The Latest from the New America Foundation

To Limit Debt, Promote Savings

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:22:10 +0000

February 10, 2012

Reid Cramer

William Elliott

February 10, 2012

Student loan debt was a problem long before Occupy Wall Street protesters added it to their list of grievances. The recession hit the younger end of the workforce particularly hard: the combination of a jobless recovery, rising tuition bills and mounting debt have become a crushing burden. Total student debt today is approaching one trillion dollars — exceeding the balance due on credit cards — and is second only to mortgage debt in American households. In fact, it's the only class of debt in which defaults are increasing. Given the state of the economy, much of this debt will never be repaid. It will remain an albatross weighing down an entire generation.

It's time to look ahead to a new paradigm, in which student loans are not the only answer. Let's consider the power of savings. Currently, we know scores of students never make it to college because they perceive it as financially out of reach. Others bail when they realize the debt burden will be too high. The cost proportionality of getting an education compared to the amount of borrowing necessary to finance it is way out of line. Students need a way to finance college without compromising their future financial well-being. Beyond efforts to limit tuition growth and create affordable educational options, there are significant advantages for placing a greater emphasis on savings.

A growing body of compelling research has illuminated the connection between savings and educational outcomes. Even modest-sized savings and asset holdings have the potential to alter the way people think about the future, which can lead to productive changes in behavior. For example, children with a savings account in their own name are more likely to have higher math scores than children without a savings account — scoring on average almost 9 percent higher.)

Studies have also shown savings are linked to expectations of high school graduation, academic achievement, and pursuit of postsecondary education.

Providing access to savings accounts can create a financial stake in college for students, and it’s a more effective strategy than simply advising them to save: if students have a tangible place to store funds, they are three to six times more likely to attend four-year colleges than youths with no savings. These accounts impel children to think about their postsecondary education. Opening the door to college motivates performance in certain ways, like staying in school and studying harder. And the earlier this starts, the better. Account ownership helps make the savings purpose more salient. We have observed that a college-bound identity takes shape long before children fully understand what it even means to go to college.

The concept of children's savings accounts has begun to take hold in a diverse set of countries including Britain, Singapore, Canada, and South Korea. In the U.S., 529 College Savings Plans have proven to be popular vehicles as earnings on deposits are tax-free. Unfortunately, to date they have had a limited reach among many households with modest incomes. That’s largely because the strength of the incentive to save is based on how much a family earns. If the family has a small tax bill or gets a refund, the incentive is particularly weak.

We should look for ways to advance more inclusive policies that create opportunities for more children. Early investments by the federal government in children’s future college plans may be less costly than bailing them out as young adults. Instead of waiting for parents to open accounts, let's make sure every child has an account to call their own.

One legislative proposal seeks to do just that. The America Saving for Personal Investment Retirement and Education (ASPIRE) Act would create accounts for every newborn. Each account would be seeded with a $500 contribution, and children in families earning below the national median income would receive matching funds for contributions of up to $500 each year. After account holders turn 18, they would be able to make tax-free withdrawals for multiple purposes, including the costs of postsecondary education. This is an approach that casts a wide net and allows all kids, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, to have a foundation for building their future.

How can the government fund these children’s savings accounts in the current economic slowdown? Through a system of tax preferences and direct spending, we already allocate $56 billion a year helping students pursue postsecondary education. Compare this to the $3.5 billion estimated cost to fund the ASPIRE Act during its first year. This approach can be tried at the local and state level. In fact, the City of San Francisco has begun offering each child entering public school a savings account. Their Kindergarten to College initiative (K2C) is a relatively low-cost investment designed to trigger significant returns, through increased savings, greater college access and degree completion, and lower debts.

If we think of children's savings accounts as a way to reduce ever-rising public expenditures on student loans, we can envision a more efficient, more hopeful, and more productive strategy for funding higher education. Instead of going into debt, young people could save money in advance.

The Sidebar - 2-09-12

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:21:45 +0000

This is the premier episode of The Sidebar, the weekly podcast from the New America Foundation that looks at what's in and what's underlying the news. This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Tamar Jacoby, Katherine Zoepf and Dan Meredith about Syria, privacy and immigration.

Audio Attachment:

The Sidebar - 2.09.12

The Other Academic Freedom Movement

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:54:10 +0000

February 9, 2012

How scientists broke through the paywall and made their articles available to (almost) everyone.

Konstantin Kakaes

February 9, 2012

In the summer of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a researcher at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, set up an email system for about 200 string theorists to exchange papers they had written. The World Wide Web was a mere infant—it had been opened to the public on Aug. 6 of that year. The string theorists weren’t particularly interested in making their research widely available (outsiders would have a tough time following the conversation anyhow). Ginsparg’s archive was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another.

For a short while, it would remain an insular tool for exchanging the latest theories of quantum gravity. But the novel system of communication would become the basis for a new model of academic publishing. Some wags would later joke that it was string theory’s greatest contribution to science.

By 1996, Ginsparg would write: “Many of us have long been aware that certain physics journals currently play NO role whatsoever for physicists. Their primary role seems to be to provide a revenue stream to publishers, a revenue stream invisibly siphoned from overhead on research contracts through library systems.” The arXiv, as it came to be known, was by then used widely in physics; some mathematicians and computer scientists had also started using it. Ginsparg had increasingly turned from doing physics to running the archive. (In 2002, he even received a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work on the arXiv .)

Since April 2008, researchers with funding from the National Institutes of Health have been required to submit their articles to a site called PubMedCentral, one of the arXiv’s offspring. After an embargo period (up to 12 months post-publication), the articles are openly accessible. During the embargo period, journals would have the option of restricting access to subscribers and charging nonsubscribers on a per-article basis (about $30). This experiment in open-access publishing is now on the verge of ending altogether or becoming the new status quo, depending on which politicians win an important legislative battle.

The Federal Research Public Access Act, reintroduced today by a bipartisan assortment of politicians, would broaden the open-access requirement to nearly all federally funded research. The rationale is that taxpayers, having paid once for the research, shouldn’t have to pay again to read what was done. Today’s bill is a response to the Research Works Act, which was introduced in December. The Research Works Act would roll back NIH’s open-access policy and prohibit the government from imposing any similar policies in the future.

The invisibly siphoned revenue stream that Ginsparg referred to comes from institutional subscriptions, which don’t come cheap. A year’s print subscription to Cancer Genetics, say, will run you (without discounts) $5,010 per year. (Individuals can subscribe for $280.) Cancer Genetics, along with 2,637 other journals, is published by Elsevier, a multinational conglomerate that made $1.1 billion last year on $3.2 billion in revenue—a 36 percent profit margin. This is typical of the industry. It helps that the “referees” who peer-review journal articles perform the job for free. (Almost 5,000 scholars are now boycotting Elsevier in protest of price-gouging and other practices, in a movement started by a British mathematician on Jan. 21.) Erik Engstrom, Elsevier’s current CEO, made $3.2 million in 2010; his predecessor Ian Smith got more than $1.7 million as a parting gift when he left after eight months on the job.

A journal article serves many purposes. One of them is to make money for publishers. Scientists and other academics publish in scholarly journals as a credentialing mechanism and, secondarily, to tell people about their work. Journals used to be crucial for both of these reasons, but in a world where academics could just post a paper up on their own websites, the primary purpose of a journal article is its professional validation. That’s why it makes some sense that the authors of a journal article should pay for the privilege of that validation, via peer review, rather than readers paying for the privilege of reading.

That is the reasoning behind the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit group of seven journals that launched in October 2003. The PLoS journals weren’t the first “open-access” journals, but they have become the standard-bearers of the rapidly growing movement. PLoS journals charge authors between $1,350 and $2,900 per article, which goes to cover overhead. The work is then freely available to all on the Web. These fees are paid for out of research grants directly, rather than, as in the old system, being siphoned through university libraries. For those who can’t pay (for instance, scientists from poor countries), the costs are waived.

Such “open-access” models blur the current legislative debate a bit. Since articles published in open-access journals are freely available from the get-go, the legal requirement that they be made accessible after some waiting period becomes moot. But it is a spur for old-fashioned journals, which stand to lose if their archives are made freely available, to change their business model.

There is little doubt that author-pays models will be less lucrative than the subscription-based models, because they do not allow for the same rates of growth—it’s easier to grow a subscriber base than an author base. But it does seem the fees can cover production costs, even though the old guard tries to argue otherwise. Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, which has been leading the lobbying push against public-access mandates, says he doubts the open-access business model is “sustainable.” However, PLoS brought in more than it spent in 2010, and its CEO, Peter Jerram, made $432,640 in 2010—it’s not a shoestring operation, even if it doesn’t come with millions.

The open-access movement has been gathering steam. Harvard adopted an open-access policy in 2008. The policy requires faculty to grant their institution a nonexclusive right to freely distribute their scholarly articles. Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California-Berkeley followed in September 2009; as did Princeton in September 2011. But the university policies allow their researchers to apply for waivers from the open-access requirement if publishers won’t let them make their papers available. The current NIH rule and the broader Federal Research Public Access Act have no such loophole.

The open-access movement has strong momentum. After a hacker was arrested in July 2011 for breaking into JSTOR, an online archive of journal articles, the company opened up first some of its archive from before 1923 to the public, then later granted limited open access to more recent articles. In England, the Royal Society made its historical archives, including its Philosophical Transactions, first published in 1665 and thus the world’s oldest peer-reviewed publication, open-access in October. More recent publications were also made more available, albeit after (at most) a one- to two-year post-publication embargo. Google Scholar has wide coverage and frequently gives the public access to full text, even of subscription-gated papers, via researchers’ websites (though it omits PDFs over 5 megabytes, irking researchers in disciplines like archaeology that rely on larger image files). JSTOR’s future in the world of Google Scholar is tenuous.

Of course, most scientists already get unfettered access to the journals they need through their institutions. But the current ecosystem of publishing still is not particularly healthy for them. Scientists joke about things like the minimum publishable unit (also least publishable unit, or, for short “publon”). Maximizing the number of publications while minimizing their intellectual content doesn’t serve any broader interest. But it’s the inevitable result when the number of publications (which is objectively verifiable) becomes disproportionally important in relation to the quality of insight. Academic administrators have grown increasingly concerned with the “impact factor” of journals—i.e., how often the journal is cited. This, in turn, has led to pressure on researchers to cite for the sake of citing.

The progress of science won’t turn on the publishing model. Journal articles are the shadow of science, not science itself. But by taking power away from journal publishers, open-access (and public-access mandates) should make for a healthier scientific ecosystem. It won’t immediately fix the “publon” effect, but charging for publication should exert at least a slight pressure on scientists to actually have something to say.

Elsevier and other commercial publishers have an incentive to encourage the publication of as many papers as possible, regardless of the quality. In a statement, Elsevier says laws like FRPA “could undermine the sustainability of the peer-review publishing system.” These claims are easily mocked.

The shell game here is the oldest one in politics: an attempt to pass off the parochial interest of the few (journal publishers) as a broader societal benefit. The debate in Congress cuts across ideological lines—the competing bills have Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in both the House and the Senate. It should be mentioned here that Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a sponsor of the Research Works Act, got $15,750 in donations from the Elsevier and its executives in the last two years (out of a total of $119,300 that the company and its executives spent on congressional races). The bills are likely to be held up in Congress for quite a while. The White House, in the meanwhile, is conducting its own review of the issue.

