7 Habits of Highly Positive People: The Secret to Constant Happiness

1. Don’t let bad things pull you down

Highly positive people take bad things and see the good things in them.

Bad things can happen to anyone. The difference between a positive person and a negative one isn’t the events that happen to them but how they respond to those events. While negative people let bad things pull them down, positive people don’t. They take bad things and make the best out of them.

As Randy Pausch once said, “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

A great example is Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential women in the world. She was, for a time, the world’s only black billionaire. Oprah may be rich and successful today, but she faced extreme hardship as a child.

When she was born up till the age of six, Oprah lived in rural poverty with her grandmother. She was so poor that she often wore dresses made of potato sacks, for which the local children made fun of her for.

When she was nine, Oprah was sexually abused–by the people closest to her, her cousin, uncle, and a family friend. At 13, after years of abuse, Oprah ran away from home. She was pregnant at 14 but her son died shortly after birth.

She attended an affluent suburban high school, Lincoln High School, but had her poverty constantly rubbed in her face as she would ride to school with fellow African-Americans who were servants of her classmates’ families.

Despite this extreme hardship, Oprah did not let it get her down. She overcame her adversity to become a benefactor to others, first becoming a radio anchor at 19, then having her own daytime talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show at 22. Through the show, she has helped millions of people around the world, empowering people to take charge of their life and drawing from both her life lessons and her interviewees’ life lessons to inspire others.

If Oprah had caved in the face of hardship, she would never be where she is in life. She is such a positive light because she chose to make the best out of difficulties she was dealt with and subsequently use these lessons to help others.

Likewise for you, don’t ever let yourself get pulled down by your difficulties. Rather, ask yourself what you can learn from them and how you can turn them around to create the life you seek. Such a proactive approach is the start to living an empowered, happy life.

2. Appreciate every good thing that comes your way

Highly positive people are grateful for every good thing that comes their way.

A month ago I conducted a 14-day gratitude challenge on my personal development blog, Personal Excellence, to over 200 participants. Aside from the assigned gratitude tasks to be done one task a day, I asked my participants to identify at least three things to be grateful for every day.

While it was awkward to deliberately find things to be grateful for at the beginning, many participants quickly eased into the task after a couple of days. From friendships, to daily coffee, to burnt toast, to family vacations, to life itself, many gained a new-found appreciation for these very things which they tended to take for granted.

The participants emerged from the challenge more appreciative and positive of life, even though their lives have technically not changed much compared to before the challenge.

Many of us tend to focus on the negative things in life and that naturally makes us feel negative. Why not pay attention to the many great positive things in our lives instead? For example, instead of being upset at the traffic jam you are in right now, why not be grateful for the vehicle you get to drive?

Instead of lamenting about your lousy boss, why not be grateful that you have a boss to lament about as opposed to being retrenched or unemployed? You’ll be surprised to see how many great things you already have going on with this little mindset shift.

3. Lead a well-rounded life

Highly positive people lead a well-rounded life. This means they don’t let work take over their life; neither do they let their relationships override their personal agenda.

I used to devote all my attention to work, to the point where I deprioritized my social life and my personal leisure. While it was great fun working since my work (helping others to grow) is my passion, I became very uninspired after a while because I was neglecting my other life areas. This was when I realize the importance of a well-rounded life to my emotional well-being.

So today, I ensure that I devote time to the core areas of my life: career, love, family, friends, self (through recreation), and contribution. My life wheel video shares the 11 core areas that make up our lives (collectively termed as the “life wheel”) and how to start achieving a 10/10 in all the areas.

4. Deal with your problems right away; don’t let them linger

Highly positive people deal with their problems right away rather than ignore them.

One thing I consistently teach on my blog and in my coaching is not to ignore your problems. Because ignoring your problems doesn’t mean that they will go away. Often times they will linger around and weigh you down subconsciously, even though you don’t realize that.

For example, I used to be an emotional eater where I would eat in response to my emotions like stress and sadness. For a long time I never dealt with this problem, choosing instead to drown myself in food whenever I felt bad.

Later I realized that I was utterly miserable because my stress eating (a) was causing me to gain extra weight, and (b) had turned me into a slave of food. It was only two years ago when I began tackling this issue and a year ago when I achieved complete resolution.

A simple tip to deal with your problems is to (a) keep a record of all outstanding issues you’d like to deal with, then (b) work on them one at a time. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming tackling multiple problems, but doing it one at a time will help you to manage things easily.

5. Let go

Highly positive people let go of the things that do not support them in living a conscious and positive life. This includes toxic and negative relationships.

I once had to let go of a deep friendship of 10 years because we were severely holding each other back. While I was always working on bettering myself, he tended to procrastinate on his own development and would at times live vicariously through my progress.

His lack of proactiveness in living the life of his dreams would negatively impact me as we had always agreed to work on our life goals together and take action together as best buds. I also felt that I was responsible for his inactions if he was truly living vicariously through my own goal progress.

While we tried to work things out in the beginning, it never happened. All our attempts to resolve this issue drained us as we kept going round in circles. After years as buddies, we were simply not compatible as each other’s good friend anymore.

We finally parted ways after 10 years and we immediately felt relieved of a dead weight.

Looking back I wish we had moved on earlier because the later years of our friendship actually drained us more than they helped us to grow.

Think about the negative things in your life right now — from toxic people, to energy vampires, to negative beliefs, to unhappy thoughts, to things that trigger unhappy memories — and start letting go of them, one by one. The sooner you let them go, the happier you will be.

6. Take responsibility for your life

Highly positive people take responsibility for their lives because they realize that happiness is a choice.

For all the problems, heartaches, toxic people, and baggage you are facing, take responsibility for them. While you may not have created those problems and they may be the result of others’ misactions, you can still take responsibility for experiencing them. Doing so puts you in the position to put a stop to them.

For example, I once experienced a heartbreak with someone I liked. While initially I faulted him for bringing me such pain and anguish, it was only in the later years when I took responsibility for my emotions and the situation that I was finally able to move on.

I later realized that I can literally control my happiness by taking responsibility of my negative emotions (and subsequently my life). Because it’s when I do that I can then take action to address my unhappiness and the situations causing it, rather than putting blame on others. Subsequently, I was able to easily move on from two other relationships that didn’t work out.

7. Spread love and kindness (by helping others)

Last but not least, highly positive people spread love and kindness to others without expecting to get anything back in return.

One of the most rewarding things one can do in life is to help others. This is something I have experienced every day for my past five years of running my personal development blog.

The changes I see in my readers’ lives, the happy looks on their faces, and the deep emotional shifts they experience from reading my articles or attending my courses — these bring so much joy into my life and are reason enough for me to continue what I’m doing forever.

While some of us may think that we need to achieve X status or Y age before we can help others, that’s not true at all. The simplest things can help others: one little phone call to a distanced friend, one pat on the back to congratulate a co-worker for a job well done, or a shoulder to lean on for a friend in need.

I started my blog at a relatively young age of 24 which most people wouldn’t think of as an old-enough age to offer help or advice to others. That was a limiting belief on their part though, because we can always help others no matter how old we are or where we are in life.

In the past five years I was able to help many break through limiting careers, let go of toxic relationships, gain strength from hard moments, excel in their goals, and achieve greater heights by simply focusing on helping those I can help, one step at a time.

If I had thought that one person couldn’t make a difference, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this blog post today, and neither would I be running a personal development blog or doing life coaching for others.

You have more power than you think you have, so use that to help others. You will find that when you give, you will naturally receive in return as well.

