Children used to be scared of the dark – now they fear failure

Tim Lott in The Guardian

Many facets distinguish the minds of children from those of adults, among them imaginative capacity, the repression of reason and the mysterious condition of innocence. But perhaps one of the most telling divisions is between the things adults fear and those that worry children.

I recently asked one of my youngest daughters what she feared most. She answered without hesitation: failure. This disturbed and surprised me. I had always thought of fear of failure as an adult preoccupation, but it seems that one of the effects of the climate of the times (and the media saturation that expresses it) is the importation of adult fears to childish minds. The fear of ghosts is being replaced by the terror of underperformance.

This “adultisation” of fear is underlined by a survey I came across on the internet suggesting that children’s fears had changed considerably over the past few generations. In this survey, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the top five fears 30 years ago were animals, being in a dark room, high places, strangers and loud noises. In the updated survey, kids were afraid of divorce, nuclear war, cancer, pollution, and being mugged.

A more recent poll, carried out in the UK a little over a year ago, points up some enduring traditional fears, including spiders and bugs, witches, the dark and clowns. However, being bullied, being approached by strangers and school performance all featured.

Children’s fears are a litmus test of the society we live in and they are clearly changing – becoming more concrete – as society becomes more performance-driven, insecure and saturated with threatening, upsetting facts. Refreshingly, missing from either of the lists was fear of terrorist attack or paedophile abduction – the sort of thing parents have nightmares about – but it is clear that the imaginative arena of anxiety is undergoing a transformation and perhaps an intensification.

I don’t know what to do about fear, given I suffer fair amount of existential fear myself, even knowing, as I do, that fear for the most part is useless. “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom,” said Bertrand Russell, but unless one is singularly lacking in imagination, one never conquers fear completely.

I was once asked what single piece of advice I would proffer my 17-year-old self and the answer I came up with was, “Don’t be so afraid.” Nevertheless, I spent much of my early years frightened, like my daughter, of failure or rejection. Many of my later years, too.

Fear can be shameful. The film that most recently gave me the chills was Force Majeure in which a father runs away from his wife and children when he is faced with a situation of sudden danger. My secret terror – and I imagine the fear of many men – is that some ignoble primal instinct in such a situation would render me similarly unheroic. How would one live with oneself after that?

I cannot sincerely tell my children there is nothing to be afraid of in life. What I can say with conviction is that fear, for the most part, is useless. It tarnishes your soul, yet does nothing to protect you against the situation you are anxious about. It is the most terrible waste of time. I agree wholeheartedly with Aung San Suu Kyi – “The only real prison is fear and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”

Courage is not being free from fear, however. Courage is not allowing fear to distort your purposes and cramp your life. We all have secret fears and to deny it is to deny some essential element of our personalities. But if you can do one thing for your children, show them bravery, so that they learn bravery themselves. For courage is the wellspring from which an authentic life flows.

Freedom from the Known - Jiddu Krishnamurthi

An audio book courtesy the Krishnamurthi Foundation


The book is available in PDF form here

Whither Pakistan?

Interview with Tarek Fateh

Far too many Western Muslims speak of freedom as a sin whilst Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn – and die – for human rights

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN in The Independent

Sunday 11 January 2015

Ill with flu last week, I watched the events unfolding in Paris with dread, rage and disbelief – feelings that surge every time there is an Islamicist atrocity. To kill so many over line drawings or as an expression of religious zeal? What drives these fanatics? In normal circumstances, I would have been on TV and radio channels providing immediate responses, soundbite explanations. Bedbound, I had time to reflect more deeply on this carnage and the question of freedom: what it means, how precious it is and how fragile. That fundamental human impulse and right has now become one of the most volatile and divisive concepts in the world today.

Yes, we, the fortunate inhabitants of the West, are more free than those who live and die in the South and East, but some of the claims made by our absolutists are hypocritical as well as outlandish. Public discourse is expected to be within the bounds of decency and respect; language matters and the wrong word can incite high emotion.

Internalised caution in normal life is a good thing. Not good is the way the powerful control our right to know or speak. People are prosecuted for thought crimes; the BBC films on the monarchy have allegedly been blocked by the royal family; the Chilcot report on the Iraq war is still withheld and when it is finally released the full truth will be censored. I don’t see Index on Censorship kicking up a fuss about these serious attacks on free expression. State power in Europe and North America overrides the citizen’s right to know or speak. These things are never simply black and white or about them and us.