Smaller journals will suffer in coming years, as they give way to informal sharing among colleagues and lower-margin open-access replacements. Top-tier publications like Nature and Science will survive; in fact, the publishers of both journals have publicly said they oppose the Research Works Act. They will survive because they have acquired such stature that a result is no longer published in Nature or Science because it’s important; it’s important because it was published in Nature or in Science.

Whatever the White House ends up saying, and even if Congress remains gridlocked, the movement toward open publishing now seems irreversible. In 1996, Ginsparg said that it wasn’t a question of if, but when “commercial publishers accustomed to large pre-tax profit margins” would find themselves unable to compete with a “global raw research archive” combined with “high-quality peer-reviewed overlays.” The answer to his question seems clear: now.

Mobile Phones Will Not Save the Poorest of the Poor

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:03:33 +0000

February 9, 2012

The cost of cellphone-based financial services is hurting huge swaths of the developing world.

Sascha Meinrath

Jamie M. Zimmerman

February 9, 2012

Entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs, and governments exalt mobile technology as a game-changing tool to fight global poverty. But what if our eagerness to connect the world is inadvertently exacerbating the global economic divide?

In 2008, the New York Times reported that mobile phones may hold the key to ending global poverty altogether. The enthusiasm was—and is—understandable: From 2005 to 2010, cellphone use tripled in the developing world. According to the International Telecommunications Union, there are now almost 6 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions worldwide. Mobile penetration has reached 79 percent of the developing world. Multiple studies on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) have linked increased cellphone adoption with positive trends in economic and human development indicators, from gross domestic product to the Grameen Bank’s Progress Out of Poverty Index.

Despite the hype, a harsh new reality is unfolding. Take the case of the often glamorized M-PESA, Kenya’s popular mobile-phone-based payment and money transfer system. In only four years, M-PESA has grown to 14 million users. It now processes more transactions domestically in Kenya than Western Union does globally. The use of mobile phones to transfer money and manage personal finances has provided a speedier and more cost-effective delivery system for millions of Kenyans. The Economist reported in 2009 that Kenyan households using M-PESA saw their incomes increase—anywhere from 5 percent to as much as 30 percent—after beginning to use mobile banking. By the end of 2009, M-PESA had reached 65 percent of Kenyan households.

But there’s a downside to this program—and others like it—that’s too often ignored: These mobile money services do not effectively reach the poorest of the poor. In a 2010 study of M-PESA usage in Kenya, where mobile money penetration is greatest, 60 percent of the poorest quartile did not use the service. Part of the problem is access: Telecom companies have relatively little incentive to build out infrastructure, especially in poorer, rural markets.

Coverage is not the only problem. Mobile money services have a transaction fee structure that is prohibitive to those living below the poverty line—currently about 50 percent of the Kenyan population. These users are forced to pay remarkably high fees for their modest transactions. For example, a $1 M-PESA transfer carries a 12 percent fee; a $5 M-PESA transaction carries a nearly 8 percent fee. It may not sound like much, but for the poorest of the poor, this is a substantial financial drain.

These fee-based business models are geared toward maximizing revenue, which translates to a stunning level of resource extraction from poor communities. A 2007 report by Research ICT Africa examined income expenditures of 17 African countries and found that many of the poorest individuals studied were spending more than 16 percent of their entire income on mobile services. Obviously, for these constituencies, the current costs of connectivity are far too high. Yet while the technologies for dramatically lowering the cost of connectivity already exist, politicians and regulators have been unwilling to enact bold policies that would deploy innovative solutions and promote meaningful competition. For instance, regulators in Brazil under President Lula, have been willing to take on powerful financial interests; however, across most of the developing world, policymakers remain unwilling or unable to create pro-poor regulatory environments.

In the case of mobile connectivity, a rising tide does not lift all boats. As more people use and benefit from mobile services, the divide between adopters and those left out will grow exponentially. This creates a greater economic divide and leaves the poor further and further behind. In Kenya, M-PESA may, in fact, be driving a new wealth divide. While it’s helping many Kenyans access savings in a more efficient and safer way, M-PESA is also leaving a substantial portion of the nation’s poor in even more dire straits.

Now is the time for a radical shift in thinking about ICT4D and the digital divide. We must find practical and appropriate solutions to support truly universal low-cost mobile connectivity. This will require regulators and policymakers willing to fight the tough regulatory battles necessary in order to ensure that the poorest householders are able to truly harness the power of mobile connectivity. If we do not, we run the risk of helping many at the expense of doubly-disadvantaging substantial portions of the global populace.

Tinkering With Tomorrow

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Will the DIY Movement Craft the Future?

Event Venue:

New America DC

New technologies are making it easier than ever to turn an idea into a reality. 3D printers, open-source software, hackable products, and collaborative communities have turned traditional tinkering into a full-scale “maker movement” that allows – and encourages – everyone to tap into their inner entrepreneur. Can this movement usher in a new age of innovation? Will hackers have a profound impact on the economy? And if so, is the system ready to deal with it?

Location:

New America Foundation

1899 L Street NW Suite 400

Washington, DC 20036

See map: Google Maps

Participants List:

Marvin Ammori
Legal Fellow, New America Foundation

Cindy Au
Community director, Kickstarter

Chad Dickerson
CEO, Etsy

Dale Dougherty
Founder and Publisher, Make magazine

Jeff Howe
Author, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Tom Kalil
Associate Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Timothy B. Lee
Technology policy writer, ArsTechnica

Annie Lowrey
Economic policy reporter, New York Times

Sascha Meinrath
Director, Open Technology Initiative
New American Foundation

Mitzi Montoya
Dean, College of Technology & Innovation, Arizona State University

Jim Newton
Chairman and Founder, TechShop

David Plotz
Editor, Slate

Michael Weinberg
Attorney, Public Knowledge

Tim Wu
Author, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Professor, Columbia Law School

Matt Yglesias
Moneybox columnist, Slate

Event Time and Date:

Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 12:15pm - 5:30pm

Calendar

Student Loan Interest Rates: History, Subsidies, and Cost

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:59:11 +0000

February 9, 2012

Jason Delisle

Click here to download PDF

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to prevent federal student loan interest rates from doubling later this year. This is the culmination of decades of legislative changes to the federal student loan program. Few people are aware of the policies that led to the pending student loan interest rate increase and many question whether the 6.8 percent fixed interest rate charged on the most widely-available loans provides a real benefit to students.

This issue brief details the history of federal student loan interest rates, including the decisions that led to today’s fixed rates and the pending rate increase. It also examines the popular argument that current rates are unfavorable for borrowers and disputes the claim that student loans earn revenue for the government.

The timeline below shows the interest rates on federal student loans taken out in each year, as well as the Congressional action that led to these interest rates. Roll over the points in the graph for more information.

Attachments:

Student Loan Interest Rates: History, Subsidies, and Cost

Are Mobile Solutions Overhyped?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:36:40 +0000

February 7, 2012

Eric Tyler

Kentaro Toyama, University of California, Berkeley; Maura O’Neill, USAID; and Katrin Verclas, MobileActive

February 7, 2012

Editor’s Note: Contributors to this post will be part of a panel on the topic taking place on Thursday, February 9th in Washington, D.C. Sign up for the event here. This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and the Global Public Square.

There are now over 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, according to the International Telecommunications Union, with global mobile penetration at 87 percent. In the developing world, where landlines are especially scarce in rural areas, mobiles have been used for governance, banking, agriculture, education, health, commerce, reporting news, political participation, and reducing corruption.

But the ubiquity of the mobile phone - and its application to a diverse and growing set of development goals - doesn’t guarantee economic or social progress.

Are mobiles just another high-tech solution to what are essentially systemic and deeply rooted problems? Are mobile solutions for combating global poverty overhyped?

Kentaro Toyama, (@Kentarotoyama), Researcher at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley

Yes, mobile solutions are overhyped. At the moment, there is tremendous excitement around using mobile phones to address illness, ignorance, oppression, and other socio-economic challenges of the developing world. Within a decade, though, I expect that we’ll look back and see mobile development just as we view 1960s attempts to tackle the same problems with television – the technology has great potential, but overall it’s just an unproductive diversion.

Cheerleaders for mobile development point out that there are nearly six billion active mobile accounts in the world, and that mobile phones are increasingly used by the remotest rural villagers. It’s hard, indeed, to overhype the business success or the consumer appeal of mobile phones.

Market penetration, however, is not the same as meaningful impact.

Technology amplifies human intent and capacity, but technology by itself doesn’t fix challenges of intent or capacity. What’s overhyped is a belief that mobile-centric programs are a cost-effective means to combat disease, improve education, or alleviate poverty, as if mobile or not were the essential question. What’s overhyped is technological innovation as a primary solution to complex social problems, at the expense of tested-and-true interventions that nurture people and institutions.

Here’s an analogy: Imagine that you were chair of the board of a failing organization. Which of the following actions would most help turn it around?

1. Replace the chief executive with someone smarter and wiser.

2. Consult with clients, and address organizational blind spots.

3. Provide relevant, high-quality training for the employees.

4. Buy every employee a fancy smartphone with specially designed productivity software.

I’ve asked this question of many audiences, and everyone always laughs at (d). Yet, (d) in one form or another is the rationale behind most mobile development.

The real question is one of priority: Why allocate resources for technology-centric projects, when they could be better spent on people-centric ones? To paraphrase an old adage (with a deep apology to poets), “If you give a person a turbo-charged, heat-seeking, robotic fishing pole, they might eat until the technology becomes obsolete, which in our age is a couple of years at best; if, however, you teach them how to fish, they’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Maura O’Neill, (@MauraAtUSAID), Chief Innovation Officer at USAID

It depends. If you are looking for instant improvements in health, education or income shortly after a mom in a remote village or a young person in an urban slum purchases a cell phone then you will be shaking your head. Five billion cell phones in and of themselves are not going to produce development. On the other hand if you look at what occurred in Internet retail or music downloads you might predict we are within spitting distance of that development inflection curve.

After Amazon went public, raised an additional billion dollars in debt and was still mounting losses, many people were dismissing it - pointing to its single digit share of the book market. It will never be more than a bit player, many thought. Not sustainable. No scale.

A market rarely looks robust from the outset. Until, of course, it does and it is too late for competitors.

However, one company usually doesn’t get it right at first. It is an iterative process. There was Napster, then Kaaza and then Apple launched a business model that finally was a hit for the industry and consumers. Legitimate downloads skyrocketed. There was Friendster and MySpace, both market leaders, before Facebook built a new mousetrap.

We are in that experimentation phase just before the inflection point in the field of mobiles for development. Thousands of apps, few with massive scale. Lots of people are chasing that dream. Many will end up failing while the Amazons and the Facebooks of development will emerge faster than people think.

The first signs that mobiles will be a game changer in development are appearing. 15 million Kenyans or 70% of the country’s adult population now have mobile money wallets nestled in their back pockets – a phenomenon that occurred in just the last four years. It is already driving development outcome improvements in savings and internal remittances.

It hasn’t gone viral globally. At least not yet. But when VISA invests in companies like Fundamo, and is putting it global distribution assets behind game changing mobile applications, we know true development is not far behind. Serious mobile money launches or re-launches based on the lessons learned are occurring in dozens of poor countries. Vodafone, Google and other players are offering digital wallets. Financial inclusion will soon be within reach of millions.

There will be development hurdles mobiles will struggle to solve. Twitter may have accelerated the Arab Spring but tackling development problems will remain complex. The next decade will be transformational in development. Mobiles will be a big part of the story.

