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The world this week
 

The world this year

KAL’s cartoon

 
The world this year

The world this year

Dec 20th 2022 |

Russia invaded Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s excuse for this

unprovoked act of aggression was that he wanted to “de-Nazify” the
country, a democracy with a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The invasion, which Mr Putin thought would end in a quick and easy
victory, proved spectacularly incompetent.

Russia failed to take Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Its vehicles and kit
broke down. Ukrainians fought hard, picking off Russian fuel and
ammunition supplies and pushing the invaders back. America and
Europe supplied Ukraine with weapons, cash and intelligence. Russia
shelled civilians, tortured captives, kidnapped children and made
thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons.

In the bleak midwinter

Some 7.8m refugees fled from Ukraine; another 7m were internally

displaced. America estimated that 100,000 troops on each side had
died or been injured in the war and 40,000 civilians had been killed.

As the year ended, Ukrainians had recaptured much of the territory

Russia had stolen. But Mr Putin drafted hundreds of thousands more
troops and bombed Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, hoping to
freeze civilians over the winter. Ukrainian generals predicted that
Russia would launch a big new offensive in early 2023.

Hundreds of thousands of young men left Russia to avoid the draft.

Even as a mercenary group led by a pal of Mr Putin scours Russian
prisons for new recruits to send to the front, Russians are still banned
from calling the war a war.

The West imposed sanctions, barring Russia’s banks from SWIFT, a

global payments system, freezing many of its foreign assets and
banning the sale to it of high-tech components. Hundreds of
companies pulled out of Russia, including Apple, BP, Ford and Shell.
Russian planes were banned from Western airports. Some wealthy
Russians faced sanctions, too. Roman Abramovich gave up his
ownership of Chelsea football club.

The war caused energy prices to soar. Oil rose to nearly $140 a
barrel before falling again. Mr Putin cut off most gas supplies to
Europe, where governments scrambled to secure new supplies and
subsidise household heating bills. Investment in alternative energy
rose.

The prices of wheat, cooking oil and other essential foods rocketed
as the war disrupted exports from Ukraine and Russia. The high cost
of fuel and food helped spark civil unrest in over 90 countries.

Germany unveiled a new foreign policy, called the Zeitenwende

(turning point). Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to raise defence
spending and end the country’s long dependence on Russian energy.

Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO to protect themselves

against Russia. This was awkward for Mr Putin, whose excuses for
invading Ukraine included a desire to halt the alliance’s eastward
expansion. If both countries join, Russia’s border with NATO will have
doubled. However, Turkey is holding up the applications.

And a partridge in a pear tree

For Britain it was the year of two monarchs, three prime ministers
and four chancellors. Boris Johnson resigned, eventually, after
becoming the first prime minister to receive a criminal fine (for
breaking lockdown rules). “Them’s the breaks,” he said. Liz Truss’s
tumultuous seven weeks in Number 10 saw the pound fall to a four-
decade low against the dollar, government-bond yields soar and the
IMF rebuke her government for its unfunded budget. “The markets
will react as they will,” said her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and they
did. Rishi Sunak restored some calm when he took over from Ms
Truss.
Queen Elizabeth II died, aged 96, after 70 years on the British
throne. Some 250,000 people filed past her coffin as she lay in state.
King Charles III, who has promised to follow his mother’s tight-lipped
approach to reigning, will be crowned on May 6th.

‘Tis the season to be jolly

The covid-19 virus became less dangerous as more people were

vaccinated. Most countries loosened their restrictions, though not in
time to allow the unjabbed Novak Djokovic to play in the Australian
Open. A truckers’ protest in Canada against covid mandates
morphed into a movement against the government, which enforced
the Emergencies Act for the first time.

Xi Jinping secured a third term as China’s leader. His “zero-covid”

policy was all but abandoned after protests against harsh lockdowns,
the biggest since he came to power in 2012. Covid started to spread
rapidly in China. Experts fretted that the government has failed to
vaccinate old people properly. China continued to avoid the use of
highly effective foreign-made vaccines.

Inflation soared to double digits in America, Britain and the euro

area, prompting central banks to tighten monetary policy sharply. In
March the Federal Reserve increased its main rate for the first time
since 2018. In November the Bank of England raised its rate by the
biggest amount since the 1980s. The European Central Bank lifted its
from a negative -0.5% to zero, and then higher.

President Joe Biden signed a huge package of subsidies to promote

clean energy and tackle climate change, the misleadingly named
Inflation Reduction Act. America’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v
Wade, passing control of abortion policy back to the states. Some 13
states banned most abortions. The Democrats held on to the Senate
in midterm elections, defying expectations, and only narrowly lost the
House. Candidates in tight races endorsed by Donald Trump did
especially badly. At the end of the year the House committee
investigating the assault on the Capitol in 2021 recommended that Mr
Trump face charges of insurrection.
The death in custody of Mahsa Amini sparked huge protests in Iran.
Amini had been arrested by the morality police for wearing her hijab
improperly, and died after being beaten. Protesters railed against the
theocracy for weeks. Women burned their hijabs in public. Around
15,000 people were arrested; some were executed.

In Sri Lanka the spike in food prices came on top of a slump in food
production caused by a ban on chemical fertilisers. The Rajapaksa
brothers were blamed. Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime
minister amid the worst economic crisis since independence.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country when a mob stormed his
presidential palace.

Joyful and triumphant

Italy elected a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni of the

Brothers of Italy. Ms Meloni became the country’s first female prime
minister. After yet another election in Israel Binyamin Netanyahu was
set to become prime minister again, a year after he left office in
disgrace. South Korea got a new president: Yoon Suk-yeol.
Emmanuel Macron was re-elected in France. In Australia the
Liberals were turfed out after nine years in charge. Ferdinand
“Bongbong” Marcos, the son of a dictator, won the Philippines’
presidential election. Colombia got its first-ever president from the
left: Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter. William Ruto won
Kenya’s presidential election. The opposition challenged the result,
though there was no repeat of the widespread killings that marred
previous ballots. After years seeking the job, and time in prison,
Anwar Ibrahim became Malaysia’s prime minister.

Jair Bolsonaro lost Brazil’s presidential election, but did not admit it.
Without evidence, his party claimed the vote was rigged. The
electoral authority dismissed the challenge and fined the party for
wasting its time. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will be sworn in on January
1st. He vows to halt the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which
accelerated under Mr Bolsonaro.

Imran Khan was ousted as prime minister of Pakistan following a

vote of no confidence in parliament. He did not go quietly. Six months
later his party won most of the seats in a series of by-elections. A few
weeks after that Mr Khan was shot in the leg at a rally.

God rest ye merry gentleman

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, bought Twitter. He
sacked the CEO, the entire board and half the staff. Mr Musk said he
would allow more free speech, but balked when offensive tweets
proliferated and upset advertisers. In December he asked his Twitter
followers if he should stay as CEO; they said no. Mr Musk ceased to
be the world’s richest man; Bernard Arnault, the boss of LVMH, a
luxury firm, surpassed him.

Stockmarkets were battered during 2022. The shine came off big
tech stocks. The share prices of Meta and Tesla fell by over 60%.
Apple briefly reached a stockmarket value of $3trn in January; it is
now worth about $2.1trn. The S&P 500 had its worst first half since
1970. Cryptocurrencies were also hammered, especially after the
collapse of FTX, one of the biggest crypto exchanges, whose boss
was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Bitcoin is down by 65%.

America limited exports to China of chips made with American

technology and banned outright chips for use in the development of
Chinese artificial intelligence. China took the dispute to the WTO.

The worst drought on record in the Horn of Africa pushed more than
80m people into hunger. Millions are on the brink of famine.

Ethiopia and the rebellious leaders of the northern region of Tigray

agreed to end a civil war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are
thought to have died because of the conflict, mostly from hunger or
disease.

Business and daily life in South Africa were constantly disrupted by

power cuts. Eskom, the state electricity monopoly, has been so
hollowed out by corruption that half of its generation capacity is
regularly offline.

Abe Shinzo, a former prime minister of Japan, was assassinated.

Salman Rushdie, a writer, was stabbed by a jihadist but survived. In
1989 Iran’s late ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, had ordered Muslims to kill
Mr Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses”, a novel.

The world’s population passed 8bn, just 12 years after it reached

7bn. Improvements in nutrition and medicine have increased humans’
lifespan.

Ding-dong merrily on high

The Oscars ceremony was full of surprises. “Coda” became the first
film released primarily over streaming to win best picture. Will Smith,
an actor, slapped Chris Rock, a comic, for being rude about his wife.
Netflix reported a dip in subscribers and introduced ads to increase
revenue. The biggest box-office hit was “Top Gun: Maverick”, proving
that a 60-year-old actor in a leather flight jacket and shades can still
pull them in.
The world this week

KAL’s cartoon
Dec 20th 2022 |
Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

A looming Russian offensive (Dec 15th 2022)

North Korea is preparing for another nuclear test—or many (Oct 18th
2022)

Iran’s tired regime is living on borrowed time (Sep 29th 2022)

Bashar al-Assad is hollowing out Syria’s ravaged state (Jun 16th

2022)

KAL’s cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last
week’s here.
Leaders
 

Why 2022 mattered

It has to be Ukraine
A $44bn education
The year of the rate shock
The laws of nature
 
The crucible

What 2022 meant for the world

Some years bring disorder, others a resolution. This one asked
questions

Dec 20th 2022 |

IT
WAS
A year that put the world to the test. From the invasion of
Ukraine to covid-19 in China, from inflation to climate change, from
Sino-American tensions to pivotal elections, 2022 asked hard
questions. The ordeal has not only sent the world in a new direction,
but also shown it in a new light.

The biggest surprise—and the most welcome—has been the

resilience of broadly liberal countries in the West. When Vladimir
Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24th, he
expected the government of a corrupt state to buckle. After a
humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the decadent,
divided West would surely fail to match condemnation of Russia with
real backing for Ukraine.

In fact Volodymyr Zelensky and his people affirmed that self-

determination and liberty are worth dying for. They became an
inspiration. After an upsurge in popular support, Western
governments threw their weight behind democracy’s new champion.
Led by the Biden administration, the West is providing arms and aid
on a scale even hawks had not imagined.

At home voters also made themselves heard, siding against taboo-

busting populists. In America, despite the awful approval numbers of
Joe Biden, centrists used their ballots to preserve fundamental rights,
including in some states the right to an abortion after the Supreme
Court overturned Roe v Wade. In competitive races hard-core
election-deniers endorsed by Donald Trump almost all lost.

In France Marine Le Pen camouflaged her far-right origins, but was

still beaten by Emmanuel Macron, a centrist. After Giorgia Meloni
became Italy’s first far-right post-war prime minister, she leaned to the
centre. Even in stumbling Britain, both Labour and the governing
Conservatives are calculating that victory in elections lies away from
the populist extremes of right and left.

As messy democracies show unexpected resolve, so seemingly

steady autocracies have had feet of clay. Mr Putin is the prime
example, doubling and redoubling his catastrophic gamble. But he is
not the only one. After three months of protests following the death in
custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for failing to follow
the rules in wearing her hijab, the security forces in Iran have taken to
shooting female protesters in the face, breasts and genitals. Now that
the mullahs have forfeited the faith of their people, they have no other
lever but violence.

Those who admire strong leaders for getting things done should be
careful what they wish for. Xi Jinping has extended the dominance of
the Chinese Communist Party, installing himself as its permanent
chief and the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. But his steps
to cool the property market, rein back consumer tech and block covid
did grave harm to the economy. Today, as the virus spreads, it is clear
that his government wasted months when it should have been
vaccinating the elderly, stockpiling drugs and creating intensive-care
beds.

Even China’s all-encompassing social control showed cracks.

Although the Chinese security services swatted down widespread
protests last month, these had been triggered partly by the sight of
maskless crowds in Qatar enjoying the World Cup.

For all those who embrace classical liberal values, including this
newspaper, Western resilience is heartening—and an important
change after a long retreat. But the good news goes only so far. The
tests of 2022 have also revealed the depths of the world’s divisions
and have set big government on the march.

To gauge the divisions, compare the almost universal support for

America after the attacks of September 11th 2001 with the global
south’s determination to stay neutral in the fight over Ukraine. In the
most recent UN vote to reprimand Russia, 35 countries abstained.
Many understandably resent how the West asserts that its worries are
issues of global principle, whereas war in Yemen or the Horn of
Africa, say, or climate-related droughts and floods, always seem to be
regional.
In much of the world liberal values are embattled. Despite the defeat
of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, democracy is under strain in Latin
America. As he presides over ruinous inflation in Turkey, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan is prosecuting potential opponents in the election in
2023. In Israel Binyamin Netanyahu is trying to avoid jail for
corruption by forming a coalition with the Arab-hating, gay-bashing far
right. Indonesia adopted an illiberal criminal code in December that
threatens to ban sex outside marriage, stifle free speech and impose
religious orthodoxy. India’s economy is brimming over with tech-
inspired enterprise, but its politics are majoritarian, ugly and cruel.

All around the world, the idea of limited government is taking a

beating. Because of the post-invasion energy shock, European
governments are pouring money into fixing prices. They are also
powering the transition from fossil fuels, itself a welcome goal, using
industrial policy rather than markets. America’s answer to the security
threat from China is to deploy trade barriers and subsidies to
decouple its own economy and boost home-grown industries. If that
harms America’s allies, too bad.

Economic nationalism is popular. The largesse during the pandemic

changed expectations of the state. Creative destruction, which
reallocates capital and labour, may be unpalatable to ageing
populations that put less store by economic growth and to younger
voters who embrace the politics of identity.

But big-government capitalism has a poor record. Given decades-

high inflation, caused partly by ill-judged fiscal and monetary policy,
especially in America, it is odd that voters want to reward politicians
and officials by giving them power over bits of the economy they are
not suited to run. State-backed champions in energy and tech
sometimes succeed, but the more that countries pile in, the more
waste and rent-seeking there will be.

The chips were down

Judged by the liberal yardstick of limited government, a respect for
individual dignity and a faith in human progress, 2022 has been
mixed. However, there is hope. The West was arrogant after the
collapse of Soviet communism. It paid the price in Iraq, Afghanistan
and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In 2022, having been
rocked by populism at home and China’s extraordinary rise, the West
was challenged and it found its footing. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign
up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
Inspiration nation

Our country of the year for 2022 can only be

Ukraine
For the heroism of its people, and for standing up to a bully

Dec 20th 2022 |

IN
NORMAL
TIMES, picking The Economist’s country of the year is
hard. Our writers and editors usually begin with a freewheeling
debate in which they spar over the rival claims of half a dozen
shortlisted nations. But this year, for the first time since we started
naming countries of the year in 2013, the choice is obvious. It can
only be Ukraine.

The honour normally goes to the country which, in our view, has
improved the most in the previous 12 months. So Ukraine is in one
sense an unusual choice, in that life for most Ukrainians has grown
spectacularly worse since Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of
their country in February. Multitudes have died. Cities have been
smashed and charred. Millions have fled their homes. Ukraine’s
economy has shrunk by about a third. Because of Russian attacks,
many Ukrainians are shivering in the dark without electricity.

Yet Ukrainians have proved themselves this year. Four of their

qualities stand out. The first is heroism. When the invasion began,
most people thought Ukraine would be crushed by its much larger
neighbour. Many would have understood if Ukraine’s defenders had
run away. Mr Putin clearly expected the Ukrainian army to fold: his
troops arrived with their dress uniforms ready for a victory parade but
without nearly enough food.

The Ukrainians stood and fought. President Volodymyr Zelensky,

spurning Western offers to spirit him out of Kyiv, supposedly snapped
that he needed “ammunition, not a ride”. Ordinary Ukrainians showed
similar mettle. Professors, plumbers and pop stars flocked to enlist,
swapping comfortable beds for frosty foxholes and the risk of
agonising death. In battle after battle they routed the Russians. In
defending themselves against an aggressor who disputed their
country’s right to exist as an independent state, they found a new
sense of nationhood.

They showed ingenuity, too. They spotted their enemies’

weaknesses, blew up their fuel and ammunition supplies, and quickly
learned how to use new Western-supplied weapons. They devolved
decision-making to officers in the field, making their units more nimble
and adaptable than the plodding, hierarchical Russians. They made
deft use of help from friendly intelligence services, especially
America’s, while their enemies fought half-blind, and sometimes gave
away their own positions by making phone calls on open lines.

Ukrainians have also demonstrated resilience. When there is no tap

water at home, they melt snow. When there is no electricity, they find
heat and light in cafés with diesel generators, or sleep in the offices
where they work, many of which now have bomb shelters and bottled
water. The horrors Mr Putin keeps inflicting on them do not seem to
have dented their morale.

And with a few exceptions, they have not answered war crimes with
war crimes. Russian forces have routinely bombed civilians, tortured
captives and plundered villages. By contrast, Russian prisoners-of-
war are startled at how well they are treated. This is largely because
Ukraine is not, as Mr Putin claims, a Nazi state, but a democracy
where human lives matter. It has its flaws, notably corruption, but its
government and people had rejected Putinism even before the war,
and now they reject it more strenuously.

By standing up to Russia’s despot, Ukrainians have protected their

neighbours. Had he conquered Ukraine, he might have attacked
Moldova or Georgia next, or menaced the Baltic states. Ukraine has
shown that underdogs can stand up to bullies, even enormous ones.
It has thus been an inspiration not only to places with predatory
neighbours, such as Taiwan, but also to oppressed people
everywhere. Many tyrants broadcast big lies to justify their misdeeds,
and impose their will through terror. Ukrainians have shown that lies
can be exposed and terror can be resisted. Their struggle is far from
over. But their example in 2022 was second to none. Slava Ukraini! ■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

Twitter

Elon Musk’s $44bn education on free speech

He has had a crash course in the trade-offs in protecting free
expression

Dec 19th 2022 |

ELON
MUSK’s two months running Twitter has been an unhappy
experiment. The social network’s 250m users have endured a
wearying saga in which Mr Musk is the central character. Advertisers
have fled. Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose
$4bn a year, by one estimate. The damage has spread to Tesla, Mr
Musk’s carmaker, part of the reason it has lost half a trillion dollars in
market value since early September, costing Mr Musk the title of the
world’s richest man.

On December 19th it looked as if Mr Musk might throw in the towel,

after Twitter users voted for him to step down as chief executive. It
has been a costly adventure. But in one sense his turbulent
stewardship of the social network has done the rest of the world a
favour. In two short months Mr Musk has been through a public crash
course in the principles of free speech, neatly demonstrating the
trade-offs involved in protecting expression online.

From the outside, Twitter seemed simple to someone whose day job
was building self-driving cars and space rockets. Mr Musk, a self-
described “free-speech absolutist”, had grown concerned (with some
justification) that Twitter had been captured by censorious left-wing
scolds. Shortly after agreeing to buy the platform he explained his
approach to moderation: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which
matches the law.”

In practice he has found that the right to speech conflicts with other
rights. One is safety. Last month Mr Musk said that his commitment to
free speech meant he would not ban a Twitter account that tweeted
the whereabouts of his private jet, even though he considered this a
security risk. But on December 14th he changed his mind after a
“stalker” bothered his son. After suspending the jet account, Twitter
introduced rules outlawing the reporting of others’ real-time locations.

As well as limiting speech in the name of safety, Mr Musk has

curtailed it to avoid the lesser sin of causing offence. In October the
number of views of tweets that Twitter deems “hate speech” doubled,
as users tested the limits of Mr Musk’s new regime. Rather than allow
this legal-but-nasty content, Twitter cracked down. In November
hateful tweets recorded one-third fewer views than before the
takeover. Earlier this month Twitter suspended the account of Ye, a
rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after he posted a picture of a
swastika within a Star of David—an image that, however grotesque,
is nonetheless permitted by America’s laws.

Mr Musk even limited speech when it was bad for profits. After
pranksters sent tweets aping brands like Pepsi (“Coke is better”) and
Nestlé (“We steal your water and sell it back to you lol”), Twitter
outlawed such behaviour to stop advertisers fleeing. Then, to stem an
exodus of users, on December 18th Twitter said it would ban people
from linking to rival social networks or posting their usernames. When
questions were raised as to whether regulators would consider such
a move anticompetitive, Mr Musk apologised and free speech was
restored.

All this holds two lessons for whoever follows Mr Musk as Twitter’s
boss, should he leave. One is to keep content moderation at arm’s
length. The person deciding whether a post is acceptable is
compromised if they are also responsible for boosting engagement
among users and spending by advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg (whose
reputation has risen in light of Mr Musk’s pratfalls) realised this and
outsourced Facebook’s biggest moderation headaches to an
independent “oversight board” in 2020.

The second lesson is that moderation has no clean solutions, even

for “technokings” with strong views on free speech. Free expression
is not a problem with a solution bounded by the laws of physics that
can be hacked together if only enough coders pull an all-nighter. It is
a dilemma requiring messy trade-offs that leave no one happy. In
such a business, humility and transparency count for a lot.

These are novel concepts to some in Silicon Valley, who are impatient
to tear up the established ways of doing things. But just as
cryptocurrency enthusiasts have recently received a bracing lesson in
the value of boring old financial prudence, so Mr Musk and his fellow
free-speech enthusiasts are learning why free expression has caused
many to scratch their heads over the centuries. Tech valuations have
suffered a sharp correction in 2022. It has also been a chastening
year for tech egos. ■
After the storm

The year of the rate shock

Financial markets are adjusting to higher rates. That does not mean
the chaos is over

Dec 20th 2022 |

ONCE
MORE
for the cheap seats at the back. That way the lesson
may sink in. After a strong run from mid-October, stockmarkets have
tumbled yet again. The S&P 500, an index of American shares, has
shed 5% since December 14th, when the Federal Reserve increased
interest rates by half a percentage point and Jerome Powell, its
chairman, said that policymakers had no plans to start lowering rates
until they were confident that inflation was moving down to 2%. “The
historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening
policy,” he declared.

The end of cheap money caused drama in markets in 2022. Investors

are hopeful that the chaos will soon be over and that a rate cut might
come as soon as mid-2023. However, Mr Powell’s warning sounds
like an effort to drive home the idea that the optimism is misplaced.
It would not be the first time. Markets have collapsed after most Fed
meetings this year, as investors have been shaken by Mr Powell’s
hawkish tone. In each of the five worst weeks for American stocks in
2022, shares plunged by about 5%. All of them took place
immediately before or after a Fed meeting. As inflation, first
unleashed by a fiscal stimulus, proved stickier than expected, the
increasingly hawkish central bank meted out monster rate rises even
as investors kept hoping that it might let up. When the stockmarket
peaked in America on January 3rd, bond markets thought that the
upper bound of the Fed’s policy rate of 0.25% would rise by just 0.75
percentage points by the end of the year. In the event, it stands at
4.5%.

The fierce tightening of monetary policy was the trigger for much of
the turbulence that rocked finance in 2022. The collapse in tech share
prices was so violent that Meta has twice shed more than a quarter of
its value in a single trading day. The rout in bond markets was so
extreme that corporate issuance and loan markets seized up in the
spring. British pension funds were thrown into turmoil in the autumn
by moves in gilt prices, and the collapse in crypto revealed what
American authorities are calling a “massive years-long fraud” at FTX,
an exchange, perpetrated by Sam Bankman-Fried, a former
wunderkind. On December 20th the Bank of Japan roiled markets by
modifying its policy of capping long-term interest rates. Each case
had its idiosyncrasies, but all were exposed when the era of free
money came to an abrupt end.

Will things be calmer in 2023? Interest rates are higher across most
of the rich world than they have been for more than 15 years, so
much of the rate shock may seem to be safely in the past. Inflation
appears to be abating, in America at least. Though many countries in
Europe are still struggling with high energy costs, price increases
seem to have slowed there, too. Perhaps the adjustment, though
painful, is largely done.
Such thinking could well prove mistaken. For a start, a gulf remains
between what the Fed says it will do and what investors expect from
it. The central bank reckons it may have to raise interest rates above
5% in 2023, and leave them there. That does not tally with investors’
expectations. Despite Mr Powell’s warnings, they are betting on a
shallower peak and continue to think that the first rate cut may come
as soon as the summer.

In short, policymakers and investors still differ over the most

important questions. How sticky will inflation be? At what level will
rates peak? And when will central bankers start to ease off?

Another source of uncertainty is whether America will enter a

recession and, if so, when. The Fed reckons that it may be spared,
projecting slow growth of 0.4-1% in 2023, and inflation of around 2.9-
3.5%. If recession does strike, investors will not be ready. Analysts
say that profits could well grow by 7.6% in 2023, well above nominal
GDP.

Last, the effects of the rate shock are still working their way through
to asset prices. So far, only the quickest and twitchiest asset markets,
like stocks, bonds and crypto, have adjusted. Those moves are still
being digested by financial institutions. Only in crypto have large firms
been in real danger, with some lending platforms, exchanges and
hedge funds going bust.

However, the interest-rate shock could yet expose cracks elsewhere

in the financial system. And more pain is to come. Prices have yet to
adjust in markets that are slower to mark down assets, as in private
equity and property.

The Jay walk

The rate shock dominated financial markets in 2022. Little wonder

that investors wish an end to it. Yet the big debates about inflation
and interest rates remain unresolved; investors’ hopes for growth and
profits look too rosy; and the effects of rate rises have yet to filter
through to all corners of the financial system. Whatever investors
choose to believe, the chaos of 2022 could well follow them into the
new year. ■
The laws of nature

Why climate change is intimately tied to

biodiversity
There is a financial case for investing in biodiversity

Dec 20th 2022 |

THE
NATURAL
world is a source of beauty and wonder, but it also
provides humans with essential services. Jungles, savannahs and
mangroves act as buffers against infectious diseases and storm
surges. Forests channel moisture into rivers that irrigate crops, while
their roots prevent landslides. At a gathering on Monday in Montreal,
196 governments from around the world pledged to protect and
restore 30% or more of the Earth’s water and land by 2030.

Lofty promises about preserving the world’s biodiversity have been

made and broken many times before. One step towards avoiding yet
more disappointment is to emphasise the close link between
preserving biodiversity and the widely held goal of reaching net-zero
carbon emissions.

The destruction of natural environments is depressing, relentless and

hard to ignore. The area of coral reefs has halved since the 1950s
and the rate of loss is accelerating. Some 10m hectares of forest are
lost worldwide every year. Less known is the link between biodiversity
and climate change. Each year more than a quarter of the carbon
dioxide emitted by industry and agriculture is absorbed by natural
ecosystems.

Around the world, investment in the energy transition is accelerating.

Spending in 2022 on clean energy, for example, should reach $1.4trn,
roughly a fifth above the pre-pandemic level. Scores of countries and
thousands of big companies have plans to get to net-zero emissions
within the next 20-30 years. Given that biodiversity has an important
role in meeting these carbon-reduction goals, you might think that it
would feature highly in these plans.

Not so. For example, Joe Biden’s chief piece of climate legislation,
the Inflation Reduction Act, contains about $400bn of subsidies for
clean energy and other initiatives yet has too little to say about
biodiversity. Faced with tighter regulation of emissions and carbon-
pricing schemes, many bosses are now dedicating more time and
cash to cutting their firms’ carbon footprints. But most still regard
biodiversity as a nice-to-have luxury that is far beyond their remit.
That needs to change. Safeguarding biodiversity is an efficient way to
control carbon emissions. More of the rising amounts of government
spending being thrown at mitigating and adapting to climate change
should be spent on it.

In addition, companies and investment firms that are allocating huge

sums to developing clean-energy sources, re-engineering industrial
processes and developing carbon-capture technologies should pay
more attention to the opportunities from preserving ecosystems. By
investing in biodiversity—directing capital to projects that repair an
ecosystem, for example—companies can offset their emissions. By
some estimates, schemes to manage carbon-rich peatlands and
wetlands and to reforest cleared land could provide more than one-
third of the emissions reductions that are needed to prevent more
than 2°C of global warming.

Key to marshalling more capital is better measurement, so that the

link between investment in natural projects, biodiversity and carbon is
made clear. Today some so-called carbon-offset schemes that involve
firms paying money to, say, plant a forest, are dubious and opaque—
and belong to the realm of con-artists and scams rather than science.
Better guidelines and practice can help and so can new technology.
Drones and satellites can improve the measurement of biodiversity
and accounting systems can measure how spending on biodiversity
compares with funnelling cash into other kinds of carbon
management.

The services ecology

The planet is in a vicious cycle in which global warming damages

ecosystems, in turn impairing their ability to absorb carbon. Over the
past 20 years the Amazon has become a net source of carbon
dioxide, emitting 13% more than it captures. Spending money on
nature need not only be an act of philanthropy. It can also be
attractive for governments and firms investing in mitigating climate
change. ■
For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue,
our fortnightly subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our climate-change
hub.
Letters
 

On needle-exchange programmes, Kenya, the EU, the

Titanic, street names, job titles
 
On needle-exchange programmes, Kenya, the EU, the Titanic,
street names, job titles

Letters to the editor

A selection of correspondence

Dec 20th 2022 |

Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.com

Needle-exchange policies

Your article on syringe exchanges did not recognise the continuing

challenge of HIV and the weight of evidence on harm reduction (“No
harm intended”, December 3rd). Across the world, 1.5m people were
newly infected with HIV last year. Because of stigma, discrimination
and criminalisation, people who inject drugs and their sexual partners
are 35 times more likely to contract HIV than people who do not inject
drugs. Needle and syringe programmes, as part of a comprehensive
package of harm-reduction services, are effective in preventing HIV
and in connecting people who inject drugs to other life- saving
services.

Your article, based on a single new study in a rapidly changing drug-

use environment, did not reflect the wealth of research. HIV
guidelines for people who use drugs, released by the World Health
Organisation this year, reviewed the most recent evidence and made
a strong data-informed recommendation for the prioritisation of
needle and syringe programmes for drug users.

To end the AIDS pandemic the world needs to move away from
failed, punitive, stigmatising approaches towards a human-rights,
community-led approach, rooted in decades of experience and
evidence.

WINNIE
BYANYIMA

Executive director

UNAIDS

Geneva

The distribution of sterile syringes and other life-saving services is not

the reason why 556,472 people have died of opioid-related
overdoses from 2000 to 2020. Over this period, opioid-related fatal
overdoses increased by 716% and synthetic opioid-related fatal
overdoses by 5,833%. The real moral hazards were the drug firms’
gross production and promotion of legally prescribed opioids without
having to bear the cost of the ensuing epidemic, and the production
of synthetic opioid-laced illicit drugs with little consideration of the
rocketing rates of fatal overdose among users.

To “do no harm” do not stigmatise people with substance use

disorders as “junkies” and “addicts”. To determine which policies
work, do what harm-reduction researchers do: follow the science, the
full breadth of it, including studies that use multiple methods and that
evaluate a range of harm reduction and overdose- prevention efforts.

BRIAN
WEIR

Assistant scientist

PROFESSOR
SUSAN
SHERMAN

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Baltimore

The more discussion on intravenous drug abuse the better. I have

volunteered at a needle exchange in Fresno that exchanges up to
30,000 needles on a Saturday afternoon. People who avail
themselves of such programmes avoid the risk of dirty needles and
associated drug paraphernalia. Many such exchanges have free
primary health-care services attached to them, and every person who
works there will find a moment to ask about treatment. I have
personally witnessed the miracle of a person using the needle-
exchange programme, receiving free doctor care on a Saturday and
going to a local clinic for treatment the following Monday. The
exchanges do not encourage people to do drugs. If someone is
abusing drugs they will continue to do so, clean or dirty needles . Alas
the power of addiction is such that it trumps all rational behaviour.

ALEX
DODD

Former CEO of Aegis Treatment Centers

San Francisco
Without fear or frontiers

I got to know Kenya’s boda-boda motorbike taxis during a Rotary

humanitarian visit to the country (“Brotherhood of bikers”, December
3rd). They were driving all over the place, in the city and in the
countryside, transporting passengers, chickens and building material.
They certainly have a disdain for traffic rules and there are many
accidents. The general hospital in Nairobi even has a special ward for
boda-boda casualties. Interestingly, boda-boda has come to mean
border-to-border, as indeed they criss-cross the country from border
to border and also drive over the border into neighbouring countries.

GRETA
CLEYNHENS
DU
BOIS

Kingston, Canada

Swapping ideas in the EU

Charlemagne suggested that the European Union’s “one-size-fits-all”

policies hold back the spread of good ideas between its members
(November 26th). However, when it comes to road safety, the EU
shares precisely the kind of smart thinking highlighted in the column.
In an EU-funded project called Road Safety Exchange, we have
taken Lithuanian policymakers to see the Dutch cycling infrastructure
that so impressed your correspondent. Polish experts came with us to
look at France’s ultra-efficient traffic-fine processing centre, and
Portuguese specialists got a hands-on look at how the Irish do
roadside drug-driving checks. The “sharing of best practice” may be
awful Brussels jargon, but the EU can be genuinely good at it and, in
our case, the results can even save lives.

DUDLEY
CURTIS

European Transport Safety Council

Brussels

Charlemagne quoted Tom Lehrer’s advice to plagiarise: “it’s why the

good Lord made your eyes”. But he should have cited the rest of Mr
Lehrer’s wisdom on plagiarism: always remember to call it research.

MORAY
CLAYTON

Mbabane, Eswatini
A failure to communicate

Your article on the sinking of the Titanic (“Back story, November

26th), said that the radio officer of the nearby SS Californian was
“asleep”. According to Parks Stephenson, who has investigated the
wreck, before going off duty the officer carried out his captain’s
instruction to warn ships in the vicinity about ice, but was brusquely
told to shut up by the Titanic’s radio officer because he was
interrupting the transmission of passenger messages. That was an
hour before the Titanic’S encounter with the fatal iceberg.
Official inquiries established that, although the Californian failed to act
on seeing flares fired from the Titanic, her role had she done so
would have been the same as the RMS
Carpathia, the first ship to
pick up passengers from lifeboats. James Cameron’s Jack, in the
water, would still have died.

SIMON
TIMM

London

Street racers
Regarding unusual street names (“Signs of the times”, November
26th), some of my favourites are in the village of Silverstone, from
which the motor-racing circuit takes its name. Here there is a Stewart
Drive, Brabham Close and Graham Hill.

STUART
KING

Dumfries

And what do you do?

Bartleby’s column on job-title inflation was excellent (December 10th).
I remember a meeting I had in the 1990s with executives from a retail
chain based in Michigan. The company let its managers make up
their own titles. I was handed business cards that read “Queen of the
Inventories”, “Merchandising Maven” and “Secret Weapon”. I recall
that this group of managers was a particularly happy one.

SATYEN
HOMBALI

Pune, India

When I was an undergraduate one of my roommates took pride in his

part-time job: “I focus exclusively on the retail distribution of refined
petroleum products.”

ANDRE
MONCHEUR
DE
RIEUDOTTE

Boise, Idaho

You might be amused by this snippet from “Full Moon” by P.G.

Wodehouse: “Is there anything higher than a vice-president? ‘Well, as
a matter of fact,’ Freddie confessed, in a burst of candour, ‘in most of
these American concerns …vice-president is about where you start. I
fancy my guerdon ought to be something more on the lines of
assistant sales manager.’”

DAVID
LINDSAY

London

As any fan of the American version of “The Office” would tell you,
there is a world of difference between “assistant to the regional
manager” and “assistant regional manager”.

NAREG
SEFERIAN

Arlington, Virginia
By Invitation
 

Jaime Yassif on the need for better safeguarding of

bioscience
 
Biotechnology

Jaime Yassif on the need for better safeguarding of

bioscience
An expert says bad-faith actors can too easily get hold of dangerous
biotechnology

Dec 19th 2022 |

AS
A
RESULT
of advances in bioscience and biotechnology, synthetic
DNA—the potential building blocks of a dangerous pathogen—could
be just an online order away. In recent years, the cost of DNA
synthesis has continued to plummet, new suppliers have emerged in
countries around the world, and bench-top synthesis devices that
make it easier for scientists to print DNA in their own labs are now
commercially available. Safeguards have not always kept up.

Even more concerning, one of the main barriers to a step-by-step

blueprint to assemble that DNA into a transmissible, lethal virus could
be no more than a paywall in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Many journals continue to publish the latest science on how to tinker
with pathogens to make them more transmissible or virulent, and how
to make them from scratch.

These developments are taking place in the context of accelerating

bioscience and biotechnology advances that are revolutionising the
capability to engineer living systems. These can have real potential
benefits in improving human health, fostering economic development,
and combating climate change. However, these advances also pose
significant risks of deliberate exploitation by malicious actors or
through inadvertent misuse.

Growing concerns about potentially risky dual-use bioscience

research were highlighted most recently around research at Boston
University involving an engineered variant of the covid virus. Earlier
controversies included experiments on the lethal H5N1 avian-flu virus
that made it more transmissible among humans, and an article
showing how to use mail-order DNA to synthesise the horsepox virus
—a close cousin of smallpox—from scratch. These incidents raised
troubling questions. Could engineered pathogens be accidentally
released with catastrophic consequences? And could the publication
of this kind of work provide a roadmap for terrorist groups to engineer
the next pandemic?

Such questions are being asked against the backdrop of rapid

international expansion of research into the covid virus that caused
the most recent pandemic, and other pathogens with pandemic
potential. This includes work to modify these pathogens or synthesise
them from their genetic components. The questions also come amid
the construction of new high-containment labs to house this work,
some of which may not have proper safety and security systems in
place. According to GlobalBioLabs.org, a website, there are now at
least 69 “biosafety level-4” labs—the highest risk classification—that
are operational, under construction or planned around the world. This
is a significant increase on ten years ago, and contributes to growing
risks of biological catastrophe, through accidents or deliberate
misuse. So, what can be done to protect against an outcome that
could be far worse than the destruction wrought by covid-19?

One major challenge is that the barriers to entry for engineering

biology are falling, making it possible for a broader range of actors,
including those with nefarious intent, to use these technologies. For
example, it is now easier than ever to read, write, and edit DNA and
RNA—the underlying blueprint for all life on earth—and to shape the
fundamental properties of biological systems or even build them from
scratch. Though new tools for engineering biology offer tremendous
potential benefits, stronger guardrails are needed to prevent misuse
as they become more broadly accessible. This work is urgent.
Bioengineering capabilities will continue to advance in the coming
years—including through integration with AI-based-tools and robotics-
enabled automation—and it will be critical to ensure that biosecurity
safeguards keep up with accelerating developments.

Unfortunately, the world is nowhere near establishing strong enough

guardrails. Many national governments have failed to make sufficient
investments in biosecurity, and much of the work that has been done
has focused on traditional approaches—including protecting labs and
securing pathogen stocks. These steps are important but not
sufficient. Biosecurity efforts need to incorporate new approaches to
guard against emerging biological risks, but governments, not known
for nimble responses, are struggling to keep pace.
According to the Global Health Security Index, which measures
biosecurity and pandemic preparedness capacity across 195
countries, as of 2021, 94% of countries had no national-level
oversight measures for dual-use research. There is also no
international organisation dedicated as its top priority to reducing
these risks, notwithstanding the critically important work of the WHO
and the Biological Weapons Convention. International leadership and
collaboration is essential for advancing promising approaches and
raising the bar globally for biosafety and biosecurity. Bioscience
governance gaps anywhere can leave the world vulnerable
everywhere.

Building a better system of safeguards will require intervention at

every step of the bioscience research and development life cycle:
from funding, through research execution, and on to publication or
commercialisation. For example, public and private funders who
support bioscience research and innovation should incorporate more
rigorous biosecurity review processes into their grant-making and
investment decisions. At the same time, scientific journals should
institute more rigorous pre-publication review processes to ensure
that they are not publishing “information hazards” that could make it
easier to engineer a biological weapon.

Industry also needs more effective—and universal—practices for

screening orders of synthetic DNA to ensure that the building blocks
of dangerous pathogens don’t fall into the hands of malicious actors.
While some of these funders, publishers and others have voluntarily
stepped forward to put strong guardrails in place, too many have not,
and these groups need much better tools to guard effectively against
deliberate or accidental misuse.

Tackling this challenge will require co-ordination between

governments, the biotechnology industry, the academic bioscience-
research community, publishers, funders, and many others. To jump-
start this effort, NTI, where I work, is co-operating with international
partners to incubate and launch a new independent, international
organisation called the International Biosecurity and Biosafety
Initiative for Science (IBBIS). This will help to equip those on the front
lines of biosecurity with practical tools and solutions to undertake the
types of interventions described above, so biotechnology can flourish
safely and responsibly.

IBBIS will be the first international organisation dedicated to reducing

emerging biological risks associated with technology advances. It will
work with key players across the public and private sector and is
designed to be agile, risk-tolerant and innovative. Its initial focus will
be to support the implementation of more robust DNA-synthesis
screening practices globally, but the scope of its work will expand
over time.

The 21st-century bioscience revolution is creating incredible

opportunities to help us all live healthier, longer lives on a thriving
planet. The international community—with governments, industry, and
the research community working in tandem—must take bold steps
now to safeguard bioscience so the world can benefit from its
promise and prevent its perils.■

Jaime Yassif is Vice President for Global Biological Policy and

Programs at NTI

For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue,
our fortnightly subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our climate-change
hub.
Europe
 

Peace on Earth
No room in the middle
The last taboo
Balkan barricades
Food of the frauds
 
Christmas in Kharkiv

A Ukrainian city celebrates despite the cold and the

Russians
Festivities will be underground to avoid incoming shells

Dec 20th 2022 | KHARKIV

THE
GUNS
are now silent in North Saltivka, a neighbourhood on the
north-eastern edge of Kharkiv, but war is everywhere to be seen.
Charred, splintered white apartment blocks stick out from the soil like
bones in a burial ground. Trenches still cut across play areas and
football fields. Among the ruins Yevgeny Zubatov, 32, is walking with
his seven-year-old son Danya. He has come to pay respects, he
says, to the apartment he abandoned when war broke out on the
morning of February 24th. He makes the trip every weekend, bringing
a thermos flask so he can drink a cup of tea within his own four walls
—or three and a half, as they are now. He has brought some
chocolates this time, a nod to the upcoming holiday season. But he
says he is in little mood to celebrate. “My New Year is just about my
son. We are carrying on for him.”

Mr Zubatov’s melancholic mood is not unusual in Ukraine’s second

city, which lies just 35km (22 miles) from the Russian border. Russian
artillery has been pushed back beyond firing range of the city, but it is
unclear whether Kharkiv will ever return to its pre-war life. A local
enterprise now makes flak jackets for small children (pictured), to
wear during evacuation. At least half of the pre-war population of 2m
has left, including the vast majority of the 300,000 who lived in North
Saltivka.

In the most affected area, the easternmost Saltivka 3, residents

struggle on despite the absence of even basic infrastructure. They
warm themselves using wood-burning stoves, ventilated through
holes in boarded-up windows. A green tarpaulin “invincibility point”,
provided by the central government, provides a last line of support.
When Russian rockets took out electricity and water on December
16th, the tent was overflowing with residents looking for a Starlink
internet connection and hot drinks. For many of them, alcohol was a
quicker route to invincibility.

Father Valera, an Afghan war veteran turned local priest, says the
worry of staying warm has amplified the anxieties of people struggling
to come to terms with the war. “I see the spiritual pain in everyone I
speak to in Saltivka, including children,” he says. “Their eyes flick all
over the place. They shudder when doors slam.” At the height of
fighting in February and March, the basement of Father Valera’s
chapel became a shelter for over 50 people. Services continued even
as missiles blew out the windows above ground.

Now, the priest is looking for new ways to help his parishioners
recover psychologically. Christmas was as good a place as any to
start, he said; he expected a delivery of trees and decorations in the
coming days. But there are no plans to follow a government proposal
to switch observance of Christmas to the Western date of December
25th. Father Valera’s church is part of the controversial, Moscow-
aligned branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox church, and so will
celebrate on January 7th—just as it always has.

For a long time, city authorities were unsure about their own
celebration plans, especially given the blackout orders that have been
in place since the early days of war. Mayor Ihor Terekhov, who has
promoted himself as the face of Kharkiv’s brave resistance, said at
one point he considered cancelling the seasonal programme. In the
end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “War has taken enough away
from our children,” he said. Instead Kharkiv will put on a limited
programme of events, all underground. On December 19th the mayor
unveiled a tree at the University subway station, just underneath its
usual spot on Freedom Square. “There was no way of justifying
placing one above ground since there have been direct impacts on
the square already,” the mayor said. “The enemy has the co-
ordinates.”

