Esta vez, Europa está de verdad al borde del precipicio

¿Queda un minuto para la medianoche en Europa? Nos tememos que la política del Gobierno alemán de hacer algo que sirve ya de poco y llega demasiado tarde corre el riesgo de provocar precisamente una repetición de la crisis de mitad del siglo XX que la integración europea pretendía evitar. Nos resulta extraordinario que sea Alemania, precisamente, la que parezca no haber aprendido de la historia. Obsesionada con la inexistente amenaza de la inflación, da la impresión de que la Alemania actual otorga más importancia al año 1923 (el año de la hiperinflación) que a 1933 (el año en que murió la democracia). A los alemanes no les vendría mal recordar que una crisis bancaria europea ocurrida dos años antes de 1933 contribuyó de forma directa a la descomposición de la democracia, no solo en su propio país, sino en todo el continente. Llevamos más de tres años advirtiendo de que Europa continental necesitaba limpiar los lamentables balances de sus bancos. No hicieron prácticamente nada. Mientras tanto, desde hace dos años se está extendiendo un pánico silencioso entre los bancos de la periferia de la eurozona: se han reducido los servicios financieros transfronterizos, interbancarios y generales, y se han sustituido por financiación del BCE; y el dinero inteligente —grandes depósitos no asegurados de personas con altos ingresos— ha abandonado las costas de Grecia y otros bancos mediterráneos. Pero ahora el público está perdiendo la confianza, y el pánico puede extenderse a depósitos sin asegurar más pequeños. Si Grecia saliera del euro, se produciría una congelación de depósitos, y los depósitos en euros se convertirían en nuevos dracmas: por tanto, un euro en un banco griego no equivale a un euro en un banco alemán. Los griegos han retirado más de 700 millones de euros de sus bancos en el último mes. Más preocupante es que el mes pasado también hubo un aumento de las retiradas de dinero de algunos bancos españoles. La torpe operación de rescate de Bankia llevada a cabo por el Gobierno solo ha servido para incrementar la inquietud de la población. En una visita reciente a Barcelona, a uno de nosotros le preguntaron varias veces si era seguro tener dinero en un banco español. Este tipo de proceso puede ser explosivo. Lo que hoy es una tranquila visita al banco puede convertirse en una carrera de sálvese quien pueda. Si se produjera la salida de Grecia, las personas racionales se preguntarían: ¿quién va a continuación? Como se debatió en una reunión del Nicolas Berggruen Institute celebrada la semana pasada en Roma, la forma de salir de esta crisis parece clara. Resulta extraordinario que sea Alemania la que parezca no haber aprendido de la historia En primer lugar, es preciso establecer un programa de recapitalización —mediante acciones preferentes sin derecho a voto— de los bancos de la eurozona, tanto en la periferia como en el centro, directa a través del Instrumento Europeo de Estabilidad Financiera (IEEF) y su sucesor, el Mecanismo de Estabilidad Financiera (MEE). La estrategia actual de recapitalizar los bancos a base de que los Estados pidan prestado a los mercados nacionales de bonos —o al IEEF— ha resultado desastrosa en Irlanda y Grecia: ha provocado una explosión de deuda pública y ha hecho que el Estado fuera todavía más insolvente, al tiempo que los bancos se convierten en un riesgo mayor en la medida en que más parte de la deuda pública está en sus manos. Segundo, para evitar el pánico en los bancos de la eurozona —un fenómeno seguro en el caso de salida de Grecia y muy probable en cualquier caso— es necesario crear un sistema europeo de garantía de depósitos. Con el fin de reducir el riesgo subjetivo (además del riesgo del precio de las acciones y el riesgo crediticio asumidos por los contribuyentes de la eurozona), también habría que tomar otras medidas: 1. El programa de garantía de depósitos debe financiarse con los gravámenes bancarios apropiados: podría ser un impuesto de transacciones financieras o, mejor aún, un impuesto sobre todos los pasivos bancarios. 2. Es necesario poner en práctica un programa de resolución bancaria en el que los acreedores no asegurados —tanto mayoritarios como minoritarios— sean los primeros que paguen, antes de recurrir al dinero de los contribuyentes para cubrir las pérdidas de un banco. 3. Deben tomarse medidas para limitar el tamaño de los bancos con el fin de evitar el problema de las entidades demasiado grandes para caer. 4. También somos partidarios de un sistema de supervisión y regulación para toda la UE. Un euro en un banco griego no equivale a un euro en un banco alemán Es cierto que el fondo europeo de garantía de depósitos no funcionará si existe el riesgo continuo de que un país se salga de la eurozona. Garantizar los depósitos en euros sería muy caro, porque el país en cuestión necesitaría convertir toda la deuda a una nueva moneda nacional, que enseguida se depreciaría respecto al euro. Por otra parte, si el seguro de depósito solo tiene validez mientras el país no abandone el euro, será incapaz de impedir un pánico bancario. Por consiguiente, es necesario tomar más medidas para reducir las probabilidades de que se produzcan abandonos de la eurozona. Hay que acelerar las reformas estructurales que estimulan el crecimiento de la productividad. Entre las políticas que pueden conseguirlo están una mayor flexibilización monetaria por parte del BCE, un euro más débil, algún estímulo fiscal en el núcleo duro, más gasto en infraestructuras que reduzcan los cuellos de botella y faciliten el abastecimiento en la periferia (a ser posible, con una regla de oro para las inversiones públicas) e incrementos salariales por encima de la productividad en el centro para impulsar los ingresos y el consumo. Por último, dado el volumen insostenible de las deudas públicas y los costes de endeudamiento de varios Estados miembros, no vemos alternativa posible a algún tipo de mutualización de la deuda. En la actualidad existen varias propuestas de eurobonos. Entre ellas, la que preferimos es la de un Fondo Europeo de Redención que hace el Consejo Alemán de Asesores Económicos, no porque sea la mejor, sino porque es la única capaz de aliviar la inquietud alemana sobre la perspectiva de asumir un riesgo crediticio excesivo. El FER es un programa provisional que no derivará en un sistema de eurobonos permanentes. Cuenta con los avales suficientes y la antigüedad adecuada, además de tener unas condiciones muy firmes. El principal peligro es que cualquier propuesta que sea aceptable para Alemania supondría tal pérdida de soberanía fiscal para los Estados que sería inaceptable para a periferia de la eurozona, en especial Italia y España. Ceder parte de la soberanía es inevitable. Sin embargo, existe una diferencia entre federalismo y neocolonialismo, como nos dijo un veterano político en la reunión del NBI en Roma. Dado el volumen insostenible de las deudas, no vemos alternativa posible a algún tipo de mutualización Hasta hace poco, la postura de Alemania sobre estas propuestas ha sido siempre negativa. Es comprensible la preocupación alemana sobre el riesgo subjetivo. Será difícil de justificar el hecho de que se ha arriesgado el dinero de los alemanes si en la periferia no se llevan a cabo unas reformas sustanciales. Pero es inevitable que esas reformas tarden aún cierto tiempo. La reforma estructural del mercado de trabajo alemán no fue precisamente un éxito de la noche a la mañana. Por el contrario, la crisis bancaria europea es un riesgo financiero que podría dispararse en cuestión de días. Los alemanes deben comprender que la recapitalización bancaria, el seguro europeo de depósitos y la mutualización de la deuda no son opcionales. Son medidas esenciales para evitar una desintegración irreversible de la unión monetaria europea. Si todavía no están convencidos, deben entender que los costes de la ruptura de la eurozona serían astronómicos, para Alemania tanto como para el resto del mundo. Al fin y al cabo, la prosperidad actual de Alemania es en gran parte una consecuencia de la unión monetaria. El euro ha dado a los exportadores alemanes un tipo de cambio mucho más competitivo que el viejo marco. Y el resto de la eurozona sigue siendo el destino del 42% de las exportaciones alemanas. Sumir a la mitad de ese mercado en una depresión no puede ser beneficioso para Alemania. A la hora de la verdad, como reconoció la canciller Merkel la semana pasada, la unión monetaria siempre tuvo implícita en ella una mayor integración en una unión fiscal y política. Pero antes de que Europa piense en dar este paso histórico, debe demostrar que ha aprendido las lecciones del pasado. La UE se creó para no repetir los desastres de los años treinta. Ya es hora de que los dirigentes europeos —y en especial los alemanes— sean conscientes de que están peligrosamente cerca de caer en ello. Niall Ferguson es catedrático de la Universidad de Harvard; su último libro es Civilización: Occidente y el resto. Nouriel Roubini es catedrático en la Universidad de Nueva York y presidente de Roubini Global Economics. Ambos son miembros del Consejo para el Futuro de Europa del Nicolas Berggruen Institute.

