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Economists question dominance of free-market ideas

Economists question dominance of free-market ideas

By Patricia Cohen

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.

But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washington, questioning the profession’s most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.

“There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

“What I’ve learned is anyone who says anything even obliquely that sounds hostile to free trade is treated as an apostate,” Mr. Blinder said.

And free trade is not the only sacred subject, Mr. Blinder and other like-minded economists say. Most efforts to intervene in the markets — like setting a minimum wage, instituting industrial policy or regulating prices — are viewed askance by mainstream economists, as are analyses that do not rely on mathematical modeling.

That attitude, the critics argue, has seriously harmed the discipline, suppressing original, creative thinking and distorting policy debates. “You lose your ticket as a certified economist if you don’t say any kind of price regulation is bad and free trade is good,” said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done groundbreaking research on the effect of the minimum wage.

Most economists are still devoted to what is known as the neoclassical model. Philip J. Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago — the temple of free-market economics — said the theory and methods were “taught to avoid personal biases and conclusions that aren’t found in the data.” Like any science, he said, the field changes course slowly: “It requires evidence, and if evidence is there, it will accumulate and positions will move.” He added, “I personally have a lot of faith in the discipline.”

But as issues like income inequality, free trade and protectionism have become part of the presidential candidates’ stump speeches, more thinkers have joined the debate. In addition to Mr. Blinder, other eminent economists like Lawrence H. Summers and the Nobel Prize-winner George A. Akerlof have pointed out what they see as the failings of laissez-faire economics.

“Economists can’t pretend that the consensus for free markets and free trade that existed 30 years ago is still here,” said Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at Berkeley who served in President Bill Clinton’s cabinet.

Part of the reason is the growing income inequality and dislocation that global markets and a revolution in communications have helped create. Economists who question the free-market theories “want to speak to the reality of our time,” Mr. Reich said.

Meanwhile, critics have also pointed out the limits of standard cost-benefit accounting to measure items like the cost of inequality or damage to the ecosystem.

The degree to which economists wander from the mainstream varies widely.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, for instance, said, “I fall into the methods of the mainstream, but not the faith,” which he defines as the belief that more markets and free trade are always good and government regulation is always bad. Thinkers like these may come up with controversial ideas but are hardly marginalized. Other economists, however, go much further, and try to chip away at the field’s underlying theoretical foundations. So while Mr. Blinder, Mr. Card and Mr. Rodrik might be considered mere heretics, this second group has earned the label “heterodox.”

Although the meaning of the term is slippery, Frederic S. Lee, an economist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who edits the Heterodox Economics Newsletter, says it refers to those who reject the neoclassical model, which Milton Friedman helped create, and which Ronald Reagan championed when he took over the White House.

Mr. Reny and others point out that the increasing popularity in the mainstream of behavioral economics, which looks at people’s complex psychological reactions to events, has offered a fuller picture of how consumers operate in the marketplace. Still, Mr. Lee criticizes neoclassical economics for maintaining that the market, if left alone, would ultimately find a happy balance. He also takes the discipline to task for relying on abstract theories and mathematical modeling instead of observation and sociological analysis.

In Mr. Lee’s view, for example, oil companies — not the natural workings of the market — determine gas prices, and the federal deficit is a meaningless term because the federal government prints money in the first place.

According to his estimates, 5 to 10 percent of America’s 15,000 economists are heterodox, which includes an array of professors on the right and the left (post-Keynesians, Marxists, feminists and social economists).

Heterodox economists complain that they are almost completely shut out by their more influential neoclassical colleagues who dominate most American university departments and prestigious peer-reviewed journals that are essential to gaining tenure. There are a few university departments where these iconoclasts are welcome, like Amherst in Massachusetts, the New School in New York and Professor Lee’s home, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but these are exceptions.

The experience of Mr. Card’s graduate students suggests how the process can work. Mr. Card is by no means on the fringe, but he said his research on the minimum wage in New Jersey “caused a huge amount of trouble.” He and Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton, found that contrary to what free-market theory predicts, employment actually rose after an increase in the minimum wage.

When Mr. Card’s graduate students went on job interviews, he said other economists would ask questions like “What’s wrong with your adviser? Has he started drinking?”

This is why Mr. Blinder said he advises graduate students “not to do what I do” when it comes to challenging the standard model.

Criticizing the approach that currently dominates the field, Mr. Blinder said economists must look more closely at the real world instead of modeling it in the lab. “Economics is insufficiently scientific,” he said. “Mathematics may be useful, but mathematics is not scientific. It doesn’t generate refutable hypotheses.” In a recent issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes spurred an energetic debate on the Web by suggesting that some precepts of heterodoxy were being incorporated into the mainstream — even if many heterodox economists were not.

Max B. Sawicky at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a nonprofit research organization that is a bulwark of heterodoxy, wrote in a discussion on tpmcafe.com that, “The duty of orthodoxy is clear: deny departmental positions and resources to inferior research programs and purify the top journals of incorrect thinking, all understood as maintaining high standards.”

This is the point where Mr. Rodrik, who has written extensively on the downside of globalization, departs from both Mr. Sawicky and Mr. Blinder. Although he acknowledged that inflexible rules about how one makes an argument and what counts as evidence can create blind spots, but insisted that once those rules were accepted, there was tremendous openness inside the academy.

The problem is outside, where economists are expected to “regurgitate ideas” about the glories of the free market. Most mainstream economists think that voicing any skepticism or doubt provides “ammunition to the barbarians,” he said, and allows narrow-minded people to “hijack any argument to suit their purpose.”

Mr. Rodrik said he used to worry about this until he realized that “on any issue, there are barbarians on both sides,” so there was no point in shading an argument to “suit one set of barbarians over the other.”

“And I’ve slept a lot better since.”

