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The urbanization of the past two decades has altered the country's demographic balance rapidly and profoundly. The change has hastened the decline in fertility and population growth rates, particularly those of China's working-age population, as the size of the country's elderly population has risen.

If the government achieves its target, China's urban population will grow by more than 230 million between now and 2030, reaching approximately 975 million.

For China's leaders, further urbanization on a significant scale is not optional: It is imperative. China is in the early stages of an effort to rebalance toward an economic model grounded in robust domestic consumption and characterized by greater economic integration between, and equality across, its diverse regions.

the central government has targeted the Yangtze River economic corridor -- the urban industrial zones lining the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai -- as a key area for investment, development and urbanization in the coming years. Ultimately, the Party hopes to transform the Yangtze's main 2,800-kilometer-long (1,700-mile-long) navigable channel into a central superhighway for goods and people, better connecting China's less developed interior provinces to the coast and to each other by way of water -- a significantly cheaper form of transport than road or railway.

Stretching 6,418 kilometers from its source in the Tibetan Plateau to its terminus in the East China Sea, the river both divides and connects the country. To its north lie the wheat fields and coal mines of the North China Plain and Loess Plateau, unified China's traditional political cores. Along its banks and to the south are the riverine wetlands and terraced mountain faces that historically supplied China with rice, tea, cotton and timber.

The river passes through the highlands of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the fertile Sichuan Basin, the lakes and marshes of the Middle Yangtze and on to the trade hubs of the Yangtze River Delta. Its watershed touches 19 provinces and is central to the economic life of more people than the populations of Russia and the United States combined.

The Yellow River may be the origin of the Han Chinese civilization, but on its own it is far too weak to support the economic life of a great power.

This division, more than any other, forms the basis of Chinese political history and provides China's rulers with their most fundamental strategic imperative: unity of the lands above and below the river. Without both north and south, there is no China, only regional powers.

If the Yangtze did not exist, or if its route had veered downward into South and Southeast Asia (like most of the rivers that begin on the Tibetan Plateau), China would be an altogether different and much less significant place.

the Upper (encompassing present-day Sichuan and Chongqing), Middle (Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi) and Lower Yangtze (Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Shanghai and parts of Anhui).

Geography and time have made these regions into distinct and relatively autonomous units, each with its own history, culture and language. Each region has its own hubs -- Chengdu and Chongqing for the Upper Yangtze; Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang for the Middle Yangtze; and Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for the Lower Yangtze.

In many ways, China was more deeply united under Mao Zedong than under any emperor since Kangxi in the 18th century. After 1978, the foundations of internal cohesion began to shift and crack as the reform and opening process directed central government attention and investment away from the interior (Mao's power base) and toward the coast.

Today, faced with the political and social consequences of that process, the Party is once again working to reintegrate and recentralize -- both in the sense of slowly reconsolidating central government control over key sectors of the economy and, more fundamentally, forcibly shifting the economy's productive core inland.

In 2011, more than 1.6 billion metric tons of goods passed through it, representing 40 percent of the nation's total inland waterborne cargo traffic and about 5 percent of all domestic goods transport that year

First, there is a clear shift in central government policy away from intensive focus on coastal manufacturing at the expense of the interior (the dominant approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and toward better integrating China's diverse regions into a coherent national economy.

By 2001, the economies of Shanghai and Shenzhen, for instance, were in many ways more connected to those of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles than of the hinterlands of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.

This continual supply of cheap labor from the interior kept Chinese manufacturing cost-competitive throughout the 2000s -- far longer than if Chinese factories had only had the existing coastal labor pool to rely on.

This dual process -- accumulation of wealth by the state and systematic wage repression in low-end coastal manufacturing -- significantly hampered the development of China's domestic consumer base. But even more troubling was the effect of labor migration, coupled with the relative lack of central government attention to enhancing inland industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, on the economies of interior provinces.

