Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

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phrases:
underscore the importance of

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Rise of Consumer Society
1. Toward a consumer society.
1.1 From Production to Consumption
- Historians looking back at the twentieth century may well conclude that it was the century of the consumer society. What has undoubtedly had the most significant impact upon the way of life of ordinary people in industrial societies over the past century has been the mass availability of consumer goods.
- Traces of luxury and symbolic consumption can be found throughout history. In contrast, consumer society - in which ever-growing consumption becomes the principal aspiration, source of identity, and leisure activity for more and more of the population - is a much newer phenomenon.
- The question, therefore, is not when consumption beyond subsistence first appeared, but when it took over. This distinction parallels the one made by Karl Polanyi between the quite ancient appearance of markets and the more recent domination of society by the market. Since the rise of markets and of mass consumption is closely related, Polanyi's conclusion that the domination of the market was finally established in England in the 1830s is potentially relevant to the history of mass consumption.
- Today in developed countries minimum standards of nutrition, housing, and clothing are assured. Beyond these minimum needs, such former luxuries as homeownership, durable goods, travel, recreation and entertainment are no longer restricted to a few. The broad masses participate in enjoying all these things and generate most of the demand for them.
- What is new is the common man's sharing in the ways of living that in the past were reserved for the few. The common man's ability to use some of his money for what he would like to have rather than for what he must have represents the revolutionary change.
- The things whose consumption characterizes a consumer society are not those that are needed for subsistence, but are valued for non-utilitarian reason, such as status seeking, envy provocation, and novelty seeking.(good definition of consumer society)
-  A salient characteristic of a consumer society is that it is one in which a principal focus of leisure or nonwork time is the spending of money.
- The ostensible functions of the things purchased - their announced uses - become less and less important, as compared to non-utilitarian or symbolic functions. The latter include the provision of novelty and status; provision of a basis for personal relationships of comparison, sharing, envy, or social ranking; and provision of a sense of identity.
- A consumer society is one in which the possession of use of an increasing number and variety of goods and services is the principal cultural aspiration and the surest perceived route to personal happiness, social status, and national success.
- One of the most common themes is that a consumer society relates individual identity to consumption, so that our judgments of ourselves and of other relate to the lifestyle that is created by consumption activities.
- Consumption, and not production, is the central motor of contemporary society. Laurel Anderson and Marsha Wadkins contrasted consumption-oriented societies with production-oriented ones, noting that, in the former, an individual's identity is tied to what one consumes rather than in a production culture where an individual's identity is more tied to what one produces. John Lukacs also said that "In the modern world the production of consumption becomes more important than the consumption of production."
1.2 Perpetuating the Consumer Culture
- On any given day, 18 billion displays ads appear in magazines and daily newspapers across the United States. In consumer cultures like the United States, the urge to buy is sanctioned, reinforced, and exaggerated in ways so numerous, so enticing, so subtle that ignoring them is not an easy option.(United States is a consumer society)
- The 148 billion dollars spent on advertising in the United States in 1994 was greater than the GNP of all but the top twenty economies in the world in 1990. In the United States, there are more shopping centers than high schools.
- The sales message is perhaps nowhere more vivid and insistent than on television. The centrality of television viewing in daily living is suggested by the fact that more time is spent watching television than doing anything else besides working and sleeping. According to a survey, the average individual watches television four hours a day. Televisions offer windows into as well as direct access to the market.
- Recent innovations in communication and information technologies are transforming and strengthening the bonds that tie consumer behavior to consumer culture. The linkages between the home, where most television viewing occurs, and the marketplace have become strengthened in recent years with the introduction of instant credit and instant market access through programs that sell directly to audiences. Increasingly the home is yet another extension of the marketplace.
- The extent to which advertising shapes consumerist tendencies and culture is the subject of a debate that has traditionally centered on the issue of whether advertising merely reflects or actively creates wants.
- The rise of the consumer society would not have been possible without a widespread willingness to take on personal debt. And personal debt would not have become as easy and appealing as it is today without the development of the credit card.
- After World II, sporadic efforts were undertaken by banks to introduce credit cards. The ultimate success of the credit card as an institution, awaited successful adaptation of technological innovations such as the computer to the specific requirements of credit card banking. Between 1958 and 1970, 100 million credit cards were dispersed across the United States. With its mass distribution, the feel of the card and the spontaneity of credit transactions have become commonplace. .(The development of credit card might be a good symbol of consumer culture)
2. The McDonaldization of Society(this phrase is interesting for me)
2.1 McDonaldization as a Rationalization Process