Katrin Verclas, @Katrinskaya, Co-Founder and Editor of MobileActive

Yes and no. There is no doubt that mobile technology has revolutionized communications worldwide, with over six billion active subscriptions, according to the GSMA, and with Africa and India experiencing growth in mobile accessibility and availability that is unprecedented.

Mobile phones have been instrumental in allowing people to strengthen their social networks and safety nets in case of financial or medical emergencies. Phones have ‘normalized’ information disparity in markets, allowing farmers, for instance, access to information about commodity prices to negotiate better prices for their products. Information available via mobiles can streamline supply chains for small shopkeepers.

Phones are increasingly used for delivery of basic health care services, such as more accurate and speedy transmittance of patient information, streamlining of drug supply chains, vaccination outreach, and sexual health information.

Mobile money has seen particularly striking success in reaching the unbanked. A recent study looked at 18 branchless banking providers and found that they’d brought on average 1.39 million people into the formal financial system for the first time.

Lastly, mobile phones have the potential to lessen income and power inequalities between men and women. One 2008 study in South Africa notes that mobile phones can have a distinctly positive economic effect on female users. When network coverage was extended to a new locality, employment increased by 15 percent, with “most of this effect…due to increased employment by women.”

Yet mobile technology is no silver bullet. As the Financial Times pointed out not too long ago, in many Africa countries there is “an acute shortage of resources and trained staff means that more than 50% of the region’s population is estimated to lack access to modern health care facilities." Mobile technology may serve as an effective communications medium for local community health workers, but it will not replace the lack of investment, and the lack of resources and trained medical staff.

While mobiles are great for accessing information about commodity prices, similarly, they will not replace investments into roads and transportation infrastructure that would allow goods to actually get to market efficiently and speedily.

Lastly, while the data on mobiles and women is conflicting, there is with growing evidence of a bottom-of-the-pyramid mobile divide. In the poorest areas, cell phones are especially scarcer, and cost and literacy impose greater barriers to poorer women, who are more likely to be illiterate than men. It is often these poorest, most rural women who could most use information about market prices, personal safety, and female health care who are also least able to afford mobile phones and take advantage of its opportunities.

Eric Tyler (@Erict19), Program Associate at the New America Foundation

Yes, if you are predicting that mobile technology will mean the end of the digital divide and that a mobile phone in every hand will solve all problems. No, if you are saying that utilizing mobile phones already in the hands of nearly 6 billion people is profoundly better than dropping tablet computers out of helicopters.

Mobile phones are leading the developing world into the information economy and digital age. Already, we’ve seen the potential of the devices to transform an entire industry, as mobile money did in Kenya. And for a large portion of the developing world’s next generation, it will be through mobile phones that Internet connectivity is gained.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and throw mobile phones at every problem we see. The sustainability and effectiveness of mobile solutions will be closely tied to the human reality and context that surrounds these devices. And important questions still need to be asked around replicability and costs. For example, why has mobile money not yet taken hold outside of Kenya? And how can prices come down for those who cannot afford mobile phones?

A promising sign of mobiles phones’ potential are early randomized evaluations of projects showing a range of positive impacts. One such study of a mobile money transfer project in a drought prone village in Niger showed a huge reduction in distribution costs and greater diversity in crop allocation, purchasing decisions, and diet for mobile transfer beneficiaries.

“Mobile development” is still in its infancy. After all, the first call was made from a mobile less than forty years ago. The inventor Martin Cooper picked up the two and half pound handheld and dialed his rival company’s head researcher to gloat. Martin couldn’t have envisioned the implications of his breakthrough for helping the world’s poorest, and the picture is still coming into focus today. What is already clear is that this is just the beginning, and as mobile phones get smarter, cheaper, and more widespread, they will continue to play an integral role in adapting international development to the digital age.

The Economic and Geo-Political Implications of China-Centric Globalization

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:52:06 +0000

February 8, 2012

Thomas Palley

The last 30 years have witnessed the era of globalization which has been marked by the creation of an integrated global economy. Globalization has been the product of both policy and market forces, and U.S. policymakers have persistently been in the vanguard. However, what began as a project of globalization has been transformed with little explicit public discussion into a project of China-centric globalization.

China-centric globalization is characterized by three features: (1) the emergence of China as the global center of manufacturing, with China playing the role of factory for the world; (2) the creation of a new dollar zone shared by the U.S. and China and enforced by China’s adoption of an exchange rate pegged to the dollar; (3) the development of China as the fulcrum of U.S. engagement with the global economy, with the U.S. having a massive trade deficit with China and transferring significant chunks of manufacturing capacity to China.

Globalization has always been controversial but China-centric globalization has made it even more so. Globalization poses challenges for the character of America’s economy, for the goal of shared prosperity, and for U.S. national security. China-centric globalization amplifies these concerns by aggravating adverse economic tendencies within the globalization process, and by raising additional national security concerns about dependence on China, with whom the U.S. still has an uncertain geo-political relationship.

Looking into the future, the current path of China-centric globalization poses a threat to both U.S. economic recovery and global growth and development. It has not only hindered American attempts to escape from the post-bubble recession that began in December 2007 but it has also threatened to block future attempts to recalibrate and improve the globalization process. If anything, U.S. policy has failed to come to grips with the problems associated with China-centric globalization. Especially troubling is the U.S. Treasury’s policy toward China’s exchange rate. The Treasury’s past policy can be accused of dereliction of duty in its failure to protect the U.S. manufacturing sector. Its current policy of encouraging China to introduce a flexible yuan exchange rate with free capital mobility promises to compound that damage.

It is important to remember that China-centric globalization has been largely the product of U.S. policymakers and U.S. corporations. It therefore should be subject to review. As it is now, China-centric globalization has set in motion a momentous process that is causing changes of historical proportions. This process has developed rapidly with little public consideration of its implications. It was put in place in the late 1990s by a triumphant corporate sector, at a time when the public was caught up in the euphoria of a long-running cycle of asset bubbles that created illusory prosperity. Change of this proportion would be dangerous even if the U.S. and China were close allies, which they are not. At the end of the 19th century, a similar seismic shift of economic power between Great Britain and Germany, whose monarchs shared a common lineage, contributed to the tragedy of World War I. That history speaks to the dangers of such developments and should be a caution to U.S. policymakers. The troubling developments already in place and in prospect should be an alarm. Yet, U.S. policymakers do not seem to have fully grasped the dangers inherent in China-centric globalization.

To continue reading this paper, click here.

Attachments:

Palley, Thomas. The Economic and Geo-Political Implications of China-Centric Globalization (22 pp.)

New America NYC Event: What in the World is Going on at the UN?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:26:29 +0000

Sometimes even U.N. diplomats have an exciting week. Or, as Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations said of her time last week, a “fascinating and frustrating and, really, in the end, depressing week.”

She was speaking Monday night in a discussion at the Core Club hosted by the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy magazine (the full audio of the event is available below). And she was, of course, speaking about the Russian-Chinese veto of a resolution sponsored by the Arab League, demanding that Syrian president Bashar al Assad step down and that his vice president negotiate a transition to democracy.

Audio Attachment:

Full Audio of New America NYC Event: What in the World is Going on at the UN?

What would you do?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:43:40 +0000

New America Book Event: Beautiful Souls

Event Venue:

New America DC

From corporate whistleblowing to civil disobedience, some of the boldest acts of dissent are carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system, but by true believers clinging with unusual fierceness to their convictions. In his latest book, Eyal Press tells the dramatic stories of people who refused to conform when facing a morally compromising situation. Drawing on his reporting on a number of case studies and on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Press delves deeply into the psychology of resisting, especially when doing so poses a great risk.

We invite you to join us in celebrating the release of Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times hosted by the New America Foundation.

A reception will follow.

Copies of Beautiful Souls will be available for purchase.

Location:

ASU Washington Center

1834 Connecticut Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20009

See map: Google Maps

Participants List:

Featured Speaker
Eyal Press (@EyalPress)
Author, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times
2011 Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation

Moderator
Andrés Martinez
Vice President, New America Foundation

Event Time and Date:

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Calendar

New America NYC: Documenting the Egyptian Revolution

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:24:19 +0000

Reflections from Tahrir One Year On

Event Venue:

New America NYC

In collaboration with the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force:

On February 11, 2011, an 18-day popular uprising in Egypt culminated in the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak, who after 30 years in power had been one of the longest-serving autocrats in the Arab world. One year on, the world remains irrevocably altered by the regional events that have collectively come to be known as the Arab Awakening.

Come meet three documenters of the historic Egyptian uprising as they discuss the events surrounding the revolt and the ongoing revolutionary upheaval in the country.

Copies of Khalil’s book Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation will be available for purchase.

FEATURING

ASHRAF KHALIL

Author, Liberation Square
Cairo-based independent journalist, Foreign Policy, LA Times, Times of London

JOHN MOORE

Staff Photographer, Getty Images

ROMESH RATNESAR

Deputy Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek

Location:

New America NYC

199 Lafayette Street Suite 3B

New York, NY 1

See map: Google Maps

Event Time and Date:

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - 6:30pm - 8:15pm

Calendar

Attachments:

liberationsquare.jpg

There Will Not Be Blood

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:03:09 +0000

February 7, 2012

Across the world, crime is down -- and in a big way. Are violent movies to thank for less real blood and gore?

Charles Kenny

February 7, 2012

For all the grim news about the economy and jobs over the last few years, one indicator of the quality of life in the United States has stubbornly continued to improve. The latest Federal Bureau of Investigation data suggests crime rates went on falling through the first half of 2011, recession be damned. In 1991, the overall national violent crime rate reported by the FBI was 758 cases per 100,000 inhabitants; by 2010, that had dropped to 404 per 100,000. The murder and "nonnegligent homicide" rate dropped by more than half over the same period. You wouldn't know it from watching television -- beyond the continuing conviction that "if it bleeds it leads" on local news, the number of violent acts on prime-time TV shows climbs ever-upward. But that rise in fake violence may have played some role in the real-life trend heading squarely the other way.

The United States isn't alone in a trend towards people just getting along better -- it's a global phenomenon. In 2001, homicide killed more than twice the number of people worldwide who died in wars (an estimated 557,000 people versus total war deaths of around 208,000). But just as in the United States, violent crime rates have been falling across a large part of the planet. The data is patchy, but in 2002, about 332,000 homicides from 94 countries around the globe were reported to the United Nations. By 2008, that had dropped to 289,000. And between those years, the homicide rate fell in 68 reporting countries and increased in only 26.

Look at the really long-term picture and violent crime rates are way down. Institute of Criminology professor Manuel Eisner reaches all the way back to the 13th century to report that typical homicide rates in Europe dropped from about 32 per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages down to 1.4 per 100,000 in the 20th century. (Sadly, of course, for all of their decline, U.S. rates are still more than three times that -- a rate above what Eisner suggests is the Western average for the 1700s.)

The global picture of the last few years, along with the historical picture covering the West over the last 800 years, both suggest that there isn't just a constant proportion of bad people out there who will commit a crime unless you lock them up before they do it. And there's a lot more evidence that whatever is behind declining violence it isn't the number behind bars -- or, indeed, the length of sentencing or the number of cops on the street.

It is true that a Pew Center report suggests that as U.S. crime rates were declining, the national prison population increased from 585,000 to 1.6 million between 1987 and 2007. But the rest of the world hasn't followed the United States down the path towards mass incarceration, and yet has still seen declining violence. The U.N. crime trends survey suggests that homicides fell in Britain by 29 percent between 2003 and 2008 alone, for example. And yet the incarceration rate in Britain was one-fifth as high as the United States, according to the Pew report. Again, within the United States, one of the places with the most dramatic drops in violent crime is New York City -- the homicide rate is 80 percent down from 1990. But while the rest of the country was locking up ever more people, New York City's incarceration rate fell by 28 percent over the last two decades.

