Travels in the Riel World

As the global financial system tries to right itself after staggering to the brink of collapse, one banking sector finds itself in somewhat better shape than most of the world. That would be the Islamic banking system, which credits its steadiness to practices that are unique to Islamic finance, such as banning interest and shying away from excessive debt and risk. The Washington Post has a story on the topic:

As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own. Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,” said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,” said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. “Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.”

What makes a global city? Foreign Policy magazine just came out with what they call the Global Cities Index - a ”comprehensive ranking of the ways in which cities are integrating with the rest of the world.” They explain their Index this way:

The world’s biggest, most interconnected cities help set global agendas, weather transnational dangers, and serve as the hubs of global integration. They are the engines of growth for their countries and the gateways to the resources of their regions. In many ways, the story of globalization is the story of urbanization.

But what makes a “global city”? … The cities that host the biggest capital markets, elite universities, most diverse and well-educated populations, wealthiest multinationals, and most powerful international organizations are connected to the rest of the world like nowhere else. But, more than anything, the cities that rise to the top of the list are those that continue to forge global links despite intensely complex economic environments. They are the ones making urbanization work to their advantage by providing the vast opportunities of global integration to their people; measuring cities’ international presence captures the most accurate picture of the way the world works.

So which cities came out on top? Not surprisingly, New York led the list, followed by London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Other U.S. cities in the top 30 were Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco and Boston. Toronto came in with a healthy ranking of number 10.

After Tokyo and Hong Kong, the leading Asian cities were Singapore and Seoul. After London and Paris, the European leaders were Brussels, Madrid and Berlin. The Latin American leaders were Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. And the highest ranked cities in the Middle East and Africa were Dubai, Istanbul and Cairo.

Richard Florida wrote an interesting article a while back in which he suggested that government policy makers would be wise to forge new ideas based on the economic and innovation potential of so-called mega-regions around the world. Much more so than countries or cities, he contends, mega-regions are actually the prime drivers of the global economy.

While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation.

The world’s largest mega is Greater Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic activity. Next is the 500-mile Boston-Washington corridor, with some 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in output…

Mega-regions are the true force driving the rise of emerging economies. Some 40% of Brazil’s total economy is made up of a corridor stretching from Rio to São Paolo. Russia is propelled by the Moscow mega. India’s economy is shaped by the mega-regions of Bangalore and Mumbai.

China is not our real competitor. Rather, we should be thinking about the great mega-regions around Shanghai, Beijing and the Hong Kong-Shenzhen corridor, which account for roughly 43% of the output of the entire country.

Florida discusses several ways in which governments can support the innovation that arises from mega-regions, from promoting free trade to developing urban policies meant to improve infrastructure and facilitate “greater cross-border flows of goods and people.” It’s a thought-provoking piece that is worth a look.

Thomas Friedman is in Greenland to learn about climate change.  Greenland, of course, is a sparsely populated land near the top of the earth. So why would one go to Greenland to study the environment? Friedman explains:

Because the world’s biggest island has just 55,000 people and no industry, the condition of its huge ice sheet — as well as its temperature, precipitation and winds — is influenced by the global atmospheric and ocean currents that converge here. Whatever happens in China or Brazil gets felt here. And because Greenlanders live close to nature, they are walking barometers of climate change.

What did he learn there? Well, a new language. Sort of.

I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”

It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago …” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.

There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year…Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps.

There’s much more in his column in today’s paper. Check it out.

I’ve had some posts in recent months about the character and personality of cities. It never really occurred to me, however, that these character traits could make a city resistant to a recycling program. But that seems to be the conclusion of this story about the startlingly low recycling rate in Houston, Texas.

While most large American cities have started ambitious recycling programs that have sharply reduced the amount of trash bound for landfills, Houston has not. The city’s shimmering skyline may wear the label of the world’s energy capital, but deep in Houston’s Dumpsters lies a less glamorous superlative: It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.

Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively.

Houston officials - even those who favor recycling - place a large part of the blame for this issue on the city’s sense of independence and aversion to government regulations.

