Chrystia Freeland

On the Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert took off and ran with the idea from Chrystia’s recent Atlantic essay that the super-elite “are increasingly a nation unto themselves.” “Let the rich start their own country,” Colbert said. “Call it ‘America Plus.’ We already live in gated communities. I say we just connect them all with really long driveways.”

Colbert deadpanned that creating a rich America and a poor America might just ameliorate U.S. unemployment overall: “To us [in America Plus] you’ll now be cheap foreign labor, and we might just start hiring you again.”

Do watch the whole clip:

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

During the depths of the financial crisis, Alcoa announced that it would lay off 13% of its global workforce, or about 13,500 people. Since then, they have built up their presence in China and Russia, finalized a new mine in Brazil, and started construction of the world’s largest aluminum facilities in Saudi Arabia. Alcoa’s rate of job creation in its home country of the United States, however, has been rather tepid in comparison.

Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld acknowledged that prospects for his business today were better abroad than they were at home, but he did note that in the past year Alcoa hired 1,500 people in the U.S. in the automotive and aerospace industries and so long as the United States retained its sense of entrepreneurship, creativity and excellence in higher education, jobs will come.

Dominic Barton was similarly sober about the current state of the U.S. labor market, saying that it’s currently undergoing an acute phase of creative destruction. However, he urged the audience to focus on long-term job growth, citing the example of Samsung in the wake of Korea’s financial crisis in 1997:

Samsung.  In 1997 there was massive layoffs that were going on. So if you looked at them with the lens of what happened in that crisis, yep, they laid off a lot of people. The number of jobs they’ve created since because of the investments that they’ve made is many, many multiples of what they’ve lost. But they’re different people. I think that what we need is this. There is restructuring, and there always will be restructuring. We can never get away from that.  But what’s — what are the conditions that are in place in the country to enable jobs to be created? And that’s something where I think business can help play a role. Not to subsidize jobs when they shouldn’t exist, but to help create the conditions to do it.

Towards the end of the Newsmaker, Chrystia steered the conversation to the relationship between the business community and the Obama administration. Klaus Kleinfeld observed that after a period of remarkable coordination during the financial crisis, government policy since then become less responsive to current developments and that the “societal dialogue” has become more “stratified.” Dominic Barton agreed and offered his own solution to this problem:  stripping elected officials of some authority over issues of economic competitiveness and handing it to technocrats who will be able to administer policy over a time-frame longer than the next election. Countries like Malaysia and South Korea have lessons to teach the United States in terms of of streamlined policy-making, Barton said:

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

It was striking to hear how encouraged both Klaus Kleinfeld and Dominic Barton sounded when Chrystia asked them about the effects of the recent turmoil in the Middle East on the business environment there. Barton believed the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt were “the dawn of a new good thing that’s occurring” and noted that it is likely that new capital will come into these countries as a new leadership emerges. Kleinfeld, whose company is in the process of building the world’s largest integrated aluminum system in Saudi Arabia, said that Alcoa is still very comfortable in the region and that the only surprises with their Saudi partners have been positive surprises. For Kleinfeld, the most assured way to bring about stability in a region plagued by unrest is to have businesses come in and create jobs:

If there’s one thing that the Middle East needs particularly for the young — as well as well-educated people — it’s jobs. And it does it in a region which typically has not had much of an economic growth around Ras Azzour. So that’s all very, very good. And not just for us as a company but also for the region. And it’s gonna have a stabilizing as well as a kind of uplifting, positive element

Like Saudi Arabia, China has a large population that accepts a level of repression so long as the leadership can deliver economic growth. Barton, a China expert who headed McKinsey’s Asia operations before ascending to the consultancy’s top spot, said that he did not think that dissent in China would spillover and create a Middle-East-style uprising because the Chinese Communist Party has been able to stay on top of job growth. He had an interesting anecdote about McKinsey’s study on the effectiveness of China’s stimulus plan that illustrated the leadership’s obsession with maintaining growth:

During the financial crisis, there was a stimulation program that was being put in place. And we’d been asked, almost ordered to do work to figure out what sort of discount should you put on TVs in tier three cities? It was a very focused question. And the reason was they were trying to create consumer demand in a very sophisticated manner. Do you sort of drop the price by 25 percent or do you have people buy it and they get a 25 percent rebate from the mayor? That was literally the thing.

