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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Bill James, the author, statistician, and baseball fanatic, was hired by the Red Sox as senior baseball operations adviser in Nov., 2002.
Bill James, the author, statistician, and baseball fanatic, was hired by the Red Sox as senior baseball operations adviser in Nov., 2002. (For The Globe Photo / Dave Kaup)

Copyright The Boston Globe | March 30, 2006

LAWRENCE, Kan. — You can’t MapQuest 445 Tennessee St. Not technically, anyway.
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It’s on a block that doesn’t actually exist, the street ending where it runs into ”The Kaw” — what locals call the Kansas River.

But drive east down Fifth Street — past Mississippi, Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio until the curve in the road at Fifth and Tennessee (here in Lawrence, the streets are named from east to west in the order in which they entered the Union) — and there it is, shoved into an awkward corner lot, 15 feet from the train tracks, another 15 from the river.

The house is simple white, with wood siding, cobalt blue trim, and a clue that gives Bill James away — resting atop a cobblestone pillar, an oversized baseball.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the most mysterious member of the Red Sox’ front office works at this mystery address in Lawrence, Kan., a quiet college town some 1,470 miles from 4 Yawkey Way.
Photo Gallery Photo gallery Inviting e-mail from Henry

The godfather of modern baseball statistical analysis, James is among a growing number of sabermetricians (a term he coined) being hired publicly by major league teams. The 56-year-old broke onto the scene with his revolutionary ”Baseball Abstract” in 1977, a book he produced annually for 12 years.

His ideas have been lauded and laughed at, excoriated and extolled, but here in this small, Midwestern world, James listens to none of it — the bad or the good. He just works. The house-turned-office is simple. A few prints hang randomly on the walls and some baseball memorabilia lines the mantle. Homemade bookshelves constructed of raw boards resting on stacks of bricks stretch from floor to ceiling and trace the walls of James’s office. Boxes are strewn about the floor, an old computer monitor sits abandoned on a table, and papers cover the desk — it’s five rooms filled with a lifetime of obsession.

The humble little house didn’t always sparkle.

According to James’s wife, Susan McCarthy, a tall, slender redhead who works from home as an artist, the place was in such bad shape a few years ago that the insurance company refused to cover it unless they fixed it up.

”It really did look bad. It just needed to be painted and the yard looked terrible,” she recalls, sitting in the much more stately living room of the James’s massive, vintage Victorian home on Ohio Street, just a few blocks from the office. ”Bill was supposed to be taking care of getting someone to mow, and he let months go by. He just doesn’t like to take care of stuff like that.”

What James does like to take care of are numbers, at least some of them.

”I’m utterly uninterested in any numbers that aren’t connected to baseball,” says James, who majored in English and economics at his beloved University of Kansas. ”If you put a dollar sign in front of it, I don’t understand it. Math requires discipline. I work by obsession rather than by discipline.”

In Kansas, James practices his obsession alone, saying he’s ”too damn disorganized” to hire the help he needs (and, pausing quizzically asks, ”Are you looking for a job?”).

And so the place is quiet. That is, except for the seven trains that rumble by each day on the tracks right outside the office window, shaking the shelves but going completely unnoticed by James as he talks about his work with the Red Sox.

Writing his ticket
This is James’s fourth year as senior baeball operations adviser for the Sox. What that title means, or, rather, how much weight it carries, has been widely speculated. Does James affect daily rosters? Does he suggest shifts in the outfield in the middle of games?

Go ahead and ask him, but god luck getting a straight answer. Bill James is not a yes-or-no kind of guy. He will let you in, but just a little. No names, of course. No specifics. But shortly after returning from an eight-day trip to Fort Myers, Fla., in February, James described one of the 16 ”work projects” he picked up at spring training.

”There’s a player on our team who we might keep or who we might trade,” he generalizes. ”And there’s an issue about his performance last year about which we need specific information. The specific information is, do players who have this tendency ever get over it or is it permanent?

”I need to study that, and I need to get that done within a week or two because I need to send it to [general manager] Theo [Epstein] because Theo needs to make a decision. Is this guy going to stay with us or do we involve him in a trade?”

His work today, it seems, has come a long way from that first Abstract, which wasn’t exactly a success. James doesn’t remember how much it was or how many he sold, but McCarthy remembers all too well — at $3.50 a piece, the ”1977 Bill James Baseball Abstract” sold about 50 copies.

The second abstract fared slightly better, according, of course, to McCarthy, who remembers it sold more than 100 copies. James, whose last full-time day job was working at the Stokely-Van Camp pork-and-bean plant in Lawrence in the late 1970s (where he worked as a security guard and boiler room attendant, among other things), bumped up the price a whole 50 cents, a testament to the fact that, for him, this was about passion before profit (McCarthy says James wasn’t sure what he was doing was worth any money, so he had a hard time charging people for it). But by the sixth edition, James had an agent, a book deal, and a little peace of mind.

”It finally allowed him to think, ‘Yes, I can really do this,’ ” McCarthy says. ”Up to that point, it was still questionable because he certainly wasn’t making enough money when it was self-published. It was a huge deal for us because neither of us ever had any money at all. Now we had some, and we were able to buy a house.”

James does remember that book deal. He remembers feeling relief that the burden of self-publishing was gone. Talking about it, though, his tone is matter-of-fact. But ask him about his days working for agents on arbitration cases, and you see glimpses of that 11-year-old boy in Mayetta, Kan. (population about 300), who fell in love with baseball in the summer of 1961.

He tries to explain why arbitration was so fun. He proceeds haltingly, as he often does, changing directions in midthought, searching for an applicable analogy.

”It’s sort of like playing lacrosse or stairwell field hockey or some game that nobody else played, but you loved it and played it all the time,” he says. ”Everybody told you what a crappy game it was and why don’t you play basketball or something normal. And then, all of a sudden, you’re in a situation where there’s a million dollars on the table and everyone has to play a game of stairwell field hockey with you. It’s kind of like, ‘Hey, this is fun. All these guys are trying to play my game.’ “

Behind the scenes
James no longer plays alone. Today aspiring sabermetricians form groups across the country as Jamesian philosophy becomes more widely accepted. But perhaps the two most important Bill James devotees are John Henry and Epstein. Henry first read a James abstract in the early 1980s and says as an adult he waited for new Bill James books like he waited for new Beatles albums as a kid.

”In the summer of 2002 Theo [Epstein] and I were discussing the future GM,” Henry wrote in an e-mail. ”[Theo] was standing in the doorway of my office, smiled and said, ‘We should hire Bill James to be our general manager.’ While he was being lighthearted about it, both of us knew that what was called ‘Moneyball’ was really ‘Jamesianball.’ “

Henry found James’s e-mail address, and sent him an introduction and an offe all at once. He asked, among other things, simply, ”Why don’t you work in baseball?” and added, ”We’re intent on building an open, warm, and exciting working environment for the best in the game on and off the field. With or without you, we are going to be buiding on what you have introduced to the game we love.”

James had been working on the fringes of professional baseball for more than 20 years when he got that first e-mail from Henry. He had arbitrated and secretly consulted for other teams, including the Royals in the 1990s. In those days, admitting James might be right was a Major League Baseball faux pas (he says there was ”very strong resistance” to his ideas in the organized baseball community for about 15 years), so part of his agreements with teams was silence, and that didn’t bode well for James, who responded to an e-mail requesting an interview with, ”Oh, I talk to everyone.” His early work with teams was frustrating and unsuccessful, a pattern he has broken since joining the Sox. And while Henry’s pitch was quite compelling, James says he didn’t need to be convinced.

”I was always battling the fact that people didn’t really understand what I was talking about,” James says. ”Theo and John Henry understand what I’m saying usually before I finish the sentence. When I tried working for other teams … I was talking gibberish.”

Then, trailing off in notable Jamesian fashion and slipping into an impersonation, he adds, ”It was a failure to communicate, in the words of Cool Hand Luke. Did you ever see ‘Cool Hand Luke?’ “

In Boston, communication is not a problem. When James was hired in November 2002, the Sox didn’t hesitate to make it public. Assistant GM Jed Hoyer says announcing James’s hiring was never a question.

”Why hide it?” Hoyer says. ”It’s something we’re very proud of. We want to hire the best employees possible and from our standpoint why would we hide that?

”One thing with Bill is he’s been a lightning rod for controversy, because there’s a lot of conflict surrounding the sabermetric community, and he’s considered kind of the godfather of that, but he doesn’t care what people think about him, say about him. In that aspect I think he’s perfect for Boston. He’s unflappable.”

James says he feels welcome to voice his opinions to the front office, but generally waits until someone asks. How important is he to the Sox? ”If I were to drop dead it would be quite awhile before the Red Sox noticed.” Do they make moves you don’t recommend? ”Yes, sometimes I’m filing a minority report,” such as this spring, when James argued vociferously against one player and the Sox invited him to spring training nonetheless.

Feeling at home
Many of James’s opinions are vented in the requisite quarterly reports. The first three years James worked for the Sox, one of those reports was a free agent analysis submitted to Epstein shortly before Thanksgiving. This year, because he ”had a different relationship with the committee that was steering the Red Sox” during Epstein’s absence from the team, James didn’t submit a free agent analysis.

Generally, though, the report details every player who might be a free agent in the upcoming season, an estimate of what he will sign for, and James’s comments — longer comments on players whom the Sox might be interested in, ”one-word” comments on the others. (Henry says James’s reports are so valuable that ”a long time from now” James should publish them in their entirety).

A project James was working on after returning from Fort Myers involved comparing players’ strikeout rates in the minor leagues with their strikeout rates in the majors. James predicts a player strikes out more in the majors than in the minors ”almost 100 percent of the time.” He is trying to find out how the numbers relate so scouts have a guidepost for determining if a prospect should be moved down the list based on their current strikeout percentage.

It’s the kind of thing James loves — it’s the work he loves from the place he loves. It’s walking down Massachusetts Street (Lawrence’s downtown, chosen because the town’s settlers were from Massachusetts) without being noticed. It’s KU basketball, and keeping stats a his son’s Little League games. And, after all these years and all those books (26), it’s about still loving baseball. Sure, this place feels a world away from Fenway, but it was here that James grew up in harmony with one fundamental Boston tradition.

A Kansas City A’s fan as a child, James read ”The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” annually, and he’s been quoted as saying, ”Kansas City hates the Yankees more than Boston does.” He also made sure his children (Rachel, a sophomore at Hollins University in Virginia; Isaac, a senior at Lawrence’s Free State High School; and Reuben, a sixth-grader) got the message, reading the book at least twice to each of them.

McCarthy says the kids always knew their dad was famous in the baseball world but didn’t realize how famous until he got the Sox job. Rachel is the only one in the family who reads stories about her father (her parents stopped long ago), and Isaac is the only one sabermetric-minded.

So when your own kids don’t really think you’re all that big of a deal, and you live in a town where celebrity reaches its zenith on the floor of the Jayhawks’ Allen Fieldhouse, a baseball stat guy, no matter how genius, enjoys unbridled anonymity.

”I realized the other day that Isaac’s best friend has no idea who I am,” James says laughing. ”That’s fine. That’s perfect, actually.”

Serious approach
Perhaps it’s that humbling existence that keeps James so modest. As the inventor of the Runs Created stat, and Major League Equivalency, which predicts how a minor league player will perform in the majors, along with several others stats, James’s contributions to baseball are undeniable. Still he remains hesitant to claim his work has any real value.

His two favorite hobbies — baseball and crime novels — are things he says ”respectful academics wouldn’t touch.” Whatever causes James’s self-effacing style, he says it’s left him ”spending a lot of time declining invitations to take myself seriously.” But writing 26 books is serious business, and James admits a staid approach when it comes to his passions.

”I’m every bit as serious about trying to figure out baseball as an economist is about trying to figure out the economy,” he says. ”[When I read crime novels], I’m just as serious about trying to figure out what happened there as an academic is trying to figure out something about cancer research. It’s not that I really believe it’s important. I’m not under some illusion that this actually makes any difference. I just take a very academic interest in things that are not academically appropriate.”

Academic or not, James’s work has secured his place in baseball lore and, at present, in the Sox’ front office. And when the senior baseball operations adviser does drive the 51 miles from Lawrence to the Kansas City International Airport, and takes the inevitable two-flight trip to join his colleagues on Yawkey Way, Henry says James’s presence turns grown men into little boys.

”When he arrives for a stint in Boston, it really feels like baseball’s wizard has arrived,” Henry says. ”There is a feeling of wonder and awe from those of us who really appreciate Bill’s genius and demeanor. He is one of a kind.”
� Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 4:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; Page F01

GORDONSVILLE, Va. — That avid wine lover Thomas Jefferson dreamed of re-creating the great wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux in Virginia. He never did so because he couldn’t get French grapes to grow at Monticello. Dennis Horton has gone about things differently.

Horton, whose vineyards are rooted less than 20 miles north of Jefferson’s estate near Charlottesville, set about in 1977 to find out which grapes would grow. He planted and tore up cabernet sauvignon vines. He planted and tore up Riesling and merlot. He planted and tore up at various times Semillon and sauvignon blanc and zinfandel and pinot noir, among others.

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Dennis Horton in his vineyard. Aficionados seek out his widely praised Viognier. (By Tracy A Woodward — The Washington Post)
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“I’ve torn up more vines than most people have ever planted,” he says. “The pinot noir I made tasted like something that ought to run my car.”

But his passion for viticultural experimentation has borne, well, fruit. Horton Vineyards is now one of the largest in the state, and it produces what some have called the crown jewel of Virginia wines: a heady-scented, peach and vanilla-flavored white wine that writer Paul Lukacs describes as “a bright June morning in a glass.” Though few Americans have ever heard of Horton’s Viognier, and fewer still, he says, can pronounce it (VEE-on-yay), it is so prized by aficionados that it’s sold in restaurants as distant as Manhattan and Napa Valley, Calif. Lukacs, in his new book “The Great Wines of America,” numbers it among the country’s 40 greatest oenological achievements — the only one in Virginia and one of only three on the East Coast.

Moreover, while many Virginia vintners hope new prosperity will follow the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting direct shipment from wineries to customers across state lines, Horton was one of the few already shipping out of state via independent distributors. At present, he says, of the vineyard’s 30,000-case annual production, he ships 5,000 to 6,000 cases out of state. Most of that is Viognier, which has been Horton’s star wine since the early 1990s when his third vintage, he says, “cleaned California’s clock” at a celebrated series of tastings around the country.

“Dennis’s 1993 Viognier is considered by many to be the finest Viognier ever produced in this country,” said Bruce Zoecklein, Virginia’s oenologist and past president of the American Society of Oenology and Viticulture. “And he is without question a leader in the industry. His willingness to plant varieties new to Virginia, particularly the Viognier, without any guarantee of success, has greatly enhanced the state’s standing in the wine industry” nationally and internationally.

Marketing Viognier, however, was at first a challenge. Until about 15 years ago, the grape was grown only in Condrieu, a region of France’s Northern Rhone valley near Lyons. “When I put in my first eight acres of Viognier in 1992,” Horton said, “there were only 300 acres of Viognier growing in the entire world.”

Wasn’t that an extraordinary gamble?

“It’s better to be lucky than smart,” Horton said. But he’d also learned a great deal in 15 years of experimenting. The two major curses of Virginia viticulture, he says, are untimely spring frosts and summer humidity. The first can kill a whole season’s grapes in the bud. The second can rot them on the vine.

Viognier, he says, is one varietal with the capacity to bud and fruit after a frost, he says. Its grape also grows in loose clusters that permit air and anti-mildew sprays to circulate among the individual grapes.

“And it’s a sugar factory” whose potential alcohol and chemical balance, he found, remained remarkably consistent from year to year in his vineyards.

Horton was lucky in other ways as well. A number of California vineyards took the Viognier plunge around the same time, raising the profile of the obscure grape and easing the marketing challenge a bit. Then, too, “We don’t get a lot of variation in quality, but the ‘93 vintage was really off the charts,” Horton said.

“The first year we made 300 cases of Viognier,” pressing the refrigerated grapes in whole clusters, aging the juice eights months in old oak barrels and two more in the bottle. “I thought we’d never sell it all,” he said. But after the ‘93 vintage, the wine soon began to sell itself to anyone who tasted it, even at $20 a bottle.

With 28 of his 110 vineyard acres now in Viognier, he makes 3,000 cases a year and it’s flying out the door. Many of Virginia’s 100-plus other wineries have boarded the Viognier bandwagon as well, says Zoecklein: “It’s proving the ideal wine grape for the state.”

Will Viognier become the new chardonnay?

“Well, I’d like to think so,” Horton said. “I think it’s a more interesting wine. For example, the young wine, with its rich nose and exuberant style tends to do the best at tastings. But after a year or so, I think it’s actually a better food wine. It starts to lose some of that intoxicating perfume, but it softens and gains in complexity at the back of the palate. That interesting tradeoff makes it almost two different wines.”

Still, Horton is far from a one-grape vintner. With his wife, Sharon, who manages the vineyards, his winery turns out 36 different wines from such arcane grape varieties as tannat (from southern France), touriga nacional (from Portugal), graciano (from Spain) and rkatsiteli (from the former Soviet Georgia). And that’s not counting his fruit wines.

Close to his heart, too, is the Norton grape, a native Virginia variety which makes a $12 red wine that is one of Horton’s mainstays. The Norton grape, named for a Richmond physician who first domesticated it around 1830, was a keystone of the pre-Prohibition wine industry. But in the winery-closing wreckage of Prohibition, the Norton grape was all but forgotten until 1965 when it was resurrected and made into wine again by Stone Hill Winery in Hermann, Mo., west of St. Louis.

Hermann, as it happens, was Horton’s home town. He grew up among its largely German population, drinking wine at the family table and hearing from Hermann’s backyard winemakers about the former glories of the Norton grape. The thick-skinned red varietal was one of the first Horton planted.

The wine it makes, mysteriously devoid of the “foxy” rankness that characterizes wine made from other native American grapes, is unique. It reminds one a bit of a California merlot that tried to bulk up into an Australian shiraz with too much time at the gym. It is dark as night, almost as thick as syrup, and for those who like chewable wines, a genuine gustatory adventure.

“It’s a great grape for us, easy to grow, and it continues to grow in the bottle for at least 10 years,” Horton said. “But you can’t use it for blending. Even a drop makes the whole thing taste like Norton.”

True, it isn’t Horton Viognier, but then, what is?

Ken Ringle, a former Style writer, last wrote for Food about Knight’s Gambit vineyard.

Posted at 11:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2006

BOSTON ‘Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on Web sites, or the latest sensational attack,” Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a Washington Post opinion article last week. “History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately.”

Rumsfeld was arguing that any evaluation of the present catastrophe in Iraq should take a longer view.

I agree with him. Indeed, I have spent the last six years exploring two generations’ worth of events and decisions that brought us here. I have written a history of the Pentagon called “House of War,” which will be published in May. But contrary to what Rumsfeld hopes, such a “bigger picture” in no way exonerates him or the Bush administration for its grave failures.

The disaster in Iraq both recapitulates American mistakes of the past and worsens them immeasurably.

Let’s begin with Rumsfeld himself. In 1975, he was President Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense when the U.S.S. Mayaguez was seized off Cambodia by the newly empowered Khmer Rouge. The American crew of 38 was captured.

Rumsfeld shaped the response - which was to ignore diplomacy, begin bombing a Cambodian port city and dispatch a large force of marines to rescue the crew. Bad moves based on bad intelligence. Untold numbers of Cambodian civilians were bombed and 40 American rescuers were killed in an attack on an island where the crew was thought to be held.

In fact, the American sailors had already been released unharmed and set adrift on a Thai fishing vessel. The Mayaguez affair was a dress rehearsal for Rumsfeld’s war in Iraq.

The Iraq war breaks with American tradition by being explicitly defined as “preventive,” but in other ways it fulfills the core tradition - the eschewing of diplomacy in favor of wars whose real purpose is to feed the insatiable appetite of the economic, political and cultural behemoth on the Potomac. The Pentagon is 63 years old: Key moments in its lifetime cry out to be freshly understood.

Why, after the disappearance of America’s Cold War enemy in the early 1990s, did Washington maintain its huge Cold War military? In reviewing an arms race that led, across 40 years, to the accumulation of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, when will the United States reckon with the truth that Washington held the initiative at almost every stage of that escalation, with Moscow forever struggling to catch up?

By what right did the United States come out of the energy crisis of the 1970s proclaiming, with the Carter Doctrine, its intention to use military force to protect access to Gulf oil? (Jimmy Carter, too, is a progenitor of the war in Iraq.)

What is revealed by the “retirement syndrome,” in Robert Jay Lifton’s phrase - the consistent phenomenon of men whose careers shaped the national security state, only to denounce its assumptions as they left power? This is true not only of legions of generals and admirals, but of statesmen like Henry Stimson and George Kennan, civilian hawks like Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze, and presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, who famously decried the “military-industrial complex” he had just created.

What does it say that, as pressures periodically built to rein in Pentagon budgets and influence, new threats and enemies were conveniently discovered, “rescuing” the Pentagon, as Dean Acheson said of the North Korean invasion of South Korea? Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were such rescuers, and so was Osama bin Laden. Now comes Iran.

How did the impulse to demonize the enemy in Moscow paralyze American strategic and political thinking? This psychological imprisonment was so complete that the demonizing mindset carried over into the new century, when dreaded “communism” was replaced by “terrorism.” George W. Bush did not invent this myopia.

Iraq shows how self-destructive were the responses of Americans and their government to the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. They were not new, but flowed along a channel through which powerful currents had been running for 60 years.

The point of history’s bigger picture, however, is to see that, as human choices shaped this terrible outcome, human choices can change it.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

Posted at 11:56 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Friday, March 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for ou failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global discussions to generate pessimism about the feasibility of a democratic state, or of a flourishing economy, or of a tolerant society, wherever these conditions do not already obtain.

Indeed, cultural stereotyping can have great effectiveness in fixing our way of thinking. When there is an accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation (no matter how casual), a theory is born, and it may refuse to die even after the chance correlation has vanished without trace. For example, labored jokes against the Irish, which have had such currency in England, had the superficial appearance of fitting well with the depressing predicament of the Irish economy when it was doing quite badly. But when the Irish economy started growing astonishingly rapidly, for many years faster than any other European economy, the cultural stereotyping and its allegedly profound economic and social relevance were not junked as sheer rubbish. Theories have lives of their own, quite defiantly of the phenomenal world that can be actually observed.

Many have observed that in the ’60s South Korea and Ghana had similar income per head, whereas within 30 years the former grew to be 15 times richer than the latter. This comparative history is immensely importat to study and causally analyze, but the temptation to put much of the blame on Ghanaian or African culture (as is done by as astute an observer as Samuel Huntington) calls for some resistance. Mr. Huntington closes his contrast with a spectacular formula: “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count.” Ghanaians, and perhaps many other Africans, seem doomed to stagnate, according to this analysis.

In fact, that cultural story is extremely deceptive. There were many important differences, other than any differences in cultural predispositions, between Ghana and Korea in the 1960s. First, the class structures in the two countries were quite different, with a very much bigger—and proactive—role of business classes in Korea. Second, the politics were very different, too, with the government in South Korea eager to play a prime-moving role in initiating societal reform and economic development in a way that was not true in Ghana. Third, the close relationship between the Korean economy and Japan, on the one hand, and the U.S., on the other, made a big difference, at least in the early stages of Korean economic expansion.

Fourth—and perhaps most important—by the 1960s South Korea had acquired a much higher literacy rate and a much more expanded school system than Ghana had. Korean massive progress in school education had been largely brought about in the post-World War II period, mainly through resolute public policy, and it could not be seen just as a reflection of cultural difference. This is not to suggest that cultural factors are irrelevant to the process of development, but they do not work in isolation from social, political and economic influences. Nor are they immutable.

The temptation of founding economic pessimism on cultural resistance is matched by the evident enchantment, even more common today, of basing political pessimism, particularly about democracy, on alleged cultural impossibilities. While it is easy enough to understand the widespread—and increasing—doubts about armed intervention allegedly aimed at jump-starting democracy in Iraq through largely foreign and military planning, it would be quite a leap from there to become skeptical of the general possibility of the emergence of democracy in any country that is currently nondemocratic. It is worth remembering that democracy has developed well enough in many countries in Asia, Afica and Latin America, and in the case of some, such as South Africa, even foreign assistance to local democratic movements (for example through economic boycott) has positively helped.

When it is asked whether Western countries can “impose” democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of “imposition,” since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy “belongs” to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially “Western” idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.

Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is “government by discussion,” and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading. There is a long history of public reasoning across the world, and while it has gone through ups and downs everywhere the sharp priority of liberal tolerance that has emerged in the West over the past three centuries reflects how social evolution can strengthen and consolidate one tendency to the exclusion—or near exclusion—of other tendencies.

The belief in the allegedly “Western” nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition (“they are all Europeans,” we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: “Everyone who wanted to speak didso. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer.” Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela’s quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western “imposition.”

Similarly, the history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or “Islamic” in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Musim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).

Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as “ambassadors of Western values” would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge. This is particularly important to emphasize since the illusion of cultural destiny can extract a heavy price in the continued impoverishment of human lives and liberties.

Mr. Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, is the author of “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny,” published next week by Norton.

Posted at 11:49 AM · Comments (0)

BRITAIN and France have experienced long periods of conflict and rivalry but now victory in one area can be claimed: Britons are more intelligent than the French.
A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. �The early human beings in northerly areas had to survive during cold winters when there were no plant foods and they were forced to hunt big game,� he said. �The main environmental influence on IQ is diet, and people in southeast Europe would have had less of the proteins, minerals and vitamins provided by meat which are essential for brain development.�

He added that differences in intelligence across Britain could be attributed to bright people moving to London over hundreds of years. Adults in England and Wales have an IQ of 100.5, higher than Ireland and Scotland, both with 97. People living in London and the South East average 102. �Once in the capital they have settled and reared children, and these children have inherited their high intelligence and transmitted it to further generations.�

The pattern is repeated in other countries, Professor Lynn claimed. In France, IQ scores in Paris were much higher than those in rural areas.

Professor Lynn has spent three decades analysing thousands of test results to scrutinise the role of evolution in IQ. He has published his findings in a new book. Britons excel in another area of Professor Lynn�s research. He found that university students had, at 109, the second-highest undergraduate IQs in the world, beaten only by their US counterparts on 110.

Professor Lynn ascribes the differences between British and French intelligence levels to the results of military conflict. He described it as �a hitherto unrecognised law of history� that �the side with the higher IQ normally wins, unless they are hugely outnumbered, as Germany was after 1942�.

A �normal� IQ ranges from 85 to 115 but exceptionally gifted people have scores starting at 145.

Copyright - The Times

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ASSOCIATED PRESS in Shanghai
Updated at 12.06pm:
China’s foreign currency reserves reached US$853.7 billion (HK$6.66 trillion) by the end of February, probably topping Japan’s to become the world’s largest, a state-run newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed source.

Japan’s foreign currency reserves - the amount of currency from abroad the government holds in its accounts - had reached US$850 billion at the end of February, Tokyo announced earlier.

Chinese central bank officials refused comment on the latest figures, reported in China Business News, saying data on foreign exchange reserves are only released quarterly. Those figures are due to be issued in mid-April.

China’s foreign currency reserves rose 34 per cent last year to a record US$818.9 billion amid surging exports.

Foreign reserves have soared as China’s surging exports, especially to the United States, have brought home billions of US dollars and other foreign currencies. China’s global trade surplus last year reached US$101.9 billion, up from US$32 billion the year before.

China’s foreign currency regulator buys dollars and other foreign currencies that come into the economy and stockpiles them in US Treasury bonds and other assets in order to limit the flow of currency into the economy, which it worries could set off inflation.

Analysts estimate that three-quarters of China’s reserves are in US Treasuries, reflecting the dominance of the dollar.

At current rates of growth, Beijing’s foreign exchange reserves could reach US$1 trillion this year.

Published in the South China Morning Post. Copyright � 2006. All rights reserved.

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Copyright The Associated Press

Date: March 28, 2006
ABUJA, Nigeria_Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has disappeared
from his haven in Nigeria, just as he was to have been handed over to
face trial on war crimes charges, Nigerian officials said Tuesday.

Taylor vanished Monday night from his villa in the southern town of
Calabar, the government said. Last week, Nigeria’s government agreed _
under pressure from the U.S. and others _ to surrender him to stand before
a U.N. tribunal on charges related to civil war in Liberia’s neighbor,
Sierra Leone. President Olusegun Obasanjo was to travel to the United
States this week for a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush on
Wednesday.

A government statement said Obasanjo was creating a panel to
investigate Taylor’s disappearance on Monday night. The statement raised the
possibility he might have been abducted, but did not elaborate.

Nigerian presidential spokesman Oluremi Oyo said members of Taylor’s
Nigerian security detail had been arrested.

The presidential statement offered no details on how Taylor’s
disappearance was discovered or whether he was being hunted. Nigeria’s Guardian
newspaper reported Tuesday that dozens of people who had been living
with Taylor in the villa in a walled government compound had left Monday
and were flying to Lagos en route to an unknown destination.

Johnny Mcclain, Liberia’s information minister, said his government
would have no comment because Nigeria had not formally informed it of
Taylor’s disappearance.

Sando Johnson, a longtime Taylor loyalist, expressed concern.

“We hope that wherever Mr. Taylor has gone to, he’s going to survive,”
Johnson said in the Liberian capital. “We knew that calling for his
arrest was going to cause trouble and this is just what is happening now.”

Obasanjo had offered Taylor refuge under an agreement that helped end
Liberia’s civil war in 2003.

Since then, though, the United States, the United Nations and others
have called for Taylor to be handed over to an international war crimes
tribunal.

While the Sierra Leone tribunal’s charges refer only to the war there,
Taylor also has been accused of starting civil war in Liberia and of
harboring al-Qaida suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 12 Americans and more than 200
Africans.

He is charged with backing Sierra Leone rebel, including child
fighters, who terrorized victims by chopping off body parts.

Obasanjo initially resisted calls to surrender Taylor. But Saturday,
after Liberia’s new President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf asked that Taylor be
handed over for trial, Obasanjo agreed.

African leaders have been reluctant to see the continent’s former
presidents or dictators brought to justice, apparently fearful they would be
the next to be accused of human rights abuses or other crimes. African
leaders have been reluctant to see the continent’s former presidents or
dictators brought to justice, apparently fearful they would be the next
to be accused of human rights abuses or other crimes.

Since agreeing Saturday to hand Taylor over, Obasanjo had been under
pressure to ensure Taylor was sent to the U.N. tribunal sitting in Sierra
Leone. Taylor had escaped from a U.S. penitentiary in Boston to launch
Liberia’s war.

He also is believed to have considerable resources. U.N. investigators
have said he and his allies continued to steal from the Liberian
treasury even from exile. The U.N. Security Council had expressed concern he
was using “misappropriated funds” to undermine his homeland’s stability
in the run-up to the elections Sirleaf won earlier this year, taking
over from a transitional administration.

On Monday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United
States has told Obasanjo that it was Nigeria’s responsibility to “see
that he is able to be conveyed and face justice.”

APviaNewsEdge

Copyright (c) 2006 The Associated Press

Posted at 9:49 PM · Comments (0)

An excerpt. Copyright The New York Times

Legend has it that when Napoleon’s Imperial Guard was cornered by the British at Waterloo, its leader boldly declared: “The Guard dies. It does not surrender.” Today’s French can’t even stand up to unarmed foreigners. When French young adults were asked what globalization meant to them, half replied, “Fear.”

Beneath that facade of arrogance, the French are suffering from a condition apparent to any American. They have low self-esteem. They’re not feeling empowered. They need that great engine powering our economy: the American self-help industry.

The French produce great Camembert, but they haven’t absorbed the wisdom of Spencer Johnson’s modern classic, “Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life.” They haven’t heeded Donald Trump’s instructional CD, “Think Like a Billionaire.” They haven’t mastered Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or Anthony Robbins’s “Awaken the Giant Within.”

A few French men and women have looked across the ocean for guidance � Robbins says he advised Fran�ois Mitterrand � but the French masses still haven’t awakened their inner giants. And they won’t, unless we help them help themselves by sending over the titans of the American self-actualization movement.

This Marshall Plan B wouldn’t cost American taxpayers much beyond a few French lessons, plane tickets and hotel rooms. The French might initially resent the intrusion � they have that fear of new things � but we can reassure them: there’s a precedent. The U.S. government sent them the pioneer of self-help literature, Benjamin Franklin, and Paris loved him.

The only serious objection I expect is from Americans worried about our G.N.P.: Could the American economy struggle along without these gurus? But I think we’re ready to go it alone, thanks to the billions of dollars of wisdom we’ve already stockpiled.

We’ve learned secrets like “Be Proactive” and “Think Win/Win” (two of Covey’s seven habits). We now realize, thanks to Robbins, that “the past doesn’t equal the future.” We’ve paid $19.95 for Johnson’s revelation: “Movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese.”

We can afford to share this knowledge with the French. If they understood Covey’s radical Win/Win theory � “Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial” � French students might not be marching today. They might wonder why they’d want to spend the rest of their lives (well, at least until they retire in their 50’s) working for someone who doesn’t want them around.

Posted at 6:22 PM · Comments (0)

March 21, 2006 - Copyright Spiegel

A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

Beijing’s Unwanted Best Seller

By J�rgen Kremb in Beijing

People across China are trying to uncover the name of the mystery author behind the much-discussed best seller “Wolf Totem,” which has sold millions of copies. The tome’s author is a known Chinese dissident who is writing under the nom de plume Jiang Rong. If he had used his real name, the book never would have been published.

That is the subject of fiery discussions among China’s history-obsessed readers, its critical intellectuals and growth-drunk industrial moguls.

The country’s Han Chinese, who make up a majority of the population of the People’s Republic, are a compliant herd of sheep that had to learn from the tyranny of Mongolian wolves — at least according to the main theory of the 650-page tome “Wolf Totem.” The book is currently breaking all sales records and, except for the Mao Bible, no publication has attracted more readers in China. Since first appearing in 2004, the book’s author, who hides behind the pseudonym Jiang Rong, has pulled in 10 literature prizes for his crude combination of autobiography, animal stories and ethnological observations of the Mongolian plains. The best voices of Radio Beijing have read the 12-part audio book during the broadcaster’s “Gold Time,” its best time slots. Some 4 million volumes are now in circulation.

It’s the kind of success story the Communist Party loves to hear about. Foreign publishers are engaging in bidding wars for the translation rights to the novel. One Tokyo publisher forked out $300,000 for the comic rights alone. Penguin Books, which plans to publish the English translation, set a Chinese record when it paid an advance of $100,000 for the world-wide English rights to the book. And Bertelsmann’s Random House division ponied up �20,000 for the German rights.

Yet despite all the success, there’s a hitch — Jiang Rong refuses to take part in the marketing of the book, regardless of whether it’s the Communist Party’s propaganda machine or a foreign publishing house. The aging author may have scored a best seller his first time up to bat, but he’s no wolf. The 60-year-old sits on a rattan stool in a bamboo garden in Western Beijing — as shy and reserved as the Panda bears for which his country is famous.

From dissident to author

“Photos?” — No, not for publication, just for memories, he says. “I hate all the hype. I almost had a heart attack just writing the thing.” He gave away the theatrical rights — an appearance at the premiere would have been a nightmare for him. Only five people — including his wife — know who is behind the pseudonym. The political scientist, who works at a major university in the capital city, invited SPIEGEL ONLINE to his house for an interview. The author has not yet revealed his true identity to Chinese journalists, and he spoke on the condition that this publication also agree not to do so. Under his real name, the Chinese censors would have never approved the book’s publication. Following the student uprising and massacre at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, Jiang was placed in jail for two years. Today, he is still prohibited from teaching. Nor is he allowed to hold a passport or leave the country.

The Communist Party accused him of belonging to the circle of dissidents that sought to persuade the country’s Communists to introduced democratic reforms during the spring of 1989. His intellectuals offense? Attempting to peacefully transform the Communist Party into one that adhered to the principles of social democracy.

Understandably, he exercised great caution when he sat down to write his book. Almost six years ago, his wife, a major fixture on the Chinese cultural scene, began noticing odd changes in her husband’s behavior. At first, she chalked it up to his age. “Suddenly he began locking himself in his office every day and refused to tell me what he was doing.”

Inside the six square-meter room, and hemmed in by towering bookshelves, the political scientist began soul searching, helped along by behavioral studies, ecology and the history of the Mongolian plains. The result is a kind of Chinese wolf dance, an autobiography of a young Chinese man who tries to live with the wolves.

The life of the wolves

After growing up in Mao Zedong’s communist Beijing, Jiang Rong fled the madness of the Cultural Revolution by volunteering for work in the Mongolian grasslands, where he lived with a nomadic family.

One day he decided to ignore the advice of the clan chief and set off mindlessly into the wilderness on his own. Without realilzing it, he stumbled onto the hunting grounds of a pack of wolves. Through a mixture of terror and fascination, a young Jiang watched as the predators cleverly chased a herd of sheep over a cliff to their death. The corpses were dragged into a cave to be saved like frozen food to provide winter nourishment for the wolves.

He was fascinated, and from then on he began studying the wolves’ lives. His tragic and melancholic attempt to domesticate one of the wild animals is perfect for the Hollywood screen — especially the moment when he realizes that taming one of the clever beasts is akin to killing it.

The book’s damning societal critique doesn’t begin until he describes how soldiers arrived on the steppe from the capital city and forced the Mongolian nomads to abandon their nature-based lifestyle. Jiang has to accompany the uniformed men during a wolf hunt and watch as it transforms into a gory attempt at extermination.

As more soldiers arrive, the number of wolves killed increases. Just as in Tibet, the colonization by the Chinese causes an ecological disaster for the intact natural landscape of Inner Mongolia. Chinese settlers transform the steppe into fields, but without the wolves, rats quickly become a plague. Wild sheep graze until the meadows are dust. Mongolian sand storms glide over Beijing to Seoul. Once a mere parable, the story is now reality every spring, an example of the serious impact China’s uncontrolled explosive economic growth is having on its neighbors.

Ideological misunderstandings

But the gifted storyteller doesn’t just leave readers with a bleak outlook. A 60-page call to action attached to the end of his book reminds local literary critics of the book “Huang Shan.” “Huang Shang” is the anthology of cultural criticism penned by leading Chinese intellectuals that provided the ideological kindling for what would become the fires of the student revolt in 1989.

Jiang’s theory: the Han Chinese have become patient lambs, willing to accept any leadership rather than seize the reins and sculpt their own future, as wolves would.

But this can also be misinterpreted. Kai Strittmater of the S�ddeutsche Zeitung felt the book laid the groundwork for the Latin Americanization of China — a transformation from a communist dictatorship to a fascist government. Nonsense, counters the author, pointing to his history as a critical left-wing thinker.

But since the publication of “Wolf Totem,” at least four books aimed at China’s management elite have asked the same question: “How can we use the wolves’ strategy to make China even more successful?” The government has used the propaganda apparatus of the Central Committee to disclose the fact that members of the powerful Politburo have studied the book and deemed it a “significant work.”

All of this happened, of course, before the country’s security agency sent a highly classified dossier to the country’s political chiefs, divulging just who had written about his dances with wolves. Once Jiang’s identity had been revealed, publishers were told they could no longer publish books under pseudonyms unless the central censors had been made aware of an author’s true identity — and political leanings. The directive came too late to stop Jiang Rong’s success.

Translated from the German by Andrew Bulkeley

Posted at 10:16 PM · Comments (0)

trans. R.D.V. Glasgow [ Buy from the London Review Bookshop ] � Polity, 206 pp, �25.00

In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universe orderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world. Martha Freud was a paragon among wives. There is nothing more liberating from domestic drudgery and the guilt that coes of avoiding it than having a cleaning lady who loves cleaning, a child-carer who�s content with child-care, a homebody who wants nothing more than to be at home. And Martha Freud was all those things. Quite why she was those things is something that er husband might have been the very person to investigate, but Freud was nobody�s fool and knew when to leave well alone in the murkier regions of his personal life � especially that dark continent in his mind concerning women. Freud mentioned in passing in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss (to whom he wrote that no woman had ever replaced the male comrade in his life), that at the age of 34, after the birth of her sixth child in eight years, Martha was suffering from writer�s block. Impossible to imagine why. But like other mysteries about Martha�s life, this new biography does not (or perhaps cannot because some of the source material remains unavailable) elaborate on what she might have been trying to write. A shopping list, I expect. Unless it was that book about interesting new ways she had thought of for interpreting her dreams, which she worked on in those odd moments when the children weren�t down with chickenpox or needing their stockings mended.

History tells of Mrs Freud � the wife � as a devoted domestic, and there is little in Katja Behling�s biography to suggest we adjust our view of her. The big idea seems to be that we must value her contribution to the development of psychoanalysis as the provider of a peaceful home life for its founder. The sine qua non of radical thought is someone else changing the baby�s nappy. In his foreword to the book, Anto Freud, a grandson, puts it with incontestable logic:

Would he have had the time and opportunity to write this foundational work if he had had, say, to take his daughter to her dancing classes and his son to his riding lessons twice a week? … His youngest daughter was born in 1895. When she cried in the night, was it Sigmund who got up to comfort her? … If Martha had been less efficient or unwilling to devote her life to her husband in this way, the flow of Sigmund�s early ideas would have dried to a trickle before they could converge into a great sea. Martha always saw to it that her husband�s energies were not squandered.

And if Freud had comforted his daughter when she cried in the night, would Anna have been so desperate for her father�s attention as to devote her life to publishing his papers and continuing his work? Apostles need more than ordinary unhappiness to fit them for their task.

Juliet Mitchell, in praise of the new biography, berates those who dismiss Martha Freud as a stereotypical Hausfrau rather than seeing in her �a highly ethical and decent human being�, though it isn�t at all clear to me that they are mutually exclusive descriptions. As to dismissing her, on the contrary, one wrings one�s hands and weeps over her, or would if she didn�t seem to have been perfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha�s reply to a letter of condolence after Freud�s death that it was �a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possible to remove the mis�re of everyday life from his path�. Like strange sex between consenting adults, there�s nothing to be said against contentment and a division of labour which both parties are happy about. We must read and wonder at the good fortune that each should have found the other. Which of us would not wish for a Martha of our own to take care of the mis�re in our daily life while we sit in our study or silently at the lunch table bubbling up enlightenment for the world? Then again, who among us would wish to be Martha, no matter how essential her biographer might claim her to be in the production of the grand idea? To be a muse, an inspiration, might, I suppose, have its attractions; but to be the housekeeper of a world-shattering theory isn�t quite the same.

There�s no point in pretending in the light of 53 years� evidence that there was a great originator in Martha struggling to get out. But you can�t help wondering how it could be that she wanted only this of herself, a woman who at her marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacin. Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to-be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested in music and painting, and had no shortage of suitors. When Freud became obsessively suspicious of her brother (and the husband of Freud�s sister), Eli, who controlled the Bernays�s finances, he insisted, on pain of ending their relationship, that she break with him completely. She held her own, firmly reflected Freud�s ultimatum back at him, and maintained her relationship with Eli. She travelled to northern Germany to holiday with only her younger sister for company and had a wonderful time in spite of her fianc�s suspiciously heavy-handed use of ironic exclamation marks: �Fancy, L�beck! Should that be allowed? Two single girls travelling alone in North Germany! This is a revolt against the male prerogative!� But as soon as they were married Freud forbade his devoutly Orthodox Jewish wife to light the sabbath candles. It wasn�t until the first Friday after her husband�s death that she lit them again. What do women want is one thing, but the real question is what made Martha run: run the household, the children, the travel arrangements, the servants, and with never a word of complaint except a mildly expressed bafflement at her husband�s choice of profession. �I must admit that if I did not realise how seriously my husband takes his treatments, I should think that psychoanalysis is a form of pornography.�

Marriage, they say, changes people, and it does look as if Martha Bernays might have had the makings of another woman � at any rate, another life � altogether. What this otherwise rather dutiful biography (the mirror of its subject, perhaps) does offer us is a glimpse (but sadly very little more) of the by no means uninteresting Bernays family and their oldest daughter, Martha, before she became the other Mrs Freud. Three of Martha�s six siblings died in infancy; her oldest brother, Isaac, was born with a severe hip disorder and walked on crutches; and the next brother, Eli, was not much liked by his mother. When Martha was six, her father, Berman Bernays, was imprisoned for fraudulent bankruptcy after some shady dealings on the stock market. Two years later, the family moved away from the public shame in Hamburg to Vienna, and Martha recalled hearing the �sizzling of her mother�s tears as they landed on the hot cooking stove�. She was teased at her new school for her German diction. Isaac died when Martha was 11, and seven years later Berman collapsed in the street, dying of �paralysis of the heart� and leaving the family without an income. Berman�s brothers had to support them, and Eli took over his father�s job in order to help out. Not an uneventful childhood, not lacking in trauma to be lived through. There are all sorts of pain and difficulty there, yet Martha did not take to her bed and succumb to the vapours. There is not the slightest indication that she lost the use of her legs, or found herself unable to speak. And this is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that when her father died, her mother appointed as her temporary guardian none other than the father of Bertha Pappenheim, later better known as Anna O., who might have told her a thing or two about the proper way to react to family loss. Nor is there any indication that her positively neurotic lack of neurotic symptoms (unless you count obsessive compulsive caring for her husband�s welfare) struck the father of psychoanalysis as worth a paper or two.

What Sigmund and Martha had in common were families embroiled in shadowy financial scandals. Freud�s uncle was imprisoned for trading in counterfeit roubles, and persistent rumour had it that his father was implicated in the scam. The way both dealt with the discomfort of public shame and lived happily ever after together was by embacing a perfect 19th-century bourgeois existence, provided you don�t include Sigmund�s incessant thoughts about child sexuality, seduction theory, the Oedipus complex, penis envy and the death drive � or perhaps even if you do. Presumably itwas precisely that exemplary bourgeois surface, the formal suits, the heavy, glossy furniture, the rigid table manners, ordered nursery and bustling regularity, that made it possible for those deeper, hardly thinkable thoughts to be had and developed into something that looked like a scientific theory. By polishing that surface and keeping the clocks ticking in unison, Martha was as essential to the development of Freudian thought as Dora or the Rat Man. It�s just that she didn�t have the time to put her feet up on the couch, and Sigmund never cared to wonder what all that polishing and timekeeping was about. Martha was not there in order to be understood; she was there so that he might learn to understand others.

Not that women weren�t interesting. Anna O. and Dora were fascinating. Minna, Martha�s younger sister, who lived with them, was someone to whom, when no serious man was around, Freud could talk about intellectual things. Who could have been more stimulating than Lou Andreas-Salom�, Marie Bonaparte, Hilda Doolittle, Helene Deutsch or Joan Riviere? But they were none of them his wife. It is the woman�s place, Freud said to his oldest daughter, Mathilde, to make man�s life more pleasant. Intellectual companionship was to be found elsewhere. The more intelligent young men look for a wife with �gentleness, cheerfulness, and the talent to make their life easier and more beautiful�. (Not Lou, then.) In 1936 he spoke to Marie Bonaparte of his married life: �It was really not a bad solution of the marriage problem, and she is still today tender, healthy and active.� He expressed his relief to his son-in-law Max Halberstadt, �for the children who have turned out so well, and for the fact that she� � Martha � �has neither been very abnormal nor very often ill�.

In fact, it was precisely Martha�s sturdy, if somewhat timekeeping and cleanliness-fixated nature that Freud found most attractive, according to Behling. She was the lodestone, the quintessence, the elixir to which his life�s work was ostensibly devoted. He was the Doctor and she was what the cured would look like. She was normal. Obviously, it would have been extremely trying had Anna or Dora or the Wolf Man been like her. But in his world of psychical distortion, Martha represented what no one who takes his works seriously could ever really believe in: the ordinary, undamaged specimen. According to Ernest Jones, �her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would well deserve the psychoanalysts� highest compliment of being �normal�.� No problem for Martha coming to terms with her missing penis at the right stage of her development, no big deal about transferring her Oedipal desire for the mother to the father. She had adapte nicely to her castration, and although it meant her superego was a flimsy thing compared to that of a man (woman �shows less sense of justice than man, less inclination to submission to the great exigencies of life, is more often led in her decisions by tender or hostile feelings�), it served well enough for Freud�s purposes. Imagine if Freudian analysis had gone quite another way and the master had studied the normality he apparently had so close to home instead of its deformation. What was it that Emmeline (whose bossiness and self-absorption Freud hated) and Berman Bernays did so right? How could he not have been in a rage to know? But what intellectual innovator would want to give up interesting for ordinary, especially when ordinary, if left to its own devices and sublimation of desires, arranged such a comfortable life for him? …

(For the complete article please see the link below.)

Jenny Diski�s non-fiction book, On Trying to Keep Still, will be published in April. She is the author of Only Human, about a patriarch and his wife, among other novels.

Posted at 11:20 AM · Comments (0)

Mar 23rd 2006
Copyright The Economist

IN 1940, nine years before his Communist Party seized power, Mao Zedong
set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would, he said,
take “certain necessary steps”� to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the
principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land
over to the private ownership of the peasants.”� If only things had turned out
this way.

The “necessary steps”� involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of
thousands,maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were
executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their
small parcels of land, but not for long. By the late 1950s, private
land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less
members of “People’s Communes”�. It was an upheaval that, along with bad
weather and a frenzied attempt to catch up with American levels of industrial
production, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.

As our survey describes, China has yet to undo the damage. A few years
after Mao’s death in 1976, the People’s Communes were dismantled. Under Deng
Xiaoping, agricultural production soared as for the first time in 30
years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land
to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation
that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of
urban
China that mesmerises foreign businesses. Since its boom in the early
1980s,
the countryside has lagged ever further behind.

This time, a genuine great leap forward
Deng kept in place two pillars of the Maoist rural order: collective
land
ownership and an apartheid system that barred rural residents from
moving
to
the cities. The latter has begun to erode, due to the need for cheap
labour
to sustain a manufacturing boom. But the former remains firmly in
place.

Now is the time to revive Mao’s vision of a new landowning order. This
would
ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market
economy
the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership
rights,
and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge
economic
benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money
to
boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do
so.
And
if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient
capital to
start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and
encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities.
For
China to sustain its impressive growth rate and reduce inequalities,
getting
the many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land and
into
wealth-creating jobs is essential. The exodus would help those left
behind
to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently.

