debate
Italy pays its people to go on vacation
Sep 4th
The following article by Silvia Marchetti first appeared in GlobalPost.
ROME, Italy — “Exploit your holidays to discover your unique, magical Italy,” intones Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in a new TV ad encouraging Italians to vacation at home this year.
For those Italians still unsure of exactly why they should “discover” Italy — according to Berlusconi, a land not just of “sky, sun and sea but also of history, culture and art — the state has thrown in a sweetener: it will help pay for citizens’ summer or winter breaks by granting “holiday vouchers.”
Berlusconi’s government believes that tourism can be a strategic tool in Italy’s economic recovery, but only if Italians spend money for vacations at home instead of abroad.
The coupons are available to all low-income families, especially those with many children, who wish to go to the seaside or mountains but can’t normally afford it. If the state has its way, visits to sunny beaches or historical cities will no longer be a privilege for the few, but a right of the many.
The new series of coupons can be used from Aug. 23 until July 3, 2011, though they’re restricted around the Christmas period. The Tourism Ministry has set up a website [2] through which citizens can apply for vouchers and book vacations, choosing from a wide range of offers and staying at hotels plugged into the government’s initiative.
Under the voucher scheme, the state grants a holiday bonus varying between 20 and 45 percent of a predefined budget, which depends upon the income level of the family and number of members. For example, a family of four with a yearly income of up to 25,000 euros ($32,000) receives a coupon worth 1,240 euros ($1,585), of which the family pays just 682 euros ($872) — the rest (45 percent) is subsidized by the state.
If the same family earns more than 30,000 euros ($38,000) per year, then it is required to contribute 992 euros ($1,268) — in this case the state funds just 20 percent of the entire vacation.
The binding condition of vouchers is that they are used in travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, resorts, camping sites and the like that have signed up to the scheme and which now number more than 4,500.
Andrea Cardone, owner of a beach campground in Liguria, hailed the initiative.
“The vouchers brought me 15 additional clients this year, all families with children. It makes me earn something extra and the base of my guests widens.”
His colleague Luigi Piras, who runs a hotel-pizzeria in Sardinia, agreed: “This place is quite isolated and in times of economic crisis even one coupon-client can make a difference.”
But not all types of accommodation are favored. Venice’s four-star Hotel La Fenice et des Artistes, close to Saint Mark’s Square, even with the bonuses remains way too expensive.
“So far none of our clients have used the coupons, I guess Venice is just not a voucher destination,” said manager Nadia Baldissera.
In August, bowing to pressure from industry, the Tourism Ministry extended the voucher system to foreigners who are residing — and thus paying taxes — in Italy.
“I personally told the minister [Michela Vittoria Brambilla] that it was a mistake to exclude foreigners at the start,” said Christian Seymons, a Frenchman who restyled a Renaissance country resort near Florence, The Hedgehogs’ Hamlet, and has so far hosted two coupon-families. “Now it’s quite late, summer’s almost over and it’s a real pity because 90 percent of my clients are foreigners and I think they should have as well the opportunity to discover Italy.”
The coupon has the goal of supporting what minister Brambilla describes as “social tourism.” When she presented the new vouchers at a press conference in early August, she talked of “high-quality tourism [3] that blends art, history and leisure” saying holidays are “an important moment for relax, physical and mental wellness, social cohesion and cultural enrichment essential in bettering life quality.”
In introducing the scheme, Italy is following the example set by other European countries, including France, where the recent introduction of coupons has led to a 5-percent increase in demand for hotels and resorts. Since the release of the first coupons in January, some 7,000 Italian families have taken advantage, generating a domestic tourism revenue of 5.5 million euros ($7 million), according to data from the ministry.
The vouchers might turn into a helpful instrument to recover part of the money Italians have spent in outbound tourism. Quoting data by the Bank of Italy — more than 13.771 billion euros ($17,606 billion) spent by Italians during their vacations abroad in 2009 — Berlusconi’s office posted a note on the government’s website aimed at convincing nationals to spend their holidays (and money) at home in order to support Italy’s economy and not that of other countries.
Some Italians are favorable to the coupon strategy, others not. Daniele Bolgi, a 55-year-old Roman shopkeeper with four kids, says he will not apply for the vouchers and suggests a more direct means of supporting struggling families.
“It would be better if the bonus went in our salary so we could spend it as best we wish,” he said.
On the other hand, bank employee Maria Bianchi, a divorced woman with two daughters, plans to go to the seaside in September thanks to the coupons.
Photo caption: Gondolas are seen berthed in the waters of Venice. REUTERS/Sharon Lee
Read more GlobalPost stories here:
Swedish police to question WikiLeaks founder
The U.S. war in Iraq is over. Who won?
Sep 3rd
The end of America’s combat mission, after seven and a half costly years, has raised questions that will provide fodder for argument for a long time to come: Was it worth it? And who, if anyone, won?
It’s too early to answer the first question, according to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Gates, a man of sober judgment. “It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run … How it all weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen.”
For a sizeable group of Middle East experts, the second question is easier to answer than the first. “So, who won the war in Iraq? Iran,” says the headline over an analysis by scholar Mohammed Bazzi for the Council on Foreign relations, a New York-based think-tank. His argument: “The U.S. ousted Tehran’s sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shi’ite government for the first time in Iraq’s modern history.
“As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq’s Shi’ite factions.” As a consequence, U.S. influence has been waning, Iran’s has been rising, and there are predictions that Iran will fill the vacuum created by the drawdown of U.S. troops to 50,000 who will “advise and assist” the Iraqis.
When President Barack Obama announced the completion of the drawdown in a somber speech on August 31, he made no reference to Iran – a curious omission – but said that “in an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners.” In the case of Iraq, only optimists find it easy to see shining success.
Six months after national elections, there is still no Iraqi government, with Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds unable to agree on how to share power and, as importantly, the country’s enormous oil wealth. A squabbling, deadlocked parliament is not much to show for more than 4,000 American, up to 100,000 Iraqi deaths and $1 trillion in war spending.
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, and the neoconservative war hawks who agitated for an attack on Iraq, predicted that the country would become a model of democracy that would inspire the rest of the Arab world, largely run by autocratic regimes, to follow suit. That proved a pipedream. Instead, in the words of Wathiq al-Hashemi, a political analyst in Baghdad, Iraq has become a theatre for settling foreign disputes.
“Iran has said many times … that it will fill the vacuum after the U.S. withdraws. The country has become the target of regional ambitions and interference in its affairs.”
PULL-OUT TOO EARLY?
Which raises the question whether the U.S. has pulled out too early. Like many of America’s foreign policy moves, the withdrawal by August 31 was a function of domestic politics rather than conditions on the ground.
“This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office,” Obama said in his speech. “That is what we have done, we have removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq.” Promise fulfilled.
For Obama, how to deal with Iran’s influence in Iraq and elsewhere in the region is a work in progress. The issues range from the Tehran government’s nuclear programme to Iran’s backing of Hamas, the Palestinian group that runs Gaza, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite organization Israel tried (and failed) to wipe out in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The U.S. considers both groups terrorist organizations.
Early in his tenure, with his prestige riding much higher at home and in the Muslim world than it is now, Obama might have had a chance to tackle Iran the way Richard Nixon dealt with China and strike a grand bargain, putting all the differences between the two countries on the table and resolve them as a package. That possibility is probably gone.
Neither Iran nor its Hamas allies in Gaza were on the agenda this week as Obama convened the first direct talks on making peace between Israel and the Palestinians in 20 months. But the ghosts of both were hanging over the meetings which brought together Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
On the eve of the talks, the ninth revival of a “peace process” that has dragged on for decades, Hamas demonstrated its potential to undermine negotiations it opposes by killing four Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and vowed that more attacks would follow. There’s no reason to doubt they’ll try.
(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)
Two Independents could be the key to the next Congress
Sep 3rd
The following is a guest post by Joshua Spivak, a lawyer and a research fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform at Wagner College.
With Republicans making a serious push to take over the Senate in November, a rare but important development may prove to be the key to the post-2010 Congressional landscape: the Senate may feature two elected members not beholden to the major parties — Independent s Joseph Lieberman and Charlie Crist.
In a closely divided Senate, having two Independents could play an outsized role as powerbrokers and creators of a moderate bloc. It would also be only the second time since World War II that two Independents occupied the Senate.
Successful Independents are very rare in high-level American legislative politics. Instead, they have been much more successful in winning gubernatorial races despite the fact that the Senate has twice as many seats available. In the last two decades alone, Minnesota, Maine, Alaska and Connecticut have all elected Independents. In the 2010 elections, there are at least three serious Independent gubernatorial contenders.
While there have been a number of Independent Senators in recent years, only Vermont’s James Jeffords was able to have any real impact, thanks to switching control of the chamber when he moved from the Republican side of the aisle. Nearly all of these Independent s have been men who left their previous party during midterms in a huff, either for personal pique or for political purposes. These senators then either quickly align with the opposition party.
Most importantly, though, none succeeded in winning re-election as an Independent. One of them, Robert Smith of New Hampshire, quickly went back to the Republican Party after being defeated in a primary election for his apostasy. The only other time that two non-major party candidates were elected was in 1970. Harry Byrd Jr., formerly a Democrat, was elected as a senator of Virginia and conservative James Buckley became a New York senator. But both wound up closely aligned with one party or the other, and neither were important figures in the Senate.
There are two notable exceptions to the dearth of elected Independents, and both won office in 2006. One is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, but is clearly a member of the Democratic Caucus. In fact, in his 2006 election campaign he won the Democratic nomination, but then declined it. So the party left the spot blank, which only helped to ensure Sanders’ election.
The other exception is Lieberman, who claims to be an Independent Democrat and officially caucuses with the party, but is actually more of a true Independent figure. This coming term, he could have company from Florida’s Charlie Crist.
Lieberman and Crist will have been elected under mirror image circumstances. Both are key political figures in their state who have triumphed before in state-wide races. Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination in 2006 to Ned Lamont only to win the general election on an Independent ballot line, being carried to victory on the strength of a coalition of some of his historic voter base and Republicans.
Crist, who dropped out of his primary facing an all-but-certain humiliation at the hands of conservative hero Marco Rubio, needs a similar coalition of his base plus Democrats to pull off his seemingly improbable victory. According to the latest polls, it is looking good for Crist, as he leads in the three-man race set-ups.
What will this mean for the Senate? Crist will probably want to caucus with one of the parties, most likely the Democrats, in order to gain seniority in the committee system. However, he still would need to prove his Independent status to keep intact the coalition of moderates that elected him.
So too with Lieberman. Though he is an established politician and 22-year incumbent, Lieberman might have good reason to want to join Crist in developing a moderate bloc in the Senate. After permanently enraging a large swath of Connecticut Democrats, probably enough to deny him the party’s nomination in a primary, he will once again need to walk a fine line in revitalizing his winning coalition in a 2012 re-election campaign.
Lieberman must appeal to his base of moderate Democrats while at the same time scaring off serious Republican challengers who could split the vote. Perhaps the best way to do this would be to join forces with Crist in a moderate bloc in the middle. The two Independents could leverage their potential swing votes, especially if the Senate is close to being evenly split. If they are able to corral some of the moderates in both parties into their coalition, they may be able to make progress in defeating filibusters, the key task facing anyone wanting to advance legislation the Senate.
Having two Independents elected to the Senate will certainly be a noted rarity. If Crist wins office in November, and the Republicans succeed in making big gains in the Upper House, these two non-affiliated senators could become the key to success in the next Congress.
Is your boss a ‘bosshole’?
Sep 3rd
The following is a guest post by Peter Sims, a former venture capitalist and co-author of “True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership.” His next book, “Little Bets,” will be published next spring.
It has been damn near impossible to find consistently good and objective insight and analysis from business thought leaders. But Robert I. Sutton, a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and the Stanford Institute of Design (where we have overlapped), is an exception.
His new book, out now, is his best to date. Good Boss, Bad Boss is food for thought for managers and leaders in organizations large and small. It is packed with insight, lists of “how to” suggestions, and questions for bosses to ask themselves.
Sutton weaves many of these nuggets together with interesting stories in Good Boss, Bad Boss — while building on his last book, The No Asshole Rule, a New York Times best seller.
Sutton draws upon an impressively broad collection of research, including fascinating sociology research from Rob Cross that shows top performing employees are far more likely to have high energy than high IQs. He also gives some space to Frank Flynn’s research about what kind of boss is most effective — competitive, aggressive, passive, or submissive. “Moderately assertive” bosses win. Those bosses are able to strike a balance between managing too much and too little, something Sutton calls “Lasorda’s Law,” after the former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda’s style.
Most of the book is organized around insights like these, including INSEAD’s Morton Hansen whose research shows the problems with “solo star” organizational cultures and Amy Edmondson’s research about the importance of psychological safety in order to increase decision-making and creative confidence.
Sutton also quotes from Karl Weick, the legendary psychology professor at University of Michigan’s business school, who taught Sutton: “fight as if you are right, and listen as if you are wrong.”
Sutton laces the observations together with illustrative anecdotes about good bosses like 3M’s William Coyne, Pixar’s Ed Catmull, IDEO’s David Kelley, and Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Company – and bad bosses, such as the temperamental Joe Cassano of AIG, whose division lost an estimated $45 billion.
He also shares the best organizational insights and observations he has accumulated over the years such as at Avis, General Motors (a company and culture Sutton has followed closely and astutely), and The Onion. General Motors managers, for example, were distanced from the needs of their customers for years because they got free GM cars, without haggling at dealerships. Meanwhile, writers at The Onion throw out 600 headlines ideas for every 18 that get published — a testament to the importance of creating failure-tolerant cultures.
At times, though, so many insights make the book feel a bit like a cookbook and wind up getting lost in the shuffle. Sutton’s a good writer, although be prepared to dog-ear and underline your copy to revisit the themes that resonate the most.
