surely must have shattered any remaining trust people may have had in the bureaucracy and big business.

Then again, East Village is still full of Japanese kids who did not fit in and Ryuichi Sakamoto still lives in New York. Japanese speaking henna gaijin are still paraded on TV variety shows as curious freaks. Construction is continuing unabated with government subsidies. And LDP—neither liberal nor democratic—is again in power. One can only hope for the best.

If this review—like the book itself—comes across overly negative, it is because Kerr focused on the critical aspects. Japan, of course, has so many good aspects to it. That’s why Kerr, I and many a Japanophile cares. At the end, this is a work of love. As Kerr points out, the overwhelming majority of books written about Japan by gaijin focus on the lovely aspects—the aesthetics, the traditional culture, the food, the politeness of people, the efficiency, the beauty that remains in nature and in culture—therefore, a critical look that doesn’t overlook the troubling side is useful. Taking an analogy from what is missing in new ikebana, Kerr concludes Japan has strayed too far from jitsu, or reality, and there is a need to getting back in touch with this reality. He concludes: “The result of Japan’s war with jitsu has been to tear apart and ravage most of what Japan holds most dear in its own culture, and this lies at the root of the nation’s modern cultural malaise: people are sick at heart because Japan has strayed so far from its true self … The challenge of this century will be how to find a way home” (p. 385).


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A Better India: A Better World by N.R. Narayana MurthyMy ...

A Better India: A Better World by N.R. Narayana Murthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a refreshing book by an important business leader. When an Indian colleague first lent it to me, I wasn’t thrilled to read it but felt obliged. I was very much positively surprised. N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founder and chairman of Infosys presents a rather coherent and positive vision to the world according to himself. If only many more business leaders thought like him, one might even feel tempted by this thing called ‘compassionate capitalism.’  Narayana Murthy has thought much about India, his homeland, and its contradictions. In the introduction to his book, he outlines these:

“The enigma of India is that our progress in higher education and in science and technology has not been sufficient to take 350 million Indians out of illiteracy. It is difficult to imagine that 318 million people in the country do not have access to safe drinking water and 250 million people do not have access to basic medical care. Why should 630 million people not have access to acceptable sanitation facilities even in 2009? When you see world-class supermarkets and food chains in our towns, and when our urban youngsters gloat over the choice of toppings on their pizzas, why should 51 per cent of the children in the country be undernourished? When India is among the largest producers of engineers and scientists in the world, why should 52 per cent of the primary schools have only one teacher for every two classes? When our politicians and bureaucrats live in huge houses in Lutyens’ Delhi and the state capitals, our corporate leaders splurge money on mansions, yachts and planes, and our urban youth revel in their latest sport shoes, why should 300 million Indians live on hardly Rs 545 per month (US$10 at current exchange rate), barely sufficient to manage two meals a day, with little or no money left for schooling, clothes, shelter and medicine?” (pp. xiii-xiv).

His starting point is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘four freedoms’—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear (p. xiii). He later elaborates on what a ‘civilized society’ entails: “a society where everybody has equal opportunity to better his or her life; where every child has food, shelter, health care and education; a society where duties come before rights; where each generation makes sacrifices to make life better for the next generation” (p. 11). Obviously, many of these tenets are increasingly not present in today’s USA and, worse, many Americans on the right would dispute these principles as smacking of socialism.

Narayana Murthy is a well-read and well-travelled, learned man who clearly thinks a lot about societal issues. In the introduction his acknowledged three books that have influenced him deeply: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber; My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi; and Peau Noire, Masques Blancs by Franz Fanon (p. xiv). This rather eclectic selection shows the breadth of his reading and attests to an open mind. He builds his own philosophy on these disparate strains of thought, emphasizing the importance of values and leadership. He sets out early in the book that, “I do not know of any community—a company, an institution or a nation—that has achieved success without a long journey of aspiration, hard work, commitment, focus, hope, confidence, humility and sacrifice” (p. xxiii).

His student years in France in the 1970s were very important in forming his thinking. In the first chapter, a lecture to students, he compares France to India for its civil-mindedness: “In France, everybody acted as if it was their job to discuss, debate and quickly act on improving public facilities. In India, we discuss, debate and behave as if the improvement of any public facility is not our task, and consequently, do not act at all” (p. 11). His conclusion: being a developing country is a mindset. Here he breaks clear of the Left, placing the onus on the individual, as well as the society as a whole, to take responsibility for its own destiny. He tells a story of how he lost any sympathy for the Left after having been incarcerated by Bulgarian authorities when traveling back from Paris to India in 1974 (pp. 4-5).

This is a collection of 37 essays and speeches given at a variety of fora during the 2000s and selected for the book by the author himself. They are divided into sections: Address to students; Values; Important national issues; Education; Leadership challenges; Corporate and public governance; Corporate social responsibility and philanthropy; Entrepreneurship; Globalization; and, finally, three short chapters on Infosys. In such a collection it is inevitable that there are overlaps between the chapters and many recurrent themes. I’ll pick a few themes that I found interesting here below.

He addresses students in a variety of schools, ranging from prestigious institutions like INSEAD, Indian Institute of Technology, IESE Business School in Barcelona and NYU, to various other universities in India. He exhorts his values: “You must believe in and act according to the principle that putting public interest ahead of private interest in the short term will be better for your private concerns in the long run.” … “Ego, vanity and contempt for other people have clouded our minds for thousands of years and impeded our progress. Humility is scarce in this country.” … “No county that has shunned merit has succeeded in solving its problems.” … “The reason for the lack of progress in many developing nations is not the paucity of resources but the lack of management talent and professionalism” (pp. 14-15).

Narayana Murthy is a fan of globalization and refers to the ‘global bazaar’ and Thomas Friedman’s ‘flat world’ in several places. In this context, he calls for “an environment of tolerance and respect for multi-culturalism” (p. 19). He sees global warming and environmental degradation as major threats and sees that the answers must lie in global cooperation: “The solution is not to force developing nations to forgo what the developed world has enjoyed for over a century. It is to come together as one planet and use innovation in technology to produce alternate energy solutions and reduction of carbon emissions.” His thinking reflects the intergenerational equity perspective embedded in the original definition of sustainable development: “After all, this is the only planet we have. Conduct yourself as if you have borrowed it from the next generation. Remember that you will have to give it back to them in good shape” (pp. 20-21).

He is also very critical of laissez-faire capitalism, a theme that resonates throughout the book: “Unfortunately, the greed of several corporate leaders, the meltdown of Wall Street, the increasing differences between the salaries of CEOs and ordinary workers, and the unbelievable severance compensation paid to failed CEOs have called into question whether capitalism is indeed a solution for the benefit of all, or if it is an instrument for a few cunning people to hoodwink a large mass of gullible middle-class and poor people. Never before in the history of capitalism have so few people brought so much misery to so many.” His views of how to manage a company are in line with his broader beliefs: “The only way you can save capitalism and bring it back to its shining glory is by conducting yourselves as decent, honest, fair, diligent and socially conscious business leaders. In every action of yours, you have to ask how it will make the lowest level worker in your corporation and the poorest person in your society better. You have to learn to put the interest of the community—your corporation, your society, your nation and this planet—before your own interest.” Again emphasizing the need for sacrifice, he states that, “(T)o succeed in these days of globalization, global warming and laissez-faire capitalism, every worker in your corporation will have to accept tremendous sacrifices in the short term and hope that goodness will, indeed, succeed in the long term and make life better for every one of them” (pp. 21-22). Certainly not the thinking en vogue on this continent!

Naryana Murthy is also rather harsh on India. In a chapter entitled ‘What Can We Learn from the West?’ he chastises his own nation for faulty values: “Indian society has, for over a thousand years, put loyalty to family ahead of loyalty to society.” … “Unfortunately, our attitude towards family life is not reflected in our attitude towards the community. From littering the streets to corruption to violating contractual obligations, we are apathetic to the community good.” … “Apathy in addressing community matters has held us back from making progress which is otherwise within our reach. We see serious problems around us but do not try to solve them. We behave as if the problems do not exist or as if they belong to someone else” (pp. 47-49). He continues, “our intellectual arrogance has also not helped our society. I have travelled extensively and, in my experience, have not come across another society where people are as contemptuous of better societies as we are, with as little progress as we have achieved.” He identifies things that India should learn from the West, including accountability, dignity of labour (“everybody in India wants to be a thinker and not a doer”), and professionalism (punctuality, respect for other people’s time, respecting contractual obligations), concluding that “the most important attribute of a progressive society is respect for others who have accomplished more than they themselves have, and the willingness to learn from them” (pp. 50-51)

Elaborating on individual responsibilities, he adds one more: discipline. “There are several ingredients for national development—natural resources, human resources, leadership, and finally, discipline.” … “The utter lack of discipline exhibited by our people is rendering these other three powerful factors ineffective for fast-paced economic growth. We see umpteen examples of undisciplined behaviour around us every day. What is even sadder is that this behaviour has become the norm even among the powerful and the elite.” … “Discipline is about complying with the agreed protocols, norms, desirable practices, regulations and the laws of the land designed to improve the performance of individuals and societies. Discipline is the bedrock of individual development, community development, and national development” (p. 57). In this category, Narayana Murthy includes aspects, such as lack of discipline in thought, or intellectual dishonesty (objectivity to focus on outcomes and results, rather than politics or focus on caste and religion; corruption). To achieve discipline, India needs role models (honest, accountable, disciplined leaders committed to change), swift and harsh punishment of offenders, transparency, political reform, and an improved bureaucracy (p. 65).

