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Apolloemma

E-Book vs. P-Bookby James Surowiecki                                                                                                                                                                                                                     July 29, 2013                                                               

                                                                                                        

                          
KeywordsBusiness; Barnes & Noble; Nook; E-books;Bookstores;Retail;Borders
                                    
When Barnes & Noble announced, a couple of weeks ago, that its Nook division lost almost five hundred million dollars last year and that its C.E.O. was resigning, there was one obvious conclusion: the company was doomed. After all, the Nook was how B. & N. was going to compete with Apple and Amazon, and thrive in a future dominated by e-books. With the Nook’s failure, B. & N. looked like just another business anachronism, a chain of cavernous barns selling piles of outdated merchandise. Who went to a store anymore to buy a physical book?But the hastily written obituaries left out some important facts. To begin with, B. & N.’s retail business still makes good money, and, though its sales fell last year, its profits actually rose. Its operations, thanks to better inventory management, are more efficient: it can make more money while selling fewer books. The Nook is the only part of the business that’s losing money. Being a book retailer isn’t easy—thanks, above all, to Amazon—but Borders’ bankruptcy, in 2011, left B. & N. without a major national competitor. “In this market, you could actually pick up market share simply because you’re the only major bookseller left,” John Tinker, a media analyst at the Maxim Group, told me. And B. & N. has generally avoided the expensive, long leases that can drain a retailer’s cash flow; many of its leases are short—which gives it flexibility in terms of moving or downsizing—and, since its stores generate foot traffic (which is good for surrounding stores), it has considerable leverage with landlords. B. & N., which still has more than six hundred retail stores (and six hundred and eighty-six college bookstores), also retains considerable leverage with publishers. As a recent report from the Codex Group showed, browsing in stores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search or social media. So publishers have a stake in B. & N.’s survival.
There are plenty of things B. & N. could do better, of course. Its Web site could be sportier. Its stores, publishing people gripe, are too cluttered, often with non-book merchandise, and don’t do a good enough job of showcasing its key product. (The demise of the Nook should help in this regard, since those giant Nook display booths took up a lot of floor space.) It might also be time for the firm to embrace more innovative ways of pricing and selling books; Peter Olson, the former C.E.O. of Random House, has suggested that B. & N. could bundle e-books and print copies, or offer volume discounts. Motivated, personalized customer service would also make a difference. The obvious model here is the experience at Apple’s retail stores. But B. & N. could also look closer to home. Independent bookstores are now thriving, thanks in large part to their close ties to both publishers and customers. “Stores that can help you not just find what you’re looking for but also help you discover books you haven’t heard of are still very valuable to readers,” says Daniel Raff, a management professor at Wharton who’s written an in-depth study of Borders and B. & N. This suggests that, instead of succumbing to the temptation to reinvent itself, B. & N. should focus on something truly radical: being a bookstore.

Of course, a lot of people consider this a hopeless strategy: in their view, physical books are “technologically obsolete,” and the book industry is heading down the path that the music industry took, where digital downloads decimated CD sales and put record stores out of business. It’s true that, between 2009 and 2011, e-book sales rose at triple-digit annual rates. But last year, according to industry trade groups, e-book sales rose just forty-four per cent. (They currently account for about a fifth of the total market.) This kind of deceleration in the growth rate isn’t what you’d expect if e-books were going to replace printed books anytime soon. In a recent survey by the Codex Group, ninety-seven per cent of people who read e-books said that they were still wedded to print, and only three per cent of frequent book buyers read only digital.
E-books obviously have certain advantages (like the fact that you can carry lots of them around with you), but for many book buyers their main appeal is that they’re cheaper. Against that, the Codex Group finds that people of all ages still prefer print for serious reading; e-book sales are dominated by genre fiction—“light reading.” This may be just a prejudice that will vanish as e-books become more common. But we do read things differently when they’re on a page rather than on a screen. A study this year found that people reading on a screen tended to skip around more and read less intensively, and plenty of research confirms that people tend to comprehend less of what they read on a screen. The differences are small, but they may explain the persistent appeal of paper. Indeed, hardcover sales rose last year by a hundred million dollars.
For many people, as a number of studies show, reading is a genuinely tactile experience—how a book feels and looks has a material impact on how we feel about reading. This isn’t necessarily Luddism or nostalgia. The truth is that the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive. Unlike the phase-change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-books is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book isn’t obsolete. Barnes & Noble just needs to make sure it isn’t, either. ♦


          ILLUSTRATION: Marc Rosenthal

Apolloemma

My words: I am satisfied that this author did not repeat the words of other people and indicate that E-books are more likely to coexist with P-books rather than conquest them.

