From NYTimes:
"Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.
...The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company.
“Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”
The vision of a renewable future in the gulf is rooted not so much in a fuzzy green sentiment — though that is starting to take hold — as in analysis of the region’s economic future and the high-end lifestyles of its citizens.
...The world is now consuming 80 million barrels of oil a day, and that could continue to rise steeply over the coming decades if population and consumption trends continue. That could mean having to add six Saudi Arabias worth of oil output just to keep up, according to Mr. Barker-Homek, at a time when scientists are warning that carbon levels need to be cut significantly to avoid potentially disastrous global warming.
To hedge their positions, then, an increasingly sophisticated generation of largely Western-educated leaders in the Middle East are seizing on green business opportunities, by seeding research in faraway nations.
The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, announced last January that he would invest $15 billion in renewable energy. That is the same amount that President-elect Obama has proposed investing — in the entire United States — “to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future.
”Masdar, the model city that will generate no carbon emissions, is tied to the crown prince’s ambitions. Designed by Norman Foster, the British architect, it will include a satellite campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a research park with laboratories affiliated with Imperial College London and other institutions.
In Saudi Arabia, the new state-owned King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, gave a Stanford scientist $25 million last year to start a research center on how to make the cost of solar power competitive with that of coal. Kaust, now in its first grant cycle, also gave $8 million to a Berkeley researcher developing green concrete.
And it has other agreements as well, with Caltech, Cambridge, Cornell, Imperial, La Sapienza, Oxford and Utrecht, to name just a few.
In November, the Qatari government signed an agreement with Britain’s visiting prime minister, Gordon Brown, to invest £150 million, or more than $220 million, in a British low-carbon technology fund, dwarfing the fund’s investments from home...
“The impact has been enormous,” said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant. “It has greatly accelerated the development process.”
martes, 13 de enero de 2009
Russia: Boosting Population a Vague Science
From MoscowTimes:
The fact that Russia's population is shrinking should come as a surprise to no one. According to the State Statistics Service, 12 million more Russians died than were born from 1992 to 2007, with the arrival of 5.5 million immigrants only partially compensating for the loss.
It is clear from statements by political leaders that the government is aware of the problem and the serious threat that it poses to future economic growth and security as the country's work force shrinks.
What is also clear, according to demographers and public health experts, is that the government hasn't made enough effort to get to the root of the problem or to measure whether the policies it has put in place to deal with the demographic crisis are really helping. Although some financial incentives have been created to help couples have more children, experts say a much more comprehensive approach is necessary.
Given existing trends, demographers say the population will shrink from the current level of 142 million to something between 125 million and 135 million by 2025, and could fall to as low as 100 million by 2050.
This demographic decline has serious economic consequences -- there will be as many as 8 million fewer people in the work force by 2015 and possibly 19 million less by 2025, according to study by a group of Russian demographers sponsored by the United Nations and released in late April.
Population change is dependent on three main factors: the birthrate, the death rate and immigration rates. Last October, then-President Vladimir Putin approved a government demographic strategy through 2025 that sets targets in each of these three categories. But while this strategy shows that the government is concerned about the current situation, the program's goals suggest that it has little interest in understanding the roots of the problem, preferring to throw money at it instead.
Demographers have calculated that, in Russia, the replacement fertility rate -- the number of births per woman necessary to maintain the current population -- is 2.15. In 2006, the fertility rate was 1.3 children for every woman. The number of babies born last year jumped to about 2 million -- up 8.3 percent from the year before and a post-Soviet record. Still, the fertility rate rose only to 1.4 children per woman. State officials wasted no time in claiming that government policy was to thank for a new baby boom, with Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova only the most recent example. "It is a true demographic explosion that no other developed country has generated," Golikova said in a speech on April 26.
"We are proud that ... Russians have had the right reaction to the measures to encourage births."
The measures introduced by the government included an increase in monthly social payments to mothers, making it easier for young families to get mortgages, and "mother's capital" -- a one-time payment of around $10,000 for those women giving birth to a second child. Access to the money comes only three years after the child is born, and it must be used for the child's benefit, such as improving the family's living conditions or paying for education.
Demographers doubt, however, that government perks were the sole or even the main cause of the rise in births.
Vladimir Arkhangelsky, of the Research Center for Population Problems at Moscow State University, said the latest spike in births is the result of an increase in the number of women reaching their peak childbearing years. These women were themselves products of an early 1980s baby boom, which followed increases in Soviet-era social payments and an anti-alcohol campaign.
Arkhangelsky and other demographers say the number of children being born will likely fall off again in about five years as the women of the 1980s baby boom move out of their most fertile years and are replaced by the much smaller generation born in the 1990s.
According to the State Statistics Service, in 2007 there were 24.1 percent fewer females from the age of 10 to 19 than in the 20 to 29 age group. There were 44.1 percent fewer females under the age of nine than in the 20 to 29 group.
An added concern is that, even if the new benefits are partially responsible for the increase in births, they may still have a negative effect on the country's wealth disparity in the future. Women living below the poverty rate experienced a more significant rise in birthrate than any other segment of the female population, said Valery Yelizarov, head of the Research Center for Population Problems.
According to the Social Insurance Fund, the government body that issues birth certificates, about half of the women who gave birth last year reported a monthly income below the poverty line for Russia -- 3,500 rubles ($150). About 70 percent of the mothers reported a monthly income of less than 7,000 rubles ($300).
"The government needs to think of how to stimulate [births among] those who are more successful in life," Yelizarov said.
According to the government demographic strategy, incentives designed to get families to have more than one child should boost the birthrate by 50 percent by 2025. But the global trend, and particularly in developed countries, has been away from larger families, leading some experts to express doubts that the target can be met.
Karl Kulessa, the UN's population agency chief in Russia, said there were many social and economic factors that work against bigger families.
Benefits for larger families introduced by the French government have played at least some part in a jump in the birthrate from 1.7 babies per woman in 1994 to almost 2.0 in 2006. But to achieve similar results in Russia, the government needs not only to provide families with the financial resources to provide for more children but also to influence attitudes in a country where one-child families are the norm, Arkhangelsky said.
"This means increasing in the prestige of having bigger families," he said. "The state needs to change perceptions about mothers who take care of their children. There should be the understanding that these mothers work at home, not just stay at home."
Medvedev himself has only one child, a son, while Putin has two daughters.
Other demographers agree that the government has done little, if anything, to influence public opinion about larger families.
Another issue is whether the facilities exist for a baby boom of the magnitude the government would like to see.
The infant mortality rate in the country jumped from .88 percent for children born in January 2007 to almost 1 percent for those born in January of this year, a fact Yelizarov suggested may be a sign that maternity hospitals and their staff were unable to deal with the increased workload.
To meet the challenge of the growing number of births, the government plans to spend 20 billion rubles ($850 million) from 2008 to 2010 to build 23 new perinatal centers in Russia, said Olga Sharapova, head of the Health and Social Development Ministry's department for medical and social problems related to pregnant women and children. "This will help save the lives of hundreds of mothers and children every year," she said.
"The birthrate is a very difficult thing to increase quickly, so the state and the people can achieve much more by addressing deaths," said Natalya Rimashevskaya, a demographer with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
One out of three Russians dies before reaching retirement age -- 55 for women and 60 for men -- and 80 percent of those dying early are men, according to data from the Health and Social Development Ministry.
Russia is one of the few countries in the world where life expectancy has declined since the 1960s. In 2006, the life expectancy for Russian men was 60.6 years, about 15 years less than that in most developed countries.