How Suite It Isn’t: A Dearth of Female Bosses

December 17, 2006
How Suite It Isn’t: A Dearth of Female Bosses
By JULIE CRESWELL
LIKE so many other women who entered corporate America in the 1970s, Carol Bartz simply wanted to make a little money. She did not harbor secret desires to run her own company or become chief executive of a large corporation. She just wanted to do a good job.
After working her way through college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a cocktail waitress (required uniform: red miniskirt, black fishnets and red feather in hair), Ms. Bartz graduated with a computer science degree in 1971. Tall, blonde, boisterous and ambitious, she entered the work force at a time when the promise of new professional opportunities for women was in the air.
What Ms. Bartz says she discovered, however, was that male counterparts and supervisors shook the corporate ladder ever more fiercely with each rung that she and other pioneering women of her generation ascended. But by combining a first-rate mind with hard work and decisive career moves, she managed to duck, bob and weave her way through Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry in the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, Ms. Bartz had become one of the first women to run a large corporation. She garnered accolades from Wall Street and her peers for turning Autodesk into a leading international software company. This spring, Ms. Bartz stepped down as Autodesk’s chief executive, but she remains the executive chairwoman of its board.
Despite her hard-won reputation as an astute businesswoman, Ms. Bartz found herself repeatedly skipped over during a recent meeting of business and political leaders in Washington. The reason was that the men at the table assumed that she was an office assistant, not a fellow executive. “Happens all of the time,” Ms. Bartz says dryly, recalling the incident. “Sometimes I stand up. Sometimes I just ignore it.”
The contours of her long, bumpy journey to the chief executive’s suite reflect some of the gains women have made in navigating corporate hierarchies over the last 30 years, but also illustrate how rare it still is for a woman to get the keys to a company’s most powerful corner office. For decades, the pat explanation was that women simply had not been in the work force long enough; with patience, the pipeline would fill.
A look at the pipeline suggests otherwise. While top business schools are churning out an increasing number of female M.B.A.’s, only about 16 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies are women, according to Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. The numbers are even sparer at the top of the pyramid: women fill only nine, or less than 2 percent, of the chief executive jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
“There have been women in the pipeline for 20 to 25 years; progress has been slower than anybody thought it ever would be,” laments Julie H. Daum, the North American board practice leader for Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm. She says she does not expect the situation to change anytime soon. “It’s not as if we’re in the beginning of something that’s going to explode and that there are going to be lots of women in the c-suite,” she said. “I think we’re still way far removed from where we should be and from where women would like to be.”
No one disputes that more women have highly visible roles as chief executives. During the past year alone, several women joined the ultra-exclusive C.E.O. club, taking the reins at large, prominent Fortune 500 companies. In June, Irene B. Rosenfeld was named the chief executive of Kraft Foods, a job that once eluded her earlier in her career at Kraft; she joined a competitor before she returned to the company. Two months earlier, Patricia A. Woertz jumped from the Chevron Corporation to become chief executive at the chemical giant Archer Daniels Midland. Those two anointments were followed by Indra Nooyi’s ascent to the top seat at PepsiCo.
Even so, those women remain statistical anomalies. And the complex question of why women remain so underrepresented in the corporate suite yields a variety of possible answers. A number of women leave their careers — sometimes by choice, sometimes not — to focus on rearing families. The remaining pool suffers from a lack of networking or mentoring programs, others contend.
Many other women end up in dead-end staff positions, says Ilene H. Lang, president of Catalyst. “Women are almost two and one half times as likely to be channeled into staff jobs like H.R. and communications than into operating roles where they would be generating revenue and managing profit and loss,” Ms. Lang says. “When more women hold line positions, there will be more women top earners and C.E.O.’s.”
Analysts and executive women also say that one of the biggest roadblocks between women and the c-suite is the thick layer of men who dominate boardrooms and corner offices across the country. “The men in the boardroom and the men at the top are choosing and tend to choose who they are comfortable with: other men,” Ms. Bartz says.
Women — particularly those who have made it to the top — may also shoulder some of the responsibility for the dearth of female C.E.O.’s. There is little consensus among them over how to approach the topic of women in power, or, in fact, whether the issue should even be addressed. Representatives of nearly all of the Fortune 500 female chief executives contacted for this article said that their bosses were either “too busy” or did not want to participate in an article about female C.E.O.’s. They said that these executives preferred to be acknowledged for their accomplishments, rather than for being women.
Another camp of women argues that until stories of women landing top jobs are no longer newsworthy — that is, as long as they remain curiosities or oddities — and until women’s occupation of the c-suite reaches a statistical par with men, women owe it to future generations to continue to address the topic.
“The truth is, left alone, I think the situation would get worse,” Ms. Bartz says. “I think the reason you see roughly 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies run by female C.E.O.’s is because there has been some discussion about the issue. If the topic didn’t continue to be highlighted as important, I do think that percentage would slide backward.”
MS. BARTZ, 58, reached a professional pinnacle in 1992 when, after contending with years of what she believed were stereotypes about women’s managerial aspirations, she assumed the chief executive’s job at Autodesk. The company had revolutionized the architecture and manufacturing design fields with software that allowed users to build multidimensional computer models of their plans.
For Ms. Bartz and other women of the watershed generation who moved into senior corporate roles, there were no how-to manuals and few mentors to offer guidance in handling corporate and personal challenges in the glare of the public spotlight. Ms. Bartz and other women say they also discovered that every decision they made — business or personal — was magnified.
Ms. Bartz was born on a Wisconsin dairy farm, where her grandmother raised her after her mother died. She was a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen who also excelled in physics and advanced algebra. And she saw education as a way to escape the confines of her small hometown.
“It was never about wanting to be a C.E.O.,” Ms. Bartz says. “I didn’t know what a C.E.O. was. It was about getting the A’s and getting the education.”
After college, Ms. Bartz took a few odd jobs before landing a sales position at 3M, where she says she ran directly into a wall of men stalling her career. There was, for instance, the time a manager booked her to share a room with a male sales representative during a business trip and then tried to fire her over it, she said. Ms. Bartz had actually quietly booked a separate room when she arrived at the hotel. In her fourth year at 3M, she asked for a transfer to corporate headquarters. “Women didn’t do those jobs,” she recalls being told. After that, she packed up her belongings and quit. A spokeswoman for 3M declined to comment.
During the following years, Ms. Bartz climbed the ranks at the Digital Equipment Corporation before joining Sun Microsystems in 1983. There, she flourished under the culture that gave managers more autonomy to make decisions quickly and shoulder more responsibility.
Kim Polese, who worked at Sun for seven years in the 1980s before helping to found a tech company, Marimba, in 1996, said: “Sun was a culture of true opportunity. I didn’t feel at Sun that the fact I as a woman factored into whether I would advance or not.” Ms. Bartz eventually became Sun’s No. 2, behind the chief executive Scott McNealy, who once described her as “hardly a shrinking violet.” Indeed, she earned a reputation as a direct and tough-as-nails manager who could soften her approach with humor and charm.
That style would become vitally important to her when she joined Autodesk in the early 1990s. She swept into her new role with enthusiasm. Her plans had to be put on hold, however, when she discovered during her first week on the job that she had breast cancer. After undergoing a mastectomy, Ms. Bartz ignored her doctor’s recommendation that she recuperate for six weeks. She did not want to appear fragile or weakened, and she returned to work after four weeks. (Asked about questions tossed her way that a male C.E.O. would never receive, Ms. Bartz said that during a news conference shortly after she disclosed her cancer, a reporter asked, “Which breast?”)
To be sure, there have been plenty of men who have gone out of their way to support the professional advancement of their female colleagues. Maggie Wilderotter, 51, the chief executive of Citizens Communications, a communications services company based in Stamford, Conn., credits an early boost to a male boss who gave her numerous opportunities in the emerging cable industry in the 1970s. During the 12 years she spent at a San Diego software company, CableData, she held no less than 14 different jobs.
“I was able to move from job to job, and that prepared me to be the leader of those business units at the company,” Ms. Wilderotter recalls. “A lot of that had to do with the entrepreneurial founder of the company, Bob Matthews, who built a culture where women were given opportunities.”
One of four daughters of a former telecom executive, Ms. Wilderotter said her early peek into the life of a working woman came from her mother, who worked part-time as a real estate agent in New Jersey.
