the Arabesque

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: July 1, 2008

In voting against the Bush tax cut in 2001, Senator John McCain said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” Today he campaigns in favor of extending that same tax cut beyond its expiration date.

Senator Barack Obama last year called himself a “longtime advocate” of public financing of election campaigns. This month, he reiterated his “support” for such financing while becoming the first major party presidential nominee ever to reject it for his own campaign.

Do you think either of these men is a hypocrite?

If so, does this hypocrite really believe, in his heart, what he is saying?

Fortunately, we don’t need to get into the fine points of taxes or campaign finances to take a stab at these questions. We can probably get further by looking at some experiments in what psychologists call moral hypocrisy.

This is a more devious form of hypocrisy than what was exhibited by, say, the governor of New York when he got caught patronizing a prostitute. It was obviously hypocritical behavior for a public official who had formerly prosecuted prostitutes and increased penalties for their customers, but at least Eliot Spitzer acknowledged his actions were wrong by anyone’s standards.

The moral hypocrite, by contrast, has convinced himself that he is acting virtuously even when he does something he would condemn in others. You can understand this “self-halo” effect — and perhaps discover it in someone very close to you — by considering what happened when two psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, tested people’s reactions to the following situation.

You show up for an experiment and are told that you and a person arriving later will each have to do a different task on a computer. One job involves a fairly easy hunt through photos that will take just 10 minutes. The other task is a more tedious exercise in mental geometry that takes 45 minutes.

You get to decide how to divvy up the chores: either let a computer assign the tasks randomly, or make the assignments yourself. Either way, the other person will not know you had anything to do with the assignments.

Now, what is the fair way to divvy up the chores?

When the researchers posed this question in the abstract to people who were not involved in the tasks, everyone gave the same answer: It would be unfair to give yourself the easy job.

But when the researchers actually put another group of people in this situation, more than three-quarters of them took the easy job. Then, under subsequent questioning, they gave themselves high marks for acting fairly. The researchers call this moral hypocrisy because the people were absolving themselves of violating a widely held standard of fairness (even though they themselves hadn’t explicitly endorsed that standard beforehand).

A double standard of morality also emerged when other people were arbitrarily divided in two groups and given differently colored wristbands. They watched as one person, either from their group or from the other group, went through the exercise and assigned himself the easy job.

Even though the observers had no personal stake in the outcome — they knew they would not be stuck with the boring job — they were still biased. On average, they judged it to be unfair for someone in the other group to give himself the easy job, but they considered it fair when someone in their own group did the same thing.

“Anyone who is on ‘our team’ is excused for moral transgressions,” said Dr. DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University. “The importance of group cohesion, of any type, simply extends our moral radius for lenience. Basically, it’s a form of one person’s patriot is another’s terrorist.”

If a colored wristband is enough to skew your moral judgment, imagine how you are affected by the “D” or the “R” label on your voting registration. If you are a Democrat, you are more likely to think Mr. McCain hypocritically switched tax policies to pick up conservative votes, but Mr. Obama’s decision to abandon public financing probably looks more complicated. If you’re a Republican you’re likelier to figure Mr. Obama did it just so he could raise more money on his own, but you’re more willing to consider Mr. McCain’s economic rationales.

The more interesting question is how presidential candidates, and their supporters, turn into hypocrites. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments that humans are remarkably sensitive to unfairness. We’ve survived as social animals because we are so good at spotting selfishness and punishing antisocial behavior.

So how we do violate our own moral code? Does our gut instinct for self-preservation override our moral reasoning? Do we use our powers of rationality to override our moral instinct?

“The question here,” Dr. DeSteno said, “is whether we’re designed at heart to be fair or selfish.”

To find out, he and Dr. Valdesolo brought more people into the lab and watched them selfishly assign themselves the easy task. Then, at the start of the subsequent questioning, some of these people were asked to memorize a list of numbers and retain it in their heads as they answered questions about the experiment and their actions.

That little bit of extra mental exertion was enough to eliminate hypocrisy. These people judged their own actions just as harshly as others did. Their brains were apparently too busy to rationalize their selfishness, so they fell back on their intuitive feelings about fairness.

“Hypocrisy is driven by mental processes over which we have volitional control,” said Dr. Valdesolo, a psychologist at Amherst College. “Our gut seems to be equally sensitive to our own and others’ transgressions, suggesting that we just need to find ways to better translate our moral feelings into moral actions.”

That is easier said than done, especially in an election year. Even if the presidential candidates know in their guts that they are being hypocritical, they cannot very well be kept busy the whole campaign doing mental arithmetic. Besides, they are surrounded by advisers with plenty of spare mental power to rationalize whatever it takes to win.