Paul Krugman: 'I'm sick of being Cassandra. I'd like to win for once' | Business | The Guardian

By now you will probably have read an awful lot about the financial crisis. Perhaps I've been reading all the wrong stuff, but until now I hadn't managed to find answers to the most puzzling questions. If the crash of 2008 was preceded by an era of unprecedented prosperity, how come most of the people I know weren't earning much? Deregulation of financial services was supposed to have made us all better off, so why did most of us have to live off credit to keep up? Now that it has all gone wrong, and everyone agrees we're in the worst crisis since the Great Depression, why aren't we following the lessons we learned in the 1930s? President Obama is the only world leader who has attempted a Keynesian stimulus programme. Why has it been only minimally effective? Why do most other western leaders still insist the only way out is to tighten our belts and pay off our debts, when that clearly isn't working either? And how come the bankers, credit agencies and bond traders are still treated with cowed reverence – don't frighten the markets! – when they got us into this mess? These mysteries were beginning to make me feel as if I must be going mad – but since reading Paul Krugman's new book, I fear I'm in danger instead of becoming a bore. It's the sort of book you wish were compulsory reading, and want to quote to anyone who'll listen, because End This Depression Now! provides a comprehensive narrative of how we have ended up doing the opposite of what logic and history tell us we must do to get out of this crisis. Its author is a Nobel prize-winning economist who writes a column in the New York Times and teaches economics at Princeton University. An authority on John Maynard Keynes, Krugman wrote a book in 1999 called The Return of Depression Economics, largely about the Japanese slump, which drew ominous parallels between Japan's economic strategy and the pre-New Deal policies of the early 30s that turned a recession into catastrophic depression. At the time, unsurprisingly, most western economists weren't bowled over; in thrall to the seemingly endless boom, the Great Depression looked to them to be more or less irrelevant. Krugman's latest book will be much harder to ignore. He doesn't expect it will be an easy message to sell, though. "As far as I can make out, the serious opposition to the coalition's policy is basically a half-dozen economists, and it looks as if I'm one of them – which is really weird," he laughs, "since I'm not even here." Visiting London last week, he met lots of what he calls Very Serious People: "And there are lots of things these people say that sound very wise and sensible. But it's all upside-down; it's all wrong. Yet the power of their orthodoxy – even when it's failing – is quite awesome." These Very Serious People present economics as a morality play, in which debt is a sin, and we have all sinned, so now we must all pay the price by tightening our belts together. They tell us the crisis will take a long time to resolve, and must inevitably be painful. All of this, according to Krugman, is the opposite of the truth. Austerity is a self-imposed collective punishment that is not just unnecessary, but won't work. We know what would work – but for complex political and historical reasons that his book explores, we have chosen to forget. "Ending this depression," he writes, "should be, could be, almost incredibly easy. So why aren't we doing it?" Krugman offers the example of a babysitting co-op, or circle, in which parents are issued with vouchers they can exchange for babysitting hours. If all of the parents simultaneously decide to save their vouchers, the system will grind to a halt. "My spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us try to slash our spending at the same time, then we are also slashing our incomes, so we don't actually end up saving more." We could issue more vouchers to everyone, to make them feel "richer" and encourage them to spend – which would be the circle's equivalent of quantitative easing. But if everyone is determined to save, the parents will hold on to the extra vouchers, and the circle still won't work. This is what's called a liquidity trap, "and it's essentially where we are now". The same principles apply to the "paradox of deleverage". Debt in itself is not a terrible thing, he says. "Debt is one person's liability, but another person's asset. So it doesn't impoverish us necessarily. The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time. High debt levels make us vulnerable to a crisis – and this is when you get the self-destructive spiral of debt deflation. If both of us are trying to pay down our debt at the same time, we end up with lower incomes, so the ratio of our debt to our income goes up." Crucially, Krugman continues, "what's true for an individual is not true for society as a whole". The analogy between a household budget and a national economy is "seductive, because it's very easy for people to relate to", and it makes some sense when we're not in the grip of a macro-economic crisis. "But when we are, then individually rational behaviour adds up to a collectively disastrous result. It ends up that each individual trying to improve his or her position has the collective effect of making everybody worse off. And that's the story of our times." At these moments someone has to start spending – and, Krugman argues, it is the government. But we're endlessly being told by the coalition that it has to pay off its debts because servicing the interest is ruinous, and the bond markets will destroy us unless we're seen to be tackling the deficit. "Well, now. We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis. And we know it, actually, best of all from the history of the UK – which spent much of the 20th century, including the 30s, with debt levels much higher than it has now." But what about bond markets? Invoked as global bogeymen, we're warned that they punish governments who fail to cut spending – even if cuts don't reduce the deficit. I've never understood why the markets should care how and when we reduce the deficit, as long as we can pay our way. According to Krugman, they don't. "That's the interesting thing. The actual verdict of the markets, for countries that have their own currencies, has been that they don't really care at all in terms of what you're doing in short-run policy." Likewise, the danger of being downgraded by a credit rating agency has been wildly overstated. "We saw it in Japan in 2002; they had the downgrade, and nothing happened. Which led us to predict that would happen for the US," whose credit rating was downgraded by one agency last year. "And it was exactly right. Nothing happened." A breadline in the US in 1930. According to Krugman, our governments have failed to learn the lessons of the Great Depression. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty Images Thus far, Krugman has essentially restated the case for Keynesianism. "And these are not hard concepts, actually. It's not hard to get it across to an audience. But it doesn't seem to play in the political sphere." What's fascinating is his historical analysis of why policy-makers, who once understood these principles, collectively decided to forget them. In the years following the Great Depression, governments imposed regulatory rules upon the banking system to ensure that we could never again become indebted enough to make us vulnerable to a crisis. "But if it's been a long time since the last major economic crisis, people get careless about debt; they forget the risks. Bankers go to politicians and say: 'We don't need these pesky regulations,' and the politicians say: 'You're right – nothing bad has happened for a while.'" That process began in earnest in 1980, under President Reagan. One by one the regulations on banking were lifted, until "we lost the safeguards, and it meant there was an increasingly wild and woolly financial system willing to lend lots of money". Politicians were in part persuaded to deregulate by the argument that it would make us all richer. And to this day, "there's this very widespread belief that there was, in fact, a great acceleration in growth. But this really isn't hard. You sit down for a minute with the national account statistics, and you see it ain't so." If we divide the period between the second world war and 2008 into two halves, "the first half is a really dramatic improvement to living standards, and the second half is not." It was certainly dramatic for the top 0.01%, who saw a seven-fold increase in income; in 2006, for example, the 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers in America earned $14bn, three times the combined salaries of New York City's 80,000 school teachers. But between 1980 and the crash, the median US household income went up by only roughly 20%. "So it's a total disconnect." Why would economists claim ordinary people were getting much richer if they weren't? "The answer, I think, has to be that you need to ask: 'Well who are the people who say these things hanging out with? What is their social circle?' And if you're a finance professor at the University of Chicago, the people that you're likely to meet from the alleged real world are going to be people from Wall Street – for whom the past 30 years have, in fact, been wonderful. If you're a mover and shaker in the UK, you're probably hanging out with people from the City. I think that is the story of the disconnect." But the influence of the top 0.01%'s mindboggling wealth didn't stop at finance professors. Their mansions and yachts and luxury lifestyles created "expenditure cascades", whereby, "if you're a little bit down the income distribution from there, you're going to feel some compulsion to match some of that too. And then, in turn, the people below you can feel some compulsion too." There were early warning signs, such as the savings and loans crisis of the late 80s, that should have alerted politicians to the dangers of financial deregulation, moral hazard and subsequent spiralling debt. But by then Wall Street's influence over policy-makers had rendered them deaf to alarm bells – in part because bankers were financing so many politicians' campaigns. Krugman quotes Upton Sinclair's famous observation: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" – but more than that, he suspects the sheer glamour of wealthy bankers had a powerful influence over politicians. "My impression is that old style captains of industry can be rather boring. I'm not sure how much thrill there is in hanging out with someone like that. But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain. They're impressive." Even Obama is not immune to their charms, says Krugman. Early into the administration he met the president and his economics team, "and it was just clear that rumpled professors with beards just didn't come across as being so impressive. Yeah," he chuckles. "I had that definite sense." But even many of the rumpled professors had been seduced by the promise of a new world economic order, in which Keynesianism was not just redundant but faintly ridiculous. By 1970, Krugman writes, "discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse. The field was dominated by the 'efficient-markets hypothesis'," which persuaded economists that: "We should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes called a 'casino'." The death of Keynesianism was "triumphantly" announced, largely by Republican economists whose work had become "infected by partisanship and political orientation". Now, as they are faced with the catastrophic collapse of their theories, Krugman thinks political bias and professional pride are what's stopping them admitting they were wrong. Those economists cite the woefully limited impact of Obama's almost $800bn stimulus package as proof that they are still right. According to Krugman, the only thing wrong was it wasn't enough. Almost half went on tax cuts, and most of the remaining $500bn went on unemployment benefits, food stamps and so on. "Actual infrastructure spending – that's more like just $100bn. So if your image of the stimulus programme is: 'We're going out there and building lots of bridges' – that never happened." In an economy that produces $15tn worth of goods and services each year, $500m "is just not a big number". Back in 2009, Krugman had warned: "By going with a half-baked stimulus, you're going to discredit the idea of stimulus without saving the economy." And that, he sighs, "is exactly what happened. Unfortunately it was one of those predictions that I wish I'd been wrong about. But it was dead on." Since the crash Krugman has become the undisputed Cassandra of academia, but he jokes: "I'm kind of sick of being Cassandra. I'd like to actually win for once, instead of being vindicated by the disaster coming – as predicted. I'd like to see my arguments about preventing the disaster taken into account instead." The likelihood of that is a fascinating question. Krugman is not the most clubbable of fellows. In person he's quite offhand, an odd mixture of shy and intensely self-assured, and with his stocky build and salt-and-pepper beard he conveys the impression of a very clever badger, burrowing away in the undergrowth of economic detail, ready to give quite a sharp bite if you get in his way. His public criticisms of the Obama administration have upset many Democrats in the US, while his more vociferous criticisms of George Bush used to earn him death threats from angry rightwingers. I hope none of that gets in the way of his argument. What we need to do, Krugman says, is simple: ditch austerity, kickstart the economy with ambitious government spending, and bring down the deficit when we're back above water again. Most importantly of all, we need to do it now. "Five years of very high unemployment do vastly more than five times as much damage as one year of high unemployment. To say: 'Yes, it's painful, but time does heal these things … " He breaks off and sighs in despair. "Well, no. Time may not heal it."