The highlight of Kharkiv’s Christmas programme is a new musical

show, “The Ice Lady”, which will be performed thrice daily on the
platform of the University station. The director, Alexei Nastachenko,
said the show would eschew any mention of war. But the motifs aren’t
hard to decipher: in a terrible land, not so far away, a witch has turned
everything to ice. One day she resolves to do the same to the play’s
hero. The hero resists, and after a valiant struggle is saved by love,
friendship and all good things. The witch melts away. “Wartime
Kharkiv has been united by a fantastic desire to love one another,”
says Mr Nastachenko. “When this all ends, we will be the happiest
people on Earth.”

Sociologists tracking Ukrainian public opinion have noticed trends

that back Mr Nastachenko up. Alexei Antipovich, whose Rating
polling agency compared the mood before and during the war, says
Ukrainians are, paradoxically, surer of their future than before the war
began. Having a common enemy has consolidated a once fractured
nation: “The difference across religions, geography, language and
age has not just become less. It has disappeared completely.”
Ukrainians have become more optimistic, and have higher opinions of
themselves, their fellow citizens and the state. Fully 97% of them now
believe Ukraine will win the war.

That hope is shared even in the ruins of North Saltivka. The residents
who stayed say they learned a lot about their own resilience. “Our
story is about realising we are stronger than we thought we were,”
says Tatyana Protsenko, who gave birth to a baby daughter in
October despite staying in an apartment block that was struck by
artillery eight times. Her husband, Yehor Bezuglov, agrees. In the
most desperate of times, neighbours found one another: they looked
each other in the eye, and liked what they saw. The hope is that now
they will be given a chance to rebuild their shattered lives together.
But fear of the Russians remains, he says; if anything, it has
increased since the guns stopped. “You get used to the guns. Silence
is the worst thing. It’s when the fear starts all over again.” ■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

No room in the middle

Pope Francis has failed to be a spiritual mediator in

Ukraine
His mistrust of America seems to stop him seeing Vladimir Putin
clearly

Dec 20th 2022 | ROME

WHENEVER
POPE Francis looks up from his writing, he is reminded
of Ukraine. On his desk sits an icon he acquired while archbishop of
Buenos Aires as a parting gift from one of his bishops, Svyatoslav
Shevchuk, who in 2011 returned to Kyiv to lead the Ukrainian Greek-
Catholic church. It was among the few possessions Francis brought
to Rome. The depth of his concern for Ukraine became obvious on
December 8th when he was moved to tears as he mentioned its
suffering at a ceremony in Rome.

Yet as Christmas nears, it is clear that Francis’s efforts to position

himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine have failed. The
pope is an outsider in a clash between two mostly Orthodox
countries. He has also repeatedly antagonised both Ukrainians and
Russians with his statements and omissions.

Early in the war, the pope condemned the invasion as “unacceptable

armed aggression”, denounced the Bucha massacres and kissed a
Ukrainian flag sent to him from the town. In an interview he warned
the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, not to
become “Putin’s altar boy”. But he did not identify Russia as the
aggressor. In an interview published in June he seemed to reach out
to Russian leaders, saying the invasion was “perhaps somehow
provoked” and cautioning against viewing the war as a simple tale of
good versus evil.

More recently he has been more critical of the Kremlin, particularly

after meeting with Archbishop Shevchuk on November 7th. Last
month he irked the regime in Moscow by declaring that troops from
two ethnic minorities, the Chechens and Buryats, were the cruellest.
The Vatican has since issued a highly unusual apology.

This zigzagging reflects some of the outstanding characteristics of

Francis’s papacy. He is open to interviews and reluctant to heed the
Vatican’s official diplomats, instead forming his views in conversations
with a changing circle of interlocutors. But the first Latin American
pope also has a deep mistrust of the United States and believes that
the Vatican’s place lies somewhere between the West and its
enemies. His failure to see the obvious in Ukraine highlights the limits
of such attempted equidistance.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

The last taboo

France starts a debate on legalising assisted dying

It is in the hands of a citizens’ assembly, rather than politicians

Dec 20th 2022 | PARIS

FEW ASPECTS of life are as sensitive as the leaving of it. Such is
the taboo about death and how to manage it in many parts of Europe
that France has decided that its debate about whether to legalise
assisted dying should be taken out of the hands of politicians. On
December 9th a citizens’ assembly made up of 150 randomly
selected people began a public debate that will shape the way France
approaches the legal and medical management of death.

Over nine weekends between now and the end of March 2023, the
newly established citizens’ assembly will meet in Paris. Officially its
remit is to discuss the “end of life” rather than “assisted dying”. The
question that Elisabeth Borne, the prime minister, set participants
when she launched the convention was open-ended: “Is the current
framework surrounding the end of life well-adapted to the different
situations that arise, or should changes be brought in?” It is clear,
however, that what is up for discussion is whether to legalise assisted
dying.

France already passed a law (in 2016) that strengthens a doctor’s

obligation to respect the wishes of those who are terminally ill and
who do not want to prolong life with medical treatment, in order to
enable people to “die with dignity”. Doctors can deeply and
continuously sedate terminally ill patients who are suffering and close
to death. They must make these options available and respect a
patient’s wishes to exercise them. French law, however, does not
allow assisted dying. This means the supply of lethal drugs, under
defined and controlled circumstances, by doctors to terminally ill
patients, administered by either the patient or a medic.

Assisted dying is just as controversial in Europe as elsewhere in the

world. Only a few countries on the continent currently allow some
form of the practice. They include Austria, Belgium, Germany, the
Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. But many countries are debating
the issue. On December 9th the Portuguese parliament passed a bill
to legalise assisted dying, although previous votes have been
overturned by presidential veto.

President Emmanuel Macron has been careful not to express a view

publicly. By setting up the assembly, though, he is implying that the
law needs to change. Those close to him say that he thinks that
French law should give people greater control over the end of their
life, in order to avoid “inhumane situations”, but that he is uneasy with
the most permissive legislation. Mr Macron raised the subject on a
recent visit to the Pope, who deems suicide a grave sin. (This is, after
all, Catholic doctrine.) The Council of Christian Churches in France
has called for better use of palliative care, under existing law, rather
than anything that assists death.

This is not the first citizens’ assembly that Mr Macron has set up. A
previous one, brought in back in 2019 in response to the gilets jaunes
(yellow jackets) uprising against a rise in the carbon tax on motor
fuel, was about how France should respond to climate change. But
the subject was so vast, and the proposals that emerged so
numerous (149), that it lacked focus. Mr Macron also made the
mistake of promising upfront to take on board all its recommendations
with “no filter”. This pledge was practically unworkable, and irritated
parliamentarians, who felt they had been robbed of a job.

After this more narrowly focused citizens’ assembly reports back in

the spring, a law could follow before the end of 2023. The legalisation
of assisted dying in France, if that is what is decided, would mark the
biggest single piece of social legislation on Mr Macron’s watch. A poll
in October found that 78% of the French are in favour, although the
debate may yet prove acrimonious. When the previous president,
François Hollande, legalised gay marriage, it drew howls of protest
from Catholic traditionalists. The challenge for Mr Macron will be to
leave his mark on French society without dividing it.■
Balkan barricades

Kosovo and Serbia are on the verge of conflict

again
Another violent clash is the last thing America or the EU need

Dec 20th 2022 | RUDARE

IN
THE
VILLAGE of Rudare locals wander in the street and warm
their hands on flaming braziers. Lorries block the road. A car
disgorges a group of masked men. On December 10th barricades
were erected across the north of Kosovo, where most inhabitants are
ethnic Serbs. Diplomats from America and the European Union are
working overtime to defuse an explosive situation. On the walls of the
ethnic-Serbian part of the nearby divided city of Mitrovica, someone
has been spray-painting the crest of a mysterious “Northern Brigade”.
Whether it is a secret paramilitary organisation or a campaign to
make people believe there is one—no one knows. “We are waiting!”
says the stencil.

Since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, crises have come and gone
in the country’s north. Diplomats rush in, and the barricades come
down. But this one feels more dangerous than usual. In November
the representatives of Kosovo’s Serb minority withdrew from the
country’s government institutions. That included the ethnic Serbian
members of Kosovo’s police force in the north. Kosovo has sent
ethnic Albanian policemen to replace them. But Tatjana Lazarevic,
editor of KoSSev, a local news site, says they face “huge mistrust”
among locals, who see them as an “occupying force”.
Until 1999 Kosovo was a repressed southern province of Serbia with
a large ethnic-Albanian majority which wholeheartedly backed
separatist guerrillas. During the fighting, Serbia began expelling
hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their own homes.
NATO intervened and established a UN protectorate, which declared
independence in 2008.

But Serbia rejects that claim. It is supported by Russia, its

longstanding great-power patron, which is allergic to Western
interventions anywhere (and not so troubled by ethnic cleansing). The
current tensions began in June, when Kosovo changed the rules for
people entering with Serbian documents. With war raging in Ukraine,
a violent Balkan flare-up would distract America and Europe, and
serve the interests of the Kremlin.

On December 15th Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, handed in his

country’s application to join the EU. On the same day Aleksandar
Vucic, Serbia’s president, asked NATO, which ensures Kosovo’s
security, to permit up to 1,000 Serbian troops to return to Kosovo.
Such a possibility was envisaged in the UN resolution which ended
the Kosovo war in 1999, but today the notion is ludicrous. There is no
“time machine” for Serbia to reverse two decades of history, scoffs Mr
Kurti. On December 1st Mr Vucic publicly called Mr Kurti “terrorist
scum”. “Tensions have never been higher in 20 years, mistrust has
never been deeper,” says Miroslav Lajcak, who leads the EU’s
diplomacy in the region.

There is little risk of the Serbian army openly rolling into Kosovo’s
north. But the Serbian government could try to emulate the strategy
of “little green men” which Vladimir Putin used when he seized
Crimea from Ukraine in 2014: infiltrating unmarked soldiers without
officially acknowledging their allegiance. Western powers are trying to
negotiate an end to the crisis before any violent confrontation takes
place. An incident in which either Serbs or Albanians die could spark
a conflagration. Diplomats find Mr Kurti stubborn. But Mr Vucic has
lost much credit by refusing to apply sanctions on Russia. In
September Serbia and Russia signed an agreement to consult on
foreign policy.

Mr Kurti says he is ready to find a solution and normalise relations

between Kosovo and Serbia. Yet it is unclear whether he or Mr Vucic
can accept the trade-offs that diplomats are proposing. They require
that Serbia treat Kosovo like a state, albeit without formally
recognising it. Kosovo must implement an agreement it signed in
2013 (though it was rejected by Mr Kurti, who was then in opposition)
to form an association of Serb-majority municipalities with autonomy
over education, health care and other portfolios.

The problem, says one diplomat, is that relations are now so bad that
the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo “are living on two different planets”.
On planet Rudare, meanwhile, many locals are no happier with the
stand-off than anyone else. A teacher manning one of the village’s
barricades says he was ordered there by his school’s director. “We
are hostages of Belgrade and Pristina,” he says, referring to the
Serbian and Kosovar capitals. ■
Charlemagne

Why Europe’s traditional foods are not always what

they seem
A hungry columnist does some seasonal research

Dec 20th 2022 |

TRUDGING
AROUND
Prague’s narrow streets makes for hungry
work. What better way to cap off a spot of sightseeing than with a
local delicacy? How about a trdelnik? Throw a cobblestone in any
direction in the Czech capital these days and it is likely to land on a
stand peddling the unpronounceable snack. Think of it as a Danish
pastry crossed with a rotisserie chicken: sweet dough is wrapped
around a metal spit and theatrically twirled over glowing charcoals
until browned, then dipped in nuts and sugar. The “old Bohemian
speciality” advertised by the jolly vendor warms the hands on a chilly
wintertime stroll; in summer it can be used as an ice-cream cone.
Either way, for a few tasty minutes one can imagine oneself a burgher
of medieval Prague, indulging a sweet tooth while traipsing over
Charles Bridge. Dobrou chut!

The only glitch in this alluring daydream is the fact that trdelnik is no
local snack at all. Nobody in Prague recalls seeing this supposed
Czech staple for sale until about a decade ago. Even today, trdelnik
scent blankets the touristy bits of Prague like a smog, but is hard to
find anywhere else. Food sleuths place trdelnik as a delicacy from
Romania or Slovakia, no more authentically Bohemian than a Big
Mac. The allure to vendors is clear: the margins flogging a bit of
warmed-up dough for 70 crowns (around $3) would have executives
at McDonald’s salivating. Tourists see something plausibly authentic
—how would they know?—and ask few questions.

Europe paints itself as a land of food and tradition, and perhaps most
of all as a land of food traditions. The French invented the restaurant,
Italian food is the world’s most popular and Europeans consider wine
made anywhere other than their little peninsula as a variant of
rubbing alcohol. France, Spain and Italy hold the record for the
amount of time spent at the table each day: an impressive two hours,
twice the figure of burger-gobbling Americans. Traditional foods are
protected by EU schemes to ensure that only an authorised caste can
produce feta cheese, Champagne or Prosciutto di Parma; UNESCO
recently lauded the baguette as part of humanity’s cultural heritage.
But as with trdelnik, there is sometimes more to European grub than
meets the palate.

Take ciabatta. Italy’s now-ubiquitous bread is paraded as a timeless

Italian classic, perhaps once baked in the earthen ovens of ancient
Rome. In fact the elongated loaf was devised in 1982 by Italian
bakers trying to fend off the French baguette. Belgian beers top
global league tables, known for their alcohol content, which can
exceed that of wine. Is that distinctive feature the outcome of brewing
traditions devised by the various monks and friars featured on the
beers’ labels? Pish. The strength of low-country beer is a modern
regulatory dodge. In 1919 Belgian taverns were banned from selling
spirits, a prohibition that lasted until 1983. Drunks in search of an
efficient tipple nudged breweries towards making dubbel-strength
beers. Tripels followed soon enough.

The dairy lobby is a keen fabricator of heritage. It is largely down to

Big Cheese’s Swiss arm, the Schweizerische Käseunion, that fondue
has emerged as Switzerland’s national dish. Facing a glut of Gruyère
and Emmentaler in the 1930s as exports melted, cheese-peddlers
proclaimed the Alpine virtues of a dish consisting overwhelmingly of
cheese. British farm labourers of yesteryear were unfussy about their
mid-day meals. Nevertheless in the 1960s the Milk Marketing Board
revived the idea of a cheese-laden Ploughman’s Lunch, now a pub
staple. As skimmed milk gained popularity in Ireland in the 1970s, a
new way to use surplus cream was needed. Thus Bailey’s Irish
Cream (a sickly mix of whiskey, cream and cocoa extract) was born.
An Irish meadow on its label suggests centuries of heritage; in fact it
is younger than Liam Gallagher.

Governments trying to nudge the populace towards new foods are

nothing new. The potato went from South American curio to
European favourite thanks in part to 18th-century French efforts to
diversify away from wheat. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, its keenest
promoter, stationed armed guards around a potato patch to make it
seem valuable and removed them at night so that peasants would
steal and plant the tubers. Polish authorities in the 1940s started
peddling carp—a bottom-feeding fish that tastes like muddy pond—in
the absence of more flavourful fish. “A carp on every Christmas table”
was advised; the fish (previously mostly a Jewish delicacy) was
handed out to workers as festive bonuses. It has endured as a
holiday staple. An even more ambitious fish-peddling scheme was
later devised by Norway. In the 1980s supply of salmon exceeded
domestic demand. Japan seemed an obvious market, but only tuna
and sea bream were considered acceptable to eat as sushi and
sashimi: at the time, the Japanese were as likely to eat raw salmon
as an Italian to dip his spaghetti in mayonnaise. One marketing blitz
(and a few discounted consignments of Norwegian salmon) later, a
new tradition of orange sushi was born.

Grubby business

Why label a food traditional when the claim is so dubious? It is a type

of marketing to which gourmets are predisposed. “Tradition, whether
real or not, does seem to add an extra element of tastiness” to what
we eat, says Megan Elias of Boston University, editor of Food,
Culture & Society, a journal. Food goes into our bodies, into our faces
even. A dish can connect people across time—if the eater believes it
to be authentic.

Cookbooks, those archives of countries’ cuisines, first became

popular in the latter 19th century, not coincidentally a golden era of
European nation-building. For what forges a people into a nation?
Some will say allegiance to a flag, a shared language or currency. Yet
Italians are likely to have stronger feelings about how to cook pasta
than about the symbols on their banknotes. The mouth and the heart
are connected like no other organs. A Greek can enjoy pickled
herring and a Finn a pint of Guinness, but not like a Swede or a
Dubliner. They will feel no more sense of traditional connection than a
Czech biting into a trdelnik. ■

Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European

politics:

A corruption scandal leaves the EU reeling (Dec 15th)

Europe is grappling with its dodgy memorials, a plinth at a time (Dec

8th)

America’s green subsidies are causing headaches in Europe (Dec

1st)
Britain
 

A way in the world

Scrooge-onomics
Nursing a grievance
Westminster’s other cathedral
 
The new Britons

The children of Britain’s eastern European

immigrants are changing the country
They are an optimistic, confused bunch

Dec 20th 2022 | WELWYN GARDEN CITY

IT
IS
THE
last day of term at the Polish Saturday school in Welwyn
Garden City, north of London. A group of teenagers spills from a
classroom into the hallway. Most are the children of Poles, and can
speak the language fluently. But as soon as they cross the threshold
they slip into English, inflected with the mild Cockney accent of
Hertfordshire. It happens a lot, says the headteacher, Iwona
Pniewska.

Similar scenes occur across the country. In 2004 Britain opened its
labour market to citizens of the Baltic and eastern European countries
that had just joined the EU. Many young adults came, especially from
Lithuania and Poland—and, a few years later, from Bulgaria and
Romania. They soon settled down and had children. In 2008 one in
27 babies born in England and Wales had a mother from one of the
new EU countries; last year the proportion was one in 14. Others
have grown up in Britain after arriving as young children. Some are
British citizens; some have been granted settled status since Britain
left the EU. All are now folding themselves, more or less easily, into
British society.

The Economist has interviewed more than a dozen children of

eastern European immigrants, from age 13 to 20. Because most are
children, we have kept all of them anonymous. They are
geographically spread, from south-west England to Scotland. They
display a mixture of optimism and confusion about Britain and their
place in it. The same is true of many immigrants’ children—but in
some ways the children of eastern Europeans are unusual.

All seem to understand that their parents moved to Britain because

they saw few opportunities in eastern Europe. As one young woman,
who was born in Bulgaria, puts it: “We belonged to a class where, no
matter what you do, you end up in the same place.” Migration brought
little improvement at first. Their parents frequently worked desultory
jobs in warehouses and cafés, and as cleaners. One girl remembers
seeing a picture of her parents crammed into a house in London with
other Poles.
Their parents’ progress since then has been rapid, but somewhat
uneven. Several say that their mothers’ working lives have changed
more dramatically than their fathers’. One child of Polish immigrants
says that her father works the night shift as a delivery driver, as he
has done for years. By contrast, her mother began by working as a
cashier and a waitress and is now an architect. Another says that her
mother worked for several years as a cleaner; she is now an estate
agent.

Many eastern European men landed well-paid manual work in Britain,

often in the construction industry. Women, by contrast, had to learn
English and retrain. The upshot is a unique employment pattern. The
latest Labour Force Survey, covering July to September 2022, shows
that women who were born in eastern Europe are more likely to hold
managerial or professional jobs than men born in eastern Europe.
The opposite is true of workers born in Britain, western Europe, Africa
or Asia.

Their parents’ climb from the very lowest rungs of the employment
ladder may have shaped the teenagers’ views of the world. In a
generally glum country, they are strikingly optimistic about their
economic prospects. “One hundred per cent”, replies a young man,
when asked about the chance that he will be able to live a more
comfortable life than his parents. Three girls answer the same
question so quickly that it seems unlikely the possibility of faring
worse than their parents has even entered their minds.

Because their parents moved anywhere that jobs could be found, the
teenage children of eastern Europeans have grown up dispersed.
The 2021 census shows that 612,000 people in England and Wales
mostly speak Polish, making them three times as numerous as
Bengali-speakers (who are mostly Bangladeshi) or Gujarati-speakers
(who are Indian but may have arrived from east Africa). Yet the most
Polish-speaking place in England is Boston, a town where only 6% of
people speak the language. By contrast, 11% of people in the London
borough of Tower Hamlets speak Bengali and 13% of people in
Leicester speak Gujarati.

They tend to go to schools without many people from the same

background. And they frequently ignore the others anyway. “I do have
Polish people in my form, but I’m not friends with them,” explains one
child of Polish immigrants. A 19-year-old man who was born in
Lithuania describes his school in London as a wash of cultures, in
which he knew as many Pakistanis as Lithuanians. He was
untroubled by that. “I never thought: ‘I need to know Lithuanians’,” he
says.

Not all of their parents are so sanguine. Many send their children to
Saturday schools to make friends and learn about the homeland in a
(theoretically) monolingual environment. Other parents find churches
or outfits such as Karma Leicester, a Polish football team that runs a
youth academy. “They don’t want us to forget our roots and stuff,”
says a girl in the Welwyn Garden City school, with a barely detectable
eye-roll.

There is indeed some danger of that. Even those who are fluent in
their parents’ first language say that they tend to think in English and
then translate their thoughts. And not all are perfectly fluent. In one
family the older sister speaks excellent Lithuanian but the younger
does not, because her sister often speaks English with her. As they
grow older, roots can wither. “It sounds bad to say, but sometimes I
forget that I’m Polish,” says a 20-year-old who arrived in Britain as a
young child.

A few have mulled moving to the country where their parents were
born. But those teenagers seem to be motivated by little more than
pleasant memories of annual trips to visit their grandparents, and
they have no real plans. By contrast, those who have decided against
moving are firmly committed to Britain. “I’m getting worse and worse
at Polish, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that,” says a boy, flatly.
Their identities are fluctuating and complicated. “I consider myself
Lithuanian”, says one girl, who goes on to explain that she considers
England her home country. Her identity seems to be a way of
expressing closeness to her family rather than national allegiance. “I
don’t feel entirely British,” says the Lithuanian 19-year-old from
London. “But I don’t feel entirely Lithuanian either.”

Unlike America, Britain does not offer hyphenated identities off the
peg. You cannot be Polish-British as easily as you can be Italian-
American (although you can be a British Indian, because “Indian” is a
widely acknowledged ethnic group). As a result, members of the new
generation of eastern-European-descended Britons must use labels
that do not capture the way they feel, and sometimes make them feel
like they belong nowhere. That is regrettable. But perhaps they will be
able to bend the language in time. They are a confident bunch, and
they have the numbers.■

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Gift-giving economics

The inefficiencies of Christmas

Should you forget presents and give cash?

Dec 20th 2022 |

‘TIS
THE season to be jolly—and to feign delight at disappointing
Christmas presents. The average British adult splurged around £550
($667) on gifts in 2021, according to one survey. But a back-of-the-
envelope calculation by Ian Stewart of Deloitte, a consultancy,
suggests that the volumes of unwanted stuff in effect destroyed
around £3bn of the £25bn value. Though many see Christmas as a
time of generosity and cheer, others see waste. A small number study
its inefficiencies.

In 1993 Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota identified a

“deadweight loss” when he studied the difference between the cost of
seasonal gifts and how much their recipients valued them after they
had accounted for exchanges and put sentimental value aside. Today
he says that on average cash spent on another person yields around
85% of the benefit of cash they spend on themselves. Although gift-
giving may make some people happy, it’s “a lousy way to allocate
resources,” he says.

There are ways to reduce Christmas losses. One is the use of gift
cards, which give recipients some choice. But Britons don’t seem to
like them much. A survey of adults from Ipsos, a pollster, found that
43% of Americans, 40% of the French and only 29% of Britons were
planning to give them for Christmas 2022. Making it easier to return
unwanted gifts should help. Al Gerrie, chief executive officer of
ZigZag, a returns platform, says that when a gift message or gift wrap
is used in fashion retail (that is, for a present) return rates tend to be
considerably higher.

As e-commerce has expanded, so too have ways of sending stuff

back. But returns are a headache for retailers. On average it costs
between £5 and £10 to put a product back on the shelves, says Mr
Gerrie, thanks to the shipping, inspecting and repackaging required.
(In January, Father Christmas’s elves must conduct “sniff tests” to see
if a garment has been worn.) Increasingly, retailers are charging
shoppers to return goods. ZigZag’s data suggest the number of paid-
for returns has more than doubled since last year, while the number
of free returns has fallen. That, though, may mean more consumers
are stuck with unwanted gifts.
Another Christmas inefficiency for retailers is the fact that it comes
but once a year. Gary Grant of The Entertainer, which sells toys,
jokes that he would love it if festive sales were spread throughout the
year rather than being crammed into the final quarter. He is
understaffed, he says, during the holiday season, when he expands
his workforce by 50%, and then overstaffed the rest of the year.
Shipping companies, warehouse operators and sorting centres must
also organise themselves to meet peak demand; that can mean
unused capacity at quieter times of the year. Data from Metapack, a
logistics software company, suggest that in December the volume of
posted parcels is more than double the level in September.

Over time, it does seem that consumers are spreading their spending
a little more thinly across the year. In 1986 25% of the year’s
spending on clothing was in November and December. In 2019 the
share was 22%. Seasonality in retail spending, which includes
restaurants, is also falling. Seasonal employment as a share of the
total between October and December has been decreasing since
1997, according to the Office for National Statistics. A new study by
Mr Waldfogel found that since 2000 growth in the American economy
has been associated with a smaller seasonal bump in December’s
retail sales.

While some dream of white Christmases, others may yearn for

mandatory exchanges of cash, or even a mechanism to randomly
allocate the celebrations evenly across months of the year. Much
would be lost if such a system were adopted, not least the joy that
can accompany the exchange of carefully (if badly) chosen presents.
But creating a fresh batch of unintended consequences for
economists to analyse might yield some happy returns.■

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Nursing a grievance

British nurses launch unprecedented strikes

They are the first in the Royal College of Nursing’s 106-year history

Dec 19th 2022 |

ONLY
THE
River Thames separates St Thomas’s hospital in London
from the Houses of Parliament. Yet for the nurses who picketed
outside the hospital, it might have been an ocean. On December 15th
around 100,000 nurses across England, Northern Ireland and Wales
went on strike for 12 hours. Another strike in England and Wales took
place on December 20th. Pat Cullen, the general secretary of the
Royal College of Nursing (RCN), has warned that the walkouts—the
first in the organisation’s 106-year history—may continue into
January and beyond.

The RCN’s chief demand is more money. It has asked for a pay rise
of 5% above inflation as measured by the retail price index (RPI).
Given that RPI inflation is 14%, that seems a tough ask. The average
basic salary for a full-time nurse in England is around £36,000
($45,000). Comparisons with the pay of other British workers is tricky
because the range is wide. Yet nurses point out that their pay fell by
6% in real terms in the decade to 2021, compared with a 3% fall for
private-sector workers. Their pay also lags behind that of nurses in
most other rich countries. Ms Cullen has said the RCN’s demand is a
“starting point”.

The government has said it will not budge. In 2022 it followed the
recommendation of a pay-review body in offering most nurses a rise
of 4-5%. It has said more money would have to cover other NHS staff
(apart from doctors, dentists and senior managers) and come out of
front-line NHS services. Yet on December 15th a former head of the
pay-review body acknowledged that its recommendation would
probably have been more generous had it come later in the year,
taking higher inflation into account. In Scotland, where, as in Northern
Ireland and Wales, health is devolved, the government pre-empted
strikes by offering a pay rise of 7%. To fund this and other NHS costs,
it is raising the higher and top rates of income tax by 1%.

Yet the strikes are about more than money. “Pay is the lightning rod,
it’s attracting all the energy,” says Jim Buchan of the Health
Foundation, a research charity. But it “cannot be disentangled” from
working conditions. During the covid-19 pandemic, many nurses left
the NHS. Figures published by the NHS in September revealed a
shortage of 47,496 nurses, meaning nearly 12% of jobs are unfilled.
Those left must work harder, as they tackle an NHS waiting list that
has ballooned to 7.2m from 4.6m in early 2020.

Such pressures are felt throughout the NHS. Some 10,000

ambulance workers in England and Wales, and midwives in Wales,
are planning industrial action. Junior doctors may follow. Their union
plans to hold a ballot in early January.

NHS employees say that it is patients who pay the price for poor
working conditions. In a recent RCN survey, only 18% of nurses said
that they had enough time to provide the quality of care they liked.
“We’re so short-staffed, I cry for my patients,” says Kafelat Adekunle,
a community matron. Ambulance delays are at record highs. “People
are only interested now, because as an absolute last resort, the
ambulance workers have said we’re not carrying on any more,” says
Paul Turner, a paramedic with the North West Ambulance service.

On December 15th a survey by YouGov, a pollster, found that almost

two-thirds of Britons supported the nurses’ strikes. Near St Thomas’s
picket lines, cars crossing Westminster Bridge honked their horns in
support. Yet if the walkouts are seen to harm patients, the goodwill
may vanish. Nurses in acute services, such as chemotherapy,
paediatric intensive care and high-risk mental-health services, are
scheduled to work throughout the walkouts. In other departments,
staffing levels are reduced roughly to those typical for night-time and
on Christmas Day. Ambulance workers have said they will respond to
life-threatening cases, though it is not always obvious which those
are.

No amount of planning can prevent the anguish and inconvenience

caused by cancelled procedures. They affect nurses too. “My
operation was cancelled today,” says Ms Adekunle, the matron. “But I
don’t mind. We’re fighting for everyone.”■

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Bagehot

Westminster’s other cathedral

A religious constitution suits a godless country surprisingly well

Dec 20th 2022 |

“ONCE
IN
ROYAL David’s city, stood a lowly cattle shed.” The
soloist’s voice sliced through the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, a
small church in a corner of the Palace of Westminster, before a
congregation of MPs, lords, cabinet ministers, aides, IT support staff
and your correspondent.

Amid the singing, a woman marched down the aisle with a green
piece of paper marked “VOTE”. Sacred matters had to wait; profane
politics called. There was a division over whether to carry out an
impact assessment on the effect a free trade deal with Australia and
New Zealand would have on Britain’s farmers. “And our eyes at last
shall see Him,” bayed the assembled singers as MPs gathered their
winter coats and rushed to the voting lobbies.

Religion is entwined with Britain’s Parliament. The House of

Commons begins its day with prayers. Since attendance at prayers is
the way to guarantee a seat for the day, even the godless turn up.
Britain has a religious constitution, with church and state fused, rather
than separated. The king is head of the Church of England; Catholics
may not ascend the throne. Head to the House of Lords, Britain’s
upper chamber, to find 26 Bishops from the Church of England
debating everything from welfare to defence policy. At times,
Parliament—filled with cloisters, saints and stained glass windows—
is as much a cathedral as a place of politics.

Devotion in Westminster is not matched by the country at large. For

the first time, only a minority of people identify as Christian in some
form, according to the 2021 census. In 2001, 72% did. Now only 46%
do. Weekly church attendance is now under 1m in a country of 67m.
Meanwhile, the ranks of the godless grow. In 2011, a quarter of
people expressed no religion. Now 37% do. A religious constitution
suits a godless country surprisingly well.

A gap between politicians and voters on religion has always existed.

Before the second world war, British prime ministers tended towards
scepticism even when Britain was still relatively devout, points out
Mark Vickers, in his new book “God in Number 10”. Clement Attlee,
the post-war Labour leader, declared: “Believe in the ethics of
Christianity. Can’t believe the mumbo jumbo.” Organised religion was
associated with joyless Sundays, which was anathema to the
ambitious and often hedonistic men who ran Britain in the first half of
the 20th century. David Lloyd George, the Liberal prime minister, said
that “the thought of Heaven used to frighten me more than the
thought of Hell”.

Now, the opposite applies. It is the norm for leading politicians to be

people of faith, even if their voters are not. Rishi Sunak, the prime
minister, is a Hindu and keeps a statue of Lord Ganesh, the elephant-
headed God, on his desk in Downing Street. Among the great offices
of state, only James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, is not particularly
religious. Even Boris Johnson, once labelled a pagan by one admirer,
called himself a “very, very bad Christian”. Sir Keir Starmer would be
the first avowedly atheist leader of Britain since Jim Callaghan, the
Labour prime minister who led the country five decades ago. (Mr
Johnson, the very bad Christian, chided Sir Keir with scripture: “‘The
foolish man has said in his heart, there is no God.’ I’ll leave it at that.”)

Sociological rather than ecclesiastical reasons explain Britain’s

surplus of godly MPs. Parliamentarians are joiners by nature. Turning
up to church every Sunday and sitting alongside people one may not
particularly like is good training for a career in politics. Geography
plays its part. A country’s capital cannot help but shape a country’s
politics. Despite its reputation as a hotbed of metropolitan liberalism,
London is the most devout place in the country. One in four attends a
religious service in the city each month, compared with one in ten
outside the capital.

Political calculation rather than constitutional limit stops faith from

playing too large a role in British politics. There are few votes to be
gained by scooping up a devout minority. (Likewise, there are few to
be gained by railing against the role of religion in public life.) Mr
Sunak plays down the fact he is the first non-Christian leader of the
country. “It’s also wonderful that it’s not that big a deal,” he told the
Spectator. Most voters do not care either way, as long as religion
does not intrude into day-to-day politics. When it does, the results are
rarely good. Tim Farron, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats and
a devout Christian, spent much of the 2017 general election being
grilled on whether he thought homosexuality was a sin.

We do do God

Since the state does not separate religion and politics, MPs are left to
do it themselves. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has expressed unease
over abortion after 12 weeks. During his pitch for leader in 2019, he
said he would not touch the limit of 24 weeks. “I don’t think it defines
my politics,” he said of his faith. A sense of restraint is necessary for
all parts of the constitution to work and faith is no exception.

Britain’s settlement on religion and politics may look ridiculous. But a

secular constitution is no guarantee against neuralgic debates on
faith. America divides church and state, yet religion infects politics. A
narrative of exclusion is a potent thing, which evangelical
Republicans have whipped up for decades, with great success. In
Britain, religion permeates the constitution and daily life of politics to
such an absurd degree it is hardly there at all. And so theocracy in
theory becomes secular democracy in practice.

Instead, religion in British politics is like nitrogen in air: inert and

ignored but there nevertheless. The devout can tell themselves that
Britain is still a Christian country; the secular can console themselves
that this has no effect. In the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft,
lawmakers crept back in after the motion was defeated (Ayes 192,
Noes 296) to belt out more carols and hear a sermon. Keep religion
in Parliament. It is the best way of keeping religion out of politics.■

Read more from Bagehot, our columnist on British politics:

Why do Harry and Meghan wind people up? (Dec 15th)

Britain’s actual problem with free speech (Dec 8th)

Emigration is in the air for Britons (Dec 1st)

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
United States
 

Care or confinement
Move along
Disorder on the border
Listen up
 
Care or confinement

Is forced treatment for the mentally ill ever

humane?
Worsening homelessness prompts new mental-health policies in
California and New York

Dec 19th 2022 | Los Angeles and New York

IN
AMERICA’S big cities, a walk down the street or a wait for the
subway can be an exercise in avoidance. Scores of commuters in
Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere don metaphorical blinders
every day in order to ignore those sleeping fitfully on the train or
battling psychosis on the street. Such indifference is morally fraught,
but it is also a reflection of how common homelessness and public
displays of mental illness have become.

Most Americans who experience homelessness do so briefly. They

stay with family or crash on a friend’s couch until they can afford rent.
(The lack of affordable housing is the biggest driver of
homelessness.) The Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s latest count of homeless people, tallied on a single
night in January, found that 22% of them are “chronically homeless”,
and that there were 16% more perennially homeless adults in 2022
than in 2020. Many live in tents beneath highways or in public parks.
They are more likely to be suffering from drug addiction and mental
illness, both of which can be made worse by living on the streets. The
number of people sleeping outside has increased by roughly 3%
since 2020, cancelling out the modest decline of people in shelters.
As the ranks of unsheltered people have grown, an old question re-
emerges: how should government help people who may not be able
to help themselves?

The places most troubled by this, New York City and California, are
trying to find an answer. Both have enacted policies aimed at people
who are homeless and suffering from a psychotic disorder, such as
schizophrenia. Yet they differ in important ways. Last month Eric
Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, instructed police and
first responders to hospitalise people with severe mental illness who
are incapable of looking after themselves. Mr Adams’s plan is a
reinterpretation of existing rules. Law-enforcement and outreach
workers can already remove people from public places if they present
a danger to themselves or others. But now, the mayor stressed,
people can be hospitalised if they seem merely unable to care for
themselves. “It is not acceptable for us to see someone who clearly
needs help and walk past them,” Mr Adams proclaimed.

The mayor’s plan follows a policy change on the opposite coast. At

the urging of Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, the
state legislature passed the Community Assistance, Recovery, and
Empowerment (CARE) Act in September , creating a new civil-court
system aimed at directing the mentally ill and homeless to treatment
and housing. Patients can be referred to CARE court by police,
outreach workers, doctors or family members, among others.

Acceptance into the system means court-ordered treatment for up to

two years, after which patients can “graduate” or, potentially, be
subjected to more restrictive care, such as a conservatorship.
California has been quick to try to distance CARE court from New
York’s apparently more punitive response. “It’s a little bit like apples
and giraffes,” says Jason Elliott, Mr Newsom’s deputy chief of staff.
“We’re both trying to solve the same problem, but with very different
tools at our disposal, and also really different realities.”

The biggest difference between the two policies is their size. Because
New York City recognises a right to shelter, the vast majority of the
roughly 68,000 homeless people there have a roof over their heads.
Experts reckon that Mr Adams’s order may at first affect only those
few hundred people in the most dire straits. The California Policy Lab
at the University of California estimates that 10% of unsheltered
people in Los Angeles who took part in street outreach programmes
had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder of the kind that CARE
court is supposed to help manage. Because more than 100,000
Californians are sleeping rough, the state thinks that up to 12,000
people may initially be eligible for treatment.

A swinging pendulum

The schemes may be different, but the outrage they inspire is similar.
Any discussion of compulsory treatment for the mentally ill is tangled
up in a decades-long fight over the balance between protecting
people’s civil liberties and bodily autonomy, and ensuring their safety
and that of others. Officials and critics alike are squeamish about any
reform that evokes the horrors of state-run asylums in the 20th
century, which were often unsanitary, overcrowded and understaffed,
and sometimes just cruel. When government-run hospitals were shut
down, community-based care was supposed to take their place.
Instead, patients were often discharged to underfunded boarding
houses and shelters. “We have not only abandoned people with
severe mental illness to the jails, but also to the streets,” says
Elizabeth Bromley, a psychiatrist at UCLA.

Many liberals blame Ronald Reagan for the government’s

abandonment of mentally ill Americans. As governor of California in
1967, Reagan signed a landmark bill for patients’ rights, but then cut
funding for mental-health care. As president in 1981, he rescinded
federal funds for state mental-health services. But Alex Barnard, a
sociologist at New York University, argues that heaping blame on
Reagan is too simple. “Many administrations in California have had
opportunities to reverse Reagan,” he says. Perpetuating the myth of
Reagan’s total culpability, he adds, is “a way of distracting ourselves
from the real challenge of building a system today that meets
people’s needs, rather than just wishing we had it 50 years ago.”

Civil-rights advocates in both states worry that the new policies herald
a swing of the pendulum back towards confinement. It is unclear how
often mentally ill people are detained for examination or treatment,
but recent research suggests that the average yearly detention rate in
22 states increased by 13% between 2012 and 2016. Many critics
argue that involuntary treatment is not only brutal, but ineffective. But
the evidence is mixed and conducting research is tricky, says Mr
Barnard. “You can’t randomly assign people to voluntary and
involuntary treatment if you think that somebody is at risk of killing
themselves,” he explains. Mr Adams’s plan and Mr Newsom’s CARE
court both aim to exhaust options for voluntary treatment before
mandating medication or hospital.
Logistical questions abound, too. Luke Bergmann, the director of
behavioural health services in San Diego County, worries about how
severely ill, often isolated patients are supposed to travel to their
court appointments, and whether there will be enough beds in long-
term care facilities to house them. Watchdogs on both coasts wonder
what kind of clinical training police will receive, and whether racial
bias will lead to worse outcomes for black and Hispanic homeless
people. Brian Stettin, Mr Adams’s senior adviser for mental health,
admits that confrontations with police can be traumatic, and stresses
that cops will work alongside medical workers.

That Mr Newsom and Mr Adams are rethinking involuntary treatment

reflects the failures of America’s mental-health system, but also their
recognition that homelessness represents a political problem for their
administrations—and their careers. As unsheltered homelessness
has grown, Americans have become accustomed to public displays of
profound suffering. Californians routinely say that homelessness is
one of the most important issues facing the state; New Yorkers worry
most about crime.

Allowing the mentally ill to languish in the streets contributes to a

feeling that public safety and quality of life in America’s biggest cities
are deteriorating. Mr Newsom and Mr Adams are two of the
Democratic Party’s most charismatic and ambitious politicians.
Should either seek higher office one day, they will be asked what they
did to solve the hardest problems in their respective domains. Now
they will at least have an answer.■

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly
subscriber-only newsletter, which examines the state of American
democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
Move along

Donald Trump’s popularity with Republican voters

is sinking
Polls reveal a fall in support for him to Make America Great Again,
again

Dec 18th 2022 | WASHINGTON, DC

IN
HIS
BOOK “The Art of the Deal”, Donald Trump admonishes
businessmen who engage in cons and implores entrepreneurs to
deliver results for their clients. Eventually, he says, a con artist can no
longer outrun the people they’ve betrayed. “You can’t con people, at
least not for long,” the former president wrote in his business
bestseller, written before his political ascent. “You can create
excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of
press…But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch
on.” These remarks are proving prescient about the business of
politics. After defeat in three key elections in a row, Republicans are
catching on to the con.

New polling from The Economist and YouGov, our partner in weekly
surveys of American adults, shows Mr Trump’s popularity with
Republican voters sinking. According to YouGov’s latest poll,
conducted between December 10th and 13th, just 46% of
respondents who said they were either Republicans or independents
who “lean towards” the Republican Party said they wanted Mr Trump
to run for their party’s nomination again. And 37% did not want him to
run. These polls were in the field before the House select committee
investigating January 6th released its full report, which seems unlikely
to help the former president either.
Compared with previous YouGov polls, that is the highest share yet of
anti-Trump members of the Republican rank-and-file. In September,
when YouGov began asking this question regularly, just 27% of
Republicans said they did not want the former president to run again.
Since then, the share who want Mr Trump to make America great
again, again, has fallen from 56% to 46% (see chart). Some of the
biggest declines have been among Republican women (57% to 41%),
African-Americans (66% to 42%) and Republican voters who do not
have college degrees (62% to 52%).

Mr Trump has also been losing ground in early polls for the
Republican nomination in 2024. Several recent surveys have found
him trailing Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, in a head-to-head
matchup. One poll from Suffolk University in Boston found support for
Mr DeSantis at 56%, a full 23 points ahead of Mr Trump. Other
surveys disagree. One released by Morning Consult on December
11th shows Mr Trump 18 points ahead of Mr DeSantis. The
Republican primary is 14 months away, so these polls are of little use
in predicting what would happen in that contest. But they do show
that the former president’s return is not as inevitable as once thought.

True, Mr Trump does not need all Republican primary voters to unite
behind him in order to secure the nomination. He could win with a
plurality. That is because the election rules adopted by many states’
Republican Party committees, which oversee the selection of the
presidential candidate, grant all or a significant number of a state’s
delegates to the national party convention to the winner of the
statewide popular vote. That is how Mr Trump was able to amass a
large lead in pledged delegates early in the contest in 2016, despite
polling between 30% and 35% for most of February and March, when
the earliest-voting states made their choice.

Though his fortunes are fading, Mr Trump may still have sufficient
underlying support to repeat this trick. YouGov’s poll reveals that 38%
of Republicans identify themselves as “MAGA” Republicans and 68%
still rate Mr Trump “very” or “somewhat” favourably. If the rest of the
party is unable to unite behind a challenger—as was the case in 2016
when Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, John Kasich, then the
governor of Ohio, and Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, split the
anti-Trump vote—he could consolidate enough delegates to clinch
the nomination again. It is also possible, though unlikely, that the
state party committees could change the delegation-selection rules
before 2024.
A poor performance by Republicans in this year’s midterms
underlined Mr Trump’s political weaknesses. Most of the candidates
for Congress that he endorsed did worse than expected and most of
those running for statewide office lost. Any dispassionate observer
reflecting on his performances in 2018, 2020 and 2022 will see that
Mr Trump has now directly or indirectly lost key elections three times
and never secured the votes of a majority of Americans (in 2016 the
electoral college, not the people, put him in the White House). Most
Americans long ago decided that it was time to move on. Republican
voters may at last be deciding the same.■

For more coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency, visit our dedicated hub
and follow along as we track shifts in his approval rating. For
exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our
correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our
weekly newsletter.
Disorder on the border

Title 42 might be nixed

What the end of an obscure public-health order will mean for
America’s border

Dec 20th 2022 | Dallas

AS
A
BABY, Jesus was a migrant, forced to flee the threat of violence
and seek refuge in Egypt. So it is perhaps fitting that in the run-up to
the day celebrating Jesus’s birth America is confronted by problems
about how to manage an influx of migrants arriving at its southern
border. A border policy called “Title 42”, which was due to expire on
December 21st, was granted a temporary administrative stay by the
Supreme Court. Depending on what the court decides, the
controversial policy could be wound down in a matter of days.