Sentence:
1.        A hastily written obituaries left out some important facts.
2.        Being a book retailer is not easy-thanks, above all, to Amazon, Apples-but Border’s bankruptcy, in 2011, left B.&N. without a national competitor. “In this market, you could actually pickup market share simply because you are the only bookseller left,” John Tinker, a media analyst at the Maxim Group, told me.
3.        And B.&N. has generally avoided the expensive, long leases that can drain a retailer’s cash flow; many of its leases are short- which gives it flexibility in terms of moving or downsizing-and, since its stores generates foot traffic (which is good for surrounding stores), it has considerable leverage with landlords.
4.        As a recent report from the Codox Group showed, browsing in stores is still a far more common way of finding new books than either online search or social media. So publishers have a stake in B.&N. survival.
5.        Independent bookstores are now thriving, thanks in large part to their close ties to both publishers and the customers.
6.        “Stores that can help you not just find what you are looking for but also help you discover books you have not heard of are still very valuable to readers.” This suggests that, instead of succumbing to the temptation to reinvent itself, B.&N. should focus on something truly radical: being a bookstore.
7.        It is true that, between 2009 and 2011, e-book sales rose at triple-digit annual rates, but last years, according to industry trade groups,. E-book sales rose just 44%. (They currently account for about 1/5 of the total market.)
8.        In a recent survey by the Codex Group, 97% of people who read e-books said that they were still wedded to print, and only 3% of frequent book buyers read only digital.
9.        Unlike the phase change move toward digital that we saw in music, the transition to e-book is going to be slow; coexistence is more likely than conquest. The book is not obsolete. Barner&Noble just needs to make sure that it is not, either.





Words:
1.        cavernous adj. a cavernous room, place or hole is very large and deep.
2.        Barn n a large farm building of storing crops, or for keeping animals in.
3.        Obituary n. an article in a newspaper about the life of someone who just died.
A hastily written obituaries left out some important facts.
4.        Downsize v. if a company or organization downsizes, it reduces the number of people it employs in order to reduce costs.
The airline has downsized its work force by 30%.
5.        Sporty adj. a sporty clothes are designed to look attractive in bright informal way./ a sporty car is designed to look attractive and go fast.
6.        Clutter v. to cover or fill a space or room with too many things, so that it looks very untidy.
7.        Gripe. n. something unimportant that you complain about.
My main gripe was the price of refreshment.
8.        Demise n. formal the end of something that used to exist.
The demise of nook will help in this regard.
9.        Succumb v. =give in succumb to : to stop opposing someone or something that is stronger than you, and allow them to take control.
Succumbing to pressure from the chemical industry, Governor Blakely amended the regulations.
Gina succumbed to temptation and had a second serving of cake.
10.        Radical adj. of or from the root of base; fundamental.
Radical things / the radical flaw.
11.        Decimate v. kill or destroy a large part of something
Disease has decimated the populations.
12.        Wedded to something adj. to believe strongly in a particular idea or way of doing things.
On the whole the working class is still wedded to the labor party.
13.        Tactile adj. relating to your sense of touch.
Reading is a genuinely tactile experience.
14.        Nostalgia n. a feeling that a time in the past was good, or the activity or remembering a good time in the past and wishing that had not changed.
He looked back on his university days with a certain amount of nostalgia.
15.        Luddite n. someone who is opposed to using modern machines and methods.

Apolloemma

One of the more curious revelations from Edward Snowden’s trove of secret N.S.A. documents was a recent report that United States spy agencies have been vacuuming up communications in Brazil. Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, broke this story in O Globo, one of that country’s major newspapers, on July 6th. Greenwald, in an follow-up piece in the Guardian, pointed to a rough Google translation of his original July 6th report:

In the last decade, people residing or in transit in Brazil, as well as companies operating in the country, have become targets of espionage National Security Agency of the United States (National Security Agency - NSA, its acronym in English). There are no precise figures, but last January Brazil was just behind the United States, which had 2.3 billion phone calls and messages spied.…
Brazil, with extensive public and private networks scanned, operated by large telecommunications companies and internet, is highlighted on maps of the U.S. agency focus primarily on voice traffic and data (origin and destination), along with nations such as China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. It is uncertain how many people and companies spied in Brazil. But there is evidence that the volume of data captured by the filtering system in the local telephone networks and the Internet is constant and large scale.