The best chapter, though, does just the opposite. Chapter 8: “Squelch Your Inner Bosshole” presents Sutton’s unique contribution to the mountains of leadership and management literature – while illustrating the corrosive long-term effects that toxic and bullying bosses (i.e. assholes) have on organizations, Sutton presents a compelling case for the need for good bosses. In doing so, he coins a new term “bosshole.”
“Bossholes make people sick,” he writes before citing a study of 6,000 British civil servants over 20 years that found that people experienced more heart attacks, angina, and deaths from heart disease when bosses criticized them unfairly, didn’t offer praise, and didn’t listen to their problems.
A Swedish study of over 3,000 workers produced a similar finding. “I would call those lousy Swedish bosses incompetent assholes, as they were bad at getting things done and treated people like dirt,” Sutton writes. Sutton’s blend of rigorous empiricism, humor, passion, and catchy phraseology is both memorable and powerful.
So is your boss a “bosshole”? Sutton provides a 20-item survey here to find out.
Housing double-dip threatens banks
Sep 2nd
Another dip in U.S. housing looks likely, bringing with it difficulties for banks and for their government guarantors.
What is perhaps worse: having chucked money at supporting asset markets in order to support banks the past two years, the policy options for handling another housing downturn and banking crisis would be greatly circumscribed.
If you think the debate about more fiscal stimulus is heated, wait until you see the venom which the prospect of another housing and banking bailout brings.
Despite absolutely massive official support, via the FHA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, a now expired housing credit and other initiatives, air now appears to be leaking out of the housing market faster than it is being pumped in.
The recent run of data in the aftermath of the expiration of the housing credit has been terrible. Existing home sales fell 27 percent in July to an annual rate of 3.83 million, the lowest figure in the 11-year history of the data, leaving inventories above a year’s worth of sales even before you account for the shadow inventory of foreclosures and would-be short sales. Nearly 15 percent of all loans are past-due or in foreclosure and 23 percent of properties encumbered by a loan are in negative equity, meaning they have very good reason to default if they haven’t already. Another 5 percent of mortgaged homes have 5 percent equity or less.
Combine all this with a clearly weakening U.S. employment scene and you have the potential for further substantial falls in the value of housing, which, last time I checked, is bad news for the loans that are the backbone of the financial system.
Meanwhile household formation, a key determinant of house prices over the medium term, is going in the wrong direction. When jobs are tough to find and house prices aren’t rising many people decide it is better to move back home with mom and dad.
To be sure, house prices are very sticky and it is hard to forecast where they will bottom. People hate selling at a loss, even if they can afford to write a check to their bank to be rid of a property, and so bad fundamentals may be slow to translate into steep price drops. As well, very low interest rates will give some the means, if not the motivation, to keep paying on underwater properties.
LOAN LOSSES AND MAGICAL THINKING
So, how well are banks prepared for a double-dip in U.S. housing?
A recent report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on profitability at insured institutions starts off promisingly enough, leading on the fact that profits were $21.6 billion in the second quarter, a $26 billion jump from the $4.4 billion net loss of the year before and the strongest showing by the industry since 2007.
Things in the release went rapidly downhill from that cheery start and my heart sank when I read that:
“The primary factor contributing to the year-over-year improvement in quarterly earnings was a reduction in provisions for loan losses. While quarterly provisions remained high, at $40.3 billion, they were $27.1 billion (40.2 percent) lower than a year earlier.”
Banks’ ratio of reserves to total loans and leases actually fell in the quarter, an outcome which would be fine if we were not possibly heading into another recession.
I realize that the performance of corporate loan books has been strong but commercial property is still a problem area. The fact is, with changes in accounting rules giving banks more leeway on how they classify assets, there is very little transparency in what those profits mean and if those provisions for losses are appropriate.
Even after a strong rally on Tuesday the KBW index of bank shares is down more than 10 percent in the past month, indicating that someone is drawing a connection between a deteriorating economy and banking profits.
So, we have a housing market which is well set up for a fall and a banking industry which may or may not be generating the kinds of real profits it needs to put it on a firm capital footing again. Nothing has to happen, and there are reasons why a muddle through may be the most likely outcome. The largest banks still benefit from an assumed government guarantee and may, even if housing relapses, simply take longer to reach health.
Here is the real risk: if banks do require another rescue the political consensus to do it quickly and effectively will not be there. The United States has squandered its opportunity to address the fundamental problems, choosing to extend and pretend and to prop up asset values.
It will be interesting to see what Plan B is.
The Knightian dog ate my recovery
Aug 31st
Remember when business and economic leaders droned on about “100-year storms,” 2008’s get-out-of-jail free card for people who missed the housing bubble?