What about harsh punishment? Statistics from MIT psychologist Stephen Pinker's new book on global trends in violence show the United States used to execute more than 100 times the amount of people in the 1600s as it does today -- and yet violence rates then were far higher than today. Think Clint Eastwood's western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Despite all of the authorized hangings, there was still a lot of unofficial shooting. More broadly, the number of countries using the death penalty has declined worldwide -- along with violent crime rates.

In a survey asking "What Do Economists Know About Crime" for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Angela Dills, Jeffrey Miron, and Garrett Summers conclude "economists know little." They suggest that it isn't just incarceration or the death penalty -- any link between lower crime and the number of police, higher arrest rates, and the stock of guns (whether more or less of them) is weak. Studies from Latin America have echoed that longer sentences are not linked to lower crime rates -- although a higher probability of being caught may be related to less violence in the region.

At the same time, for those convinced that crime is a product of poverty and inequality, the recent trends for New York and the nation as a whole also pose a challenge: For all the growing estates of the plutocrats in Wall Street, neither growing inequality nor rising unemployment has reversed the downward path of crime. Similarly, Latin American evidence suggests that while rising inequality might be linked to increased violence in the region, average incomes are not -- richer countries are no safer than poorer ones, all else equal.

What about drugs, then? Interestingly, the NBER survey notes that drug enforcement might increase crime. The authors suggest that "If government forces a market underground, participants substitute violence for other dispute-resolution mechanisms," -- i.e., if they can't go to court to settle their dispute over who gets which street corner, rival drug gangs will shoot each other instead.

New York's experience suggests that it is possible to reduce the violence associated with drugs by taking those disputes off of the street. Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that one important factor behind the decline in homicide in New York was shutting down open-air drug markets. It didn't slow sales, but it did eliminate 90 percent of drug-related killings over turf conflicts. Echoing the recent pattern in New York City, Eisner suggests that the long-term historical decline in Western homicide rates as a whole is associated with "a drop in male-to-male conflicts in public space."

Over the sweep of centuries, Eisner suggests that cultural change -- from "knightly warrior societies" to "pacified court societies" -- is an important factor. So are we just getting more civilized, then? Indeed, the decline in violence coincides with global evidence of converging attitudes towards greater toleration. For example, the proportion of people worldwide who say they wouldn't want to have a neighbor of a different religion dropped from 67 percent to 48 percent between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s. Turn on the television and you'd be sure to think that political dialogue is getting more rancid by day. And it might be, but people's attitudes are actually becoming more pacific and tolerant.

Cultural factors are important, then. But before you rush to deride the Federal Communications Commission and the Supreme Court for their lackadaisical attitude to violence on television, note that the trend towards more -- and more graphic -- violence on TV doesn't quite sync with the pattern of crime rates. A culture of violence and violence in popular culture are two very different things. In fact, one more element of cultural change that may behind declining violence is the substitution of fantasy violence for the real thing. French historian Robert Muchembeld argues in his book, History of Violence, that crime fiction and novels about war have given young men a way to indulge in violent fantasies without actually going out and stabbing someone. Or, over the last few years, they could stab someone playing Grand Theft Auto rather than stab someone while actually committing grand theft auto. This is the blood-and-gore version of the argument that that more pornography leads to lower sexual violence.

There might be something to it. While exposing kids to the latest cadaver on CSI -- or to Jack Bauer's lessons in successful torture on 24 -- is probably a bad idea, watching an action movie might in fact reduce violence among adults. A recent study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests that violent crime rates actually dropped when a blood-splattered blockbuster was in the cinema in the United States. The authors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna looked at data from 1995 to 2004 and concluded that violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend in the United States.

Perhaps humanity will never completely abandon its lust for blood. But it appears that lust can in fact be sated using fake blood wielded by Hollywood special-effects technicians. And outside the theater, people respond to behavioral cues -- if their friends don't stab people to win an argument, they are less likely to do it themselves. They also respond to institutional cues -- if they can use the courts to settle a dispute or address a wrong, they're less likely to resort to blood feuds. All of which suggests the hope that, in years to come, there will be a lot more deaths on TV and movie screens than in the real world.

Public Diplomacy in the Age of Social Media

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:17:06 +0000

Event Venue:

New America DC

How does social media change how statecraft is practiced in the 21st century? Who’s participating and why? What have been some lessons learned from the pioneers who have logged on to listen and engage? Join us for this Social Media Week event as three representatives from the U.S. Department of State will share case studies and professional experiences gleaned directly from the virtual trenches. Alexander Howard, Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, will moderate.

On Twitter? Follow updates from @NewAmericaOTI throughout the event and join the conversation with #SMWdiplomacy.

Location:

New America Foundation

1899 L Street NW Suite 400

Washington, DC 20036

See map: Google Maps

Participants List:

Featured Speakers
Suzanne Hall (@SuzKPH)
Senior Advisor, Innovation in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
U.S. Department of State

Nick Namba (@nicholasnamba)
Acting Deputy Coordinator for Content Development and Partnerships
U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Information Program

Ed Dunn (@EdAndDunn)
Acting Director
U.S. Department of State’s Digital Communications Center

Moderator
Alexander Howard (@digiphile)
Washington Correspondent
Government 2.0

Event Time and Date:

Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 9:30am - 11:00am

Calendar

Vetoes Leave Syria Headed for a Bloody Stalemate

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:30:59 +0000

February 6, 2012

Randa Slim

February 6, 2012

The double veto cast by Russia and China at the United Nations Security Council on Saturday represents a clarifying moment in the Syrian uprisings.

At the 2012 Munich Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted, "We don't know what the endgame will be until we start the game." Well, fasten your seatbelt -- the game over Syria has started.

The Syrian conflict is no longer just about a brutal dictator repressing peaceful protesters who are demanding what every Arab desires: dignity, freedom, and an opportunity at a decent life. The Syrian revolution is now the fault line in Middle Eastern politics, through which U.S.-Russian competition, the U.S.-Iran conflict, the Iran-Saudi regional rivalry, and the Shiite-Sunni ages-old conflict will play out.

The double veto has dealt a heavy blow to the political endgame outlined by the Arab League proposal: an orderly transfer of power from the president to his deputy, formation of a unity transition cabinet to oversee the writing of a new constitution, and the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections.

To start with, this endgame had a minimal chance of success. Giving up power peacefully is not an Assad family tradition. Both father, the late Hafez Assad, and son, Bashar al-Assad, have shown their willingness to use any violent means at their disposal to quell internal dissent. This was the case in Hama in 1982 when Hafez Assad sent his military, including warplanes, to crush an Islamist uprising, killing an estimated 10,000 people and razing one-third of the city buildings. In Homs, Hama, Idlib, Daraa, and numerous other Syrian cities, the son is now living up to his father's murderous legacy.

What the protesters and activists on the ground will take from the double veto is one lesson: Down with politics -- this is a military fight, and it is ours to win.

While the international community will be there in words, it lacks the will to intervene militarily in Syria. As Clinton said, "Military intervention has been absolutely ruled out and we have made that clear from the very beginning."

The double veto at the United Nations marks the beginning of the proxy regional game: armed opposition under the leadership of the Free Syrian Army -- funded by Arab Gulf states including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, trained by Turkey -- waging a protracted fight against the pro-regime military and paramilitary groups funded and trained by Iran and Russia.

Despite recent limited success in defending restive cities and taking control of territory in places like Zabadani and Homs, the Free Syrian Army remains more a collection of disparate groups of defectors than it is an organized army. Its headquarters are in a refugee camp inside Turkey close to the Syrian border. The number of fighters is estimated to be in the range of 10,000 to 30,000.

To wage an effective military campaign against an army that numbers in the hundreds of thousands, they need weapons, training and operational support. Only when the regime's military superiority is threatened will we start to see defections in its senior ranks.

Iran, the Syrian regime's main sponsor and ally, will not stand idle. There are reports by Syrian opposition groups of Iranian assistance to the Syrian regime, especially in the area of building electronic and telecommunications capacity. Iran, Russia and China are the main suppliers of weapons to the al-Assad regime.

While Iran's support in weapons and training will continue, and in fact increase, in the coming weeks, it would be hard to say whether Iran and/or its proxy Hezbollah will send troops to assist in the Syrian regime's military campaign.

It is fair to say that Iran and Hezbollah will come to al-Assad's rescue in case of a Libya-like scenario. Iran's supreme leader warned of a regional war in case of a military intervention in Syria.

Absent that, Iran and Hezbollah will assess whether military action to prop up a regime whose political fortunes are rapidly declining will make a difference in preventing al-Assad's ouster, an outcome U.S. President Barack Obama describes as "inevitable."

Despite all the rhetoric about a U.S.-Zionist conspiracy targeting the Syrian regime, the Iranian regime itself has been reaching out to Syrian opposition groups. Tehran's interest now lies in delaying the inevitable as long as possible while laying the groundwork for a working relationship with a post-al-Assad regime.

Given the makeup of the opposition groups and Iran's pro-al-Assad stance, it is unlikely that Iran will be able to preserve the close alliance it has built and nurtured with the Syrian regime since the days of Hafez Assad. The best Iran could achieve is that whoever replaces al-Assad will not be hostile to Iran or to Hezbollah, Iran's main regional proxy.

While it is hard to predict the final endgame in Syria, it is safe to argue that the failure at the United Nations Security Council to approve the Arab League proposal for an orderly transfer of power in Syria sets the stage for a protracted bloody stalemate between a brutal regime and a militarized opposition.

The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:20:49 +0000

February 3, 2012

Liberation from the bounds of books and libraries doesn't mean freedom from the constraints of corporate power and culture. A response to David Weinberger's Too Big to Know.

C. W. Anderson

February 3, 2012

In "Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room", the simultaneously fascinating and frustrating book by Berkman Center senior researcher David Weinberger, there is a wonderful moment where the mechanisms of "fact-building" are laid bare.

"It's 1983. You want to know the population of Pittsburgh, so instead of waiting six years for the web to be invented, you head to the library," Weinberger begins.

What follows next is the elaboration of the deeply material processes through which even seemingly simple facts are assembled -- from the decision made by you, the curious researcher, to look the answer up in an almanac in a public library, all the way back to the public agencies, research funding mechanisms, and publishing-industry processes that allowed the population of the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area to be certified as 2,219,000 souls. This story provides us a key insight into the nature of facts: they are constructed, yes, but they are not simply constructed out of thin air, and they are certainly not constructed out of words or digital links. Money and materials, documents and discourse, all go into making facts "facts." In the words of Michael Fortun, an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, facts are made, but they are not made up.

I wish there were more episodes like the Pittsburgh almanac story in Too Big to Know. Instead, Weinberger often retreats into a philosophical stance that overemphasizes the power of media technology to reshape the basic epistemological structures of the social world. This theoretical starting point -- which we might describe as a kind of Heideggarian McLuhanism -- ultimately dematerializes and dehistoricizes our notions of what it means to say that a fact is "networked." And this tendency, which I would call a tendency to see networks as coterminous with "the Internet," largely evacuates any understanding of digital power from Weinberger's analysis.

