SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

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Restless Workers ADNAN ABIDI/REUTERS

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

F

Paris RoM LAWYERS IN Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the

globe. Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs. High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France. In January, the government of Iceland, whose econ-

obaMa’s WasHIngton

Tests for the new commander in chief.

omy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices. Just recently, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism. “Nearly everybody has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,” said Nicolas Véron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy. In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe,

JAVIER BARBANCHO/REUTERS

Protesters held a banner calling for job protection in Sevilla, Spain. Policemen cast shadows as they stood guard during a demonstration by workers in New Delhi, India. Joblessness spreads

Continued on Page 4

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MoneY & bUsIness

Questioning whether to spend or save.

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scIence & tecnologY

Certain colors may help performance.

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I ntellIgence: tro u b l es fo r t he po pe, page 3.

Getting Out of the Habit Your plane plunges to the earth with a terrifying crash. But somehow, miraculously, you escape the flaming wreckage. In your state of shock, profoundly grateful to be alive, you promise to make LENS changes. You’ll quit cigarettes. Spend more time with your family. Devote the rest of your life to securing world peace. A short time later, you find yourself living pretty much the same way you always had. Even a life-altering trauma is not alFor comments, write to nytweekly@ nytimes.com.

ways enough to prompt lasting changes in people’s lives, Michael Wilson wrote recently in The Times. He cited the case of Mike Wilson, no relation, a workaholic software designer, who said that after surviving a plane crash in Denver, he vowed to spend more time with his wife. “Right after the incident, it was kind of a high priority for me,” he said. “Then the realities of life set in. I think it’s really easy to fall back into those old habits.” As neuroscientists have discovered, old habits become physically embedded in people’s brains, as synapses lock into near-permanent neural pathways. But calcified brain patterns or not, other recent Times articles disclose that in ways large and small the human capacity for change can still defy the odds. Sometimes all it takes is a smile.

Power utilities in California, Chicago and Washington State have found a simple way to counter the American tendency to waste energy. By affixing smiley faces — or glowering frowns — to power bills, customers are goaded into awareness of their electricity consumption. The bills compare each customer’s energy use to that of their neighbors. “It’s fundamental and primitive,” Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, told The Times’s Leslie Kaufman. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.” The United States government has committed billions of dollars to changing perceptions in the Middle East, sometimes without much success. Yet one of the lowest-cost tools has proven to

be the most effective, Michael Slackman wrote in The Times. Teaching English to Egyptian teenagers can go a long way in changing attitudes. “Everything in my life is different now,” said Manal Ade Ahmed, a 16-year-old student from Asyut, Egypt, a bastion of Islamic extremism. Before her exposure to English, “I was afraid to deal with anybody who was different, I thought it was bad,” she told Mr. Slackman. “Now, I think it is important to get to know other people and other cultures.” But positive change can also come from surprisingly small sources. Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, authors of the book “Nudge,” are experts in the field of behavioral economics. They advocate gentle suggestions — “nudges” — to help people make

CAHIER DU SAMEDI 21 FÉVRIER 2009, NO 19930. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

better choices with food, safety and finance, perhaps without even realizing they have been influenced. Mr. Thaler’s favorite example involves images of the common house fly etched into the urinals at the Amsterdam Airport. “Men evidently like to aim at targets,” Mr. Thaler told The Times’s Jeff Sommer, because after the fly images were in place, “spillage” on the men’s room floor decreased by 80 percent. (The airport officials did not explain how that was measured.) The fly images, Mr. Thaler said, “attract people’s attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring them to do anything." It may not be on the order of Middle Eastern peace or energy independence, but cleaner restrooms are a start. And a change we can all believe in.

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LE MonDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009 o p I n I o n & C o M M E n TA RY pAUL kRUgMAn

editorials of the times

Mr. Obama And Russia Vice President Joseph Biden told a European security conference earlier this month that it was “time to press the reset button” and revisit the many areas where the United States and Russia can work together. The next day, Russia’s almost never conciliatory deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, embraced the overture. We are relieved that Washington and Moscow are talking about cooperation. There is certainly a lot in the relationship that needs resetting, starting with reviving negotiations to do away with thousands of nuclear weapons. But pressing the reset button cannot mean absolving Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin of its authoritarian ways. President George W. Bush spent years looking the other way while Mr. Putin harassed opponents, stifled a free press and bullied Russia’s neighbors. While he was busy looking into Mr. Putin’s eyes, Mr. Bush also ignored Russia’s list of grievances — many illegitimate, but not all. President Obama must not repeat either mistake. The Russians have given him fair warning of how difficult this relationship could be. Just days before Mr. Biden spoke, the Kremlin “encouraged” the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan — with a $2.15 billion pledge of loans and aid — to give notice that it is closing an American base that supplies United States forces in Afghanistan. Arms control may be the most promising area for early progress. The 2002 Moscow treaty, Mr. Bush’s one and only agreement, allows each country to deploy between 1,700 and 2,200 long-range nuclear weapons. They could easily go to 1,000 weapons each. A swift agreement also would send an important signal to North Korea, Iran and other potential nuclear scofflaws. The administration also has begun hinting that it may be open to some compromise on Mr. Bush’s missile defense system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic. We are skeptical that the technology is anywhere near ready. We are also skeptical about the Russians’ insistence that the system poses any threat to their security. A healthy dialogue on the subject is in order. The Kremlin has offered to assist NATO with Afghanistan, President Obama’s top security challenge. Moscow has no love for the Taliban. And that is certainly worth testing. But if Washington has learned any lesson, it is that it must have multiple options for wartime supply routes — and Russia cannot have a chokehold. The administration also will have to test whether Moscow will do more to help end Iran’s nuclear program. That, too, is in Russia’s clear strategic interest, even though the Kremlin has yet to see it. So far Mr. Obama has been quiet about Russia’s latest efforts to bully its neighbors. He will have to find his voice. After its war with Georgia last year, Russia defied international law by recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It recently went further and announced plans to establish bases there. While the Georgia dispute may not lend itself to quick solution, Moscow must not be allowed to think the world has acquiesced to its indefinite presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We’re not sure how Mr. Obama is going to find the right balance between cooperating with the Kremlin and avoiding enabling its bullying ways. But that can be the only basis for a sound relationship.

CoRRECTIon A letter from a reader in Kenya that was included last week in the section titled “Letters to the International Weekly” misspelled the name of the writer. It is Dominic Ndwiga, not Ndwgia.

And Now, We’ll Pay for It By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century. This month the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001. At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income. Why should we have expected our net worth to go up? Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in rightleaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt. Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real. So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people real-

What Only Newspapers Will Do Outside the shrinking guild of scribblers, it’s disappointingly hard to find much sympathy for the beleaguered newspaper industry. Only 18 percent of Americans believe all or most of what The New York Times publishes, according to a poll last year by the Pew Research Center. If the Internet is putting us out of business, who cares? It matters. The argument that if newspapers go bust there will be nobody covering city hall is true. It’s also true that corruption will rise, legislation will more easily be captured by vested interests and voter turnout will fall. In 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen argued that the famine caused by China’s Great Leap Forward could never have happened in India because the government could not have ignored the plight of its people. “Newspapers play an important part in this,” he said. From the poorest country to the richest, a welter of academic research since then points to the importance of an independent press in disseminating hard-to-get information, mobilizing the public and putting pressure on government and businesses in favor of the public good. During the Great Depression, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration doled out more money in counties with more radios. Today, Hispanic voter turnout is higher where there is a local Spanish-language TV station. Companies in countries with a larger daily newspaper circulation are fairer to minority shareholders and have a better record responding to envi-

Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.

Dans l’article “World Will Test a New Chief,” p. 3: EVEnTUALLY: finalement To MULL oVER: réfléchir longuement à shoRThAnD: sténographie To hAggLE oVER: discutailler, marchander TURMoIL: agitation, tumulte

Dans l’article “How the ‘Paradox of Thrift’ Affects a Recovery,” p. 5: ThRIfT: épargne, économie REbATE: rabais IRonCLAD: cuirassé; en béton (fig) CAVEAT: mise en garde

Dans l’article “For Evolution to Live, Darwinism Must Die,” p. 6 fECkLEss: inefficace, inepte

ize even now. For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks, which are indeed in even worse shape than the rest of the system. But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole. And as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people

Editorial observer/EDUARDO PORTER

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

LExIqUE

PAUL HILTON/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Americans’ net wealth has fallen since 2001, and now a “deflationary spiral” is possible. A bank vault in Hong Kong.

and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump. Are policy makers ready to do what it takes to break this vicious circle? In principle, yes. Government officials understand the issue: we need to “contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral,” says Lawrence Summers, a top Obama economic adviser. In practice, however, the policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation. There’s hope that the bank rescue will eventually turn into something stronger. It has been interesting to watch the idea of temporary bank nationalization move from the fringe to mainstream acceptance. If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to gross domestic product was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom. Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion will be a long, painful slump.

