Machines can make many things better, and for less.

Louis Vuitton has been caught pulling the wool—a very fine and delicately woven wool, no doubt—over the eyes of consumers. Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority this week demanded that the luxury company cease and desist with ads that imply their products are made by hand.

The glossy magazine advertisements featured a Vermeer-worthy model at a workbench, addressing a leather handle: “A needle, linen thread, beeswax, and infinite patience protect each over-stitch from humidity and the passage of time,” read the ad copy.

The bureaucrats paid to protect the public from flimflammery declared this to be a fraud. “[C]onsumers would interpret the image of a woman using a needle and thread to stitch the handle of a bag,” the agency ruled, “to mean that Louis Vuitton bags were hand stitched.” In truth, some of the work is done with the efficacious and none-too-tony assistance of sewing machines. For shame!

OK. We do need him.

Should we care? One is inclined to recommend the Advertising Standards Authority as a fine place for the U.K.’s new coalition government to find some savings.

Why the preference for the handmade, anyway? Yes, there are still goods where skilled craftsmanship makes all the difference: No machine can match the judgment of an experienced luthier, who has to adapt to the acoustic quirks of each piece of wood he carves for a violin. But does it matter whether a product is crafted by hand or stamped out by machine, if the consumer can’t tell the difference?

The aura of the handmade has been around ever since machines displaced tools as the main means of manufacture. Nineteenth-century moralists lamented the loss of honest craftsmanship and built a movement embracing goods that were objectively less well made than their factory-made counterparts.

Thorstein Veblen derided this as “exaltation of the defective,” which he disdained as just another manifestation of the leisure class’s taste for waste. He sneered at the “propaganda of crudity and wasted effort,” that led such advocates of the artisanal as John Ruskin to champion products of “painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude” over the “visibly more perfect goods” made cheaper by machines. He hated the smug vanity of people flaunting Ruskin’s rough-hewn books.

There is a robust Ruskinite movement afoot again today, celebrating the rustic and exalting in, if not the defective, the artless (where art is understood as artifice). It is in foodstuffs where the modern taste for the artisanal flourishes most fully. Many are the farmers markets now offering bruised peaches and splotchy tomatoes as a rebuke to the plastic gloss of supermarket produce.

Who knows how much of this is really grown by Mr. Green Jeans, and how much is just the battered leftovers from the warehouse, repurposed for the farm stand. But there is no doubt that perfection is now about as fashionable in foods as it is in Persian carpets.

Louis Vuitton, like many modern makers of luxury goods, is in a tricky position. Their clients expect the glossy perfection that machines make possible. But they don’t want the taint of mass-market cheapitude that comes with highly productive technology.

A role must be found for craftsman, because these days nothing is more rare and exotic. For all the micro-tolerances of the machine work that go into making a Ferrari, the company has technicians assemble its engines by hand. Perhaps that’ the most efficient and effective way to do it; or perhaps it’s an inefficiency that lends its own aristocratic gloss.

Bugatti brags that it employs actual humans to caress its Veyron coachwork for hours per car—an extravagance, and purposefully so. Or take champagne: A few houses still hire men to do the riddling by hand, turning the bottles in racks to work the sediment down onto the cork for removal. Machines can now do it in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost, but of course without the elegant wastefulness of a million turns of the wrist.

Once upon a time the craftsman’s touch could be displayed through personalization—the adding of monograms and various options for customization. Machine-made goods came off the assembly line with a perfect sameness that was a liability: making the ability to choose and specify details a great luxury. But in the last 20 or 30 years, computer-controlled production has democratized customization. When you can order a computer-cut shirt from Land’s End for $50, customization loses its upper-crustiness.

What is Louis Vuitton to do? The company could always try to show that there is some by-hand work involved in its handiwork by embracing the ethic of the splotchy tomato. Myth has it that weavers once inserted errors in their work to signal that, unlike the unlucky Arachne, they wouldn’t try to achieve godlike perfection. Imperfection today is a different signal. It’s a declaration that the weaver isn’t a machine, which is why newbie carpet collectors are told to look for uneven stitching.

If imperfection becomes a desirable luxury- good quality, savvy factory manufacturers will simply start programming their computers to insert certain random and human-seeming flubs into the products. Advertising police will never stop luxury goods from delivering more mystique than reality. That may make such pricey purchases a conspicuous waste of one’s money—but wasn’t that always the point?

Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704717004575268980205920578.html

Panicked Republicans risk future energy development.

With oil now lapping the Louisiana shore, a political oil panic is beginning to wash over the GOP. Somewhere, Rahm Emanuel is wondering if the Gulf spill is another crisis he won’t have to let go to waste.

Start with Sarah Palin, who spent most of 2008 rapping Democrats for not being more supportive of domestic energy production, only to turn around and suggest President Obama was in bed with Big Oil. The argument seems to be that anyone who accepts oil contributions must be in favor of oil spills.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski rushed to back Interior Secretary’s Ken Salazar’s comment about putting his “boot on the neck” of BP, lecturing anyone not “angry” about the accident as lacking in “emotion.” Louisiana Sen. David Vitter jumped into a debate over the liability cap. Democrats proposed an arbitrary $10 billion; Mr. Vitter countered with an arbitrary four quarters of company profit. This allowed Democrats to accuse the GOP of flacking for Big Oil.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions publicly berated an industry witness at a hearing for not knowing his “business.” Over in the House, California Rep. Darrell Issa has taken the bold step of blaming federal employees, singling out the Minerals Management Service (MMS).