Source: http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2013/10/16/7-habits-of-highly-positive-people/

Develop your hearts!!

One of my great privileges of my work is that i get to meet, observe and know leaders at a wide variety of organizations, including businesses, governments, universities etc.

I've met a quite a few who exercise to keep their hearts and bodies fit for the long hours and no small number of them are also motivated by the desire to impress others with their presence, energy and competitiveness.

Regular physical exercise is certainly of value. What many leaders miss, however, is the need to develop their hearts in other ways beyond exercise that are even more important: ways that produce the character strengths of love, kindness, compassion, gentleness and empathy.

A leader whose character is missing these strengths may have power over others but will lead from influence that moves people to give their best efforts and align their behaviour with the leader's goals. This truth is expressed in sayings such as you have to "EARN THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD" and "People don't care what you know until they know that you care".

If you are a leader, you can develop the heart of the people you lead by bringing them together to serve at a local charitable organizations in your community that helps the less fortunate. By getting to know and serving the people in your life, your community and the world at large, you will develop the heart of a person others will want to follow.

Remember your Victory Dance

BE brilliant at the basics. Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the first one. Be the only one. Be unforgettable. Be interesting. Be a sleeper. Be That Guy. Be That Girl. Be the world’s expert on yourself. Be better than yesterday, but not as good as tomorrow. Be confident enough to be humble. But be somebody who reminds everybody of nobody else in the world.

AND DON’T wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t sell, enable people to buy. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Don’t be weary in well doing, for in due season you will reap a great harvest if you faint not. And don’t wait for the mainstream to validate your voice. Don’t despise the day of small beginnings. Don’t be selfish with your knowledge. Don’t complain if you haven’t earned the right. And don’t be different, be unique.

BECAUSE YOU are what you charge. You are what you believe. You are the books you’ve read and the people you’ve met. And you are an empty sheet of paper in the minds of every person you encounter.

AFTER ALL, the world cannot resist a man on a mission. The best swimmers are always in the pool. The sculpture is inside the stone. And the two greatest days in your life are the day you’re born, and the day you realize why you were born.

AND if you are successful you will always have too much to do and too little time. If you aren’t being criticized, you aren’t doing much. And if everyone says you’re out of your mind, you just might be onto something.

EVEN THOUGH, it’s not easy being yourself. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. And it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

SO, WORK hard, work long and work smart. Work like you don’t need the money. And work from technique, because you never know how you will feel.

AND DON’T FORGET THAT success leaves clues. That confidence is king. That credibility comes from specificity. That listening is not waiting to talk. And that a nice person who is mean to a waiter is not a nice person.

OR, TO tell the truth, to tell it all and to tell it now. To give value first. To paint yourself into a good corner. To allow customers to participate in your brand. To do the work once and benefit many times. To give yourself away. To respect people’s no’s. To take massive action. And to act as if you already were the person you’re trying to become.

THEREFORE, ALWAYS stand up, stand out or be counted out. Discover your Personal Differential Advantage. Learn to love your zone of discomfort. Greet each day with love in your heart. Show, don’t tell. Make daily appointments with yourself. Never apologize for your art. Remember your Victory Dance. Work harder on yourself than your job. Find your one big idea. And always validate your existence, be yourself and do something cool – every single day.

Source: http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/collectivegenius/2006/06/life_isnt_about.html

Growth in a Buddhist Economy (Jeffrey Sachs)

I have just returned from Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom of unmatched natural beauty, cultural richness, and inspiring self-reflection. From the kingdom’s uniqueness now arises a set of economic and social questions that are of pressing interest for the entire world.
Bhutan’s rugged geography fostered the rise of a hardy population of farmers and herdsmen, and helped to foster a strong Buddhist culture, closely connected in history with Tibet. The population is sparse – roughly 700,000 people on territory the size of France – with agricultural communities nestled in deep valleys and a few herdsmen in the high mountains. Each valley is guarded by a dzong (fortress), which includes monasteries and temples, all dating back centuries and exhibiting a masterful combination of sophisticated architecture and fine arts.

Bhutan’s economy of agriculture and monastic life remained self-sufficient, poor, and isolated until recent decades, when a series of remarkable monarchs began to guide the country toward technological modernization (roads, power, modern health care, and education), international trade (notably with neighboring India), and political democracy. What is incredible is the thoughtfulness with which Bhutan is approaching this process of change, and how Buddhist thinking guides that thoughtfulness. Bhutan is asking itself the question that everyone must ask: how can economic modernization be combined with cultural robustness and social well-being?

In Bhutan, the economic challenge is not growth in gross national product, but in gross national happiness (GNH). I went to Bhutan to understand better how GNH is being applied. There is no formula, but, befitting the seriousness of the challenge and Bhutan’s deep tradition of Buddhist reflection, there is an active and important process of national deliberation. Therein lies the inspiration for all of us.

Part of Bhutan’s GNH revolves, of course, around meeting basic needs – improved health care, reduced maternal and child mortality, greater educational attainment, and better infrastructure, especially electricity, water, and sanitation. This focus on material improvement aimed at meeting basic needs makes sense for a country at Bhutan’s relatively low income level.

Yet GNH goes well beyond broad-based, pro-poor growth. Bhutan is also asking how economic growth can be combined with environmental sustainability – a question that it has answered in part through a massive effort to protect the country’s vast forest cover and its unique biodiversity. It is asking how it can preserve its traditional equality and foster its unique cultural heritage. And it is asking how individuals can maintain their psychological stability in an era of rapid change, marked by urbanization and an onslaught of global communication in a society that had no televisions until a decade ago.

I came to Bhutan after hearing an inspiring speech by Prime Minister Jigme Thinley at the 2010 Delhi Summit on Sustainable Development. Thinley had made two compelling points. The first concerned the environmental devastation that he could observe – including the retreat of glaciers and the loss of land cover – as he flew from Bhutan to India. The second was about the individual and the meaning of happiness. Thinley put it simply: We are each finite and fragile physical beings. How much “stuff” – fast foods, TV commercials, large cars, new gadgets, and latest fashions – can we stuff into ourselves without deranging our own psychological well-being?
For the world’s poorest countries, such questions are not the most pressing. Their biggest and most compelling challenge is to meet citizens’ basic needs. But, for more and more countries, Thinley’s reflection on the ultimate sources of well-being is not only timely, but urgent.

Everybody knows how American-style hyper-consumerism can destabilize social relations and lead to aggressiveness, loneliness, greed, and over-work to the point of exhaustion. What is perhaps less recognized is how those trends have accelerated in the United States itself in recent decades. This may be the result of, among other things, the increasing and now relentless onslaught of advertising and public relations. The question of how to guide an economy to produce sustainable happiness – combining material well-being with human health, environmental conservation, and psychological and cultural resiliency – is one that needs addressing everywhere.

Bhutan has many things going its way. It will be able to increase exports of clean, run-of-the-river hydropower to India, thereby earning foreign exchange in a manner that is sustainable and that can fill government coffers to fund education, health care, and infrastructure. The country is also intent on ensuring that the benefits of growth reach all of the population, regardless of region or income level.

There are serious risks. Global climate change threatens Bhutan’s ecology and economy. Incautious and expensive advice from McKinsey and other private consulting firms could help turn Bhutan into a degraded tourist zone. One must hope that the quest for GNH will help steer the country away from such temptations.

The key for Bhutan is to regard GNH as an enduring quest, rather than as a simple checklist. Bhutan’s Buddhist tradition understands happiness not as attachment to goods and services, but as the result of the serious work of inner reflection and compassion toward others.
Bhutan has embarked on such a serious journey. The rest of the world’s economies should do the same.