This was the whole idea that there was no way that people could be held accountable for the crisis because the notion of there being a problem with continual double-digit house price growth and sky-high leverage was just so darned unlikely.
Well, it looks like we have the 2010 version of how the dog ate their homework again and this time it is called “Knightian uncertainty.”
Over to European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet, who in a weekend speech at the Federal Reserve’s economic conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming more or less said there is a biggish chance that he and his peers have no idea what is going on or what will happen next.
“Today, central bankers have to take decisions in an environment marked by a degree of uncertainty in the economic and financial sphere that seems to me largely unprecedented. … The acceleration of major advances in science and technology (not only information technology), the ensuing structural transformations of our economies, the ever-growing complexity of global finance and the overall process of globalisation are itself creating a multidimensional acceleration of change,” Trichet said.
“These phenomena contribute not only to a wider degree of uncertainty in underlying probability distributions, including fat tails. They also entail a much more significant element of Knightian uncertainty — that is, the type of uncertainty in which there is no underlying probability distribution.”
So, what is this Knightian uncertainty and why is it causing the price of our shares and houses to go down? Named after University of Chicago economist Frank Knight, it is the idea that there is a distinction between risks, which you can assign probabilities to, and uncertainties, which you just can’t fathom.
Well, all praise to Mr Trichet, who made to my mind a much franker, more humble speech than Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, admitting the central role and problematic nature of debt and deleveraging in the current economic muddle.
That said, I have a suggestion: much of this “discovery” of there being more Knightian uncertainty is really just a dawning of how little the people who are using the term knew in the first place and how foolish they were to be so over-confident in their frameworks. Uncertainty isn’t rising, not for technological reasons or any other. We are simply becoming more aware of it.
THE DEBT THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
Nicholas Nassim Taleb has been properly excoriating academically minded policy-makers for being over-confident in their own systems, like the guy who bluffs in poker and then complains that you shouldn’t have called him.
“Life is not a laboratory in which we are supplied probabilities. Nor is it an exercise in textbooks on statistics. Nor is it an urn. Nor is it a casino where the state authorities monitor and enforce some probabilistic transparency,” Taleb writes.
“The more events matter, the worse our empirical knowledge about their properties.”
The amazing thing is that central bankers, or at least some of them, are just now getting the courage to admit how little they know and knew about the forces that caused the crisis and the ones that are still operating today.
Up to a point this is because of the pressure of position; too much discussion of ignorance by policy makers might have a, shall we say, destabilizing effect. What would they do on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange if Bernanke stood up and said, “Your guess is as good as mine, fellas, but we’ll do our best”?
There was quite a trans-Atlantic contrast on view at Jackson Hole however; between Trichet who was forthright about the risks of debt and the need for a plan of reduction and Bernanke who was very much still the technocrat, reassuring us that he was standing by, ready to push the right button on the machine whatever the future might bring.
Bernanke seemed to draw comfort from the fact that consumers raised their savings rates more than previously known this year, by which I take it that he sees balance sheet repair as an event rather than a trend. My guess is that savings rates are going up to 8 or 9 percent and staying there, rather than that the U.S. consumer has to pay a little back and then borrow more later.
It seems Bernanke will have his Knightian moment a bit later than Trichet, but it is coming just the same.
Here is one more prediction: next year, when today’s corporate earnings estimates turn to dust, look for more than one executive to blame it partly on — you guessed it — Knightian uncertainty.
Is Twitter work?
Aug 30th
The following is a guest post by Laura Vanderkam, author of “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” and “Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues.” She is a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors. This piece originally appeared on her blog. The opinions expressed are her own.
In “168 Hours,” I talk about trying to distinguish between “work” and “not-really-work.” Work means activities that are advancing you toward your career goals. I like this definition, because it forces us to examine how we spend our hours closely.
We do plenty of things at work that are not-really-work, even if they look like it. A meeting that you didn’t need to attend, or that went on long past the point of diminishing returns is, by this definition, disguised and ineffective leisure time. On the other hand, coffee with a friend, during which you discuss your career plans, is work.
Of course, few things are ever black and white, and social media inhabits that great gray area. I have had an active Twitter presence for about 6 months. It is insanely addictive; I’d estimate that I check it several times a day. As someone who is trying to market a product (a book), I like the idea of being able to casually reach many people, without all the infrastructure involved in maintaining an email newsletter or an actual postal mailing list (so retro!).
But is Twitter work? If I’m tracking my 168 hours, should it be work or leisure?
In the “work” category, I have a few data points. Twitter does drive some people to this blog, where they can learn more about me and my work. Twitter also enables me to scan lots of people in real time — for instance, when I needed to buy a ticket to BlogHer, which was sold out. I searched for people offering to sell a ticket, and (with some help from other folks too), scored one. BlogHer has already produced several media opportunities and it enables me to see pithy feedback from readers who might not contact me directly, because I can search for “168 Hours” or my name.