“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated.” …

“I’m a Texan, and it pains me that we still have the Old Western mentality,” said Tex Corley, the chief executive of Strategic Materials, the nation’s largest glass recycler, which is based in Houston.

Well, there you go. Some cities promote walking and mass transit, while others shun recycling as just another unnecessary government mandate.

No, it’s not the KFC you were probably expecting. Although it’s close. In Afghanistan, Kentucky Fried Chicken has been transformed into Kabul Fried Chicken by an Afghan expatriate who has returned to his home country with his sights set on an emerging market for fast foods. Time magazine has the story.

As the sun sets in Kabul and the wail of the muezzin issuing from loudspeakers mounted on minarets calls the faithful to evening prayer, the fryer at KFC is being fired up for the evening rush. But Kabul Fried Chicken has little in common with the U.S. chain whose initials it copied: The chairs are a little too high for the tables, and the delights depicted in photographs mounted on the walls — big milkshakes, braised ribs, lattes — are conspicuously absent from the menu. The fare on offer is more egalitarian. Kebabs, pizza and, of course, fried chicken.

Kabul Fried Chicken is, if he is to be believed, the brainchild of Mirwais Abuldrahizmi, who long ago observed that the young people of the Muslim world like to express their cosmopolitan yearnings through their consumption habits. And returnee Afghans, like himself, bring with them visions from exile of girls without headscarves, shopping malls as social hubs, and the rituals of fast food…

Mirwais is not the only Afghan pretender to the Colonel Sanders mantle in Kabul. Another is Jamshed, who uses only one name, and runs one of three rival KFCs…He claims that after being told by the (real) KFC regional HQ in Lahore, Pakistan, that opening a franchise in Kabul would cost him a few hundred thousand dollars, he opted to go the pirate route. He claims to have bought the U.S.-based KFC’s secret fried chicken recipe on the black market for $1,200, although obviously that claim can’t be verified. “You can get anything at the bazaar in Pakistan,” he says.

Normally, a knock-off of a global company would have to deal with legal issues of intellectual property rights. But this is Afghanistan. As the story notes:

Imitation … is endemic to Afghanistan’s business environment. “We’re an underdeveloped country,” Mirwais says. “So we can’t come up with our own ideas.”

The website New West has an interview online with Heather Hansen, co-author of the new book, Disappearing Destinations, which looks at the environmental challenges that are plaguing popular tourist destinations worldwide. An excerpt from the interview:

How did you come up with the idea for Disappearing Destinations?

Kim and I were at a conference in Denver, talking about the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which had just come out. We tossed around the idea of “1,000 Places to See Before THEY Die.” Once we started looking at our favorite places in that context, we became obsessed with writing a book that could help travelers see their dream destinations as whole places with real issues that affect the lives of the people who live there and, ultimately, the viability of the locations themselves.

Global warming seems to be the cause of many of the problems you describe … Do you think it’s more difficult for local people to respond to the situation when the cause is so widespread?

In the case of climate change in this region, there’s plenty that people can do on a daily basis to mitigate its effects…It may be difficult to see immediate results but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making a marked difference at a critical time. As Gerald Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder says in the book: “The longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. Every day we’re committing ourselves to climate change in the future. When you view it that way, it’s not something that you should just give up on…

Since our expertise is in how to travel more mindfully our message is also that all us have control over the way we move around the world. We have the power to affect change–for worse, or we hope better–in these places with the choices we make. For example, if you go to the Galápagos, you have the choice whether or not to support an outfitter with a proven record of environmental stewardship and investment in the local community.

What do you suggest that people who are concerned about the issues you raise in your book do?

What needs to be done really varies from one location to the next. In some places, responsible tourism is the “great green hope” as I talk about in the Appalachia chapter. Just going there and contributing to the diversification of the economy makes a difference (this is also the case in the Congo Basin and the Amazon where tourism revenue can sustain a population in the long term, while logging cannot).

Do you enjoy living someplace that is walkable? It’s important if you like to walk to restaurants and shops, if you harbor a desire to walk to work, or even if you just enjoy walking for fitness.