Things get even more complex when you think about freedom and Muslims. Muslims living in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia or Turkey have no freedom to say what they think about the political system or the faith. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other nation. Iran is the second-worst country for journalists and bloggers. In Pakistan people are tortured for blasphemy – often false charges trumped up to keep people in line.

Last Friday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Raif Badawi was dragged out of prison in shackles, brought in front of the mosque and flogged 50 times for “insulting Islam”. Imagine the scene: worshippers who had just finished praying to a merciful God then watched the merciless punishment. This will happen every week until he has been lashed a 1,000 times. He will also spend 10 long years in a Saudi prison. His body and mind will thus be shredded. Badawi, an activist, had started a website, the Liberal Saudi Network, and shared some of his perfectly reasonable views. For that he had to be punished so severely that no one would ever try to do the same again.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan, most central Asian states, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya, even “liberated” Iraq, people know they must not say what they think about their rulers or their imams, not even to neighbours or friends. The only choice is to conform and live, keep your boiling thoughts locked in your own head. Imagine the psychological consequences.

When, in 2010, the Arab Spring unexpectedly arrived, Muslims rejoiced, and thought they could at last speak freely and get proper democracies. I was in the Middle East in the most optimistic months. Spring turned to winter and even harsher restrictions were imposed everywhere. Now thousands of Muslims try to flee every day, to get to places where they can earn a living, be safe, most of all be liberated from oppression. Those people on boats who turn up on Europe’s shores want what the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly had before they blasted it all away.  

Large numbers of Western Muslims are disturbed by the rights and liberties they have inherited and sometimes reject them. Meanwhile Muslims who have never known real freedom yearn for, indeed die to get those same liberties and human rights. That gap between Muslims who have and don’t want and those who crave and can’t have grows bigger all the time. For too many British Muslims, familiarity breeds contempt for freedom. They talk about it not as a priceless entitlement but a peril, out-of-control hedonism and lasciviousness – as a sin. I find that deplorable.

After my book Refusing the Veil came out last year, some female Muslim acquaintances organised a soiree for me to read from it and discuss its contents. These were reasonable, educated women. Here are some of the comments made:

“Why did you have to write this; who gave you permission?”

“Even to think these thoughts is wrong, and you go and publish them? If you were in a Muslim country you would be in jail.”

“If your mother was alive she would have slapped you for writing this.”

When I replied that my mother refused the veil when she was 22, the woman came back: “Then I feel sorry for you. She was the sinner and she made you one too.”

“OK I have not read the book because it will dirty my pure thoughts, but if you are a Muslim, you follow Islamic rules without question. Are you even a Muslim?”

Only two out of 14 women defended my right to write the book. But then said they could never challenge Islamic practices so openly.

What has led to this lethal closing of the Muslim mind? Third-generation Western Muslims are less liberated than were my mother’s generation in the Forties and Fifties. White women who convert are even more rule-bound and obedient. It just shows human history is not a straight road towards enlightenment.

Those of us who value freedom need to understand better what it means. Especially in a world which is both coalescing and splitting apart, where technology has unleashed hope and possibilities as well as limitless hate, where political and religious control is tightening. To seek to be free is a big responsibility. Too big and scary for some people, Western Muslims in particular. This is the debate that needs to open up now within Islam. Will it? No. And that’s our tragedy. 

What the British Raj can't be blamed for

Written by Khaled Ahmed in The Indian Express| Posted: October 4, 2014 12:00 am

On September 18, the Indo-British Heritage Trust held a discussion in London about “whether the Indian subcontinent benefited more than it lost from the experience of British colonisation”. Speakers who said the subcontinent lost were heavyweights like William Dalrymple and Shashi Tharoor, both of whom I have enjoyed listening to and whose books have given me great pleasure. From Pakistan, the speaker chosen on the other side was my colleague at Newsweek Pakistan, Nilofar Bakhtiar who, before leaving for London, agreed with me that we were better off under the British.

Is that surprising, after half a century of failing to fulfil the promises made twice to the people of India? Once when Muslims and Hindus were united in their struggle for freedom; and second when they fell apart, and Muslims promised to set up a utopian state where they would be “free to practise their religion”.

Under British Raj, we were not free, but we were also not slaves. The British were less brutal than the Belgians to their colonies in Africa. We claimed rightly that we had the right to be free, to decide our own destiny, to have the law we wanted and a government we were able to choose. Morally, we had the right to tell the Raj to go, to resist it and struggle against it. We’d had enough of serving the gora sahib and fighting his imperial wars.