Title 42 is an obscure public-health rule (first invoked during the

Trump administration) which enabled America to expel people who
crossed the border without authorisation, due to the risk covid-19
posed. It has doubled as an immigration tool used to manage the
large numbers of people arriving at America’s southern border, driven
by instability in their home countries and, over the past two years, the
perception that Joe Biden’s administration would be more welcoming
than Donald Trump’s was. From March 2020 through October 2022,
Title 42 was invoked to rapidly process and expel migrants around
2.5m times.

Republicans, who have made tighter border security a core issue,

hoped that Milton Friedman’s aphorism, that nothing is so permanent
as a temporary government programme, would prove true for Title 42.
But in April the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
announced it was no longer necessary for public-health purposes.
Nineteen Republican states sued to prevent a wind-down, saying that
without it they would be overwhelmed by migrants. On December
16th a federal judge ruled against Republican states requesting that
its cancellation be delayed—which is why they asked the Supreme
Court to grant an “administrative” stay to keep Title 42 in place
temporarily.

Officials in El Paso, Texas, expect arrivals to increase by as much as

40% once Title 42 is lifted. Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican
governor, has predicted “total chaos”. However, the furore
surrounding Title 42 distracts from a broader conversation that needs
to happen in Washington, DC, about America’s immigration laws and
how they should be rethought.

The last time America enacted broad immigration reform was in 1986.
Since then there have been three big changes in arrivals, besides
their greater number. First, whereas most used to be Mexicans,
migrants are now much more of a mix, including Venezuelans and
Cubans, which increases the challenge of sending them back.
Second, the number of family units and children has risen: typical
migrants are no longer single Mexican males seeking to work in
America. Third, the share of people claiming asylum has swelled,
complicating efforts to decide on their claims quickly. “Asylum used to
be the exception to the rule at the border”, but “now the exception has
overtaken the rule,” says Theresa Cardinal Brown at the Bipartisan
Policy Centre, a think-tank.

The Biden administration is hiring 3,500 extra staff and contractors at

the border to deal with the influx. But it is under pressure to do more.
There are reportedly discussions in the White House about whether
to embrace some Trump-like controls, for example limiting asylum
eligibility to people who would be tortured if they returned home, or
restricting people from applying for asylum in America if they passed
through another country where it was safe to apply. Immigration
activists will balk at the revival of policies reminiscent of Mr Biden’s
predecessor. Once again Mr Biden faces a test of whether he is
willing to anger progressives.

Ultimately Congress needs to change immigration law to deal with the

border better, revamping asylum laws and creating more legal
pathways to come and work. It is “extremely unlikely” to do so in the
next Congress, predicts Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American
Immigration Council, another think-tank. In 2023 the Republican-
controlled House is expected to hold hearings and push for the
impeachment of the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro
Mayorkas, who oversees immigration. That would keep the border in
the headlines but do nothing to fix it. ■
For more coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency, visit our dedicated hub
and follow along as we track shifts in his approval rating. For
exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our
correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our
weekly newsletter.
Lexington

Free speech is not in peril in America

The problem is deeper than that

Dec 20th 2022 |

THE
GREAT American debate about free speech is flaring again, this
time around Elon Musk’s curating of Twitter. He is restoring speech
rights or denying them, depending on your view. The predictable
parties are declaring their positions and luxuriating in righteousness.
They will change few minds, also predictably, because they are
tussling over the wrong end of the stick. America has no problem with
speech. It has a problem with listening.

Does the distinction seem specious? Speaking and listening do not

mean much without each other. But emphasis matters. Focusing on
the right to speak rather than the obligation to listen substitutes the
easy question for the hard one, and a freedom secured by law for a
discipline that must be instilled by culture. It also ensures that the
debate—too grand a word, really—remains futile.

In a self-satirising proof of how emphasising speech-rights leads

people to talk past each other, Yale Law students said they were
exercising speech-rights last spring when they shouted down a free-
speech event because they disapproved of one panellist, a
conservative Christian. “You’re disrupting us!” a protester shouted at
Kate Stith, the professor moderating the event.

Newspapers continue to tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile

the politics of their staff with covering a fractious democracy. They
tend to default to framing their purpose in terms of protecting the right
to speak—as though a publication is meant to serve its interview
subjects and op-ed writers—rather than of protecting readers’
opportunity to understand the world.

This tripped up the editorial board of the New York Times a few days
after the incident at Yale. In an attempt to defend free speech, the
Times wound up coming out against it. “Americans are losing hold of
a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak
their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being
shamed or shunned,” the newspaper declared. There is no right in
America, of course, to silence one’s critics. The Times itself is in the
business of shaming and shunning (Lexington has some experience
of this), and that work is safeguarded, thank goodness, by the First
Amendment.
What the paper failed to articulate was why readers (and reporters)
needed to listen to views they might find repugnant. The moral logic
that once inspired newsrooms—to resist dangerous movements like
white nationalism, readers needed to understand them—has been
stood on its head. Now, to report empathetically about people and
ideas deemed dangerous is to “platform” or “normalise” them.
Readers are too dim to be trusted with such information. Journalists
are excoriated just for interviewing supporters of Donald Trump.
“There’s nothing more to learn from them,” sneered a Vanity Fair
columnist, more than a year before some of them attacked the
Capitol.

More speech alone will fix none of this. Besides, insisting that
someone must be allowed to speak can violate free-speech rights, as
the dean of Berkeley Law School recently told the Wall Street
Journal. He was explaining why nine student groups at the school
were justified in banning Zionists from speaking at their events, even
though he considered the rule anti-Semitic.

Like those law students, all Americans can now relax in

homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing
that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or
information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the
congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media
group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of
hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even
adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic
democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous
weakness.

In 1953, after he finished “Mariners, Renegades & Castaways”, his

magnificent study of “Moby Dick”, the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R.
James appended an essay about the circumstances in which he
wrote it: he was imprisoned on Ellis Island, awaiting a decision about
whether he would be deported. He was disappointed that fellow ex-
radicals chose not to help him. Instead, he found, “old-fashioned
American liberals” spoke up.

James brooded upon a quotation from Voltaire above the letters

column in the New York Herald Tribune, a newspaper now extinct: “I
wholly disapprove of what you say and I shall defend to the death
your right to say it.” In the past, he wrote, “I have smiled indulgently at
the grandiloquent statements and illusions of these old liberals.” But
he began thinking about the conditions in which they struggled to
establish the principles he had relied upon. “Today it is not their
limitations I am conscious of,” he concluded, “but rather the
enormous service they did to civilisation.”

So many Starbucks

To James, who was deported, one of the most vile characters in

“Moby Dick” is Starbuck, the first mate. Starbuck knows Ahab is
dooming the ship but lacks the courage to stand up to him. “His
story”, James wrote from the depths of disillusion with the Soviet
Union and horror at Nazi Germany, “is the story of the liberals and
democrats who during the last quarter of a century have led the
capitulation to the totalitarians in country after country.”

There is good reason to feel optimistic about America. Democrats

heard voters’ concerns about crime and inflation and tempered their
more extreme impulses. Voters heard the lunacy of the election-
deniers and rejected them. Jurors heard cases against the
insurrectionists of January 6th and delivered justice.

But just as Republican politicians tremble before Mr Trump, some

leaders of American institutions, afraid of their students or staff, are
still treading Starbuck’s path rather than defending the principles that
once made their institutions integral to the American project. They
might instead consider the example of Ms Stith as she faced the Yale
students. “Grow up,” she urged them. ■
Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:

Republicans should leave Hunter Biden to his painting, and the

Justice Department (Dec 15th)

What Democrats—and Republicans—can learn from Raphael

Warnock (Dec 8th)

Elon Musk is showing what a waste of time Twitter can be (Dec 1st)

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly
subscriber-only newsletter, which examines the state of American
democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
Middle East & Africa
 

Finding faith in the fund

Shell companies
An election with no voters
 
Finding faith in the fund

Ghana has struck a preliminary IMF deal and halted

debt payments
Pain and hope loom in equal measure

Dec 20th 2022 | DAKAR

KEN
OFORI-ATTA, Ghana’s finance minister, is fond of invoking
scripture in speeches on the economy. Recently, as the country
defaulted on its domestic debt, he found solace in the first book of
Samuel saying “nothing will be lost, nothing will be missing.” Yet the
Bible is a poor guide to macroeconomics. Holders of domestic bonds
stand to lose a good chunk of money. Now foreign creditors are
getting a buzz cut, too. On December 19th Ghana suspended interest
payments to foreign creditors, in effect defaulting, pending talks.

It has also appealed to the high priests of economic orthodoxy,

agreeing to a preliminary $3bn bail-out (about 4% of GDP) from the
IMF. It needs the help. Public debt is above 100% of GDP and local
and foreign interest payments eat up 70-100% of revenue, according
to Mr Ofori-Atta. Inflation is running at 50% and the central bank has
raised its main interest rate to 27%. In past crises Ghana has wisely
called in the IMF early to head off trouble and avoid spending cuts
that were too painful. This time, however, it dallied for so long that
austerity alone will not save it.

The government blames covid-19 and surging global inflation for its
pickle. Yet its troubles can also be traced to overspending, excessive
borrowing and overconfidence. This is hardly new. Ghana’s
governments tend to blow their budgets to win votes in election years.
But recent splurges were funded largely by foreign-currency bonds,
making Ghana especially vulnerable to swings in exchange rates.

Nonetheless Mr Ofori-Atta was far from contrite as he announced the

deal with the IMF. “Let us all gather the harvest with joy,” he
proclaimed. He even thanked his disgraced deputy, Charles Adu
Boahen, who was sacked by President Nana Akufo-Addo last month
after being accused of asking for a $200,000 fee to set up a meeting
with the vice-president. The triumphalism will rile long-suffering
Ghanaians. Many think Mr Ofori-Atta, a cousin of the president,
should himself have been fired for poor management of the economy.
The fund’s deal will bring pain. But it also offers hope. It aims to slash
debt to 55% of GDP in the medium term, perhaps by 2028, and the
costs of servicing foreign-currency debts to 18% of government
revenue. Next year’s budget includes spending cuts worth 2% of
GDP. (A vast national cathedral that Mr Ofori-Atta lavished $58m of
public money on will remain a stalled building site.) Social
programmes will be protected, says the fund, though some worry Mr
Ofori-Atta’s promise to review them for efficiencies may be a pretext
for more cuts. The agreement is already boosting confidence in
Ghana’s economy. The currency, the cedi, had slumped all year but
has leapt since the bail-out was announced (see chart).

The government is trying to make progress on a debt restructuring, a

condition of the deal. In early December Mr Ofori-Atta said the
holders of domestic bonds worth 137bn cedis ($15.2bn) should swap
these for ones paying a lower rate of interest and that will be repaid
over a longer period. The exchange, which was meant to be
completed by December 19th, would represent a loss of about 50%
of the value of the bonds, reckons J.P. Morgan, a bank.

This would create a new set of problems. Ghana’s banks are heavily
exposed to government debt. For some it represents more than half
of total assets. A huge hit to the banking system could cause lending
to plunge, which would in turn hurt the wider economy. The biggest
danger will be next year, when the government’s replacement bonds
will pay no interest at all, warns Ernest Addison, the governor of the
Central Bank of Ghana. “Straight away there are issues of liquidity,”
he says.

Ghanaians are already pulling money out of mutual funds, says

Frederick Duvor of Apakan Securities, a brokerage firm in Ghana.
“People want to salvage what’s left of their investments.” Pension
schemes will be hit, too. By the time many pensions are paid out, “it
will be worth close to nothing,” he worries. Banks, pension funds and
insurers have all demanded better terms. Last week the government
blinked and extended the deadline to the end of the year. It may also
tweak the scheme.

Nervous policymakers are trying to prop up the banks. The central

bank will loosen liquidity and capital-adequacy requirements. The
government promises that a donor-backed fund worth 15bn cedis will
help ensure financial stability. Mr Addison says the World Bank has
committed $250m to it. All this should help. Yet when asked if he is
therefore not too worried, Mr Addison simply says, “It is early.”
Garnering debt

Investors holding $13bn of Ghana’s foreign-currency bonds will not

get off lightly, either. The government has previously floated talk of a
30% cut to the face value of the debt it will repay and suspension of
some interest payments. This, too, may result in a fight, though some
bondholders say they expect a relatively quick deal.

There are plenty of longer-term obstacles to Ghana’s recovery. Badly

hit banks will not lend much for as long as it takes them to rebuild
their balance-sheets. Interest rates will remain eye-watering for some
time. Government spending will be austere for years. And the weak
global economy will be a drag on growth, too.

Yet Ghana has been here before—16 times in fact. All those crises
and bail-outs have not stopped it from becoming the richest country in
continental west Africa as measured by income per head. It has a
relatively educated workforce and widely available (if pricey)
electricity. Some of its loose spending went on much-needed
infrastructure. “We could actually get quite nice growth within two or
three years,” reckons Charles Robertson of Renaissance Capital, an
investment bank, “led by cheap currency and a low debt overhang.”

Ghana has one other formidable advantage: a surprisingly resilient

reputation with donors and foreign investors based on its robust
democracy, record of development and its leaders’ knack for selling a
good-news story about the country. That Ghana managed to clinch a
deal with the IMF in less than six months suggests its reputation as a
country worth backing remains miraculously intact. Other donors are
likely to follow suit.

The recent surge in the cedi suggests some investors are already
believers again. If the global economic picture improves, more may
be tempted back. That would give Ghana a leg-up. But before it is
able to emerge into this promised land of growth, its people face a
painful journey. For this they blame the government, despite its
repeated appeals to a higher authority. ■
Urbanisation gone nuts

What the price of Zanzibari coconuts says about

African development
Islanders are chopping down trees as cities expand

Dec 20th 2022 | ZANZIBAR

MUSA
HAIDAR holds a coconut to his ear and shakes it from side to
side. Its sloshing pleases the market trader, who puts the large brown
ovoid back atop the pile at his stall on the outskirts of Zanzibar City,
the main one on the east African island.

His customers are less happy, however. A coconut going for 500
Tanzanian shillings ($0.20) a few years ago today sells for 1,500
shillings. That makes it more expensive to whip up curries or other
dishes using coconut milk. “The prices you see,” says Mr Haidar,
“they’re not normal. Coconuts have become expensive for local
people.”

Why have prices gone nuts? “People are chopping, chopping,”

explains Omar Yusuf Juma, another coconut seller, swinging his
machete for effect. A count in 2013-14 found just 3.4m coconut trees,
down from 5.7m in the late 1990s. Since hungry Zanzibaris still
demand creamy fish curries and beans baked in coconut milk, falling
supply has led to higher prices. Nuts from the mainland are pricier
because of high transport costs.

The felling of coconut trees reflects how Zanzibar and the rest of
Africa are urbanising. The defining feature of Africa’s expanding cities
is sprawl: cities are oozing outwards rather than growing upwards. As
Zanzibar City has spread farther into erstwhile countryside, when
people move to their new plots they chop down the coconut trees to
make space for their new homes.

Moreover, some houses, as well as many island hotels, have furniture

made from coconut wood. Emmanuel Elias, a carpenter, explains that
it is cheaper than imported alternatives. By law farmers cannot chop
down fruit-bearing trees for furniture; in practice it is hard to stop
them. Even if they abide by the rules, many do not plant new trees,
since these take at least six years to produce fruit, and 15 years to
reach maximum production levels. State subsidies for seedlings have
proved no match for urban population growth.
In his workshop Mr Elias dusts off a sleek dressing table he is selling
for 400,000 shillings. He points out the striking black dots inside the
grain that are the hallmark of coconut wood. “This is the land of
coconut trees,” he says. But for how much longer?
One Saied-ed

A farcical election pushes Tunisia towards one-man

rule
Voter turnout was lower than the inflation rate

Dec 20th 2022 | DUBAI

THE
LAST
time voters in La Goulette, a suburb of the Tunisian
capital, had to pick a representative in parliament, it was a
complicated choice. No fewer than 56 parties fielded candidates for
their district. They had a rather easier time of it in Tunisia’s
parliamentary election on December 17th: only one candidate was on
the ballot. It is hard to imagine that there was very much suspense in
his campaign headquarters as the results came in.

This was the climax of a 17-month power grab led by Kais Saied, the
country’s authoritarian president. In July 2021 he suspended much of
the constitution and sent the army to bar the doors of parliament; he
later dismissed its members. He went on to sack judges; install
loyalists in key agencies, including the electoral commission; and
harass and arrest critics. This summer he hastily shoved through
constitutional changes to dilute parliament’s power.

In a grim bit of irony, the election came 12 years to the day after
Muhammad Bouazizi, a street hawker, set himself on fire to protest
against extortion by the local police. His death was the spark for the
overthrow of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the longtime dictator, the
creation of a flawed but real democracy in Tunisia, and the Arab
spring more generally.

By the time Mr Saied was elected in 2019, many Tunisians had come
to despair of their post-revolutionary politicians, who seemed more
interested in fighting each other than fixing problems. The president
has lived up to his promise to change the political system. Yet he has
done almost nothing to tackle the economic mess that caused so
much of the public’s anger, which may soon be directed at him.

Mr Saied, who blames political parties for much of the deadlock,

sought to reduce their role in this election: party logos, for example,
were not displayed on ballots next to the names of candidates. Major
parties decided to boycott the poll, and only 1,058 candidates met the
requirements to run for 161 seats.
Beyond La Goulette, nine other districts had one-man races.
Elsewhere the choice was even simpler: seven of ten constituencies
that represent the diaspora had no candidates. The Tunisian
embassy in London did not bother to open a polling station because
there was nobody to vote for.

Even where races were competitive, the candidates were often

nobodies. The party boycott left a motley crew of individual
candidates—anyone who could gather 400 signatures and self-
finance a short campaign. Many Tunisians had no idea who was on
the ballot. The electoral commission wound up affixing a headshot of
each candidate next to his (rarely her) name: instead of voting for
parties, voters could opt for the candidates with the best hair.

Turnout was predictably low, with only about 800,000 of the country’s
9m registered voters bothering to show up. Mr Saied had promised
that the new parliament, freed from the shackles of party politics,
would be the most democratic in Tunisia’s history. Instead he
delivered a legislature elected by less than 9% of voters.

The Salvation Front, an opposition group, quickly called for protests

and demanded that Mr Saied step down. So did Abir Moussi, who ran
against Mr Saied in the presidential election of 2019. The front
includes Ennahda, an Islamist party that has been a powerful force in
Tunisia’s democratic politics, whereas Ms Moussi is a staunch anti-
Islamist and self-professed admirer of the deposed dictatorship. That
such ideological opposites find themselves aligned against Mr Saied
says much about his dwindling support.

At first his self-coup in 2021 had wide backing from a frustrated

public. Polls showed his approval ratings above 80%, unprecedented
for a Tunisian president (or, indeed, for most politicians). But his
popularity was short-lived. Official turnout for the constitutional
referendum in July was a mere 30%, and many think that number
was inflated. His poll numbers keep sliding. Few Tunisians turn up for
pro-Saied rallies.
There is little optimism that Mr Saied’s government and his new
rubber-stamp parliament will do much to turn around the economy.
The diagnosis has not changed much: Tunisia is unproductive. It has
a bloated public sector with one of the world’s highest wage bills
(18% of GDP). State-run companies are uncompetitive. Decades of
underinvestment in the poorer south and west have left those regions
lagging far behind Tunis, the capital.

If the root causes are unchanged, though, the symptoms have

worsened. The economy shrank by almost 9% in 2020 and growth
remains sluggish. Soaring food and energy prices this summer
caused a balance-of-payments crisis, with shortages of sugar, butter,
cooking oil and other staples as imports languished at ports. Even
bottled water has been rationed. Annual inflation jumped to 9.8% in
November. It is a truly unhealthy democracy that announces a voter-
turnout figure lower than its headline-inflation rate.

What has saved Mr Saied, until now, is apathy. If he cannot organise

big rallies, neither can the opposition: most Tunisians are too
disgusted with politics (and too busy trying to survive) to take to the
streets in protest.

But Mr Saied cannot rely on the public’s quiescence for ever. A debt-
to-GDP ratio of around 90% looks ominous. A hoped-for deal with the
IMF
remains stalled, in part due to opposition from the UGTT, a
powerful trade union. More shortages and price rises—and perhaps
protests—are likely next year. Mr Saied has done much to return
Tunisia to one-man rule. His inattention to the economy, however,
means he may not long remain that man. ■
The Americas
 

Man bites watchdog

Lessons from Messi
 
Man bites watchdog

An “electoral reform” in Mexico will make elections

less safe
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is nobbling the electoral
commission

Dec 20th 2022 | Mexico City

WHEN
MEXICO’S president decides he wants to do something, he
does not give up easily. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long
yearned to weaken Mexico’s electoral body, the Instituto Nacional
Electoral, known as the INE. He has held a grudge against it since
2006, when he claims that the INE rigged the vote in a presidential
election, causing him to lose to Felipe Calderón, a centre-right
politician, by 0.6 percentage points. There is no evidence that this is
true.

Mr López Obrador’s resolve has only hardened in the face of growing

opposition. After tens of thousands of protesters marched in
November against his plan to slash the INE’s size, staff and budget,
he put on his own protest—dubiously using government funds to do
so. When he failed to get the two-thirds majority needed in the lower
chamber for his initial proposal, which involved altering the
constitution, he reverted to a package of laws which required only a
simple majority to pass.

On December 15th, the day Congress stopped for the holidays, the
upper chamber voted to approve the package, which makes changes
to over 450 articles in five current laws, as well as introducing a new
piece of legislation.

The event was not without rancour: one senator dressed as a

dinosaur to protest against the “Jurassic plan”. The reforms will be
signed into law by Mr López Obrador in 2023, although opposition
lawmakers and the INE will try to appeal to the Supreme Court to
have the package struck down for breaching the constitution.

The reforms are worrying partly because Mexico only became a true
democracy in 2000. Key to this process was the creation of the INE.
Surveys show that Mexicans trust the INE more than any other
institution, bar the armed forces. By nobbling it, Mr López Obrador
makes it less likely that elections will be free and fair.

Some of the most damaging ideas of the president’s proposed

constitutional amendment were removed. The INE
will not be
dismantled and its senior people will still be elected by parliamentary
votes, rather than directly by the public, as Mr López Obrador had
wanted. The electoral court will not be subsumed into the Supreme
Court. Still, there is much that is concerning. “This could mean
stepping back over the line from a democratic system to an
authoritarian one,” says Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst.

By shrinking the INE, the new rules erode its ability to do its job. This
includes running elections and monitoring that parties obey the law,
along with issuing voter credentials for 97m Mexicans that are used
as identity cards. The law scraps the INE’s 300 permanent local
branches, responsible for setting up polling stations and running
elections in their areas. They will now exist only temporarily, around
election time. That entails laying off some 85% of the INE’s 2,500
staff. The rules also curb the INE’s powers to audit, regulate and
punish breaches of electoral law.

There will also be less to regulate, as Mexico’s strict limits on

campaigning will become looser. These limits were designed to make
elections fairer by reducing the advantages of incumbency. Until now,
candidates were banned from campaigning more than three months
ahead of elections and in the two days immediately preceding them.
Public servants, including the president, were barred from boasting
about their achievements during the campaign period. For the past
few years TV and radio slots have been distributed equally to parties
by the INE, and parties have not been allowed to buy their own.
These tough rules were a reaction to the 70-year dominance of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which used its deep pockets
and chokehold on public office to drown out its rivals. Indeed it was
Mr López Obrador and other leftists who campaigned for tighter rules
after his loss in 2006.

But from now on campaigning is not restricted to a set period of time.

People in positions of power, including the president, can openly
campaign for their party and chosen candidates whenever they like—
although they cannot explicitly call for people to vote for them. A rule
which bans the use of public funds for “self-promotion” will be
scrapped; in theory, the president could use public coffers to print a
million leaflets lauding his successes (though such leaflets could not
ask people to vote for him).

Since Morena, the president’s party, is so dominant, this tilts the

playing field in its favour, giving it many of the same tools used by the
PRI in the past. “It ties the opposition’s hands behind their backs
while giving steroids to the ruling party,” says Denise Dresser, an
academic.

The president says that the reform will save money. But the INE’s
budget in 2022 is 13.9bn pesos ($700m), just 0.2% of federal
spending. The INE is large, but so is Mexico: setting up polling booths
across it is no easy task. Elections cannot be run on the cheap in a
country that in the 1970s and 1980s was racked by electoral fraud.

The INE must make all the changes by August 2023, a rapid
turnaround. In 2024 Mexico will hold elections for a new president
and Congress (Mr López Obrador cannot run, since he is limited to
one term). Mr Regidor reckons the reform could result in political
parties, particularly the ruling one, engaging in illegal behaviour,
knowing that the electoral authority is not strong enough to punish
them.

Morena has broken rules in the past. Mr López Obrador was found by
the INE to have breached electoral laws 29 times in the run-up to
midterm elections in 2021, by praising his party during the
campaigning period. In December the INE accused Claudia
Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City and the favourite to succeed
Mr López Obrador, of campaigning illegally early for the election in
2024. It deemed a rally in June, at which she spoke about her record,
to have been a campaign event. She says it was not. She is also
accused of promoting hashtags such as “EsClaudia” (“It’s Claudia”)
on social media and on murals across the country. Both would no
longer be illegal under the new law. ■
It was messy, but it’s Messi

Argentina clinch the World Cup after beating

France on penalties
The national team could teach its politicians a lesson

Dec 18th 2022 | Buenos Aires

THEY
BEGAN the World Cup by losing to Saudi Arabia, one of the
least fancied teams in the tournament. Argentina’s footballers ended
it as champions, beating France, the holders, in a penalty shoot-out
after a thrilling 3-3 draw. When Gonzalo Montiel drove home the
decisive spot-kick, millions of Argentines streamed onto Avenida 9 de
Julio, in the centre of Buenos Aires, setting off firecrackers, chanting
songs, and honking car horns. La
selección, as the national team is
known, took home Argentina’s third cup, and the first in 36 years.

Argentina expected, and in the end got, a ferocious match. When

France took home the World Cup in 2018, their team was younger
and their players more expensive than almost any other. Kylian
Mbappé, then just 19, became the second youngest player ever to
score in a World Cup final, after Pélé did so at 17 in 1958. This year
the French squad is collectively worth over €1bn ($1.1bn), compared
with Argentina’s more modest €645m, according to Transfermarkt, a
website devoted to transfer fees.

Yet Argentina saw them off—eventually, having led 2-0 and then 3-2.
Mr Mbappé had hauled France back into the game with a penalty and
a goal in normal play and then another spot-kick in extra time,
becoming only the second man to score three times in a World Cup
final. But the glory will belong to Lionel Messi, Argentina’s 35-year-old
captain, who despite being widely regarded as the world’s best player
for many years had never managed to get his hands on the game’s
most desired trophy. Fittingly, Mr Messi scored two goals, and set up
the whole team for another, netted after a flowing move by Ángel Di
María, who finished coolly before bursting into tears.

Argentina’s fans had already made this World Cup one about their
country and its captain. Some 50,000 Argentine supporters
descended on Doha for the final, compared with only 10,000 from
France, a far richer, more populous country. Argentine hinchas, or
fans, have a reputation for rambunctiousness. They pen new football
songs almost as fast as Mr Messi can dribble through a triad of
opposing players, and came armed with drums, giant flags in the
national alabaster white and sky-blue stripe, and a whopping 500kg
of yerba mate, the country’s favourite herbal drink.

The final settled any debate, Argentines crow, about who the greatest
living footballer is. Yet Mr Messi has had a chequered relationship
with his home country, which he left at 13 to train in Europe.
Compared with Diego Maradona, an Argentine midfield megastar of
an earlier generation, Mr Messi, who had to be given growth
hormones as a child, was long deemed timid and lacking in passion.
Maradona (who died in 2020) was overheard in 2016 saying that Mr
Messi didn’t “have enough personality to be a leader”. Argentines
resented the fact that he won often with Barcelona, his club in Spain,
but not with the national squad. With Mr Messi at its helm, la
selección lost two finals at the Copa América, Latin America’s top
football competition, and one at the World Cup. In frustration, he
briefly retired from the national team in 2016.

All that changed last year, when Argentina won the Copa América
trophy for the first time in 28 years. Since then, Messi-mania has
gripped the country. His T-shirt, emblazoned with the number 10, has
become a national uniform. He has started to sound more combative.
Clips of Mr Messi asking Wout Weghorst, a Dutch striker, “What’re
you looking at, dummy?” after a nasty quarter-final match which
threatened to descend into a brawl, have been remixed to electronic
dance music, printed on mugs, and tattooed on the bodies of super-
fans.

In Argentina, the beautiful game is more than a sport. “When they ask
you who you are, you answer: I am a son, I am a father and I belong
to such and such team,” says Ariel Scher, a journalist who writes
about football. “The construction of an identity in this country is
unthinkable without some kind of link to football.”

Football and national identity became intertwined after Argentina beat

England in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico, in which
Maradona scored two goals, one famed for its beauty and the other—
a handball not spotted by the referee—for vexing a generation of
English fans. Coming on the heels of Argentina’s humiliating defeat
after invading the Falkland Islands, a British territory in the South
Atlantic, it felt to many like a moment of national vindication.
Maradona became, to some, a demi-God. A sect called the Church of
Maradona boasts thousands of adherents, its own ten
commandments and a newly opened branch in Mexico.

If football is a religion in Argentina, then a World Cup victory is its

spiritual apotheosis—and this one comes at a time of national agony.
Argentina has been battered this year by record droughts, inflation
reaching 100%, and fractious politics. The vice-president, Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner, survived an assassination attempt when a
gun held only inches from her face failed to fire; and earlier this
month she was sentenced to six years in jail over a corruption
scandal.

Against this chaotic backdrop, the national team has spread joy and
even temporary harmony. The deep-rooted grieta, or rift, in Argentine
politics between Ms Fernández’s followers and the liberal opposition
has not been forgotten. But Ms Fernández’s supporters were
uncharacteristically quiet after her conviction on December 6th,
perhaps because they were at home watching the football. Congress
has had trouble reaching the quorum to hold a session, partly
because some legislators are in Doha.

“World Cup fever has helped the government end a year that could
otherwise have been explosive in a fairly peaceful way,” says Andrés
Malamud, an Argentine political scientist at the University of Lisbon.
But as the country’s politicians gear up for a general election in 2023,
they cannot expect happy memories of the World Cup to save them.
“All the research about the effects of sporting victories on elections
shows that they are ephemeral—they don’t last more than two
weeks.”

Still, Argentina’s political class could learn from its sportsmen. The
team is more close-knit than in previous World Cups, says Klaus
Gallo, a historian who has written on football at Torcuato di Tella
University in Buenos Aires. Mr Messi shone not only because of his
talent but also because he could rely on the men around him. The
country’s divided government, in which the moderate president and
the leftist vice-president go for months without speaking, could take
note. So could the opposition, which has sometimes fomented the
grieta at the expense of conciliation.

Much like some Argentines used to deride Mr Messi, Argentine

politicians have a habit of undermining their best assets. Ms
Fernández and much of her leftist wing of Peronism, the populist
movement that has dominated Argentina for seven decades, have
vilified Argentina’s agribusiness and the private sector more
generally, though these are the motors of the country’s economy.
Argentina’s political class could learn from its country’s belated
embrace of their star midfielder–if you’ve got it, appreciate it.

The final lesson comes from Mr Messi and la selección’s modest

manager, Lionel Scaloni. “In the past five World Cups, Argentina has
done better with managers who were humble and focused on
planning,” says Mr Malamud. “And they fared badly with managers
who were showmen and braggarts.” The braggarts were Maradona in
2010, who, though an excellent player, was a terrible coach, and
Jorge Sampaoli in 2018. The hard workers have been José
Pékerman in 2006, Alejandro Sabella in 2014 and Mr Scaloni.

The prudence and professionalism of Argentina’s manager and his

star player offer a sobering contrast to the amateurism with which
Argentina’s economy is managed, with a dozen exchange rates and a
host of price and currency controls. Argentina’s political leaders talk a
good game, but fail to deliver results. Unlike the quietly spoken,
ruthlessly goal-focused Mr Messi.■
Asia
 

Slum-mop billionaire
Dumplings and skewers
Moving house
 
Slum-mop billionaire

Can India’s richest man remake Mumbai’s biggest

slum?
Gautam Adani takes on India’s essential, impossible job:
redeveloping Dharavi

Dec 20th 2022 | MUMBAI

DHARAVI
IS
A
square mile of corrugated iron, concrete blocks and
plastic sheeting in the middle of Mumbai, crammed with humanity.
With perhaps 1m residents, the slum is one of the world’s biggest. As
a setting for outlandish rags-to-riches stories, it may be the best-
known. In “Slumdog Millionaire”, which won eight Oscars in 2009, a
Dharavi youth’s hardscrabble experiences helped him win the Indian
version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” In “Gully Boy”, a more
recent Bollywood potboiler, a slum-dwelling rapper overcomes
prejudice to win the hearts of the city’s Westernised overclass. But
Dharavi’s latest saga may be its most dramatic yet.

Slap bang in the middle of India’s space-constrained financial capital,

the slum is a huge obstacle to Mumbai’s—and therefore India’s—
development. The state government of Maharashtra, in which
Mumbai sits, has for nearly two decades therefore been trying to
entice private developers to Dharavi with promises of rich returns. Yet
it has failed, chiefly because of the main impediment to most big
infrastructure projects in India. Many of the slum-dwellers don’t want
to move. And in India poor people have votes.

Redeveloping the slum in a way that avoids political meltdown while

generating an attractive return is a formidable endeavour. S.V.R.
Srinivas, the official in charge of the project, has called it “by far one
of the most complex tasks ever to be undertaken in the world”. Yet
last month came news of a possible breakthrough. A fresh contract to
fix up Dharavi was awarded to Gautam Adani, Asia’s richest and
perhaps India’s best-connected man.

Mr Adani, a former diamond trader whose vast conglomerate controls

ports, solar farms, food processing, coal mines and much else, has
released few details of the deal, which is expected to be signed in the
coming weeks. But the long-standing plan is to rehouse those
Dharavi residents who settled in the slum before 2000 in new flats
built within its borders. Most others will be offered new public rental
housing within a 10km (6.2-mile) radius, with an option to buy the
properties over time.
Many of the slum’s thousands of cottage industries, which churn out
textiles, leather and metal goods by the truckload, will also be
relocated within Dharavi’s boundaries, even if they may have to
downsize. Those considered to be polluting will be excluded.
Whatever former slumland remains will be for Mr Adani. Superbly
located on three suburban railway lines, an upcoming metro line and
adjacent to Mumbai’s prime commercial district, it could be worth
30,000-40,000 rupees ($360-480) a square foot at today’s rates,
reckons Gulam Zia of Knight Frank India, a property firm.

Dharavi’s location and fame make it a powerful example of a much

bigger problem. India’s cities are home to over a third of its
population, or around 480m people, and are the engines of its growth.
Yet the poor conditions in which most city-dwellers live, learn and
labour are a blight and significant speed limit. Around half live in
slums and a third without a connection to piped water, according to
the UN. In 2016 a third of India’s urban-dwellers lived more than three
to a room. In Dharavi’s hutments, as its slum shacks are called, a
dozen people to a tiny room is not uncommon. “To live in a proper
home, to have a toilet, it is a matter of dignity,” says Raju Korde, an
entrepreneur in Dharavi.

As so often in India, if the problem is allowed to fester it will grow. The

UN reckons India’s urban population will rise to 43% of the total by
2035. So there is a lot riding on Mr Adani’s plan—and the tycoon will
embark on it with two great advantages. First, a capacity to finance its
large upfront costs in the absence of any return for several years. Mr
Adani secured the contract by guaranteeing a minimum investment of
50.7bn rupees ($614m). Pankaj Kapoor of Liases Foras, a real-estate
research firm, reckons the total cost of the project will be around
230bn rupees.

Second, Mr Adani will have strong support from the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), which is the power behind Maharashtra’s state
government as well as in Delhi. The BJP
has made infrastructure
development central to its agenda. And Mr Adani is a close ally of its
leader, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. Where previous failed
redevelopments of Dharavi were “developer driven”, notes Mr
Srinivas, the state government will now be more involved. It will form
a special-purpose vehicle for the venture with Mr Adani’s group and
take a 20% stake in the project.

Even so, the giant slum remains daunting. “We are not in a
dictatorship,” says Mr Srinivas. “Doing this project requires
consensus.” Yet so many Dharavi residents will lose out to the
redevelopment that consensus is hard to imagine. Slum-dwellers who
are eligible for a new home worry that they will lose their current good
access to schools, meeting-places and the sense of community that
is richly evident in Dharavi’s caste- and ethnically-based quarters.
Many do not trust the government’s promises. Mumbai abounds with
cases of former slum residents stuck in so-called transit housing after
the developers of their new homes went bust.

The slum’s small-business owners are even more afraid of being

uprooted, especially those who face being dispatched far away. “No
one is against development,” says Mehmood Khan, who runs an
aluminium-recycling business in Dharavi’s industrial cluster. “But if the
residents are being resettled locally we should be, too.” In fact, only
around 30% of the slum-dwellers are eligible for free rehousing. And
among the rest are many Dharavi residents who have spent
thousands of rupees to buy a slum dwelling which, lacking title, now
looks worthless. They will not be dispossessed without a fight.

The slum does not feel braced for conflict, at least. There has been
little organised opposition to the latest redevelopment plan. Decades
of failed schemes have bred a certain fatalism, or complacency, in
Dharavi. Mr Adani will have seven years to complete the public-
housing part of the project after the contract is signed; he will have
another ten years to develop the outstanding slumland. “Ask anyone
in Dharavi and they will say, ‘Why talk about it? If it does happen
maybe it will happen in 20 years,’” says Laxmi, a third-generation
resident, who works in a crèche for the children of ragpickers. The
combination of Mr Adani and his Hindu-nationalist allies looks like an
unprecedented force for change in Dharavi. But many locals think
they have seen this film before.■

Dumplings and skewers

Japan’s cities are being remade for an ageing

population
The coastal city of Toyama is a global exemplar of “compact living”

Dec 20th 2022 | Toyama

TOYAMA
NESTLES between a deep blue bay and snow-topped
peaks, some 250km northwest of Tokyo. In many ways, it is a
quintessential regional Japanese city: its residents are greying, its
industry is stable but sclerotic, its cuisine is exquisite. American
firebombs targeting its steel mills wiped out 99% of Toyama’s centre
during the second world war. Afterwards, the city was rapidly rebuilt
and sprawled as its population grew. But that was then. Since the
1990s the city of 414,000 (and falling) has been battling the ills of an
ageing population: ballooning bills, falling tax revenues and an out-of-
date urban plan.

Yet Toyama has battled much better than most—even managing a

modest revival. A sleek new light rail line, Japan’s first, snakes
through its city centre. Skirting a spruced-up medieval castle, walls
white as snow, the line runs to a formerly neglected port
neighbourhood further north along the bay. A former elementary
school, its classrooms surplus to requirement, has been turned into a
snazzy old folks’ centre with hot-spring exercise pools. On a new
central plaza stands the crown jewel of the renewed Toyama: a
cultural complex designed by Kuma Kengo, a star architect,
containing an extensive library and a glass art museum.

The city has adopted what urban planners call a “compact city” policy.
Recognising that sprawl is expensive to build, maintain and service,
planners try to make cities smaller, denser and less car-reliant. These
aims, long pursued in Europe, are relatively new to Japan. Local
governments consider them a means to “triage municipal liabilities”
amid demographic change, says Andre Sorensen of the University of
Toronto. The World Bank calls Toyama “a global role model” for
compact cities.

Planners there have pursued what they call a “dumpling and skewer”
structure, in which denser hubs (the dumplings) are linked by public
transport (the skewers). Making it work required first winning over lots
of recalcitrant locals. Mori Masashi, who was Toyama’s mayor from
2002 to 2021 and spearheaded the transformation, held hundreds of
town hall discussions of the plan. “I had to convince people to think
30 years into the future,” he explains. He also travelled widely to learn
from cities as far afield as Amsterdam and Portland.

Thoughtful design helped. The new light rail has carriages that align
flush with station platforms, eliminating the steps that can trip up
elderly riders. Lest youngsters feel left out, the city also built a
skatepark, a rarity in Japan. Such projects made canny use of the
city’s existing resources. Old rail tracks were repurposed for the new
light rail, a move that reduced costs by 75%, according to the World
Bank. While the government handled construction, it farmed the rail
network out to an expert private firm. It also offered subsidies to
entice people to move into the dumplings.

The policy, though no panacea for the demographic squeeze,

changed Toyama’s trajectory. The city arrested the outflow of people
from its centre: net migration into the downtown area was negative
before 2008 but has since been growing. In 2005 only 28% of
Toyama residents lived along public-transit corridors; by 2019 nearly
40% did. The new developments have made property more attractive.
Land prices in the city centre had been declining by around 2% a
year until 2012; in the decade since, they have grown by an average
of 2% per year, with gains in some areas reaching as high as 6%.
Using increased tax revenue from the revived city centre to support
more remote parts of the region is a “basic model for other cities”,
says Nitta Hachiro, the governor of the surrounding prefecture, also
called Toyama.

The new urban design may have other long-term benefits. Public
transport use among those aged 60 and older has more than trebled.
Sakamoto Kazuko, a 73-year-old local, says the new network has
made life “more convenient”. She goes out more often than before,
using a discount rail pass for the elderly to visit the city centre and
stroll while her grandchildren are at school. Small-scale studies show
promising results: old folks who stay active by using their discount
transit passes need less nursing care than those who do not.
For those living far from the centre, the benefits are less clear. The
compact city is a “bubble” which people outside it look on with “cold
eyes”, says one 73-year-old shopkeeper in the suburbs. Local
governments with ageing, shrinking populations face hard choices
about where to keep water and sewers running and where to close
schools and clinics. Even as cities strive to become more compact,
they may fail to reach the density necessary to keep businesses
profitable, says Okata Junichiro, also of the University of Tokyo. But
they must try. Japanese cities once grew boldly. As the population
ages and declines, they must learn to shrink with grace. ■
Moving house

Extreme weather is making parts of Australia

uninhabitable
Some towns and suburbs will have to move to higher ground

Dec 20th 2022 | LISMORE

FROM
HER balcony in Lismore, a town in northern New South
Wales, Maralyn Schofield surveys the wreckage of her
neighbourhood. Located at a confluence of the slow-moving Wilsons
River, her house was erected on 13-metre stilts to preserve it from
seasonal floods. Yet when Lismore was inundated last February, after
days of torrential rainstorms, the floodwaters poured into Ms
Schofield’s sitting-room.

She was rescued by boat and deposited on a neighbour’s roof. At

least her house, now patched up with blankets and election billboards
for walls, is still standing, she bravely notes. The house next door is
in a crumpled heap. Another was washed away.

Australia’s extreme climate makes it especially vulnerable to global

warming. Much of its vast interior is semi-arid and, with temperatures
1.5°C above the long-term average, increasingly beset by wildfires
and drought. A warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture,
which makes the country subject to record-breaking precipitation—
such as the massive rainfall and flooding it has suffered this year.

Brisbane received almost a year’s worth of rain in five days last

February, costing A$656m ($444m) in damage. Suburbs west of
Sydney were subsumed in July for the fourth time in 18 months. Vast
quantities of water recently gushed through the Murray-Darling basin,
a giant river system in eastern Australia, swallowing several towns.
This year’s floods have claimed the lives of at least 27 people and
destroyed or damaged well over 28,000 houses. And as this article
went to press South Australia was threatened by a fresh inundation.

Conservative politicians, often in hock to the coal industry, denied for

years that such disasters were getting worse. This not only stopped
Australia curbing its emissions, it also prevented it from taking
effective measures to adapt to the warming they cause. The
government “muddled through with easy options”, says Jamie Pittock
of the Australian National University. It built levees, raised homes and
splurged on post-disaster clean-ups. Australia is estimated to have
spent almost 50 times as much responding to disasters in the past
couple of decades as on building more resilient houses and other
infrastructure.