Yes, the politics of this are tricky for the GOP. The caucus is acutely aware that “drill, baby, drill” sits badly in black water. Gulf state politicians such as Mr. Vitter, up for election, are under intense pressure to be seen to be doing something, preferably to BP. Yet grandstanding is rarely smart politics.

Republicans have invested too many years supporting responsible energy development to now sound believable bashing the industry. And as the Vitter episode shows, there is little gained in engaging Democrats in legislative one-upmanship. In a competition over who is more irrationally “tough” on Big Oil, Republicans will not win.

As for conservatives who think there is black gold in politicizing this (Mrs. Palin), think again. Right now the story line is President Obama versus the Oil Spill, and that hurts him. Those hurling accusations threaten to turn it into President Obama versus the GOP, a fight the White House would prefer. Beltway politicking during a crisis just annoys the public.

What some Republicans are really risking is future energy development, and their role managing it. Oil slick or no, our energy needs remain the same. Americans get that, which is why even amid 24/7 slick coverage a CNN poll found a majority still supports offshore drilling. That number will rise with gas prices.

The left is already using this to impose the restrictions it has long desired. President Obama yesterday said he’d continue a deep water moratorium and announced a suspension in new Arctic drilling. That’s surely just a start. And Republicans currently saying the industry doesn’t know its business will be hard pressed to complain.

As for making a convenient target of the MMS, they might consider it is one of the few agencies worth its pay, a body that works with the industry to produce safe, affordable energy, rather than against it. It also has a great track record. The political pile-on instead resulted in the firing yesterday of the MMS head and guarantees a MMS larded down with new regulations. Next time gas hits $4 a gallon, Republicans (who may be in charge) will wish they had this ally.

The real worry is that Republicans are making themselves vulnerable to Mr. Obama’s last big agenda item: cap and tax. The president has never made secret his desire to replace cheap and sure fossil fuels with expensive and unreliable energy sources. Up to now the GOP has offered good opposition.

Yet not wanting any crisis to go to waste, Mr. Obama has been out beating the industry and arguing the spill backs his call for climate legislation. This is a repeat of financial regulation, an attempt to force Republicans to either go along or get slammed for siding with Wall Street (in this case Big Oil). The more Republicans join the drill bash, the more opportunity Mr. Obama has to peel off votes.

If the GOP is looking for a political role model, they might try Sen. Mary Landrieu. The Louisiana Democrat has been a beacon of calm and sense. She’s stayed focused on the immediate, avoided early accusations, and tried to keep the accident in perspective. At a recent Senate Environment hearing she summed it up neatly.

“I know that this committee has its eyes on the environment. We in Louisiana . . . not only have our eyes on it, we have our heart invested in it and we are making a living on that delta. But we need the oil that comes from offshore to keep this economy moving. We must examine what went wrong, weigh the risk and rewards, fix what is broken and move on . . . If we could do without this oil, we would. But we simply cannot—not today, not in the near future.”

How principled. How refreshing.

Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704269204575270842009220082.html

The spill is a disaster for the president and his political philosophy.

I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don’t see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.

President Obama promised on Thursday to hold BP accountable in the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill and said his administration would do everything necessary to protect and restore the coast.

The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.

And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public’s fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don’t get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea.

In his news conference Thursday, President Obama made his position no better. He attempted to act out passionate engagement through the use of heightened language—”catastrophe,” etc.—but repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae. His staff probably thought this demonstrated his command of even the most obscure facts. Instead it made him seem like someone who won’t see the big picture. The unspoken mantra in his head must have been, “I will not be defensive, I will not give them a resentful soundbite.” But his strategic problem was that he’d already lost the battle. If the well was plugged tomorrow, the damage will already have been done.

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. In any case, the strategy was always a little mad. Americans would never think an international petroleum company based in London would worry as much about American shores and wildlife as, say, Americans would. They were never going to blame only BP, or trust it.

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls?

What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama’s standing with Democrats. They don’t love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have. They are invested in him. In time—after the 2010 elections go badly—they are going to start to peel off. The political operative James Carville, the most vocal and influential of the president’s Gulf critics, signaled to Democrats this week that they can start to peel off. He did it through the passion of his denunciations.

The disaster in the Gulf may well spell the political end of the president and his administration, and that is no cause for joy. It’s not good to have a president in this position—weakened, polarizing and lacking broad public support—less than halfway through his term. That it is his fault is no comfort. It is not good for the stability of the world, or its safety, that the leader of “the indispensble nation” be so weakened. I never until the past 10 years understood the almost moral imperative that an American president maintain a high standing in the eyes of his countrymen.

Mr. Obama himself, when running for president, made much of Bush administration distraction and detachment during Katrina. Now the Republican Party will, understandably, go to town on Mr. Obama’s having gone only once to the gulf, and the fund-raiser in San Francisco that seemed to take precedence, and the EPA chief who went to a New York fund-raiser in the middle of the disaster.

But Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: when you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704269204575270950789108846.html

Plants that spontaneously grow in the city are marvels of adaptation. What can we learn from them?

What makes a plant worth our admiration? Peter Del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum, walks up a short grassy hill near the South Street Gate and points to what he considers to be the Arboretum’s most amazing tree: the dwarf beech, a tree seemingly born from a German expressionist landscape, its knobby branches folded into a series of right angles that create a canopy resembling barbed wire. It’s one of many impressive trees in the Arboretum’s 265 acres in Jamaica Plain, which are carefully managed by a team of professional horticulturists.