We had a different vision of what kind of state we wanted. We wanted equality instead of inequality practised by exploiters, peace instead of the conflict of a developing bipolar world. After fighting the wars of the Raj, we thought of becoming neutral and nonaligned. We could achieve our visions only after becoming independent.

We have inequality today and we have fought many “just” wars to perpetuate it. And the index of unhappiness keeps on climbing.

By ousting the British we also wanted to purge ourselves of what we diagnosed as a “slave mentality”. We had had enough of local brown sahibs who spoke English and perpetuated the Raj of the mind. After Independence, we would revive our languages and learn to think “free” in them. But today, we are slaves to our narratives of exclusion.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have much to fall back on. The British had wrested India

from a dying ruling elite that didn’t even control it territorially. We had no political system we could emulate, except tyranny of one sort or another. Jawaharlal Nehru honestly thought the past was all rotten.

Keen to be born as a nation-state, we disagreed we were one nation. Under the British, India was united as one state. We should have become a nation, but we didn’t. One side suspected the Raj was dividing what was one nation; the other side thought we were not one nation in the first place.

Democracy, introduced by the British through limited franchise and devolved elections, was new to us and felt good. They forced us to respect democratic principles. We had a struggle ahead with the kind of society we were. To be truly democratic we had to remove the caste system, which the Raj couldn’t extirpate. We agreed to disapprove of it. But in 2014, certain communities in our region still feel left out.

The British enabled us to put the past behind us. But after 1947, becoming free, we revived the past we should have buried and got nothing out of it. Muslims thought faith had made them a nation but soon discovered that language divided more than religion united. Muslims rejected the biggest gift of the Raj: secular governance. The British taught us modern commerce, growing out of stock exchanges we had known nothing about. Bombay converted the mostly Gujarati merchant community into India’s wisest class — Hindu, Parsi, Ismaili, etc — who deserved to rule India and thought, rightly, that it was not yet time for independence. Nobody listened.

The Muslims of India got a raw deal. Religion didn’t bind in 1947; and Bangladesh was created in 1971. Further, rejecting the lessons of the Raj, they set up an Islamic state in Pakistan that immediately led to the reduction of the non-Muslims to second-class citizens. Pakistan as a revisionist state fought wars with India. The Muslims of India too became discriminated against. Today, India is ashamed of its Muslim-killing communal riots. South Asia has suffered ethnic cleansing to shame the Balkans.

If we are bad today, it doesn’t mean the British Raj was bad. The bad in us is a kind of return to being us. If India has communal riots, Pakistan is brutal to Hindus in Sindh, joined with Muslim Sindhis through language. Their daughters are kidnapped and forcibly married to Muslim boys after forced conversion, driving Hindu families into exile in India. In “secular” Bangladesh, Hindus should have fared better, but there too, their “bleeding” back into India is unending.

Under the British Raj, Muslims’ sectarianism was effectively suppressed. The Shia and the Sunni began to feel like one community under secular administration and it was no surprise that Pakistan was created by a Shia leader. Today, he would have been bumped off by a “target-killer” of Karachi. The late Papiya Ghosh — yes, there are such great “colonised” people in the subcontinent — in her classic Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (2007) tells us how self-determination went wrong in India.

Biharis were the first workers in a peasant India, after iron ore was discovered in Bihar and the steel industry came up there together with the railways. After 1947, Bihari Muslims were most unfairly driven out of India into East Pakistan, but there the self-determining principle was language, not religion. So they were killed and pushed out again. We are still “self-determining” after 67 years, and most of it is just killing. Did the British teach us to kill to achieve self-determination? What Dalrymple does to the Brits through his books is tonic for them.

There were things done in India that should make them squeal with guilt. But “freedom” shouldn’t make us forget how we have fallen short after 1947. What happened to the good things we learned from the European Enlightenment the British carried with them?

I unabashedly admire Raja Rammohan Roy and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan because they borrowed from the Enlightenment and tried to pull us out of the abyss that still attracts us. In Pakistan, “Khan” is not the password to acceptance you thought he would be. Borrowing values made them “unoriginal” for us.

Tagore actually told the Brits what was really wrong with them. He didn’t want the disease of nationalism creeping into “free” India. But we had strong “single” identity ingredients that “excluded” the manifold “other”. Toxic textbooks distort history today to make us feel proud of unworthy things that would’ve made Tagore wince.

