After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind

By Phil Zabriskie, Published: January 27

Sonja Sohn stood in front of her audience, confident about the performance she was about to give. This wasn’t surprising, considering her history as an actress who was just coming off a five-year run as Det. Shakima “Kima” Greggs on HBO’s “The Wire,” one of the most critically acclaimed shows in television history. To project professionalism, she had pulled her hair back and was wearing pressed slacks and a collared shirt. Her motivation was clear, her research was done, and after many months of preparation, she was ready.

There was no script, though. Her “stage” was a classroom at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, and her “audience” — made up of teenagers and young adults whose lives could have beenmined for “The Wire” — wasn’t about to grant her anything based on her past credits. Not 18-year-old Tyrea Daniels, who guesses he had been arrested eight or nine times by then for selling drugs and stealing cars; 16-year-old Latavia Cornish, who says she was “always outside, stealing, getting locked up”; or 21-year-old Sean Hawkins, who had been “thuggin’ it up” since he dropped out of high school, “selling drugs, partying, stealing, robbing everything in sight.” They and about 15 people from similar backgrounds were slouched in their chairs, warily eyeing Sohn and each other.

This was late in 2009, during the first session of ReWired for Life, a program Sohn had conceived of years earlier and devoted herself to building after “The Wire” signed off. She hadn’t been ready to leave the show behind, neither what it stood for nor the Baltimore streets on which it had filmed. It was more than that, though. “I had an extraordinarily strong sense of purpose,” she says, in the same half-purr, half-growl voice familiar to fans of “The Wire.” “My entire life had become about this.”

All of which meant little to Daniels, Cornish and Hawkins. It was cool to meet Kima because they had loved the show and loved seeing their reality depicted on screen. And free food was never a bad thing. Beyond that, they didn’t expect much. They had all been prodded to come by probation officers, counselors and parents.

“We are talking about a throwaway population that adults think are too far gone,” Sohn says later. “We’re talking about kids that people have given up on over and over and over again. They don’t feel like anyone is there for them. They may have parents who love them, but they’ve been falling back on themselves for so long that if you come in front of their faces talking, and not backing it up with action, you just become another one of the people who have disappointed them.”

Sohn, then in her early 40s, was certain that if the right people came to ReWired at the right time, they could benefit immensely, maybe even transform their lives. She didn’t expect it to happen in that first session, but she believed in herself, she believed in her plan, and she believed that transformation, even here, was possible.

Hawkins, for one, wasn’t buying it. He had grown up near Green Mount Cemetery on the east side, then over by Walbrook Junction on the west side. His father was in jail. His mother and her boyfriend encouraged him, but their voices faded when he stepped out the door and walked past one boarded-up house after another. He was clearly smart, but he quit school because the people he saw getting ahead — getting paid, getting girls, getting respect — were the guys in the game, hustling. After a string of arrests left him facing the possibility of a long prison stretch, however, he began to see things differently. He was about to become a father, and his girlfriend already had another child, meaning he was on the verge of abandoning his kids just like his father had done. He resolved to make changes, but GED programs and job hunting made him feel, he says, like “a blind man in a black room trying to find a black hat.”

Sohn was offering to help, but he figured she must have had an angle. Why else would she be here?

“A lot of the way I live my life has nothing to do with logic,” Sohn says, but Hawkins didn’t know that and didn’t know how committed Sohn would prove to be. Sohn might not have known herself, actually. But she did believe that she could understand what these kids had been through — because she’d been through it, too.

***

Landing the part of Kima was a huge break, but when filming started in 2002, Sohn was awash in anxiety, forgetting lines, feeling disoriented. She was a professional actress in her mid-30s. She had done this before. This shouldn’t have been so hard.

But “The Wire” wasn’t a typical TV series. Over five seasons, it chronicled the uneven, often quixotic efforts of police, drug dealers, junkies, teachers, dock workers, kids and ex-cons to improve their lots. The show’s writing team, led by former Baltimore Sun staffer David Simon and featuring former Baltimore detective and public school teacher Ed Burns, weren’t trying to create entertainment per se, says Simon, but rather “a dialectic about urban issues and poverty, and the drug war and economics.” They pursued authenticity above all else, ruthlessly refusing to provide happy endings and instead using language, location and narrative to pull viewers into a world of, as Simon puts it, “people who have been separated economically, socially, politically from the rest of America” — and then insisting that we all share stakes in, and responsibility for, the future we are building.

For Sohn, though, the material was “kicking my whole thing up,” she says. She had grown up in Newport News, Va., in an area much like the Baltimore neighborhoods in which “The Wire” was set. Cops were not the good guys where she came from, so even acting the part was unnerving. The show’s broader message made it palatable, says Simon. “I think that was a great relief to her, because I think she had some latent sense of horror that she was going to be working on a cop show as a cop,” but the fractured lives in the script conjured barbed memories. Her father was an African American Army vet from the poor side of Winston-Salem, N.C., her mother a Korean he had met while in the service who had grown up during the worst of the Korean War. Sohn was raised in a public housing project that resembled the West Baltimore low-rises the drug crew in “The Wire” controlled in the show’s first season. There was a good deal of fighting in the streets and in her home. Her father was prone to violent rages during which he battered Sohn’s mother and threatened to do worse.