But on this sunny spring afternoon, Del Tredici is interested in a far less spectacular destination: an area just outside the gate across South Street known as Stony Brook Marsh, where untamed vegetation grows atop an abandoned trash heap. On one side, a brackish pond is filled with invasive phragmitis reeds. On the other, a hillside of rubble has been colonized by a haphazard forest of thin trees. Along the path, stalks of Japanese knotweed poke insistently from the ground. It’s filled with species that are often called “invasive,” “noxious,” and “weed,” the kinds of plants that conservationists rail against and homeowners consider unsightly.

But the very characteristics that most people deride are ones that Del Tredici admires. He calls this area an “emergent forest,” an ecosystem formed spontaneously without the help of human hands. Those thin trees, for instance, are ailanthus trees, featured in the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” — planted originally for ornamental purposes, but now flourishing on their own because of their ability to grow by cloning themselves at the roots. “I don’t think anybody has planted an ailanthus tree in 100 years, yet it is the most common tree in most northeastern cities by a long shot,” Del Tredici says. The phragmitis reeds, which also fill the Back Bay Fens, are able to thrive in highly degraded wetlands like this one, where they help clean polluted water.

What some people see as a collection of undesirable plants, Del Tredici views as a valuable ecosystem that’s unique to the hostile habitat of the city. He’s the author of a new field guide, “Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast,” that focuses exclusively on species like these, the hardy and self-sufficient plant life that grows spontaneously in cities. Though the book is primarily a catalog of plants, Del Tredici also sees it as part of a deeper argument: that there’s a lot more value in these plants than we give them credit for.

“I consider ‘weed’ to be a politically incorrect term,” he says. “There is no biological definition of the term weed. It’s really a value judgment.”

If we saw this motley collection of plants differently, Del Tredici suggests, we’d realize they’re a kind of marvel: living things in the harsh and stressful urban landscape that don’t just survive there, but thrive. With no effort on our part, they fill the city with greenery, providing cleaner air and water, shade, and food and habitat for wildlife. They do it without expensive fertilizers and irrigation. It’s time, he suggests, that we learned to embrace them — to stop thinking of them only as weeds to uproot, and start considering what they have to offer.

When most of us think about the urban landscape, we tend to fall into one of two worldviews. One is what you might call the traditional gardener’s approach, cultivating attractive ornamental plants while eliminating weeds — think of Boston’s Public Garden, or a carefully landscaped front yard. More recently, a new idea has gained ground: to reflect the natural landscape by planting native vegetation, while eliminating alien species.

Del Tredici is offering an entirely different philosophy. Nothing is native to the city, he argues. The modern city is a new kind of habitat — one that provides pockets of livable spaces in surroundings that can be harsh, inhospitable, and polluted. The city habitat is so specialized, our divisions of “native” and “invasive” plants doesn’t really apply here. Instead, the plants that grow and thrive here could be considered the natural denizens of a new kind of habitat — what he calls “cosmopolitan” species. Like the human residents of Boston, many have immigrated from other parts of the world to coexist in a single community. “You can in many cases get as much functionality out of a cosmopolitan group of plants as you can out of a native group of plants,” he says.

In his quest to better understand urban plants, Del Tredici explored corners of the city that held habitats less obvious than open spaces like Stony Brook Marsh. As we exit onto Washington Street, we find a less hospitable environment — a spit of dirt at the entrance of the stone gate, where some greenery has managed to grow.

“Look at that spectacular dandelion,” he says, bending down and plucking a plump saucer-shaped flower from the ground.

The loose soil at the gate is home to a modest garden of what most people would call weeds: dandelions, chicory, mugwort, butter and eggs — all scrappy plants that grow stubbornly in pockets of land that no one is responsible for. At some point, he says, “someone will weed-whack all of this.”

Because most of us see these bits of greenery as aberrations, we don’t appreciate these small spaces for what they are: micro-environments that manage to support an entire specialized ecosystem. A few feet away, he points to tiny maple seedlings pushing out of the dirt surrounding a concrete light post. Further down, he finds a Virginia creeper growing along a chain-link fence — which happens to be a wonderful habitat for plants, he points out, because it gives them a protected place to grow.

Fences, pavement cracks, railroad tracks, highway medians — these are specialized habitats that humans create, and they offer niches where certain plants thrive. Many of these plants are “pre-adapted” to the urban environment. Species that grow in sidewalk cracks, for instance, originally grew in the cracks of cliffs and other marginal areas. Other urban plants are accustomed to rough conditions, and can survive being stepped on or attacked repeatedly by maintenance crews. Butter and eggs, also called yellow toadflax, originally grew in open grasslands, sand dunes, and gravelly soils; in the city, it readily sprouts up in cracked asphalt, vacant lots, rubble piles, and roadsides. Some plants are native to areas with challenging chemical conditions, and they can tolerate the pollution in city soils and waterways, and the salt that leaches off roads. Their toughness means that we can still maintain greenery in places we’ve made inhospitable to most plant life.

Like any other plants, these species are consuming carbon dioxide, producing oxygen, creating shade, and serving as food and habitat for wildlife. Even mugwort, which he calls “the quintessential urban weed,” absorbs heavy metals from the ground, prevents erosion on slopes, and helps populate barren, nutrient-depleted soils. And they do it all without help. By contrast, “the Arboretum looks the way it does because we have 15 people who come in every day” to maintain it, Del Tredici says.

After spending more than three decades at the Arboretum focusing on the kinds of plants that people use to beautify landscapes, Del Tredici began turning his attention to this so-called spontaneous vegetation, prompted by the interest of his students at the Harvard Design School, where he is a lecturer. “Even though it’s a very common and very important part of the city, nobody pays much attention to it,” he says. His students calculated that spontaneous vegetation covers about 10 percent of the land in Somerville.

