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Barack Obama’s demand, in his June 15 speech, that the former British Petroleum Company create an escrow account, to guarantee the funds that will be needed to deal with the consequences of the continuing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, should have been made weeks ago, and should surely have been framed more strongly than it was.The President, in this matter, continues to demonstrate the quality, laudable in itself, but in politics extraordinarily dangerous, of assuming that those he is dealing with are as reasonable and well-intentioned as he is himself. In fact they are often driven by ruthlessly self-interested motives that leave him in a position of seeming weakness and unwillingness to defend not only national but his own political interests.At the end of May one saw the President on international television walking on a Louisiana beach, accompanied—off-scene—by hundreds if not thousands of newsmen, broadcasters, and cameramen. He seemed abject. He bent over and picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. He shook his head in concern. A cutaway showed his speeches earlier in this affair declaring that his administration is in charge of the great effort to save America’s coast and waters from the terrible pollution that is spreading as a result of a volcano of oil erupting from the sea’s floor and meeting the sickly-colored, toxic chemicals being mixed into the water that are meant to disperse it.In his June 15 speech, Mr. Obama finally insisted that BP would pay for all the damage and cleanup and would be held responsible for any illegalities; and the next day at the White House BP agreed to an independently administered $20 billion escrow fund, while the full costs to the Gulf region are far from clear.In the press conferences given by the President and the BP chairman that followed the meeting it was clear that the American government still does not control this situation. BP alone will determine what is done with respect to the oil geyser and its promised closure. While it will make available the $20 billion compensation fund, the timing, terms, and ultimate worth of BP’s assurances of compensation and reparation remain open to interpretation and change.Advertisement How can the President possibly say that his administration has “been in charge”? BP has been in charge from the start—it and its contract companies, all of them desperately trying to plug the hole in the bottom of the sea, and all defending corporate and fiscal interests of their own. The President’s associates and advisers have apparently decided that the agencies of the United States government are technically incompetent to give instructions to BP, which seems improbable. But they certainly can and must tell BP what priorities must be set, and they must establish goals to be met, and on what timescale.BP’s lawyers and lobbyists have just as desperately been striving to allow BP to unload responsibility upon anyone or everyone else, including incompetent or irresponsible or compromised federal regulators. Allow me, in the style of the metropolitan columnists who influence Washington, to draft what the President might have said in his June 15 speech:“My friends:“The American nation has suffered a grievous blow from the catastrophe produced in the Gulf by what formerly was known as the British Petroleum Company. This is the latest in a series of major accidents produced in this company’s American operations, causing loss of lives among its workers, unforgivable human suffering by private citizens, and great damage to private and public interests, continuing today in the Gulf.“I have therefore today given orders that the American functions of this company be provisionally seized, or placed in temporary receivership, by the American government, as in recent months we have been forced to seize banks and corporations devastated by economic crisis, such as General Motors, AIG, and certain financial institutions.“BP’s American management will be placed under public authority and will be instructed to terminate the oil emergency as rapidly as possible and in disregard of whatever costs must be incurred by the company. This effort will be conducted by BP through its own best efforts, closely supervised by officers of the United States Coast Guard and Navy, the Energy and Treasury Departments of our government, and will be accompanied by an investigation by the Justice Department and its executive agencies, including the FBI, for any possible evidence of fraud, malfeasance or profiteering, contributing to this disaster. None of these agencies of government will incur any responsibility whatever for the decisions and actions of BP while conducting its operations to terminate the oil blowout.“In no circumstances will company, proprietary, or stockholder interest be given priority over measures to terminate this emergency and to safeguard the assets or interests of the United States public or government. No funds of this company shall be expended on political lobbying intended to influence Congress or the executive agencies of federal government until this emergency has formally been determined to have been ended.“Clearly, losses to British pension funds and other British shareholders of BP should be of concern to the British government. However those individuals and institutions investing in companies with notoriously controversial histories assume the accompanying risks.“The Oil Pollution Act signed into law in 1990 greatly expanded the US government’s ability and resources necessary to respond to oil spills; and it does not preempt state action to impose additional liability, which may be unlimited, with penalties and damages in addition to federal liabilities that may extend to prison sentences.“I am instructing that all BP assets within the United States, or in its surrounding waters, including funds immediately at its disposal, and all other BP funds accessible to the United States government, be temporarily seized and sequestered so as to prevent the transfer of any funds or assets of this company outside United States jurisdiction and access. The disposition of those assets will eventually be determined by the courts or by a new independent federal agency, with priority given to the reimbursement of persons and property-holders victimized by this catastrophe, and the redressment of damage or destruction to public assets and municipal, state, and national interests for which the former British Petroleum corporation is deemed by the courts, or by the independent agency, to have been responsible.” This is what the American people wanted to hear. President Obama wishes to be seen as decisive and a leader? Here was his opportunity. He wants a Democratic Congress elected in the fall? And a second presidential term for himself? This could have made a decisive contribution to those ambitions, as well as assuring necessary help to millions of people and repairing grave damage to the environment.He then could have concluded his speech by saying to his political opponents that any Republican or Democrat who wishes to run for office in November as an opponent of these Obama administration crisis measures—and as a defender of BP corporate and stockholder interests, or its customary executive remuneration and financial practices—as against the national interest of the United States and redress of the damage that continues at this moment to be done to the United States and its citizens, would be more than welcome to do so.—June 16, 2010

金融时报对巴克莱公司２００８年业绩的报告中说，“银行已确认该公司因复杂债务工具导致的减计损失达８０亿英镑，不过由于它的自身债务减计（１６．６亿英镑），该公司的总损失相应减少。”　

我看过以后的第一个想法就是：这个报告肯定是不对的。如果你的上市交易的债务价值下降，那肯定是因为市场认为你的声望较之先前下降了；市场对你的债务的定价，所反映的是预计中的违约风险上升，这不会增加你的利润，只会更加提高你的信用风险。

Obama demonstrates that [glamor's] magic still exists. What a glamorous candidate he was-less a person than a persona, an idealized, self-contained figure onto whom audiences projected their own dreams, a Garbo-like "impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations," in the words of Time's Joe Klein.

The institutional conditions of practical progress

The complete text of "Plasticity into Power: Comparative Historical Studies in the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success," which forms part of the Politics series. The book was originally published in 1988 and is to be republished by Verso in the near future. It explores, in comparative historical detail, an idea that plays a major role in my social-theoretical writings: the idea of the practical as well as the moral advantages of institutional arrangements and discursive practices that facilitate their own revision.

"Plasticity into Power" was published by Verso in a new paperback edition in 2004 together with "False Necessity" and "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task." To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

经典选读。"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

Eagleton can, of course, fight back against this kind of rebuttal if he can only show that there is something in theology which undermines the arguments against religion made by the new atheists. And this indeed is what he is up to in Reason, Faith and Revolution when he seeks to show, with the use of the theologian Thomas Aquinas, that the God so readily dismissed by Dawkins and Hitchens is not a god that many theologians, or indeed believers, would recognise.

It is very disturbing to find telegrams signed off by Hillary Clinton which seem to suggest that regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks – such as grubbing around for top UN officials' credit card and biometric details.

哈金和戴思杰都是为西方读者写作的，直接来自中国的作品却比较难，比较艰深，比较难以定位和理解。在中国受到喜爱的作家，在德国可不见得会受到读者的青睐。

本文为《从马克思主义到后马克思主义？》序。作者书中总结“叛逆”与“顺从”、“集体主义”与“个人主义”这两组对立主题：若称社会主义是叛逆的集体主义，新自由主义则可被成为顺从的个人主义。

当西方支持的暴君被赶走，政局长远地变化了。但革命到底能传播多远？With western-backed despots being turfed out politics has changed for ever. So just how far can the revolution spread?

神圣罗马帝国的约瑟夫二世是个慷慨的音乐爱好者，但不幸的是，当他听完莫扎特的《后宫诱逃》(Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail)，他说了一句：“太多音符了，亲爱的莫扎特”，从此便成为乐盲的永恒象征。

彼得森国际经济研究所的Arvind Subramanian的新书，该书认为中国经济实力将很快让美国黯然失色——比人们预期的要快。

两本叶芝分析的书评

Masses of information from the media constantly bombard us. Yet paradoxically often what is most significant goes unreported. Take for instance Tony Blair's recent visit to Africa. Suddenly countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Ghana come under the spotlight. But one country which forever remains off the UK/US media map is Chad, lying just to the south of Libya and "over three times the size of California", according to the CIA's official website.  Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, it gained independence in 1960 and since then has been gripped by civil war. In a rare case of coverage, on May 21 1992, the Guardian carried four short paragraphs: 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or been executed during the tyranny of Chadian president Hissene Habre (1982-1990). A report of the justice ministry committee concluded that Habre had committed genocide against the Chadian people.  Unreported in Britain, two years ago, in a case inspired by the one against General Pinochet of Chile, several human rights organisations, led by Human Rights Watch, filed a suit against Habre in Senegal (his refuge since 1990) arguing that he could be tried anywhere for crimes against humanity and that former heads of state were not immune.  However, on 20 March 2001, the Senegal Court of Cassation threw out the case. Human rights groups are now aiming to secure an arrest warrant and extradition request from Belgium (where one of the victims of Habre's torture now lives) and put him on trial there.  So behind the wall of silence, what precisely has been going on in Chad? In fact, the US and UK have been conducting over the last three decades a massive, secret war against Libya - often using Chad as its base. UK involvement in a 1996 plot to assassinate the Libya leader, President Col Mu'ammar Gadafi, as currently alleged by the maverick M15 officer David Shayler, has been reported as an isolated event. Yet the 1996 plot is best seen as part of a wide-ranging and long-standing strategy by the US/UK secret states to dislodge Gadafi.  Seizing power in Libya by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, Gadafi (who intriguingly had undertaken a military training course in England in 1966) quickly became the target of massive covert operations by the French, US, Israeli and British. Stephen Dorril, in his recently published book on MI6, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in a complete flop. In 1980, the head of the French secret service, Col Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was rapidly suppressed.  Then in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Hissene Habre, with the backing of the CIA and French troops, overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Human Rights Watch records: "Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habre in order, according to secretary of state Alexander Haig, to 'bloody Gadafi's nose'." Bob Woodward, in his semi-official history of the CIA reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that throughout the decade Libya ranked almost as high as the Soviet Union as the "bÍte noir" of the administration.  A recent report from Amnesty, Chad: The Habre Legacy, records massive military and financial support for Habre by the US Congress. It adds: "None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by Amnesty International covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations."  US official records indicate that funding for the Chad-based secret war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, donated $7m to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). But a plan to assassinate Gadafi and take over the government on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.  Frustrated in their covert attempt to topple Gadafi, the US government's strategy suddenly shifted. For 11 minutes in the early morning of 14 April 1986, 30 US Air Force and Navy bombers struck Tripoli and Benghazi in a raid code-named El Dorado Canyon.  Backing Reagan came the ecstatic response of the major media in both the US and UK. Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan president. Middle East specialist David Yallop reported: "Nine of 18 F111s that left from the UK were specifically briefed to bomb Gadafi's residence inside the barracks where he was living with his family." In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi's home. Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months, was killed while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.  Following the April 1986 attack, reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media. But away from the media glare, the CIA launched by far its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And, as concern grew in MI6 over Gadafi's alleged plans to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya including the London-based Libyan National Movement.  Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habre and install Idriss Deby as the new president in a secret operation. The French government had tired of Habre's genocidal policies while the Bush administration decided not to frustrate France's objectives in exchange for their co-operation in the war against Iraq. Yet even under Deby the abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.  David Shaylerís original allegations over the anti-Gadafi assassination plot were vigorously denied by the government. But within the broad historical context outlined here, they do, indeed, make sense.  Dr Richard Keeble is director of undergraduate studies at City University's department of journalism and the author of Secret State, Silent Press (John Libbey) and Ethics for Journalists (Routledge)  http://www.medialens.org/articles/the ... s_2002/rk_secret_war.html

Simple-minded moral posturing on Darfur by celebrities and rights activitsts has made the conflict even worse...

Forget aid-people in the poorest countries like Haiti need new cities with different rules. And developed countries should be the ones that build themLacking electricity at home, students work under the dim lights of a parking lot at G'bessi Airport in Conakry, GuineaOn the first day of TEDGlobal, a conference for technology enthusiasts in Oxford in July 2009, a surprise guest was unveiled: Gordon Brown. He began his presentation with a striking photograph of a vulture watching over a starving Sudanese girl. The internet, he said, meant such shocking images circulated quickly around the world, helping to mobilise a new global community of aid donors. Brown's talk ended with a call to action: developed countries should give more aid to fight poverty.When disaster strikes-as in the recent Haiti earthquake-the prime minister is right. Even small amounts of aid can save many lives. The moral case for aid is compelling. But we must also remember that aid is just palliative care. It doesn't treat the underlying problems. As leaders like Rwandan president Paul Kagame have noted, it can even make these problems worse if it saps the innovation, ambition, confidence, and aspiration that ultimately helps poor countries grow.So, two days later, I opened my own TED talk with a different photo, one of African students doing their homework at night under streetlights. I hoped the image would provoke astonishment rather than guilt or pity-for how could it be that the 100-year-old technology for lighting homes was still not available for the students? I argued that the failure could be traced to weak or wrong rules. The right rules can harness self-interest and use it to reduce poverty. The wrong rules stifle this force or channel it in ways that harm society.The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new "charter cities," where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under.To understand why rules are the way to harness self-interest, and why such new cities could work where old cities have not, look again at the example of electricity. We know from the developed world that it costs very little to light a home-on average, less than one US penny an hour for a 100-watt bulb. We also know that most poor people in Africa are not starving. They could afford some light. Africans do not lack electricity because they are too poor. Indeed, reliable power is so important for education, productivity and job creation that it would be more accurate to say that many in Africa are poor because they don't have electricity. So why don't they?Why the right rules matterConsider development the other way round. US customers have cheap electricity mostly because rules channel self-interest in the right way. Some protect investments made by utilities, others stop these companies abusing their monopoly power. With such rules, companies win; efficient providers make a profit. But customers win too; they get access to a vital resource at low cost. It's the absence of these rules that explains why many Africans don't have electricity at home. It might seem a simple insight, but it took economists a long time to understand it.In the 1950s and 1960s, economic models treated ideas as public goods, meaning that once one existed it was assumed to exist everywhere. Some ideas are like this-for example, the formula for oral rehydration therapy, the mixture of sugar, salt, and water, that stops children dying from diarrhoea. No one owns it and you can find it easily online. If all ideas were like this it would be easier for poor countries to grow. But they aren't: patents and other legal rules stop some ideas spreading, while others are just easy to keep secret.When I started graduate school in the late 1970s I was convinced economists underestimated the potential for new ideas to raise living standards. The body of work that grew out of my PhD thesis came to be called new growth theory, or post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory in Britain (when it was infamously taken up by new Labour in the mid-1990s). Initially I just wanted to understand how good ideas, like those which make cheap electric light possible, were discovered. But then another topic began to interest me: why didn't ideas common in some parts of the world spread to others?Put simply, some countries are better able to establish the type of rules that help good ideas spread, while others are trapped by bad rules that keep ideas out. The rules stopping cheap electricity, for instance, are not hard to identify. The threat of expropriation or political instability stops many western electricity companies moving into Africa. Those that do set up there can exploit their power as monopolists to charge excessive prices. Often they offer bribes to stop rules being enforced, or pay bribes themselves. Good rules would stop all this. So to unleash the potential of the marketplace, poor countries need to find a way to create good rules.The challenge in setting up good rules lies in solving what economists call "commitment" problems. How can a developing country promise to keep the rules that govern investment fair? Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling illustrates this problem with the example of a kidnapper who decides he wants to free his victim. But the kidnapper worries that the victim, once released, will go to the authorities. The victim, eager to be free, promises not to-but there is no way for him to guarantee he will keep quiet. As a result, the kidnapper is compelled to kill the victim, even though both would be better off if a binding agreement could be made. Poor countries face similar problems: their leaders cannot make credible commitments to would-be investors.Rich nations use well-functioning systems of courts, police and jails, developed over centuries, to solve such problems. Two people can make a commitment. If they don't follow through, the courts will punish them. But many developing countries are still working their way down the same arduous path. Their leaders can fight corruption and establish independent courts and better rules over property rights, but such moves often require unpopular measures to coerce and cajole populations, making internal reforms excruciatingly slow. Subsequent leaders may undo any commitments they make. A faster route would seem to be for a developed country to impose new rules by force, as they did in the colonial period. There is evidence that some former colonies are more successful today because of rules established during their occupations. Yet any economic benefits usually took a long time to show up, and rarely compensated for years of condescension and the violent opposition it provoked. Today, violent civil conflicts have led some countries to again consider military humanitarian intervention, but this can only be justified in extreme circumstances. My point was that there is a middle ground between slow internal reforms and risky attempts at recolonialisation: the charter city.There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country-residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice-a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.I started thinking about city-scale special zones after writing a paper about Mauritius. At the time of its independence in 1968, economists were pessimistic about this small island nation's prospects. The population was growing rapidly, new jobs were scarce in its only real export industry (sugar), and high tariffs designed to protect small companies manufacturing for the domestic market meant no companies could profitably use their workers to manufacture goods for export. It was politically impossible to dismantle these barriers to trade, so policymakers did the next best thing: they created a special category of companies, ones said to be in a "special export zone." The zone didn't physically exist, in that these companies could locate anywhere on the island, but companies "inside" the zone operated under different rules. They faced no tariffs, or limits on imports or exports. Foreign companies in the zone could enter and exit freely, and keep profits they earned. Domestic companies could enter too. The only quid pro quo was that everyone in the zone had to produce only for export, so as not to compete with domestic firms. The zone was a dramatic success. Foreign businesses entered. Employment grew rapidly. The economy moved from agriculture to manufacturing. Once growth was underway, the government reduced trade barriers, freeing up the rest of the economy.The history of development is littered with failed examples of similar zones. Mauritius was unusual because it had low levels of crime and the government already provided good utilities and infrastructure. The zone only had to remove one bad form of governance: trade restrictions. Yet many developing countries still can't offer the basics, another reason why building new cities is an attractive option. Cities are just the right scale to offer basic conditions. So long as they can trade freely, even small cities are big enough to be self-sufficient. Yet because they are dense they require very little land.To apply the lessons from Mauritius in countries with pervasive problems, the key is to create zones with new rules that are big enough to be self-contained. Big enough, that is, to hold a city. Then let people decide whether to enter.When I returned to Mauritius in 2008, I outlined my ideas to Maurice Lam, head of the Mauritian Board of Investment. Maurice splits his time between Mauritius and Singapore. He and I knew that Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, had experimented in the 1990s with a similar idea, establishing new cities that Singapore could help to run in China and Indonesia. These ran into difficulties because the local governments retained discretionary powers that they used to interfere after Singapore had made large investments in infrastructure. This convinced us that explicit treaties reassigning administrative control over land were needed. Maurice also said that countries in Africa would be open to this kind of arrangement. Some officials, eager to make a credible commitment to foreign investors, had already made informal inquiries about whether Mauritius would be willing to take administrative control over their special export zones.What could go wrong?Some economists have objected that a charter agreement between two countries will not necessarily solve the commitment problem that lies at the heart of development failures. The leaders of many countries enter into agreements, sometimes with the best intentions, that subsequent leaders or officials do not honour-as Lee Kuan Yew found to his cost. To guard against such an outcome, partners in a charter city must negotiate a formal treaty, like the one that gave the British rights in Hong Kong (see box, right). Under this arrangement the only way for the host country to renege on its commitment would be to invade. Even governments that resent having signed such agreements in the past almost always respect them. The Cubans hate the agreement that gave the US control of Guantánamo Bay, but learned to live with it.Another objection comes from those who study urbanisation. They point out that the location of most existing cities is determined by accidents of history or geography, and suggest, correctly, that there are geographical requirements for a city to survive. But they are surely wrong to think that all the good sites for cities are taken. Here distance matters, but it is not an insurmountable obstacle: Mauritius continues to develop despite its remote location. Flat land is cheaper to build on, but many cities have developed on hilly terrain. A river can provide fresh water and access to the sea, but with desalination, so too can any coastal location where a port could be built. Access to the sea is the only real necessity-as long as a charter city can ship goods back and forth on container ships, it can thrive even if its neighbours turn hostile or unstable. And there are thousands of largely uninhabited coastal locations on several continents that could qualify.Other urban economists fear new cities will repeat the unimpressive history of government-planned ones like Brasília, or Dubai's recent bust. But these are both extreme examples. The state was too intrusive in Brasília and almost non-existent in Dubai. Hong Kong is the middle ground, a state ruled by laws not men, but one that leaves competition and individual initiative to decide the details.The experience in Hong Kong offers two further lessons. The first is the importance of giving people a choice about the rules that govern them. Hong Kong was sparsely populated when the British took over. Unlike other colonial systems, almost everyone chose to come and live under the new system. This gave the rules proposed by the British a degree of legitimacy they never had in India, where the rules were imposed on often unwilling subjects. This is why building new cities, rather than taking over existing ones, is so powerful.The second lesson is the importance of getting the scale right. Most nations are too large to update all their rules and laws at once. The coercion needed to impose a new system on an existing population generates friction, no matter who is in charge. Leaders on mainland China understood this when they attempted to copy the successes of Hong Kong by gradually opening a few places, such as the new city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Yet while nations are too big, towns and villages are too small. A village cannot capture the benefits that arise when millions of people live and work together under good rules. Cities offer the right scale for dramatic change.The demands of migrationAs billions of people urbanise in the coming decades, they can move to hundreds of new cities. The gains new cities can unleash are clear. Picture again the students studying under the streetlights. By themselves, political leaders in poor countries won't provide cheap, reliable electricity any time soon. They can't eliminate the political risk that holds back investment or ensure adequate regulatory controls. But working with a partner nation, they can establish a new city where millions of young people could pay pennies to be able to study at home. And as these cities seek out residents, the leaders and citizens in existing countries will face the most effective pressure for good governance-competition.We know from history that the competitive pressures created by migration can boost economic growth. But strong opposition to immigration in the world's richest economies prevents many people from moving to better systems of rules. Charter cities bring the good systems of rules to places that would welcome migrants. Indeed, charter cities offer the only viable path for substantial increases in global migration, bringing good rules to places that the world's poor can easily and legally access, while lessening the contentious political frictions that arise from traditional migration flows.Intelligently designed new cities can offer environmental benefits too, a point increasingly made by environmentalists like Stewart Brand (see p39.) For example, Indonesia emits greenhouse gases at a rate exceeded only by China and the US. This rate is partly due to logging practices in its rainforest, and efforts to clear land for palm-oil plantations and pulp-producing acacia trees. Brand has cited the experience of Panama to demonstrate the green potential of urbanisation: as people there left slash-and-burn agriculture for work in cities, forest regenerated on the land they left behind. Similar migration to new cities in places like Indonesia could do much to reduce carbon emissions from the developing world.Investment in charter cities could also make more effective the aid rich countries give. The British experience in Hong Kong shows that enforcing rules costs partners very little, but can have a huge effect. Because Hong Kong helped make reform in the rest of China possible, the British intervention there arguably did more to reduce world poverty than all the official aid programmes of the 20th century, and at a fraction of the cost. And, if many such cities are built, fewer people will be trapped in the failed states that are the root cause of most humanitarian crises and security concerns.There are many questions to be resolved before the first city is chartered. Is it better to have a group of rich nations, or a multinational body like the EU, play the role the British played in Hong Kong? How would such a city be governed? And how and when might transfer of control back to the host country be arranged? But as we begin to explore these questions, we must not lose sight of the fundamental insights that advocates of the free market underestimate. The win-win agreements that we see in well-functioning markets are possible only when there is a strong, credible government that can establish the rules. In places where these rules are not present, it could take centuries for locals to bootstrap themselves from bad rules to good. By creating new zones through partnerships at the national level, good rules can spread more quickly, and when they do, the benefits can be huge.The world's fortunate citizens must be able to provide assistance when disasters like the earthquake in Haiti strike, but we must also be wary of the practical and moral limits of aid. When the roles of benefactor and supplicant are institutionalised, both parties are diminished. In the case of Haiti, if nations in the region created just two charter cities, they could house the entire population of that country. Senegal has offered Haitians the opportunity to return to the home "of their ancestors." "If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region," a Senegal government spokesman said. Outside of the extraordinary circumstances of a crisis, the role of partner is better for everyone. And there are millions of people seeking partnerships around the world. Helping people build them successfully is the opportunity of the centuryHong Kong: the first charter city? Hong Kong was a successful example of a special zone that could serve as a model for charter cities. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the only place in China where Chinese workers could enter partnerships with foreign workers and companies. Many of the Chinese who moved to Hong Kong started in low-skill jobs, making toys or sewing shirts. But over time their wages grew along with the skills that they gained working with educated managers, and using modern technologies and working practices.Over time they acquired the values and norms that sustain modern cities. As a result, Hong Kong enjoyed rapid economic growth-in 1960, the average income was around £2,500; by 1997, it was around £20,000.Even if it had wanted to, the Chinese government acting alone could not have offered this opportunity. The credibility of rules developed over centuries by the British government was essential in attracting the foreign investment, companies and skilled workers that let these low-skill immigrants lift themselves out of poverty. As in Mauritius, authority rested ultimately with the British governor general, but most of the police and civil servants were Chinese. And the benefits demonstrated in Hong Kong became a model for reform-minded leaders in China itself.