phYsICIAn: médecin To spAwn: donner naissance à, se multiplier

ronmental concerns. And a 2000 study by Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess of the London School of Economics proved Sen to be right: governments in India provide more public food and disaster relief in hard times in states where newspaper circulation is higher. It’s easy to forget the role of an independent press in the development of democratic institutions. Through much of the 19th century, newspapers were mostly partisan mouthpieces. But as circulation and advertising grew, they shed political allegiances and started competing for customers by investigating corruption and taking up populist causes. Claudia Goldin and Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago found that between 1870 and 1920, the share of political dailies that claimed to be independent rose from 11 percent to between 40 percent and 60 percent. Corruption, measured by an index of articles mentioning the topic in The Times, plummeted by four-fifths over this period. From the creation of the Food and Drug Administration to limits on working hours, a lot of progressive-era reforms might have failed without an independent press. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, Alexander Dyck of the University of Toronto and David Moss of Harvard Business School analyzed muckraking magazines of the period, like McClure’s and Collier’s. Analyzing Congressional votes on regulatory

oeuvré, ouvragé; ainsi wrought iron: fer forgé

Dans l’article “The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art,” p. 8:

Dans l’article “Julia Roberts: Mom, Stage Actress and, Once Again, Leading Lady,” p. 8:

jEAn-MIChEL bAsqUIAT: (1960-1988) artiste

To bRIng To bEAR: appliquer (son énergie) à;

braquer (son arme) sur; to bring pressure to bear on: faire pression sur.

To sURMIsE: conjecturer

Dans l’article “The Boom is Over, Long Live the Art,” p. 8: AbIDIng: durable DRAwbACk: ici, retrait sooThIng: réconfortant To TAnk: subir une défaite cuisante DERELICT: abandonné TEnEMEnT: logement social qUEER ART: art gay

ExpREssIons Dans l’article “World Will Test a New Chief,” p. 3: wRoUghT bY: provoqué par; il s’agit d’un ancien participe passé du verbe to work, et signifie donc

legislation related to issues covered in these magazines, the researchers found that representatives in districts in which the magazines had larger circulations became more favorable to the populist causes exposed in their articles. Cosmopolitan’s 1906 series “Treason in the Senate” pushed many senators in 1911 to vote for the 17th Amendment, which mandated that senators be elected by popular vote rather than chosen by governors. These days, even the harshest newspaper critics admit that citizens need information. They argue that the Internet will empower ordinary people to do the task themselves, better. I’m not so sure. In a recent study, Mr. Gentzkow concluded that the introduction of television in the 1940s and 1950s was responsible for between a quarter and a half of the decline in voter turnout since then. Some alternatives, like Politico.com and ProPublica, an investigative reporting outfit financed by philanthropy, do original journalism. But they are tiny. And rather than a citizen reporter, the Internet has given us the citizen pundit, who comments on: newspaper articles. Reporting the news in far-flung countries, spending weeks on investigations of uncertain payoff, fighting for freedom of information in court — is expensive. Virtually the only entities still doing it on the necessary scale are newspapers. Letting them go on the expectation that the Internet will enable a better-informed citizenry seems like a risky bet.

RÉfÉREnCEs Dans l’article “Julia Roberts: Mom, Stage Actress and, Once Again, Leading Lady,” p. 8: MIChAEL CLAYTon: film de 2007, dans lequel

jouaient George Clooney, Sidney Pollack et Tilda Swinton qui a obtenu l’Oscar du second rôle 2007. Le film a par ailleurs été 6 fois nominé aux Oscars. Il s’agit d’un avocat, interprété par G. Clooney qui, plus ou moins malgré lui, découvre une grosse affaire de pollution liée à l’usage d’un herbicide. L’industrie agrochimique est évidemment prête à tout pour éviter le procès de masse (class action) intenté contre elle. L’avocat réussira d’abord à ne pas se faire tuer, puis à confondre les industriels corrompus.

américain, né à Brooklyn d’une mère d’origine portoricaine et d’un père d’origine haïtienne. Il fait ses débuts comme artiste de rue, peignant des graffiti qu’il signe SAMO, puis deviendra un des pionniers du mouvement néo-expressionniste. Malgré sa mort prématurée par overdose, il continue à exercer une très grande influence sur les artistes contemporains. Dans les années 80, il fut très proche d’Andy Warhol, et ils se sont beaucoup influencés mutuellement. Il a connu trois périodes: la première où ses toiles représentent des masques, des hommes squelettes, où il s’interroge visiblement sur son origine noire, une seconde de peinture sur panneau, dont la structure de bois est visible, où se mélangent collages, images, textes écrits sans qu’il soit évident d’en saisir la relation, puis une troisième période figurative plus symbolique. Artiste reconnu internationalement, il a déjà bénéficié de deux rétrospectives : en 1992 au Whitney Museum of American Art, puis en 1995 au Brooklyn Museum. En 2008, sa dernière œuvre vendue s’est négociée à plus de 13 millions de dollars.

ThE nEw YoRk TIMEs Is pUbLIshED wEEkLY In ThE foLLowIng nEwspApERs: CLARín, ARgEnTInA ● DER sTAnDARD, AUsTRIA ● foLhA, bRAzIL ● LA sEgUnDA, ChILE ● EL EspECTADoR, CoLoMbIA ● LIsTIn DIARIo, DoMInICAn REpUbLIC ● LE MonDE, fRAnCE ● 24 sAATI, gEoRgIA ● sÜDDEUTsChE zEITUng, gERMAnY ● pREnsA LIbRE, gUATEMALA ● ThE AsIAn AgE, InDIA ● LA REpUbbLICA, ITALY ● AsAhI shIMbUn, jApAn ● sUnDAY nATIon, kEnYA ● kohA DIToRE, kosoVo ● REfoRMA gRoUp, MExICo ● VIjEsTI, MonTEnEgRo ● LA pREnsA, pAnAMA ● ExpREso, pERU ● MAnILA bULLETIn, phILIppInEs ● RoMAnIA LIbERA, RoMAnIA ● EL pAís, spAIn ● UnITED DAILY nEws, TAIwAn ● sUnDAY MonIToR, UgAnDA ● ThE obsERVER, UnITED kIngDoM ● ThE koREA TIMEs, UnITED sTATEs ● EL nACIonAL, VEnEzUELA

le monde

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009

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o b a m a’ s Wa s h i n g t o n neWs analysis

Flexing Those Presidential Muscles

World Will Test A New Chief By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — We’re about to find out what the Obama Factor is worth around the world. The Factor is all the good will, popular support and considerable charm that Barack Obama has brought to the Oval Office. At home, it’s still potent. But abroad, it’s questionable how far Mr. Obama can travel on promises to act as the anti-Bush, to use diplomacy and “smart power” before blunt force. Some of his aides acknowledge that those promises will eventually collide with necessities to defend American interests. Take Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly is discussing opening talks based on “mutual respect” with the new administration. “This could be real,” one of Mr. Obama’s top diplomats said, “or it could be the beginning of a fabulous new delaying tactic.” Here’s a look at some of the opening moves, and how they may play out: seeking help in afghanistan Now that Europeans have been softened up by declarations about closing Guantánamo and initiatives on global warming, European governments and other allies are receiving requests for their assessment of what is needed in Afghanistan. “It’s clever and of course it’s what we’ve asked for: Input about a policy before it’s settled and we read about it in your newspaper,” one ambassador whose country has more than a thousand troops in Afghanistan said recently. “But you can see a few muscles tensing because everyone knows what’s coming next.” What’s coming is Mr. Obama’s insistence that the countries that have developed the strategy now contribute the additional troops and resources it requires. That is what George W. Bush never got: The “coalition of the willing” quickly exited Iraq, and public pressure is building in Europe to do the same in Afghanistan. But the problem goes beyond mere troop numbers. The United States is shifting strategy to deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single problem. The Europeans have not bought into the new strategy. They agree Pakistan is a critical obstacle to winning the war, but they see it as Mr. Obama’s problem, not theirs. mulling diplomacy With iran During the campaign, Mr. Obama’s discussion of Iran became shorthand for his declaration of a new era of diplomacy, one that stresses engagement rather than (or at least before) confrontation. And that process has started. During the campaign, Mr. Obama also said the world could never tolerate Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons or ability to build them on short notice. Does that mean he will demand, as the Bush administration did unsuccessfully, that every centrifuge shut down? The best estimates are that Iran already has roughly 5,000