“I grew up in a household where it was a matter of fact that we would all go to college and a matter of fact that we could do and be anything that we wanted to be,” she says. “I didn’t feel that I had to be relegated to only getting married and having kids.”
Ms. Wilderotter studied economics and business administration at the College of the Holy Cross and, like Ms. Bartz, did not know what career path she would follow. “I never sat down and said, ‘I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ ” she says. “I just had opportunities present themselves to me in my career.”
Opportunities eventually led her to McCaw Cellular and then to AT&T, where she became an executive in the AT&T Wireless unit. In 1996, she became the chief executive of a start-up called Wink, which provided electronic commerce on television. While her career was moving forward quickly, finding the right work-life balance over the years wasn’t always easy.
When she was nine months’ pregnant with her first son in 1984, Ms. Wilderotter jumped on an airplane because a customer refused to sign a contract unless she appeared before him in person — regardless of her condition. After an arduous cross-country trip involving canceled flights and late-night arrivals, Ms. Wilderotter marched into the customer’s office at 10 a.m. and dropped the contract on his desk, threatening to have the baby in his office if he didn’t sign the document in five minutes. He signed, and her baby arrived seven days later.
Today, having raised two sons, Ms. Wilderotter says her husband’s flexible schedule as the owner of a small vineyard allowed her to take on increasingly demanding opportunities as a businesswoman.
“Having that backstop at home was essential for me to be able to do what I needed to do from a business demand perspective, but there were many times I missed the soccer game or couldn’t make it to the parent-teacher conference,” she says. “But my boys have grown into delightful young men and they are very proud of me as a working woman and even the women they date now are strong women. I think of that as a gift to my boys.”
Another legacy Ms. Wilderotter hopes to leave is the presence of more women on corporate boards. Some analysts argue that the key to securing more C.E.O. titles for women may be found in the boardroom. Boards play pivotal roles when it comes to recruiting and appointing chief executives, and they are a power center in which women remain very underrepresented.
In the most recent Catalyst report on women in the workplace, women held 14.7 percent of the director seats at Fortune 500 companies. More glaringly, 53 companies have no women as directors, while 182 other companies each have only one woman on the board, according to the report.
CORPORATE boards remain, for the most part, clubby and male-dominated worlds where members have attended many of the same schools, dress the same and represent a single social class, says Douglas M. Branson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In his new book, “No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom,” he argues that boards can minimize their isolation from larger social issues by adding women. Others agree.
“Women on boards are the ones who pay attention to the pool of employees and succession planning and whether there are women and people of color coming up in those succession plans,” says Vicki W. Kramer, a management consultant and co-author of a study, “Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why Three or More Women Enhance Governance,” that was released this fall by the Wellesley Centers for Women.
Through interviews with 12 C.E.O.’s and 50 women who served on a combined 175 boards of Fortune 1000 companies, the study examined how the dynamics and issues discussed in the boardroom changed as more women were added to the mix. A single woman on a board is typically viewed as a “token woman” and is unlikely to drive female-related issues because she does not want to be seen as a one-issue director, Ms. Kramer says.
The addition of a second woman to the board only slightly changes the environment. The women sometimes feel the need to stay away from each other, worried that it will appear as if they are conspiring against the men on the board.
The tipping point is the presence of three women on a board. “Somehow, at three, gender goes away and they are much less concerned about being seen together,” Ms. Kramer says.
Still, the number of corporations with three or more women on the board is fairly limited. Only 76 boards among the Fortune 500 have three or more female members. Ms. Wilderotter herself started off as the lone woman on nearly all the 14 boards of which she has been a member over the years, with the exception of those at Xerox and the McClatchy Company. She says she is most proud of the fact that she never left a board without a woman on it. “I would finesse myself onto the nominating committee and try to populate boards with women,” she says, laughing.
That includes her own company, Citizens. When she joined the company two years ago, it had no women as board members and only one woman in a senior position. Today, 5 of Citizen’s 14 directors are women. And women hold many of the senior operating positions at the company.
“We’ve all had hurdles we’ve had to overcome, but I also believe you can take control over your own destiny,” Ms. Wilderotter says. “I’ve always tried to align myself with companies that had good, positive cultures in the work environment that supported both women and men.”
At Autodesk, Ms. Bartz felt under intense pressure to perform immediately at a very high level, not only because she was one of the first women to get the keys to a corner office in Silicon Valley, but because Autodesk was desperately in need of a new direction.
Founded by an unconventional programmer, Autodesk was a classic Valley example of a successful company being run by an unwieldy group of innovators. For years, it had ridden on the success of its AutoCAD software product, but by the time Ms. Bartz arrived on the scene, Microsoft had solidified its dominant position in the software industry and Autodesk was struggling to release a Windows version of its product.
From Ms. Bartz’s perspective, being a woman was not a hindrance at Autodesk, but being an outsider among the insulated cadre of programmers and coders was.
But she eventually found her footing, and during her 14-year reign as Autodesk’s C.E.O., the company’s annual revenue jumped to $1.52 billion from $368 million and shareholders were rewarded with an 18.6 percent annualized return on their stock, versus 10.6 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
Ms. Bartz says she believes that a lot of women take themselves out of the race to the c-suite before it ever begins. “There is a whole lot of hand-wringing going on with women,” she says. “They get the high-power degrees and then they drop back because they tell themselves they’re not going to get very far anyway. I think they look around and wonder whether the struggle is worth it or not.”
Finding a work-life balance was also easier for her because she could afford good child care, Ms. Bartz notes. (Her husband is a retired Sun executive.) “The problem with balance is that it only works if you can buy some balance,” she observes.
And while Ms. Bartz says networking played an important part in driving her career forward, she is not big on mentoring programs. “It’s sort of like trying to find the perfect snowflake match,” she says. “Does someone think in order to be successful, they need to act like me?”
Now retired and with her daughter at college, Ms. Bartz says her life has entered an awkward stage. “Before, every second was planned. I’d be pointed to a conference room, told who was in there and off I’d go,” she said. “I didn’t have a minute to spare, therefore, I don’t think I wasted any minutes.”
BUT as executive chairman of the Autodesk board, Ms. Bartz still travels regularly on behalf of the company. She recently returned from a trip to Moscow, where she was surprised to be ushered into a room to meet a top executive with one of the country’s largest energy companies.
“He wanted to meet me. My guys were doing back flips because it was a really big deal to get a meeting with him,” she says, laughing. “That’s the irony of the whole situation of being a female C.E.O. It is so darn hard to get to the top, but you do get the privileges once you are there.”
No one knows that better than the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carleton S. Fiorina, who declared after she had been removed from her job that she had been treated differently simply because she was a woman. Many other powerful businesswomen, however, contend that the polished blonde who graced glossy magazine covers actively pursued and used the media spotlight to draw attention to herself and her leadership at H.P. — in the process becoming one of the best-known female executives in recent memory.
“She lived her tenure in the press, but she did that by design. That was her strategy,” Ms. Wilderotter says. “I guess it’s a lesson in being careful what you ask for.”
Ms. Wilderotter says that for up-and-coming female C.E.O.’s, a better example of grace under pressure is Anne Mulcahy, the chief executive of Xerox who has stunned Wall Street and her peers by saving a company many had written off. “She does not seek publicity but gets publicity because she’s good at what she does,” Ms. Wilderotter says.
Ms. Mulcahy, who has been at Xerox for 30 years, says she was lucky to inherit a company in which “enlightened leaders” long ago had built an infrastructure of recruiting and sourcing and development that has created a diverse team of leaders at the top.
“I feel fortunate because this is a company that understood the value of inclusiveness before it was in vogue because it believed it was the best way to keep talent,” Ms. Mulcahy says. “But you have to keep focusing on it. This doesn’t happen by accident. But it helps to have a culture that has a history of practicing this.”
Looking forward, Ms. Wilderotter says change in the c-suite will occur only if chief executives lead by example and begin adding different voices to their leadership teams.
“I don’t think it’s about mentoring programs or diversity programs at companies — it starts with a C.E.O. who is willing to have a diverse leadership team to run his or her business,” she says. “If a C.E.O. declares through his actions that men and women are important to the performance of the company, the rest of the company takes notice and changes the paradigm.”

