Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty: One Thing Leads to Another

March 6, 2007

One Thing Leads to Another

The Principles of Uncertainty - Maira Kalman

February 6, 2007

The Impossibility of February

Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty: Completely

January 2, 2007

Completely

Learning to Keep Learning

December 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I recently attended an Asia Society education seminar in Beijing, during which we heard Chinese educators talk about their “new national strategy.” It’s to make China an “innovation country” — with enough indigenous output to advance China “into the rank of innovation-oriented countries by 2020,” as Shang Yong, China’s vice minister of science and technology, put it.

I listened to this with mixed emotions. Part of me said: “Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that was so focused on innovation — instead of one that is basically anti-science.” My other emotion was skepticism. Oh, you know the line: Great Britain dominated the 19th century, America dominated the 20th and now China is going to dominate the 21st. It’s game over.

Sorry, but I am not ready to cede the 21st century to China yet.

No question, China has been able to command an impressive effort to end illiteracy, greatly increasing its number of high school grads and new universities. But I still believe it is very hard to produce a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google — which for me is a proxy for curtailing people’s ability to imagine and try anything they want. You can command K-12 education. But you can’t command innovation. Rigor and competence, without freedom, will take China only so far. China will have to find a way to loosen up, without losing control, if it wants to be a truly innovative nation.

But while China can’t thrive without changing a lot more, neither can we. Ask yourself this: If the Iraq war had not dominated our politics, what would our last election have been about? It would have been about this question: Why should any employer anywhere in the world pay Americans to do highly skilled work — if other people, just as well educated, are available in less developed countries for half our wages?

If we can’t answer this question, in an age when more and more routine work can be digitized, automated or offshored, including white-collar work, “it is hard to see how, over time, we are going to be able to maintain our standard of living,” says Marc Tucker, who heads the National Center on Education and the Economy.

There is only one right answer to that question: In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a uniquely innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think that we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.

Tomorrow, Mr. Tucker’s organization is coming out with a report titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times,” which proposes a radical overhaul of the U.S. education system, with one goal in mind: producing more workers — from the U.P.S. driver to the software engineer — who can think creatively.

“One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other,” said Mr. Tucker. Thus, his report focuses on “how to make that kind of thinking integral to every level of education.”

That means, he adds, revamping an education system designed in the 1900s for people to do “routine work,” and refocusing it on producing people who can imagine things that have never been available before, who can create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies and design software “that will capture people’s imaginations and become indispensable for millions.”

That can’t be done without higher levels of reading, writing, speaking, math, science, literature and the arts. We have no choice, argues Mr. Tucker, because we have entered an era in which “comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life” and in which the constant ability to learn how to learn will be the only security you have.

Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. We, China, India and Europe can all flourish. But the ones who flourish most will be those who develop the best broad-based education system, to have the most people doing and designing the most things we can’t even imagine today. China still has to make some very big changes to get there — but so do we.

Maira Kalman - The Principles of Uncertainty: Ich Habe Genug

December 5, 2006

Ich Habe Genug

Go read more posts at donkey o.d.'s new home

Carter: Iraq one of the 'greatest blunders' by any American president

Last Sunday: Digging in and digging deep

by Robert Jensen

Deeper Crisis, Less U.S. Sway in Iraq

Judge Upholds Policyholders’ Katrina Flood Claims

Ten Months or Ten Years

Should you wish to read what Friedman has to say, here he is:

November 29, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, “The Central Liberal Truth,” Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are “progress-prone” and others are “progress- resistant.” In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

“Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,” adds Mr. Harrison. “But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association — what we refer to today as ‘social capital.’ Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.”

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

donkey o.d.

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Turning on the Puppet

Here is Maureen Dowd's column for today. I have added a photo of Nick Rapavi that I found.

November 29, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The pictures show a handsome blond kid. Nick Rapavi’s family and friends described him as a tough guy with a selfless streak. He’d wanted to be a marine since high school, and his dress uniform had a parade of medals for heroism in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a Purple Heart. He was on his third overseas deployment, and planned to go to college when he finished this stint in the spring.

The 22-year-old corporal, the oldest son of a dentist, grew up in Northern Virginia in the shadow of the Pentagon. The kid described as being “full of life” died Friday in Anbar Province, the heartless heart of darkness in western Iraq, the hole-in-the-desert stronghold of the Sunni insurgency and Al Qaeda fighters.

His mother told The Washington Post that her son’s squad had approached a gate on patrol, and Nick told his men to “stay back while he went through.” He was shot in the neck by a spectral enemy that melted away, one of 2,874 brave Americans to die fighting in Iraq.

In Latvia, President Bush vowed yesterday that “I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” But his words about Iraq long ago lost their meaning. Especially the words “mission” and “complete.”

At least in Anbar, the Pentagon may be about to pull troops off the battlefield. In another article yesterday, The Post, reporting on a classified Marine Corps intelligence report, said that “the U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter Al Qaeda’s rising popularity there.”

The Post went on: “The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as ‘embroiled in a daily fight for survival,’ fearful of ‘pogroms’ by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on Al Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.”

ABC Nightly News went even further last night, reporting that the Pentagon is “writing off” Anbar and will send the 30,000 marines stationed there to Baghdad. “If we are not going to do a better job doing what we are doing out there,” a military official told Jonathan Karl, “what’s the point of having them out there?”

President Bush is still playing games, trying to link the need to stay in Iraq with Al Qaeda. “No question it’s tough,” Mr. Bush said at a news conference. “There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by Al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal.”

Never mind that W. dropped the ball on Osama, and that his own commanders have estimated that Al Qaeda forces represent only a fraction of the foe in Iraq. Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the Bush invasion.

The administration still won’t admit the obvious, that our soldiers are stuck in the middle of a civil war and that it’s going to take more than Dick Cheney powwowing with the Saudis to get us out of it. Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, gingerly talks of “a new phase” in the conflict.

But reality does break through at moments. As Mr. Bush and Mr. Hadley head to Jordan to try to tell Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki not to go all wobbly, a stunning secret memo from Mr. Hadley has surfaced, expressing severe skepticism about whether our latest puppet can cut it.

