When you buy your trainers, do you want to make a political statement? Businesses want to attract consumers by advertising their commitment to liberal causes like diversity and tackling climate change. It is a phenomenon known as woke capitalism. But is it a welcome sign that multinationals are becoming socially responsible? Or is it just the latest trick by business to persuade us to part with our cash, and a smokescreen to disguise the reluctance of many companies to pay their fair share of taxes? The Economist's Philip Coggan asks whether it's a case of getting woke or going broke.
30 January 2020
Failed Architecture: Jakarta’s Superblocks Continue a Legacy of Urban Segregation
From the fortified and securitised environments of early Dutch colonialism to the construction of privatised gated-estates in the city’s urban fringe in the 1980s and 1990s, walling and the enclosure of people and wealth are recurring features of Jakarta’s built form. However, unlike the mercantilist storehousing, colonial military infrastructure or residential estates of the previous three hundred years, since 2006 a very new form of urban separation has emerged in the city: the integrated-superblock.
Enormous and exclusive, the superblock sits at the intersection of the office, the shopping mall and the home. They tower over the largely single or double-storey neighbourhoods around them and are stark and imposing expressions of the city’s significant, and still growing, inequalities. But superblocks did not appear from thin air. They are a product of a series of late-20th and early-21st century changes in Indonesia’s political economy. [...]
Crucially however, the property market in the immediate aftermath of the democratic transition was heavily liberalised, subject to extreme property speculation and ensnared by the continuation of New Order-connected oligarchic control. Appropriation and rent-seeking was aided by the creation of a state managed, but IMF directed, financial crisis response organisation: the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA). IBRA was a significant financial vehicle in Indonesia through the early-2000s and existed with the sole mandate of stabilising the business environment and returning money to government coffers as quickly as possible. To do so, the bank bailed out over 70% of underperforming loans given to property developers by the New Order, offered debt restructuring packages to well-connected developers and auctioned off state-held property in the inner city for next to nothing. This amounted to a recapitalisation of privileged developer groups and a government-sanctioned transfer of land from collective to private ownership for effectively no public gain. [...]
The logic of the superblock recalls both the old form of enclosing social relations found in the moneyed separations of the new towns of the 1980s, but it is also the construction of something entirely new. The nation, for those that can afford it, is increasingly entangled with the recessed conditions of the gated-estate gone global – privatised and keenly aware of its surroundings, but dislodged from the specifics of its geography and blurred into a worldwide network of prestige, inter-reference and money.
Nautilus Magazine: Galactic Settlement and the Fermi Paradox
In a 2014 paper on the topic, my colleagues and I rebutted many of these claims. In particular, we argued that one should not conflate the population growth in a single settlement with that of all settlements. There is no reason to suppose that population growth, resource depletion, or overcrowding drives the creation of new settlements, or that a small, sustainable settlement would never launch a new settlement ship. One can easily imagine a rapidly expanding network of small sustainable settlements (indeed, the first human migrations across the globe likely looked a lot like this). [...]
The results are pretty neat. When we let the settlements behave independently, Hart’s argument looks pretty good, even when the settlement fronts are slow. Even if all the ships have a very limited range (only able to reach, say, the nearest stars to Earth) and even if they are no faster than our own interstellar ships today (like Voyager 2), we find they can still settle the entire Milky Way in less than its lifetime, supporting Hart’s version of the Fermi Paradox. [...]
On the other hand, there are a lot of assumptions in Hart’s arguments that might not hold. In particular, his assertion that if the sun has ever been in range of a settled system then it would have been settled and the settlers would still be here. Perhaps Earth life for some reason keeps the settlements at bay, either because “they” want to keep Earth life pristine or it’s just too resilient and pernicious for an alien settlement to survive. Perhaps Earth is Aurora?
Social Europe: Russia’s path toward a better political capitalism
Many western commentators are obsessed with Putin, alternatively demonising and lionising him, and fail to notice that these three objectives are not particularly novel or original. They are exactly the same as those of Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet leader and his predecessor in the Kremlin. [...]
Yeltsin’s choice of Putin, which was to a large degree fortuitous—Putin was the protégé of the later alienated oligarch Boris Berezovsky—paid off. All three objectives were achieved: Putin was able to end the chaos of the 1990s, he reversed the economic downturn, and he left ‘the family’ (Yeltsin’s) intact with all its money. Putin now hopes in turn that his choice will be equally inspired. [...]
In the ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, Russia’s average annual growth in per capita gross domestic product was 0.3 per cent, against more than 7 per cent for China. Thus, in the past decade alone, the income gap between China and Russia doubled: while in 2009, China’s GDP in international dollars was about 3½ times that of Russia’s, the ratio is 7:1 today. [...]
In that context, the selection as Medvedev’s successor of Mikhail Mishustin, a rather unknown official among Kremlinologists, not only has an element of surprise (which Putin must relish) but, on reflection, makes sense. Who better to jump-start the economy than the person who was able to reform the notoriously corrupt and inefficient system of Russian taxation—so that it now looks, according to the Financial Times, as ‘the tax system of the future’? If Mishustin brings with him likewise technocratically-minded and effective leaders in their 40s and 50s, and if they remain politically shielded by Putin (the way the reformers in China in the 1990s were ‘shielded’ by Deng Xiaoping), Putin might just have a chance to reverse the circular economic history of Russia and produce an economic upturn.
Science Alert: Cats Do Bond Securely to Their Humans - Maybe Even More So Than Dogs
This may not come as a huge surprise to those who live with cat companions, but it suggests two important things. Firstly, it looks like we've underestimated the depth of the bond cats can form with their people. Additionally, it shows that dogs don't have a monopoly on secure social bonding with Homo sapiens. [...]
In their behavioural experiment, the research team observed how cats respond to their owners in a strange environment. Previous research on rhesus monkeys (the controversial wire mother experiments reported in 1958) and dogs (a much more ethically sound experiment reported last year) had shown that both species form secure and insecure attachments. [...]
Interestingly, those rates - 64.3 percent and 65.8 percent - are pretty close to the 65 percent secure attachment rate seen in human infants. And cats showed a secure attachment rate slightly higher than found in a test of 59 companion dogs published in 2018; the canines were 61 percent secure and 39 percent insecure.
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