* * *

Just to be clear right from the start: there is no doubt that Too Big to Know is a smart, readable book. All too often the academic response to readable, obviously mass-market oriented books like Weinberger's is to pick nits, helpfully pointing out entire scholarly bodies of evidence that the author missed and using this lack of grounding in the literature as an excuse to toss the entire exercise out the window. Sometimes such criticism is justified, other times, it is less so. In this case, at least, readability is far from a sign of shallow thinking. There are probably hard-edged sociological reasons behind Weinberger's accessible argumentative style, but there is little doubt that he knows his stuff. Indeed, one of the failings of Too Big to Know may be that the book tries to do too much, rather than too little.

Nevertheless, if Too Big To Know is a multi-course meal, it is an ultimately unsatisfying one. Its primary flaw is its open indebtedness to a particular vision of both Heidegger and McLuhan. These commitments are central to nearly all of Weinberger's writings, from The Cluetrain Manifesto onward, and as such, it's doubtful that such an open disagreement on intellectual first principles can be easily bridged. Nevertheless, Weinberger's commitments need not be ours, and there are particularly important reasons why we might wish to avoid them.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used "medium is the message," McLuhan's major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems -- such as the media -- operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan's primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, "McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions."

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan's inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher -- probably the greatest of the 20th century -- the most important aspect of Heidegger's thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather "Dasein," "being-in-the-world") are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

* * *

Too Big to Know thus amounts to a fairly straightforward marriage of the Canadian mystic to the gnomic German philosopher. The digitization of 21st-century media, Weinberger argues, leads not to the creation of a "global village" but rather to a new understanding of what knowledge is, to a change in the basic epistemology governing the universe. And this McLuhanesque transformation, in turn, reveals the general truth of the Heideggarian vision. Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free.

The causal force lying behind this massive sea change is, of course, the internet. Google search results -- "9,560,000 results for 'Heidegger' in .71 seconds") -- taunt you with the realization that there are still another 950,000-odd pages of results to get through before you reach the end. The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The "web world" is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks.

And yet: as the Pittsburgh almanac example has already shown us, facts have always been networked. What do almanacs, census bureaus, government funding streams, volunteers, the notebooks these volunteers carry, and libraries amount to, if not a network? A particular kind of network, true, but a network nonetheless. What Weinberger does in Too Big to Know is to confuse a shift in network architecture with the onset of networked knowledge per se. Particular questions about the materiality and power arrangements of our emerging networked architecture are dissolved in the digital bath of the world wide web. In his rush to make the Heideggerian point about the contextualization of all knowledge, Weinberger falls back on McLuhan -- a particularly unreliable guide to technological change.

If our starting point is that all knowledge is networked, and always has been, then we are in a far better point to start talking about what makes today's epistemological infastructure different from the infrastrucure in 1983. But we are also in a position to ask: if all knowledge was networked knowledge, even in 1983, than how did we not behave as if it was so? How did humanity carry on? Why did civilization not collapse into a morass of post-modern chaos? Weinberger's answer is, once again, McLuhanesque. It was the medium in which knowledge was contained that created the difference. Stable borders around knowledge were built by books.

I would posit a different answer: if knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. Within philosophical subfield known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) this "acting-as-if-stability-existed" is referred to as "black boxing." One of the black boxes around knowledge might very well be the book. But black boxes can also include algorithms, census bureaus, libraries, laboratories, and news rooms. Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. In other words, understanding changes to knowledge in this way leaves us far more sensitive to the operations of power than does the notoriously power-free perspective of Marshall McLuhan.

* * *

Now all of this has been rather abstract, so I just want to conclude with a real-life example about the operation of knowledge systems in the 21st century. It is 2012, and I want to know the population of Pittsburgh. I type "population of Pittsburgh" into my Google search box, and up come several answers, including a the Pittsburgh Wikipedia page, "Quick Facts" from the U.S. Census Bureau, and a link-less answer titled "Best Guess" (it tells me the population of the city of Pittsburgh -- not the entire metro area -- is 334,563). In theory, there are pages and pages of links following these top three: but I don't look at them. Something tells me that the first page of the Google results is really all I need.

On the one hand, we can stand back and be amazed at the operation of the Google algorithm, and speculate as to how this digital fact-sorting marks a new era in human thought. On the other hand, we can wonder: "how does Google black box the incredible stream of digital data in order to produce a particular result on a particular page that convinces me, more or less, that the population of Pittsburgh is 334,563? And what about Wikipedia? What are it's fact production processes? How do they work? And most importantly, how do they stabilize, both psychologically and sociologically? Why don't I care that the Google results page goes on towards infinity?" If we avoid Marshall McLuhan's easy answers to these complex questions, and retain the core of Heidegger's brilliant insights while also adding a hefty dose of ontology to his largely immaterial philosophy, we might begin to understand the real operations of digital knowledge/power in a networked age.

Weinberger, however, does not care about power, and more or less admits this himself in a brilliant essay 2008 on the distinction between digital realists, utopians, and dystopians. Digital utopians, a group in which he includes himself, "point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities." The realists, on the other hand, are rather dull: They argue that "the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium." Politically speaking, digital utopianism tantalizes us with the promise of what might be, and pushes us to do better. The political problem with the realist position, Weinberger argues, is that it "is ... [a] decision that leans toward supporting the status quo because what-is is more knowable than what might be."

The realist position, however, is not necessarily a position of quietude. Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. Our job, as thinkers and teachers, is not to stand back and claim that the all bricks have crumbled. Rather, our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently.

The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:13:30 +0000

February 4, 2012

Evgeny Morozov

February 4, 2012

The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?

Engaging the history of flânerie may be a good way to start answering these questions. Thanks to the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German critic Walter Benjamin, both of whom viewed the flâneur as an emblem of modernity, his figure (and it was predominantly a “he”) is now firmly associated with 19th-century Paris. The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. “The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,” the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once remarked. The flâneur was not asocial — he needed the crowds to thrive — but he did not blend in, preferring to savor his solitude. And he had all the time in the world: there were reports of flâneurs taking turtles for a walk.

The flâneur wandered in the shopping arcades, but he did not give in to the temptations of consumerism; the arcade was primarily a pathway to a rich sensory experience — and only then a temple of consumption. His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism. Occasionally, he would narrate what he saw — surveying both his private self and the world at large — in the form of short essays for daily newspapers.

It’s easy to see, then, why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”).

Online communities like GeoCities and Tripod were the true digital arcades of that period, trading in the most obscure and the most peculiar, without any sort of hierarchy ranking them by popularity or commercial value. Back then eBay was weirder than most flea markets; strolling through its virtual stands was far more pleasurable than buying any of the items. For a brief moment in the mid-1990s, it did seem that the Internet might trigger an unexpected renaissance of flânerie.

However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur.

In the second half of the 19th century, Paris was experiencing rapid and profound change. The architectural and city planning reforms advanced by Baron Haussmann during the rule of Napoleon III were particularly consequential: the demolition of small medieval streets, the numbering of buildings for administrative purposes, the establishment of wide, open, transparent boulevards (built partly to improve hygiene, partly to hamper revolutionary blockades), the proliferation of gas street lighting and the growing appeal of spending time outdoors radically transformed the city.

Technology and social change had an effect as well. The advent of street traffic made contemplative strolling dangerous. The arcades were soon replaced by larger, utilitarian department stores. Such rationalization of city life drove flâneurs underground, forcing some of them into a sort of “internal flânerie” that reached its apogee in Marcel Proust’s self-imposed exile in his cork-lined room (situated, ironically, on Boulevard Haussmann).

Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely. That so much of today’s online activity revolves around shopping — for virtual presents, for virtual pets, for virtual presents for virtual pets — hasn’t helped either. Strolling through Groupon isn’t as much fun as strolling through an arcade, online or off.

THE tempo of today’s Web is different as well. A decade ago, a concept like the “real-time Web,” in which our every tweet and status update is instantaneously indexed, updated and responded to, was unthinkable. Today, it’s Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword.

That’s no surprise: people like speed and efficiency. But the slowly loading pages of old, accompanied by the funky buzz of the modem, had their own weird poetics, opening new spaces for play and interpretation. Occasionally, this slowness may have even alerted us to the fact that we were sitting in front of a computer. Well, that turtle is no more.

Meanwhile, Google, in its quest to organize all of the world’s information, is making it unnecessary to visit individual Web sites in much the same way that the Sears catalog made it unnecessary to visit physical stores several generations earlier. Google’s latest grand ambition is to answer our questions — about the weather, currency exchange rates, yesterday’s game — all by itself, without having us visit any other sites at all. Just plug in a question to the Google homepage, and your answer comes up at the top of the search results.

Whether such shortcuts harm competition in the search industry (as Google’s competitors allege) is beside the point; anyone who imagines information-seeking in such purely instrumental terms, viewing the Internet as little more than a giant Q & A machine, is unlikely to construct digital spaces hospitable to cyberflânerie.

But if today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.

It’s easy to blame Facebook’s business model (e.g., the loss of online anonymity allows it to make more money from advertising), but the problem resides much deeper. Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.

What this means in practice was explained by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, on that same show. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” he asked, immediately answering his own question: “You want to go with your friends.”

The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible.

Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg really believes what he said about cinema, there is a long list of films I’d like to run by his friends. Why not take them to see “Satantango,” a seven-hour, black-and-white art-house flick by the Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr? Well, because if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you.

Besides, isn’t it obvious that consuming great art alone is qualitatively different from consuming it socially? And why this fear of solitude in the first place? It’s hard to imagine packs of flâneurs roaming the streets of Paris as if auditioning for another sequel to “The Hangover.” But for Mr. Zuckerberg, as he acknowledged on “Charlie Rose,” “it feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.”

IT’S this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.

That might even be worth it if frictionless sharing enhanced our online experience; after all, even the 19th-century flâneur eventually confronted advertising posters and murals on his walks around town. Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable. It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way.

Worse, when this frictionless sharing scheme becomes fully operational, we will probably read all our news on Facebook, without ever leaving its confines to visit the rest of the Web; several news outlets, including The Guardian and The Washington Post, already have Facebook applications that allow users to read their articles without even visiting their Web sites.

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously.

Why Don’t American Cities Burn?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:07:11 +0000

Inequality, Poverty, and Hope for Urban America

Event Venue:

New America DC

American cities have remained relatively free of collective violence in recent years. Why, given record inequality and historically negative economic events, is this the case? University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Katz explores these questions and the intersections of race, inequality and poverty in his new book, Why Don't American Cities Burn?

One of the country's leading urban historians, Katz has previously chronicled the evolution of the welfare state and the transformation of urban forms. He now has set out to explain the shift away from images of a pathological black "underclass" to praise of the entrepreneurial poor who work to find the beginning of the path to the middle class. Katz examines the possibility of a new narrative that acknowledges the complicated history of American cities while simultaneously demonstrating the capacity of residents, advocates and government to address many of the problems facing urban centers. Rather than waiting for a "silver bullet" to solve long-standing problems, he asks, can we create a politics of modest hope?

Join us on February 17^th for a discussion with the author on how the interlocking forces of lingering racial inequality, social and economic exclusion, and urban policy have contributed to a society deeply fragmented along the lines of race and class.

This event will be live webcast on the event page starting at 12:15pm on February 17th for viewers outside the Washington area. No advance registration is necessary.

Location:

New America Foundation

1899 L Street NW Suite 400

Washington, DC 20036

See map: Google Maps

Participants List:

Featured Speaker

Michael B. Katz

Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Author, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?