In a way, the N.S.A.’s focus on Brazil seems puzzling. Why would the United States care so much about communications traffic in a friendly South American country? But last week, at the Aspen Security Conference, General Keith Alexander, the director of the N.S.A., made a little-noticed remark that helps explain his agency’s interest in Brazil. During a question-and-answer session with an audience of journalists and current and former government officials, a German reporter rose and asked Alexander this: “Why are you focusing so much on gathering data also from Brazil, since there’s not too much terrorism going on in Brazil as far as I know?”
Alexander’s answer was somewhat elliptical (emphasis mine):

You know, the reality is we’re not collecting all the e-mails on the people in Brazil nor listening to their phone numbers. Why would we do that?  What somebody took was a program that looks at metadata around the world that you would use to find terrorist activities that might transit and leaped to the conclusion that, aha, metadata—they must be listening to everybody’s phone; they must be reading everybody’s e-mail. Our job is foreign intelligence.
I’ll tell you, 99.9 and I don’t know how many nines go out of all that, whether it’s in German or Brazil, is of no interest to a foreign intelligence agency. What is of interest is a terrorist hopping through or doing something like that.

(In the video of General Alexander’s remarks, this exchange starts at about 52:20.)
Alexander’s answer doesn’t seem terribly revealing. But embedded in it was a major admission, which is alluded to by the portions, “metadata around the world that you would use to find terrorist activities that might transit” and “a terrorist hopping through.”
I asked General Michael Hayden, the former director of both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., what he found most interesting in Alexander’s remarks. “He committed two acts of declassification,” Hayden told me, using a euphemism for when a senior official reveals secret info by speaking in public. The first revelation Hayden flagged was not terribly surprising: in an earlier portion of his remarks, Alexander mentioned that the N.S.A. knows precisely what documents Edward Snowden accessed.
But Alexander’s second act of declassification was much more interesting. Hayden pointed to Alexander’s comments about Brazil, and his point about not being interested in the communications of Brazilians. He asked me to think about the geography of Brazil, which bulges out eastward into the Atlantic Ocean. I still didn’t understand. “That’s where the transatlantic cables come ashore,” he finally explained.
Indeed, they do. According to a detailed map of the network of submarine cables that transmits our voices and our Internet data around the world, Brazil is one of the most important telecommunication hubs on earth.
There is an even more detailed, interactive version of this map, and Teleco, which collects information about telecommunications in Brazil, has additional details on the major submarine lines that run through the country. It reports that one of the lines, Atlantis-2, which connects South America to Europe and Africa and was created by twenty-five telecommunications companies, is part of a network that, when complete, “will form the infrastructure of the global information society.”
While the idea that the N.S.A. is tapping transatlantic cables is hardly shocking—there have been excellent recent stories on the subject in the Washington Post and The Atlantic—as far as I’m aware, Alexander and Hayden’s remarks last week represent the highest level of confirmation of the practice, and they help to explain Greenwald’s report on the N.S.A.’s interest in Brazil.
They also help shed light on an N.S.A. slide recently published by the Guardian, which appears to show that the umbrella program for this type of “upstream” collection is called Fairview and/or Blarney.
The map on this slide is a less detailed version of the one mentioned above, but it indicates the many submarine cables going to and from Brazil, and explains that the N.S.A. uses these programs for the “collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”
Finally, Greenwald has reported that Snowden downloaded N.S.A. documents described as the “crown jewels” of the agency. There has been much speculation about what these sensitive documents might be. Three former government officials told me that they likely contain details of our relationships with foreign intelligence agencies, and, if so, that there might be explosive revelations about surveillance practices undertaken by Western allies that violate privacy laws and other statutes within those countries.
Vanee’ M. Vines, a spokesperson for the N.S.A., said, “We’re not going to elaborate on remarks that Gen. Alexander made in Aspen,” and added that the agency also had no comment on speculation about other documents possessed by Snowden.

Apolloemma

Boss RailThe disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.by Evan Osnos                                                                                                                                                                                                                     October 22, 2012
                                                                                                        

The crash at Wenzhou. The Rail Ministry had been determined to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway more quickly than anyone thought possible.

                 
      

On the morning of July 23, 2011, passengers hurried across Beijing South Station at the final call to board bullet train D301, heading south on the world’s largest, fastest, and newest high-speed railway, the Harmony Express. It was bound for Fuzhou, fourteen hundred miles away.

