Lawrence Durrell and Justine

Love — wanton, all-consuming, passionate love — is the theme of Lawrence Durrell’s classic romantic novel, Justine, set in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Two couples are inexorably drawn to each other in a romantic entanglement that ends in death and separation and the birth of a girl who finds a home with the narrator, the English schoolmaster Darley. She is the motherless child of the woman who loved him, by the husband of the woman he loved.

Sounds complicated?

Such are the toils of love when the woman at the centre is Justine — the beautiful, imperious, elusive Jewess, Justine, who, the narrator learns from an autobiographical novel written by her former French Albanian husband, can never give or take satisfaction in love because every time she has sex with a lover, she re-imagines being seduced as a young girl by a relative.

But that makes her no less desirable to the narrator and her present husband, “Prince” Nessim, a Coptic merchant prince, who are both hopelessly in love with her.

Others pay the price. The husband has his revenge — or so it is believed — on the relative, who dies in a duckshoot accident.

And the other victim is Melissa. Sweet Melissa. The Greek cabaret dancer who loved the narrator unconditionally — and knew, though they stayed together, Justine was the woman he loved.

But, instead of leaving him, she told Nessim about the affair he was having with his wife.

That was how she ended up having a baby by Nessim — two dejected lovers seeking consolation in each other.

Durrell describes the beginning of their affair with marvellous clarity.

They talked now as a doomed brother and sister might… In all this sympathy an unexpected shadow of desire stirred within them, a wraith merely… It foreshadowed, in a way, their own lovemaking, which was so much less ugly than ours — mine and Justine’s. Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. It was already dawn when they rose from their conversation, stiff and cramped, the fire long since out, and marched across the damp sand to the car, scouting the pale lavender light of dawn. Melissa had found a friend and patron; as for Nessim, he was transfigured.

Sensuous prose and rich character studies fill every page of the book.

Melissa is adorable. How could the narrator not fall in love with her? Look at the way she reacted when they met in a cafe and he lied to her that he had been suffering from “a minor but irritating venereal irritation”.

I had been horrified I said at the thought of having to make love again before I was quite well. At this she put out her hand and placed it on mine and laughed, wrinkling up her nose: laughing with such candour, so lightly and effortlessly, that there and then I decided to love her.

We idled arm in arm by the sea that afternoon, our conversations full of the debris of lives lived without forethought, without architecture. We had not a taste in common. Our characters and predispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us. I like, also, to remember that first kiss by the sea, the wind blowing up a flake of hair at each white temple — a kiss broken by the laughter which beset her…. It symbolized the passion we enjoyed, its humour and lack of intenseness: its charity.

And then he meets Justine in a dark hall while giving a talk on writers. It is she who pursues him. She accosts him in a cafe with a question about his talk.

Put simply, she is night if Melissa is light as a summer’s day.

A femme fatale, Justine utterly consumes the narrator until she mysteriously disappears when the relative who first seduced her — Capodistria — dies in a duckshoot.

Then Melissa leaves too. “I shall always come back if you want,” she tells the narrator.

He also leaves Alexandria to take up a teaching job.

They exchange letters, but he only sees her after her death.

When a friend phones him to say she is ill at an Alexandria hospital, he hurries back. He wants to marry her. But when he arrives at the hospital, she is dead. Then he discovers she has had a baby by Nessim.

Taking the baby into his care, he begins writing his memoir. Justine begins on a romantic note:

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the invention of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes…

I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word “escape”. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way…

At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney piece I light a lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends — of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora — precipitated conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!

With time, comes change.

Justine, the narrator learns in a letter from a friend, has become a plump, hardworking settler at a Jewish kibbutz near Haifa.

The friend, a rich beautiful artist named Clea who once loved Justine, ends her letter by offering a new relationship to the narrator:

I do not know why but it is towards you, my dear friend, that my thoughts have turned more and more of late. Can one be frank? Is there a friendship possible this side of love which could be sought and found? I speak no more of love — the word and its conventions have become odious to me. But is there a friendship possible to attain which is deeper, even limitlessly deep, and yet wordless, idealess? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body (I leave that to the priests) but in the culprit mind? Once or twice I have felt the absurd desire to come to you and offer my services in looking after the child perhaps. But it seems clear now that you do not really need anybody any more, and that you value your solitude above all things…

The story ends:

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? So that…

That is how Justine ends. But it is only the first novel in Lawrence Durrell’s famous Alexandria Quartet. Published in 1957, Justine was followed by Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960).

Clea ends with another letter from Clea to the narrator. She describes how Justine and Nessim have met again in Alexandria, greeting each other with love and laughter. Some fires never go out.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Singapore Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam knows his history.

While praising the “uniqueness” of Indian democracy, he defended the East Asian model by pointing out that democracy used to be limited in Britain and America too.

“It was not until 1930 that Britain got Universal Suffrage. The US did not get Universal Suffrage until 1965,” he said.

He was referring to the 1965 Voting Rights Act which made it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote after the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended racial discrimination.

Britain gave the vote to women from the age of 21 only in 1928. Only older women, from the age of 30, had been allowed to vote in Britain since 1918.

Mr Tharman recalled: “In Britain, before the Reform Act of 1832, only 1.8 per cent of the adults had the vote. After that Act, 2.7 per cent got the vote. After the Second Reform Act of 1884, 12.1 per cent got the vote.”

But while democracy was limited, there was stability, economic growth and the middle class grew, he said.

Neatly, from there, he segued to the East Asian model. “A group of men (usually men) centralised power, planned in the long term interests of the country and executed those plans quite smoothly. Some of these countries did not hold elections…

“But, on the whole, the countries progressed. People received education, were empowered, the infrastructure developed, the economies grew steadily.”

He added: “There is no clear correlation between dictatorship and progress… Outside of East Asia, in the post World War II period, dictatorships have in fact a poor record in delivering progress to the country as a whole — but then, the sad fact is that democracies also have a poor record in those countries.”

What is unique about Indian democracy?

All adult Indians have had the right to vote since independence in 1947 even though many of them are poor and illiterate, said Mr Tharman.

But, he added, “there is the price of democracy”.

Popularly elected politicians are not always the most capable leaders and they may “champion narrow ethnic/religious causes”.

India lags behind in many ways, he pointed out. “Infant mortality is high. India has a literacy rate of 61 per cent.”

But he acknowledged: “India appears to be set on a path of steady growth. It should easily register six to eight per cent growth.”

The point to note is this: He did not shy away from openly talking about East Asian dictatorships.

And look at the clever connection he made between East Asia and the evolution of democracy in Britain and America.

This was not a typical politician speaking. No sound bites here, solid examples from history.

Opinion has long been divided on the virtues of Indian democracy and the advantages of the East Asian model.

Amartya Sen: The other side

Amartya Sen

The Nobel Prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen gives his own take in his new book, The Idea of Justice.

He mentions Singapore and writes:

The detractors of democracy… see… serious tensions between democracy and development. The theorists of the practical split — “Make up your mind: do you want democracy, or instead, do you want development?” — often came, at least to start with, from East Asian countries, and their voice grew in influence as several of these countries were immensely successful — through the 1970s and 1980s and even later — in promoting economic growth without pursuing democracy. The observation of a handful of such examples led rapidly to something like a general theory: democracies do quite badly in facilitating development, compared with what authoritarian regimes can achieve. Didn’t South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong achieve astonishingly fast economic progress without fulfilling, at least in the early days, the basic requirements of democratic governance? And after the economic reforms in China in 1979, didn’t authoritarian China fare a lot better in terms of economic growth than democratic India?

But development cannot be equated only with economic growth, says Sen.

The assessment of development cannot be divorced from the lives that people lead and the real freedom they enjoy… Development can scarcely be seen merely in terms of … a rise in the GNP (or in personal incomes), or in industrialization, important as they may be… Their value must depend on what they do to the lives and freedom of the people involved, which must be central to the idea of development.

With India growing rapidly now, one can no longer argue democracy is incompatible with economic growth, he adds.

He is right. (More about his book in my previous post.)

And there is evidence that countries at a certain stage of development dump the East Asian model. Look at South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia.

But hats off to Mr Tharman. You really have to know your history to draw any analogies between East Asia and America and Britain.