La amenaza de la amnesia alemana.

La situación de Europa es grave, muy grave. ¿Quién habría pensado que el primer ministro británico, David Cameron, haría un llamamiento a los gobiernos de la zona del euro para que se armaran de valor a fin de crear una unión fiscal (con un presupuesto y una política fiscal comunes y una deuda pública garantizada en común)? Y Cameron sostiene también que la única forma de detener la desintegración del euro es una mayor integración política. ¡Un primer ministro británico conservador! La casa europea está ardiendo y Downing Street hace un llamamiento en pro de una reacción racional y resuelta por parte del cuerpo de bomberos. Lamentablemente, el cuerpo de bomberos está dirigido por Alemania y su jefe es la canciller Angela Merkel. A consecuencia de ello, Europa sigue intentando apagar el fuego con gasolina —la austeridad impuesta por Alemania—, con lo que, en tan sólo tres años, la crisis financiera de la zona del euro ha llegado a convertirse en una crisis existencial europea. No nos engañemos: si se desintegra el euro, lo mismo ocurrirá a la Unión Europea (la mayor economía del mundo), lo que desencadenará una crisis económica mundial que la mayoría de las personas vivas actualmente nunca han padecido. Europa está al borde del abismo y sin duda caerá en él, a no ser que Alemania —y Francia— cambien de rumbo. Ahora los alemanes deben preguntarse si ellos, que han sido quienes más se han beneficiado de la integración europea, están dispuestos a pagar el precio que entraña o preferirían dejarla fracasar Las recientes elecciones celebradas en Francia y en Grecia, junto con las locales en Italia y la continua zozobra existente en España e Irlanda, han mostrado que el público ha perdido la fe en la estricta austeridad que les ha impuesto Alemania. La cura de caballo de Merkel ha chocado con la realidad… y la democracia. Una vez más estamos aprendiendo a base de palos que, cuando se aplica en plena crisis financiera grave, esa clase de austeridad sólo conduce a la depresión. Esa idea debería haber sido dominante; al fin y al cabo, fue una enseñanza fundamental que se desprendió de las políticas de austeridad del presidente Herbert Hoover en Estados Unidos y del canciller Heinrich Brüning en la Alemania de Weimar a comienzos de los años treinta del siglo pasado. Lamentablemente, Alemania, precisamente ella, parece haberla olvidado. A consecuencia de ello, el caos se cierne sobre Grecia, como también la perspectiva de pánicos bancarios posteriores en España, Italia y Francia… y con ello una avalancha financiera que enterraría a Europa. ¿Y después? ¿Acaso debemos desechar lo que más de dos generaciones de europeos han creado: una inversión en masa en una construcción institucional que ha brindado el período más largo de paz y prosperidad en la historia del continente? Una cosa es segura: la desintegración del euro y de la UE entrañaría la salida de Europa del escenario mundial. La política actual de Alemania es tanto más absurda en vista de las graves consecuencias políticas y económicas que afrontaría. Corresponde a Alemania y a Francia, a Merkel y al presidente François Hollande, decidir el futuro de nuestro continente. La salvación de Europa depende ahora de un cambio fundamental en la posición en materia de política económica de Alemania y de la de Francia en materia de integración política y reformas estructurales. Francia tendrá que aceptar una unión política: un gobierno común con control parlamentario común para la zona del euro. Los gobiernos nacionales de la zona del euro ya están actuando al unísono como gobierno de facto para abordar la crisis. Se debe llevar adelante y formalizar lo que está llegando a ser cada vez más cierto en la práctica. Por su parte, Alemania tendrá que optar por una unión fiscal. En última instancia, eso significa garantizar la supervivencia de la zona del euro con la fuerza y los activos económicos de Alemania: adquisición ilimitada de bonos estatales de los países en crisis por parte del Banco Central Europeo, europeízación de las deudas nacionales mediante eurobonos y programas de crecimiento para evitar una depresión en la zona del euro e impulsar su recuperación. Podemos imaginar fácilmente cómo se despotrica en Alemania contra esa clase de programa. ¡Aún más deuda! ¡Pérdida de control de nuestros activos! ¡Inflación! Sencillamente, ¡no funciona! Pero sí que funciona: el crecimiento de Alemania, basado en la exportación, se debe a esa clase de programas precisamente en los países en ascenso y los Estados Unidos. Si China y EE.UU. no hubieran bombeado dinero financiado en parte con deuda en sus economías a comienzos de 2009, la economía alemana habría recibido un golpe muy duro. Ahora los alemanes deben preguntarse si ellos, que han sido quienes más se han beneficiado de la integración europea, están dispuestos a pagar el precio que entraña o preferirían dejarla fracasar. Además de la unificación fiscal y política y políticas de crecimiento a corto plazo, los europeos necesitan urgentemente reformas estructurales encaminadas a restablecer la competitividad de Europa. Cada uno de esos pilares es necesario para que Europa supere su crisis existencial. ¿Entendemos nosotros, los alemanes, nuestra responsabilidad paneuropea? Desde luego, no lo parece. De hecho, raras veces ha estado Alemania tan aislada como ahora. Prácticamente nadie entiende nuestra dogmática política de austeridad, que contradice toda experiencia, y se considera que hemos perdido el rumbo en gran medida, o que vamos como en un coche en dirección contraria a la del tráfico. Aún no es demasiado tarde para cambiar de dirección, pero ahora sólo nos quedan días y semanas, tal vez meses, en lugar de años. Alemania se destruyó a sí misma –y el orden europeo– en dos ocasiones en el siglo XX y después convenció a Occidente de que había sacado las conclusiones oportunas. Sólo de ese modo, reflejado con la mayor claridad en su aceptación del proyecto europeo, obtuvo Alemania la anuencia para su reunificación. Sería a un tiempo trágico e irónico que una Alemania restaurada por medios pacíficos y con la mejor de las intenciones provocara la ruina del orden europeo por tercera vez. Joschka Fischer, ministro de Asuntos Exteriores y Vicecanciller de Alemania de 1998 a 2005, fue un dirigente del Partido Verde alemán durante casi veinte años. © Project Syndicate 2012. Traducido del inglés por Carlos Manzano

