Three economists–Ed Glaeser, David Cutler and Jacob Vigdor–conducted careful research and proved that ghettos do indeed stop poor people getting jobs or doing well in school. But they also found that certain players do well out of ghettos, and not just the drug dealers. The main winners are those who build bridges between the ghetto and the outside world–what we would call superconnectors. These people live near the ghetto, belong to the same ethnic group, and are typically entrepreneurs, often selling into the ghetto and providing jobs outside it to the inhabitants. The number of ethnic superconnectors is growing quite fast, but only expanding cities–Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles–have seen burgeoning weak links between the poor and mainstream communities. Once again, Detroit and New Orleans have missed out, not because of anything specific in the poor areas, but because there is little to connect to locally, no dynamic economy, no new jobs.114
So what can be done? Plainly, new ventures near poor areas are crucial–but these are developing naturally anyway, and it is hard to stimulate them in any other way. Better transport systems linking poor and rich areas are also important, and eminently feasible when there is money for infrastructure projects. But often the poor areas, lacking political clout and campaigning skill, lose out. In Johannesburg, for example, one of the most divided and dangerous places on earth, there is very little public transport. Now huge funds are being spent on a swish new local train service–but it will link the airport with the rich suburbs and business areas, bypassing the nearby black settlements.
However, some diverse worlds have been linked in ways that enhance economic wellbeing. Take the recent enlargement of the European Union, which has allowed millions of people from Eastern Europe to settle in richer North and West European areas, especially Britain and Scandinavia. While mass immigration is always controversial, particularly in times of high or rising unemployment, no other phenomenon generates such an increase in diverse weak and strong links. Economists also say that immigration boosts host-nation economic performance.
Sometimes all it takes is one or two individuals, armed with a powerful conviction and a commitment to spreading it, to generate a large number of links and lift millions out of poverty. Such was the case when Americans Joseph Juran, an electrical engineer, and W. Edwards Deming, a statistician, moved to Japan in the early 1950s. In 1951, Juran, who had been born in Romania, published the first edition of his Quality Control Handbook, the Bible of the nascent quality-improvement movement. Few Americans were very interested in Juran’s ideas, so when a lecture tour in Japan sparked a wave of interest there, he moved and began to consult with Japanese firms. At the time, Japanese industry was notorious for churning out cheap, shoddy imitations of Western products. By the 1970s, leading Japanese consumer electronics firms such as Sharp, Canon and Hitachi were producing higher-quality goods than their US and European rivals. Only then did Western industry begin to take an interest in ideas that had originated in America decades before.
Many of the most cost-effective philanthropic initiatives use well-off volunteers to educate poor people, forming links between rich and poor hubs. In South Africa, a company in which I’m a director encourages its employees to help local schools by donating computers and showing the kids how to use them. In London, ‘Debate Mate’ sends successful university debaters into schools in poor areas, where they help set up debating clubs. According to astonished teachers, debating engages and encourages previously unmotivated pupils in ways they never thought possible.
There are no easy ways to tackle poverty, but one direction seems clear–facilitate and multiply the weak links, especially financial and commercial, that can improve the networks of poor people.
Poverty displays similar characteristics all around the world–in Harlem and New Orleans, in Peru and rural Bangladesh, in Paris and London, in Johannesburg and Detroit. Moreover, the effects of poverty were much the same in the pre-industrial world, in early America and in the Great Depression as they are today. And they are similar in inner cities, remote villages, ghettos and shanty towns. Being poor is about being confined to limited enclaves, unable to break free, unable to climb up to even the lowest level of property and capital formation. Poverty is about the absence of varied networks, of connections to people who are economically and socially active.
It therefore seems likely that poverty could be reduced, and perhaps eventually eliminated, by connecting poor people to mainstream communities, by facilitating weak links to people with money. So we must identify and remove the barriers to the spontaneous and rich flowering of weak links. Given a fair chance, the poor themselves will do the rest.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A NETWORK SOCIETY
Networks, past, present and future
The network is the least structured organisation that can be said to have any structure at all.
Kevin Kelly115
Berlin, Germany, 1932–45
Around 1930, Germany was a highly decentralised and sophisticated society, with many centres of power and influence. Its regions and cities had strong local authority, a legacy of its formation only sixty years earlier out of many smaller states. It also had trade unions, an army that jealously guarded its independence from the state, Catholic and Protestant churches and schools, local and big business, a wide array of regional and national political parties, a large number of ancient and independent universities, and numerous cultural and civil institutions. After Italy, China and Japan, no country in the world had such a rich cultural heritage. After the United States, no country had such widespread and effective industry and technology. Possibly no country on the planet had such a profusion and variety of hubs and weak links.
In the 1932 elections, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party won more seats than any other party, although it was still well short of an absolute majority. However, through a deal with the German National People’s Party (the ‘Nationalists’), the Nazis gained a slim working majority and Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. Having come to power constitutionally, he proceeded to abolish civil rights and the constitution. Six months after taking office, he declared a one-party state. In January 1934, local government was abolished and all power centralised. In June 1934, Hitler ended the competition between his two paramilitary forces, the SA and the SS, by killing the leaders of the former, disbanding it and consolidating all power in the brutal hands of the SS.
By doing all this, Hitler greatly simplified the network map of Germany. He closed a huge number of the country’s social and political hubs and weak links, and reduced the country to one centre of power and propaganda. By the late 1930s, gone from German society were the communists, socialists, anarchists, social democrats, conservatives, nationalists, Catholics and all other non-Nazi politicians. Gone were the trade unions. Gone were independent mayors and regional parliaments. Gone were independent intellectuals, certainly every Jewish one, including such luminaries as Albert Einstein. Gone were the scientists who were to give America, rather than Germany (or the Soviet Union), the first atomic bomb. Gone, to concentration camps, were millions of Jews, socialists, anarchists, communists, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, gypsies and anyone who dared criticise the regime. Gone was intellectual, political or social debate. And if, to the outside observer, the churches, army and big business operated largely as before, the tacit bargain was their acceptance of Nazi tyranny.