India - a reluctant rising power

Some countries are naturally at ease with the concept and the reality of strategic power. Such was clearly the case of France under Louis XIV, the Sun King in the seventeenth century, and such is the case today of China, whose leadership is comfortable with the balance-of-power games of classical Europe.


India is clearly in a different category. In economic terms, India’s confidence has been boosted by the way the Western world now looks at it with a mixture of respect and greed: “What kind of deals can I strike with such an emerging market, whose population will soon be the largest of any country in the world?”

Yet, in order to understand India’s political and diplomatic relationship with the outside world, the most enlightening comparison is with America in 1920. Like the United States after World War I, India is realizing that its status and role in the world have been deeply transformed in the last two decades. And, like America then, India is not naturally at ease with the notion of exercising global power.

India’s history and culture, from Asoka, its mythical emperor in the third century BC, to Gandhi, push it to emphasize ethics and to consider itself an “exceptional” nation in its relationship with the world. Contrary to China, India finds it difficult to adapt to its status as an emerging “Great Power.” It would be a gross exaggeration, of course, to speak of an Indian “inferiority complex.” And yet India constantly measures itself against China, remains obsessed with Pakistan, and has recently begun to look more critically at its relationship with the US.

It is natural for India to proclaim its “democratic” superiority to China while recognizing that on all strategic fronts it is not in the same league. But is it even possible to draw a comparison between what one Indian academic has called the “robotized Chinese man” and the vast human diversity of India?

India seems to worry more than ever about China’s evolution. China’s key role within the G-20, together with the relative if not absolute decline of the Western powers, seems to have reinforced the hard-liners in Beijing and the nationalism of a China that seems less ready than ever to accept any criticism of its human rights record. Viewed from New Delhi, the vision of a reasonable, prudent, and ultimately satisfied China – a vision “sold” to the world by the Minister Mentor of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew – appears less than obvious.

When it comes to Pakistan, too, India seems to lack confidence. On all fronts – demographic, economic, military, and political – India is far above Pakistan. But India does not seem to know how to deal with its northwestern neighbor, and even less whom to deal with in its government.

The largest democracy in the world cannot say openly that it almost preferred the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf to the chaos of the current situation. In reality, what prevails in India is a deep sense of frustration with Pakistan. India’s overtures to Pakistan’s government have largely remained unanswered, and when Indian officials express their unease, the US, if not the international community, accuses them of behaving irresponsibly.

If India seems not to believe that America and its allies can really “succeed” in Afghanistan, nor is it willing to resign itself to a return of the Taliban to power, which could in turn lead to Talibanization of Pakistan. Yet India seems to behave in a very “European” way in Afghanistan; it is ready to send money and experts, but not troops.

India’s worries and frustrations in Afghanistan and Pakistan translate into a mixture of disillusion and irritation with an America that, seen from New Delhi, allows itself to be manipulated by Pakistani officials. Indians cannot quite decide whether the Americans are simply “naive” or duplicitous; either way, they are not reassured.

Whatever the case, the current warming of relations between India and Russia, symbolized by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent visit, does not translate into a grand reversal of alliances, as India’s break with Russia in the 1990’s did. India’s exchanges with Russia are only one-fifth of what they are with China. What prevails nowadays in New Delhi and Moscow is simple pragmatism.

While there is room for Europe in India’s view of the world, for India (as for China) Europe is above all an economic rather than a political reality. When it comes to politics, bilateral relations prevail, and from that standpoint France and Germany seem more important than Great Britain. The Raj era may be visible in the buildings of New Delhi and in the uniforms of the Indian army, but Britain has lost any competitive edge that it once had in India. The past is truly passed.

India’s unease about strategic power, and its resemblance to a gigantic European Union united only by the English language, reflects its ongoing search for a new international identity. In this quest, India is impaired by its lack of practice in the exercise of power on a grand scale. India is not about to become a second China – it lacks both the means and the ambition. That is a further reason for the West to engage and invest in India.

Afghanistan Woes

``Failed state'' is a term applied frequently to Afghanistan and is often deemed the cause for why terrorists gained such influence there. But a country does not fail of its own volition, nor is it weakened by unknown causes. A country fails, when it fails, for definite, identifiable reasons. These must be addressed if Afghanistan is to be revived.


Twenty years of invasion, civil war, and drought have left Afghanistan's institutions in ruin. Millions of Afghans huddle in refugee camps or are displaced from their homes. Land-mines defile the countryside. Millions are sick and poor; many live at starvation levels. For these and many other reasons, rebuilding Afghanistan's economy will require not only economic reconstruction but an effort to reinvent the country's political and cultural institutions. Such a massive effort will be doomed to failure, however, if Afghanistan's neighbors intervene in ways that promote economic upheaval all over again.

Afghanistan is no place for quick fixes. Rebuilding the country cannot be done cheaply. Any thought that the anti-terror coalition will be able to bail out fast (as the West did when it abandoned Afghanistan to its fate after the Soviet withdrawal ten years ago) should be forgotten. The West must stick with Afghanistan until its reconstruction is established. Otherwise, it runs the risk of renewed chaos and violence, but this time in a more destabilized region, as Pakistan's current problems demonstrate.

Three problems are of immediate concern, the most important being feeding the Afghan people - both within the country and in refugee camps outside Afghanistan. Humanitarian aid is being delivered, but a distribution system safe from the predations of Afghanistan's warlords needs to be built. Indeed, the warlords have been given too big a say in distributing aid already, and it may be hard to strip them of this power. But stripped they must be.

The second problem involves relocating Afghan refugees now living in Pakistan and Iran, as well as those displaced within Afghanistan. To achieve this goal, the agricultural economy must be revived in order to revive this industry, providing jobs and food for people. A massive impediment here is the millions of mines left over from the Soviet invasion that must be removed.

The West has a big incentive to be generous to Afghanistan's rural poor. Starving farmers, if unassisted, may return to cultivating a very reliable cash crop: the opium poppy, long a staple of the warlord economy. Eliminating it will not only help farmers and the West as it tries to curtail heroin use, but also Afghanistan's infant government as it struggles to assert its national authority against the warlords. A bankrupt warlord, after all, cannot buy weapons or bribe people to maintain their loyalty.

Major infrastructure investments will also be needed if the economy is to be revived. Housing, particularly for returning refugees, will need to be constructed fast. Cities such as Kabul, Mazar, Herat and others will need to be rebuilt as centers of economic and cultural life. Village housing must be provided at a massive level.

Roads, airports and communications systems must also be revitalized if trade is to be restored. The educational system needs to be rebuilt almost from scratch, and with so many women anxious to return to teaching, a revived educational system will also help Afghanistan's democratic politicians gain a powerful lobby of workers. Particular attention should be given to elementary schools and libraries outside of cities.

Afghanistan poses particular difficulties in reconstruction, as it is not a society with a strong political center. Planners should take advantage of the country's decentralized nature and emphasize private sector participation in reconstruction. A decentralized system will respond better to local needs and avoid an over-bureaucratic public sector. But autonomous economic regions should be avoided as a threat to Afghan national unity because they would play into the hands of the warlords. Moreover, poorer regions would do badly in such a system.

In the long run, Afghanistan has resources that can be exploited. There is the potential for oil and gas exploration, and of mining iron ore and precious metals. These activities should be explored in a framework of economic development across Central Asia. Afghanistan, indeed, must be integrated into the regional pipeline and other development schemes. Afghans can contribute in a tangible way here by reopening the North-South route connecting the resource rich economies of Central Asia to densely populated India and Pakistan.