Home became a place of pure misery, even more so when a babysitter, an older girl, started molesting her. She wanted to run away but didn’t want to leave her mother alone to endure her father’s abuse. Ducking down a nearby alley, she’d write her thoughts on the wall with a broken piece of brick. Or she’d go to a school playground, climb a slide shaped like a rocket ship, and say, again and again, “It’s going to get better,” until one day, better wasn’t enough. “It’s going to be great!” she announced.

“I don’t stay disempowered for long,” she says. But while school, sports and poetry kept her going in her youth, she also started using and selling pot and cocaine. She managed to keep up her grades and hold a job through high school, though, then went to New York, where she started, but didn’t finish, design college. She did, however, fall in love with and marry someone she describes as a nice, stable middle-class guy. They had two daughters together and lived comfortably in Brooklyn, but chaos was never far away. Her drug use continued, and her brother, who had drifted to North Carolina and had his own issues with drugs, was shot and killed after befriending a woman with a violently jealous boyfriend.

Sohn realized she had to make some big changes. Intense therapy and painful self-reflection helped her get off drugs and recalibrate her life. Her marriage didn’t survive, but what she calls her “healing” later involved mending hurts she had both endured and inflicted. Over time, she established good relationships with her ex, her daughters, even her parents — who, she came to think, did their best despite their own tumultuous upbringings.

And she was grateful for her mother’s devotion and the protection she tried to provide (she is now deceased). Sohn was grateful, too, for her father’s encouragement and social justice teachings. He had always discussed the issues of the day with young Sonja, always pointed out political and civic leaders he admired for trying to improve the lives of others. The violence, she believes, stemmed from undiagnosed or mistreated mental illness, an outcropping of his youth — for years, he wasn’t allowed to touch his tuberculosis-ridden mother — and his time in Korea. In later decades, he got treatment, found a supportive church and became a positive part of her life again.

***

Kima and Sonja persevered together, the character surviving a shooting, the actress settling into her role and then growing more invested in the real-life narratives all around her.

Simon and Burns, who had spent a year reporting on a single drug-strewn block to co-write a book called “The Corner,” were both intimately familiar with the aching desperation and stagnant resignation afflicting much of Charm City. Brooklyn-born Jamie Hector, who played ascendant drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, ran a nonprofit theater group in New York for at-risk youth. Gbenga Akinnagbe — a.k.a. Chris Partlow, Stansfield’s dead-eyed hit man — was the son of Nigerian immigrants who spent part of his youth in homeless shelters before riding his wrestling skills to college. To them and others, the material was personal and important, part of something larger.

In 2008, after the final season, Sohn, Hector and Akinnagbe went to North Carolina to campaign for Barack Obama. Sohn was stunned to learn that their work on “The Wire” had bequeathed them a platform. “Something happened to her,” Hector says. “I guess she realized the amount of change she could effect in the lives of young folks.”

Sohn started wondering: What if they took “The Wire” into schools, dissected how characters negotiated their environment and got kids to talk about how they did the same in their lives? Could that help them step outside themselves and see how they were making decisions, how there could be other possibilities?

She shared the idea with Simon, saying she wanted to start an organization called ReWired for Change (ReWired for Life is its pilot program). “I was surprised,” he says. Most TV and movie people who adopt a cause, he adds, “say a few words, they’ll go to a dinner, they’ll give some money, but this is time. Time is the ultimate expenditure.” He gave his blessing but worried about how Sohn would raise money and whether she could succeed where even the best-intentioned Baltimoreans had not. “There was a part of me who wanted to put my arm around her and say” — he takes on an almost pitying tone — “you are about to go on a journey.”

Sohn gathered advice and support at the panels and the college classrooms that cast members from “The Wire” were frequently invited to. She cultivated local contacts and tapped Simon and “Wire” cast mates to join the board and give money. A few Baltimoreans held fundraisers. To cover shortfalls, Sohn figured, “I could drain myself until we got this thing off the ground.”

ReWired for Life, she believed, should be community-based and grounded in both social justice and academic theory. Its facilitators needed credibility, so she recruited “Elder” Ted Sutton, who in the late 1980s had been a shotgun-toting lieutenant under legendary Baltimore drug kingpin Melvin Williams but now counseled gang members looking to get out of the game, and Greg “Shamsuddin” Carpenter, a convert to Islam who spent two decades in prison but now helped former inmates adjust to life on the outside.