I don’t know about India but in Pakistan, all the infrastructure that serves us today is a Raj bequest — the roads, bridges, railroad and the world’s largest canal system — without which the state of Pakistan couldn’t have survived. After 67 years, all that is now quite rundown. Unkindly, the world calls us a “failing” state. Did the Raj cause us to fail? 

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities

• 
• • Paul Verhaeghe
  • theguardian.com, Monday 29 September 2014 09.00 BST

'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.

How capital captured politics - Why was TISA kept secret?

WikiLeaks has shown us that western democracies are now ruled by market forces that debase the very notion of freedom

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • The Guardian, Sunday 13 July 2014 20.15 BST

'The Trade in Services Agreement prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact the 2007-08 meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from a lack of regulation.' Photograph: Andy Mueller/Reuters

In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global historical importance of what was agreed upon.

In June, WikiLeaks made public the secret draft text of the agreement. It covers 50 countries and most of the world's trade in services.

It sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. It prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact that the 2007-08 financial meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from a lack of regulation. Furthermore, the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, including traffic of personal and financial data. Despite all this, we heard little about it.

Yet is this discrepancy between importance and secrecy really surprising? Is it not rather a sad but precise indication of where do we, in western liberal democratic countries, stand with regard to democracy? A century and a half ago, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx characterised the market exchange between worker and capitalist as "a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham." For Marx, the ironic addition of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of egotistical utilitarianism, provides the key to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To quote The Communist Manifesto: "By freedom is meant – under the present bourgeois conditions of production – free trade, free selling and buying." And by equality is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and seller, even if one of them is forced to sell his labour under any conditions (like today's precarious workers).

The main culprits of the 2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves on us as experts leading us on the painful path to financial recovery. Their advice should trump parliamentary politics. Or, as Mario Monti put it: "Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians." What, then, is the higher force whose authority can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives of the people? As far back as 1998, the answer was provided by Hans Tietmeyer, the then governor of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised national governments for preferring "the permanent plebiscite of global markets" to the "plebiscite of the ballot box".

Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: global markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of voting goes on in them permanently (and is permanently reflected in market fluctuations) and at a global level, not only within the limits of a nation state.

This, then, is where we stand with regard to democracy, and the Tisa agreement is a perfect example. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated and enforced in secret, and set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital. In this way, the space for decision-making by the democratically elected politicians is severely limited, and the political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital is indifferent (like culture wars).

This is why the release of the Tisa draft marks a new stage in the WikiLeaks strategy: until now its activity has been focused on making public how our lives are monitored and regulated by the intelligence agencies – the standard liberal topic of individuals threatened by oppressive state apparatuses. Now another controlling force appears – capital – which threatens our freedom in a much more twisted way: by perverting our very sense of what the word means.

Gujarat is India’s top state in economic freedom

S A Aiyer in the Times of India

Does Narendra Modi actually have a great Gujarat model, or just wellpackaged hype? Critics say that Gujarat has grown fast, but some others have grown faster. 

The Raghuram Rajan Committee on development indicators says Gujarat’s social indicators are just middling. Looking at children of class 3-5 who can do subtraction, Gujarat has declined from 22nd among 28 states in 2006 to 23rd in 2012. However, economist Arvind Panagariya argues that Gujarat has made substantial social progress under Modi, starting from a low base. 

Forget this debate. Neither growth nor social indicators are accurate measures of Modi’s main election plank — good governance. Measuring governance is difficult, and hence neglected by statisticians. Yet it’s all-important. One annual report has long provided indicators of governance. This is Economic Freedom of the States of India (EFSI), written by Bibek Debroy, Laveesh Bhandari and me. The 2013 EFSI report shows Gujarat has been No. 1 in economic freedom for the last three years, widening its lead over others. On a scale from 0 to 1, its overall freedom score has improved from 0.46 to 0.65. Tamil Nadu comes a distant second with 0.54. Economic freedom is not identical to good governance. But lack of economic freedom typically means poor governance — a jungle of rules and obfuscating bureaucrats that promote corruption, delay and harassment. This hits everybody from farmers and consumers to industrialists and transporters. 

What exactly is economic freedom? EFSI uses a methodology adapted from Economic Freedom of the World, an annual publication of the Fraser Institute. Data for Indian states is not available on many issues. So, EFSI limits itself to 20 indicators of the size and efficiency of state governments, their legal structure and property rights, and regulation of labour and business. 

Many of these indicators directly measure governance — the proportion of stolen property recovered; proportion of judicial vacancies; proportion of violent crimes; proportion of investigations completed by police and of cases completed by the courts; and the pendency rate of corruption cases. The list is by no means comprehensive, but provides strong clues. 

Gujarat is the best state in pendency of corruption cases, and in the proportion of non-violent crime. It is close to the top in completion of police investigations. It scores poorly in judicial vacancies and recovery of stolen property. 

Its quality of government spending is high: it has the lowest ratio of administrative GDP to total GDP. Spending is focused on infrastructure rather than staff. Modi’s repeated state election victories show that his approach produces high voter satisfaction. Gujarat is not a classical free-market state. It has large, expanding public sector companies, and substantial taxes on capital and commodities. It has many subsidies, though fewer than in other states. Still, business thrives in its business-friendly climate. One businessman told me that in Tamil Nadu, it took six months and several visits (and payments) to ministries for industrial approval. But in Gujarat, the ministry concerned called him the day before his appointment, asking for details of his proposal. Next day, he found the bureaucracy had in advance prepared plans of possible locations for his project, and settled the matter on the spot. This was unthinkable elsewhere, and showed both efficiency and honesty. Corruption has not disappeared in Gujarat, but is muted. 

Modi’s Jyotigram scheme provides 24/7 electricity for rural households, plus reliable power at fixed times for tubewells. This explains why Gujarat has India’s fastest agricultural growth (10%/year for a decade, say economists Gulati and Shah). Indian agriculture is crippled by regulations, but Gulati shows that Gujarat has the highest agricultural freedom among states. Modi charges farmers for power, and so all his three state power companies are profitable. By contrast, power companies in other states with free rural power have accumulated losses of almost Rs 200,000 crore. 

Critics accuse him of giving cheap land to favoured industrialists. But state and national governments the world over use such sops to attract industries. Unlike most politicians, Modi has clearly not enriched himself. 

Good governance includes communal peace. So, the 2002 Muslim killings reflect terribly on Modi. For some, it puts him beyond the pale. But since 2002 the state has been peaceful. In 2011-12 , Gujarat had the lowest Muslim rural poverty rate among all states. Its overall poverty rate for Muslims (11.4%) was far lower than for Hindus (17.6%). This was also true of six other states, so Gujarat is not unique in this. 

In sum, EFSI and other studies show that Gujarat has good governance. It has social and communal flaws. But it is India’s top state in economic and agricultural freedom. That’s not hype.

Margaret Thatcher began Britain's obsession with property. It's time to end it

Right to buy helped to turn the UK into a nation that saw houses as something to make money from, not to live in. Now we are at crisis point – and the government must step in 

• 
• • Rowan Moore
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 April 2014

Margaret Thatcher takes tea with former GLC council house tenants in Balham in 1978. Photograph: Kenneth Saunders for the Guardian

In 1975, in her first speech as leader to the Conservative party conference, Margaret Thatcher declared her belief in a "property-owning democracy". She didn't invent the phrase – the 1920s Tory MP Noel Skelton should take the credit for that, and the American liberal philosopher John Rawls picked it up before she did – but it became the most distinctive of all her many distinctive ideas, the one that most succinctly describes the Britain she wanted to create.

Through thrift and hard work, went the theory, ordinary families should be able to buy their own homes. It would give them security, dignity and freedom and liberate them from the nannying of local council landlords. It would make them better citizens, with their own stake in the economic wellbeing of the country, they would have an incentive to contribute to national prosperity. It exemplified her belief that capitalism was good not only for the rich, but for people on modest incomes. As the then environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, put it later: "Home ownership stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society."

So Thatcher allowed council tenants to buy their own homes at reduced prices, and sincethe right to buy was introduced, about 1.5m have been bought. She presided over an economy in which house buying became a national obsession and home ownership went up from 9.7m to 12.8m. Fundamental to her idea was that government, which had built between a third and a half of all homes for the previous three decades, should step back. Councils could no longer build council housing. The market would provide. Houses would be built by housebuilders, to use the standard term for the companies that buy land, win planning permission and then (sometimes) put homes on it.

Thatcher's idea is now at a point of crisis. Housebuilders are not building enough houses, and the proportion of people owning their own homes has been falling since 2007. People have long ago found that it does not always make you free to be shackled to a mortgage, still less if you cannot cross the increasingly high threshold into ownership. In London and the south-east, businesses lament the effects on them of expensive housing caused by the lack of mobility of potential workers.