Beijing South Station is shaped like a flying saucer, its silvery vaulted ceiling illuminated by skylights. It contains as much steel as the Empire State Building and can handle two hundred and forty million people a year, thirty per cent more than New York’s Penn Station, the busiest stop in America. When Beijing South opened, in 2008, it was the largest station in Asia; then Shanghai stole the crown. In all, some three hundred new stations have been built or revitalized by China’s Railway Ministry, which has nearly as many employees as the civilian workforce of the United States government.
When the passengers for D301 reached the platform, they encountered a vehicle that looked less like a train than a wingless jet: a tube of aluminum alloy, a quarter of a mile from end to end, containing sixteen carriages, painted in high-gloss white with blue racing stripes. The guests were ushered aboard by female attendants in Pan Am-style pillbox hats and pencil skirts; each attendant, according to regulations, had to be at least five feet five inches tall, and was trained to smile with exactly eight teeth visible. A twenty-year-old college student named Zhu Ping took her seat, then texted her roommate that she was about to “fly” home on the rails. “Even my laptop is running faster than usual,” she wrote.
For the Cao family, in the sleeper section, riding in style was a mark of achievement. The parents had immigrated to Queens, New York, two decades earlier and worked their way up to stable jobs as custodians at LaGuardia Airport. They put two sons through college, became American citizens, and now found themselves back in China on a tour, posing for pictures in matching hats, standing ramrod straight beneath Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square. Their next stop would be a reunion with relatives in Fuzhou. This was the first vacation of their lives. Their son, Henry, who ran a camera-supply business in Colorado, was returning, for the first time, to a country that he had been raised to remember as poor.
Until now, China’s trains had always been a symbol of backwardness. More than a century ago, when the Empress Dowager was given a miniature engine to bear her about the Imperial City, she found the “fire cart” so insulting to the natural order that she banished it and insisted that her carriage continue to be dragged by eunuchs. Chairman Mao crisscrossed the countryside with tracks, partly for military use, but travel for ordinary people remained a misery of delayed, overcrowded trains nicknamed for the soot-stained color of the carriages: “green skins” were the slowest, “red skins” scarcely better. Even after Japan pioneered high-speed trains, in the nineteen-fifties, and Europe followed suit, China lagged behind, with what the state press bemoaned as two inches of track per person—“less than the length of a cigarette.”

In 2003, China’s Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, took charge of plans to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway—more than could be found in the rest of the world combined. For anyone with experience on Chinese trains, it was hard to picture. “Back in 1995, if you had told me where China would be today, I would have thought you were stark raving mad,” Richard Di Bona, a British transportation consultant in Hong Kong, told me recently. With a total investment of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars, the undertaking was to be the world’s most expensive public-works project since President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, in the nineteen-fifties. To complete the first route by 2008, Minister Liu, whose ambition and flamboyance earned him the nickname Great Leap Liu, drove his crews and engineers to work in shifts around the clock, laying track, revising blueprints, and boring tunnels. “To achieve a great leap,” he liked to say, “a generation must be sacrificed.” (Some colleagues called him Lunatic Liu.) The state news service lionized an engineer named Xin Li, because he remained at his computer so long that he went partly blind in his left eye. (“I will keep working even without one eye,” he told a reporter.) When the first high-speed line débuted with a test run in June, 2008, it was seventy-five per cent over budget and relied heavily on German designs, but nobody dwelled on that during the ceremony. Cadres wept. When another line made its maiden run, Liu took a seat beside the conductor and said, “If anyone is going to die, I will be the first.”
That autumn, to help ward off the global recession, Chinese leaders more than doubled spending on high-speed rail and upped the target to ten thousand miles of track by 2020, the equivalent of building America’s first transcontinental route five times over. China prepared to export its railway technology to Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey. It charted a freight line through the mountains of Colombia that would challenge the Panama Canal, and it signed on to build the “pilgrim express,” carrying the faithful between Medina and Mecca. In January, 2011, President Obama cited China’s railway boom in his State of the Union address as evidence that “our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped.” The next month, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, blocked construction of America’s first high-speed train, by rejecting federal funds. Amtrak had unveiled a plan to reach speeds comparable to China’s by 2040.

Apolloemma

I DO NOT know whether the construction of high-speed rail system is a stark raving exploration or not.