The number for women is higher, at 73.1, but still almost 10 years below that in most developed countries.
Experts agree that a large share of early deaths in Russia, particularly among men, are preventable. Cardiovascular diseases account for 55 percent of all deaths, four times the rate in Western Europe. The government has made cutting the death rate among the working-age population by 38 percent by 2025 one of its targets, with the ultimate goal of raising average life expectancy to 75 years -- the current figure for Mexico. "The biggest reason the mortality rate is so high rate is the very low value placed on life by the state and people themselves," said Alla Ivanova, chief statistician at the Health and Social Development Ministry's Central Scientific Research Institute for Health Care Information.
Over the past two decades, state spending on health care has remained meager and people have failed to develop healthier lifestyles, she said.
When asked what the state's focus should be under Medvedev to raise life expectancy, most experts named poverty and heavy drinking.
Most demographers agree that the government needs to find ways to lower alcohol consumption and especially the abuse of cheap, low-quality alcohol that kills thousands every year.
Battling low-quality alcohol will be a challenge, however, as the state surrendered its monopoly on alcohol production in 1992 and corrupt law enforcement bodies have failed to crack down on illegal producers of alcohol in the years since. Additionally, ubiquitous and aggressive television advertising has made beer an integral part of Russian teen culture.
Alexander Nemtsov, a senior researcher at the Scientific Research Institute of Psychiatry, has calculated that annual alcohol-related deaths averaged about 426,000 over the past 20 years, or almost 30 percent of deaths among men and 17 percent for women.
Studies show that mortality rates have risen or fallen in tandem with alcohol consumption rates in the country, and both rose in the 1990s.
Long-term poverty often produces a vicious cycle, in which a lack of economic prospects leads to alcoholism and drug abuse, which in turn keep people impoverished, Ivanova said. Fortunately, income levels among Russians have risen in recent years, and this may have been the main factor behind a 1.3-year jump in male life expectancy and 0.8-year rise for women from 2006 to 2008. Interestingly, the death rate among people under 40 remained basically unchanged from that in the turbulent 1990s.
In addition to fighting alcohol abuse and providing better opportunities for those marginalized in the course of the drastic economic reforms of the 1990s, Ivanova said the government needed to improve medical care and make it more accessible.
"This can prevent another 200,000 deaths every year that occur because of the poor organization of preventative medicine services and because, for various reasons, people just don't turn to doctors in time," she said.
Meanwhile, Health and Social Development Minister Golikova has named heart disease and traffic accidents as the two major preventable causes of death in Russia.
Senior ministry official Sharapova said the government was set to spend an additional 10 billion rubles ($420 million) from 2008 to 2010 to improve care at regional health facilities for people being treated for heart disease and injuries sustained in car accidents. She said the ministry was also working to develop a program to decrease alcohol-related deaths.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, immigration became the only immediate solution to Russia's demographic catastrophe. From 1992 to 2007, 5.5 million people immigrated to the country, with 4.5 million of those gaining Russian citizenship.
It is impossible to say how many people move to Russia annually because of the difficulties of tracking illegal migrants and the complex registration system for those entering the country legally.
In 2007, the Federal Migration Service issued more than 2.1 million work permits for foreigners but only 194,000 temporary residence permits. These numbers indicate that only a fraction of those who come to work are able to gain, or are even interested in, citizenship. The service plans to issue 350,000 residency permits in 2008.
There is only one state program aimed at attracting Russian-speaking people from former Soviet republics into the country, but in order to be eligible for Russian citizenship and financial benefits, potential immigrants have to settle in remote and sparsely populated areas, like the Far East.
This program focusing on these "fellow countrymen" was established by then-President Vladimir Putin in June 2006 and was to kick into action in 2007. Viktor Ivanov, the Putin aide appointed to oversee the program, said in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt in 2006 that the country was ready to welcome the 25 million ethnic Russians living in other former Soviet republics.
So far, however, the results have been very modest. In 2007, only 2,100 immigrants were resettled in Russia as part of this program, said a source in the Federal Migration Service who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. The service is currently reviewing 8,500 applications, covering 23,000 potential immigrants.
The challenges are even more severe for potential immigrants who are not ethnic Russians. Isolation, the lack of social infrastructure, xenophobia and salary discrimination all make life for immigrants difficult.
Olga Chudinovskaya, an immigration expert at Moscow State University, said migrant workers are paid on average half of what Russian citizens receive for the same job.
She added that the public perception of immigrants as criminals is an extreme exaggeration. In 2007, migrants accounted for only 1.5 percent of the crimes registered by the Interior Ministry.
Chudinovskaya said the program of resettling "fellow countrymen" in Russia is based on "false priorities," since the government would face a struggle keeping immigrants in far-flung and economically depressed regions.
It will be far more logical for the government to grant citizenship to immigrants who already have jobs in Russia, have come with a strong motivation to stay and who would not ask the government for help, she said.
One of the biggest problems in the policy area is that no one has any real idea of how programs will work, as demographers have not been given much of a consultative role in their formation.
"When officials speak of billions of rubles spent on demographic projects, I only shrug, because there was no serious scientific examination of them," said Anatoly Vishnevsky, a leading expert in the field and head of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
For example, it is impossible to determine whether the recent spike in births is because Russians are developing a preference for bigger families, as the government says, or because the baby boomers of the 1980s have reached childbearing age. There are no statistics being collected on whether new babies are second -- or even third -- children; they are just being counted, Yelizarov said.
The government is not only failing to collect the necessary information on the problem, but it has also not invested in any real analysis of the results.
"We need to understand what factors influence birthrates and death rates and how, as well as what money needs to be spent to achieve the desired results," Yelizarov said.
In another telling example of how government priorities are mismatched, the Health and Social Development Ministry's own figures show that there were far fewer deaths from traffic accidents last year than from poisoning, even though Golikova called traffic accidents one of Russia's two leading causes of preventable deaths.
Increased social payments notwithstanding, very little is being done to alleviate the most pressing problems facing young families. Svetlana Misikhina, a demography researcher at the Institute of Urban Economy, pointed to the government's mortgage policy as an example.
Citing a lack of adequate housing as a major obstacle for younger families wanting to have more children, the government created a program to provide greater access to mortgages.
The problem is that few effective measures have been put in place to increase the rate of new home construction. The result has been a further increase in real estate prices, putting new or bigger apartments out of reach for the majority of young families. The government has also done nothing to develop programs that would allow nursing mothers to work from home or work part time.
"The biggest problem of all is that our presidents -- Putin and Medvedev -- are misinformed about the demographic situation, and this is the first thing that needs to be dealt with," Vishnevsky said.
The fact that Russia's population is shrinking should come as a surprise to no one. According to the State Statistics Service, 12 million more Russians died than were born from 1992 to 2007, with the arrival of 5.5 million immigrants only partially compensating for the loss.
It is clear from statements by political leaders that the government is aware of the problem and the serious threat that it poses to future economic growth and security as the country's work force shrinks.
What is also clear, according to demographers and public health experts, is that the government hasn't made enough effort to get to the root of the problem or to measure whether the policies it has put in place to deal with the demographic crisis are really helping. Although some financial incentives have been created to help couples have more children, experts say a much more comprehensive approach is necessary.
Given existing trends, demographers say the population will shrink from the current level of 142 million to something between 125 million and 135 million by 2025, and could fall to as low as 100 million by 2050.
This demographic decline has serious economic consequences -- there will be as many as 8 million fewer people in the work force by 2015 and possibly 19 million less by 2025, according to study by a group of Russian demographers sponsored by the United Nations and released in late April.