Both were there when Sohn met Hawkins, Daniels, Cornish and the others for the inaugural session and explained that they were embarking on four 12-week “modules.” Initially, Sohn said, they’d focus on self-reflection, on ways “to become more aware of yourself and your history, and to understand how you got to where you are.” The second module would break down “how you think and how your thinking informs your decision making.” This was greeted with a collective shrug, but she pressed on. “The next couple of pieces revolve around your understanding of the world around you” — relationships and affiliations with everyone from friends and family to congregations and cops — and then “taking that critical-thinking model to the world around you, so you can give back.”

***

They met twice a week, two hours per day. They watched parts of Season 1, which focused on the drug trade, and Season 4, which centered on the school system. Then, Sutton, Carpenter and Sohn tried to get the participants to discuss what they had seen and relate it to their own lives. Early on, the conversation was muted. That changed after they watched clips from Season 4 during which four eighth-graders — Naimond, Dukie, Randy and Michael — were coming of age and trying to negotiate the streets. The characters were starting to understand what they wanted, what they needed, and the extent to which they were on their own. That day, Hawkins recalls, “we all started to talk.”

Prompted by other episodes and other exercises in the ensuing weeks, they began sharing stories of fractured home lives, friends who had died, close calls and run-ins with the police. They talked about morality, cause and effect, decisions and consequences. Sohn never dismissed their responsibility, but she knew these were people shaped by events that unfolded over generations, people who developed skills they needed to survive, destructive though they may have been. Daniels, for instance, had been in foster care his entire life, moving from home to home, with no money, no real sense of security. “Tyrea has no family,” Hawkins says with astonishment. “I’ve never met anyone who says, ‘I have no family,’ and they really mean it.

“I went out there to hustle because I wanted to, because I felt like doing it. He hustles because he has to. He robs because he has to.”

Daniels himself recalls being urged to stay in school, but school was just another place he had to protect himself. “When I go to school, I got to watch my back,” he says. And after school, “when I walk the streets, I got to watch my back.”

The group dwindled from 20 to 15, then 10. Those who stayed, though, grew more engaged. They knew that Carpenter, Sutton and, especially, Sohn didn’t have to be there. Hawkins says a measure of trust developed. Toward the end of the session, Sohn and Carpenter led a field trip to North Carolina, stopping on the way in Newport News. “She showed us the project she came from, the school she went to,” Daniels recalls. He says it was like she was telling them: “I went through this, I got my [expletive] together,” and they could, too.

The group became its own support network. When Cornish saw her uncle get shot and killed at a barbecue, and when Hawkins’s younger stepbrother and another good friend were murdered while sitting on an East Baltimore stoop, they could reach out to others who understood what they were going through. In times past, Hawkins would have sought revenge, but he had taken to heart the lesson that “the choices you make lead to consequences.” (He says the killer was later killed in prison.)

This wasn’t Hawkins’s last challenge, though. Sohn nominated him for a mayoral anti-gang violence initiative, so he’d be receiving an award at City Hall. On the day of the ceremony, while waiting for Sutton to give him a ride, Hawkins got a call telling him that some guys had gone to his mother’s house looking for his twin sister’s boyfriend. Hawkins didn’t know the whole story, but “my twin sister, that’s everything to me,” he says, the anger rising in his voice as he remembers. “When she calls, I come running, because she doesn’t call me for something small.”

Sutton, an imposing man known as “Crazy Ted” in his gangster days, had gone through something similar when he was getting out of the game. On the eve of his college graduation, his crew wanted him to help take care of a rival. He said no, and the next day got his degree. He channeled that experience to counsel Hawkins, who Sutton could see was enraged and thinking about violence. As Sutton recalls: “I was like, ‘Look, this is that fork in the road right now. You can already play this whole scenario out in your mind like a chess game.’ ” There’d be a confrontation, retribution, and someone would end up dead or in prison.

“The 15 bus is right there,” Sutton told him, pointing down the street. “You can go to your mother’s house. Or you can get in this car with me.” At the end of the day, “you can be looking at your award at home and happy, or you can be down at central booking.”

Sutton’s words pierced Hawkins’s rage. “I looked, and I thought, and I went on and did what I was supposed to do, because any setback would not take me forward in life,” he says. “That would have taken me 10 steps back.”

“The possibility of a different way of doing things — that’s the key piece.” Sutton says. “A lot of them, they don’t even see another way.”

***

The second group skewed older and had different needs. Nikita Brady was exhausted from years spent on the corners, dealing, fighting, stealing. Her closest friend had been shot and killed. She had been told she could play basketball in college if she could get in, but “I didn’t have that extra push, that motivation, until I met with Sonja,” she says.

“We started to see,” Sohn said, “that although the program is very useful, if you don’t have your GED, and you don’t have a job, and you’re 19 years old, and you’re quitting drug dealing….” She paused. “If in this very moment, you can’t earn money to help yourself, the rest is a moot point.” The participants needed practical life skills they could not learn watching “The Wire” — résumé writing, opening a bank account, handling job interviews, dealing with legal issues.

