Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century E-Book

Nicolas Berggruen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 247

Beschreibung

For decades, liberal democracy has been extolled as the best system of governance to have emerged out of the long experience of history. Today, such a confident assertion is far from self-evident. Democracy, in crisis across the West, must prove itself. In the West today, the authors argue, we no longer live in "industrial democracies," but "consumer democracies" in which the governing ethos has ended up drowning households and governments in debt and resulted in paralyzing partisanship. In contrast, the long-term focus of the decisive and unified leadership of China is boldly moving its nation into the future. But China also faces challenges arising from its meteoric rise. Its burgeoning middle class will increasingly demand more participation, accountability of government, curbing corruption and the rule of law. As the 21st Century unfolds, both of these core systems of the global order must contend with the same reality: a genuinely multi-polar world where no single power dominates and in which societies themselves are becoming increasingly diverse. The authors argue that a new system of "intelligent governance" is required to meet these new challenges. To cope, the authors argue that both East and West can benefit by adapting each other's best practices. Examining this in relation to widely varying political and cultural contexts, the authors quip that while China must lighten up, the US must tighten up. This highly timely volume is both a conceptual and practical guide of impressive scope to the challenges of good governance as the world continues to undergo profound transformation in the coming decades.

Leseprobe

Praise for Intelligent Governance in the 21st Century

“Berggruen and Gardels offer an unconventional take on what good governance should mean in the 21st century, going beyond exasperated accounts of East versus West to offer something far more compelling and pragmatic.”

– Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

“Berggruen and Gardels seem to be everywhere – from Beijing to Rome to Mexico City – and know everyone, cross-pollinating ideas beyond all kinds of boundaries. And they have the determination and resources to put their highly original and worthy ideas into action.”

– Nouriel Roubini, Roubini Associates

“With existing structures of democracy producing widespread alienation, there is an urgent need to reconsider governance in the 21st century. Berggruen and Gardels propose hybrid institutions that combine accountability with expertise, inclusiveness with meritocracy. Bringing together Confucian traditions with a European sense of history and American pragmatism, this is that rare book that combines radically innovative thinking with extensive practical knowledge. It should be on the reading list of anyone – politicians, CEOs – concerned with good governance in a time of globalization.”

– John Gray, Emeritus Professor, London School of Economics, author of The Two Faces of Liberalism

Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century

Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels

Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century

A Middle Way between West and East

polity

Copyright © Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels 2013

The right of Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6358-6

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I Globalization and Governance

1  Globalization 2.0 and the Challenges to Good Governance

2  America’s Consumer Democracy versus China’s Modern Mandarinate

3  Liberal Democratic Constitutionalism and Meritocracy: Hybrid Possibilities

4  The New Challenges for Governance: Social Networks, Megacities, and the Global Scattering of Productive Capabilities

Part II Intelligent Governance: Theory and Practice

5  Intelligent Governance: Tenets and Template

6  Rebooting California’s Dysfunctional Democracy

7  The G-20: Global Governance from Summits to Subnational Networks

8  Europe: Political Union and the Democratic Deficit

Part III Conclusion

9  Survival of the Wisest

Notes

Acknowledgments

While the authors are solely responsible for the contents of this book, we have been privileged to draw from the truly remarkable array of leaders and thinkers around the world who have been active members in the three main projects of the Nicolas Berggruen Institute: the Think Long Committee for California, the 21st Century Council, and the Council on the Future of Europe. They are all listed, respectively, in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. Their insights as well as their broad experience in practical governance of their societies have been invaluable in shaping our ideas.

To start with we have to single out Jacques Attali for thanks since he introduced the two of us and is always brimming with stimulating ideas. In California, we are indebted to Bob Hertzberg, former Speaker of the Assembly and “best governor California never had,” for his indefatigable energy latched to vision rare in a practical politician. Felipe González, Gerhard Schroeder, Juan Luis Cebrián, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso were instrumental in founding the 21st Century Council. Gordon Brown has brought the same intelligence and global scope to our Council that he brought to his chairmanship of the critical G-20 summit in London when prime minister of the UK during the financial crisis of 2008–9. Mario Monti’s labors as prime minister in the “depoliticized space” of a technocratic government in Italy have been in many ways a test of our approach to governance, and we have deeply appreciated the opportunity to exchange ideas with him in the European context.