But as the cost of climate-related damage rises, it is becoming harder

to ignore. According to the Climate Council, an advocacy group,
about one in 25 Australian homes could be uninsurable due to
excessive flood risk by 2030.

The Labor government of Anthony Albanese, elected in May, has set

stiffer emissions-reduction targets. Having campaigned on a promise
to increase funding for climate-related disasters, it has also helped
launch a more serious debate on how Australia’s towns and suburbs
can adapt to the effects of warming. Some will have to be
abandoned. There is a “recognition that we actually have to undergo
managed retreat and pay people to move,” says Mr Pittock. Many in
Lismore’s battered suburbs concur. “I love my house,” says Ms
Schofield, but living in the flood-zone has become “just too risky”.

One solution is for governments to “buy back” untenable homes in

order to take them off the market. In October state and federal
governments launched an A$800m “resilience” fund that will buy
2,000 properties in northern New South Wales from people facing a
“catastrophic risk to life”. The fund will also provide money for owners
to raise or waterproof their flooring. A similar scheme, of A$740m,
has been established in Queensland.

Another approach is to help locals to exchange their ruined plots for

safer ones, as happened in Grantham, a small town west of Brisbane.
After floods in 2011 killed 12 people and destroyed much of
Grantham’s infrastructure, the local council bought fields on higher
ground and moved dozens of families to them under a land-swap
agreement. Some homeowners simply cut their properties free of the
foundations and carted them uphill.

Where Australians choose not to leave disaster-prone areas, state

governments may end up forcibly acquiring their land. Meanwhile, the
short-termism that has got Australia into this fix endures. Even as
New South Wales and other states are trying to nudge people out of
some high-risk areas, they are funnelling them into others. Thus, for
example, the intensive development taking place on the floodplains
west of Sydney.

In 2017 a federal infrastructure agency predicted that the number of

people living on its floodplains could double by 2050, to over 260,000.
Yet the city’s western suburbs already see regular heavy flooding.
The state’s premier, Dominic Perrottet, recently promised to impose
some building restrictions, but only in the most dangerous areas.
“People have to live somewhere,” he says. Yet fire and water will
increasingly limit their options.■
China
 

A covid stress test

Way back when
 
A pandemic stress test

A wave of covid-19 reveals flaws in China’s health

system
It is better than it used to be, but still needs reform

Dec 19th 2022 |

WITHIN
THE next month, China’s medical institutions will face their
“darkest hour”. This warning by Zhang Wenhong, a prominent
infectious-disease expert, has been circulated by state media. It
reflects a view that not long ago would have been treated as heresy
in “zero-covid” China. But with the virus now sweeping the country,
including its hospitals, talk of crushing it has ceased. People are
queuing for hours at fever clinics. Medical staff are falling sick in
droves. In the coming weeks deaths will rise rapidly as the disease
takes its toll on an undervaccinated population.

For much of the past three years, since cases of covid-19 were first
detected in the central city of Wuhan, the government has viewed its
handling of the pandemic with pride. It had succeeded in keeping
covid at bay and deaths to an astonishingly small number compared
with many other countries. It had also managed to turn this to great
propaganda advantage. At least until late this year, when the virus
began to run loose and protests erupted over often-brutally enforced
lockdowns, many people appeared to buy the official line that China’s
accomplishments were the product of a superior political system, one
said to be uniquely capable of mobilising people and resources on a
scale needed to prevent the virus from spreading.

With zero-covid now all but abandoned and streets near-emptied not
by lockdowns but by fear, the public’s attention is turning to the
health-care apparatus. In recent days calls in Beijing to 120, the
number for medical emergencies, have risen to five or six times the
normal level. “Covid chaos”, as a newspaper in Beijing called it, has
broken out in hospitals. People in many cities have been flocking to
them, terrified even by mild infection with the virus. They were once
told that it posed a grave threat to their lives. Now, dismissively,
officials are calling the current Omicron variant flu-like. But immunity
to covid is low in China, so the ballooning number of cases will result
in many deaths: about 1.5m in the next few months, by The
Economist’s worst-case estimate.
Fatalities on such a scale would still be lower, as a share of the
population, than seen in many other countries as a result of covid.
But they will raise questions in China about weaknesses in the
country’s health-care system and whether they may have contributed
to people’s suffering and the ordeal of medical staff.

It would not be the first time for such soul-searching. An outbreak of

SARS, which was first detected in China in 2002 and killed hundreds,
mostly within China, prompted much debate about the system’s
failings. Having initially covered up the emergence of SARS, officials
became more open. Henk Bekedam, then the World Health
Organisation’s chief representative in Beijing, recalls a study by
Chinese government researchers, funded by the WHO, that was
completed in 2005. China Youth Daily, a state-controlled newspaper,
revealed details of it with an eye-catching headline: “China’s health
reforms have not succeeded”. It was “quite something” to see those
words, says Mr Bekedam.

Under Xi Jinping, who became China’s leader a decade ago, public

acknowledgment of policy error would be harder to imagine. Perhaps,
he may feel, there is less need of one. Much has been done to
remedy the problems that SARS highlighted.

A big one was the public’s fear of any contact with the health system
because of the high cost of getting treated. Before SARS, community-
level care had crumbled. Many state-owned enterprises and the
“people’s communes” that had once provided health services had
been dismantled. Hospitals remained under state control but had
become market-driven. To pad their budgets and the wallets of their
staff they could set their own prices for drugs and treatments. In
cities, only people with formal job contracts had access to insurance.
Most of China’s 900m rural dwellers had to pay for their own medical
expenses.
After SARS, officials ramped up efforts to enroll rural residents in a
government-funded health-insurance scheme. In 2007 they did the
same in cities among those without formal jobs. Two years later the
government unveiled a plan for health reform that aimed to provide
affordable, basic care for everyone (“universal health coverage”, as
the WHO calls it) by 2020. It involved a big increase in government
spending. The government’s annual outlay on health as a share of
GDP tripled to about 3% compared with the amount being spent at
the time of SARS, the WHO reckons (see chart 1). By 2011 more
than 95% of China’s population had some form of government-
financed health insurance. By 2017 the number of health workers per
person had increased by more than 85% and the number of hospital
beds by nearly 145%.

Lessons from Wuhan

Much, then, to crow about. But the eruption of covid in 2019 showed
that a lot remained to be done. The SARS outbreak, tiny by
comparison, had revealed woeful inadequacy in China’s disease-
surveillance apparatus. With American help, China tried to remedy
this by training hundreds of people in how to respond to such events.
But covid was rampant in Wuhan by the time the chief of the Chinese
Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, George Gao, learned
about it, according to reports.

What unfolded in Wuhan in 2020 exposed wider problems in the

health-care system. The government’s efforts to rebuild community-
level care, and make it act as a gateway to hospitals like Britain’s
general-practitioner (GP) clinics, had clearly made little progress.
Terrified residents of Wuhan, often with only mild symptoms of covid,
rushed straight to hospitals—disdainful (as many Chinese are) of
neighbourhood health centres where doctors tend to be less well-
trained and equipment inferior. Writing in the Chinese Journal of
Health Policy, four academics in Wuhan described the scene as
“chaotic”, like a bank run. Community health centres proved of little
use. Their doctors were summoned to help out in hospitals. A
national plan for health-care development had called for community
clinics to have 3.5 health workers per 1,000 residents served by
2020. At the start of the pandemic, Wuhan’s had only 2.7, the
scholars noted. Stripped of their bare-bones staff, some clinics had to
close as the virus swept the city.

Days after the first covid-related death was announced, the tide
began to turn. A citywide lockdown was imposed. The city’s
government began demanding that citizens with symptoms be
escorted to community health centres for checks. This helped to ease
some of the pressure on hospitals. But the clinics struggled to cope.
Many people with chronic conditions such as high blood pressure or
diabetes had been getting their medicine and check-ups at hospitals.
When hospitals stopped providing such services to limit the flow of
people, community facilities were supposed to take up the reins. They
were unprepared. “Throughout the city, it became difficult for
outpatients with chronic diseases to see a doctor or get their
medicine,” the academics said.

As the virus runs rampant again, officials are trying to show they are
better prepared. The city government in Beijing says that by the end
of November—a week before the main mechanisms of zero-covid
were dismantled—240 of the capital’s community health centres had
set up fever clinics. Within another few days the remaining 110 or so
had opened them, too.

But until recently they had not been busy vaccinating people. Amy, a
vlogger in the city of Kunming, says she was fully vaccinated at her
local clinic six months ago, but has heard nothing from them since
about a booster. (Chinese-made vaccines, the only type permitted in
China, are less effective than the ones commonly used in rich
countries.) She has just tested positive, with mild symptoms. Were it
to get more serious, official advice is that she go first to her
community clinic. But Amy insists she would go to hospital, despite
the queues and brevity of consultations. The quality of care is better
there, she says.

Trick or treatment?

Amy’s view is not surprising. China’s health-care system, and the

ability of its health-care institutions to respond to emergencies such
as covid, are still saddled with many of the same problems that were
evident during SARS. In 2017 the government stopped allowing
hospitals to sell essential drugs at a mark-up as a way of generating
revenue—a practice that had been causing huge public resentment.
But hospitals still find other ways to make money, such as by
prescribing unnecessary treatments, including expensive inpatient
care. To attract customers they buy shiny, imported MRI scanners
and other diagnostic tools, and charge patients steep prices for tests,
as less glamorous but important areas of care are neglected.

Since 2001, thanks to the government’s insurance schemes, out-of-

pocket payments for health care have dropped from about 60% of
households’ health spending to 30%, according to “Healthy China”, a
report in 2019 by the WHO, the World Bank and the Chinese
government. But this was still higher than the average of about 20%
in the OECD, a club of rich countries.

The profit motive in hospitals has created a blizzard of distortions.

One is evident in the country’s shortage of intensive-care beds, a
problem that will worsen as serious cases of covid rise. Before the
pandemic, hospitals had pondered their worth. Why spend money on
installing them and training specialist staff when a far steadier stream
of revenue could be created by focusing on the predictable needs of
patients with non-communicable diseases, such as cancer and heart
ailments? These are fast-growing as the population ages, lifestyles
change and pollution undermines health.

In early December the government ordered hospitals to ensure their

critical-care beds were ready for use by covid patients, including beds
earmarked for other kinds of illnesses. This month the government
said there were now about ten per 100,000 people—a big increase
from recent official figures of about four.
But The Economist’s modelling suggests that is still only about one-
third of the number that may be needed to cope with the covid wave
(see chart 2). A paucity of intensive-care capacity had been one of
the main reasons for maintaining a zero-covid policy. Ramping it up
now will not be helped by a chronic shortage of nurses with the
necessary skills. Those who suffer most from the critical-care deficit
will be people living in places other than the biggest cities, where the
fanciest hospitals are concentrated. In the countryside many village
“doctors” do not even have a university degree.

The government is clearly aware of the problem. Its latest health-

reform plan, published in 2016, stresses the need for an effective
primary-care system. It has spent billions of dollars on beefing up
community-level facilities. But recruiting talent for the medical
profession is hard enough—salaries are relatively low, as is public
respect for doctors. Violence against medical staff is common, often
triggered by high prices for their services. Persuading doctors to work
in general practice outside hospitals is even tougher. With fewer
expensive facilities and medicines at their disposal, community GPs
have less opportunity to augment their salaries.

Neither they, nor doctors in hospitals, have much incentive to make

the system work better. Ideally, primary-care facilities should refer
people in need of special care to hospitals, which in turn should send
patients back for routine follow-up treatment. But referrals can
deprive those making them of customers, and doctors are reluctant to
lose business. George Liu of La Trobe University in Melbourne notes
that the volume of care delivered by community health workers in
China has increased in the past decade, but their share of the total
has declined. “That’s because they are still competing with hospitals,”
he says.

As covid cases rise and local governments scramble to beef up

primary-care facilities to divert patients from overstretched hospitals,
some see a glimmer of hope. On WeChat, Health News, the health
ministry’s mouthpiece, said the shift of attention to community clinics
had created an “opportunity”. Their fever departments should become
a permanent feature, not just a covid-related one, it suggested, so
that people with high temperatures would no longer feel a need to go
to hospital.

It is astonishing that China, a country that has hosted two Olympic

games and boasts of landing spaceships on the Moon, is still
debating how to build community health clinics that patients trust and
want to use. If the covid pandemic can accelerate long-needed
change, some of the suffering it is causing will not have been in vain.
■

Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter,

to understand what the world makes of China—and what China
makes of the world. And all our stories relating to the pandemic can
be found on our coronavirus hub.
Way back when

Bertrand Russell and “The Problem of China”

A sage’s century-old look at a country on the rise

Dec 20th 2022 | BEIJING

UPON
ARRIVING in China in 1920 Bertrand Russell, a British
philosopher, was overwhelmed at the welcome he received. “They
hail me as the second Confucius, and invite me to tell them exactly
what they are to do with their country,” he wrote to a paramour. “It is a
terrible responsibility.”

Still, Russell took up the challenge. After a sojourn lasting nearly ten
months, he returned to England and in 1922 published a book called
“The Problem of China”. It remains relevant a century later, offering
enough wisdom to offset its occasional lapses into folly.

Russell’s observations are at times prescient. He described, for

example, how “the most urgent problem in China’s relations with
foreign powers is Japanese aggression.” He also noted that Russia’s
Bolsheviks enjoyed “the enthusiastic sympathy of the younger
Chinese students” and might gain wider appeal.

One young person whom Russell met during his stay was Mao
Zedong. The future Communist leader’s name does not appear in the
book. But Russell declared that “a vigorous reformer possessed of
literary skill could carry with him the great majority of Young China.”

Russell thought China was being held back by Confucianism’s

emphasis on filial piety, which, he argued, led to corruption and
“prevented the growth of public spirit”. He foresaw a booming
Chinese textile sector, with the potential to be “as great as that of
Lancashire”. He thought that contact with the West would help
China’s industrial development, which he expected to “proceed
rapidly throughout the next few decades”. But he warned China that
“development should be controlled by the Chinese rather than by
foreign nations.”

Critics knock Russell for failing to spend much time in the countryside
and holding China to different standards from other countries. Some
of his observations are quaint, such as his description of Shanghai as
“a vast city, about the size of Glasgow”. Others are cringe-worthy,
such as his view of the Chinese as “gentle, urbane, seeking only
justice and freedom”. Compared with “white races”, they have “much
less desire…to tyrannise over other people,” he wrote. Tibetans and
Uyghurs might disagree.

“I don’t think I shall write on China. It is a complex country, with an old

civilisation,” Russell stated in correspondence, before changing his
mind. In his letters he often sounds like a detractor. In one, for
example, he describes China as “decaying and rotten, like the late
Roman Empire”. He also gripes that “most of the students are stupid
and timid,” whereas in the book he calls them “able and
extraordinarily keen”.

“The Problem of China” was widely read in the country and praised
for its largely positive assessment. (It is still available there today.)
Russell believed that China, with its resources, population and
patriotic spirit, could become “the greatest Power in the world after
the United States”. But he also offered a warning: “The danger of
patriotism is that, as soon as it has proved strong enough for
successful defence, it is apt to turn to foreign aggression.”

Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter,

to understand what the world makes of China—and what China
makes of the world.
Christmas Specials
 

Time lords
All uncreated men are equal
The two Brazilian booms that bookmark the history of
the car
Use your loaf
Paws for thought
When money dies
Going off grid
Batter up
The wibbly-wobbly circle of life
The weight of the world
The myth of the holy cow
Complex saviours
The three knife trilogy
Hot spot
Taking the mickey
Through a crystal curtain
Secrets of the shallows
 
Time lords

In a corner of Java live the Amish of Indonesia

The Baduy of Indonesia shun modernity. But growing numbers are
abandoning their way of life

Dec 20th 2022 | kanekes

IT
WAS
JUST another day in Kanekes when Herman Jarkan
(pictured) was struck by an epiphany. He was rushing home after the
weekly shop one afternoon in May 2014. On his shoulders was
balanced a baton of wood, on either end of which hung two big
knapsacks laden with rice, cooking oil and salted fish. His bare feet
gripped the cobblestones of the path which meandered up hills and
through forests.

The walk afforded him time to think. His thoughts often drifted back to
the question that had nagged away at him for years: should he leave
his village and family to seek a better life on the frontier?

The arguments for and against were as well trodden as the path
under his feet. His village contained his world. That was by design.
His people had always shunned modernity. But he had travelled to
the big cities in the Outside and marvelled: people there lived in
buildings that scraped the sky and drove machines many times faster
than the fastest man. That world tantalised him. He wanted to be
closer to it. But he had to be sure. Once he left, he could never move
back.

Over the years Mr Herman had learned to dismiss those thoughts.

But today was different. “If I don’t leave now, I never will,” he realised.
So he decided to go. It felt as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders.

Kanekes is a mere three-hour drive from Jakarta, Indonesia’s heaving

capital, but it feels a world apart. Gone are the high-rises, the pell-
mell traffic and the throngs of people. In their place is the forest: the
ancient trees standing sentry, the flashy green moss carpeting the rot,
and amid the slick humus, paths leading to the terraced bamboo
houses of the Baduy.

The Baduy have lived in this corner of western Java for centuries.
They are an example of what Indonesians call masyarakat adat,
ethnic groups who live according to their traditions. Life revolves
around their religion. They believe that their forest is the wellspring of
the universe and that they are its divinely appointed guardians. To
protect the land, they must “follow whatever our ancestors did in
order to live in harmony with nature,” says Sangsang, a Baduy official
who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.

The Baduy are a people trapped in amber

The Baduy, who are subsistence farmers, live by a rigid set of rules.
They are not allowed to irrigate their fields, use chemical fertilisers
and pesticides, or plant crops that harm the land’s fertility. To defend
the land, they must be ritually pure. Modernity is a byword for moral
corruption. Electricity is banned; so are radio, television and mobile
phones, as well as the use of modern vehicles. They cannot wear
shoes or long trousers. Toilets are forbidden.
Like the Amish of America, the Baduy are a people trapped in amber.
A 16th-century Dutch etching of two Baduy men could be a modern-
day portrait. And yet, on the outskirts of Kanekes, an acid-rain drizzle
of modernity is slowly dissolving the amber.

The Baduy are divided into two castes: Inner Baduy, who number
about 900, and the 15,000 Outer Baduy, who live in a horseshoe of
land encircling the sacred southern core of Kanekes. The Outers are
freer. They may travel in modern vehicles and can get away with
wearing shoes. But they are still not allowed to drive, and can charge
their phones only in the outside world. As a result, they seem to
straddle the past and present.

For centuries, the people of the interior have relied on Outer Baduy to
serve as a bulwark against modernity. The latter handle emissaries
from the outside world: the local government and tourists. That leaves
the hermits of the inner sanctum at liberty to pursue their asceticism.
As Mr Sangsang says, “Inner Baduy are higher in status” precisely
because they have less to do with the wider world than their
neighbours.
This hierarchy is woven into the fabric of everyday life, in the colour of
their clothes (black and blue for Outers, black and white for Inners); in
the walls of their bamboo houses (patterns are permitted only for
Outers); and in the deference Outers show Inners.
This difference is also mapped onto the land. The Inners and Outers
are separated geographically. Because they are pure of heart, Inners
may live among their sacred sites; Outers must live farther away. The
Indonesian government manages Outer Kanekes while the interior is
governed by Baduy spiritual leaders. “For Inner Baduy villages, this is
where the government stops,” says Jaro Saeja, the headman of the
Outer Baduy, pointing at his house. The two groups may visit each
other but for no longer than two nights.

There is, however, an exception to this commandment. Inners

convicted of committing the worst sins, such as adultery or driving a
car, are banished to Outer Kanekes for several months. The
punishment captures the vexed attitude Inners have towards Outers:
the former are grateful for the way the outer villages repel the wider
world. And yet it is a service that must, through contact with that
world, blemish their souls.

Despite the frontier’s association with sin, a growing number of Inners

are migrating to Outer Kanekes. Many who move had previously
been banished there. At the end of their exile, the authorities of the
interior ask whether they want to go home or stay in the outer ring.
“Most say ‘I will stay,’” says Mr Sangsang. He estimates that ten
Baduy—about 1% of the population of the inner core—move to the
frontier every year. They move, he says, because of the lure of the
modern. The authorities do not stand in their way. But it is not an
easy decision.

No going back

Mr Herman sits cross-legged in a hut near one of his fields, about a

five-minute drive from his home in Outer Baduy. He pulls out one of
two phones (“one for business, one for personal use”) and shows off
a picture of himself and two Baduy friends in Jakarta. It was taken by
a professional photographer—one of Mr Herman’s good friends, he
says.
Mr Herman first left Kanekes when he was 13. He was helping his
father, who made handicrafts for tourists, deliver a large order to a
customer in Jakarta. To get there they walked, barefoot, for two days.
When they arrived, Mr Herman saw skyscrapers and pylons. He saw
the tiny figures of labourers high up in the frame of a building they
were erecting, and a crane delivering metal girders to them. How did
they get so high up, he wondered. How did they communicate with
the crane operator? “I was astonished,” he says.

He began to spend more time in Outer Kanekes. Picking up odd jobs

there, he met tourists who taught him some Indonesian. “I wanted to
make friends from the outside world,” he recalls.
Outer Kanekes was nowhere near as alien as Jakarta but it was
different in its own way. The Outers had it much easier than the
Inners, Mr Herman thought. To construct their houses, they could use
saws. Inners had to use axes and machetes—bulky, tiring tools. In
the time that it took Inners to walk from the interior to the exterior,
Outers could travel by bus or train to Jakarta. He began to dream of
leaving.

Life got in the way. Mr Herman got married, had children, tended the
fields. The prospect of leaving his parents pained him. He did not
know how he would support himself in Outer Kanekes. “In the interior,
you manage together,” says Jamidi, Mr Herman’s nephew, who was
banished to the exterior in July 2022. Land is owned and tended
communally. By contrast, in the exterior, says Mr Jamidi, “Everything
is money.”

But Mr Herman continued to explore, visiting his friends in Jakarta a

few times a year. They showed him how to order a taxi on a mobile
phone and took him to fancy restaurants, where he had to explain his
bare feet to bemused security guards. Those trips stirred a longing for
adventure and agency. “I wanted to try things I’m not allowed to do,”
he says. “I wanted to try to be more free.”
That afternoon in 2014, when Mr Herman returned home from the
market, he told his wife of his decision. He yearned for the freedoms
of Outer Kanekes—but it was the growing hardship of life in the
interior that clinched his decision. As the population of Inners has
grown, the land allotted to every family has shrunk with each
generation. Mr Herman’s parents were apportioned one hectare of
land; Mr Herman received just half that.

Things would be different in the exterior, he reckoned. He would be

able to buy land and sell surplus produce to a much bigger market.
More tourists come to Outer Kanekes than to the interior (where
foreigners are banned), plus he would be able to use a mobile phone
to advertise and sell his wares to consumers online. “I thought, ‘Of all
five of us [his parents and siblings], one of us can’t be poor, one of us
has to progress.’ That was how I got the courage to go out.”
One month later, Mr Herman and his family left Inner Kanekes. At last
the dream that he had nurtured for 25 years had come true. Yet, far
from celebrating, Mr Herman was consumed with anxiety. He did not
have a job and he could hardly afford to feed his family. His worries
kept him up at night. So, too, did homesickness for life and his family
in the interior.

Liminal space

Eight years later, Mr Herman’s life is transformed. He owns four plots

of land, on which he grows bananas, durian, stink beans and timber.
He sells his produce online. He is prosperous, and was able to buy a
house for his newly married son. It took his parents a year to make
their peace with his decision to leave, but now they are pleased for
him, he says.

In many respects, Mr Herman is the picture of a modern Indonesian.

He distracts his one-year-old son with cartoons on his smartphone.
When he is not working the fields, he lives on his phone, just like any
other social-media obsessed millennial. He thinks in terms of profit
and loss, not virtue and vice—which is just as well given that he
wears flip-flops and has a solar panel affixed to his thatched roof,
breaking the prohibitions against shoes and electricity.

His new life is not without hardship. The individualism of the Outer
Baduy cleared the path for Mr Herman to remake himself into an
entrepreneur—but it comes with penury, too—a sense of alienation
from his culture. He has discouraged his siblings from following him
to the exterior, in part so they can look after their parents, but also to
spare them “the difficult hardships I had to endure” in Outer Kanekes.

Mr Herman does not regret his move: “I am really happy with my life.”
He says that he does not chafe against the rules of the Outer Baduy
as he did back in the interior. “If we give in to all our desires, it’s never
ending. As long as I have enough to feed and attend to my family’s
needs, I am content.” But every year a small but growing number of
Outers heed those desires and abandon Kanekes altogether.
Modernity is rushing in. There is no going back. ■

PHOTOGRAPHS: ROSA
PANGGABEAN
All uncreated men are equal

Should we care about people who need never

exist?
How do you value a life not yet lived?

Dec 20th 2022 |

IN 1852 THE HMS
Birkenhead, carrying troops to fight the Xhosa
wars, struck a rock near Danger Point in what is now South Africa.
The soldiers assembled quietly at the ship’s stern, while the women
and children on board clambered to safety on a small boat tethered
alongside. Over 440 men lost their lives, drowned, crushed, or eaten
by sharks.

Saving women and children first became known as the Birkenhead

drill. It was invoked on the Titanic and celebrated as an unwritten law
of the sea. To many at the time, its rationale seemed self-evident.
Women and children were “naturally more helpless”, as a journalist
put it. On the Titanic, one fashionable woman lamented that she was
a “prisoner in my own skirt”, unable even to jump into a lifeboat
without assistance.

Some have, however, suggested a deeper justification for the drill,

rooted in safeguarding the future of a society. Some of the Titanic
survivors went on to have children. Madeleine Astor remarried and
had two sons with her new husband. (One of them would describe
himself as a “most lucky man”, acknowledging that his mother’s good
fortune was also his own.) Leah Aks later gave birth to a daughter
and second son. Her great-granddaughter, a flautist, has taught a
class about the Titanic at the University of Tennessee. In rescuing
over 700 souls from the icy deep, the lifeboats of the Titanic also, in a
sense, “saved” the additional lives these survivors went on to create,
salvaging them from the deeper abyss of non-existence.

The questions posed by population ethics range from the intimate to

the cosmic

A growing band of philosophers, and a smaller number of

economists, have wondered how to value these sorts of lives—lives
which did not exist at the time of the rescue, but which could not have
existed without it. Their inquiries fall within a field known as
“population ethics”, which was invented in its modern form by Derek
Parfit, a British philosopher, in the 1970s. Economists routinely ask
how a policy or regulation affects people’s well-being. But often a
policy does not merely benefit or harm a population, it helps to create
it, changing the number and identity of the people in question. In
these cases, an analyst cannot simply compare the lives of a given
population with and without the policy. Their task is trickier than that,
because the group of people that exists with the policy will be
different from the one that exists without it.

The questions posed by population ethics range from the intimate to

the cosmic. Should a couple have a child—and should the
government pay for any fertility treatment? Should humankind seek to
colonise other planets to increase its potential size and lifespan
beyond Earth’s limits? Somewhere in between are the policy
questions posed by climate change, which would be less vexing if
humanity was less extensive. In a paper published in 2017, Noah
Scovronick of Princeton University and his co-authors calculated the
cost of preventing temperatures rising by more than two degrees
above pre-industrial levels. With a population of 9.7bn in 2050, the
annual cost of emissions curbs would increase to $481 per person.
With a smaller population of 8.7bn, the cost would drop to $471. The
second option is cheaper. The first has more people in it. How should
the two be ranked and evaluated?

Before making that call, any analyst would need more practical
details. They would want to know how the smaller population could
be achieved, for example: could it be done while respecting
everyone’s reproductive rights? But they would also need to answer a
philosophical conundrum: what weight to place on the 1bn or so
people who would exist in one scenario but not the other?

After the Titanic disaster, an official inquiry concluded that ships

should carry more lifeboats, despite the expense. Similar calculations
have become a routine part of economics, estimating how much
societies should spend on reducing other risks, such as road
accidents. These estimates do not shy away from putting a dollar
value on saving a life. They might, for example, infer the value from
the amount of extra pay people demand to work in dangerous jobs.
But it is vanishingly rare for these calculations to acknowledge that
saving someone’s life might also make it possible for their
descendants to live too.

The exceptions prove the rule. In 1981 W. Brian Arthur, then at the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria,
compared the cost to society of different kinds of death. On plausible
assumptions, saving someone from a motor accident was worth 2.5-4
times as much as sparing someone from cancer. Road victims tend to
be younger so they had more years of life ahead of them. They also
had more kids ahead of them. For every 100 people killed by cancer,
the world also loses the two children these cancer victims might have
had. For every 100 people killed on the road, society loses 32
potential children.

Saving the young from untimely death is not the only way for
governments to influence the number of people who come into
existence. Policies on family planning, parental leave and subsidised
child care can affect fertility rates fairly directly. Many other policies do
so indirectly and often inadvertently.

High house prices, for example, make it harder for young people to
start a family. The expense can also stop small families becoming
larger. One study found that a hypothetical increase in unemployment
by ten percentage points in Europe would reduce the number of
children per 100 women by nine. Increasing women’s education can
delay childbearing. It can also make women more employable, so
that staying at home to raise kids entails a bigger economic sacrifice.
In China, the long fight against covid-19 has coincided with a sharp
decline in the number of marriages and births. Scholars blame the
economic uncertainty and the strains of managing a household under
lockdown. Almost every big economic policy is also de facto a
population policy, because it will reshape the prospects of people who
could still have children.

For what it’s worth

All of this raises practical as well as philosophical questions. When
deciding how much to spend to save people from shipwrecks or road
accidents, should their potential offspring count? If some people are
never born because of a government decision—a tightening of
planning regulations that raises the price of homes, a hike in interest
rates that spreads unease and unemployment, or a pandemic-related
lockdown that keeps Cupid’s arrow in its quiver—should their non-
existence count against the policy?

The usual answer is no. The life of your potential offspring “has never
been counted as part of the value of saving your life,” notes John
Broome, a moral philosopher at Oxford. These lives can go
uncounted even when they are the point of a policy. In justifying the
public provision of infertility treatment, Britain’s clinical guidelines
dwell on the treatment’s benefits for the mother. But they decline to
consider the value of the child that might result. The same reticence
applies even to much bigger changes in population. Climate change,
for example, will change how and where people live, all of which will
presumably influence the size of the future population. But “in all the
very extensive writings on the harm of global warming, I have never
seen the effect on population mentioned among the harms or
benefits,” wrote Mr Broome in 2001. (He later served on a working
group for the International Panel on Climate Change.)

The reason for this silence, he went on to say, is obvious. “The

people who do these valuations take it for granted that changes in
population are not, in themselves, good or bad. They assume they
are ethically neutral.” Policymakers do, of course, worry about the
impact of extra people (or fewer) on everyone else. They worry about
the environmental strains of overpopulation and the fiscal strains of
demographic decline. But many are neutral about the change in
population in itself. Even if they could be assured that an extra 1bn
people would not overcrowd the planet and clog the atmosphere,
many would view the existence of this additional multitude as neither
good nor bad.
This stance is common, convenient and often compelling. The
intuition behind it was best captured by Jan Narveson, a Canadian
philosopher, in 1973. “We are in favour of making people happy,” he
wrote, “but neutral about making happy people.”

This intuition of neutrality is perhaps most appealing when applied to

a family’s decision whether or not to have children. That decision will
have all sorts of profound effects on others, most notably the parents.
But setting those aside, does a couple’s choice make the world better
or worse? Neither, argues Mr Narveson. As a result, “there is nothing
immoral, or even slightly unbenevolent, about having no children
when one could have had them.” This is true, he argues, even if the
children would probably have flourished.

You might object that the never-born child has lost out in some way.
Their non-existence is worse for them than the life they could have
led. But that is a metaphysical mistake, Mr Broome points out: if they
never exist, there is no “them” for it to be worse for.

This argument is not confined to modern philosophy. Lucretius, a

Roman poet, made the same point in verse 2,000 years ago:

“What loss were ours, if we had known not birth?

…whoso ne’er hath tasted life’s desire

Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth.

Poetically appealing, the intuition is also politically convenient. It

allows policymakers and analysts to give little weight or even thought
to the additional people who might come into the world as a result of
their policies, whether they be improving road safety, reducing home
prices or curtailing lockdowns. The 32 kids who might result from
saving 100 young motorists’ lives do not factor into the road-safety
budget. The child who might result from infertility treatment does not
feature in the calculation of that treatment’s costs and benefits.
People who would not exist without a decision cannot sway that
decision.

Making happy unicorns is a matter of moral indifference only as long

as someone is doing it

Because of the intuition’s appeal, Mr Broome went to considerable

philosophical lengths to preserve it in the preparation of his book
“Weighing Lives”. But at last he “grudgingly concluded” that it had “to
be abandoned”. Many other philosophers have reached the same
position. They include Parfit before him and more recently, William
MacAskill, who became an intellectual celebrity in 2022 with his book
“What We Owe the Future”. Mr MacAskill was one of Mr Broome’s
doctoral students, and his book describes a similar intellectual
journey away from the neutrality intuition.

Such journeys typically pass through several stations. One obvious

objection to neutrality is the threat of extinction. If one couple refuses
to have a child, it is neither good nor bad. But if every couple refuses,
it is a catastrophe. A recent New Yorker cartoon depicts Noah’s ark.
Amid the pairs of monkeys, elephants and giraffes, one unicorn says
to the other, “I just don’t think I want kids.” Making happy unicorns is a
matter of moral indifference only as long as someone is doing it.

Never was I ever

Critics of the neutrality principle point out its awkward asymmetry. It

applies to happy people but not to those who would be horribly
unhappy. Parfit imagined a “wretched” child, “so multiply diseased
that his life will be worse than nothing”. It would be wrong to bring
such children into the world, Mr Narveson conceded.

But this creates a moral dilemma. Everyone who gives birth takes an
ethical gamble. They hope to bring a happy child into the world. But
there is always a chance the child will suffer horribly, perhaps
because of a rare birth defect or later accident or illness. Thus in
order to do something morally neutral, they run the risk of doing
something morally regrettable.

Even when applied to “non-wretched” lives, the intuition of neutrality

runs into logical difficulties. By placing no weight on potential
populations, whatever their size and degree of contentment, neutrality
makes it hard to weigh them against each other. The ethical scales
give the same “neutral” reading for all of them, regardless of whether
they are large or small, happy indeed or merely happy enough.

In his book, Mr MacAskill imagines a would-be mother deciding

whether to have a child. She is suffering from a temporary vitamin
deficiency, which means that if she conceives now, her child will
suffer headaches later in life. If she waits, her child will not.
The scales are neutral about making a happy child with occasional
migraines. And they are neutral, too, about making a happy child
without. They give the same ethical reading, even though one of
those choices seems intuitively better than the other. In failing to
distinguish either of these scenarios from the childless status quo, the
scales also fail to distinguish them from each other.

Difficulties of this kind have prompted philosophers like Parfit and

Broome to look for a moral reason, and a workable method, for
weighing potential people. Parfit was wary of saying that existence is
better for a person than non-existence (since in the latter scenario,
there is no person). But even if causing someone to exist is not
“better” for a person than the alternative, it might still be “good” for
them, Parfit argued in his book “Reasons and Persons”. He quoted
another philosopher, Thomas Nagel. “All of us…are fortunate to have
been born. But…it cannot be said that not to have been is a
misfortune.”

If causing someone to exist is good for them, that good can be placed
on the ethical scales. By bearing a child, the mother in Mr MacAskill’s
example benefits that child. If she waits, she heaps a larger benefit
on the child without headaches than she would have conferred on the
different, earlier child with headaches.

What philosophers call an “impersonal view” is also possible. In

ranking futures, a decision-maker may decide that one world is better
than another, even if it is not better for anyone who exists in both. The
children who could exist in Mr MacAskill’s example would have lives
worth living. Such lives are good things. A world with them is better
than one without.

From an impersonal vantage point, people who merely could exist

should be weighed alongside those who do or will. This view of
potential people has potentially stark implications for everyone else. If
adding a (sufficiently) happy person to the world makes that world
better, then it might be worth adding them, even if it requires some
sacrifice on the part of others. A bigger, worse-off population could be
morally preferable to a smaller, better-off one. A world with 9.7bn
people paying $481 per year to fight carbon emissions might be
better than a world with fewer people paying less.

On a planet that already feels overstretched that is not an obviously

appealing position. But the same philosophical logic can be recast as
a radically green argument. Imagine the world reaches a point of
great environmental precariousness, such that every cut in pollution
today allows humanity to survive just a little longer. By living less well
ourselves, we can, in effect, add another generation to the lifespan of
our species. If our children also tighten their belts, they can add a
further generation. And the same is true of their offspring, too. In this
way, humanity might curtail the quality of life to increase the quantity
of life, as it extends over time.

The problem is where do you stop? When couched in these terms,

even savage cuts in the quality of life could be justified by a sufficient
increase in the quantity. We might be forced to conclude that a
threadbare world is better than a comfortable one if enough extra
people get to experience it.
This is one version of what Parfit dubbed the “repugnant conclusion”.
He imagined a world where people had lives that were barely worth
living (a life of “muzak and potatoes” as he put it). If the population
was sufficiently large (and in a philosophical thought experiment, the
only limit on a population’s size is the philosopher’s imagination) such
a world could be morally preferable to one where a smaller population
enjoyed lives of joy and abundance.

It is a deeply unappealing conclusion. It troubled Parfit for the rest of

his life and remains one of the “cardinal challenges of modern ethics”,
according to Gustaf Arrhenius of the Institute for Futures Studies. It is
one reason why some philosophers still tenaciously defend the
neutrality intuition.

Mr Broome thinks it can be avoided by properly calibrating the scales,

changing what counts as a borderline life. Parfit imagined it as a life
that is only just worth living for the person living it. For Mr Broome the
borderline is a life that is only just worth adding to the world, from an
impersonal viewpoint. If lives of muzak and potatoes do not make the
world better, if they are repugnant, then by definition they fall below
this line. And so only happier potential lives would have positive value
on a properly calibrated scale.

The sum of all fears

But even if this calibration deflects the repugnant conclusion, it has

other off-putting implications. As Mr Arrhenius has pointed out, it
might favour a world of hellish lives over another world where many
more people lead slightly negative lives just below Mr Broome’s
borderline. Indeed, the repugnant conclusion and its variants are
fiendishly difficult to avoid. They pop up in many fields of ethics and in
many guises. Viewed from a certain angle, Parfit’s conundrum is not
that different from the more familiar dilemma of whether to help a lot
of people a little, or a few people a lot, as Dean Spears of the
University of Texas, Austin, and his co-authors have pointed out.

Something like the repugnant conclusion can arise whenever a moral

calculation requires adding up things with no obvious upper limit, be
they people, pleasures or pains. Tyler Cowen of George Mason
university has likened the repugnant conclusion to Pascal’s wager: if
heaven is infinitely blissful, people should sacrifice almost everything
to improve their odds of admission by even a fraction. That too is a
repugnant thought. And it arises because there is no upper limit on
the joys of heaven, just as there is no upper limit on the population in
Parfit’s imagination.
The fear of large populations of low-quality lives has overshadowed
the field of population ethics

The ubiquity of the repugnant conclusion and its ilk could be

paralysing. But Mr Spears and Mark Budolfson of Rutgers University
instead find it liberating. “If the repugnant conclusion is unavoidable,
then we should not try to avoid it.” If a theory makes sense of
practical cases, it should not be tossed out merely because it has
counterintuitive implications when applied to imaginary scenarios that
involve limitless summations of hypothetical people.

In 2021 Mr Spears and Mr Budolfson published a short paper with 27

other scholars (including most of those named in this story). It tried
not to solve the repugnant conclusion but to disarm it. It stated their
shared view that the repugnant conclusion was not as fatal as it
seemed. “The fact that an approach to population ethics…entails the
Repugnant Conclusion is not sufficient to conclude that the approach
is inadequate,” they wrote. The fear of large populations of low-quality
lives has overshadowed the field of population ethics. Perhaps an
unusually large population of high-quality authors can dispel it. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: TIMO
LENZEN
A tale of oil and rubber

What Brazil’s 19th-century rubber crash could

teach today’s oil drillers
Two Brazilian booms bookmark the history of the car

Dec 20th 2022 | Macaé and Manaus

ONE
OF THE mysteries of the Amazonas theatre concerns
courtesans. Legend has it that in the 19th century the corridors under
this great pink opera house in the rainforest were used to smuggle in
sex workers during performances, to liven up “The Magic Flute” for
rubber barons in their private boxes.

This legend may or may not be true, says Sigrid Cetraro, the modern-
day director of the Amazonas. What is certain is that the opera house
in Manaus, which opened in 1896, is a blingtastic testament to the
excesses of Brazil’s rubber boom of 1879-1912.

Nearly all the building materials were imported from Europe: steel
from Glasgow, roof tiles from Alsace, marble from Tuscany. The
auditorium is shaped like a lyre; the chandeliers are of Venetian
glass. Look up at the ceiling and you appear to be under the Eiffel
Tower. “The governor [at the time] wanted to show off to the world the
riches that were coming from the Amazon,” says Ms Cetraro. Her
voice carries easily across the stalls—the acoustics are splendid.

After Charles Goodyear invented vulcanisation in 1839, global

demand for rubber exploded. Suddenly latex, the milky fluid that
seeps out of rubber trees, could be turned into a durable yet stretchy
material, ideal for use in valves, raincoats, condoms and, most of all,
tyres, first for bicycles and ultimately for cars. (It was also used on the
road outside the opera house in Manaus, to muffle the clatter of
carriage-wheels.)

For most of the 19th century nearly all of the world’s rubber came
from Brazil, home of Hevea brasiliensis, the Pará rubber tree.
Manaus, a city reachable only by sailing 1,450km up the Amazon,
became the great rubber hub. The profits brought the city trams,
running water and electricity. The biggest rubber traders dreamed up
ever wilder means of ostentation. Manaus became the world’s largest
market for diamonds. Tycoons reportedly sent their laundry to Lisbon.

The story of Brazil’s rubber boom is one of profligacy and cruelty, of

hubris and nemesis. The planters made easy fortunes from nature’s
bounty and bonded labour. They spent their cash on conspicuous
consumption, and failed to invest in better technology. After a few
decades, they were undercut by cheaper producers in Asia, and the
boom turned to crash.

This fascinating era has a modern parallel. Now, as then, Brazil is

enjoying a windfall thanks to nature and the world’s demand for cars:
an offshore oil boom. It, too, could end in tears. Your correspondent
visited Manaus, the old rubber capital, and Macaé, the modern oil
capital, to see what can be learned from two Brazilian booms that
bookmark the history of the car.

First stop is the Museu do Seringal (rubber-tapping museum), which

is reachable by river from Manaus. Our boat heads upstream, and
turns into creeks that grow steadily narrower, with the jungle pressing
in from both sides. Finally, we make landfall at a clearing with a big
wooden house, a replica 19th-century general store and all the crude
technology that tappers once used to extract rubber from trees.

It was gruelling work. A seringueiro would set off after midnight, when
the temperature was cool enough for the rubber to flow, and make a
long round of his rubber trees. At each one, he cut a diagonal
channel in the bark and attached a cup at the bottom to catch the
latex that seeped out. His only light was a paraffin lamp strapped to
his head. His nightly circuit was several kilometres long. The rubber
trees grew where nature planted them, and a typical tapper would
have to tap 100-200 each night.

When the seringueiro’s cups were full, he headed for the

smokehouse. This was a cramped wooden lean-to. Inside, over an
open fire, he would heat up the latex and wind it around a stick until
he had a lump the size of a football. He would then trade it for a
reduction of his debt. Most rubber-tappers never saw cash. They
bought their food and kit from the boss’s store: cutting tools, lamps,
grain—and booze, to foster dependency. Prices were steep; tappers
could not shop anywhere else, and were forbidden from fishing or
hunting. When they handed over the bouncy fruits of their labour,
their debts shrank a bit—but seldom to zero, not least because the
boss would typically charge a 50% commission to ship the rubber to
Manaus. The boss lived well—in a big house with imported furniture,
mirrors and wine decanters.

In a small wooden church by the store, workers could seek spiritual

solace. Sometimes, says Gabriel Leao, a museum guide, the “priest”
hearing confessions was in fact a stooge, who reported the men’s
transgressions back to the boss, who could then punish them “like
slaves”, with beatings or whippings.