None of this will be possible unless Afghanistan's young males are disarmed and given productive work. Essential here, is to attract expatriate Afghans with skills and professional achievements to help in rebuilding the country by establishing small firms that will suck up the unemployed. Expatriate involvement will also likely support the rights of women to participate fully and legally in economic and political life, as was the case before 1978.

Finally, donor countries must apply the lessons learned in restoring the war-ravaged states of the former Yugoslavia. Grants and planning must be coordinated, and the consent of Afghanistan's neighboring countries assured. If the latter are ignored, regional interests can incite chaos once again. An international conference on Afghanistan should be called by the US and held under UN auspices. It must affirm not only Afghanistan's territorial integrity, but insure that donor commitments meet the scale of the job and that these promises are kept.

A decade ago, the West turned its back on Afghanistan and chaos ensued. To abandon the country again would be criminal folly.

No Time for a Trade War

The battle with the United States over China’s exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great Depression. But 17 of the G-20’s members introduced protectionist measures just months after the first summit in November 2008. The “Buy American” provision in the United States’ stimulus bill got the most attention. Still, protectionism was contained, partly due to the World Trade Organization.


Continuing economic weakness in the advanced economies risks a new round of protectionism. In America, for example, more than one in six workers who would like a full-time job can’t find one.

These were among the risks associated with America’s insufficient stimulus, which was designed to placate members of Congress as much as it was to revive the economy. With soaring deficits, a second stimulus appears unlikely, and, with monetary policy at its limits and inflation hawks being barely kept at bay, there is little hope of help from that department, either. So protectionism is taking pride of place.

The US Treasury has been charged by Congress to assess whether China is a “currency manipulator.” Although President Obama has now delayed for some months when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner must issue his report, the very concept of “currency manipulation” itself is flawed: all governments take actions that directly or indirectly affect the exchange rate. Reckless budget deficits can lead to a weak currency; so can low interest rates. Until the recent crisis in Greece, the US benefited from a weak dollar/euro exchange rate. Should Europeans have accused the US of “manipulating” the exchange rate to expand exports at its expense?

Although US politicians focus on the bilateral trade deficit with China – which is persistently large – what matters is the multilateral balance. When demands for China to adjust its exchange rate began during George W. Bush’s administration, its multilateral trade surplus was small. More recently, however, China has been running a large multilateral surplus as well.

Saudi Arabia also has a bilateral and multilateral surplus: Americans want its oil, and Saudis want fewer US products. Even in absolute value, Saudi Arabia’s multilateral merchandise surplus of $212 billion in 2008 dwarfs China’s $175 billion surplus; as a percentage of GDP, Saudi Arabia’s current-account surplus, at 11.5% of GDP, is more than twice that of China. Saudi Arabia’s surplus would be far higher were it not for US armaments exports.

In a global economy with deficient aggregate demand, current-account surpluses are a problem. But China’s current-account surplus is actually less than the combined figure for Japan and Germany; as a percentage of GDP, it is 5%, compared to Germany’s 5.2%.

Many factors other than exchange rates affect a country’s trade balance. A key determinant is national savings. America’s multilateral trade deficit will not be significantly narrowed until America saves significantly more; while the Great Recession induced higher household savings (which were near zero), this has been more than offset by the increased government deficits.

Adjustment in the exchange rate is likely simply to shift to where America buys its textiles and apparel – from Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, rather than China. Meanwhile, an increase in the exchange rate is likely to contribute to inequality in China, as its poor farmers face increasing competition from America’s highly subsidized farms. This is the real trade distortion in the global economy – one in which millions of poor people in developing countries are hurt as America helps some of the world’s richest farmers.

During the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, the renminbi’s stability played an important role in stabilizing the region. So, too, the renminbi’s stability has helped the region maintain strong growth, from which the world as a whole benefits.

Some argue that China needs to adjust its exchange rate to prevent inflation or bubbles. Inflation remains contained, but, more to the point, China’s government has an arsenal of other weapons (from taxes on capital inflows and capital-gains taxes to a variety of monetary instruments) at its disposal.

But exchange rates do affect the pattern of growth, and it is in China’s own interest to restructure and move away from high dependence on export-led growth. China recognizes that its currency needs to appreciate over the long run, and politicizing the speed at which it does so has been counterproductive. (Since it began revaluing its exchange rate in July 2005, the adjustment has been half or more of what most experts think is required.) Moreover, starting a bilateral confrontation is unwise.

Since China’s multilateral surplus is the economic issue and many countries are concerned about it, the US should seek a multilateral, rules-based solution. Imposing unilateral duties after unilaterally labeling China a “currency manipulator” would undermine the multilateral system, with little payoff. China might respond by imposing duties on those American products effectively directly or indirectly subsidized by America’s massive bailouts of its banks and car companies.

No one wins from a trade war. So America should be wary of igniting one in the midst of an uncertain global recovery – as popular as it might be with politicians whose constituents are justly concerned about high unemployment, and as easy as it is to look for blame elsewhere. Unfortunately, this global crisis was made in America, and America must look inward, not only to revive its economy, but also to prevent a recurrence.

An interesting letter

Hope you are doing well. Forgive me if the content of the talk hurts you in any manner. My intention is definitely not to embarrass you or put you in inconvenience. It’s been a while that I am encountering a very strange feeling that gives me immense joy and peace. I would like to share it with you – and to let you know that the source of the happiness is you. In the next few minutes, I am planning to put in plain words what I think about you and the feelings I have for you. You have the liberty to switch off or sign off from listening to this. The worst trait of mine is I may sound very boring to you. So it is solely up to you either listen or not.

First things first:

1. You are fine-looking in all sense of the word.
2. You have a comforting voice that brings peace most of the time.
3. You are elegant and charming.
4. You are woman of resilience, calm determination and display excellent judgment.
5. You bring providence and confidence to people who look up to you.

Frankly the above mentioned points are not the reasons why I become crazy for you. Probably those are good reasons to be a good friend. But there are things more than that.

I feel close to my mother whenever I think about you. I feel that you are my child whenever I speak to you. I feel that you are close to my soul whenever I am with you. In short, I feel the warmth as if I am in my mother’s womb with no tensions, fears or insecure feelings – only peace, joy and calmness. I feel that there is something more of poetry, more of melody and more of godliness whenever you talk to me. Somehow I think I am continuously trying to become acquainted with you.

I wouldn’t call it a feeling of love or lust. I don’t know what it is. I do not expect anything from you – nothing from your emotional side, none from your physical side, and none from your material side. I fully want the sacred side of you – and I am sure that is one pristine side which you have not shared it with anyone yet. And I want to explore that. That is the reason probably why I am interested to see the many facets of your personality, curious to know everything about you in-depth. Do you know, by trying to explore you, I started exploring myself deep down into my inner mind. Getting deeper into myself, I have started knowing my feelings, thoughts, deeper stirrings and I understood how ghastly one’s thinking could be. In fact, the picture I have about you may be different from what you really are. But that doesn’t matter.

In fact I had thought not to verbalize my thoughts, as I believed it has to be a silent commitment; eye to eye, being to being and soul to soul. It thought it has to be understood, not said. I don’t know why his urge to convey the thoughts to you at any cost suddenly arose.

All I can say now is you can count on me for any support. Until then God bless you and your boyfriend/partner.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

The joy in the celebration of the New Year lies in the fact that each man, woman, and child is essentially reborn. All of the mistakes, the indiscretions, regrets and wrong turns of the previous year can, if we let them, fall away into distant memory.

Personally, I can absolve myself of the guilt I have over opportunities missed because I was too afraid of criticism or rejection. I can forgive myself for the times that I may have yelled at the friends, in the heat of anger and frustration. And I can vow that in 2010, I will do better. I will be better. Let us put the past behind us; forgive whenever we can and let us resolve to live the best and meaningful life ahead.

When we go to bed on December 31st, we awake with a whole new year ahead. There is just something about the new year, so fresh, so new, so unblemished that allows us to believe, if only for a little while, that we can again be anything that we want to be. We have three hundred and sixty five brand new opportunities to be a healthier person, a nicer person, a better person.

My wish for all of you is the health, strength and courage to live the best, happiest life that you can live as well.

Obama Undermines the UN Climate Process

Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli , which some accepted and others denounced. After the fact, the United Nations has argued that the document was generally accepted, though for most on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Responsibility for this disaster reaches far and wide. Let us start with George W. Bush, who ignored climate change for the eight years of his presidency, wasting the world’s precious time. Then comes the UN, for managing the negotiating process so miserably during a two-year period. Then comes the European Union for pushing relentlessly for a single-minded vision of a global emissions-trading system, even when such a system would not fit the rest of the world.

Then comes the United States Senate, which has ignored climate change for 15 consecutive years since ratifying the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Finally, there is Obama, who effectively abandoned a systematic course of action under the UN framework, because it was proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics.

Obama’s decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries. Some will view this as pragmatic, reflecting the difficulty of getting agreement with 192 UN member states. But it is worse than that. International law, as complicated as it is, has been replaced by the insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing word of a few powers, notably the US. America has insisted that others sign on to its terms – leaving the UN process hanging by a thread – but it has never shown goodwill to the rest of the world on this issue, nor the ability or interest needed to take the lead on it.

From the standpoint of actual reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, this agreement is unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions. Who will take seriously the extra costs of emissions reduction if they see how lax others’ promises are?

The reality is that the world will now wait to see if the US accomplishes any serious emissions reduction. Grave doubts are in order on that score. Obama does not have the votes in the Senate, has not displayed any willingness to expend political capital to reach a Senate agreement, and may not even see a Senate vote on the issue in 2010 unless he pushes much harder than he has so far.

The Copenhagen summit also fell short on financial help from rich countries to poor countries. Plenty of numbers were thrown around, but most of these were, as usual, empty promises. Aside from announcements of modest outlays for the next few years, which might – just might – add up to a real few billion dollars, the big news was a commitment of $100 billion per year for the developing countries by 2020. Yet this figure was unaccompanied by any details about how it would be achieved.

Experience with financial aid for development teaches us that announcements about money a decade from now are mostly empty words. They do not bind the rich countries at all. There is no political will behind them. Indeed, Obama has never once discussed with the American people their responsibility under the UN Framework Convention to help poor countries adapt to the impact of climate change. As soon as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned the $100 billion “goal,” many Congressmen and the conservative media denounced it.

One of the most notable features of the US-led document is that it doesn’t mention any intention to continue negotiations in 2010. This is almost surely deliberate. Obama has cut the legs out from under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in effect declaring that the US will do what it will do, but that it will not become further entangled in messy UN climate processes in 2010.

That stance might well reflect the upcoming 2010 mid-term Congressional elections in the US. Obama does not want to be trapped in the middle of unpopular international negotiations when election season arrives. He may also feel that such negotiations would not achieve much. Right or wrong on that point, the intention seems to be to kill the negotiations. If soothe US does not participate in further negotiations, Obama will prove to have been even more damaging to the international system of environmental law than George Bush was.

For me, the image that remains of Copenhagen is that of Obama appearing at a press conference to announce an agreement that only five countries had yet seen, and then rushing off to the airport to fly back to Washington, DC, to avoid a snowstorm back home. He has taken on a grave responsibility in history. If his action proves unworthy, if the voluntary commitments of the US and others prove insufficient, and if future negotiations are derailed, it will have been Obama who single-handedly traded in international law for big-power politics on climate change.

Perhaps the UN will rally itself to get better organized. Perhaps Obama’s gambit will work, the US Senate will pass legislation, and other countries will do their part as well. Or perhaps we have just witnessed a serious step towards global ruin through our failure to cooperate on a complex and difficult challenge that requires patience, expertise, goodwill, and respect for international law – all of which were in short supply in Copenhagen

 

***Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

What Next in Afghanistan?

Afghanistan’s future does not look good. The Taliban are gaining military and political strength, and President Hamid Karzai is losing support at home and internationally due to his administration’s rampant corruption and the obvious fraud committed in his re-election. Weariness with the war is spreading in the United States, where President Barack Obama finds it difficult to decide about an increase in troops, as demanded by his own generals. European NATO members with troops in Afghanistan would prefer to withdraw them today rather than tomorrow.


The West seems to have lost its orientation in the Hindu Kush – that “graveyard of empires,” as it was called after the British disaster in January 1842, when only one man survived an expedition 16,000. What, many people are asking, is NATO really fighting for in Afghanistan?

Europe remains silent on that question and has only one aim: to get out. In the US, the debate about the purposes being served in Afghanistan is at least still taking place. Follow it, and you will conclude that, ultimately, the war is all about the American superpower’s military victory over the Taliban, so that it can finally withdraw its troops – for a second time.

The source or meaning of the conflict in Afghanistan is impossible to find in the country itself. Afghanistan is the battlefield, but the causes of the wars that have devastated it since the mid-1970’s were and are still to be found beyond its borders. So an exclusively “Afghan solution” is not possible.

Three dates are central to understanding today’s Afghan quagmire: 1989, 2001, and 2003.

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, the Red Army had already withdrawn from the country, thereby admitting its defeat. Following the Soviet Union, the US withdrew from the conflict, too, and at that moment, the second Afghan war started – a proxy war between regional neighbors over power in the Hindu Kush, disguised as a civil war.

Supported by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan sought strategic depth against its arch-enemy India with the help of militant religious students from Afghan refugee camps. These “Taliban” were created and equipped by the Pakistani secret service, the ISI. Iran defended its own interests and those of the Shia minority in the west of the country. And in the north, the Tajik Northern Alliance and Abdul Rashid Dostum’s Uzbek militia were supported and equipped by Afghanistan’s northern neighbors and Russia.

In the shadow of this second Afghan war, Osama bin Laden established his terrorist organization in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan: Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, carried out its terrible terrorist attack on the US. A month later, the current war in Afghanistan started.

In March 2003, George W. Bush launched his invasion of Iraq, not only squandering America’s military strength, but also connecting all the individual crises between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indus Valley. As a result of America’s foreign-policy folly, Iran became the central geo-political player in the entire region, linking the western and eastern part of this long belt of instability.

So, those who are grappling with the Afghan riddle today should consider, first and foremost, the regional realities: can the West afford to withdraw? If so, we should pull out of Afghanistan immediately. If not, we should stop discussing an “exit strategy.”

The cost of the West’s retreat from this troubled region is predictable, since we must deal with several threats that endanger Western security, and that would not disappear with withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan: terrorism, Islamist radicalism, nuclear threats (Pakistan, Iran), proxy wars and regional conflicts (Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kashmir), and looming disintegration (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in the longer term in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula). This means that we cannot talk about withdrawing our troops, but only of redrawing the battle line farther West.

It is extremely doubtful that such a step would bring more security. On the other hand, the West’s strategy in Afghanistan up to now has also yielded little progress, only strengthening the Taliban day by day. So what should we do?

First, we need to define a clear political goal: a stable status quo in Afghanistan that will prevent the country from again becoming a battlefield of regional interests and an organizational base for Al Qaeda. Without a sufficient military presence, as well as improved and reinforced reconstruction efforts, this goal is not attainable.

Second, a renewed regional consensus on Afghanistan’s future would also help avoid further destabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan. This requires that Pakistan’s and Iran’s interests be included in this consensus, as well as India’s, Saudi Arabia’s and probably also China’s. (The Kashmir conflict must, indirectly, play a role in this settlement, but the difficulties of including it should not be underestimated.) Forging this consensus will not be an easy diplomatic task. But it is feasible and should be the goal of a new conference on Afghanistan.

Third, a parallel effort at crisis containment – and perhaps even at finding solutions – is needed for the wider Middle East, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and Iran. It’s an equation with very many known unknowns, but if we do not try at least to mitigate these issues, the known unknowns will continue challenging all partial solutions.

But the big question remains whether the US and its European allies still have the strength, perseverance and far-sightedness for such an undertaking. There are good reasons to doubt this. The alternative would be a chaotic and dangerous future in this large hot spot. Afghanistan may seem far away, but its chaos and violence are in fact just next door.

***Joschka Fischer, a leading member of Germany’s Green Party for almost 20 years, was Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 until 2005***

Will Russia Save the West?

Rapid changes in the global economy and international politics are raising, once more, an eternal issue in Russia: the country’s relations with Europe, and with the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole. Of course, Russia partly belongs to this region. Yet it cannot and does not want to join the West wholeheartedly – at least not yet. Meanwhile, this choice looks very different now compared to just a few years ago.


It is becoming obvious that the Euro-Atlantic world, whose economic and political model seemed so triumphant 20 years ago, is now lagging somewhat behind China and other Asian countries. So is Russia, where, despite encouraging talk about innovation-based development, the economy continues to de-modernize as corruption has been allowed to metastasize, and as the country relies increasingly on its natural-resource wealth. Indeed, it is Asia that has turned out to be the true winner of the Cold War.

These rising powers raise problems regarding Russia’s geo-strategic choices. For the first time in decades, the values gap between Russia and the EU appears to be increasing. Europe is overcoming state nationalism, while Russia is building a nation state. Broken by history and not wishing to be ravaged by war again, Europeans have embraced compromise and renounced the direct use of force in international relations.

Russians, on the other hand, emphasize their “hard power,” including military force, because they know that they live in a dangerous world and have no one to hide behind. And, because of the country’s comparative lack of “soft power” – social, cultural, and economic attractiveness – it stands ready to use the competitive advantages (i.e., its resource wealth) available to it.

Internal political developments in Russia are also pushing the country in a different direction from the West. Quite simply, Russia is moving away from democracy.

This emerging values gap is not an insurmountable obstacle to geostrategic rapprochement. But, coupled with mutual irritation, which is particularly strong in Russia, closing the gap is becoming much harder. For, while Russia ’s elite never considered itself defeated in the Cold War, the West essentially treated Russia as a defeated country – an attitude symbolized by NATO’s eastward expansion, which laid a deep foundation for ongoing tension. It was only after the West encountered an armed rebuff in South Ossetia that NATO expansion was stopped in its tracks. Yet NATO has not given up on further enlargement.

NATO expansion is nothing more than the extension of its zone of influence – and in the most sensitive, military-political sphere . And yet the West’s unwillingness to abandon that effort is coupled with a repeated refusal to recognize Russia’s right to have its own zone of interest.

So NATO expansion has left the Cold War unfinished. The ideological and military confrontation that underlay it is gone, but the geopolitical rivalry that it entailed has returned to the fore. Thus, the old mentality survived on both sides.

Energy debates are another example of this. Non-Russian Europe should thank the Almighty for the presence of energy-rich Russia at its borders, while Russia should be thankful for having such wealthy customers. But the natural differences in the interests of energy consumers and producers have been given a political/security twist – witness the discussions about an “Energy NATO.”

F aced with the impossibility of advantageous accession to Euro-Atlantic institutions, Russia is drifting fast towards alignment with China – a “younger brother,” though a respected one. Russia’s “Asian choice” of today is not the same as the Slavophile/Eurasian choice of the past. On the surface, it looks like a choice in favor of a rapidly rising civilization. But the current estrangement from Europe – the cradle of Russian civilization and modernization – threatens Russia’s identity and will increase its geostrategic risks in the future.

Europe does not benefit from this estrangement either. It will continue to move towards beautiful decay – Venice writ large. The United States also loses. Without Russia, which will remain the world’s third strongest power for the foreseeable future, it is impossible to solve the key problems of international security.

The current Euro-Atlantic security architecture seems to suit the majority of Americans and Europeans, though it is becoming increasingly fragile and counterproductive. So Russia will struggle to create a new architecture largely on its own – whether through a new treaty on collective European security, or even through its accession to NATO. This is not only in Russian political and civilizational interest, but it also reflects our duty to the entire community of Euro-Atlantic nations, which is being weakened by the “unfinished Cold War.”

The idea of a “Union of Europe” between Russia and the EU should be put on the long-term agenda. That Union should be based on a common human, economic, and energy space. The combination of a new security arrangement for the Euro-Atlantic community and the establishment of the Union of Europe could arrest the decline in the international weight of the West.

****Sergei Karaganov is Dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs of the Russian Research University – Higher School of Economics. This article is based on a report on Euro-Atlantic security prepared by the Russian group of the Valdai Club, of which Professor Karaganov is Chairman. ***

The Rising Sons of North Africa

The role played by Libyan ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, in gaining the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s state visit to Washington accompanied by his son, Gamal, suggest that dynastic successions are underway in both countries.

They are not alone. Mubarak and Qaddafi, along with Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, are among the world’s oldest and longest-serving heads of state. All four face the ticklish problem of succession, and speculation has been mounting for some time of possible attempts to keep power in the family.

That solution is becoming pretty commonplace, from the Aliyevs of Azerbaijan to the Kims of North Korea to the Assads in Syria. Dynastic succession safeguards the immediate and frequently extensive interests of the ruling family as well as those of the wider political and business elite. But the possibility of near simultaneous successions in North Africa is striking nonetheless.

All four North African rulers have, to greater or lesser degrees, made themselves the center of highly opaque power structures. Everything in their countries depends on the person and family rather than the office. Yet, despite these authoritarian leaders’ apparently solid grip on power, ensuring that a relative takes over is not as simple as it seems. The problem boils down to overcoming possible resistance – from both the elite and the public – that could derail the handover or undermine the successor’s authority.

Dealing with elite interests requires ingenuity. Lucrative business opportunities can be allocated to soothe the successor’s political adversaries, while renegades can be targeted to discourage others – for example, by being stripped of property or dismissed from positions of influence.

Where members of the ruling family hold direct commercial interests – as in Libya and Tunisia – the political transition is certain to cause collateral economic damage. For example, if Qaddafi’s fourth son, Muatasim, emerges as the successor, he could take away Saif al-Islam’s business holdings and ability to profit from foreign contracts. In Tunisia, a successor from the Trabelsi branch of the Ben Ali clan – linked to the president through his second wife, Leila Trabelsi – could target the extensive interests of families related to Ben Ali’s daughters from a previous marriage.