With all the interest in sustainability these days, he argues, nothing is more sustainable than landscapes that grow on their own. For that reason, spontaneous vegetation could be an attractive alternative for landscape design: It conserves water and other resources, and it’s affordable for cities with diminishing maintenance budgets.

In his book and lectures, Del Tredici proposes an approach to urban wild spaces that is less about planting and more about editing, in which plants are allowed to grow naturally and then only maintained minimally to weed out truly undesirable species, like vines that choke out other plants.

Although it’s hard to imagine such an approach being implemented in high-profile spots like the Public Garden, it could be a way to boost the city’s plant cover in spaces that are open but unmanaged — for instance, vacant lots that are not currently in use. Del Tredici also proposes creating what he calls “spontaneous roofs,” in which soil on a roof is allowed to self-colonize with plants — a low-maintenance alternative to planted green roofs that only requires occasional weeding.

His ideas aren’t an easy sell with the professional landscapers who look after parkland in and around the city. Bree Harvey, a spokesperson at Mount Auburn Cemetery, says, “We have to keep the place looking the way all the people who have purchased grave space here expect it to look.” Dennis Collins, the cemetery’s horticultural curator, says that there are also historical and cultural regions for preserving the space, which is designated as a National Historic Landmark, from encroaching weeds. “We’re not a natural area; it’s 170-plus years of managed landscape,” he says.

Jeremy Dick, a horticulturist for Boston Natural Areas Network, known as BNAN, says that while Del Tredici’s ideas makes sense and offer potential benefits for urban spaces, implementing them would require major shifts in attitude. “Land stewards and conservationists in the future will need to overcome their bias toward these plants to appreciate them,” says Dick. Many of the urban plants Del Tredici talks about are alien to the area, and these people have been trained to view all invasive species in a negative light.

Dick says that BNAN, which owns or helps to manage several community gardens, urban wilds, and greenways in the Boston area, often receives complaints from residents if an area becomes too weedy or unkempt. When people see spontaneous plants springing up, they see a mismanaged area and start to worry that it invites trash-dumping, or crime.

Del Tredici is aware that he faces an uphill battle. We can’t escape the fact that neatly trimmed rose bushes signal wealth and safety, while dandelions poking out of asphalt cracks are signs of poverty and neglect. Even if weeds are a symptom of urban blight, not the cause, it would take quite a campaign to disconnect the two in people’s minds. Del Tredici himself admits that features like spontaneous roofs have a slim chance of being widely accepted in the United States. However, there are small signs of change. At Mount Auburn Cemetery, Collins says that landscapers have begun to phase out pesticide use on the grass in recent years, resulting in lawns that are marbled with dandelions and clover. “People are getting used to a different concept of turf; they’re not expecting the perfect golf course in quality,” he says.

As Del Tredici and I walk back through Stony Brook Marsh, we stop to look at the smooth, undulating trunks of the ailanthus trees — which although not as dramatic as the dwarf beech, are striking in their clonal similarity. I ask him if he looks at plants like this and sees beauty. “I’m open-minded about beauty,” he answers. It may take a while before the rest us catch up.

Courtney Humphries is a freelance science writer and the author of ”Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…And the World.”  

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/23/this_is_not_a_weed/

What monarchs offer modern democracy

The tumultuous past two months in world politics have brought a surprise with them: Suddenly, monarchy seems relevant again.

In Belgium, where the fragile government constantly is on the verge of collapse, King Albert II has been essential in trying to prevent its dissolution, mediating between leading politicians and pushing them back to the bargaining table. After Britain’s recent election, as politicians from the Labor, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties struggled to negotiate a ruling coalition, Queen Elizabeth’s presence reminded Britons that the country retained institutions that would prevent it from really melting down.

And most notably, in Thailand, the chaos that has ruled the streets of Bangkok stems partly from fear over the country’s future after the eventual death of increasingly frail 82-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who has helped resolve past political crises by forcing the leaders of the army and the demonstrators to meet and reconcile. Without him, notes James Ockey of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, “Thailand may not be able to resolve future crises without major conflict.”

The idea of a monarch may seem like an anachronism in a 21st-century democracy, a relic of an earlier era in which a small elite intermarried and ruled much of the world, while most average people had no say. And to be sure, in states where kings and sultans still actually rule, like Brunei, Jordan, and Morocco, monarchs can be every bit as oppressive and opaque as any other dictatorship. Morocco’s King Mohamed VI, for example, presides over “repressive legislation to punish and imprison peaceful opponents,” according to Human Rights Watch. In Brunei, Jefri, the brother of the ruling sultan, allegedly embezzled billions in state funds, which he spent on some 2,000 cars and a lasciviously named royal yacht, among other items.

But in Europe and parts of Asia, many politicians, political scientists, and citizens have lately developed greater respect for the positive role a constitutional monarch can play in democracy. As in Belgium, monarchs can be arbiters of last resort when elected politicians cannot resolve deep divisions. They can offer their nations a unifying figure to prevent political crises from spiraling into something worse. And in an era of partisanship and diminished individual rights, monarchs can serve as a means of stability in a democracy that might otherwise tear itself apart. A.W. Purdue, author of the book “Long to Reign?”, argues that a king or queen “enables change to take place within a frame of continuity.”