In trying to urbanize and industrialize the interior, Beijing is going against the grain of Chinese history -- a multimillennia saga of failed attempts to overcome the radical constraints of geography, population, food supply and culture through ambitious central government development programs.

Profiling, on the other hand, is based upon indirect experiences with broad groups (or types) of people.

Zimmerman is not alone in using race as a primary indicator of perceived dangerousness. A common refrain used to justify behavior like Zimmerman’s is that sadly young African-American males do commit the lions share of crime in America.

This argument uses Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data to back up its assertions. By that standard, it becomes very easy to then connect the dots and see somebody like Travyon Martin as a potential threat.

the UCR is not only voluntarily submitted by police departments but more importantly only measures crime actually reported to the police.

When our images of young African Amrican males are limited to hoodlums and athletes it should come as little surprise that Zimmerman (and the jury) thought he’d made the right call in his pursuit of Martin. This works both ways however.

One of my favorite courses to teach is Criminal Justice and Film. One of my favorite parts of the course is when I screen a double feature of “Dirty Harry” and “Taxi Driver.” Everybody always cheers and collectively feels a sense of relief when Eastwood takes matters into his own hands and guns down the psychotic Scorpio killer. At the end of the film, Eastwood tosses his badge away in disgust.

The reaction is markedly different with “Taxi Driver”. Instead of relief, the audience feels disgust and revulsion when the psychotic Travis Bickle saves a child prostitute by massacring a tenement full of pimps and thugs. The public reaction within the film treats Bickle as a hero. As an audience we know the truth, Bickle is a mentally disturbed Vet and a failed political assassin.

It becomes much easier to excuse and justify Harry’s actions simply because he’s a much more (seemingly) likable and charming person. This is why stand your ground laws are so problematic from a public policy perspective.

Public policy, particularly criminal justice policy, tends to be based more on conventional wisdom or common sense than empirical research.

Academics need to not only do a better job publicizing their research but we need to make it more accessible and relatable to non professional nerds. Only when this happens will public policy reflect science instead of somebody’s gut feeling. Let’s get to work.

“We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”

The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.

Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.

THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.

The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.

This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.

“I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”

If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.

almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.

At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.

Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.

People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.

That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.

Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).

These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure.

with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies

The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.

Americans assume a "unity of goodness": that all good things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go together. But for many places with different historical experiences based on different geographies and circumstances that isn't always the case.

many countries in the developing world are saddled either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American advice is more dubious than supposed, because America's experience is the opposite of the rest of the world.

For the more complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those who are exposed as tax cheaters.

For without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such distinctions?

What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.

The ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization. Arab states whose regimes have fallen -- Egypt, Libya, Syria -- never had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups in Syria and militias in Libya -- have often fought impressively. Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.

Huntington implies that today's instability -- the riotous formation of new institutional orders -- is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth.

As for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a replacement for revolution. "He who corrupts a system's police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system's police stations."

In Huntington's minds, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power.

He writes, "In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order.

Thus, paradoxically but understandably," he goes on, "the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military..." And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened branch of society at the time.

The logic behind much of Huntington's narrative is that the creation of order -- not the mere holding of elections -- is progressive.

But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 

access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.

You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.

You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.

The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.

You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.

You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.

 Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.

There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent

Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.

Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.

By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.

 Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.

This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.

The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.

In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.

A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).

Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.

When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.

Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.

What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.

The resultant grid of photos is very revealing (below). Here is a portion of southern China, one of the most densely settled regions on the planet. Each image is one degree intersection. There is hardly a building in site. And for a place that has been intensely farmed for centuries if not millennia, there is a surprising lot of wildness. What it does to show is urbanization.

Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all. This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms. By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.

The women are given less forgiving roles: Catherine Gibson's Susan can only imagine personal fulfillment through having a baby, Ilinca Kiss's elegant, icy Beatrice oozes stereotypes of Frenchness like a perfume and Claire Sanderson's Hannah goes on vaguely "working with the environment," serving as a foil to the other characters. Her best line is to observe that she's busy after Senexate, because "Most people didn't care about climate change when it was only going to affect their children, but they care now."