Securing popular legitimacy requires equal dexterity, which has played an important role in preventing North African leaders and family members from openly admitting their preparations for dynastic successions.

In Egypt, where such preparations are the most obvious, Gamal and other senior figures have stubbornly denied his presidential ambitions. At the same time, room has been made for Gamal to build a public profile of his own through his senior role in the ruling party, and a constitutional framework has been put in place that will allow him to be elected in multi-candidate elections, thus establishing a façade of republican legitimacy.

This strategy may find imitators. Ben Ali’s son-in-law, Sakhr el-Materi, was last year elected to the central committee of the ruling Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique party. In Algeria, Bouteflika’s brother, Said, has been linked to a “grassroots” movement that – it is rumored – could eventually serve as a basis for his succession bid. But these two cases are at much earlier stages, and their prospects for success more uncertain.

In Libya, Saif al-Islam has sought to distinguish himself as an agent of democratic change by setting up “non-governmental” organizations, establishing “independent” media outlets, and even sponsoring his own private drafting committee for a new constitution. But he has encountered stubborn resistance from key elite groups, who regard his agenda as a threat to their vested interests.

The legitimacy question is particularly problematic if the ruler’s biography or charisma is closely tied to the legitimacy of the regime. In Libya, the regime’s founding myth is inextricably linked to Qaddafi’s 1969 coup and his eclectic political theories. His departure would expose the anachronistic nature of the state’s ideological foundation; family ties will do nothing to protect his successor from the resulting shock to the system.

The Algerian situation is similar. The regime’s legitimacy is based on the war of independence, with all presidents to date having played important roles in it. But Bouteflika’s most likely successors, including his brother, almost certainly will not have this tie. As in Egypt, public opposition to a succession seen to threaten the republican order could sharpen the army’s understanding of itself as guardian of the state, prompting it to intervene. This is much more likely in Algeria than in Egypt.

Another public-relations problem concerns business interests. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak will have to counter the widespread perception that his interests are aligned with close allies among the business elite, notably steel tycoon Ahmed el-Ezz. Gamal could seek to dispel this perception by publicly making examples of regime cronies involved in excesses. While business interests are not as openly discussed in Tunisia, they are no less unpopular. Ben Ali’s successor could raise his profile by clamping down on cronyism.

The four rulers have deliberately played their succession cards close to their chests. Keeping everyone in suspense helps prevent the emergence of organized opposition to a dynastic succession. Moreover, they may worry that heirs apparent will seek to force them out of office prematurely.

Thus, Ben Ali has demoted prominent politicians back when they attained sufficient influence to be considered potential successors. He is apparently concerned that one of them could imitate a coup like the one he led in 1987 that toppled Habib Bourguiba. (He has since changed the constitution to prevent a repeat).

In Libya, the fortunes of Saif al-Islam and Muatasim have waxed and waned as Qaddafi enforces his authority to prevent the emergence of a challenger. While few obstacles remain in Gamal’s path to power in Egypt, in Algeria, meanwhile, a bid to install Said would likely collapse against resistance from powerful regime interests.

***Excerpts from an Article written by Wolfram Lacher (senior analyst covering North Africa at Control Risks, a global business risk consultancy)***

Afghanistan’s Customary Laws

When the problems riddling Afghan society are listed – violence, insecurity, corruption, religious fundamentalism – one dominating factor is usually left out: the influence of customary law. In Afghanistan, there are three principal legal references: constitutional law, the Koran, and the system of customary law known as Farhang , the most dominant and strictest version of which is called Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtuns).
Originally an ancient honor code, Farhang ensures the dominance of the oldest male of any household, followed by married sons, unmarried sons, and grandsons, then wives (with the youngest at the bottom). Collective decisions are taken by patriarchs in councils called jirgas , where all have to be in agreement.

This agreement includes including collaborating or not with the Taliban, cooperating with the Coalition forces, accepting or refusing poppy eradication in a village. Everything else is left to patriarchal discretion. Here, no one will intervene except to reinforce the application of the patriarch's rights – say, in stoning a supposedly wayward girl, or turning a blind eye to so-called “honor killings” of women.

Every act of an Afghan male’s life is integrated in a form of reciprocity, in which nothing is free. Melmastia , the basic tenet of hospitality means “I will give you shelter if you ask me to, even if you are a fugitive murderer; but, in exchange, you fight my battles.” This sense of customary obligation is why so many of President Hamid Karzai’s cronies remain in place and Taliban leaders remain safe.
Women are excluded from collective decision-making, as they are mere objects. Girls are literally sold upon marriage (the father is paid money for his daughter’s labor and reproductive capacity) and join their husband’s household. The younger the girl, the higher the price. Marriage, especially in the provinces, is routinely consummated on pre-pubescent bodies.

Yet women are precious in their own way. A family’s principal “cultural capital” is its honor, which is ensured by denying women any opportunity to highlight male failings and therefore tarnish clan respectability. As a result, women must be strictly secluded and made invisible when in public, for they are personally responsible for the desire that they could ignite in schools, hospitals, parks, or markets. The all-covering burqa ensures sufficient anonymity to permit women a certain amount of freedom in public space.

Every female simultaneously carries her father’s and her husband’s honor, and will stoically submit to all forms of violence committed in its name. This may mean dying in childbirth rather than risking the “dishonor” of giving birth in a public place, a hospital, in front of strangers.

Going to court is practically unheard of, as it would mean renouncing family practices. From the male point of view, resorting to outside police or judicial intervention would signify an inability to fight one’s own battles – an admission of defeat and a symbolic castration.

This helps explain the intense corruption present in Afghan courts, where “honor” can be redeemed by bribing a judge to have a rapist or murderer released. As violence is strictly a private matter, relinquishing justice to state institutions could be an unacceptable humiliation.

Customary law is not rigid in that it is made to fit round the demands of global economy. It has become more rigorous in it s applications due to the influence of militant Islam, which seeks to use religious texts to legitimize escalating brutality, especially against women. However, Farhang and privatized violence are precisely what Mohammad sought to ban through Koranic law, which went beyond the personal domain and instituted a code that gave some rights to women.

For example, while the Koran allows for a measure of female inheritance, tribal custom does not authorize it, which explains the popularity of tribal councils to resolve inheritance problems and cheat women out of their rights. Similarly, whereas the Koran requires four eyewitnesses as proof of adultery, mere suspicion of some unregulated, potentially sexual conduct by a woman warrants stoning under customary law.

Yet an awareness of alternatives is seeping in through the media, even in remote provinces. Iranian films and the much loved Indian TV serials, not to mention the occasional American film, influence peoples' expectations. Add to that the experience of having lived abroad as refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Girls know that there are options to an unacceptable way of life: women are increasingly demanding more from life than what custom ordains.

This is especially true for those who have lived in Iran, a totally Muslim environment that allows women the freedom to study and work as well as access to adequate healthcare and family planning. Once back in rural Afghanistan, forced into brutal marriages, many desperate women – especially returnees from Iran – resort to self-immolation. Violence and murder of women are on the increase, perpetrated by men who feel that these alternatives pose a threat to their authority.

The West imagines that religion is the central issue in Afghanistan. But the heart of the matter is the preservation of ancient patriarchal rights that go back to Biblical times, reformatted to fit the demands of globalized capitalism. Governments and international aid organizations have failed to take into consideration the role of Farhang , perhaps because the power of unwritten law remains largely inconceivable in the West. But Afghanistan cannot begin to solve its many problems until it criminalizes the privatized violence of this antiquated code.