The part focusing on important national issues considers a wide range, including the role of population in economic development in India. Talking about population growth as a strain to development risks getting attacked from both the Left and the Right these days, but Narayana Murthy barges right into the issues. He highlights the need for ‘good human capital’ (p. 94) but also warns that “a failure to stabilize India’s population will have significant implications for the future of India’s economy” and that “high population densities have also led to overloaded systems and infrastructure in urban areas” (p. 95). He links the population debate to environment and resources, in particular energy demand, noting how the combined demands from India and China will put pressure on world resources: “The rapid growth in emerging economies cannot be sustained in the face of mounting environmental deterioration and resource depletion” (pp. 96-97). He sees a clear role for the government, which must “focus on conservation-friendly policies. For example, subsidies on conventional fuel make it difficult for renewable energy sources to compete and should be removed at least for rich and middle-class people.” … “The government can play a key role as a regulator in making Indian industry environmentally responsible” (pp. 99-100). Would someone please tell that to the politicians in Washington, DC?

So, how to deal with the issue of excessive population growth? Well, there’s the need to meet unmet need of contraception and the issue of how Indian states have failed to implement family planning programs. Narayana Murthy recognizes that there’s been a significant decrease in population growth in certain southern states, such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, where “state governments here focussed on human development, opened up local economies, and improved social services … Rising female literacy in these states contributed to the success of family planning … A focus on women’s and children’s health also contribute to population control.” He concludes, in line with what is also known from empirical literature: “human development goes hand in hand with lower population growth” (pp. 98-99). What he doesn’t mention is that states like Kerala have for decades been run by parties from the Left.

His ‘Framework for Urban Planning in Modern India’ also recognizes the importance of planning but calls for “radical, immediate reform in the planning and management of our cities” that “must adequately address the shortage of low-cost housing” (pp. 104-105).

Moving to corporate governance, he extols the virtues of good corporate governance to enhance corporate performance while ensuring that corporations conform with the interests of investors and society by “creating fairness, transparency and accountability in business activities among employees, management and the board” (p. 174). “The abuse of corporate power results from incentives within firms that encourage a culture of corruption. … Clearly, good governance requires a mindset within the corporation which integrates the corporate code of ethics into the day-to-day activities of its managers and workers” (p. 181). “Corporate leaders have to create a climate of opinion that values respectability in addition to wealth” (p. 184).

So what is this ‘compassionate capitalism’ that Narayana Murthy longs for?  According to him it is about “bringing the power of capitalism to the benefit of large masses. It is about combining the power of mind and heart, the good of capitalism and socialism … The benefits of growth have to be distributed widely” (p. 215). While this does not exist anywhere, Narayana Murthy does pay some respect to what he calls the ‘Swedish model.’

He returns to the theme of the lack of credibility of capitalism today: “Greedy behaviour from corporate leaders has strengthened public conviction that free markets are tools for the rich to get richer at the expense of the welfare of the general public” (p. 216). Lest capitalism is rejected as the most accepted model for growth in developing countries and by the alienated poor, the business leaders have to regain the trust of society and abide the value system of the community where they operate. Touching on a debate that rages both in America and Europe, Narayana Murthy weighs in on executive compensation: “Business leaders should shun excessive managerial compensation. Managerial remuneration should be based on three principles—fairness with respect to the compensation of other employees; transparency with respect to shareholders and employees; and accountability with respect to linking compensation with corporate performance … We have to create a climate of opinion which says respect is more important than wealth” (pp. 216-217). Indeed.

At the end, this rather visionary and socially aware business leader sees globalization in an almost exclusively favourable light, concluding that “we need a flat world because is spreads the American beliefs in free trade to the rest of the world; it benefits consumers from all over the globe; it helps create a world with better opportunities for everyone; and, finally, it brings global trade into focus, shunning terrorism and creating a more peaceful world” (p. 256). The self-confessed admirer of the United States would be bitterly disappointed with the level of political discourse here today.


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Nagarkot

The sun was setting over the Himalayan range across the valley. From this distance the snowcapped mountains appeared peaceful, but the reality up there would be different, I mentioned to my friends Roland and Madeleine sitting next to me enjoying their drinks and some succulent momos on the terrace. These were the highest mountains in the world, with several peaks reaching up to more than 7,000 meters above sea level. Many climbers had perished in the violent blizzards, sudden storms and avalanches during their attempts to the summit. Mount Everest (8,848 m) shone bright between peaks that appeared much larger than this highest of them all in the distance. Here in Nagarkot, away from the noise and pollution of Kathmandu valley, there was true peacefulness. It was wonderful to sit down and relax with good old friends who recently relocated to Kathmandu from Cairo.  I had spent the week in Kathmandu attending the Evaluation Conclaveorganized by the South Asian Community of Evaluators, a gathering of more than 300 evaluation professionals. When the Conclave ended at lunchtime (with no white smoke), I checked out of my hotel and hooked up with my friends to drive out of town. We drove through the chaotic city traffic across the ring road, past Bhaktapur where finally urban sprawl gave way to open fields. It was very dusty, although it had rained just a week before. In the beginning of March, there were no crops in the fields. Here people would grow rice in the summer on their terraced fields. In the winter, another crop of wheat, rapeseed, millet would be harvested.
Soon the road started climbing up the hillside. The traffic was not heavy on the winding road but there was a constant flow of vehicles: cars, small SUVs and trucks, buses, minivans carrying tourists and, most of all, motorbikes. We all shared the road with pedestrians, dogs, goats, the occasional cow. Traffic is hazardous on Nepal’s mountain roads, but here we were progressing safely in the VW Tiguan steered by Roland.
As we reached higher ground, we saw many small bars and restaurants perched perilously above steep slopes with gorgeous views giving out to the valley. Resisting the temptation, we pushed onwards. There were also several military camps along the road. Nepal is still emerging from a prolonged Maoist insurgency and lawlessness that rendered much of the countryside uninhabitable, contributing to the uncontrolled growth of the capital city region.
Nagarkot, just 40 km outside of the city, has developed into a major tourist destination thanks to its proximity to the capital and natural beauty. The town of Nagarkot is not much more than a messy conglomeration of houses in a crossing where two roads diverge, but it is bustling with activity. On all sides, there are smaller and larger establishments under the general rubric of ’resort,’ with names like Paradise Inn, Café du Mont, and The Hotel at the End of the Universe. We continued past the town and the sprawl of resorts ended. We drove until we came to another fork in the road where a soldier advised us to take the path to the left. The road became increasingly rough with potholes on the unpaved surface. At the end of the road we reached Bhangeri Durbar Resort. A reservation had been made by Amogh, a friend of my New York –based Nepali friend Anish. Bhangeri Durbar turned out to be a lovely choice. A new hotel, opened only at the end of 2011, it was made with good taste and occupied a pristine location with a view to the Himalayan mountain range. The altimeter in Roland’s wristwatch clocked over 1,800 meters above sea level.
Although we were the first to arrive in late afternoon, we would not be the only guests. Two other groups arrived after us. The first consisted of a class of MBA students from Kathmandu who were at a retreat. The students—boys and girls in almost equal numbers—looked terribly young as they frolicked in the garden. The second group consisted of ten Chinese tourists who would stay for one night, admire the Himalayan sunset, eat a specially prepared Chinese meal, and depart for their next destination early in the morning. Chinese tourists are an increasing presence in Nepal (as well as elsewhere in Asia). The assistant manager of Bhangeri Durbar told us that 70-80% of their guests are from China. The Chinese tour modality is like that of the first mass tourists in the West in the 1960s. They travel by bus and cover the entire country in one week zooming from one location to the next.
By the time we arrived for dinner after a rest, both of our fellow traveler groups had already finished eating, so we had the restaurant—and the assistant manager’s attention—all to ourselves. The meal was delicious consisting of chicken curry and fish curry (made from frozen fish, as Nepal is far from sources of fresh fish), spinach and other vegetables and, of course, rice and daal. The vegetables were grown in the hotel’s own fields just below. We asked for raksi, the local alcohol distilled from rice or millet, which the staff went to procure from a nearby farmhouse. He soon returned with a plastic water bottle filled with slightly cloudy liquid, which we sampled for the benefit of our digestion.
Gurung, the assistant manager, was running the restaurant in a highly professional manner, spoke excellent English and was generally very sophisticated. Our discussion revealed that he was originally from this area—Gurung, his name, also implies an ethnic group, as is the case with many Nepali names—but had left for boarding school in Kathmandu in his early teens. He had completed hotel and restaurant school in 2009 and had only recently returned to his home area for the first time in many years.
Darkness fell rapidly and the moon that rose over the mountains was two-thirds full, bright orange and huge. It’s so much closer here, observed Madeleine.
Sleep came easy in the fresh air and absolute silence despite the moonlight. Wake-up was before 6 am when it was still coal dark. This was to get ready to observe the sunrise over the mountains half an hour later. The sky was slowly getting lighter and colored in pink and turquoise hues. Soon the sun appeared behind the range as a small red fire ball. What followed, however, was disappointing. The mountains and the valley were covered in a thick cloud and it would be hours before the snowy peaks appeared behind the haze. We had no choice but to lodge a complaint with Gurung about this over breakfast.
For me this was just a mini-holiday, as I’d have to leave this afternoon for India. However, we still had time for some sightseeing and decided to head up to the highest point in the area, the Nagarkot Tower. I had expected to see hikers there, but was surprised at the scene. Just below the peak, there was a fair field with a large grouping of shops selling snacks and souvenirs. The largest share of merchandise, however, clearly was alcohol of different varieties: there were large bottles of beer, rows of Khukri rum, piles of Ruslan vodka and Himalayan whisky. This was clearly a popular party place. We climbed up the steps leading to the top (now over 2,000 meters high, according to Roland’s watch) – and found the party! Although it was still early—well before noon—a large crowd had already gathered at the top and more were coming. A makeshift sound system with two large speakers was blasting music, Gangnam Style, and a group of young girls were dancing in a circle. A couple of kids were playing badminton next to them. Families had settled down for a picnic, no doubt consuming some of the beverages from downhill. Young couples were photographing each other with the now visible snow peaks as a backdrop. The day was gorgeous, the sun warming up the cold mountain air. Almost all of the people on the mountain were Nepali. What a great way to spend a Saturday, I thought.
With some time still on our hands, we decided to explore the area a bit more. Nagarkot was clearly booming and new resorts were coming up in every scenic spot. The valleys below were covered with agricultural terraces. Large hawks soared high above them. I couldn’t but help to reflect on the transformation of the landscape caused by this rapid development. Although this cannot be classified as mass tourism, the individual hotels, resorts and restaurants add up to large-scale development, with the inflow of thousands of people every weekend. Then again, tourism is bound to bring in lots of money to the area and generate significant amounts of income for the local people who then do not need to add to the fray in Kathmandu. This development had allowed our friend Gurung to return to his home area. Perhaps, development is inevitable so close to the teeming capital city. So far the style of development has been as benign as could be expected. As we headed down towards the city, most of the traffic was to the opposite direction. I would not have minded turning around and joining the revelers for another evening of merry-making.