Orienting the East

Education Supplement Orienting the East U. Michigan Psychologist Richard Nisbett Asks: Do Asians and Westerners Think Differently? by Hua Hsu April 16 - 22, 2003

illustration: Suzanne Allen

In 1944, the eminent Chinese anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotang accepted an offer from the State Department to spend a year working in the United States. Fei's stint began with all of the excitement and wonder promised by this still-rising star among nations, but as the months drew on he grew exhausted with the fidgety, restless nature that outlined every feature of American life. He returned to China wiser and more attuned to American customs, but thankful that they were not his own: "American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book. . . . Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past. How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people. . . . In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their life."

Fei's ennui would lead to a complete turnabout in thought as he went from a fascinated student of American culture to a strident critic. But rather than causing us to write him off as someone who, say, hates us for our freedom, Fei's comments suggest deeper assumptive differences. University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett explores the psychological dimension of this gap in his new book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (Free Press). "The Easterner lives in a very complex social world where role relations are much more important than in the West," he explains over the phone from his office in Ann Arbor. "The person is literally a different person if they're taken out of their web of relationships. That's just not the attitude in the West—in the West, I'm a bundle of attributes. What I am is my wants, needs, traits, and abilities. I am a package of those things, and I am that package regardless of the social milieu in which I find myself."

Geography rests on a simple premise: Due to a variety of socio-historical factors, Asians (defined as those from China, Korea, and Japan) and Westerners (defined as people of European culture, but mostly focusing on Americans) possess different cognitive approaches to understanding their place in the world and solving problems. Asians approach the world with a holistic, field-oriented sensibility, paying careful mind to an object or act's web of relations and context; Westerners are more object-oriented, training their eye on that object or act's prominence and often slighting the surrounding field.

All of these distinctions trickle down to individual self-perception and mark the different approaches Easterners and Westerners may have to solving problems. According to Nisbett, deference toward field relations and interconnectedness allows Asians to find meaning or peace in contradiction. The stubborn primacy of the individual in Western thinking lends itself to ideas of control, and as a result it's more difficult for a Westerner to leave contradiction alone.

"In the individualistic West, you have the luxury of paying attention just to your relationship to some object or to your own goals, so the social field and physical field become less important," he says. Westerners have a sense of personal control. To the extent there is a feeling of control, it's in league with other people—I have to do this in some sort of harmonious set of relations with other people, I can't just go off like a cowboy."

The idea for Nisbett's work came from one of his Chinese graduate students, Kaiping Peng. Peng, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, believed that there were fundamental differences in the way he and his adviser understood the world, gaps that couldn't be reconciled by culture, religion, or history, but rather through a re-examination of cognition and epistemology. Nisbett explains: "He would propose an experiment to do, and I would say, 'But nobody thinks the way you say the Chinese do,' and I always turned out to be wrong."

Nisbett eventually grew enamored with his own conclusions, and he cheekily describes this period of research as "dancing with the devil." Though it seems fairly intuitive to say that people are differently socialized, and that these differences trickle down to the level of thought and action, it was an unpopular idea in Nisbett's home field of psychology. It was fine to say that people held different thoughts but not that people could possess different approaches to thinking. Nisbett and his graduate researchers collaborated with psychologists throughout the U.S., Japan, China, and South Korea to get to the bottom of Peng's suspicion.

The teams ran a battery of experiments in each nation and concluded that these different cognitive approaches were very real. One of the most basic experiments involved showing Japanese and American subjects an animated underwater scene and asking them to describe what they saw. Japanese subjects made 70 percent more statements about the scene's background, while American subjects usually focused their observations on the single biggest, fastest, or most strikingly colored fish. Another experiment gave subjects a picture of a cow and then asked them to pair it with either a chicken or a patch of grass. Researchers found that Westerners invariably linked cow with chicken since they were both classifiable objects. The more field-oriented Asians matched the cow with grass.

Nisbett points to newer data collected in the past year that would suggest the possibility of change at a young age. "I'm certainly not an essentialist in that I think that these differences are genetic . . . and I'm not an essentialist in that I think these things aren't changeable. We don't know at what point these differences become ingrained, and we don't even know how fixed they are in being ingrained."

You'd be forgiven for regarding Nisbett's conclusions with a wary eye. On the surface, they run counter to the conventions about human difference we would like to believe, particularly at a time when culture and nation are misread as a difference that can only be reconciled by violence. Universalism is good—it sounds fair, bears no grudges, and offers a hopeful understanding of the world. What if it's just a fiction?

Nisbett himself was worried that his work would be interpreted as something that condemned, rather than celebrated, human difference. "Universalism is kind of a religion," he explains. "It wasn't just that I had a deep intellectual conviction; it was really a religion for me that we were all the same. It was very important. But if we are really different, we ought to know that. Otherwise, we can attribute difference to the other person being a jerk, or to them belonging to a group that's inferior in some way."

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Ever since Samuel Huntington's jarring Clash of Civilizations (1996) recast the seemingly peaceful post-Cold War world as an array of rigid, potentially antagonistic cultures, there has been a heightened interest in acknowledging, explaining, and understanding the world's differences. In particular, recent books like Kishore Mahbubani's Can Asians Think?, William Hannas's The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (2003), and C. Fred Alford's Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization (1999) have fixed on that nebulous space dividing Asian and American. Though Nisbett's book glosses over some of the obvious historical or linguistic reasons separating Asian and Western thought—and though it invests itself in a simplistic promise of even cross-cultural exchange—it's a vital contribution to the discussion of how humans differ and how they can get along in spite of those differences.

I spoke to Nisbett the day before the war on Iraq officially began and we wondered aloud whether this was an appropriate time to ditch universalism. Interspersed among Geography's flat details of theory and experimentation, you read Nisbett himself struggling with his conclusions, and you eventually find him relinquishing one kind of hope for another. "Now that I know that we're different, my crusade is a little different," he explains. He closes the book with an inspired call for a more humane globalism, one that departs from foundational differences but aspires toward universal values and compassion.

