History Readings

The civil service, notorious for its inefficiency and endemic corruption, has long ago lost all popular confidence in it. It is also unable to collect tax revenue.

The failure of the state is clearly reflected in the fast deterioration of the services it provides in basic goods, such as education, health, sanitation, and transport. Diminished funds, frequent strikes, and low morale in public administration have combined to bring the state virtually to a halt.

Nor are authorities able to protect citizens, and their properties, from social disorder, widespread vandalism, and occasional bouts of violence

this has caused a breakdown in the rule of law.

Turn to the political class and you will find that its authority has vanished into thin air. Prime minister George Papandreou may have shown political courage at times, but has no control over either his party or his government.

Greece’s GDP will shrink by 5% this year and will be 2% smaller in 2012; the economy is expected to contract for four successive years. Greece is meanwhile faced with one of the greater human flights in her history. This includes three categories of individual, mostly young people, who should be the most valuable to Greece if Greece is to overcome its present crisis: academics and intellectuals; entrepreneurial middle-class professionals with technical skills and expertise; and long-term immigrants who, in the last two decades, were the backbone of Greece’s development

Evidently, the problem with Greece is far deeper and much more serious than this country’s (already deep and serious) financial crisis. It involves nothing less than a complete and drastic overhaul of the Greek state system. It should however be equally obvious that, as Greece is an EU country, Europe cannot but face up to this problem and contribute to its solution, as any alternative route must inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire project of European integration.

His theory draws upon many of the most prominent views of how humans emerged. These range from our evolution of the ability to run long distances to our development of the earliest weapons, which involved the improvement of hand-eye coordination. Dramatic climate change in Africa over the course of a few tens of thousands of years also may have forced Australopithecus and Homo to adapt rapidly. And over roughly the same span, humans became cooperative hunters and serious meat eaters, vastly enriching our diet and favoring the development of more-robust brains. By themselves, Wilson says, none of these theories is satisfying. Taken together, though, all of these factors pushed our immediate prehuman ancestors toward what he called a huge pre-adaptive step: the formation of the earliest communities around fixed camps.

“When humans started having a camp—and we know that Homo erectus had campsites—then we know they were heading somewhere,” he told me. “They were a group progressively provisioned, sending out some individuals to hunt and some individuals to stay back and guard the valuable campsite. They were no longer just wandering through territory, emitting calls. They were on long-term campsites, maybe changing from time to time, but they had come together. They began to read intentions in each other’s behavior, what each other are doing. They started to learn social connections more solidly.”

“The humans become consistent with all the others,” he said, and the evolutionary steps were likely similar—beginning with the formation of groups within a freely mixing population, followed by the accumulation of pre-adaptations that make eusociality more likely, such as the invention of campsites. Finally comes the rise to prevalence of eusocial alleles—one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation, and are found at the same place on a chromosome—which promote novel behaviors (like communal child care) or suppress old, asocial traits. Now it is up to geneticists, he adds, to “determine how many genes are involved in crossing the eusociality threshold, and to go find those genes.”

Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.

“Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”

If Wilson is right, the human impulse toward racism and tribalism could come to be seen as a reflection of our genetic nature as much as anything else—but so could the human capacity for altruism, and for coalition- and alliance-building. These latter possibilities may help explain Wilson’s abiding optimism—about the environment and many other matters. If these traits are indeed deeply written into our genetic codes, we might hope that we can find ways to emphasize and reinforce them, to build problem-solving coalitions that can endure, and to identify with progressively larger and more-inclusive groups over time.

the bursting of the debt bubble three years ago was not just a severe example of the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of American capitalism. Rather, it was the ultimate consequence of the modern global economy. Chief among the changes that have taken place is the integration of China, Russia, India and other countries into the global economic mainstream. The developed world once had maybe 500 million workers. Today, say the authors, we’ve added another two billion people to the global work force. That change alone has had a great deal to do with the stagnant wages, income inequality and the oversupply of labor in America that was masked by rising home prices and access to credit.

they believe that this is perhaps the best time in recent history for the government to take on a sustained infrastructure program, lasting from five to seven years, to create jobs and demand. “Labor costs will never be lower,” says Hockett. “Equipment costs will never be lower. The cost of capital will never be lower. Why wait?” Their plan calls for $1.2 trillion in spending — not all by the government, but all overseen by government — that would add 5.2 million jobs each year of the program.