Some Small Countries Do It Better: Rapid Growth and Its C...

Some Small Countries Do It Better: Rapid Growth and Its Causes in Singapore, Finland, and Ireland by Shahid Yusuf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This excellent small book of just 169 pages provides a systematic analysis of evidence pertaining to a particular development path that a group of three small countries—Singapore, Finland and Ireland—followed.  I read the book with special curiosity, not only due to a general interest in economic and social development, but because I was born and grew up in one of the countries, Finland, and wanted to know whether I would recognize my home country from their analysis. I can now confirm that I mostly did.

Collectively termed Sifire, they experienced strong growth and transformed their economies from middle-income countries to some of the richest in the world in the period since the mid-1980s. The authors’ premise is that: “The path followed by these three countries offers a different perspective on growth. Their approach may be of greater relevance than the well-worn East Asian model in the highly competitive global environment of the early 21st century because it does not necessarily assume heroic levels of investment” (p. 3). Moreover, they suggest that “it may be better tailored to the opportunities available to a heterogeneous group of middle- and lower-middle-income economies …, as well as to late-starting, low-income countries that, because of their youthful, rapidly increasing populations, need to grow at high single-digit rates to create enough jobs and to double per capita income in 10 years” (p. 3).

The authors provide a number of reasons for their focus on these particular three countries. Firstly, they acknowledge that “between 1985 and 2005, the three Sifire countries demonstrated a remarkable capacity to learn and, by improving the quality of learning, to achieve technological catch-up, develop manufacturing capabilities of the first rank, and increase their ability to innovate.” Demographically they are of comparable size. Ireland, the smallest, had a population of 4.4 million in 2008, as compared with 5.3 million for Finland, the largest of the three countries. In 1985, Sifire were all middle-income countries, with per capita GDPs ranging from US$6,000 to US$11,000. By 2008, they were among the countries with the highest incomes as a result of steady rates of growth. Singapore’s economy grew the fastest (5.0-6.4% p.a.) on average, followed by Ireland’s, with Finland’s economy in third place (2.9-4.6% p.a.). The authors assert that the Sifire growth was closely linked to “competitiveness, derived in large part from institutional factors and the quality of the countries’ human resources.” (pp. 21-22)

The authors are both economists with no discernible bias for anything but rather classical economics. Shahid Yusuf has a history in the World Bank and is now Chief Economist of Growth Dialogue at the George Washington University School of Business in Washington, DC. Kaoru Nabeshima is Director of Technological Innovation and Economic Growth Studies Group in the Institute of Developing Economies of Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO). Chapter 1 of the book – Looking for Growth – reviews the conventional wisdom on economic growth before turning more specifically – and more interestingly – to the Sifire group. In this context, they acknowledge the key role governments played in promoting the development strategies in each of these three countries. They recognize how the three countries devised consultative arrangements involving key segments of the business community, labour unions or other influential representatives able to communicate the concerns of workers and exercise a degree of discipline over their constituencies, the financial community, and the education sector (or, more broadly, the learning economy, which includes preschooling and vocational training). This has enabled the governments to “achieve a workable consensus on economic objectives and strategies, and to agree on emergency remedial policies when the nation faces crisis” (p. 16).

Turning specifically to Finland, the authors say it “demonstrates the workings of an advanced democratic system that has perfected the political and labour market institutions for consensus building around key economic objectives and the capacity to arrive at significant macroeconomic results by coordinating the initiatives of a number of small urban centres” (pp. 23-24). When I grew up in the country, ‘consensus’ was the key word. The frequently tough negotiations between the labour unions and central employers’ and industry organizations were a perennial feature. Despite some hard rhetoric, they all eventually ended up in both sides making concessions for the common good. The government played a key role in facilitating these. One feature of the multiparty democracy in Finland is the emphasis on the qualifier ‘multi.’ There have long been many parties active on the national political scene and none of the 3-4 big ones ever reached anything even remotely resembling an absolute majority (in the latest parliamentary elections, the conservatives were the largest party with 20.4% of the vote, while the second, the social democrats, got 19.1%). This forced the country always to have coalition governments, which together with a general consensus regarding the overall development goals guaranteed that there’d never been major disruptions or changes in the chartered course.

In Chapter 2 – How Sifire Compressed Development – the authors move into analysing the context of the Sifire experience. The Sifire developed against a backdrop of globalization (in the case of Finland and Ireland, the integration with EU provided an important context) and this road was not always smooth. In fact, all of the countries faced crises during the late 20th century. In the authors’ analysis, the advantages of a consensus-based development path became apparent during the crises that helped “crystallize options and prod decision makers to choose among alternatives by systematically gathering and evaluating data and by canvassing the views of market participants.” Further, the crises “highlighted the desirability of mechanisms to reduce investment risks for domestic and foreign investors and thereby raise the level of investment through better coordination of the decisions of key players, of public investments, and of policy incentives. (p. 40)

A major crisis for Finland was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been a major market for Finnish products over the past several decades. Entire industries had developed around supplying the seemingly endless and hardly discerning eastern market. Fortunes were made by the so called ‘Red Barons’ who manufactured and sold to the communist market, getting paid in hard currency through the government of Finland that in turn imported oil and other goods at advantageous prices (incidentally, this steady supply of energy from the Soviet Union shielded Finland from the worst impacts of the OPEC-induced energy crises in the 1970s). My uncle was in the garment industry, but never bet his fortunes on the Soviet trade. I remember him telling me in the 1980s how his peers on what was then a garment focused street in Helsinki were mocking him: “Uitto goes to Paris for fashion shows; what a waste of time! We manufacture one-size-fits-all boots and frocks in a single model and colour and the Russkies buy as many as we have time to produce!” Well, the Russian market was suddenly gone overnight and so were all of those who had relied on it. Finnish unemployment shot from negligible to over 20%. This forced a rapid restructuring of the economy.

The authors identify a third success element, which is the “governments’ capability to implement decisions, to follow through with promises, and to ensure that incentives were actually delivered with the minimum of transaction costs. Crises in these small economies underlined the advantages of public organizations with a limited number of clear objectives, a readiness to engage with key stakeholders, streamlined structures with few layers, and strict accountability” (p. 41). The long-term strategy for growth was further centred on technology as a driver, which required building capabilities in the countries (p. 44). They conclude the second chapter by stating that: “Globalization and the pace of technological change served as the enabling conditions for these countries – as they did for others as well – but Sifire’s widening lead over other countries emerged from the forging of domestic consensus in support of long-term-development strategies that were keyed to the quality of human capital, intangible factors, and an open, productively networked system of innovation and learning. The focus on human capital committed these countries to building their education and training assets. The importance attached to intangibles and the soft infrastructure undergirding development meant that institutions were given due attention” (p. 48).

The chapters that follow focus more in detail on these specific success factors. Chapter 3 considers the Elements of a Learning Economy, providing a host of statistics on the major shift in the structure of exports from primary commodities to high-tech products in Sifire. The chapter also provides an overview of the education sector, on the premise that this economic transformation was only made possible by the investment in human capital (p. 65). It focuses on the comprehensiveness and quality of education, as well as research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Apart from the broad-based quality education, innovation was spurred by an open economy and the focus on IT and telecommunications industries. The authors conclude that all three countries leveraged “technological advances in key subsectors with the rise of advances in electronics and telecommunications, thereby opening new industrial pathways. Globalization in general – and for Finland and Ireland, integration with the EU – widened market opportunities that were essential for their industrial development. Without access to large external markets, these small countries would not have been able to grow as rapidly and consistently as they have done” (p. 96).

