In today's networked information economy, Yochai Benkler suggests, the most important inputs into the core economic activities of the most advanced economies are, for the first time, widely distributed in the population. Examples of decentralized or peer production are increasingly common, with Wikipedia just one among the list of notable examples. In contrast to the old model, in which all parties needed large-scale capital investment to influence the public space, Benkler suggests that today's networked public sphere has fewer barriers to entry. The groups that have traditionally influenced the public sphere include commercial interests (representing the power of money), government (which influences through funding, access, and threats, representing the power of power), parties, citizens, and a final group of civil society actors (i.e. professional values, journalism and universities). In Benkler's view, these categories of power have been destabilized by the spread of new means of social sharing and exchange. Today, authority, quality and accreditation are separate to capital due the addition of many new groups and platforms, including examples such as the following:

• Pro Publica, American Independent Media
• New highly visible blogs
• Sunlight Foundation
• Wikileaks
• Large-scale participatory platforms for politically active participants
• Citizen journalism, camera phones, and footage

Benkler notes that many critiques have arisen to the argument that the Internet democratizes. For example, some claim that new parties can talk on the Internet, but no one will necessarily hear them. Not only is very little attention actually paid to politics online, but links between sources are also very concentrated. Additionally, there is the question of whether the blogosphere simply offers a new version of elitism, in which the top bloggers come from similar backgrounds to those who formerly dominated the public sphere.

However, Benkler argues that the Internet does make the public sphere more democratic after all. The structured web offers more visibility to more people, in accreditation and filtration clusters. Speakers on the periphery can be identified by major sites and broadcast iteratively to higher-level visibility. On Daily Kos, for example, people are able to bring posts of interest forward onto the home page. All of this occurs with relatively little financing.

In their 2010 paper, Benkler and Shaw explored patterns among the top 155 political blogs, applying link analysis and other methods to explore differences between bloggers on the political left and on the political right. They found that the left adopts enhanced platforms much more quickly and has more flexible content boundaries--a measure of how easy it is for bloggers on the periphery to have their content taken up. While the right has more sole-author blogs, the left has more user blogs available and more large-scale collaboration (exemplified by blogs with more than 20 writers). The authors found that there was no single effect of "Liberation Technology" in this case, in that the left and right showed divergent practices. While Benkler concedes that a link analysis is only so useful without full content analysis, he also notes that the results are consistent with social cognition literature on the differences between people on the left and the right. Another explanation, however, comes from the theory that there was more need for the left to embrace the blogosphere in 2002; when technology first became available, the right dominated the government, news, and already had a platform for discussion in churches. Seeking a new forum for discussion and debate, the left seized on the blogosphere as a solution.

Any mention of climate policy was noticeably missing from President Obama's recent state of the union address. This is unfortunate because every day of inaction on climate policy by the United States government is another day that American consumers must pay substantially higher prices for products derived from crude oil, such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Moreover, a substantial fraction of the revenues from these higher prices goes to governments of countries that the US would prefer not to support.

So, what is the cost of a single day of delay? US crude oil consumption is approximately 20m barrels per day and roughly 12m barrels per day are imported. An oil price that, because of climate policy uncertainty, is $20 a barrel higher than it would otherwise have been implies that US consumers pay $400m per day more, of which $240m per day is paid to foreign oil producers. Dividing these figures by the United States population implies that every US citizen is paying about $1 per day more for oil - and more than half of that may be going to an unfriendly foreign government.

Why does this climate policy price premium exist? It is not due to a dearth of readily available technologies for producing substitutes for conventional oil. A number currently exist that are economic at oil prices significantly below current world prices of $80-90 per barrel. Several even have the potential to scale up to replace a large fraction of US oil consumption.

Tar sands and heavy oils, gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids are all available to produce substantial amounts of conventional oil substitutes at average costs at or below $60 per barrel. If these technologies were currently in place throughout the US, the world price of oil would not exceed that price, because any attempt by conventional oil suppliers to raise prices beyond that level would immediately be met by additional supply from producers of oil substitutes.