Organizing neighborhoods in a lattice shape isn't just less confusing; it also encourages different kinds of mobility. Grids encourage walking. Perpendicular intersections make life easier for bike commuters. Streets that don't twist and turn make public transportation like buses and rail more viable commuting options, thus diminishing our over-reliance on cars.

Most of the oldest cities in America — not to mention the oldest capitals in Europe, or in the Roman Empire, for that matter — were laid out in neat, densely interconnected grids that enabled people to get around before cars came along... These communities had what Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, calls "location efficiency," a rough analogue to the idea of energy efficiency that captures the extent to which your job, your grocery store, and your favorite pub are all convenient to you. Around the turn of the century, U.S. cities of all sizes built thousands of miles of railway for streetcars that made the urban grid even more efficient. "It happened everywhere, it happened brilliantly," Bernstein says, "and we threw it away." [The Atlantic Cities]

Indeed, deviating from the tightly woven grid pattern creates all kinds of impractical weirdness. The planners behind the labyrinthine suburbs sprouting up in Las Vegas are quickly running out of names for their streets, as Willy Staley pointed out at The Awl. Incidentally, the street names therein have already reached their comically absurd end, like Big Bird Court or Tupac Lane.

It isn't exactly a secret, either, that urban flight has all sorts of psychological and sociological drawbacks, engendering seclusion, a lack of diversity and shared ideas, and a "disassociation from the reality of contact with other people," as The New York Times put it in 1999.

"The way we organize most cities actually encourages individuals to make choices that make everyone's life harder," Frank told Montgomery. "The system fails because it promises rewards for irrational behavior."

For Ataturk, the first step was contraction, abandoning any attempt to hold the Ottoman regions that surrounded Turkey.

The second step was to break the hold of Ottoman culture on Turkey itself.

The slaughter of World War I did more than destroy the Ottoman Empire. It shook its confidence in itself and its traditions.

Ataturk did not try to suppress Muslim life in the private sphere, but Islam is a political religion that seeks to regulate both private and public life.

For Ataturk, the military represented the most modern element of Turkish society and could serve two functions. It could drive Turkish modernization and protect the regime against those who would try to resurrect the Ottoman state and its Islamic character.

Ataturk came to power in a region being swept by European culture, which was what was considered modern.

the commonalities of life in poor, urban, religious neighborhoods don’t begin to overcome the profound differences — and importance — of the religions they adhere to.

That said, Carsamba drove home to me the problem the AKP, or any party that planned to govern Turkey, would have to deal with. There are large parts of Istanbul that are European in sensibility and values, and these are significant areas. But there is also Carsamba and the villages of Anatolia, and they have a self-confidence and assertiveness that can’t be ignored today.

They represent an increasingly important trend in the Islamic world and the option is not suppressing them (that’s gone) but accommodating them or facing protracted conflict, a kind of conflict that in the rest of the Islamic world is not confined to rhetoric. Carsamba is an extreme case in Istanbul, but it poses the issue most starkly.

given how healthy the Turkish economy is, wanting to join the European Union is odd. And the fact is that the European Union is not going to let Turkey in anyway.

while Carsamba can’t be ignored, the secularists hold tremendous political power in their own right and have the general support of the military.

Never forget that at crucial points the Ottomans, as Muslim as they were, allied with the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians in order to dominate the Balkans. They made many other alliances of convenience and maintained a multinational and multireligious empire built on a pyramid of compromises. The AKP is not the party of the Wahhabi, and if it tried to become that, it would fall. The AKP, like most political parties, prefers to hold office.

The Turks failed to understand the American and European perception that Turkey had gone over to the radical Islamists.