The transition was enabled by an education strategy that responded to the economy’s needs. Sifire focused on providing “universal primary education and expanded secondary and tertiary education as demand for higher skills began rising. High levels of enrolment in the science and engineering fields enabled the Sifire countries to accelerate industrialization and assisted in progressive upgrading of new and traditional industries” (p. 97).

Chapter 4 – Governance and Growth – starts off with recapping some theories of endogenous growth and institutions. Yusuf and Nabeshima then return to the issue of “leadership that forged a consensus on economic objectives and the means for achieving them” (p. 103). They continue that: “A leadership committed to a firm economic agenda that enjoyed broad support could strengthen the economic governance institutions and deepen the organizational capabilities to enforce rules, uphold the law, and frame as well as implement policies” (p. 104).

A large part of this chapter focuses on coordinators that helped the countries en route to a knowledge-intensive economy. In the case of Finland, the system involved a host of actors from the public and private sectors. The government’s Science and Technology Policy Council set policy that individual ministries implemented. Financing for both the private companies and academic institutions was channelled through the Academy of Finland, Tekes (a unit under the Ministry of Trade and Industry) and the Finnish Innovation Fund, Sitra, directly under the parliament. Universities, research institutes, business R&D, industry and academic societies were all harnessed to the task (pp. 105-107). Some of the more hard-core free-marketers in the USA today might condemn such public-private partnerships as unfair competition, but this has been the practice in virtually all successful countries.

The authors also underscore the importance of urban networks, which facilitated the creation of social capital. Admittedly, Sifire benefited from a small number of dominant cities (in Singapore’s case just one) where the people and activities are centred.

The next chapter deals with Delivering Quality Education, the million dollar question that has eluded educators and policy-makers in many countries, not least in the United States. Yusuf and Nabeshima boil the Sifire success to six factors, which they elaborate on and which I quote in an abbreviated form here: (1) Raising and sustaining student performance at high levels are inseparable from non-school factors, such as family circumstances, the value a society attached to education, and the conviction that excellence is necessary for progress toward a better, innovative and more prosperous society. (2) Quality needs to be pervasive, extending from the primary all the way to vocational and tertiary levels. (3) Student performance and the pursuit of excellence must continually be reinforced by family and social environments. (4) Teacher qualifications. (5) Pay and prestige. (6) Teacher autonomy in fine-tuning the curriculum and pedagogical techniques and in evaluating students (pp. 119-123). Several of these factors fly in the face of what educators elsewhere are trying. In the US, the focus is distinctly on the stick rather than the carrot. Standardized testing is seen as a solution and schools that fall below the averages risk having their funds withdrawn. Parents blame teachers for failing their kids, without taking responsibility themselves.

Allowing teachers the freedom to design their own curricula for learning, rather than answering tests, obviously hinges upon having quality teachers. In America, teaching is not a respected profession and the pay is poor. Consequently, statistics show that those graduating from teachers’ colleges have lower than average academic grades. In Finland, all teachers are required to have master’s degrees and the competition to enter teacher training in the University of Helsinki is harder than getting into the medical school. I for one credit my high school teachers in geography, history and languages for my lifelong interest in world affairs. A perverse conclusion of market thinking in America has devalued this most important of professions, which now is seen as not producing direct economic value and therefore doomed to low pay and prestige in the public sector.

The sixth and final chapter attempts to distil the Message from Sifire, condensing it under three main headings: (1) Pragmatic governance; (2) Leveraging global markets and general-purpose technologies; and (3) Quality of human capital. In this summary, I had the feeling that, despite their own evidence to the contrary, the authors seemed to downplay the importance of the public sector and the government. Perhaps this was not fully in line with the ideology of the economists or the World Bank that published the book.

They then draw implications for African countries, while identifying differences in the situations. Yusuf and Nabeshima acknowledge that all is not rosy for Sifire and, especially, Ireland and Finland have later again faced crises. However, they affirm that this “cannot diminish the remarkable economic progress by the three countries against considerable odds. Nor does the postcrisis slowdown detract from the relevance of their experience for ambitious low- and middle-income countries” (p. 132). They conclude: “Whether countries hew to a Sifire-type strategy or choose a different approach, the outcome will be crucially linked to design, planning, institutional architecture, and implementation. The efficacy of these elements will be affected by governance mechanisms” (p. 144). I would argue that the relevance goes beyond the middle- and low-income countries that are explicitly targeted. In fact, many of the lessons are directly relevant to the debates currently raging in the United States.


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UNDP evaluates its work on the poverty-environment nexus

This piece appeared on Climate-Eval blog a few days ago.
 
Juha Uitto, Deputy Director of the Evaluation Office at UNDP, outlines the conclusions of the recently published Evaluation of UNDP Contribution to Environmental Management for Poverty Reduction.

Environment and poverty are inextricably interlinked; people who depend directly on natural resources for their livelihoods tend to be poorer in material terms. Whether working in agriculture, forestry or fisheries—or relying on small scale extraction to eke out a living—the returns from their labor are subject to environmental factors. Even relatively small fluctuations in climate can make the difference between a high yield and crop failure. Because of this direct dependency, small farmers everywhere in the world have become masters at managing risk and adapting to changing conditions. However, global climate change is introducing a whole new dynamic, potentially amplifying the changes in temperatures and weather conditions, causing droughts and storms in places where they used to be infrequent, thus straining the adaptation capabilities of the people living there.

Another conundrum is that poor people often live in locations that are particularly vulnerable to climatic hazards; in the rapidly growing cities in the developing world, shanties often sprout up on steep slopes prone to landslides and vulnerable to storms. Whether in rural or urban areas, poverty also forces people to degrade the natural resources they depend upon. Forests are cut down to provide fuel or building materials, thus exposing the land to the forces of nature. As Hurricane Sandy, which battered New York this October so graphically demonstrated, it is not only the developing countries that are vulnerable to climatic hazards.

Poverty reduction is at the heart of UNDP’s mandate. Tackling environmental sustainability is therefore essential for the organization to achieve its goals of human development and resilient nations. But it is not only adapting to the changing climate that is needed. Promoting a green economy and a transition to non-polluting renewable energies can give a much-needed boost to the sluggish global economy. Transformation towards a low-carbon society will benefit the environment as well as the people and countries. UNDP can support the process, while ensuring that the benefits are also accruing to the poorest segments of society. The Evaluation Office of UNDP works to produce knowledge and lessons from the scrutiny of past operations to help the organization to set its direction and to understand what works, under what circumstances, in what respects, and how, recognizing the importance of context.

The recently published Evaluation of UNDP Contribution to Environmental Management for Poverty Reduction brought into the open a number of challenges that the organization faces in integrating its work on poverty reduction and environmental management. The evaluation findings suggest that while there is substantial recognition of the ‘poverty-environment nexus’ within UNDP, its articulation in programming remains uneven. This unevenness is dependent on a number of factors, both internal and external. For example, the organizational structure around focus areas and separate funding sources has resulted in a ‘silo effect’ in which teams sometimes work in parallel with each other. The absence of monitoring processes and indicators to track poverty-environment linkages diminishes the attention to these issues and reduces incentives to work together. Consequently, the results on the ground have been mixed, with significant achievements in a number of country programs but considerable variation in direction and priority.

Yet, the evaluation revealed many bright spots: such as in Mexico, where UNDP convened a multi-sector environmental consultative groups and established platforms for debate at local, state, and federal levels; in Sri Lanka, UNDP worked closely with the government to promote more attention to the nexus under the UN Development Assistance Framework; in Tanzania, UNDP led the pilot ‘Delivering as One’ activities to expand coordination among donors and ministries regarding poverty-environment issues.

Overall, the evaluation showed that where the poverty-environment nexus is recognized as critical to achieving sustainable development, there is strong support to address it in programs and projects. In Rwanda, the joint UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative demonstrated the linkages between degrading natural resource base and the health of the country’s agriculture.

Commitment of the government, degree of cooperation within the government, efficiency of UNDP advocacy, and effectiveness of its programming on the ground are all factors that influence the results. There is also evidence that positive results at the country level can be replicated elsewhere. The evaluation concluded that addressing the poverty-environment nexus is essential to achieving UNDP’s mission. The organization needs to learn from its good experiences and replicate its successes in a more systematic manner, while taking into account contextual factors, which places importance on strong knowledge management across the various regions and country offices.

The evaluation further concluded that greater attention to climate change adaptation in recent years has contributed significantly to raising awareness and understanding about the importance of addressing poverty-environment linkages coherently, including in preventing and recovering from natural disasters. Another global evaluation studied UNDP Contribution to Disaster Prevention and Recovery and that, too, highlighted the centrality of climate change, recommending that UNDP’s disaster risk reduction strategy should more directly address climate-related hazards and adaptation to climate change. More on that later.


Dr. Juha I. Uitto is Deputy Director of the Evaluation Office at UNDP. He has held a number of positions and conducted a large number of programmatic and thematic evaluations in UNDP and GEF since the late-1990s. Before becoming a fulltime evaluator, Dr. Uitto spent nearly a decade in the United Nations University as coordinator of the environment and sustainable development research and training program. He has published widely in peer reviewed and professional journals on environment, natural hazards and evaluation, and has authored/edited several books on related topics.