We particularly value what we’ve learned from our Chinese colleagues – Zheng Bijian, Wu Jianmin, Zhang Yi, and Feng Wei in Beijing – and have taken Zheng’s strategic theme of “building on a convergence of interests to create a community of interests” as a guiding light of our global endeavors.

The powerful cross-pollination of ideas between the Eastern and Western scholars whom Li Chenyang and Daniel A. Bell gathered together at Singapore’s Nanyang Technical University in January 2012 to discuss political meritocracy was almost mind-bending. There is far too little of that kind of in-depth engagement of worldviews today. We benefited from it greatly.

Our association with Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen has opened wide a window into the impact of the information revolution and social media on governance. Our proximity here in California to Silicon Valley has enabled us to hold several discussions to delve more deeply into these subjects. We are highly grateful to all the participants in those meetings in the Bay Area, which included Microsoft strategist Charles Songhurst, MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, e-Bay founders Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar, YouTube creator Chad Hurley, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Google.org’s Shona Brown and Matthew Stepka. At various times those discussions were also joined by California Governor Jerry Brown; Francis Fukuyama; the US State Department’s top digital diplomat, Alec Ross; Transparent Society author David Brin; and Singapore’s former foreign minister, George Yeo.

Finally, we are profoundly thankful to Dawn Nakagawa, Executive Director of the Nicolas Berggruen Institute, without whose logistical genius, professionalism, steady nerves during inevitable crises, and persistence we would be lost.

Introduction

In this book we examine how the best practices of governance in East and West, developed over centuries under very different historical and cultural circumstances, might be brought to bear on the common challenges wrought by globalization.

We focus on China and the United States, not as literal alternatives, but as a metaphor of the tradeoffs that must be considered in constructing a mixed constitutional system that incorporates the signature elements of both – respectively, guidance by the long-term perspective of meritocratic elites and the popular sovereignty of democracy.

In the first chapter, “Globalization 2.0 and the Challenges to Good Governance,” we contrast the geopolitical and geo-civilizational outlooks of West and East as they face the transition underway from American-led globalization to an interdependence of plural identities. We also introduce the concept of “intelligent governance” in response to the political and cultural awakening that is part and parcel of the global shift. Our argument is that good governance must devolve power and involve citizens more meaningfully in ruling their communities while legitimizing the delegation of authority through decision-division to institutions that can capably manage the systemic links of integration.

In Chapter 2, “America’s Consumer Democracy versus China’s Modern Mandarinate,” we analyze the contemporary strengths and deficiencies of both systems.

Chapter 3, “Liberal Democratic Constitutionalism and Meritocracy: Hybrid Possibilities,” revisits the debates over the qualities of political meritocracy versus electoral democracy as forms of good governance, touching on topics from the origins of the examination system in China to the deliberations of the American Founding Fathers over the pitfalls of direct democracy.

We further muse over some of the affinities of Western classical and Enlightenment thinkers with Confucian precepts and ponder what the building blocks of a hybrid form of governance might be where rulers are selected on merit but checked by popular elections.

Having revisited the old debates, in Chapter 4 we place them in the context of the newest challenges and opportunities of the 21st century – social networks, the emergence of the megacity, and the global scattering of productive capabilities – to which all systems of governance must respond.

Taking all of the foregoing into consideration, Chapter 5, “Intelligent Governance: Tenets and Template,” is an exercise in political imagination that proposes an institutional design for a middle way between West and East – not a one-size-fits-all blueprint, but an ideal suggestion, the principles of which would have to be molded to particular circumstance.

In Chapters 6, 7, and 8 we report on our efforts to do just that – adapt the principles of intelligent governance in widely varying conditions, from California to the G-20 to Europe.

Chapter 9 puts our discussion in the broadest possible historical context of the potential emergence of the first truly global civilization – if we figure out how to make our different operating systems compatible. Our title, “Survival of the Wisest,” says it all.