HASAN SARBAKHSHIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will test President Obama. spinning, nearly enough to make fuel for two weapons a year if it is further enriched to weapons grade. So maybe the best Mr. Obama can hope for is to freeze the enrichment process short of weapons-grade fuel, and trust that inspectors will spot any cheating. In that case, does he also demand access to the 10 to 15 sites that American intelligence agencies believe might be secret locations for enrichment or weapons design? And then there is the biggest decision of all: The United States has a major covert program under way to undermine the main enrichment plant at Natanz. A senior American intelligence official, who worked for President Bush, said recently that Mr. Obama could not abandon the covert program because it is his only insurance policy — if perhaps not a very reliable one — if “engagement” fails. needing china’s largesse What really changes the dynamic with China isn’t Mr. Obama’s goals or personal qualities, as much as the stimulus plan. It’s the Chinese whom the Treasury is counting on to lend the United States much of that $787 billion. For Mr. Obama, the good news is that such borrowing invests China in America’s recovery; the bad news is that a need to borrow China’s real capital could cost Mr. Obama in political capital as he and China’s leaders haggle over North Korea or climate change. That is only one of the ways the global economic crisis is changing the power map of the world. Dennis C. Blair, the new director of national intelligence, reminded the Senate recently that the Depression and the war that followed were linked. While he did not predict the rise of another Hitler, he warned darkly that “all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, the instability and high levels of violent extremism.” A pessimist might call that the Meltdown Factor, and wonder if the Obama Factor is its equal.

intelligence/Gudrun Harrer

The Pope’s Religious Travails Vienna, Austria With the recent attack on a synagogue in Caracas, the anti-Jewish undertones of criticism of Israel in the Arab world, and the unsavory mixture of Holocaust denial and threats against the Jewish state from Iran, now would be a good time for the Roman Catholic pope to denounce the repugnant nature of anti-Semitism, as he has done several times, but also to show it with his actions. But so far, Pope Benedict XVI has not done that. “Shadows and mistrust” darken the relations between Judaism and the church, as the Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said. The latest crisis was precipitated by the lifting of the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, a Briton who has denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. The pope quickly demanded that Bishop Williamson take back his statements, but the damage had been done. After Bishop Williamson’s rehabilitation, many Catholics renounced their faith, especially in Germany, Benedict’s place of birth. Members of the clergy in Germany and Austria publicly disavowed the Vatican’s decision even if they stopped short of criticizing the pope directly. Bishop Williamson is one of four bishops whom Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated illicitly in 1988: illicitly because Lefebvre and his breakaway Society of Saint Pius X had been suspended by the Vatican for rejecting the decisions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as too progressive. They were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II but Benedict reversed that decision, citing the need for mending this split in the church. Tolerance of ultraconservative Catholics seems to outweigh other concerns. Relations between Benedict and Jews have Gudrun Harrer is an analyst and editorial writer at Der Standard in Vienna, Austria. Send comments to [email protected].

been strained ever since he decided two years ago to allow the Latin Mass again. This concession to conservatives and reactionaries was considered an affront by many Jews. In an old version of the rite, Catholics prayed for the conversion of the “unfaithful” Jews. This was later modified into a prayer for the “illumination” of Jews, but was not completely abolished. One American sociologist, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, argues that Catholic doctrine was partly to blame for the Holocaust. Pope Benedict seems to lack the right touch to foster better relations with other religions. When in 2006 he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor condemning Islam without putting this judgment into historical perspective, he worsened tensions with Muslims. And he inflicted damage to ecumenical efforts in 2007 when he suggested that Protestant faiths “are not true churches.” Before becoming pope, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger earned a reputation as a conservative hard-liner. Some Catholics have seen their worst expectations exceeded: Austrians were taken aback when Pope Benedict elevated to bishop a parish priest named Gerhard Maria Wagner, who once described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment of New Orleans because of its bordellos and abortion clinics, or warned children not to read Harry Potter because they would be exposed to Satanism. Catholic priests began collecting signatures for a petition to the Vatican to revoke Father Wagner’s appointment as auxiliary bishop in Linz. And some Austrian Protestant congregations reported being overwhelmed by requests from Catholics who wanted to convert. On February 15, only two weeks after his designation, Father Wagner himself asked the Vatican to be released from the task. At least one church official is paying for his intemperate remarks.

By JOHN HARWOOD Mr. Kennedy retained that high standing through his first 100 days, despite the disastrous Bay of Pigs WASHINGTON — Few remember the early trainvasion of Cuba in April 1961. Yet the victories he vails of Franklin Roosevelt after he swept 57 perachieved from a Democratic Congress remained cent of the vote and all but six states against Hermodest. bert Hoover in 1932. But political insiders scorned In 1981, Ronald Reagan needed every bit of his his extended post-election passivity — presidents political capital — and some good will from an asweren’t inaugurated until March then — including sassination attempt — to win his package of deep a Caribbean yacht cruise while the Great Deprestax and budget cuts. “Reagan had great momension festered. tum, and even greater momentum after he came “By early February, the president-elect was in back from being shot,” recalled his speechwriter political trouble,” Jonathan Alter wrote in “The Ken Khachigian. “Still, there was resistance.” Defining Moment,” his history of F.D.R.’s first 100 In Roosevelt’s case, it was the application of supdays. And then Roosevelt executed a demonstration ple leadership skills to a public terrified of financial of leadership that lifted the nation’s spirits, swept ruin that allowed him to win all his New Deal agenda through Con15 items on his 100-days priorgress and durably transformed the ity list; the Emergency Banking federal role in American society. Act swept through the House by In other words, it may not be too voice vote. early to ask whether Tom DaschAides hope that Mr. Obama’s le’s tax problems, Judd Gregg’s confident style and attractive ideological misgivings about joinyoung family may similarly help ing the cabinet, Wall Street’s reprovide a measure of political sistance and the near-complete buoyancy apart from legislative Republican rejection of an ecodebates over financial regulanomic stimulus package add up to tion, health care or energy. the depletion of President Obama’s “Obama has no choice but to momentum. But it is too early to spend his capital now,” said the answer with much confidence. Republican media consultant Presidential strength is an eluRUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES Mark McKinnon. “The success sive and ephemeral force that flows President Obama rallied of his first term will be almost from many sources. It derives support for his stimulus solely determined by whether largely from numbers: the size of plan in Fort Myers, Florida. he can return the country’s ecothe election victory, the poll ratnomic footing.” ings, the breadth of partisan supThe bright spot for Mr. Obama is that the comport in Congress. By those measures, Mr. Obama’s munications and social networking strengths he 53 percent popular vote majority, mid-60 percent and his team demonstrated during the campaign job approval ratings, and solid House and Senate may fit the task of preserving presidential initiamajorities compare favorably at this stage with the tive. In his new book, “Dispatches From the War profile of any new president since World War II. Room,” the pollster Stanley Greenberg plumbs the But the sustainability of those power gauges experiences of past clients, including President Bill can be inversely related to the scale of the political Clinton, Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela, in breakchallenges a president faces. The recession and two ing through the stalemates that so often frustrate wars facing Mr. Obama easily match the stagflathe ambition of new administrations. tion and cold war challenges that confronted Ron“Leaders with projects and an electoral mandate ald Reagan in 1981, and may exceed those of any keep people with them by mobilizing, educating, predecessor since F.D.R. persuading,” Mr. Greenberg said. “It has actually Moreover, presidential momentum can drain been a long time since we’ve had a president with rapidly — or replenish — depending on unplanned that kind of momentum that has carried through to events. pass major elements of the reform agenda.” After John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated RichWith enactment of the stimulus package, “Obama ard Nixon in 1960, Americans rallied behind him; will have done this” in less than a month, Mr. Greenhis initial 72 percent job approval rating was the berg added. “Now he has to keep support for much highest Gallup has recorded for a new president, tougher measures.” before or since.

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le monde

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009 world trends

Laid-Off Foreigners Flee A Once-Booming Dubai By ROBERT F. WORTH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fastgrowing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage. Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city — or worse. “I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.” With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield. The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — Ali al-Shouk contributed reporting.

looking like a ghost town. No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy. Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis. Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. “At the moment there is a readiness to believe the worst,” said Simon Williams, HSBC bank’s chief economist in Dubai. “And the limits on data make it difficult to counter the rumors.” Some things are clear: real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai’s six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. Recently, Moody’s Investor’s Service announced that it might downgrade its ratings on six of Dubai’s most prominent state-owned companies, citing a deterioration in the economic outlook. So many used luxury cars are for sale, they are sometimes sold for 40 percent

BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Debt-ridden foreigners are leaving Dubai, fearing they face prison for unpaid bills. A car abandoned in a garage. less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai’s roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear. Some analysts say the crisis is likely to have long-lasting effects on the seven-member emirates federation, where Dubai has long played rebellious younger brother to oil-rich and more conservative Abu Dhabi. Dubai officials have made clear that they would be open to a bailout, but so far Abu Dhabi has offered assistance only to its own banks. “Why is Abu Dhabi allowing its neighbor to have its international reputation trashed, when it could bail out Dubai’s

In Japan, Jobless Lack A Safety Net

by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out. “Is it going to get better? They tell you that, but I don’t know what to believe anymore,” said Sofia, who still hopes to find a job before her time runs out. “People are really panicking quickly.”