Chiang Mai Blues

Surely, this must be the best band in Chiang Mai and, by extension, anywhere in the Golden Triangle. The guitarist was clearly the frontman, leading the direction of music and dominating the scene with his long flowing curly hair. The drums and bass kept an unwavering beat and provided a thick sound to complement the guitar that soared, cajoled and growled. David sitting next to me appeared to particularly dig the bass player’s crisp and accurate work. All three were Thai, but the music was undiluted Western blues and rock. The guitarist had internalized influences from B.B. King, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana and others and merged them into a strong and convincing blend. His blond Caucasian wife and little daughter were a supportive audience at the bar, not that the Boy Blues Band needed any domestic support; the general audience was enthusiastic enough. The venue was a second floor open air lounge above the famed Chiang Mai night bazaar on the east side of the city. I had just followed the sound emanating from the locale. On the way there, I had found Australian David drinking a beer by himself in a nearby bar and he willingly joined me. My colleague Indran had arrived shortly after having decided , correctly, that he could also just follow the sound and find me at the source.

We were all in town attending an international forum with Eval-Partners that brought together more than 80 professional evaluators from around the world, primarily but not exclusively from various regional and national associations. These were known as VOPEs – voluntary organizations of professional evaluators – and there are now more than 150 of them in 110 countries with a total membership of some 33,000. The art and science of evaluation is gaining ground steadily. The driving forces behind this networking and capacity development affair were the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation and UNICEF. The four-day workshop was conducted in high spirits that occasionally reached the tone of a revivalist meeting: evaluation can change the world! Chiang Mai was a good choice for the meeting. Not overwhelmingly large and cost-wise reasonable. Although seemingly off the beaten track, it is now well connected by international airlines .The growth of the city is driven by the booming cross border economy that encompasses northern Thailand, south-western China, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. Regional trade is flourishing like in few areas of the world. Construction in the city is rampant and migrant labour floods into Chiang Mai. An indication of Chiang Mai’s growing importance is that there are now several direct international air connections that do not pass through Bangkok. I for one flew in and out on Korean Air through Seoul-Incheon. Looking at this region leaves no doubt that the future of the 21st century is in Asia.

Chiang Mai has been in existence for more than 700 years. It was founded by King Mengrai in the late-13th century. Some decades earlier, the king had already founded another major centre of northern Thailand, Chiang Rai, which he had named after himself. Mengrai came to control a huge area of land in between what today consists of Laos and Myanmar. Lanna—‘kingdom of a million rice paddies’—was born and Mengrai was its king. His dynasty was to rule Lanna for the coming centuries. Lanna thrived through turbulent times. Agriculture produced such a surplus that a class of prosperous artisans who didn’t have to break their backs in rice farming was born in the city. An indicator of the high culture and status of Chiang Mai then is the fact that in 1455 the city hosted the eighth world Buddhist convention. The venue of the meeting, the gorgeous temple of Wat Chet Yod, still stands on the north-western fringe of the city by the ring road.

Then as now, war and intrigue were tools of statecraft. A prolonged conflict with the Kingdom of Ayutthaya to the south sapped the resources and in 1545 a strong earthquake added to the misery. Finally, following a dispute of an important Buddha image that was believed to have significant powers, Lanna was overtaken by Pegu (currently Burma) led by King Bayinnaung in 1558. When the heroic leaders of Ayutthaya, Taksin and Kawila, finally liberated Lanna from the Burmese in 1774, they found a suppressed and hungry nation. In bloody times, it’s hard to distinguish between the good and the bad. All occupying troops kill and rape innocent civilians and destroy their villages and fields. Soon Taksin and Kawila fell out with each other and another conflict ensued. Eventually, some years later, the founder of the dynasty that still today rules Thailand, Kind Rama I (Phra Buddha Yod Fa) came to power.

The legacy of Lanna is alive in Chiang Mai and the city still retains the structure of the town built by Mengrai, with the old town surrounded by a square of moats. While the city has spread out far beyond the original area, it has retained much of its charm and the physical setting in between the hills remains beautiful. There are some 85 Buddhist temples or wats in the city and its immediate surroundings. Thailand’s second city, Chiang Mai is still quite small with only about 170,000 inhabitants in the city proper (and double that if you count the surrounding area), but it is booming. Traffic has increased and the growth puts inevitable pressures on sustainability.

Chiang Mai has changed significantly since the 1990s when I had last been here. Fifteen years ago I remember sitting with Kanok Rerkasem at a bar in the night bazaar enjoying a quiet Singha beer in a sedate atmosphere. The hilltribes from the surrounding areas were selling their handicrafts and traditional music was accompanying a slow dance on a nearby stand. Chiang Mai has of course been a tourist destination for decades. The beautiful setting in a valley surrounded by forested hills, pleasant climate and exquisite temples have long attracted foreign visitors, whether on a spiritual or more physical quest (or a combination, inspired by the ready availability of mind-expanding weeds). Now the scene has changed and the atmosphere today is anything but sedate. The bar area around the bazaar has expanded and there are now numerous fashionable bars and restaurants serving not only Thai food and beer, but a large variety of European and Asian fares. One indicator of change is the wide availability of decent and reasonably priced wine (unlike in neighbouring Laos, with its French influence, wine has until recently been a luxury item limited to fancy hotel restaurants). You can still find the hilltribe women in their colourful outfits and there are chairs where a weary shopper can sit down for a soothing foot or neck massage, but many of the shops have also become more formal in style.

Many of the changes must be due to, not only the flourishing regional economy, but the fact that so many Westerners have decided to settle down in Chiang Mai attracted by its pleasant climate, low cost of living and, especially, friendly and welcoming essence. Most of those going native appear to be men of a certain age who presumably spent time here in the 1970s and 1980s leaving their hearts here while returning to Germany, Australia, North America and elsewhere. Now decades later, with some money in their pockets, they’ve returned to live a better retirement life here than they could ever achieve in their home countries. Inevitably, some have younger Thai girlfriends, but there are also those who maybe never left and stayed with their local sweethearts all along. Sitting in the Red Lion pub on Sunday afternoon, I observed one such old couple, both now closing in on 70, behaving like couples everywhere do after a long marriage, squabbling over small things, but still showing that soft tenderness that is Thailand.

So, I too was so glad to be back. The reason why I visited Chiang Mai regularly in the 1990s was a joint project with Chiang Mai University, a comprehensive institution of higher learning established in 1964. Based then at the UN University in Tokyo, I was the managing coordinator of PLEC – ‘People, Land Management and Environmental Change ‘– a project based on a network of research institutes in a dozen countries working on identifying successful local adaptations in smallholder agriculture that both provided a reliable source of food as well as sustainably managed land and biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. Funded by the Global Environment Facility through the UN Environment Programme, we were the first ever project to be incorporated into the GEF portfolio working on biodiversity conservation in production landscapes. Kanok was one of our leaders and co-coordinator of the Southeast Asia cluster working across the borders in the region. He and his colleagues at CMU and in China’s Yunnan Province produced some path-breaking work, but that’s another story. Sadly, a few years ago Kanok succumbed to a massive heart attack while on a field trip in the hills doing what he liked best. The world lost a top-notch applied scientist and a sweet, gentle soul.

Back at the lounge, Boy Blues Band showed no signs of slowing down. We decided to call it a day to make it fresh to the day-long meetings starting again early in the morning. The blues night was a nice complement to the cultural event we had witnessed the night before at the workshop get-together. The Thai traditional dance performed by a group of skilled dancers and musicians was lovely, certainly somewhat spiced up to entertain the foreign visitors. Apart from the dance (in which I was forced to partake towards the end), I did appreciate the music played by the group of four men primarily on bamboo flute and percussion. More importantly, however, not too many years ago this type of musical entertainment would have been the only type you’d find in the entire northern Thailand. While Bangkok has its live music spots—even there rather few and far between—Western style music, apart from that booming out of the go-go bars and clubs, has not penetrated widely into Thailand.

After the Eval-Partners event, I had one more meeting to attend. Somewhat surprisingly, despite a number of national level evaluation organizations, Asia has been lacking a regional forum promoting evaluation. This was now to change, as the Asia-Pacific Evaluation Association held its founding general assembly. For years, this has been driven by one exceptional individual, Prof. Ryokichi Hirono. Now in his 80s, Hirono-sensei has been an advisor to a succession of Japanese prime ministers and foreign secretaries, as well as a director in OECD in Paris and UNDP in New York, amongst many other achievements. He has also been the president of the Japanese Evaluation Society and now accepted the title of interim president of the newly-founded APEA until the whole membership can elect a regular president in March 2013. He gracefully participated in the stretch exercises initiated by Laura Pan Luo, evaluation professor at the Chinese Agriculture University, who also led the meeting to a song. She had taken a segment of a speech made by Indran at another meeting a few months back and asked her piano teacher in Beijing to compose a tune to it. The meeting bravely tackled this rare piece of evaluation music.

On other evenings, I would wonder around the city tasting excellent meals in the many small establishments, but limited my musical experiences to listening to a lonely musician playing bamboo flutes in one corner of the night bazaar. I can well understand those of my kin who wish to settle here permanently.

What Counts as Credible Evidence in Applied Research and ...