Politicians are hypocritical for the same reason the rest of us are: to gain the social benefits of appearing virtuous without incurring the personal costs of virtuous behavior. If you can deceive even yourself into believing that you’re acting for the common good, you’ll have more energy and confidence to further your own interests — and your self-halo can persuade others to help you along.

But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your heart you know you’re wrong.

………………………………………………………………………….

Further readings:

“The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press.

“Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Psychological Science, 2007.

“Moral hypocrisy: Addressing some alternatives.” Batson, C. D., Thompson, E. R., & Chen, H. (2002). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 330-339.

By: Steve Lohr, INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Published: June 27, 2008

NEW YORK: Bill Gates is retiring, sort of. He is still only 52, and he is going off to spend more time guiding the world’s richest philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He will still be Microsoft’s chairman and largest shareholder, but Friday is his last day as a full-time worker at the software giant, marking the unofficial end of his career as a business leader.

Sure, there are the blockbuster Microsoft products, like Windows and Office, used in offices and homes, everywhere, every day. But beyond that, Gates, and his company, founded 33 years ago, have fundamentally shaped how people think about competition in many industries where technology plays a central role, the behavior of modern markets, and even antitrust.

In a sense, Bill Gates can be seen as the foremost applied economist of the second half of the 20th century.

Yet the old rules of competition, so lucratively mastered by Microsoft, are being altered by the current wave of Internet computing - and Google is the company at the forefront. So far, Microsoft is struggling to adjust, and it will be up to Gates’s successors to overcome the challenge or watch Microsoft’s wealth and leadership in the industry steadily erode.

Whatever the future for Microsoft, the Gates legacy is impressive. The main reason that there are more than a billion copies of the Windows operating system on personal computers around the world, according to industry experts and economists, is that Gates grasped and deployed two related concepts on a scale no one ever did in the past - “network effects” and the creation of a technology “platform.”

Put simply, a network effect is that the value of a product goes up as more people use it. A technology platform is a set of tools or services that others can use to build their own products or services. So building the workbench-like platform encourages more people to join the network, which attracts more interest in the platform, enlarging the network and so on.

For Gates, the strategy started with its first product, Microsoft Basic, a programming language, but really took off with its operating systems, first Microsoft DOS and then the many versions of Windows. Today, there are many thousands of software applications that run on the Windows platform, not just word processing and spreadsheets but the specialized programs in doctors’ offices, factory floors and retail stores mainly run on Windows - a very broad network, on a technology platform.

“Gates saw software as a separate market from hardware before anyone else, but his great insight was recognizing the power of the network effects surrounding the software,” said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That, Cusumano added, was the essential difference in the paths of Microsoft and Apple, the early leader in personal computing. Apple, he said, focused on making outstanding products alone, while Microsoft nurtured a growing business ecosystem of outside software developers who use, and are dependent up, Microsoft’s technology.

“Apple has always been a product company, and Microsoft is a platform company,” Cusumano said.

The result, he adds, is that Apple today does make outstanding products, though its market share is small, while more than 90 percent of personal computers run Microsoft software.

Hindsight tends to bring clarity. In the early years, it is unclear how much Gates was pursuing each opportunity as it came as opposed to a grand strategy. He had large ambitions. When he was a Harvard undergraduate, Gates lamented that so many of his fellow students pursued a “narrow track for success,” diligent strivers in safe professions, instead of being willing to “take big risks to do big things,” recalled Michael Katz, who was a Harvard student at the time.

While Gates dropped out of college to found Microsoft, with Paul Allen, Katz went on to become an economist. In fact, he was the co-author of a seminal paper in 1985 on network effects and the use of technology standards as weapons of competition, a paper that would eventually be cited prominently in the landmark U.S. government antitrust suit against Microsoft.

In the early 1980s, when Katz a and a fellow economist, Carl Shapiro, were doing the research for the paper, they looked at technology standards like the rivals in videocassette recording, Sony’s Betamax versus VHS, backed by other Japanese companies. They looked at personal computers, mainly in terms of the competition between Apple and IBM-compatible personal computers. They were aware of Microsoft’s role, as an operating system supplier, Katz said, but had no inkling how things would play out.

“At the time, we weren’t thinking that Microsoft would rise to dominate the computer world,” said Katz, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

By the early 1990s, Gates spoke fluently in the economic language of network effects, network externalities, increasing returns and technology standards. In a Harvard business school case study, Gates explained, “We look for opportunities with network externalities - where there are advantages to the vast majority of consumers to share a common standard. We look for businesses where we can garner large market shares, not just 30 or 35 percent.”