As Workers Grow Restless, Nations Grope for Answers jor exporters. On February 12, Pioneer of Japan said it would abandon the flat-screen televithere are fears that growing joblesssion business and cut 10,000 jobs worldness might encourage a move away wide in response to sagging demand for from free-market, pro-Western policies, consumer electronics. while in developed countries unemployMillions of migrant workers in mainment could bolster efforts to protect loland China are searching for jobs but cal industries at the expense of global finding that factories are shutting down. trade. Though not as large as the disturbances Indeed, some European stimulus in Greece or the Baltics, there have been packages, as well as the one passed in dozens of protests at individual factories the United States, include protections in China and Indonesia where workers for domestic companies, increasing were laid off with little or no notice. the likelihood of protectionist trade The breadth of the problem is also bebattles. coming apparent in Taiwan, where exProtectionist measures were an inports were down 42.9 percent in January tense matter of discussion as finance compared with a year ago, the steepest ministers from the Group of 7 economies plunge in Asia. met recently in Rome. Chang Yung-yun, a 57-year-old restauWhile the number of jobs in the United rant kitchen worker, States has been fallwas laid off when her ing since the end of Current Unemployment Rates employer closed in 2007, the pace of laymid-November. Her offs in Europe, Asia Spain 14.4% son, an engineer, has and the developing Ireland 8.2 been put on unpaid world has caught up France 8.1 vacation for weeks, only recently as comUnited States 7.6 a tactic that has bepanies that resisted Greece 7.5 come common in deep cuts in the past Canada 7.2 Taiwan. follow the lead of “The greatest fear Germany 7.2 their American counfor our people is losterparts. Sweden 6.9 ing jobs,” Taiwan’s The International Italy 6.7 president, Ma YingMonetary Fund exBritain 6.1 jeou, said in an interpects that by the end Mexico 4.7 view. of the year, global Australia 4.5 Calls for protececonomic growth Japan 4.5 tionism have resowill reach its lowest Netherlands 2.7 nated among a fearpoint since the Deful public. In Britain, pression, according Source: International Labor Organization refinery and power to Charles Collyns, THE NEW YORK TIMES pla nt employees deputy director of walked off the job in the fund’s research January to protest the use of workers department. The fund said that growth from Italy and Portugal at a construchad come to “a virtual halt,” with develtion project on the coast. Some held up oped economies expected to shrink by 2 signs highlighting Prime Minister Gorpercent in 2009. don Brown’s earlier promise of “British “This is the worst we’ve had since jobs for British workers.” 1929,” said Laurent Wauquiez, France’s Half a world away in Colombia, Jaime employment minister. “The thing that is Galeano, 40, is among the workers havnew is that it is global, and we are always ing a hard time finding work. As a bodytalking about that. It is in every country, guard in a country notorious for drugand it makes the whole difference.” related violence and kidnappings, Mr. In Asia, any smugness at having esGaleano thought his profession was imcaped losses on American subprime mune until he lost his job last year. debt has been erased by growing de“The conditions for finding a job are spair over a plunge in sales among materrible,” he said. What is more, his age is now an impediment, with a ministry Reporting was contributed by Keith informing him that only applicants unBradsher from Taipei, Taiwan; Heathder the age of 32 would be considered for er Timmons from New Delhi; Simon new positions. Romero and Jenny Carolina González “After turning 35, a person is worth from Bogota, Colombia; and Maïa de la nothing,” Mr. Galeano said. Baume from Paris.

From Page 1

By MARTIN FACKLER

OITA, Japan — Koji Hirano said his “mind went blank” with disbelief when he and other workers at a Canon digital camera factory in this southern city were suddenly called into a cafeteria in October and told they were being laid off. The shock turned to fear when they were also ordered to vacate their employer-provided apartments, a common job benefit here. With no savings from his monthly take-home pay of as little as $700, he said, he faced certain homelessness. “They were going to kick us out into the winter cold to die,” said Mr. Hirano, 47. The current economic crisis has spread joblessness and distress across the world, and Japan has been no exception — with output plunging at historic rates, the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent in December from 3.9 percent the month before. The country’s real gross domestic product shrank at an annual rate of 12.7 percent from October to December. But what has proved more shocking has been the fact that so many of those laid off have been so vulnerable, with hundreds and perhaps thousands cast into the streets. Mr. Hirano and the others laid off by Canon are part of a new subclass of Japanese workers created during a decade of American-style deregulation. As short-term employees they have none of the rights of so-called salarymen or even the factory workers for Japan’s legions of small manufacturers. They can expect little in the way of unemployment or welfare benefits. In Japan, a country with little experience of widespread unemployment until recently, there is inadequate assistance for laid-off workers. According to the Labor Ministry, about 131,000 layoffs have been announced since October. Of those, only about 6,000 were culled from the majority of Japanese workers who hold traditional full-time jobs, which are still often held for life. The overwhelming majority — some 125,000, the ministry says — are so-called nonregular workers, who are sent by staffing agencies or hired on short-term contracts with lower pay, fewer benefits and none of the legal protections against layoffs of regular full-time employees. Mr. Hirano and other former tempo-

banks and restore confidence?” said Christopher M. Davidson, who predicted the current crisis in “Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success,” a book published last year. “Perhaps the plan is to centralize the U.A.E.” under Abu Dhabi’s control, he mused, in a move that would sharply curtail Dubai’s independence. Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here. But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or near-

KATSUMI KASHARA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The unemployed in Japan face the threat of homelessness. A sign at a protest last month read: “Do not allow layoffs by big companies.” rary workers at Canon were allowed to stay in their apartments for a few extra months after a public outcry reached all the way to the prime minister. Over the New Year holiday some 500 disgruntled former temporary workers made homeless by layoffs built an impromptu tent city in a Tokyo park adjacent to the Labor Ministry. As never before, the global downturn has driven home how a decade of economic transformation has eroded Japan’s gentler version of capitalism, in which companies once laid off employees only as a last resort. “This recession has opened the nation’s eyes to its growing social inequalities,” said Masahiro Abe, a professor at Dokkyo University who specializes in labor relations. “There is a whole population of workers who are outside the traditional support net.” Until a decade ago, nonregular workers accounted for less than a quarter of Japan’s total work force, and included subcontractors and others outside the lifetime employment system as well as students or homemakers working part-time jobs. But the number of nonregular workers rose sharply after an easing of labor laws in 1999 and again in 2004 allowed temporary workers to work on factory lines and in other jobs once largely restricted to full-time workers. Today, 34.5 percent of Japan’s 55.3

million workers are nonregular employees, including many primary earners for households, according to the Internal Affairs Ministry. According to labor experts and Labor Ministry officials, Japan needs to revamp the system to fit a more dynamic labor market in which not all jobs are held for life, and to prevent layoffs from being so financially devastating. “We must build a safety net that suits this more deregulated working environment,” said Yusuke Inoue, a section chief in the Labor Ministry’s bureau of stable employment. Canon said it had underestimated the difficulties faced by the laid-off temporary workers in the current economic downturn and would offer them more aid. Mr. Hirano and other laid-off temporary workers said their annual pay was about $22,000 a year, below what many labor experts call Japan’s poverty line of $25,000 a year. Mr. Hirano and his co-workers said they believed that if they worked hard, Canon would reward them with an offer of direct employment, at higher pay. “We did our best, so Canon should have taken care of us,” said one 32-yearold laid-off worker who was so ashamed of his situation that he asked that only his family name, Murakami, be used. “That is the Japanese way. But this isn’t Japan anymore.”

le monde

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009

5

money & business

How the ‘Paradox of Thrift’ Affects a Recovery In recent years, the American consumer spent too much money. Bought too much house, took on too much debt and generally lived beyond his or her means. Free-spending ways helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And now they’re going to have to do their part economic to end the crisis. How? scene By spending. Enough already with the saving that many Americans have suddenly begun doing. This very moment, Congress and President Obama are preparing to send them a tax rebate, to inspire them to stimulate the economy, to spend as if the future of the country depended on it. John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century economist, would have appreciated the apparent absurdity in these mixed messages. He coined a phrase, “the paradox of thrift,” to point out that what was rational for an individual during hard times — saving money — could be ruinous for an entire economy. Eventually, many of the savers may end up out of work because everyone else is saving, too. At his recent news conference, Mr. Obama was asked directly whether people should spend or save their rebate checks. He avoided the question. Fortunately, though, it has an answer. The first part involves figuring out how to spend money now to save money later — which can lift the economy today and help individual households cope with their battered finances in the long run. The second part involves realizing that Keynes’s paradox isn’t ironclad. In a financial crisis, when banks may need capital as much as retailers or restaurants need business,

DAVID LEONHARDT

struggling to save Monthly rate

PeRsonAl sAVinGs RATe

The personal savings rate has fallen greatly since the early 1980s, but began to rise last year. In December the rate was 3.6 percent.

12 percent

9

6

DEC. 2008

Average rate, over previous 12 months

3.6%

3

3

0

0 1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s –3

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

many people can save without guilt. Besides developing the most famous prescription for curing downturns, Keynes can also be considered the godfather of behavioral economics, as the columnist David Ignatius recently wrote. While other economists obsessed over statistical models that treated people as hyperrational automatons, Keynes wrote about “animal spirits.’’ He helped explain how psychology shaped economics. Psychology-tinged economics — that is, behavioral economics — has taken off over the last two decades, and one of its central findings is that most people do not do a good job of planning for the future. They aren’t nearly as nice to their “future self,’’ as economists say, as to their “present self.’’

THE NEW YORK TIMES

They eat just one more doughnut and put off exercising until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. They fail to set aside enough for retirement. These habits end up causing a lot of trouble. But they also present an opportunity in a time like this. Most people could save themselves a good bit of money by giving proper respect to their future self. They could spend a little now and save a lot later. I asked behavioral economists for some examples, and they helped me come up with a nice little list. Parents of young children can pay to join a large retail store that offers members discounts and make up their membership fee with just a few months of diaper purchases. Drivers can inflate their tires, change their air and fuel

filters and start getting better mileage. Frequent book buyers who don’t mind screen reading can buy the new Kindle. It costs $359, but most new books then cost less than $10. Families who shop at rent-to-own stores can temporarily pare back and then buy furniture or electronics outright. People who do a lot of laser printing can purchase a printer that uses only a cent or two of ink per page. (Many use far, far more.) In these cases — and, no doubt, many others — the initial investment tends to pay off quickly, sometimes in mere months. That’s why such spending is perfectly suited to the moment. It will keep people employed or create new jobs when the economy needs the help. But it will also shore up households’

finances. The one big caveat is that some people will feel that they can’t afford to lay out an extra $50 or $100 right now. Millions of workers have already lost their jobs, and many others simply want to cut back. In December, households saved an average of 3.6 percent of their disposable income, up from about 1 percent in recent years. In a normal recession, this new saving would have a lot more downside than upside, just as Keynes explained. But this recession is different. It has been caused by a financial crisis. If Americans don’t get their finances in better shape banks will remain afraid to lend, and the recession will linger. Even more immediately, banks need to get their own finances in order.

Wall Street ‘Vultures’ Eye A Mountain of Bad Assets By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED and ZACHERY KOUWE

DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Researchers have found that retail prices that end in .99 encourage consumers to buy more.

The Price Is Right When It’s at 99 Cents By TIM ARANGO

In one of the many smoky scenes in “Mad Men,” the critically loved television show about the advertising world in the era of martinis and misogyny in the 1960s, a founder of the fictional advertising firm Rogers & Sterling describes marketing glory. “I’ll tell you what brilliance in advertising is,” says the actor John Slattery in the character of Roger Sterling. “99 cents.” It may be just the insight retailers are looking for as they struggle to stimulate consumer spending in this trying time: If you can’t sell something for 99 cents, you should at least tack on .99 to the price. Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, tried the 99-cent approach and arguably saved the music industry from oblivion. In picking that one standard price for each song for sale on iTunes, Mr. Jobs built a commercially viable digital delivery business for music. Before the start of iTunes in 2003, it was a questionable proposition that people would ever pay for music online when they could steal it from any number of peerto-peer networks. Dave Gold also tried it. In the 1960s, he and his wife owned a liquor store in Southern California where they sold

wine at various prices: 79 cents, 89 cents, 99 cents and $1.49. “We always noticed that the 99 cents sold much better,” he recalled in an interview. They priced all their wine at 99 cents, and overall sales improved. “The 79 cents sold better at 99, the 89 cents sold better at 99, and of course the $1.49 sold better at 99,” he said. Mr. Gold and his wife eventually

A one-penny difference has ‘a considerable effect on sales.’ took the concept to the extreme and in 1982 started a chain of 99 Cents Only stores. They took it public in 1996, and today the company has 282 stores and is worth more than half a billion dollars. In the last quarter, sales were up 8 percent; profits, 31 percent. Mr. Gold wasn’t the first to strike on 99 cents as a lucrative marketing gimmick, but he may have done the most with it. No one quite knows who came

up with the concept. Regardless, the marketplace power of .99 seems undeniable. But why? Academics have offered a variety of psychological explanations. One study, by Robert M. Schindler, a professor of marketing at the Rutgers School of Business in New Jersey, found that consumers “perceive a 9-ending price as a round-number price with a small amount given back.” Researchers have also found that prices ending in .99 communicate “low price” to consumers. At the University of Chicago, for instance, researchers found that when the price of margarine dropped from 89 cents to 71 cents at a local grocery chain, sales improved 65 percent, but that when the price fell to 69 cents, sales rose 222 percent, according to Kenneth Wisniewski, an author of the study. And Professor Schindler, in a study at a women’s clothing retailer, found that the one-penny difference between prices ending in .99 and .00 had “a considerable effect on sales,” according to his study, with items whose prices ended at .99 outselling those ending at .00. So when retailers price their wares with a figure ending in 9, the reason is simple, Professor Schindler said. “It’s to make the price seem like it’s less.”

Howard S. Marks is the sort of financier who Washington hopes will help fix America’s troubled banks. The problem is, he is not quite sure he wants the job. Mr. Marks is a former banker who became a pioneer in the graveyard of Wall Street. He is one of the biggest players in distressed investing — putting money into risky investments that few others will touch. But he and other potential investors are wary of the risk in this case. With its plan to shore up banks, the Obama administration hopes to entice investors like Mr. Marks, who has $55 billion at his command, to buy troubled assets from the nation’s banks and enable them to make the loans needed to jump-start the economy. The administration hopes, in short, to counterbalance some of the fear gripping the financial world with a bit of oldfashioned greed. To combat the bust, Washington wants to marshal some of the same financiers who grew rich during the boom: hedge fund managers and corporate buyout specialists. But Mr. Marks and other investors like him said they were in no hurry to wade into this mess. Distressed investors — “vultures’’ is the Wall Street term for them — aim to buy investments on the cheap in hopes of reaping big returns. Yet even for the vultures, the risks — political as well as financial — seem daunting. Some worry about being seen as profiteers who benefit at taxpayers’ expense, even though the economy could get worse unless they swoop in. “You have to ask whether this is an attractive deal,” said Mr. Marks, the chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, a big money management firm in Los Angeles. It all depends on the price, the terms and the risks, he said. Wall Street, of course, wants what it always wants: a lot of potential profit on the upside, and not much risk of losses on the downside. But as Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner outlined his sweeping rescue plan on February 10, the questions kept piling up. What kind of assets would the banks sell, and at what price? What role would the government play? And, of course, the big one: what are these investments really worth? The banks themselves are struggling to place values on them. Hundreds of billions of dollars of these assets are hanging over banks. Until there is a clear way to purge them, the industry, and the broader economy, are

likely to languish. That is where the vultures come in. Hedge funds and other institutions dominate the field of distressed investing, and they are known for driving hard bargains. In recent weeks, several prominent hedge fund managers met with Lawrence H. Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, to discuss their interest in the planned publicprivate partnership. Few of these investors were willing to discuss their plans publicly. Some worried their own investors, which include large public pension funds, might view the potential investments as too risky. But if the vultures do alight, their rewards could be enormous. Funds specializing in distressed investments earned annual returns of more than 30 percent in the early 1990s as the economy pulled out of recession. “There are plenty of guys who are willing to take the risk, but they want the high returns,” said Chip MacDonald,

Financiers fear earning public scorn if they make big profits. a partner at the law firm Jones Day. One model might be the governmentbrokered sale of IndyMac Bancorp, the large California mortgage lender that failed last summer. IndyMac was bought by a group of private firms last month for $13.9 billion. As part of the deal, the investors agreed to assume the first 20 percent of the bank’s losses, while the government picked up the rest. Another issue is the price at which the troubled assets would be valued by the banks. While potential investors want to buy as cheaply as possible, the banks might have to take debilitating writedowns if they sold at fire-sale prices. Such an outcome might not be in the government’s — or taxpayers’ — interests. And the potential political costs, money managers said, are real. Some managers said that if they did their job well, they could earn double-digit returns and, with them, public scorn. “We can’t really win,” one private equity executive said. “When we made money, people criticized us. This year, we lost money, and people are criticizing us.”