What Counts as Credible Evidence in Applied Research and Evaluation Practice? by Stewart I. Donaldson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The evaluation field continues to engage in paradigm wars that involve heated debates over which approaches and methodologies produce the most reliable results to support evidence-based policy-making. Somewhat regretfully, the commendable goal of enhanced rigour in evaluation research has been hijacked by a focus on a narrow set of experimental methods—randomized controlled trials or RCTs—which have been proclaimed as the ‘gold standard’ by their proponents. This trend has been boosted by calls for unambiguous measurements of results and impacts, and cost-efficiency, by policy-makers and bureaucrats struggling with making policy choices and undertaking programs under increasing resource constraints. On the other side, the reaction from the proponents of more qualitative methodologies and participatory approaches to evaluation has been strong, even emotional at times. As a professional evaluator, I’ve witnessed these brawls first hand.

This book makes an excellent contribution to the debate through a balanced presentation of the issues and by letting the different sides to make their respective cases. The authors in the book include a number of leading scholars and practitioners in the field. The perspective is North American (all authors work in the US or Canada) and draws heavily on experiences from education and social services. Although my own work pertains to evaluating international development programs, I found the discussion in the book on what constitutes credible evidence very valuable.

In the two introductory chapters the editors frame the debate in the context of a search for evidence-based society and how this has played out in the use of experimental and non-experimental designs for collecting evidence. Quite didactically, they place the debate within the broader scientific paradigms of social inquiry, including logical positivism, post-positivism, constructivism and related thinking, and pragmatism. They also tentatively place the chapter authors along these paradigmatic axes. The following eight chapters are divided into two sections arguing, respectively, for experimental and non-experimental routes to credible evidence. The trajectory of the chapters moves from the most hard-core case for experimental designs to an argument for the credibility of image-based research in evaluation. The chapters in between tend to take a conciliatory approach to the extent that the last of the chapters in the experimental section could have been moved to the non-experimental section.

Part II entitled ‘Experimental Approaches as a Route to Credible Evidence’ contains four chapters. In the first, Gary Henry argues for high-quality policy and program impact evaluations as a necessity for providing solid evidence for policy choices, linking the matter to democratic theory and the need to detect and debunk bad policies. His view assumes that there actually are ways to objectively define what produces desirable outcomes—and what such outcomes are. He acknowledges types of bias in evaluation research, but sees them in technical, rather than political terms. In the chapter that follows, Leonard Bickman and Stephanie Reich assess the credibility, reliability and validity of RCTs, concluding that while there are threats to the validity (especially external validity) of RCTs, they still can be seen to be amongst the most credible designs available to evaluators. Despite this overall conclusion, Bickman and Reich acknowledge that there are other, non-experimental approaches to establish causality (many natural science disciplines—geology, astronomy, engineering, and subfields of medicine—base their research on non-experimental designs). In social sciences, they particular highlight the program theory, theory-driven or pattern-matching method, recognizing that such other approaches are needed to supplement RCTs that can only answer a very limited number of questions.

The last chapter in this part of the book, by George Julnes and Debra Rog, introduces the concept of actionable evidence. The authors assert that for evidence to be useful, it should not only be credible but also actionable, defined as adequate and appropriate for guiding actions in targeted real-world contexts. The lengthy chapter takes as its starting point the question of relating the choice of methods to the questions that stakeholders want addressed. They proceed to outline a multitude of evaluation tasks (borrowing from Carol      Weiss) and then consider the implications of the tasks for methodology. Another way of framing the evaluation questions relates to the level of conclusion and the different levels of causal questions in impact evaluation, including whether the evaluation seeks to provide an aggregate description, disaggregation for causal analysis, or an inferential analysis of the underlying constructs and causal mechanisms. They state that, “experimental methods are argued as appropriate for strengthening impact-evaluation conclusions, but the value of these methods is dependent on the level of conclusions being addressed” (p. 104). Summarizing the discussion on the relationships between questions and methods, Julnes and Rog express their view that, while particular questions call for quantitative designs, there is substantial territory open to other designs. This summary leads the authors to consider the contextual factors that affect the adequateness and appropriateness of alternative methods, including policy context and the nature of the phenomena studied. They then discuss how to judge the adequacy of methods for providing the evidence that is needed to address the stakeholder questions identified, and when is it appropriate to use particular methods for causal analysis, taking into account constraints posed by factors internal to the program, evaluation capacity and political constraints, as well as ethical considerations. The discussion is nuanced and fair. Julnes and Rog conclude by affirming the primacy of the evaluation stakeholder questions in influencing the types of evidence needed. They caution against “simple frameworks that drive method choice in a somewhat automatic fashion” and instead wish to support “more informed judgments on method choice in political public policy environments” (p. 128). To me, this is one of the strongest, most thoughtful and balanced chapters in the book. Therefore, it also deserves its place in the middle, bridging the quantitative and qualitative parts.

Another chapter in this section of the book, preceding the chapter discussed above, by Russell Gersten and John Hitchcock focuses on the role of the What Works Clearinghouse, established in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education. The chapter is descriptive and possibly useful to education researchers and evaluators, but did not raise my own somewhat biased interest.

Part III on ‘Nonexperimental Approaches for Building Credible Evidence’ consists of another five chapters, starting with one of the grand old men of evaluation, Michael Scriven. His chapter, ‘Demythologizing Causation and Evidence,’ is written with flair in lively language. Like Julnes and Rog before him, Scriven enlists other sciences—from mathematical physics and geology to anthropology, ethnography and epidemiology—to demonstrate how experimental methods are but one of the many approaches to analyse causation. He writes, “much of the world of science, suffused with causal claims, runs along very well with the usual high standards of evidence, but without RCTs” (p. 136). Breezing through the origins of causal concepts, the cognitive process of causal inference vs. observation, and the level of evidential certainty required for scientific, legal and practical purposes, he then addresses the alleged supremacy of RCTs as well as “other contenders.”  His myth-busting position is that “(i) the attempted takeover of the terms evidence and cause is partly inspired by the false dichotomy between experiment and quasi-experiment, and (ii) the whole effort is closely analogous to the attempted annexation of the concept of significance by statistically significant” (p. 151).

The following chapter by Jennifer Greene discusses evidence as ‘proof’ vs. evidence as ‘inkling.’ Her premise is that evaluation is both influenced by the political, organizational and sociocultural contexts, as well as it serves to shape that context. Consequently, “evaluation is not a bystander or neutral player in the debates that often surround it, but rather an active contributor to those debates and to the institutions that house them” (p. 153). Her chapter attempts to demonstrate how the present discourse assumes that ‘evidence’ can make social systems ‘efficient and effective’ and how these assumptions convey a particular view of human phenomena and responsibilities of government in democratic societies. The argument is a useful antidote to the positivistic view presented by Henry earlier in the book. Her vision of evidence is not providing the truth, or neat and tidy small answers to small questions. Rather, in Greene’s view evidence must provide a “window into the messy complexity of human experience; evidence that accounts for history, culture, and context; evidence that respects difference in perspective and values; evidence about experiences in addition to consequences; evidence about the responsibilities of government, not just the responsibilities of its citizens; evidence with the potential for democratic inclusion and legitimization of multiple voices—evidence not as proof but as inkling” (p. 166).

Sharon Rallis starts her chapter by telling the story of how she first encountered evaluation when she was teaching a federally funded summer program that was subject to an evaluation. The evaluators insisted on holding on to their plan to assess the program against a single outcome, with no regard to the important associated benefits that the program had bolstering the self-esteem of the participating students. Furthermore, the evaluation based on a quasi-experimental design deprived half of the students from participating in an important part of the program, which Rallis and other program colleagues felt was unfair. While the evaluators claimed that their work was scientific and rigorous, Rallis pondered about the missing piece and came to the conclusion that it was ‘probity’—goodness and moral soundness. Consequently, she began to study evaluation with a commitment to make evaluations useful for the program personnel and participants. This chapter elaborates on her vision of evaluation with probity and moral reasoning, grounded in nonconsequentialist theories. She explains: “The evidence we collect looks quite different from that of our colleagues who measure outcomes. Our aim is not to cast judgment … but to discover what happened and what the experience meant to the program participants. We hope that our discoveries can lead to improving the program and thus the well-being of the participants” (pp. 174-175). Rather than RCTs, evaluation done with these principles borrows tools from fields such as ethnography, phenomenology and sociolinguistics/semiotics. She presents a case from an evaluation and needs assessment of an HIV/AIDS education and prevention program that provides some unexpected insights into the participants’ experiences. She asserts that this work is rigorous because “it is grounded in theory and previous research and in moral principles of justice and caring” (p. 178).

Sandra Mathison in her chapter ‘Seeing Is Believing’ explores the credibility of image-based research and evaluation, as one form of evidence to establish and represent truth and value. Like the part III authors before her, she emphasizes how the credibility of evidence and the knowledge thus created is contingent on experiences, perception and social conventions. Image-based research uses images in three ways: (i) as data or evidence; (ii) as an elicitation device to collect other data, and (iii) as a representation of knowledge (p. 184). Mathison posits four considerations for establishing the credibility of image-based research: (1) quality of the research design, (2) attention to context, (3) adequacy of the image from multiple perspectives, and (4) the contribution images make to new knowledge (p. 188).