"It's a little harder to believe [in convergence] today than it was four or five months ago," Nisbett says. "It doesn't seem quite so likely today." He pauses, considering the weight of his words. "That's the hopeful conclusion." send a letter to the editor

The larger shame behind New Orleans

By Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005

NEW YORK The wretchedness coming across our TV screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families. It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans.

The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even George W. Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.

The Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After falling sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Bush.

If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.

Indeed, according to the UN Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.

The national infant mortality rate has risen under Bush for the first time since 1958. The United States ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the CIA's World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.

So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The United States ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

One dispiriting element of Katrina was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing more than 6,000, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."

The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the United States - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.

It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.

None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990s, we made real headway.

The best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the left in exchange for the right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.

Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

In the tsunami region, disbelief over U.S. woes

By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2005

BANGKOK In Aceh, where a tsunami last December hit hardest in Asia, the first reaction to the disaster in New Orleans was sympathy, said Azwar Hasan, a social worker in the Indonesian province where at least 126,000 people died.

"Is there any food there?" he asked. "Any water? I'm really sorry to hear what has happened."

But then he made a statement that is being repeated around Southeast Asia, where America is remembered with gratitude and admiration for its fast, well-organized assistance to victims of the tsunami.

"America is the best-developed country in the world," Azwar said. "This kind of thing shouldn't be happening in America. We are wondering what is going on in America, and why."

Around the region, people have watched the televised scenes from the United States of suffering and chaos with sympathy, with horror and with bewilderment at America's inability to take care of itself.

For some, the scenes from Hurricane Katrina seem to be shaking fundamental ideas about the country's strength and competence. Many of the comments, in telephone interviews around the region, came in the form of puzzled questions.

"How is it possible?" asked Aristedes Katoppo, an Indonesian journalist. "How is it possible that in an advanced society like the United States it is so difficult to provide help or rescue people? How is it possible that this breakdown in law and order could happen?"

He said he felt uncomfortable criticizing a nation in the midst of suffering, but he found comparisons with America's forceful role in Iraq unavoidable.

"Let's just say that it is noted that America sends troops to try to maintain order in distant places, but it seems to have difficulty to do it in their own back yard," he said.

Some people, like F. Sionel Jose, a novelist in the Philippines who has had a long and enthusiastic relationship with America, seemed crestfallen.

"It's very disappointing," he said. "It's something people like me don't expect. Somebody told me they're shooting at helicopters! And looting."

Paulynn Sicam, a government official in the Philippines who has studied and lived in the United States, also sounded disappointed, and angry.

"It's so heartbreaking to see how helpless America has become," she said. "You're not strong any more. You can't even save your own countrymen and there you are, out there trying to control the world."

She said there was no excuse in a nation like America for the suffering and apparent incompetence she had seen on television. "Why are people hungry?" she said. "That really bothers me. Why are they hungry? The first thing you do, you feed them."

She added: "The other thing that bothers me is how capitalism continues its merry way in the light of a disaster like this, with gas prices going up sky high. It's so opportunistic. Is this America? Is this the American way?"

Several people were struck by the social and racial divisions that have come to the surface, a side of America that clashes with the common view of a rich, advanced nation.

"It came to my mind that I didn't see that many whites on television," said Anusart Suwanmongkol, the managing director of a hotel in Pattani, Thailand.

"What you saw was the helpless, the infirm, the poor and the old - mostly black, the underclass," he said. "It's quite a powerful image on television." Like many people, he has followed the coverage closely on local television channels, CNN and satellite feeds of American networks.

"It was quite incredible that President Bush, I think on 'Good Morning America,' was smiling, and that didn't go well with me," he said. "I thought he would project a serious image - the nation needs help."

American hubris may have contributed to the disaster, said Supara Kapasuwan, a college dean in Bangkok who spent more than five years in the United States earning a master's degree and a doctorate.

"I can't say I was surprised," she said, speaking of the failure to evacuate the city.

"Americans - not all of them but many - seem to have this attitude that they are invincible, that nothing's going to happen to them," she said.

Newspapers around the region reflected these views, sharing sympathy while expressing shock and amazement at this unusual view of what one called "the planet's most powerful country."

Home Schoolers Content to Take Children’s Lead

Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Gaby, 9, and Sydney Billings, 7, with their toddler brother, Dylan, make their own decisions about lessons.

By SUSAN SAULNY

Published: November 26, 2006

CHICAGO, Nov. 23 — On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.

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Sally Ryan for The New York Times

Sydney Billings, 6, one of four siblings in Chicago, is taught through unschooling. Her mother, Juli Walter, calls the process “child-led learning.” More Photos »

Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.

In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.

“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”

As the number of children who are home-schooled grows — an estimated 1.1 million nationwide — some parents like Ms. Walter are opting for what is perhaps the most extreme application of the movement’s ideas. They are “unschooling” their children, a philosophy that is broadly defined by its rejection of the basic foundations of conventional education, including not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums and textbooks.

In some ways it is as ancient a pedagogy as time itself, and in its modern American incarnation, is among the oldest home-schooling methods. But it is also the most elusive, a cause of growing concern among some education officials and social scientists.

“It is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math,” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, whose national research includes a focus on home schooling.

There is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students. There is not even reliable data on how many people are unschooling, though many experts suggest the number is growing.

Here in Chicago, a group called the Northside Unschoolers has 100 families registered on its online list. There are similar organizations coast to coast, including the San Francisco Bay Unschooling Network, Unschoolers Unlimited in Guilford, Conn., and the Unschoolers of the Ozarks, serving Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, although accurate figures for the number of families they serve are hard to come by. Adherents say the rigidity of school-type settings and teacher-led instruction tend to stifle children’s natural curiosity, setting them up for life without a true love of learning.

“When you think about it, the way they do things in school is mostly for crowd control,” said Karen Tucker, a mother of three boys who is an unschooler in Siloam Springs, Ark., and belongs to the Unschoolers of the Ozarks. “We don’t duplicate the methods of school because we’ve rejected school.”

Coming under the umbrella of home education, unschooling is legal in every state, though some regulate it more than others. The only common requirement is that students meet compulsory attendance rules.

In states with the most permissive regulations — many of them in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan and Nebraska — the idea of unschooling has flourished in recent years, with families forming online communities, neighborhood-based support groups and social networks for their children.

Members of such organizations form a united front against sometimes fierce criticism from outsiders.

“When you are in a subculture of a subculture, you often get painted as the freak family,” Ms. Tucker said, “and people believe that what the expert says is true, instead of thinking the alternative viewpoint portrayed has some merit.”

Ms. Walter, a natural-childbirth instructor, has had to assuage tense feeling from some of her peers.

“Sometimes people take it personally, like, ‘Oh, school’s not good enough for you?’ ” she said. “No, no. It’s just that this is what works for our family.”

Only 25 states have testing or evaluation requirements for home-schoolers, so it is difficult for researchers to get a representative sample of students to even begin to answer their most basic questions about unschooling. And among home-schoolers, unschoolers bristle the most at the thought of standardized testing.