Ordinary people like me also don’t want any trouble. The government is right in maintaining the tightest security in view of the terrorist threat.

Amartya Sen

The Nobel Prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen, however, expresses a different view in his new book, The Idea of Justice. In the concluding chapter, Justice and the World, he writes in the section, Justice, Democracy and Global Reasoning:

Active public agitation, news commentary and open discussion are among the ways in which global democracy can be pursued, even without waiting for the global state. The challenge today is the strengthening of this already participatory process, on which the pursuit of global justice will to a great extent depend. It is not a negligible cause.

Singapore is not alone, of course, in tightening security for the Apec meeting. PM Lee recalled Australia spent $300 million building a fence surrounding “the whole of the centre of Sydney” for the Apec meeting there in 2007 and declared a public holiday “so all Sydneyans could leave town and leave us there in solitary splendour”. “We’re not going to do quite that, but we hope to have a peaceful meeting,” he added.

Everyone wants peace. Sometimes it takes unusual forms, though.

Sen recalls the reaction of two famous British thinkers, James Mill and David Ricardo, during the drought of 1816.

In The Idea of Justice, in the chapter, Justice and the World, Sen writes:

In the troubled English summer of 1816, James Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, wrote to David Ricardo, the great political economist of his time, about the effects of drought on agricultural output. Mill was worried about the misery that would be an unavoidable result of the drought, “the thought of which makes one’s flesh creep on one’s bones — one third of the people must die”… “It would be a blessing,” Mill wrote, “to take them (the starving population) into the streets and high ways, and cut their throats as we do with pigs.” Ricardo expressed considerable sympathy for Mill’s line of exasperated thought, and like Mill (James Mill, I hasten to add, not John Stuart) expressed his disdain for social agitators who try to sow discontent with the social order by telling people, wrongly, that the government can help them. Ricardo wrote to Mill that he was “sorry to see a disposition to inflame the minds of the lower orders by persuading them that legislation can afford them any relief”.

David Ricardo’s denunciation of inflammatory protests is understandable given his — and Mill’s — belief that people threatened by famine resulting from the crop failure of 1816 could not, in any way, be saved.

But such protests cannot be ignored by policy makers, according to Sen. He writes:

First, what “tends to inflame the minds” of suffering humanity cannot but be of immediate interest both to policy-making and to the diagnosis of injustice. A sense of injustice must be examined even if turns out to be erroneously based, and it must, of course, be thoroughly pursued if it is well founded. And we cannot be sure whether it is erroneous or well founded without some investigation. However, since injustices relate, often enough, to hardy social divisions, linked with divisions of class, gender, rank, location, religion, community and other established barriers, it is often difficult to surmount these barriers to have an objective analysis of the contrast between what is happening and what could have happened — a contrast that is central to the advancement of justice. We have to go through doubts, questions, arguments and scrutiny to move towards conclusions about whether and how justice can be advanced. An approach to justice that is particularly involved with the diagnoses of injustice, as this work is, must allow note to be taken of “inflamed minds” as a prelude to critical scrutiny. Outrage can be used to motivate, rather than replace, reasoning.

Second, even though David Ricardo was perhaps the most distinguished economist in Britain of his time, the arguments of those whom he took to be mere instigators of protest did not deserve such prompt dismissal. Those who were encouraging the people threatened by starvation to believe that government legislation and policy can mitigate hunger were actually more right than Ricardo in his pessimism about the possibility of effective social relief. Indeed, good public policy can eliminate the incidence of starvation altogether.

Can each country pursue its own idea of justice?

No, says Sen, not in this globalized world where events in one country can affect others.

Sen writes in the same chapter in the section, Justice and Open Impartiality:

There are two  principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of public reasoning about justice should go beyond the boundaries of a state or a region…

The first ground… is easy enough to appreciate. How America responds to the barbarity of 9/11 in New York affects the lives of many hundreds of millions elsewhere in the world — in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, but well beyond these direct fields of American action. Similarly, how America succeeds in managing its present economic crisis (the crisis of 2008-9) will have a profound effect on other countries that have trade and financial relations with America and still others who have business relations with those who have commerce with America…

The interdependences also include the impact of a sense of injustice in one country on lives and freedom in others. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” said Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, in April 1963, in a letter from Birmingham jail. Discontent based in one country can rapidly spread to other lands: our “neighbourhoods” now extend across the world. Our involvement with others through trade and communication is remarkably extensive in this contemporary world… and make it hard for us to expect that an adequate consideration of diverse interests and concerns can be plausibly confined to the citizenry of any given country, ignoring all others.