Since the book is about live, ongoing projects, the reader may follow the activities of the Nicolas Berggruen Institute at http://www.berggrueninstitute.org.

Nicholas Berggruen

Nathan Gardels

Los Angeles/Paris, June 2012

Part I

Globalization and Governance

1

Globalization 2.0 and the Challenges to Good Governance

Introduction

“East is East, West is West.” But, today, the twain are intertwined.

Everyone knows the contrasting traits that distinguish these broad civilizational spheres: authority versus freedom, the community versus the individual, the cycles of the ages versus the progress of history, and representative democracy versus, in China’s case, rule by a meritocratic mandarinate. Yet, we also know that China has become the factory of the world and the largest creditor of the United States.

In this book we revisit the twain that Rudyard Kipling famously said “never shall meet” in this new historical context where China and the West are as tightly tethered as they remain highly distinct.

As the West recedes from its centuries-long dominance and the Middle Kingdom regains its solid foothold in history, we are obliged to look out on this changing landscape with Eastern as well as Western lenses.

If the reader will permit the reduction of some essential truths, the modern Western mind tends to see contradiction between irreconcilable opposites that can only be resolved by the dominance of one over the other. Following the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,1 this was the approach Francis Fukuyama2 took when he argued that “the end of history” had arrived after the Cold War in the triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of human governance. In the geopolitical mind of the West, territories and ideologies are either won or lost.

The Eastern mind instead sees complementary aspects of a whole – yin and yang in Taoist parlance – that must be continually balanced on a pragmatic basis depending on shifting conditions. History doesn’t end. The cycles go on as the relationships between freedom and authority or the individual and the community find a new equilibrium. In the “geo-civilizational” mind of the East, what is incommensurate can co-exist.

When he quips that “the Tao is much deeper than Hegel,” George Yeo, the former foreign minister of Singapore and one of Asia’s most important thinker/ practitioners, is alluding to this contrast between the Eastern and Western mind.

It is from within the perspective expressed by Yeo that this book addresses the common challenges of governance that both East and West are facing as a result of the complexity and diversity of the interdependence that ties us together.

Following the pragmatic, non-ideological Eastern approach, our concern is what we can learn from each other. The question is not whether rule by a meritocratic mandarinate rooted in China’s ancient “institutional civilization” will win out over Western-style democracy, or vice versa. The question we pose is what balanced combination of meritocracy and democracy, of authority and freedom, of community and the individual, can create the healthiest body politic and the most intelligent form of governance for the 21st century. Indeed, we ponder whether there might even be the emergent possibility of a new “middle way.”

Is Democracy Self-Correcting?

The conventional, though not incorrect, wisdom in the West is that, despite the awesome achievement of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in just three decades, the modern mandarinate of nominally Communist China is not self-correcting, and thus not sustainable. Unless it loosens its autocratic grip by allowing freer expression and more democratic mechanisms for popular feedback and accountability, the “red dynasty” will succumb to terminal political decay – rife corruption, arbitrary abuse by authorities, and stagnation – just as all previous dynasties have in China’s millennial history.

The unconventional observation of this book is that, just as we’ve seen with financial markets, Western democracy is no more self-correcting than China’s system. In a mirror image of China’s challenge, one-person-one-vote electoral democracy embedded in a consumer culture of immediate gratification is also headed for terminal political decay unless it reforms. Taking a cue from China’s experience with meritocratic rule, establishing capable institutions that embody both the perspective of the long term and common good in governance is key to the sustainability of the democratic West. The argument we will make in this book is that restoring equilibrium in each system will require a recalibration of political settings through mixed constitutions that combine knowledgeable democracy with accountable meritocracy.

Governance

Governance is about how the cultural habits, political institutions, and economic system of a society can be aligned to deliver the desired good life for its people. Good governance is when these structures combine in a balance that produces effective and sustainable results in the common interest. Bad governance results either when underlying conditions have so changed that once effective practices become dysfunctional or when political decay sets in as organized special interests gain dominance – or both. Then debts and deficits become unsustainable, protective cartels sap the vigor of the economy, corruption destroys trust, social mobility stagnates, and inequality grows. The ruling consensus loses legitimacy. Decline sets in.