Sentences:（I do not collect many sentences in this article.）
1.When Beijing South opened, in 2008, it was the largest station in Asia; then Shanghai stole the crown. In all, some three hundred new stations have been built or revitalized by China's Railway Ministry, which has nearly as many employees as the civilian workforce of the United States’ government.
（这里说的可是铁道部的员工人数和整个美国政府的雇员人数是一样的呀。）
2. When the passengers from D301 reached the platform, they encountered a vehicle that looked less like a train than a wingless jet: a tube of aluminum alloy, a quarter of a mile from end to end, containing 16 carriages, painted a high-gloss white with blue racing stripes. The guests were ushered abroad by female attendants in Pan Am-style pillbox hats and pencil skirts; each attendant, according to regulations, had to be at least five feet five inches tall, and was trained to smile with exactly 8 teeth visible.
3. The undertaking was to be the world's most expensive public-works project since President Eisenhower's interstate highway system, in the nineteen-fifties.





Words:
1.underside n. the bottom side of or surface of something.
    The leaves are green on top and silvery on the underside.
2. vaulted adj. in the shape of or consisting of several arches joined together.
3. revitalize v. put new strength or power into something.
     They hope to revitalize the neighborhood by providing better housing.
4. civilian n. anyone who is not a member of the military forces or the police. 平民
5. gloss n. a bright shine on a surface.
6. Pan-Am style: or Pan American World Airways, was the principal international airline of the United States from the 1930s until it collapse in 1991.
7. custodian n. someone who is responsible for looking after something important or valuable.
8. ramrod n. sitting or standing with your back straight and your body stiff.
     They found themselves back in china on a tour, posing for pictures in matching hats, standing ramrod straight beneath Mao's portrait in Tiananmen Square.
9. Dowager. n. a woman from a high social class who has land or title from her husband.
     Empire Dowager
10. eunuch
11. scarcely adv (这个副词很重要) : almost not or hardly
       "Red skins" scarcely better. 也没好多少
12.Stark raving : completely crazy
      He is gone stark raving mad.
13. undertaking n. an important job, a piece of work, or activity that you are responsible for.
14. lunatic n someone who behave in a crazy or very stupid way-often used humorously.
       Some colleagues called him lunatic Liu.

Apolloemma

Conflicting Interestsby George Packer


                          

American foreign aid has always been an awkward exercise in high-minded self-interest—humanitarian goals balanced uneasily with strategic calculations. Whenever these two come into conflict, Presidents inevitably find a way out of their loftier commitments. In 1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a huge reconstruction package for postwar Europe, initiating the modern era of foreign assistance, he told his audience at Harvard’s commencement, “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” But, when the Marshall Plan was enacted, the Times headline was forthright about its anti-Soviet purpose: “AID BILL IS SIGNED BY TRUMAN AS REPLY TO FOES OF LIBERTY.” The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which President Kennedy signed at the height of the Cold War, created the Agency for International Development and placed restrictions on foreign military funding. In 1974, Congress amended the act, and required the United States to reduce or end military aid to regimes with poor human-rights records, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”


In the interests of national security, such provisions have been flouted by Presidents ever since their enactment. After a military coup overthrew an elected government in Chile in 1973, with the connivance of the C.I.A., President Nixon continued assistance to the Pinochet regime. Even Jimmy Carter, who tried to put human rights at the heart of his foreign policy, granted himself “extraordinary circumstances” waivers so that aid could continue flowing to sordid but strategically important regimes in Iran, Zaire, and other countries. In 1986, Congress imposed a painful contortion on future Presidents with an appropriations bill that stated unequivocally that “none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to this Act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” But after 9/11 President Bush found a way to resume assistance to Pakistan, even though its President, Pervez Musharraf, had taken power by overthrowing an elected government. And, when Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak cracked down on pro-democracy activists in 2006, the Bush “freedom agenda” was quietly revised to keep the pipeline of aid open to a key Middle Eastern ally.
This history of double standards shadows the recent events in Egypt and Washington. When a country’s military sends tanks into the streets, deposes an elected President, suspends the constitution, shuts down television stations, and arrests the leadership of the ruling party, the usual word for it is “coup.” But, in the days since all this came to pass in Egypt, the Obama Administration has gone to great lengths to avoid calling it by its rightful name—Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that the events of July 3rd and afterward were under “review”—for the obvious reason that, under the law, it would mean the end of $1.5 billion in U.S. military and economic aid.
Hypocrisy can be an essential tool of foreign policy, but it works best when there is a policy to justify it—otherwise, it can seem randomly cynical. At the moment, the U.S. has no policy toward Egypt. In the two and a half years since the popular protests that overthrew the Mubarak regime, the Administration has followed a pattern: express concern about tumultuous events, then accept their outcome as a fait accompli and make the best of the new status quo, without a perceptible effort to use whatever influence the U.S. still has over the main actors in Egypt’s political drama.