- George Ritzer: "I have been thinking about the process of rationalization for many years. It has long been believed that bureaucracy represents the ultimate form of rationalization. However, it gradually began to dawn on(dawn on sb. good phrase!) me that something new was on the horizon, something destined to replace the bureaucratic structure as the model of rationalization. That 'something' turned out to be the fast-food restaurant, most notably McDonald's, which revolutionized not only the restaurant business, but also American society and, ultimately, the world."(McDonald not only revolutionized the restaurant business, but also American society, good example!)
- George Ritzer defined McDonaldization as the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world. McDonaldization involves an increase in efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control through the substitution of non-human for human technology.(definition of McDonaldization.good definition!) While(一种不怎么常用的转折方法） undoubtedly bringing with it many positive developments, McDonaldization also involves a wide range of irrationalities of rationality and associated problems.
- In the last two decades or so, fast-food restaurants had proliferated to the degree that they were virtually everywhere. Also, many other businesses had been organizing along the lines developed by McDonald's. Almost all social institutions (for example, education, sports, politics, and religion) were adapting McDonald's principles to their operations. And McDonaldization was spreading around the world - fast-food croissanteries in Paris, Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing, McDonald's in Moscow. In any case, as George points out, these are all part of what Weber called the rationalization process.
- Other than fast-food restaurants, McDonaldization also takes place in the credit card industry. Prior to credit cards, the process of obtaining loans was slow, cumbersome and non-rationalized. The modern credit card has made the acquisition of at least one type of loan highly rational. It is now a very efficient process, often requiring little more than the filling out of a short questionnaire（这样描述efficiency). With the existence of credit bureau and computerization, credit records can be checked and applications approved very or disapproved very rapidly.
- The decision as to whether or not to offer a pre-approved card, or to approve an application for a card, is often left to a non-human technology - the computer. Computerized scoring system exert control over(good phrase) credit card company employees by, for example preventing them from approving an application if the score falls below the standard. And these scoring systems are, by definition, calculable, relying on quantitative measures rather than qualitative judgments about things like the applicant's character. Thus, credit card loans, like fast-food hamburgers, are now being served up in a highly rationalized, assembly-line fashion. As a result, a variety of irrationalities of rationality, especially dehumanization, have come to be associated with both.
- It is worth noting that in terms of being an independent force in the process of McDonaldization, the rationalization of credit card loans has played a central role in fostering the rationalization of other types of loan such as automobile and home equity loans. Automobile loans used to take days, but now a loan can be approved, and one can drive off in a new car, in a matter of hours, if not minutes. Similarly, home equity loans are obtained much more quickly and easily than in the past. Such loans utilize many of the same technologies and procedures that are used in decision making involving credit cards.
2.2 New Means of Consumption
- As mentioned above, capitalist society has undergone a shift in focus from production to consumption. In the early days of their economic system, capitalists concentrated almost exclusively on controlling production in general, and production workers in particular. However, as factories have moved out advanced capitalist nations, capitalists have moved toward controlling consumption in general, especially the thoughts and actions of consumers. While producing more and cheaper goods remain important, attention is increasingly being devoted to getting people to consume more, and a greater variety of, things.  
- Corresponding to this new era of consumption are new means of consumption, including fast-food restaurants, credit cards, shopping malls, theme parks, cruise ships, gambling casinos, home shopping via television or computers, and even the somewhat older supermarkets.(these are new means of consumption)
-  Just as the means of production are necessary to, and facilitate, production, means of consumption perform the same roles in the sphere of consumption. They are means to lead consumer to consume in ways that are most advantageous and most profitable to manufacturers and sellers. This means that at least some of the time they act to the detriment of consumers. For example, fast-food restaurants lead people to eat foods that are detrimental to their health because they are high in cholesterol, sugar, salt, and other additives; credit cards induce people to spend more than they should and beyond their available capital; shopping malls entice people into buying things they often do not need.(good examples!)
- While these and other new means of consumption enable people to do things they could not do before, they also constrain them to buy more than they need; to spend more than they should. Of course, consumers always possess the capacity to refuse to use the new means of consumption, or to resist consuming when they find themselves in contact with them. However, these means are structured in such a way that people are lured into them and, once in them, they find it extremely difficult not to consume.
- Malls are physically constructed so that one is led past one alluring shop after another. Window displays, signs advertising sales, and perhaps goods placed in bins outside the store attract the consumer's attention. Many malls have also added small kiosks and pushcarts in the middle of aisles to offer yet more attractions One can pass all of these by, but the longer one is in the mall, the harder it gets.