Michael Gordon reveals in today’s Times that in a classified assessment, Mr. Hadley wrote that the Iraqi leader, who is getting pushed around by Moktada al-Sadr, was having trouble figuring out how to be strong.

“The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps,” he writes, “it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing ‘monetary support to moderate groups,’ and by sending thousands of additional American troops into Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is current shortage of Iraqi forces.”

Just what the election said Americans want: More kids at risk in Baghdad. (W.’s kids, of course, are running their own risks, partying their way through Argentina.)

Mr. Hadley bluntly mused about Mr. Malaki: “His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shi’a hierarchy and force positive change. But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

It’s bad enough to say that about the Iraqi puppet. But what about when the same is true of the American president?

How to Fight Poverty: 8 Programs That Work

November 16, 2006

Talking Points

By TINA ROSENBERG

Ask Americans whether they want to spend taxpayer money to educate girls abroad, and 80 percent say yes. Do they want to give food and medical assistance in poor countries? Eighty four percent do. Prevent and treat AIDS? That’s 79 percent.

But ask them whether they favor foreign aid, and only a bare majority does.

This disconnect occurs because a lot of Americans are concerned about how foreign aid is spent. Most Americans think Washington should help the needy abroad. But they worry the money will be wasted.

There are too many stories about taxpayer funds winding up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, financing dams and highways that never get built or paying exorbitant salaries to American consultants. Americans also wonder when they hear about how miserable life in some countries continues to be: why doesn’t foreign aid seem to be doing any good?

One reason is that not much money goes to combating that misery.

When pollsters ask people in the United States to guess how much their government spends on foreign aid, the median response is 25 percent of the federal budget – and Americans think that it should be 10 percent. The real number is less than 1 percent. And only a tiny percentage of that goes to fight poverty.

That percentage was even smaller during the Cold War, when a large chunk of American foreign aid went into dictators’ pockets or to their helicopter fleets. Its purpose was not to help people, but to buy friends.

But even today, 39 percent of the State Department's foreign aid budget goes to military aid, supporting congenial governments like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, and to fighting drugs.

Of the money that is marked for development – to help poor countries get richer – a lot goes to programs to help a nation’s central bank become more independent or to train congressional staff. This is important work, but it does not fight poverty. And a lot of what remains goes to help people in emergencies – feeding the hungry after crop failures, or rebuilding after a tsunami.

Not much is left for preventing crop failures in the first place. President Bush has proposed to give $23.7 billion in aid grants to poor countries in 2007. But even by the most generous calculations, only $3.7 billion is actually anti-poverty aid.

If antipoverty efforts do not help as much as Americans would like, one reason is that their government is spending far less than they think it is. This is unfortunate because there are programs out there with a proven track record of working — of lifting poor people out of poverty, and keeping them out — some run by governments, some by charity groups, and a few by businesses.

Here are some particularly effective ones.

I. The Gold Standard: Universal Vaccination

Universal vaccination is cost-effective foreign aid at its best. It is so successful, so widely considered essential, that many people today do not realize that it began only 20 years ago.

When Unicef and the World Health Organization started a global effort to vaccinate children against common childhood diseases in 1985, they were met with widespread skepticism. Vaccination rates for children in many countries were appalling – only 20 percent of the world's children in 1980 had gotten their third shot of D.P.T. (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) on time, the conventional measure of vaccine coverage.

But the program has had stunning success. By 1990, 75 percent of children had completed their D.P.T. shots on time. Bangladesh went from 9 percent D.P.T. completion in 1987 to 98 percent five years later. Worldwide, children were being immunized against polio and measles as well.

The logistics are heroic. Wars are routinely halted for inoculation campaigns. Entire countries get vaccinated in two days. Measles vaccines are successfully kept cold during day-long journeys by bicycle and canoe.

A full course of immunization, including everything in the supply chain, costs only $30. In the last 20 years this campaign has saved 20 million lives. It has given hundreds of millions of children a better start.

In the 1990s, however, the world’s attention turned to other problems, and vaccination rates slipped backwards. Bangladesh fell back to 66 percent in 1999. Every year 27 million children — a quarter of the world’s children — go unvaccinated against the basic diseases. Two to three million of these children die. Even for those who survive, these diseases can be crushing, forcing children to drop out of school, and parents to spend time and money they cannot afford on doctors and care for their sick children.

The challenge today is two-fold: to improve basic vaccine coverage, and to put new vaccines into global use. Vaccines now exist to protect children against common diarrheal and pneumococcal killers, against hepatitis B and a common influenza. But they are mainly in use in wealthy countries. Soon there may be a malaria vaccine as well. All these must become part of the universal vaccine package.

Help has come from an organization launched in 2000, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Financed by governments, organizations such as the World Bank and Unicef and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI gives poor countries money to improve their infrastructure and logistics – and then gives them more if they actually achieve improved vaccination rates. It also helps assure a predictable market for new vaccines, which encourages drug makers to produce them in large quantities. It has helped expand both basic and new vaccine coverage – because of GAVI, for example, 90 million children have been immunized against hepatitis B(pdf).

Immunization became a victim of its success, but close attention and new partnerships are now reviving vaccines. It is a lesson that eternal vigilance is needed, even to protect a program that became venerable practically overnight.

II. Give Poor People an Ownership Stake

Look around the edges of any large third world city and you will see vast settlements built by the residents themselves. Migrants from the countryside claim empty plots in nighttime land invasions, put up a blanket with a pole or a cardboard roof and begin stockpiling bricks. Their livelihoods are similarly jerry-rigged. A man will nail together a booth, at which he can sit and repair his neighbors’ shoes. A woman will open a window to the street to turn her living room into a mini-bodega, selling cooking oil and rice.

Most people surveying these kingdoms of dust and hope see only poverty. But Hernando de Soto saw something else – untapped wealth. Mr. De Soto, a Peruvian economist, realized that the world’s poor own trillions of dollars’ worth of assets. But their houses, plots of land and businesses lacked formal title – and so could not be used to do all the things that people in wealthy countries do to turn a little money into a lot of money.

Without title, people can not sell stakes in their businesses, use their homes as collateral for loans, buy insurance, or form limited liability corporations to reduce their personal risk. They cannot get credit in banks. They do not improve their businesses because their investment may suddenly vanish at any moment. They must spend money and time bribing the police to keep from being kicked off their land. In many cases they cannot even get electricity and telephone service.

Mr. De Soto’s crusade, which has now marched to El Salvador, Egypt, Mexico, Honduras, Tanzania, El Salvador, the Philippines, Haiti, Albania and elsewhere, attempts to turn these dead assets into living capital. All countries, of course, have ways to register property. But in most poor nations, they involve so much red tape that they are essentially useless for the poor. Mr. De Soto had tried an experiment in Peru – he established a two-sewing machine garment factory in a Lima slum and hired five college students to get all the necessary permits to legalize it. He claims it took them 289 days and cost them 31 times the average monthly minimum wage.

Mr. De Soto likes to say that when he walks through the rice fields in Bali, a different dog barks whenever he crosses from one farm to another. The dogs recognize the assets under their masters’ control. But the legal system does not.

To change this, Mr. De Soto founded an organization in Lima called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. It carries out research on the informal sector. But the governments of Peru and El Salvador have also hired the I.L.D. to run registries that give poor people simple, quick ways to get title for their land, homes and businesses. It also helps them use those titles productively. In other countries, I.L.D. is helping governments design such agencies or train government officials to do this work.

The I.L.D.’s work in Peru means that legalizing a business can now be done in a day, by visiting a single desk. The cost dropped from $1,200 to $174. The group says that between 1990 and 1995, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima (pdf), and the value of the underlying land doubled by 1998. Hundreds of thousands of new businesses have been legalized. Poor people saved millions in administrative costs, and Peru raised millions of dollars in new taxes.

Getting title, of course, does not mean that poor people can necessarily turn it into higher incomes. To use newly legal assets, the poor must still contend with banks that won't lend to them, and courts that require bribes and put up other hurdles. Tackling these issues may help solve one of the most vexing drawbacks of globalization and the market economy – in much of the third world, they have tended to benefit only the wealthiest. But establishing property rights is a necessary first step.

III. Microcredit: The 62-Cent Solution

In 1976, a Bangladeshi economist named Muhammad Yunus came upon a group of 42 artisans – but perhaps the more appropriate word is “slaves.” They made crafts such as chair seats, and used materials lent to them each day at exorbitant rates of interest by the buyer of their work. They were forever in debt, unable to turn enough profit to buy their materials in advance at market prices. Mr. Yunus gave the group a loan from his pocket that averaged 62 cents per person. With that, they bought their freedom.

Twenty years later, the Grameen Bank, the organization Mr. Yunus founded, has lent small sums of money to 6.7 million people in Bangladesh, almost all of them women, many of whom had never before touched money. It offers savings, insurance, home mortgages, pension funds, scholarships, credit for families to buy fertilizer, build latrines or dig wells, and a program of no-interest loans for beggars, so they can offer candy or dried chiles for sale as they go house to house.

Microcredit now reaches nearly 100 million clients in more than 100 countries. The World Bank has found that microcredit accounted for 40 percent of the entire reduction in moderate poverty in rural Bangladesh —and that it had an even bigger impact on extremely poor borrowers.

Microcredit raises an entire village’s standard of living – even non-borrowers’ lives improve. (Lending to men, by contrast, proved not to affect poverty at all.) Studies of microcredit programs all over the world show that it produces higher incomes and better-fed children, and improves a family’s ability to survive illness or drought.

To many people, the name Grameen is synonymous with microcredit. But the Grameen Bank is not even the largest microcredit lender in Bangladesh – that is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Nor were Mr. Yunus’s 62 cent loans the first – the earliest documented microloan took place in 1973, in Recife, Brazil, lent by Accion International , a group that has now lent over $10 billion.

But what Mr. Yunus and Grameen did – why they are sharing the 2006 Nobel Prize for Peace -- was show how an idea helping a few hundred people could be expanded to help millions. Grameen has also struck the proper balance – it is sustainable and profitable, with $600 million in savings from borrowers as capital. At the same time, it has never forgotten that its mission is to fight poverty, not maximize profit. It charges interest rates far lower than other commercial microlenders.

Grameen developed a model now in use globally. Although it is a bank, in many ways it is the opposite of a bank. Traditional banks in poor countries do not lend to the poor — administrative costs are too high, and the poor were thought to be bad risks. Normal banks stick close to business districts, require collateral, and lend mainly to men.

Grameen turned this on its head. Instead of collateral, Grameen depends on social pressure to guarantee loans. Women form borrowing groups of five, and must pay back their loans regularly for others in the group to be able to get one; borrowers must pledge to eliminate dowry, eat vegetables, have small families and educate their children — requirements not likely to be found at conventional banks.

It has been a decade since Grameen Bank accepted any donations or took loans. But hundreds of newer microfinance groups still look for donors. Accion International, for example, creates new microfinance institutions in 22 countries, which stop needing help once they become profitable. It also trains traditional banks in how to lend to the poor.

Microcredit started as an antipoverty program, but continues as a business. That is one reason it has grown and grown while other forms of aid fight for governments’ dollars and attention.

IV. Bribe the Poor

In 1995, the Mexican peso crashed and the economy contracted by 6 percent. At the time, Santiago Levy, the deputy finance minister, realized that the country’s antipoverty programs were going to fail its poor. The programs were a hodgepodge of food subsidies, adopted in response to powerful food producers. They were inefficient because they targeted foods everyone ate, rich and poor. Some even targeted foods the poor don’t eat, such as bread – poor Mexicans eat tortillas.

Mr. Levy saw a looming disaster – but also an opportunity to build political support for an antipoverty program that worked. Stealthily, he organized a pilot project to test a new idea in Campeche, far away from the capital so it would draw little notice. He began a program to pay poor mothers to keep their children in school and take their kids to the health clinic. He compared the results to poverty figures in a group of similar villages without the program. It was a great success. Data in hand, he persuaded President Ernesto Zedillo to phase in the new program and phase out the food subsidies.

Oportunidades, formerly called Progresa, is now embraced by all parties in Mexico and, with financing from the World Bank, is helping virtually every poor family. It not only focuses antipoverty spending on those who really need it, it does so in a way that encourages families to break the cycle of poverty for their children.

The average family in Oportunidades gets $35 a month – about a quarter of the rural family income. Families with many children in school can get up to $153 a month, a ceiling imposed to avoid providing incentive to have more children.

From the beginning, Oportunidades built in rigorous evaluation. Those studies have shown that it does focus its help on Mexico’s poorest people, and that the money is producing good results. Children are bigger and healthier. Oportunidades has also cut child labor and led to more schooling – in rural areas, for example, the number of children starting high school increased 85 percent. Moreover, by paying women, Oportunidades has augmented their power inside the family without increasing domestic violence.

There are fashions in foreign aid, and Oportunidades is hot. The World Bank sings its praises (pdf). So far 25 countries have adopted some version. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg just announced he is looking for donors to finance a pilot program to test whether New Yorkers, too, can be bribed out of poverty.

V. Link Up the Villages

When Shenggen Fan, now 45, was growing up in a village in China, it could take two days to get to Shanghai by motorboat and then bus. It took him an hour to walk to high school. Farmers grew only products they could eat or sell to their neighbors.

Now when he lands in Shanghai, he can drive to his family’s home in three hours. The high school is a 10-minute bike ride from his house. Farmers now buy animal feed and fertilizer from trucks visiting the village, and sell other visitors the cereals, watermelons and pigs they raise. The village has grown much more prosperous.

What has changed? Roads. Dirt trails were first replaced with all-weather roads made of broken bricks mixed with dirt, with drainage. Then the road to town was paved.

Almost everything people need to be able to live decently requires a road. A good dirt road with ditches is fine, or one built by villagers themselves with local stones or locally-made bricks. It just needs to be a road that allows a farmer to push his products to market in a hand cart, and that lets buses and trucks get from the village to the main trunk roads. The villagers themselves can maintain it.

Roads allow farmers to market their products, and bring in fertilizer and seeds. They let rural residents take non-farming jobs in nearby towns. Sick people can get to the hospital in time. Roads make it easier for the government to bring in water and electricity. Children can get to school faster, which means more will go. “With roads, people travel out and bring in new knowledge,” says Mr. Fan. “They change their behavior. Roads are a window to the outside world. In extreme cases, roads are life-saving – in the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and 1985, thousands of people died because they could not be reached by food aid.”

Today Mr. Fan is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. The studies he and his colleagues have done on how poor governments should spend their money show that building small feeder roads is one of the single most effective ways to fight poverty (pdf). In India, it would be the single most effective antipoverty program, the group concluded. Feeder roads would also be among the best ways to spend money in Africa and China.

Rural roads are not glamorous. Government officials want to build highways, not feeder roads. China, for example, has expanded its national highway system by 44 percent a year since 1988. But rural roads have expanded only 3 percent a year. In Africa, fewer than 10 percent of feeder roads are currently passable during the rainy season, effectively cutting off villages for months at a time.

Thirty years ago, the World Bank concentrated on infrastructure. But many of its projects to build dams, highways and electrical plants were plagued with corruption and waste, or ended up hurting poor people. Building infrastructure, including roads, got a bad name. What's needed today is the infrastructure equivalent of microcredit – small projects for villagers that are a necessary first step out of poverty.

VI. Target the Decision-Makers

Suppose you are a parent in rural India, or parts of Africa, or China. You are poor. School is available for your children. But you may have to pay school fees, and you must buy uniforms and books. The nearest school is in the next village – a dangerous walk for a young girl.

Besides, you need your daughter at home to fetch water and take care of her younger siblings. You know that education is important – but it is your sons who will support you when you are old, while your daughters will become part of their husbands’ families. Your decision is easy – the boys, and only the boys, go to school.

Gene Sperling, formerly President Clinton’s national economic advisor, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, likes to talk about the central paradox in girls’ education: Going to school is good for girls. Educated girls make more money. They are more productive farmers and have smaller, healthier, better-educated families of their own. They are even less likely to catch the AIDS virus. Educating girls is also great policy for a nation. Closing the educational gender gap boosts economic growth.

But educating girls is not necessarily good for parents – and they make the decisions. Most poor people in the world live in societies in which the girl marries into her husband’s family. Educating a daughter, these cultures say, is like watering a neighbor’s garden. Parents will send their girls to school only if the costs are very low.

That’s one reason why far fewer girls than boys go to school. Of children in primary school today, 150 million will drop out before they finish – two thirds of them girls. In Africa, the majority of girls do not finish primary school.

School is often very expensive. School fees in some countries, such as the Congo, are more than the national per capita income. When Tanzania abolished school fees in January, 2002, school attendance doubled overnight – and most of the new students were girls. There are other costs. Parents must buy books and uniforms. When Kenya tried abolishing fees for uniforms, books and school construction in some places, students stayed in school 15 percent longer.

The other cost to parents is the lost value of the girls’ work at home. To solve this problem, many countries now pay families to send children, especially girls, to school. It is a central feature of Oportunidades-style cash payments, for example. Bangladesh's government provides 15 to 20 kilograms of grain, mainly wheat, per month to families of poor boys and girls if they maintain 85 percent attendance in primary school. The government also pays a stipend to all girls in rural areas in grades 6 through 10, covering the cost of tuition, exams, books, supplies, uniforms, transportation and even kerosene for lamps to study by. The girls must keep up minimum grades, attend classes and not get married until out of school. This program has boosted girls’ enrollment from 27 percent to 60 percent.

Bangladesh is also home to the schools run by BRAC, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. BRAC's community schools have doubled the completion rates of government schools by overcoming the hidden obstacles to educating girls.. BRAC runs more than 30,000 schools for poor students, many in places where the nearest government school is far away. Teachers are women – often local high school graduates given training by BRAC. These features reassure parents that their daughters will be safe on the way to school and while in class. School schedules work around harvests and allow girls to be home during peak chore times. BRAC schools are run in close consultation with parents and do everything possible to help parents give their daughters the gift of learning.

VII. A Green Revolution for Africa

What was probably the single most effective antipoverty program in world history began in northern Mexico in the 1940s. Test plots showed that new varieties of dwarf wheat resisted many plant pests and diseases, and doubled or tripled the usual yields. Similar improvements followed in corn and rice. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations spread the seeds to India and Pakistan, and parts of Asia, Latin America and North Africa, along with irrigation techniques, pesticides and fertilizer.

