Given that reality, what’s needed are new, globally accepted standards of privacy – which Google is working towards. And, Fleischer argues, the best starting point for such a framework is “an entirely new privacy protection principle that does not exist in the regulatory frameworks of the 80s and the 90s: the ‘preventing harm’ principle.” That is, don’t try to stop organizations from collecting information about individuals, because you can’t. But do try to make sure that that information isn’t used to harm individuals.

The trick, of course, is to define “harm.”  The standard has been criticized as vague, and the whole idea has turned out to be surprisingly controversial. But then, that’s why the article is worth reading, and the discussion is worth having.

You’d think this point would be blazingly obvious to everybody, but apparently not. On the left, it regularly gets denounced as being elitist, racist, blame-the-victim, and so on. Just remove the exploitation and oppression, and the poor will prosper, etc. And on the right, especially among “hard-nosed” neocons of the Rumsfeldian stripe, it tends to get dismissed as being touchy-feely claptrap. Just remove the commissars and Russia will become a flourishing free-market economy and model democracy. Just get Saddam out of the way and give Iraqis the vote, and they will become a model democracy.

I don’t intend to debate these objections here (although I welcome comments), other than to note that recent history hasn’t been kind to either one. Witness Vladimir Putin’s newly autocratic Russia, the ongoing Iraq War, or the persistence of inner-city poverty 40 years after the launch of the Great Society. In any case, Washington Post reporter Shankar Vedantam made the argument far better than I could in last Monday’s edition of his always-fascinating Department of Human Behavior column: “One Thing We Can’t Build Alone in Iraq” (29 Oct 2007, p. A3). Vedantam starts out talking about how New York hotel doormen get their jobs, but then quickly moves on to his real topic: social capital. A key passage:

“Most people in America get their jobs because of who they know, not what they know,” said Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s not nepotism — one person knows me and another person finds out and someone says, ‘Did you hear there is a new job at the bank?’ or they say, ‘Do you know a good lawyer?’ ”

The example of the doormen highlights the importance of something that Putnam calls social capital: a measure of how closely people in the community are interconnected. Levels of social capital predict everything from the quality of schools and local government, to the risk a country will go down in corruption or blow up in civil war.
…
So what exactly is social capital? Putnam, the author of the 2005 book “Bowling Alone,” said it describes how much people in a community feel responsible for each other.

It turns out that social scientists have devised ways to measure this supposedly touchy-feely quantity, and find that social capital is a strong predictor of very practical things like village prosperity in India, a community’s ability to recover from a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami-or a nation’s receptiveness to democracy. Vedantam again:

It is social capital, [Putnam} added, that seems to create the right soil for democracy, not the other way around. This is why Putnam predicted many years ago that democracy was unlikely to flourish in Russia: Social capital levels were extremely low.

And in Iraq, after decades of Saddam’s brutal rule and half a decade of post-invasion chaos, social-capital levels are abysmal. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that social capital is virtually impossible to build from the top down; it has to come from the people themselves.

This analysis is hardly unique to Putnam. Francis Fukuyama, for one, made much the same point in his 1995 book Trust. So did Fareed Zakaria in his 2004 book, The Future of Freedom. So did the Post’s David Ignatius back in May.

And so did Robert J. Samuelson in his column on Wednesday: “The Global Poverty Trap.” As he puts it:

It’s nature vs. nurture. One of the big debates of our time involves the causes of economic growth. Why is North America richer than South America? Why is Africa poor and Europe wealthy? Is it possible to eliminate global poverty? The World Bank estimates that 2.5 billion people still live on $2 a day or less. On one side are economists who argue that societies can nurture economic growth by adopting sound policies. Not so, say other scholars … Culture (a.k.a. “nature”) predisposes some societies to rapid growth and others to poverty or meager growth.

Samuelson’s column is framed as a review of a new book by UC-Davis economist, Gregory Clark: A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Samuelson takes issue with some of Clark’s argument, which seem to verge on a kind of cultural determinism. But he heartily endorses the essential point:

Capitalism in its many variants has been shown, he notes, to be a prodigious generator of wealth. But it will not spring forth magically from a few big industrial projects or cookie-cutter policies imposed by outside experts. It’s culture that nourishes productive policies and behavior.

By and large, nations have either lifted themselves or have stayed down. Societies dominated by tribal, religious, ideological or political values that disparage the qualities needed for broad-based growth will not get growth. Economic success requires a tolerance for change and inequality, some minimum level of trust — an essential for much commerce — and risk-taking. There are many plausible combinations of government and market power; but without the proper cultural catalysts, all face long odds.