Catch them Young: Ideas are not agents that do things, individual do !!!

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Future Dialouge: Business, Science and Politics in the changing world !
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Two opposite observations, but going hand in hand always in futuristic or policy related conferences are as follows: Planning; enough is enough...concentrate on implementation & action; Now stop everything and just go back to basics. This reconciliation of combining the wisdom of the fundamentals from the past and secondly the pragmatism of the future by forgetting the planned design so as to focus on the only actions to be followed. 

Social exclusion and environmental degradation are staunch allies of each other.  Equal access to public space in the cities is at the heart of fighting these allies. The recent debates about sustainability which carry strong notions of socio-economic and  environmental principles need further extension not only towards good governance assisted by cooperation and knowledge sharing but also new technological solutions which are economical and eco-friendly. In this respect, resource efficiency and integrated planning holds the key. Resource efficiency will also be influenced by consumption habits. Integrated planning includes bottom up approach towards micro-participative planning. As regards technology it has to be remembered that it is the key to many problems but it will only work during the favorable conditions. 


India will be having more than 65 cities which will have more than one million population in the next decade; while Europe will be having less than 40. In the context of half of humanity is already living in the cities and the birth rate of the people living in the cities is outliving that of in the rural areas there is bound to be massive resources constraints on the demography which can contribute to the collapsing of the cities. The rush to the city is more evident than ever before. Rural populations are moving to the cities to seek improvements to their quality of life-most notably through better economic opportunities. Building municipal infrastructure which feeds to the aspirations of huge migrating class needs to a lot of urban sustainability principles in the design itself.  

Even-though, sustainability is not the luxury but a must need, the business opportunities cited by west in this area are enormous. As noted by one climate expert: "Urban sustainability in emerging markets is still very much a growth agenda and it`s better, more efficient growth than we have seen in developed world." We know, that debates about legal commitment about GHG emissions cut failed in Copenhagen and further but interestingly the term "equitable access" is doing more penetrative rounds in the discussions about business opportunities hidden in the problem of unsustainable cities of the developing world, especially in India.  So, 'equitable access'remains the buzz word to attract the crowded debates in the policy making domains in recent times. 

In the situation where urbanization is uncontrolled what can happen? Social breakdown due to cultural divergences-importing & sustaining poverty-stealing of jobs because of skills proliferation across the global demography-economic stagnation because of lack of human and economical development of the urban population- conflict, violence & crime due to trafficking; these are some of the consequences. And remember, human consequences outweigh any other benefit out of the rapid urbanization. Its impact on health, education and employment conditions is enormous giving rise to negative externalities. 

Community participation, strengthening and empowering local leadership, motivating frugal innovation for solving the grassroots problem, addressing the stakeholders with proper information and allotment of tools so they themselves can monitor the security and prosperity of the public good(transport systems, parks, libraries, hygiene systems) are some of the significant structural elements of the urbanized life. Progressive and sustainable urbanization reflects the greatest values of civil life and professional efficiency. 


Planning way ahead of future is certainly the key. As evident in the well established case of Manhattan  the planning of which started in 1811, well before modern technologies of transportation and other innovations were out of our imagination.  Recent innovative experiments of sustainable are New Heaven, Vancouver, Lisbon, Johannesburg, Barcelona. But what about Asian and African cities which are not learning or not investing in the knowledge exchange and dissemination about the best practices of 'sustainable urbanization'. Off course, big cities in India will certainly have Governments attention and allocation of funds likewise. But real shaping up has to be in emerging cities who are going to be megapolis in coming years. Planning for them now will certainly reduce the pressure on the resources and space in the biggest metros of the country. 


Urban reforms must transform the shape of the cities. To achieve this we need to create more and more inspiring examples. Delhi Metro is one such example.Replicating this example in other cities like Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai. Pune is underway. The kind of know-how and experience generated out of great work done by Delhi Metro can also help Indian railway to improve its performance in improving safety and speed before they move forward to discuss the technological up-gradation on the shorter routes of the travel which can add more quality and comfortable travel to the aspiring middle class passengers so as to offer cheap trains to the massive poor population on the busy routes. 

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What exactly happened at Fukushima ?

Conventional Wisdom upside down: Designed in USA, Manufactured in China !

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I recently came across very provocative but still very critical-pragmatic paragraphs about the things we experience in economic policy crisis these days. I was reading John Kenneth Galbraith`s biography written by Richard Parker. In his very in-depth analysis about the transition from Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman via George Keneyes through John Kenneth Galbraith. In the context of last three years financial crisis following lines are very noteworthy.

" It has recently been common-indeed fashionable-to talk about the end of the New Deal legacy that was born in 1934. In this view, Franklin Roosevelt`s idea of activist government, and the kind of economic theory eventually labeled 'Keynesian'-activist, interventionist, and liberally purposive-with which Galbraith is associated, has come to a close. Replacing it, we are told, is our 'new' era; Information age has replaced industrial age;  computers, fibre optics, and biotechnology are the new iron of the American economic power; and with them is coming a new way not just of doing things, but of living itself. We are told, we`ll be 'set free' to change our jobs (and careers) repeatedly, to manage our health care, investments, and retirement on our own to compete globally, and thereby to win (if we compete successfully) an unprecedented new prosperity alongside our new freedom."

And now when the issue of competitiveness comes across Paul Krugman tears apart this argument in his famous "Pop Internationalism." Krugman basically argues that notion of competitiveness can hold among different firms but never among different countries. He challenges conventional wisdom in this way: "Conventional view suggests that capital and technology are in fixed supply, and the growth in new countries comes at the expense of the more established countries. The reality is that diffusion of the technology, while it increases competition faced by the leader`s exports also expands their markets and reduces the price of their imports."

          Next, Krugman points out at the credibility crisis and manhandling of the situation which leads to debt crisis. "People in early 1990s were convinced that devaluation was not going to work and Europe seemed on an inevitable path of full monetary union. These apparent lessons for the advanced countries were reinforced by different but seemingly related experiences in the developing world. The debt crisis in the developing world led to the emergence of very high inflation rates. In the efforts to control inflation, exchange rate targets came to play an important role." Then he asks very acute question: Where does the conventional wisdom about economic policy comes from? It is partly driven by economic analysis, I don`t mean to say that research is completely ignored and partly driven by recent economic experience. Confidence of economic experts in what they say comes not so much from solid evidence as from the fact that so many other important people are saying the same thing. You get my point: conventional wisdom, to some extent based on real evidence, has a strong element of sheer fashion into it."

When we observe completion of 10 years of 9/11 or three years of financial crisis, one question looms largest: How does experts get it wrong that none could predict that. (Except this...)  Again Krugman, three years back wrote, about the reasons behind wrong forecasts of the coming economic situation. He says: "Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems."

Apt description of the crisis in the Krugman`s words is: " Yet the story of economics over the past half century is, to a large degree, the story of a retreat from Keynesianism and a return to neoclassicism." He concludes: "Economics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system. If the profession is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Even during the heyday of perfect-market economics, there was a lot of work done on the ways in which the real economy deviated from the theoretical ideal. What’s probably going to happen now — in fact, it’s already happening — is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center."

Why I referred to all of this: Just one experience. When I was visiting downtown market in Trieste, Italy recently, I visited many shops which shown the mark on the various products with the punchline: "Designed in USA, Manufactured in China". And I was trying to interpret what it really meant when Italian finance minister visited Beijing to request Chinese government to buy Italian debt. Then certainly conventional wisdom was upside down; welcome the inevitable but unimaginable.

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