Debt and speculation have been encouraged more than thrift and people who only wanted a home were forced to be gamblers in a turbulent market. The property-owning democracy is not turning out to be democratic, excluding as it does the large minority who don't own homes. In a sick practical joke, people have been encouraged to take on long-term mortgages at the same time that secure lifetime employment, which might pay for them, is disappearing. As for public spirit, with rising house prices goes rising nimbyism, as owners seek to protect their investment from all possible threats, above all the threat of more homes being built nearby that other people might live in.

Over three decades, a culture has been created in which the price of homes colours almost every aspect of life. It affects people's decisions about whether and when to live together, stay together and have children. An economy has been created in which inflation, otherwise frowned upon, is desirable in house prices, even essential. Property values are used as the principal tool of urban regeneration and, when those values fail to materialise, so does the regeneration. The infamous bedroom tax regards a few square metres of spare space as such a great asset that it must be wrenched from the grasp of the undeserving poor. "Values", indeed, is a telling word – we use it more to describe property than anything to do with ethical or social ideals.

It is amazing, beyond satire, that the two biggest stories in housing are on the one hand the bedroom tax and on the other the streets and squares of empty houses in Belgravia and Kensington, bought as investments by owners who rarely visit. At the same time that, when it comes to poor people, vacant rooms are deemed an offence to be expunged, they grow unchecked in the most desirable parts of London.

At almost every level, the market isn't working, from ex-industrial towns in northern England, where the values are too low to justify repairs to existing houses, to the under-supply and high prices in London, where an average home now costs £458,000, or 13 times the median full-time income. Hidden favelas are growing up in suburbs such as Newham and Southall, with unauthorised developments in back gardens and flats occupied at many times the levels for which they were designed.

 Newham, London: favela-style housing is on the increase in suburbs such as Newham and Southall, with severe overcrowding and unauthorised developments in back gardens and yards. Photograph: Newham Council/Archant

A system has been created with a few winners, for sure, but not the people excluded from the market, nor those barely able to pay for their homes, some of whom will drown when interest rates start going up. Even those who bought early enough to have a profit on their home find it to be largely nominal, impossible to realise without removing themselves or their children from the all-important property ladder.

Not even housebuilders are entirely happy, although recent government policies such as Help to Buy and the encouragement of easy credit have helped their share prices rise. They grumble that planning restrictions and regulations make their work unreasonably difficult and that the margins in their business are low. "It is a fantastically hard business," says one of those involved, because of its booms and busts. The most obvious winners were people such as Judith and Fergus Wilson, the Kent-based buy-to-let magnates said to be worth £180m. But here too there are losers – the people who got their fingers burned when this particular market crashed.

As Danny Dorling, in his recent book All That is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster has pointed out, the home is now seen as a commodity, as a unit of investment to be traded up or down. Attachment to a place, or the interconnectedness of units to make a community, is given little value. The pursuit of ideals, the idea of social or architectural betterment in the provision of housing, has all but disappeared.

Early in the last century, when Arts and Crafts architecture was flourishing and the first garden cities were being planned, the German architect Hermann Muthesius publishedThe English House, which was based on the premise that this country was particularly good at domestic architecture and that countries such as Germany should look and learn. It is unlikely anyone would want to do this now, as new British homes have, as well as the highest prices, the meanest dimensions to be found anywhere in Europe. What we have instead are a series of distinctive if largely inadvertent types, created by a warped market, which might be summarised thus:

Rural eyesore

An attempt to squeeze housing units into places where people want to live (the countryside in southern England), but the people there already don't want any more. Compromise ensues, in which new houses take on a huddled, crowded air and are given a traditional style to mitigate their intrusion. Making a new place with positive and exceptional qualities is out of the question, as all the developers' creative energies have gone into wrestling with the planning system to get their permission.

Investment silo

In London and some other big cities, dense apartment blocks are built with the primary purpose of creating vehicles for investment. Sometimes they are towers. In the previous decade, these developments were primarily aimed at British-based buy-to-let investors; currently the main target are overseas buyers. These projects typically have just enough decking, white paint and glass balustrades to allow good-looking young couples to be photographed inside them holding glasses of white wine, such that the adjectival nouns "luxury lifestyle" can be attached. They also have enough odd angles, or multicoloured cladding, to claim the adjective "iconic".

Affordable silo

Similar to an investment silo, to the extent that housing associations are now the main providers of affordable housing, and are also pressured to behave more and more like property developers. Their products therefore look increasingly like those of developers, although with some reductions in the luxury lifestyle and "iconic" elements. On the other hand, they tend to be built with better standards of space, as housing associations have to follow stricter rules than private developers.