The last chapter in part III, by Thomas Schwandt, is entitled ‘Toward a Practical Theory of Evidence for Evaluation’ and it functions as a kind of recap of what has come before; as such, it could have equally well been placed in part IV on conclusions. This is another rich chapter that goes to the heart of the debate of what we mean by evidence: “…information helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment. Framed in a more rigorous epistemological perspective, evidence means information bearing on whether a belief or proposition is true or false, valid or invalid, warranted or unsupported. At present, we face some difficulty and confusion with understanding the term evidence in evaluation because it is often taken to be synonymous with the term evidence-based” (p. 199). He then proceeds to problematize the term evidence-based, as being narrowly interpreted to mean only a specific kind of finding regarding causal efficacy. Secondly, Schwandt argues why evidence cannot serve as a secure and infallible base or foundation for action. Furthermore, he emphasizes that, as an aspect of policy making, evaluation must consider ethics. Schwandt concludes that “deciding the question of what constitutes credible evidence is not the same as deciding the question of what constitutes credible evaluation … However necessary, developing credible evidence in evaluation is not sufficient for establishing the credibility of an evaluation” (p. 209). He further asserts that method choice alone does not determine what is credible and convincing evidence. He calls for framing evidence in a practical-theoretical way that that is concerned with the character and ethics of evidence and the contexts in which evidence is used.

In the final part of the book, Melvin Mark summarizes the different perspectives of the book with an aim of changing the terms of the debate. He concludes: “Extensive and continued discussion of the relative merits and credibility of RCTs versus other methods would have limited capacity to move forward our understanding and our practice. … by changing the terms of the debate, we may be able to improve understandings of deeply entrenched disagreements; move toward a common ground where such can be found; better understand the disagreements that remain; allow, at least in select places, credible evidence as part of the conversation; and enhance the capacity of stakeholders to make sensible decisions rather than be bewildered by our disagreement or draw allegiances based on superficial considerations” (pp. 237-8). Certainly a deserving goal.  The book ends with an epilogue by Stewart Donaldson that attempts to provide a practitioners guide for gathering credible evidence in the evidence-based global society.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and although much of the debate around epistemology, approaches and methods is familiar to someone educated and working in evaluation and applied social science research, the way it is framed in this book is truly enlightening. For a thoughtful reader, it becomes evident that the truth—as almost always in such debates—is somewhere in the middle. All of the approaches and methodologies have merit when used appropriately and in appropriate contexts. Both experimental and non-experimental methods can be rigorous, but both can also have serious flaws with regard to internal and external validity, relevance and appropriateness. The old saw about everything looking like a nail when you have only a hammer in your tool box is true here as well. The take-home lesson is that, instead of allowing methods to dictate one’s evaluation questions and designs, one should choose one’s methods according to the questions one wants answered.


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Shooting America

On Friday, 14th of December 2012, a young gunman walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and proceeded to shoot and kill 26 people, including 20 children in the ages of 6 and 7 years. This horrific incident was one of the worst mass murders even in the violent history of America. Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t entirely isolated. In fact, this was the third incident of a similar kind to take place in the United States just in 2012. These recent cases include the movie theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado, on the 20th of July 2012, in which twelve people were killed and 58 injured; and the shooting at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on August 5, in which a white supremacist killed six people, possibly mistaking the Sikhs for Muslims. Six of the worst mass shootings in America have taken place since 2007.
Could this finally be a turning point—the straw that broke the camel’s back, in the words of Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California—in the American attitude towards gun violence? There are signs of outrage that seem unprecedented; after all, the horror of the slaughter of these little children is just too painful, too hard even to imagine. But don’t hold your breath.
There is much focus on the mental health of the shooter and on providing increased security in schools. This is understandable. However, I do not see this primarily as a mental health issue. This is not meant to belittle the importance of psychological factors or to deny the importance of mental illness as an explanatory factor. America’s mental health care system is clearly broken and there seem to be extraordinarily many sick people who turn to violence. However, there are crazy people everywhere, but in most other places they can be stopped before they are able to commit mass murder. Just recently, a Chinese nutcase attacked a school in his own country. Armed only with a knife, he was able to injure a number of people but not to kill anyone before he was apprehended.
In this latest case in Connecticut, the assailant was in the possession of three advanced pieces of weaponry: Glock and Sig Sauer handguns and an AR-15 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle. He used this firepower to enter the school and then to kill the kids and their teachers. It is worth noting that apparently he had acquired access to these guns from his mother (who was the first victim of his killing spree), a gun enthusiast.
What surprises me is that so relatively few Americans have arrived at the inevitable conclusion that access to high-powered firearms itself is a threat. While a few people like Feinstein and Dan Gross of the anti-gun violence Brady Campaign have systematically brought the issue of stronger gun control up, the debate still seems to be up in the air. Although most pro-gun politicians have had the sense of laying low since Friday’s tragedy, a number of gun activists, sensing a threat to their God-given right to carry any weapon, have again decided that attack is the best defense. People like John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, has been seen on a number of TV talk shows peddling his claim that everywhere where stricter gun controls have been effected, murder rates have gone up (would someone please look at the statistics behind this implausible claim). Citing the Aurora example, Lott asserts that the shooter actually chose that particular movie theatre because it didn’t allow guns. There were other theatres closer to the murderer’s home but, Lott implies, there might have been armed people there who would have returned the fire, so the shooter was afraid of attacking them. Just imagine a gunfight in a crowded and dark movie theatre.
Another creep, Philip Van Cleave, president of the sinister sounding Virginia Citizens Defense League, actually had the temerity to tell Washington Post on Sunday after the Newtown massacre that guns are fun. Defending the people’s wish to own semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 (implicated in the three latest massacres mentioned above), he was quoted by the newspaper as saying: “I could ask you why should anyone want a Ferrari? [Bushmasters] are absolutely a blast to shoot with. They’re fast. They’re accurate. … Guns are fun, and some of them are much more cool than others.” Apart from the stunning insensitivity, Van Cleave’s views may not be that rare amongst Americans.  
Who exactly Lott, Van Cleave and their ilk envision could have been better armed to fight back in the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown is not clear to me. The young teachers who died with their students? Or perhaps the children themselves? Employing armed guards and arming teachers or movie goers or citizens in general so that they can return fire when a deranged person starts shooting at them is such a dystopian vision that few of us I imagine would cherish. And would all of us really want to be trained in handling guns?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe many Americans do see this as a desirable way of protecting oneself and one’s liberties. After all, this is a country where large groups of people arm themselves in preparation against a takeover by the socialists in the Federal Government (or even—gasp!—the United Nations) . It would seem inevitable that an even larger number of people walking and driving around with concealed weapons would result in those guns being used when things heat up in, say, a traffic jam or a supermarket line. And the risk of innocent bystanders getting hurt in these altercations seems high.
This happened on Friday, August 24, 2012, when a man shot his former co-worker near Empire State Building in Manhattan. The police killed the assailant immediately following the incident, in the process injuring eight innocent bystanders with ricocheting bullets—and remember, these were highly trained law enforcement officers who are experts in handling firearms.
“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” has long been the rallying call of the supporters of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a powerful pro-gun lobby. Regretfully, that’s just not true. There will always be nuts who want to kill people. However, their ability to do so is significantly increased by the availability of guns. Later the same evening, the brother of the Empire State Building victim was interviewed by CNN. His opinion: Don’t turn this into a referendum on firearms; if the killer hadn’t had a gun, he could have used a “baseball bat or whatever.” Perhaps so. People who are inclined to commit premeditated murder do find a way to do so. A baseball bat would do the trick, but it just might be more difficult to carry it concealed to the spot, then un-shield it rapidly when the intended victim is in sight, and to wield it to his head—all on a crowded city street. The intended victim might have a higher chance of escape, too, when he sees the batter approaching. In this particular case, the victim was also physically larger than the assailant, which might have made a difference in a fight without guns.
A more important point is that premeditated murder is, by definition, usually targeted towards a specific individual against whom the would-be murderer bears a grudge. Such murders occur in all countries.
There are two very obvious cases where the availability of guns does create a much larger hazard. One, as we have seen, is indiscriminate mass murder by a lunatic. An individual’s ability to massacre a large number of people is directly correlated with the availability of guns, especially powerful assault weapons. In this year’s cases, the madmen’s ability to kill was multiplied by the availability of such automatic weapons, with clips holding more than 100 rounds of ammunition reducing the need to reload. Such weapons and clips have no legitimate use in private hands, as they are by no stretch of imagination needed for hunting or target practice. Their only purpose is to enable the killing of as many people as possible in close combat.
The other case, which so obviously speaks against having guns around is that the majority of killings in the US happen between family members and people who know each other. Only a small fraction of these are premeditated murders. Most are either accidents (every year many people shoot themselves or their dear ones accidentally when fondling their beloved guns) or happen when arguments—between spouses, friends or colleagues—heat up and a loaded gun happens to be handy. Guns kill people, even when people don’t intend to do so.
In the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic, that appeared on newsstands just before the Connecticut massacre, Jeffrey Goldbergargues that it is too late to install any further gun controls in America. There are already some 280-300 million guns owned by private citizens in America and each year this number is increased by more than 4 million. These are of course stupendous figures, given that the total population of the USA is just around 311 million. I have recently heard that slightly less than half of American adults own a gun. Simple arithmetic thus implies that these people have multiple guns at home. Goldberg draws the conclusions that it would be impossible anymore to regulate the situation through democratic means and, therefore, it would be better to give more guns to law-abiding citizens so that they can defend themselves. This is a saddening view, although it does have a certain logic. Yet, by the same logic it would be futile to attempt to address any similar issue that involves an advanced situation, including nuclear disarmament. His solution would also bring back the Wild West in which disputes were settled with six-shooters.
Except that in the Wild West, guns were quite strictly controlled in towns where the sheriff made sure that gunslingers would check their weapons at the gate. Joe Kleinin Time magazine (August 6, 2012) outlined how this free-for-all guns-galore is not an American tradition or what the Founding Fathers expected. Rather it’s a result of a concerted advocacy effort by all kinds of right-wing groups since the 1970s to overturn gun control legislation. In 1993, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, legislation was passed to ban assault weapons, but that too was let expire a decade later.
Of all industrialized countries, the United States has by far the largest amount of guns per capita: 88.8 firearms per 100 people. This is far more than the 54.8 in the second most gun-heavy country in the world, Yemen. America has some 5% of the world’s population but, depending on the estimate, up to half of the world’s firearms in the hands of private citizens. Topping the list with Yemen, which many consider en route to becoming a failed state and which now is the principal host of Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, should not be an accolade most Americans would want. Still a large number of Americans seem to be perfectly content with it.
Unfortunately, my own country of origin, Finland, is number 4 on the list (the third place goes to Switzerland, where most men who have served in the army have a rifle in their closet). Why Finland, the seemingly tranquil Nordic country known for its peace-making efforts on the world scene? I suppose the reasons are something similar to those that would be applicable to America, too: a macho culture of rugged individualists. There, too, men go on rampage shooting people.
Another factor that militates against gun control in America is (you guessed it) money. There is a lot of money involved in gun sales and they are not limited to domestic sales, as if the 4 million guns sold in the US annually wouldn’t be enough. Mexico’s drug war is largely fought with American guns: it is estimated that 80% of the guns confiscated from Mexican gangs have been bought legally in the US.
In the American political system, lobbyists for special interest groups play a central role. Politicians find it hard to go against the lobbyist if they want to stay in power. According to the Time article by Joe Klein, NRA has funded a total of US$18.9 million to political parties and candidates running for federal office since 1990. Of this amount, 82% has gone to the Republicans. The New York Times columnist Charles Blow has calculated that the NRA’s financial contributions to politicians in Washington are 4,100 times larger than those by the largest anti-gun organization, the Brady Campaign.
When culture, tradition, corporate interests and money come together, it will be a tough job to go against them and change things when it comes to the prevalence of guns and the ensuing gun violence. This is the reason for my pessimism, but I do hope that I am proven wrong. Perhaps, in the unspeakable tragedy of the Sandy Hook elementary school, there lies a seed of hope for some modest reform. If nothing more, it would seem reasonable to start by banning semi-automatic assault weapons and clips containing tens or hundreds of rounds of ammunition. 