Dysfunction and decay aptly describe governance across much of the democratic West today, which is in crisis from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. After centuries of forward momentum fueled by an inner civilizational confidence, debt, political gridlock, indecisiveness, and fraying legitimacy are paralyzing the capacity of liberal democracy and free market economies to manage change. On the face of it, that momentum and confidence has shifted to the East. Indeed, as we have already noted, Western liberal democracy is being challenged as the best form of governance by non-Western forms of modernity, most notably by China’s mandarinate and state-led capitalism. Yet signs of decay and dysfunction are already appearing there as well owing to enveloping corruption and the collateral social, environmental, and even spiritual damage of China’s remarkable success.

From Globalization 1.0 to 2.0

The challenges produced by the present global power shift, combined with rapid technological advance, are daunting for the rising powers no less than for the receding ones. All political systems are in some way experiencing disequilibrium as they seek to adjust to the repeated shocks caused by the transition underway from what we call Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 2.0.

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, American-led globalization – 1.0 – has so thoroughly transformed the world through the freer flow of trade, capital, information, and technology that it has given birth to a new phase – Globalization 2.0.

“In the past few centuries what was once the European and then the American periphery became the core of the world economy,” writes Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf. “Now, the economies of the periphery are re-emerging as the core. This is transforming the entire world … this is far and away the biggest single fact about our world.”3

Nobel economist Michael Spence reinforces this point. What we are seeing today, he writes, are “two parallel and interacting revolutions: the continuation of the industrial Revolution in the advanced countries, and the sudden and dramatic spreading pattern of growth in the developing world. One could call the second revolution the Inclusiveness Revolution. After two centuries of high-speed divergence, a pattern of convergence has taken over.”4

This great economic and technological convergence that is the consequence of Globalization 1.0 has at the same time given birth to a new cultural divergence as the wealthier emerging powers look to their civilizational foundations to define themselves anew against the waning hegemony of the West. Since economic strength engenders cultural and political self-assertion, Globalization 2.0, above all, means the interdependence of plural identities instead of one model for all. The once regnant Western liberal democracies must now contend on the world stage not only with neo-Confucian China but also with the likes of the Islamic-oriented democracy within Turkey’s secular framework, which has become an attractive template for the newly liberated Arab street. In short, the world is returning to the “normal pluralism” that has characterized most of human history.

Historically, a power shift of this magnitude often ends in collision and conflict. But, given the intensive integration that the post-Cold War round of globalization has wrought, it also poses entirely new possibilities of cooperation and cross-pollination across a plural civilizational landscape.

We are thus at an historical crossroads. How we govern ourselves in the coming decades within and among nations will determine which of these paths the 21st century follows.

Establishing a new equilibrium under the Globalization 2.0 operating system is a double challenge.

The complexity of the deeper global integration of trade, investment, production, and consumption, no less information flows, requires greater political and technical capacity at the megacity-region, national, and supranational level to manage the systemic links of interdependence. If it all falls apart, everyone will be damaged. At the same time, the growing diversity that has come with the global spread of wealth, amplified by the participatory power of social media, requires more devolution of power toward the grass roots, where the restive public is clamoring from the bottom up for a say in the rules that govern their lives. Political awakenings everywhere are demanding the dignity of meaningful participation.

Failure to find an institutional response to this double challenge will result in a crisis of legitimacy for any governing system – either because of the failure to perform through providing inclusive growth and employment or because a “democratic deficit” that shuts out diverse public voices will undermine effective consent.

Getting the balance right will thus make the difference between dynamic and stalled societies as well as determine whether clash or cooperation emerges as the global modus operandi.

That balance might be called “intelligent governance,” which devolves power and meaningfully involves citizens in matters of their competence while fostering legitimacy and consent for delegated authority at higher levels of complexity. Devolving, involving, and decision-division are the key elements of intelligent governance that will reconcile knowledgeable democracy with accountable meritocracy.