The Green Revolution is not yet over – productivity continues to increase, and even faster than in the early days. It has prevented famine and brought improvements in income, health and survival to hundreds of millions of people.

But few of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa’s farmers get less than half the amount of grain per acre that Asian farmers get. From 1980 to 2000, India’s agricultural yields rose 28 percent. Africa’s dropped by 7 percent.

A Green Revolution for Africa is a challenge. Africa’s climate is much more varied than south Asia’s, so what crops need varies from place to place. Africa’s infrastructure is worse than India’s was, the soil is more degraded and AIDS is killing off the continent’s labor force.

But while a single Green Revolution benefiting all of Africa may not be possible, a patchwork of Green Revolutions is. Indeed, this is happening.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University is working with 78 villages across Africa to help them improve crop yields, part of a demonstration project trying to attack several different causes of poverty at once. Each village gets help with crops, clean water, nutrition, schools and health, for a total cost of no more than $110 per person per year. The Millennium Village project hopes to show that conquering poverty is possible for very little money. In agriculture, the project provides appropriate seeds and fertilizers to farmers who pledge to contribute part of their surplus to local schools for their lunch program. The subsidies diminish as farmers become able to buy the seeds and fertilizers themselves, and after three years the farmers are on their own.

Even after just one year, success has been notable. Farmers are growing a minimum of 3.5 times as much grain as before, with one village in Rwanda increasing its output 62-fold.

Can this be done on a large scale? The evidence says yes.

Ethiopia – a country once emblematic of crop failure and hunger – has doubled food production in the last 10 years and the government says it will double again by 2010. Malawi’s harvest this year was double that of last year. Ethiopia’s strategy was to provide farmers with better seed, more fertilizer, and hundreds of extension agents to spread good techniques. Malawi began to pick up 75 percent of the cost of farmers’ fertilizer and seed. Many farmers are now able to feed their families and sell surplus crops for the first time. Part of the advance has been luck – good rains. But success today will give farmers a cushion and better tools for withstanding the next drought.

The initial costs of improving crop yields is daunting for many governments in Africa. But if the Millennium Villages and countries like Ethiopia and Malawi can show success, they will make a strong case that farmers mainly need a one-time boost and that the benefits are great for Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable to drought.

VIII. Hold the Patient’s Hand

Tuberculosis is curable. Millions of people alive today can personally attest to the power of antibiotics. A simple course of four antibiotics, which costs as little as $11, can now vanquish a dreaded killer.

So why do nearly 2 million people a year still die of it? Because these antibiotics must be taken daily for six to nine months. That means that the local health clinic must have a steady supply. Patients must continue to take the full course even though they stop coughing, and the medicine causes nasty side effects. TB strikes mostly the poor, especially those living in crowded conditions. Many of them are migrants, who may be lost to the health system when they move.

If they don't finish the course, terrible things can happen. Patients stay sick, but now with a form of TB resistant to the basic drugs. Medicines that can cure this form of TB can cost $10,000, and the course of treatment is two years. Because of poor adherence, resistance has reached the point where some forms of TB are incurable. South Africa is battling an outbreak of this extremely resistant TB, and no doubt many other places are as well – they just don’t know it yet.

The solution is a strategy invented in Tanzania in the 1970s and now in use all over the world, called DOTS, for Directly Observed Treatment, Short-course.

DOTS has several components – among them good supply management and diagnosis – but what is key is what it is named for. Someone becomes a pill pal, with the job of watching the patient swallow the medicines. This can be a neighbor, a family member, or a community health worker.

DOTS is now widespread – it covers about 60 percent of the world’s diagnosed TB cases. It greatly improves the chance of cure. DOTS gives patients a social incentive to take their pills. But sometimes other layers of incentive are necessary as well. In her book “Millions Saved ,” Ruth Levine, the director of programs at the Center for Global Development in Washington, writes about China’s TB program. In 1990, TB in China was the leading cause of death in adults, killing 360,000 people that year. The next year, China switched to DOTS.

China found a way to make DOTS even more effective – by relying on the market. With help from the World Bank, China’s government pays village health workers to find TB patients, get them to the lab for periodic sputum checks, and see them through the full treatment course. The pill pal gets a bonus, too, as does the health center. China’s TB cure rate went from 52 percent to 95 percent, which prevents 30,000 TB deaths per year. Rates of resistant TB are far lower in the parts of China where DOTS is used.

DOTS is one of the most cost-effective health programs around. Each cure costs just $100, and brings a return of $60 for every dollar spent. It works because the drugs are cheap and it relies on community workers instead of doctors. The DOTS strategy recognizes that the promise of being cured is not always enough to change the way people behave. It uses social – and occasionally monetary – incentives to get the community and the patient working towards health.

These are not the only good programs. There are many more out there – family planning, provision of small amounts of nutrients such as Vitamin A, agroforestry to restore the fertility of soil, to name a few. But the above eight are some of the best.

A few common threads link these eight programs.

Many of them rely on the market. Microcredit and property legalization help poor people to start businesses. Other programs pay people for desired behavior.

Another common element is a focus on women and girls, who tend to be poorest of the poor and use help more efficiently than men.

A lot of these programs got their start when one individual looked at a familiar landscape in a fresh way.

The most important things these programs share, however, is that they work -- and with more money they could be working on a grander scale. Financing them, and others like them, is the kind of foreign aid Americans say they want, and should have.

The Opinionator: Pelosi’s First Big Mistakes

November 15, 2006, 10:40 am

Which is worse: Nancy Pelosi’s embrace of Alcee Hastings as a potential chairman of the House intelligence committee, or her endorsement of John Murtha’s candidacy for House majority leader? The New Republic appears to vote for Hastings by publishing a special Web-only editorial that calls Pelosi’s signals toward Hastings “both substantively foolish and politically tone-deaf” and “based on petty personal and identity politics.”

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, seems to vote for Murtha. She writes:

I wrote a few weeks back that Pelosi’s first test as speaker would be whether she picks Florida’s Alcee Hastings — who was removed from his federal judgeship for agreeing to take a bribe — to head the intelligence committee. As it turns out, I was wrong. Pelosi’s first test was how to handle Murtha. Whatever happens tomorrow, she flunked. Whether she’ll get another failing grade on Hastings remains to be seen.