The President’s critics wildly overstate that influence. Qatar underwrote the Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi with eight billion dollars, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait immediately promised twelve billion dollars to the interim regime. Even American money no longer buys what it used to. As for American prestige in Egypt, it has declined under Obama from the dismal level of the Bush years, with the anti-Morsi crowds convinced that the U.S. and its Ambassador, Anne Patterson, were conspiring to keep the Muslim Brotherhood in power, and the Islamists equally convinced that the Americans had conspired to throw Morsi out. The advent of political freedoms has not helped America’s cause in the country where, four years ago, President Obama promised a new era of understanding.
It’s easy to fault the White House for passivity and confusion, but no one has come up with a plausible policy in the face of the Middle East’s day-to-day upheavals, its shifting alliances and growing fissures. Some American neo-conservatives and congressional Democrats and Republicans have called on the President to denounce the coup, eliminate aid, and demand the restoration of elected government. This position has the advantage of being consistent with America’s stated principles, as well as with its laws. (It also joins together two of the Middle East’s strangest bedfellows: pro-Israel hawks and the Muslim Brotherhood.) But the loss of American hardware might reduce the Egyptian military’s ability to control jihadis in the ungoverned Sinai desert, while the diplomatic rebuke could profoundly alienate secular-minded Egyptians. The U.S. would appear less hypocritical, and also less relevant than ever.
But the “realist” position—the view that Washington should use whatever tools available to pursue its vital interests—is hardly more helpful. If those interests include the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the fight against jihadism, and that old chestnut “stability,” it isn’t at all clear how the coup advances any of these. Morsi basically kept Egypt’s foreign policy in place; the Muslim Brotherhood had its eyes on the prize of domestic transformation. The violent elimination of the Brotherhood from Egyptian politics could easily spawn a new generation of extremists who regard democracy as a Western trap, and un-Islamic. (Some analysts see the Salafist al-Nour Party as the real winner in the events of the past two weeks.) In 1992, the Algerian Army cancelled elections that would have put Islamists in power, and the country was engulfed in a decade-long civil war. Egypt isn’t likely to descend to that level of violence, but the coup will surely be a boon to Al Qaeda’s sympathizers, and create new ones.
The core political problem in Egypt is one that almost always arises from years of dictatorship: a culture of suspicion and confrontation, a mentality of winner-take-all. Islamists and secular-minded Egyptians regard one another as obstacles to power, not as legitimate players in a complex game that requires inclusion and consensus. Versions of this mutual negation can be seen across the region, from the liberal mini-uprising in Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the brutality of Syria’s sectarian civil war. The fractures are deepened by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are competing for checkbook influence. In Syria, both are strengthening the ultraconservative Sunni rebels; in Egypt, Qatar backed the Brotherhood, while Saudi Arabia is supporting the secular forces (another perverse alliance). But neither country has any interest in an inclusive outcome. They both see a zero-sum game: Sunni vs. Shiite, Arab vs. Persian. Ultimately, they want to preserve and advance their own profoundly undemocratic regimes. America has no stake in these fights.
The street protests that began the Arab Spring have become destructive means for each side to assert its own primacy on the national stage. Nothing good will come of the overthrow of Morsi’s bad government if Egypt’s next transition doesn’t find a place for all of the country’s legitimate factions. America may no longer have the leverage to insure an outcome favorable to its interests or its values, but it should use its remaining influence to help Egypt’s factions move past their own zero-sum game. ♦