This idea of interdependence expressed by Sen has come to be accepted by governments around the world.

That is why the world is moving towards common laws and agreements.

Apec, Asean, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, each is a reminder we are living in a globalized world.

Ordinary people like me also don’t want any trouble. The government is right in maintaining the tightest security in view of the terrorist threat.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, however, expresses a different view in his new book, The Idea of Justice. In the concluding chapter, Justice and the World, he writes in the section, Justice, Democracy and Global Reasoning:

Active public agitation, news commentary and open discussion are among the ways in which global democracy can be pursued, even without waiting for the global state. The challenge today is the strengthening of this already participatory process, on which the pursuit of global justice will to a great extent depend. It is not a negligible cause.

Singapore is not alone, of course, in tightening security for the Apec meeting. PM Lee recalled Australia spent $300 million building a fence surrounding “the whole of the centre of Sydney” for the Apec meeting there in 2007 and declared a public holiday “so all Sydneyans could leave town and leave us there in solitary splendour”. “We’re not going to do quite that, but we hope to have a peaceful meeting,” he added.

Everyone wants peace. Sometimes it takes unusual forms, though.

Sen recalls the reaction of two famous British thinkers, James Mill and David Ricardo, during the drought of 1816.

In The Idea of Justice, in the chapter, Justice and the World, Sen writes:

In the troubled English summer of 1816, James Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, wrote to David Ricardo, the great political economist of his time, about the effects of drought on agricultural output. Mill was worried about the misery that would be an unavoidable result of the drought, “the thought of which makes one’s flesh creep on one’s bones — one third of the people must die”… “It would be a blessing,” Mill wrote, “to take them (the starving population) into the streets and high ways, and cut their throats as we do with pigs.” Ricardo expressed considerable sympathy for Mill’s line of exasperated thought, and like Mill (James Mill, I hasten to add, not John Stuart) expressed his disdain for social agitators who try to sow discontent with the social order by telling people, wrongly, that the government can help them. Ricardo wrote to Mill that he was “sorry to see a disposition to inflame the minds of the lower orders by persuading them that legislation can afford them any relief”.

David Ricardo’s denunciation of inflammatory protests is understandable given his — and Mill’s — belief that people threatened by famine resulting from the crop failure of 1816 could not, in any way, be saved.

But such protests cannot be ignored by policy makers, according to Sen. He writes:

First, what “tends to inflame the minds” of suffering humanity cannot but be of immediate interest both to policy-making and to the diagnosis of injustice. A sense of injustice must be examined even if turns out to be erroneously based, and it must, of course, be thoroughly pursued if it is well founded. And we cannot be sure whether it is erroneous or well founded without some investigation. However, since injustices relate, often enough, to hardy social divisions, linked with divisions of class, gender, rank, location, religion, community and other established barriers, it is often difficult to surmount these barriers to have an objective analysis of the contrast between what is happening and what could have happened — a contrast that is central to the advancement of justice. We have to go through doubts, questions, arguments and scrutiny to move towards conclusions about whether and how justice can be advanced. An approach to justice that is particularly involved with the diagnoses of injustice, as this work is, must allow note to be taken of “inflamed minds” as a prelude to critical scrutiny. Outrage can be used to motivate, rather than replace, reasoning.

Second, even though David Ricardo was perhaps the most distinguished economist in Britain of his time, the arguments of those whom he took to be mere instigators of protest did not deserve such prompt dismissal. Those who were encouraging the people threatened by starvation to believe that government legislation and policy can mitigate hunger were actually more right than Ricardo in his pessimism about the possibility of effective social relief. Indeed, good public policy can eliminate the incidence of starvation altogether.

Can each country pursue its own idea of justice?

No, says Sen, not in this globalized world where events in one country can affect others.