The act of walking may also be helpful in much bigger ways. Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times about the environmental and economic benefits of walking and of taking public transit, given fast-rising gas prices. He reported on the topic from Berlin, and had this to say:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require … changing how and where many of us live.  To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Now, of course, some U.S. cities are actually friendly to pedestrians. But which ones? Lucky for us, Prevention magazine has already done a study on this and ranked the best cities in the country (and in each state) based on which were the most walkable. 

In all, Prevention ranked 500 cities. Of these, the top five were Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These just edged out San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu and a few other urban areas for the top spots. Other major cities that scored well include Philadelphia (15), Seattle (23), Denver (24), Portland, Oregon (27) and Austin, Texas (29).

It sometimes seems as if there is no end to the type of work that can be outsourced these days. Businesses have been outsourcing labor for years, and individuals have figured out how to outsource personal tasks, nursing home care and even pregnancies. Now comes word of the latest work that is being outsourced - legal research. Time Magazine has the story.

Mark Alexander, a Dallas attorney, says he’s ethically obligated to do what’s best for his clients, “and that includes saving them money.” So when one of them asks him to research a securities-fraud topic, for example, or breach of contract, he doesn’t even think about applying his $395 hourly rate. Instead, he calls Atlas Legal Research, an outsourcing company based in Irving, Texas, that uses lawyers in India to provide the service for $60 per hr. “When a client pays me a $25,000 retainer and I can save them money, I will do so,” says Alexander. Handing off the work to a $225-per-hr. junior associate is not an option. “They don’t even know where to stand in the courtroom,” he says.

While the Americans learn, well-trained lawyers in secure offices in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Bangalore and Gurgaon (outside Delhi), who typically earn $6,000 to $30,000 annually, do legal grunt work…The considerable savings is perhaps one reason Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, Mass., has projected the offshoring of 29,000 legal jobs by the end of the year and as many as 79,000 by 2015.

Perhaps we should call it Outsourcing 2.0, as it’s being described as the next logical step in outsourcing, from lower skill to higher skill jobs. There is obviously a limit, though, as to how much of this work can be done from abroad, which at the moment is limited to legal reseach and document review.

It’s part of India’s inevitable move up the corporate food chain, from lower-value business process outsourcing–like call centers–to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). The latter category encompasses higher-skilled jobs, such as engineering and medicine, and relies on the KPOs to behave more like branch offices of U.S. companies.

ValueNotes, a business-research firm based in Pune, India, says a subset of KPO called legal process outsourcing (LPO) has grown revenues 49% from 2006, to $218 million last year. The figure will nearly triple, to $640 million, by 2010, it says…

TransUnion, in Chicago, has successfully outsourced legal work for four years, according to general counsel John W. Blenke. “Every law firm is really an outsourcer. One lawyer usually can’t do it all,” he says. Indian attorneys are currently reviewing more than a million litigation e-mails for the company, which costs less than $10 per hr., he says. He would pay $60 to $85 per hr. to a U.S.-based legal-staffing company for the job.

Blenke says he’s cautious, however, about the work he outsources. “You can only do it with a few things. It has to be an area that you know well, so you can build processes around that,” he says.

There was an article in the NY Times this week about the challenges and the allure of doing business in emerging markets around the globe. Or, more accurately, “emerging emerging markets.” Buried within the story was a fascinating account of just how business gets transacted in some cultures.

First, the overview of these markets:

Forget Hong Kong, Beijing, Moscow and Mumbai. Intrepid bankers, investors and hedge fund managers are journeying to farther corners to do deals…

Many of the new investment targets are mineral- or oil-rich nations, like Ghana, where high commodity prices are spurring domestic economic growth, the political framework is solid or stabilizing, and doors are opening to foreign investment. Others, like Vietnam, are adopting capitalism and creating industries. Most of these places have large young populations that are moving from rural economies into cities, eager for cellphones and cars.

Some investors and deal-makers call them “frontier” markets, but there are plenty of other names for these nations. A Merrill Lynch analyst refers to them as “emerging emerging” markets, while Goldman Sachs focuses on the N-11, or Next 11, developing countries.

And, for our purpose of understanding cultures, here is a description of a business meeting in Saudi Arabia in which the actual business was transacted at the very last moment - literally on the way out the door, and only after the necessary relationship-building was accomplished.

Bassam Yammine, a managing director and co-chief executive of the Middle East at Credit Suisse, recently took a colleague from the bank’s London office to see a client in Saudi Arabia. He noticed his guest’s discomfort when, 40 minutes into the meeting, Mr. Yammine, a 40-year-old Lebanese banker, and the client were still chatting about politics and the weather. His colleague shot him a panicked look when everyone got up to leave, still not having mentioned business deals. Halfway out the door, Mr. Yammine turned around, quickly discussed the deal and he and his colleague left the meeting with a check.

“In this part of the world, that’s how you do business,” said Mr. Yammine, who spends his time in Riyadh or Dubai and traveling the region. “Relationships are an important factor in clients’ decisions.”

For more of an understanding of the work culture of this region of the world, check out Margaret Nydell’s book, Understanding Arabs.

As the U.S. presidential contest degenerates into a series of Saturday Night Live skits and arguments over who is more capable of answering a non-existent red phone in the Oval Office, it’s becoming apparent that any serious talk of issues has been postponed, at best, for the time being. Which is unfortunate, since numerous important topics deserve to be discussed and debated.

The NY Times last Sunday ran an interesting op-ed feature in which it asked eight recent candidates for president to write about one issue they would still be discussing if they were still in the race. One of the more intriguing responses came from Chris Dodd on the country’s lack of investment in infrastructure. Here is some of what he wrote:

On Aug. 1, the bridge carrying Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River buckled and broke. Thirteen people were killed. More than 100 were injured.

Afterward, we learned the frightening facts: 160,570 of our bridges are in just as dangerous a shape; a third of our roads are in poor or mediocre condition; some of our biggest cities depend on water and sewage systems over a century old.

With every bursting pipe, potholed road and derailed train, the conclusion became inescapable: America’s backbone is decaying.

Dodd then wrote about his proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank that ”would unite the public and private sectors to complete large-scale works. Funds would go to the most qualified projects, not those with the most political clout.”

And, really, if we’re honest, it’s not just a matter of repairing roads, bridges and sewage systems. At some point, the U.S. has to modernize its infrastructure, both for environmental and productivity reasons. Thomas Geoghegan just wrote about this for The American Prospect, bemoaning the clogged highways and antiquated public transit systems that plague much of the country.

The point is we’re trapped. We can’t move…Compare the U.S. to the European Union. Over there, thanks to Eurostar (the high-speed rail system), easy transit to the airports, and Ryanair, Europeans have more geographic mobility than we do. Eurostar is more important to European unity than adopting a new EU constitution…

It’s easier to get from Dublin to Madrid, where Irish kids commute to do start ups. Over there, from Paris to Brussels, I puff along on air. Over here, on our dilapidated rails, I have to jolt along, in effect, by stage coach. It seems obvious that we should invest in high speed rail and mass transit, but we don’t…

Here’s the 2005 U.S. infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers: aviation D+, bridges C, drinking water D-, rails C-, roads D, school buildings D.

Infrastructure is not a sexy issue, by any means, which is why it doesn’t get discussed much in political campaigns. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. After all, as Steve Clemons recently noted:

There are a lot of reasons Rome fell, but one of the biggies is that Rome overspent on its military and the maintenance of empire and underinvested in its core, which slowly rotted.

A Los Angeles McDonald’s has given itself a face lift. And — in deference to the fast-growing Asian population of the area — the restaurant was redesigned with the help of feng shui consultants, according to this story.

On a busy commercial strip in this Los Angeles-area community is a quiet place where the walls are dabbed with red, the booths form a semicircle — perfect for a palaver with a paramour — and two waterfalls flow silently.

It is not a new cafe heralding gentrification, but rather a McDonald’s, newly renovated with the consultation of experts in feng shui, the Chinese practice of creating harmonious surroundings…

The design clearly reflects the owners’ desire, shared by many purveyors of fast food, to keep customers in their establishments as long as possible. The goal is opposite that of fast-food restaurants of yore, whose greatest wish was high customer turnover.

To that new end, the remodeled store also has a “McCafe” — essentially an outlet for McDonald’s coffee sold at Starbucks prices — a flat-screen television and soft cushioned chairs, all intended to encourage lingering.

But the use of feng shui experts and the multiple Asian touches — a vase at the entry filled with bamboo, and red accents galore, among other things — are also nods to the ever-expanding Asian population here in eastern Los Angeles County, where streets with Spanish names are peppered with stores bearing Chinese-lettered signs and where one of the largest Buddhist temples in the nation makes its home.

There was just a three-part series about Russia in the Christian Science Monitor. It focused on the young people who are part of what has been dubbed the “Putin Generation” - those who have come of age in a Russia that is more stable and prosperous, but still tightly-controlled politically and beset by corruption in business.

The whole series is worth a read, but there were some interesting cultural points in the second article, which focused on a young woman who has struggled to establish herself as a new business owner. The story points out the opportunities of the new Russia, but also the country’s inability so far to break free of some of the stifling practices of the past. An excerpt:

Yulia Barabasheva never wanted to have her own beauty salon…But with a dream of securing a steadier income and starting a family, she opened her unmarked brown metal door to the public in April last year.

It took the help of her husband, Igor Barabashev, a businessman, to get $180,000 in start-up loans and complete a six-month slog through Russia’s formidable bureaucracy to obtain a license. Now, she and her staff of 14 take clients up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, giving them thinner eyebrows or 5-inch nails.

At 25, Barabasheva is politically unengaged, like many of her “Putin generation.” But she enjoys a rising prosperity, which Russians typically chalk up to President Vladimir Putin. Serving that new wealth has opened the door to opportunities that would have been unheard of for average Russians just a decade ago. But even as Mr. Putin’s Russia allows ever greater numbers of people, like Barabasheva, to move up the economic ladder, it demands a scrappy persistence to battle red tape and corruption while trying to get ahead…

That shift toward broader prosperity, especially in Moscow, has been dramatic. In his first five years in office, Putin brought the poverty rate of his countrymen down to about 16 percent, according to the World Bank…Official figures put the middle class at about 20 percent of the population…

But the backstage of business in Putin’s Russia is much messier, according to Barabasheva and other entrepreneurs. “The state structure is quite complicated, quite corrupted, and it requires a lot of financial investment and emotional investment,” she says.

In a recent speech, Putin acknowledged such challenges. “To this day, it’s impossible to start a business within months,” he said, laying out his vision for Russia through 2020. “You have to go to every office with a bribe: firefighters, hospital orderlies, gynecologists, you name it. It’s just a nightmare.”

Here’s a report that should give many of us pause. The Southwestern United States could lose two of its largest sources of water within the next two decades.

Climate change and a growing demand for water could drain two of the nation’s largest manmade reservoirs within 13 years, depriving several Southwestern states of key water sources, scientists warn.

Researchers at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Wednesday that there’s a 50 percent chance that lakes Mead and Powell will dry up by 2021, and a 10 percent chance the lakes will run out of usable water by 2013.

“We were surprised that it was so soon,” said climate scientist David Pierce, co-author of the institution’s study that detailed the findings…

Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border and the West’s largest storage reservoir, and Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, have been hit hard by a regional drought and are half full…Researchers said that if Lake Mead water levels drop below 1,000 feet, Nevada would lose access to all its river allocation, Arizona would lose much of the water that flows through the Central Arizona Project Canal.

The economic advances that have been made during the past decade or so in India are beginning to change the country in ways that reach beyond bank accounts and consumer goods. India’s younger generations, for example, have developed high expectations for their careers and are even beginning to question centuries-old social values. Business Week reports on the changes:

For Ravikiran M.S…security and stability simply aren’t enough. The 24-year-old programmer is brimming with ambition. He rides a motorbike to work and hopes to buy a car. And he expects quick promotions, dreaming of becoming a CEO. “I want the posh life,” he declares.

Ravikiran is typical of India’s in-a-hurry younger generation. With the tech-services boom, the country’s college grads are coming of age in a time of economic optimism, and unlike their parents and grandparents, this group has vibrant job prospects and high hopes. The challenge for companies is to harness their energy while reining in inflated expectations… “It’s a very different generation,” says S. Gopalakrishnan, chief executive of Indian tech giant Infosys Technologies. “They want immediate rewards.” …

The challenge for companies is to address both the desires and frustrations of the younger generation. These become abundantly evident in the cafés and bars of Bangalore. As the city has developed into India’s Silicon Valley, it also has become the country’s bar-hopping capital.

“We need capitalism with a human face,” says P.B. Devaiah, a 20-year-old industrial engineering major at a local college. Sitting with friends at Java City, a crowded coffee shop, he complains that much of the programming in India is the equivalent of sweatshop labor, where new hires are expected to spend as much as 12 hours a day writing code. “We’re being used as machines,” Devaiah says.

When the conversation turns to social issues, India’s young people are likely to erupt in grousing about arranged marriage, the caste system, and interactions with Westerners…One of the biggest concerns is the changing role of women. The tech industry was once almost exclusively male, but by last year about 35% of employees were women…

Veena Parashuram is one of this new generation of Indian women. The 26-year-old engineer grew up in a village so primitive that she never used a spoon, fork, or napkin until she went away to boarding school at age 10. When a teacher told her girls could become anything they wanted, “my mind opened up,” she says.

Although her parents wanted her to submit to an arranged marriage and settle in their village, she went to engineering school in Bangalore and the Netherlands, where she met a German man. The couple married to ease the difficulties of getting work permits, but Parashuram says “the concept of marriage is pretty weird.” While she’s planning a traditional Indian wedding, she says, she doesn’t “like to follow rules that were set down hundreds of years ago.”

Did anyone see Newsweek’s recent “What’s Next” issue? It included a multi-story feature about the rise of China as a superpower and some of the ways in which the country is evolving.

From the cover story by Fareed Zakaria, here is a dramatic overview of just how fast China is growing these days:

Lawrence Summers has recently pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution the average European’s living standards rose about 50 percent over the course of his lifetime (then about 40 years). In Asia, principally China, he calculates, the average person’s living standards are set to rise by 10,000 percent in one lifetime! The scale and pace of growth in China has been staggering, utterly unprecedented in history—and it has produced equally staggering change. In two decades China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.

Recall what China looked like only 30 years ago. It was a devastated country, one of the world’s poorest, with a totalitarian state. It was just emerging from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed universities, schools and factories, all to revitalize the revolution. Since then 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China—about 75 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction over the last century.

And here are two opposing views of whether a Chinese-U.S. conflict is inevitable in the coming decades:

Some scholars and policy intellectuals (and a few generals in the Pentagon) look at the rise of China and see the seeds of inevitable great-power conflict and perhaps even war. Look at history, they say. When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power, unsettles the international order and seeks a place in the sun. This makes it bump up against the established great power of the day (that would be us). So, Sino-U.S. conflict is inevitable.

But some great powers have been like Nazi Germany and others like modern-day Germany and Japan…In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton’s John Ikenberry makes the crucially important point that the current world order is extremely conducive to China’s peaceful rise. That order, he argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep foundations—and there are massive economic benefits for China to work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it suicidal to risk a great-power war. “Today’s Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join,” writes Ikenberry.

That’s the title of an interesting article that appeared recently in the Boston Globe. It focuses on some of the success stories coming out of Africa, despite the poverty, hunger and corruption that still plagues much of the continent.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy…According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS. It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story. By many standards, Africa is doing better than it has in decades. The number of democratically elected governments has risen sharply in the past decade, and the number of violent conflicts has dropped. African ec