Some political scientists have even argued for reviving defunct monarchies in the interest of democracy, especially in developing nations where monarchs could serve as figures of national unity to prevent ethnic and tribal bloodletting. Cambodia did so in the early 1990s following its civil wars, and the king helped inspire average Cambodians and heal wounds after the Khmer Rouge era. After the toppling of the Taliban in 2001, Afghanistan welcomed back former king Zahir Shah to launch the Loya Jirga and serve as a figure of unity as political parties bargained to build Afghan democracy. In Iraq, Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a descendant of the last monarch, has begun publicly arguing that a constitutional monarchy could help reduce the vicious ethnic and sectarian divides roiling the country. In Laos, where people can see the Thai monarchy on Thai television broadcasts, the exiled royal family has become a rallying point for some opponents of the authoritarian government. Southeast Asia academic Michael Vatikiotis argues, in an essay pushing for a return of the crown in neighboring Burma, that monarchy provided a unifying factor in that diverse society — a unifier ripped away during British colonial rule and never effectively replaced.

“The forlorn hope of progressive political change in Burma using all modern means,” he writes, “suggests that reaching back in time and resurrecting the long-dismantled monarchy could provide a prescription.”

Although the House of Windsor dominates global media coverage of monarchy, in reality 12 European countries still have monarchs, as do Cambodia, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Bhutan, and other nations. Despite occasional republican movements that attempt to end the monarchy, polls show strong support for the crown in nearly every nation that has one. In the Netherlands, 70 percent of respondents in one poll wanted to retain the monarchy; in Spain, 65 percent of respondents supported it; in Japan, the number was 82 percent. In many of these countries, poll respondents have more respect for the monarchy than any other public institution.

Many modernizing countries have found that a monarch provides a source of authority and national identity that stands apart from political squabbles. He or she can serve simply as a figurehead, or more substantively as a kind of independent power center that can check the worst impulses of elected politicians, in the way that a Supreme Court or House of Lords might.

Although a ceremonial president can fill this role, as in Israel or Germany, the monarch has a unique claim on the public imagination. Neil Blain, an expert on modern monarchies at the University of Stirling in Britain, says the monarch’s symbols, like the scepter and crown, can’t be replicated by a ceremonial president. The queen, he says, “attests, however mythically, to the country’s political stability and enduring historical foundations.”

“The English do not wish to see the queen on a bicycle,” he says, “because from where people stand here she looks just right in a Rolls-Royce Phantom or better still, a horse-drawn carriage.”

In developing nations, modern monarchs can do more than provide links to the past — they can help usher in democracy. In Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck pushed his once-isolated country toward its first truly democratic elections. In Spain, King Juan Carlos midwifed a new Spanish democracy after dictator Francisco Franco’s death. In Cambodia, King Norodom Sihanouk returned to the country after the wars of the 1970s and 1980s and helped oversee a transition to democracy in the 1990s that brought the country a vibrant, if sometimes rough and bloody, democracy.

Some of these monarchs also helped bring economic and cultural modernization. The royals of Bhutan have prodded their citizens to embrace the Internet, satellite television, international trade, and other modern changes. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, though not a constitutional monarch, has been credited with pushing for social and economic reforms that have diluted the power of the conservative religious establishment and pushed the kingdom to invest in science and technology education.

European monarchy experts also now see a growing role for kings and queens at a time when countries are becoming more diverse. As democracies take in more and more immigrants, and countries give up some of their national identities to superstructures like the European Union, these changes can make national unity more difficult, and a monarch can serve to welcome newcomers and help them feel like citizens.

Sweden’s king, Carl XVI Gustaf, for example, has used the monarchy to integrate immigrants. In one famous speech, he said that “new Swedish citizens…have come here from countries all over the world…under these circumstances it is precisely the strength of the monarchy that the king can be an impartial and uniting symbol.” The Netherlands’ queen, Beatrix, has used royal speeches to call for tolerance at a time when right-wing anti-Islamic politicians have made headway among the Dutch public.

Scholars of monarchy also suggest that, in an era of tightening internal security and control, when elected politicians are amassing previously unheard-of powers and courts are loath to challenge them, a monarch can safeguard public freedom. Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, a think tank in London, recently argued in the Financial Times that Queen Elizabeth has stood aside too often while the prime minister has become too powerful, but that she remains a figure, under the British constitution, who could check the executive’s power. “The only solution is to make our current constitution work,” Butler wrote. “It certainly means having a monarch who is prepared to intervene on behalf of the people.” In fact, Britain’s unelected House of Lords — often criticized as a relic of a vanished feudal aristocracy — has played a similar function, trying to limit the British government’s surveillance efforts and other new powers.

Similarly, in Cambodia former King Sihanouk (who has since stepped aside because of health reasons and now holds the title of King Father), frequently clashed with Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is elected but has amassed near-dictatorial powers in his office. Sihanouk frequently criticized Hun Sen’s strongman tactics, and invoked the royal institution as the protector of average people abused by the prime minister.

Monarchs, however, must walk a very fine line. Because today’s constitutional monarchs’ power is so nebulous, to use it effectively they must be extremely careful in wielding it.

In Thailand, King Bhumibol Adulyadej frequently has used public speeches to criticize what he sees as politicians who are too venal or power-hungry — which sometimes has veered into a political alignment with Bangkok-oriented elite parties and against parties aligned with rural people, who came to Bangkok and eventually led the demonstrations that resulted in violence. “The palace is thus very much in politics, although the general myth is that the king is above politics,” says Irene Stengs, an expert on the Thai monarchy at the Meertens Institute in the Netherlands.

In fact, the king sanctioned the 2006 coup, after it happened, that deposed populist former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. With these actions, Bhumibol — who is protected from public criticism by strict lese majeste laws — has chipped away some of the respect he earned over decades. Among the “red shirts” battling the government, one has begun to hear anti-monarchical sentiments, though they are careful not to disdain the current monarch. In contrast to many previous rallies in Bangkok, the red shirts did not hold up noticeable photos of the king this time — interpreted as a sign of distrust of the palace.