Marcus condemns Murtha’s conduct in the Abscam scandal (“disqualifying” on its own) as well as “the back-scratching, dealmaking style” that Murtha has demonstrated in the quarter-century since then. She writes:

In a story last month, the New York Times described how Murtha has operated “a political trading post” in a back corner — the Murtha corner, it’s called — of the House floor, where Democrats and Republicans alike come to get Murtha’s blessing for earmarks or his help on close votes. As Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski told the Times, “nobody ever leaves completely disappointed.”

Murtha is one of 12 Democrats who voted against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. He’s one of four who killed a strong Democratic ethics package earlier this year. He is a one-man earmarking factory whose beneficiaries have included a lobbying firm that employed his brother and another founded by a former top aide.

The biggest puzzle, and biggest disappointment, in all this is Pelosi, who was pitch-perfect in her first several days as speaker-elect. Now comes this lose-lose move.

The (Fictional) Triumph of the Conservative Democrats

November 14, 2006, 10:30 pm

By Thomas F. Schaller

Two narratives have begun to emerge from the 2006 Congressional elections. The first is that Democrats didn’t win so much as Republicans lost. The second is that the Republicans who lost were beaten by a bunch of conservative Democrats.

There’s some truth to the first one: The election was a negative referendum on President Bush and the Republican Congress, specifically their mismanagement of Iraq, their ethical problems, and their inability to balance the federal budget or refrain from trying to distract Americans public with noisy wedge issues rather than provide solutions to more pressing problems.

But the second narrative is a fiction. And it is puzzling that Republicans and conservatives are the ones peddling it.

The poster boy for the Democrats-won-as-conservatives theme is Heath Shuler, a 34-year-old former University of Tennessee football star from western North Carolina. Just hours after the results came in last Tuesday, The Times’s David Brooks wrote in this space: “Many moderate Republicans survived, despite my pessimistic expectations … Furthermore, many moderate Democrats won, like Heath Shuler in North Carolina.” Charles Krauthammer echoed the point in his Washington Post column on Friday: “Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats . . .Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax — and now a Democratic House member.”

But take a closer look at who actually won — and lost — last Tuesday.

As of this writing (a few recounts are pending), Democrats captured 6 Senate seats and 28 House seats, and they are also expected to unseat Republican Representative Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

Based on the National Journal’s ideological ratings of Congress, the majority of defeated House Republicans were purged from the liberal third of the G.O.P. caucus. Ten of the 28 most liberal Republicans lost, including four of the top 12: Jim Leach of Iowa (No. 1), Nancy Johnson of Connecticut (No. 3), Simmons (No. 7), and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire (No. 12). Sherwood Boehlert of New York, sixth on the list of most liberal Republicans, is retiring from Congress, and the Democratic candidate won the race for his seat.

As for the new class of Congressional Democrats, sure, it includes a few self-described “pro-lifers” and opponents of gun control. But the vast majority of House candidates in competitive races ran as Iraq war critics who support reproductive choice and embryonic stem cell research, want to raise the minimum wage, and oppose privatizing Social Security. A pack of blue-dog Zell Millers this is not.

The Senate results are similar. Much attention has been paid to the flattop haircut and heartland personality of farmer Jon Tester, Montana’s Senator-elect; the way former Reagan Navy secretary and Vietnam veteran Jim Webb used his son’s combat boots to kick out Virginia’s George Allen; and the anti-choice position of Bob Casey, the newly elected Catholic Democrat from Pennsylvania.

These biographical nuggets obscure the fact that these men and the other three new Democratic senators ran as strong economic populists and thundering critics of the war. Republican Conrad Burns of Montana closed the gap during the late stages of his campaign by criticizing Tester as a big-government tax-and-spender. Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse beat the most liberal Republican incumbent senator, Lincoln Chafee, by running to his left. And in Ohio, Republican moderate Mike DeWine fell to Sherrod Brown, who promptly was named heir to the late Paul Wellstone, the über-progressive senator from Minnesota.

What we witnessed last week was the final stage of a regional realignment, one that began four decades ago, in the wake of the civil rights movement, and slowly but steadily converted most southern Dixiecrats into Republicans. Until this year that transformation was incomplete, as many Ford- and Rockefeller-style Republicans continued to represent blue districts or blue states in the Northeast and Midwest.

The Rust Belt realignment of 2006 provided a corrective: Now (presuming Simmons is defeated), Chris Shays of Connecticut will be the sole surviving Republican among the 22 Representatives from New England. Although Maine and New Hampshire each have two Republican senators, should any of them or retire, Democrats will be poised to take their places.

The great irony of the 2006 midterms for Republicans is that the conservatives who pulled the party to the right survived, while the liberal wing was decimated. Because the Democrats who beat those liberal Republicans ran even further left, the notion that conservative Democrats carried the day is plainly absurd.

Conservative talking heads usually rush to paint Democrats as a pack of tin-eared, out-of-the-mainstream liberals. That’s why it’s so surprising that some of these same voices are now cherry-picking the results in an effort to perpetuate the fiction that Republicans lost, but conservatives somehow won. It suggests that this year’s defeat so stunned the conservative movement, it lost its messaging mojo, too.

For liberal Democrats, that may be the biggest victory of all.

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EARLIER BLOGS:

November 10, 2006, 9:37 pm

More Power to Them: Democrats Win Beyond Congress

By Thomas F. Schaller

Amid the hoopla and historical analogies following the Democrats’ capture Tuesday of both chambers of Congress, an equally dramatic story is unfolding at the state level, where Democrats also re-established themselves as the majority party among governors and state legislatures.

Democrats elected six new governors among the thirty-six chosen this week, giving them a 28-member majority for the first time since 1994 — the same, fateful year they lost control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats netted almost 300 state legislative seats, snapping up nine new state legislative chamber majorities to just one for the Republicans.

These new governorships and legislative majorities will, of course, have direct implications for policy and politics in their respective states. But the national implications of these shifts in power has great portent for national politics in the 2008 presidential race and, especially, the redistricting battles in the coming decade.