 The Nursery of GeniusA brief survey of ten magazines of influenceBy Nicholas Sabloff“A magazine,” Thomas Paine said, “is the nursery of genius.” Upon moving to America, Paine became a contributor and editor at the Pennsylvania Magazine. Not long after, he published Common Sense, the pamphlet that defined the American Revolution.Generations of young writers and thinkers have been drawn to what is an elusive project: to create a magazine that makes an indelible mark on the course of politics, art, literature, and history. Such idealists have persevered in the face of the debt, disillusionment, meager circulation, and general indifference from which all but a few of these publications inevitably perish.What follows are brief sketches of a certain variety of little magazine, “little” (with the exception of the American Mercury) by virtue of their circulation. They are not zines or self-published pamphlets or policy journals, all of which may also be entitled to a claim of littleness. The magazines here are united in their commitment to forwarding the causes of literature, high art, and politics; they are best remembered for helping to establish canonical writers and for their contributions to the intellectual culture of their day. The spirit of such magazines was perhaps best captured by Lionel Trilling in the 1950s when he wrote, “They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have . . . except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.” The Dial, Boston1840-1844  Often considered the progenitor of the “little” magazine in America, the Dial was founded by “Transcendental Club” members Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like many little magazines, the Dial was conceived out of frustration with the other journals of its day. Emerson used the second issue to call for a native literature that represented American culture. To this end, the magazine published obscure writers and poets, most of whom remained that way. The most notable exception was its most popular contributor, Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendentalists’ interest in Eastern religions and philosophy brought the magazine more mockery than readers (“ethereal” was a common complaint): it never had more than 300 subscribers and Emerson came away from the project $300 the poorer. The magazine’s influence, however, has lived on. Resurrected countless times, in the 1920s the Dial became the premier Modernist magazine in the U.S. (it brought T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to American readers) and gave birth to a publishing house, the Dial Press, that carries on to this day. Poetry, Chicago1912-Present The flourishing of Modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with a renaissance in American literary magazines. Harriet Monroe’s showcase for American poetry was at the center of this efflorescence. Poetry published T.S. Eliot’s groundbreaking “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. The poem had been passed along to Monroe by the magazine’s foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound. Poetry’s early years featured Pound’s promotion of imagism and, following the publication of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” passionate defenses of free verse. It published early work by Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The initial pay rate: a generous $10 a page. The amount the magazine received in a bequest from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly in 2003: $100 million.The Masses, New York1911-1917 The Masses advocated for progressive causes such as socialism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and birth control, and published such progressives as Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Bertrand Russell. The furious satires penned by its cartoonist, Art Young—he pilloried everything from the press to Jesus, and depicted capitalism as an overstuffed bald eagle—brought the magazine its share of controversy and notoriety. Edited by Columbia professor Max Eastman, the Masses was radical enough to print the intrepid American journalist and revolutionary socialist John Reed and antiwar enough to run afoul of the Espionage Act in 1917, resulting in a series of trials that led to the magazine’s demise. After folding in 1917, Eastman and his colleagues returned a year later with theLiberator. Many of these same editors, though not Eastman, regrouped in 1926 to launch the more overtly Marxist New Masses.The Criterion,London1922-1939T.S. Eliot edited Modernism’s most famous magazine at night after coming home from his job at Lloyds Bank. The Criterion’s editorial office was his house. From these modest origins sprung a debut issue containing “The Waste Land” and a magazine that, in its first year, received contributions from Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, and W.B. Yeats. In his effort to convey a European consciousness unlike  that found in other magazines of the time, Eliot’s Criterion became the first periodical to publish Proust in English. Eliot spent the following years trying to establish such writers as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Wyndham Lewis, while simultaneously expounding his defense of classicism, tradition, and Catholicism. The magazine never reached more than 800 subscribers and Eliot somewhat dispiritedly ended the Criterion in 1939.The American Mercury, New York1924-1980H.L. Mencken conceived the American Mercury as a magazine capable of taking in the whole absurd carnival of the American scene during the Jazz Age. Irreverent, learned, iconoclastic, and satirical, the magazine became indistinguishable from Mencken himself. It furiously lampooned his favorite targets— creationists, Prohibition, the “booboisie”—in the pungent style of its editor. The premier literary tastemaker of his time, Mencken published fiction by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Sherwood Anderson alongside articles written by convicts, clergyman, lawyers, dishwashers, and outdoorsmen. At its peak, in 1928, the American Mercuryhad 84,000 subscribers. The magazine lost momentum after 1929 when Mencken’s satirical edge, defense of laissez-faire economics, and disdain for the proletariat put him out of step with the culture of the Depression era. The man Walter Lippmann once referred to as “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people” left the magazine in 1933.Partisan Review,New York1934-2003It has been said of Partisan Review that despite rarely having more than ten thousand subscribers, it had the right ten thousand subscribers. When people get nostalgic for the golden days of the “public intellectual” in America, Partisan Review is never far from their minds. Though it began under the auspices of the arts branch of the American Communist Party, the magazine’s founding editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, soon parted ways with the party’s embrace of Stalinism. Staunchly anti-Stalinist and a defender of high art,Partisan Review was a magazine in which Rahv’s critiques of Marxism were followed by Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” The flagship publication of the New York Intellectuals, Partisan Review published Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and such classic essays as Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” The number of little magazines—Macdonald’s Politics, Howe’s Dissent—started by its former contributors over the years, often following an intellectual falling-out, testifies to its influence.Les Temps Modernes, Paris1945-PresentJean-Paul Sartre launched Les Temps Modernes one year after the liberation of France and at the height of his fame as a novelist, playwright, literary critic, and philosopher. It was truly a magazine of the moment and quickly became the leading exponent of Existentialism. (It, too, peaked at ten thousand subscribers.) The magazine published such titans of postwar experimental literature as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Raymond Queneau, and Marguerite Duras, as well as Sartre’s monumental literary manifesto, “What Is Writing?” The magazine’s name, taken from the Charlie Chaplin filmModern Times, reflected Sartre’s belief that engagement with the present moment was man’s duty. Sartre also believed in the pen’s ability to ignite political change, and in its first decade,Les Temps Modernes condemned capitalism and colonialism, and demanded that France depart from Indochina and Algeria. By the early 1950s, Sartre’s Soviet sympathies had caused all the original editors but Simone de Beauvoir to depart, and it was on the pages of Les Temps Modernes, in one of the defining moments of 1950s intellectual life, that Sartre and Albert Camus’s friendship ended as the two quarreled bitterly in print over Stalinism.The Paris Review,Paris/New York1953-PresentThe Paris Review, which began life in hopes of recapturing the literary spirit of 1920s Paris, wanted to serve its writers, and George Plimpton, its charismatic co-founder and editor, was not bashful about engaging in a little showmanship to ensure that their voices would be heard. While never as fervently countercultural as Barnet Rosset’s more European-orientedEvergreen Review, in its early years the Paris Review helped to launch Terry Southern, Philip Roth, and Jack Kerouac, and was the first to publish Samuel Beckett in America. Its “Art of Fiction” interviews have become an institution unto themselves. Forever hovering around ten thousand subscribers, the magazine is still going strong despite Plimpton’s death in 2003 and despite the belief of one of its founding editors, Peter Matthiessen, that “little magazines should have short lives and then disappear.”The Baffler, Chicago1988-presentFounded by Thomas Frank, the Baffler modeled itself after Mencken’s American Mercury, and like his idol, Frank loved to cause mischief by exposing the absurdities and delusions of the “booboisie.” Unlike most little magazines, the Baffler was built around an explicit thesis: that American business culture had co-opted the very idea of dissent by making it a commodity. The magazine spent the 1990s ridiculing one instance after another—from the Gen-X rebel consumers at Details to the peddling of “alternative” culture—in which subversion and rebellion were marketed as lifestyle choices and the counterculture was used only to reinforce the logic of late-twentieth-century capitalism. Despite only publishing seventeen issues to date, the magazine has two anthologies of essays to its name. These days, Frank can be found on the punditry circuit, having brought his critique of the culture wars into the mainstream with his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?n+1, New York2004-Present  Over the course of only five issues n+1 has laid claim to being the most important new little magazine to emerge from post-9/11 America. Although its small circulation pales in comparison to such coevals as the Believer and McSweeney’s,n+1 has caused an impressive amount of commotion by responding polemically to the present era. Beyond liberal politics, the editors’ other great passion is the defense of the literary novel: the magazine openly declares itself a descendent of the high seriousness and sense of tradition of Partisan Review. Yet the magazine’s self-conscious tone and its ability to shift casually from discussions of European theory to dissections of pop culture are unmistakably contemporary. In recent issues, the magazine has begun focusing its breezy editorials on exploring the effects that such cultural phenomena as dating, casual sex, porn, and the omnipresence of cell phones and email have had on contemporary consciousness and the experience of everyday life.http://archives.jrn.columbia.edu/nyrm/2007/sabloff_well.html

今年12月1-4日的巴塞尔迈阿密海滩艺博会又卖出了一批货。作者Blake Gopnik,虽然欧美各国经济都有问题，但根据artiprice.com统计，今年上半年全世界艺术品销售额达到58亿美元，比去年增长34%

波伏娃第二性新英文译本的书评。

David Fincher’s The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, is fast and intelligent and mean, a sort of screwball comedy without the laughs. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whose credits include The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and based on a novelised history by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. As long as it stays with the details of its tale – the faces, the clothes, the dialogue, the rooms, the parties, the sleek restaurants – the movie seems both restrained and sure-footed, willing to leave the thinking and the conclusions to us. But its larger plot movements are strangely dedicated to an insistence on two intriguing but evasive fables. One says that genius needs humiliation to get it going: so much so that the humiliation may be more important than the genius, a nicely faux-democratic message. The other says you can only make real money, money beyond dreams as distinct from just a lot of ordinary money, if you don’t care about wealth at all. Genius doesn’t calculate, even when it’s a computational genius.The film’s best line appears in a long, intense, information-crowded conversation before the credits. Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard, is sitting in a bar with a girl from the far less classy Boston University and boasting about his implausible chances of getting into one of Harvard’s fancy and exclusive social clubs. Once he’s in, he says, he’ll be able to introduce her to a better class of people than the ones she knows. For some reason the girl, Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara, doesn’t take kindly to this suggestion, and the mood goes from lousy to worse. Finally she gets up and leaves, telling him that he will go through life believing that people don’t like him because he’s a nerd. This won’t be true. They won’t like him because he’s an asshole.Zuckerberg trots back to his dorm room and proves by inventing Facebook that Erica is absolutely right. No, that’s not quite the film’s line of argument, but it is largely what it shows us and a late attempt at a revision of Erica’s line lends it a weird retrospective authority. Just before the movie ends, a woman lawyer who has been present at the depositions regarding various suits against Zuckerberg and what he stole from or owed to whom, looks at our lonely hero, forlorn and with only his computer to befriend him, and says: ‘You know, you’re not really an asshole, you’re just trying so hard to be one.’ Then comes a truly mawkish moment. Zuckerberg hesitates, then types onto his Facebook page a version of the request that millions are now making and receiving every day: will Erica be his friend? No answer, film ends. Just as we’re wondering whether this little scene wouldn’t have been too soppy for David Selznick let alone David Fincher, a text crawls up the screen telling us how much Zuckerberg settled for: $65 million in one case, an ‘undisclosed amount’ in another. Facebook, the text informs us, is worth 26 billion. This is just a grand old American story after all. Nice guys finish last and assholes finish rich. If you’re feeling sentimental, you can ask the key, corny question. Yes, but are they happy?Of course a lot happens between Erica’s insult and this ending, and what humanises Zuckerberg in the movie is the possibility that he’s so angry not because Erica has upped and left him, but because she had the last word and she’s smarter than he is. He can’t have this. When he gets back to his room, he drops a few sexist and ethnic slurs about Erica onto his blog for all who care to see, toys with inventing a web-game where people – I mean male students – are invited to compare pictures of girls with pictures of animals, and then settles for devising another game called Facemash. This involves hacking into the records of the university’s residence halls, collecting photographs of all the female students, and putting them up on the screen in pairs. The game is really subtle. The guys just say which of the two girls is ‘hotter’, and chortle away. The game is so successful that before the night is over Harvard’s computer system has crashed and Zuckerberg is famous.Enter the Winklevoss brothers. These are two athletes, rowers, members of an elite that will never admit Zuckerberg even into its environs, who are looking for a programmer for an idea they have: a computer-based social network trading on the snob value of Harvard’s name, an extended electronic version, in other words, of the system Zuckerberg was describing to Erica. They contact Zuckerberg, who says he’ll work with them but does nothing but stall them for a month or two. Meanwhile he invents his own social network, and calls it The Facebook – later he drops the ‘the’. He and his friends, notably Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, who puts a little money into the venture, start to include other universities in the system, including places on the West Coast, and well before the end of the movie, the network has gone international. The Winklevoss brothers learn about it just after they have narrowly lost a race at Henley. Close but no cigar; just the news that the locals too have Facebook.Did Zuckerberg steal the Winklevosses’ idea? They think so, and the $65 million they received in the settlement suggests there was something ($65 million, to be precise) in the thought. Zuckerberg’s position is that he so transformed a lame, provincial project that he can’t possibly be taken as having nicked it: this would be like saying Shakespeare stole Macbeth from Holinshed, or Newton stole gravity from the apple. The case of Saverin is rather different. At the centre of the movie, with flashbacks radiating out from it, is the room where the depositions are being heard in the two cases. Saverin lent Facebook more and more money, and was CFO of the company. However, once Zuckerberg had met the charismatic Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), and moved to California, Saverin was edged out, and the film pictures him as the model of East Coast caution trumped by West Coast cool. Parker is the real-life inventor of Napster, a music-piracy system whose failure did more damage to the recording industry than even its success could have done, and what Zuckerberg likes about him is not just his savoir-faire, the sort of fast style that makes the poshest Harvard club look like a garden party, but his sense of risk and the future. Saverin too is suing Zuckerberg, ostensibly for cheating him out of the continuing profits but in movie terms for betraying the only friend he has.The acting in the movie is quite wonderful, very disciplined and focused. Timberlake as Parker is charming, funny, reckless, even dangerous, but also nervous, an ex-nerd who hasn’t entirely forgotten his past. The film’s second-best moment, after Erica’s early line, comes when Parker announces at a party, as everything is being filmed, that soon all our lives will instantly be on the internet. Two minutes later the police burst into the apartment and take him off for snorting cocaine. Did somebody set him up? Saverin out of envy and revenge? Zuckerberg because he thought Parker was putting the company at risk?Garfield is good as Saverin: sympathetic, decent, but limited, and easily made to feel inferior, a nice guy who won’t finish last but won’t be near the front either. The triumph of the movie is Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. He manages that stolid, stubborn, stupid look that clever people often have, and when his expression changes, which is not often, we may think he is getting angry. But then Eisenberg’s closed manner robs us of any confidence that we can read any of his expressions. This is the whole trick of the performance. We can’t gauge the expression, yet our curiosity forces us to do something with a face that is held so long and so often in front of our eyes. So we keep guessing. Was that almost a smile, and if so, what did it mean? Contempt? Some milder form of amusement at the idiocy of others? Some of our guesses are irresistible, and might even be right. Zuckerberg’s social awkwardness, presumably real enough at one stage, has become a style, a mask, an aggressive pose. His confidence in his own intelligence, and his conviction that he owes nothing to anyone, least of all any sort of obligation to be nice to them, come across very clearly whatever expression is on his face, and his only weakness, it seems, is a defensive impatience: he just can’t afford to think anyone else has a mind that matters. He is a monster of sorts, and like all monsters, a mirror of something that humans want or need or fear. Certainly it’s as a monster that he is compelling, and that’s why the attempt to reduce him to a little boy lost, just a nerd after all, is so craven, a shameless reaching out for the Oscar-worthy stereotype.