Sweet Bird of Youth! The Case For Optimism
Youth. Antisocial, mobile-tapping, Lady Gaga-obsessed layabouts who get off the couch only to riot. What's to like? Rather a lot. In the Middle East and North Africa, youths played a major role in bringing down some long-standing dictatorships. And that may be only the start. A burgeoning young population might help speed global economic growth and be a sign of positive developments in the quality of life worldwide.
Around the world, countries are in various stages of progress through what economists call the demographic transition. That's the move from high rates of fertility and mortality — women having lots of children, many of whom die young — to low birthrates and longer life expectancies. The rich countries of Europe and North America, along with Japan, are all the way through this transition, with many of them seeing shrinking populations as a result. Africa is still in the middle of the change; Latin America and Asia are further ahead.
In all regions of the world, mortality rates have fallen before fertility rates have. To put it crudely, fewer people die before fewer people are born. That's why we've seen such dramatic global population growth over the past 50 years, from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion. At the start of the demographic transition, women still have lots of children, but many more of those children survive into adulthood and old age. Only after a while do birthrates decline. And between those two moments not only do populations increase, but the average age of people also drops. You get a youth bulge.
Take the developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa as an example. In 1960, on average, women in the region gave birth seven times, and about one-quarter of children died before their fifth birthday. By 1980 child mortality had almost halved, but fertility rates remained stubbornly high. Child mortality dropped further by 2000, and at last fertility began to follow — dropping to three births per woman. Meanwhile, the proportion of working-age people increased from about half in 1980 to nearly two-thirds today.
Traditionally economists and political scientists viewed a youth bulge as a problem. As part of a rising number of mouths to feed and hands to employ, an army of youths would put pressure on wages and food supplies, potentially dragging developing-world societies further into poverty. And youths could all too quickly become a literal army — provoking unrest and civil war. But in many countries, recent evidence tells a different story.
Work by David Bloom at Harvard and other economists suggests that the youth bulge can speed economic development. When a greater percentage of the total population is of working age, then, other things being equal, you would expect income per person to be higher. As women cease spending their most productive years having babies, they can enter the workforce. That's good. It is working-age people (not children or retirees) who save the most, creating more funds for investment and growth. Bloom and his colleagues suggest that as much as a third of East Asia's "miracle" growth rates over the past few decades might be attributed to the youth bulge.
But there's nothing inevitable about a youth bulge producing a growth dividend. Benefits have to be earned. Without the right policies spurring education and job opportunities, they won't materialize. The Middle East got education right: college and university enrollment in Egypt has doubled since 1990, for example, and Cairo University alone has about 200,000 students. But a sclerotic private sector and hidebound institutions have failed to create sufficient jobs for graduates. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds in the Middle East and North Africa is above 25%. And despite the fact that in many countries in the region there are more young women than young men in college, few women are active in the workforce, especially after marriage.
In the Middle East, then, young people had nowhere to go but the street. Luckily, once there, they confounded skeptics by favoring ringtones over riots. Young, educated and tech-savvy, they helped foment peaceful revolutions. Think of Tahrir Square as Egypt's Woodstock — only cleaner and with a purpose.
Political scientist Chris Blattman of Yale suggests that it isn't just in the Middle East that the link between youth and political violence might be weaker than many once thought. Around the world, he notes, "the people who riot or rebel are poor, unemployed young men... The problem is that the people who don't riot are also poor, unemployed young men. Most of the population is poor and unemployed and young. It's not clear that the poorer and less employed are more violent." It is clear, though, that if the youth demonstrations lead to more responsive governments that focus on creating jobs, the region may at last start seeing a demographic dividend.
That's just the start. Behind the youth bulge is more good news. Falling fertility and mortality rates are great outcomes in their own right. They mean that the probability that a woman in the Middle East or North Africa will go through the pain of watching one of her children die before its fifth birthday has fallen from 85% in 1960 to just about 10% today. That's still too high, but no parent could call it anything other than wonderful progress.
Moreover, falling fertility, along with reduced risk from childbirth, means that maternal mortality has dropped worldwide. The number of mothers who died in childbirth fell from 526,000 in 1980 to 343,000 in 2008. Reductions in fertility and child and maternal mortality are all connected to a greater power among the world's women to make decisions about how many children they want and how to raise them. A sign: girls' school-enrollment rates have been climbing rapidly worldwide. Even in parts of the Middle East, they now match or surpass boys' rates of enrollment. Declining birthrates also reflect family-planning programs' rolling out access to modern contraceptive techniques, which have reduced birthrates by as much as 1.5 births per woman.
Falling mortality at a time of rising populations worldwide suggests even more good news: the global breakdown of the so-called Malthusian trap, which predicts that rising population will lead to increased poverty, famine and even war as limited resources are spread among ever more people. Instead, famines have become increasingly rare. Wealth has been spreading so much that global poverty has been more than halved since 1990. And the recent past has seen a considerable downtick in violence: there were 24 wars going on in the world in 1984, but by 2008 that number had dropped to five.
The spread of global democracy, better health, more education, less violence — it all adds up to a much better world. And that suggests the biggest new idea of all: it's time to abandon our usual pessimism about the state of the planet and the course of history. We've got many challenges to overcome, but it might be a good idea to adopt a bit of youthful optimism when it comes to confronting them. After all, we appear to be making pretty good progress.
Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More
This gets to the paradox of Afghanistan today: despite the enormous level of government corruption and the Taliban's resurgence in parts of the country, there is another story here — of Afghan recovery and progress. But this story is not well understood by many Americans, 6 out of 10 of whom now oppose the war in Afghanistan.
Consider that under Taliban rule there were only a million children in school. Now there are 6 million, many of them girls. During the Taliban era, the phone system barely existed; now 1 in 3 Afghans owns a cell phone. Basic health care has gone from being a luxury to being available to most of the population, and annual economic growth is over 20%.
These kinds of advances explain why 6 in 10 Afghans in a poll last fall said their country is going in the right direction. The positive feelings Afghans have about the trajectory of their country seem counterintuitive given Afghanistan's deep poverty and feckless government, but they become more explicable when you recall what life under the Taliban was like. The Taliban incarcerated half the population in their homes, massacred thousands of Shi'ites, hosted pretty much every Islamist terrorist and insurgent group in the world and were pariahs on the international stage. Simultaneously, they presided over the collapse of what remained of the economy. And before the Taliban, there was civil war and rule by warlords; before that, a communist dictatorship; and before that, brutal Soviet occupation.
No wonder that 6 in 10 Afghans today have a favorable opinion of the U.S. military presence in their country. They understand that the U.S. is a guarantor of a future that is somewhat better than the Afghan past. They are not, of course, expecting Afghanistan to be turned into a central Asian nirvana, but they are hoping for more security and prosperity, and there is reason to believe they are right to do so. The war in Afghanistan still claims far fewer victims than the war in Iraq, a conflict widely believed to be all but over. Last year about 4,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by warring factions, while in Afghanistan, which has a larger population than Iraq, some 2,800 civilians died in the conflict. That makes the death rate of the Afghan war 9 per 100,000. (The murder rate in Washington is 22 per 100,000.)
The Taliban are getting squeezed where it hurts. The southern province of Helmand is the linchpin of Afghanistan's opium trade and a region where the Taliban once roamed freely. Now it might as well be Marine-istan, so effectively does the U.S. control most of it. A recent BBC poll found the proportion of Helmand residents who say their security is "good" has jumped from 14% to 67% since 2009. And in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, the religious warriors have been pushed out of key districts. The International Council on Security & Development, a think tank that has done field work in Afghanistan for years and is generally critical of Western policy, released a report last month that concluded that the U.S. troop surge in Helmand and Kandahar had improved security significantly.
This makes the prospect of "reconciliation" with elements of the Taliban more plausible. Insurgents do not make peace deals when they think they are winning, but they might if they begin to think they are losing. Richard Barrett, the U.N. official responsible for monitoring the Taliban, says, "I have heard of 12 different initiatives designed to engage the Taliban in talks." And such initiatives are pursued with a large national consensus that this is the right way forward; more than three-quarters of Afghans favor negotiations with the Taliban.