As Greece Turns Leftward, Its Tycoons Stay in Background

New York Times ATHENS — While money pours out of Greek banks and Europe debates whether or not Greece deserves its next handout, the people potentially in the best position to help shore up the nation’s finances are mainly keeping their heads down. They are among the wealthiest Greeks — whether shipping magnates, whose tax-free status is enshrined in the constitution, or the so-called oligarchs who have accumulated vast wealth via their dominance in core areas of the economy like oil, gas, media, banking and even cement. Astute investors, they have been reluctant to lend a hand to the Greek treasury through the risky proposition of buying government bonds. But they have also been slow to dispense funds to philanthropies trying to combat the mounting social ills that their nation’s economic collapse has wrought — drawing a sharp rebuke from the head of a foundation created from Greek shipping wealth that has become Greece’s largest charitable donor in recent years.Mainly, though, they have done what Greeks from the richest to those of modest means have traditionally done: pay as little as they can in the way of taxes. Many economists say the oligarchs are a big part of Greece’s economic problem, because they have capitalized on the insular, quasi-monopolistic approach to business that is one reason their nation has long lagged the far more competitive economies of many other euro zone nations. The moneyed elite in Greece have always been secretive in nature, especially when it comes to their fortunes. Assessing the ultimate value of Greek private sector wealth is a nearly impossible task, because much of the money exists offshore, secreted away in Swiss bank accounts or invested in real estate in London and Monaco. And now, with the country’s top vote-getter, the leftist firebrand Alexis Tsipras, talking more and more about nationalizing companies and industries and, in the words of his top economic adviser, “taxing the rich,” there is even more incentive to lie low. Of course, the left is not alone in this view. “Let’s be frank — the well-off need to pay their fair share of taxes,” Bob Traa, the International Monetary Fund’s representative in Greece, said in a speech last year in Athens. Last year alone, an estimated 8 billion euros ($10.2 billion) in collectible taxes were in arrears — nearly half of the country’s budget deficit. The nation’s tycoons have every incentive to keep their country in the euro currency union. The question is, Are they willing to bear the cost of doing so? “The oligarchs want to keep the euro — largely because of the banks which are so deeply integrated in the euro system,” said Costas Lapavitsas, an economist at the University of London. “But they are keeping quiet about it.” But as children go hungry in Greek schools because their parents have no money with which to feed them, and the streets of Athens become home to growing numbers of desperate, jobless people, pressure is mounting on the country’s rich to do what the state can no longer effectively do: write checks. After all, philanthropy is a Greek word. But with many wealthy Greeks still fearful of showing their financial hand, private giving to date has been relatively meager. “I get the sense that almost nothing is being done,” said Andreas C. Dracopoulos, co-president of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which was set up in the 1990s to put to charitable use the winnings of its shipping tycoon founder. “Everyone is saying let someone else do it, and so far I am seeing little action.” This January, the Niarchos foundation, which describes itself as an international charity with offices in Athens, New York and Monaco, said it would donate 100 million euros to a series of projects aimed at helping Greeks cope with the economic crisis. Plans include food vouchers to help destitute parents feed their children and programs to attack the growing epidemic of homelessness in big cities like Athens and Piraeus. Shipping analysts guess that the value of Greek shipping assets alone is about $85 billion — although they hasten to add that those assets underpin a substantial debt burden of around 300 billion euros ($380 billion) for the industry, used to finance vessels that can cost hundreds of millions of euros each. And in the slack global economy, shipping — and shipping magnates — are feeling the pinch. Thanassis Martinos, a second-generation shipping heir, said his company, Eastern Mediterranean, was having one of its worst years on record and was likely to lose money in 2012. Página 2 de 2 Still, he and some other shipping billionaires say they are doing their part. In addition to philanthropic giving, Mr. Martinos said it was important that wealthier Greeks contribute by providing jobs for the country’s increasingly rootless youth, among whom employment is above 50 percent. That is why, despite the slump in his business, he said he had refrained from laying off workers. “The biggest problem is not feeding young people,” he said. “It is giving them jobs.” Another rich shipper, who insisted on not being identified because he did not want to draw attention to himself, said that he was providing thousands of free meals to families in and around his ancestral village. Several shippers said they had also donated to a nascent campaign being organized by the trade group that represents Greek shipowners in Athens — although its president, Theodoros Veniamis, declined to say how much money they hoped to raise. What the shipping magnates are not doing, though, is paying taxes. Mr. Martinos’s company, for example, bases its fleet of tankers offshore — as do all shipping companies here — although the administrative offices are in Athens. Greece’s income tax revenue is 7.3 percent of gross domestic product, well below the 11 percent average for euro zone countries, according to Eurostat. Even so, there has been little talk by recent governments or even by Greece’s financial backers about imposing taxes on shippers — a move, it is assumed, that would prompt them to take their business elsewhere. That is a blow Greece would have trouble absorbing. The shipping industry employs about 200,000 people. And it brought in 13 billion euros in foreign exchange in 2010, making it the country’s top single foreign-exchange earner. Would shipping’s special tax exclusion change under a left-wing government? It is hard to say. Euclid Tsakalotos, a top economic adviser to Mr. Tsipras, said in an interview last week that the first thing Mr. Tsipras would do was to “tax the people that past governments have been afraid of taxing.” Mr. Martinos says such an outcome is unlikely, given shipping’s vital role in the economy. Greek shippers are also some of the country’s largest investors, owning large tracts of real estate and interests in tourism, banking and media. “I don’t think the policy will change,” he said. “Shipping is a net profit for Greece.” Many shipowners and other wealthy Greeks are said to be taking the long view, arguing that Greeks will come to their senses in the next election and not vote in large numbers for Mr. Tsipras if they become convinced that it means a forced march out of the euro zone. But privately, they cannot ignore the increasingly grim economic and social environment — which is why some have bolstered their already tight security forces by hiring more bodyguards. Peter Nomikos, a 33-year-old shipping scion, has started a campaign to raise money from Greek businesses and individuals and then, through a foundation he set up in the United States, use those funds to buy back as many of Greece’s deeply discounted bonds on the open market as possible. The plan would be to retire them to help bring down the country’s staggering debt burden, which is now 350 billion euros — 165 percent of the nation’s G.D.P. Mr. Nomikos is also building a microbrewery on Santorini, the island of his shipping forefathers. He says that he hopes to create a few jobs in the community and that he plans to contribute 50 percent of the profit to the foundation. “No single person is rich enough to bail out Greece — not least myself,” said Mr. Nomikos, who through his beer company has already bought 100,000 euros worth of bonds at current rock bottom prices of around 15 euro cents on the euro.