Enrique de Souza, a leathery man in his 80s, worked as a rubber-

tapper from the age of eight, when vestiges of the old system still
survived. “I never saw money till I was 18,” he recalls, sitting on a
porch at the museum. “Everything we produced was paid for in credit
or in goods.” He toiled from 1am to 8pm, and lived in a small tent. If
his working life was harsh, his father’s and his grandfather’s were
harsher. “They used to tell me how cruel their bosses were,” says Mr
de Souza. For serious offences, such as damaging the rubber trees,
the overseers might “tie a man to a tree and leave him out in the sun
for two or three days”.

Euclides da Cunha, a Brazilian journalist, called the Amazonian

rubber trade “the most criminal employment organisation ever
spawned”. However, many tappers were not passive victims, argues
Barbara Weinstein in “The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920”. Many
flouted rules against fishing or selling their rubber to itinerant traders.
Many fought back against abusive bosses by mixing stones or sand
into their big rubber balls to inflate the weight. Even debt bondage
was looser than it seemed. A tapper could simply disappear into the
rainforest, taking with him the supplies his boss had advanced him on
credit, and never return. The fact that workers could leave forced
even the most heartless bosses to temper their cruelty somewhat.

Rubber robber
The profits from rubber were vast. It became Brazil’s second-largest
export, after coffee. But the boom “proved both short-lived and
superficial”, notes Ms Weinstein. In 1876 a British adventurer, Henry
Wickham, smuggled 70,000 rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil. He
delivered them to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, which bred
plants that were ultimately used to break the Brazilian rubber
monopoly.

The descendants of Wickham’s seeds were sown in neat rows in

Asia. British and Dutch plantations in Malaya and Sumatra proved far
more productive than the Brazilian jungle, since there were fewer
natural parasites and rubber trees could be planted close together
without transmitting rubber-blighting insects and fungi to each other.
In 1912 Malaya and Sumatra yielded 8,500 tonnes of latex, a quarter
as much as the Amazon. Nine years later, it was 370,000 tonnes.
Brazil’s rubber economy imploded. Manaus withered. Its power
generators seized up. The opera house was shuttered and “ridiculed
as an emblem of folly”, notes Greg Grandin in “Fordlandia: the Rise
and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”.

As Mr Grandin describes in his book, the founder of the Ford motor

company created an odd postscript to the boom. In 1927, eager to
secure rubber for the tyres of his Model Ts, Henry Ford bought a
concession to a tract of the Brazilian Amazon the size of Tennessee.
He thought that with his deep pockets, his management skills and
American know-how, he would swiftly tame the forest and turn a
profit. “A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is
beginning,” gushed a German newspaper. Many Brazilians expected
Ford, the richest man in the world, to win. He lost.

He tried to recreate a slice of the Midwest in the Amazon. Fordlandia

(Fordville) had Michigan-style homes (which were too hot), movie
theatres and square dancing. Clearing the jungle was hard, and met
local opposition. When the firm wanted to bulldoze villages, it offered
to compensate only homeowners with title deeds, which hardly
anyone had. Some workers showed up hoping to pocket the famously
generous $5-a-day wages that Ford paid in Michigan, and drifted
away when they were paid only 35 cents.

Alcohol was legal in Brazil, but Ford banned it and had workers’
quarters searched for surreptitious bottles. He was also a food crank,
who insisted that staff eat oatmeal, tinned peaches and whole-wheat
bread. In 1930 workers sick of such dull fare (for which their wages
were docked) rioted, smashing machinery and chanting “Kill all the
Americans!”

Leaf blight and caterpillars devastated Ford’s rubber trees. In 1945

his son took over the firm and shut the Amazonian project down. The
land, into which $20m (around $400m in today’s money) had been
sunk, was sold back to the Brazilian government for less than
$250,000. Fordlandia became a ghost town, remaining largely
deserted until the 2000s.

Today Manaus is a big city, but still has a frontier feel

Manaus, after decades of relative obscurity, eventually found a new

money tree to tap. The military regime that seized power in Brazil in
the 1960s wanted to populate the Brazilian Amazon with Brazilians,
so that no neighbouring country might be tempted to encroach on it.
So it took advantage of a “free-trade zone” set up in 1957 which
allowed goods to escape tariffs so long as they were made or
assembled in Manaus. Since the 1970s Brazilian consumers have
paid higher prices for motorbikes, televisions, fridges and a host of
other goods, in order to create jobs in the Amazon. This makes little
economic sense—few firms would spontaneously build factories in
such a remote spot—but geopolitics trumps efficiency.

Today Manaus is a big city, but still has a frontier feel. Half of its 2m
inhabitants live in slums; they drift in from other parts of the region,
clear land, build shacks, hook up Wi-Fi cables and hope that one day
they will be granted title to the homes they occupy. Violence is
rampant, as in the old days: in some areas, walls are pocked with
bullet holes, mementoes of battles between drug gangs.

As for Brazil, it has found a new natural resource to get excited about.
At first glance the present-day oil boom is very different from the
rubber boom a century ago. Oil workers are well-paid. Managers are
professional. Oil firms innovate.

On a dock in Macaé, nearly 3,000km from Manaus, sits a row of

gigantic torpedo-like objects. They are a local invention. A metal tube
is filled with heavy concrete discs. This “base torpedo” is dropped into
the water and plunges to the bottom, dragging a chain behind it. Fins
guide it; a long spike on its nose lets it pierce the ocean floor, where it
buries itself for ever, helping to anchor a floating oil rig. Petrobras, the
state oil firm, has poured oodles of capital into extracting Brazil’s “pre-
salt” oil, billions of barrels of which lie far below sea level, beneath a
thick layer of salt.

The world’s thirst for petrol has brought prosperity to Macaé. Until the
1970s it was little more than a fishing town. Now its warm, windy
seafront is lined with fancy bars and restaurants. Oilmen carouse on
a strip called Praia dos Cavaleiros (Knights’ Beach), next to Praia do
Pecado (Sin Beach, which is disappointingly quiet). Downtown shops
offer the latest gadgets and the sparkliest jewellery. Workers from all
over Brazil flock to Macaé. The population has quintupled since the
late 1970s, to around 260,000.
Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president from 2011-16, said the pre-salt oil
was “strong evidence” that “God is Brazilian.” Evidence emerged,
however, that God punishes hubris. In 2014-15 the oil price crashed,
sparking a fiscal crisis and Brazil’s worst recession since 1990, when
the country was battling hyperinflation. In good times, Ms Rousseff
had splurged much of the oil bounty on vast tax breaks for her pet
industries and absurdly lavish pensions for civil servants that spurred
women to stop work at 50 and men at 55. In bad times, she was
impeached.

This took place as Brazil’s biggest-ever corruption scandal was

unfolding—centred on Petrobras. The national oil firm had long been
inefficient: required by the state to hire locals wherever possible and
favour local suppliers even if they cost more. It turned out to be filthy,
too. Billions of dollars of contracts were padded, kickbacks were
pocketed, and half the ruling class seemed to be in on the act. The
scandal tarnished three former presidents, dozens of lesser
politicians and scores of executives. It disgusted the public and paved
the way for the angry populist presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (who lost
an election in October).

It devastated Macaé. Rodrigo Vianna, an economist in the mayor’s

office, says the city lost 50,000 jobs between 2015 and 2020, as low
oil prices and the graft probe forced Petrobras to hunker down.

Then the oil price soared again, partly because of Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine. The Brazilian Oil and Gas Institute, a think-tank,
expects oil production in 2031 to be 5m barrels a day, twice what it
was in 2015. Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, an ex-president who was
jailed for taking bribes during the big corruption scandal, will return to
power in January. (His convictions were later overturned.) He is
eagerly dreaming up ways to spend the expected bonanza.

Turning black stuff into grey matter

Yet all this is based on an industry whose long-term future is in doubt.

If the world is serious about curbing climate change, petrol cars must
eventually give way to electric ones, and gas-fired power plants to
nuclear, solar and wind. If demand for hydrocarbons falls, so will the
price, and much of Brazil’s reserves may have to be left below the
salt. When oil sells for $90 a barrel, more than 95% of Brazil’s proven
reserves can be profitably extracted, estimates Rystad Energy, a
consultancy. At $30 a barrel, less than half can be.

What has Brazil learned from the rubber crash? “Nothing,” says
Roberio Braga, a historian in Manaus. “The money is being
consumed, not invested.” That is too harsh. Much has been wasted,
to be sure. But efforts have been made to convert petrodollars into
human capital. This is the race that all petrostates face: to turn a
windfall into brainpower that will generate sustainable prosperity.
Brazil has done better than some, pouring cash into schools and
basic health care. Life expectancy rose from 70 to 76 between 2000
and 2018, and Brazilian schoolchildren’s scores on international tests
improved in maths, reading and science. (These improvements were
partly reversed by the pandemic.)

Mr Vianna says Macaé will become “a capital of knowledge” as well

as energy, thanks to local universities and research institutes. He
insists it will be better prepared for change than Manaus was when
the rubber boom crashed. Oil will still be needed to make plastics for
a long time, he predicts, and gas-fired power stations will hum for
years. As the world shifts away from fossil fuels, the city will diversify
into hydrogen, solar cells, wind power—and tourism, he says.

Not all are convinced. Jefferson Assis, who manages a bar on

Knights’ Beach, moved to Macaé from Espirito Santo, the state next
door. He is glad he did: he earns more than he did back home. But he
is not investing his savings in Macaé. Instead, he is buying farmland
in his home state. “I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket,” he
confides. Also, he has read a bit of history. His fear is that “what
happened in Manaus could happen in Macaé—a collapse.” After all,
he muses, “Oil is already an outdated kind of energy.” ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: MEL
HAASCH
Use your loaf

How food affects the mind, as well as the body

It turns out you are what you eat after all

Dec 20th 2022 |

A GLISTENING
ROAST turkey. Rounds of golden, roast potatoes and
parsnips. Pigs in blankets (because what meat-based meal is not
improved by a side of sausages wrapped in bacon?). Brussels
sprouts. Bread sauce. Cranberry sauce. Gravy. And, to finish, brandy-
sodden pudding topped with butter.

Countries vary in their Christmas-meal traditions. Poles prefer fish,

often carp. A Swedish julbord groans with variety, though herring will
never be far off. But the repast served at most British tables on
December 25th is iconic, and has been (with goose sometimes
standing in for turkey) since the time of the Victorians.

A good meal has a positive impact on one’s mood. Part of that

pleasure is immediate. Those who avoid overindulgence and family
squabbles will enjoy a postprandial rise in their blood sugar. That will
prompt a flood of endorphins—chemicals that act as happy hormones
—to rush through their brains.

But the pleasure goes deeper. Animal proteins, such as roast fowl,
hams or fish, contain all the amino acids that the body needs
including many it cannot make for itself. Tyrosine and tryptophan are
needed for the production, respectively, of dopamine, a
neurotransmitter that controls feelings of pleasure and reward, and
serotonin, another such, which helps regulate mood. Brussels sprouts
contain folate, a vitamin without which the brain cannot function
properly. And cranberries are high in vitamin C, which is involved,
among other things, in converting dopamine to noradrenaline,
another neurotransmitter, and a lack of which seems to be associated
with depression.

With mental-health disorders rising, a growing number of scientists

are investigating how food or nutritional supplements affect the mind.
Brains, being the most complex and energy-demanding of the body’s
organs, almost certainly have their own specialised, nutritional needs.
Welcome, then, to the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry.

An adult human brain, which accounts for about 2% of a body’s

mass, uses 20% of its metabolic energy. An host of vitamins and
minerals are necessary to keep it going. Even in one small section of
the brain’s metabolic pathways, many essential nutrients are needed.
The conversion of tryptophan to serotonin alone requires vitamin B6,
iron, phosphorus and calcium.

Disentangling the brain’s nutritional needs from those of the rest of

the body is tricky. Recommended daily allowances (RDAs) are little
help. They were formulated during the second world war on the basis
of the nutrients needed for the physical health of troops. No such
RDAs exist for the brain. Not yet, at least.

Compared with other fields, nutritional science is understudied. That

is partly because it is hard to do well. Randomised controlled trials
(RCTs), used to test drugs, are tricky. Few people want to stick to an
experimental diet for years. Instead, most nutritional science is based
on observational studies that try to establish associations between
particular foods or nutrients and diseases. They cannot be used to
definitively prove a causal connection between a disease and a
particular contributing factor in a diet. But as with smoking and lung
cancer, put together enough of these kinds of trials and causal
narratives begin to emerge.
It is now clear that some diets are particularly good for the brain. One
recent study concludes that sticking to the “Mediterranean diet”, high
in vegetables, fruit, pulses and wholegrains, low in red and processed
meats and saturated fats, decreases the chances of experiencing
strokes, cognitive impairment and depression. Other recent work
looking at a “green” Mediterranean diet high in polyphenols (the
antioxidants found in things like green tea) found it reduced age-
related brain atrophy. Another version, the MIND diet, emphasises,
among other things, eating berries over other kinds of fruit and seems
to lessen the risk of dementia.

Only 10% of adults in America consume their recommended daily

serving of vegetables

Scientists think such diets may work by reducing inflammation in the

brain. This, in turn, may affect areas such as the hippocampus, which
is associated with learning, memory and mood regulation—and
where new neurons grow in adults. Studies in animals show that
when they are fed a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids (from walnuts, for
example), flavonoids (consumed mainly via tea and wine),
antioxidants (found in berries) and resveratrol (found in red grapes),
neuron growth is stimulated and inflammatory processes are
reduced. This fits with research suggesting that those who regularly
eat ultra-processed, fried and sugary foods, which increase
inflammation in the brain, heighten their risk of developing
depression.

The hanger games

That Christmas feast is often lambasted as an orgy of gluttony. In

fact, with its sides of multiple vegetables, its nutritional density may
make it among the healthier meals some people eat throughout the
year. Only 10% of adults in America consume their recommended
daily serving of vegetables, and just 12% get enough fruit. It is a
similar story in much of the world. As a result, many turn to vitamin
and mineral supplements to make up for their dietary deficiencies.
In 2018, 54% of North Americans and 43% of Asians were taking a
nutritional supplement. The most common types are multivitamins,
vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids. America spends the most on
dietary supplements, followed by western Europe and Japan. One
estimate put the global market at $152bn in 2021, with 9% annual
growth expected until 2030. But in many places the regulation of the
supplement industry is either weak or non-existent and little rigorous
research has been carried out on either their benefits or risks.

The story of nutritional supplements starts in 1912 when Casimir

Funk, a Polish-American biochemist, proposed that unidentified
organic substances were required in tiny amounts to maintain human
health. It was a revolutionary idea. And he was correct. Along with
macronutrients such as protein and carbohydrates, there were
undiscovered components of foods—micronutrients. The first vitamin
to be isolated and then synthesised in 1936 was thiamine or B1.
Deficiency causes beriberi, a disease that can affect both the
cardiovascular and the central nervous systems. The discovery
prompted a race to isolate, characterise and manufacture vitamins
and ultimately launched the supplement industry.

Half a century after Funk’s discovery, the notion that nutrients might
be able to treat mental illnesses took hold. Abram Hoffer, a Canadian
psychiatrist, tried treating schizophrenics with high doses of vitamins
B3. Then in 1968 Linus Pauling, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist,
coined the term “orthomolecular psychiatry” to describe the theory
that varying the concentration of substances normally present in the
body could treat mental disease. But there was little evidence to
support their claims and in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association
released a report dismissing orthomolecular psychiatry, highlighting
the lack of controlled experiments and concluding that large doses of
B3 were “useless and not without hazard”.

The absence of any large-scale, serious studies in the field of

nutritional psychiatry left an opening for those keen to promote the
potential of supplements far beyond any existing science. Autumn
Stringam is one such case. After her first baby was born in 1992 Ms
Stringam, a Canadian, was admitted to a psychiatric ward with severe
post-partum psychosis. Her family had a history of mental illness,
including bipolar disorder, psychosis, depression and suicide. Her
prognosis was grim. But then her father, together with a friend
working in the animal-feed business, developed a supplement
containing a range of vitamins and minerals that they claimed were
based on supplements that reduced anxiety and stress in pigs. Ms
Stringam credited the supplements with her recovery. Her story
spread and the family started selling the pills widely.

There were, however, no trials proving efficacy or safety. The

suggestion that the supplements were a cure-all led one
schizophrenic to abandon his prescribed medication. He
subsequently murdered his father and seriously injured his mother. In
2003 the Canadian drug regulator, concerned about the use of
untested supplements for serious mental-health disorders, seized the
pills. The episode cemented the idea in many minds that using
micronutrients to treat mental-health conditions was pure quackery.

And yet today much science does support the idea that there is a
strong link between what people eat and their mental health. Studies
have shown that B12 shortages cause depression and poor memory
and are associated with mania and psychosis. Low levels of vitamin
D are associated with increased risks of dementia and stroke, and
are implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders. A recent RCT found
that high doses of B6—100mg per day rather than the RDA of 1.3mg
—reduces anxiety. In a study by Robert Przybelski of the University of
Wisconsin of geriatric patients attending a memory clinic, 40% were
deficient in one vitamin (of five that were looked for), and 20% in two.

Epicurious

So why not simply pop a handful of vitamins rather than bother with a
complex, and perhaps expensive, diet? In part because you rarely
know exactly what you’re getting. Ted Dinan, a professor of
psychiatry at University College, Cork describes the supplement
industry as the “Wild West”. Unlike tightly regulated drugs,
supplements may contain more, or less, of what they claim. Too much
vitamin A can be harmful in pregnancy. There are a variety of health
risks from taking beta carotene and vitamin E. High doses of one
nutrient can interfere with the absorption of others.

Any testing of the use of micronutrients in mental-health conditions in

Canada stalled after the episode with Ms Stringam. And yet some
remained intrigued. Julia Rucklidge, a clinical psychologist at the
University of Canterbury in New Zealand, was approached in 2003 by
a Canadian colleague to see if she might be interested in running
such trials. She was sceptical: “I had been taught that nutrition is
completely irrelevant to brain health.” At the time, she recalls, she
was immersed in positive data showing the efficacy of Prozac, an
antidepressant, and stimulants such as methylphenidate for attention-
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She was excited, she explains,
to have these new drugs as tools to treat mental-health problems.

Then she was forced to question those views. She had been treating
a child with obsessive compulsive disorder for a year with no
success. The family did not want medication. One day when they
were leaving she remembered she had a box of supplements under
her desk for a trial she was planning. She offered them to the parents
with the caveat that she had no idea whether they would work. Two
weeks later they returned, saying the child’s obsessions were gone.
Dr Rucklidge was sceptical that any improvement was due to the
supplements but it nudged her towards conducting more trials. A few
decades on and she has shown that supplements are helpful in
children with ADHD—particularly those who struggle to regulate their
emotions. The trial was recently replicated in America. Other
evidence of the efficacy of supplements is emerging. The results of a
large RCT published in September showed that taking a daily
multivitamin may improve cognition in those over 65. Researchers
followed more than 2,000 people and estimated that three years of
supplementation led to a 60% slowing of cognitive decline.

Nutritional psychiatry is still in its infancy. As it becomes clearer which

micronutrients affect the brain, the next stage is to determine how
they do so. Another new field of research could help with that.

One of the most intriguing scientific developments of recent years is

the discovery of the importance of micro-organisms in the gut as
intermediaries between what goes into the mouth and what happens
in the brain. Researchers now know that microbes form a complex
ecosystem in the gut—known as the microbiome. These microbes
need micronutrients. A diet lacking in them, such as that consumed
by many in the West, may lead to an imbalance in the gut
microbiome.

A person’s capacity to deal with stress can be altered by a single

strain of bacterium

Could this affect how people think and feel? Evidence is mounting for
a link between the gut and the brain in what is termed the
psychobiome—part of the microbiome—that does just that. The
substances that the various bacteria, viruses and fungi produce may
go directly into the bloodstream and infiltrate blood vessels, or they
may stimulate the vagus nerve that connects the gut and the brain.
The bacteria in the gut produce, among other things, tryptophan, the
amino acid thought to have come entirely from the diet.
The sorts of microorganisms found in yogurt specifically, and
fermented foods generally, have also been shown by trials to reduce
anxiety. Most astonishing to Dr Dinan is the finding that a person’s
capacity to deal with stress can be altered by a single strain of
bacterium. Studies show that two species of Bifidobacterium and one
of Lactobacillus each reduce stress. In a trial on germfree mice, an
abnormal stress response was reversed when they were given oral
doses of Bifidobacterium infantis. These findings have given rise to
the notion of “psychobiotics”—bacteria that, when ingested, may have
similar effects to antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication.
The difficulty with developing this new field of research lies in the
economics. Unlike drugs, vitamins, minerals and microbes are not
patentable. Pharmaceutical firms have nothing to gain commercially
from running trials on pills that anyone can flog. It is difficult to trust
industry-sponsored research since it has a bias towards favourable
findings. Governments, universities and health systems are better
placed to run such trials. None of this will replace the need for a good
diet. But it would provide food for thought. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: CRISTINA
SPANÒ
Christmas Specials | Puppy love
What makes certain dogs popular in certain countries
Why a starring film role matters for particular breeds of dog

Dec 20th 2022

“EVERY
DOG must have his day,” wrote Jonathan Swift. And yet
some seem to have more days in the sun than others. Breeds spring
in and out of fashion. And stereotypes are not always right: the
French demonstrate a striking preference for the Australian shepherd
over the poodle, the country’s national dog.
Pure-breed puppies are certified by national kennel clubs to make
sure they meet certain ancestral and aesthetic requirements. To
determine what shapes tastes, The Economist examined historical
data on 86m dog breed registrations in nine countries: America,
Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa
and Sweden.
Some countries are particularly nationalistic in their choices. Breeds
of German origin represented 83% of registrations in the top ten
breeds in Germany over the past ten years compared with 33% on
average in the other eight countries. Colonialism seems to leave a
mark: New Zealand and South Africa disproportionately favour British
dogs. And nationalism can interact with history. German shepherds
were co-opted as emblems of Germany in first world war
propaganda, which torpedoed their popularity in America and the rest
of Europe.
Elsewhere practicality carries more weight. In Japan, three breeds—
the toy poodle, the chihuahua and the dachshund, none of them
Japanese—account for 50% of registrations over the past ten years.
They are, however, all small, useful in a densely populated country
filled with tiny apartments.
Most popular breeds
Breeds that make up 50% of dog registrations, 2011-21

Breed origin
Germany
Britain
Nordic countries
Other, mixed or indistinct

Germany
German shepherdDachshundGerman wirehaired pointer

America
Labrador retrieverGerman shepherdGolden retriever

Britain
Labrador retrieverFrench bulldogEnglish cocker spaniel

Finland
Labrador retrieverDachshundGerman shepherd

Japan
Poodle*DachshundChihuahua

South Africa
BulldogStaffordshire bull terrierRottweiler
*99% of poodles registered in Japan were toy poodles.
Some countries’ tastes are more fickle, driven by fads and cultural
capital. Winning the American Kennel Club’s Westminster dog show
is a reliable driver of popularity: it increases the odds of a new puppy
registration of that breed in a country by, on average, 67% in the year
the breed wins, and by 93% two years later. But it is far from the only
thing that can shift the public’s dog-buying habits.
In 1970 the poodle was the fifth-most-popular breed in France. But
popularity led to overbreeding which in turn led to snappy pooches
and its popularity subsequently tumbled. Still, according to Stanley
Coren, a psychologist who writes about the intelligence of dogs,
poodles are the second-smartest breed (bested only by border
collies). That blend of brains and beauty may explain their ten
victories at the Westminster dog show.
1970 19692021France% of all dog registrations

In 1955 just four chihuahuas were registered in Japan. Then in 2002

a chihuahua named Qoo-chan, dressed in a suit and tie, appeared in
a tv advert. Japan went mad for the diminutive pups which are the
smallest recognised dog breed. It is now the second-most-popular
dog in Japan; only the toy poodle is more beloved. Two American
films, Legally Blonde and Beverly Hills Chihuahua,
further raised the
breed’s profile.
2002 19552021Japan
When Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” was released in 1961, 2,300
dalmatians were registered with the American Kennel Club (AKC).
Re-releases of the movie in 1969, 1979, 1985 and 1991 unleashed a
surge in demand and registrations peaked as a share of registrations
at 42,621 in 1994. As awareness of their high energy-levels grew,
interest waned. By 2006 registrations had plummeted to 820 though
the breed is rising in popularity in Germany.
1994 19262021America
100 years of popular dogs in America
Breeds that made the top three

0 50% Poodle Beagle Labrador retriever Boston

terrierAmericancockerspaniel German shepherd 1930 1940 1950
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 ↑ % of dog registrations

On-screen appearances can transform the public’s preferences. A

positive starring role in an American film increased the odds of
registering a new puppy of the same breed by 119% in the year the
movie was released, rising to a peak of 176% higher two years later.
In seven of the nine countries, such releases led to a statistically
significant bump (Japan and South Africa seem sniffy about American
pop culture). Repeated performances by Labradors in films such as
“Marley and Me” may have helped the breed hold the number one
spot in America for the past 31 years.

Germany’s efforts to promote the German shepherd as a symbol of

national unity during the first world war trashed the breed’s popularity
in America. But in 1918 Rin Tin Tin, a German shepherd puppy saved
by an American GI on a battlefield in France, raced to the rescue. Rin
Tin Tin starred in 27 American films from 1922 to 1931. He dug
Warner Bros out of a financial hole and
German shepherds bounded
to the top spot between 1926 and 1928.

Beagles were beloved in America by the 1940s. Norman Rockwell

frequently included them in his idealised portraits of American family
life. Then on October 4th 1950 one particularly endearing, if lazy,
beagle made his debut in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip. By
1953 Snoopy had propelled beagles to the position of top dog in the
AKC charts, where they remained until 1959, loping past the long-
reigning cocker spaniel.

The French writer Colette likened the visage of her beloved French
bulldog to that of a frog that had been sat upon. The breed’s
popularity, nonetheless, is soaring. In 1966 the breed made up just
0.006% of AKC registrations; by 2021 it had sprung up the rankings
to seize the number-two spot. Frenchies can thank celebrities such
as Reese Witherspoon and Lady Gaga who post selfies with their
pets for their new following.

Explore dog breed fashions in America over the last century: hover
over or tap on the streams in the chart below to reveal the breeds.

Across the countries we analysed, some patterns leap out from the
past decade of dog registrations. A small number of breeds make up
an overwhelming share of registrations. Compare that to Sweden
where the top ten breeds barely cover 30% of registered dogs. The
Rottweiler is an international favourite, making the top ten in five
countries, but it is most popular in South Africa. Labradors reign not
just in America, but in four other countries. Only in space-conscious
Japan do they fail to make the top ten; their popularity is still on the
rise in the Nordic countries. Top dog.
Breeds that made the top ten, 2011-21

Share of registrations, ordered by rank

No data

Finland
Labrador retrieverDachshund 20112021 25%

Sweden
Labrador retriever 20112021 25%

Germany
German shepherdDachshund 20112021 50%

France
Belgian shepherd Australian shepherd 20112021 50%

New Zealand
Labrador retrieverGerman shepherd 20112021 50%

South Africa
RottweilerBulldog 20112021 50%

America
Labrador retrieverGerman shepherdGolden retriever 20112021 50%

Britain
Labrador retriever 20112021 50%

Japan
PoodleChihuahuaDachshundPomeranian 20112021 50%
Note: Different countries don’t always agree on if a dog qualifies as a
breed, how to differentiate between related breeds and which are
mere varieties or distinct breeds. And countries sometimes call the
same breeds by different names. The same country may even spell
names in more than one way, depending on the year. For this piece,
we cleaned the data to make it consistent across countries and time
as much as possible, while still leaving distinctions where they are
important.
Sources: American Kennel Club; Box Office Mojo; Centrale Caniche;
Encyclopedia Britannica; German Kennel Club (VDH); Finnish Kennel
Club (Kennelliitto); IMDb; Japan Kennel Club; KUSA Kennel Union of
Southern Africa; New Zealand Kennel Club; Rotten Tomatoes;
Swedish Kennel Club (Svenska KennelKlubben); The Kennel Club;
Westminster Kennel Club; Dog movie stars and dog breed popularity
(data) by Stefano Ghirlanda, Alberto Acerbi, and Harold Herzog,
PLoS ONE, 2014; thesmartcanine.com/canadian-dogs; The
Economist
Illustrations: Stephen Cheetham
When money dies

The great inflation of the 1500s is echoing eerily

today
Inflations past have lessons for today

Dec 20th 2022 |

IN
THE DAYS
of Henry VIII, England seemed to be falling apart.
There had never been so many beggars, witnesses reported, many of
whom would cut your throat given half a chance. Everyone
suspected, rightly it turns out, that the currency was being debased.
Morals were as degraded as the coinage. At one infamous funeral in
Kent midway through Henry’s reign, an observer reported that “the
burial was turned to boozing and belly-cheer”, with an orgy involving
“seven score persons of men, every one of them having his woman”.
The feeling that something was not quite right was shared across
Europe, which by the 1590s was consumed by financial crisis, social
unrest and war.

The root of the chaos was a wholly unexpected, and wholly

unfamiliar, surge in inflation. For at least the 300 years leading up to
the 1500s, western Europe made modern-day Japan look like
Zimbabwe. In England in 1500 the price of a standard basket of
goods facing consumers (largely food, but including other things such
as clothing and light) was no higher than it had been in 1275,
suggests work by Gregory Clark, a historian, and researchers at the
Bank of England.

All this changed after 1500. Sustained price inflation, once

unthinkable, became unstoppable. Within 50 years average prices
across England had doubled. Before long Italian prices were rising by
5% a year, research by Paul Schmelzing of Boston College suggests.
In France and Holland, inflation hit 4% by the end of the century. In
Russia the inflationary trend picked up from the 1530s. The global
rate of inflation peaked in the 1590s at close to 3% a year. If 3% does
not sound too painful, bear in mind that growth in nominal incomes in
a pre-capitalist world was basically zero: almost any level of inflation
made people poorer.

Just as with today’s inflation, pundits in the 1500s furiously disagreed

over the causes

The inflationary surge also lasted a long time—longer, even, than the
galloping-inflation era in the early 19th century caused by the
Napoleonic wars, or that of the 1970s. Some countries suffered more
than others. Scottish inflation was often a lot worse than English.
Dutch inflation might have been the worst of all.

Just as with today’s inflation, pundits in the 1500s furiously disagreed

over the causes. Nowhere was this debate more heated than in
France in the 1560s and 1570s. Jean Cherruyer de Malestroit, one
pundit, played the role of Larry Summers, a former American treasury
secretary, arguing that price pressure was the result of excessive
spending. Jean Bodin, the Paul Krugman of his day, argued that
unexpected shocks to the global economic system were to blame.
Both economists wrote pamphlets attacking the other’s position.
Historians continue to disagree.

Like Messrs Summers and Krugman today, both Malestroit and Bodin
had a point. Excess demand certainly played a role. The population
had grown fast after the Black Death; many of those people had
moved to cities. This raised demand for food even as it cut the
number of farmers producing it. And some monarchs goosed the
economy by manipulating the currency.
Henry VIII’s “great debasement” of the 1540s involved taking one
gold coin, melting it down, adding worthless metal, and then recasting
it as two “golden” coins. Using this method Henry plucked coins out of
thin air worth about 2% of GDP in some years. Henry spent the extra
cash on wars and palaces. The resulting boost to nominal demand
provoked merchants to raise their prices. It was not just Henry, or his
successor, Edward VI, who debased the currency. Scotland started
doing it in 1538 and then doubled down on the strategy in 1560. In
the southern Lowlands, or today’s Netherlands, Belgium and
Luxembourg, the silver coinage was debased 12 times from 1521 to
1644.

But debasement alone does not explain the great inflation, whatever
Malestroit might have argued. It was not a new strategy, for one thing.
It is reckoned that France debased its silver coins 123 times between
1285 and 1490. Between those years there was no inflation. And yet
in the 1500s, even as many countries slowed down their
debasements, they all saw inflation. Spain stopped debasing entirely
from 1497 to 1686. Some historians, therefore, follow Bodin and say
that demand-side explanations by themselves are insufficient. They
also look at what was happening across the Atlantic, the source of a
huge supply shock to Europe’s economy.

In about 1545 people discovered vast silver deposits in Bolivia.

Potosí, the centre of this lucrative new industry, became perhaps the
fifth-largest city in the Christian world by population (after London,
Naples, Paris and Venice). In the first quarter of the 1500s just ten
tonnes of silver had arrived on Europe’s shores. By the third quarter
of the century Europe imported 173 tonnes. Spain, where much of the
metal arrived, initially experienced especially high inflation—but it
then spread across the rest of Europe, as far as Russia.

Today’s surge in inflation, only a year or so old, has already had

profound social and political consequences. Consumer confidence is
at rock bottom as real wages decline; incumbent politicians are
unpopular; and protests about the cost of living are mushrooming.
All that is peanuts, however, compared with the effects of the 16th-
century inflation. Average real wages, which at the start of the 1500s
were at the princely level of about seven pence a week, then fell, and
fell, and fell. They would not regain their purchasing power until the
late 19th century. The consequences of this almighty squeeze on
living standards went beyond rampant beggary and orgies at
funerals. Across Europe, society and politics became radically
unstable.

In a paper published in 1986 Jack Goldstone, now of George Mason

University, asked why from 1550 to 1650 “states broke down on a
wide scale”. In France in 1572 the Saint Bartholomew’s Day
massacre involved Catholic-on-Protestant assassinations, resulting in
thousands of deaths. The 1590s were years of revolt in Austria,
Finland, Hungary and Ukraine. Russia experienced its “time of
troubles”, a 15-year period of lawlessness from 1598. The Thirty
Years War started in 1618, and the period culminated with the
execution of England’s Charles I in 1649. In each year of the first
quarter of the 1500s, about six in every 100,000 people globally died
in conflict. From the 1620s to the 1640s, about 60 in 100,000 were
perishing annually. The number of people tried and executed for
witchcraft surged.

Unhappy elites were, in part, responsible for the chaos. The gentry
often depended on fixed payments (such as rents) for their income,
and so may have experienced the effects of the great inflation more
than those who could simply raise prices. In northern France and
Belgium inequality fell in the 1560s and 1570s as middle-income
people did fine while rich landlords were squeezed. Plutocrats, not
used to economic strife, agitated for change.

Ruff and tumble

More importantly governments suffered. Centuries of zero or low

inflation affected how they structured state finances. Monarchs often
leased plots of land on fixed rents for as long as 99 years. Customs
duties were held at nominal prices. This was a problem once inflation
took off. From the mid-1570s to the mid-1590s Spain’s tax revenues
were constant in cash terms, but they had less purchasing power.
And governments’ expenses, which were not fixed, soared. In the
century after 1530 the price of putting a soldier in the field rose
fivefold.

The inflation thus, over time, contributed towards weaker states and a
debt crisis. Governments did what they could to raise revenue. In
1544 and 1545 Henry VIII offloaded state assets, such as plots of
land, worth over £150,000 (or more than 2% of GDP), and there were
smaller sales under Elizabeth I in the early 1600s. Knighthoods were
granted “in unprecedented numbers”, most for large fees, pointed out
Mr Goldstone. Borrowing exploded, just at a time when many lenders
were starting to raise interest rates. Defaults, rare in the 1300s and
1400s, multiplied, with France (in 1558, 1624 and 1648), Portugal (in
1560) and Spain (in 1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627 and 1647)
reneging on claims to foreign investors.

Eventually, the great inflation came to an end. Population growth

slowed, reducing demand for goods and services. Monarchs got a
handle on monetary and fiscal policy, promising to default and
debase less frequently than they used to. And the flow of precious
metals from the Americas slowed. Yet the lessons from the century
are clear. No matter the cause, societies which let inflation set in
should expect more than just their living standards to be debased. ■

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES
KERR
Christmas Specials | City planning
The decline of the city grid
The oldest form of city planning is falling out of fashion

Dec 20th 2022

THE
CROSSROAD of South Ashland Avenue and West County Line
Road, in Will County, Illinois, is a picture of classic midwestern rural
America. Ashland Avenue, at that point, is barely wider than a lane.
On one side is a vast corn field; on the other, a few ranch houses,
each set on at least an acre of land and hidden behind hedges.
Farther up the road a bright red combine harvester works its way
through the fields. Chevrolet pickup trucks, a few of them seemingly
having survived since the 1950s, are the main vehicles rushing along
the county line. Yet this junction also represents the very end of the
great metropolis of Chicago.
The address of the final home on the corner, listed on the mailbox
outside, is “32649”. Divide that figure by 800 and you get the distance
in a straight line running south in miles—40.8—from Madison Street,
at the centre of the Chicago loop, its downtown business district.
Almost every street address in the city is configured thus. Streets that
run east to west are measured from State Street; those that run north
to south are measured from Madison. Each standard-sized block
measures an eighth of a mile, and has 100 addresses
Chicago has the world’s most consistent, orderly grid layout.
Passengers on planes landing at night at O’Hare International Airport
(address: 10,000 West Balmoral Avenue, putting it 12.5 miles west of
downtown) see a city that looks like a giant circuit board, with
regimented streets going almost exactly north-south or east-west. At
the spring and autumn equinoxes, when Earth is a quarter of the way
on its annual orbit around the sun, this means that the sun rises and
sets in line with the street grid. On those days, Chicagoans flock
downtown to see the streets lit up at sunset as though by a perfectly
positioned spotlight—pouring scorn on Manhattan’s equivalent dates,
which both come in summer, due to its grid’s off-north alignment.
Thanks to the rise of digital mapping, the relative orderliness of
different street systems can now be calculated. Geoff Boeing of the
University of Southern California created a measure of city “entropy”,
looking at how consistent the direction of streets in over 100 major
cities worldwide is, as well as how continuously they run through any
given city without interruption. A measure of zero suggests a city with
absolutely no consistent street direction. A measure of one implies a
perfect grid, with no interruptions or curves. Chicago hits 0.89, higher
than any other city on Earth. London, a city stitched together over
millennia from villages on the lines of haphazardly placed Roman,
medieval and Victorian thoroughfares, gets just 0.015. This can be
shown on a polar histogram. Cities like London are circular blobs;
those like Chicago, clean crosses.

Chicago
It will come as no surprise to frequent travellers that of the cities Mr
Boeing studied, the 16 most orderly are all in North America. The
United States is famous for its grid layouts, and the logical, easy-to-
remember addresses they generate. Think of The Velvet
Underground’s song, “I’m Waiting for the Man”. Any New Yorker,
hearing the lyrics “Up to Lexington, 125”, will know that Lou Reed
meant 125th Street, the heart of Harlem. To find streets named in
music about London, such as “Abbey Road”, one must consult a
map.
Yet street grids far predate the United States. The first grid-planned
city known to archeologists is Mohenjo-Daro, built around 2600bc
along the Indus river, in what is now south-eastern Pakistan. Like
modern Chicago, the ancient city had wide thoroughfares for through
traffic (probably then oxen carts, tiny models of which have been
excavated from the site), built on a north-south/east-west alignment,
binding narrower streets within neighbourhoods on the same grid.
The ancient Greeks also liked the design. Since the designers of
Mohenjo-Daro’s names are lost to antiquity, the earliest known urban
planner is Hippodamus of Miletus, whose plan for that city laid out
even square blocks. Hippodamus was also among the first to connect
town planning and social order. Aristotle deemed him “the first person
not a statesman who made inquiries about the best form of
government”.
In Renaissance Europe, many early urban planners favoured radial
cities, with roads that spread out from a central plaza, because they
were easier to defend. Filarete, who designed one of the first “ideal
cities”, planned a city built in the shape of a star, with roads spreading
out from a central square featuring a church, and ending at fortress
walls. Palmanova, a small fortress town near Venice, is probably the
closest example that was actually built.
But the grid kept coming back. In the Spanish colonies, the Law of
the Indies decreed that new cities should be planned on grids, though
as in Europe, with large squares at the centre for churches. Streets
laid out along the squares would then block the wind, which would
otherwise “cause much inconvenience” to the religious festivals and
the like that were expected to be held in the plaza.
In the United States, a mix of idealism and practicality drove the
adoption of the grid. In the late 17th century, William Penn laid out his
city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, on a grid, as a sort of
enlightenment alternative to the hierarchical European city. Instead of
naming streets for what they contained, they were given numbers, or
named for the trees lining them. Penn, a Quaker, believed that if all
streets were equal, the people would be too.

Philadelphia
Yet the reason why most American cities are built on grids is largely
to do with money. Thomas Jefferson’s land ordinance of 1785 laid out
the as-yet-unconquered land to the west in perfect grids to make it
easier to sell plots to farmers, and fund the young government. This
logic applied to towns too. Chicago’s grid was first laid out in 1830,
when the city was little more than a fort on the Chicago river.
Developers of later suburbs simply followed the old pattern, partly
because it made it easier for trams to transport people between the
new developments and the city. (As a result, as the city spread along
the grid without a single numbering system, duplicate addresses
proliferated. Chicago’s clever street system was introduced only in
the early 20th century, after the postal service threatened to cut the
city off.)
What makes the grid pop up again and again? The benefits of
building streets in uniform grids are clear to anyone who has ever
played SimCity. Roads are expensive to build. Laying them out in
grids allows more buildings to sit alongside them, which can more
easily be linked to sewage lines, electricity connections and gas
pipes. Square lots hold rectangular buildings which are filled with
rectangular rooms holding rectangular tables, beds and desks. “All of
these rectangles combine and give us this efficiency of geometry,”
says Paul Knight, an architect who works for Historical Concepts, a
firm based in Atlanta and New York.
And grids are easy to navigate. In London cab drivers have to spend
up to four years learning the street network before they can get
around without a map. Chicago or New York taxi drivers can achieve
much the same thing in a day. Pedestrians can walk in a fairly direct
route anywhere they need to go, without worrying about dead ends or
impassable barriers between roads.

London
Grids also allow for what Laurence Aurbach, a historian of urban
planning, says is the most consistent rule of city design throughout
history: functional traffic separation. That is, the separation of
pedestrians from vehicles; fast vehicles from slow ones; and through
traffic from local traffic. Grids can have networks of wide main roads
and narrow side streets, with pavements and crossings for
pedestrians. Faster traffic can be constrained to wider through-
streets, where it has to stop less often, leaving narrower residential
streets quieter and less polluted. In the Victorian era this meant that a
network of trams was easy to interlace through them, providing rapid
transport for workers from expanding suburbs back into city cores. On
a grid, you can get anywhere you want to go by taking two trams—
one travelling north and south and another heading east or west.
And yet in the past century or so, grids have gone out of fashion.
Some newish ones exist, such as Milton Keynes, a city first planned
out in the 1960s in southern England, and Chandigarh, a city planned
by Le Corbusier, a modernist architect, in India in the 1950s. But in
the vast majority of new settlements all over the world streets twist
and turn and end in cul-de-sacs. This, explains Jeff Speck, an urban
planner and author of “Walkable Cities”, is partly just because cul-de-
sacs are cheap: you can fit a larger number of suburban detached
houses around a smaller patch of tarmac. But it is also by design.
From the 1930s onwards, inspired by thinkers like Ebenezer Howard,
a British writer who believed everyone should live in radial “garden
cities” of no more than 32,000 residents, governments began to
encourage curving streets, as well as zoning to separate industry
from residential areas.

The force driving much of this was the arrival of the car. As more of
them filled up the streets, regular intersections meant traffic ground to
a halt: “gridlock”. Intersections meant more opportunities for crashes.
Cul-de-sacs keep out unwanted traffic. The problem with this, as Mr
Speck notes, is that it comes at the expense of people not in their
own vehicles. If you are walking in a modern suburb, “You’re always
going out of your way,” he says. It is not only people walking who
have to take less direct routes. Buses are more effective when roads
are in grids, allowing passengers to get anywhere with just one
change.
Could grids be resurrected? Architects are discovering that cul-de-
sacs are a dead end. According to Mr Boeing’s research,
neighbourhoods that have been built in America in the past 20 years
are more orderly than those of the two decades before. The problem
is that these days so few are built they have little impact. And most
new housing is grafted on to existing neighbourhoods—with street
patterns established long ago.
Should construction one day take off again though, the grid might
make a return. The important thing is to get them right. As Jane
Jacobs, an influential early critic of the car-centric replanning of cities,
argued in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, what
matters most is that the blocks are short, and the roads not too wide.
Short blocks are easy to walk through, and create plenty of space for
different businesses. Long blocks, designed to reduce the number of
times cars have to stop at traffic lights, “thwart the potential
advantages that cities offer”, and turn streets into sewers for vehicles.
Bear that in mind, and the oldest form of city planning remains as
valuable as ever. ■
Choose your own city, or select one below:
 
Chicago
New York
Philadelphia
London
Milton Keynes
Barcelona
Brasilia
Beijing
Abu Dhabi
Chandigarh
© MapTiler
© OpenStreetMap contributors

Sources: Getty Images; © MapTiler © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap;

The Economist
Take me out to the ball game

Why cricket and America are made for each other

The world’s second-most-popular sport and biggest sports market are
about to meet

Dec 20th 2022 | GRAND PRAIRIE, MORRISVILLE AND

STATEN ISLAND
BY
THE
MIDDLE
of September, half a diamond was all that remained
of the infield at the AirHogs baseball stadium in Grand Prairie, Texas.
The artificial turf was being carted away. The pitcher’s mound was a
crater. The dugout had been dug out. The stadium’s tenant, a minor-
league team of the same name, disbanded in 2020, a victim of the
pandemic.

But on that Sunday the Dallas-Fort Worth area, of which Grand

Prairie is part, thrummed with sports. In the car park across the road,
souped-up cars were doing timed laps around a traffic-cone circuit.
By lunchtime the nearby Olive Garden, a chain restaurant where a
$25 meal supplies a day’s calories, was full of diners in jerseys
signalling their support for the Texas Rangers, a baseball team. At
BoomerJack’s Grill and Bar that evening, half the acreage on the
dozens of flat screens was given over to the Dallas Cowboys’ first
game of the American football season.

That afternoon, northwest of Dallas, a dozen multimillionaires

gathered at a 2,500-acre ranch. Horses bobbed in their stalls before
the main house. At the back, manicured gardens were framed by
rows of trees receding into the distance. Inside, around a Putinesque
conference table, the men discussed their plans to bring a new sport
to this sports-saturated country. When the AirHogs stadium reopens
in the spring it will be the first home of Major League Cricket (MLC).

All the men were of Indian descent. They and their partners, who
include the CEOs of Microsoft and Adobe, have put in $44m and
committed another $76m to start the league. As owners of the first six
franchises—in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle
and Washington, DC—they are betting that conditions are right to turn
cricket, long seen as a baffling foreign game, into an American
pursuit. The first season will run from July 13th to 30th.

Most Americans may not take cricket seriously—and most of the

cricketing world does not take America seriously—but in 2024 the
country will co-host (with the West Indies) a cricket World Cup,
qualifying the American team automatically. USA
Cricket, the
governing body in America, wants to include cricket at the 2028
Olympics in Los Angeles. The world’s biggest sports market and
second-most popular sport are about to discover what they really
think of each other.

Among cricket fans and pub-quizzers, this fact is settled: the first
cricket international ever was played between the United States and
Canada in Manhattan in 1844 (Canada won). Those of a nerdier bent
also know that cricket was popular in antebellum America. The first
recorded mention comes from Georgia in 1737, notes Tom Melville in
“The Tented Field”, a history of cricket in America. Baseball
“remained in a distant second place until after the civil war,” writes
John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, in
“Baseball in the Garden of Eden”.

Various reasons have been set forth for cricket’s decline after the civil
war. One is that baseball was more conducive to battlefield conditions
—it did not need a smooth batting surface. Another is that baseball
was, then, a much shorter game. But above all, as Mr Melville writes,
“Cricket failed in America because it never established an American
character.”

What, though, gave baseball its American character? Scholars agree

the sport originated in England; there are references to “base ball”
from at least the mid-18th century. In 1905 Albert Spalding, an
American baseball pitcher and businessman, set up a commission to
investigate the game’s origins. Spalding had “a yearning for grand
national stories to match the burning patriotism of the day”, writes
Beth Hise in “Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect”.
The commission returned with the perfect—if bogus—story of Abner
Doubleday, a civil-war hero who supposedly laid out baseball’s rules
in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, home today to the baseball hall of
fame.

The creators of this origin story “were not mere liars and blowhards”,
writes Mr Thorn. They “were trying to create a national mythology
from baseball, which they identified as America’s secular religion”. Via
email, he elaborates: cricket’s popularity faded “as America’s fervour
for the Union coincided with the rise of professionalism in baseball
and accompanying superior quality of play. The lower and middle
classes embraced baseball, leaving cricket to the upper class, which
had time to play and observe” the days-long matches. Cricket was
consigned to society’s margins, as a sport fit for toffs and perhaps
migrants.

Take me out to the ball games

Today, the conversion of the AirHogs baseball stadium is symbolic of

larger trends within the world’s two major bat-and-ball sports.
“America’s national pastime” has been declining in popularity for
decades, according to Gallup, a pollster. Though 34% of Americans
surveyed in 1937 named baseball as their favourite sport, by 2017,
the last time Gallup asked the question, just 9% chose it, barely more
than the 7% who picked soccer. The main problem is that baseball
games have become longer and duller. In 1937 an average major-
league game ran for about two hours. The average game now drags
on for more than three hours. Yet average runs per game have
remained about the same: between eight and ten, according to
Baseball Reference, a sports site.

One culprit is time-wasting by pitchers and batters. Another is

statistical-analysis-led strategy, which has robbed the game of some
of its most exciting, if inefficient, tactics such as stealing bases. The
chief problem is stubborn traditionalism. Changes that have irked
fans and officials include radio commentary, stadium floodlighting and
electronic decisions on strikes. That makes it difficult for baseball
authorities to innovate.

No such malady afflicts cricket, whose legions of South Asian fans

make it the world’s most-watched sport after soccer. As baseball
started its long decline, cricket was entering a period of growth and
dynamism. In 1971 England were touring Australia for a terrifically
dull series of tests—the traditional, five-day version of the game.
When the third test was washed out, the teams agreed to play a one-
day match. Some 46,000 fans showed up, compared with 42,000
over five days of the first test. (Australia won.)

Cricket tours embraced “one-day internationals” (ODIs) as a regular

feature. By 1975 the International Cricket Council had launched an
ODI
World Cup. In the late 1970s a rogue American-inspired league,
“World Series Cricket”, introduced yet more innovations, such as
floodlights, colourful uniforms to replace white flannel, and white balls
to replace red ones. For a sport thought of by non-fans as a bastion
of obscure tradition, cricket has proved remarkably adaptable.

Still, even ODIs were a whole day long. By the 21st century that
seemed a bit much. In the early 2000s the English cricket board
introduced a shorter form, known as Twenty20 (T20), which took just
three hours. It was an instant success.

Cricket and baseball have met in the middle on length, but cricket
provides far more action

That was just the beginning of T20’s rise. In 2008 the Indian cricket
board launched the Indian Premier League (IPL), a tournament of
city- or state-based franchises. It borrowed heavily from American
sports leagues, even importing cheerleaders from American football.
As Tim Wigmore, a British sports journalist, put it in his book about
T20, “The IPL
marked the Americanification of Indian cricket: sport as
an international event, with the best players from the world over, but
with an Indian team always winning.”

This format spread, spawning the Caribbean Premier League,

Australia’s Big Bash and more. It is this model that the backers of
MLC
are adopting, reimporting to America what IPL
adapted from it.
Cricket and baseball have met in the middle on length, but cricket
now provides far more action per minute. The average T20 sees
between 250 and 400 runs.

Much else has changed in the century and a half since cricket fell out
of favour with Americans, not least the meaning of “Americans”. In
1920 the United States was 89.7% white, 9.9% black and rigidly
segregated. Major League Baseball did not see its first black player
until 1947. Today white and black people together make up only 73%
of the population, and people with American passports speak every
major language. Baseball’s biggest star is Ohtani Shohei, a Japanese
phenomenon so intent on playing in America that he sacrificed
enormous sums to move. The promise of America—in many ways the
whole point of America—is that anybody can be American.

To an underappreciated degree, America has kept that promise. In

2019 there were 5.5m South Asians in America, up from 2.2m in
2000 (and just 2,507 in 1920). Indians account for 4.6m, of whom
68% were born outside America. Migrants from cricket-loving former
British colonies in the Caribbean—Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad
and Tobago—number another million.

“Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of
cricketers, but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible,” says
an Indian origin Trinidadian character in “Netherland”, a novel set in
New York’s cricket-playing milieu in the early 2000s. Of course, he
adds, “That’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown.”
USA Cricket, which is responsible for developing the sport and
selecting the national team, reckons that 200,000 people play cricket
across 400 local leagues. Most are indeed black or brown. Today the
American men’s, women’s and under-19s’ national teams are
composed entirely of American South Asians and West Indians (and
one Briton). Five players on the men’s squad share the Gujarati
surname Patel. “I used to play for teams where everyone would pray
to Allah…And then another team where everyone would be like, ‘Our
Lord, Jesus Christ’,” says Joseph O’Neill, the author of “Netherland”.
Many American clubs, he says, are formed on the basis of origin.
Some are all-Jamaican. Others are made up of people from a specific
village in India or Sri Lanka.

If passion for cricket is one defining characteristic of Indians in

America, another is financial success. The median annual household
income for Indian-Americans in 2019 was $119,000, nearly double
the national average. Indians are vastly over-represented in Silicon
Valley. A few have become wealthy beyond their dreams. And yet
something is still missing.

At the ranch outside Dallas, the millionaires were hosted by Anurag

Jain, who owns the Dallas team along with Ross Perot Jr, a
billionaire. As a 14-year-old in the southern Indian state of Tamil
Nadu, Mr Jain says, he was a “really good” fast-bowler and hoped to
play professionally. But one day “My father sat me down and said,
‘You know, son, your cricket-playing days are done. I need you to
think about being an engineer or a doctor.’” He chose engineering,
moved to America for an MBA
and succeeded fabulously. But “There
was a seed inside me that was unfulfilled.”

Another investor is Satya Nadella, the Indian-born CEO

of Microsoft,
who was not present that day. As a young man he was a spin bowler
whose dream “was to attend a small college, play cricket for
Hyderabad, and eventually work for a bank,” he wrote in his book,
“Hit Refresh”. A few years after he became CEO, Microsoft
announced plans to build a world-class cricket oval on its campus.
“When we heard there are a bunch of guys who are thinking about
MLC, we thought that there is an opportunity for us to bring the game
that we love to this country,” says S. Somasegar, Mr Nadella’s partner
in the Seattle franchise.

The potential rewards are enticing. MLC

reckons the domestic
television and streaming audience could be as large as 5m. (The
founders started and sold a cricket pay-TV channel and streaming
service called Willow TV.) The league’s backers also hope to
persuade India’s vast audience to tune in, and are in negotiations
with global broadcasters. There will be lots of merch, too.

Venky Mysore, CEO

of the Knight Riders, which owns teams of that
name in Abu Dhabi, Kolkata and Trinidad and Tobago, says that
millions of Indians watch the Caribbean Premier League when his
Trinbago Knight Riders play. The Los Angeles Knight Riders will be
his fourth team. The real opportunity is “to get the average American
fan into it,” says Mr Mysore. “And that’s a bigger challenge.” A further
hurdle is presented USA
Cricket, which is currently in financial
distress because of a covid-afflicted series with Ireland in 2021. More
worrying still is that USA
Cricket is a relatively new body (it replaced
an older, scandal-plagued entity called United States of America
Cricket Association). MLC
has a commercial agreement with USA
Cricket to develop and promote the domestic league.
So how do a bunch of techies and businessmen intend to take on the
ghost of Abner Doubleday? Their answer is technocratic. MLC
isn’t
just six major league teams, but also includes Minor League Cricket,
a development league with 26 teams, including in places like
Sacramento and St Louis. Moreover, MLC
is investing in cricket
academies to train youngsters and to encourage schools to adopt the
sport—a way into the hearts of the American middle class, as field-
tested by soccer. MLC
will also need to invest in building cricket
ovals. Soccer can use American football fields. But there are few
cricket grounds in America, and most have lousy batting surfaces and
outfields with the wrong grass.

Few, but not none. Around 15 years ago Morrisville, a town of about
30,000 in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham metropolis, planned to
build four baseball diamonds. But cricket was catching on in town,
helped by the fact that over a quarter of residents were Asian (today
that’s nearly half). “So we designed it as a proper cricket venue and
set it up,” importing clay from Indiana and a pitch curator from New
Zealand, says Mark Stohlman, then mayor of Morrisville. Mr
Stohlman himself became a convert; he is now a batsman in the local
league. At the end of August the ground hosted the minor league
finals, in which the Seattle Thunderbolts (mostly Indians and a
sprinkling of South Africans) beat Atlanta Fire (Indians and West
Indians) by ten runs.

Pitcher perfect

This points to one way for cricket to become an American sport: just
by being more visible. More grounds mean more matches, which
mean more players like Mr Stohlman. “This is a long-term play, it has
to start with investing in infrastructure, investing in players,” says
Vijay Srinivasan, one of MLC’s founders. “We know this is not going
to happen overnight.”

But there is another way to look at it. Perhaps American cricket does
not even need a Doubleday narrative. After all, there are millions of
cricket-mad South Asians and West Indians who are as American as
any baseball fan. Their presence is a powerful enough incentive to
lure the MLC
investors. The new league, in turn, is already attracting
people who would never otherwise have come to America.

The English sport is imbued with the ideals upon which America was
founded

People like Unmukt Chand, who led India’s under-19 team to a world
cup victory, but in 2021 accepted a multi-year contract with the Silicon
Valley team. Or Liam Plunkett, an English cricketer, who can now live
closer to his American-born wife’s family by playing for Philadelphia.
Cricketers go to England, Australia or India, too, but for a season, not
for a lifetime. “There’s opportunities here,” says Shadley van
Schalkwyk, a South African cricketer in Seattle. “Once you get over a
few hurdles in the USA, there is a better finish line.”

Seen that way, it matters less whether 330m million people think of
cricket as American. By providing opportunity, the prospect of
prosperity and, above all, a better future for migrants, the English
sport is already imbued with the ideals upon which America was
founded. “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see
men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment
of justice,” writes Mr O’Neill in “Netherland”. For a lot of this planet’s
people, that is what America represents, too. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: MAXIME
MOUYSSET
The wibbly-wobbly circle of life

Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry

has changed the world
It lays waste to ecosystems, allows wars to kill millions and has kept
billions from starvation

Dec 20th 2022 |

IT
USED
TO be a marvel; it remains, in its way, a subject of awe.
Between the River Tees and the town of Billingham in the northeast of
England there is a sprawling chemical works just over 100 years old.
In the 1920s, as part of the newly formed Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI), it was feted as a miracle of modernity; to a visiting
Aldous Huxley it was “one of those ordered universes that exist…as
pure logic in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence”, a
forerunner of the sort of future he would explore and deplore in
“Brave New World”. In the 1940s its strategic importance made it a
target for the German Luftwaffe; by the 1960s it employed 20,000
people, the largest plant of its sort in the world.

Today CF Industries, the American firm which now owns the site,
employs just 200 people on Teesside. Behind its perimeter fences
much of the once thronged area borders on the derelict. But the plant
can still fulfil the function for which it was first built. Billingham fixes
nitrogen.

“Fixing” nitrogen means turning the element’s chemically inert

gaseous form, which makes up 78% of the atmosphere, into a more
reactive compound. Only after this is done can the nitrogen-
containing compounds fundamental to agriculture and industry be
created. Plants such as Billingham perform this crucial step by
distilling nitrogen from liquefied air and reacting it with hydrogen
generated from methane and steam to make ammonia, a gas in
which every nitrogen atom is bound to three hydrogen atoms.

The mixture of temperature, pressure and catalysts needed in order

to make this happen was first demonstrated by Fritz Haber, a German
chemist, in 1909; the means of providing them on an industrial scale
were developed by Carl Bosch of BASF, a German chemicals firm. In
1913, at a plant in Oppau, outside Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, the
Haber-Bosch process got to work. At the end of the first world war the
treaty of Versailles required the details of the process to be revealed
to the victors, and chemical engineers descended on Oppau to
understand how it might best be copied at places like Billingham.
Huxley found the result awe inspiring:

The scene of [the final transformation] is a huge building…

church-like by reason of the silence that reigns there, its solitude
and the long line of vast steel cylinders receding, like the
columns of a Norman cathedral, into a distant twilight. It is within
 these cylinders that the mystery is finally consummated. Brought
into contact with a catalyst, the hot compressed gases suffer a
last sea change. That which, a quarter of a mile away, was air,
emerges from the cylinders as ammonia.

Ammonia has many uses; it can be a cleanser for water supplies or a

way of scrubbing toxic gases from exhausts. It is a chemical
feedstock that can be turned into nitric acid, necessary for the
synthesis of explosives such as trinitrotoluene (TNT), or cyanide,
which the chemical industry uses to make polymers such as nylon.
And it can be used to make fertilisers.

The haber-bosch process, fundamental to feeding 8bn people, is one

of the preconditions of modernity

Poke around on a British farm and you will probably see blue bags of
the Nitram-brand ammonium-nitrate fertiliser pellets made in
Billingham. If it were possible to poke around inside the crops
growing in those farms’ fields, you would find that much of the
nitrogen they contain had come from such pellets. And if you are a
Briton who does source your food almost entirely from organic farms
(which eschew chemical fertilisers) something similar is true for you,
just as it is for most people in rich and middle-income countries. The
human body typically contains a few kilograms of nitrogen, an amount
which, lumped together, would weigh about as much as your arm
from finger tip to a bit above the elbow. In most people, in most parts
of the world, a good kilo of that nitrogen has passed through the
reaction vessels of the Haber-Bosch process. A factory-made
forearm’s worth of flesh.

Without the Haber-Bosch process it is estimated that 30-50% of the

world’s harvest would be lost; it is fundamental to feeding the world’s
8bn people. Like electricity and the internal combustion engine, it is
one of the preconditions of modernity.

And just as the fossil-fuel use that has provided most of the world’s
electricity and mobility has rearranged the planet’s carbon cycle, so
the drive to fertilise has upended its nitrogen cycle. About 90% of the
nitrogen fixed into fertiliser at a plant like Billingham fails to get into
humans. Much of it builds up in the environment rather as carbon
dioxide builds up in the atmosphere. As with the carbon dioxide, this
causes problems. It kills people, reduces biodiversity and affects the
climate. Its effects are less disturbing than those of carbon dioxide;
but given the scale of carbon dioxide’s threat to the climate, that is no
great comfort.

Nitrogen fixation is, at the moment, closely tied to that fossil-fuel use;
perhaps 2% of fossil-fuel use is in nitrogen fixation plants like
Bellingham. And like fossil-fuel use, it ties together disparate parts of
the world. That Russia is rich in natural gas, the source of almost all
the hydrogen used to make ammonia, as well as phosphorus and
potash, other crucial plant nutrients, makes it a fertiliser superpower,
the only country in the top-five exporters of all three products, which
are often sold mixed together in specific proportions. Its invasion of
Ukraine resulted in these fertilisers no longer flowing west to Europe,
where farmers use them more efficiently than almost anywhere else.

That drove up fertiliser prices, and when fertilisers have risen in price
faster than their crops, farmers often choose to use less of the stuff,
reducing input costs to protect their margins, or grow other crops.
High fertiliser prices might be expected to stimulate production at
places like Billingham. But again, margins matter; Billingham’s natural
gas now costs more too. And so prices stay high, encouraging
farmers to use less and, in poorer parts of the world, increasing the
number that use none at all. Politics, pipelines and factories halfway
around the world affect the harvest as surely as the sun and rain.

Natural cycles that have been at work for billions of years are now
shackled to human politics and economics in ways that span the
planet, shape its ecosystems and reach into human nerves and
hearts. The notion of an “Anthropocene” world, in which human
needs, relationships and politics have reshaped the most
fundamental planetary processes, can seem very abstract. Seen
through the lens of nitrogen it is as immediate as the meal on your
plate.

IN 1843, THE year The Economist was founded, a rich English

farmer, Sir John Lawes, started a long-running experiment in a field
called Broadbalk. Both beginnings were driven by concerns about
wheat. The Economist wanted tariffs on wheat imports which
benefited English landowners—the Corn Laws—lifted so that free
trade could bring down the price. Lawes wanted those landowners
and their tenants to be more productive, and thus more competitive,
and to make money by helping them become so.

To that end he embarked on a carefully controlled study of the

benefits of fertilisers both natural and artificial. On his Rothamsted
estate, about 50km (30 miles) north of London, he divided a played-
out wheat field into a set of parallel strips, each to be fertilised
differently. The study of soils and yields thus begun continues today,
the longest-running experiment in the world.

In the sunny late afternoon of an otherwise rainy October day,

Broadbalk’s 4.5 hectares (11 acres) of just-ploughed and -seeded soil
stretch black and rich up a gentle slope, a ditch at the bottom, a stand
of trees at the top. Ian Shield, who manages the agronomy
experiments at what is now Rothamsted Research, apologises for the
fact that the low sun, the recent ploughing and the residual rainwater
make the long-built-up differences between the soils in the various
strips hard to discern by eye.

Come spring, though, the difference will be manifest. The strips will
flourish according to how they have been fertilised. And those which
will do best will be the ones that have received heroic amounts of
manure and those which received a lot of Nitram.

When Lawes began his experiment at Broadbalk he was particularly

interested in the benefits of a fertiliser produced from bones and
sulphuric acid known to work in rich soils, and which Lawes was
producing for sale at a works in London. The Rothamsted work
showed that, on its own, the concentrated phosphorus in this product
did little. When applied along with “ammoniacal salts”, however, it
achieved a lot, increasing the yield by a third—the same as the
improvement provided by rich farmyard manure. As Lawes wrote a
couple of years later, in an article enthusiastically reported on by this
newspaper:

The absolute necessity of supplying nitrogen to enable the soil to

produce more wheat than it could do in a natural state, is so
apparent throughout this series of experiments, that it is difficult
to entertain the slightest doubt upon the subject.

Lawes had shown what has come to be known as Liebig’s law of the
minimum. In his work on agriculture Justus von Liebig, then the
world’s greatest chemist, argued that plant growth was limited by
whichever of their necessary nutrients was in shortest supply;
providing more of any other nutrient would be of no avail. In
Broadbalk, nitrogen was the limiting nutrient.
The same, it has since been discovered, is true not just in British
farms; it is true in most farms across the world, and in most of the
world’s land-based ecosystems. This is, at first blush, surprising.
Billions of years before Haber and Bosch got to work, some types of
bacteria had evolved the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The supply of other vital nutrients, such as phosphate and potassium,
depends mostly on the abundance of minerals which contain them in
the rock from which the soil is made; in some places they will be
scarce. Nitrogen is available wherever the bacteria capable of fixing it
from the atmosphere can live—which means pretty much anywhere.

There are, however, some basic biochemical constraints; life needs a

great deal of nitrogen; and fixing that nitrogen requires a lot of energy.

Of the four types of large molecules on which life depends, two—

proteins, which catalyse chemical reactions, and nucleic acids, which
embody genetic information—are composed of lots of nitrogen-
bearing subunits. This means that living things require more atoms of
nitrogen then they do of any other element save carbon, hydrogen
and oxygen.

One of the reasons nitrogen is such a good building block for big
molecules is that nitrogen atoms are capable of forming three
chemical bonds to their neighbours. Each nitrogen atom in the
backbone of a protein is connected to two carbon atoms and a
hydrogen; in nucleic acids they may make one bond to one carbon
atom and two bonds to another.
This versatility, though, is inseparable from the chemical quirk that
makes nitrogen hard to fix. Nitrogen atoms can use their capacity for
making three chemical bonds to tie themselves to each other very
tightly. Molecules of N2, the gaseous form of the element which
makes up most of the atmosphere, are pairs of atoms which share
such a “triple bond”—the threefold strength of which explains why
prying them apart in a Haber-Bosch reactor requires high pressure
and a lot of heat.
Bacteria are far better chemists than Haber, Bosch or any of their
human successors. The catalyst they use to fix nitrogen, a protein
called nitrogenase, has been fashioned by evolution to do so without
high temperatures and pressures, twisting and coaxing the molecules
apart rather than breaking them with brute force. That said, it is
complex to make, fussy about its working conditions (it cannot abide
the presence of oxygen) and an energy hog; keeping it going requires
a lot of metabolic juice. The ability to fix nitrogen thus extracts a high
price from the bacteria that do it.

Adding nitrogen to an ecosystem is hard work; losing it from one is

distressingly easy. Fires remove nitrogen more thoroughly than they
do other nutrients (it is because potassium is left behind when the fire
is done that it is called, in agricultural applications, potash). Water
leaches soluble forms of nitrogen out of soils when other elements
prove more recalcitrant. And there are also bacteria which, instead of
making fixed nitrogen, feed on it, eventually turning it back into N2 or
N2O—nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas—and returning it to
the atmosphere.

Birds can be very good at depositing nutrients from the oceans thick
and white upon the land

Evolution has encouraged other organisms to support the

nitrogenase using ones in their endeavours. Many plants exude
sugars to feed the nitrogen-fixing bugs in the soil; some, the legumes,
build up symbiotic nodules—rhizomes—in which the bacteria can fix
their little socks off. Some 19th-century crop rotations included
legumes as a way of restoring nitrogen, and Lawes recommended
them. He also saw that wheat’s need for nitrogenous manure meant
those rotations should contain fodder crops so the farm’s livestock
could produce an adequate amount of it. The ammoniacal salts
bought from chemists to use at Broadbalk were all very well for
experiments, but there was nothing like enough of them for the
industry as a whole.
Change, though, was afoot. As anyone who has stood too long
beneath sea gulls can attest, birds can be very good at depositing
nutrients from the oceans thick and white upon the land. The best
such deposits in the world, at that time, were those on islands off the
west coast of South America. The nutrient-rich upwelling waters of
the Humboldt current make the seas there peculiarly fecund, and
persistent high pressure makes the climate particularly dry, allowing
droppings rich in concentrated nitrogen, phosphate and potassium to
build up for centuries.

In 1840 the Peruvian Republic granted Don Francisco Quiroz,

president of the Lima chamber of commerce, a monopoly on the
exploitation of the guano on the shittiest of its islands, the Chinchas.
He was backed by British and French investors who knew that men of
science, such as the current’s namesake, Alexander von Humboldt,
spoke highly of the stuff.

In March 1841 a ship called the Bonanza unloaded the first reeking
cargo of guano in Liverpool; all told, 8,000 tonnes were imported that
year. By the end of the decade the tonnage was 70,000. In 1847
Lawes calculated that if farmers were to provide the wheat fields of
Norfolk with as much nitrogen as was made available by crop rotation
using guano instead, they would have to apply 76,000 tonnes. Within
ten years Britain imported three times that amount every year. Guano
had gone global.

This was the pivotal moment in what Francis Thompson, a British

historian, called the “second agricultural revolution”—the shift, as he
put it, from farming as a sort of extraction to farming as a sort of
manufacture. Before, farms had been akin to living mines, their
production limited but self-renewing. After, they became more like
factories, their owners and managers concerned with inputs as well
as outputs. The essentially local and closed nature of the farming
economy was opened up—as it had to be, given the fact that fewer
and fewer people were living on the land.
Britain, in the fore of this second revolution, was initially the main
market for Peru’s “white gold”; but America and continental Europe
followed. In 1856 America’s Guano Islands Act made it a national
policy that claims which citizens staked to uninhabited guano-coated
islands would be protected by the navy. The objections of those who
saw such seizure as a route towards the imperialism which the
republic so detested in others were waved aside.

When, by the 1860s, many of the best guano deposits had been
depleted, the trinity of nutrients it had provided in a user-friendly
bundle began to be procured singly. Phosphate came from bones and
fossilised dung. Potash was produced in the backwoods of Canada;
after the discovery of huge deposits of potassium-bearing mineral
salts in Prussia it was mined, too.

As for nitrogen, most came from mineral deposits in the Atacama

Desert, not that far from the guano islands off Peru. In 1879
competition for control of the nitrate deposits saw a war break out
between Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Chile won, and for the rest of the
century it completely dominated trade in fixed nitrogen.

But its supplies were not unlimited. In 1898 (the year America’s
guano-begotten non-imperialist expansion across the Pacific saw it
annex Hawaii and the Philippines) Sir William Crookes, a chemist,
alerted the annual meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science to a coming nitrogen crisis. Crookes noted
that the number of people around the world gaining sustenance from
bread, and thus wheat, had been 371m in 1871. Less than three
decades later the number was 146m larger. And it was continuing to
grow exponentially; in another 30 years there would be 230m more.

Existing means could not meet such demand. Crookes believed the
world to offer no great new tracts of land suitable for wheat farming.
And at the then current extraction rate of 1m tonnes a year, Chile
would run out of nitrate within a generation or so.
Replacing wheat was not an option. “The accumulated experience of
civilised mankind”, Crookes wrote, had “set wheat apart as the fit and
proper food for the development of muscle and brains.” If the world
was forced to depend on lesser grains like rice and maize, “races to
whom wheaten bread was not the staff of life” would squeeze the
“Great Caucasian race…out of existence”.

That made the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen “one of the great

discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists…vital to the progress
of civilised humanity”. On the basis of the latest figures from
Rothamsted he calculated that eventually as much as 12m tonnes a
year would be needed.

There was, as Crookes mentioned in an aside, another imperative,

too. The chemists of the second half of the 19th century had not
restricted themselves to plant nutrition and dyes. They came up with
a range of compounds in which, if given the right push by a detonator,
nitrogen atoms would quit their places tied to oxygen atoms in order
to form triple bonds with each other, thus creating a hot, rapidly
expanding explosion of N2, carbon dioxide and steam. Nitroglycerine,
stabilised in the form of dynamite, was revolutionising civil
engineering. In guns, the development of “smokeless powders” that
produced much less soot than old-fashioned gunpowder made it
possible for the gases produced when one bullet was fired to drive a
mechanism which would chamber the next. Such automatic
weaponry chewed through flesh, and used up ammunition, as never
before.

The increasing military need for fixed nitrogen driven by these

developments was particularly worrying to Germany. Imperial
ambition was near its peak, making war with one or more of Europe’s
other great powers more and more likely. The chemical industry was
acutely aware that its imports from Chile came mostly through British
traders—and that even if that were to change, the Royal Navy could
stop the trade by force. Hence the urgency with which Haber’s
discovery was industrialised.
The Haber-Bosch process is widely taken to have prolonged
Germany’s ability to fight the first world war. It also made possible the
extremities of the second, including the murder of more than a million
in Auschwitz by means of Zyklon B, an industrially produced form of
cyanide. It has been calculated that 6m tonnes of high explosive were
used in that war, and that over the 20th century explosives used in
war killed as many as 150m people. Internal-combustion engines
may have driven the tanks, planes and ships. Fixed nitrogen made
them into killing machines.

The effects of industrially produced nitrogen fertilisers were not so

quickly felt. By the 1930s Billingham, a wonder when opened the
decade before, had come to be seen as a drain on ICI’s resources.
The gains in agricultural productivity seen in the first half of the 20th
century mostly came from the mechanisation of field work by tractors,
combine harvesters and the like.

In the second half of the century, though, nitrogen really came into its
agricultural own, and plants like Billingham became Anthropocene
farming’s umbilici mundi. The biggest factor in this was that plant
breeders—notably Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico for the
Rockefeller Foundation—learned how to breed crops particularly
adept at growing in highly fertilised soils. The task was, again, an
urgent one. The population was growing quickly, the risk of famine
was taken to be high. And, again, it had geopolitical ramifications;
American policymakers treated feeding Asia with a “green revolution”
as a way of averting the possibility of red ones.

Crops better at using nitrogen drove demand for nitrogen and other
fertilisers; abundant nitrogen drove demand for crops better at using
it. As new strains became available yields and nitrogen use climbed
inexorably; yields in India more than tripled between 1960 and 2000.
By the end of the century the researchers at Rothamsted were finding
that roughly 80% of the new varieties’ impressive yield was down to
nitrogen fertiliser.
Human industry now fixes about 150m tonnes of nitrogen every year;
more than all the bacteria in all the soils of all the world.

ON
ONE
SIDE of Grebbeweg, a road just outside Veenendaal in the
central Netherlands, there is a bright grassy field. On the other side, a
meadow known as Hell. A nature reserve just a few hectares in area,
in the early winter De Hel has, at best, a melancholy charm. The
surface is waterlogged, the foliage an array of the world’s least
vibrant shades of green. In spring, though, says Wieger Wamelink, an
ecologist from nearby Wageningen University, it sparkles with orchids
and buzzes with insects, an ecosystem revived thanks to what its soil
now lacks: nitrogen.

The natural nitrogen cycle balances itself; over time the amount of
nitrogen fixed from the atmosphere by bacteria equals the amount of
nitrogen stripped out of compounds in the soil and water and returned
to the air as N2 by “denitrifying” bacteria.

In their eagerness to fertilise the land humans substantially increased

nitrogen fixation around the world while doing nothing to increase the
rate of denitrification: it currently runs at only 40% or so of the rate at
which nitrogen is added to the environment. As a result, fixed
nitrogen is building up in the planet’s soils and waters, as carbon
dioxide is building up in its atmosphere.

And humans have fixed nitrogen unwittingly, too. The innards of

internal-combustion engines get hot enough to burn some of the
nitrogen in the air they take in along with their fuel. Forest fires and
biomass-burning put nitrogen from plants back into the air, too. The
total tonnage produced this way is a lot lower than the amount of
nitrogen fixed for use as fertiliser, but it adds disproportionately to
some of the problems: nitrogen oxides created this way go directly
into the air, which is where they do the most harm to human health.
Airborne nitrogen oxides increase the concentration of ozone, which
at ground level is a threat both to human health and to the health of
crops. Roughly 60% of the increase in ground-level ozone seen
across the 20th century can be associated with nitrogen-oxide
emissions, and current levels of ozone are held to be shortening over
150,000 lives worldwide every year. According to Wim de Vries,
another researcher at Wageningen, they are costing the world
between 3% and 16% of its cereal production. They can also create
little aerosol particles that damage lungs, sometimes reacting with
ammonia to produce tiny particles of ammonium nitrate; in cities,
roughly 30% of the smallest, most-damaging particles contain
nitrogen. Though car exhausts dominate the production of these
particles, modelling suggests that halving Europe’s agricultural
emissions would reduce the number of lives shortened by particulate
air pollution on the continent by 19%, sparing some 70,000 lives a
year.

Eventually almost all of this airborne effluvium comes to the earth,

there to join the nitrogen added by farmers but spurned by their
crops. Unlike the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the nitrogen in
the soil does not just accumulate. It builds up in particular places; it
acidifies soils and it changes its chemical form. It does stuff. It might
return to the atmosphere as ammonia, or nitrous oxide; it might
dissolve in run-off as a nitrate ion and travel through streams and
rivers to the sea. Nitrogen given up by the soil in the form of ammonia
in one place can create an ammonium-nitrate particle in the
atmosphere, then fall back to Earth to fertilise a plant hundreds of
kilometres from where it started. After that plant dies and decays, the
nitrogen finds a bacterium keen to turn it into nitrous oxide, in which
form it then rises to the stratosphere. A century later—over the span
of which, because nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, it will
have warmed the planet 300 times more than a molecule of carbon
dioxide would—a stray photon of ultraviolet light turns it back into an
ion, chemistry turns it into nitrogen dioxide and rain washes it back to
the soil.
One overarching aspect of this superabundance is the reduction of
biodiversity. Dr de Vries reckons that nitrogen deposition is, after
habitat destruction and climate change, the third greatest destroyer of
biodiversity in the world. A principal reason for this is that some plants
are better at using nitrogen than others. If nitrogen levels are
increased the plants that are good at using it get a bigger boost than
the rest, and outcompete them. Overall biomass may well increase;
biodiversity does not.
The most spectacular examples of this effect are the dead zones now
frequently found where rivers that drain large agricultural basins flow
out into the sea. Nitrogen and phosphorus from farmlands stimulate
exponential growth in some species of algae, which bloom until they
have used up all the oxygen in the water. Creatures from throughout
the water column either die or come to the surface—there to die at a
later date. Over the second half of the 20th century such dead zones
became ten times more common as nitrogen flows into the sea from
farming grew by about half.

On land the same dynamics play out more subtly. The difference
between the orchid-free field dominated by a single type of grass on
one side of Grebbeweg and the multi-hued complexity on the other
side is that the nitrogen stocks of De Hel have been systematically
reduced, allowing species which are less good at using the nutrient to
hold their own better. To restore the nature reserve to a pre-industrial
state, conservationists stripped it of its topmost layer of soil, in which
most of the residual nitrogen was to be found. They also started
mowing it in early summer when the growing blades of grass are
nitrogen rich and making hay thus removes more nitrogen than it
would at other times.

For all this, De Hel still contains more nitrogen than it would have
centuries ago, when its sodden infertility won it its disparaging name.
And the amount is increasing, as more nitrogen is deposited from the
air. The same is true for most Dutch nature reserves, and that has
plunged the country into a complex and peculiarly anthropocene
crisis that feels like a forerunner of the future world.

After the famine the Netherlands suffered during the last winter of the
second world war, boosting food production became a national
priority, and that urgent desire for self sufficiency produced farms that
could expand on the country’s historical success as a dairy exporter.
Today the Netherlands, which houses roughly 0.1% of the world’s
cows on just 0.008% of its land surface, produces 4% of its cheese.
The remarkable productivity comes from fertilised meadows and
protein-rich concentrates which provide the cattle with all the nitrogen
they can use and more—a surplus they get rid of. Cowpats and piss,
particularly when mixed and left on the floor of a shed, are a potent
source of ammonia.

In 2015, after booming Chinese consumption saw enduring concerns

about overproduction ease, European Union caps on dairy production
were lifted and farmers invested in new cows and cowsheds. These
expansions received permits as part of the Dutch government’s
“integrated approach to nitrogen”, the PAS, under which any activity
which will lead to nitrogen deposition, including building new homes,
needs a permit, and new permits are in principle balanced out by
reduced emissions elsewhere. In 2018, the European Court ruled that
the PAS permits were not limiting nitrogen deposition on nature
reserves as well as EU law required. As a result of that decision, the
next year the Dutch high court ruled that no new permits could be
issued. No farms could expand; no new building works could be
undertaken. According to ABN
AMRO, a bank, projects worth €14bn
($15.7bn) were put at risk.

The government made room for some construction permits to be

issued by cutting the speed limit on the country’s motorways from
130kph to 100kph, thus modestly reducing nitrogen-oxide emissions
from cars. But it also realised that it needed to do something about
ammonia from farms, which accounts for far more of the total
deposition. Fearing for their future, dairy farmers staged protests, with
tractors blockading city streets (and the Wageningen campus) and
muck spread around ministers’ houses.

At the end of November 2022 the government sketched out the latest
of its approaches to the problem. It will look to 2,000 to 3,000 farms in
particularly sensitive areas to volunteer to be bought out. It will
encourage other measures to reduce ammonia production, including
more outdoor grazing and lower-protein concentrates in food. Jan
Willem Erisman of Leiden University says that, in principle, this could
be a way out of the immediate crisis—but warns that much could still
go wrong. And in the longer term, Dutch farmers are not wrong to
worry about a world in which their practices come under increasing
pressure, and in which the country’s total herd is significantly
reduced.

The Netherlands has a particular history and geography, with soils

vulnerable to ammonia-induced acidification and the sort of dense
settlement to be expected around the delta of a major river such as
the Rhine. Its situation has been shaped by the quirks of Europe’s
common market, subject to one-of-a-kind transnational regulation,
and the possibilities implicit in a world-trade system which makes it
easy to source nitrogen-rich concentrate from around the world and
ship dairy products to whoever most wants them. And it reflects a
distinct set of regulatory choices on arcana such as the maximum
permitted nitrogen-loading per hectare for various ecosystems and
whether a bulldozer’s emissions matter more when starting a new
project than when finishing an old one.

But it is a particular instance of a pervasive set of issues: how to deal

with the fact that human politics and regulations are now intimately
involved in the flows of the fundamental stuff of life on a scale that
has impacts throughout the living world. The archetype of these
issues is that of carbon dioxide. Yet it is also, at the moment, a
conceptually simple one; the primary prescription is to decouple
human industry from the carbon cycle by renouncing fossil fuels. The
means of doing this lie within the human world of economics and
politics: do things differently or do things less.

Nitrogen is different. You cannot feed 10bn people without providing

them with nitrogen, and choices made about how that nitrogen is
provided will change life off farms as well as on it—not least because,
if you use less nitrogen, you will tend to use more land. In most of
Africa, the fastest growing continent, nitrogen remains as yet too
scarce. How is it to be made plentiful without a recapitulation of the
problems it has caused elsewhere?
A world which ate fewer animals would have less of a problem,
because the conversion of plant protein to animal protein is
notoriously inefficient, as the ammonia rising from cowsheds makes
clear. But it remains the case that, to many (including many who
currently enjoy only very little access to meat), life in a meat-free
world is as hard to reconcile with ideas about the good life as
Crookes thought life in a wheat-free world was.

So if a modern-day Crookes were to survey the world of nitrogen

surplus as their predecessor did the world of incipient nitrogen
shortage, with what mission should they charge their fellow
scientists? A reversal of what happens at Billingham—industrial
denitrification on the same scale as industrial nitrogen fixation—is not
possible. The nitrogen molecules in the mostly-nitrogen atmosphere
are infinitely fungible; whether you distil them from the air over
Teesside or Maharashtra makes no difference. The fixed nitrogen is
doing more harm in some places than others. And even when it is
concentrated, it is very diffuse. Fixation can start with an atmosphere
that is 78% N2. The pollutants denitrification would need to deal with
are measured in parts per billion.

Instead, look at moving from a macroscopic human intervention in the

cycle to a microscopic one: enlist the bacteria as allies. Pivot Bio, an
American startup, has identified strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria with
which seeds can be treated before they are sown in order to ensure
that there is lots of nitrogen fixation going on in the soil where they
set their roots. Bayer, an agrochemical giant, has been working with
Ginkgo, the only big synthetic-biology firm, to design bacteria that
might do even better, and could be added to seed before it was sold.
In theory such treatments could provide crops with as much nitrogen
as they get from current fertilisers while losing much less to the
surrounding environment.

Breaking down the binary of plant and bacteria helps bridge the rift
between natural and industrial
Biologists armed with new gene-editing techniques have a more
ambitious scheme: endowing plants that are not legumes with the
means to build rhizomes, the symbiotic nodules in which legumes
host their own bespoke colonies of nitrogen fixers. This is hard. It
requires not just developing the genetic circuits needed to build the
right structures, but also those needed for plants to lure the bacteria
into those structures and respond to their needs.

Giles Oldroyd, who leads an effort to this end at Cambridge

University, sees it as a question of setting up a dialogue between
forms of life divided by billions of years of evolution. That gives the
science a pleasing symbolic resonance with its possible application,
breaking down the binary of plant and bacteria in order to help bridge
the rift between natural and industrial.

A world in which the human interaction with the nitrogen cycle is

dominated not by a few hundred Haber-Bosch plants, or a few
hundred million car exhausts, but instead farmed out to countless
trillions of bacteria in soils and rhizomes would be more efficient and
responsive, making the adaptation to local conditions that is hard for
users of today’s fertilisers far easier.

Bulk production of ammonia might still go on, perhaps on a far

greater scale. It is possible that in a post-fossil-fuel world hydrogen
made by splitting water electrically could be traded internationally.
And because liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff, some think that trade may
take the form of ammonia; use the hydrogen for Haber-Bosch in one
place, transport the resultant ammonia over an ocean in a tanker,
crack it back into hydrogen and N2 at the end point. But such a trade
would be designed to bypass life’s nitrogen cycle, putting all the inert
nitrogen sucked up at one end back into the air at the other.

In feeding plants and preserving nature there could be ever more

care to national circumstances, local soils and particular seeds. Not
exactly a repudiation of the muscular, commoditised modernity that
Haber-Bosch made possible, allowing the agriculture of inputs and
outputs to go global. But a radical rethinking of it, one suited to an
age where biological ways of doing things are becoming more
important than chemical ones, and where the environment is treated
as part of the process, not just a resource to strip and a dumping
ground for what has not been used.

Ambivalent as he was about the planned world he thought it

heralded, Aldous Huxley saw in Billingham:

a vast co-operative work of art, the joint product of many

separate creations, the visible manifestation, in a single co-
ordinated whole, of countless individual thoughts…a poem of
which the technicians and administrators are joint authors.

The Anthropocene nitrogen cycle is nothing like a work of art, let

alone a good one—not yet. It is overwrought, deformed and
damaging, shaped by necessity and desire, not care or grace. But it
is, happily, a work in progress. At the level of the field and the world,
jointly authored by farmers, citizens, microbes, landscapes,
consumers, forests, scientists and fields, not to mention technicians
and administrators, it may yet achieve a poetry of its own. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: IBRAHIM
RAYINTAKATH

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hub.
The weight of the world

The economics of thinness

It is economically rational for ambitious women to try as hard as
possible to be thin

Dec 20th 2022 | NEW YORK

MIREILLE
GUILIANO is a slim and successful woman. She was born
in France and studied in Paris before working as an interpreter for the
United Nations. She then worked in the champagne business and in
1984 joined Veuve Clicquot whose performance was, at the time,
rather flat. She fizzed up the ranks and launched their American
subsidiary. In 1991 she became its chief executive and ran it with
great success. In her apartment overlooking downtown Manhattan,
she offers a glass of water before quipping “You know how much I
love water.” She is correct; drinking plenty of water is a key rule in
“French Women Don’t Get Fat”, her bestselling book on how to lose
weight and stay slim “the French way”.

