Wealthy, tranquil Norway seemed a world apart from the violence and extremism that has wracked other parts of the planet. That illusion was shattered in July when Anders Behring Breivik -- a far-right madman obsessed with a purported Muslim takeover of Europe -- set off a bomb in Oslo and went on a killing spree at an island youth camp, killing 77 people. In the aftermath, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg provided a case study in how to guide a nation through trauma. Stoltenberg emphasized the principles that have made Norway the envy of the world in the first place. "We will never abandon our values," he told Norwegians two days later. "Our reply is: more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivete."
In the months since, Stoltenberg has resisted pressures to institute greater domestic surveillance measures and maintained a pro-immigration stance. As he put it: "We need to accept that there are extreme views out there, too. They cannot be silenced to death, but debated to death."
Within the world of development economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are known as the "randomistas" for eschewing grandiose solutions to eradicate poverty in favor of randomized field trials. Through their Poverty Action Lab, they have studied how the world's poor make economic decisions -- in the process redrawing the battle lines between those who call for massive infusions of government aid and those who reject the usefulness of aid altogether.
In their book this year, Poor Economics, Banerjee and Duflo argue that hunger is not solely the result of being unable to afford enough food. Just like every other consumer on the planet, they found, the world's poor purchase goods based on the human desire for short-term pleasure over long-term gain. "What if the poor aren't starving, but choosing to spend their money on other priorities?" they asked in a Foreign Policy article this year. From Indonesian villages to rural Morocco, they met people who would fall comfortably within the international definition of hungry, yet were forsaking needed nutrients for better-tasting treats or a DVD player.
What to do? For starters, they suggest leaving the grand, one-size-fits-all solutions where they belong: back at the academy.
BANERJEE
Muse Voltaire.
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? China.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Spring.
Reading list Open City, by Teju Cole; Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, by Mohammed Hanif; Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
DUFLO
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? China.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Spring.
Reading list Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuscinski; Richard III, by William Shakespeare; Trespass, by Rose Tremain.
Mikko Hypponen spends his days waist-deep in worms and viruses -- of the virtual kind. A leading expert on cybersecurity, he has played a key role in helping us understand -- and then stop -- some of the dangerous menaces of the digital age. There were the worms Sobig.F, which Hypponen and his team dismantled in 2003, and Sasser, which they spotted in 2004; more recently, he has monitored hacking at Sony, as well as security threats to mobile devices.
Hypponen's most high-profile case by far, however, is Stuxnet (and Duqu, its recent clone), and here his investigations shed much-needed light on the complex new world of cyberwar, where the bad guys and good guys alike -- from shadowy computer hacks to major world powers -- are now fighting. Last year, Stuxnet was discovered to have attacked nuclear centrifuges in Iran beginning in 2009. Some suspected Israel, but Hypponen has posited that it was the U.S. government. "If you look at who has the know-how, who has the technology, who has the motive, it's pretty obvious," he told Forbes this year.
For Hypponen, who has been consulted by law-enforcement officials on three continents, Stuxnet proves that cyberattacks can affect the offline world -- the increasingly networked water, power, and transportation systems that we all rely on. As he put it, "If the Internet doesn't work, or if computers don't work, our society doesn't work."
Muse Twitter.
Stimulus or austerity? Neither will fundamentally address the pain being felt by people and governments.
America or China? Both. Neither. Superpowers were a 20th-century phenomenon.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Arab Spring.
Reading list Gurumarkkinointi, by Antti Apunen and Jari Parantainen; DarkMarket, by Misha Glenny; Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, by Kevin Poulsen.
Best idea Plastic recycling as invented by Mike Biddle.
Worst idea Social networks that don't actually delete your data when you press "delete."
SUBJECTS:
(228)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE