World
Policy Journal
How Much Is Enough?
“How much is enough?” is the question of our time. As the dangers of
unchecked climate change become clearer and the global population inches
towards 10 billion, policymakers, thinkers, and activists search desperately
for ways to reduce consumption and promote sustainable lifestyles. Meanwhile,
in much of the developing world, many are moving in the opposite direction,
longing to take full advantage of their newfound purchasing power: a
revolution of rising expectations.
Against this backdrop,
World
Policy Journal has convened a group of global thinkers to
address the critical question of how much is enough in colliding worlds of
overabundance and scarcity. People’s answers to the question drive decisions,
policies, and behaviors all over the world—from poverty-stricken rural villages
where subsistence on a dollar a day is a way of life; to cities worldwide
that are growing along with their emerging middle classes; and to the gilded
enclaves of the most privileged, for whom the minimum is never sufficient.
The Summer 2011 issue of
World
Policy Journal also explores the state of the war in
Afghanistan; the push for better civil-military coordination in U.S.
policymaking; the plight of Egypt’s liberals in today’s post-revolutionary
moment; the roots and realities of Greece’s financial crisis; the Russian
government’s perpetual inability—or unwillingness—to fight alcoholism; and
the West’s muddled response to the violent madness of Libya’s Muammar
Gaddafi.
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UPFRONT
The Big Question
What does “quality of life” mean, and how should we measure it? A panel of
global experts weighs in. Featuring Peter
Singer, Pavan Sukhdev, Hon-Lam Li, and other leading
thinkers.
Finding Enough: Confessions of a Secular Missionary
“How much is enough?” William
Powers has spent much of the past year posing this question
to people around the world, following his own experiment to see how much he
could reduce his consumption footprint. “Whenever I talked directly about
ecocide and global warming,” he writes, “eyes glazed over.” But audiences
everywhere did respond to the idea that less is more. “Guide folks into a vision
of their lives with less material clutter and over-scheduling and you strike
a powerful chord,” writes Powers, who calls for efforts to promote balanced
consumption—starting with a global ban on all forms of marketing to children
under the age of 12.
Anatomy of a Dollar a Day
Living on “a dollar a day” has become shorthand for defining poverty in the
developing world. Yet it tells us very little about the lives of some 850
million people who survive at or around that level. Meet two such people in
Vietnam: a pedicab driver in Hanoi and a farmer in a village 50 miles outside
the capital. How do they allocate their limited resources?
The Pleasures of Excess
The emergence of
Western-style consumer culture in places like India comes just as
environmentalists and sustainability advocates, many based in the West, are
calling for the adoption of less consumption-driven lifestyles. “To judge
from the enthusiasm with which many Indians have embraced consumerism, it’s
going to be a tough sell,” writes Mira
Kamdar. Until a tipping point is reached in the West and
citizens revolt en masse against our own hyper-consumptive economies, an
event whose arrival is distant at best, it is hypocritical to expect people
in emerging economies to behave any differently, she argues.
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
Chutes and Ladders: Middle Class in Motion
Creating sustainable development might ultimately hinge on how we understand
“middle class,” since achieving that vaguely defined status is now the
ambition of billions of people. To find out what it means to be middle class,
World Policy Journal turned
to writers in three countries at different levels of economic development—Tecee Boley in Liberia, with a per capita annual income of
roughly $400; Aubrey
Belford in Indonesia, at around $4,000; and Bas Heijne in
the Netherlands, at roughly $40,000.
This Land Is Your Land: A Conversation with Hernando de
Soto
In his book
The Mystery of
Capital, probing the relationship between property rights and
poverty, the influential Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto claims that some $9
trillion of “dead capital” is locked up in land, homes, and businesses
belonging to poor people who do not technically “own” them. Without deeds or
titles, he argues, people all over the world are not able to leverage their
property for profit. For the past decade, solving this problem has been de
Soto’s mission, as he explains in a conversation with the editors of
World Policy Journal.
Inside the Bubble
As a teacher at a school for the children of Ecuador’s wealthy elite, Thea Johnson witnessed
firsthand the realities of social mobility in a highly stratified society. “In
Ecuador,” she writes, “the poor can become working- or middle-class, but the
middle class can never become rich.” This dynamic has not changed under the
presidency of Rafael Correa, whose dreams of a “socialist revolution” have
yet to shake the roots of the power structure.
Land’s End
Can an island nation survive without its islands? Kenneth E. Barden
reports from the remote South Pacific country of Kiribati, where rising sea
levels are creating an existential crisis. “For Kiribati,” writes Barden,
“the question of sustainability is not a matter of lifestyle—it is a
matter of life and death.”