In the book she describes her discomfort when as a teenager she

gained weight while spending a summer in America. Her uneasiness
comes to a head when she returns home to France and her father,
instead of rushing to hug her, tells her she looks “like a sack of
potatoes”. She goes on a new diet plan, remembers her old French
habits (lots of water, controlled portions, moving regularly) and tips
the scales back in her favour.

As a successful woman who is willing to talk publicly about her

appearance and her weight, Ms Guiliano is rare. “Of course no one
wants to talk about it,” she says. “It is much easier to pretend it
comes naturally.” Successive waves of feminism have told smart
women they should have emancipated themselves from vanity—as
they have from domestic servitude and an existence defined by
procreation.

But as a woman greatly affected by a comment about her weight she

is not rare. Aubrey Gordon, the co-host of the Maintenance Phase, a
podcast which unpicks the problems with modern weight loss and
wellness, was told by a doctor that she was overweight aged just ten.
Roxane Gay, an American writer, describes the shock on her parents’
faces when she returned home from her first term at boarding school,
aged 13, weighing 30 pounds (around 14 kgs) more than she did
when she went away.
These experiences are deeply personal but also universal, at least in
the rich world. They reflect the pressure on women to look like an
“ideal”. That ideal has changed over time. Renaissance nudes boast
ample curves. But in more recent decades it has been defined by
thinness. In the 1980s in New York it was the “social X-ray”, a term
coined by Tom Wolfe in his novel “Bonfire of the Vanities” to describe
women so slight they existed only in two dimensions. This morphed
into the “heroin chic” ideal of London in the 1990s.

Today the perfect body is the “weasel bod”, says one Los Angelena,
who is surrounded by women seeking physical perfection. These
women strive to look streamlined and sleek, like a weasel, as though
they could slip through water without disturbing it. Pursuit of such a
body might permit a little more food than the regimes of the past but it
is just as difficult to attain.

All women eventually recognise the importance placed upon their

bodies. It is as though girls are walking through a forest unaware and
are then shown the trees. They can wonder how the trees got there,
how long they have been growing and how deep their roots really go.
But there is little they can do about them and it is almost impossible
to imagine the world any other way. And the fiction that clever and
ambitious women, who can measure their worth in the labour market
on the basis of their intelligence or education, need pay no attention
to their figure, is difficult to maintain upon examination of the
evidence on how their weight interacts with their wages or income.
The relationship differs in poor countries where rich people are
generally heavier than poor ones.

Wealthy people are thinner than poor ones in countries such as

America, Britain, Germany and rich Asian countries, such as South
Korea. There is typically a gently downward sloping relationship
between most measures of weight, like body mass index (BMI), a
measure of obesity, or the share of a population that is obese, and
income, as measured by wages, the share of people below a poverty
line or their income quartile.
That poor people are more likely to be overweight has often been
explained by arguments that obesity, in the rich world, is a feature of
poverty. Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods. They may
reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to
prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low-
wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible
than those performed by the “laptop class”. Or because low income is
often a function of limited education, perhaps, so goes the thinking,
that lack of education extends to a lack of knowledge about how to
maintain a healthy weight.

The problem with all of these explanations is that the correlation

between income and weight at the population level in advanced
countries is driven almost entirely by women. In America and Italy the
relationship between income and weight or obesity is flat for men and
downward-sloping for women. In South Korea the correlation is
positive for men but this is more than offset by the sharply negative
correlation in women. In France the relationship slopes gently
downwards for men, but the slope is much steeper for women. These
kinds of patterns seem to hold across most rich countries and appear
robust to various ways weight or obesity might be measured.

The duchess’s decree

In other words, rich women are much thinner than poor women but
rich men are about as fat as poor men. Wallis Simpson, whose
marriage to King Edward VIII prompted his abdication, is supposed to
have said that a woman “can never be too rich or too thin”.
Apparently she must be both or neither.

That should give pause to anyone who thinks that poverty can explain
why people are overweight or obese, or that being rich helps people
to maintain a lower weight. You must then explain why those
dynamics seem only to affect women. Perhaps the relationship would
look the same for both sexes, but the occupations they do that
require or might result in slimness differ. Men disproportionately do
lower-paid physically active jobs, like construction (although nurses
spend as much time walking or standing as builders, and are
disproportionately women). Some rich women, such as actresses,
might be explicitly required to be thin to play certain roles.

Still, it is hard to believe that either dynamic explains the entire

difference. Data from the American Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS)
suggest that just 3.5% of civilian workers do intensely physical jobs
(and some of those categories, like exercise instruction and dancing,
employ plenty of women). Only 0.1% of workers do jobs such as
acting. That there is a gender gap in the relationship between income
and weight, which cannot easily be explained by other differences
between men and women, indicates another explanation: perhaps
being thin helps women become rich.

Myriad studies which find that overweight or obese women are paid
less than their thinner peers while there is little difference in wages
between obese men and men in the medically defined “normal”
range. There are exceptions: one Swedish study found that obese
men were paid less, but obese women were not. But research in
America, Britain, Canada and Denmark suggests that overweight
women do have lower salaries. The penalty for an obese woman is
significant, costing her about 10% of her income.

The stigma against overweight people has grown with their number

This might understate reality because it is hard to measure the wage

gap for someone who was not offered employment because of their
size. The upper estimates of the wage premium for a women being
thin are so significant that she might find it almost as valuable to lose
weight as she would to gain additional education. The wage premium
for getting a master’s degree is around 18%, only 1.8 times the
premium a fat women could, in theory, earn by losing around 65lbs—
roughly the amount that a moderately obese women of average
height would have to lose to be in the medically defined “normal”
range. The penalty appears to be particularly significant for white
women—evidence for black or Hispanic women is weaker (though
could be explained in part the fact that studies often use BMI which
can misclassify these women).

Discrimination against fat women has not diminished as their

numbers have risen. “We might expect a declining penalty due to the
increase in the percentage of overweight individuals,” wrote David
Lempert, an economist, in a working paper for the BLS, because it
has become more normal to be overweight. Instead the stigma
against overweight people has grown with their number; it almost
doubled between 1980 and 2000. He suggests this may be because
“the increasing rarity of thinness has led to its rising premium.”

The conclusion of the paper layers one infuriating sentence on top of

another. As larger women age, he writes, they incur the effects of
years of cumulative wage discrimination. Controlling for other factors,
their starting wages are lower. Throughout their working careers,
these women receive fewer raises and promotions. His paper shows
“that an obese 43-year-old woman received a larger wage penalty in
2004 than she received at 20 in 1981,” and also that “an obese 20-
year-old woman receives a larger wage penalty today than she would
have in 1981 at age 20.”

This might reflect, in part, the higher costs that obese employees
might impose on their employers, especially in America. Health-
insurance premiums in America are often paid by employers, and
very overweight or obese people tend to incur higher costs, partly
because they suffer more health problems as they age. Still, it is
unclear why these costs would be passed on only to women. And
studies in Canada and Europe (where government-funded health
care is the norm) find similar sized wage penalties for women.

Meanwhile, the idea that the penalty for being obese might be rising,
not falling, is backed up by the data from the “implicit bias” test run by
Harvard University. It asks test-takers to associate people of different
races, sex, sexual orientation or weight with words like good or bad.
And in general the findings are trending in a positive direction—
discrimination on the basis of race and sex has fallen over the last
decade. Negative associations of gay people have fallen by a third.
Weight is the exception—attitudes towards heavy individuals have
become substantially more negative.

In this context the arguments often made for why women and girls
feel such pressure to be thin and suffer from low self-esteem when
they are not appear woefully incomplete. Perhaps women do feel bad
about themselves because they compare themselves to the gazelles
that populate the covers of magazines and are duped into thinking
those photos are unedited and attainable. Maybe their parents or a
doctor commented on their weight when they were young. But in
addition to those pressures is the powerful incentive of the market:
women accurately perceive that failing to lose weight or be thin will
literally cost them.

It is economically rational for everyone to devote time to education

because it has clear returns in the labour market and for future
wages. In the same way it appears to be economically rational for
women to pursue being thin. Obsessing over what and how much to
eat and paying for fancy exercise classes are investments that will
bear returns. For men they are not.

To some extent women know this. A generation ago they seemed to

take it for granted. “The most basic thing to get on with after your job
—or during it—is how you look and feel. It is unthinkable that a
woman bent on ‘having it all’ would want to be fat, or even plump,”
wrote Helen Gurley-Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in
the 1980s and 1990s in her book “Having It All”, before rattling off
advice about how to survive on 800 calories a day, encouraging
women to weigh themselves daily and to accept that “dieting is hell
and stop getting depressed about it!”
Such attitudes were more acceptable four decades ago. But the
economic reality does not seem to have shifted much. All that has
changed is the narrative, which has embraced body positivity and
shunned dieting. Instead of the South-Beach diet or Atkins women
eliminate foods—becoming gluten-free, vegan, low-sugar—under the
guise of health or wellness, to improve their gut health or raise their
energy levels. People spend large sums to attend Soul Cycle classes,
a kind of boutique indoor cycling, to be strong and fit, not to burn
calories. “Even glossy women’s magazines now model scepticism
toward top-down narratives about how we should look…but the
psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in
an ecosystem that pretends to resist her,” writes Jia Tolentino in her
book “Trick Mirror”. Feminism “has not eradicated the tyranny of the
ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier.”

The perception of total control is misguided

Because being very obese comes with elevated health risks, some
might argue it is not a problem that there are incentives for women to
lose weight. But this relies on two wobbly pillars of logic. First, that
people’s weight really is within their control. And second, that shame
is an effective motivator.

Most people have experienced the effect that eating a little less and
moving a little more has on their physical form and so it is common to
think that weight and obesity is a mutable trait—one that slim people
work to achieve and fat people fail to achieve. If this were the case,
then it might seem possible for women to opt out of discrimination on
the basis of weight, by conforming to the body type society demands
of them.

Yet the perception of total control is misguided. People often report

gaining weight when they start taking antidepressants; women tend to
if they suffer from conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome.
Ms Gay describes how her weight gain occurred in the aftermath of a
brutal sexual assault. It also raises the question of why a great slice
of humanity collectively lost control of their eating habits in the 1980s,
when obesity rates began to soar in developed countries. Scientists
are unsure of the answer (some point to the rise of processed foods)
but they do agree that it is almost impossible to lose weight and stay
smaller—and people who achieve this are far rarer than those who
spend their lives trying, failing and blaming themselves.

Perhaps shame can work for some people, on the margin. It worked
for Ms Guiliano. When asked why her reaction to her father’s
comment was to decide to lose weight, rather than to tell him off, she
pauses for a moment. “But, of course,” she says, “he was right.”
Too high a price

But think, too, of the huge cost that the stigma, shame or the fear of
becoming overweight has on all of the women and girls who spend
their lives worrying about what becoming that way might cost them. It
is impossible to move around the world as a woman and not notice
the time, energy and investment women make in logging the food
they eat, reading diet books and attending exercise classes. Anyone
who has tried a juice cleanse or a cabbage soup diet will know that
the pursuit of thinness can come at the expense of other important
things girls and women might want to do, like being able to focus on
exams and work or enjoy food.

According to some surveys, girls as young as six recognise the

expectation that they should be thin. Then adolescents “overwhelmed
by sudden expectations of beauty, transmit anorexia and bulimia to
one another like a virus,” writes Ms Tolentino. The tragedy is that
there is no escape. Most women seem to try to conform. Some
choose not to. Many simply fail. But whatever path is taken, it seems
to come at a great cost. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: DIANA
EJAITA
The myth of the holy cow

India’s movement to protect cows is rooted in

politics, not religion
How the Hindu right co-opted the cow

Dec 20th 2022 | Mumbai

THE
LYNCHING began with an announcement over the loudspeaker
of the local temple: a calf had been slaughtered. It was 28th
September 2015, around the Eid holiday, and Hindu-Muslim tensions
were running high in the village of Bisara in the Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh (UP). The broadcast roused the village’s Hindu residents,
who consider the cow sacred. They were convinced one of a handful
of Muslim families in Bisara, the Akhlaqs, had slaughtered the cow for
Eid.

Late in the evening, dozens of rioters broke into the Akhlaqs’ home
and found meat in the refrigerator. They could not be sure it was beef,
but that didn’t matter. They smashed a sewing machine over Danish
Akhlaq’s head. Then they grabbed the patriarch, Mohammed, and
dragged him outside, his head crashing down 14 stone steps to the
street. By the time the police arrived half an hour later, he was dead.

Justice is yet to be served. Most of the 18 accused are out on bail.

Four were given front-row seats at a rally held by Yogi Adityanath, the
fiery Hindu priest who runs UP. One died in custody and received a
martyr’s send-off, Hindu nationalist politicians descending on Bisara
to pay their respects. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not taken
much notice. His first remark on the murder, eight days after it took
place, was a call for Hindus and Muslims to unite.

India’s prime minister has a fixation with cows. Under his Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), they have become a symbol for the struggle to
remake India as a Hindu state. To eat beef or not to eat beef has
become the question dividing the country’s billion Hindus, who protect
cows because they revere them, and its 200m Muslims, whose
religion permits them to eat beef and sacrifice cows. More than class
or caste, this distinction stirs passions and wins votes.

Most of India’s Hindus share the belief that slaughtering cows is

sacrilegious. Thus protected, cows have multiplied to the point that
India has more cattle—over 300m, according to the United States
Department of Agriculture—than any other country. Cows sashay
down motorways, causing accidents. They gnaw at whatever
pastures they come across, to the consternation of small farmers.
And they excrete everywhere.

No matter. Hindus are unwavering in their devotion to gaumata, or

mother cow. Historians have puzzled over this. Why and how did the
humble cow, not the majestic elephant or the fearsome tiger, become
holy? The theological basis for its elevation is mixed. Indeed,
veneration of the cow has often had less to do with achieving success
in the afterworld than with acquiring and holding political power in this
one.

Ask Hindus why they consider the cow sacred and they will probably
wax lyrical about the sustenance it provides. The typical Indian family
consumes copious amounts of milk—not skimmed or lactose-free but
the good stuff, so thick and creamy that it exudes the sweet smell of
butter when heated. Visit a Hindu temple and you will see cows
everywhere. Statues of them are draped in marigold wreaths and
multicoloured shawls. There is often a shelter on site where priests
feed and bathe cows. Worshippers give generously towards their
care, hoping for good fortune in return.
Yet religious texts are ambiguous on the question of cows. Few
Hindus today read the Vedas, the books considered the fountainhead
of Hindu wisdom. If they did, they would be gobsmacked. Sure, the
cow is admired, mentioned more than any other animal except
perhaps the horse. In the Rigveda alone the animal is mentioned
around 700 times. But it is not clear the cow is off the menu. Those
700 mentions include references to slaughtering cattle for food and
sacrifice. One text prohibits eating cows and bulls only to quote a
revered sage, Yajnavalkya, who says otherwise. He would eat the
meat of either “as long as it is tender”.

It seems Vedic Indians, who lived around 1500BC, ate beef. So did
the gods. Indra, the king of gods, is said to have had a taste for bulls.
Agni, the fire god, enjoyed the meat of horses, bulls and cows. In the
Mahabharata, one of Hinduism’s great epics, 2,000 cows were
slaughtered daily in the kitchen of King Rantideva.

It contains multitudes

Such contradictions are not surprising. Hinduism is, says Wendy

Doniger, a retired Indologist at the University of Chicago, a
decentralised faith. There is no living figurehead comparable to the
pope. Myriad holy men command personal followings. Hindus have
their pick of deities, because god comes in many forms. There is no
singular religious text, like the Bible or Koran, but rather an array of
epics. There isn’t even one holy day of the week. Individuals’
practices depend on which temples they pray at, which elders they
speak to and which texts they pick up.

That has left room for the powerful, religious or political, to push
practices that serve their own ends. Various groups helped build what
the late Indian historian, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, labelled “the myth of
the holy cow”. Like Mr Modi and his incarnation of the BJP, each
group has emphasised venerating cows as a way to define its own
community.
Start with Brahmins, the priestly caste. Around 500BC Buddhism was
spreading in India. The Brahmins were grasping to maintain influence
over the masses. It was no good trying to counter the Buddhist belief
in ahimsa—non-violence towards all living things. The public was sold
on it. Better to take the moral high ground. The Brahmins focused on
parts of Hindu texts that do uphold cow worship. Where the early
Buddhists, who were not vegetarians, opposed only the unnecessary
sacrifice of animals in general, the Brahmins went further and
stopped killing cows for meat, too. They went vegetarian and began
to worship the cow. In an agricultural society, where cattle were
valuable, it was an easy way to get the public on-side. Soon lower-
caste Hindus began giving up beef in an attempt to shimmy up the
social ladder. Only the dalits, the untouchable caste, continued to eat
beef.

The next boost to the myth of the holy cow came during the colonial
era. When local Hindu rulers called for beef bans, the British refused,
claiming they wanted to remain neutral in local conflicts. Besides,
beef was—and still is—a staple in the British diet.

The cow protection movement, led by the Arya Samaj, a

fundamentalist Hindu group, put the cow at the centre of their
struggle to revive India’s Hindu identity following decades under
Muslim and British invaders. They demanded money from Hindu
households and used it to build cow sanctuaries and organise violent
protests. Posters and pamphlets listed offences, from setting cows
loose to selling them to strangers.

Freedom fighters also used the animal as a symbol for their fight.
“Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world,” Mahatma Gandhi
said. “And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect
the cow.” British consumption of beef became a lightning rod. The
1857 Indian Rebellion began when a rumour spread among the
sepoys of the East India Company that the cartridges they tore open
with their teeth and loaded into rifles were greased with beef tallow.
By the time India won independence, in 1947, the cow was regarded
as an inalienable part of Indian identity. When the constitution was
drafted, in 1949, the Parliament received over 100,000 letters,
postcards and telegrams imploring lawmakers to institute a
nationwide beef ban. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who
claimed to be a secular modernist, caved. Article 48 of the Indian
constitution calls on state policymakers to “endeavour” to prevent cow
slaughter and preserve the native breed.
Since then, the fight for the holy cow has been part of the backdrop of
Indian politics. Politicians of all stripes have entertained a national
beef ban to appease the Hindu right.

With Mr Modi, the cow protection movement has one of their own in
charge. He was eight when he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary organisation that often shares
a stage with the Arya Samaj.

Ahead of his election in 2014, Mr Modi accused opposition politicians

of watching over a “pink revolution”, promoting the slaughter of cattle
and propping up the beef trade. In power, he has poured crores of
rupees into setting up cow shelters. He has not done enough to
condemn cow vigilante groups, like the one that killed Mr Akhlaq in
Bisara. Under his leadership, BJP-led states have cracked down on
cattle slaughter.

But eight years into BJP

rule, it has become clear that talk of cow
protection is about politics rather than faith. Life is no better for cows.
The party’s vaunted investment in cow sanctuaries has turned out to
be a sham; there is often little effort to provide real shelter.

Despite the beef bans, butchers continue to kill cattle in underground

slaughterhouses, which are far less humane than regulated shops.
Chetan Sharma, a Hindu animal-rights activist, has raided about 500
illegal abattoirs over the past decade, and paints a grim picture.
Butchers blind the animals by rubbing chilli powder into their eyes,
whip them and drive them to remote areas. There are no stun guns or
drugs to minimise the pain, just a struggle to hold the animal down
and a whopping knife to the throat. Piles of limbs and severed heads
are left to rot in pools of fetid blood.

The dark side of the moo

Meanwhile, India’s cattle population is ballooning. Small dairy farmers

have no use for cows once they stop producing milk. They don’t even
need buffaloes now that tractors and other mechanised farm tools
have become affordable. But with cattle markets shuttered, they can’t
sell the animals. Indigent families have no option but to abandon
them.

India’s cows have become pawns of the Hindu right

These stray cows have a miserable existence. In cities, they are hit
by cars and choke on rubbish. They starve to the point that their ribs
poke through their sagging skin. Those that roam rural areas cause
trouble for farmers. In recent years, there have been countless
reports of fed-up farmers shooting cows that ambled onto their land
and destroyed crops.

In one farcical case, farmers in UP

began locking wandering cattle
inside public schools, bringing classes to a halt and filling the
buildings with dung and urine. It was a desperate attempt to get BJP
politicians to deal with what local media have termed “the stray cow
menace”. It was also a fitting metaphor for how the BJP
itself is using
cattle. After millennia of slaughter and sacrifice, worship and
protection, India’s cows have become pawns of the Hindu right. ■

PHOTOGRAPHS: SHUTTERSTOCK, BRIDGEMAN, GETTY

IMAGES
Complex saviours

The new tech worldview

Silicon Valley may be coming down to earth. Not so tech’s big
thinkers

Dec 20th 2022 | San Francisco and Woodside

SAM
ALTMAN is almost supine. He is leaning back in his chair, feet
up, in his home library overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Bridge. In washed jeans and a T-shirt, the 37-year-old entrepreneur
looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever
could. Yet the CEO of OpenAI, a startup reportedly valued at nearly
$20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for
good, is not one for light conversation. The only signs of playfulness
are two pairs of pink-coloured high-tops sitting on a bookshelf, with
logos representing his two favourite technologies, AI and nuclear
fusion. Occasionally he drifts into nerd-speak. At one point, keen to
convince your correspondent that AI will progress faster than people
think, he says, sounding rather robotic himself: “I’m curious if that
caused you to update your priors.”

Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart
of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech
investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus
Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with
soldiers and spooks, talks fast—and interrupts frequently. By his pool
is a giant throne, from the set of “Game of Thrones”. It fits with the
grandeur of his worldview that the West, which he cherishes for its
classical values of free thought and free speech, should be fighting
an epic internal battle not to give in to self-loathing.

You might think these men have little in common. But they are both
part of what Mr Lonsdale calls a “builder class”—a brains trust of
youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of
Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and
male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual
interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and
machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of
government.

They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout,
but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition. They measure their status
not so much in mansions and yachts as in engagement with their blog
posts and essays, some mind-numbingly long. There is a lot of fresh,
idealistic money behind them. The number of techno-billionaires in
America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.
Some of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use
their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment. Their musings are
treated with cultish reverence by scores of aspiring entrepreneurs.

This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with

what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them. Some
think the transformation wrought by big tech has not lived up to the
excitement—and wealth—that it generated. As Peter Thiel, the co-
founder of PayPal, a payments firm, and mentor to many of these
iconoclasts once remarked, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got
140 characters.” Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone
and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new
technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one
thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK,
now what?’”

A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is
the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat. Yet it is
hard not to be sceptical. Governments are hounding Silicon Valley
over the power of big tech. Tech stocks have been hammered this
year and firms are laying off workers in droves. To cap it all, the arrest
of Sam Bankman-Fried, a crypto entrepreneur who once sought to be
the epitome of a philosopher king, has shown how flaky the morality
of supposedly enlightened elites can be. The question is: are the rest
of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence?
Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?

Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the

past. In the 1970s business stalwarts such as Hewlett-Packard and
Intel could have launched the personal computer, but didn’t, worried
about the impact on their legacy products. Two hippies, Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak, filled the void by creating Apple, unleashing a
new age of personal computing. In the early 2000s buttoned-up
venture capitalists became the bogeymen; they were dismissed for
snubbing messianic young founders who created triumphs like
Google. Soon came the turn of visionary founder-CEOs, and with
them a shift in business philosophy to something more ruthless. As
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, memorably put it,
“Move fast and break things.”

Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual

seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds. The most well known
is Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor. The other
is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator,
whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered
required reading on tech campuses.

In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community

of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on
removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced
himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to
“cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as
“extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through
life extensions. After a slow-burning adolescence, the rationalist
movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big
ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech
utopianism.

A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that

Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set,
advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019. Progress, they
think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural
advancement—and deserves its own field of study. Mr Collison points
to an array of influences for his progress fetish and cites the
economist Robert Lucas: “Once one starts to think about [growth], it
is hard to think about anything else.” His Irish heritage may also have
contributed; the country experienced a growth miracle in his youth. “I
was Lucas-pilled by my upbringing,” he says. He has co-founded the
Arc Institute, which has raised $650m to experiment with new ways of
doing science.

There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in

2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for
Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In
it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter
replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for
work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate
wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and
redistribution. His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have
become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the
rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build
a fusion reactor.

On the more ideological side, Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian

streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the
shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called
“In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an
excessive focus on the failures of the West. With a soft spot for
Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that
aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and
transparency into public policy. He is also bringing the startup culture
to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of
Austin, which emphasises free speech.

Think bubble

All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman

was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator,
which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In
2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr
Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr
Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early
backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr
Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at
school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham
remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would
figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,” he says.

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a

contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for
his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still
calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less
“cynical” than his guru.

Some dismiss their idealism as mercenary as well as messianic

Do their views matter to anyone beyond their circle of acolytes? The

unravelling of Mr Bankman-Fried’s crypto kingdom, after his FTX
trading platform mishandled billions of dollars-worth of client funds, is
a big red flag. He had promised to divert part of his wealth, measured
at $26bn at its peak, to support effective altruism, a philosophical
movement that purports to use rigorous cost-benefit analysis to do
good. His downfall is bound to strain belief in anyone who boasts of
being rich and clever enough to engineer radical social change.

Some dismiss their idealism as mercenary as well as messianic. “The

tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says
Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What
Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits
and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient
for their business models.”

Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a

sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains
to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of
wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may
encourage a greater focus on hard tech, rather than internet apps. If
they can inspire future entrepreneurs to engage in the hard slog of
building tomorrow’s trillion-dollar firms, their lofty theorising will have
been worth it. ■

ILLUSTRATION: KEITH
NEGLEY
The three knife trilogy

Emigrants from a small corner of China are making

an outsize mark abroad
Chinese migrants from Wenzhou are strikingly different from their
compatriots

Dec 20th 2022 | PARIS AND PRATO

WANG
RUI (pictured) was too young to remember his parents when
they left him. He was just two when his mother set off to start a new
life in Europe. A year later his father followed her. In the countryside
around the coastal Chinese city of Wenzhou, young adults like them
were doing the same in droves—abandoning their towns and villages,
and often their children, in pursuit of a dream. Why eke out a hand-to-
mouth existence in Wenzhou when there was far more money to be
made in sweatshops in France or Italy? Why stay behind when so
many had already left?

Wenzhou was a place with a rebellious streak

Mr Wang is sitting in a poky café in Pantin in north-eastern Paris,

where the city gives way to the banlieues: grim suburbs with high
populations of poor migrants. He recalls his childhood with sadness.
His father was earning a decent income at a state-owned transport
firm. “It was not necessary for him to leave China,” he says. But his
mother, who had a job in a village textile factory, was not satisfied.
“Sometimes, when my mother is angry, she says she left China
because she wanted to leave my father. But I also know that she
wanted to get more money.”

It was 1989 when she bade farewell, a year of pro-democracy

upheaval in China and the rapid unravelling of communism’s grip on
eastern Europe. Demonstrators began demolishing the Berlin Wall;
the Soviet Union’s days were numbered. Chaos in eastern Europe
created an opportunity: ill-guarded borders, easier for migrants like
her to cross without being challenged.

Wenzhou was a place with a rebellious streak—not in a political

sense, but in the realm of business. Even then, a decade into Deng
Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” programme, the economy of urban
China was still largely under the dead hand of the state. Wenzhou
was different. It had a tradition of entrepreneurship that had
weathered the worst of Maoism. Indeed, Mao Zedong had
inadvertently fostered it by neglect. Wenzhou was on the front line of
potential war with Taiwan, so the state and its firms invested little in it,
fearing money spent could be lost in any conflict. It had no airport
until 1990 and no railway link until eight years later. Geography had
helped, too. Wenzhou’s land-facing sides are ringed by hills and
peaks. It is isolated. Its unique dialect is described in China as the
least intelligible to outsiders—a “living fossil” of ancient Chinese.

The Wenzhounese are also famed in China for leaving their home
town to do business elsewhere, and excelling at it. Even during Mao’s
vicious Cultural Revolution they travelled across the country, buying
and selling, notes Joseph Fewsmith of Boston University in an edited
volume, “Mao’s Invisible Hand”. They delighted in the nickname “the
Jews of the east”—to Wenzhounese, the term captured their flair for
commerce and a sense of kinship that helped them survive and
prosper in far-flung places. Turn up in France, or Italy or Spain and
there would be people ready to help.

The ties that bind

Those bonds have enabled a remarkable phenomenon. Among

Europe’s 1.7m China-born immigrants, people with links to just one
city—Wenzhou (and the neighbouring county of Qingtian, which
historically was part of Wenzhou)—form the majority.
The Wenzhounese in Europe are concentrated in a few cities. You
rarely chance upon their delicately flavoured seafood cuisine (au cee,
as it is called in Wenzhounese), let alone hear snatches of their
dialect, as you walk through streets elsewhere, not even in
multicultural London. Among non-Chinese, even Wenzhou’s name is
little known (oddly—its population of about 9.6m is bigger than the
British capital’s). Yet in the places where most Wenzhounese have
settled, their impact on business and society is huge.

Mr Wang’s mother had a cousin in France, so that was the obvious

place to go. It was fairly easy then to cheat the system. Many
Wenzhounese were helped by people-smugglers. They commonly
overstayed visas. When getting these became harder, pretending to
be Japanese was used as a ruse. Get in line with some real
Japanese tourists and European immigration officers would give your
fake passport only a cursory glance.

As China opened its doors to the outside world in the 1980s and
1990s, making travel abroad easier, emigration from Wenzhou
surged. It was mainly people from the city’s rural environs who left.
They were poorer and had little land. They also had strong ties with
clans—it is common in Wenzhou’s villages for many residents to have
the same surname. People settling abroad could tap into kinship
networks for support. Their loyalties to lineage reinforced the bonds
of trust created by their links with this city and its distinct culture. In
Europe, Wenzhounese tend to form communities based not on
random affiliation with Wenzhou, but on which of the region’s rural
counties (plus Qingtian) they come from.

Their trust in one another is a key part of Wenzhou’s entrepreneurial

success. The area is famous in China for its informal lending
schemes. People with a business plan can get the startup money
they need without recourse to snooty state banks. Abroad,
Wenzhounese migrants tap into their networks for cash.

But before going into business, there is a rite of passage—hard graft.

Many Wenzhounese in Europe have similar stories of a long and
tough induction to European life, toiling in tiny factories. Some
migrants have had to work years to pay off debts incurred by
payments to the “cattle”, as Wenzhounese call the people-smugglers.
The trust circle may have helped to provide the cash, but it had to be
returned.
Wenzhou is known as the deer city (its central district, Lucheng,
bears the name). That is because of a legend that, some 2,000 years
ago, its founders saw a white deer with a flower in its mouth passing
by. To them it was an auspicious sign. There is a streak of that
optimism in how Wenzhounese sometimes describe their typical
experience in Europe as a sa bbu qo, or trilogy. Part one involves
drudgery as a hee gong, or black worker (black, in Chinese, meaning
illegal). Part two is the stage of formal employment, with documents
in order. In the final part, the migrant becomes the boss.

For many, part one has begun in central Italy on the edge of Prato, a
medieval Tuscan town. In 1989 there were just 38 ethnic-Chinese
people living there. Now there are about 35,000 and thousands more
in the nearby regional capital, Florence. Most of them are from the
Wenzhou area. Their arrival in Tuscany and sweeping reconfiguration
of one of its pillar industries—clothing—has been one of the most
dramatic chapters in the recent history of migration in Europe.
Just outside Prato’s ancient walls, “Little Italy uncomfortably
commingles with Little Wenzhou”, as two scholars who have
specialised in the study of Prato’s ethnic-Chinese population,
Elizabeth Krause and Massimo Bressan, put it in a research paper
published in 2017. Farther towards the edge of town there is barely
any sign of Little Italy in the industrial expanse that unfolds. On
factory after factory, warehouse after warehouse, the signs have
Chinese characters. Almost all are run by Wenzhounese and mainly
employ Wenzhounese. “It is just like China!” exclaims a non-
Wenzhounese emigrant from that country.
Ding Jinrong is the 56-year-old boss of one of these businesses,
Hermosa Fast Fashion. His part-one story is typical: sneaking into
Italy by road in 1991 via Hungary and Austria, then making his way to
Prato where he worked and slept in factories (“not as good as this
one,” he says, indicating his own large warehouse). Back then, he
was alone. He had left his wife behind in their village outside
Wenzhou. “It was a hard life,” he chuckles. “But what could you do?”

The thousands of Wenzhounese who flooded into Prato at that time

were following an earlier wave of migrants. These were mainly poor
Italians from the south of the country, drawn by the city’s textile
businesses’ need for cheap labour. The influx had caused a
population surge in Prato, but by the 1980s the supply of such labour
was running out. China was beginning to outcompete Prato’s mostly
small-scale businesses, which specialised in subcontracted work
cutting and sewing materials for clothing firms. The Wenzhounese
satisfied a desperate demand: they were willing to work hard for low
wages. They saved a dying industry.

Wenzhounese call their niche sectors in Europe the sa bo de, or

three knives

Soon they began to move up the value ladder, first taking over the
tiny companies for which they worked, then the entire production
chain. They developed a new specialism in pronto moda, or fast
fashion. China could make clothes quickly, too, but getting them to
Western markets could take weeks. Prato’s Wenzhounese
businesses could not only produce them rapidly, in lightning response
to ever-shifting trends, but also ensure swift delivery to wholesalers in
Europe. Moreover, they would have the coveted “Made in Italy” label.
By the mid-2000s Prato boasted thousands of Chinese-owned
clothing firms, making it Europe’s biggest fast-fashion hub. Some did
work for famous global brands. A centuries-old tradition of textile work
in Prato had set out on a new trajectory, steered by Chinese.

Knife skills
Wenzhounese are renowned in China for specialising in a handful of
industries and establishing large shares of their markets both
nationally and globally. Factories in Wenzhou produce 60% of the
world’s buttons, a quarter of China’s spectacles and one-tenth of its
shoes, official websites claim (don’t ask about its share of the world’s
sex toys). Wenzhounese call their niche sectors in Europe the sa bo
de, or three knives, because that instrument is used in all of them:
making clothes, fashioning leather and catering. The Wenzhounese
in Prato wield the first of these knives; those in Florence employ the
second, making handbags and suitcases. Milan has Italy’s biggest
number of Wenzhounese (twice as many as Prato, although, as a
share of the city’s population, they are far less prominent). All of the
knives have played a role in the Milanese community’s growth. The
city’s Wenzhounese have spread into other businesses, too. By 2019
11.5% of bars in Milan were Chinese-owned, according to Corriere
della Sera, a national newspaper based there.

It is the same in the other European countries with many

Wenzhounese. The catering business has drawn many to cities in
Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. They rarely serve au cee
dishes, unless they know their customers are likely to be
overwhelmingly Wenzhounese. Instead they offer better-known
regional Chinese cuisine, such as Cantonese, or food from other
countries (pizza included). In recent years Wenzhounese-run
Japanese restaurants have proliferated in Paris. They now
outnumber those with Japanese owners by ten to one, reckons
Cheng Xiabing, a PhD student at Sorbonne University who focuses
on Chinese involvement in the Parisian catering industry.
In Paris Wenzhounese often specialise in the wholesale of clothing
and leather goods. In 2015 a Wenzhounese tycoon, Hsueh Sheng
Wang, opened Europe’s biggest textile trading centre in a Parisian
suburb. Mr Hsueh migrated to Paris from Wenzhou in the 1970s as a
child, with his parents. His first job was as a deliveryman. The final
part of his trilogy—as the CEO of Eurasia Group, a large property firm
he founded—is legendary among the city’s Wenzhounese.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have taken their toll. On a
recent visit to the three-storey complex, your correspondent saw row
after row of tiny showrooms crammed with displays—and boxes filled
with goods ready to ship to customers. Yet Wenzhounese staff said
there were far fewer visitors these days. The war has pushed up
transport costs, they complained, especially from faraway production
bases like China. Both in Prato and Paris, owners of textile- and
leather-related businesses said a few were closing down.

Some Wenzhounese talk of returning to their native city to live.

Amnesties offered by European governments mean most have
acquired residency permits in Europe. But few have applied for
foreign citizenship. China does not allow dual nationality, so
Wenzhounese with Chinese passports mainly prefer to keep them:
they are essential for doing business in China without the fetters
imposed on foreigners, or for enabling retirement to their ancestral
villages (where many still have houses).
Wenzhou’s links to Europe far precede the influx of the past 30 or 40
years. The first long-term settlement of Wenzhounese on the
continent dates back more than a century. During the first world war,
the allies needed for labour—their own young men were needed to
fight instead. Chinese people helped to make up the numbers. About
135,000 of them joined an allied organisation called the Chinese
Labour Corps. Its members dug trenches, carried away the dead and
injured, and maintained the roads and railways needed to supply the
troops. After the war about 3,000 Chinese survivors (thousands had
been killed by bombs, disease or in accidents) stayed behind in Paris.
Many were from Wenzhou. Others from Wenzhou joined them later.

When China began opening up in the 1980s, France was therefore

an obvious destination for Wenzhounese, as was Italy, where some of
those early migrants had headed, too. It may have helped that
Wenzhou was no stranger to at least one strand of Western thinking:
Christianity. Wenzhou is often described by Chinese as the country’s
“Jerusalem” because so many of its people are followers of the faith
(at least one-tenth, by conservative official estimates). They are
evangelical Protestants whose ancestors were converted by Scottish
missionaries in the 19th century. Perhaps not the best fit with the
Catholic traditions of countries such as France and Italy, but still a
spiritual overlap. There is a link, too, with entrepreneurialism—many
of Wenzhou’s Christians believe that making money is a way of
serving God. Successful ones are known as “boss Christians”. In
European cities wealthy Wenzhounese have helped to open
churches, with services in their dialect. Paris has well over a dozen.
“God gives us an ability to do business,” says a lay clergyman.

But Europe can be a hostile place, too. Anger has flared against
Wenzhounese, with people accusing them of everything from unfair
and exploitative business practices, to crime and causing damage to
local ways of life. In 2004 rioting erupted in the south-eastern Spanish
city of Elche, a traditional centre of the country’s shoemaking industry.
Two Chinese shoe warehouses were set on fire. Hundreds of
protesters took to the streets, some with banners saying “Chinese
out”. They were enraged by local Wenzhounese traders’ sale of cut-
price shoes from Wenzhou, which they said were forcing Spanish
firms out of business.
Wenzhounese often complain about hostility shown by the police,
accusing them of disproportionate targeting of Chinese businesses
during crackdowns on illegal behaviour. In Milan in 2007, following a
sharp escalation of fines imposed by Italian police on Wenzhounese
traders for using private vehicles for commercial purposes, hundreds
of Chinese staged a protest, waving Chinese flags. They clashed with
police, injuring several, and overturned cars.

Young Wenzhounese...are beginning to find a voice

In 2009 the citizens of Prato—a city long known as a left-wing

stronghold—elected Roberto Cenni as mayor. Mr Cenni, a centre-
right textile entrepreneur, had made anti-immigration a central feature
of his campaign for the job. “The people who are truly being
discriminated against are the people of Prato,” he said, referring to
non-Chinese. Mr Cenni was replaced in 2014 by a left-wing mayor,
Matteo Biffoni, who is more sympathetic to the Chinese presence. But
September’s election of a national government with a neo-fascist past
has shown a worrying trend in European politics towards the far right,
especially for immigrants.
Young Wenzhounese—those brought up in Europe, who are fluent in
European languages and usually are citizens of the countries they
live in—are beginning to find a voice. In Paris Wang Rui, the boy who
was left behind in Wenzhou by his parents, rejoined them at the age
of seven when his father returned to pick him up. In Rome, his first
port of call, he recalls the scorching heat, and the pleasure of being
able to drink water safely straight from the tap.

Now Mr Wang is 35, with a master’s degree in management. The

three knives are not for him. He is a business consultant who has
also thrown himself into politics (at 18 he automatically became a
French citizen, having grown up in France). Mr Wang and other
young French Wenzhounese born or brought up in the country have
helped the genesis of a rights-protection movement that, in recent
years, has spawned several protests in Paris against anti-Asian
racism.

Singing the song of angry men

One of them, in 2016, attracted tens of thousands of people—the

biggest ever led by ethnic-Chinese in Europe. The flags they waved
were French. They sang “La Marseillaise”. Many of the participants
were Wenzhounese, angered by the death of a Wenzhounese tailor
after being assaulted by three teenagers. The demonstrators
complained that such attacks on ethnic-Chinese were often ignored
by the Parisian authorities. The protest sparked much debate in
France about such crimes. The tailor’s assailants were convicted of
the murder. The court ruled that it was racist.

Wenzhounese activists see the protest movement as a watershed—a

political awakening among a group that hitherto had preferred to stay
out of the limelight. One of them, Olivier Wang, a Wenzhou-born
commercial lawyer, says the demonstrations have achieved some
success. “It would be impossible to end all racism by French towards
Chinese,” he admits. But he says Wenzhounese have shown that
they are no longer prepared to be ignored. “Now we stand up and say
no.”

Many young Wenzhounese still find it hard to say that word to elders
in their community. The tradition of hard graft is one that is hard to
shake off. You see it in the café-tabac shops that are part of the fabric
of Parisian life. Visit one these days and it is likely that the people
running it will be young Wenzhounese. The shops are controlled by a
government monopoly—you need to be French to run one. It is tough
work with long hours. But elder Wenzhounese, having completed
their trilogies, are helping their French-born children shell out for
them, seeing such shops as safe investments. In that most French of
businesses, the Wenzhounese are spreading their wings.