Discussant

Devin Fergus
Assistant Professor of US History
Hunter College

Moderator

Reid Cramer

Director, Asset Building Program
New America Foundation

Event Time and Date:

Friday, February 17, 2012 - 12:15pm - 2:00pm

Calendar

Solar: Not Just For Tinfoil-Hatters Anymore

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:33:03 +0000

February 1, 2012

But most of our debates about it miss the point.

Lisa Margonelli

February 1, 2012

Since 2007, California has experienced a solar boom. Photovoltaic panels rest on 107,159 rooftops, as of this writing (the numbers are updated here every Wednesday). Driven by incentives that are bankrolled by every Californian who pays a utility bill, Californians now have more than one Gigawatt of solar capacity installed over our heads That’s a lot: one Gigawatt is roughly the size of one of the state’s four nuclear power plants, although solar PV panels do not produce power at the steady, even rate that nukes do.

California recently approved 11 separate solar power plants, big installations of mirrors and equipment that can concentrate the sun’s heat to produce power. If built, those 11 plants will have a capacity of 4.2 Gigawatts. The cumulative impact of all of this building—driven by federal investment tax credits and state mandates to generate a third of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2033—is astonishing. In short order, solar could lose its tinfoil-hat-California-dream aura to become the Golden State’s new normal.

This is a stunning triumph of all the things we Californians hold dear: idealistic bureaucrats, an action-hero governor, starry-eyed inventors, entrepreneurial environmentalists, venture capitalists, and thousands of big and small businesses and homeowners who want to be part of the future.

But will it last?

California has been on the solar cutting edge before. In the 1980s, the state produced 95 percent of the world’s solar power. One company, LUZ International, designed solar thermal power plants and managed to reduce the price of generating a solar kilowatt hour of power by two-thirds between 1984 and 1989.

But by 1991, LUZ was bankrupt. The problem wasn’t the technology: LUZ’s plants are still gleaming away in Kramer Junction and Harper Lake for the utility NextEra Energy Resources. What did LUZ in were falling energy prices, unpredictable political support for the tax incentives that kept investors in the game, and the lack of a big-picture push to make solar a fundamental pillar of energy security.

Unfortunately, the things that killed LUZ are still around. Forecasts of falling natural gas prices would make solar energy less competitive. Solyndra has ensured dwindling political support. And we still don’t have a national greenhouse gas policy or a carbon tax that would ensconce solar as a core of our electric portfolio.

Is there a cautionary tale here? Or is LUZ just an artifact of the past?

The first person I called was Michael Lotker, LUZ’s former VP of Business Development. He wrote a report on the demise of LUZ published by Sandia National Laboratories in 1991. For a report, it’s a ripping yarn of how high energy prices—combined with an activist California Public Utilities Commission and government initiatives—helped make room for solar entrepreneurs in California’s energy markets. Investors were attracted by federal “Energy Tax Credits” while state property tax exemptions helped reduce costs. LUZ’s power plants looked vaguely like space stations or Martian landing pads. Big circles of mirrors concentrated solar heat, while extensive pipe systems carried hot fluids to the generators. Although the engineers managed to reduce the cost of solar power, energy prices fell even faster: fossil-fuel prices dropped by 78 percent between 1981 and 1991.

Meanwhile, the political support for solar power evaporated. Congress started dragging its feet on the yearly renewal of the Energy Tax Credit, and 1990’s renewal lasted only nine months. This made financing perilous. Then, in 1991, California’s governor vetoed the property tax exemption. Although it was ultimately reinstated, the credit was labeled “controversial.”

I reached Lotker, who’s left solar power to become a rabbi, while he was helping with a funeral. He remembered the days of trying to secure political support. “It was two emergencies every year,” he told me. “The first was getting the new plant online. The other was getting the credits. It was always life or death and it made our costs much higher.”

Lotker described many barriers to the company’s success. There was “false confidence” in the availability of renewable energy—and a lack of commitment to taking the steps to make solar competitive with other forms of power, including putting a price on pollution or the hidden costs of conventional power generation.

“I always thought support for these [steps] was a mile wide and an inch deep,” he said. “Everyone loved them but no one would fight to the death.” Thirty years ago, Lotker and his compatriots at LUZ looked at bombing ranges in Nevada and imagined powering the whole U.S. with concentrated solar thermal power from them, but “inch deep” support cut their small effort off at the knees.

Today Rabbi Lotker drives by the old plants occasionally and says he feels “like a father” to them, but without a carbon price solar power will lack enough support to become a major part of the grid.

In the usual discussions of solar power in the media, we focus on whether the technology “works” or whether it’s too expensive to compete. Sometimes we talk about poor management, boondoggles, or the proper role of government in helping renewable energy. Rarely do we talk about how politics invades a business model, making a risky proposition more risky. If we learned anything from the past, it should be that the dumbest thing we could possibly do is to support a technology, get companies going, and then yank the support so that taxpayer investments go to waste.

Some of LUZ’s founders started a company called BrightSource, which designs, develops, and sells solar power plants that use banks of precisely angled mirrors to concentrate heat on a central tower to generate steam and electricity. BrightSource has contracts for 2.4 Gigawatts of generation with California utilities and plans to design and build several plants. BrightSource’s senior vice president of government relations and communications, Joe Desmond, was formerly chairman of the California Energy Commission and has held positions in the public and private sector. He is a springy intellectual with an encyclopedic enthusiasm for solar.

To Desmond and those on the inside of the energy business, it’s obvious that the entire utility sector is the product of government regulations, incentives, and goals. But that can also be risky for a technology. Regulators sometimes get enamored of a technology with hidden barriers—hydrogen for example—that then falls out of favor. And no one will forget the starkness with which the tricky relationship between politics and the grid was laid bare during the California blackouts of 2000-2001, which cost Governor Gray Davis his job. “There are high consequences for the failure to manage risks,” Desmond said.

Desmond mentioned two ways that risk is already embedded in the solar energy landscape. First, as in the ’80s, federal tax credits are an important part of getting investors to pony up money for solar projects. The “Investment Tax Credit” has been extended to 2016, a solid timeframe that allows entrepreneurs a predictable future. But a provision called Section 1603—which allows those tax credits to be monetized early—must be renewed every year, and it was not renewed at the end of 2011. With shades of LUZ, the shuttering of 1603 is likely to cut private financing for solar significantly. Solyndra’s bankruptcy is driving the debate around renewing programs like 1603, even though the loans the federal government made to the start-up are very different from the tax credits made to solar producers. “It’s difficult to communicate the difference in a sound bite,” said Desmond.

But, in many ways, the problem with tax credits is old-school. The newer, more interesting, more futuristic risk is the one posed by the restructuring of the grid itself. The old grid was hierarchical, with centralized power plants dispatching power at will. The new grid is a two-way flow of information and energy. “We’re moving from centralized to distributed decision making,” said Desmond. “How do we manage these risks?” Regulators often play catch-up to the technology. A partially solar-powered grid will have benefits and risks we don’t yet understand, and these will be combined with the risks of wind, cheap and plentiful natural gas, and a “Smart Grid” that makes consumers and their usage part of the conversation.

As the grid gets more complicated, so does the regulation. BrightSource and other power companies have been working on ways to store energy so it can be dispatched on the grid when it’s needed. BrightSource stores heat, and then uses it to generate electricity after the sun has set. Hydroelectric plants often pump water back behind a dam so they can send power onto the grid when it’s needed. But as energy storage evolves, regulators need to decide philosophically what it is. Is it like electricity, which is a product? Or is it more like natural gas, a fuel that can be stored? Recently the California Public Utilities Commission has had seven proceedings on energy storage. The consequences of the commission’s obscure decisions on this issue may suddenly become visceral some screaming hot afternoon in 2015. And no one wants to be the next Gray Davis.

I left the conversation with Desmond thinking that while the energy cognoscenti have learned the lessons of LUZ, the rest of us have not. We’re enjoying the same pointless debate about the government’s proper role in energy markets that we had in 1991. In the meantime, the grid and the power markets have evolved from the punch-card world of 1981 to the day-trading Internet of today We need to up our game.

In some ways, reality has overtaken the moribund conversation. A day or two after I interviewed Desmond, a tree fell across a power line near my house and left me without power for almost 24 hours. I hadn’t lost power in five years, and the last time it happened I was miserable. I had just a few battery flashlights, the battery in my laptop only lasted two hours, and the phone was dead. Not this time. Now my laptop’s battery lasts seven hours, my cell was fully receptive, and I had a cheap solar-powered LED light from Ikea. With my gas stove and the IKEA lamp I made dinner, called the utility to report the wire, and did an evening’s work on the computer. I even watched a movie on it. Between the batteries, the 3G network, and the solar light, my evening was not too different from a night on the grid—just darker.

It made me wonder if maybe we were missing the whole point about solar. I called John Perlin, a solar historian and author of From Space to Earth: The Story of Solar Electricity. Perlin is now involved in the installation of solar photovoltaics at UC Santa Barbara. He believes we’ve gotten too wrapped up in trying to make solar power compete with fossil fuels, distracting us from its real advantage, which is that it’s right on the roof, independent of the grid. You don’t need wires, or power plants, transformers, or dispatchers. “Doing away with high-voltage lines is not a Luddite view,” says Perlin, “It’s a futuristic one. The revolution will come as we cut down the utility lines and up with the rooftops.” We’ve put decades of effort into making solar conform to the grid—even down to converting solar panels from DC power to AC power and then turning that AC power back to DC power for our TVs, computers, and electronics. House by house, we’ve created redundant costly equipment. Perhaps what we need instead is a more contrarian viewpoint. “All our appliances are DC, trapped in an AC world,” said Perlin. “The history of technology is full of these discontinuity stories.”

If we’re going to take advantage of the discontinuity of our times, then we (the public, policy makers, and the media) need to start talking about what power means now.

Did Obama Just Declare Victory in Afghanistan?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:06:57 +0000

February 2, 2012

Why not? Nothing else has worked.

Fred Kaplan

February 2, 2012

In October 1966, as the Vietnam War was spiraling out of control, Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., now-famously suggested that we simply declare victory and bring the troops home. He added, in a less well-known coda, “It may be a far-fetched proposal, but nothing else has worked.”

Lyndon Johnson would have done well to take the idea seriously. Now it seems Barack Obama is doing just that in Afghanistan.

That’s one way to read Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s remark Wednesday that, “hopefully,” all U.S. combat troops will leave Afghanistan by the middle or end of 2013—not a year later, as had previously been announced.

Panetta let loose the news while talking with reporters en route to Brussels, not in a formal announcement. He emphasized that this drawdown would be a transition, not a withdrawal. There will still be U.S. troops in Afghanistan to advise, assist, and train local security forces, at least through 2014, as the NATO members had decided at a conference in Lisbon 15 months ago.

White House and Pentagon spokesmen, apparently caught off-guard by Panetta’s comment, waved it away as nothing new. Rather, they said, it simply specified the pace at which the United States would carry out the longstanding plan to draw down forces and transfer combat operations to the Afghans. They hastened to add that Panetta said this timetable would “hopefully” be followed; it could be changed.

What does this all mean? A few inferences can be drawn with fairly high confidence.

First, President Obama really is getting out of there. Last June, he announced that he would withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of the year (which he did) and another 23,000 by the following summer (which—bet a lot of money on this—he will). That will leave 68,000 troops in Afghanistan this fall, and Obama said that the drawdown would continue at a steady pace till 2014.