President Obama has also shifted the calculations of the Taliban by announcing that American combat forces will stay in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, a sea change in U.S. policy that has surprised the Taliban and even dovish members of Obama's Cabinet. When Obama announced the surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in December 2009, he said they would start withdrawing in 18 months. Vice President Joe Biden subsequently opined, "In July 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
Extending the deadline is enormously important. The fact that there will be large numbers of American forces in Afghanistan for the next four years has major implications for all the players in the country. Taliban detainees have told their U.S. interrogators that the prospect of fighting for another four long years is sapping their morale. And more years on the clock will allow the buildup of a much larger and more effective Afghan National Army — one that is more capable of resisting the Taliban — while giving Afghan politicians sufficient time to organize to defeat the Karzai mafia, which now dominates the country.
There is also some real hope that Afghanistan's economy can be based on more than just international aid and opium production. In January, an obscure Pentagon office, the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, released a report about Afghanistan's mineral wealth. The 49-page study details the size and location of an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits across Afghanistan, the fruits of "remote sensing technology" of satellites, buttressed by the work of geologists on the ground taking samples.
The Pentagon report concluded that Afghanistan could become a "world leader" in lithium, which is used in making batteries and other industrial processes, and it found a massive copper deposit just south of Kabul and next door to another giant copper seam for which the Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the right to mine. The report also identified substantial gold deposits; three months ago the Afghan government approved a deal brokered by JPMorgan in which Western investors will invest an estimated $50 million in a gold mine in northern Afghanistan.
With such potential wealth below the surface, Afghanistan can "become either South Korea or Somalia," an official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry explained to me. Afghans already lived through their own version of Somalia during the civil war of the early 1990s and the subsequent rule of the Taliban, who restored order at the price of imposing a brutal theocracy. They don't want more of that; fewer than 10% of Afghans in a number of polls hold a favorable view of the Taliban. There's nothing like living under Taliban rule to convince one that the group's promises of Islamist utopia here on earth don't pan out. Instead, Afghans want what everyone else wants: a slightly more prosperous and secure future. Slowly, very slowly, that goal is being met.
Bergen, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993, is the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda and the director of the national-security studies program at the New America Foundation
How can we be so sure? Start with the numbers. Most stars are too far from Earth for us to hear from the theoretical inhabitants of any of the theoretical planets orbiting them. A signal from a star 1,000 light-years away would, by definition, take 1,000 years to get here — and that's just next door, in an observable universe with a radius of some 14 billion light-years. "If the nearest hundred or thousand stars don't have life, we probably won't ever, ever, ever know about it anywhere else," says astronomer Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Whether or not we ever hear from aliens, cooking up life may be a whole lot more complex than just mix, heat and serve. Even asteroids are known to have once contained water ice, and radio active isotopes — which have since decayed — provided them with warmth. But they're hardly crawling with living things. What's needed, says Brownlee, is a more varied world, like Earth, that has a lot of different environments. That leads to chemical disequilibrium, which in turn leads to electrons' being traded back and forth. That's what builds complex molecules and, later, organisms. "It's not a matter of random assembly," he says. "You could put all of the elements of life in a jar and wait a trillion years, and it'll still just be there."
Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University is even less persuaded of the odds of otherworldly life. The author of The Eerie Silence, which argues — well, you can guess — Davies questions some of the most fundamental premises of our search for extraterrestrial life, including our hunt for earthlike worlds. "There's certainly a lot of real estate out there, but habitable is not the same as inhabited," he says. "I have no idea what turns nonlife into life. I get irritated by people who say life can emerge in earthlike conditions."
Our scientific methods are also hopelessly poor, because almost all our theories of life are drawn from the only place we know it exists, which is right here. When your sample group is so vanishingly small — when n=1, as the statisticians say — you've got a long way to go before you reach statistical significance.
But the biggest mistake exobiologists make may be believing that the only place to look for alien life is on alien worlds. The best place to find it could be on Earth. If life indeed developed with relative ease, Davies argues, it could have emerged numerous times in numerous different forms right beside carbon-based organisms like us. We don't see it because we don't know what we're looking for.
We've already discovered life in extreme environments on our own planet — notably in deep volcanic vents where water is heated to 120°C (250°F), temperatures that ought to be unsurvivable. Those organisms don't count as aliens because on the temperature spectrum, they're living in a zone adjacent to our own. "They don't stand out, because there's no discontinuity," Davies says. On the other hand, if we found no life at all in the 125°C-to-175°C (260°F to 350°F) range and then a critter popped up at 195°C (385°F), we might be onto something.
Of course, even such aliens would hardly be the kind we either crave or fear — those who could regale us with tales of what things look like on the other side of the cosmos on the one hand, or conquer us with their superior intellects on the other. Too bad — or maybe very good — you're never going to see them.
Yet while our fiscal challenges are large and growing, they are not insurmountable. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on which I served as associate director, has shown a way forward. Its recommendations offer proof that broad bipartisan support for deficit reduction — based on the principle of shared sacrifice — is possible. Yes, the population is aging, which means Social Security and Medicare costs will rise. And yes, health care costs continue to grow faster than the economy, putting upward pressure on federal health spending. But we can address these challenges. Our problems are not fundamentally economic; they are political.
The politics of pain makes deficit reduction a difficult task, of course. More worried about the next election than about the next generation, politicians prefer to avoid or defer decisions that increase people's taxes or cut their benefits and services.
Making things worse, pledges of what not to do — raise taxes, meddle with Social Security, cut defense spending — are pervasive in Washington. The more pieces of the budget that policymakers take off the table, the harder it is to bring debt under control.
And yet the fiscal commission overcame these odds. The plan would cut $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending — both defense and nondefense — while protecting, and in some cases increasing, spending on education, infrastructure and high-value R&D. It would cut $600 billion in mandatory spending, especially by reducing health care costs and reforming federal pensions, while protecting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. It would reform the tax code in a way that reduces or eliminates various tax breaks in order to drastically cut tax rates while helping generate nearly $1 trillion in new revenue. And it would make the Social Security system solvent for the next 75 years and beyond through a combination of progressive changes to the benefit formula, a gradual increase in the retirement age and an increase in the amount of income subject to the payroll tax, among other measures.
In total, the fiscal commission's recommendations would reduce the deficit by $3.9 trillion through 2020, bring annual deficits to manageable levels of 1% to 2% of GDP (compared with 10% this year) and put the debt on a downward path after 2013.
The recommendations prove that we can enact policies to bring the debt under control and do so without cutting spending or increasing taxes in a way that hurts low-income individuals or stifles investment and growth. Far more important, the commission showed that such a plan can garner support from across the political spectrum. The plan received the support of 11 out of 18 commissioners, a bipartisan super majority that comprised five Democrats, five Republicans and one independent. The fiscal commission demonstrated emphatically that the parties can work together, in the spirit of principled compromise, to get our fiscal house in order.
Unfortunately, the President's budget this year failed to include most of the commission's recommendations, and House Republicans have thus far focused too narrowly on cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But neither party has ruled out the adoption of the recommendations. As tough votes on this year's budget and a debt-ceiling increase come up, a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan may be the only way to avoid stalemate.
On our commission, we actually found that the "go big" approach helped garner more votes, not fewer. Republicans were willing to cut defense spending, but only if nondefense spending (including entitlements) was also cut. Democrats were willing to accept substantial spending cuts, but only if accompanied by significant new revenues.
If President Obama and the leadership of both chambers of Congress — and both parties — are willing to enter into serious negotiations to solve our fiscal problems, there is no doubt that they can reach agreement. Everyone will have to give up something. After all, the solutions are painful. But in the process, everyone can get something in return: a better future.
Goldwein is policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
There is a chance, and maybe even a good one, that you'll walk into work one Monday morning and find out your job is being moved to China or India. Millions have already seen that happen, from shop-floor machinists to IT specialists, in places as disparate as Italy, the U.S. and South Korea. China is a manufacturing machine, charging into the global market for everything from cars to solar panels. India's highly trained engineers are outdueling Stanford grads for jobs in R&D, software development and other sectors that are supposed to be the West's economic salvation. The harsh realities of the globalization of labor have left much of the world's workforce feeling despondent. Everyone in places like London and Los Angeles is competing with smart applicants from Bangalore or Shanghai who are willing to work long hours for a pittance. When there are 2.5 billion people in those two Asian giants combined, how can anyone's job be safe?