PORTFOLIO
Fleeing Burma
From
the moment Burma won its independence from Britain, the Rohingya—a
Muslim minority community in a largely Buddhist nation of 55 million—have
been targeted by a succession of repressive governments intent on controlling
and marginalizing non-Burmese ethnic groups. Hundreds of thousands
have fled across the border to Bangladesh, where the government refuses
to recognize them as refugees, classifying them as illegal immigrants. Saiful Huq Omi,
a photographer based in Dhaka, presents powerful images of the desperate
conditions of the Rohingya: crushing poverty, no access to medical care, and
no recourse to the law. And yet, he writes, “even a life of misery in
Bangladesh seems more appealing than a return to Burma.”
FEATURES
Reclaiming Afghanistan
The killing of Osama bin Laden served as a jarring reminder of just how far
the war in Afghanistan has moved beyond its initial goals, writes Michael Daxner, who has
consulted for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan for the past decade. The
massive nation-building effort into which the United States and NATO stumbled
continues to falter, even as Washington anxiously debates the size and
schedule of inevitable force withdrawals. “Still,” Daxner writes, “for the
first time in at least five years, I have the sense that there is a genuine
movement among Afghans toward taking the initiative and reclaiming a role in
determining their country’s future.”
Guns and Butter
Since the end of the Cold War, the military side of America’s foreign policy
system has won more funding and more influence, while the civilian side—the
State Department’s diplomats and foreign aid officers—has lost out. One
reason for America’s travails in Iraq and Afghanistan is the reality that the
military has been asked to fill a vacuum left by the absence of a fully
resourced and well-trained corps of diplomats, writes Patricia DeGennaro.
“Our government needs to put its money where its ‘smart power’ mouth is and
create a comprehensive national-security structure that supports an alignment
of interests instead of endless confrontation,” DeGennaro writes. That
essential realignment might require nothing short of the creation of a joint
civilian-military agency—an authority superior to both the State Department and
the Pentagon.
Beyond Tahrir Square
At the core of
the Egyptian revolution were young people with dreams of turning Egypt
into a genuine secular democracy. Now, the fate of their ambitious project is
in doubt, reports Jenna
Krajeski. Under military rule, the tide in Egypt has turned
from revolutionary to counterrevolutionary, and Egypt’s liberals are in
danger of being pushed aside and outflanked by the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Egypt’s so-called ‘Facebook revolutionaries’ are now confronting the task of
spreading their message to people and places barely touched by the Internet
and social media,” Krajeski writes. The course Egypt takes will depend
to a great extent on whether the liberals can remain relevant without
betraying the principles of their revolution—or each other.
Greek Tragedy
The roots of Greece’s economic catastrophe lie in excesses that have become
endemic to Greek society and governance during the past three decades, argues
Ioannis N. Grigoriadis.
“Greece’s path toward recovery will not only involve administrative reform,”
he writes. “It also requires a major economic and cultural shift in people’s
lives. Greeks will have to give up living beyond their means and expecting
every unfulfilled need to be met by the state.” Along with a drastic
reduction of the size of the public sector, Grigoriadis calls for creating a
skilled bureaucracy committed to ending the “national sport” of tax evasion.
Drinking Games
Soviet-era joke: Brezhnev gets a telegram from Siberia—“Quick, send two train
cars of vodka. The people have sobered up and are asking where the Tsar
is.” Today, reports Heidi
Brown, alcoholism poses as great a threat to Russia as it did
during Soviet times, largely on account of the decades-long unwillingness of
authorities to confront the problem. A drunk population, it seems, is easier
to control—and there is money to be made from the booze
beez-ness. “That basic
calculation has managed to survive the momentous political upheavals that
shaped Russia in the past century—the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet era,
the collapse of communism, and the rise of crony capitalism,” writes Brown.
“Regardless of all those transformations, no Russian government has ever
seriously attempted to provide for or encourage the treatment of alcoholism.”
Map Room: Yemen — Hearts, Minds, and al-Qaida
In the wake of popular protests inspired by the so-called “Arab
Spring”—followed by intense fighting between the government and tribal
groups– Yemen seems to be on the verge of descending into chaos. Some
counterterrorism experts worry that this environment will benefit al-Qaida’s
affiliate in Yemen, known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Yet
earlier this year, Glevum Associates, a social-science research and strategic
communications firm, released a wide-ranging report on Yemeni public opinion
that found little support for AQAP.
Coda: …To The Shores of Tripoli
In 1985, CBS News correspondent David
A. Andelman, now the editor of
World Policy Journal, travelled to Libya to
interview its ruler, Muammar Gaddafi. “I was left with one overriding,
utterly chilling, impression,” Andelman recalls. “It was his eyes. In no
sense can the camera possibly do them justice. They look at you, through you,
and you recognize that there is something quite mad going on behind them.” As
NATO’s military action against Gaddafi continues, Andelman reflects on the
broader challenges posed by the shifting politics of the Middle East.
All too often the West, but especially the United States, “has been out of
touch with the hopes and dreams of most of the region's people—our engagement
confined largely to the regimes of their oppressors or violent intervention
when it has suited us, or our various acolytes,” he laments.
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