So Sohn put the third session on hold and started adapting the original vision. But a new opportunity arose. Maj. Melvin Russell, commander of Baltimore’s Eastern District and an early backer, put Sohn in touch with Pastor Marshall Prentice of Zion Baptist Church in East Baltimore. Prentice said Sohn could use a house the church owned farther up East Lanvale Street if she fixed it up. It stood across from two vacant houses, near known drug corners, and it was yet another project to add to her to-do list. But she had long imagined having a house for the program to serve as an anchor in the community ReWired was trying to engage.

Three months later, a large banner hung from the building, welcoming one and all to a free barbecue at the “Village House.” The interior, once dingy and rundown, was now clean, airy and pleasant. Several dozen people gathered out front, and Sohn, in a burgundy dress, buzzed around shaking hands, dispensing hugs, telling people to get something to eat. Sutton was there — when a well-dressed lady said she had come from a funeral, he asked, “Young or old?” Hawkins was there, too. He had found work with a landscaping company but was hoping to find something that paid better. His wife, Shakiara, was about to start a short prison stint for fraud, so it was on him to care for the kids.

Sohn soon started a new gig, too, as Det. Samantha Baker on ABC’s “Body of Proof,” a crime drama filming in Providence. It was a supporting role on a traditional cop show, but it was also a way to keep working and help fund ReWired. She was driving up and down Interstate 95 on a weekly basis, doing her scenes, then heading back to Baltimore. She sounded and looked tired.

Late in 2010 and into 2011, the third session remained on hold, and she was struggling to find the right people to manage ReWired and the Village House. Early in 2011, Daniels got arrested because he had held up an older couple at a bus stop after his foster mother had thrown him out and he had been homeless for several weeks. Sohn was heartened that he called her and said he knew he had done the wrong thing. It showed reflection and accountability, she thought, part of what she had been trying to instill. The group rallied around him, writing to him in jail, sending money, doing whatever they could — while also stressing that he had to make better choices.

One night in March, Daniels, wearing a black Adidas tracksuit, arrived at the Village House for a ReWired meeting. He wouldn’t be sentenced until the summer, but the weeks since he had gotten out of jail had been dispiriting. He was trying to look after his daughter, but job interviews kept stalling when his record came up. Plus, his sentencing judge had earlier said she’d give him 19 years if she saw him again.

Brady was there. She had stepped up efforts to earn her GED because she had been told it would help her get a scholarship at a community college. Hawkins arrived with his son, still trying to find something better than his $7.50-an-hour landscaping gig. His wife was getting out of Jessup soon, but for the time being, “I’m a 24-hour pop!” he said. “It’s nerve -racking. And a lot of brothers can’t do it, and I lost a lot of friends because people would say the stupidest thing to me, like, ‘Why don’t you just give ’em to your mother, and you get out there and get yours?’ ” The answer was simple: “My father wasn’t there for me, and he coulda been. There’s nothing on this earth that could keep me from my son. And to know that everything I do for him and my family makes me a better person. And this program has made me see that there’s another way.”

***

In July, the ReWired crew gathered again at the Village House for a good-bye of sorts. “Body of Proof” was moving to Los Angeles — and Sohn with it.

The gathering was orchestrated by Koli Tengalla, a veteran community activist and a fellow at the Open Society Institute whom Sohn hired to direct the Village House. The program was always designed to function without her. After she left, however, Hawkins, Brady and others asked for more responsibility and set up a snowball stand to raise funds to pay for GED tutoring for their classmates and school supplies for younger kids.

After leaving prison, Shakiara Hawkins started interning at the Village House and was later hired as a full-time assistant. Sean Hawkins got a better paying job, too, in the warehouse of an event production company run by a man who met Sohn at her favorite Baltimore pub and offered his help. Brady was not only working; she had also enrolled at Baltimore County community college and was on the basketball team. Even Daniels had good news: He was sentenced to 61 days after the judge who said she’d give him 19 years was apparently swayed by his story, his pledge to honor his commitment to the court and his ReWired classmates, several of whom attended the sentencing.

Even with the full schedule in California, and a rash of health issues that plagued her last fall, including a burst blood vessel in her colon that landed her in intensive care, Sohn is working closely with Tengalla to plan the next steps for the Village House, trying to develop a mental health piece for the program and trying to connect people like Hawkins and Brady with services ReWired can’t provide, such as job counseling. She’s also searching out new sources of funding and talking up the program in venues such as panel discussions at Harvard and Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Defending Childhood” task force, chaired by former baseball manager Joe Torre.

In December, soon after getting out of the hospital, she flew to Baltimore to testify at the task force’s first hearing. Her voice shaky, she told her tale of transformation, stressing that she had done it, and that there are many kids in Baltimore and elsewhere who can do it — if they get the right help.

It won’t work every time, but “I know what is possible,” she concluded.

Former foreign correspondent Phil Zabriskie is now a writer based in New York. He can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

Pulitzer Prize winner announced as next Philippe Roman Chair at LSE

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce that author and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum will take up the post of Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the School for 2012-13.

Anne Applebaum, who is director of political studies for the Legatum Institute, and a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, will succeed Professor Ramachandra Guha. She takes up the post in October 2012. 

In her journalism, Anne Applebaum writes about US and international politics, with a focus on issues of economic and political transition. She began her career covering the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist in 1989.  In the early 1990s,  she was the foreign editor, and then the deputy editor, of the Spectator magazine.  She then wrote columns for the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Evening Standard newspapers before joining the Washington Post in 2001 

Her best known book, Gulag: a history, narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps. Making extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews, Gulag: a history won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, as well as Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Anne Applebaum said: "I'm delighted to be given this wonderful opportunity to meet and work with the students and faculty of the LSE, one of the few truly global institutions."

The Philippe Roman Chair is based at LSE IDEAS, the centre for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy. The post gives LSE the chance to bring a renowned expert from another part of the world to the School for a year of research, teaching and discussion. Previous holders have been Professors Niall Ferguson, Paul Kennedy, Chen Jian and Giles Keppel.

Professor Arne Westad, co-director of LSE IDEAS, said: "We are delighted that Anne Applebaum will be joining LSE IDEAS for the next academic year. Her current focus on the Stalinization of post-war Central Europe will greatly enhance the centre's research on European affairs and the history of the Cold War and we look forward to welcoming her to LSE in October."

The other co-director, Professor Michael Cox, added: "This is a top appointment, not only is Anne Applebaum the first woman ever to hold this prestigious position, she is also the first Chair to have a real interest and expertise in Central Europe."

Ends

Contact:

Emilia Knight, LSE IDEAS, 020 7107 5363, e.knight@lse.ac.uk

Jess Winterstein, LSE Press Office, 020 7955 7060 or email Pressoffice@lse.ac.uk

27 January 2012

Apple and the American economy

THE macroeconomic discussions that Apple's success prompts tend to be very curious things. Here we have a company that's been phenomenally successful, making products people love and directly creating nearly 50,000 American jobs in doing so, criticised for not locating its manufacturing operations in America, even as Americans complain to Apple about the working conditions of those doing the manufacture abroad: life in dormitories, 12-hour shifts 6 days a week, and low pay. It isn't enough for Apple to have changed the world with its innovative consumer electronics. It must also rebuild American manufacturing, and not just any manufacturing: the manufacturing of decades ago when reasonable hours and high wages were the norm.

The utility of Apple, however, is that it does provide a framework within which we can discuss the significant changes that have occurred across the global economy in recent decades. Contributing to that effort is a very nice and much talked about piece from the New York Times, which asks simply why it is that Apple's manufacturing is located in Asia.

You should read that piece for yourselves, but the story, in a nutshell, is this. Apple's products are assembed in massive factory complexes in China, run by Foxxconn, which also handles the production of consumer electronics for many other large players in the industry:

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

The components that go into the phone are quite often assembled in China, or elsewhere in Asia, as well:

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

All told, the physical production of Apple's products accounts for hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. America, which finds itself several million jobs short of where it would like to be, and particularly short of the middle-skill manufacturing positions that once powered growth in the middle class, seems to want some of those back. Is that a reasonable desire?

How did we get here? A new paper by Richard Baldwin helps lay out some of the story. We can summarise it briefly by noting that specialisation is limited by the extent of the market. When transport costs are very high, the accessible market is quite small, perhaps no more than a village, which will then make nearly everything it needs for itself. As transport costs decline, economic activities may begin to unbundle. As overseas shipping costs fell during the industrial revolution, it became possible for massive industrial cities to specialise in large-scale production and ship their goods to customers all over the world. The concentration of industry in cities, however, was still largely a product of the fact that it was costly to move goods over land. In a port city, you could bring in inputs, process them into outputs, and ship them back out. If it had been necessary to move intermediate goods well inland for manufacture at any point, costs would have soared, making profitable production impossible.

But transport costs continued falling. Shipping became much cheaper and more efficient. Air freight became an economic possibility. And improvements in trucking and freight rail led to stunning drops in the cost of moving goods over land. And so where once producers had crowded on top of each other in cities to take advantage of specialisation without blowing their budget on transport costs, they now began to spread out: first into the suburbs, then into cheaper regions of the same economy, and then, finally, into vastly cheaper economies abroad. This process facilitated the rapid industrialisation of Asian giants like Japan and Korea, while also speeding along the process of deindustrialisation in expensive markets in America and Europe.

At this point, many seemed to conclude that distance was if not dead then dying, and that continued fracturing of supply chains was likely to continue. What actually seems to have occurred is a bit more interesting. Supply chains have indeed continued fracturing, but distance has reasserted itself in two important ways. First, in the advanced world, agglomerations of the talented individuals who design these products have become increasingly important. And secondly, information technology, which allows for better coordination of production processes, has once again made proximity a relevant concern in manufacturing. It's possible to coordinate a supply chain that's draped across an archpelago of Asian economies. To maximise the return to this chain, however, it's still necessary to keep plants reasonably close together. A plant located in America is too distant from Asia to make much economic sense; transit time to the rest of the supply chain in Asia is sufficiently long, in most cases, as to erode the gains to just-in-time production, or unexpected changes in designs or orders. Changing transportation and communication technologies facilitated a shift in manufacturing to Asia, then reinforced its presence there.

It's not necessary to talk about this as an entirely organic process. Unquestionably, Asian governments aggressively pursued manufacturing and subsidised it heavily, both directly and through advantageous exchange rates. As the story points out, Asia has capitalised on other advantages, as well. Cheap labour is one. More flexible land-use, labour, and environmental rules are another; China can erect a massive operation in no time at all, staffed with compliant labour and with little concern about the impact of the factory on watersheds, air quality, and traffic. Skill supply seems to matter as well. China is churning out engineers with basic technical competence (but less, it appears, than a bachelor's degree) by the hundreds of thousands. It would be incorrect to point to any one of these characteristics as the driving force behind the global shift. Rather, these are self-reinforcing factors within a global economy that has multiple stable equilibria. After some level of Asian development and integration, it became more attractive for manufacturers to locate there as more manufacturers located there.

What does this mean for the American economy? The Times piece quotes Steve Jobs as telling President Obama that those jobs aren't coming back, and they probably aren't. Attracting firms back to America wouldn't simply be a matter of helping reduce production costs in America. You'd have to replicate the convenience of the entire supply chain, which would likely be an enormously costly enterprise. Given the quality of the jobs characteristic of these production chains, one should ask whether it might not be a better idea to invest that money elsewhere.

Apple, it's worth pointing out, continues to capture most of the value added in its products. The most valuable aspects of an iPhone, for instance, are its initial design and engineering, which are done in America. Now, one problem with this dynamic is that as one scales up production of Apple products, there are vastly different employment needs across the supply chain. So, it doesn't take lots more designers and programmers to sell 50m iPhones than it does to sell 10m. You have roughly the same number of brains involved, and much more profit per brain. On the manufacturing side, by contrast, employment soars as scale grows. So as the iPhone becomes more popular, you get huge returns to the ideas produced in Cupertino, and small returns but hundreds of thousands of jobs in China.

This discrepancy manifests itself in America as rising income inequality, which makes Apple's choices somewhat politically fraught. At the same time, it's worth asking how the American government might alter its policies so as to make life better for middle- and low-skill workers in America at reasonable cost. Offering heavy subsidies to Apple to get it to relocate production would reduce inequality in America; you'd increase the tax burden which would mostly affect richer households and you'd create low-wage jobs, which would mostly benefit underemployed, low-skill workers. Now, perhaps after we add up everything Americans will decide that this kind of massive intervention in the economy and associated efficiency cost is worth it, in order to provide the dignity of employment, such as it is, to millions of workers. It's worth asking, however, whether there might not be a different and better way forward.

For one thing, it's far from obvious that the embrace of this system by Asian economies is a good thing for them over the long run. In the short term, as Mr Baldwin points out in his paper, industrialisation via biting off bits of global supply chains is in many ways a more superficial form of development than was achieved in earlier periods by Europe, America, Japan, and Korea, all of which developed an entire production capacity from the ground up. There is far less technology transfer in the newer, supply-chain model, for instance, and so it is less clear that Chinese manufacturing hubs will develop the innovative hubs and headquarters that did emerge in America and Japan. Furthermore, technology can change quite rapidly. It is stunning how quickly the present system emerged it might well go away just as quickly, either through mass automation or changes in input costs or shifts in the cost of moving goods and ideas. Who knows, rapid improvements in 3-d printing could take the world economy back to the days of hyperlocalisation in manufacturing.

America has also done very well in the past by looking forward toward the unseen opportunities ahead rather than the obvious opportunities currently being exploited. Think for a moment about the world Apple has created: one in which a very large share of the population is connected to each other and to all sorts of data resources via remarkable and powerful little hand-held computers. The potential to develop new business models for the production and delivery of goods and services is almost unimaginable, and it's safe to say we've only begun to scratch the surface. One can't say in advance what the impact of such businesses will be on employment and earnings, but it might well change the demand for skills within America in unexpected ways. To the extent that China's government is encouraging resources to flow toward manufacturing and assembly, it is reducing its ability to experiment with and develop these new technologies and businesses.

Jobs matter. They certainly matter to the well-being, material and psychological, of those who struggle to find one. Whether they matter enough—and specifically whether these low-skill manufacturing jobs matter enough—to undertake major and costly government interventions in the economy, in the process potentially harming the effectiveness of America's innovative businesses, is the question with which American workers and leaders are now wrestling. The answer seems clear enough to me, though my perspective is obviously different from those elsewhere in the economy. Until there is a meaningful improvement in American labour markets, however, especially for those without a college degree, recapturing those assembly jobs from China will continue to linger as a policy temptation.

THE OBAMA MEMOS

A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society’s cutting edge.

And the world is changing very rapidly. Think social networking, gay marriage, stem cells or the rise of China. Most companies look nothing like they did 50 years ago. Think General Motors, AT&T or Goldman Sachs.

Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery. With few exceptions, just as in the middle of the 20th century, students take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department.

It may be that inertia is appropriate. Part of universities’ function is to keep alive man’s greatest creations, passing them from generation to generation. Certainly anyone urging reform does well to remember that in higher education the United States remains an example to the world, and that American universities compete for foreign students more successfully than almost any other American industry competes for foreign customers.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to speculate: Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different? Here are some guesses and hopes.

1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. This is a consequence of both the proliferation of knowledge — and how much of it any student can truly absorb — and changes in technology. Before the printing press, scholars had to memorize “The Canterbury Tales” to have continuing access to them. This seems a bit ludicrous to us today. But in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.

2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.

For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on individual effort. One leading investment bank has a hiring process in which a candidate must interview with upward of 60 senior members of the firm before receiving an offer. What is the most important attribute they’re looking for? Not GMAT scores or college transcripts, but the ability to work with others. As greater value is placed on collaboration, surely it should be practiced more in our nation’s classrooms.

3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to incorporate audio and visual effects. Think of a music text in which you can hear pieces of music as you read, or a history text in which you can see film clips about what you are reading. But there are more profound changes set in train. There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.

Similarly, it makes sense for students to watch video of the clearest calculus teacher or the most lucid analyst of the Revolutionary War rather than having thousands of separate efforts. Professors will have more time for direct discussion with students — not to mention the cost savings — and material will be better presented. In a 2008 survey of first- and second-year medical students at Harvard, those who used accelerated video lectures reported being more focused and learning more material faster than when they attended lectures in person.

4. As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did. We are not rational calculating machines but collections of modules, each programmed to be adroit at a particular set of tasks. Not everyone learns most effectively in the same way. And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning. Students listen to lectures or they read and then are evaluated on the basis of their ability to demonstrate content mastery. They aren’t asked to actively use the knowledge they are acquiring.

“Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences. Still, with the capacity of modern information technology, there is much more that can be done to promote dynamic learning.

5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.

English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).

As the “Moneyball” story aptly displays in the world of baseball, the marshalling of data to test presumptions and locate paths to success is transforming almost every aspect of human life. It is not possible to make judgments about one’s own medical care without some understanding of probability, and certainly the financial crisis speaks to the consequences of the failure to appreciate “black swan events” and their significance. In an earlier era, when many people were involved in surveying land, it made sense to require that almost every student entering a top college know something of trigonometry. Today, a basic grounding in probability statistics and decision analysis makes far more sense.

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could. Think, for example, of the widespread use of the e-book, or the coming home to roost of debt problems around the industrialized world. Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html?pagewanted=print

This article has been revised to remove an editing error. Derek Bok was not Lawrence Summers’s immediate predecessor as president of Harvard. Dr. Bok first served from 1971 to 1991; Dr. Summers took office in 2001.

The Benefits of Bain Capitalism

THE debate over Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital, in which several of his Republican rivals sound as if they’re auditioning for a production of “Les Misérables,” is at heart a debate about the last 30 years of American capitalism.

In the decades after World War II, the United States economy was highly regulated, highly taxed and highly successful. War, tyranny and ideological mania had devastated our competitors, and while Asia stagnated and Europe struggled to rebuild, America grew and grew and grew. It was a golden age for the liberal model of political economy, with a powerful regulatory state presiding over labor-management cooperation and a steadily expanding middle class.

But like all golden ages it passed. First in Europe and then in Asia, competitors emerged to challenge the United States’ economic dominance. In this new landscape, the pillars of the postwar economic order began to look like liabilities. Our heavily unionized industries seemed sclerotic, our regulatory system stifling, our tax rates punitive. And so American policy makers, C.E.O.’s and investors responded by changing their priorities — privileging growth over security, efficiency over equality, and embracing creative destruction on a scale that would have been unthinkable in the America of 1955.

In the private sector, this revolution was driven by men like Mitt Romney. As Ben Wallace-Wells put it in a New York magazine profile last October, Romney has spent his entire career seeking to “perfect” the American corporation, stripping “its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.”

This process didn’t just involve pillaging companies and throwing their employees out onto the street, as Romney’s more overheated critics charge. While Bain’s record is hard to assess from the outside, one comprehensive study cited by Reihan Salam in The Daily suggests that private equity buyouts in general tend to have “only a modest net impact on employment” in the companies involved.

But neither was Romney the Henry Ford-esque job creator he’s tried to play on the campaign trail. He served his investors, not his employees, and his goal was always to make an uncompetitive company competitive, even if that required cutting paychecks and shuttering plants along the way. What’s more, Bain usually found a way to reap profits even when the overhaul failed and the company went belly-up.

In the broadest sense, though, the competitiveness revolution was good for the United States. In the 1970s, there were sound economic reasons to expect that other developed nations would gradually catch up to American living standards and per capita G.D.P. Instead, our rivals got rich, but we stayed richer. As Adam Davidson noted in last weekend’s Times Magazine, “even Europe’s best-performing large country, Germany, is about 20 percent poorer than the U.S. on a per-person basis.”

But keeping America’s edge came at a cost. Our economy became more efficient, but also more ruthless and Darwinian. Our G.D.P. kept rising, but the new wealth was less evenly distributed. The revolution delivered growth, but at the expense of stability and certainty. And for many Americans, even the “modest net impact” of private equity buyouts cost them a solid, good-paying job.

On the left, and now apparently in Newt Gingrich’s campaign shop, there’s a persistent suggestion that it could have been entirely otherwise — that the midcentury model could have somehow been sustained, that the private equity “vultures” could have been held at bay, and that what worked for the United States when Europe was in ruins and half the world was Marxist-Leninist could have worked in the age of globalization as well.

This is a fantasy, unfortunately — one that belongs to the world of Hollywood endings, where Gordon Gekko is defeated, Blue Star Airlines stays in business and Bud Fox’s dad gets to retire with a solid pension. Indeed, it’s such a fantasy that even Oliver Stone didn’t quite believe in it: In “Wall Street,” Blue Star was saved from Gekko’s clutches — and presumably, from the real-life fate of an Eastern Airlines or a Pan Am — not by a government subsidy or a benevolent Daddy Warbucks, but by a rival buyout specialist.

Still, just because the private equity revolution was necessary doesn’t mean that it was an unmitigated good. And for Mitt Romney to frame criticisms of Bain as just “the bitter politics of envy,” as he did last week, displays a tone-deafness that could cost him the presidency. No one — and certainly no politician — who has profited so immensely from an age of insecurity should ever appear to be lecturing the people who’ve lost out.

Instead, Romney needs to prove to anxious voters that he and his party have more to offer them than just Bain capitalism alone. To win the White House, he’ll need to promise not only competition that leads to growth, but growth that leads to broadly shared prosperity. To defend his revolution, he’ll need to show that he’s reckoned with its costs.

There's more. You go over to a friend's house to watch a football game and some sausage-shaped mutt howls and whines and goes hysterical every time you swear at the ref. When you get up to grab a handful of Doritos, he bounds across the room and rips a chunk out of your calf, then acts like you deserved it.

What's up with these dysfunctional quadrupeds? Why can't they get it through their heads: It's not about you. OK? Parakeets understand this. Turtles do, too. So why not dogs?

Dogs used to be fully integrated into the culture. They ate their disgusting food, slept 18 hours a day and kept their yaps shut. They understood that their mission in life was to go for long walks, kill squirrels, stick their tongue out for photo-ops with the kiddies and scare away intruders. But that was when dogs had names like Rover and Fido and Skippy. Dogs knew their place. They knew where they stood on the depth chart. They never mistook a fire engine or a bawling infant or a grunt from a geriatric house-guest for a Mongol invasion.

But now that dogs have names like Scheherazade and Mr. Bingley and Mingus, they think they own the joint. My sister has a couple of those yappy dogs that look like filthy dust mops, and I'm always getting in trouble for stepping on their paws or accidentally drop-kicking them across the living room. My feeling is: If you don't want to get stepped on, stop impersonating a bedroom slipper. Didn't you guys ever hear of Darwin? And get that hair out of your eyes and try shaking a tail feather every once in a while so the rest of us can tell you're still breathing.

The other day a friend was telling me that "Leo" inadvertently wandered directly into the path of a cow and got spooked. Leo is a dog. The cow didn't have a name. With the exception of Daisy, cows never have names, which is what I love about them. And they don't expect to have names. They're cows. You don't give goldfish, hyenas or future entrées at Smith & Wollensky names like Leo or Daphne or Barnabas. Once you start doing that, they forget pretty soon that they're animals.

People get all weepy when they tell you that their dog just died. They expect you to be compassionate and understanding, as if they'd just lost four sons at Bull Run. Not me. "Valjean did have 17 kinds of cancer and was deaf and blind before you finally had the common decency to put him down," I point out. "So get your chin up, buy another dog. It's not like the dog store's running low on inventory."

When I first moved to my cute little town, it was filled with big, stupid mongrels with loads of time on their hands. They would lie in the sun, snooze and mind their own business. Now my town is filled with Patagonian snow bitches and neurotic dogs that get carted around in iPad cases. Pretty soon you won't be able to live here anymore.

And don't get me started on people who talk about their dogs as if they were children. Nobody ever drove 400 miles round-trip in a single day just to have lunch with their dog on their birthday. And nobody ever spent $200,000 to send a Pekinese to Princeton.

My mom had a cat that lived 15 years. I loved that cat because for 15 solid years it stayed out of my way. We had a good working relationship: You're a pet; I'm a human. Let's keep it that way. Cats get the big picture. Cats stick to the agenda. Cats keep a low profile. To paraphrase Bob Dylan: Cats don't need you and, man, they expect the same.

Just for the record, my mom's cat was named Tom.