Yet there's another way of looking at the great shift of economic power to the East, one that is much less scary and perhaps even inspiring. Those 2.5 billion people are getting richer by the day. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for the workers of the world.
Thirty years ago, the average person in China or India could afford almost nothing beyond basic food and other simple necessities of life. That poverty was a problem for all of us. With so little spending power in the developing world, the global economy was dependent on a handful of wealthy nations, especially the U.S. Today, however, China and India have become a new source of growth for the global economy. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians can now splurge on Sony LCD TVs, Australian steaks and Apple iPhones. Last year, Indians and Chinese bought 19.9 million new passenger vehicles, 70% more than Americans did, according to J.D. Power. This new bonanza for consumer goods increases demand for copper, cotton and other natural resources; the machinery to manufacture those goods; the ships and trucks to transport them; and the people to design and sell them. The result is higher sales and bigger profits for companies such as Boeing and Rio Tinto, as well as more jobs.
We've already seen the benefits. If not for the continued rapid growth in emerging economies like China and India, the world might easily have descended into a real depression in 2008. China lifted all of East Asia out of the recession by buying capital equipment and consumer goods from Japan, South Korea and the rest of the region. U.S. exports of goods to China reached $92 billion in 2010, a 32% jump. The influence of China and India will only spread and strengthen as the two countries get wealthier and purchase more from the rest of the world. In Western Australia, the local chamber of minerals and energy believes the industry will create 40,000 jobs over the next three to five years in that state alone, in part because of expanding exports to China.
The newly rich of China and India are also bringing their money right to your doorstep. Their citizens are becoming active tourists, filling hotel rooms and dining out in Times Square and Tokyo's Ginza. According to the U.N. World Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese traveling outside the country rose to 47.7 million in 2009, 54% more than in 2005, and they spent more than French, Japanese or Canadian travelers. Chinese and Indian companies are expanding overseas in a quest for global presence and markets, creating jobs everywhere. Mumbai-based IT giant Tata Consultancy Services — a firm built on outsourcing from the U.S. and Europe — employs more than 13,000 non-Indians, nine times as many as in 2005. Chinese firms invested $56.5 billion abroad in 2009, up from only $12.3 billion in 2005, and they tend to hire locally as they invest, to absorb talent and know-how. Not one of the 450 people who work in the U.S. for Chinese appliance maker Haier is from China.
The advance of China and India demands an overhaul in the way we think about jobs. You might just find, for example, that your biggest customers are in Chengdu, not Chicago, or that your boss sits in New Delhi, not New York City. Your paycheck could come in renminbi or rupees instead of in euros or dollars. Sure, in this new economic order, your job may be lost to Chinese or Indian workers. But don't worry. They'll give it right back.
The days when we built our airports around cities now seem distant; in the new, mobile century, we build our cities around airports. For most businesses, it's more important to be close to Bangalore or Shanghai than to be near the next suburb over. And as we complete "the annihilation of space by time" that Marx predicted, and as connectedness becomes more urgent than rootedness, airports are not just becoming cities. Cities are becoming like airports — places to leave from more than to live in.
I'd always sensed this, but it came home to me with almost shocking immediacy when I was reading the dazzling new book Aerotropolis. One of its authors, John F. Kasarda, is a business professor in North Carolina who flies from Amsterdam to Seoul preaching the gospel of building homes and businesses near airports. Co-author Greg Lindsay is a journalist who knows how to make Kasarda's research racy while raising questions about the cost of living in midair.
As Kasarda sees it, the writing's already on the screen. The third largest computer company on the planet, Lenovo, doesn't even have a corporate headquarters; its executives just orbit the globe. Two in every five IBM employees have no office. And Ram Charan, "the most influential consultant alive," in Fortune's words, had no home until he bought one (in Dallas, of course) at 67. Previously he lived entirely in hotels and on planes, sending his laundry to an office in Dallas, from which strangers sent him fresh clothes at a future destination.
Much of this is as alarming as hearing George Clooney's character in Up in the Air say, "The slower we move, the faster we die." What does a world in constant flight say about family ties and continuity? Doesn't the aerotropolitan way of life put business before humanity and convenience before community?
Aerotropolis points out that we can still address the oldest needs but in new and liberating ways: A grandmother flies to DFW every Tuesday from her home in Houston to babysit for her daughter, who is completing her medical residency. Polish surgeons commute every week to work in Nottingham, England, as fast as Brits travel on weekends to Estonia for stag parties. Yet several years ago, I spent two weeks living in and around Los Angeles' LAX to see what the global city of the future might look like. I've never been so exhausted. People were shouting, sobbing, sitting alone and confused at baggage carousels. Airport workers kept telling me how travel is etymologically related to travail. The whole experience felt as unsettling as being in a city of cranes like Beijing or Dubai.
But maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions. Norman Foster's Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International is larger than all five of Heathrow's terminals combined, and when you walk through the mile-long (1.6 km) dragon-headed structure, it's hard to dispute that it's infinitely more appealing than the overcrowded cities and villages all around. It was the largest airport terminal in the world until Terminal 3 in Dubai eclipsed it. Emirates Airlines not long ago boasted profits greater than those of all U.S. carriers combined. LAX, which I'd taken to be the future, is, in fact, like New York City's JFK, hopelessly lost in the past. Even as LAX is busy upgrading shuttle buses to take visitors downtown, Beijing and Dubai — like Dallas — are building whole cities in the air that allow them to take off, again and again. It's only those of us stuck on the ground, perhaps, who can't see the larger picture.
Iyer is the author of The Global Soul, about airports and movement
That's where the promise of stem cells lies. As the mother cells of every tissue in the body, they are the biological ore from which the body emerges. All cells can trace their provenance to a stem cell, to the embryo and the first days after fertilization when such cells form. It's now possible to grow stem cells in a lab, not just from embryonic tissue but also by turning back the clock on an already developed cell like one from the skin, bypassing the embryo altogether with four important fountain-of-youth genes that rework the skin cell's DNA machinery and make it stemlike again.
These biological wonders are transforming the way we treat disease as well as how we think about unhealthy states and even the way we approach aging. Now that it's possible to generate an unlimited supply of stem cells from our own tissues, scientists say it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to turn those cells into nerves, heart cells, liver cells or any other living tissue we may need if we get sick or injured. Disease, therefore, no longer needs to be a black box of medical mystery. To expose what makes nerve cells in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease lose their ability to control muscle, for example, some researchers have already grown motor neurons from stem cells made from patients' skin and watched how they develop, at first normally, then veering off into pathology. Such a disease-in-a-dish strategy led to the discovery that it's not the motor neurons that are at fault but that other cells assigned the task of supporting these nerves turn toxic and break down the connections to muscle. With that insight, drugmakers have begun screening compounds to see if they can find an agent to block that lethal effect.
Even when we already know what causes a disease, stem cells can help us improve on existing therapies. Stem cells may make it possible for Type 1 diabetics, for example, to eliminate their repeated blood checks and insulin injections by someday allowing them to generate their own insulin-making pancreatic cells. If stem cells can replenish the dying brain neurons that affect memory and cognition, Alzheimer's patients might also benefit.
But why stop there? If these cells can replace ailing cells, why not aging ones? Can stem cells, as a source of replenished, renewable and healthy cells, keep us young forever? "In the absence of disease, why would we die?" asks Douglas Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard University. "With stem cells, can we get control of the aging process?"
There's tantalizing evidence that this might be possible, at least when it comes to blood and the immune system. Thomas Rando, a researcher at Stanford University, thinks stem-cell treatments may enhance healing in older patients who have difficulty recovering from surgery or a fracture. But he's also thinking about deeper issues involving the power of regenerative medicine. "There are very basic questions I hope we can make headway on using stem cells — in terms of understanding cellular aging, how that's related to tissue aging and the aging of an organism," he says. Which leads to the interesting possibility that with stem cells, we may no longer define age as how old we think we are but as how old our cells tell us we are.
Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us. Ownership hadn't made the U.S. vital; it had just about ruined the country.
Maybe we're all learning though. You're not likely to be buying big-ticket items if you're out of work, and even if you have a job and a house, good luck taking out a second mortgage to help you scratch that consumerist itch. That's especially true for the young, who've borne the brunt of the recession, with a jobless rate in the U.S. of about 20%.
And it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.
Those companies, however, while successful, are essentially Internet-era upgrades of old car- and video-rental businesses. The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers. There's a green element here, of course: sharing and renting more stuff means producing and wasting less stuff, which is good for the planet and even better for one's self-image. And renting a power drill via SnapGoods for the one day you need it is a lot cheaper than buying it. It's a perfect fit for an urban lifestyle in which you have lots of neighbors and little storage.
But the real benefit of collaborative consumption turns out to be social. In an era when families are scattered and we may not know the people down the street, sharing things — even with strangers we've just met online — allows us to make meaningful connections. Peer-to-peer sharing "involves the re-emergence of community," says Rachel Botsman, co-author of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. "This works because people can trust each other."
We yearn to trust and be trusted — one researcher has found that people get a spike of the pleasant neurotransmitter oxytocin when they're entrusted with another's goods. That's the beauty of a sharing society — and perhaps the reason it might prove more lasting than one built on ownership.
But don't despair. In the age of texting, old-fashioned romance may seem as antiquated as Old English. Yet technology can smooth the course of true love, whether it helps find it, nurture it or, if need be, end it.
Looking for your Romeo? The boom in Internet dating means there are more fish in the sea than ever before. Heading online is no longer seen as a last resort. Half the respondents in a survey by advertising giant Euro RSCG Worldwide said they knew someone who had met a partner online. With Internet dating, "you kind of go to a 'bar' and look at all potential mates very easily and scroll through them," says Patrick Markey, director of the Interpersonal Relationship Laboratory at Villanova University. For those too busy for the singles scene, online dating is a welcome shortcut, especially when profiles and photos let you be choosy about your choices.
Before you even go on your first date, you can Google and Facebook your potential love to your heart's content to make sure she's not hiding any skeletons. "What people know about each other gets revealed more quickly now," says Robert Rosenwein, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University. "It may warn you off from some people so you don't have to spend time figuring out whether or not a person's right for you."
So once a potential Juliet is found, what's the way to a modern woman's heart? Try her cell phone. If they're correctly organized, text messages are like stacks of love letters tied with ribbon — only now they're searchable. Paul Walker, 25, used texts to create the perfect anniversary gift for his girlfriend, Elizabeth. He created a calendar that tracked the chronology of their relationship, using only their text messages. As he was making the calendar, Walker, who lives in Brooklyn, converted his chats with her into a text document — 1,200 pages long. Though the mass of messages was intimidating, the finished calendar showed the arc of their relationship. "It ended up creating a rather emotional thing," says Walker. And an overjoyed girlfriend.
Technology helps not just the enamored though. In a study, Jen Eden and Alice Veksler discovered that those attempting to thwart an unwanted love have new tools at their disposal. "We found that people use avoidance tactics to maintain a status quo" in a relationship, says Eden, a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio. "And computer-mediated technology is great for that because you can think about what you want to say." If a romance goes sour, your iPhone can take all the effort out of writing a Dear John letter. In the magazine survey, 43% of women and 27% of men said they had been dumped via text message.
Especially in the case of breakups, it's tough to draw the line between efficient and impersonal communication. The key seems to lie in balancing your online and off-line relationship. "Some people think it's 'add water, instant relationship' because we have access to each other's Facebook profiles," says Art Ramirez, an assistant professor of human communication at Arizona State University. Technology just cuts out the small talk, letting you know if your partner is the right one for you.
And who needs Shakespearean declarations of love anyway? If Juliet had Googled Romeo, she would have found out he was a Montague and avoided all that fuss.
His plan would sound like the scheme of a hopeless idealist if it weren't for Mullaney's track record. He's one of the founders of Smile Train, an organization that funds cleft-palate operations in countries where people are too poor to pay for them. Smile Train, set up in 1999, raised $91 million in 2009 with a fundraising staff of four and had $101 million in assets, according to its tax records. The charity claims that, because of its work, 600,000 people no longer have cleft palates.
Mullaney is a believer in scale, which is partly why he loves direct mail. From the more than 100 million letters a year Smile Train has sent out, he and his team have reams of data about what appeals generate the most money. He knows which of the 49 faces he tested on the envelopes — presurgery, postsurgery, children, grownups — elicited the best response. (American-looking kids, presurgery.) He knows whether promising to never send another request for money is more effective than enclosing address labels. (It is.) Smile Train's team analyzed the mail so thoroughly, they can not only predict the most generous ZIP codes, but they can also foretell that Alysons will give more than Suzies.
Now Mullaney, who has parted ways with Smile Train, wants to take those data-analyzing techniques and apply them to a new set of problems — which, like cleft palates, can be solved with surgery performed by local medical clinics at non-Western prices.
His new foundation, Surgery for the Poor, hopes to be the invisible marketing and fundraising arm for a family of what he calls "charity brands." It will function like a wholesaler, a big donormaking factory gathering money cheaply for different causes, each under its own name. If the trends at Smile Train hold, spending $36 million on direct marketing the first year and $60 million a year thereafter will yield a surplus by the second year, and by the fifth, $146 million annually to spend on operations.
Why doesn't everybody do what Mullaney's doing? Similar techniques are used by credit-card companies. But, says Mullaney, whose background is in advertising, most foundations reject direct mail because it's expensive, annoying, and déclassé. Less than 0.5% of people respond to the initial letters. (But about 60% of those who do will give again sometime in the next two years.) Nonprofits are also wary of spending donors' money on getting more donors. "The whole charity industry is very dysfunctional when it comes to this stuff, because they're antibusiness and antimarketing," says Mullaney.
Raising lots of cash just for direct mail is not uncontroversial. Several fundraising experts said they'd never heard of a campaign so big. But Mullaney is meeting with billionaires to get the first $25 million and claims he's 80% of the way there. And he's unapologetic about spending that much to raise more — or about the junk mail. "Do-gooders run 9 out of 10 charities. They don't understand why they have to market," he says. "It's time for marketers to step up."
Around the world, countries are in various stages of progress through what economists call the demographic transition. That's the move from high rates of fertility and mortality — women having lots of children, many of whom die young — to low birthrates and longer life expectancies. The rich countries of Europe and North America, along with Japan, are all the way through this transition, with many of them seeing shrinking populations as a result. Africa is still in the middle of the change; Latin America and Asia are further ahead.
In all regions of the world, mortality rates have fallen before fertility rates have. To put it crudely, fewer people die before fewer people are born. That's why we've seen such dramatic global population growth over the past 50 years, from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion. At the start of the demographic transition, women still have lots of children, but many more of those children survive into adulthood and old age. Only after a while do birthrates decline. And between those two moments not only do populations increase, but the average age of people also drops. You get a youth bulge.
Take the developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa as an example. In 1960, on average, women in the region gave birth seven times, and about one-quarter of children died before their fifth birthday. By 1980 child mortality had almost halved, but fertility rates remained stubbornly high. Child mortality dropped further by 2000, and at last fertility began to follow — dropping to three births per woman. Meanwhile, the proportion of working-age people increased from about half in 1980 to nearly two-thirds today.
Traditionally economists and political scientists viewed a youth bulge as a problem. As part of a rising number of mouths to feed and hands to employ, an army of youths would put pressure on wages and food supplies, potentially dragging developing-world societies further into poverty. And youths could all too quickly become a literal army — provoking unrest and civil war. But in many countries, recent evidence tells a different story.