The Third Industrial Revolution (The Economist)

THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers’ cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week’s special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides.
A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line.
Towards a third dimension
The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together. Now a product can be designed on a computer and “printed” on a 3D printer, which creates a solid object by building up successive layers of material. The digital design can be tweaked with a few mouseclicks. The 3D printer can run unattended, and can make many things which are too complex for a traditional factory to handle. In time, these amazing machines may be able to make almost anything, anywhere—from your garage to an African village.
The applications of 3D printing are especially mind-boggling. Already, hearing aids and high-tech parts of military jets are being printed in customised shapes. The geography of supply chains will change. An engineer working in the middle of a desert who finds he lacks a certain tool no longer has to have it delivered from the nearest city. He can simply download the design and print it. The days when projects ground to a halt for want of a piece of kit, or when customers complained that they could no longer find spare parts for things they had bought, will one day seem quaint.
Other changes are nearly as momentous. New materials are lighter, stronger and more durable than the old ones. Carbon fibre is replacing steel and aluminium in products ranging from aeroplanes to mountain bikes. New techniques let engineers shape objects at a tiny scale. Nanotechnology is giving products enhanced features, such as bandages that help heal cuts, engines that run more efficiently and crockery that cleans more easily. Genetically engineered viruses are being developed to make items such as batteries. And with the internet allowing ever more designers to collaborate on new products, the barriers to entry are falling. Ford needed heaps of capital to build his colossal River Rouge factory; his modern equivalent can start with little besides a laptop and a hunger to invent.
Like all revolutions, this one will be disruptive. Digital technology has already rocked the media and retailing industries, just as cotton mills crushed hand looms and the Model T put farriers out of work. Many people will look at the factories of the future and shudder. They will not be full of grimy machines manned by men in oily overalls. Many will be squeaky clean—and almost deserted. Some carmakers already produce twice as many vehicles per employee as they did only a decade or so ago. Most jobs will not be on the factory floor but in the offices nearby, which will be full of designers, engineers, IT specialists, logistics experts, marketing staff and other professionals. The manufacturing jobs of the future will require more skills. Many dull, repetitive tasks will become obsolete: you no longer need riveters when a product has no rivets.
The revolution will affect not only how things are made, but where. Factories used to move to low-wage countries to curb labour costs. But labour costs are growing less and less important: a $499 first-generation iPad included only about $33 of manufacturing labour, of which the final assembly in China accounted for just $8. Offshore production is increasingly moving back to rich countries not because Chinese wages are rising, but because companies now want to be closer to their customers so that they can respond more quickly to changes in demand. And some products are so sophisticated that it helps to have the people who design them and the people who make them in the same place. The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.
The shock of the new
Consumers will have little difficulty adapting to the new age of better products, swiftly delivered. Governments, however, may find it harder. Their instinct is to protect industries and companies that already exist, not the upstarts that would destroy them. They shower old factories with subsidies and bully bosses who want to move production abroad. They spend billions backing the new technologies which they, in their wisdom, think will prevail. And they cling to a romantic belief that manufacturing is superior to services, let alone finance.
None of this makes sense. The lines between manufacturing and services are blurring. Rolls-Royce no longer sells jet engines; it sells the hours that each engine is actually thrusting an aeroplane through the sky. Governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online, turn them into products at home and market them globally from a garage. As the revolution rages, governments should stick to the basics: better schools for a skilled workforce, clear rules and a level playing field for enterprises of all kinds. Leave the rest to the revolutionaries.