Reading Twitter may also sometimes count as work in a non self-promotional way. I’ve followed more than a few links myself to things that look interesting. Since I am constantly looking for story ideas, this gives me exposure to articles I might not have otherwise read. I am also reminded, casually, when acquaintances have articles or books coming out, if I happen to see it.
And, of course, when I got an email saying Martha Stewart was following me on Twitter, that was pretty exciting. But there are also several data points in the non-work category. For starters, despite the time and attention I have devoted (willingly; it’s addictive) to Twitter over the past 6 months, this has had a fairly low payoff. Of the past 7,000 visitors to this blog, 90 have come directly from Twitter.
I only have about 650 followers, but several folks with far more impressive numbers — in the 5 figures — have tweeted or re-tweeted links to this blog. So we are talking hundreds of thousands of potential impressions leading to 90 click-throughs. Yikes.
Not only that, many of these people have included my Twitter handle in their tweets. Sometimes, I get a few new followers out of that. But not many. My sense is that Twitter is a bit like workmen playing a radio as they’re doing renovations on the house next door to yours. You can hear it, sort of. But you’re not paying attention.
Twitter veterans know this, so people pile on the tweets (like every 30 seconds) or try to be as shocking or grandiose as possible in order to grab you. On Twitter, every link is the Best Post Ever. Then people come up with strategies and products that organize tweets so you don’t have to see all this. All very fun. But I’m not sure most of it is work, if you generally think you should be earning more than minimum wage for the time invested.
Now, obviously, some people have gotten a great return on investment with Twitter. People do pay attention to celebrity tweets, and people can become celebrities via Twitter. “S*it My Dad Says,” the book based on the Twitter phenomenon, made the best-seller list. For me, though, I think I’m going to consider Twitter mostly in the leisure category for now.
I’m curious to know what other Twitter users have found.
Sunny side up: why eggs are safer in Europe
Aug 28th
The following is a guest post by Bonnie Azab Powell, co-founder of the food-politics blog The Ethicurean who started the Bay Area’s first Community-Supported Agriculture program for meat, BAMCSA, in 2006. She now manages the CSA programs for Clark Summit and Soul Food farms. She eats two runny eggs nearly every day. The opinions expressed are her own.
Reading about the recall of 550 million possibly salmonella-tainted U.S. eggs, laid and packed in just a handful of massive Iowa factories made me think about the egg aisle of a Sainsbury’s supermarket I visited in England, near Brighton, two years ago.
I was so struck by the store signage, which read not only “Organic” and “Free Range” — familiar terms — but also “Barn” and “Caged,” that I took several pictures with my iPhone. My English host practically had to drag me away from reading all the explanatory text included on the cartons: barn eggs are “laid by hens free to nest, perch, and roam in spacious barns,” while “Woodland organic free-range” eggs are “from hens free to roam in a natural environment with trees.”
Not only are the cartons informatively labeled, each egg is stamped with a simple code that tells what kind of system produced it.
It sounded so … pleasant. I didn’t see how anyone with a heart could pass over these visions of happy nesting, perching, tree-scratching chickens – despite being more expensive — for the grim “from caged hens.” And yet as I watched, plenty of shoppers opted to save the pound or more per dozen.
In Europe, the philosophy is “Buyer Be Aware.” But in the U.S., it’s “Buyer Beware.” American food labels have loads of nutritional information, but little that you can trust to tell you how it was produced.
Looking out for the little chicks
In line with its more protective attitude toward consumers, Europe requires any genetically modified food ingredients to be identified as such. Egg operations over a certain size are required to vaccinate their flocks for salmonella unless they can demonstrate that they have strict preventive measures in place or that there hasn’t been an incidence of salmonella on the property in the previous year. As a result, salmonella infections in England have dropped a stunning 96 percent since 1997.
And the European Food Safety Authority has strongly discouraged the use of antimicrobials for controlling salmonella because of the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria. Governments in Europe have much more power to enforce food safety testing and to shut down infected farms.
Whereas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has only recently acknowledged that the routine non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals — which promotes growth — might be causing antibiotic-resistant bugs.
Here in America we even don’t have mandatory recalls. We let the industry conduct its own testing for pathogens, and when it is nice enough to tell the FDA it’s found some, we let the company recall months-old tainted products on its own schedule. We also let a “habitual violator,” as the Iowa Department of Natural Resources called Wright County Egg owner Jack Decoster for his hog-waste handling, keep on making food for millions of Americans. The most punishment he’s received so far has been being fined for animal and worker abuse.