Population change is dependent on three main factors: the birthrate, the death rate and immigration rates. Last October, then-President Vladimir Putin approved a government demographic strategy through 2025 that sets targets in each of these three categories. But while this strategy shows that the government is concerned about the current situation, the program's goals suggest that it has little interest in understanding the roots of the problem, preferring to throw money at it instead.
Demographers have calculated that, in Russia, the replacement fertility rate -- the number of births per woman necessary to maintain the current population -- is 2.15. In 2006, the fertility rate was 1.3 children for every woman. The number of babies born last year jumped to about 2 million -- up 8.3 percent from the year before and a post-Soviet record. Still, the fertility rate rose only to 1.4 children per woman. State officials wasted no time in claiming that government policy was to thank for a new baby boom, with Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova only the most recent example. "It is a true demographic explosion that no other developed country has generated," Golikova said in a speech on April 26.
"We are proud that ... Russians have had the right reaction to the measures to encourage births."
The measures introduced by the government included an increase in monthly social payments to mothers, making it easier for young families to get mortgages, and "mother's capital" -- a one-time payment of around $10,000 for those women giving birth to a second child. Access to the money comes only three years after the child is born, and it must be used for the child's benefit, such as improving the family's living conditions or paying for education.
Demographers doubt, however, that government perks were the sole or even the main cause of the rise in births.
Vladimir Arkhangelsky, of the Research Center for Population Problems at Moscow State University, said the latest spike in births is the result of an increase in the number of women reaching their peak childbearing years. These women were themselves products of an early 1980s baby boom, which followed increases in Soviet-era social payments and an anti-alcohol campaign.
Arkhangelsky and other demographers say the number of children being born will likely fall off again in about five years as the women of the 1980s baby boom move out of their most fertile years and are replaced by the much smaller generation born in the 1990s.
According to the State Statistics Service, in 2007 there were 24.1 percent fewer females from the age of 10 to 19 than in the 20 to 29 age group. There were 44.1 percent fewer females under the age of nine than in the 20 to 29 group.
An added concern is that, even if the new benefits are partially responsible for the increase in births, they may still have a negative effect on the country's wealth disparity in the future. Women living below the poverty rate experienced a more significant rise in birthrate than any other segment of the female population, said Valery Yelizarov, head of the Research Center for Population Problems.
According to the Social Insurance Fund, the government body that issues birth certificates, about half of the women who gave birth last year reported a monthly income below the poverty line for Russia -- 3,500 rubles ($150). About 70 percent of the mothers reported a monthly income of less than 7,000 rubles ($300).
"The government needs to think of how to stimulate [births among] those who are more successful in life," Yelizarov said.
According to the government demographic strategy, incentives designed to get families to have more than one child should boost the birthrate by 50 percent by 2025. But the global trend, and particularly in developed countries, has been away from larger families, leading some experts to express doubts that the target can be met.
Karl Kulessa, the UN's population agency chief in Russia, said there were many social and economic factors that work against bigger families.
Benefits for larger families introduced by the French government have played at least some part in a jump in the birthrate from 1.7 babies per woman in 1994 to almost 2.0 in 2006. But to achieve similar results in Russia, the government needs not only to provide families with the financial resources to provide for more children but also to influence attitudes in a country where one-child families are the norm, Arkhangelsky said.
"This means increasing in the prestige of having bigger families," he said. "The state needs to change perceptions about mothers who take care of their children. There should be the understanding that these mothers work at home, not just stay at home."
Medvedev himself has only one child, a son, while Putin has two daughters.
Other demographers agree that the government has done little, if anything, to influence public opinion about larger families.
Another issue is whether the facilities exist for a baby boom of the magnitude the government would like to see.
The infant mortality rate in the country jumped from .88 percent for children born in January 2007 to almost 1 percent for those born in January of this year, a fact Yelizarov suggested may be a sign that maternity hospitals and their staff were unable to deal with the increased workload.
To meet the challenge of the growing number of births, the government plans to spend 20 billion rubles ($850 million) from 2008 to 2010 to build 23 new perinatal centers in Russia, said Olga Sharapova, head of the Health and Social Development Ministry's department for medical and social problems related to pregnant women and children. "This will help save the lives of hundreds of mothers and children every year," she said.
"The birthrate is a very difficult thing to increase quickly, so the state and the people can achieve much more by addressing deaths," said Natalya Rimashevskaya, a demographer with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
One out of three Russians dies before reaching retirement age -- 55 for women and 60 for men -- and 80 percent of those dying early are men, according to data from the Health and Social Development Ministry.
Russia is one of the few countries in the world where life expectancy has declined since the 1960s. In 2006, the life expectancy for Russian men was 60.6 years, about 15 years less than that in most developed countries.
The number for women is higher, at 73.1, but still almost 10 years below that in most developed countries.
Experts agree that a large share of early deaths in Russia, particularly among men, are preventable. Cardiovascular diseases account for 55 percent of all deaths, four times the rate in Western Europe. The government has made cutting the death rate among the working-age population by 38 percent by 2025 one of its targets, with the ultimate goal of raising average life expectancy to 75 years -- the current figure for Mexico. "The biggest reason the mortality rate is so high rate is the very low value placed on life by the state and people themselves," said Alla Ivanova, chief statistician at the Health and Social Development Ministry's Central Scientific Research Institute for Health Care Information.
Over the past two decades, state spending on health care has remained meager and people have failed to develop healthier lifestyles, she said.
When asked what the state's focus should be under Medvedev to raise life expectancy, most experts named poverty and heavy drinking.
Most demographers agree that the government needs to find ways to lower alcohol consumption and especially the abuse of cheap, low-quality alcohol that kills thousands every year.
Battling low-quality alcohol will be a challenge, however, as the state surrendered its monopoly on alcohol production in 1992 and corrupt law enforcement bodies have failed to crack down on illegal producers of alcohol in the years since. Additionally, ubiquitous and aggressive television advertising has made beer an integral part of Russian teen culture.
Alexander Nemtsov, a senior researcher at the Scientific Research Institute of Psychiatry, has calculated that annual alcohol-related deaths averaged about 426,000 over the past 20 years, or almost 30 percent of deaths among men and 17 percent for women.
Studies show that mortality rates have risen or fallen in tandem with alcohol consumption rates in the country, and both rose in the 1990s.
Long-term poverty often produces a vicious cycle, in which a lack of economic prospects leads to alcoholism and drug abuse, which in turn keep people impoverished, Ivanova said. Fortunately, income levels among Russians have risen in recent years, and this may have been the main factor behind a 1.3-year jump in male life expectancy and 0.8-year rise for women from 2006 to 2008. Interestingly, the death rate among people under 40 remained basically unchanged from that in the turbulent 1990s.
In addition to fighting alcohol abuse and providing better opportunities for those marginalized in the course of the drastic economic reforms of the 1990s, Ivanova said the government needed to improve medical care and make it more accessible.
"This can prevent another 200,000 deaths every year that occur because of the poor organization of preventative medicine services and because, for various reasons, people just don't turn to doctors in time," she said.
Meanwhile, Health and Social Development Minister Golikova has named heart disease and traffic accidents as the two major preventable causes of death in Russia.
Senior ministry official Sharapova said the government was set to spend an additional 10 billion rubles ($420 million) from 2008 to 2010 to improve care at regional health facilities for people being treated for heart disease and injuries sustained in car accidents. She said the ministry was also working to develop a program to decrease alcohol-related deaths.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, immigration became the only immediate solution to Russia's demographic catastrophe. From 1992 to 2007, 5.5 million people immigrated to the country, with 4.5 million of those gaining Russian citizenship.