6

le monde

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009 science & technology

Artificial Arms That Learn To Obey the Brain’s Orders By PAM BELLUCK

ability to control a pretty robust prosthetic limb has surprised everyone with how good it is.” Typically, a person with a prosthetic arm can make only a few motions, often so slowly that many people use the arms only for limited activities. There is a separate motor for each movement, said Gerald E. Loeb, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, “and that motor has to be explicitly controlled,” usually by the person consciously contracting muscles in the back or biceps. Before Ms. Kitts had the reinnervation procedure in October 2007, for example, she had to move her back muscles a certain way to make the wrist rotate, and flex her triceps and biceps to move the elbow up and down. “It was a lot of work,” she said. “It wasn’t useful to me at all.” The reinnervation method is part of a recent explosion of new ideas and techniques being explored as scientists try to help people better compensate for missing limbs or paralysis. The drive is being fueled by increasing amputations from diabetes and military injuries and by advances in technology. Efforts under way include more flexible and sensitive skin and arm designs, and wireless devices implanted in prosthetic arms to allow more natural movement. Researchers have also used sensors implanted in the brain to enable two monkeys to control a mechanical arm, and a paralyzed man to move a cursor on a computer screen. Some of these methods, if perfected and if SHAWN POYNTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES approved by regulatory Amanda Kitts lost her arm in a car accident agencies, may eventually become more viable in 2006, but a new kind of prosthesis allows for amputees. And while her to tie shoes at her child care center. the reinnervation technique does not require the chest. Electrodes are placed over regulatory approval because it is the chest muscles, acting as antendone with surgery and existing denae. When the person wants to move vices, it has limitations that even its the arm, the brain sends signals that creator acknowledges, including that first contract the chest muscles, which it is not possible for every patient, is send an electrical signal to the proscostly, and takes months for the rethetic arm, instructing it to move. The wired nerves to grow and become process requires no more conscious effective. effort than it would for a person who Still, experts say it is the most adhas a natural arm. vanced system being used in actual Researchers reported February 10 patients that allows the nervous sysin the online edition of The Journal of tem to directly control movement of an the American Medical Association artificial arm. Since it was pioneered that they had taken the technique furin 2001 by Todd Kuiken, a physiatrist ther, making it possible to perform 10 and biomedical engineer at the Rehahand, wrist and elbow movements, bilitation Institute of Chicago, it has a big improvement over the typical been performed on about 30 people prosthetic repertoire of bending the in the United States, Canada and Euelbow, turning the wrist, and opening rope, including eight soldiers injured and closing the hand. in Iraq or Afghanistan. “It’s dramatically impacted the Daniel Acosta, 25, an Air Force vetfield,” said Stuart Harshbarger, a bioeran who was injured by a roadside exmedical engineer at Johns Hopkins plosive in Iraq in 2005, had the proceUniversity in Maryland who is the produre last year, and said his prosthetic gram manager for a military-financed left arm now moved “a lot faster” and prosthetics study that includes remore naturally. “The difference is I’m search on the technique. “It’s already not really thinking about it,” Mr. Acosbeing used by practicing clinicians ta, of San Antonio, Texas, said. “I kind and surgeons across the country. The of just do it.” Amanda Kitts lost her left arm in a car accident three years ago, but these days she plays football with her 12-year-old son, and changes diapers and hugs children at the three Kiddie Cottage day care centers she owns in Knoxville, Tennessee. Ms. Kitts, 40, does this all with a new kind of artificial arm that moves more easily than other devices and that she can control by using only her thoughts. “I’m able to move my hand, wrist and elbow all at the same time,” she said. “You think, and then your muscles move.” Her agility is the result of a new procedure that is attracting increasing attention because it allows people to move prosthetic arms more automatically than ever before, simply by using rewired nerves and their brains. The technique, called targeted muscle reinnervation, involves taking the nerves that remain after an arm is amputated and connecting them to another muscle in the body, often in

How Color Can Affect Performance SHAUN BOTTERILL/GETTY IMAGES

A study of some Olympic events found that athletes in red defeated those wearing blue 60 percent of the time. By PAM BELLUCK

Trying to improve your performance at work or write that novel? Maybe it’s time to consider the color of your walls or your computer screen. If a new study is any guide, the color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative. In the study, published February 5 on the Web site of the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with 600 people to determine whether cognitive performance varied when people saw red or blue. Participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue or neutral backgrounds on computer screens. Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes. “If you’re talking about wanting enhanced memory for something like proofreading skills, then a red color should be used,” said Juliet Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at the business school at the University of British Columbia, who conducted the study with Ravi Mehta, a doctoral student. But for “a brainstorming session for a new product or coming up with a new solution to fight child obesity or teenage smoking,” Dr. Zhu said, “then you should get people into a blue room.” The question of whether color can affect performance or emotions has fascinated scientists, advertisers, sports teams and restaurateurs. In a study on Olympic uniforms, anthropologists at Durham University in England found that evenly matched athletes in the 2004 Games who wore

For Evolution to Live, Darwinism Must Die “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. carl Equating evolution safina with Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this month, ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity; the discovery of DNA; developmental biology; studies documenting evolution in nature; evolution’s role in medicine and disease; and more. By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.”

ESSAY

The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin. That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. The idea was not exactly new. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, after more than 20 years of writing and thinking, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few

realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?”

red in boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling defeated those wearing blue 60 percent of the time. The researchers suggested that red, for athletes as for animals, subconsciously symbolizes dominance. Effects that were perhaps similarly primal were revealed in a 2008 study led by Andrew Elliot of the University of Rochester. Men considered women shown in photographs with red backgrounds or wearing red shirts more attractive than women with other colors, although not necessarily more likeable or intelligent. Experts say colors may affect cognitive performance because of the moods they engender. “When you feel that the situation you are in is problematic,” said Norbert

Red seems to be linked to accuracy, and blue stimulates creativity. Schwarz, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, “you are more likely to pay attention to detail, which helps you with processing tasks but interferes with creative types of things.” By contrast, Dr. Schwarz said, “people in a happy mood are more creative and less analytic.” Many people link red to problematic things, like emergencies or X’s on failing tests, experts say. Such “associations to red — stop, fire, alarm, warning — can be activated without a person’s awareness, and then influence what they are thinking about or doing,” said John A.

Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale University. “Blue seems a weaker effect than red, but blue skies, blue water are calm and positive, and so that effect makes sense too.” Still, Dr. Schwarz cautioned, color effects may be unreliable or inconsequential. “In some contexts red is a dangerous thing, and in some contexts red is a nice thing,” he said. “If you’re walking across a frozen river, blue is a dangerous thing.” It might also matter whether the color dominates someone’s view, as on a computer screen, or is only part of what is seen. Dr. Elliot said that in the Science study, brightness or intensity of color — not just the color itself — might have had an effect. The Science study’s conclusion that red makes people more cautious and detail-oriented coincides with Dr. Elliot’s finding that people shown red test covers before I.Q. tests did worse than those shown green or neutral colors. And on a different test, people with red covers also chose easier questions. I.Q. tests require more problem-solving than Dr. Zhu’s memory and proofreading questions. When Dr. Zhu’s subjects were asked what red or blue made them think of, most said that red represented caution, danger or mistakes, and that blue symbolized peace and openness. The study also tested responses to advertising, finding that advertisements listing product details or emphasizing “avoidance” actions like cavity prevention held greater appeal on red backgrounds, while ones using creative designs or emphasizing positive actions like “tooth whitening” held more appeal on blue. The study did not involve different cultures, like China, where red symbolizes prosperity and luck.

about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant THOMAS POROSTOCKY step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is couldn’t figure out how. always advisable to perceive clearly Charles Darwin was after the how. our ignorance”) and prescience astonThinking about farmers’ selective ish more as scientists clarify how much breeding, considering the high mortalhe got right. But only when we fully acity of seeds and wild animals, he surknowledge the subsequent century and mised that natural conditions acted as a half of knowledge added since can we a filter determining which individuals really appreciate both Darwin’s genius survived to breed more individuals like and the fact that evolution is life’s drivthemselves. He called this filter “natuing force, with or without Darwin. ral selection.” What Darwin had to say

le monde

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009

7

t h e w ay w e e at

Sparkling Sales for Fizzy wines Champagne, prosecco and other effervescent wines are more popular than ever. Spending on sparkling wines in nearly every country increased in the last five years, particularly in East Asia, Eastern Europe and South America.

FRANCE

The French have outspent everyone at about $70 per person in 2008.

INDIA

COLOMBIA

DAVE YODER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

For Prosecco, Growth And Growing Pains By AMY CORTESE

Prosecco has gained many fans worldwide with its fresh flavor, pleasing bubbles and gentle price tag — typically $10 to $20 a bottle. Global sales have been growing by double-digit percentages for 10 years, to more than 150 million bottles last year. And with consumers in an economizing mood, prosecco is an increasingly popular alternative to Champagne, which has been soaring in price. But prosecco is also encountering some growing pains. From its traditional home in northern Italy, it is now waging a war against outsiders, just as Champagne, its more elite cousin in France, has done for so many years. A host of producers elsewhere in Italy and as far away as Brazil are trying to cash in on the drink’s newfound popularity. Because prosecco is the name of a grape, like chardonnay or cabernet, anyone can use the name. Today, about 60 percent of all prosecco — some eight million cases — comes from producers outside the traditional prosecco-growing region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, a cluster of villages about a half-hour’s drive north of Venice. The newcomers are not held to the same strict production standards as the

traditional producers, which are tightly governed under Italian wine laws. The Italian winemakers worry that upstarts will weaken prosecco’s image just as it is taking off. “If everyone around the world plants prosecco, we will lose the value of the name,” says Ludovico Giustiniani, vice president of a consortium that represents about 150 wineries in the traditional prosecco-producing region. The consortium, along with a broader group of growers and producers, has formed a plan that would create an official prosecco production zone tied exclusively to northern Italy. Only wine produced in that region could be labeled as prosecco. If the plan is approved by the Italian government prosecco would then be eligible for “protected designation of origin” status under European laws intended to protect regional products from Champagne and port to Serrano ham. “It will let prosecco be an Italian product — and nothing else,” says Giancarlo Moretti Polegato, the owner of Villa Sandi, one of the area’s prominent wineries. But protection from the European Union would extend only across its 27 member countries.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

