Lawrence Hecht's Former Blog and Future Info-sharing Outpost

The panel sponsored by National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. The panelists were Michael Azerrand of emusic.com, Amy Phillips, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, Knox Robinson of The Fader, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone and Tracks, and Brandon Wall of prefix magazine. The moderator was Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker.

The event started 15-20 minutes late, and that was after they made the general public wait at the door while working journalists and journalism students were given special seating privileges. Hmmm, the panel had 2-3 graduates of the J-School and except for the band member were all professional writers. I should have anticipated that they would believe that blogging helped instead of challenged them professional.

Since I last posted on the subject of blogging after listening to the Charlie Rose Show, this post will just include bullet points:

Before the presentation, I challenged several of the people sitting around the table that Paul Wolfowitz might not be a bad choice for the World Bank presidency. I got a series of responses that reminded me that the New School had been the last bastion of legitimate Communist Economics. And then the lecture began:

J. Mohan Rao of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst led a workshop at the New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. These are my observations based on what I heard:

Professor Rao evaluated the impact of India’s economic reforms by comparing economic growth in the 80’s and the 90’s. Since 1980, the Indian economy has had 5-year economic cycles steadily grown and average growth of 5.7%. While growth rates were similar in the 80’s and 90’s, the growth in the 80’s was unsustainably fueled by government debt spending and financial controls. However, the 90′s might have created social inequities.

A government financial crisis in 1991 led to a series of reforms that dealt with openness of finance, foreign trade, and domestic policies. The reforms aimed at globalization, but may not have directly affected external integration. Many of the reforms that were prescribed are similar to those promoted by the IMF and World Bank, and that have been called the American Consensus. The reforms included:

• Reducing non-tariff barriers
• Broadening export incentives
• Reducing tariffs by 80%
• Reducing barriers to foreign direct investment
• Devaluation of the exchange rate
• De-licensing the private sector
• Taking away set-aside sectors for small companies and the public sector

The effectiveness of the reforms was questioned at the workshop. One failure is the social inequity that the reforms MIGHT have caused. The middle class and college educated have benefited, but not everyone. In fact, the manufacturing sector stagnated and agricultural output fell in the last 15 years. That’s significant because 60% of the population is involved in agriculture. Personally, I wish there was stronger, quantitative evidence that the poor’s standard of living declined because of Neo-liberal economic policies.

Another problem with the reforms was that the 80% drop in tariffs was followed by a dramatic drop in government revenues. Public capital was 5.6% of GDP in 1991, but 2.6% of GDP in 2000. This had dramatic ramifications throughout Indian society. Reduced funding limited the government’s ability to regulate. Maybe India wouldn’t face periodic brown-outs if the government had more money to invest in its national infrastructure.

Interesting fact: In the last 14 years, the India’s foreign trade grew from 14% to 26% based on a Trade/GDP ratio. As a comparison, the U.S.’s ratio is 16% and China’s is about 31%.

Between 1991 and the present, Indian IT and IT-enabled Services (i.e., call-centers) were the only sectors that grew dramatically faster than the rest of the economy. Coupled with a world-class higher education system, this has lead many people to think that India can “leapfrog” stages of development into a “knowledge economy”. However, this might not be the best approach. The IT companies compete globally and don’t necessarily have strong links to the rest of the domestic economy. Would a traditional development strategy that focused on industrial jobs have been a better approach?

The Congress Party recently unseated the BJP government because of most people hadn’t benefited from globalization and the economic reforms. Like Lula’s government in Brazil, the Left’s coalition hasn’t made drastic policy changes, but they may want to consider these two policy recommendations:

• Increase income taxes. This will make the rising middle class pay for needed government services.
• Invest in infrastructure projects. China is far ahead of India in this area.

Microsoft’s CIO Ron Markezich spoke to about 100 people at an event sponsored by the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce.

Markezich doesn’t sell software. Instead, he implements it, in addition to telecom and IT hardware, at Microsoft itself. It was extremely interesting hearing how Microsoft’s IT department operates in comparison to its peers at other Fortune 1000 enterprises. Marckezich said that Microsoft uses other vendor’s software if Microsoft doesn’t produce an enterprise-class product in a particular category. In terms of security products, that means they use Computer Associates’ eTrust and Sybari. In the case of Sybari, Microsoft thought anti-virus was such an important feature that they bought the company.

The Microsoft IT department does lab testing and uses all Microsoft products before they are distributed to clients. Using a phrase I never heard before, Markezich says that they “eat their own dog food.” They also help improve their products by using advisory boards. In addition, Microsoft gets end user feedback by sending out employees to clients’ offices for 1-2 weeks at a time. The lessons the IT department learns are often documented as a best practice and then distributed to clients via avenues like a Security Center of Excellence.

Speakers at “From Confrontation to Collaboration”, a panel sponsored by the NYU Urban Planning Student Association and the New York Chapter of the American Planning Association, talked about partnerships between community organizations, developers and the government. They told stories about the terrible ’80s and successes under the Bloomberg Administration. The speakers explained why collaboration often doesn’t occur and tips about how to effectively collaborate.

For someone who has taken an urban planning or public policy course, engaging the residents, the stakeholders, of the neighborhood is common sense. We have heard endless stories of projects and investments that failed because a developer didn’t care about the locals or was too arrogant or lazy to talk to them. This failure of communication often results in residents complaining to politicians, protesting in the streets and media attention. Even more significantly, it can result in lawsuits that delay or even cancel construction. Since this is such a nasty outcome, it is “common sense” to seek to avoid this. Why do so many people lack “common sense?”

Marcia Kesner of New York Visions blames reluctance among developers and government to share information. She blames everyone’s lack of time and a general unwillingness to listen to each other and to compromise. Richard Kahan of the Urban Assembly spoke about how the poor communities he worked with in the Bronx to had difficulty finding time and money to participate in civic processes.

Representatives from prosperous neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn talked about success collaboration with developers and local government. Ed Ruben talked about how his board on the East Side was practical, got all their facts and wasn’t “knee-jerkily” opposed to development. He also talked about the credibility the board has due to its institutional history and ability to create consensus among local residents, single issue advocacy groups and others. Jerry Armer of Community Board 6 in Brooklyn spoke about the successful rezoning of Park Slope, plans for IKEA and the Ratner stadium development plan. Armer also works for the Metrotech BID. I greatly admire panelist Winston Von Engel’s work in his role of Deputy Director of City Planning in Brooklyn. The rezoning efforts in Downtown Brooklyn inspired an entrepreneurial project I started in 2002.

Armer complained that sometimes government folks think they “know best.” While he didn’t link this attitude directly to the Ratner stadium, I do. From what I heard, since the public funding is coming from the state, the much praised ULURP process has been usurped in the Ratner project and a special Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) has been drawn up. Unfortunately, the panelists expressed concern that there has been a checkered history nationwide of CBAs having “no teeth.”

Kahan used to run the New York State Urban Development Corporation and invoked the need for state and federal involvement to steer policy towards more regional solutions that might be stalled by parochial or NIMBY issues. He didn’t seem to have any quibbles about state power overriding local laws. In response to one of my questions, Kahan denied that this necessarily creates the danger of “government knowing best.” He then recited a quick litany of best practices that state planning officials use to engage local communities in all of their projects. My concern is that this puts too much reliance on government competence rather than a tried and true local democratic process like ULURP.