And as we were talking about this I was amazed at how sort of precise it was. I said, you know, we gotta make sure that the impact is there and how we do — sort of doing the McKinsey thing, we wanna make sure this happens. And this guy said to me, “I think we have a different definition of impact than you.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he says, “If this doesn’t work, we’re gonna have probably 12 million people that won’t have jobs. And you should know that all of the revolutions in our 5,000 year history have occurred in the countryside.”

And so there is a revolution — it — so he was just trying to explain to me we understand how important this is, you idiot, basically.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

At this morning’s Newsmaker “Thriving in the New Global Economy,” Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld and McKinsey Global Managing Director Dominic Barton told Chrystia their outlook for the world economy. From his perch atop one of the world’s leading aluminum producers, Kleinfeld was “really positive” about global growth prospects. Coming off a strong year in which aluminum demand rose 13 percent, the Alcoa chief forecast that aluminum demand will grow at a slightly slower rate of 12 percent this year thanks to China’s efforts to slow down its economy:

While also bullish on global growth, Barton noted that there was a sense of fragility in the world economy that concerned him. Specifically, the McKinsey head was worried about the government’s response to looming inflation, which he predicted would rise to the range of 6 to 7 percent. Mounting government debts and the rising cost of capital, which Barton believes will be “up fairly significantly” as savings rates in the emerging markets decline, will exacerbate the inflation problem:

“We’re in a slack period if you just look at what the cost of money is. It’s an incredibly unique period. I think that’s going to go away, and that’s going to make it challenging.”

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

The Uprising Index Chrystia refers to in this week’s column ranks 80 countries on the likelihood of a domestic uprising based on the average of four equally-weighted factors: corruption; vulnerability to rising food prices; political freedom; and internet penetration.  Our thesis is that an uprising is more likely in a country if corruption is high, if rising food prices have a big effect on a country’s economy, if political freedom is low, and if internet penetration is high.  After crunching the data, here are the 25 countries that scored highest by our measure (out of a maximum score of 1):

As Chrystia noted in her column, this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation that’s meant to be suggestive and provocative, not definitive.  We limited our sample to the 80 countries for which we had data on vulnerability to rising food prices, and this excluded a few places that seem like they ought to have a high latent potential for rebellion, such as Iran, Jordan, and Cuba.

There are plenty of quants out there creating models that will predict the next uprising—the Political Instability Task Force has a model that predicts instability with over 80% accuracy over the period from 1955 to 2003.  One analyst I talked to compared this kind of approach to the search for “El Dorado:” attractive and desirable, yet elusive.

The raw data used to construct the index comes from the following sources:

• Corruption data came from Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perception Index, available here.  Transprency International uses business opinion surveys and other assessments of bribery, kickbacks, embezzlement, and anti-corruption efforts to compute its index.  We divided the countries into deciles ranking from 0.1 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the decile of countries that are perceived to be the most corrupt.
• Data on the vulnerability to rising food prices came from Nomura’s September 2010 Food Vulnerability index, which you can view here.  Nomura constructed their index using three components: nominal per capita GDP in U.S. dollars at market exchange rates; the share of food in total household consumption; and net food exports as a percentage of GDP.  Once again we divided the countries into deciles based on their score and gave them a ranking from 0.1 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the decile of countries most vulnerable to a food-price shock.
• Political freedom data came from Freedom House’s 2010 Freedom in the World survey, available here.  Freedom House uses two surveys, one for political rights and one for civil liberties, to rank countries on a scale of how much political freedom their people enjoy.  Once again we divided the countries into deciles based on their score and gave them a ranking from 0.1 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the decile of countries that are the least free.
• Internet penetration data came from 2009 estimates from the International Telecommunication Union on the number of internet users per 100 inhabitants in a country, available here.  Once again we divided the countries into deciles based on their score and gave them a ranking from 0.1 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the decile of countries that have the highest estimated number of internet users per 200 inhabitants.

We encourage you to download our spreadsheet, play around with the data, and offer your suggestions for how we could improve it.  One way to refine this index would be to get the data for the past decade and backtest to see if it would have predicted any of the color revolutions of the 2000s. Be sure to leave your ideas in the comments here.

Special thanks go to Steve Davis, Jeff Friedman, and Paul Swartz for their advice and assistance with creating the index.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

One casualty of the uprisings in the Middle East has been the professionals who didn’t see them coming. The International Monetary Fund has taken a hit for its April 2010 report on Egypt, which praised the country’s ‘‘sustained and wide-ranging reforms since 2004,’’ noting they had made the economy more durable and less vulnerable to external shocks. Ditto the C.I.A., whose director, Leon Panetta, endured the very personal ignominy of seeing his public predictions to Congress proven wrong within hours of making them.

For anyone who watched the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis, there is something very familiar about this failure of the experts. There seems to be something about swift, massive paradigm shifts — whether they are the bursting of a financial bubble that has been years in the making, or a popular revolt against a political regime that had been stable for decades — that we find hard to anticipate.

Research by behavioral economists like Dan Ariely of Duke University has suggested that part of the problem may be that when we have a vested interest in the status quo our brains are wired to view it as good and stable. Dr. Ariely’s work has focused on the cognitive blinders our financial self-interest imposes. But a similar bias may shape the views of political experts, who can end up developing a sense of ‘‘ownership’’ of the national elites they study that seems to be nearly as powerful as the proprietary feeling bankers had for the credit derivatives they created.

In a prescient book about democracy and authoritarianism written before he went to work at the White House, the political scientist Michael McFaul argued that assumptions of regime stability are always dominant, and that, when those regimes are authoritarian, these assumptions are always wrong. Dr. McFaul strenuously disagreed with that default view, arguing: ‘‘assuming that the current configuration of autocratic regimes in play today will persist 50 years from now is much more naïve than believing that some of these regimes might succeed in making the transition to democracy.’’

Dr. McFaul’s conviction is looking pretty good today. But even if we are able to overcome our psychological resistance to the very notion of regime change, anticipating precisely when dictators will be toppled may not be possible. ‘‘By their very nature, these tipping points are not predictable,’’ said Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A better way of thinking about whether regimes will endure, he suggested, might be to try to understand the potential for rebellion, given the right catalyst. ‘‘Most of the time it’s dormant and hence there is no predictability of uprisings,’’ he argued. ‘‘But once we enter into a critical period like the current one, this latent factor has some predictive power.’’

In that spirit, my colleague Peter Rudegeair and I have done a back-of- the-envelope calculation to identify countries with a high latent potential for uprisings. We considered four factors — political freedom (on the grounds that democracies don’t usually require popular rebellions to achieve regime change), corruption, vulnerability to food price shocks and Internet penetration. Our spreadsheet used publicly available measures of the four factors and came up with a list of 25 most vulnerable countries.* You can see the spreadsheet explaining the publicly available measures of the four factors we used and the top 25 countries we came up with here. Libya, Algeria and Egypt made it into the top 10. Perhaps more surprisingly, so did Russia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Venezuela.

According to Wired.com, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million over the past three years on computer models that try to forecast unrest. Bearing that in humbly mind, this fast and dirty calculation is meant to provoke discussion, not to pinpoint the next hot spot.

Dr. Acemoglu suggested that one way to refine this sort of calculation would be to consider ways in which the different factors that make a regime vulnerable to revolution interact: ‘‘For example, a lot of corruption without any Internet penetration or a lot of Internet penetration without corruption may create no pressure for uprisings, but when both of them are present that might be a whole different ballgame.’’

Lucan Way, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said another contributor to regime fragility that it would be worth factoring in to a more sophisticated analysis (you can try this at home!) is whether the authoritarian government is itself the product of recent revolutionary struggle. Dictatorships run by an ideologically united revolutionary party — Iran, for instance, and to a lesser extent China — are, Dr. Way argued, more durable than those whose rulers rely purely on guns and patronage.

Food-price shocks are often the catalyst that tips a regime with a latent vulnerability to an uprising into one facing people in the streets: that was the case in Tunisia, and has been true as far back as the Bolshevik Revolution. Something else that can propel a society with a latent potential for rebellion into action is the demonstration effect, or what Dr. Acemoglu calls ‘‘contagion,’’ a phenomenon also familiar to anyone who was caught in the wildfire global spread of the financial crisis in 2008.

In both cases, the sudden belief that a previously stable status quo could change had the power to alter reality. This interplay between perception and fact is what George Soros, an expert in paradigm shifts in both markets and countries, calls reflexivity.

Even some of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes seem to be getting concerned about the danger of contagion and the power of perception. Hence China’s efforts to block electronic information and discussion of the uprisings in the Middle East. The Kremlin may have even more reason to worry: A Russian opinion poll found that one-third of respondents thought the ‘‘Egyptian scenario’’ of mass protests was possible in Russia. That is the kind of thinking that can tip a latent potential for rebellion into a revolution.

*Update: For ease and simplicity, we used Nomura’s Food Vulnerability Index to calculate how rising food prices would affect a country’s domestic economy.  Because Nomura limited their Food Vulnerability Index to 80 countries, our uprising  index is also limited to 80 countries.  This explains why some countries that seem like they would be prime candidates for having a high latent potential for rebellion — like Iran, Cuba, and Jordan — do not make our list.

They are being called the Facebook revolutions, but a better term for the uprisings sweeping through the Middle East might be the Groupon effect. That is because one of the most powerful consequences satellite television and the Internet have had for the protest movements is to help them overcome the problem of collective action, in the same way that Groupon has harnessed the Web for retailers.

“It is a question of co-ordinating people’s beliefs,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, with Matthew Jackson of Stanford University in California, is working on a paper about the effect of social networks on collective action problems.

Protesting against an authoritarian regime is a prime example of this issue, Mr. Acemoglu said, because opponents of a dictator need to know that their views are widely shared and that a sufficient number of their fellow citizens are willing to join them to make opposition worthwhile.

“I need to know if other people agree with me and are willing to act,” he said. “What really stops people who are oppressed by a regime from protesting is the fear that they will be part of an unsuccessful protest. When you are living in these regimes, you have to be extremely afraid of what happens if you participate and the regime doesn’t change.”

That makes publicly protesting an oppressive regime a classic collective action problem: If everyone who wants regime change takes to the streets, the group will achieve its shared goal. But if too few protest, they will fail and be punished. Even if an overwhelming majority wants change, it is smart for individuals to speak out only if enough compatriots do, too.

As protests have spread from Tunisia to Egypt and now to Bahrain, Libya and other parts of the Middle East, the power of television, particularly Al Jazeera, and the Internet to spread information and to help with the practicalities of organizing demonstrations has become readily apparent. Taken together, television, Facebook and Twitter may have been even more powerful in helping to solve the problem of collective action, by giving people unhappy with their governments the confidence that their views are widely shared.

This potential for technology to overcome collective action problems has been taken to the next level in the consumer space by Groupon. The swiftly growing electronic coupon company is built around the retailer’s version of the collective action problem: Offering deep discounts is worthwhile if it attracts enough extra customers so that the retailer can make up in the scale of his sales what he loses because of the lower price.

Groupon has solved that problem by creating sales that only occur if a sufficient number of people sign on. The Groupon technique is particularly powerful because once the tipping point is reached, all the interested shoppers are locked in to participating – your investment in the Groupon coupon is irrevocable from that moment on.

Political activists have not yet figured out an equivalent way of ensuring participation once a sufficient mass of supporters is identified: Even if we all watch television coverage of demonstrations together and express our enthusiasm for the movement online, we have no guarantee our neighbors will take the physical risk of going out in the streets until they actually do so.

Even so, the combination of satellite television and social networking has made it dramatically easier for the disaffected to overcome one of the central obstacles to organizing regime change – letting each individual know what views are shared by enough people to make protesting worthwhile, and relatively safe.

This new power is transformative. As Mr. Acemoglu said: “There have always been many regimes that are unpopular, but it has taken a well-organized civil society to allow that pent-up frustration to find a voice.” Technology is making it much easier for frustrated societies to express their collective anger.

Once that collective action problem is overcome, the act of physically coming together to express a deeply felt emotion can be – as we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia – very powerful. We are social animals who take pleasure in intense, mass experiences: Hence the continued popularity, in this digital age, of sports events and music concerts.

But even though the Groupon effect makes it easier to bring people together to oppose unpopular regimes, it may be harder for new technologies to overcome the “day after” problem.

Regime change is a classic matter of collective action and of a tipping point – if enough of us do not like the government, and if we can find a way to co-ordinate our protests (and, crucially, if the regime lacks the means or the will to fight back), we can topple our oppressive rulers.

Installing a new and better regime is a much tougher project, and one that may not be as easily facilitated by new technologies. Social networks are good ways to discover whether our beliefs are shared and even to lock us in to specific, self-contained acts.

We haven’t yet figured out how to use them to facilitate more complicated, longer-term collective actions that require significant commitment and negotiation.

That is the next challenge for activists: Using the Internet to facilitate social transformation that is more complicated than getting a sufficient mass of people to come out to the streets.