sol and others say. “For these Prosecco’s success can be reasons,” he says, “this area seen in the steep-hilled villagthat didn’t exist 25 years ago es surrounding Conegliano now accounts for 60 percent and Valdobbiadene. The area of prosecco production.” has grown from a sleepy agriCountries like Brazil, Rocultural area to one of Italy’s mania, Argentina and Auswealthiest enclaves. Prosectralia have begun to plant co sales from this area were prosecco. Brazil, in particu370 million euros last year. lar, has embraced the grape, And a hectare of vineyard in perhaps not surprisingly, givthe most coveted spots, like en that its main wine region is Cartizze, sells for more than populated by northern Italian $1 million. immigrants. The vines are tended and German and Austrian proharvested by hand. Machines ducers have taken to buying cannot navigate the steep terGIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES tanks of Italian prosecco prorain. In 1969, the region was Prosecco grapes have been cultivated in northern duced in the plains and shipawarded the status of denominazione di origine controlItaly, upper left, to make sparkling wine for 300 years. ping it to their countries to be bottled. lata, or D.O.C., Italy’s version Now, Brazil, Romania and Australia are competitors. The threat of foreign-brand of a wine appellation. prosecco has prompted northToday, the United States is ern Italian producers, of both D.O.C. and Italy. Growers there are less regulated prosecco’s No. 1 market outside of Italy. I.G.T. prosecco, to work together to prothan their D.O.C. kin; they were granted But it is also catching on in new markets, tect their turf. They say they believe that the Italian wine system’s least-stringent like China, India and Vietnam. their proposal will raise quality and predesignation, known as I.G.T., in 1995. “Prosecco can be the best-selling vent others from calling their products They can produce almost double the sparkling wine of the world,” says Gianprosecco. The key is to link prosecco to volume of wine per hectare, and quality luca Bisol, general manager of the Bisol its traditional home. can vary. winery, in Valdobbiadene. “Champagne is the king of the bubble,” In the flatlands, winemakers can use The problem is that others saw the poMr. Bisol says. “But prosecco maybe can machines to harvest and tend to their tential, too. It started with the relative be considered the small prince.” vines, at about a tenth of the cost, Mr. Binewcomers in the plains of northern

Saving a Beloved Squirrel By Eating Its Gray Nemesis

Selling the Sea Without The Water

By MARLENA SPIELER

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

Basil Katz contributed reporting from Paris.

Source: Euromonitor International

Spending on sparkling wine, change from ’03 to ’08

olhÃo journal

OLHÃO, Portugal — In the early 1990s, João Navalho, a microbiologist recently out of graduate school, came to the salt marshes in the Algarve region with a handful of young partners to grow and harvest microalgae. Their dream was to market the algae’s beta carotene as natural orange dye for the fast-growing organic food market. The business foundered; the 15 hectares of marshes, known as salinas, became a garbage dump for residents in this pocket of southwestern Portugal. After years of frustrated effort, the partners suddenly changed course. “We looked around and said, we’re stupid!” Mr. Navalho recalled. “We have a lot of land here. What we should do with the salinas is produce salt!” They asked the longtime locals for someone who might remember how to harvest salt the old way: by hand, as it was done here before industrialization made it cheap and plentiful, and small salt works fell into disuse. The answer was right in front of them. Living on the edge of the marshes was Maximino António Guerreiro, a retired salt worker who started harvesting here with his father more than four decades ago. In 1997, the salt project began. Mr. Guerreiro cleaned out and rebuilt the long-abandoned patchwork of rectangular, clay-lined salt beds. With young workers from Eastern Europe, he opened sluices from the sea and

Growth is impressive at almost 200 percent. Still, few Indians are buying sparkling wine, and per capita spending is less than a penny.

While Colombians have spent about $37 million on sparkling wine in 2008, sales are down 8 percent from five years ago.

MIGUEL RIBEIRO FERNANDES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Producers of salt in Portugal want to revive a once-thriving trade. set up a system of dams to control the water flow. He shared the secrets of salt: how to measure evaporation levels and determine the correct salt density and water temperature, when to add water and when to rake and skim. “I had to quit school when I was 14 to help my father make salt every day, and then the work disappeared,” said Mr. Guerreiro, 56. “Now we’re back — making the most beautiful white salt in the world.’’ Two years later, Necton, the salt company Mr. Navalho created here, produced its first salt crop. Now it is one of the region’s new salt pioneers, struggling to revive what was once a flourishing trade in this part of Portugal. They are trying to convince consumers of the health and taste benefits of handmade salt and to compete in an increasingly sophisticated global salt market. “What we are selling is ocean saltwater without the water,” Mr. Navalho said. “Call it sea dust.” To many people, salt is salt. But to those for whom it is a gourmet condiment, few varieties compare to the

superlative salt known as fleur de sel, harvested by gently skimming the white, lacy film from the surface of salty beds. European designer salt must compete with exotic salts from around the world, including Himalayan pink salt, a South Korean salt that is roasted in bamboo, and Hawaiian red Alaea, which gets its color from red clay. But Necton has bigger plans. Mr. Navalho has begun to cultivate an exotic salad vegetable called salicorne, which is a small weed with fleshy, tart, dark-green branches. He hopes to build a sanctuary for the wild birds here. He is trying to draw visitors for tours of both the salts works and the little algae-growing he still does. And Mr. Navalho, who was born in Mozambique, wants to expand operations to Africa, to restore some of the abandoned salt fields built by the Portuguese 300 years ago. First, however, he has to persuade customers to think about salt differently. “People might like to drive a Ferrari, but they can’t afford it,” he said. “But they can afford the best salt in the world.”

Rare roast beef splashed with meaty jus, pork enrobed in luscious crackling fat, perhaps a juicy, plump chicken … these are feasts that come to mind when one thinks of quintessential British food. Lately, however, a new meat is gracing the British table: squirrel. Though squirrel has appeared occasionally in British cookery, history doesn’t deem it a dining favorite. Even during World War II and the period of austerity that followed, the Ministry of Food valiantly promoted the joys of squirrel soup and pie. British carnivores replied, “No, thank you.” These days, however, squirrel is selling as fast as gamekeepers and hunters can bring it in. “Part of the interest is curiosity and novelty,” said Barry Shaw of Shaw Meats, who sells squirrel meat at the Wirral Farmers Market near Liverpool. “It’s a great conversation starter for dinner parties.” While some have difficulty with the cuteness versus deliciousness ratio — that adorable little face, those tiny claws — many feel that eating squirrel is a way to do something good for the environment while enjoying a unique gastronomical experience. With literally millions of squirrels rampaging throughout England, Scotland and Wales at any given time, squirrels need to be controlled by culls. This means that hunters, gamekeepers, trappers and the Forestry Commission provide a regular supply of the meat to British butchers, restaurants, pâté and pasty makers. The situation is more than simply a matter of having too many squirrels. In fact, there is a war raging in Squirreltown: invading interlopers (gray squirrels introduced from North Amer-

ica over the past century or more) are crowding out a British icon, the indigenous red squirrel immortalized by Beatrix Potter and cherished by generations since. The grays take over the reds’ habitat, eat voraciously and harbor a virus named squirrel parapox that does not harm grays but can devastate reds. “When the grays show up, it puts the reds out of business,” said Rufus Carter, managing director of the Patchwork Traditional Food Company, a company based in Wales that plans to offer squirrel and hazelnut pâté on its British Web site, patchwork-pate.co.uk. Enter the “Save Our Squirrels” campaign begun in 2006 to rescue Britain’s red squirrels by piquing the nation’s appetite for their marauding North American cousins. With a rallying motto of “Save a red, eat a gray!” the campaign created a market for culled squirrel meat. Many enjoy squirrel simply because they like its taste. Mr. Carter said he didn’t know what he was eating when he tried it. But, he said, “at first bite, I thought it delicious.” Fergus Henderson, the chef and coowner of St. John restaurant in London, offers squirrel on the menu “seasonally.” Though the meat is available all year long, it is in the spring, when hunting season is over, that country folk can focus their attentions on controlling the squirrel population. One might think that because of easy availability, squirrel would be the perfect meal-stretcher for these economically challenged times, but it takes a lot of work to get the meat off even the plumpest squirrel. Combined with the difficulty in skinning, Mr. Carter said, many otherwise enthusiastic hunters, gamekeepers and chefs “can’t be bothered with it.”