At some point during this steady exit, there won’t be enough American troops to conduct effective combat operations, except perhaps along the Pakistani border, where fighting has tended to be fiercest. So it makes sense that most of the remaining troops would shift to an “advise and assist” role, especially since—in tandem with the U.S. drawdown—Afghanistan’s army will be taking more of a lead role in staving off insurgents.

It’s unclear whether the Afghan army is ready for this transition. Panetta’s remarks no doubt send a message to President Hamid Karzai and his commanders: Get ready; this is happening, and soon.

Second, Obama and Panetta have presented this drawdown (a la George Aiken) as the product of military success. The claim is half true but also a bit disingenuous.

Yes, we have accomplished a good part of the mission: Bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is crumbling, the Taliban’s momentum has been halted, the Afghan army is improving. One could make the case—and Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and national security adviser Tom Donilon have reportedly done so with particular conviction—that U.S. interests in Afghanistan are no longer vital.

However, Obama’s pullout—and its recent acceleration—also stems from a conclusion that the U.S. war strategy hasn’t succeeded and is extremely unlikely to succeed any time soon. When Obama decided in December 2009 to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he did so as part of a shift to a new counterinsurgency strategy, as recommended by the top commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (modeled in part on the strategy employed in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus, who would later replace McChrystal). The core idea of counterinsurgency (COIN) is not so much to chase after bad guys (though it does involve some of that) but rather to protect the population—to live among the people, in their neighborhoods, and thus earn their trust, which will embolden them to provide intelligence on where the bad guys are, as the challenge in fighting insurgents isn’t killing them but finding them. But an equally important element of this strategy is to create a zone of security, so the government (with outside help) can provide basic services to the people and thus bolster their support—which will in turn dry up support for the insurgents.

Some have called this strategy “clear-hold-build”—clear an area of insurgents, hold it (i.e., stay there) so the insurgents don’t come back, and meanwhile build legitimacy for the government. One thing about this strategy is that it takes a long time, costs a lot of money, and results in a lot of casualties (at least in the short term, though it’s unpredictable how long the “short term” lasts).

Obama adopted the COIN strategy, quite explicitly, as a test. He was convinced that, given the stakes, it was worth a try. But he made it very clear that his commitment would not be open-ended. One precondition of COIN’s success is that the “host government” (in this case, led by President Karzai) institutes reforms, which will attract the loyalty of its people. The U.S. military can help give the local government some “breathing space,” so it can clean up its act without pressure. But the rest is up to that government.

The critical fact is that, by and large, we’ve done our part, but Karzai hasn’t done his. The U.S. military (increasingly with Afghan counterparts coming along) has made considerable progress on the tactical military front. But the Afghan government hasn’t followed through—hasn’t provided services, hasn’t cleaned up its corruption, in short hasn’t given the population’s fence-sitters much reason to turn away from the insurgents (who exploit real grievances) and pledge allegiance to the government.

That being the case, there’s only so much a foreign army can do.

Another problem has been the insurgents’ ability to maintain sanctuaries across the porous border with Pakistan, often with the blessings of Pakistani officials. From the beginning, the top U.S. military leaders—including Petraeus, McChrystal, and Adm. Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—said publicly that, unless something was done about those safe havens, the military campaign would have its limits.

Obama gave his Afghan surge 18 months to make real strategic progress. (That was how long all of the 30,000 extra troops would be deployed.) On the crucial issues—basic services, corruption, the sanctuaries across the border—little progress was made.

And now, the CIA’s latest National Intelligence Estimate, coordinated with all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, calls the war a stalemate.* A leaked NATO report, based on 27,000 interrogations of 4,000 Taliban and other captives, portrays an insurgency whose fighters are convinced they’re winning.

Meanwhile, U.S. and allied casualties continue to mount. In a growing number of cases, secret insurgents within the Afghan army have been killing their own trainers. This is a diabolical tactic, designed to sow distrust between allied and Afghan soldiers just as they’re interacting more and more. But it works. Last week, after a rogue Afghan soldier killed four unarmed French trainers, President Nicholas Sarkozy announced he was pulling out all French troops a year ahead of schedule.

And why not? If this was the only problem the counterinsurgents were having, it could be managed. But on top of all the other problems, including the fact that the political preconditions for success seem as far-from-fulfilled as ever, well, then, it’s perfectly reasonable to cut losses and bail.

Obama isn’t quite bailing. American troops will be on the ground for some time to come. But the page has turned. If we didn’t have troops in Afghanistan already, the present conditions would hardly justify sending tens of thousands there. And, while we shouldn’t expect those whose land we occupy to love us for our assistance, we should at least have the same basic interests as the government that our troops are fighting and dying to uphold—and that doesn’t seem to be the case either.

There are risks in this move, political and strategic. If we pull out combat forces and the Taliban plow through the purely Afghan defenses, reoccupy cities, and take over the government, then Obama will be accused of “losing Afghanistan.”

Quite aside from Obama’s fate, what might be Afghanistan’s? Al-Qaeda may no longer be much of a menace, but that’s largely because of the U.S. presence there. The Taliban seem not to be aligned with the remaining fragments of al-Qaeda or with the Pakistan-based Haqqani network, but the Haqqanis in particular could exploit a power vacuum. If no peace accord can be reached in the next year, civil war may well resume. (This is one reason even Karzai is now seeking a deal with insurgents, though it’s unclear why they would make one if they think they’re going to win anyway.) Or maybe the neighboring countries will step in; several of them have a more vital interest in preventing a flare-up in violence, or an expansion of Pakistan, than we do.

It’s a mess, but it would be a mess, whether we stayed for one year, two years, or 10. So why not make it one year, push hard, hope for the best, then stop spending lives and money on a lost cause? As George Aiken might have said, nothing else has worked.

The 80 Percent Solution

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:12:10 +0000

The Strategic Defeat of bin Laden's al-Qaeda and Implications for South Asian Security

February 2, 2012

Thomas F. Lynch III

With the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the United States and Western governments scored a major but still underappreciated victory in the nearly decade-and-a-half-old war against al-Qaeda. Bin Laden’s death did not eliminate all of the features of al-Qaeda that make it dangerous as a factor in terrorism internationally. Its role in assisting regional jihadist groups in strikes against local governments and by inspiring “lone wolf” would-be martyrs in acts of violence will remain with us for many years. Yet the manner in which U.S. intelligence and military operatives found and eliminated bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was devastating to three of the five most critical features of al-Qaeda:

· Its legitimacy as a core organization capable of choreographing catastrophic global terrorist events;

· Its brand name rights as the ultimate victor should any of its loosely affiliated Salafi jihadist regional movements ever achieve success in a local insurgency;

· Its ability to claim that it was the base for certain victory– much one able to less reestablish a credible unfettered training area for global jihad – in the area most critical to its own mystical lore: Afghanistan and western Pakistan;

Bin Laden’s demise also degraded by half – but did not eliminate – the fourth and fifth elements of al-Qaeda’s essence: its role as a “vanguard” of a wider network of Sunni Salafi groups and its ability to serve as a key point of inspiration for “lone wolf” terrorists around the globe. As a consequence, the death of Osama bin Laden has produced an 80 percent solution to the problems that this unique terrorist organization poses for Western policymakers.

This 80 percent solution has multiple, important implications. Globally, it means that al-Qaeda’s growing isolation from alternative, nonviolent approaches to political change in the Muslim world must be reinforced – and is best reinforced – with a deliberate and visible reduction in the U.S. military footprint in Islamic countries worldwide. Washington can best isolate al-Qaeda and limit its ability to reclaim relevance in the struggle for reform in the Islamic world by quietly enabling security forces in Muslim states to counter al-Qaeda affiliates while simultaneously providing judicious and enduring support for Muslim voices for nonviolent political change.

Yet the most immediate implications of the historic development of May 2, 2011, matter to the trajectory of U.S. policy in South Asia. Bin Laden’s demise fundamentally alters the current framework of U.S. and coalition strategy in Afghanistan, and challenges the underpinnings of U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Bin Laden’s unique and pivotal role in grafting al-Qaeda’s aspirations onto the regional and local aims of the Afghan Taliban and extremist groups in Pakistan means that the U.S. understanding of the major security risks in South Asia must change in the wake of his death. Absent bin Laden, the risks of al-Qaeda’s return to unfettered sanctuary in Afghanistan or western Pakistan have dropped dramatically, while the risks of a devastating proxy war between India and Pakistan over their relative positions in Afghanistan continue to grow. The United States and its Afghan coalition partners must better appreciate this altered risk calculus, and reframe diplomatic, military, and economic plans accordingly. The United States must reduce its present focus on killing off every last al-Qaeda affiliated leader or mid-level Haqqani Network operative[i] in Pakistan and pay far more attention to the factors necessary to inhibit proxy war in Afghanistan: an enduring relationship with Pakistan and diplomatic engagement with Pakistan and India on an acceptable political and security framework for Afghanistan into the next decade.

[i]This is not to say that al-Qaeda and the Haqqani Network are the same entity. American policy treats them as different entities and targets each for different reasons. However, I will assert in this monograph that the intense American policy focus from mid-2011 on attacking these terrorists and radicals in Pakistan harms far more important, long-term policy interests in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For the rest of this 30-page policy paper click here.

Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III is Distinguished Research Fellow for South Asia and the Near East at the Center for Strategic Research, part of the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies (NDU-INSS). The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government. Portions of this research paper were first presented at the National Defense University – Conflict Records Research Center (NDU-CRRC) and the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) – Center for Advance Governmental Studies co-sponsored Conference, “Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaeda’s Past and Future through Captured Records,” held on September 13-14, 2012 at National Defense University. Dr. Lynch thanks NDU-CRRC and JHU for permission to use some of that material in this paper.

Attachments:

The 80 Percent Solution (30 pp.)

Inside the Egyptian Revolution

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:49:48 +0000

An Event and Conversation with Ashraf Khalil, Rob Malley, and Leila Hilal

February 2, 2012

Author Ashraf Khalil speaks with Middle East Task Force Co-Director Leila Hilal at New America on Feb. 1, 2012.

The whole video of our recent event on the Egyptian revolution (available below) is well worth your time, but here we wanted to highlight a few of the interesting points that resulted from the discussion with Egyptian-American journalist Ashraf Khalil on his newly released book Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation.

Revolutionary sparks – Hosni Mubarak fell after just 18 days of mass street protests. But the roots of the revolt can be traced back three decades. Khalil dubbed Mubarak an “accidental dictator” whose reign saw the creeping grip of a formidable police state. But as that regime solidified, so did the strands of resistance. In the days and weeks leading up to the Egyptian uprising, a succession of events sparked what would become an uncontainable revolutionary movement.

The tipping point – Mubarak’s departure became inevitable once protestors succeeded in overwhelming security forces. The revolutionary current, which continues to define Egypt’s political scene today, became unstoppable as Egyptians reclaimed their sense of power and dignity. “There were multiple small tipping points,” Khalil noted “with Tunisia as the final shove over the cliff.” The revolution was spawned from the toxic mix of an Egyptian society bereft of a healthy and equitable economy (“seeing the top 5%...seemingly operating under a completely different set of rules than everybody else”), a lack of democratic legitimacy (“the November 2010 parliamentary election was such a clear slap in the face -- the ballot stuffing was just so over the top”), and a neglected younger generation without prospect for employment or healthy social lives (“that wouldn’t even pay them enough to make it worth getting out of bed”).

