Business and Media

It seemed oddly fitting that on the 50th anniversary of the East-West Summit between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, Vienna’s Hofburg would once again play host to the World Economic Forum on Europe and Central Asia. June 8 and 9 was an assessment of just how far constellations have shifted since – with a Berlin Wall rising and falling, and the Soviet system vanishing from the world stage. The penetrating light of U.S. power has also dimmed a bit, and at this occasion, kept its glimmering shine in the background.

Revolution across the Arab world has forced the region’s peoples and governments to grapple with the need for change. Years of sclerosis have given way to a frantic push for reforms to match the aspirations and discontent of millions.

But reform momentum is tugging in two, quite opposite, directions. One push is for governments to provide for their people; the other calls for governments to stop restricting their people’s freedom, particularly their economic liberty. The first type of reform will likely only exacerbate the Arab world’s grave problems; the second offers hope for positive and sustainable change.

The consequences of the Japanese earthquake – especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant – resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them.

Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake – which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing – and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events.

The start of 2011 – what we might call Year 2 AG (“After Greece’s” debt crisis) has brought good and bad news on the economic front. The bad news is that 2 AG is beginning with more or the same, with headlines about government debt and default, this time focused on Portugal and Spain.

There’s an old joke on Madison Avenue: Half of all the advertising is wasted on customers who will never buy – it’s just that nobody knows which half. People avoid health-care jokes, but you could say the same thing about drugs.

In fact, in both advertising and pharmaceuticals, no one knows what the numbers are, because no one knows what “effectiveness” means, other than people buying things or recovering their health. But was it the advertisements or the drugs that led to one outcome or another?

There is a word in Austrian German that seems to perfectly sum up the efficiency of your average bureaucrat: Amtsschimmel, a wondrous reference to the layer of mold-like dust collecting on government records. Or maybe, say others, the word derived from “simile” and the endless repetitive use of packaged phrases. Either way, the meaning is the same: Bureaucracy works slowly.

After the death of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston (21) in 2009, Oliviero Toscani ran a billboard campaign to dramatize the horrors of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, which he hoped would prompt the fashion industry to discontinue its use of emaciated models in their ad campaigns and on their runways.

In the lead up to the Group of 20 Summit in South Korea this November, a global economy caught between recovery and stagnation seemed to be fostering a new type of indecision. The momentum behind policy coordination and consensus that characterized the G20’s first meetings was giving way to power struggles. As the heads of state of the world’s 20 leading nations convened in Seoul on Nov. 11, it was perhaps the finger pointing that best characterized the mood.

Currency wars and global imbalances had dominated the debate in the days leading up to the two-day affair. Nothing new in monetary policy discussions, but the deliberations had taken on new tensions following the Nov. 3 decision by the Federal Reserve to resume quantitative easing.