Work by David Bloom at Harvard and other economists suggests that the youth bulge can speed economic development. When a greater percentage of the total population is of working age, then, other things being equal, you would expect income per person to be higher. As women cease spending their most productive years having babies, they can enter the workforce. That's good. It is working-age people (not children or retirees) who save the most, creating more funds for investment and growth. Bloom and his colleagues suggest that as much as a third of East Asia's "miracle" growth rates over the past few decades might be attributed to the youth bulge.
But there's nothing inevitable about a youth bulge producing a growth dividend. Benefits have to be earned. Without the right policies spurring education and job opportunities, they won't materialize. The Middle East got education right: college and university enrollment in Egypt has doubled since 1990, for example, and Cairo University alone has about 200,000 students. But a sclerotic private sector and hidebound institutions have failed to create sufficient jobs for graduates. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds in the Middle East and North Africa is above 25%. And despite the fact that in many countries in the region there are more young women than young men in college, few women are active in the workforce, especially after marriage.
In the Middle East, then, young people had nowhere to go but the street. Luckily, once there, they confounded skeptics by favoring ringtones over riots. Young, educated and tech-savvy, they helped foment peaceful revolutions. Think of Tahrir Square as Egypt's Woodstock — only cleaner and with a purpose.
Political scientist Chris Blattman of Yale suggests that it isn't just in the Middle East that the link between youth and political violence might be weaker than many once thought. Around the world, he notes, "the people who riot or rebel are poor, unemployed young men... The problem is that the people who don't riot are also poor, unemployed young men. Most of the population is poor and unemployed and young. It's not clear that the poorer and less employed are more violent." It is clear, though, that if the youth demonstrations lead to more responsive governments that focus on creating jobs, the region may at last start seeing a demographic dividend.
That's just the start. Behind the youth bulge is more good news. Falling fertility and mortality rates are great outcomes in their own right. They mean that the probability that a woman in the Middle East or North Africa will go through the pain of watching one of her children die before its fifth birthday has fallen from 85% in 1960 to just about 10% today. That's still too high, but no parent could call it anything other than wonderful progress.
Moreover, falling fertility, along with reduced risk from childbirth, means that maternal mortality has dropped worldwide. The number of mothers who died in childbirth fell from 526,000 in 1980 to 343,000 in 2008. Reductions in fertility and child and maternal mortality are all connected to a greater power among the world's women to make decisions about how many children they want and how to raise them. A sign: girls' school-enrollment rates have been climbing rapidly worldwide. Even in parts of the Middle East, they now match or surpass boys' rates of enrollment. Declining birthrates also reflect family-planning programs' rolling out access to modern contraceptive techniques, which have reduced birthrates by as much as 1.5 births per woman.
Falling mortality at a time of rising populations worldwide suggests even more good news: the global breakdown of the so-called Malthusian trap, which predicts that rising population will lead to increased poverty, famine and even war as limited resources are spread among ever more people. Instead, famines have become increasingly rare. Wealth has been spreading so much that global poverty has been more than halved since 1990. And the recent past has seen a considerable downtick in violence: there were 24 wars going on in the world in 1984, but by 2008 that number had dropped to five.
The spread of global democracy, better health, more education, less violence — it all adds up to a much better world. And that suggests the biggest new idea of all: it's time to abandon our usual pessimism about the state of the planet and the course of history. We've got many challenges to overcome, but it might be a good idea to adopt a bit of youthful optimism when it comes to confronting them. After all, we appear to be making pretty good progress.
Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More
Why Afghanistan Is Far from Hopeless
In winter, a noxious fog sometimes descends on Kabul that is so acrid, you can actually taste it. It's a toxic brew of fumes from traffic jams and thousands of charcoal fires, and it's a testament to the fact that in the decade since the fall of the Taliban, Kabul's population has gone up sixfold, from 500,000 to about 3 million.This gets to the paradox of Afghanistan today: despite the enormous level of government corruption and the Taliban's resurgence in parts of the country, there is another story here — of Afghan recovery and progress. But this story is not well understood by many Americans, 6 out of 10 of whom now oppose the war in Afghanistan.
Consider that under Taliban rule there were only a million children in school. Now there are 6 million, many of them girls. During the Taliban era, the phone system barely existed; now 1 in 3 Afghans owns a cell phone. Basic health care has gone from being a luxury to being available to most of the population, and annual economic growth is over 20%.
These kinds of advances explain why 6 in 10 Afghans in a poll last fall said their country is going in the right direction. The positive feelings Afghans have about the trajectory of their country seem counterintuitive given Afghanistan's deep poverty and feckless government, but they become more explicable when you recall what life under the Taliban was like. The Taliban incarcerated half the population in their homes, massacred thousands of Shi'ites, hosted pretty much every Islamist terrorist and insurgent group in the world and were pariahs on the international stage. Simultaneously, they presided over the collapse of what remained of the economy. And before the Taliban, there was civil war and rule by warlords; before that, a communist dictatorship; and before that, brutal Soviet occupation.
No wonder that 6 in 10 Afghans today have a favorable opinion of the U.S. military presence in their country. They understand that the U.S. is a guarantor of a future that is somewhat better than the Afghan past. They are not, of course, expecting Afghanistan to be turned into a central Asian nirvana, but they are hoping for more security and prosperity, and there is reason to believe they are right to do so. The war in Afghanistan still claims far fewer victims than the war in Iraq, a conflict widely believed to be all but over. Last year about 4,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by warring factions, while in Afghanistan, which has a larger population than Iraq, some 2,800 civilians died in the conflict. That makes the death rate of the Afghan war 9 per 100,000. (The murder rate in Washington is 22 per 100,000.)
The Taliban are getting squeezed where it hurts. The southern province of Helmand is the linchpin of Afghanistan's opium trade and a region where the Taliban once roamed freely. Now it might as well be Marine-istan, so effectively does the U.S. control most of it. A recent BBC poll found the proportion of Helmand residents who say their security is "good" has jumped from 14% to 67% since 2009. And in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, the religious warriors have been pushed out of key districts. The International Council on Security & Development, a think tank that has done field work in Afghanistan for years and is generally critical of Western policy, released a report last month that concluded that the U.S. troop surge in Helmand and Kandahar had improved security significantly.
This makes the prospect of "reconciliation" with elements of the Taliban more plausible. Insurgents do not make peace deals when they think they are winning, but they might if they begin to think they are losing. Richard Barrett, the U.N. official responsible for monitoring the Taliban, says, "I have heard of 12 different initiatives designed to engage the Taliban in talks." And such initiatives are pursued with a large national consensus that this is the right way forward; more than three-quarters of Afghans favor negotiations with the Taliban.
President Obama has also shifted the calculations of the Taliban by announcing that American combat forces will stay in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, a sea change in U.S. policy that has surprised the Taliban and even dovish members of Obama's Cabinet. When Obama announced the surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in December 2009, he said they would start withdrawing in 18 months. Vice President Joe Biden subsequently opined, "In July 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
Extending the deadline is enormously important. The fact that there will be large numbers of American forces in Afghanistan for the next four years has major implications for all the players in the country. Taliban detainees have told their U.S. interrogators that the prospect of fighting for another four long years is sapping their morale. And more years on the clock will allow the buildup of a much larger and more effective Afghan National Army — one that is more capable of resisting the Taliban — while giving Afghan politicians sufficient time to organize to defeat the Karzai mafia, which now dominates the country.
There is also some real hope that Afghanistan's economy can be based on more than just international aid and opium production. In January, an obscure Pentagon office, the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, released a report about Afghanistan's mineral wealth. The 49-page study details the size and location of an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits across Afghanistan, the fruits of "remote sensing technology" of satellites, buttressed by the work of geologists on the ground taking samples.
The Pentagon report concluded that Afghanistan could become a "world leader" in lithium, which is used in making batteries and other industrial processes, and it found a massive copper deposit just south of Kabul and next door to another giant copper seam for which the Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the right to mine. The report also identified substantial gold deposits; three months ago the Afghan government approved a deal brokered by JPMorgan in which Western investors will invest an estimated $50 million in a gold mine in northern Afghanistan.
With such potential wealth below the surface, Afghanistan can "become either South Korea or Somalia," an official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry explained to me. Afghans already lived through their own version of Somalia during the civil war of the early 1990s and the subsequent rule of the Taliban, who restored order at the price of imposing a brutal theocracy. They don't want more of that; fewer than 10% of Afghans in a number of polls hold a favorable view of the Taliban. There's nothing like living under Taliban rule to convince one that the group's promises of Islamist utopia here on earth don't pan out. Instead, Afghans want what everyone else wants: a slightly more prosperous and secure future. Slowly, very slowly, that goal is being met.
Bergen, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993, is the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda and the director of the national-security studies program at the New America Foundation
Relax: You Don't Need to Worry About Meeting E.T.
The recipe for life ought to be pretty simple: start with water, add some hydrocarbons and simmer for a million millennia or so. Nothing but chemistry plus energy plus time. It worked on Earth; it might have worked on Mars, till the planet dried up. For all we know, it's working right now in the deep oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa. Humans and aliens haven't connected yet, but with 1022 stars out there (that's 1 with 22 zeros), it's just a matter of time — right? Wrong. If exobiologists have learned anything, it's that you and your kids and their kids' kids will probably never hear the slightest peep from an alien. If E.T. the movie star is your idea of what extraterrestrial life might be like, you will be disappointed. If your thoughts run more to War of the Worlds, you can breathe easy.How can we be so sure? Start with the numbers. Most stars are too far from Earth for us to hear from the theoretical inhabitants of any of the theoretical planets orbiting them. A signal from a star 1,000 light-years away would, by definition, take 1,000 years to get here — and that's just next door, in an observable universe with a radius of some 14 billion light-years. "If the nearest hundred or thousand stars don't have life, we probably won't ever, ever, ever know about it anywhere else," says astronomer Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Whether or not we ever hear from aliens, cooking up life may be a whole lot more complex than just mix, heat and serve. Even asteroids are known to have once contained water ice, and radio active isotopes — which have since decayed — provided them with warmth. But they're hardly crawling with living things. What's needed, says Brownlee, is a more varied world, like Earth, that has a lot of different environments. That leads to chemical disequilibrium, which in turn leads to electrons' being traded back and forth. That's what builds complex molecules and, later, organisms. "It's not a matter of random assembly," he says. "You could put all of the elements of life in a jar and wait a trillion years, and it'll still just be there."
Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University is even less persuaded of the odds of otherworldly life. The author of The Eerie Silence, which argues — well, you can guess — Davies questions some of the most fundamental premises of our search for extraterrestrial life, including our hunt for earthlike worlds. "There's certainly a lot of real estate out there, but habitable is not the same as inhabited," he says. "I have no idea what turns nonlife into life. I get irritated by people who say life can emerge in earthlike conditions."
Our scientific methods are also hopelessly poor, because almost all our theories of life are drawn from the only place we know it exists, which is right here. When your sample group is so vanishingly small — when n=1, as the statisticians say — you've got a long way to go before you reach statistical significance.
But the biggest mistake exobiologists make may be believing that the only place to look for alien life is on alien worlds. The best place to find it could be on Earth. If life indeed developed with relative ease, Davies argues, it could have emerged numerous times in numerous different forms right beside carbon-based organisms like us. We don't see it because we don't know what we're looking for.
We've already discovered life in extreme environments on our own planet — notably in deep volcanic vents where water is heated to 120°C (250°F), temperatures that ought to be unsurvivable. Those organisms don't count as aliens because on the temperature spectrum, they're living in a zone adjacent to our own. "They don't stand out, because there's no discontinuity," Davies says. On the other hand, if we found no life at all in the 125°C-to-175°C (260°F to 350°F) range and then a critter popped up at 195°C (385°F), we might be onto something.
Of course, even such aliens would hardly be the kind we either crave or fear — those who could regale us with tales of what things look like on the other side of the cosmos on the one hand, or conquer us with their superior intellects on the other. Too bad — or maybe very good — you're never going to see them.
Fix the Deficit? We Can Do That
It's rare that those of us concerned about the nation's fiscal course come bearing good news. The federal debt, after all, is as high as it has ever been in the post-1945 period and is growing uncontrollably. Under our best projections, the debt will grow from nearly 65% of gross domestic product today to over 90% by the end of the decade — a level that experts have warned could have dangerous economic consequences.Yet while our fiscal challenges are large and growing, they are not insurmountable. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on which I served as associate director, has shown a way forward. Its recommendations offer proof that broad bipartisan support for deficit reduction — based on the principle of shared sacrifice — is possible. Yes, the population is aging, which means Social Security and Medicare costs will rise. And yes, health care costs continue to grow faster than the economy, putting upward pressure on federal health spending. But we can address these challenges. Our problems are not fundamentally economic; they are political.
The politics of pain makes deficit reduction a difficult task, of course. More worried about the next election than about the next generation, politicians prefer to avoid or defer decisions that increase people's taxes or cut their benefits and services.
Making things worse, pledges of what not to do — raise taxes, meddle with Social Security, cut defense spending — are pervasive in Washington. The more pieces of the budget that policymakers take off the table, the harder it is to bring debt under control.
And yet the fiscal commission overcame these odds. The plan would cut $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending — both defense and nondefense — while protecting, and in some cases increasing, spending on education, infrastructure and high-value R&D. It would cut $600 billion in mandatory spending, especially by reducing health care costs and reforming federal pensions, while protecting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. It would reform the tax code in a way that reduces or eliminates various tax breaks in order to drastically cut tax rates while helping generate nearly $1 trillion in new revenue. And it would make the Social Security system solvent for the next 75 years and beyond through a combination of progressive changes to the benefit formula, a gradual increase in the retirement age and an increase in the amount of income subject to the payroll tax, among other measures.
In total, the fiscal commission's recommendations would reduce the deficit by $3.9 trillion through 2020, bring annual deficits to manageable levels of 1% to 2% of GDP (compared with 10% this year) and put the debt on a downward path after 2013.
The recommendations prove that we can enact policies to bring the debt under control and do so without cutting spending or increasing taxes in a way that hurts low-income individuals or stifles investment and growth. Far more important, the commission showed that such a plan can garner support from across the political spectrum. The plan received the support of 11 out of 18 commissioners, a bipartisan super majority that comprised five Democrats, five Republicans and one independent. The fiscal commission demonstrated emphatically that the parties can work together, in the spirit of principled compromise, to get our fiscal house in order.
Unfortunately, the President's budget this year failed to include most of the commission's recommendations, and House Republicans have thus far focused too narrowly on cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But neither party has ruled out the adoption of the recommendations. As tough votes on this year's budget and a debt-ceiling increase come up, a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan may be the only way to avoid stalemate.
On our commission, we actually found that the "go big" approach helped garner more votes, not fewer. Republicans were willing to cut defense spending, but only if nondefense spending (including entitlements) was also cut. Democrats were willing to accept substantial spending cuts, but only if accompanied by significant new revenues.
If President Obama and the leadership of both chambers of Congress — and both parties — are willing to enter into serious negotiations to solve our fiscal problems, there is no doubt that they can reach agreement. Everyone will have to give up something. After all, the solutions are painful. But in the process, everyone can get something in return: a better future.
Goldwein is policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Your Next Job: Made in India or China
There is a chance, and maybe even a good one, that you'll walk into work one Monday morning and find out your job is being moved to China or India. Millions have already seen that happen, from shop-floor machinists to IT specialists, in places as disparate as Italy, the U.S. and South Korea. China is a manufacturing machine, charging into the global market for everything from cars to solar panels. India's highly trained engineers are outdueling Stanford grads for jobs in R&D, software development and other sectors that are supposed to be the West's economic salvation. The harsh realities of the globalization of labor have left much of the world's workforce feeling despondent. Everyone in places like London and Los Angeles is competing with smart applicants from Bangalore or Shanghai who are willing to work long hours for a pittance. When there are 2.5 billion people in those two Asian giants combined, how can anyone's job be safe?
Yet there's another way of looking at the great shift of economic power to the East, one that is much less scary and perhaps even inspiring. Those 2.5 billion people are getting richer by the day. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for the workers of the world.