It is impossible to say how many people move to Russia annually because of the difficulties of tracking illegal migrants and the complex registration system for those entering the country legally.
In 2007, the Federal Migration Service issued more than 2.1 million work permits for foreigners but only 194,000 temporary residence permits. These numbers indicate that only a fraction of those who come to work are able to gain, or are even interested in, citizenship. The service plans to issue 350,000 residency permits in 2008.
There is only one state program aimed at attracting Russian-speaking people from former Soviet republics into the country, but in order to be eligible for Russian citizenship and financial benefits, potential immigrants have to settle in remote and sparsely populated areas, like the Far East.
This program focusing on these "fellow countrymen" was established by then-President Vladimir Putin in June 2006 and was to kick into action in 2007. Viktor Ivanov, the Putin aide appointed to oversee the program, said in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt in 2006 that the country was ready to welcome the 25 million ethnic Russians living in other former Soviet republics.
So far, however, the results have been very modest. In 2007, only 2,100 immigrants were resettled in Russia as part of this program, said a source in the Federal Migration Service who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. The service is currently reviewing 8,500 applications, covering 23,000 potential immigrants.
The challenges are even more severe for potential immigrants who are not ethnic Russians. Isolation, the lack of social infrastructure, xenophobia and salary discrimination all make life for immigrants difficult.
Olga Chudinovskaya, an immigration expert at Moscow State University, said migrant workers are paid on average half of what Russian citizens receive for the same job.
She added that the public perception of immigrants as criminals is an extreme exaggeration. In 2007, migrants accounted for only 1.5 percent of the crimes registered by the Interior Ministry.
Chudinovskaya said the program of resettling "fellow countrymen" in Russia is based on "false priorities," since the government would face a struggle keeping immigrants in far-flung and economically depressed regions.
It will be far more logical for the government to grant citizenship to immigrants who already have jobs in Russia, have come with a strong motivation to stay and who would not ask the government for help, she said.
One of the biggest problems in the policy area is that no one has any real idea of how programs will work, as demographers have not been given much of a consultative role in their formation.
"When officials speak of billions of rubles spent on demographic projects, I only shrug, because there was no serious scientific examination of them," said Anatoly Vishnevsky, a leading expert in the field and head of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
For example, it is impossible to determine whether the recent spike in births is because Russians are developing a preference for bigger families, as the government says, or because the baby boomers of the 1980s have reached childbearing age. There are no statistics being collected on whether new babies are second -- or even third -- children; they are just being counted, Yelizarov said.
The government is not only failing to collect the necessary information on the problem, but it has also not invested in any real analysis of the results.
"We need to understand what factors influence birthrates and death rates and how, as well as what money needs to be spent to achieve the desired results," Yelizarov said.
In another telling example of how government priorities are mismatched, the Health and Social Development Ministry's own figures show that there were far fewer deaths from traffic accidents last year than from poisoning, even though Golikova called traffic accidents one of Russia's two leading causes of preventable deaths.
Increased social payments notwithstanding, very little is being done to alleviate the most pressing problems facing young families. Svetlana Misikhina, a demography researcher at the Institute of Urban Economy, pointed to the government's mortgage policy as an example.
Citing a lack of adequate housing as a major obstacle for younger families wanting to have more children, the government created a program to provide greater access to mortgages.
The problem is that few effective measures have been put in place to increase the rate of new home construction. The result has been a further increase in real estate prices, putting new or bigger apartments out of reach for the majority of young families. The government has also done nothing to develop programs that would allow nursing mothers to work from home or work part time.
"The biggest problem of all is that our presidents -- Putin and Medvedev -- are misinformed about the demographic situation, and this is the first thing that needs to be dealt with," Vishnevsky said.
ECB weakening the Euro?
From tradeandtaxes (via FT Alphaville):
Although it is not yet clear that the rising dollar vs. the euro and yen is due to central bank interventions, the following graph appears to show that the European central bank has been intervening heavily to weaken the euro by buying currency reserves.
Dynamic Scoring
Dynamic Scoring, by Andy Harless(via Mark Thoma):
"Suppose that, at the beginning of the fiscal year, Congress appropriates $100 billion extra for infrastructure projects. At the end of the fiscal year, how much higher will the deficit turn out to be, compared to what it otherwise would have been?
The obvious answer, and the one that usually seems to be implicitly assumed by the media and the pundits, is $100 billion. But if you think about it carefully, it should become obvious that the obvious answer is the wrong answer.
The government is going to use most of that money to hire people and to buy things. Many of the people it will hire are people who were previously unemployed. Many are leaving other jobs which will subsequently be filled by people who were unemployed. These previously unemployed people, who may have been collecting benefits, will now be paying taxes. Those taxes will reduce the deficit, as will the reduced benefit payments. Moreover, for the businesses from which the government purchases, their profits will rise, and they will pay additional taxes on those additional profits. And they may expand and hire new people, or retain people that would otherwise have been laid off. And (if you believe in a multiplier effect), all the newly employed people, as well as the owners of the businesses, will spend more money, thus providing more profits and more employment for others, who will also pay taxes and stop collecting benefits. And so on. The ultimate effect of the original expenditure on the budget deficit will be considerably smaller than $100 billion.
This is called dynamic scoring. ... In the past, dynamic scoring has met with a lot of skepticism – and with good reason. Under normal economic conditions (by which I mean those that prevailed from 1953 through 2007), it's not clear that budget changes have any significant indirect effects on revenues and expenditures. Supply-siders claimed that the incentive effect of tax cuts would increase incentives for economic activity and thereby result in increased revenues. (I mean, "increased" relative to the static estimate of the revenue loss, not increased relative to what would happen without the tax cut. The latter idea had a lot of play in the popular press, but it was seldom taken very seriously by economists.) Keynesians (the old-fashioned kind) claimed that tax cuts and expenditure increases would increase demand and thereby result in increased revenues (again, relative to the static estimate). But...
Mainstream economic analysis said they were both wrong. Many economists think there are major supply-side benefits to more efficient taxation, but most such economists think those are primarily long-run benefits (faster growth over a span of time) rather than benefits that would significantly affect revenues in the short run. The Keynesian argument would make sense if monetary policy were passive, but in fact, the Fed has its own goals, and its goals don't necessarily change in response to fiscal policy. And of course the Fed takes fiscal policy into account when deciding how to accomplish those goals. So if a tax cut or an expenditure increase were expected to create, say, a million extra jobs, then, under normal economic conditions, the Fed would simply raise interest rates enough (according to its best estimate) to destroy a million jobs. (If the Fed didn't think the demand for those million jobs would be potentially inflationary, then it would already have tried to create them.)
But today's economic conditions are not normal. The Fed, like most everyone else, is expecting the recession to be a severe one, a potentially deflationary one, but the Fed is running out of options for how to deal with it. Contrary to what happens under normal conditions, the Fed will make no attempt to offset the effects of fiscal policy; indeed, it will enthusiastically welcome the help. The old-fashioned Keynesians, whose advice about dynamic scoring was (properly, in my opinion) considered wrong or irrelevant for so long, can now dust off their computers and start giving meaningful dynamic estimates of the effects of budget changes. ...
But there has never been a consensus beforehand about how dynamic scoring should be done, or even about the direction of the effects. In the past, the only conservative approach was to use static scoring – to ignore any indirect effects that budget changes might have on the ultimate deficit.
