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Identity Project's List: Economist
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Mar 17, 11
"HUNDREDS of millions of Indians cannot prove they exist. They have no birth certificate, no driving licence, no social-security number. So they find it hard to open a bank account, borrow money or draw on government services.
Nandan Nilekani, an Indian software billionaire, volunteered to give every one of his 1.2 billion compatriots an identity number tied to biometric data. The Indian government thought this a wonderful idea, but there was a snag. The proposed database was ten times larger than the largest biometric database in existence. How was a poor country going to build it? " -
Mar 15, 11
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Globalisation
The redistribution of hope
Optimism is on the move—with important consequences for both the hopeful and the hopeless
Dec 16th 2010 | from the print edition
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“HOPE” is one of the most overused words in public life, up there with “change”. Yet it matters enormously. Politicians pay close attention to right-track/wrong-track indicators. Confidence determines whether consumers spend, and so whether companies invest. The “power of positive thinking”, as Norman Vincent Peale pointed out, is enormous.
For the past 400 years the West has enjoyed a comparative advantage over the rest of the world when it comes to optimism. Western intellectuals dreamed up the ideas of enlightenment and progress, and Western men of affairs harnessed technology to impose their will on the rest of the world. The Founding Fathers of the United States, who firmly believed that the country they created would be better than any that had come before, offered citizens not just life and liberty but also the pursuit of happiness.
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