Reducing government spending in the short term will only make things worse.

Now that the curtain has been pulled back, cheap credit alone can’t fix our problems. The country is in a deflationary cycle that is very difficult to get out of: as wages decrease (or more workers become unemployed), people become afraid to spend. Assets like homes drop in value. Businesses react by lowering prices and laying off yet more workers — which only triggers a new round of deflation. The only thing that doesn’t change is the unsustainably high debt that was accrued during the bubble.

they call for a “global rebalancing,” which includes a radical change in the current dysfunctional relationship between creditor and debtor nations, and even a new global currency that would be administered by the International Monetary Fund.

As Lincoln saw it, “older” powers like Britain, France and Russia could go on to see imperial archipelagos flourish, but “younger” states should opt for geographic and political consolidation and centralization at home.

Beginning in 1862, Bismarck unified Germany, but he explicitly rejected the idea of a “Großdeutschland,” or “Greater Germany,” incorporating Austria, in favor of a “kleindeutsche Lösung,” or “Little German Solution,” that preferred centralization over maximum territorial expansion.

Unifying states needed more than just will; they needed propitious events and conditions.

the Civil War — as significant as it is for American history — is even more important when viewed through a comparative, transatlantic lens. The fight for internal unification rather than expansion meant that never again would the United States seek to conquer and annex its neighbors. It would, along with Bismarck’s Germany, be a new kind of state: centralized, rationalized and mobilized to dominate the coming century.

Third, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision.

Fourth, the government bonds of the other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion.

The German public still thinks that it has a choice about whether to support the euro or to abandon it. That is a mistake. The euro exists and the assets and liabilities of the financial system are so intermingled on the basis of a common currency that a breakdown of the euro would cause a meltdown beyond the capacity of the authorities to contain. The longer it takes for the German public to realize this, the heavier the price they and the rest of the world will have to pay.

The fact that arrangements are made for the possible default or defection of three small countries does not mean that those countries would be abandoned. On the contrary, the possibility of an orderly default—paid for by the other eurozone countries and the IMF—would offer Greece and Portugal policy choices.

he discussions ought to start right away because even under extreme pressure they will take a long time to conclude. Once the principle of setting up a European Treasury is agreed upon, the European Council could authorize the ECB to step into the breach, indemnifying the ECB in advance against risks to its solvency. That is the only way to forestall a possible financial meltdown and another Great Depression.

Who can accomplish something significant in three months?   But this is exactly the point — it takes a project out of the realm of business as usual.

Rapid Results was designed to help large corporations.   It was invented about 40 years ago by Robert Schaffer, a management consultant.  Five years ago, Schaffer’s company spun off a group as a nonprofit to train people all around the world to use the same method.   Rapid Results has spread, well, rapidly, because it has a champion in the World Bank, which is teaching people to use the method in various countries.

A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do.  They vote.  Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank — say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 — how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days?  The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.

Rapid Results initiatives are a “bite-sized approach to complex problem-solving.  Communities will get confidence to tackle problems that may seem insurmountable.”  The tight deadline “forces a degree of prioritization and focus which leads to results,

The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes.  People aren’t sitting and waiting for the district official to come out.   They go buy the materials themselves.  Women sleep on the bulk cement bags to make sure no one steals them. A village in Sudan needed bricks for a school, and the contractor wasn’t producing enough.  So the Rapid Results team organized a competition in the community to make bricks, and the project stayed on schedule.

According to the Association of American Publishers, total gross sales for all books in 2010, as reported by 87 publishers, were about $15.6 billion, an increase of around 2.7 percent over 2009. CD audiobooks represented $189.7 million of that total, a drop of 11 percent. But the increase in download sales to $81.9 million was a boost of 38.8 percent, reflecting the shift toward digital audio, a trend that from all accounts has continued in 2011.

Armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War

If the world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that's because there's more information about wars -- not more wars themselves.

Societal norms about what to make of this information have also changed. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has noted, "The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence," so that we see today's atrocities -- though mild by historical standards -- as "signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen."