I was reminded of Edna O’Brien’s novel, August is a Wicked Month, when two scandals erupted last month – one, predictably, in the financial sector and the other, more surprisingly, in the journalistic sector.

BBC News (August 10) and Reuters (August 7) gave wide circulation to the scandal over the fixing of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), that underpins the nearly $350 trillion market in derivatives. While this lapse was not on the moral scale of Bernie Madoff’s classic rip-off of his clients, it did create waves of indignation and attendant condemnation simply because far too many financial firms and regulators had their hands dirtied.

It also reminded many of the time that Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs tried to laugh off his firm’s lapses by saying that his firm was “doing God’s work”. Perhaps the only way for him to have defended himself against the hostile merriment he provoked from American comedians such as Jon Stewart would have been to say that he had in mind the holy trinity of Indian mythology where Brahma was the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, and that he was thinking of Shiva!

Then, in mid-August, journalism was rocked by the charge of plagiarism against prominent journalist Fareed Zakaria of CNN and Time. The scandal has now died down, as with the plagiarism of the distinguished historian Doris Kearns Goodwin earlier. But it cannot be entirely wiped away, and it has left many asking questions concerning journalistic ethics that will certainly be examined more fully by schools of journalism.

But after August, the Americans have opened the season on gaffes – by both Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama as the election reaches the final lap of an excruciating marathon. Gaffes are, of course, a regular feature of political life, and they multiply as politicians navigate the rapids of the election season. Thus, we remember, Joe Biden’s foolishly borrowing entire episodes from British politician Neil Kinnock. But the more famous one has to be Sarah Palin’s gaffe, as senator John McCain’s vice-presidential candidate, about being able to handle Russia because she could see it across the border from her home!

But US presidential candidate in 2004, John Kerry, topped them all when he said back then that firms that were outsourcing were Benedict Arnold’s. At first, i thought he must be complimenting these firms because i had never heard of Benedict Arnold and thought he must be an obscure English poet, a distant cousin of Matthew Arnold. Lo and behold: i soon discovered that Benedict Arnold was America’s greatest traitor!

He sounded like Lou Dobbs, the great scourge of outsourcers whose CNN show broadcast internationally was a farrago of attacks on the greed of corporations that outsourced. He is now gone, but President Obama has more than made up for Dobbs’s absence, so far with no price having to be paid for this lapse.

In fact, the president has been let off for many gaffes that no one else would have been forgiven. Buried from view have been his gaffes in pronouncing foreign names, often during state visits abroad and at home, which far exceed the tendency of American politicians in pronouncing foreign names; one shudders when even today, Iraq is pronounced as Airac.

When i spoke at the Indian Parliament a few days after he had, i was told that he had continued manhandling Indian names, as he had done earlier in Washington (where he also called Prime Minister Nehru, President Nehru once) and in Mumbai. A Japanese diplomat told me that he did the same with Japanese names.

By letting him off scot-free, the media does not serve him well. If not the serious media, the comedians should provide the corrective. For, these gaffes suggest an inherent lack of seriousness about international issues that, if left to fester, may well come to haunt the US and its friends and foes.

The original article appeared in Times of India.

The distinguished journalist Harold Evans directs his reptilian fury at the Financial Times (August 27th) for a lapse from its “high standards in publishing my “venomous” column on Mr. Zakaria’s plagiarism. He hisses loudly but he fails to bite.

He forgets the elementary fact that Mr. Zakaria had confessed to plagiarism. No, there was no third degree applied by rogue cops. None of what Mr. Evans writes about who wrote what and retracted what charges they had made on the issue — his assertion that I could not have known all this is somewhat ludicrous — has any bearing on the fact that Mr. Zakaria was a self-confessed plagiarist.

The only questions were what penalty could and should follow. Since Mr. Zakaria was a journalist as also a man feted by universities with honorary degrees and even sitting as a member of the Yale Board of Trustees, the two issues had to be separated.

The penalties at universities are fairly severe, as I explained. If Mr. Evans doubts that, he should look up what is said on the subject by the University of Durham which he attended. The issue for universities then is clear: should they expect less from the people they honour and more from those whom they teach? I think this matter of equity is so important at universities that self-confessed plagiarists of high profile must be reprimanded, and even honours may possibly be withdrawn, unless our students become cynical about plagiarism.

As for journalism, which I do know something about as having been a founder of the influential Media specialization in the School of Public Affairs at Columbia (the role model for the changes made at our School of Journalism) and having taught with Sylvia Nasar at the School of Journalism, I am astonished by the lackadaisical approach taken by Mr. Evans to the question of standards in journalism.

He is also offended that I talk of “over-commitment” by Mr. Zakaria, a generous attempt to explain how his lapse could have occurred. He writes at the same time of exoneration by investigation by CNN and Time, of “thousands” of Mr. Zakaria’s columns (in an internal, not impartial third-party investigation that no one could take as compelling since these institutions’ profit motive would conflict with their principles.) I might ask: how many thousands? Mr. Evans might as well have written: hundreds of thousands!