Microsoft’s market share in Internet search in the United States is less than 10 percent, while Google holds more than 60 percent and Yahoo has about 20 percent. And the rise of Internet services and social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, but also Web-based alternatives to traditional desktop software including e-mail, word processors and spreadsheets poses a fresh challenge to Microsoft.

Traditional desktop software - and the technology standards Microsoft controls there - matter far less when more software is accessed with a Web browser and delivered over the Internet from vast data centers run by Google and others. The new technology is widely known as “cloud computing” and the business model behind it is typically to sell online advertising.

“The threat to any technology company is to miss one of the big shifts in technology, and Microsoft missed the transition to cloud computing and advertising as the revenue source for the Internet,” said David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard business school.

“The Web is now the platform,” Yoffie added. “People are writing Web applications for everything from Facebook to business programs inside corporations. The business ecosystem is migrating to the Web and way from Microsoft.”

At Microsoft, there is scant sign of panic, despite its trailing position and its failed bid to buy Yahoo as a catch-up strategy. Microsoft sees an evolution in computing instead of any disruptive revolution that would imperil the company, said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer.

Microsoft, Mundie said, is preparing for a widening world of both cloud computing and “client” machines, not only PCs but also cellphones, cars, game consoles and televisions, all running Microsoft software.

“Our conclusion is no, you’re not really looking at some tectonic shift,” Mundie said. “The next big platform is the union of the clients and the cloud.”

From: INTERNATIONL HERALD TRIBUNE
Published: June 27, 2008

The U.S. Congress has always had a soft spot for “experts” who tell members what they want to hear, whether it’s supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth.

Right now, the welcome mat is out for analysts who claim that out-of-control speculators are responsible for $4-a-gallon gas.

Back in May, Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager, made a big splash when he told a Senate committee that speculation is the main cause of rising prices for oil and other raw materials. He presented charts showing the growth of the oil futures market, in which investors buy and sell promises to deliver oil at a later date, and claimed that “the increase in demand from index speculators” - his term for institutional investors who buy commodity futures - “is almost equal to the increase in demand from China.”

Many economists scoffed: Masters was making the bizarre claim that betting on a higher price of oil - for that is what it means to buy a futures contract - is equivalent to actually burning the stuff.

But members of Congress liked what they heard, and since that testimony much of Capitol Hill has jumped on the blame-the-speculators bandwagon.

Somewhat surprisingly, Republicans have been at least as willing as Democrats to denounce evil speculators. But it turns out that conservative faith in free markets somehow evaporates when it comes to oil. For example, National Review has been publishing articles blaming speculators for high oil prices for years, ever since the price passed $50 a barrel.

And it was John McCain, not Barack Obama, who recently said this: “While a few reckless speculators are counting their paper profits, most Americans are coming up on the short end - using more and more of their hard-earned paychecks to buy gas.”

Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we don’t have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

Indeed, this past Monday, Masters assured a House subcommittee that a return to the days of cheap oil is more or less there for the asking. If Congress passed legislation restricting speculation, he said, gasoline prices would fall almost 50 percent in a matter of weeks.

O.K., let’s talk about the reality.

Is speculation playing a role in high oil prices? It’s not out of the question. Economists were right to scoff at Masters - buying a futures contract doesn’t directly reduce the supply of oil to consumers - but under some circumstances, speculation in the oil futures market can indirectly raise prices, encouraging producers and other players to hoard oil rather than making it available for use.

Whether that’s happening now is a subject of highly technical dispute. (Readers who want to wonk themselves out can go to my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com, and follow the links.) Suffice it to say that some economists, myself included, make much of the fact that the usual telltale signs of a speculative price boom are missing. But other economists argue, in effect, that absence of evidence isn’t solid evidence of absence.

What about those who argue that speculative excess is the only way to explain the speed with which oil prices have risen? Well, I have two words for them: iron ore.

You see, iron ore isn’t traded on a global exchange; its price is set in direct deals between producers and consumers. So there’s no easy way to speculate on ore prices. Yet the price of iron ore, like that of oil, has surged over the past year. In particular, the price that Chinese steel makers pay to Australian mines has just jumped 96 percent.

This suggests that growing demand from emerging economies, not speculation, is the real story behind rising prices of raw materials, oil included.

In any case, one thing is clear: The hyperventilation over oil-market speculation is distracting us from the real issues.

Regulating futures markets more tightly isn’t a bad idea, but it won’t bring back the days of cheap oil. Nothing will. Oil prices will fluctuate in the coming years - I wouldn’t be surprised if they slip for a while as consumers drive less, switch to more fuel-efficient cars, and so on - but the long-term trend is surely up.