Sen writes in the same chapter in the section, Justice and Open Impartiality:

There are two  principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of public reasoning about justice should go beyond the boundaries of a state or a region…

The first ground… is enough to appreciate. How America responds to the barbarity of 9/11 in New York affects the lives of many hundreds of millions elsewhere in the world — in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, but well beyond these direct fields of American action. Similarly, how America succeeds in managing its present economic crisis (the crisis of 2008-9) will have a profound effect on other countries that have trade and financial relations with America and still others who have business relations with those who have commerce with America…

The interdependences also include the impact of a sense of injustice in one country on lives and freedom in others. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” said Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, in April 1963, in a letter from Birmingham jail. Discontent based in one country can rapidly spread to other lands: our “neighbourhoods” now extend across the world. Our involvement with others through trade and communication is remarkably extensive in this contemporary world… and make it hard for us to expect that an adequate consideration of diverse interests and concerns can be plausibly confined to the citizenry of any given country, ignoring all others.

This idea of interdependence expressed by Sen has come to be accepted by governments around the world.

That is why the world is moving towards common laws and agreements.

Apec, Asean, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, each is a reminder we are living in a globalized world.

Average wages have also fallen back to 2007 levels. The “average nominal earnings per employee by industry” was 3,609 Singapore dollars (about $2,575) in the second quarter of this year — less than the 3,773 Singapore-dollar average pay cheque in 2007.

From Statistics Singapore Monthly Digest, October 2009

See how much productivity has fallen?

All the figures here are from the Monthly Digest of Statistics Singapore, October 2009.

Productivity fell by 0.8 percent in 2007, then by 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2008 before things went from bad to worse. The drop was 7.1 percent in the second quarter, even worse — 9 percent in the third quarter — then went into double digits, plunging 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter and a shocking 14.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Singapore was then in full-blown recession.

But the slide did not stop even when the recession ended. Productivity fell by 6.2 percent in the second quarter. Back to single digits at last!

No wonder the government is talking up a storm about boosting productivity.

Frankly, the Finance Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, is worried.

As Singapore becomes a high-income economy, it faces the difficulty of maintaining high rates of productivity growth, he told the Financial Times, reports Channel NewsAsia.

The services sector is touted as the future hope, but it was the one where productivity continued to fall in the second quarter.

Manufacturing recovered in the second quarter, with productivity up 3.8 percent after falling by as much as 23.9 percent in the first quarter.

Construction made productivity gains both in the first quarter (3.9 percent) and the second (4.4 percent) after falling 3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

But service sector productivity fell throughout last year and it has been falling rapidly since late last year. It fell by 8.6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, 10.3 percent in the first quarter of this year and 8.2 percent in the second.

Not only the hotel and retail sectors have been badly hit.

Financial services fell by 15.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and by 12.2 percent in the first quarter and 5.8 percent in the second quarter of this year.

Information and communications fell by 1.9 percent, 4.4 percent and 4.7 percent during the same periods.

Business services fell by 6.1 percent, 4.1 percent and 2 percent.

Here is the wages chart.

Average monthly nominal earnings per employee by industry

(All figures in Singapore dollars)

More job seekers are visiting the WDA’s Careerlink Centres — over 14,000 in September, up from 10,000 in August. There were 13,000 job seekers at the centres in  June and July, and 12,000 in May.

These figures from the WDA appear in the Monthly Digest of Statistics Singapore, October 2009.

There were no details about the jobs provided, only this chart.

More than 13,000 people have found jobs through the government agency since April this year — almost the same number as last year.

Jobseekers can visit the WDA website for more information about how it can help them.

Type the letters “l” and “e” in the Google search engine in Singapore, and see what you get.

Lee Kuan Yew in Google Singapore

The first word that pops up in the dropdown box is the domain name of an e-learning solutions provider.

Next comes Lenovo the computer company.

Only then comes Lee Kuan Yew.

Apparently, internet users in Singapore are more likely to Google lead.com.sg and Lenovo than Lee Kuan Yew.

“Google doesn’t reveal its search algorithms, but the company’s engineers confirm that what we’re looking at…. is, essentially, a list of the 10 most popular queries that start with a given prefix,” wrote Josh Levin in Slate.

Go down the list and see what else Singaporeans are likely to Google.

Lego, Left 4 Dead, Lee Hwa, Leighton Meester and Levis.

Toys, games, bling, music and duds.

That’s the naked truth as your eyes can see if you look at this list from Googleverse.

Chris Anderson

I enjoyed reading Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s books, Free, and The Long Tail. Anyone who loves to blog or spend time online will find them highly informative.

Here, in The Long Tail, Anderson is writing about the “reputation economy”. As a blogger himself, he understands why people blog and create websites, whether they expect to make any money and why many of them are not interested in copyright protection.

It’s a long extract, but fascinating.

The Reputation Economy

Why do they do it? Why does anyone create something of value (from an encyclopaedia entry to an astronomical observation) without a business plan or even the prospect of a paycheck? The question is a key one to understanding the Long Tail… The motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail. One economic model doesn’t fit all. You can think of the Long Tail starting as a traditional monetary economy at the head and ending in a non-monetary economy in the tail. In between the two, it’s a mixture of both.

Up at the head, where products benefit from the powerful, but expensive, channels of mass-market distribution, business considerations rule. It’s the domain of professionals, and as much as they might like to do what they do, it’s a job, too. The costs of production and distribution are too high to let economics take a backseat to creativity. Money drives the process.

Down in the tail, where distribution and production costs are low (thanks to the digital technologies), business considerations are often secondary. Instead, people create for a variety of other reasons — expression, fun, experimentation, and so on. The reason one might call it an economy at all is that there is a coin of the realm that can be every bit as motivating as money: reputation. Measured by the amount of attention a product attracts, reputation can be converted into other things of value: tenure, audiences, and lucrative offers of all sorts.

Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, calls this the “exposure culture”. Using blogs as an example, he writes:

The exposure culture reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favourite articles and jokes has become as much a part of American work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but, instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the centre of this exposure culture is the almighty search engine. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don’t sue — you celebrate.

Disney and Metallica may be doing all they can to embrace and extend copyright, but there are plenty of other (maybe more) artists and producers who see free peer to peer (”P2P”) distribution as low-cost marketing. Musicians can turn that into an audience for their live shows, indie filmmakers treat it as a viral resume, and academics treat free downloads of their papers as a way to increase their impact and audience.

Each of these perspectives changes how the creators feel about copyright. At the top of the curve, the studios, music labels and publishers defend their copyright fiercely. In the middle, the domain of independent labels and academic presses, it’s a grey area. Farther down the tail, more firmly in the non-commercial zone, an increasing number of content creators are choosing explicitly to give up some of their copyright protections. Since 2002, a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons has been issuing licences of the same name to allow for a flexible use of certain copyrighted works for the sake of the greater value (for the content creators) of free distribution, remixing, and other peer-to-peer propagation of their ideas, interests and fame. (Indeed, I’ve done that with my own blog, for all of the reasons above.)

In short, some creators care about copyright and some don’t. Yet the law doesn’t distinguish between them — copyright is automatically granted and protected unless explicitly waived. As a result, the power of “free” is obscured by fears over piracy and is often viewed with suspicion, not least because it evokes unfortunate echoes of communism and hippie sloganeering.

Regardless, it’s something we’re starting to reconsider as the power of the “gift economy” becomes clear — in everything from the blogosphere to open source. In one part of my professional life (the 650,000-circulation magazine I edit), I’m near the head of the curve, and in another (my 30,000-reader blog) I’m in the tail. My decisions on intellectual property are different in each. Someday soon, I hope, marketplace and regulation will more accurately reflect this reality.

Ten trips were made on buses for every six railway journeys in September.

This becomes clear from the ridership figures of the two main transport operators, SBS Transit and SMRT.

Both are running up profits in what looks like a recession-proof business.

MRT train

SBS daily bus ridership dropped by more than 60,000 — to 2,284,765 in September this year from 2,346,677 in September 2008 but was still more than the 2,200,560 logged in September 2007.

SBS daily rail ridership rose to 378,828 in September this year from 362,875 in September 2008 and 307,556 in September 2007. This includes trips on the North East Line (NEL), Sengkang Light Rapid Transit (LRT) and Punggol LRT.

SMRT monthly rail ridership is also up — 44,097,931 in September this year, from 42,890,883 in September 2008 and 37,591,642 in September 2007. The current figure includes trips on the newly opened Circle Line.

SMRT monthly bus ridership dropped by more than 70,000 — to 23,714,000 in September this year, down from 23,788,000 in September 2008, but was still more than the 22,496,000 logged in September 2007.

Based on SBS’ daily ridership, monthly SBS bus rides totalled  68,542,950 and SBS rail journeys 11,364,840 in September this year.

Singapore: Total bus and rail ridership in September

Combined, SBS and SMRT bus trips totalled  92,256,950 and rail journeys 55,462,771 in September.

Public transport is recession-proof. Both the transport operators report higher profits.

On October 30, SMRT reported:

Group revenue for the first six months ended 30 September 2009 was up marginally at 445.3 million Singapore dollars (SGD). Net profit after tax for the first half of the year rose to SGD101.0 million, 21.9 percent higher on account of higher operating profits.

Back in August, SBS Transit reported:

Group revenue of SGD168.9 million for the second quarter of 2009 decreased by 6.6 percent or SGD11.9 million as compared to SGD180.8 million in the second quarter of 2008 due mainly to lower bus fare revenue.

(But) Operating expenses of SGD153.1 million for the second quarter of 2009 decreased by 12 percent or SGD20.8 million as compared to SGD173.9 million in the second quarter of 2008 due to lower fuel and electricity costs, savings from the Singapore Government Budget 2009 and lower other operating expenses,
partially offset by higher depreciation and repairs and maintenance expenses.

Group operating profit of SGD15.8 million for the second quarter of 2009 was 130.0 percent or SGD8.9 million higher than that of SGD6.9 million in the second quarter of 2008.

I won’t go into the politics, but he said, "We have to pursue self-renewal aggressively, keep the party young, keep the party current. Every general election we induct new candidates, every year we attract younger Singaporeans through the YP. We give them roles online, doing battle in cyberspace, on the ground, organizing activities which attract younger people. So you find I’ve now been to Zouk, I’ve now been to the Power Station."

The idea is not to be hip — you have to click with the mainstream audience —- but cool. The coolest leaders in the last 50 years? (That’s how long the PAP has ruled Singapore.)

John Kennedy, Pierre Trudeau, and, of course, Barack Obama.

Just watch Obama write a note for 10-year-old Kennedy Corpus, asking her teacher to excuse her for missing a day at school when her daddy showed up with her at his townhall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in June this year. Here’s the YouTube video.

See how the graph falls steeply to just above 865, then goes down by a few big steps before tapering off. The sharp drop from the top shows how big is The Huffington Post’s lead over the competition. The graph tapers off someway down below 865 as the competitors are more closely packed. (Chart created with this Google Chart generator.)

Gizmodo is second with an authority of 901, TechCrunch third (896), Mashable fourth (888), Boing Boing fifth (883), Engadget (880), The Daily Beast seventh (863), Gawker eighth (857), The Corner on National Review ninth (854) and Hot Air 10th (853).

TMZ is 11th (849), Think Progress and CNN Political Ticker tied at 12th (848), Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish 14th (834).

The rest of the pack are bunched more closely, with authorities ranging from 829 — that’s Newsbusters.org — to 762, where Big Government is tied with The Big Picture and Dvice.

Those who read blogs don’t, of course, go by the Technorati list. Celebrity watchers will read TMZ anyway, techies go for TechCrunch while politicos will get their kicks from The Daily Dish, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.

That’s what The Long Tail is all about. Chris Anderson describes how new technology has created niches, fragmenting mass markets.

Top 20 album sales are no longer what they were. Network TV is losing audience share to cable TV. We have so much choice we go for what we like and tune out the rest.

That is why the Technorati Top 100 is just like a bestseller list or a top 20 chart.

It shows the hottest blogs but doesn’t determine what we read. It’s a list, not a tastemaker.

The internet has created other means of persuasion, such as the recommendations I get from Google Reader based on what I read.

Chris Anderson describes how LAUNCHcast — now Yahoo Music Radio — did the same for music lovers.

The Long Tail makes fascinating reading.

I enjoyed reading Anderson’s latest book, Free, even more. But that’s because I love to blog. We all have our little niches — just like The Long Tail says.