Does Mr. Evans seriously believe that, with 24 hours in the day, Mr. Zakaria wrote “thousands” of columns, book reviews and his fine books, ran the GSP talk show, did specials on different issues and gave commencement speeches, and was not “over-committed”? Is he Superman?

More likely, he is a friend of Mr. Evans who shows a strange lapse of professional standards when he fails to mention that he is married to the celebrated Tina Brown who now runs the Daily Beast and Newsweek whose international edition was long edited by Mr. Zakaria. Has Mr. Evans heard of conflict of interest and the need for transparency? The Japanese have a tradition where, if a samurai commits harakiri by disemboweling himself, his best friend or chosen attendant will put him out of his agony by doing a kaishaku: cutting his head off. Mr. Evans instead tries to circle the wagons around his friend with absurd allegations of my indulging in the “full Nuremberg”. Mr. Evans must know that this is obnoxious and his abuse of his status in British journalism makes his behavior contemptible.

Jagdish Bhagwati

University Professor of Economics, Law & International Affairs, Columbia University

Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations

The massacre in Norway in July 2011 and the recent attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, were the work of right-wing extremists who sought to remake the world in their neo-Nazi image. Likewise, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were the work of Islamist extremists who view other religions and cultures as a threat. But it would be simplistic to believe that our leaders do not add fuel to the fire of hatred, even if their chauvinism takes a more “civilized” form.

Just ask the Japanese, who were continually denounced in the 1980’s as wicked traders. Or consider how the unceasing refrain against outsourcing nowadays has demonized India.

This is not new. Japan’s heavy burden of atrocities during World War II effectively erased from America’s popular memory the Immigration Act of 1924 and other federal legislation aimed at excluding the Japanese and the Chinese from the United States, as well as racist state legislation, such as California’s 1913 Alien Land Act. With the war’s outbreak, Americans of Japanese origin were expropriated and herded into concentration camps. California Attorney General Earl Warren championed the measures – the same Earl Warren, who, a decade later, as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, would oversee the rejection of the separate-but-equal doctrine at the heart of America’s segregation of its black citizens.

The anti-Japanese hysteria of the 1980’s fell on fertile ground. Many in the US feared that, just as the nineteenth century had been British and the twentieth century had been American, the twenty-first century would be Japanese. But, unlike the British or the Americans, the Japanese allegedly were gaining ground in nefarious ways, exporting aggressively to the US and unfairly excluding US exports from their domestic market.

Virtually every Japanese policy was interpreted in the worst possible light. The propaganda was bipartisan in the US, and, with few noteworthy exceptions, was widely disseminated by the country’s uncritical and pseudo-patriotic media. I recall the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson – alongside John Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of his time – remarking that anti-Japanese propaganda had gone so far that Japan’s critics would argue that the Japanese bow in greeting Westerners to make it easier to cut them off at the knees.

The effect, particularly given a long history of anti-Japanese sentiment, was a predictable wave of racist violence, including the destruction of Japanese cars. The beating death of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American who was mistaken for a Japanese, also resonated historically, recalling a pseudo-scientific article on how to distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese that Life magazine published in December 1941.

The Indian situation in the US today is different; there is no baggage of unpleasant memories on which prejudice and violence can draw. Yet, like a desert cactus, hate can thrive on very little.

Unfortunately, US President Barack Obama’s administration has continually harped on outsourcing to India as a cause of American job losses. Similarly, Senator Charles Schumer of New York has indulged in Japan-bashing, China-bashing, and India-bashing – a singular record of truculence and economic illiteracy – while Senator Barbara Boxer of California attacked her most recent electoral opponent, Carly Fiorina, for eliminating 30,000 jobs at Hewlett Packard during her stewardship of the company. In fact, in a highly competitive world, Hewlett-Packard managed to save 150,000 jobs by sacrificing those 30,000.

In the current presidential election campaign, the Democratic Party is attacking Obama’s Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, on the same specious grounds, with a complacent media acquiescing in the Democrats’ de facto India-baiting.

The net result has been to fuel resentment against India that spills over into occasional violence. Groups calling themselves “dot-busters” have attacked Indian women. When I have written in favor of freer trade and liberal immigration, I have been denounced as a “curry nigger.”

Nor has the Obama administration helped matters by shifting the blame for the failure of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations onto India. Outside the US, it is well known that Obama himself pulled the plug on Doha. The notion that “we are open and others are closed,” a cherished belief of US politicians and media – and an article of faith with the current administration – also feeds the notion that countries like India are wicked traders, much like the Japanese in the 1980’s.

Much of the world expected more elevated behavior from Obama. Unfortunately, it has gotten a much lower standard than it anticipated.

The original article appeared on Project Syndicate.

Plagiarism is in the news. Fareed Zakaria, Time Magazine columnist and CNN television show host, was perhaps a predictable victim of overcommitment: there are only 24 hours in a day. It appears he overreached as he sought to grasp multiple topics outside his usual field, foreign policy. Plagiarism seemed to be an easy solution to the impossible demands on his time, as he tried to maintain “pundit” status.

His misfortune was to pilfer from Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor and a staff writer for The New Yorker, a magazine that all intellectuals read. The plagiarism was caught, however, not by the magazine (for intellectuals do not read Time, not even at the dentist) but by a blogger of little distinction.

How could such a lapse happen? Could Mr Zakaria not have called up Ms Lepore and discussed her views at first hand, as he used to do regularly with me?

The punishment will probably be to banish him from journalism, even though the profit motive is clearly prompting CNN and Time to test the waters by starting only with a “suspension”. Mr Zakaria is probably a cash cow for them. The Indian government will be under pressure to withdraw the prestigious Padma Bhushan award that was conferred on him as a distinguished Indian journalist. It is also certain that prestigious schools of journalism, such as the one at Columbia University (where I teach), will have no alternative but to keep plagiarists at a distance and condemn them.

But the unfortunate Zakaria case also raises the question of plagiarism in higher education. Universities have become victims of plagiarism by students in an age when there is free access to information and assignments can be written by simply copying huge chunks of text, even entire essays, from the internet.

Once difficult to perpetrate, plagiarism is now so easy that a university such as Columbia will explicitly warn incoming students of the dire consequences, such as expulsion, if a student is caught. In addition, we warn students that, if they steal from others, there is software that can unmask them. I can feed a paragraph, even a few sentences, into the computer and lo and behold it will tell you who wrote much the same thing earlier. I know of many instances where plagiarism has been exposed in this way.

But universities can do more to stamp out plagiarism. For example, since essays are the natural medium for plagiarism, a remedy that I find useful is to ensure that a fraction of the grade depends on multiple-choice examinations where one cannot steal or copy. This would not merely insulate a significant fraction of the grade from plagiarism. It would also suggest that, if a student fails the multiple choice but scores highly on the essay, the latter needs to be examined for plagiarism.

Universities should also ensure that big fish such as Mr Zakaria who are caught plagiarising are firmly dealt with: letting them off with a soft rap on the knuckles can only breed cynicism among students who are exhorted not to plagiarise. Withdrawal of honorary degrees and expulsion from boards of trustees are among the punishments that should be automatic once plagiarism has been acknowledged.

But the issue of plagiarism is not confined to students facing the pressures of examination and competitive performance. It has spread to faculty members where charges of plagiarism, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes accurate, have proliferated, reflecting the pressures of a “publish-or-perish” culture.

The pressures that can fuel plagiarism by the “superstars” in academia, however, are different, perhaps similar to those that felled Mr Zakaria. The need to write something that “catches the public eye” has for many become an obsession. The media is a playground for achieving celebrity academic status, which is pleasurable in itself but also leads to large lecturing fees. And so it leads to borrowing ideas without attribution.

I noticed it when a distinguished economist happened to take a concept of mine that I had written about many times. They used the idea in an article, without attribution. In that instance, I am happy to believe that it was an unwitting omission. But it illustrates what academics have to guard against with zealous scrupulousness. It can surely be done.

The original article appeared in Financial Times.

The sudden death of Abid Hussain by a massive heart attack last Thursday, was a tragedy for his family. He was in London with his wife Karki (a woman of great charm and intellectual achievement) on way to Washington to be with his daughter Vishaka and died in his sleep, in keeping with the generosity of spirit that marked his life: he would not impose a long illness on his beloved family.

Many have written already about the prominent role he played as a public servant and as a public intellectual. There was little that he had not touched and transformed into success and there were few important positions which had not come his way, including membership of the Planning Commission at a time when the Commission was relevant to our economic policy making, and secretaryship in the commerce ministry. He had even been our ambassador to Washington during 1990-92, and left an indelible impact on the two countries’ relations at a critical time when they were on the cusp of change.

But, none of these enumerations do him justice. He must be remembered for the most compelling of his achievements; and these are twofold: his pioneering work on community development and his unwavering support for our economic reforms.

When i and current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were together at St John’s College in Cambridge in the mid-1950s, we had shared aspirations to fulfill Jawaharlal Nehru’s call for a “tryst with destiny” by taking the Indian economy to dramatic improvement over the dismal record of nearly a quarter of a century of bad policies. As it happens, in a parallel which is remarkable, my friendship with Abid Hussain went back to over 50 years as well; and it remained very close also.

But it began differently; and here, i can also point to a unique achievement of Abid which has no parallel at all. I went as an OECD consultant to Ankara in 1962, to the Devlet Planlama Teskilati (the Turkish Planning Commission), to “advise” on economic policy. Wherever i went, i was asked if i was Abid Hussain. I naturally said: No. But then i discovered that Abid was an icon in Turkey. So, i started saying: Yes. I began to be treated much better!

Why was he an icon? The reason was that he was helping Turkey with setting up its community development program, seeking to lift up the rural communities. Abid had been a pioneer in our own community development programs. It is a sad commentary that today we make much of “new kids on the block” like my colleague Jeffrey Sachs with his village projects which are mostly hype, even ignoring his dramatic failures as with shock therapy in Russia. Instead we need to honor our hero Abid.

But Abid’s other principal achievement, for which the nation must honor him, is that, along with the prime minister, he was the one, unwavering proponent of our reforms. He was resolutely, but politely, against the extensive proliferation of senseless regulations and controls: he had seen it at first hand in the commerce assignment. He loved the witticism that the problem in India was that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand was nowhere to be seen. He matched it with his own wit as when, told by an American friend that immigrant Indians were of great benefit to America, he wisecracked: make sure, however, not to get them into your bureaucracy!

Like the prime minister, he had arrived at the realization that India’s future, both in terms of prosperity and poverty reduction, required economic reforms. And he worked tirelessly to translate that understanding into policy. When the full story of our reforms is written, Abid will share the glory with the prime minister as a hero of our historic transformation.

The original article appeared in Times of India.

If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an axe to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase “sustainable development.” In fact, the United Nations’ Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development is about pet projects of all and sundry – many of them tangential to the major environmental issues, such as climate change, that were the principal legacy of the original Rio Earth Summit.

Thus, the International Labor Organization and trade-union lobbies have managed to insert “Decent Jobs” into the seven priority areas at the Rio conference. I would love for everyone, everywhere, to have a decent job. But what does that have to do with either the environment or “sustainability?”

No one should pretend that we can magically offer decent jobs to the huge numbers of impoverished but aspiring workers in the informal sector. Such jobs can only be created by adopting appropriate economic policies. Indeed, the really pressing task facing many developing economies is to pursue policies that promote economic opportunities by accelerating growth.

The flavor of the week in Rio is “sustainability indexing” for corporations, by way of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Such indexing is being compared to accounting standards. But the latter are “technical” and gain from standardization; the former are not and must reflect variety instead.

Corporations can, of course, be asked to conform to a “don’t” list – don’t dump mercury into rivers, don’t employ children for hazardous tasks, etc. But what they practice as “do’s” by way of altruism is surely a matter of what they consider virtuous to spend their money on.

The notion that a self-appointed set of activists, in conjunction with some governments and international agencies, can determine what a corporation should do by way of CSR contradicts the liberal notion that we should ask for virtue to be pursued, but not in a particular way. At a time when the world is emphasizing the importance of diversity and tolerance, it is effrontery to suggest that corporations should standardize their notion of how they wish to promote good in the world.

Even when the Rio+20 agenda includes something more properly “environmental” – say, the supply of water – platitudes predominate. Thus, the availability of safe drinking water is now to be enshrined as a “right.” We have traditionally distinguished in human-rights conventions between (mandatory) civil and political rights, such as the right to habeas corpus, from (aspirational) economic rights, because the latter require resources. Blurring that distinction – thereby disregarding the problem of scarcity – is no solution.

After all, “availability” can be interpreted according to many criteria and thus in myriad ways: How much water? At what distance from different households (or by pipe into each house)? At what cost? These decisions have different implications for the availability of water, and they must compete, in any event, against other “rights” and resource uses.

In the end, therefore, water availability cannot properly be called a “right.” Rather, it is a “priority,” and countries will inevitably differ in the sequence with which they pursue it relative to others.

While these are “sins of commission,” the “sins of omission” at Rio+20 are even more glaring. For a conference that is supposedly addressing “sustainability,” it is worth lamenting the absence of a heroic effort to agree on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord.

If the cataclysmic scenarios implied by neglect of climate change are valid – and extreme estimates, it must be said, could backfire politically by looking implausible or, worse, by producing a “Nero effect” (if Rome is burning, let’s party) – Rio+20’s lack of action should be regarded as an historic failure.

But a matching omission is that prompted by our societies’ increasing political unsustainability, not because of the immediate financial problems like those afflicting Europe and threatening the world, but because the modern media have made visible to all the disparities in the fortunes of the rich and the poor. The rich should be urged not to flaunt their wealth: extravagance amid much poverty arouses wrath.

The poor, meanwhile, need a fair shot at raising their incomes. That can only come through access to education and economic opportunity, both in poor and rich countries.

“Less Excess and More Access”: only a policy mix based on this credo will guarantee that our societies remain viable and achieve genuine “sustainability.”

The original article appeared on Project Syndicate.