Student silo

Exploiting loopholes in the planning and regulatory systems, which make fewer demands on student housing than other types, property companies have in recent years rushed into this market. Among the attractions of students to developers is that they can be put into even smaller spaces than anyone else. The typology is similar to other types of silo, but with still less in the luxury lifestyle department.

Northern disaster zone

 Parts of Liverpool and Gateshead have been demolished by the government, the old streets replaced with smaller numbers of new homes. The result? The uprooting of people who wanted to stay put and zones of demolished and empty buildings. Photograph: Nigel R. Barklie/REX

Parts of Liverpool or Gateshead, for example: places afflicted by the last government's Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder project, where about £2bn of public money was spent buying up streets in areas of low value, demolishing them, and replacing them with smaller numbers of new homes. The theory was that, under the laws of supply and demand, reduced supply would raise values. The reality was the breaking up ofcommunities, the uprooting of people who wanted to stay put and devastated zones of demolished and empty buildings.

Overcrowded London

Flats and backyards adapted to house as many people as possible.

Empty Belgravia

Extraordinarily expensive houses owned by people with properties in several other countries, such that they are usually unoccupied. Often also iceberg houses, with multifloor basements expensively created underneath, to create further quantities of void.

Nonexistent new town

Successive governments are lured to the attractive idea of the new town, as it enables large numbers of homes to be built while annoying fewer residents than if they have been spread over a wider area. It appeals to politicians' love of a visible gesture. The same governments then fail to provide the infrastructure and planning to make these towns happen. The last administration promised both a new city in the Thames Gateway, to the east of London, and a series of "ecotowns". Very little of either appeared.

It is not in fact so difficult to create good modern housing. There are well-known examples in continental Europe, often cited in discussions of the subject, such asHammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, Vauban in Freiburg, and Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam. Peter Hall, the planning expert whose recent book, Good Cities, Better Lives, explores the best European examples, says that there is an "extraordinary similarity" between these schemes: they have good public transport, from which all homes are within easy walking distance, and "a good disposition of semi-public spaces", such as playgrounds and shared gardens.

 St Andrews in East London: housebuilder Barratt, not always a byword for design quality, is responsible for this project with its emphasis on robust detailing, balconies and shared space.

Nor is Britain incapable of decent developments. Barratt, a housebuilder not always associated with design quality, has built the St Andrews and Barrier Park projects in east London, albeit only after prodding from the London Development Agency, the public body that sold it the land. Richard Lavington, one of the architects of these developments, says that the aims were "to put a balcony on every unit, and to create a positive interface between private and public", by which he means placing family homes close to shared open spaces and streets in such a way that they might readily use them. He also sought "clear, robust detailing" that would be "straightforward to build".

Again, this is not complicated stuff and the developments live up to these claims. Cognoscenti of new housing will also know of fine, small-scale projects by the developers Crispin Kelly of Baylight and Roger Zogolovitch of Solidspace. Kelly says: "Big windows and high ceilings are a start, and lack of fussiness – having the confidence to do things simply." Inside, he likes bonus spaces – on a stair landing for example – where a child might do homework, and outside something as basic as a bench that encourages neighbours to meet. Like Kelly, Zogolovitch likes undesignated spots "where you might set up a cello or an easel or write a novel". He uses design to make small spaces feel larger and give them personality.

 Kevin McCloud at The Triangle housing project in Swindon. Photograph: Professional Images

In Swindon there is The Triangle, created with the help of Kevin McCloud's company Hab, which also stresses the importance of shared space and simple design. And, when you ask for examples of good new housing, you keep being referred back to Cambridge. Here is Accordia, which won the Stirling prize in 2008, and the university-backed £1bn plan to create 3,000 homes, half of them for key workers, on 150 hectares in the north-west of the city. Also in Cambridge are developments such as the "Scandinavian-style"Seven Acres, by the multinational construction company Skanska, which again is based on the virtues of simplicity and shared space.

But these bright spots are too rare and require favourable conditions, such as having a TV personality or an ancient university to back them. They tend to be in places such as London or Cambridge, where prices rise faster than elsewhere. This helps to pay for more quality, but by definition makes it harder to achieve.

The housing crisis is one of both quantity and quality. Some 250,000 new homes a year are said to be needed, but after 2008 the number fell below 100,000, mostly built by private housebuilders but also by housing associations. In the postwar peak in the late 60s, more than 400,000 were created a year, many of them by the councils later banned from building by Margaret Thatcher. Meanwhile, the private sector built at a reasonably steady rate from the late 1950s on, between 150,000 and 250,000 a year. Until the 2008 crash, that is, when output plummeted to a level not seen for half a century.