Nepal’s royal family recently learned of the devastating consequences when a king overtly takes sides. After a Maoist insurgency rooted in the rural regions challenged Nepal’s parliamentary government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, then-King Gyanendra in 2005 took control of the government himself and attempted to dominate the security forces and to wipe out the Maoist movement. The suppression failed, even parliament turned against the crown, and the Maoists eventually took power in Kathmandu as part of a power-sharing agreement. In 2008, with Gyanendra’s reputation in tatters, Nepal created a republic and abolished the monarch, and Gyanendra moved out of his palace like a delinquent tenant.

For now, most of the other constitutional monarchies seem to have absorbed the lessons of places like Nepal. In Spain, Juan Carlos, though given an extremely conservative education and hailing from a conservative background, has worked with politicians from across the ideological spectrum. In Britain, even as the Labor, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties haggled with one another about forming a new government, Queen Elizabeth did not appear in public to bless any of their leaders — although she personally, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, disdained the Labor policies of Tony Blair. And according to British tradition, when the new Parliament convenes for the first time and the government formally announces its agenda for the year, the person who reads the speech — as she always does, no matter who is setting the policies — will be the Queen.

Joshua Kurlantzick is Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/23/saved_by_the_crown/

Can an ‘MBA oath’ fix what’s wrong with business?

The portrait of the American business world that has emerged from the financial crisis is rife with unapologetic amorality. Mortgage bankers encouraged people to take out home loans they couldn’t afford, distinguished investment houses peddled deals to their clients that they themselves wouldn’t consider investing in, and officers at those same institutions continued to pay themselves millions of dollars even as they were bailed out by the federal government, all while insisting — even in front of Congress — that this is simply how the game is played.

Several years back, of course, it wasn’t Wall Street, but firms like WorldCom and Enron and Tyco that shocked public sensibilities, their leaders engaging in outright fraud and larceny to pump up stock prices, their own compensation, or both. Whether inside or outside the law, the last decade has given many Americans the nagging sense that the members of the business elite play by a set of rules far removed from those of the society that ultimately supports them.

The political solution tends to be fresh regulation, such as the president’s push to rein in the big banks. But recent years have also seen the emergence of an alternative from within the business world itself — more specifically, from within the graduate schools that produce a disproportionate number of business leaders. The idea is both radical and straightforward: to make executives more moral, changing business itself by changing the way its leaders think about their responsibilities. And a subtly powerful way to do that,

according to a few management scholars and a growing number of business school students, is simply by creating an oath: a pledge of ethical behavior, modeled on medicine’s Hippocratic Oath, that would be administered as graduates embark on their careers.

The invention of the MBA oath is generally credited to Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, two professors at Harvard Business School who have written papers on the topic. In 2004, the Richard Ivey School of Business, a top Canadian business school, instituted a pledge that all students were required to take on graduation. In 2006, Thunderbird School of Management, a school of international business in Glendale, Ariz., instituted an oath of its own, and the next year Columbia Business School put in place an honor code meant to bind its students beyond graduation and into their working lives.

The oath that has gotten the most attention, though, is at Harvard. Last year, a group of Harvard business students organized a voluntary oath ceremony at the school’s graduation — over half the graduating class, about 550 freshly minted MBAs in all, took the pledge, promising to “create value responsibly and ethically.” A similar ceremony will be held later this month for the class of 2010. Some of those student founders, working with the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, have set out to seed an international movement: “The Oath Project” website now has pledges from 2,800 students at business schools in the United States and abroad, and two of the project’s founders have just published a book on the oath and its potential. The oath gained fresh prominence earlier this month, when Nohria was named dean of Harvard Business School.

“As managers, we’re in charge of a lot of resources, both human resources and capital resources, and we’ve seen that over the last few years, business has gone wrong, and a lot of people have lost jobs,” says Peter Escher, a 2009 Harvard Business School graduate, one of the founders of the school’s MBA Oath and coauthor of the new book. “An oath is a way to lay out the boundaries around the profession, to develop an agreed-upon body of knowledge and ethics.”

A spoken promise may seem like flimsy armor against the outsized financial incentives that come into play in corporate corner offices, but proponents point to evidence from behavioral science of the surprising power of norms and symbols in shaping our behavior. The sanctity of the Hippocratic Oath itself, they argue, along with the gravity with which everyone from military officers and lawyers to accountants and architects treat their codes of professional conduct, suggests how effective communal standards and ethical self-policing can be. A code, in other words, can be a powerful thing.

Those not won over by the business oath argue that its proponents have things backwards. A few words, no matter how earnestly intoned, are unlikely to change anyone’s long-term behavior — the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t create a doctor’s sense of duty, it merely reflects it, and that sense of professional obligation is the product of years of exposure to medicine’s almost tribal code of behavior.

To its adherents, the oath is part of an attempt to create such a value system for business — to turn management into a profession with aims beyond simply keeping share prices high. But to some of its critics, the oath is just fuzzy thinking. Businesses, they argue, are meant to make money for their owners and shareholders, and in so doing to help grow the economy. To the extent that business has a higher purpose, it is that. It’s up to a nation’s citizens and elected officials to rein in that behavior when it stops serving the public good. The oath, in other words, sits squarely in the middle of a larger debate over whether it is possible to articulate a set of higher principles for business at all.

Throughout Western history, most revolutions have had their oaths. The Tennis Court Oath helped bring on the French Revolution, the Protestation oath failed to avert the English Civil War. The Declaration of Independence was not only an announcement of rebellion but a solemn promise of solidarity, its signers mutually pledging to each other “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” (That pledge held.)