There is still no consensus about the details. But today one can hardly doubt that the indirect effects of stimulus policies on the budget will partly (if not entirely) offset their direct effects, or that the indirect effects will be large enough to be important. In today’s environment, static scoring is not just conservative, it's fundamentally unreasonable.
The details have to be negotiated... But next time you think that an $800 billion stimulus plan will add $800 billion to the national debt, think again.
I was thinking more along the lines of the traditional supply-side argument, i.e. the dynamic effects from the higher growth rate we'd have with improved infrastructure, but as noted above, these "are primarily long-run benefits."
Here's Paul Krugman subsequent Bang for the buck (wonkish):
"Mark Thoma says he was thinking about thinking about this; I was actually thinking about it. Anyway, it’s true: the cost of an effective fiscal stimulus, in terms of adding to the government’s debt, can (and should) be much less than the headline cost.
Consider an increase in government spending; assume that the interest rate is fixed (a good assumption right now, because interest rates are up against the zero lower bound). Then textbook analysis says that if the stimulus is dG, the increase in GDP is 1/(1 - c(1-t)) where c is the marginal propensity to consume out of income and t is the marginal tax rate. Suppose c is 0.5 and t is 1/3; then the multiplier is 1.5, which is more or less the conventional wisdom right now.
But if $100 billion in spending raises GDP by $150 billion, and the marginal tax rate is 1/3, $50 billion of the spending comes back in additional revenue. So bang for the buck — increase in GDP per dollar of added debt — is 3, not 1.5. Since the main concern about stimulus is that it will add to government debt, it’s this bang for the buck measure, rather than the multiplier, that’s relevant. And 3 sounds a lot better than 1.5.
Take this a bit further: $150 billion is about 1 percent of GDP, which Romer and Bernstein say means a million jobs; so this says $50,000 per job, which is a much better number than the critics have been throwing around (plus many more workers with full-time rather than part-time jobs).
Bang for the buck also heightens the contrast between effective and ineffective stimulus policies. Stay with c = 0.5, t = 1/3, and look at the effects of a tax cut; the multiplier is 0.75, half that for public investment, but bang for the buck is 1, only 1/3 that for investment.
So thinking about how stimulus comes back via revenues is important.
"Suppose that, at the beginning of the fiscal year, Congress appropriates $100 billion extra for infrastructure projects. At the end of the fiscal year, how much higher will the deficit turn out to be, compared to what it otherwise would have been?
The obvious answer, and the one that usually seems to be implicitly assumed by the media and the pundits, is $100 billion. But if you think about it carefully, it should become obvious that the obvious answer is the wrong answer.
The government is going to use most of that money to hire people and to buy things. Many of the people it will hire are people who were previously unemployed. Many are leaving other jobs which will subsequently be filled by people who were unemployed. These previously unemployed people, who may have been collecting benefits, will now be paying taxes. Those taxes will reduce the deficit, as will the reduced benefit payments. Moreover, for the businesses from which the government purchases, their profits will rise, and they will pay additional taxes on those additional profits. And they may expand and hire new people, or retain people that would otherwise have been laid off. And (if you believe in a multiplier effect), all the newly employed people, as well as the owners of the businesses, will spend more money, thus providing more profits and more employment for others, who will also pay taxes and stop collecting benefits. And so on. The ultimate effect of the original expenditure on the budget deficit will be considerably smaller than $100 billion.
This is called dynamic scoring. ... In the past, dynamic scoring has met with a lot of skepticism – and with good reason. Under normal economic conditions (by which I mean those that prevailed from 1953 through 2007), it's not clear that budget changes have any significant indirect effects on revenues and expenditures. Supply-siders claimed that the incentive effect of tax cuts would increase incentives for economic activity and thereby result in increased revenues. (I mean, "increased" relative to the static estimate of the revenue loss, not increased relative to what would happen without the tax cut. The latter idea had a lot of play in the popular press, but it was seldom taken very seriously by economists.) Keynesians (the old-fashioned kind) claimed that tax cuts and expenditure increases would increase demand and thereby result in increased revenues (again, relative to the static estimate). But...
Mainstream economic analysis said they were both wrong. Many economists think there are major supply-side benefits to more efficient taxation, but most such economists think those are primarily long-run benefits (faster growth over a span of time) rather than benefits that would significantly affect revenues in the short run. The Keynesian argument would make sense if monetary policy were passive, but in fact, the Fed has its own goals, and its goals don't necessarily change in response to fiscal policy. And of course the Fed takes fiscal policy into account when deciding how to accomplish those goals. So if a tax cut or an expenditure increase were expected to create, say, a million extra jobs, then, under normal economic conditions, the Fed would simply raise interest rates enough (according to its best estimate) to destroy a million jobs. (If the Fed didn't think the demand for those million jobs would be potentially inflationary, then it would already have tried to create them.)
But today's economic conditions are not normal. The Fed, like most everyone else, is expecting the recession to be a severe one, a potentially deflationary one, but the Fed is running out of options for how to deal with it. Contrary to what happens under normal conditions, the Fed will make no attempt to offset the effects of fiscal policy; indeed, it will enthusiastically welcome the help. The old-fashioned Keynesians, whose advice about dynamic scoring was (properly, in my opinion) considered wrong or irrelevant for so long, can now dust off their computers and start giving meaningful dynamic estimates of the effects of budget changes. ...
But there has never been a consensus beforehand about how dynamic scoring should be done, or even about the direction of the effects. In the past, the only conservative approach was to use static scoring – to ignore any indirect effects that budget changes might have on the ultimate deficit.
There is still no consensus about the details. But today one can hardly doubt that the indirect effects of stimulus policies on the budget will partly (if not entirely) offset their direct effects, or that the indirect effects will be large enough to be important. In today’s environment, static scoring is not just conservative, it's fundamentally unreasonable.
The details have to be negotiated... But next time you think that an $800 billion stimulus plan will add $800 billion to the national debt, think again.
I was thinking more along the lines of the traditional supply-side argument, i.e. the dynamic effects from the higher growth rate we'd have with improved infrastructure, but as noted above, these "are primarily long-run benefits."
Here's Paul Krugman subsequent Bang for the buck (wonkish):
"Mark Thoma says he was thinking about thinking about this; I was actually thinking about it. Anyway, it’s true: the cost of an effective fiscal stimulus, in terms of adding to the government’s debt, can (and should) be much less than the headline cost.
Consider an increase in government spending; assume that the interest rate is fixed (a good assumption right now, because interest rates are up against the zero lower bound). Then textbook analysis says that if the stimulus is dG, the increase in GDP is 1/(1 - c(1-t)) where c is the marginal propensity to consume out of income and t is the marginal tax rate. Suppose c is 0.5 and t is 1/3; then the multiplier is 1.5, which is more or less the conventional wisdom right now.
But if $100 billion in spending raises GDP by $150 billion, and the marginal tax rate is 1/3, $50 billion of the spending comes back in additional revenue. So bang for the buck — increase in GDP per dollar of added debt — is 3, not 1.5. Since the main concern about stimulus is that it will add to government debt, it’s this bang for the buck measure, rather than the multiplier, that’s relevant. And 3 sounds a lot better than 1.5.
Take this a bit further: $150 billion is about 1 percent of GDP, which Romer and Bernstein say means a million jobs; so this says $50,000 per job, which is a much better number than the critics have been throwing around (plus many more workers with full-time rather than part-time jobs).
Bang for the buck also heightens the contrast between effective and ineffective stimulus policies. Stay with c = 0.5, t = 1/3, and look at the effects of a tax cut; the multiplier is 0.75, half that for public investment, but bang for the buck is 1, only 1/3 that for investment.
So thinking about how stimulus comes back via revenues is important.
lunes, 12 de enero de 2009
Is it Art? - John Lanchester on Videogames from LRB
From LRB:
"From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar. ...
Shouldn’t we just leave gamers to their annoying games, until they become less annoying? Is there anything that might be done about it, to make video games less offputtingly difficult/ arbitrary/self-segregating/stupid? One of the people who has most engaged with the question is also one of the few unquestioned geniuses in the video-game world, Shigeru Miyamoto.
...Miyamoto has, throughout his career, engaged with the question of arbitrariness by making his games more arbitrary, more silly – by making that silliness part of the fun. He is the inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong and Zelda and Nintendogs: in other words, he’s Walt Disney. At his best, as in the recent Super Mario Galaxy, made for the Nintendo Wii, his games are visually beautiful, witty (a quality expressed mainly through the design of the many small planet-worlds in the game, heaving with imaginatively designed traps and enemies), and have a sublime, enchanting silliness. He dislikes narrative in game design, so his games don’t have a story (except for the Zelda series), but they do offer wholly satisfying worlds – this being one of the things video games do best.
...It is no accident that Miyamoto has dedicated his career to the Japanese console-maker Nintendo, for whom all of his games have been designed. Nintendo began life in the late 19th century as a maker of card games, and that emphasis on gaming survived their transition to newer technologies. That might sound like a truism – video-game maker has background in games – but as it happens the company’s two great rivals have different histories. Sony is a consumer technology company, Microsoft is a software company, and both have been more reluctant than Nintendo to understand that what people mainly want to do with games is play;
their interest has recently focused more on their desire to ‘win the battle of the living-room’. Translated, that means to sell consumers a super-powerful omnicompetent console which sits in the corner of the room and gives the parent company a share of all sorts of potential future revenue streams. Sony’s PS3 is a wonder of the world, with two astounding new technologies inside, the multi-threading Cell computer chip and the new generation Blu-Ray Disc; the Xbox 360 is a powerful computer in its own right; but the much lower-tech Nintendo Wii is a lot more fun than either of them.
If one were trying to find a point where video games are turning into a form of artistic expression, however, it might be towards the more powerful consoles that one would look.
The Wii is great entertainment but in spirit it is closer to a toy than a game; I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s a virtue. In the form of games such as those of Miyamoto, it is close to a spirit of pure play. This is often elusive in the darker types of video game. A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are notorious (especially among people who’ve never played them) for their apparent celebration of random violence. The most recent iteration of the game, however, Grand Theft Auto IV, involves the main character having to spend a large amount of time building up his relationships, so that he can have people to help him do his criminal thing; and building up these relationships involves driving to see these people, taking them out to nightclubs, and sitting there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life.
Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a movie studio, starting at the birth of the medium and running all the way into the near future: he builds the studio, sets budgets, hires directors, manages the careers of stars, co-ordinates the production of the film, and then, within the game, actually gets to make animated films in the relevant style of the period, from silent to early colour to the present day. The player can then upload these films to the internet where anyone can watch them.[2] The Movies is an example of just how sophisticated video games can be; but it also has a not so subtle flaw, in that the business of running the studio, in the game, is all too realistic: it’s almost as much of a budget-juggling, ego-massaging, logistics-forecasting pain in the bum as it would be in real life.
That’s not atypical.
Most games, as Poole argues, are work-like. They have a tightly designed structure in which the player has to earn points to win specific rewards, on the way to completing levels which earn him the right to play on other levels, earn more points to win other rewards, and so on, all of it repetitive, quantified and structured. The trouble with these games – the majority of them – isn’t that they are maladapted to the real world, it’s that they’re all too well adapted. The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.
So, on the one hand, we have those games which manage to achieve a pure state of play – too few, but they do exist. In addition to Miyamoto’s masterpieces, I should mention the magnificently goofy series of games jointly produced by Lego: Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. They are perfect games for an adult and a child to play together.
... The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film. But it does have two great strengths.
The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema.
The second is to do with a sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose. It is this which gives the best games their immense involvingness. You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is.
...Gaming is profitable and has grown fast, and this audience has allowed it to do so, so the industry is to a large extent focused on giving the boys what they want.
And what do they want? The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren’t supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence – it’s what young men want to see. (Pornography in the sexual sense is less of an issue: they can get that from the internet, any time they want.) Their rule-bound, target-bound educations and work lives leave them with a deep craving to go and commit imaginary crimes – as well they might. Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It’s keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more.
It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear. One of the problems is that the new consoles are difficult and expensive to create games for: no one can create a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 without access to significant amounts of capital. The next generation of consoles is a long way away, and this will likely be even more the case by the time they’ve grown up. As the tools of filmmaking have got cheaper, those for game making have got more expensive; this might mean that the game industry never gets to move on from the need to create blockbuster equivalents. Already the industry suffers from an excessive proliferation of sequels – always a sign that the moneymen are in charge. Games do a good job of competing with blockbusters, but it would be a pity if that was the summit of their artistic development.
There are, however, glimpses of what games might one day be.
... From the aesthetic point of view, a lot turns on whether games offer their users actual creativity, or whether it is just some horrible corporate simulacrum. The PS3 has a wonderful new game called LittleBigPlanet, in which you play a sock-like creature who travels through game levels full of puzzles and obstacles, and governed by fascinatingly realistic physics – and then offers you a full set of tools to design game levels of your own, and upload them for others to play. All the specifics of the levels are up to you; you can fill them with photos and music of your own choice, you can do whatever you like. That’s fun. Is it creative? I’m not sure: part of me wants to say that it isn’t, that nothing within a world so fully made by a corporation can be truly creative. But it isn’t so far off creativity, and it is possible to imagine a day in which games like this cross over to offer real freedoms, and therefore the real possibility to make something new, something of your own.
The other way in which games might converge on art is through the beauty and detail of their imagined worlds, combined with the freedom they give the player to wander around in them. Already quite a few games offer what’s known as ‘sandbox’ potential, to allow the player to ignore specific missions and tasks and just to roam around. (Many people’s favourite aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games involves their sandboxiness. A favourite sandbox activity in the California-set Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was simply driving to the coast and watching the sun go down over the ocean.) I think more and more games will make this central to the user’s experience of the game, and one straw in the wind here is Fallout 3, a new game from the producer Bethesda. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic 2277, and your character begins the game living in Vault 101, a bomb shelter set near the ruins of Washington. The game has the usual props and targets, but one of the most striking things about it is the opportunity it offers to explore the bombed-out, desolate, intensely evocative city. This is something which, once you’ve done it, I suspect will be difficult to get out of your head – and it is a glimpse of what games can do at their best. The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form. At a moment when there’s less good cheer than there should be, it’s something to look forward to.
John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the LRB, was given the 2008 E.M. Forster Prize.
"From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist. (The exceptions come in the form of occasional tabloid horror stories, always about a disturbed youth who was ‘inspired’ to do something terrible by a video game.) Their invisibility is interesting in itself, and also allows interesting things to happen in games under the cultural radar. ...
Shouldn’t we just leave gamers to their annoying games, until they become less annoying? Is there anything that might be done about it, to make video games less offputtingly difficult/ arbitrary/self-segregating/stupid? One of the people who has most engaged with the question is also one of the few unquestioned geniuses in the video-game world, Shigeru Miyamoto.
