Rebranding America

S U B V E R S E
The Times of India, October 27 2008

Nicholas D Kristof

New York: I had a conversation with a Beijing friend the other day and mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race.

She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?

Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.

She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, i thought blacks were janitors and labourers.

Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.

She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.

She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!

We’re beginning to get a sense of how Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantanamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.

In his endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world”. That’s not because we crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis. In his endorsement, Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, i think it’ll electrify the world”. You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Obama to McCain in every single country — by four to one over all. Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency.

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States.

Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany. As for Africa, Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.

Yet before we get too far with the selfcongratulations, it’s worth remembering something else. In the western industrialised world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 per cent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade. Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president. Look, Obama’s skin colour is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism. Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence, in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as openminded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quartercentury ago. — NYTNS

Self-regulatory market a false concept

CITY CITY BANG BANG
The Times of India, October 27, 2008

Self-regulatory market a false concept from SANTOSH DESAI

Could the global economic crisis be an inflection point of some? Is it possible that what global warming could not do, the global meltdown will manage —make us rethink not just our regulations and our institutions but the path that we are choosing to walk down? For India, in particular, standing as it does at the threshold of economic resurgence, is this an opportunity to ask what its destination should be, instead of being thankful that it is relatively protected on account of its regulated past? It appears that one of the biggest lessons learnt in the current crisis is that the financial system cannot regulate itself and that left to its own devices it will push outwards without regard for risks. And given the interdependent nature of the world economy, it will suffice if even a couple of large players go for broke and succeed. The idea that self-interest will create energy that will propel us forward while our institutions act as checks and balances to ensure that this self-interest does not become self-destruction, is a theoretically sound one but one that has been deeply compromised in practice.

At a more fundamental level, the growth-centric nature of the economic system creates accomplices out of the institutions meant to control it. The regulatory bodies, the experts, the business press all become shrill cheerleaders for growth and implicitly push the case for more growth while muffling other voices. We have seen this in India in the last few years, with a conspiracy of cheer that brooked no bad news. The India story had a momentum of its own, taking on a reality of its own making. We cheered when four out of the top 10 richest people were Indian, not asking if there was something deeply wrong with this. In an article written in this column in March of this year, it had been pointed out that it is interesting that we have begun to embrace the riches of a few as our own while shunning the penury of many as belonging to them. The poor today are an electoral fabrication, vestiges of an India we are eager to leave behind.

The idea of the economy has been exceptionally well marketed; so much so that we conflate our notion of the business sector with that of the Indian economy which in turn in an act of implicit compression becomes shorthand for India. What we call the economy is an abstract construction, a virtual presence with boundaries marked by the self-interest of those in charge of running it. The interests of the millions that lie outside this definition of the economy are a struggle to accommodate and often when steps are taken in this direction, they are labelled populist. So it was wrong to waive loans for impoverished farmers but it is all right to look sympathetically at the airline industry’s demand for a bailout. Somehow, the threatened impoverishment of Messrs Goyal & Mallya makes us readier to act than the suicide of a few thousand farmers. The idea that the market can be selfregulating has been exposed as being false. The nature of the joint stock corporation makes it uniquely suited to drive a growth-at-any-cost agenda. Structurally, it atomises ownership, accountability and conscience. The widely held joint stock company in its purest form has no single owner, no one human source that we can attach consequences to. Theoretically, everyone has a share and no one is eventually responsible. The goals of a corporation, the driving ambitions that it nurtures are those of a self-sustaining organism. The corporation is its own justification. The idea of nameless and fragmented shareholders whose interests seemingly drive it, allows the corporation licence to drive an agenda divorced from any larger social context.

The reductive nature of the corporation allows it to multiply endlessly — without any sense of the consequences of its actions. The corporation cannot say no, unless the law explicitly requires it to say so. The owned-by-no-one nature of corporations allows a culture to develop where actions do not need to conform to any rules but those developed internally. People can be fired overnight, fantastic exaggerations can be told about the products that it sells and its financial performance can be window-dressed without any great self-doubt. The corporation gives a licence to people to behave in ways they never would in their personal lives. The corporation cannot be trusted to balance larger needs for it has not been designed with that goal in mind. It is like a software programme, with its own inbuilt heuristic, which gives it great facility in some areas and very little in others. To depend on it to regulate itself is to expect too much from it.

The opportunity today is to take a hard look not just at how to make the system work better, but to ask as to whether we should be working to build a new system altogether. For the current system is not only unstable but unsustainable. But that would need the courage to detach ourselves from the wisdom of others and to try and find our own truth. It will mean making our own mistakes rather than paying the price for the mistakes of others. I am not sure we are ready to do that just yet

Pull of the collective

David Brooks

Chengdu (China): The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.
This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim. These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts. When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.
You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other. The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts. Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say that western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw more on tribal philosophies. Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.
But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops. The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through western, liberal means, but also through eastern and collective ones.
The ceremony drew from China’s long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one — drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present — a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China’s miraculous growth.
If Asia’s success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism, which seemed closed after the Cold War, then it’s unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge. For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.
The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream. It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats. — NYTNS