For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/mann2.mp3

Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress

A recent report commissioned by the French government (mentioned previously on WorldChanging) foreshadows why and how GDP should be supplemented as the de facto measure of progress. The authors are world-class - Joseph Stiglitz was the chair, advised by Amartya Sen. Commission members included Nobelists and creative thinkers Kenneth Arrow and Daniel Kahneman, Nick Stern of Stern Review fame, and Robert D. Putnam. 

We went through a phase transition a few years back, when the conversational zeitgeist moved from "is climate change really happening?" to "what do we do about climate change?" In the same way, the challenge is shifting from "is GDP good enough?" to how to implement broader measures of progress in our economies and political systems. This suggests questions like: Who are the early adopters? How will particular measures advance different social goals? What are the simplest useful advances to make?

In the edited highlights below, Stiglitz, Sen, and their companions weigh in with their perspectives and recommendations.

Key Messages

The seemingly bright growth performance of the world economy between 2004 and 2007 may have been achieved at the expense of future growth. It is also clear that some of the performance was a “mirage”, profits that were based on prices that had been inflated by a bubble.

The whole Commission is convinced that the crisis is teaching us a very important lesson: those attempting to guide the economy and our societies are like pilots trying to steering a course without a reliable compass. The decisions they (and we as individual citizens) make depend on what we measure, how good our measurements are and how well our measures are understood. We are almost blind when the metrics on which action is based are ill-designed or when they are not well understood. For many purposes, we need better metrics. Fortunately, research in recent years has enabled us to improve our metrics, and it is time to incorporate in our measurement systems some of these advances.

The first main message of our report is that the time has come to adapt our system of measurement of economic activity. There are now many products whose quality is complex, multi-dimensional and subject to rapid change. This is obvious for goods, like cars, computers, washing machines and the like, but is even truer for services, such as medical services, educational services, information and communication technologies, research activities and financial services. Capturing quality change is a tremendous challenge, yet this is vital to measuring real income and real consumption, some of the key determinants of people’s material well-being.
Another key message, and unifying theme of the report, is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. Changing emphasis does not mean dismissing GDP and production measures. They emerged from concerns about market production and employment; they continue to provide answers to many important questions such as monitoring economic activity. But emphasizing well-being is important because there appears to be an increasing gap between the information contained in aggregate GDP data and what counts for common people’s well-being.

To define what well-being means, a multidimensional definition has to be used. Based on academic research and a number of concrete initiatives developed around the world, the Commission has identified the following key dimensions that should be taken into account. At least in principle, these dimensions should be considered simultaneously:
i. Material living standards (income, consumption and wealth);
ii. Health;
iii. Education;

iv. Personal activities including work
v. Political voice and governance;
vi. Social connections and relationships;
vii. Environment (present and future conditions);
viii. Insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature.

All these dimensions shape people’s well-being, and yet many of them are missed by conventional income measures.

Recommendations

Recommendation 1: When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production. As statisticians and economists know very well, GDP mainly measures market production – expressed in money units – and as such it is useful. However, it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions.

Recommendation 2: Emphasize the household perspective. While it is informative to track the performance of economies as a whole, trends in citizens’ material living standards are better followed through measures of household income and consumption. Indeed, the available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP per capita, and typically at a lower rate.

Recommendation 3: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth. A household that spends its wealth on consumption goods increases its current well-being but at the expense of its future well-being. The consequences of such behavior would be captured in a household’s balance sheet, and the same holds for other sectors of the economy, and for the economy as a whole. Measures of wealth are central to measuring sustainability. What is carried over into the future necessarily has to be expressed as stocks – of physical, natural, human and social capital. The right valuation of these stocks plays a crucial role, and is often problematic. There is also a need to “stress test” balance sheets with alternative valuations when market prices for assets are not available or are subject to bubbles and bursts. Some more direct non-monetary indicators may be preferable when the monetary valuation is very uncertain or difficult to derive.

Recommendation 4: Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth. Median consumption (income, wealth) provides a better measure of what is happening to the “typical” individual or household than average consumption (income, wealth). But for many purposes, it is also important to know what is happening at the bottom of the income/wealth distribution (captured in poverty statistics), or at the top.

Recommendation 5: Broaden income measures to non-market activities. Many of the services people received from other family members in the past are now purchased on the market. This shift translates into a rise in income as measured in the national accounts and may give a false impression of a change in living standards, while it merely reflects a shift from non-market to market provision of services. Once one starts focusing on non-market activities, the question of leisure arises. Consuming the same bundle of goods and services but working for 1500 hours a year instead of 2000 hours a year implies an increase in one’s standard of living.

Recommendation 6: Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and capabilities. Steps should be taken to improve measures of people’s health, education, personal activities and environmental conditions. In particular, substantial effort should be devoted to developing and implementing robust, reliable measures of social connections, political voice, and insecurity that can be shown to predict life satisfaction. What really matters are the capabilities of people, that is, the extent of their opportunity set and of their freedom to choose among this set, the life they value. While the precise list of the features affecting quality of life inevitably rests on value judgments, there is a consensus that quality of life depends on people’s health and education, their everyday activities (which include the right to a decent job and housing), their participation in the political process, the social and natural environment in which they live, and the factors shaping their personal and economic security.

Recommendation 7: Quality-of-life indicators in all the dimensions covered should assess inequalities in a comprehensive way. Inequalities in quality of life should be assessed across people, socio-economic groups, gender and generations.

Recommendation 8: Surveys should be designed to assess the links between various quality-of-life domains for each person, and this information should be used when designing policies in various fields. It is critical to address questions about how developments in one domain of quality of life affect other domains, and how developments in all the various fields are related to income. This is important because the consequences for quality of life of having multiple disadvantages far exceed the sum of their individual effects.

Recommendation 9: Statistical offices should provide the information needed to aggregate across quality-of-life dimensions, allowing the construction of different indexes. While assessing quality-of-life requires a plurality of indicators, there are strong demands to develop a single summary measure. Several summary measures of quality of life are possible, depending on the question addressed and the approach taken. Some of these measures are already being used, such as average levels of life-satisfaction for a country as a whole, or composite indices that aggregate averages across objective domains, such as the Human Development Index.

Recommendation 10: Measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own surveys. Quantitative measures of these subjective aspects hold the promise of delivering not just a good measure of quality of life per se, but also a better understanding of its determinants, reaching beyond people’s income and material conditions.

Recommendation 11: Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators. The distinctive feature of the components of this dashboard should be that they are interpretable as variations of some underlying “stocks”. The assessment of sustainability is complementary to the question of current well-being or economic performance, and must be examined separately.To take an analogy, when driving a car, a meter that added up in one single number the current speed of the vehicle and the remaining level of gasoline would not be of any help to the driver. Both pieces of information are critical and need to be displayed in distinct, clearly visible areas of the dashboard. At a minimum, in order to measure sustainability, what we need are indicators that inform us about the change in the quantities of the different factors that matter for future well-being.

Recommendation 12: The environmental aspects of sustainability deserve a separate follow-up based on a well-chosen set of physical indicators. In particular there is a need for a clear indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage (such as associated with climate change or the depletion of fishing stocks.) Placing a monetary value on the natural environment is often difficult and separate sets of physical indicators will be needed to monitor the state of the environment. This is in particular the case when it comes to irreversible and/or discontinuous alterations to the environment.
The Commission believes that a global debate around the issues and recommendations raised in this report provides an important venue for a discussion of societal values, for what we, as a society, care about, and whether we are really striving for what is important.