What the right balance is will differ because political systems are at different starting points. Every system must reboot based on the cultural settings of its present operating system. While China, as the conventional wisdom suggests, would need more participatory involvement and a more accountable meritocratic mandarinate to achieve balance, the United States would need a more depoliticized democracy in which governance for the long term and common good is insulated from the populist short-term, special interest political culture of one-person-one-vote elections. In short, China would need to lighten up while the US would need to tighten up.

In Europe, the institutional infrastructure necessary to complete integration – a strong but limited political union – must be invested with democratic legitimacy or it will fail to attract the allegiance of European citizens who are disenfranchised and thus disenchanted.

As the adjustment mechanism of the global power shift underway, the G-20, like the institutions of the European Union, must similarly be invested with legitimacy by nation-states and their publics. Otherwise it will lack the political capacity to provide the global public goods – a reserve currency, the stability of trade and financial flows, security, nuclear non-proliferation, and measures to combat climate change – that no individual hegemonic state or set of international states can provide under the multi-polar order of Globalization 2.0. Since proximity confers legitimacy, the chief challenge here is how to spin networks of “subnational” localities into a web of global governance as the 21st-century alternative to the outmoded notion of a distant and oppressive “world Leviathan.”

This book seeks to address this central issue of the first half of the 21st century: how good governance can establish equilibrium within nations as well as among them at the regional and global level.

To do so, we will examine the contending systems of what we call America’s “consumer democracy” and China’s “modern mandarinate” as a metaphor for identifying the tradeoffs that are required to achieve the proper balance of good governance. We will further propose an “ideal, mixed constitutional template” that is a hybrid of meritocracy and democracy. No armchair theorists, we will then report on our practical experience in implementing such a template in widely varying circumstances from California to Europe to the G-20 level.

The ultimate point of this book is that governance matters in whether societies move forward or backward. Never has that been more true than during this transition from Globalization 1.0 to 2.0. If cities, states, or nations can’t navigate the rushing white waters of change, they will crash against the rocky shoals or be left behind in stagnant waters.

A BRIEF INVENTORY OF DISEQUILIBRIUM

Everyone is feeling the shock waves of change. In the United States, Joseph Schumpeter’s5 famous “destruction” seems to be racing so far ahead of “creation” that the growing inequality between those moving ahead and those left behind is undermining faith both in democracy and in capitalism, pitting the “99 percent against the 1 percent” at the top of the income scale. Partisan gridlock has become the norm, dividing democracy against itself and paralyzing the ability of political leaders to act.

Across the spectrum in Europe, Japan, and the US, debts and deficits anchor the political imagination to the past. Everyone’s dreams are being deleveraged.

Disunity in the Eurozone over resolving the sovereign debt crisis has called the historic project of integration as well as the European social contract itself into question. To regain its balance, Europe has to go all the way back to the nation-state or all the way forward to political union. Ignoring demise instead of facing it, Japan is coasting into a retirement trap on the basis of its accumulated wealth. The country is drawing down on its domestic savings, with little thought of how to re-energize itself for the next generation.

In China, the imperatives of the middle-class transition that must shift away from the investment/export model of growth toward domestic consumption, all the while coping with the collateral social and environmental damage of quick-paced development, are testing the mettle of its so far highly successful market-Leninist mandarinate. Most spectacularly, Arab autocrats have fallen like dominoes before the networked rage of “Facebook youth” and the resurgence of repressed Islamists. Even in Singapore, arguably the best-governed place on the planet, the long-ruling Lee Kuan Yew style of paternalist democracy has not been spared the rising discontent of that nanny state’s ever-less passive citizens.

At the global level, the G-20’s capacity for global governance is perennially hampered in its efforts to correct global imbalances by sovereign hesitations. Local and global remain in a stand-off even as enlightened self-interest in reigniting global growth would reasonably dictate more robust cooperation.

In short, every system is struggling to re-establish equilibrium in the emergent post-American order. Grasping how the present imbalances arose as a consequence of greater global integration and technological advance is key to figuring out what kind of governing institutions are best suited to move beyond the current crisis.

An exhaustive analysis of how we got from there to here is beyond the scope of this book. But a simple sketch will help set the stage for our discussion of governance.

American-led “neo-liberal” Globalization 1.0 spread the wealth globally, if unequally, in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Markets were opened. Billions of new workers were invited in and started climbing the income ladder out of poverty. The spread of new information technologies dramatically enhanced productivity. For much of the West, less so for Germany and Japan, which retained their manufacturing and engineering base, this double development had the effect of hollowing out the middle class even as the global scale of markets and liberalized regulation enabled an unprecedented concentration of wealth for some, notably in the American financial sector, which, by 2005, accounted for 40 percent all business profits.6

Symptomatic of the effects across the board on the manufacturing sector, cheap Chinese labor, supply-chain savvy, microchip technology, and robotics conjoined to displace the very jobs upon which the American middle class was built.

According to an influential study by a group of economists in 2012, one quarter of the “aggregate decline of US manufacturing employment” over the past two decades was due to trade with China.7

In 1960, General Motors employed 595,000 workers. Yet, for all their globe-straddling vibrancy and billions in revenues, the Googles and Twitters of today produce few jobs. Facebook, for example, which has 1 billion daily unique hits, has only 3,500 employees. Apple employs only 43,000 people in the US, mostly in design, while the actual manufacturing of its iPhone takes place in China by Foxconn, which employs 1.2 million workers.8

As Michael Spence9 has shown, 90 percent of the 27 million new jobs created over the last 20 years in the United States instead were generated in the non-tradable sector, mainly lower wage jobs in retail, health care, and government service, many of the latter now slashed by deleveraging budget cuts due to the belated impact of the recession on state and local government revenues. By all accounts, higher education was the greatest factor in the income gap that grew between those who held these sub-prime jobs and those in information technology, design, and other high-value added sectors.

By 2009, according to former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan,10 58 percent of income in the US was held by the top 1 percent of the population. Since 1975, he reports, the wages of the top 10 percent have grown 65 percent more than the bottom 10 percent. Though exacerbated by tax cuts for the rich during the administration of George W. Bush, the structural cause of the widening income chasm has been mainly due to the creation–destruction dynamism of a wage-deflating globalized labor market and the labor-displacing productivity of new technology.

Rajan further argues that this demotion of the American middle class was concealed by the housing bubble driven by globally available liquidity, largely from China’s savings, which suppressed long-term interest rates, abetted by the lax credit policies of the US Federal Reserve that held up home prices until the bubble burst in 2009. In effect, keeping up with the Joneses was based not on increased income from decent paying jobs, but from borrowing that falling income could not sustain when home prices fell.

Just as the housing bubble in the US sustained the myth of upward mobility, low interest rates linked through the euro to German prudence and productivity along with flush global liquidity broadly enabled European states, mainly in the southern tier, to sustain a level of social welfare and public services beyond their means to afford it. The sovereign debt implosion has now exposed that gap.

For China, Globalization 1.0 meant hundreds of millions made their way out of marginal subsistence, were drawn to megacities where, for the first time in history, 50 percent of Chinese now live, and set on a path toward middle class status. That in turn has put immense pressure on the authoritarian development model to accommodate both the aspirations of that rising middle class for more openness and accountability and the left-behind migrant and rural poor for greater equality. The demand for the rule of law against arbitrary and unfairly compensated land seizures from peasant villagers has erupted into open rebellion across China, most famously in the case of Wukan in 2011. Revolts over industrial pollution, such as that in Haimen in Guandong province around the same time, are also common across China today.

Even for the most prosperous, the fevered materialism of gloriously getting rich has led many to question the spiritual price of such a single-minded pursuit of prosperity, in turn giving rise to a Confucian renaissance seeking a renewed ethical foundation for Chinese society.

Overall, just as the division of labor in manufacturing a product like Apple’s iPad has been spread across designers, suppliers, and assemblers globally – confounding the very measurement of “trade balances” – the old notions of First and Third Worlds have been fused by Globalization 1.0 into hybrid realities of rich countries with poor people and poor countries with rich people. The integration of large city-regions as production hubs in the global division of labor is emptying out the hinterlands and creating massive population centers – megacities the size of entire nations, particularly in the emerging economies.