Craig Gilbert, a keen national reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, noted this startling fact: Of the 11 states decided by five percentage points or less during the 2004 presidential contest, 9 now have Democratic governors.

Democrats were re-elected or maintained control in Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington. In addition, the Democrats captured new governorships in Colorado and Ohio — and came close to making it a full sweep of those 11 states, losing the Minnesota and Nevada races narrowly.

Historically, the party that holds the governor’s office is neither more nor less likely to win that state in the presidential election. Still, it can’t hurt Democrats that these newly-elected or, in most cases, comfortably re-elected chief executives will be on the ground when the 2008 battle for the White House moves into the final, crucial stages.

In fact, their influence may be felt sooner: A key problem for Democrats across the country in recent decades has been the deterioration of their state party machines, particularly in Colorado, Ohio and Wisconsin, where a string of popular Republican governors left of-out-power Democrats scratching their heads. For instance, the Ohio state Republican party and its longtime state party chairman Bob Bennett had been getting the best of state Democrats since the mid-1990’s. Governor-elect Ted Strickland’s landslide victory Tuesday in the Buckeye State thus gives the once-dormant Ohio Democrats a needed booster shot in the most coveted state in presidential politics. The build-up to 2008 will commence soon after Strickland’s inauguration in January.

In Colorado, the race for governor also proved significant. Denver district attorney Bill Ritter’s defeat of Republican Congressman Bob Beauprez capped an almost complete reversal — within the span of the past two election cycles — of the two parties’ fortunes in the state.

Prior to 2004, Republicans held Colorado’s governor’s office, both chambers of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, and a majority of the state’s seven-member U.S. House delegation. Now, the situation is almost exactly the reverse: Democrats have the statehouse, the state legislature, four of those seven U.S. House seats, and one of the two U.S. senators — and if incumbent Republican Senator Wayne Allard isn’t careful, he might get shown the door in 2008.

With its nine electors, Colorado is the most precious of the Interior West states Democrats will need to start winning to capture the White House. After Bill Clinton won it in 1992, it slipped back into Republican control. But even before Tuesday, Colorado seemed to be trending back: Despite spending little time or resources there, John Kerry’s 2004 losing margin of 4.6 percent was almost half Al Gore’s 8.4 percent defeat in 2000.

The larger significance of these gubernatorial victories, especially in tandem with state legislative gains, will be seen in state and Congressional redistricting battles that will follow the 2010 Census.

Because governors enjoy generally high re-election rates, the new governors will find themselves in the preferred incumbent’s position in 2010. And those winners will have great input in the battles conducted in 2011 to draw the legislative maps that will go into effect for the 2012 elections. Given all this, it is probably safe to say that the war for control in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures for January 2013 also commenced this week, and that Democrats won the first major battle of that war.

The results of the state legislative elections are too numerous to recount here, but a few notable trends deserve mention.

As in the Democratic victories in Congress and among governors, more than 80 percent of net gains in the state legislatures came outside the South. The party added nine new chamber majorities and lost only one. Most of their new Democratic chamber majorities came in the Midwest, home to five of the presidential swing states.

What happened further down ballot this week could provide the boost Democrats needed as they now set their sights on 2008 and the very top of the ballot.

November 3, 2006, 10:30 pm

Haunted on the Hill

By Thomas F. Schaller

The midterm elections are just days away, and we find ourselves showered by a virtual cascade of numbers — poll results, Congressional and gubernatorial seats in play, presidential approval ratings, and campaign finance totals.

One number stands out from the rest as most indicative of what will happen Tuesday. But we’ll come back to that later.

Released Wednesday, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll surveyed Americans during the last four days of October. For Republicans, the results are scary even by Halloween week standards. Public approval for the president’s handling of Iraq, terrorism and the economy is low. Approval ratings for Congress are even lower.

In 2004, President George W. Bush won a narrow re-election, and Republicans made small increases in their Congressional seats and no gains among state governors. On the eve of that election, voters were far from ecstatic about Bush, the situation in Iraq, and the general direction America was heading.

The 2004 pre-election situation, however, looks positively rosy compared to the outright hostility Americans feel as they head into voting booths this year. A comparison of the numbers from the Times/CBS poll taken in the last week of October 2004 with the results from this past week reveals a startling downturn in the mood of the electorate.

Heading into his re-election, Bush had a net approval margin of 5 percentage points. Now, he’s at minus 24. In 2004, 55 percent of respondents said the country was on the wrong track, compared to 43 percent who said it was on the right track. Today, that 12 percentage point margin has widened to 35, with 64 percent of respondents saying the country is on the wrong track.

In 2004 the president had a net approval of minus 4 percentage points on foreign policy and minus 5 on Iraq; the latest figures are minus 27 and minus 35, respectively. There’s no way to spin it: The war is tanking Bush’s presidency.

The one place where the president’s slide has not been as precipitous is on the economy. But even there, Bush’s net disapproval has doubled from minus 8 percentage points in 2004 to minus 16 now.

Looking at these numbers, one might ask, How did Bush manage to get himself re-elected?

The quick answer to that is that, two years ago, the president still had a strong, net approval on “handling the campaign against terrorism” — 15 percentage points. But even that strength has turned into a liability: Bush is now at minus 4 in handling terrorism.

Republicans in Congress should not feel cheery either.

Historically, public approval ratings of Congress tend to be lower than for the other two branches of government. But even by these standards, this Congress is disliked by most Americans.

Though overall approval was actually lower last spring (23 percent approving, 64 percent disapproving), and again a month ago in the wake of the Mark Foley page scandal, the slight correction in the last few weeks still leaves only 29 percent approving and 56 percent disapproving, or a net margin of minus 27.

The numbers driving these poll results are more gruesome, because they involve body counts, disfigurations, losses of limb and other unpleasant realities in Iraq. According to ICasualties.org, a Web site that tracks U.S. State Department press reports, 2,829 American service personnel and at least 146 contractors have been killed in Iraq. That’s more than the combined number of Americans and foreign nationals killed in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What’s more telling, if under-reported by the media, is the rate of fatalities and casualties, which has increased rather than declined following so many of the key moments the administration predicted would become “turning points.”