- In capitalist societies, more attention seems to be devoted to inventing new means of consumption than to the more traditional course of creating new means of production. As a result of the necessity for ever-increasing consumption, the focus of capitalism has shifted from exploiting workers to exploiting consumers. If postmodern society is consumer society, then the new means of consumption mentioned here, at least in part, are key elements of the postmodern world.
3. Issues of Personal Style and Equality in Consumption
3.1 The body in consumer culture
- The shift from production-oriented to consumption-oriented society is not only a matter of theoretical emphasis but bears on key issues concerning the social and political order of affluent societies. Michel Maffesoli suggested that we might be permitted to think that the technological innovation of the future will put itself at the service of Dionysian modulation, in particular at the service of the body. We are about to enter an era of orgies, where the sense of community is no longer based on instrumental goals but on sensuality and sentiments.
- The scope of the change in perspective from production-centered society to the consumer society is evident in the recent sociological literature on the body, largely inspired by Foucault. The issue of the social construction of the body is important in consumer society not only because everything we consume is taken in, enjoyed and processed by the body, whether through the tactile senses of touch, taste and smell, or through the distant senses of the eye and the ear. The body is important also because in its social and historical constitution the nature of the social bound is at issue.
- Consumer society is individualistic by definition. This has brought the body into focus, for it is as embodied being that we experience our separateness from others, whereas that which resides in the soul represents the social order: culture, organization, and discipline.
- In a culture dominated by appearance and image, our bodies are on display whether we like it or not（这段跟一道issue题的主题很切合）. If our bodies are to hold on to their marketable value in the world where appearances rule, they must be maintained, and the various body maintenance industries are quite vocal in reminding us of this fact. Keeping up our appearances in proper shapes involves hard work and demands body maintenance practices of various sorts. The body then becomes living evidence of the care (or lack of it) lavished upon it: we judge at a glance if someone has or has not maintained their body through the 'proper' diet, fitness practices, cosmetics, or whatever, if we want to have to 'proper' body that will pass the never-ending tests of the gazing society.
-  According to Mike Featherstone, the version of the self that predominates in consumer culture is that of the performing self, which places greater emphasis upon appearance, display and the management of impressions.  
3.2 Consumption in a class society
- According to Thorstein Veblen, the rich display their wealth through ostentatiously doing nothing productive, or through luxurious consumption, which testifies to the spender's pecuniary strength. This showing-off requires exercise and learning. As he said, "Refined tastes, manners and habits are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up by work..... A life of leisure in this way persisted in through several generations, will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect in the information of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanor."   
- Jean Baudrillard maintains that one should rid oneself of the notion of particular needs for particular objects. He does not deny that needs and utilities exist. He only rejects the prevalent notion that consumption in our society is oriented towards these needs. He invites his readers to interpret consumption according to a code of social and especially class differentiation, claiming that such a social logic will render this activity more intelligible than the psychology and economics of need satisfaction. Just as the school, consumption is a class institution.
- Pierre Bourdieu further develops this idea in his book entitled Distinction. In this book, he examines the links between social class and the practices of consumption in a detailed and empirical way. He made a distinction between economic capital and cultural capital. The latter can be linked to the idea that it is not enough merely to consume, but one must consume in a proper manner. The longer one has attended educational institutions and the more elite these institutions, the higher one's store of cultural capital.
- According to him, each social position has a whole combination of specific cultural practices associated with it. For example, people in a particular social position will read particular newspapers and books, drink particular wines, listen to particular types of music, dine at particular restaurants, wear particular styles of clothes, etc. Specific combinations of cultural and economic capitals appear perfectly natural to those who belong to them. Different social groups are at ease within different economic-cultural combinations, and will feel very awkward outside them. These combinations, as Bourdieu contends, allow the most fundamental social differences to be expressed through the ways in which they differ from each other. In other words, each act of consumption reproduces social difference.（对于不同社会阶层的很好的表述！）
- High cultural capital is relatively rare, and this rarity needs to be protected. For example, if a group's exclusive objects, qualifications, and cultural practices begin to become accessible to other groups, then they will have to be changed in order to retain the distinguishing distance.
- There is also the struggle over which is the more appropriate basis for distinction: cultural capital or economic capital. This characterizes struggles within the dominant class, which Bourdieu sees as divided into the dominant fraction of the dominant class, which is based upon economic capital, and the dominated fraction of the dominant class, which is based upon cultural capital. So it should be clear why academics, artists and intellectuals like to despise the taste of those who have merely money. It is part of the struggle to establish the legitimacy of one's claims to distinction.