Apolloemma

Janet Yellen: A Keynesian Woman at the Fed

With Ben Bernanke’s term as chairman of the Federal Reserve up at the end of January, 2014, the speculation about the identity of his successor is starting in earnest. Two recent articles in The Economist and at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog have both made Janet Yellen, who is currently Bernanke’s number two on the Fed’s board of governors, the firm favorite for the job. Slate’s Matt Yglesias reckons her accession isn’t even in doubt, saying bluntly, “it’ll be Janet Yellen.”
Other possible candidates include Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Bernanke himself, although it’s been widely reported that Geithner isn’t interested and Bernanke doesn’t want to be reappointed. Given Yellen’s résumé, she’s a justifiable favorite. Before taking her current job, in 2010, she served for six years as President of the San Francisco Fed, one of the twelve regional reserve banks. She’s also got political experience and close ties to the Democratic Party. From February of 1997 until August of 1999, during Bill Clinton’s second term, she headed up the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
A couple of things make Yellen’s candidacy intriguing. One of them, obviously, is her gender. Ever since its inception, central banking has been overwhelmingly a man’s world. If you don’t count Moscow, where Vladimir Putin recently appointed one of his aides, Elvira Nabiullina, to run the Central Bank of Russia, Yellen would be the first woman to run the central bank of an advanced nation. Given the Fed’s independence, and its capacity to lend and print money at will—a capacity  demonstrated to great effect in recent years—the person who runs the institution is arguably the second most powerful person in the country. (And with Hillary Clinton the bookmakers’ favorite to win the Presidency in 2016, it’s conceivable that in a few years’ time the two most powerful people in the United States could be female.)
But it isn’t just Yellen’s second X chromosome that makes her interesting. In a field noted for its conservatism and adherence to free-market orthodoxy, she has long stood out as a lively and liberal thinker who resisted the rightward shift that many of her colleagues took in the eighties and nineties. More recently, at the Fed, she has strongly supported Bernanke’s unorthodox (but very necessary) efforts to revive the economy and bring down the unemployment rate, and to expand the Fed’s thinking beyond its traditional fixation with inflation. It isn’t widely appreciated by the public at large, but this process has already produced a significant shift toward targeting low unemployment. Last December, the Fed made an explicit commitment to keeping the federal funds rate—a key interest rate—at close to zero until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5 per cent.
In central banking, people who worry primarily about inflation are often referred to as “hawks” and those who prioritize unemployment are called “doves.” If Obama does appoint Yellen to chair the Fed, she will arguably be the most dovish figure to head the central bank since Marriner Eccles, the Mormon banker whom F.D.R. appointed during the depths of the Great Depression. As recently as last month, Yellen gave a speech to the National Association for Business Economics in which she made a provisional case for sticking with an expansionary policy even after the headline unemployment rate comes down, noting, “A decline in the unemployment rate could, for example, primarily reflect the exit from the labor force of discouraged job seekers.”
Don’t get me wrong: Yellen is no radical. In many ways, she strikes me as a traditional American Keynesian—a modern representative of the breed that stretches back through Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman (in his later incarnation) to James Tobin, Robert Solow, and Walter Heller, and, from the founding generation, to Paul Samuelson and Alvin Hansen. Contrary to what some of its conservative critics claim, American Keynesianism isn’t a left-wing creed: like John Maynard Keynes himself, it seeks to preserve the system rather than overthrow it. But in order to do this, it relies on a program of active management of the economy, and using economic models to aid that process.
Shaped by their experiences in the Great Depression, many early U.S. Keynesians saw economics not just as a policy science, but as a blueprint for using the state to prevent slumps and to further social progress. Seeking to remedy market failures, they championed countercyclical monetary and fiscal policies (including, when necessary, sizable stimulus programs), public investments in infrastructure and education, progressive taxation, and a strong social safety net. Simply relying on the market wouldn’t get it done—that was their message.
Yellen’s recent policy pronouncements, and her earlier academic work, are very much in this tradition. Perhaps her most famous paper, which she co-wrote in 1986 with her husband, George Akerlof, a Nobel-winning economist, was about the theory of “efficiency wages.” It argued that, contrary to the free-market model, lower wages can lead to higher unemployment. Ten years later, Yellen and Akerlof challenged the notion that generous welfare benefits were responsible for a surge in illegitimate births, especially in the minority population. The real reason there were more unwed mothers, Yellen and Akerlof argued, was a change in social attitudes, particularly the decline of “shotgun marriages.” If their theory was right, they concluded, “[C]uts in welfare benefits will have little effect on out-of-wedlock births, serving mainly to lower the standard of living of the country’s poorest children. Better family planning education, birth control advice, and requirements forcing fathers to pay child support are more promising policies to reduce out-of-wedlock births.”
Since becoming the vice-chair of the Fed in 2010, Yellen, in arguing for expansionary policies, has consistently highlighted the human costs of the recession, particularly the high levels of unemployment and underemployment. In a speech to a Washington conference in February, she said:

These are not just statistics to me. We know that long-term unemployment is devastating to workers and their families. Longer spells of unemployment raise the risk of homelessness and have been a factor contributing to the foreclosure crisis. When you’re unemployed for six months or a year, it is hard to qualify for a lease, so even the option of relocating to find a job is often off the table. The toll is simply terrible on the mental and physical health of workers, on their marriages, and on their children.