Thirty years ago, the average person in China or India could afford almost nothing beyond basic food and other simple necessities of life. That poverty was a problem for all of us. With so little spending power in the developing world, the global economy was dependent on a handful of wealthy nations, especially the U.S. Today, however, China and India have become a new source of growth for the global economy. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians can now splurge on Sony LCD TVs, Australian steaks and Apple iPhones. Last year, Indians and Chinese bought 19.9 million new passenger vehicles, 70% more than Americans did, according to J.D. Power. This new bonanza for consumer goods increases demand for copper, cotton and other natural resources; the machinery to manufacture those goods; the ships and trucks to transport them; and the people to design and sell them. The result is higher sales and bigger profits for companies such as Boeing and Rio Tinto, as well as more jobs.
We've already seen the benefits. If not for the continued rapid growth in emerging economies like China and India, the world might easily have descended into a real depression in 2008. China lifted all of East Asia out of the recession by buying capital equipment and consumer goods from Japan, South Korea and the rest of the region. U.S. exports of goods to China reached $92 billion in 2010, a 32% jump. The influence of China and India will only spread and strengthen as the two countries get wealthier and purchase more from the rest of the world. In Western Australia, the local chamber of minerals and energy believes the industry will create 40,000 jobs over the next three to five years in that state alone, in part because of expanding exports to China.
The newly rich of China and India are also bringing their money right to your doorstep. Their citizens are becoming active tourists, filling hotel rooms and dining out in Times Square and Tokyo's Ginza. According to the U.N. World Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese traveling outside the country rose to 47.7 million in 2009, 54% more than in 2005, and they spent more than French, Japanese or Canadian travelers. Chinese and Indian companies are expanding overseas in a quest for global presence and markets, creating jobs everywhere. Mumbai-based IT giant Tata Consultancy Services — a firm built on outsourcing from the U.S. and Europe — employs more than 13,000 non-Indians, nine times as many as in 2005. Chinese firms invested $56.5 billion abroad in 2009, up from only $12.3 billion in 2005, and they tend to hire locally as they invest, to absorb talent and know-how. Not one of the 450 people who work in the U.S. for Chinese appliance maker Haier is from China.
The advance of China and India demands an overhaul in the way we think about jobs. You might just find, for example, that your biggest customers are in Chengdu, not Chicago, or that your boss sits in New Delhi, not New York City. Your paycheck could come in renminbi or rupees instead of in euros or dollars. Sure, in this new economic order, your job may be lost to Chinese or Indian workers. But don't worry. They'll give it right back.
Think of Your Airport As a City — but Nicer
Home is not a matter of where you sleep but of where you stand. I made this curious pronouncement seven years ago at a conference next to the Dallas Fort Worth airport (DFW), and to my surprise, the diplomats, Air Force officers, teachers and executives gathered in the room seemed largely to agree. They felt closer to fellow nomads in Singapore or Toronto, they said, than to their geographic neighbors. But when we flew away after three days of discussing global families in our hotel, I realized something even more displacing: none of us, in 72 hours, had set foot outside the airport complex, a small universe of five terminals, a 36-hole golf course and 400,000 jobs within a 5-mile (8 km) radius. No surprise. The community that has formed around the terminals — the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, as it's known — is home now to 6 million people and is the fastest-growing city in the U.S.The days when we built our airports around cities now seem distant; in the new, mobile century, we build our cities around airports. For most businesses, it's more important to be close to Bangalore or Shanghai than to be near the next suburb over. And as we complete "the annihilation of space by time" that Marx predicted, and as connectedness becomes more urgent than rootedness, airports are not just becoming cities. Cities are becoming like airports — places to leave from more than to live in.
I'd always sensed this, but it came home to me with almost shocking immediacy when I was reading the dazzling new book Aerotropolis. One of its authors, John F. Kasarda, is a business professor in North Carolina who flies from Amsterdam to Seoul preaching the gospel of building homes and businesses near airports. Co-author Greg Lindsay is a journalist who knows how to make Kasarda's research racy while raising questions about the cost of living in midair.
As Kasarda sees it, the writing's already on the screen. The third largest computer company on the planet, Lenovo, doesn't even have a corporate headquarters; its executives just orbit the globe. Two in every five IBM employees have no office. And Ram Charan, "the most influential consultant alive," in Fortune's words, had no home until he bought one (in Dallas, of course) at 67. Previously he lived entirely in hotels and on planes, sending his laundry to an office in Dallas, from which strangers sent him fresh clothes at a future destination.
Much of this is as alarming as hearing George Clooney's character in Up in the Air say, "The slower we move, the faster we die." What does a world in constant flight say about family ties and continuity? Doesn't the aerotropolitan way of life put business before humanity and convenience before community?
Aerotropolis points out that we can still address the oldest needs but in new and liberating ways: A grandmother flies to DFW every Tuesday from her home in Houston to babysit for her daughter, who is completing her medical residency. Polish surgeons commute every week to work in Nottingham, England, as fast as Brits travel on weekends to Estonia for stag parties. Yet several years ago, I spent two weeks living in and around Los Angeles' LAX to see what the global city of the future might look like. I've never been so exhausted. People were shouting, sobbing, sitting alone and confused at baggage carousels. Airport workers kept telling me how travel is etymologically related to travail. The whole experience felt as unsettling as being in a city of cranes like Beijing or Dubai.
But maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions. Norman Foster's Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International is larger than all five of Heathrow's terminals combined, and when you walk through the mile-long (1.6 km) dragon-headed structure, it's hard to dispute that it's infinitely more appealing than the overcrowded cities and villages all around. It was the largest airport terminal in the world until Terminal 3 in Dubai eclipsed it. Emirates Airlines not long ago boasted profits greater than those of all U.S. carriers combined. LAX, which I'd taken to be the future, is, in fact, like New York City's JFK, hopelessly lost in the past. Even as LAX is busy upgrading shuttle buses to take visitors downtown, Beijing and Dubai — like Dallas — are building whole cities in the air that allow them to take off, again and again. It's only those of us stuck on the ground, perhaps, who can't see the larger picture.
Iyer is the author of The Global Soul, about airports and movement
How Stem Cells Are Changing the Way We Think About Disease
Treating disease is about fixing broken parts — about replacing cells that no longer work as they should, repairing tissues that falter and boosting systems that fail. But curing disease is a different matter. To cure disease, you have to do all of that and more. You have to remove the pathological cause of the problem and to ensure that it doesn't return. This requires teasing out where rogue cells went wrong and finding a way to nurture healthier ones to replace them.That's where the promise of stem cells lies. As the mother cells of every tissue in the body, they are the biological ore from which the body emerges. All cells can trace their provenance to a stem cell, to the embryo and the first days after fertilization when such cells form. It's now possible to grow stem cells in a lab, not just from embryonic tissue but also by turning back the clock on an already developed cell like one from the skin, bypassing the embryo altogether with four important fountain-of-youth genes that rework the skin cell's DNA machinery and make it stemlike again.
These biological wonders are transforming the way we treat disease as well as how we think about unhealthy states and even the way we approach aging. Now that it's possible to generate an unlimited supply of stem cells from our own tissues, scientists say it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to turn those cells into nerves, heart cells, liver cells or any other living tissue we may need if we get sick or injured. Disease, therefore, no longer needs to be a black box of medical mystery. To expose what makes nerve cells in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease lose their ability to control muscle, for example, some researchers have already grown motor neurons from stem cells made from patients' skin and watched how they develop, at first normally, then veering off into pathology. Such a disease-in-a-dish strategy led to the discovery that it's not the motor neurons that are at fault but that other cells assigned the task of supporting these nerves turn toxic and break down the connections to muscle. With that insight, drugmakers have begun screening compounds to see if they can find an agent to block that lethal effect.
Even when we already know what causes a disease, stem cells can help us improve on existing therapies. Stem cells may make it possible for Type 1 diabetics, for example, to eliminate their repeated blood checks and insulin injections by someday allowing them to generate their own insulin-making pancreatic cells. If stem cells can replenish the dying brain neurons that affect memory and cognition, Alzheimer's patients might also benefit.