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society. Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites. Also see: Live Chat With Stephen Marche The author will be online at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, April 16, to answer readers' questions. Click the link above for details. Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information. At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination. Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response. When you sign up for Google+ and set up your Friends circle, the program specifies that you should include only “your real friends, the ones you feel comfortable sharing private details with.” That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer. Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site’s promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive. Americans are more solitary than ever before. In 1950, less than 10 percent of American households contained only one person. By 2010, nearly 27 percent of households had just one person. Solitary living does not guarantee a life of unhappiness, of course. In his recent book about the trend toward living alone, Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, writes: “Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction, that best predicts loneliness.” True. But before we begin the fantasies of happily eccentric singledom, of divorcées dropping by their knitting circles after work for glasses of Drew Barrymore pinot grigio, or recent college graduates with perfectly articulated, Steampunk-themed, 300-square-foot apartments organizing croquet matches with their book clubs, we should recognize that it is not just isolation that is rising sharply. It’s loneliness, too. And loneliness makes us miserable. We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state. A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety. Still, loneliness is slippery, a difficult state to define or diagnose. The best tool yet developed for measuring the condition is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a series of 20 questions that all begin with this formulation: “How often do you feel …?” As in: “How often do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with the people around you?” And: “How often do you feel that you lack companionship?” Measuring the condition in these terms, various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness. The new studies on loneliness are beginning to yield some surprising preliminary findings about its mechanisms. Almost every factor that one might assume affects loneliness does so only some of the time, and only under certain circumstances. People who are married are less lonely than single people, one journal article suggests, but only if their spouses are confidants. If one’s spouse is not a confidant, marriage may not decrease loneliness. A belief in God might help, or it might not, as a 1990 German study comparing levels of religious feeling and levels of loneliness discovered. Active believers who saw God as abstract and helpful rather than as a wrathful, immediate presence were less lonely. “The mere belief in God,” the researchers concluded, “was relatively independent of loneliness.” But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant. In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring. We need professional carers more and more, because the threat of societal breakdown, once principally a matter of nostalgic lament, has morphed into an issue of public health. Being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. Loneliness may not have killed Yvette Vickers, but it has been linked to a greater probability of having the kind of heart condition that did kill her. And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price. Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.” Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating. We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely. The question of the future is this: Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating; is it a huddling-together for warmth or a shuffling-away in pain? Well before Facebook, digital technology was enabling our tendency for isolation, to an unprecedented degree. Back in the 1990s, scholars started calling the contradiction between an increased opportunity to connect and a lack of human contact the “Internet paradox.” A prominent 1998 article on the phenomenon by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed that increased Internet usage was already coinciding with increased loneliness. Critics of the study pointed out that the two groups that participated in the study—high-school journalism students who were heading to university and socially active members of community-development boards—were statistically likely to become lonelier over time. Which brings us to a more fundamental question: Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet? The question has intensified in the Facebook era. A recent study out of Australia (where close to half the population is active on Facebook), titled “Who Uses Facebook?,” found a complex and sometimes confounding relationship between loneliness and social networking. Facebook users had slightly lower levels of “social loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with friends—but “significantly higher levels of family loneliness”—the sense of not feeling bonded with family. It may be that Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships—or it may be that people who have unhappy family relationships in the first place seek companionship through other means, including Facebook. The researchers also found that lonely people are inclined to spend more time on Facebook: “One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall. Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says. On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression. “If two women each talk to their friends the same amount of time, but one of them spends more time reading about friends on Facebook as well, the one reading tends to grow slightly more depressed,” Burke says. Her conclusion suggests that my sometimes unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable. A lot of other people doing the same thing feel a little bit worse, too. Still, Burke’s research does not support the assertion that Facebook creates loneliness. The people who experience loneliness on Facebook are lonely away from Facebook, too, she points out; on Facebook, as everywhere else, correlation is not causation. The popular kids are popular, and the lonely skulkers skulk alone. Perhaps it says something about me that I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking. I mention to Burke the widely reported study, conducted by a Stanford graduate student, that showed how believing that others have strong social networks can lead to feelings of depression. What does Facebook communicate, if not the impression of social bounty? Everybody else looks so happy on Facebook, with so many friends, that our own social networks feel emptier than ever in comparison. Doesn’t that make people feel lonely? “If people are reading about lives that are much better than theirs, two things can happen,” Burke tells me. “They can feel worse about themselves, or they can feel motivated.” Burke will start working at Facebook as a data scientist this year. John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology. He found higher levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone, in the morning urine of lonely people. Loneliness burrows deep: “When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely. To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook’s effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either. In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy. “Facebook can be terrific, if we use it properly,” Cacioppo continues. “It’s like a car. You can drive it to pick up your friends. Or you can drive alone.” But hasn’t the car increased loneliness? If cars created the suburbs, surely they also created isolation. “That’s because of how we use cars,” Cacioppo replies. “How we use these technologies can lead to more integration, rather than more isolation.” The problem, then, is that we invite loneliness, even though it makes us miserable. The history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved. When the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company opened its A&P stores, giving Americans self-service access to groceries, customers stopped having relationships with their grocers. When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors. Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Researchers at the HP Social Computing Lab who studied the nature of people’s connections on Twitter came to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.” I have to wonder: What other point of view is meaningful? Loneliness is certainly not something that Facebook or Twitter or any of the lesser forms of social media is doing to us. We are doing it to ourselves. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse. We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around. Every time I shop at my local grocery store, I am faced with a choice. I can buy my groceries from a human being or from a machine. I always, without exception, choose the machine. It’s faster and more efficient, I tell myself, but the truth is that I prefer not having to wait with the other customers who are lined up alongside the conveyor belt: the hipster mom who disapproves of my high-carbon-footprint pineapple; the lady who tenses to the point of tears while she waits to see if the gods of the credit-card machine will accept or decline; the old man whose clumsy feebleness requires a patience that I don’t possess. Much better to bypass the whole circus and just ring up the groceries myself. Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall. But the price of this smooth sociability is a constant compulsion to assert one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. Not only must we contend with the social bounty of others; we must foster the appearance of our own social bounty. Being happy all the time, pretending to be happy, actually attempting to be happy—it’s exhausting. Last year a team of researchers led by Iris Mauss at the University of Denver published a study looking into “the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” Most goals in life show a direct correlation between valuation and achievement. Studies have found, for example, that students who value good grades tend to have higher grades than those who don’t value them. Happiness is an exception. The study came to a disturbing conclusion: Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms. The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point. Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life. Its capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company. Two of the most compelling critics of Facebook—neither of them a Luddite—concentrate on exactly this point. Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget, was one of the inventors of virtual-reality technology. His view of where social media are taking us reads like dystopian science fiction: “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.” Lanier argues that Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, to his mind, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside. Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT who in 1995 published the digital-positive analysis Life on the Screen, is much more skeptical about the effects of online society in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’” Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.” Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people. A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume—750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend—but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users—and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user—log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee. Yvette Vickers’s computer was on when she died. Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