Counterrevolution? – Nearly a year on, the sense of frustration at the stalled pace of revolution and reform has been palpable. The situation now is a game of “blind chess,” with different factions – notably the Muslim Brotherhood, the protest movement, and the interim military junta – vying for power and national support in this post-Mubarak period. As Rob Malley noted, “The strength of the revolution was in many ways a weakness…because you didn’t really have a party, a constituency, and an agenda.” The event’s discussion delved into the various complexities that promise a bumpy road ahead for Egypt.

– Leila Hilal

Video of the entire event is available below:

Featured Speakers in this event included:

Ashraf Khalil
Author, Liberation Square
Cairo-based independent journalist, Foreign Policy, LA Times, Times of London
Contributor, The Arabist blog

Rob Malley
Director, Middle East and North Africa Program
International Crisis Group

Moderator
Leila Hilal
Co-director, Middle East Task Force
New America Foundation

Consent of the Networked

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:17:18 +0000

Rebecca MacKinnon and Steve Coll in Conversation About Citizen Consciousness and Standards on the Internet.

February 2, 2012

At a recent event marking the release of Schwartz Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon’s book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, New America President Steve Coll spoke to the author about civil liberty and privacy issues online and the responsibility of citizens and corporations to protect freedom of expression.

A snippet of their conversation follows:

Steve Coll: If we were to reach the Al Gore campaign or the earth-in-the-balance phase of all of this consciousness and communication about rights and about expectations -- both by customers and by citizens -- what would be the signs of change in the conduct of either governments or corporations that would, to you, mark that progress?

Rebecca MacKinnon: I think you’d see an across-the-board commitment, at least by democratic governments, with legislation dealing with the internet: Whatever problem it's trying to solve would seek to ensure that it is human rights and civil liberties compatible, that there be a commitment to core free expression and privacy principles in pursuing whatever problems and solutions with the internet, and a commitment by democratic countries not to pursue trade agreements and other multilateral arrangements that end up hurting free expression and privacy.

On the company side, I think you’d want to see the companies saying with pride, "We believe in free expression and privacy. We believe in protecting the rights of our users and this is part of our values," -- rather than being afraid to use the term human rights — and really agreeing to recognizing that they need to be held accountable.…

On the citizen side, I think we will see more of a coming-of-age when people are really making voting decisions and pushing their policymakers on Internet related issues, which is only just starting to happen. And also organizing to get the companies whose services and products they use to change things they don’t like.

View the entire conversation in the video below.

Slate recently posted excerpts from the book:

MacKinnon also appeared on NPR's Morning Edition to discuss the book: 'Consent' Asks: Who Owns The Internet?

View all of Rebecca MacKinnon's recent work on NewAmerica.net.

Data Without Borders DC Datadive

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:20:46 +0000

Event Venue:

New America DC

Does your non-profit organization want to collect and analyze data about your practice or field, but can't afford a full-time data scientist?

Are you a data scientist, data hacker or statistician who loves to explore data and wants to do some good at the end of the day?

Then come join us for the Data Without Borders DC Datadive!

New America is pleased to host this weekend-long sprint, organized by Data Without Borders in partnership with the 2011 American Express NGen Fellows from Independent Sector. The DC Datadive will team selected organizations with data enthusiasts to better understand their data, create analyses and insights, and receive free consultations.

If your organization has a data-driven project, or you are a socially conscious data hacker who wants to analyze non-profit data, click here to register!

Space for this event is limited. To learn more about Data Without Borders, please visit http://datawithoutborders.cc.

Location:

New America Foundation

1899 L Street NW Suite 400

Washington, DC 20036

See map: Google Maps

Event Time and Date:

Friday, March 2, 2012 - 7:00pm - Sunday, March 4, 2012 - 12:00pm

Calendar

Twitter Isn’t Evil

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:12:29 +0000

January 31, 2012

Nicholas Thompson

January 31, 2012

Twitter, it is said, has become evil. The company announced at the end of last week that it would censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. If a government really doesn’t like your hundred and forty characters, Twitter may white them out. Tweetavists reacted with outrage and warned darkly of unreported massacres in Syria. A #twitterblackout protest was organized. Forbes proclaimed that the company was committing “social suicide.” The information and communication technology minister in Thailand, where officials really don’t like you mocking the monarch, announced that it was a “welcome development.”

The #twitterblackout fizzled quickly, and rightfully so. In countries where Twitter does business, the company has to follow local laws. And if the local laws say it has to censor, it must either do so or leave. And, to Twitter’s credit, it’s going to only censor when it gets specific and valid requests to do so; it’s not going to hire robots or (deeply bored) humans to troll German posts looking for pro-Nazi jokes. It’s also not going to hide the bowdlerization. When Twitter gets a request to censor, it will post the request on chillingeffects.org. It will also make it clear to the user and the user’s followers when something verboten has been said. It also will only censor a tweet for readers in that particular country. The policy is limited, open, and realistic. That’s pretty darn good.

Still, the uproar has forced people to recognize once again the importance of the policies set by technological platforms—such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Supreme Court justices, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators for life will decide much of the future of free speech. But so will smart people with big glasses and purple shirts in Silicon Valley conference rooms. Free speech laws and policies change slowly. Companies can reset standards quickly. It’s useful for them to be reminded how much these issues matter as they balance business interests, reputation, and morals.

There’s also a question for Twitter that’s still pending: Will it enter countries where it will likely be forced to censor? It can stay out—not building offices, not selling advertising—and then just let users post whatever they want. Or it can go in and have to obey the onerous requests. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, told me, “In those countries, Twitter has no particular reason or legal duty to follow the laws of that nation, and I don’t think Twitter should agree to be bound by their censorship laws, even for their citizens. Obviously, it has the right to, but I don’t agree its good policy.” If Twitter has no corporate presence in Syria, it can let users go to Twitter.com and post whatever they want. If a censorship request comes in, Twitter can ignore it. (If the government threatens to shut off all access to the site, then, perhaps, Twitter can choose to censor.)

Last night, in an interview, Twitter’s C.E.O., Dick Costolo, said that the company couldn’t foresee going into China, a country where a competitor, Weibo, has censors who actively work “to keep things clean online.” According to Costolo, “We would love for people in China to be able to use Twitter the way we want them to … but the current environment doesn’t enable us to do that.” That surely reflects, partly, just how hard it is for tech companies to do business in China. But it also reflects Twitter’s recognition of how much its users care about maintaining open conversations online. And that’s a very good thing.

Table Talk

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:53:39 +0000

February 1, 2012

Obama's Iran Problem

Steve Coll

February 1, 2012

In the State of the Union address of 1954, which Dwight Eisenhower delivered less than a year after he had secretly ordered the C.I.A. to overthrow Tehran’s left-leaning government, he celebrated “the forces of stability and freedom” at work in Iran. In 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his annual address amid the whirlwind of Iran’s Islamic and anti-American revolution, which was inflamed in part by Iranians’ memories of Eisenhower’s coup. “We will face these challenges,” Carter declared. “And we will not fail.” Three decades on, Iran’s theocrats have built a police state, spread violence across the Middle East, and acquired nuclear reactors. Iran remains a perennially grim subject of Presidential oratory, and last week Barack Obama, while delivering his third State of the Union, added another entry: “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Leaving options on the table is a not-so-oblique way of threatening war. On the same day, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Knesset, “Only a combination of crippling sanctions and putting all the options on the table can make Iran stop” its nuclear drive. Meanwhile, three of the remaining candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination—Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich—have been speaking approvingly about bombing Iran’s atomic sites or assassinating its scientists.

There is reason to doubt, though, that an attack on Iran is imminent. The United States and the European Union are ratcheting up economic sanctions in the hope that they will push Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to re-start serious nuclear negotiations after a year’s hiatus. The E.U.’s twenty-seven member countries, which buy about a fifth of Iran’s oil exports, agreed last week to forgo all Iranian crude by July. Ahmadinejad said soon afterward that he would indeed be willing to talk again. The strategy, led by Obama, appears to be achieving its aim of raising the pressure on the ayatollahs to an unprecedented level. The value of Iran’s currency has fallen sharply. The diplomatic campaign would be stronger if it contained a definite plan to assuage Iran’s fears that the West and Israel ultimately seek regime change in Tehran—fears that presumably inform Iran’s search for a nuclear deterrent. Yet this is a rare period of momentum and international unity regarding Iran. “A peaceful resolution . . . is still possible, and far better,” the President said in the State of the Union. An attack now by either Israel or the United States would shatter diplomacy’s achievements.

The Iranian nuclear program is a problem with a long arc. The secret work began in the late nineteen-seventies, under the secular-minded Shah returned to power by Eisenhower’s intervention. There can be little doubt that Iranian scientists have studied atomic-bomb design. Several leading Israeli defense officials have said recently that Iran’s nuclear work has become so advanced that unless the sites are bombed soon—within months or, at most, within a year—it will be too late to prevent the country’s acquisition of atomic arms. It is difficult to tell whether the officials really believe that or if they are just adding to the pressure on Tehran. Either way, the evidence casts doubt on their judgment. The centrifuge technology that Iran has acquired to enrich uranium is relatively easy to hide, so it is conceivable that work has advanced further than world governments understand. But all of Iran’s known nuclear-fuel enrichment facilities are today under U.N. monitoring, and there is no evidence that any of Iran’s enriched uranium has been diverted to a military program.

Short of a nation conducting a bomb test, it’s not possible to define precisely when a country’s technology has attained weapons capability. Even if Iran is determined to stage a test, it is not certain how fast it will be able to do so. Its nuclear program has taken periodic leaps forward, but has also been marked by pauses and technical failures. Some of the failures have likely been caused by sabotage carried out covertly by the United States and Israel, including the unleashing of a computer virus called Stuxnet, which infected Iranian centrifuge controls. Meir Dagan, who through 2010 ran Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, has said that he does not think that Iran can deploy a weapon before 2015. Last February, Lieutenant General James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that Iran could technically produce enough material for an atomic bomb “in the next few years,” but that the U.S. intelligence community “did not know . . . if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

The burden of proof rests, in any event, with those who would urge war. Two of Iran’s uranium-enrichment sites are underground; there are two significant reactors and another being built, and possibly other important sites that are unknown. In these circumstances, no one can confidently predict what aerial bombardment would achieve by way of damage or delay to Iran’s over-all nuclear timelines. And the costs of any such attack are much easier to describe than the benefits. For Israel, those costs would certainly include heavy retaliatory rocket and missile strikes by Hezbollah and Hamas against Israeli civilians, a wave of popular anti-Israeli upheaval in Egypt, and the prolonged inflammation of Iran’s nuclear nationalism. A regional war involving Lebanon, Syria, and oil-producing Gulf emirates would also be a possibility.

Moreover, although “the forces of stability and freedom” may be elusive and late arriving in Tehran, the durability of the Islamic Republic is far from assured. In Cairo last week, Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to commemorate the first anniversary of their revolution, an uprising that was as stunning and as unforeseen as Iran’s revolution was in 1979. The Arab Spring offers ample evidence that no dictatorship should be assumed to be indelible.

In 2009, in Prague, Obama, in one of the eloquent and idealistic speeches that characterized his early Presidency, pledged to pursue a world free from the menace of nuclear arms. He receives little credit for his work in this field, but he has delivered: accelerated programs to safeguard loose nuclear materials abroad, and a hard-won New START treaty with Russia, which proposes a smaller American nuclear arsenal. Iran’s case doesn’t offer much prospect for clear achievement; it is a crucible of uncertainty and risk. In Prague, however, Obama warned against “fatalism” about the nuclear danger, and he prescribed a strategy to defeat it: “Patience and persistence.” That strategy shouldn’t be taken off the table.