Ms. Tucker has allowed her son Will, 13, to be tested, but she refuses to look at the scores.

“They’re meaningless to him and me,” Ms. Tucker said. “If you attach a number to your child, your opinion of the child changes, good or bad.”

The Billings children are not graded. Weekends are no different from weekdays, summer from winter. They draw or read or play outside, or go on family outings to libraries, museums or the gym. They also attend activities and take lessons familiar to pupils in traditional schools like Girl Scouts, swimming for Gaby and piano — if they express an interest — but none has seen the inside of a regular classroom.

“I don’t really know what that’s about because I don’t go to school,” said Sydney, who says she likes her life just the way it is. If she had to go to school, she said, “I’d be at school all day and not have time to be with my mom and do fun things.”

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, unschoolers tend not to be religiously motivated. They simply do not approve of ordinary education, and have decided to rearrange their lives around letting their children explore their worlds, unencumbered by the usual pupil-teacher relationship.

If Will wants to pick up a book, Ms. Tucker said, that is fine. But the decision to do so will be his choice, she said.

“The important things that you need to know are important because they’re useful to know,” Ms. Tucker said. “We all desire to get up and learn to walk because it’s a useful skill to have. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that, just an infant. Will had never been given a lesson in reading, but he read at 7. I tell people it took him seven years to learn to read because all of his experiences added up to learning how to read.”

Much of the basic mathematics that Ms. Walter’s daughters have learned so far, she said, sprung from their desire to calculate how much allowance money they would have to earn to buy dolls featured in their favorite toy catalog.

Each child gets a small weekly allowance that is deposited directly into her own bank account, then the adding and multiplying begins. The lessons have inadvertently, and painlessly, extended to taxes, shipping fees and postage, which she sees as another benefit of unschooling.

“It’s more real-world stuff,” Ms. Walter said. “How many kids get out of high school and don’t know how to balance a checkbook?”

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That study did not ask about unschooling. But it found that the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million, from 1999 to 2003.

Experts assume that the upward trend has continued, and some worry that the general public is unaware of the movement’s laissez-faire approach to learning.

“As school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally,” said Professor Huerta of Columbia. “If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.”

Pat Farenga, an author and advocate of unschooling, said the fears were unfounded.

“One criticism I hear over and over is that children won’t be ready for the real world,” Mr. Farenga said. “That’s ridiculous. We’re saying get them out of the classroom and into the real world. It’s not about isolating them and drilling them.”

Peter Kowalke, 27, was unschooled as a child and went on to earn a degree in journalism with a concentration in math three years ago from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

“You don’t know everything, and there are definite gaps in most unschoolers’ backgrounds, but you cover most of what you need,” he said. “And if you find out that you need something that you haven’t studied, you’ll have much more drive to actually learn it.”

“But it can be tough,” said Mr. Kowalke, a magazine writer who is married to a woman who was also unschooled. They met while he was filming a documentary about his educational experiences. “It’s always harder to forge your own path without someone telling you what to do.”

Success Is Relative, and Height Isn’t Everything

Essay

By STEPHEN S. HALL

Published: November 28, 2006

Tallness has always been viewed as a desirable physical trait — so desirable that more than a century ago, Sir Francis Galton began collecting measurements of British schoolchildren as a prelude to his dream of breeding genetically superior human beings. Although his eugenics project went nowhere, his obsession with height survives in a word that has become part of every modern parent’s vocabulary: percentile. Galton both coined the term and developed the statistics that allowed percentiles to be plotted on a growth chart.

Otto Steininger

Since physical size is such an intrinsic feature of basic (not to mention personal) biology, researchers have returned again and again to that fateful intersection of genes, environment and stature. When they throw human qualities like cognition or intelligence into the mix, the combination becomes both fascinating and dangerous, not least because of the half-baked lessons that sometimes make their way from the technical literature to dinner party conversations.

A group of researchers at the University of California, San Diego recently reported, for example, that mutations in a class of genes dubbed Tweedle — as in Tweedledee and Tweedledum — can alter the overall shape of fruit flies; a mutated “TweedleD,” the scientists noted, produced “short and stout” flies. The good news is that this particular class of genes is found only in insects; the bad news is that it reinforces the Galtonian notion of size as a genetically determined trait that can possibly be manipulated.

Such manipulation would look more socially attractive if the mere fact of being taller made a person smarter, as some research has suggested since the 1890s. The most recent researchers to venture fearlessly into the height wars are two well-respected economists at Princeton University. Last August, the economists, Anne Case and Christina Paxson, published a paper called “Stature and Status: Height, Ability and Labor Market Outcomes” that is still reverberating.

Economists have long been fascinated by data showing that tall adults tend to earn more money. Using data sets from four long-running studies conducted in the United States and Britain, Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson present evidence arguing that on average taller people earn more because they are, quite simply, smarter. They suggest that the difference in cognitive ability becomes apparent as early as age 3. “Throughout childhood,” they write, “taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests.”

If this were as true as it sounds, the news would obviously provoke great consternation in any parent with a child smaller than average — a status that most of us, thanks to Galton and his percentiles, know by heart. But it turns out that the Princeton story is a bit more nuanced than that, and part of a very long debate.

As Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson make clear in their paper, many studies have shown that height is not just a matter of genes, but has a lot to do with prenatal development, early postnatal nutrition, and even a family’s socioeconomic status. Indeed, the scientists who study human growth have known for almost two centuries that children who have ample early nutrition grow faster and taller than those raised in more deprived circumstances, and well-nourished children also have earlier growth spurts. Good “nurture” of this sort, including minimal exposure to disease, produces children more likely to reach their genetic potential in terms of height. And as the Princeton economists stress, “environmental factors that are thought to influence cognitive development” affect height.

When you add it all up, it says something a little more complicated than “taller people earn more because they’re smarter.” Someone who is 6 feet tall, but might have been 6-foot-2 with better early nutrition, may not have developed as much cognitive ability as someone who was well-formed and well-fed all along but stands 5-foot-6.

The more accurate, but much less catchy, formulation would be: all other things being equal, people who reach their growth potential in height, whether taller or smaller than average, are likelier to be smarter than those who don’t, probably because they benefited from optimal early development. “Part of what we are trying to do,” Dr. Paxson said, “is to focus on height as a way of getting people to focus on growth.”

Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson offered their results as an alternative theory to a much-cited paper published two years ago by Nicola Persico and Andrew Postlewaite of the University of Pennsylvania and Dan Silverman of the University of Michigan. These researchers concluded that the “height premium” in an adult male’s income correlated most strongly with a boy’s height at age 16. They speculated that taller teenagers accrued “human capital” through athletic and social activities. Dr. Postlewaite said in an interview that he did not know how to reconcile the importance of adolescence in his earlier study to the more recent Princeton findings, where adolescence ceased to be a factor when childhood cognition was weighed.