Of course, being a good economist, she doesn’t rest her case for Fed activism just on humanitarian concerns. Instead, she went on:

Long-term unemployment is also a great concern because it has the potential to itself become a headwind restraining the economy. Individuals out of work for an extended period can become less employable as they lose the specific skills acquired in their previous jobs and also lose the habits needed to hold down any job. Those out of work for a long time also tend to lose touch with former co-workers in their previous industry or occupation—contacts that can often help an unemployed worker find a job. Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.

In her speech to the National Association for Business Economics last month, she returned to the same theme, noting that “prolonged economic weakness could harm the economy’s productive potential for years to come.” And she coupled this warning with a clear message for her fellow members of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee: “[W]ith employment so far from its maximum level and with inflation running below the Committee’s two-per-cent objective, I believe it’s appropriate for progress in the labor market to take center stage in the conduct of monetary policy.”
It Yellen does take over from Bernanke next February, there’s no reason to doubt that  concern for the unemployed will remain her leitmotif. And that, ultimately, is what makes the prospect of her running the Fed so interesting.
Photograph of Janet Yellen, vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, before speaking at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in January, by Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg/Getty.

Apolloemma

Think the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United was bad? A worse one may be on the horizon.

To recognize the problem, it’s necessary to review some of the Court’s gnarled history on the subject of campaign finance. In Citizens United, which was decided in 2010, the Court rejected any limits on what a person or corporation (or labor union) could spend on an independent effort to help a candidate win an election. Thus the rise of Super PACs; that’s why Sheldon Adelson could spend sixty million dollars to help Mitt Romney in 2012. But, though Citizens United deregulated independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, the case said nothing about direct contributions to the candidates themselves.


That’s where the new case comes in. Current federal law allows individual donors to give up to two thousand six hundred dollars to any one candidate during a single election. In addition, they can give only an aggregate hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars to candidates, political action committees, and parties over a two-year period. Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama Republican, wants to give more money to the candidates he supports, so he has sued to invalidate the rules limiting the over-all amounts he can give. (Indeed, the patriotically minded McCutcheon wanted to give “$1,776” to enough candidates to exceed the current limits on direct contributions.) The Supreme Court will hear his case in the fall, and he has a good chance of winning.

To see why McCutcheon may win, one must examine the strange reasoning that governs the Supreme Court’s decisions on campaign finance. In his brief to the Justices, McCutcheon makes an argument that is breathtaking for its candor. He says that when Congress first upheld limits on contributions, in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, the limits on aggregate giving served a useful purpose. Without the ceiling, the Court explained, a person could legally “contribute massive amounts of money to a particular candidate through the use of unearmarked contributions to political committees likely to contribute to that candidate, or [make] huge contributions to the candidate’s political party.”

But that, McCutcheon points out, was before the days of Citizens United. Now, he implies, Citizens United has undermined so many of the old rules that they are kind of irrelevant at this point. Indeed, the lower-court judge who considered the McCutcheon case upheld the existing rules but raised the “possibility that Citizens United undermined the entire contribution limits scheme.”

The reason the contribution levels might be in jeopardy rests on the rationale the Justices now demand for all campaign-finance limits. According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United, the government’s interest in preventing the actuality and appearance of corruption is “limited to quid pro quo corruption.” Congress can regulate campaign contributions only to stop contributors from demanding, and receiving, quid pro quos. The Court forbids other justifications for contribution limits—like levelling the playing field. Quid pro quos are, of course, very difficult to prove. So unless the government can prove that the limits on aggregate contributions prevent quid-pro-quo corruption (and how, really, can the government do that?), these rules might fall, too.

Such an outcome is especially likely because the current Court has such an exalted idea of the importance of campaign contributions as a form of individual expression. In other words, money equals speech. The speech of wealthy people is a source of particular, almost poignant concern. As Justice Kennedy wrote, the fact that contributors “may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt.” Indeed, he observed further, “political speech cannot be limited based on a speaker’s wealth.”

Citizens United was not an aberration for this Court. It emerged from a definite view about the intersection of campaigns and free speech. The Justices in the majority are engaging in a long-term project to deregulate campaigns. A blessing on unlimited aggregate contributions is the next logical step for them to take—and they have five votes.

Illustration by Barry Blitt.