But if these technologies are financially viable at current world oil prices, then why don't they exist in the US? That's because they require massive up-front expenditures to construct the necessary production facilities. These fixed costs, plus the variable costs of production, must be recovered from sales over the lifetime of the project - and future climate policy can substantially increase the variable costs of these technologies.

Climate policy uncertainty impacts of the economic viability of these technologies because of the increased carbon intensity of the gasoline and diesel fuel substitutes they produce. Almost double the greenhouse gas emissions result per unit of useful energy produced and consumed relative to conventional oil. Therefore, if the US decided to set a significant price for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at some future date, either through a cap-and-trade mechanism or carbon fee, investors in these technologies would immediately realise a massive loss - because they would have to pay the price fixed for all of the CO2 emissions that result from producing and consuming these oil substitutes.

To understand this point, suppose that a technology exists to convert coal to an oil substitute that is financially viable at an oil price of $60 per barrel and that this technology produces double the CO2 per unit of useful energy relative to oil. At a $90 per barrel oil price, this technology could be unprofitable for a modest price of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions because of its substantially higher carbon intensity. For instance, at a $100 per ton price of CO2 emissions - which is roughly twice the highest price observed in the European Union's emissions permit trading scheme - the total cost per barrel of oil equivalent, including the cost of the additional emissions, could easily exceed $90 per barrel.

A solution to this investment impasse is a stable, predictable price of carbon into the distant future. Although there is currently a regional cap and trade mechanism for CO2 emissions in the Northeast US, permit prices in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) have been extremely modest - less than $5 per ton of CO2. California also plans to implement a cap-and-trade mechanism in 2012. No significant coal-mining activity takes place in the participating RGGI states or in California. But such regional cap-and-trade programmes are unlikely to set prices for CO2 emissions for a long enough time and with sufficient certainty to encourage investment in facilities to produce conventional oil substitutes. In other words, despite regional experiments with cap-and-trade, it is the national climate policy uncertainty that remains the major factor in preventing these investments.

If prospective investors in the major fossil fuel-producing regions of the US knew the cost of the CO2 emissions associated with these alternative technologies over the lifetime of each alternative fuel project, they would be able to decide which projects are likely to be financially viable at that carbon price. Particularly for coal-to-liquids, much of this investment would take place in the US because of the massive amount of available domestic coal reserves. This investment would also provide much-needed new domestic high-wage jobs.

New sources of supply of conventional oil substitutes would reduce oil prices, create new jobs in the United States and reduce the amount of money sent to governments, whose interests are counter to the US. Finally, this price of carbon would raise much-needed revenues for the US government and stimulate investment in lower carbon energy sources, such as wind, solar and biofuels. A modest, yet stable long-term price of carbon might even stimulate so much investment in conventional oil substitutes and low-carbon energy sources that the long-term net effect of this carbon price could be lower average energy prices across all sources.

The investments in these technologies need not result in higher aggregate CO2 emissions. For example, coal-to-liquids produces a concentrated CO2 emissions stream that is ideally suited to the deployment of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Consequently, a carbon price high enough to make CCS financially viable, yet reasonable enough to make this technology competitive with conventional oil, would address both concerns.

If there are concerns that committing to a modest carbon price may be insufficient to address climate concerns, this commitment could be stipulated only for investment projects initiated within a certain time window. The US government could reserve the right to increase this CO2 emissions price for projects initiated after that period. This logic has not escaped the Chinese government, where General Electric and Shenhua, a major Chinese coal producer, recently announced a joint coal gasification project, which is financially viable because the Chinese government can provide the necessary climate policy certainty.

The choice is stark: either we can continue to wait to implement the perfect climate policy, and in the meantime pay higher prices for oil, and watch countries like China that are able to provide climate policy certainty to investors move forward with this new industrial development; or we could commit to a modest climate policy and so unleash the new technologies and new jobs made possible by this more favourable investment environment.

On January 25, Professor Beth Simmons of Harvard University spoke as part of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Series on international human rights. Simmons, the Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, presented research from her award-winning book Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (2009).

During her lecture, Simmons explored the reasons why certain countries chose to ratify binding international treaties and others did not. Looking specifically at six "core" treaties, Simmons discussed the various domestic factors and international pressures that would explain the often-unexpected behavior of the nations toward these treaties. Strikingly, Simmons found that one of the best predictors of a country's position on a treaty was the ratification or non-ratification by its neighboring nations. This discovery, she said, suggested that nations could influence non-signatory neighbor countries to sign such treaties.