...Miyamoto has, throughout his career, engaged with the question of arbitrariness by making his games more arbitrary, more silly – by making that silliness part of the fun. He is the inventor of Mario and Donkey Kong and Zelda and Nintendogs: in other words, he’s Walt Disney. At his best, as in the recent Super Mario Galaxy, made for the Nintendo Wii, his games are visually beautiful, witty (a quality expressed mainly through the design of the many small planet-worlds in the game, heaving with imaginatively designed traps and enemies), and have a sublime, enchanting silliness. He dislikes narrative in game design, so his games don’t have a story (except for the Zelda series), but they do offer wholly satisfying worlds – this being one of the things video games do best.
...It is no accident that Miyamoto has dedicated his career to the Japanese console-maker Nintendo, for whom all of his games have been designed. Nintendo began life in the late 19th century as a maker of card games, and that emphasis on gaming survived their transition to newer technologies. That might sound like a truism – video-game maker has background in games – but as it happens the company’s two great rivals have different histories. Sony is a consumer technology company, Microsoft is a software company, and both have been more reluctant than Nintendo to understand that what people mainly want to do with games is play;
their interest has recently focused more on their desire to ‘win the battle of the living-room’. Translated, that means to sell consumers a super-powerful omnicompetent console which sits in the corner of the room and gives the parent company a share of all sorts of potential future revenue streams. Sony’s PS3 is a wonder of the world, with two astounding new technologies inside, the multi-threading Cell computer chip and the new generation Blu-Ray Disc; the Xbox 360 is a powerful computer in its own right; but the much lower-tech Nintendo Wii is a lot more fun than either of them.
If one were trying to find a point where video games are turning into a form of artistic expression, however, it might be towards the more powerful consoles that one would look.
The Wii is great entertainment but in spirit it is closer to a toy than a game; I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s a virtue. In the form of games such as those of Miyamoto, it is close to a spirit of pure play. This is often elusive in the darker types of video game. A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough. A persuasive recent essay by the games theorist Steven Poole made the strong argument that the majority of games offer a model of play which is oppressively close to work. The Grand Theft Auto games, for example, are notorious (especially among people who’ve never played them) for their apparent celebration of random violence. The most recent iteration of the game, however, Grand Theft Auto IV, involves the main character having to spend a large amount of time building up his relationships, so that he can have people to help him do his criminal thing; and building up these relationships involves driving to see these people, taking them out to nightclubs, and sitting there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life.
Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a movie studio, starting at the birth of the medium and running all the way into the near future: he builds the studio, sets budgets, hires directors, manages the careers of stars, co-ordinates the production of the film, and then, within the game, actually gets to make animated films in the relevant style of the period, from silent to early colour to the present day. The player can then upload these films to the internet where anyone can watch them.[2] The Movies is an example of just how sophisticated video games can be; but it also has a not so subtle flaw, in that the business of running the studio, in the game, is all too realistic: it’s almost as much of a budget-juggling, ego-massaging, logistics-forecasting pain in the bum as it would be in real life.
That’s not atypical.
Most games, as Poole argues, are work-like. They have a tightly designed structure in which the player has to earn points to win specific rewards, on the way to completing levels which earn him the right to play on other levels, earn more points to win other rewards, and so on, all of it repetitive, quantified and structured. The trouble with these games – the majority of them – isn’t that they are maladapted to the real world, it’s that they’re all too well adapted. The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren’t nearly irresponsible enough.
So, on the one hand, we have those games which manage to achieve a pure state of play – too few, but they do exist. In addition to Miyamoto’s masterpieces, I should mention the magnificently goofy series of games jointly produced by Lego: Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. They are perfect games for an adult and a child to play together.
... The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film. But it does have two great strengths.
The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema.
The second is to do with a sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose. It is this which gives the best games their immense involvingness. You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is.
...Gaming is profitable and has grown fast, and this audience has allowed it to do so, so the industry is to a large extent focused on giving the boys what they want.
And what do they want? The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren’t supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence – it’s what young men want to see. (Pornography in the sexual sense is less of an issue: they can get that from the internet, any time they want.) Their rule-bound, target-bound educations and work lives leave them with a deep craving to go and commit imaginary crimes – as well they might. Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It’s keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more.
It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear. One of the problems is that the new consoles are difficult and expensive to create games for: no one can create a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 without access to significant amounts of capital. The next generation of consoles is a long way away, and this will likely be even more the case by the time they’ve grown up. As the tools of filmmaking have got cheaper, those for game making have got more expensive; this might mean that the game industry never gets to move on from the need to create blockbuster equivalents. Already the industry suffers from an excessive proliferation of sequels – always a sign that the moneymen are in charge. Games do a good job of competing with blockbusters, but it would be a pity if that was the summit of their artistic development.
There are, however, glimpses of what games might one day be.
... From the aesthetic point of view, a lot turns on whether games offer their users actual creativity, or whether it is just some horrible corporate simulacrum. The PS3 has a wonderful new game called LittleBigPlanet, in which you play a sock-like creature who travels through game levels full of puzzles and obstacles, and governed by fascinatingly realistic physics – and then offers you a full set of tools to design game levels of your own, and upload them for others to play. All the specifics of the levels are up to you; you can fill them with photos and music of your own choice, you can do whatever you like. That’s fun. Is it creative? I’m not sure: part of me wants to say that it isn’t, that nothing within a world so fully made by a corporation can be truly creative. But it isn’t so far off creativity, and it is possible to imagine a day in which games like this cross over to offer real freedoms, and therefore the real possibility to make something new, something of your own.
The other way in which games might converge on art is through the beauty and detail of their imagined worlds, combined with the freedom they give the player to wander around in them. Already quite a few games offer what’s known as ‘sandbox’ potential, to allow the player to ignore specific missions and tasks and just to roam around. (Many people’s favourite aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games involves their sandboxiness. A favourite sandbox activity in the California-set Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was simply driving to the coast and watching the sun go down over the ocean.) I think more and more games will make this central to the user’s experience of the game, and one straw in the wind here is Fallout 3, a new game from the producer Bethesda. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic 2277, and your character begins the game living in Vault 101, a bomb shelter set near the ruins of Washington. The game has the usual props and targets, but one of the most striking things about it is the opportunity it offers to explore the bombed-out, desolate, intensely evocative city. This is something which, once you’ve done it, I suspect will be difficult to get out of your head – and it is a glimpse of what games can do at their best. The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form. At a moment when there’s less good cheer than there should be, it’s something to look forward to.
John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the LRB, was given the 2008 E.M. Forster Prize.
Empirical evidence on the monetary policy trilemma since 1970
Joshua Aizenman, Menzie D. Chinn and Hiro Ito from VoxEU:
"Against the backdrop of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, the issue of the trilemma – the hypothesis that a country may only achieve at most two of three goals: monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial integration – seems rather distant. We would argue that, on the contrary, the way in which the trilemma has been addressed and how it will constrain future policy choices are questions that need to be answered in order to understand how the world economy has arrived at this juncture. In particular, reserve accumulation on the part of East Asian countries can be viewed as part of how the stage was set for the low interest rates that are blamed by some for the speculative excesses of the last few years.
Many have argued that the recent reserve accumulations are closely related to changing patterns of the trilemma among developing countries. There is now good empirical evidence on this. Calvo (1998) suggests that international reserves can reduce both the probability of a sudden stop and the depth of the resulting output collapse. Aizenman and Lee (2007) link the large increase in reserves holding to the deepening financial integration of developing countries and evidence that international reserve hoarding serves as a means of self-insurance against exposure to sudden stops. Cheung and Ito (2007) find that the explanatory power of financial variables as determinants of international reserves holding has been increasing over time while that of trade openness has been declining. Obstfeld et al. (2008) find that the size of domestic financial liabilities that could potentially be converted into foreign currency (M2), financial openness, the ability to access foreign currency through debt markets, and exchange rate policy are all significant predictors of international reserve stocks.
In a recent paper we study the development of trilemma configurations over the last four decades and find that developing countries, and particularly emerging markets, have moved towards greater exchange rate flexibility and deeper financial integration. More recently, since 2000, developing countries have converged towards managed exchange rate flexibility, monetary autonomy, and financial integration; all enabled by the accumulation of unprecedentedly large international reserves holdings. So far, the adjustment of emerging economies to the liquidity crisis has proceeded in line with this new trend –the real exchange rate and monetary policy have taken the first brunt of the adjustment. Given the magnitude of the disruption, the absence of deeper adjustment so far is a testament that the observation that the intermediate ground in the trilemma, combined with proper governance and management, allows for a softer landing.
In our paper, we also test and confirm the linearity of the three aspects of the trilemma. In other words, a rise in one trilemma variable should be traded-off with a drop of the weighted sum of the other two.
The trilemma framework
It shows that it is impossible to be simultaneously on all three vertexes of the triangle; a country choosing financial integration, for example, must either forego exchange rate stability to preserve a degree of monetary independence or forego monetary independence to maintain exchange rate stability. Over the last two decades, a growing number of developing countries have opted for hybrid exchange rate regimes – e.g., managed floats buffered by increasing accumulation of international reserves (henceforth “IR”). Despite the increasing pervasiveness of greater exchange rate flexibility, IR/GDP ratios increased dramatically, especially in the wake of the East Asian crisis (see Figure 2). Most of the accumulation has been in Asia.
(continue...)
"Against the backdrop of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, the issue of the trilemma – the hypothesis that a country may only achieve at most two of three goals: monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial integration – seems rather distant. We would argue that, on the contrary, the way in which the trilemma has been addressed and how it will constrain future policy choices are questions that need to be answered in order to understand how the world economy has arrived at this juncture. In particular, reserve accumulation on the part of East Asian countries can be viewed as part of how the stage was set for the low interest rates that are blamed by some for the speculative excesses of the last few years.
Many have argued that the recent reserve accumulations are closely related to changing patterns of the trilemma among developing countries. There is now good empirical evidence on this. Calvo (1998) suggests that international reserves can reduce both the probability of a sudden stop and the depth of the resulting output collapse. Aizenman and Lee (2007) link the large increase in reserves holding to the deepening financial integration of developing countries and evidence that international reserve hoarding serves as a means of self-insurance against exposure to sudden stops. Cheung and Ito (2007) find that the explanatory power of financial variables as determinants of international reserves holding has been increasing over time while that of trade openness has been declining. Obstfeld et al. (2008) find that the size of domestic financial liabilities that could potentially be converted into foreign currency (M2), financial openness, the ability to access foreign currency through debt markets, and exchange rate policy are all significant predictors of international reserve stocks.
In a recent paper we study the development of trilemma configurations over the last four decades and find that developing countries, and particularly emerging markets, have moved towards greater exchange rate flexibility and deeper financial integration. More recently, since 2000, developing countries have converged towards managed exchange rate flexibility, monetary autonomy, and financial integration; all enabled by the accumulation of unprecedentedly large international reserves holdings. So far, the adjustment of emerging economies to the liquidity crisis has proceeded in line with this new trend –the real exchange rate and monetary policy have taken the first brunt of the adjustment. Given the magnitude of the disruption, the absence of deeper adjustment so far is a testament that the observation that the intermediate ground in the trilemma, combined with proper governance and management, allows for a softer landing.
In our paper, we also test and confirm the linearity of the three aspects of the trilemma. In other words, a rise in one trilemma variable should be traded-off with a drop of the weighted sum of the other two.
The trilemma framework
It shows that it is impossible to be simultaneously on all three vertexes of the triangle; a country choosing financial integration, for example, must either forego exchange rate stability to preserve a degree of monetary independence or forego monetary independence to maintain exchange rate stability. Over the last two decades, a growing number of developing countries have opted for hybrid exchange rate regimes – e.g., managed floats buffered by increasing accumulation of international reserves (henceforth “IR”). Despite the increasing pervasiveness of greater exchange rate flexibility, IR/GDP ratios increased dramatically, especially in the wake of the East Asian crisis (see Figure 2). Most of the accumulation has been in Asia.
(continue...)
domingo, 11 de enero de 2009
People don’t usually spend their money buying things they don’t want or need, do they? Or, how do we define Need?
GREGORY MANKIW from NYT:
"... If you hire your neighbor for $100 to dig a hole in your backyard and then fill it up, and he hires you to do the same in his yard, the government statisticians report that things are improving. The economy has created two jobs, and the G.D.P. rises by $200. But it is unlikely that, having wasted all that time digging and filling, either of you is better off.
People don’t usually spend their money buying things they don’t want or need, so for private transactions, this kind of inefficient spending is not much of a problem...."
IbnBattuta here: When we are not able to see the assumption that are guiding us, we are in deep trouble!
Unless we get quickly rid of this fallacy we will hardly see any steady sustainable growth in the near future.
"... If you hire your neighbor for $100 to dig a hole in your backyard and then fill it up, and he hires you to do the same in his yard, the government statisticians report that things are improving. The economy has created two jobs, and the G.D.P. rises by $200. But it is unlikely that, having wasted all that time digging and filling, either of you is better off.
People don’t usually spend their money buying things they don’t want or need, so for private transactions, this kind of inefficient spending is not much of a problem...."
IbnBattuta here: When we are not able to see the assumption that are guiding us, we are in deep trouble!
Unless we get quickly rid of this fallacy we will hardly see any steady sustainable growth in the near future.
A frightening percentage of people in OECD countries have been brainwashed into culturalize an increasingly higher proportion of their spending. And when possible spend more, even more then they have.
The real existence of this excess of demand is not easy to prove, let alone to quantify, but would certainly constitute a bubble, a deviation from a sustainable level.
This could probably be considered the equivalent at micro level of what Mankiw fault to the Government, an enormous misallocation.
A sudden change in cultural values that would change the composition of the basket of consumers goods for a sufficiently long period of time is likely to have permanently disruptive effects on demand
Anybody seriously doubtful about the real existence of a cultural bias in consumption just think of minimum wage workers that pays 40 bucks for a pop-star show.
Or, for that matter, the time that they may spend paying attentions to their lives.
And I'm ready to take the charge of elitist. The true elitist are those who consider that our high culture is unfit for general public and instead provide their souls with poisonous food, preventing them even the chance to accept their share in mankind bequest.
We have been humiliating our fellow citizens for too long in exchange for very little good in our countries' real long term prosperity.
For generations, we have been preaching the great highness of self-realization while we were actually selling a model with very few winners that use to take no prisoners, and a huge anomic mass to be controlled with broadcasted, home consumed, circenses.
There is nothing wrong about the fact of living in a hierarchical society, at all!!
But the rule have to be clearly stated and we must get rid of hypocrisy.
In the next days I'll publish a post about what I called Agricare, as you can see the merging of Agri-culture and Health-care.
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