Most of the adjustment to higher oil prices will take place through private initiative, but the government can help the private sector in a variety of ways, such as helping develop alternative-energy technologies and new methods of conservation and expanding the availability of public transit.

But we won’t have even the beginnings of a rational energy policy if we listen to people who assure us that we can just wish high oil prices away.

By: James Kanter, INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Published: June 26, 2008

BRUSSELS: The European Union reached a landmark agreement Thursday to cap emissions from aircraft, raising the stakes in an increasingly ferocious battle with the United States over how to regulate global greenhouse gases.

In the first requirement of its kind, all airlines arriving or leaving from airports located in the EU would be obliged to buy some pollution credits beginning in 2012, joining other industrial polluters that trade in the European emissions market. That includes non-European carriers like American Airlines and Singapore Airlines.

Including airlines in that system is the boldest move yet by the EU to stamp its environmental policies on the rest of the world.

For consumers, such rules could mean further fare increases in the wake of a steady rise in fuel surcharges imposed by airlines - a trend that looks set to continue. On Thursday the president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries warned that oil prices could reach levels of up to $170 a barrel this summer.

“At the end of the day it’s the people who fly” who will pay more under the new system, warned Anthony Concil, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, the industry’s biggest lobbying group.

U.S. officials immediately warned that the requirements probably would be illegal under the convention governing international civil aviation.

“The mandatory application of the European Emissions Trading System to U.S. airlines and airlines of other non-European countries is, we think, both contrary to international law and ultimately unworkable,” said Robert Gianfranceschi, a spokesman at the U.S. Mission to the EU in Brussels.

The compromise was reached Thursday by representatives of the European Parliament and by EU governments represented by Slovenia, which currently holds the revolving presidency of the EU. It states that the EU “should continue to seek an agreement on global measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from aviation,” according to a copy of the text seen by the International Herald Tribune.

But EU plan “may serve as a model for the use of emissions trading worldwide,” the draft law states.

The proposal still needs the assent of the full European Parliament and individual EU governments. But people involved in the negotiations said those steps were likely to be a formality, given the political agreement.

Including airlines also is a victory for European regulators, who are seeking to include more polluters in the system. That could help blunt criticism of the EU by those who see it as unfairly targeting heavy industry. The carbon trading market, which was started in 2005, caps the overall amount of pollution emitted by industries like electric utilities and steel makers in the EU.

Concil, the IATA spokesman, said the costs to the airline industry of buying permits to comply with European emissions regulations would be more than $4 billion. Imposing new, costly rules on airlines was “incredible” at a time when the industry is expected to lose more than $6.1 billion this year, he said.

Opponents of the plan argue that it will be an ineffective regional attempt to tackle a problem that requires a global solution. European airlines and charter companies also have said they would be at disadvantage to overseas competitors that operate fewer European routes.

Giovanni Bisignani, the director general of IATA, took out full-page advertisements in newspapers this week calling the plans “crazy” and saying that support for the proposals by European governments meant that they had “lost the plot.”

Bisignani said that the aviation industry already was doing enough to reduce its carbon footprint by investing in new technology and using less fuel. He said negotiations on the creation of an emissions trading program for the world’s airlines should be conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, a United Nations body.

Including airlines in the current European system “will only invite international legal battles,” he warned.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, which first proposed the rules, has said a global deal would take too long for Europe. EU officials were determined to put forward their own plans, which would cover the emissions from aircraft flying both legs of journeys to and from major destinations like London, Paris and Frankfurt.

Even so, the agreement reached Thursday reduced the chances of international disagreement, said one person closely involved in the negotiations. He would not be identified in order to allow EU governments to make an official announcement about the accord in the coming days.

He said that if other countries introduced approximately similar measures, the EU would drop its jurisdiction covering emissions on flights leaving non-EU countries like the United States, to avoid double regulation.

Most of the initial permits would be allocated to airlines by the European authorities, but airlines would be obliged to buy 15 percent in auctions. A decision on whether airlines would be obliged to buy more permits in later years could be made in coming months depending on negotiations on overhauling the European trading system and the price of oil, he said.

The aviation industry in general has long sought to play down its impact on the environment, saying it accounts for just 2 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Environmentalists say that measure underestimates the true impact of flying.

Aircraft release other gases and vapor trails at high altitudes, meaning the CO2 impact from aviation should be multiplied up to four times and could equal up to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, James Leape, the director general for the World Wide Fund for Nature, said at a conference on aviation in April.

Concerns also surround aviation because the industry is growing so rapidly - driven in large part by the expansion of low-cost carriers.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: June 27, 2008

HARARE, Zimbabwe — As Zimbabwe’s neighbors urged it to postpone this week’s presidential runoff, hundreds of beaten, newly homeless Zimbabweans gathered Wednesday outside the South African Embassy here in a desperate bid for help during the electoral crisis.

By 8:30 p.m., around 400 people, mainly men displaced by the recent political violence, were pulling down their woolen caps and hunching into thin jackets to sit out one of the coldest nights this winter. Few of them had eaten in the last several days; they began converging outside the embassy in hopes of finding food, water and medical attention.

“The situation is absolutely desperate,” said an opposition official trying to find shelter for 80 women and children at the site.

The scene unfolded amid a scramble of regional and international diplomacy, with many African and Western nations saying the vote set for Friday would be neither free nor fair.

On Wednesday, officials from Swaziland, Angola and Tanzania — the so-called troika empowered to speak for the Southern African Development Community, a regional bloc of 14 nations — called on Zimbabwe to put off the voting because the current crisis would undermine its legitimacy.

Among the most damning voices raised in criticism was that of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, who, at a dinner in London, condemned a “tragic failure of leadership in Zimbabwe.” He did not identify the object of his criticism by name.

Taking a different tack, Queen Elizabeth II stripped Robert Mugabe, the country’s president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he is presiding, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday.

The rebukes reflected the mounting international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence in going ahead with the runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of the race on Sunday. Mr. Tsvangirai cited the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.

Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted the honorary knighthood during an official visit to Britain in 1994 when, the Foreign Office said, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”

With the widespread attacks on the opposition, the Foreign Office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping away the title is exceedingly rare. A Foreign Office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done: in 1989 with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Mr. Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, was quoted on Wednesday as calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to bring calm and help pave the way for new elections in which he could participate as a “legitimate candidate.”

“Zimbabwe will break if the world does not come to our aid,” he said in an op-ed article whose authorship was attributed to him in The Guardian newspaper in London. On Thursday, however, Mr. Tsvangirai distanced himself from the article, saying it “does not reflect my positions or opinions regarding solutions to the Zimbabwean crisis.”

“I am not advocating for military intervention in Zimbabwe by the United Nations or any other organization,” his statement said.

Mr. Tsvangirai took refuge in the Dutch Embassy here on Sunday. He emerged briefly on Wednesday to hold a news conference in which he proposed negotiations, but only if Mr. Mugabe canceled the runoff first.

“We have said we are prepared to negotiate on this side of the 27th, not the other side of the 27th,” Mr. Tsvangirai said, according to Reuters.

In an interview in The Times of London Thursday, Mr. Tsvangirai was quoted as reiterating his demand for negotiations instead of elections. “Negotiations will be over if Mr. Mugabe declares himself the winner and considers himself the president. How can we negotiate?” he was quoted as saying.

The U.S. ambassador in Harare, James D. McGee, said that Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, were determined to hold the runoff “at all costs,” according to the State Department.

“We’ve received reports that ZANU-PF will force people to vote on Friday and also take action against those who refuse to vote,” Mr. McGee said in a conference call described by the State Department.

All over the country, destitute people have fled the violence, and are now looking for food, shelter, protection and medical care.

One woman at a church in Harare held her 11-month-old baby, who had casts on his tiny legs. She said that after her husband, an opposition organizer, went into hiding she had gotten word that ZANU-PF supporters were looking for her, too. She fled with the boy.

She returned home the next day, though, and that is when “the youth,” as foot soldiers of the ruling party are often called, came looking for her, she said. They snatched her son from the bed and hurled him onto the concrete floor, shattering his legs, she said.

Afterward, she was too terrified to move. But that night, when all was quiet, she set out for the opposition headquarters, Harvest House, to seek help there. She was able to carry only her distraught child, and the 12-mile walk took most of the night.

Harvest House was bursting with refugees, but she was able to get care at a hospital. Now her son’s legs stick out at an odd angle below his blue romper suit, encased in plaster casts.

The woman’s blanket was stolen, and because she has been surviving on one meal a day, her thin skirt and jacket hang on her. Her thin legs look as if they, too, might snap.

But when she looks at her baby, her strained face softens and becomes beautiful again. For three days the boy has had only water, she said, because her breast milk has dried up.

“I hate Zimbabwe,” she said. “I want to leave.”

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris and Graham Bowley from New York.

年轻人与老人

其实，人生中的许多麻烦，又何尝不是因为上帝在我们眼前撒了几粒谷子呢？