Perhaps the two studies do not require reconciliation, but rather illustrate how imperfect our grasp remains of a fundamental issue — growth and ability — that researchers have been struggling to understand for more than a century. Our measures of cognition remain tentative, and quantification of emotional or social intelligence does not enter into the formulations at all. While understandable, the economist’s focus on income as the key determinant of success reflects a narrow bandwidth of human value; in economic studies of this sort, penniless artists like Vincent Van Gogh or impoverished leaders like Mahatma Gandhi would be examples of bad labor market outcomes.

The most misleading term in the entire discussion may be “on average”— a fact that Dr. James M. Tanner, the British growth researcher, pointed out 40 years ago. “Perhaps the best analogy is with accident statistics,” he said while delivering, of all things, the Galton Lecture to the Eugenics Society in London in 1966. “No one can tell if he will be killed in a motor accident next week, yet the total number of people who will be killed in this period can be predicted rather accurately. Equally the correlation we are discussing, like road deaths, tells us something of sociological but nothing of individual importance.”

Dr. Tanner suggested then, as Dr. Case and Dr. Paxson did several months ago, that it might be useful to study how development in the womb and early childhood affects intelligence. It was a good idea 40 years ago, it’s a better idea today, and it would help shift the public conversation from relative height, which is burdened with social distraction, to optimal growth, which is about giving all children, small and tall, the best chance to reach their physical and intellectual potential.

Stephen S. Hall is the author of “Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness and Success of Boys — and the Men They Become” (Houghton Mifflin).

British bonds, built at the hajj

By H.D.S. Greenway | November 28, 2006

LONDON
IN "LORD JIM ," Joseph Conrad's tale of lost honor and redemption, the plot is driven by an incident involving the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims aspire to make at least once in their lives. The novel is set when the 19th century was giving way to the 20th in the flood tide of empire. Jim, a young sea-trained Englishman with dreams of glory and duty in the eastern seas, signs on as mate on a steamer taking Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah, the Red Sea port of disembarkation for Mecca.

The ship, Patna, was "as old as the hills . . . and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water tank." The pilgrims, 800 of them from "the outskirts of the East," stream aboard "after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers . . . crossing in small canoes" to fulfill their religious obligation.

Once at sea, the small band of European officers convince themselves that the bulkheads are about to give way, and that they will all go to the bottom within minutes "like a flat iron."

Jim's scruffy shipmates hastily lower a boat and, to his horror, Jim perceives that "the white men were about to leave the ship," abandoning their 800 darker charges to drown. Jim is contemptuous, but as a squall hits he panics and jumps into the lifeboat just before the Patna slips beneath the waves, or so he thinks.

The Patna does not sink, however, and is humiliatingly found adrift by a French gunboat and towed to Aden, after the French crew assure themselves that the passengers are free from plague. For the hajj was an early indicator of the globalization of disease. People coming from so many countries and packed together often ended up as incubators of infection that were transported back to their homelands.

Jim has broken the code of an Englishman, and that of the white man in the East, and he spends the rest of his life atoning for it.

Today, the tide of empire has receded from eastern shores, and the white man's burden, that Jim so keenly felt, has slipped from British shoulders. British responsibility now for the hajj is limited to Britain's own Muslim subjects who do not tread down jungle paths or cross rivers in small canoes, but embark in airliners or chartered flights from London and other United Kingdom cities to the north.

Today, about 25,000 of the 1.8 million British Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, ironically, is about the same number that travels from Malaysia, the country that now encompasses the lands where Lord Jim treaded.

At a briefing arranged by the Foreign Office recently, I learned of the efforts the British government is making to assist British pilgrims, an effort I am told is unique in Europe. The British government sends doctors and nurses, all volunteers, to assist British subjects should they get sick during the hajj. The doctors and nurses have to be Muslims, of course, because non believers are not allowed within the city limits of Mecca, the birth place of the Prophet Mohammed.

The doctors and nurses provide medical care for British pilgrims for when they are on the hajj, and keep track of ailments when pilgrims return to Britain with the ever-present possibility of bringing diseases back with them, as was the case in Lord Jim's day.

The British Foreign Office also provides consular services for Britons during the hajj. Should a passport be lost, or , as sometimes happens, a pilgrim dies, there will be someone from the Foreign Office -- a Muslim of course-- to help when they land in Jeddah, or in Mecca itself.

The "Foreign & Commonwealth Office," in conjunction with the "London Central Mosque Trust & Islamic Cultural Center," issues a small pamphlet, "Advice to British Hajjis," which gives passport advice, warns pilgrims of what shots to take, and where they can locate the British consular and medical teams once in Mecca.

If something goes wrong, "the British hajj delegation is on hand to assist you," the pamphlet says.

In an age when discontent is rising among European Muslims, and terrorism is being visited upon the land, the British hajj delegation is a quiet but meaningful gesture to bond British Muslims and their government, making up for the transgressions of Lord Jim and the crew of the Patna.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Indian brides pay a high price

By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune

Published: October 22, 2006

NEW DELHI Once the wedding guests were all assembled, the father of the bride brought out a large metal tray on which he had piled up 51,000 rupees (in notes of 10 and 50 rupees, to make the heap look larger) and handed it to the groom.

A new television and sofa were conspicuously displayed in the same room, so that every member of the party could see what was being offered from the bride's family to the groom as a dowry. A full list of all the other items was copied out by hand and handed to five witnesses - itemizing all the pieces of furniture, kitchen equipment and jewelry that would be delivered in payment.

Unfortunately for Kamlesh, the 18-year-old bride, who uses only one name, the payment from her father, Misrilal, was insufficient. Her new husband had expected a scooter; his parents had wanted more than the 51,000 rupees - about $1,100 - that they got. During three years of marriage, the requests for an extended dowry settlement began to be accompanied by worsening bouts of violence - until in August, he beat her over the head with a wooden stick, tied her up and locked her in the cow shed as she bled profusely.

Violent dowry harassment is an increasingly visible phenomenon in India.

An average of one dowry death is reported every 77 minutes according to the National Crime Record Bureau and victim support groups say complaints of dowry harassment are rising, fueled by a rising climate of consumerism.

"Everyone is becoming more and more westernized - they want expensive clothes, they want the consumer objects which are constantly advertised on television. A dowry is seen as an easy way to get them," said Varsha Jha, an official with the Delhi Commission for Women.

Although the giving and taking of dowry is banned here under legislation that threatens a five-year jail term, activists describe the law as "ornamental" and point out that it is almost never imposed. Dowry negotiations remain an integral part of wedding arrangements, although, to avoid legal complications, the payments are often referred to as wedding gifts.

Kamlesh has barely spoken since the attack and doctors are investigating whether she suffered permanent brain damage. The Delhi Commission for Women, a government-funded body, is helping her to prosecute her husband, who is currently under arrest for the beating.

Officials at the commission see about 40 abused women every day, and estimate that approximately 85 percent of these cases are related to dowry demands, a figure that they say has grown over the past five years.

"There has been a rise in the materialistic way of life across India and dowry demands have risen to become more extravagant in line with these materialistic needs," Kiran Walia, chairwoman of the group, said. "It is one thing to give and take dowry. But what is really obnoxious is the torture women undergo because the dowry is less than expected."