Sandy farewell

Monday, 29 October 2012

On Monday morning New York City is closed down. I’m staying at home as my office, like most others, has been forced shut. Without transportation it would anyway be impossible to get to Manhattan. It doesn’t look too bad outside, though. It’s grey and the rain is falling, but it all looks rather calm. The wind comes in gusts that violently shake the trees outside. Some leaves have already turned yellow and are flying off like wet rags.
By noon the situation is starting to look more serious. According to the reports, the storm has been moving faster than anticipated and therefore has arrived earlier than expected. Its power has intensified. There’s by now no doubt this’ll be the worst storm to hit New York since the 1938 hurricane. The TV shows images from Atlantic City, NJ. The famous boardwalk and the casinos are being pounded by heavy winds and the waves from the open ocean are splashing forcefully onto the shore. I remember my brother has a vacation property on the Brigantine Island not far from Atlantic City. I also remember it faces the ocean. There’s only the sandy beach and a narrow street between the building and the Atlantic. In good weather, the location is lovely.
I correspond with my colleague Chona who lives in New Jersey. She is lamenting the pictures of her beloved Jersey Shore being eaten up by the waves. The TV meteorologist explains how New York City is squeezed in between New Jersey and Long Island, which means that in an Atlantic storm situation like today, the water has only one way to go: inland towards the city via the inlets. Therefore, the storm surge forecast for New York harbour is grim.
The most threatening situation starts unfolding in mid-afternoon on the west side of Manhattan. A crane on a high-rise construction site on the 7th Avenue at 57th Street has collapsed and is hanging upside-down at the height of the 90th floor above the city. There is no way to stabilize it, so it’ll be pure luck if it stays up and doesn’t fly smashing into neighbouring buildings and onto the street.
Around 4 pm Governor Andrew Cuomo holds another press conference flanked by NYFD and other emergency personnel. A troop of National Guardsmen dressed in camouflage uniforms stands guard behind them. There is a life-threatening situation on Fire Island, a thin barrier island off Long Island. Fourteen people who refused to obey the mandatory evacuation order last night had to be rescued today. Having spent some good summer vacation time on the island, I can’t even imagine anyone wanting to face a hurricane on that thin sliver of sand in the Atlantic. In the process a rescue vehicle has been lost. Luckily there were no personnel losses. Cuomo quotes Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who accused people who refused to leave of being selfish, putting others at peril. The emergency chief tells in no uncertain terms that the window to evacuate is rapidly closing. Sandy is now expected to make landfall around 18:00, which will coincide with the peak of the tide coming in. When that happens, it won’t be possible to get out of the islands that surround New York City.



I also correspond with my other colleague Indran who lives high up in one of the high-rises on the East River waterfront in Manhattan. It is Zone A, but the building complex is very solid and the water would anyway never reach that high up, so he had chosen not to evacuate. He and his family moved here from South Africa only earlier this year. They are awed by the storm which they can observe through rattling windows from a vantage point tens of stories above sea level.
Our building is faring well, too. We stay in our warm apartment and enjoy the food we stocked up on before the storm: steaks and asparagus for lunch, followed by coffee ice cream; grilled chicken and salad for dinner. Do we normally eat this well? Nowa sleeps through much of her first hurricane. I go down to the basement, which looks dry—so far. 
Around the time of the landfall, I venture out briefly to snap these photographs. From the balcony the southwestern sky looks menacing. On the street side, the large trees are bending with the gale force winds. Luckily, the rain remains surprisingly moderate.
In early evening, the communications start to falter. The cable network on which our building depends on for the Internet, TV and telephone landline goes dark. The elevator also becomes unsafe to use. We’re cut off from information and communications. Well almost, as Yoko’s iPhone can still send and receive messages (my older model went blank). Some neighbours in the building report water leaking from their a/c vents. Apparently, water is also starting to gather in the basement.
Around 21:30, Yoko reads on the iPhone that Sandy is no longer a hurricane. The National Hurricane Centre has reclassified it because it “has continued to lose tropical characteristics”—no wonder at these latitudes. It doesn’t mean that its power is waning. Sustained winds of more than 120 km per hour remain. The wind and rain continue late into the night.
Tuesday, 30 October
We survived the storm with minor personal inconvenience. In the morning the winds are still high and there are heavy showers. At the JFK airport, top wind speeds recorded were 127 kph. Our cable service is restored and we never experienced a power outage. Not everyone was equally lucky. The storm left some 7 million people in 11 states and the District of Columbia without power. In New York, power outages are widespread and currently 1.8 million people are without power. In the New York University Langone Medical Centre even the back-up generator system failed. Some 260 patients, including four newborn babies, had to be evacuated.
ConEdison, the power utility, made a statement that this is the biggest storm-related problem in the company’s history. A representative couldn’t give a timetable for fixing the problems but suggested it may take a week to fully restore the service. It's going to be a cold and dark week for those affected. 
The initial reports by the police talk about seven Sandy-related deaths in the city, but there is no information about how these happened. The national death toll from Sandy is currently put at 16. According to news reports, more than 80 homes have burned down to the ground in a fire in Breezy Point, Queens, due to electric fires. One can imagine insurance companies studying the hurricane causes in the policies for loopholes to avoid payment to the home owners. A building in Chelsea collapsed partially because of the wind. The crane in Midtown West is still hanging there, but the situation remains dangerous and the police have evacuated buildings in the neighbourhood.
There is massive flooding around the city. The National Hurricane Centre recorded storm surges of up to 3.8 metres in Kings Point. The storm surge in southern Manhattan’s Battery at 4.3 metres, was the highest ever on record, beating that caused by Hurricane Dana in 1960. In the South Street Seaport waves with a height of 9 metres were measured. Residents on Staten Island report that they have never seen anything like this. Coney Island waterfront is still inaccessible even to eager reporters. Streets look like rivers with cars floating on them. Cars have been crushed under felled trees. One car spontaneously combusted in a fireball, possibly caused by salt water getting into its battery. A huge tanker has washed ashore on Staten Island.
Reports are coming in and are being updated as more information becomes available. The economic impact has not yet been assessed.
The system-wide shutdown of mass transit—both local and long distance trains, subways, buses, ferries—continues. Seven subway tunnels are severely flooded. One can only imagine the hordes of rats sprinting across the debris in the deluge. Apparently MTA had managed to get all subway cars on higher ground in anticipation of the storm, so the trains have been spared damage. MTA calculates it’ll take four days to pump out the water from the tunnels. The rain continues to fall.
It seems that we’ll spend some more time indoors.