The FDA has new egg industry safety standards that go into effect in September that supposedly could have nipped this salmonella outbreak in the bud. But the standards will still rely on the DeCosters of the world to test their own henhouses. There is a new food-safety bill that the House passed in July 2009 that would give the FDA recall authority as well as make certain inspections mandatory, but the Senate is still sitting on it.
Beyond the labels
When I went back to the same Sainsbury’s six months later, the caged eggs were gone. The chain had kicked them out. The move may have had something to do with two TV exposés of the poultry industry by the U.K. food celebrities Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. But it was still two years ahead of the European Union’s mandatory phase-out of battery cages by 2012.
That’s right. In two years, all European chickens are supposed to be free, free, free!
But the reality behind that pleasant-sounding egg labels turns out to be a little less rosy. “Enriched cages,” which offer nest boxes, litter, perches and only slightly more space per bird are still stacked several levels high and will still be allowed. And those “barn” eggs come from hens that “roam” in a seething mass of thousands on the dirt floor of a huge shed.
At least “free range” European hens have continuous access to open-air runs, which regulations say have to be “mainly covered by vegetation,” and are allotted a minimum of 4 square meters each. In America, there is no binding definition for the term, and many producers use it to describe operations that are more like the English “barn” kind.
The sad fact is that industrial farming is the norm in both Europe and America, and that whenever you have thousands of animals crowded together inside — whether barn egg layers in England or chickens at big organic operations in Northern California — you’re going to increase the risk of pathogens like salmonella.
As the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center website says, “Salmonella bacteria survive well in wet environments shielded from sunlight … under low oxygen tension, such as that found in manure slurry pits … [but they’re] destroyed by the drying effects of wind, by the bactericidal effect of UV irradiation from the sun.”
Experts can debate all they want about whether truly free-range or “pastured” small farms with their natural sun and wind disinfectants are safer than chicken über-sweatshops like DeCoster’s. Faced with a choice on a supermarket shelf of “caged” or a meaningful “free range” label, more Americans just might opt for the latter.
And if they don’t? Well, caveat emptor.
Why the coast is key to the survival of New Orleans
Aug 28th
The following is a guest post by Mark Davis, a senior research fellow and director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane Law School. The opinions expressed are his own.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill the importance of the ecosystems surrounding New Orleans, and their vulnerability to mankind’s manipulations and mistakes, has never been clearer. Equally clear is the fact that for New Orleans to transform itself and create a better future, the metropolitan area must enter into a new, wiser relationship with the land and water surrounding it.
The fate and fortune of New Orleans have always been, and will always be, tied to the coast. In the past, New Orleans has had a troubled relationship with its watery environs. The proximity to the Mississippi River and the Gulf made the city’s founding and its rise to prominence possible. But the risk of flooding from the river, torrential rains, and the Gulf made it a hard bargain with nature from the beginning.
The vulnerability of New Orleans to storms and rising seas has been growing for more than 100 years as the buffering coast began to erode. Because the causes of that coastal collapse are mostly traceable to economic activity such as oil and gas canals, dredging navigation canals, draining and filling wetlands for development, it was easy — indeed, it was policy — to discount the growing risks and to blindly hope somehow things wouldn’t get bad and, if they did, someone else would fix them.
Water also shaped the distinctive culture of the region. The port of New Orleans made the city one of the great points of entry for immigrants, adding a cosmopolitan flavor to the city known in only a handful of other American places. In stark contrast to the metropolis of New Orleans, the meandering bayous, bays, lakes, swamps, and marshes of the surrounding delta gave isolating refuge to Native Americans, expatriate Acadians (today’s Cajuns), runaway slaves, Vietnamese, and others, forging a network of landscape-oriented cultures that remains, at least for now.
Today, New Orleans’ recovery and prosperity are tied to reestablishing sustainability to its surrounding landscape.
This is not a challenge covered by old school urban renewal, new urbanism, smart growth, or any other planning approach of the moment. The future of New Orleans is dependent upon nothing less than a mutual survival pact with nature, starting with the wetland ecosystem of coastal Louisiana.
Five years after Katrina, it is fair to ask if that is happening. The best — and most optimistic — answer to that question is “maybe.” A strong foundation is being laid, but it is too early to know what will be built upon it.
After years of indifference to environmental stewardship, Katrina forced a day of reckoning. In the space of six months, Louisiana fundamentally revamped its entire approach to dealing with the coast. In a dicey but essential move, storm protection, wetland conservation, and coastal restoration were integrated into a single state authority, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. By mid-2007, the state had developed a master plan that took a more honest and urgent look at the coast and state’s future.