Simmons then turned to the analysis of why, and to what extent, these treaties matter - a question she is often asked by her students. While insisting that international treaties alone do not "solve all the problems," Simmons emphasized their role in framing human rights issues not only on the international level, but also in domestic politics. According to Simmons, these treaties support the domestic efforts of individuals and organizations across the globe that can now "point to [these] core focal group of documents as evidence [of their rights]."

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models. Ten years ago, on the eve of the puncturing of the dotcom bubble, the US held the high ground. Its democracy was widely emulated, if not always loved; its technology was sweeping the world; and lightly regulated "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism was seen as the wave of the future. The United States managed to fritter away that moral capital in remarkably short order: the Iraq war and the close association it created between military invasion and democracy promotion tarnished the latter, while the Wall Street financial crisis laid waste to the idea that markets could be trusted to regulate themselves.

China, by contrast, is on a roll. President Hu Jintao's rare state visit to Washington this week comes at a time when many Chinese see their weathering of the financial crisis as a vindication of their own system, and the beginning of an era in which US-style liberal ideas will no longer be dominant. State-owned enterprises are back in vogue, and were the chosen mechanism through which Beijing administered its massive stimulus. The automatic admiration for all things American that many Chinese once felt has given way to a much more nuanced and critical view of US weaknesses - verging, for some, on contempt. It is thus not surprising that polls suggest far more Chinese think their country is going in the right direction than their American counterparts.

But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an "authoritarian capitalist" box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China's model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts. India is a law-governed democracy, in which ordinary people can object to government plans; China's rulers can move more than a million people out of the Three Gorges Dam flood plain with little recourse on their part.

Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped - precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response. They are most attentive to the urban middle class and powerful business interests that generate employment, but they respond to outrage over egregious cases of corruption or incompetence among lower-level party cadres too.

Indeed, the Chinese government often overreacts to what it believes to be public opinion precisely because, as one diplomat resident in Beijing remarked, there are no institutionalised ways of gauging it, such as elections or free media. Instead of calibrating a sensible working relationship with Japan, for example, China escalated a conflict over the detention of a fishing boat captain last year - seemingly in anticipation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment.

Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand - where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment - as a warning of what could happen to them.

Ironically for a country that still claims to be communist, China has grown far more unequal of late. Many peasants and workers share little in the country's growth, while others are ruthlessly exploited. Corruption is pervasive, which exacerbates existing inequalities. At a local level there are countless instances in which government colludes with developers to take land away from hapless peasants. This has contributed to a pent-up anger that explodes in many thousands of acts of social protest, often violent, each year.

The Communist party seems to think it can deal with the problem of inequality through improved responsiveness on the part of its own hier­archy to popular pressures. China's great historical achievement during the past two millennia has been to create high-quality centralised government, which it does much better than most of its authoritarian peers. Today, it is shifting social spending to the neglected interior, to boost consumption and to stave off a social explosion. I doubt whether its approach will work: any top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground. Effective accountability can only come about through a bottom-up process, or what we know as democracy. This is not, in my view, likely to emerge soon. However, down the road, in the face of a major economic downturn, or leaders who are less competent or more corrupt, the system's fragile legitimacy could be openly challenged. Democracy's strengths are often most evident in times of adversity.

However, if the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington's foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests, student demonstrators erected a model of the Statue of Liberty to symbolise their aspirations. Whether anyone in China would do the same at some future date will depend on how Americans address their problems in the present.

The writer is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order, will be published in the spring.

Today's world abounds in international courts, laws, and tribunals, yet war is becoming more brutal, more transnational, with mounting civilian casualties. Helen Stacy, FSI senior fellow and Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, notes that "civilians, often women and children, who played no role in the conflict – these are the people who suffer first, last, and in the middle." Stacy recently moderated a panel on Civilians in War Zones, that included Richard Goldstone, former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, history Professor James Campbell, and Peter Berkowitz, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as part of this year's Ethics and War series.