- In this way, the dominant classes unceasingly outdistance the consumption patterns of other classes, through rejecting as banal pleasures which they formerly considered exquisite, and consequently always distinguishing themselves from others. When the popular classes can afford some luxury, the dominant classes lose interest in it, or declare it to be obsolete. It is therefore impossible ever to approach the dominant classes, since they will always invent new ways of consumption not accessible to others. In short, this struggle for distinction and recognition is an important aspect of the general symbolic struggles between social classes.（very interesting point!)
- We can see from Bourdieu's work that what is called 'taste' is sociologically speaking something that brings together things and people that go together and that consumption communicates social meaning, and is the site of struggles over social distinction.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

I should have been talking about the topic of consumer society now in Yuquan Campus with some of my American friends in World Cafe. However, I have to do my research in the lab now. What a pity!~

AdelineShenUID：2630498

"Breaking the Climate Impasse with China: A Global Solution"Discussion Paper 09-32, Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
November 2009
Author: Kelly Sims Gallagher, Senior Associate, Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements Discussion Paper Series
Belfer Center Programs or Projects: Energy Technology Innovation Policy; Environment and Natural Resources; Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements; Science, Technology, and Public Policy

SUMMARYEnhancing national competitiveness to sustain economic prosperity is at the heart of concerns in both the United States and China regarding climate change policy. These two countries are the largest emitters on the planet.  U.S. firms and labor unions are concerned that if the United States passes domestic legislation and China does not, the Chinese will have a competitive advantage in pollution-intensive technologies and products.  In turn, the Chinese government believes that it cannot agree to reduce its emissions while continuing to industrialize and develop economically, without technology transfer and financing from industrialized countries, especially the United States.
This paper explores the question of how to reconcile both countries' need for economic advancement, which is increasingly intertwined, with the imperative need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). How technology transfer occurs in practice, and how low-GHG technology transfer specifically might occur, based on prior experience with China, are examined.  Particular focus is devoted to the following questions: How could U.S. firms benefit economically from low-carbon technology transfer to China? And, how could China acquire the technologies it needs to continue its rapid progress of industrialization in a more climate-friendly manner?  The paper is aimed at finding a partial solution that would be likely to bring both the United States and China into an international climate change mitigation regime.  The ideas proposed herein certainly do not resolve many other important challenges, such as how to provide for adaptation assistance, or how to help least-developed countries attract support for improving energy access in a climate-friendly manner.
A "deal" is proposed in this paper, whereby all major-emitting countries, including the United States and China, agree to reduce emissions through implementation of significant, mutually agreeable, domestic emission-reduction policies. To resolve the competitiveness and equity concerns, a proposed Carbon Mitigation Fund would be created. This proposed fund is contrasted with other existing and proposed mitigation funds and finance mechanisms.

SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS
OVERVIEW
International climate negotiations are at an impasse because the world's two largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, the United States and China, are unwilling to accept binding emission-reduction commitments. At the same time, each blames the other for its inaction. This paper proposes a global "deal" for breaking the deadlock in a way that reconciles both countries' economic concerns with the imperative of reducing emissions. The deal has two core elements: (1) All major emitting countries agree to reduce GHG emissions by implementing significant, mutually agreeable, domestic policies and (2) The largest industrialized-country emitters agree to establish a global Carbon Mitigation Fund that would finance the incremental cost of adopting low-carbon technologies in developing countries.
DISCUSSION
The United States and China account for nearly half of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. Without their participation, it will not be possible to stabilize GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would avoid the worst consequences of global climate change or to reach agreement on a workable international climate policy regime.
Both countries’ current refusal to adopt binding GHG commitments is rooted in economic concerns, but these concerns manifest themselves somewhat differently. In the United States, objections center on the competitive disadvantage to American industry—and the attendant potential for lost jobs and carbon "leakage" if domestic firms face GHG regulations while their competitors in China and elsewhere do not. The Chinese, by contrast, are concerned about the cost of GHG mitigation and its direct impact on their ability to industrialize and continue growing their economy. China and other developing countries also argue that it is fundamentally unfair to expect them to adopt similar mitigation commitments at this time given their far lower per-capita emissions, far poorer populations, and far smaller historic contribution to current GHG concentrations.
Transforming this shared concern about economic impacts into a shared interest in reducing the cost of low-carbon technology holds the key to resolving the current deadlock. The approach proposed in this paper combines mitigation commitments for all large emitters with increased cooperation on clean energy research and development, efforts to align incentives and reduce barriers to technology transfer, and assistance from rich countries to help finance the deployment of climate-friendly technologies in developing countries.
KEY FINDINGS & RECOMMENDATIONS