The uprising in Egypt has provoked the familiar “realism-versus-idealism” foreign policy debate in many Western capitals, as diplomats and politicians struggle to balance their ideological sympathy for the protesters against fears of chaos and the threat of a future anti-Western and anti-Israel policy from Cairo if the people do win.

What we have paid less attention to is that the demonstrations have forced some of the world’s hottest technology companies to engage in a very similar debate. The conclusions these technorati end up drawing may be as significant as the verdicts of Western governments. This new intellectual battleground is a further sign that in the age of the Internet and the global economy, foreign policy doesn’t belong just to professionals or to states any more.

The quandary Egypt poses for technology companies – particularly the power troika of Google, Facebook and Twitter – goes far beyond the classic corporate social responsibility concerns that have become standard operating practice at big multinationals.

On one hand, the Egyptian revolt and the ways in which it has been facilitated by the Internet is the apotheosis of hacker culture and its worldview. That is the powerful conviction of the digerati: that they are on the side of freedom, small-d democracy and of doing good in the world. This self-image is easy to mock – that Google pledge to “do no evil” makes a pretty juicy target for satirists – but it is also deeply felt.

Egypt has helped confirm this view of technology companies being on the side of angels. For example, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who helped organize the protests, was jailed and has emerged this week as an important face of a movement looking for leaders. Before that, there was the much publicized workaround that Google and Twitter technologists devised to help evade the Egyptian government’s communications crackdown. As Adrian Chen noted on the Gawker blog, “the amount of positive press generated [for Facebook] by Egypt’s uprising … could only be greater if Mark Zuckerberg had parachuted in and started beating back riot police himself.”

On the other hand, the problem for technology companies in many parts of the world is that doing good – or even doing no evil – is very much in the eye of the beholder. The views, and the self-interest, of twentysomething programmers in Silicon Valley, or in Bangalore, India, are unlikely to coincide with those of eightysomething dictators. And that can spell trouble for companies intent on building a global business.

“Facebook is trying to expand into China, so it is hard for them to take the side of the protesters,” said Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, which argues the Internet will not necessarily make the world a freer, better place.

“They don’t want to be considered the digital equivalent of Radio Free Europe,” he explained. “If they take the side of the protesters, their global business model will come under pressure.”

Mr. Morozov is pretty certain that in this conflict between “the hacker ethos” and “the capitalist ethos,” it is the hackers who will have to compromise.

But even if he is right that technology company shareholders and executives, like any others, care overwhelmingly about maximizing profits, Mr. Morozov may be underestimating the expectations users and employees have of companies whose founding premises are the empowerment of the individual and the democratization of information.

Facebook, in particular, has been blasted by the Internet’s emerging punditocracy for failing to adapt its no-pseudonyms policy to the needs of democracy activists in authoritarian regimes who, for obvious reasons, can’t use their real names.

Facebook has a sophisticated policy team that understands these concerns. But they are also worried about weakening the “real names only” policy, which is crucial to the power of the platform, by administering a policy that permits some people to have pseudonyms and not others.

Richard Edelman, the boss of the PR firm that carries his name, works with businesses around the world. In his firm’s annual survey of which institutions people trust, technology companies are near the top. They are “seen as legitimate forces for good,” he said.

That halo brings many benefits. But as technology emerges as a force for real good in some of the grimmest parts of the world, that reputation may force technology firms to stick with their idealism even if realism might be better for the bottom line.

“There is a higher expectation of technology companies than of any others,” Mr. Edelman said. “There would be a lower expectation of resource companies, for instance. It is why, ultimately, Google walked in China.”

We used to say that Western missionaries came to do good, and ended up doing well. Technology firms could find themselves forced to do good, even if it sometimes means doing badly.

It has been a bad couple of weeks for what Vitali Silitski, a political scientist, calls the Authoritarian International.

Mr. Silitski is from Belarus — a good background for studying authoritarian rulers — and he is a student of the troubling way in which the world’s autocrats responded to the “color” revolutions in some former Soviet republics a few years ago by increasing repression at home and forming a loose international support group.

China is the star of this Authoritarian International, with its robust growth guided by a government that quashed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests but now wins plaudits even from many Western business leaders who concede that it is often better at getting things done than querulous democracies.

But just as the Authoritarian International drew strength from the Chinese model and the so-called “Beijing Consensus” it inspired, the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have been unsettling for the world’s unelected rulers.

“When you see somebody like Chávez in Venezuela reaching out to somebody like Ahmadinejad it is clear these authoritarian regimes are forming an alliance that helps them to maintain their control,” Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society foundations, said, referring to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. “If I were Hu Jintao,” he said of the Chinese president, “I would be nervous at this moment.”

If you happen to be a dictator, the scariest thing about the Egyptian uprising is its suddenness.

Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, is the son of an Egyptian diplomat, holds an Egyptian passport, and spent much of his childhood in Egypt. He is an expert in emerging markets, where regime change is the norm, and he spent Christmas with his family in Egypt. But he, like everyone else, was taken by surprise.

“These processes aren’t linear,” Mr. El-Erian said. “Nothing happens, and nothing happens and nothing happens, and then everything happens. The protest movement got ahead of policy makers in both Egypt and the West.”

That was certainly true last week at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which largely ignored the world-changing events in the Middle East in its long-set official program. Yet Egypt was the talk of the corridors and cafes, and, apart from the Arab participants, some of the most riveted were the Russians.

That is because, as the Russian opposition leader Boris Y. Nemtsov said by telephone from Moscow this week, “many in Russia are drawing direct parallels between Mubarak and Putin.”

A key similarity between the Egyptian leader and Prime Minister Valdimir Vladimir V. Putin, in the view of Mr. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and provincial governor, is that “both are corrupt regimes and both regimes have been about the enrichment of a small group of people around the leader.”

Mr. El-Erian agrees that the gap between the super-privileged and everyone else was an Achilles’ heel of the Mubarak regime.

That weakness was invisible — or deemed irrelevant — to many because of the growth of the economy overall.

But the lesson of history is that the most fragile authoritarian regimes aren’t necessarily the poorest ones. They are often those where the economy is doing reasonably well, but where gains are unequally shared. Hence, for example, the complaints in Tunisia about the enrichment of Leila Trabelsi, wife of the deposed president, and her family.

“In Egypt, there was an income distribution problem, even though the economy was growing impressively,” Mr. El-Erian said. “But there wasn’t enough trickle down.”

China’s mandarins are seen by some as the world’s smartest authoritarians. One example might be the information war that China has waged around the events in Egypt, restricting online access to independent news while in the official media emphasizing the “chaos” attendant upon the uprising.

Another is that Chinese leaders are conscious of their vulnerability to public perceptions that Communist Party rule is about enriching the cadres, rather than generating prosperity as a whole. That is why the most surprising story out of China recently was the conviction of Li Qiming, son of a senior police official, who ran over and killed a young woman.

At some level, the Russians have listened. Speaking in Davos before the uprising in Egypt had gathered true force, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said: “What happened in Tunisia, I think, is quite a substantial lesson to learn for any authorities. The authorities must not simply sit in their convenient chairs but develop themselves together with the society. When the authorities don’t catch up with the development of the society, don’t meet the aspiration of the people, the outcome is very sad.”

Mr. Nemtsov doesn’t think that Russia’s rulers will necessarily heed that advice. Russia has oil, he noted, “but the Russian regime is so corrupt it requires the price of oil to constantly increase. Oil won’t save Putin.”

For the West, one conclusion must be that even though authoritarian plutocrats can be easier to work with than dissidents — a few weeks ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, has spoken publicly about her warm personal friendship with Mr. Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne, who has upheld women’s rights — staying close to the activists is not just morally justifiable, it is pragmatic, too.

Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, wrote in an e-mail that one indirect consequence of the uprising in Egypt will be that “Western governments will be more alert to the need to reach out to civil society in these societies and be more proactive on some sort of democracy agenda.”

He sent that message from Warsaw, where he was working to support the beleaguered opposition in Belarus.

Indeed, the hardest part of overthrowing authoritarian regimes is often the day after. “If you look at the most successful transitions — Poland, Mexico, Taiwan — they’ve been long hauls,” said Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “You want there to be established oppositions, and that doesn’t happen in a two-week period.”

Mr. Silitski argues that the Authoritarian International was emboldened by the disappointing performances of the governments that were installed by the color revolutions — the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.

What one might dub the Democracy International could be needed now to prevent a similarly disappointing second act in the Arab world.

When not anchoring her own talk show at the World Economic Forum, Chrystia let a few BBC cameras follow her around Davos as she attempted to document how the global super-elite are pulling away from the rest of us.  Watch her interview some of the plutocrats at the Davos Congress Center — and make spin paintings with Damien Hirst:

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.