Disputes over inadequate dowry split couples from every social strata. This week the former Indian cricket player Manoj Prabhakar was in court trying to settle a case of alleged harassment filed by his estranged wife, Sandhya. She says that the Maruti car, jewelry, television, fridge, sofa-set, double bed and cash handed over by her family as dowry when they married were considered unsatisfactory by her husband, and alleged that he harassed her for more from the start of their marriage. He denies this.

"People are getting more greedy and aggressive in their dowry demands," said Jha, of the Delhi Commission for Women. "You might expect that as the country becomes more and more Westernized, this traditional practice would be dying out, like other traditions, but actually the reverse is true. The old habits remain."

"The men say, 'I'll just ask the girl's parents to get me a Honda.' But they forget that then they have to buy the petrol, so they go back to the bride's family to ask for the petrol money. It's not a one- step system; it's a continuous process."

Kamlesh's father had been saving for his daughter's wedding and dowry for 16 years before she married, and was squirreling away as much as he could from his daily earnings as a carpenter of around 125 rupees. The total cost of the wedding and dowry came to around 250,000 rupees, 60,000 of which he borrowed from his boss. When the demands for further dowry payments from the groom's side began coming, it was impossible for him to meet them.

Misrilal said his daughter was being bullied for an increased dowry payment from the start. After her husband attacked her in August, he left her, tied up, in the shed for several days, without food or water, until relatives came to her rescue.

"Within a year of marriage he was beating her because of dowry," Misrilal said, sitting with his daughter in a hospital corridor, waiting for her head wound to be examined.

The burden both of dowry payments and lavish weddings is one of the main reasons why female feticide - the practice of aborting female fetuses - remains widespread in India. Earlier this year a report in The Lancet, a British medical journal, indicated that as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years by families trying to avoid the expense of having a daughter and hoping to secure themselves a male heir.

"After all this torture, I feel that having a daughter is a curse," Misrilal said.

At the headquarters of the Delhi Commission for Women, the chairwoman, Walia, was meeting relatives of a young woman, Kusum Hardina, who set fire to herself a few weeks ago because she felt so desperate at the constant pressure from her in-laws to extract a higher dowry payment from her family.

On Sept. 22, she fought with her mother-in-law and brother-in-law over the dowry and then in a fit of anger poured kerosene over herself and set it alight. As she lay dying in hospital, she gave a statement to the police saying she had done it because she was being harassed for a dowry, Walia said.

She had tried to explain to her parents that she was being tormented, but they told her to stick with her husband. When she told the police, they sent around an officer who beat up her husband, which did not calm relations.

"We gave 22,000 rupees when they got married. But they wanted a color television, a motorcycle and a fridge as well," Asharam, the brother of the dead woman, said. "Her husband doesn't earn much as a builder, but he was greedy for possessions."

"Dowry should be stopped," he added. "Why should you give the husband's family money when you are already giving them a girl?"

Walia has launched an awareness-raising campaign, sending counselors to universities across the capital to alert students to the problem of dowry violence. But she was not optimistic about it chances of success.

"It is very unfortunate, but even educated boys are doing this. The rich set standards for the rest of society. I have no hope that this is coming to an end," she said.

For many Indians, higher education does more harm than good

By Anand Giridharadas / International Herald Tribune

Published: November 26, 2006

It would seem a good time to be Kinjal Bhuptani. She is a college student studying business in the financial capital of one of hottest economies on earth.

But she has no illusions of sharing in India's newfound prosperity when she graduates from Hinduja College this spring. While others land $100,000-a- year jobs at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, she is more likely to make $4 a day selling credit cards door to door.

Bhuptani's mistake, if you can call it that, was not getting into one of India's most elite universities, like the Indian Institutes of Management or Indian Institutes of Technology. Those who are admitted go on to enjoy big paychecks on Wall Street and to manage some of the world's largest companies.

In the shadow of those elite institutions, most of the 11 million students in the 18,000 Indian colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obeisance and light on marketable skills, students, educators and business leaders say. All but a tiny handful of graduates are considered unemployable by top global and local companies.

"We might as well not have studied," Bhuptani said.

The Indian educational system is locking millions of students in the bottom berth of a two-tier economy, critics argue, depriving the country of the fullest expression of their talents and denying students a chance to share in the fruits of reform.

The problem, experts say, is in a classroom environment that infantilizes students well into their mid-20s, emphasizing silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis, debate and persuasion.

Students at second- and third-tier colleges suffer not because of a dearth of technical ability or intelligence, critics note. Most simply lack the "soft skills" sought by a new generation of employers but still not taught by change-resistant colleges: the ability to speak crisp English with a placeless accent, to design and give PowerPoint presentations, to write in logically ordered paragraphs, to work collegially in teams, to grasp the nuances of leadership.

"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, an influential trade body that represents many of India's leading employers. A study that the group published last year concluded that just 10 percent of Indian graduates with generalist degrees were considered employable by major companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.

"The university has become a placeholder," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, a panel advising the Indian government on overhauling its education system.

India is one of those rare countries where you become less able to find a job the more educated you get. College graduates suffer from higher jobless rates - 17 percent in the 2001 census - than high school graduates.

But even as graduates complain of the paucity of jobs, companies across India lament a lack of skilled talent. The paradox is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of the undergraduate experience. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to spit out degree holders that no one wants to hire.

The differences between elite colleges and those attended by the majority can be striking. St. Stephens College in New Delhi, one of the country's best-known colleges, counts among its alumni a well-known novelist (Amitav Ghosh), a top United Nations official (Shashi Tharoor), and a former president of Pakistan (General Muhammad Zia-ul- Haq), and offers an illustration, through contrast, of what lesser institutions lack.

P. Jacob Cherian, the acting principal, said the essential difference was a focus on leadership and communication skills, neglected at most other institutions. As on leading Western campuses, the students have frequent chances to meet and attend speeches by prominent leaders.

"It's when you practice the skills that you actually learn them," Cherian said.

But outside elite enclaves like St. Stephens, tertiary education is an exercise in drudgery. Take, for example, Hinduja College in Mumbai. It is in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, no-name school, exemplifying a middling college experience.

Between lectures, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.

"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," said Sohail Kutchi, a commerce student.

The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as mainstay activities in the Indian economy evolve from pushing papers to answering phones and making presentations. There were few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this purportedly English-language college, the professors used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.

Education experts argue that students are also graduating without the ability to assess problems and find creative solutions, in large part because their professors encourage them to be meek and obsequious.

"Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!" a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up for the duration of class.

At Hinduja, the mode of instruction is often more evocative of a communist re- education camp than a modern campus.

That is bad news for Indian companies, which are on a hiring binge. Infosys, a leading outsourcing company, will take on 25,000 new people this year, from a pool of 1.5 million applicants.

The rejected are likely to include many smart graduates who merely lack skills like communication, poise and global exposure, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys.

"You might be very bright," he said, "but since you are studying in the vernacular you cannot speak good English. You are not taught presentation skills in your college, so you lose out."