• All countries with significant GHG emissions, including major industrialized countries like the United States and major developing countries like China, must adopt concrete, enforceable domestic GHG-reduction policies. This is essential to address concerns about competitiveness and carbon leakage and to create market incentives for the deployment of clean energy technologies.

• To support the deployment of low-carbon technologies in developing countries and to give these countries an incentive to participate in global mitigation efforts, rich countries should provide financial assistance through a new Carbon Mitigation Fund. The Fund should: (1) finance the incremental cost of low-carbon technologies; (2) disburse funds on a first-come, first-served, technology-neutral basis; (3) leverage the private market and act like a commercial bank; (4) require applicants to utilize competitive procurement processes; (5) restrict direct financing to projects in countries with enforceable domestic GHG policies; (6) require new technologies to reduce GHG emissions at least a certain percentage below a pre-defined, country-specific baseline, and (7) encourage reasonable reductions in barriers to trade and investment in low-GHG technologies. Numerous other structural and operational details would, of course, still need to be worked out.

• It is not clear how large the new fund will need to be—estimates of the incremental cost of deploying low-carbon technologies in developing countries range from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year—but contributions from major industrialized countries should reflect those countries' historic contribution to past emissions. Specifically, contributions should be proportionate to each country's cumulative per-capita emissions going back to a certain date with an adjustment for the size of its economy.

• Countries should commit to greater international cooperation on energy-technology research, development, and demonstration and to reforming existing energy subsidies to remove supports for carbon-intensive fuels. No country has a stronger incentive to invest in clean-energy technology innovation than either the United States or China, and both countries could benefit from greater cooperation to reduce costs, share risk, and accelerate the development and deployment of improved technologies.

CONCLUSION
The principal advantage of the proposed deal is that it offers a way for the United States and China to step forward together in adopting a new international climate agreement sooner rather than later. This package addresses the competitiveness and leakage concerns of the United States by requiring China and other major developing country emitters to adopt enforceable domestic emission-reduction policies. At the same time, it expands global markets for low-GHG goods and services, thus creating a potential source of export growth and job creation for U.S. industries. For China and other developing countries, this package promises to greatly reduce or eliminate the incremental costs of low-GHG technologies, facilitate "technology transfer," and help achieve more sustainable development. It also satisfies their equity concerns by requiring the countries that are most responsible for historic emissions to make the largest financial contribution toward finding global solutions.