The idea of an MBA oath first occurred to Nohria in 1996. He was on sabbatical at the London School of Business and talking to a colleague, the management scholar Sumantra Ghoshal, about various parts of the traditional business school curriculum that hindered graduates in the real world.

In particular, Ghoshal was a vocal critic of the “maximizing shareholder value” mantra, the idea, ascendant since the early 1980s, that share price should be the dominant yardstick for measuring the performance of managers. Ghoshal and others had come to believe that that worldview allowed managers to ignore their other, equally legitimate responsibilities: everything from the welfare of their own workers to the environmental impact of their products. And with compensation linked to share price, executives were inevitably tempted to do everything they could, legal and otherwise, to goose stock prices quarter by quarter, even if that damaged the company over the long run.

As Nohria recalls, he began to wonder what sort of thing he could teach students as a counterforce.

“Out of the clear blue — my sister had just graduated from medical school — I thought, what if managers actually had something that was like that?” he says. “What if we provided something that was aspirational, some guidance as to what their responsibilities actually were?”

Although it may feel quixotic to invent an oath without the weight of tradition behind it, the Hippocratic Oath itself gained prominence in the 20th century as a response to troubling modern developments. Despite its roots in ancient Greece, only a minority of American medical students took the oath until World War II, as Max Anderson, a cofounder of Harvard’s MBA Oath, has written. But in the wake of the revelations about brutal Nazi medical experimentation, schools rushed to adopt it as a way to unequivocally set down the limits of medical ethics.

And it is not only history that gives weight to an oath, psychology suggests. For example, the behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University has done a study showing that swearing on a Bible makes even atheists more honest, and that signing honor codes does make people less likely to cheat. Work by the psychologist Robert Cialdini and others has found that making a public commitment to a cause — either by speaking it aloud or writing it down — makes people firmer in their commitment, and more likely to act on it.

The effects that have been found, however, are mostly short-term ones, and there’s no evidence a pledge can shape behavior years later. For his part, Ariely (author of the forthcoming book “The Upside of Irrationality”) is skeptical that a pledge alone will change corporate decision-making. If the goal is to get executives and managers to think more broadly about societal good, a more effective measure, he argues, would be to require the reporting of, say, pollution, or the number of patents created, or the number of jobs created, in each quarterly report. The trick, Ariely says, is “to keep these things on top of people’s minds.”

And as for the Hippocratic Oath itself, its purpose may be primarily ceremonial. Asked what role the oath played in the professionalization of American medicine, Kenneth Ludmerer, a physician and historian of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, responded, “Essentially none. It’s a nice ceremony, but its impact and role is in effect zero.’

The oath’s champions do not claim that it can transform business alone. They see it as a first step in the larger project of “professionalizing” the practice of management — turning it into a field, like law or architecture, whose practitioners are united not only by specialized knowledge but a shared set of values beyond personal enrichment.

“What professions do is come up with codes of conduct that benefit society or clients or patients. That’s missing in management,” says Gregory Unruh, an ethics scholar at Thunderbird School of Management who helped its students create the school’s oath.

In this sense, the term “profession” doesn’t just refer to a job, but a special sort of work that also represents a higher calling: Doctors make money, but their first directive is to heal people; lawyers can be rich, but their responsibility is to pursue justice for their clients.

“Many people who want to be in business today want to have the status of a profession without any of the constraints,” says Khurana.

But those trying to move business in that direction are immediately challenged by the question of what business’s higher purpose would even be. The responsibilities of a doctor or lawyer are straightforward: the good of the patient; the integrity of the legal system. But aside from the owners of a company, who should the manager be thinking of?

The “Management Oath,” the pledge formulated by the consortium behind the Oath Project, addresses this problem by referring repeatedly to the good of society at large. It commits its takers to “not advance my personal interests at the expense of my enterprise or society,” to “refrain from corruption, unfair competition, or business practices harmful to society,” to “protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.”

To critics, this sort of language makes the pledge a poor guide for everyday behavior. A business manager’s job, points out Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, entails the balancing of many often competing interests. In vaguely invoking the good of society, Kaplan argues, the oath ignores these necessary tensions and compromises. The great virtue of shareholder value, on the other hand, is that it provides a single, clear goal against which all of the competing claims can be measured.

“For example, shareholders want profits and workers want higher wages, so there’s a conflict. It may make sense to move operations from one country to another, so you hurt the workers in one place, you help the ones in another,” he says. “There’s no sense of trade-offs [in the oath], and once you get into these details, it becomes meaningless, inconsistent, and impossible to actually stick to.”

The oath also runs up against an enduring strain of thinking about business: that the profit motive itself is a social good. In other words, to the extent that the oath gets its takers to think beyond profit, it only dilutes business’s positive impact on society. Writing against the MBA Oath in the Harvard Business School’s newspaper, Andrew Sridhar, a student graduating this spring, put it this way: “If you really care about those who need electricity or those who are jobless, then pursue your own ambitions aggressively, for the profit motive is the true engine of prosperity.”

Nohria understands this criticism, but believes that the elite business leaders coming out of schools like Harvard need to appreciate that corporations are creations of society, and therefore ultimately beholden to it. “A business charter is something that society bestows on businesses,” he points out. In their earliest days, corporations were only chartered for specific societally important purposes — to open trade routes throughout the British Empire, for example, or to settle Massachusetts Bay — and technically, public companies still exist because the public allows them to.