In 2006, the state took what many thought was an unimaginable step. When the Minerals Management Service put up a portion of the Outer Continental Shelf for oil drilling, Louisiana sued to stop the lease, claiming the deal did not include enough protection for the area’s environment.
The disdainful response of MMS and the petroleum industry to the state’s demand was a chilling portent of the profoundly dysfunctional approach to safety and environmental risk management that became clear after Deepwater Horizon went down. Though settled, the suit revealed much of what was wrong with MMS’s approach to offshore oil and gas development.
The suit also shifted the political landscape to allow the federal government to begin sharing the revenues it received from outer continental shelf oil energy development with states like Louisiana that serve as its support base. By law, Louisiana dedicated all its share of those revenues to coastal protection and restoration.
None of these steps taken by Louisiana so far are enough to save the coast, and there have been unsettling signs that when push comes to shove the state will settle for living behind levees instead of doing what’s necessary — such as wetland conservation, land-use planning, and funding coastal restoration — to strike a sustainable balance between environmental stewardship, economic development, and storm protection.
We don’t get to grade on a curve for this. Doing better is not a substitute for doing what is essential.
How Katrina revived New Orleans
Aug 28th
The following is a guest post by Amy Liu, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the New Orleans Index at Five. The opinions expressed are her own.
This weekend, President Obama will head to New Orleans to mark the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He should use this opportunity to present a plan for the future, not merely acknowledge the past.
We know how these anniversary rituals go. Fact sheets summarize administration achievements. Remarks feature on-the-ground successes. But this year, successes are tempered by the lingering uncertainties and unmet needs of the massive Gulf oil spill.
The president can’t avoid the entanglement of two of history’s worst disasters playing out on his watch in the same region. Luckily, the tremendous progress made post-Katrina in New Orleans offers a lesson for how the administration should shape its post-oil spill recovery efforts.
Thanks to the combination of federal and philanthropic investments, New Orleanians have been able to put the city and metro area on the path to transformation and long-term prosperity.
Katrina exposed the long-standing problems that faced New Orleans – poverty, racial and economic disparities, a stagnant economy, unsustainable land use, and failing public services, such as public education, criminal justice, and health care. The last thing taxpayers and local residents want is to have billions of dollars spent building back those failures.
In the last five years, New Orleanians, with federal, state, and other partners, have worked tirelessly to reinvent their metro area. There is now a land use master plan, which has the force of law behind it, that will guide future development without the rules being changed arbitrarily by a developer or a city official, which has happened in the past. This is a big deal in and of itself and also because most cities haven’t updated their land use plans in 20 years.
There are nearly 100 new community-based clinics that offer quality preventive care to low-income and minority patients. There is a more integrated, efficient and fair criminal justice system coming into view. The overhaul of the public schools is producing a higher share of students proficient in math and English. And a new inspector general’s office is rooting out fraud, waste, and corruption.
While economic trends in greater New Orleans are still fluctuating from the impacts of the recession and the oil spill, there are early indications that the regional economy may be performing better than in previous decades; there is growth in knowledge-based jobs, average wages and entrepreneurship.
Yet, greater New Orleans is still a work in progress. The Gulf oil spill, like Katrina, exposed remaining challenges. The New Orleans metro economy continues to be sluggish and overly dependent on a few industries that have been shrinking long before the oil spill — tourism, oil and gas, and shipbuilding. A shortage of educated workers holds back the region’s transition to a more innovative future. The rapidly-eroding wetlands are ill-equipped to protect the coastal economy and quality of life.
The Obama administration has asserted its long-term commitment to the Gulf Coast. The President, then, must use this Katrina anniversary to present plans that respond to the economic and environmental fallout from the spill while furthering the transformation that has begun in greater New Orleans, including:
- Sustaining current post-Katrina reforms, such as the progress in health care and the criminal justice system. Housing and neighborhood opportunities represent a mere beginning on a long road of systemic improvements.
- Diversifying the metro economy by providing incentives and tools to help leaders, workers and firms join the nation’s transition to a more clean and renewable energy future, expanding its energy portfolio.
- Strengthening existing and growing industries, such as helping to modernize the port as a vehicle for doubling exports and expanding U.S. capacity to handle an increasing volume of freight.
- Giving minority- and women-owned enterprises opportunities to participate in the post-oil spill cleanup and recovery efforts.
- Restoring the wetlands as part of a comprehensive approach to coastal protection that builds on the levee reconstruction and structural solutions to date. This would have the added benefit of creating jobs and strengthening the region’s engineering and innovation in coastal protection products and services.
With the overall economic recovery wavering, it is time to use limited public and private sector funds in ways that will have bold, far-reaching effects.
If Obama can partner with the people of greater New Orleans in this shared vision for prosperity, he will leave a lasting legacy of having catalyzed the most successful urban transformation in recent history.