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存一篇文献来看看。。。

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A special report on innovation in emerging markets
The world turned upside down
The emerging world, long a source of cheap labour, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation, says Adrian Wooldridge (interviewed here)Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.
This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents(good words): $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another.
Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation? The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams. Driven by a mixture of ambition and fear—ambition to bestride the world stage and fear of even cheaper competitors in, say, Vietnam or Cambodia—they are relentlessly climbing up the value chain. Emerging-market champions have not only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global themselves.
The United Nations World Investment Report calculates that there are now around 21,500 multinationals based in the emerging world. The best of these, such as India’s Bharat Forge in forging, China’s BYD in batteries and Brazil’s Embraer in jet aircraft, are as good as anybody in the world. The number of companies from Brazil, India, China or Russia on the Financial Times 500 list more than quadrupled in 2006-08, from 15 to 62. Brazilian top 20 multinationals more than doubled their foreign assets in a single year, 2006.
At the same time Western multinationals are investing ever bigger hopes in emerging markets. They regard them as sources of economic growth and high-quality brainpower, both of which they desperately need. Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets, with 40% coming from just two countries, China and India. They have also noted that China and to a lesser extent India have been pouring resources into education over the past couple of decades. China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India 60,000 every year.
The world’s biggest multinationals are becoming increasingly happy to do their research and development in emerging markets. Companies in the Fortune 500 list have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. Some have more than one. General Electric’s health-care arm has spent more than $50m in the past few years to build a vast R&D centre in India’s Bangalore, its biggest anywhere in the world. Cisco is splashing out more than $1 billion on a second global headquarters—Cisco East—in Bangalore, now nearing completion. Microsoft’s R&D centre in Beijing is its largest outside its American headquarters in Redmond. Knowledge-intensive companies such as IT specialists and consultancies have hugely stepped up the number of people they employ in developing countries. For example, a quarter of Accenture’s workforce is in India.
Both Western and emerging-country companies have also realised that they need to try harder if they are to prosper in these booming markets. It is not enough to concentrate on the Gucci and Mercedes crowd; they have to learn how to appeal to the billions of people who live outside Shanghai and Bangalore, from the rising middle classes in second-tier cities to the farmers in isolated villages. That means rethinking everything from products to distribution systems.
Anil Gupta, of the University of Maryland at College Park, points out that these markets are among the toughest in the world. Distribution systems can be hopeless. Income streams can be unpredictable. Pollution can be lung-searing. Governments can be infuriating, sometimes meddling and sometimes failing to provide basic services. Pirating can squeeze profit margins. And poverty is ubiquitous. The islands of success are surrounded by a sea of problems, which have defeated some doughty companies. Yahoo! and eBay retreated from China, and Google too has recently backed out from there and moved to Hong Kong. Black & Decker, America’s biggest toolmaker, is almost invisible in India and China, the world’s two biggest construction sites.

But the opportunities are equally extraordinary. The potential market is huge: populations are already much bigger than in the developed world and growing much faster (see chart 1), and in both China and India hundreds of millions of people will enter the middle class in the coming decades. The economies are set to grow faster too (see chart 2). Few companies suffer from the costly “legacy systems” that are common in the West. Brainpower is relatively cheap and abundant: in China over 5m people graduate every year and in India about 3m, respectively four times and three times the numbers a decade ago.

This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a fizzing cocktail of creativity. Because so many consumers are poor, companies have to go for volume. But because piracy is so commonplace, they also have to keep upgrading their products. Again the similarities with Japan in the 1980s are striking. Toyota and Honda took to “just-in-time” inventories and quality management because land and raw materials were expensive. In the same way emerging-market companies are turning problems into advantages.
Until now it had been widely assumed that globalisation was driven by the West and imposed on the rest. Bosses in New York, London and Paris would control the process from their glass towers, and Western consumers would reap most of the benefits. This is changing fast. Muscular emerging-market champions such as India’s ArcelorMittal in steel and Mexico’s Cemex in cement are gobbling up Western companies. Brainy ones such as Infosys and Wipro are taking over office work. And consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West. In some cases the traditional global supply chain is even being reversed: Embraer buys many of its component parts from the West and does the assembly work in Brazil.
Old assumptions about innovation are also being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. But this is proving less true by the day. Western companies are embracing “polycentric innovation” as they spread their R&D centres around the world. And non-Western companies are becoming powerhouses of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers.
Rethinking innovationThe very nature of innovation is having to be rethought. Most people in the West equate it with technological breakthroughs, embodied in revolutionary new products that are taken up by the elites and eventually trickle down to the masses. But many of the most important innovations consist of incremental improvements to products and processes aimed at the middle or the bottom of the income pyramid: look at Wal-Mart’s exemplary supply system or Dell’s application of just-in-time production to personal computers.
The emerging world will undoubtedly make a growing contribution to breakthrough innovations. It has already leapfrogged ahead of the West in areas such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online games. Microsoft’s research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs that allow computers to recognise handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, has become the world’s fourth-largest patent applicant. But the most exciting innovations—and the ones this report will concentrate on—are of the Wal-Mart and Dell variety: smarter ways of designing products and organising processes to reach the billions of consumers who are just entering the global market.