No government, least of all the control freaks who run China, would
embark
on such a momentous exercise lightly. Communist Party ideologues are
all
too
aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be
destabilising.
They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a
rural
landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and
descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing
up
crime.

Some officials also see collective ownership of rural land as one of
the
few
remaining badges of China’s professed “socialism”, and fear the
explosion
of
divisive political debate if this bit of constitutional dogma is
changed.
In
China’s case, however, it is the absence of reform that is proving
destabilising, as peasants protest violently against land seizures by
local
governments keen to exploit the land themselves. Though materially
better
off than they were in 1949, many peasants say that local bureaucrats
have
in
effect become the landlords, sometimes using mafia-type gangs to push
them
off their fields.

A few opponents of land reform in the countryside say they are acting
in
the
rural population’s own interests. They point to the lack of
social-security
provisions for peasants. Though peasants have limited control over the
land
they farm, in most cases it can at least help to feed them.

The weakness of this argument is that forced appropriations by local
governments have already deprived as many as 40m peasants of some or
all of
their land since the early 1990s, with little or no compensation.
Besides,
the best way to secure the welfare of the peasants is not to keep them
trapped on underworked land but to spend more directly on services for
the
poor. With strong revenue growth, a low budget deficit and a booming
economy, China can afford this. Compensating peasants for appropriated
land
on the basis of market values, not just minimal agricultural ones,
would
help too. And introducing a value-based property tax would persuade
local
governments to worry less about losing the one-off revenues they now
enjoy
from the sale of land rights.

It would be disingenuous to deny that land reform will loosen party
control
in the long run. A decade ago almost all urban housing was owned by the
state. In one of the most dramatically successful economic reforms of
the
past quarter century in China, most is now privately owned. This has
fostered the growth of a middle class that wants guarantees that its
new
assets are safe from the party’s whims. Property owners are electing
their
own landlord committees—independent of the party—to protect their
rights. A
new breed of lawyers, not party stooges as most once were, is emerging
to
defend those whose properties are threatened by the state. Property
owners
want a clean environment around their homes. Green activism, which
hardly
existed in China a decade ago, is spurring the development of a civil
society.

Even so, China’s Communist Party has shown that it will take big risks
if
economic development demands them. Hence the widespread closure and
privatisation of state-owned enterprises in the past decade, with the
loss
of millions of jobs. The leadership knows that China’s history has been
one
of recurring bloody upheavals by landless peasants; it is caught
between
wanting to retain control and wanting to avoid another upheaval. This
is
the
moment to complete the unfinished business of rural reform.

Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights
reserved.

Posted at 10:51 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Wired

There’s a new outsourcing boom in South Asia - and a billion people are jockeying for the jobs. How India became the global hot spot for drug trials.

The town of Sevagram in central India has long been known for three things: its heat, which is oppressive even by Indian standards; its snakes, which are abundant; and its ashram, a derelict and increasingly malarial retreat preserved as a tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, who lived here and was known for tenderly relocating the poisonous vipers that slithered into his shack.

Despite this intemperate setting, Sevagram’s hospital has a good reputation. Though the power fails often, forcing medics to use the backlit screens of their cell phones for illumination, the standard of care is higher than at many of the country’s public hospitals, and the facilities are comparatively plush. At the nearby government medical center in Nagpur, for instance, patients sometimes have to sleep on mattresses on the floor.

Last year, Sevagram began garnering even more cachet. A German pharmaceutical company called Boehringer Ingelheim, whose latest stroke-prevention drug was making its way through the clinical pipeline, approved the town’s hospital as a trial site - one of 28 in India recruiting stroke victims to round out the company’s 18,500-person study.

The drug regimen, known as Aggrenox, was being tested for its ability to forestall a second stroke. S. P. Kalantri, the doctor tapped to lead the trial in Sevagram, quickly grasped the offer’s appeal. Patients in Sevagram are poor enough that the benefits of taking part in the study would amount to a health care windfall; among other things, Boehringer Ingelheim guaranteed participants two physicals during each of the three years that the trial would run. For each person enrolled, moreover, the hospital would receive 30,000 rupees (about $665) - no small amount, given the puny budget of the center’s stroke ward, a single room of eight pallet beds. Kalantri talked the matter over with the chair of the hospital’s ethics committee, and the two concluded that the trial drug itself, with its possible side effects and limited efficacy, would provide little benefit to their patients. Then they went ahead and signed up.

When I arrive in Sevagram on a typically sweltering October afternoon, Kalantri is midway through a busy day. That morning, he attended to a farmer who had been bitten on the heel by a viper while sleeping, and then to a woman who had drunk a quart of insecticide in a suicide attempt. He also checked on his regular patients: a man with cerebral malaria, two women with unexplained fevers, and a stroke patient who had hemorrhaged. When I ask what treatment he gave to the stroke victim, he seems surprised. “Nothing,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Though hemorrhagic strokes are untreatable - drugs can’t undo the damage - Kalantri’s response echoed a more persistent frustration: that patients are too poor to pay for medicine. Because of this, one of the alluring features of a clinical trial is that subjects are supplied with the test drug for free. And while the medication on offer isn’t always a very useful one, there’s still the chance that it will do some good.

This casual optimism contrasts sharply with the attitude in the West, where the number of patients willing to sign up for clinical trials is abysmally low. Just 3 percent of cancer patients opt to join trials, and the number of US patients who sign up for cardiac trials has plunged by half over the past five years.

Such reticence has created a problem for the pharmaceutical industry. Modern drug design may be a sophisticated enterprise, harnessing technology that didn’t even exist a decade ago, but one part of the process remains the same: The only way to tell how well a medication really works is to feed it to a sick person. This process, the human clinical trial, is the largest and creakiest part of the drug making machine - a mammoth lab experiment that succeeds by brute statistical force. To make it run, companies have to round up a large number of ailing people and then convince them to swallow an unproven remedy with uncertain side effects.

The experiment unfolds in three stages: Phase I, when a compound is safety-tested on a few dozen healthy people; Phase II, conducted on a slightly larger group of mildly ill subjects; and Phase III, which is the most extensive. Involving thousands of subjects and taking up to seven years to complete, Phase III trials are the make-or-break point for new medicines and, because of their size, the hardest to fill with patients. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that discoveries of rare side effects (including lethal ones, like strokes and heart attacks caused by the arthritis drug Vioxx) have pushed companies to conduct ever larger studies. In the 1980s, a new drug typically was tested on 1,300 volunteers in a total of 30 trials. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had swelled to 4,200 patients and 68 trials.

“Twenty years ago, drugs were dropping the cardiac mortality rate from 20 percent to 15 percent,” says Dhiraj Narula, medical director of Quintiles ECG, a contract-research firm that organizes trials for major multinationals. “Today we’re looking at drugs that will take you from 6 percent mortality to 5 percent. To prove an effect that subtle, in a way that’s statistically robust, you need a lot of patients in your sample.” One cardiac drug study was conducted on a whopping 41,000 subjects.

The result is a bottleneck that Narula argues is impeding the arrival of important cures. Herceptin - an exceptionally effective breast cancer drug - languished in trials for years because its maker, Genentech, reportedly couldn’t recruit enough patients to test it.

Like many in the pharmaceutical industry, Narula believes that the solution to the slow pace of drug trials lies in outsourcing. As many as half of all clinical trials are already conducted in locations far from the pharmaceutical companies’ home base, in countries like India, China, and Brazil. And many industry analysts expect the market to skyrocket, particularly as expanding libraries of genetic information increase the number of drugs coming out of the lab. The consulting firm McKinsey calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5 billion by 2010.

Enticed by numbers like these, developing countries have been scrambling to catch Big Pharma’s eye - India most aggressively of all. Like high tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India’s computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth - a money train that the country can’t afford to miss. With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India’s most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, “treatment naive,” meaning they’ve never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug inter actions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another.

Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. That law allowed companies to test drugs on Indian patients only after the drugs had been proven safe in trials conducted in the country of origin. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.

The headquarters of Sevagram’s Aggrenox trial, located around the corner from the hospital’s intensive care unit, is low on frills. A drooling corner sink and two elderly computers list against the water-stained walls, under the benevolent gaze of a small plastic bust of Gandhi. A handful of scientific papers have been tacked to the wall, where they hang unstirred by a sluggish fan. Since recruitment for the trial began in January 2005, Kalantri has signed up 44 stroke victims, a quarter of the number that have come through the hospital.

Nonetheless, Kalantri is uneasy about his clinical success. “Patients here are very passive,” he reflects. “They will almost never question their doctor.” Indeed, one woman who joined the trial six months ago sits patiently for more than an hour while Kalantri translates my questions, before revealing that she is suffering from aches and fever that are likely malaria. Such deference is hard to imagine in US patients - a querulous lot - and it makes Kalantri’s position tricky. “Nine out of 10 times,” he says, “the patient will just ask me to make the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a physician, concentrating on what’s best for the patient? Or am I a researcher interested in recruiting patients? I try to balance the two sides, but …” He shrugs. “It’s a dichotomy.”

Kalantri began worrying about such matters not long after he started recruiting patients for Boehringer Ingelheim. The previous year, he had overseen a trial for Reviparin, an anticlotting drug that improves the health of one out of 65 cardiac patients within 30 days of a heart attack. The trial was enormous: Nearly 16,000 patients participated, half of them from India. When the trial ended, however, Kalantri wondered whether he had served his patients well by enrolling them. At 800 rupees a day, the drug they had taken was too expensive for any of them to afford. Plus, even when it worked, it showed results for just a month. Such a minute and costly improvement might make sense in the US, Kalantri felt, but was it really the kind of medication that poor Indians should be testing? “The biggest problems around here are snakebite and insecticide poisoning,” he points out. “We could really use a trial for one of those.”

Kalantri is in a good position to observe such discrepancies. He grew up in the neighboring town of Wardha, 15 minutes away by auto-rickshaw, and got his training at the local medical college in Nagpur - a city whose main claim to fame is a survey plaque declaring it to be India’s geographical center. He is a slight man, with a philosophical and conscientious manner. His wife is a database administrator for the hospital in Sevagram, and last year the older of their two children started attending medical school there. Although Kalantri could probably work elsewhere - in 2004, he did a stint at UC Berkeley, working on his master’s in public health and collaborating on a tuberculosis study that was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association - he remains attached to the rural hospital he joined 20 years ago. “I found my peace of mind here,” he says.

Initially, Kalantri says, he was excited by the idea of bringing clinical trials to Sevagram and liked the prospect of turning his hospital into a research center. “Drug trials can teach residents proper record-keeping and help them understand how to associate clinical care with research,” he notes. When I first called him, shortly after a record rainy season, he mentioned that the emergency ward contained a number of patients with a mysterious fever - one that epidemiological tests had been unable to identify. “It would be good to study it,” Kalantri murmured, sounding a bit regretful. “Maybe we will, one day.”

Bringing trials to India, moreover, struck him as medically important. A Nature Genetics article had recently surveyed 29 drugs whose efficacy and side effects varied in different racial or ethnic populations. Perversely, testing drugs exclusively on Americans and western Europeans could almost seem colonial.

Little by little, however, Kalantri began to see the problematic side of outsourced trials. “When I try to explain that a drug is experimental, that it might not work, the understanding is not there,” he observes. “One woman said to me, ‘What do you mean, the drug might not work? All drugs work!’”

Poorly paid doctors can also find the financial rewards of a trial hard to resist - particularly since pharma companies reward high enrollments with prizes like vacations to Hawaii and Europe. “A lot of private hospital doctors have suddenly become ‘researchers,’” Kalantri notes. “They will enroll almost anybody and recruit for almost any trial, whether or not it helps the patient.” And while the money earned from a trial in Sevagram goes to the hospital, elsewhere it may be paid to the doctor. “A lot goes into personal bank accounts,” he says.

Na�vet� and corruption are hardly unique to India, of course. They’re the early story of almost any developing industry, when regulation is still too flimsy to check the horses of rapid progress. Compared to a country like China, for instance, India is alert to the potential for exploitation and has made at least some effort to safeguard its citizens. Programs to train clinicians in World Health Organization-standard Good Clinical Practice - a set of international rules covering patient rights and data management - have sprung up around the country. In addition, all trials must ostensibly be cleared by a local review board that includes one doctor, one lawyer, and one pharmacist, as well as a housewife and a social worker.

In practice, however, policing trials is not easy. The enforcement staff of the Drugs Controller General of India - the equivalent of the US Federal Drug Administration - consists of just three pharmacists. And the country has little history of keeping medical care independent of the pharmaceutical business. The largest cardiac hospital in India, Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre, is a division of the massive Indian pharmco Ranbaxy.

“Are patients here more vulnerable?” asks Brijesh Regal, CEO of the New Delhi-based firm Apothecaries, which runs clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. “Obviously. They’re poor. They’re illiterate.” Nonetheless, he argues, most of the problems can be attributed to the growing pains of a new industry. He points to the thalidomide fiasco in the 1950s - women who were given the drug for morning sickness delivered children with severe birth defects - as evidence that every developing industry has problems. “Why are we so concerned about India?” he asks. “If problems happened everywhere else, they will happen here. We are a massive country without a lot of regulatory infrastructure.”

Regal’s willingness to accept collateral damage may seem chilling, but it has some historical precedent. The path of medical progress is strewn with cases of questionable ethics, desperate practices, and misguided experimentalism, if not outright exploitation. And since patients with the fewest options are invariably the ones most likely to try (or be forcibly volunteered for) risky new treatments, be it an artificial heart, an unproven pill, or a radical lobotomy, they’re also the ones who bear the brunt of medicine’s experimental nature. In this light, outsourcing trials to a country where decent medical care is scarce, and medication scarcer, is just the globalization of an old equation.

Kalantri, meanwhile, finds himself stuck in the uncomfortable role of gatekeeper. “Every week, I get a call: ‘Do you want to participate in this trial?’” he says. So far, he has turned down one anti-osteoporosis trial and another for a drug that might improve patient survival after a heart attack. He declined, he explains, because the studies “don’t make sense for India.” Finding better treatments for osteoporosis and high cholesterol is important, he adds. “But these are diseases that will cause problems at 40 or 50. Infectious diseases like malaria and filariasis kill at 20, and they’re much more common here.”

Kalantri is also troubled by what he sees as skewed trial demographics. “Ninety percent of patients being recruited in India are poor,” he says. “That’s the reality. Trials enroll very few patients who are rich, literate, and capable of asking awkward questions.”

But even as Kalantri has grown more selective, other Indian doctors are moving in the opposite direction. And at his own hospital, Kalantri’s pickiness has been a subject of debate. “Some of my colleagues are not exactly happy with these decisions,” he sighs. “The extra money could be used to build the department.”

Finding a dollar amount that compensates medical centers properly - covering costs like blood tests and the extra time a doctor must spend with study patients, without amounting to a bribe - is tricky, Kalantri says. He confesses that he has turned down trials because they paid too little. Nonetheless, when a representative from Boehringer Ingelheim visited to check up on the paperwork, Kalantri felt compelled to mention that the amount the company was offering per patient seemed high. The rep looked at him in surprise. “You’re the first person to say that,” she said, giving Kalantri a puzzled smile. “Everyone else has asked for more.”

Jennifer Kahn (jenn_kahn@wiredmag.com) is a contributing editor. Her profile of hacker Adrian Lamo (issue 12.04) was selected for Best American Science & Nature Writing 2005

Posted at 10:43 PM · Comments (0)

THE ZEIT GIST

Japan is officially shrinking. Last October’s census found 19,000 fewer Japanese than the previous year; the first time, barring the catastrophic year of 1945 that the population has dropped since censuses began in 1920.

Police stand watch over a march held in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward earlier this month seeking more rights for foreign workers.
The peak population figure of 127.75 million may well one day be burned into the brains of future students. By 2050 that is expected to fall to 100 million and some alarmist predictions have the last Japanese switching off the lights sometime in the next century.

Of course such doomsday scenarios seldom materialize but the shrinking population already has consequences, notably on the country’s creaking pension and health systems, which face collapse under the strain of an inverted population pyramid.

Other signs of strain are all around, for those looking.

“Old people died in the heavy snowfalls during winter because their roofs were laden with snow,” says the former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau Hidenori Sakanaka.

“In the past, young people would have cleared that snow, but there are no youngsters left in the countryside.”

Alarmed at such developments and the stubbornly low fertility rate, which slipped to 1.28 in 2004 Sakanaka recently poked his head above the bureaucratic barricades, suggesting that Japan allow in 20 million immigrants over the next half century.

Sakanaka was then head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau; a conscientious civil servant with three decades years experience of controlling the movement of people; not the most promising source for radical solutions to social problems.

Yet amid the careful language in his book, “Nyukan Senki” (“Immigration Battle Diary”), there was a startling, even utopian message: Japan must embrace multiethnic society and become a magnet for immigrants from all over Asia.

The book followed a 2000 U.N. study which suggested Japan needed 310,000 immigrants a year.

Sakanaka, who retired in 2005 and these days can be found behind the desk of