“I think that we give businesses money in return for their providing something that we value,” says Nohria. “We do this because we believe that the resources that have been used by the business have been used in a way that the value created is more than the opportunity cost of the resources consumed.”

Still, Nohria has no plans to make the oath a part of the business school curriculum. He likes, he says, the fact that students today debate whether or not to sign it, and have to defend their decision one way or another. He agrees that the oath doesn’t provide ready answers to difficult decisions. But that is not its point. Its point is to do something like the opposite: to remind its takers of the complexity and impact of the decisions they will make, and to disabuse them of the view that one measuring stick, or one model, will make those decisions easy.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.

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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/05/16/executive_honor/

His writing was widely loved. Critics begrudged him his popularity.

Over the course of a literary career that spanned an astonishing eight decades, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote some of the 20th century’s best-loved novels (e.g., “Of Human Bondage”), a cluster of hit plays in London’s West End (“The Constant Wife”), ground-breaking travel books (“The Gentleman in the Parlour,” about Southeast Asia), an eloquent intellectual memoir (“The Summing Up”), and some of the finest short stories in the English language (“The Letter,” “Rain,” “The Outstation”). Such was his success as a writer that, in his later years, he became almost as well known for his opulent manner of living as for his work.

Thus, for some, Maugham will forever be identified with his legendary home on the French Riviera, between Monte Carlo and Nice. As Selina Hastings declares with characteristic panache: “The Villa Mauresque and Somerset Maugham, Somerset Maugham and the Villa Mauresque: for nearly forty years the two were inextricably linked, the house the richest thread in the fabric of the legend, visited, photographed, filmed, described in countless articles, regarded with awe as the glamorous and exotic backdrop for one of the most famous writers in the world.”

Famous, yes. But respected? In “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham,” Ms. Hastings draws on thorough research and recently released documents to trace Maugham’s busy life—his stormy marriage, his attentiveness to his daughter, Liza, his world-wide travels, his literary quarrels, his generosity to younger writers, his often furtive homosexuality—but she also pays a great deal of attention to his literary output, where the emphasis belongs. It irked Maugham, she says, that Bloomsbury and other highbrow literary circles tended to dismiss him or ignore him altogether.

“As much as his middlebrow reputation,” Ms. Hastings writes, “it was his success, and the affluence that came with that success, that in the eyes of Bloomsbury placed him beyond the pale.” Maugham himself characterized his position on more than one occasion: “I know just where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate.”

Ms. Hastings ranks Maugham rather higher than that. She singles out his ability to create in-depth portraits of both men and women, fully realized in all their fragility, ruthlessness, fury, confusion and longing—characters often conveyed to the reader through the fluent words of an ironical, sympathetic and knowing narrator. Cyril Connolly, the English critic, hailed Maugham as “the last of the great professional writers,” someone who took pains to construct his stories properly and get his sentences right.

It was precisely such studied professionalism that seemed to put Maugham at odds with the modernist vogue, with its experimental forms, its language games, its emphasis on the purely aesthetic. And yet in 1934 Desmond McCarthy—a member of the modernist- leaning Bloomsbury set—wrote a perceptive pamphlet about Maugham arguing that “he has a sense of what is widely interesting, because, like Maupassant, he is as much a man of the world as he is an artist.”

A man of the world indeed, not least of the Far East and the Malayan archipelago to which he traveled so often. Its rubber plantations, colonial outposts and local clubs, Ms. Hastings notes, serve as the settings for many of his best-known stories. These stories, she writes, “of incest and adultery, of sex-starved missionaries and alcoholic planters, of footsteps in the jungle and murder on the veranda, are what remains in the minds of many as the very image and epitome of Maugham’s fictional territory.”

Maugham has been the object of biographical attention before, of course, but “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham” (despite its needlessly salacious title) is in a class of its own. Anyone who has read Ms. Hastings’s biographies of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford will know that she writes beautifully and has a talent for shaping a narrative; she is also adept at combining sympathy for her subjects with a tough-minded sense of their less pleasant traits and actions.

In Maugham those traits were far from hidden. His wit easily turned acrid and cruel and was deployed against family and friends alike. He said of his wife, Syrie, whom he divorced in 1929, that she had made his life “utter hell,” “[opening] her mouth as wide as a brothel door” in her money demands. His late memoir, “Looking Back” (1962), made her out to be wanton: The child she bore, he claimed (falsely), was not really his. It is clear from Ms. Hasting’s account that, despite his polished manners, he was a man profoundly antinomian in his beliefs and in certain aspects of his life.

Among the new material released by Maugham’s estate is a long interview given to a family friend by Liza before her death in 1999. Liza says there that her mother was very much in love with Maugham, despite their bouts of anger, and remained friendly with him, at times, after the divorce. It had hurt her mother tremendously that the marriage ended because of Maugham’s affections for a man (Gerald Haxton) and not a woman.

Mr. Hastings attributes Maugham’s guarded and secretive attitude toward his homosexuality to the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde when he was young medical student in London already struggling with his sexual identity. While accepting that he was predominantly homosexual in his make-up, Ms. Hastings never reads that fact into his work or limits his achievement to that of a “gay writer” as such. Maugham was extraordinarily perceptive about the lives of women and the ordeals of their romantic lives. His enjoyment of sex with women was enthusiastic, Ms. Hastings says, and it is notable that the women who come off best in his fiction are those who are free both in their expression of sexuality and in their practice of it. In this way and many others, Ms. Hastings’s uncommonly absorbing and judicious biography allows us to see the writer in full. It is the first truly rounded portrait of a fine writer and a complicated man.

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703957904575252871142772504.html