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LE mondE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2009 ARTS & STYLES

The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! NEW YORK — The contemporary art market, with its abiding reputation for foggy deals and puffy values, is a vulnerable organism, traditionally hit early and hard by economic malaise. That’s what’s happening now. The boom that was is no more. Anyone with memoESSAY ries of recessions in the early 1970s and late ’80s knows that we’ve been here before, though not exactly here. There are reasons to think that the present crisis is of a different magnitude: broader and deeper, a global black hole that stretches from New York to the global art scene. Yet the same memories will lend a hopeful spin to that thought: as has been true before, a financial drawback can only be good for art. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue. And it has given us a flood of pictures, sculptures, photographs and staged spectacles. The ideas don’t vary much. Art in New York has not always been so soothing an affair, and will not continue to be if a recession sweeps away such collectibles and clears space for other things. This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game. The first real contemporary boom was in the early 1960s. Cash was abundant. Pop was hot. But the boom was short. The Vietnam War and racism were ripping America apart. The economy tanked. In the early ’70s New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy. With virtually no commercial infrastructure for experimental art in place, artists had to create their own marginal model. They moved, often illegally, into the derelict industrial area now called SoHo, and made art from what they found there. Trisha Brown choreographed dances for factory rooftops; Gordon Matta-Clark turned architecture into sculpture by slicing out pieces of walls. Everyone treated the city as a found object. An artist named Jeffrey Lew turned the ground floor of his building at 112 Greene Street into a firstcome-first-served studio and exhibition space. People came, working with scrap metal, cast-off wood and cloth, industrial paint, rope, string, dirt, lights, mirrors, video. New genres — installation, performance — were invented. White Columns, as the place came to called, became a prototype for a crop of nonprofit alternative spaces that sprang up across America. The ’70s economy stabilized, and SoHo real estate prices rose. A younger generation of artists couldn’t afford to live there and went to the Lower East Side and tenements in the South Bronx. Again the energy was collective, but the mix was different: young art-school graduates, street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite, assorted punk-rebel types like Richard Hell and plain rebels like David Wojnarowicz. Here too the aesthetic was improvisatory. Everybody did everything — painting, writing, performing,

HOLLAND COTTER

MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, MIKE MERGEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of ‘‘Il Barbiere di Siviglia’’ in 2007 at a Manhattan movie theater, above. Renée Fleming in ‘‘Thaïs’’ as seen in December at a movie theater in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

Purists’ Agitation Over Opera at the Movies By DANIEL J. WAKIN

For 400 years humans have stood on stages and conveyed passion through song. Great buildings were raised for them to perform in. The titled and the rich paid homage with cash and devotion. Opera, that most electrifying of the high arts, has remained remarkably unchanged in its history, adapting to bigger houses, electric lights, electronic stage machinery, the recording industry. It has persevered despite waves of new claims on our attention, from television to Twitter. But now another force has emerged, which has the potential to transform how opera is produced and received. You can check it out at your local movie theater. Thanks largely to the efforts of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are seeing live opera performances in movie theaters, and many others in repeat showings. A dozen other opera companies are now sending out broadcasts of their own. Yet despite the general acclaim for the Met’s innovation, introduced and championed by its general manager, Peter Gelb, a few voices have raised concerns about long-term effects on the art form. The dissenters say that the movement will lead to more conservative programming; that the voice will become subservient to appearance; that listeners will be trained to hear something electronic and lose an appreciation for a live experience. Some worry that vocal training will change, de-emphasizing the ability to project, and that the Met’s effort is a deal with the Devil, because it will divert audiences from local opera houses. “Let’s go on with the cinema, but I have to make now a proposition to Peter Gelb and the Metropolitan Opera,” Gerard Mortier, the Belgian impresario, said in a speech last June at a conference of opera managers in Denver that stands as the skeptics’ cri de coeur. “Why go to the cinema? Come to the opera.”

onLInE: VIdEo

An excerpt from the Metropolitan Opera production of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” which was screened at movie theaters: nytimes.com/music But such voices are a minority as the broadcasts gain popularity. The Royal Opera House in London plans to transmit 10 opera and ballet performances in Europe this season and another 18 outside the continent. The Italian opera houses of Parma, Florence, Venice, Bologna and Milan, through the distributor Emerging Pictures, are beaming their productions. The Teatro Alla Scala in Milan broadcast its gala opening night, a performance of Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” live on December 7. Late in January the Met surpassed a million ticket sales for the season, with 3 of the 11 planned broadcasts still to go. That exceeds the expected total of 850,000 operagoers who will attend the 220 performances given at the house. The most recent broadcast, of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” starring Anna Netrebko, was seen in 31 countries in roughly 850 theaters.

At a broadcast of Massenet’s “Thaïs” in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, in early December, the 207 red high-backed seats of a theater in a shopping mall were filled. Many patrons had arrived an hour before to secure the best spots. Tickets cost $22. (At the Met, tickets for a matinee range from about $30 to almost $300.) Two former Met subscribers, Richard and Betty Ringenwald of Delanco, New Jersey, were there. Driving to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in Manhattan had become too burdensome, Ms. Ringenwald said. “You can see everything up close and personal, as if you’re the only person in the theater.” The Met points out that the host of each broadcast now urges viewers to visit their local opera houses. One prominent singing teacher, Marlena Malas of the Juilliard School in New York, sounded conflicted. She praised the Met for attracting new audiences and attention to opera but worried that singing increasingly for microphones would distract artists, and listeners, from the beauty of the sound, language and style of great singing. “I’m probably overreacting to it,” she said, “but I want to maintain its integrity.”

filming, photocopying zines, playing in bands — and new forms arrived, including hip-hop, graffiti, No Wave cinema, appropriation art and the first definable body of “out” queer art. But again the moment was brief. The Reagan economy was creating vast supplies of expendable wealth, and the East Village became a brand name. Suddenly galleries were filled with expensive little paintings and objects similar in variety and finesse to the galleries in Chelsea now. They sold. Careers soared. But the originating spark was long gone. After Black Monday in October 1987 the art was gone, too. Entrenched barriers came down. Black, Latino and Asian-American artists took center stage and fundamentally redefined American art. Gay and lesbian artists commanded visibility. And thanks to multiculturalism and to the global reach of the digital revolution, the American art world in the ’90s was in touch with developments in Africa, Asia and South America. For the first time contemporary art was acknowledged to be not

SOTHEBY’S/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Damien Hirst’s ‘‘Golden Calf’’ sold for $18.6 million last year, but the art climate has changed. just a Euro-American but an international phenomenon and a readily marketable one. Which brings us to the present decade, threatening to end in a drawnout collapse. If the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. In the 21st century New York is just one more art town among many, and no longer a particularly influential one. Contemporary art belongs to the world. I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense. Right. Exactly. Crazy.

Julia Roberts: Mom, Stage Actress and, Once Again, Leading Lady By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — In the last eight years, Julia Roberts has become a mother, dabbled on Broadway (in “Three Days of Rain”) and provided the voice for both a spider (in “Charlotte’s Web”) and an ant (in “The Ant Bully”). Next month, she turns up in what has become a surprisingly unfamiliar role for an actress who was the biggest female box office star in Hollywood for a decade: leading lady. “Duplicity” is a romantic tale about a couple of corporate security workers looking to steal from the corporations and from each other. Written and directed by Tony Gilroy,

KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After smaller roles, Julia Roberts is starring in a romantic comedy.

who made “Michael Clayton,” one of last year’s best-picture nominees, it pairs Clive Owen with Ms. Roberts in her first real leading role since 2001. That year, Ms. Roberts capped a long string of roles in romantic comedies with performances in “America’s Sweethearts” and “The Mexican.” That she is finally back has created a hopeful flutter among producers and filmmakers who have been yearning for some unbridled female star power. That’s been in relatively short supply since Ms. Roberts, who turned 41 in October, began to focus on raising her family and took a few strong roles in ensemble films like “Mona Lisa Smile,” “Closer” and “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Ocean’s Twelve.” She had a prominent role in the 2007 film “Charlie Wilson’s War” but shared the screen with Tom

Hanks, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. “Nobody has stepped into the vacuum,” said one female producer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her future hopes of casting the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Amy Adams and Scarlett Johansson. None of those actresses has yet approached the run of hits Ms. Roberts had in the 1990s with movies including “Erin Brockovich” (for which she won an Oscar), “Runaway Bride” and “Notting Hill.” Ms. Roberts declined to discuss her decision to star in “Duplicity,” or her reasons for stepping aside, if not quite back, at the height of her box office appeal. A number of people close to Ms. Roberts said her marriage in 2002 to Danny Moder, who did camera work on “The Mexican,” and the demands of

raising their three children had put limits on her acting career. Some who have worked closely with Ms. Roberts said her choices were based less on strategy than on instinct. She was persuaded to do “Duplicity,” they said, roughly two years ago after being urged to take the role by Mr. Owen, a friend. She was pregnant at the time, so the movie waited for the birth of her third child, and her decision to stick with it was helped by the fact that it could be shot in New York, where she has a home, without disrupting her family life. Once on board, Mr. Gilroy said, Ms. Roberts brought her considerable experience with romantic capers to bear in shaping the project. “She was our expert,” he said. “She had been down this road before, and none of the rest of us had.”