Prior to Saddam Hussein’s capture in December 2003, and including the bloodiest days en route to capturing Baghdad, there were 459 American fatalities in 269 days, or 1.7 per day. In the 1,039 days since that “turning point,” the fatality rate is 2.3 servicemen and -women per day. How about the much-touted “handover” of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 28, 2004? No better: Average daily fatalities were 1.8 before the largely symbolic transfer of control, but have jumped to 2.3 fatalities per day since. That’s an extra 15 soldiers or Marines per month.

These figures show neither progress nor safety and stability. The casualty figures for non-fatal woundings of American troops is too depressing to recount, but also rising.

As for the one key statistic that supersedes — or, rather, encapsulates — all of the numbers above, well, that’s simple: Heading into the 2004 presidential election, the post-war occupation of Iraq was in its eighteenth month, but two years later that occupation is now 42 months old.

Put another way, the war today is more than twice as old now as it was when Americans last voted. In effect, Bush and Republicans are asking for twice as much patience with a war that’s going half as well as predicted.

Karl Rove has hinted that the G.O.P.’s vaunted 72-hour pre-election program will somehow save the Republicans’ Congressional majorities. The problem is that their field program will be no match for the administration’s 42-month program in Iraq.

October 30, 2006, 10:30 pm

Deflating the Myths of 2004

By Thomas F. Schaller

With the 2006 midterms around the corner, it’s worth pausing a moment to first clarify the story of the 2004 elections.

The national media has already arrived at a narrative about what happened two years ago. The abbreviated version of this story is that George W. Bush, on the strength of his leadership on terrorism and an evangelical booster shot from the gay marriage issue, won the sort of decisive victory that eluded him four years earlier, while helping expand his party’s majorities in Congress.

The post-election summaries of the state of the two parties were strikingly different. The Democrats and their less-than-inspiring presidential nominee, we were told, were out-smarted, out-strategized, and out-maneuvered by their opponents. President Bush and the Republicans, on the other hand, were blessed with sharper consultants, more agile candidates with firmer backbones, a more substantial political infrastructure, less party infighting, and delivered a clearer and simpler message about the ideals and issues the party represented.

But there were other, more concrete factors that had already tipped the scales in the Republicans’ favor. By 2004 the Republicans controlled all of both elected branches of the national government, the federal courts, and a majority of governors and state legislative chambers. They benefited as well from a media echo chamber driven by Fox News, 24-hour conservative talk radio, and a battalion of well-funded conservative think tank experts who were willing and able to repeat every talking point and focus group-tested phrase, from “cut and run” (Democrats) to “stay the course” (Republicans).

Thomas F. Schaller, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”

Bring in the Green Cat

November 15, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Chongming, China

I’ve been a regular visitor to China since 1990, and here’s what strikes me most: Each year that I’ve come here, China’s people seem to speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty.

Yes, you can now have amazingly frank talks with officials and journalists here. But when I walked out of my room the morning after I arrived in Shanghai, the air was so smoky — from the burning of farm fields after the harvest — that for a moment I honestly thought my hotel was on fire.

And that’s why, for the first time, it’s starting to feel to me like China is reaching its environmental limits. If it doesn’t radically change to greener, more sustainable modes of design, transport, production and power generation, the Chinese miracle is going to turn into an eco-nightmare.

For some three decades now, China’s economy has grown at around 10 percent per year, based on low-cost labor and little regard for the waste it pumps into its rivers and the air. When a country grows that fast, year after year, it can start to think that the laws of nature don’t apply to it.

Guess again. China has been doing the environmental equivalent of jumping from an airplane and thinking that it’s flying, argued Rob Watson, an expert on China’s environment who heads the green building services firm EcoTech International. “After you jump out of a plane, for about five miles you can actually feel like you’re flying,” he added. But then reality hits. “It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end, and China may be approaching that sudden stop. ... When you stress a system to a certain point, it just stops working.”

China’s top leaders understand the crisis. But their response is complicated by so many Chinese flooding from the countryside to cities. In their view, political stability depends on finding those people jobs, and jobs depend on growth, and growth depends on China continuing to be the low-cost producer of everything — environment be damned.

But China can’t do what the West did: grow now, clean up later. Because the unprecedented pace and scale of its growth are going to make later too late. The China Daily reported this week that at least 24 million acres of cultivated land in China — one-tenth of the country’s total arable land — is now polluted, posing a “grave threat” to China’s food safety. More than half its rivers are also polluted, which is why less than 9 percent of “drinkable water” met government standards for bacteria in 243 rural supply stations recently tested. Many wells have excessive nitrates that can cause diabetes or kidney damage. No wonder some high-tech workers are starting to avoid China, because they don’t want to live in a dirty cloud.

Chinese officials fear that if they move to U.S.-level green production and environmental cleanup, “China will not be such a low-cost producer anymore, and that will affect jobs,” noted Dan Rosen, an expert on China’s economy and head of China Strategic Advisory. But what they are missing is that going green is not just a problem, but an opportunity. Pollution represents waste and inefficiency. Green companies are always more efficient, adds Mr. Watson, and China has a chance to become a major innovator of low-cost green solutions. When U.S. companies went green, they consistently overestimated the costs and underestimated the savings.

The other day, I sailed with Mr. Rosen from Shanghai up the Yangtze Delta to Chongming Island, the world’s largest alluvial island. There, Shanghai is trying to expand, by building the first eco-metropolis in China, based on eco-tourism, farming, wind and solar power. When you see the parklands created there, or when you stand in the protected wetlands and watch the water buffalo lounging in the mud, while peasants collect crabs, you can almost believe that China can change course.

But then, off in the distance, you see this massive bridge that is about to connect Chongming to central Shanghai, and you wonder what will happen to all the green plans here when all the overloaded trucks and consumers start rushing in. If Chongming is just a green ornament attached to Shanghai, it will never survive. If it is a model for a whole new kind of development, it, and China, have a chance.

Deng Xiaoping once famously said of China’s economy: “Black cat, white cat, all that matters is that it catches mice” — i.e., forget about communist ideology, all that matters is that China grows. Not anymore, said Mr. Rosen. “Now the cat better be green, otherwise it is going to die before it catches the mouse.”