But why stop there? If these cells can replace ailing cells, why not aging ones? Can stem cells, as a source of replenished, renewable and healthy cells, keep us young forever? "In the absence of disease, why would we die?" asks Douglas Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard University. "With stem cells, can we get control of the aging process?"
There's tantalizing evidence that this might be possible, at least when it comes to blood and the immune system. Thomas Rando, a researcher at Stanford University, thinks stem-cell treatments may enhance healing in older patients who have difficulty recovering from surgery or a fracture. But he's also thinking about deeper issues involving the power of regenerative medicine. "There are very basic questions I hope we can make headway on using stem cells — in terms of understanding cellular aging, how that's related to tissue aging and the aging of an organism," he says. Which leads to the interesting possibility that with stem cells, we may no longer define age as how old we think we are but as how old our cells tell us we are.
Today's Smart Choice: Don't Own. Share
Someday we'll look back on the 20th century and wonder why we owned so much stuff. Not that it wasn't great at first. After thousands of years during which most human beings lived hand to mouth, in the 20th century the industrial economies of the West and eventually much of the rest of the world began churning out consumer goods — refrigerators, cars, TVs, telephones, computers. George W. Bush won re-election as President in 2004 in part by proclaiming an "ownership society": "The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America."Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us. Ownership hadn't made the U.S. vital; it had just about ruined the country.
Maybe we're all learning though. You're not likely to be buying big-ticket items if you're out of work, and even if you have a job and a house, good luck taking out a second mortgage to help you scratch that consumerist itch. That's especially true for the young, who've borne the brunt of the recession, with a jobless rate in the U.S. of about 20%.
And it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.
Those companies, however, while successful, are essentially Internet-era upgrades of old car- and video-rental businesses. The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers. There's a green element here, of course: sharing and renting more stuff means producing and wasting less stuff, which is good for the planet and even better for one's self-image. And renting a power drill via SnapGoods for the one day you need it is a lot cheaper than buying it. It's a perfect fit for an urban lifestyle in which you have lots of neighbors and little storage.
But the real benefit of collaborative consumption turns out to be social. In an era when families are scattered and we may not know the people down the street, sharing things — even with strangers we've just met online — allows us to make meaningful connections. Peer-to-peer sharing "involves the re-emergence of community," says Rachel Botsman, co-author of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. "This works because people can trust each other."
We yearn to trust and be trusted — one researcher has found that people get a spike of the pleasant neurotransmitter oxytocin when they're entrusted with another's goods. That's the beauty of a sharing society — and perhaps the reason it might prove more lasting than one built on ownership.
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Tweet The Ways
Compared with a sonnet on perfumed parchment, a 140-character declaration of love doesn't seem very romantic. But you may get one soon. In a recent survey by Shape and Men's Fitness magazines, more than 65% of respondents said they had been asked out via text message. And when was the last time you sent someone a love letter? Or, frankly, any letter at all?But don't despair. In the age of texting, old-fashioned romance may seem as antiquated as Old English. Yet technology can smooth the course of true love, whether it helps find it, nurture it or, if need be, end it.
Looking for your Romeo? The boom in Internet dating means there are more fish in the sea than ever before. Heading online is no longer seen as a last resort. Half the respondents in a survey by advertising giant Euro RSCG Worldwide said they knew someone who had met a partner online. With Internet dating, "you kind of go to a 'bar' and look at all potential mates very easily and scroll through them," says Patrick Markey, director of the Interpersonal Relationship Laboratory at Villanova University. For those too busy for the singles scene, online dating is a welcome shortcut, especially when profiles and photos let you be choosy about your choices.
Before you even go on your first date, you can Google and Facebook your potential love to your heart's content to make sure she's not hiding any skeletons. "What people know about each other gets revealed more quickly now," says Robert Rosenwein, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University. "It may warn you off from some people so you don't have to spend time figuring out whether or not a person's right for you."
So once a potential Juliet is found, what's the way to a modern woman's heart? Try her cell phone. If they're correctly organized, text messages are like stacks of love letters tied with ribbon — only now they're searchable. Paul Walker, 25, used texts to create the perfect anniversary gift for his girlfriend, Elizabeth. He created a calendar that tracked the chronology of their relationship, using only their text messages. As he was making the calendar, Walker, who lives in Brooklyn, converted his chats with her into a text document — 1,200 pages long. Though the mass of messages was intimidating, the finished calendar showed the arc of their relationship. "It ended up creating a rather emotional thing," says Walker. And an overjoyed girlfriend.
Technology helps not just the enamored though. In a study, Jen Eden and Alice Veksler discovered that those attempting to thwart an unwanted love have new tools at their disposal. "We found that people use avoidance tactics to maintain a status quo" in a relationship, says Eden, a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio. "And computer-mediated technology is great for that because you can think about what you want to say." If a romance goes sour, your iPhone can take all the effort out of writing a Dear John letter. In the magazine survey, 43% of women and 27% of men said they had been dumped via text message.
Especially in the case of breakups, it's tough to draw the line between efficient and impersonal communication. The key seems to lie in balancing your online and off-line relationship. "Some people think it's 'add water, instant relationship' because we have access to each other's Facebook profiles," says Art Ramirez, an assistant professor of human communication at Arizona State University. Technology just cuts out the small talk, letting you know if your partner is the right one for you.
And who needs Shakespearean declarations of love anyway? If Juliet had Googled Romeo, she would have found out he was a Montague and avoided all that fuss.
Using Business Savvy to Help Good Causes
Brian Mullaney is raising $25 million to send out 200 million pieces of junk mail. This qualifies as good news because all the letters he sends will be asking for money. Still not seeing an upside? Mullaney, who has a way with an envelope, believes he can fix at least five of the world's problems with his direct-marketing campaigns: clubfeet, burns, holes in the heart, cataracts and hydrocephalus.His plan would sound like the scheme of a hopeless idealist if it weren't for Mullaney's track record. He's one of the founders of Smile Train, an organization that funds cleft-palate operations in countries where people are too poor to pay for them. Smile Train, set up in 1999, raised $91 million in 2009 with a fundraising staff of four and had $101 million in assets, according to its tax records. The charity claims that, because of its work, 600,000 people no longer have cleft palates.
Mullaney is a believer in scale, which is partly why he loves direct mail. From the more than 100 million letters a year Smile Train has sent out, he and his team have reams of data about what appeals generate the most money. He knows which of the 49 faces he tested on the envelopes — presurgery, postsurgery, children, grownups — elicited the best response. (American-looking kids, presurgery.) He knows whether promising to never send another request for money is more effective than enclosing address labels. (It is.) Smile Train's team analyzed the mail so thoroughly, they can not only predict the most generous ZIP codes, but they can also foretell that Alysons will give more than Suzies.
Now Mullaney, who has parted ways with Smile Train, wants to take those data-analyzing techniques and apply them to a new set of problems — which, like cleft palates, can be solved with surgery performed by local medical clinics at non-Western prices.
His new foundation, Surgery for the Poor, hopes to be the invisible marketing and fundraising arm for a family of what he calls "charity brands." It will function like a wholesaler, a big donormaking factory gathering money cheaply for different causes, each under its own name. If the trends at Smile Train hold, spending $36 million on direct marketing the first year and $60 million a year thereafter will yield a surplus by the second year, and by the fifth, $146 million annually to spend on operations.
Why doesn't everybody do what Mullaney's doing? Similar techniques are used by credit-card companies. But, says Mullaney, whose background is in advertising, most foundations reject direct mail because it's expensive, annoying, and déclassé. Less than 0.5% of people respond to the initial letters. (But about 60% of those who do will give again sometime in the next two years.) Nonprofits are also wary of spending donors' money on getting more donors. "The whole charity industry is very dysfunctional when it comes to this stuff, because they're antibusiness and antimarketing," says Mullaney.
Raising lots of cash just for direct mail is not uncontroversial. Several fundraising experts said they'd never heard of a campaign so big. But Mullaney is meeting with billionaires to get the first $25 million and claims he's 80% of the way there. And he's unapologetic about spending that much to raise more — or about the junk mail. "Do-gooders run 9 out of 10 charities. They don't understand why they have to market," he says. "It's time for marketers to step up."
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