Blame for this lack of supply is usually placed on the planning system. There is nowhere in southern England for new housing to go or, rather, nowhere where voters and therefore politicians want it to go. Suggestions of building anything on the green belt bring accusations of desecration of a national treasure and similarly with rural locations further from big cities. The theory that brownfields, that is ex-industrial sites, could answer all housing need has proved challenging in practice. Such sites are not always where people want to live.

Suggestions for fixing the problem include, as always, the new town or, as George Osborne likes to call it, the "garden city". He used the term when repackaging existing proposals for Ebbsfleet in Kent, and presenting them as his invention, but his duplicity should not obscure the possibility that it might be a good idea. Peter Hall passionately believes that the principal hope for housing is building new towns and town-size extensions to existing cities. The new towns created in the 1960s, of which Milton Keynes is the biggest and best known, may have become the butt of patronising jokes, but, says Hall, "were really rather successful". They did their job of relieving pressure and "all the evidence shows that people like living there".

Another idea is to fit more homes into London, which is several times less densely populated than, for example, Paris. Another is to encourage people to build their own houses, which currently accounts for a minute proportion of the total. Another, popular with the current government, is the "neighbourhood plan". Here, local communities (usually rural) put together their own proposals for development so that some of the proceeds go to shared benefits and growth is no longer an aggressive intervention by outsiders. It might also help if we moved away from the preoccupation of home ownership with the help of decent properties for private rent. Michael Heseltine once said that "there is in this country a deeply ingrained desire for home ownership", but in 1900 90% of homes, at almost every level of price, were rented.

All these suggestions have merit and the answer is almost certainly to embrace all of them and more. We have to go from our current culture, where new housing is treated as pollution, and something to be squeezed through the planning system with the greatest difficulty, to one where it is seen as a positive asset. There is a vicious circle – new development is poor because it takes so much effort to overcome objections and people object to it because it is poor.

But none of these ideas will happen without the thing the coalition has been least willing to employ, which is active and forward-looking public intervention. It is hard to build a new town, or a well considered rural expansion, without things such as compulsorily buying land, paying professionals to plan it or providing transport. As Dickon Robinson, formerly of housing association the Peabody Trust puts it: "The market has failed. It's time to put some controversial ideas out there."

The compulsory purchase by government from private landowners sounds communist, but it was used (for example) in the "renewal" of northern cities. It is just that politicians are more reluctant to wield it in Kent than in Gateshead. If we are sceptical about the power of planners to achieve their objectives, we only need to look at the Netherlands. There, they had a similar scale of housing shortage, in proportion to the country's size, to the one that has been diagnosed in Britain for the past 15 years. Unlike Britain, they fixed it, by building nearly half a million new homes.

Planning apart, there is a deep flaw with the idea that the market alone will meet all the country's housing needs. The problem is not only to do with the numbers supplied, but with how much each home costs and housebuilders cannot be expected to lead a process that results in the value of their product going down. They would rather sit on their land until such time as its price goes up, which means that some other agency has to do what they won't, which means, in effect, that the government has to intervene more actively in promoting building – by acquiring land, producing considered plans for its development, and then promoting such development.

Given that in much of Britain the price of homes is high, a slow deflation might be desirable; the ideal could be that prices stay the same, so that they gently fall in real terms. But the coalition's big idea is the opposite. With Help to Buy, changing pension rules and other measures, they have stimulated demand without a corresponding increase in supply, such that prices go up further. As the Financial Times has said, this is economically illiterate. It would be a useful first step to reverse these policies.

We are now at a moment similar to the 1970s, when ideas about housing that had lasted a generation stopped working. Then it was the legacy of Clement Attlee's postwar government, which believed in massive state provision of housing, but which ended up restricting freedoms and too often creating homes people didn't like. Thatcher's policies were a necessary corrective, and had real benefits, but now they too are failing. It is time for something new.

It's not easy to champion planning, as it tends to summon images of faceless bureaucrats and grandiose visions gone wrong. But, as Hermann Muthesius recognised in the early 1900s, and as Peter Hall argues about 1960s new towns, it is not un-British to plan and design new communities well. The national dependency on high house prices has, in its effects, become an economic, social and cultural disaster. Active intervention is needed. As someone once said, there is no alternative.