Camila Vallejo

Fidelidad

Editorial The Clinic

Patricio Fernández 12 Abril, 2012 Tags: Camila Vallejo, cuba, Fidel Castro

Lo que pasa en Cuba no es chacota, Camila, al menos para quienes valoramos la libertad. Por eso tus declaraciones, tras viajar a la isla, son un gravísimo error. Y digo error, para exculparte. A alguien de tu generación, sin deudas ni compromisos acumulados, no le corresponde seguir repitiendo como loro las consignas de sus antepasados. La realidad cubana está en las antípodas del mito gastado que algunos continúan defendiendo, ya sea por intereses espurios, terquedad o simple ignorancia.

Todos mis amigos de allá, los que viven adentro y los exiliados, son de izquierda (si acaso esta palabra significa algo), y detestan a Fidel. Han seguido con entusiasmo el movimiento estudiantil chileno. Se sienten identificados, porque han visto en él la irrupción de fuerzas frescas por una causa justa. Su equivalente en Cuba, sin ningún lugar a dudas, sienten que está en la oposición a la dictadura. Son los jóvenes rockeros, los escritores, los vanguardistas y los numerosísimos hastiados. Los Castro son la derecha dura. Actúan como los patrones de un gran fundo en el que los ciudadanos son tratados como inquilinos. Antes de transformarse en una vieja encorvada, Fidel se paseaba con un aire de superioridad insoportable. Tú dices que no viste nada raro: “No vi en ningún momento gases lacrimógenos, vi a la policía circulando por las ciudades sólo con su uniforme, sin cascos ni armas de ningún tipo. Ese nivel de cultura cívica, tanto del Estado como del conjunto de la sociedad, está a años luz de la represión que vivió el movimiento estudiantil el año pasado”.

Semejante declaración, Camila, sinceramente, está a la altura de los comentarios de las señoronas pinochetistas, para las que el Chile del régimen militar era un oasis de tranquilidad. El cineasta y actor cubano, Ismael Diego, hijo de revolucionarios, te lo explicó en una carta próxima y afectuosa: “Los coches lanza agua, los gases lacrimógenos y demás maquinaria represiva a las que usted está acostumbrada, no son la única forma de represión que existe. En Cuba se aplican otros métodos, en gran medida porque no va dirigida a una muchedumbre que se manifiesta en plena calle y que además responde con violencia, quizás justificada, ante la agresión. Aquí la represión va dirigida principalmente a grupos defensores de los derechos humanos, periodistas independientes, activistas políticos, blogueros, artistas e intelectuales, todas personas de ideas, de ideas incómodas para el sistema, pero de ideas. Personas pacíficas que, hasta la fecha, no han realizado ningún acto público que se asemeje a lo que usted ha experimentado, entre otras cosas, porque no tienen ese derecho. Y es ese, el acto de manifestarse a plenitud en las calles, el mayor temor que mueve al sistema represivo en mi país”. Para la visita del Papa, Camila, detuvieron a mucha gente, buena parte de los cuales siguen presos, solo por gritar en público.

Jamás autorizaría el gobierno una concentración en la Plaza de la Revolución. La ciudadanía teme expresarse. El nivel de control que se ejerce desde los CDR (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución), es impresionante. Están en todos los barrios, y caer en desgracia con sus funcionarios conduce a la ruina, cuando no a penas mayores. Últimamente no han sido pocas las pateaduras. Cuba no es Fidel, y el afecto por ese pueblo no se manifiesta avalando al sistema que lo oprime. Te preguntaron por la importancia de las redes sociales en la lucha de los jóvenes chilenos, y contestaste que había sido muchísima, y luego agregaste algo que no termino de comprender: que se trataba de una “herramienta del capitalismo”. ¿Los avances tecnológicos son “herramientas del capitalismo”?¿O lo capitalista es la interconexión? Porque no sé si te diste cuenta, pero allá en Cuba, salvo contadas excepciones, la internet está prohibida. Dijiste que en Chile la prensa estaba controlada por un duopolio –cosa harto cierta-, en la Meca de la falta de libertad de expresión. Allá no podríamos tener esta revista. Existen sólo el Granma y Juventud Rebelde, y ambos parecen folletos parroquiales.

Las verdaderas noticias circulan de boca en boca. “La bola”, le llaman ellos. ¿Viste en los noticieros de televisión a alguien hablando contra el régimen? Buena parte de la energía que tú encarnaste, aquí se vio traicionada. Los hermanos Castro no son ninguna luz ni guía para los que aspiramos a una sociedad más libre, participativa e igualitaria. Todo lo contrario. Tú pudiste ser la que se rebelara contra lo predecible, pero la disciplina fue más fuerte. En lugar de hurguetear tras bambalinas, te contentaste con el tour oficial, caíste de rodillas ante el barbón de los afiches, flameaste la bandera del Partido en vez de representar a tus auténticos cómplices habaneros. Las críticas que recibas de los que apoyaron a Pinochet, valen poco y nada. No tienen cara para quejarse de los abusos de una dictadura. Te recuerdo que varios de ellos evaden sus responsabilidades diciendo que de haber sabido lo que ocurría, no la hubieran apoyado. Estamos peleando por más y mejor democracia, ¿cierto, Camila?