No visitor to the emerging world can fail to be struck by its prevailing optimism, particularly if his starting point is the recession-racked West. The 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Project confirms this impression. Some 94% of Indians, 87% of Brazilians and 85% of Chinese say that they are satisfied with their lives. Large majorities of people in China and India say their country’s current economic situation is good (see chart 3), expect conditions to improve further and think their children will be better off than they are. This is a region that, to echo Churchill’s phrase, sees opportunities in every difficulty rather than difficulties in every opportunity.
This special report will conclude by asking what all this means for the rich world and for the balance of economic power. In the past, emerging economic leviathans have tended to embrace new management systems as they tried to consolidate their progress. America adopted Henry Ford’s production line and Alfred Sloan’s multidivisional firm and swept all before it until the 1960s. Japan invented lean production and almost destroyed the American car and electronics industries. Now the emerging markets are developing their own distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging world as a source of cheap labour must now recognise that it can be a source of disruptive innovation as well.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

I'm sorry to say that I have to leave gter for a couple of days. I want to find myself. I want to think more independently.\ These days gter has given me a lot of things, which help me go through the tough time in life. The friends here are surely very important people in my life. Don't worry much about me. I will come back soon. I just want to think calmly by myself. I just think that it's a terrible thing to stick to a BBS all the time. Maybe I just need some time to calm down and be silent. Maybe I just need some time to go away from a virtual world to embrace the beautiful sunshine and natural beauty in my city. Maybe I am just too tired. Forgive me.

I love gter and surely I will come back soon. But I need some time to adjust my mood and to talk to more people around me.

江雪UID：2790520

Enjoy yourself：）

shannonyUID：2524183

Waiting for you coming back~~
And I love your signature

草木也知愁UID：2487572

two

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Climate science and its discontents
A place in the sunThe scientists in “climategate” did not fudge the data, a report findsApr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
In the hot seat
RON OXBURGH, breezily pushing his bicycle through a clot of journalists outside the press briefing he had just given, is a busy man happy to hurry. Critics of his investigation into the scientific probity of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia will hold that haste against him. In his time Lord Oxburgh has been head of the earth sciences department at Cambridge, chief scientific adviser to Britain’s defence ministry and, briefly, chairman of Shell. In March he was asked to lead an inquiry into the CRU’s main scientific findings, a matter of much debate ever since apparently hacked e-mails from the unit were made public less than five months ago. That he has reported so soon, and in a way that supports the CRU researchers, will be seen by many critics as de facto evidence of a whitewash.
Lord Oxburgh and his colleagues were not concerned with whether CRU’s scientific findings, which are based on records of temperature change from instruments and natural proxies, were correct. They were looking to see if the analysis had been biased and manipulated.
The inquiry panel looked at 11 CRU publications from the past 20 years, spent days talking to the researchers and looking at other documentation, and concluded that if there was any malpractice at CRU they probably would have found it. They found no such thing. Instead they found “dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers ill-prepared for public attention”.
The panel did express considerable surprise at the fact that the unit did not collaborate closely with professional statisticians. This is despite the fact that their work was “basically all statistics”, as one member of the panel, statistician David Hand, of Imperial College, London, put it. The report found that the CRU scientists would, had they been more statistically au fait, have done some things differently. The panel doubted that better methods would have materially changed the results.
Bloggers and others, mostly outside academia, who criticise CRU’s work and other climate science tend to lay much stress on statistical shortcomings. Dr Hand, who has a particular interest in scientific and financial fraud, has read a lot of this work. Dr Hand admires the meticulous work of Steve McIntyre, a mining consultant and blogger, who unearthed statistical problems in another climate analysis. This was a 1998 paper, not produced by CRU, that is now known as “the hockey stick”. Those problems served to enhance the prominence of recent warming in a thousand-year reconstruction of the northern hemisphere’s temperature, and have become a cause célèbre among sceptics.
When the Oxburgh report refers to the possibility of “inappropriate statistical tools…producing misleading results” in climate science, it is the hockey stick that it has in mind. But Dr Hand sees no evidence of anything as worrying as this in the CRU work. His concerns centred mostly on questions about the selection of data sets and the need for studies that showed how sensitive the results were to different selections of data. These are, in effect, what some critics are offering (though with what the report calls “a rather selective and uncharitable approach”), and the antagonism irritates Dr Hand. “What I want to do”, he says, “is bang their heads together and say ‘Sit down together and work out what’s going on’.”
Although the panel said the CRU scientists were careful with caveats, people who subsequently made use of their results, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sometimes oversimplified issues, underplaying possible errors. It also noted that the CRU should have archived data and algorithms better, but that this was a conclusion more easily drawn in hindsight. Having been in both academia and industry, Lord Oxburgh said he has no doubt that in industry, where companies, not researchers, own the data, the record-keeping would have been better, but that the team would have done much less good research. And looking back on his own academic work he showed a certain solidarity with his subject’s sloppiness: “I’m very grateful that the isotopic composition of helium has not become a key matter of public interest.”

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