When you take the 360-degree view that the AKP likes to talk about, it is an extraordinary and contradictory mixture of states. Turkey is a country that maintains relations with Iran, Israel and Egypt, a dizzying portfolio.

Turkey’s strategy is to be friends with everyone, its “zero conflict with neighbors” policy, as the Turks call it. It is an explicit policy not to have enemies. The problem is that it is impossible to be friends with all of these countries.

Trying to be friendly with everyone is not going to work, but for the Turks, it is a better strategy now than being prematurely Byzantine.

I am trying to understand the consequences of the re-emergence of Russia, the extent to which this will pose a geopolitical challenge and how the international system will respond.

The purpose of this trip is to get some sense of how the Turks think about Russia and where Russia fits into their strategic thinking.

There are no moves that Turkey can make that will not alienate some great power, and it cannot decline to make these moves.

Nevertheless, while the Russians aren’t an immediate threat, they are an existential threat to Turkey.

There is endless talk in Turkey of intentions, hidden meanings and conspiracies, some woven decades ago. It is not these things that matter.

But modernism and secularism are woven into Turkish society. Those two strands cannot be ignored.

As a subjective matter, I like Turkey and Turks. I suspect I will like them less as they become a great power. They are at the charming point where the United States was after World War I. Over time, global and great powers lose their charm under the pressure of a demanding and dissatisfied world. They become hard and curt. The Turks are neither today. But they are facing the kind of difficulties that only come with success, and those can be the hardest to deal with.

The tensions between the secularists and the religious must not be minimized. The tensions within the religious camp are daunting. The tensions between urban and rural are significant. The tensions between Turkey and its allies and neighbors are substantial, even if the AKP is not eager to emphasize this

Along with the advanced technology, a wealthy ruling class and individual identification by stamp seals, the people at Tell Zeidan also built large public structures of mud bricks.

GURGAON, India

In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.

Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.

Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”

Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.

From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.

The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.

“We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”

Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.

Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.

Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.

“The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”

“Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.

Alawite power in Syria is only about five decades old. The Alawites are frequently (and erroneously) categorized as Shiite Muslims, have many things in common with Christians and are often shunned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike. Consequently, Alawites attract a great deal of controversy in the Islamic world.

Syria is not simply a mirror reflection of a country like Bahrain (a Shiite majority country run by a minority Sunni government). Rather than exhibiting a clear Sunni-Shiite religious-ideological divide, Syria’s history can be more accurately described as a struggle between the Sunnis on one hand and a group of minorities on the other.

The seed was thus planted for an Alawite-led military coup while the Sunni elite were preoccupied with their own internal struggles.

it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.

The idea of an AI singularity

if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.

at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down

My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.

We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.

engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems

Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.

without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.

if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.

we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology

We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.

another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.

Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide

Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it

. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years

Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies

Finally, representative democracy scales up badly

Nor are governments as important as they used to be.

the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.

we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.

The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.

Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.

a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa

In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.

by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.

It’s a normative projection

I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.

And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.

a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar

Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted

Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions

He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.

But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves

Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings

But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks

Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.

The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.

For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.

to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house

The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.

We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.

the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication

funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.

These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.

This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian

the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?

Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.

wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.

One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.

the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.

Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.

Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.

The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.

whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.

at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.

In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.

full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.

Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.

Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.

we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.

In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.

With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.

the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.

Now begins another phase. There are indications that it will center on the military. There are other signs that it will target Shanghai, the primary power base of Jiang Zemin and the locus of financial sector reform in China.

the formation of a unified National Security Council chaired by Xi himself and his apparent wresting of the reins of economic and social reform from Premier Li Keqiang, suggest that some other and deeper shift is underway

China is in the midst of an economic transformation that is in many ways unprecedented. The core of this transformation is the shift from a growth model heavily reliant on low-cost, low value-added exports and state-led investment into construction to one grounded in a much greater dependence on high value-added industries, services and above all, domestic consumption.