Oxfam Blogs the G8

As the G8 summit is about to begin in Germany, Oxfam has put together a blog specifically dedicated to it. Three Oxfam bloggers will follow the event and hopefully provide some insights that will depart from both the official propaganda and ritualistic antiglobalization protests.

Academic Research and Private Funding: A Faustian Deal?

Public and private funding makes advanced research materially possible but also constrains it. How does the source of funding affect what is being researched? How does it affect academic freedom? Who ultimately benefits from private funding? Corporations, universities, or the larger community where both are settled? At a time when cutting edge research seems to depend so much on private funding, are academics selling their soul to the Devil for a fistful of dollars?

The recent half-a-billion-dollar deal between UC-Berkeley and British Petroleum (BP) to found an Energy Biosciences Institute to research “economically viable alternative energy sources” lies at the core of such questions. Larisa Mann raises a few key issues about this deal in the online magazine Wire Trap. In addition to the risk of having corporations deciding what is worthy of being investigated, Mann asks how will the findings be used. If they become public, to begin with. She notes indeed that UC President Robert Dynes “admitted that ‘certain discoveries’ will be exclusively controlled by BP.” Put differently, BP will take advantage of a public institution (as Mann remarks, “Even with 500 million dollars from BP, UC is still a public university, with a public mission. Millions of taxpayer dollars go into it every year.”) to generate technological innovations that it will use for its own benefit.

On the other hand, however, one could nuance Mann’s critique by noting that the UC-BP deal could have a trickle-down effect by attracting talented faculty and students as well as other labs and firms that will settle in the area. This concentration could, in turn, spill over onto other related activities and become a major source of employment and economic growth. Although there is no guarantee that such virtuous circle will emerge, it is a possibility, as the Silicon Valley story and the biotech cluster around MIT and Harvard illustrate.

Therefore, although it is necessary to question the finality of such partnerships, as Mann does, we should avoid Manichean pictures. The issue of academic freedom remains crucial but we should also ask what regulations and incentives are necessary to increase the likelihood that partnerships like the UC-BP deal will generate a virtuous dynamic for the benefit of all stakeholders and not just shareholders.

Ode to the Blog?

How would poets that built their names through the printed word use the internet? Would Shakespeare or Rimbaud create a blog? What would the surrealists do with the internet? How would they cultivate the art of transgression in a world with moving barriers and elusive taboos? Would Pablo Neruda write an “ode to the blog”? We’ll never know. In the meantime, here’s his “Ode to the Book”:

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
…

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won’t go clothed
in volumes,
I don’t come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems–
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I’m on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I’m going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

As the Jewish proverb puts it: It is not the Jews that saved the Book, but the Book that saved the Jews. Could such words be written–even published–about blogging? Close your computer and open life…

Workers’ Rights and Economic Performance

A little while ago I pointed out a study suggesting that workplace collectivism, participation, and flexibility, could be the key to worker satisfaction. It seems that these features can also favor economic performance. In yesterday’s Monde, Frédéric Lemaître asked how come France did not manage to produce world leaders such as Toyota. According to Lemaître, the answer could lie in France’s overly hierarchical workplace relations and the overwhelming influence of “inheritors” in leading the main French firms. French employers don’t acknowledge that subordinates could have better ideas than their superiors and see the improvement of working conditions only as a cost and burden. Unions have their share of responsibility in this story–although the CFDT, with its former celebration of self-management, has a long history of emphasizing qualitative demands–insofar as they primarily focus on quantitative demands (job protection, better pay) at the expense of qualitative demands (workers’ rights, economic/workplace democracy).

Although one may wonder whether Japanese society is really a model of non-hierarchical social relations, the point is that making the workplace less hierarchical and more democratic can contribute to economic performance. Michael Piore and Andrew Schrank made a similar point about the implementation of labor standards in developing countries, particularly Latin America. Some forms of labor regulation offer “the possibility for a country to shift from a strategy of competing in world markets through cost-cutting and labor exploitation to a strategy of upgrading business practices to raise productivity, reduce inventory levels, and improve quality.” Countries embarking upon such strategy would not only grow but also develop. Similarly, as Suzanne Berger demonstrated in her book How We Compete, firms can compete in the world economy in different ways and there are no best practices that guarantee success. Offshoring and running after low wages is far from being the only viable or optimal strategy.

Such reflections have the merit of questioning the traditional zero-sum game between workers’ rights and economic performance, according to which consolidating workers’ rights through regulation necessarily hampers economic performance. The opposite could actually be true. The brave new world of globalization is not an iron cage.

Une autobiographie transatlantique

Je me permets d’attirer votre attention sur la publication française de l’autobiographie d’André Schiffrin. Probablement inconnu de la plupart des Français, Schiffrin a longtemps été un vrai passeur entre les milieux de l’édition française et américaine. Ce Parisien d’origine juive, dont le père Jacques Schiffrin a fondé la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade et contribué à lancer la carrière littéraire d’André Gide au début du siècle précédent, est devenu newyorkais par la force des choses. Cela ne l’a pas empêché, cependant, de continuer dans la lignée de son père. Il a été éditeur pendant plus de trente ans à Pantheon Books pour ensuite fonder The New Press en 1990.

Sa sensibilité littéraire et politique s’est illustrée dans le choix des auteurs qu’il a publiés à Pantheon Books (Pasternak, Foucault) ainsi que dans l’engagement de New Press de publier des ouvrages contribuant au débat public indépendamment de leur rentabilité. Son expérience l’a également amené à publier en 2000 un petit essai (The Business of Books) dénonçant la dérive marchande du monde de l’édition américaine. Sa trajectoire transtlantique ne pourra que toucher ceux qui vivent à cheval entre les cultures française et américaine ou, du moins, qui sont fascinés par celles-ci.

Quel avenir pour le Parti socialiste français?

Tandis que le Parti socialiste français (PS) digère encore la défaite de Ségolène Royal aux élections présidentielles et que François Hollande, premier secrétaire du PS, vient d’annoncer qu’il ne se représenterait pas à son poste, la question de l’avenir du PS se pose plus que jamais. Trois enjeux sont au coeur du renouvellement du PS: la question du leadership, la question des alliances et, enfin, la question du positionnement idéologique et programmatique.

A cet égard, il est intéressant de consulter deux “chats” récemment organisés par lemonde.fr. Dans l’un, Henri Rey, chercheur au Cevipof, soutient que le PS s’assume déjà comme parti réformiste et que, par conséquent, la question de son renouvellement idéologique est secondaire. D’après lui, la question centrale est celle des alliances: à qui le PS doit-il s’allier pour conquérir le pouvoir? La vieille stratégie d’union de la gauche (alliance avec le Parti communiste [PCF]), centrale depuis le début des années 1970, est-elle encore viable à la lumière du score du PCF lors des présidentielles (moins de 2%)? Une alliance vers le centre de François Bayrou et son Mouvement démocrate (MoDem) est-elle envisageable? Dans l’autre, Michel Noblecourt, chroniqueur au Monde, se concentre sur la question du leadership. Il explique que ni Royal ni Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) n’ont comme priorité la direction du PS. Il faut donc s’attendre à ce qu’ils mettent de l’avant un de leurs proches collaborateurs pour ainsi mener le Parti à distance.

Bref, la politique reste avant tout une histoire de rapports de force auxquels les idées et les projets qui permettraient de mobiliser les citoyens se trouvent souvent subordonnés. Au milieu de tout cela, le PS peut-il être autre chose qu’un simple outil pour la conquête du pouvoir et la satisfaction des ambitions personnelles de certains?

European Trade Unions and Flexicurity

Eight hundred union delegates are currently meeting in Sevilla, Spain, for the 11th congress of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). While yesterday the European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet came to warn them about the inflationary risks of wage increases, the central issue is the introduction of “flexicurity”(labor market flexibility and social security or protection) as a potential response to the challenges of globalization. The ETUC is worried that flexicurity will just be an excuse to cut down protection for the benefit of employers. It thus strongly criticized the European Parliament’s draft report on the Commission’s Green Paper “Modernising labour law to meet the challenges of the 21^st century.” Put simply, it believes that there’s too much flexibility and not enough security.

This response provides a taste of what French trade unions are likely to respond to president Nicolas Sarkozy–who believes that labor market reform is the key to reducing unemployment–when he’ll put the issue on the table for negotiations between employers and unions in the fall. The key to introducing the reform will lie in Prime Minister Fillon’s ability to divide unions as he did in 2003, when he introduced a law reforming the French pension system. In this respect, it is worth consulting a recent study laying out the different positions of French trade unions on flexicurity. There’s room for unions to converge on a set of demands but French labor history shows that it has rarely been enough to produce a united front.

Choosing the Next World Bank President: From American Idol to Global Idol?

Could one day the president of the World Bank be chosen by a global popular vote, a sort of American Idol process gone global? While one can be wary of such possibility at the light of the American Idol machine, the Paul Wolfowitz scandal has apparently opened up an opportunity for reconsidering how the president of the World Bank is chosen (it used to be appointed by the United States). The Center for Global Development has proposed a list of nine possible candidates (including five Americans) and launched an online survey on the desired selection process and qualifications of the next president. Citizens of the web, cast your vote.

Dispatches from the Income Gap

Two different events are taking place at the two extremes of the American income gap. At the top, Democrats are proposing to Congress to adopt a bill that would allow shareholders to take a non-binding vote on how much the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of their company should be paid. As Jonathan Chait reports in the New Republic, two economists from Harvard and Berkeley have shown that when CEO pay is set by the board of directors, it tends to be higher because board members have incentives to please CEOs. The weaker the board of directors, the higher the CEO pay. Giving shareholders the right to vote on CEO pay–even if non-binding– would balance the potential weakness of the board of directors and exercise downward pressures on CEO pay. It is worth bearing in mind that the average CEO of a Standard & Poor 500 company makes about $15 million a year.

At the other end of the income gap, Starbucks workers are organizing to get better wages, more affordable health insurance, and freedom of association (i.e., the right to form trade unions). It turns out that the company that brags about being socially responsible (read its leaflets about fair trade, sustainable development, etc., available in all its stores) has a long record of worldwide union-busting practices. Liza Featherstone reports in The Nation that in New York, the National Labor Relations Board “has accused Starbucks of violating workers’ freedom of association in about thirty different ways, including illegally firing, threatening and disciplining workers for supporting the union.” Although Starbucks workers founded a union three years ago, the gap to fill is so wide that they’re going to need many cups of foamy coffee to keep the mobilization going. I wonder how they would vote on their CEO’s pay…

Pour retracer le vote des députés français

Il est désormais possible de retracer le vote des députés français à l’Assemblée nationale. Le site mondepute.free.fr garde un registre complet des lois votées ainsi que des archives permettant de consulter les législatures de 1997 et de 2002. Bref, un bon outil de recherche.