Mr Wang, the consultant, longs to be seen as French. In 2020 he was

elected as a councillor in Pantin, the commune of north-eastern Paris
where he lives. He campaigns for more than the rights of ethnic-
Chinese. He has joined Place Publique, a new centre-left party, and
says he wants to represent Parisians of all kinds. As he is quoted as
saying on the commune’s website, “I don’t want to be reduced to my
origins.” ■

PHOTOGRAPHS: NICOLAS
DE
ROUGÉ, GIANNI
CIPRIANO, DARIO
MIALE
Christmas Specials | Hot spot
How will the haj change as global temperatures rise?
Keeping pilgrims safe will become harder and costlier as the world gets hotter

Dec 20th 2022

AL-MAQDISI, A
MEDIEVAL Islamic geographer, described the Hejaz
region in Saudi Arabia as an area of “suffocating heat, deadly winds
and clouds of flies”. It is an inhospitable spot. But it is also the site of
the haj, the annual pilgrimage is one of the five pillars of Islam and
that every Muslim who is able must complete once in their lifetime.
Before the pandemic led to a temporary cap on numbers, 2.5m
pilgrims attended each year. By 2030 the Saudi government wants
6m. Today the pilgrimage is made possible by mitigating the heat with
technology and infrastructure. But as the world warms, keeping hajis
safe will be harder and costlier.
Even in winter, average temperatures near Mecca rarely fall below
20°C. In large crowds the press of bodies makes it harder for each
individual to dispel heat. But July to October, when the air is hottest
and still damp, is most dangerous. The combination of heat and
humidity gives the “wet-bulb” temperature. The higher it is, the less
organisms can avoid overheating by sweating since moisture
evaporates more slowly.
Maximum wet-bulb temperatures around Mecca, °C

Projected daily average by month

18

24

26
28

29.5

20

22

2020

2030

2040

2050

2060

2070

2080

2090

Jan

Months of the haj

Jun

Danger

Extreme danger

Dec

*CMIP5 multi-model mean based on current emissions trajectory

(RCP4.5)
Sources: WMO Regional Climate Centre at KNMI; The Economist

Maximum wet-bulb temperatures around Mecca

Projected daily average by month, °C

18

24

26

28

29.5

20

22

2020

2030

2040

2050

2060

2070

2080

2090

Jan
Months of the haj

Jun

Danger

Extreme danger

Dec

*CMIP5 multi-model mean based on current emissions trajectory

(RCP4.5)

Sources: WMO Regional Climate Centre at KNMI; The Economist

Maximum wet-bulb temperature around Mecca

Projected daily average by month, °C

18

24

26

28

29.5

20

22

Jan

Jun
Dec

2020

Months of

the haj

2030

Danger

2040

2050

2060

2070

Extreme

danger

2080

2090

*CMIP5 multi-model mean based on

current emissions trajectory (RCP4.5)

Sources: WMO Regional Climate Centre at KNMI; The Economist

At wet-bulb temperatures of more than about 29°C, almost any

activity outside becomes treacherous. At 35°C scientists think it
becomes impossible for humans to cool down, meaning they
effectively cook (testing this on actual people is, for obvious reasons,
tricky). At these levels, even a young, healthy person with unlimited
water and shade is expected to die in about six hours. The fatal
threshold for the elderly or those with medical conditions is much
lower. The average haji spends about 20 to 30 hours outdoors.
Roughly one in every 1,000 religious visitors to Mecca dies, many
from cardiorespiratory attacks. The highest wet-bulb temperature
recorded during the haj was 27°C in September 2015. That year
hundreds, probably thousands of pilgrims perished in a crush: doctors
reported many deaths from heat stroke.
But the Arabian Peninsula is heating up significantly faster than the
average for the rest of the globe. Even if all countries meet their
current commitments to cut greenhouse-gas emissions—a big if—
climate models project that wet-bulb temperatures could exceed 29°C
on 15% of haj days between 2045 and 2053, and 19% between 2079
and 2086. It may get much worse.
Serious efforts have already been made to protect pilgrims from the
heat. Tents to sleep in are air-conditioned. Significant tracts of the
pilgrimage are conducted inside vast climate-controlled tunnels.
Walkways and prayer sites are lined with fans pumping out water
vapour. At least 4,000 hospital beds and 25,000 medics are made
available and further hospital areas are being built within the Grand
Mosque complex in Mecca. Wealthier pilgrims can travel by air-
conditioned trains—which run for just seven days a year. Those with
less money take crowded buses (or walk).
The logistics of the modern haj are mind-boggling. During the five
official days of the haj, millions of pilgrims carry out multiple rituals in
five locations, spread over around 170 square kilometres.
The Grand Mosque
Sa’i hills
Pedestrian tunnel
Mina Camp
Arafat
Muzdalifah
Muzdalifah
Jamarat al-Akbah
Jamarat al-Akbah
The Grand Mosque
Mina
The Grand Mosque
Mina
Google, © 2022 Maxar Technologies
Before the haj begins, pilgrims go to the Grand Mosque in Mecca to
perform the tawaf: circling seven times around the Kaaba, a cube-
shaped black shrine.
Many then perform the sa’i, walking or running between two hills
seven times (repeated later). Covering a total of 5km, the sa’i now
occurs entirely within vast air-conditioned tunnels.
On the first day of the haj proper, pilgrims travel to the Mina
encampment, 8km away. Most take buses, some the train. Others
walk through climate-controlled tunnels. Mina’s 100,000 communal
tents are now air-conditioned, but pilgrims on more expensive
packages get roomier—and cooler—accommodation.
At dawn of the second day, pilgrims depart for Mount Arafat, walking
about 2km outside to catch buses or trains. Some hike the whole
12km, believing that to be a holier endeavour, along the largest
pedestrian road in the world. Though uncovered, the road has asphalt
which is specially coated to stop it absorbing heat.
The day is then spent in prayer on the Arafat plains, mostly under
shade or in tents (the priciest have the best cooling systems). Many
pilgrims scale the peak of the mountain.

At sunset pilgrims go to Muzdalifah, a rocky patch of desert near

Mina. Unlike the journey to Arafat, almost everyone walks this 9km
stretch, to emulate the Prophet Muhammad. Buses, though, are
available for the old or infirm.
The night at Muzdalifah is spent outside: no tents allowed. High night-
time temperatures can be particularly dangerous, as the body doesn’t
get its usual respite from heat.

On the morning of the third day, pilgrims gather stones from the
ground around Muzdalifah before they walk to the Jamarat complex
near Mina, around 4km away.
At Jamarat, pilgrims throw pebbles at pillars representing the devil,
either from the ground or from a footbridge overlooking them. At its
peak, some 300,000 pilgrims pass over the main bridge per hour. The
pillars and the area around them are enclosed under a huge, air-
conditioned canopy, but the press of people can still send
temperatures soaring.
From there pilgrims return to Mecca and the Kaaba, for another tawaf
and sa’i. They sleep back in Mina.
On the fourth and fifth days, pilgrims return to Jamarat to stone the
devil again. Pilgrims’ hair is cut and animal sacrifices are carried out
on their behalf in remote slaughterhouses.
On the sixth and final day, pilgrims leave the Mina camp for Mecca
once more, and perform a final tawaf. The haj is over. Many people
travel on to Medina, Islam’s second-holiest city. The main mosque
there is now shaded by an enormous lattice of mechanical canopies.
Many poorer Muslims must save for years and go on the haj when
they are older and more vulnerable. In future, demand may rise in
cooler years, pushing prices up and forcing the poor to go in the
cheapest but most dangerous months (based on a lunar calendar, the
haj’s dates of the pilgrimage shift forward by about 11 days each
year). One solution in very hot years could be an age limit, as was
imposed during the pandemic.
The haj has persisted for many centuries; it will not disappear. One
haji, in 1807, rhapsodised about pilgrims’ forbearance, “through a
thousand dangers” and “fatigues of every description”. But as
temperatures increase, so too, for some, will the difficulties of
devotion. ■

Sources: A.Abbas/Magnum, AP, Alamy, Getty Images

Taking the Mickey

A treasure trove of Hollywood intellectual property

is heading for the public domain
Mickey Mouse is about to be set free

Dec 20th 2022 |

TROUBLE
IS
AFOOT in the Hundred Acre Wood. Christopher Robin,
now grown up, returns to his childhood stomping ground to find
Eeyore dead, Piglet grown into a snorting wild hog and Pooh wielding
a sledgehammer. The feral animals murder anyone in their path—
mostly young women, some in bikinis.
A.A. Milne, who created Pooh in 1926, might not have approved of
“Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey”, a low-budget slasher film due
out in February. But no approval from his estate was needed. In
January 2022 the copyright on “Winnie-the-Pooh” expired in America
and the work entered the public domain. Since then the bear has also
featured in a mobile-phone advertisement as “Winnie-the-Screwed”,
complaining to Rabbit that his mobile bill is too high.

Every year a new haul of creative work leaves copyright and

becomes free for anyone to adapt and exploit. In America, where
copyright for older works is usually 95 years, recent entries to the
public domain include Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.

But a new era in copyright is now dawning. As the limit begins to

expire for works created in the late 1920s, the public domain is
starting to receive not only works of literature, art or music, but video,
too. Hollywood’s intellectual property, some of it still wildly valuable, is
increasingly up for grabs.

In January “The Jazz Singer”, one of the first successful “talkies”, will
go out of copyright. Warner Bros, which released the film in 1927, is
unlikely to worry much about losing the rights to what is today a
historical curiosity. But a year later “Steamboat Willie”, the first film
featuring Mickey Mouse, who sits at the centre of Disney’s
merchandise business which brings in more than $5bn a year, will be
there for the taking. In the 2030s Disney films including “Snow White”,
“Bambi” and “Fantasia” will slip out of copyright. So will some of the
comic-book heroes who are among the most successful performers
at the modern box office. The latest Batman movie took more than
$770m at the box office; Warner has two sequels planned. Yet from
2035, anyone will have the right to make one.

For Hollywood executives 95 years may feel all too fleeting, but
copyright terms used to be much shorter. The first modern copyright
law in the English-speaking world, published in 1710, gave rights-
holders in England up to 28 years’ ownership of their work. America
followed suit with its first federal copyright law in 1790. By 1909 the
term was 56 years. This held until the 1970s. Then, just as
Hollywood’s treasures were about to become public property,
Congress stepped in to lengthen the term to 75 years. In 1998, as
Domesday approached once more, Congress passed the “Mickey
Mouse Protection Act”, as it was mockingly known, extending the
copyright term to 95 years.

Many expected a further extension. None has materialised. The

reason, in a number of ways, is the internet. First, it has turned voters
into copyright liberals. In the 1990s the subject of copyright was of
interest only to “educators, historians and librarians”, says Mitch
Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech pressure
group. With the advent of the internet, people saw how easily
information could be copied, and how copyright rules curtailed their
ability to share music or images, or to post on social media.

The internet also changed the balance of lobbying power. Publishers,

record labels and film studios had always pushed for lengthy
copyright terms; no commercial interest had reason to push hard
against them. That is, until the arrival of companies such as Google
and YouTube, which make their money by sharing other people’s
content. Google won legal battles over its use of copyrighted pictures
in its image search. Record labels sued YouTube for hosting clips
featuring their music, before the labels decided to settle.

More recently, America’s culture wars have made Congress more

hostile towards Hollywood. Josh Hawley, a Republican, has called for
copyright to be shortened to punish “woke corporations like Disney”.
That is unlikely, but another extension is less likely still.

As valuable properties slip towards the public domain, film studios are
shoring up their legal defences. One comfort to Hollywood is that
more recent, better-known versions of their characters are still off-
limits. “Steamboat” Mickey is black and white and doesn’t wear white
gloves. The Winnie-the-Pooh now in the public domain is the version
drawn by E.H. Shepard in 1926, rather than the red T-shirted, bare-
bottomed creation that Disney popularised in 1966. Batman will go
out of copyright in 2035 but the Batmobile will be protected until 2037,
since for his first couple of years Batman drove a pedestrian red
sedan.

As the copyright deadline approaches, Hollywood is preparing

another defence. Lawyers for studios such as Disney are getting
ready to make the case that characters like Mickey Mouse are not
just literary works, but logos. Brands and emblems fall under
trademark law, which exists to help consumers identify products as
originating from a certain company. And while copyright expires,
trademarks can last for ever.

The pioneer of “double-wrapping” creative works in both copyright

and trademark was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who locked up both sets
of rights to “Tarzan of the Apes”, which he wrote in 1912. Today
“Tarzan” is out of copyright, meaning anyone is free to write a Tarzan
story. But anyone putting Tarzan’s name or image on a piece of
merchandise can expect a complaint of trademark infringement from
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., which has licensed the Tarzan name for
everything from video games to casinos. In practice, this is enough to
put big names off creating unlicensed Tarzan stories. Today, such
spin-offs are an essential part of the economics of film production.

That sure is swell

Disney holds Mickey Mouse trademarks for a wide range of

commercial uses and might argue that his appearance on a T-shirt,
say, would fool consumers into thinking the apparel was a Disney
product. Yet this argument only goes so far, suggests Eric Perrott of
Gerben, a firm of trademark lawyers. From 2024 a company will be
within its rights to use a frame from “Steamboat Willie” on a T-shirt,
he argues. And the vendor would be allowed to use the words
“Mickey Mouse” to describe such a product, just as a used-car dealer
can use a brand name like Volvo without permission.

Reimagining an old work is an art in itself

But anyone selling Mickey merchandise can expect a bruising time.
“Even if you’re right, [when] fighting Disney in a legal battle you’ve
already lost because of how expensive it will be,” Mr Perrott cautions.
Hollywood takes no prisoners when defending its intellectual property.
In 2015 a court upheld Warner Bros’ complaint against a mechanic
who had been making and selling replicas of the Batmobile for
$90,000. The judge cited Batman in her ruling: “In our well-ordered
society, protection of private property is essential.”

As copyrights near their sell-by dates, Hollywood is getting ready.

Studios are wringing value out of properties like Batman while they
still can, says Dan Mayeda of the University of California, Los
Angeles, while also building up spin-offs whose copyright will last
longer. Trademarks are being beefed up. Since 2007 Disney’s
animation arm has incorporated a few seconds of “Steamboat Willie”
into the logo that pops up at the beginning of its movies in an effort to
establish that specific Mickey as a trademark, believes Mr Stoltz.
Defenders of long copyright terms argue that they encourage
creativity by forcing artists to make original content rather than
rehashing that of others. Yet no industry has demonstrated better
than Hollywood how reimagining an old work is an art in itself. Disney
raided the back catalogues of public-domain writers like Hans
Christian Andersen for material that its animators turned into original
films such as “The Little Mermaid” and “Frozen”. It drew on Arabian
folk-tales for “Aladdin” and Polynesian mythology for “Moana”. Since
acquiring Marvel it has taken tired comic-book heroes from the 1960s
and turned them into the most popular movies of the 21st century.

The shifting of Hollywood’s cultural treasure into the public domain

promises to spark more such creation and recreation. Some of the
resulting output should add more value than “Blood and Honey”.
Meanwhile, fans of Pooh’s gruesome new adventure will delight in its
producers’ next project: a horror reimagining of “Peter Pan”, whose
stage-adaptation rights enter the public domain in America in a year’s
time. ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: EMILE
HOLMEWOOD
Through a crystal curtain

The Chinese celebrate Tang poetry as a pinnacle of

their culture
Can poetry come alive to those who must read it in translation?

Dec 19th 2022 |

EZRA
POUND, an American modernist, described poetry as “news
that stays news”. The versions of classical Chinese poetry he
published in “Cathay” in 1915 were a declaration that, in a world of
Model Ts and machine guns, 1,200-year-old verse still mattered.

That is certainly what the Chinese think today. In the West poetry is a
minority pursuit; in China it is woven into people’s lives. Children learn
classical verse throughout their schooling, new poems celebrate
births and marriages, and idiomatic speech is embroidered with
ancient couplets.

Last year Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, a food-delivery giant,

quoted “The book-burning pit”, a Tang-dynasty poem by Zhang Jie
(836-905AD) in which an emperor kills dissenting scholars and
destroys their work. Meituan’s stockmarket value duly fell by $26bn.
Classical poetry is so familiar in China that, although Mr Wang
pretended otherwise, everyone knew he was criticising the repressive
rule of President Xi Jinping.

Can this ancient poetry come alive to readers who, like your
correspondent, speak no Chinese? The barriers are immense: not
just temporal, but linguistic and philosophical. However, the rewards
are immense, too: a glimpse into a great civilisation, the spritz of
fresh imagery, and sudden, consoling moments when an eighth-
century poet rises up off the page, a human being like any other.
Nowhere are these rewards stacked higher than in the poetry of the
Tang dynasty.

The Tang lasted from 618 to 907AD. During its first half, as China
flourished, the Silk Road brought luxuries, wealth and exoticism. The
capital Chang’an, modern-day Xi’an, had about 1m inhabitants.
Perhaps 5% of them were literate. Before a rebellion knocked
everything off centre in 755, it may have been the most prosperous
and cosmopolitan city in the world.

If your friend was out when you dropped by, you left a poem behind
As in Shakespeare’s England and J.S. Bach’s Germany, something
was in the air. Early in the Tang, poetry-writing was brought into the
examination that selected scholars for the bureaucracy. Among the
finest Tang poets were great drinkers who had studied for the exam
but failed it, or who could not hold down a government job (some
things never change).

Verse was communal. Tian Yuan Tan, professor of Chinese at Oxford,

explains that, during this time, it spread from the court into everyday
life. When somebody left town, you wrote a poem. To dignify a
banquet, you declaimed a poem. If your friend was out when you
dropped by, you left a poem behind.

Plenty of people could write Tang verse. Stephen Owen, a Harvard

professor who may have translated more of it than anyone, says that,
even if writing good poetry was formidably hard, everyday poems
were easy to toss off—Chinese has plenty of rhymes and stock
allusions. Fortunately, the best verses were rapidly anthologised, one
reason so many still exist.

And poetry was becoming more contemplative. Some wrote of the

miseries of exile. The rebellion caused upheaval and suffering, some
of which coloured poetry. David Hinton, a poet and translator, argues
that Tang China was perfused by Chan Buddhism, better known by its
Japanese name, Zen. All this gave verse a depth that court poetry
had lacked.

It is one thing for Chinese-speakers to look back on the Tang poets in

awe. It is quite another for their poetry to work in modern English.
Robert Frost, a 20th-century American writer, is supposed to have
said that “poetry is what is lost in translation”. If so, grappling with
Chinese poetry is doubly futile. English has no tones, or characters—
which may add layers of meaning. Eliot Weinberger, who wrote a
book that compares 36 translations of a single, celebrated four-line
Tang poem, points out that Chinese verbs have no tense, the
sentence may have no subject and a single character could have
several meanings (modern Chinese is less ambiguous, because it
tends to group text into two-character units). That leaves the
translator with a lot to fill in. Mr Hinton says that European poetry is
“the same grammatical world just reorganised.” By contrast, “for
Chinese, you pretty much have to reinvent it because the language is
so radically different.”

Inevitably, there are plenty of bad versions of Chinese poetry. It is

unfortunate that the first Tang poem in English, “Climbing Qi Mountain
in The Double Ninth Day” by Du Mu (803-852), from a missionary
called Robert Morrison in 1815, mixes up the words for wild geese
and swallows. The rhymes of Launcelot Cranmer-Byng, a renowned
British translator who died in 1945, are hard for the modern ear to
bear.

Everybody who experiences poetry across a millennium experiences

it in translation

Yet Frost’s epigram is either obvious or fatuous. Obvious because

nobody could imagine that the sounds and layers of meaning which
make poetry sing in one language could ever map directly onto
another. Fatuous because of the in-your-face fact that, from
Chapman’s Homer to Seamus Heaney’s “Beowulf”, poetry books are
bursting with inspiring translations.

Indeed, the language has changed so since the Tang that poems
read out loud in the original Middle Chinese would be
incomprehensible to speakers of modern standard Putonghua. In a
sense, everybody who experiences poetry across a millennium
experiences it in translation. As a rebuke to Frost, Mr Weinberger
begins his study: “Poetry is that which is worth translating.” Here are
five Tang poems. Judge for yourself.

China has hundreds of poems about the frontier. Most of them were
heroic, but here Li He (791-817), a Late Tang maverick, instead
paints a desolate picture of a barbarian threat out in the nothingness.

On the Frontier translated by A.C. Graham

 A Tartar horn tugs at the north wind,

Thistle Gate shines whiter than the stream.

The sky swallows the road to Kokonor.

On the Great Wall, a thousand miles of moonlight.

The dew comes down, the banners drizzle,

Cold bronze rings the watches of the night.

The nomads’ armour meshes serpents’ scales.

Horses neigh, Evergreen Mound’s champed white.

In the still of autumn see the Pleiades.

Far out on the sands, danger in the furze.

North of their tents is surely the sky’s end

Where the sound of the river streams beyond the border.

A lot of Chinese poetry layers images on top of each other. In the first
stanza, Li He begins with a panorama—Kokonor comes from the
Mongolian word for Qinghai, a region 1,700km west of Beijing.

Then he zooms in on the soldiers, down to the plates in their armour.

The Evergreen Mount is the tomb of Wang Zhaojun, who was sent as
a wife to appease a Barbarian leader. The mound was supposed to
be green—but here, in the moonlight, it is drained of colour, like the
steppe.

And the last stanza pulls back out again. Mr Tan points out that Li He
mixes scenery and emotion. The flickering star-cluster that
Westerners call the Pleiades was an omen of barbarian invasion.
Although the soldiers cannot see the horde, they sense it and they
are apprehensive. The Yellow River flows from the wilderness into
China, unstoppable.

The next poem is about a woman at court who is let down by her
lover. As in much Chinese poetry, it draws its power from what is left
unsaid.

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance translated by Ezra Pound

 The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

This lament is unusual for Li Bai (701-762). He was an extrovert best-

known for writing about friendship and drinking. The woman has been
waiting for her lover for some time because her stockings are soaked.
It is a clear night: he has no excuse. By the third line she has
accepted that he is not coming and returns to her room, lowering a
beaded curtain. The moon could represent two people’s separation,
grievance or a mirror of the woman’s mind, empty and at peace. As
Pound remarks in a gloss, “the poem is especially prized because
she utters no reproach”.

Pound did not speak Chinese. He was working from notes provided
by the widow of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan
and he makes mistakes. The steps are white jade—marble—not
jewelled; the stockings silk. By tradition, poems like this are in the
third person, with the poet as an omniscient observer. Mr Owen says
that in the original the moonlight in the last line is scattered by the
crystal curtain, just as it was by the dew: the lovers’ moon is in
fragments.

Pound’s versions of Chinese poems were so fresh that “Cathay” had

a profound and lasting influence on modern American poetry. Pound
wanted to escape the sentimentality and prolixity of the Victorians. In
the crystalline economy of Japanese Haiku and classical Chinese
poetry he found the means.

Farewell poems make up a lot of Tang verse. Most were formulaic,

but this stands out not only for its emotional subtlety, but also
because its author, Xue Tao (ca.768-831), was a courtesan famed for
her writing.

Seeing off Zheng, Prefect of Meizhou translated by Jeanne Larsen

 Rain darkens Mothbrow Mountain;

the river waters flow.

Parting:

her face behind her sleeves, she

stands atop the watchtower.

Two matched pennons,

a thousand mounts

in pairs on the Eastern Road—

alone she gazes

like a faithful

wife toward the column’s head.

The figure two runs through this poem. The woman’s sleeves, the
standards, the columns of cavalry all contrast with the couple who are
separated as he leads his troops to war and she is left behind.

According to Jeanne Larsen, the translator, the complete Tang

anthology features about 2,250 poets; 130 of them are women,
represented by 600 poems. Courtesans were entertainers. They were
meant to be gifted poets and musicians. In an age when wives were
usually uneducated, their conversation lubricated the dealings
between powerful men. “Sex was part of it, of course,” Ms Larsen
writes, “but only part of it.”

Xue Tao was especially successful. Eventually she retired and was
able to live independently—a fate denied most courtesans, who were
forced into marriage, concubinage or prostitution. Before that, she
spent years in the service of a military governor in modern-day
Chengdu in Sichuan. It is said that he asked her to be awarded the
title Collator, the office of collecting and combining texts, as
recognition of her writing.

Pound was drawn by Chinese poets’ focus on images. Nobody saw

more clearly than Wang Wei (699-761), who here writes on another
Tang theme: going home.

Returning to Mount Song translated by Stephen Owen

 A clear stream lined by long tracts of brush,

There horse and coach go rumbling away.

The flowing waters seem to have purpose,

And birds of evening join to turn home.

Grass-grown walls look down on an ancient ford,

As setting sunlight fills the autumn mountains,

And far, far beneath the heights of Mount Song,

I return and close my gate.

The first couplet sets up a contrast between nature and noise, as the
cart trundles beside the water. Then the poet sees the river returning
to the ocean and the birds to their nests: Wang Wei wants to leave
behind the stresses of government work and retire in peace. The next
three lines describe a series of barriers—ancient walls, the forded
river and a range of tall mountains. But the last barrier, the gate,
subverts them. Behind it lies seclusion and awareness.

Wang Wei was also a painter. He is “a guy that can see”, says Mr
Owen, the translator. “Always visualising what’s there and what’s not
there.” The surface of his poems are often just a series of statements
about nature, as in “The Deer Park”, the poem Mr Weinberger
compares in translation. The details seem natural, but the closer you
look the more you find.

Wang Wei was a Buddhist, too. From the age of 30 he studied under
a Chan master. This poem is usually thought of as a reflection on the
universal desire to withdraw from the hurly-burly of life. Mr Hinton
also detects a deeper, Buddhist yearning for meditative peace and
enlightenment.

The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 lasted seven years and brought

destruction that the Tang Dynasty never fully overcame. Roughly
1,200 of the poems of Du Fu (712-770) are from that time, 80% of
what survives. This is about how it feels when the world falls apart.

Spring Landscape translated by David Hinton

 The country in ruins, rivers and mountains

continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these

separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now

a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white

confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

The first line is one of the most famous in all Chinese poetry. Du Fu is
stuck in the capital, separated from his wife and children, the country
is at war but, as spring comes, the natural world keeps turning. As he
reflects on the devastation and the misery, he smiles wryly at the
hopelessness of his situation.
Du Fu is writing regulated verse, which sets up a perfect series of
parallels visible in the literal translation. Mr Tan points out that in the
first couplet Du Fu stands back to contrast the city’s suffering with
nature’s indifference. In the second he draws in: water droplets and
birds’ cries are now echoing his sorrow. The third speaks of the civil
war, comparing it with his own isolation from his family. And the last
focuses on the poet himself. He is not falling into self-pity, but gently
laughing at his own ridiculous transfer of worry from the ruin of the
nation to the security of the hairpin he uses to fix his official hat—
mockery all the more penetrating because, as Mr Owen notes, Du Fu
never won high office. All that in 40 characters.

In translation you lose the parallelism of Du Fu—indeed Mr Owen and

Mr Hinton say that in English end-stopped lines using repeated
patterns soon pall. You also miss literary allusions and the resonance
of phrases that have entered the Chinese language.

However, Mr Tan observes that translation has one advantage. To the

Chinese, voluminous commentaries weigh down these poems, rather
as Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” is freighted with overuse. But
readers in English coming to this poetry for the first time will find it
waiting like Pound’s white-silk fan, “as clear as frost on the grass-
blade”. ■

ILLUSTRATION: KAPO
LIU

SOURCES

1. “Poems of the Late T’ang”, translated by A. C. Graham (New York

Review Books Classics) Li He

2. “Cathay”, by Ezra Pound. (Hardpress Publishing) Li Bai

3. “Brocade River Poems: Selected works of the Tang dynasty

courtesan Xue Tao”, translated by Jeanne Larsen. (Princeton
University Press) Xue Tao

4. “The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang”, by Stephen

Owen. (Quirin Press) Wang Wei

5. “Awakened Cosmos: The mind of classical Chinese poetry”, by

David Hinton. (Shambala) Du Fu

6. “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”, by Eliot Weinberger.

7. “A little primer of Du Fu”, by David Hawkes.

8. “The Selected Poems of Wang Wei”, translated by David Hinton.

9. “A History of Western Appreciation of English-translated Tang

Poetry”, by Lan Jiang.

10. “Autumn Willows: Poetry by Women of China’s Golden Age”,

translated by Thomas Cleary and Bannie Chow.

11. “Poetry and Translation: the art of the impossible”, by Peter

Robinson.

12. The China History Podcast by Laszlo Mongomery, “The History of

Tang Poetry”, episodes 218-225.

13. Chinese Literature Podcast by Rob Moore and Lee Moore,

passim.

14. In Our Time by Melvin Bragg “Tang era poetry”, BBC Radio 4,
broadcast May 12th 2022.

15. “Du Fu and Li Bai–the poets”, by Carrie Gracie BBC Radio 4,

broadcast October 11 2012.

16. “Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet”, by Michael Wood and Sir Ian
McKellen, BBC4, broadcast April 7th 2020.
Secrets of the shallows

A megadrought has revealed a possible mafia

murder mystery
Las Vegas has a long history with the mob

Dec 20th 2022 | LAS VEGAS

THE
METAL barrel was rusted and broken. Mud from the drying lake
bed obscured its contents, but did not hide them entirely: a woman
standing on the shore of Lake Mead screamed when she spotted it.
Bones stuck out of the barrel, as if whoever was shoved inside was
trying to claw their way out and get to shore. About 300 people have
drowned in Lake Mead, a man-made reservoir 30 miles east of Las
Vegas that supplies much of the city’s drinking water. This was
different: the victim was shot to death.

His clothes were from the late 1970s or early 1980s, when Lake
Mead’s water level was around 100 feet higher than it is today. The
barrel would have sunk to the bottom. But more than 20 years of
punishing drought have taken their toll. A white ring stains the rust-
coloured canyon walls, leaving a visual marker of how far the water
has dropped. The emergence of Hemenway Harbour Doe, as the
body became known, is the weirdest manifestation of the
megadrought so far.

Armchair detectives pondered who was in the barrel. Officials kept

schtum while they tried to identify the body, creating an information
vacuum that let speculation run wild. Las Vegas was a mafia-run town
for decades, and the details of the crime—gunshot, barrel, desert—
seem pulled from a Martin Scorsese film. Could it be Jimmy Hoffa?
The labour leader with mafia ties disappeared in 1975 and has never
been found. Or perhaps someone local? Several men connected to
the mob disappeared around the same time Hemenway Harbour Doe
was murdered. The barrel’s discovery, and the murder mystery it
contains, has awakened a curious nostalgia for Vegas’s seedy past.

Some think Las Vegas struck a deal with the devil. For years, officials
left the mob and their casinos alone because they made so much
money for the state. Mob operatives pilfered money from the cash
boxes at poker tables and from the “count room”, where the house’s
winnings were tallied.

By the 1970s, the Chicago Outfit was the city’s most powerful mob
faction. But mafiosi could never get a licence to run a casino
themselves; they needed a front man. That was Allen Glick, a
developer from San Diego. Argent Corporation, Glick’s company,
bought several dubiously financed casinos in the 1970s, including the
Stardust and a resort at Echo Bay, out at Lake Mead.

A man named Johnny Pappas ran the Echo Bay property for Glick’s
company. He even kept his own boat at the marina. In 1976 Pappas
went out to meet someone interested in buying it. He never came
home. His family say he feared for his life before he disappeared. If
bookies offered odds on the identity of Hemenway Harbour Doe,
Pappas would be the favourite—narrowly ahead of George “Jay”
Vandermark.

Vandermark oversaw the slot machines at the Stardust, which by the

1970s was run by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a sports-betting genius—
and the model for Robert De Niro’s character in “Casino”, Mr
Scorsese’s 1995 film about the mafia’s reign in Las Vegas. Glick was
his boss on paper, but he probably answered to the mob. The slots
made a lot of money for both the Stardust and the Outfit. The Nevada
Gaming Control Board alleged that Vandermark stole $7m-15m from
Argent. He fled Vegas in 1976 when officials cottoned on to his
racket, and was last seen in Phoenix later that year.

But who was the trigger man? Back then cash was everywhere, and
the bosses in Chicago needed someone to make sure their money
actually made it all the way back to the Midwest. They needed an
enforcer.

Enter Tony Spilotro, who arrived in Las Vegas in 1971. He made up

for his short stature with prodigious belligerence (Joe Pesci in
“Casino”). When Spilotro was coming up on Chicago’s west side, his
gang allegedly put an ice pick through another man’s testicles, and
he squeezed his head in a vice until an eyeball popped out. His reign
in Vegas was bloody. In 1974, the Los Angeles Times reported that
there had been more mob killings and violence in the past 24 months
than in the previous 24 years. The FBI suspected Spilotro of about
two dozen murders, but he was never convicted. He owed that to
Oscar Goodman, Spilotro’s defence attorney, and, later, a three-term
mayor of Las Vegas.

A mafia lawyer turning mayor may seem odd. Not in Vegas. The
mafia was part of the fabric of the city. Neighbourhood kids would
play baseball with Spilotro’s son, or ride to school in Rosenthal’s
Cadillac. Gangsters would pay for gamblers’ chicken dinners at their
local casino. Anyone who objected knew to keep quiet. As Michael
Green, a historian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (and a rare
Vegas native), puts it: “There were people who knew it and lived with
it. There were people who didn’t think about it and lived with it. And
there were people who thought about it, had problems with it, but
what could they do?”
The Outfit’s heyday didn’t last forever. By the late 1970s and early
1980s the FBI had all but declared war on Spilotro. Wiretapping
investigations exposed the rampant theft at Argent’s casinos, leading
to the indictments of several Midwestern mob bosses. While they
awaited trial, they worried about their allies turning into government
informants. Frank Cullotta, one of Spilotro’s henchmen, once
described the bosses’ paranoia to Nicholas Pileggi, a writer who
specialises in mob tales. “I’ve heard them go around a room,” Cullotta
said. He imitated their conversation: “‘Joe, whadda you think of
Mike?’ ‘Mike’s great, balls like iron.’ ‘Larry, whadda you think of
Mike?’ ‘Mike? A fuckin’ marine’…‘Charlie, whadda you think of Mike?’
‘Why take a chance?’ And that’s the end of Mike.”

Around the same time this paranoia was spreading, Hemenway

Harbour Doe was murdered.

Both Vandermark and Pappas had been insiders. Did they know
something they shouldn’t? Were the bosses worried that they would
talk in exchange for immunity? Was Spilotro sent to keep them quiet?
Maybe they met peaceful ends nowhere near Lake Mead. Or perhaps
if Hemenway Harbour Doe is ever identified, one of them will at last
be found.

Past meets present

Vanishingly few Las Vegans who remember the 1970s are still
around. Mr Green was just a kid when his father dealt cards at the
Stardust. Rosenthal fired him personally during one of his regular
power trips. He would line employees up, Mr Green recalls his father
telling him, pointing to each worker in turn as he decided whether
they could keep their job that day.

Those days are long gone. Spilotro and his brother were found buried
in an Indiana cornfield in 1986. By the mid-1990s, the mob had been
priced out of the casino business, and casino security had become
too sophisticated to beat. The Stardust was levelled in 2007. Its 1,000
hotel rooms seem quaint compared with the 4,000-room behemoths
built by billionaires and multinationals. Once just a centre for sports
gambling, Las Vegas now has its own professional sports teams.

These days, Mr Goodman, now 83, is the unofficial mascot of Las

Vegas. Every few months he hosts a dinner at a hotel steakhouse
where he regales his guests (who pay at least $300 a table) with
stories about Rosenthal, Spilotro and his other clients. Martini in
hand, he reminisces about playing himself in “Casino”. He marvels at
Mr Pesci’s mimicry of Spilotro’s mannerisms. He still uses the
vocabulary of old Vegas, when women were “broads” and men were
“fellas”.

Today the mafia isn’t feared; it’s kitsch

Mr Goodman chafes at the speculation that Spilotro may have had

something to do with Hemenway Harbour Doe’s death. He rails
against reporters and law enforcement for describing his friend as a
cold-hearted killer. He prefers to remember the softer side of Tony,
recalling how the mobster would check on his wife Carolyn (now in
her third term as mayor) when he was out of town defending the
Syndicate. If the mob wanted to get rid of a body, he muses, they
would just dig a hole in the desert. Why go all the way out to the
lake? It is tempting to believe him. He probably understands, better
than most, how the mob worked. Or maybe he just zealously defends
his clients, dead or alive.

Mr Goodman’s storytelling and Hemenway Harbour Doe’s emergence

have something else in common. They link the city’s mafia days to
the modern metropolis it has become. Today the mafia isn’t feared;
it’s kitsch. The Mob Museum (Mr Goodman’s idea) opened in 2012.
Nearly 400,000 people visit each year. They can buy “I know a guy
who can take care of it” T-shirts, or key chains with their names
engraved on a bullet.

Hemenway Harbour Doe reminds locals that less than one lifetime
ago their city was a centre of the criminal underworld. Lake Mead
may offer more reminders: since the corpse appeared, five more sets
of remains have emerged. No foul play is suspected. But the drought
will worsen, the shoreline will retreat, and the waters will give way to
dry, cracked earth. What other secrets lie waiting in the shallows? ■

ILLUSTRATIONS: PATRICK
LEGER
Business
 

When brown meets green

Parting of the clouds
A thaw, and lots of frost
Making the most of LinkedIn
The sovereign of savoir-faire
 
When brown meets green

Why the Gulf’s oil powers are betting on clean

energy
Aramco, ADNOC and others are placing multibillion-dollar wagers on
the energy transition

Dec 19th 2022 | ABU DHABI

THE
UNITED
ARAB
EMIRATES sits on a rich fossil bounty. ADNOC,
the national oil company, is one of the world’s top hydrocarbon
producers. Two months ago the UAE
hosted some 140,000 delegates
at the planet’s largest oil-and-gas jamboree. Against the backdrop of
the worst energy crisis in decades, you might have expected much
gloating about how the Persian Gulf’s carbon-spewing exports helped
avert a bigger shock. That made the keynote address by Sultan Al
Jaber, the UAE’s minister of industry, all the more remarkable. Mr Al
Jaber repeatedly highlighted the importance of greening this
brownest of industries. “ADNOC is making today’s energy cleaner
while investing in the clean energies of tomorrow,” he intoned.

In the past the grandees of the Gulf’s energy industry limited

themselves to defending fossil fuels. Now many, like Mr Al Jaber,
profess a commitment to decarbonisation. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
have announced targets of net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases
by 2060. The UAE and Oman say they will get there by 2050. Qatar
has no net-zero target, but says it will cut emissions by a quarter by
2030 relative to a scenario that assumes business as usual. All the
Gulf countries have signed the Global Methane Pledge, which
commits them to reduce emissions of that potent greenhouse gas.
The UAE will even host the annual UN climate summit in 2023.
Some suspect this is greenwash: all soothing noises and toothless
targets after years of denying climate science and obstructing efforts
to tackle global warming. On this view, the Gulf’s governments are
too reliant on the revenues generated by the national energy firms—
which account for a big share of state budgets (see chart 1)—to be
serious about decarbonisation. Yet an examination of the leading
companies’ investment plans reveals a genuine—and in some cases
rather large—bet on green technologies.

This is worth scrutinising, because the firms behind the effort matter
beyond their region. National energy companies in other parts of the
world look to the Gulf behemoths, and especially to ADNOC and
Saudi Aramco, the Arab kingdom’s oil colossus, as examples to
emulate. Where two of the world’s biggest energy firms go
technologically and strategically, their state-run peers elsewhere often
follow.

The Gulf oil champions’ approach rests on two pillars. The first is
deep brown: it involves doubling down on oil and gas. Bolstered by
high crude prices, the region’s energy firms are investing heavily to
expand output. Aramco’s capital expenditure in 2022 will come to
$40bn-50bn. It is promising even bigger sums in the next few years,
as it aims to lift its oil-production capacity from roughly 12m barrels
per day (b/d) to 13m by 2027. ADNOC will spend $150bn on capital
projects by 2027 with the goal of boosting capacity from roughly 4m
to 5m b/d. Qatar Energy will plough $80bn between 2021 and 2025
into expanding production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by two-thirds
by 2027.

For most energy firms, doubling down on fossil fuels during the
transition to a carbon-constrained world would be financial folly. Every
national oil company in the world “wants to be the last one standing”,
observes Patrick Heller of the Natural Resource Governance
Institute, an American NGO. Naturally, “not all of them can be.” The
Gulf giants, with their vast, low-cost reserves, are the likeliest to
prevail. As such, their huge investments in new production could pay
off, Mr Heller thinks, “even if global demand declines dramatically in
the years to come”.

Oilmen betting on oil is nothing new. But the Gulf giants’ latest
wagers suggest they no longer have their heads in the sand about
the future of oil demand. They are keenly aware that their best
customers in the developed world are going to crack down on carbon
emissions, argues Mariam Al-Shamma of S&P Global, a research
firm. Policies like the EU’s carbon border tax, the details of which
member states approved on December 18th, are a sign of things to
come. “To be the last producer standing, you need more than just the
lowest cost,” Ms Al-Shamma says. To ensure their longevity, the
Gulf’s oil champions also intend to be the cleanest producers of fossil
fuels.
They enjoy a natural advantage. Their hydrocarbon reserves are
among the least carbon-intensive to extract (see chart 2). The
Emiratis and the Saudis have also made an effort to reduce this
carbon intensity further with high operational efficiency and low gas
flaring, notes Olga Savenkova of Rystad Energy, a research firm.
ADNOC is spending $3.6bn on subsea power cables and other kit to
replace natural gas burned at its offshore facilities with clean energy
from onshore. This is both green and, potentially, good business. Ms
Al-Shamma reckons that grades of crude made with fewer emissions
will fetch a premium, a trend already seen in the LNG market.

The second pillar of the Gulf’s strategy is more intriguing. It involves

investing part of today’s fossil windfall in the clean-energy
technologies of tomorrow. The region’s governments are making
some of the world’s biggest bets on carbon capture and storage,
renewables and hydrogen. “A wave of low-carbon projects is building
in the Middle East,” marvels one analyst.

“Saudi Arabia holds major advantages in decarbonisation,” says Jim

Krane of Rice University in Texas. He points to vast tracts of empty,
sunny land with a geology tailor-made for storing carbon emitted in
adjacent industrial areas. Aramco plans to develop capacity to
capture, store and utilise 11m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and to
install 12 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar power by 2035.

Overall, Saudi Arabia aims to build 54GW of renewable capacity by

2032. Not to be outdone, the UAE is eyeing 100GW of renewable-
energy capacity by 2030, at home and abroad, up from a cumulative
investment in 15GW-worth in 2021. That would make Masdar, a
state-controlled clean-energy outfit in which ADNOC has a stake, the
world’s second-biggest developer of clean energy. It recently bought
a British firm developing energy-storage technology.

The Gulf’s biggest green bets concern hydrogen. If it is made using

renewables as opposed to natural gas, hydrogen is a clean fuel.
Investments in the needed infrastructure are proliferating the world
over, from Gujarat to Texas. In 2021 the UAE inaugurated its region’s
first such “green hydrogen” plant. ACWA
Power, a Saudi utility, has
almost completed financing for a $5bn green-hydrogen project.
Oman, whose oil reserves are smaller and costlier to exploit than
those of its bigger neighbours, is talking of a $30bn investment in
what could be the world’s largest hydrogen plant. It has launched a
state-owned hydrogen entity to offer green-hydrogen projects
concessions in its special economic zones.

The Saudis and Emiratis are also looking abroad. Masdar is investing
in a $10bn hydrogen venture in Egypt; developing 4GW of green-
hydrogen and renewables projects in Azerbaijan; and has invested in
a firm working on green hydrogen in northern England. ACWA
Power
is eyeing multibillion-dollar green-hydrogen projects in Egypt, South
Africa and Thailand. By 2030 both the UAE
and Saudi Arabia want to
control a quarter or more of the global export market for clean
hydrogen.

Ben Cahill of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a

think-tank, sees the two countries moving aggressively on hydrogen
and ammonia (which can serve as a less fiddly medium to transport
the gas). They want to acquire first-mover advantage by securing
deals with buyers from Asia and Europe. Qatar is spending more than
$1bn on a plant to make “blue ammonia” from natural gas. It is
scheduled to open in 2026. If the hydrogen economy takes off,
estimates Roland Berger, a consultancy, it could produce between
$120bn and $200bn in annual revenues for Gulf countries by 2050.
That is far less than they now make from oil and gas; Aramco alone
had sales of more than $300bn in the first half of 2022. But it is
serious money—and, given the real risk of an end to the oil bonanza,
suggests that the Gulf’s green efforts ought to be taken seriously.■

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Parting of the clouds

Airlines are closing in on their pre-covid heights

But a cold winter could dent longer-term optimism

Dec 20th 2022 |

THE
AVIATION industry is a useful altimeter for the lingering impact
of covid-19. Air travel ground almost to a halt in 2020, as virus-
induced restrictions kept people at home. Since then it has clawed its
way upwards as lockdowns have eased and travellers who had been
denied holidays, visits to loved ones and business trips have
gradually returned to the air. Capacity, measured by available seats,
is set to end 2022 at around 4.7bn, according to OAG, a consultancy.
Although that remains down by 12% on 2019, before the pandemic
struck, it is nearly a third higher than at the end of last year.

Flying is not likely to hit pre-covid levels until 2024. Nevertheless,

carriers’ confidence in the victory over the virus, and in the unshaken
yearning for travel of the growing global middle-class, is evident in
their longer-term plans. America’s United Airlines has recently placed
a big order for new aircraft. Air India, a poorly run flag carrier acquired
in early 2022 by Tata Group, a rather better-run conglomerate with a
turnaround plan, is rumoured to be close to ordering 500 planes from
Europe’s Airbus and its American planemaking arch-rival, Boeing.
Healthy demand for passenger jets means that both aerospace giants
are planning to increase production in 2023, and get back to pre-
pandemic levels within a couple of years.

Aircraft sales will get an extra boost from deep-pocketed newcomers.

As part of its attempts to diversify its economy away from oil, Saudi
Arabia is poised to launch a new national airline, RIA, to compete
with incumbent Gulf carriers: Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways.
The kingdom hopes to raise $100bn, including from its sovereign-
wealth fund, for aviation. It is planning to build one of the world’s
biggest airports, in Jeddah, to serve 120m domestic and connecting
passengers by 2030.

For such grand schemes to work, international travel must rebound in

Asia. There, too, the news is encouraging. The recent loosening of
covid restrictions in China, the region’s dominant aviation market, led
to a 30% jump in domestic capacity in a matter of days. International
flights to and from China are stuck at less than 5% of levels from
2019, so 2023 won’t break records. But if Chinese are allowed to
restart foreign travel, 2024 could be the most profitable year yet for
China’s airlines, reckons John Grant of OAG.

American and European carriers, responsible for the bulk of the

industry’s profits in recent years, may get there sooner. They have
exploited passengers’ rush to get back in the air and used canny
management of capacity to keep ticket prices high. Some are already
making money again. After three awful years, when airlines
worldwide suffered a combined cumulative net loss of $187bn, the
winners will propel the global industry to a profit of $4.7bn in 2023,
forecasts IATA, a trade body.

As for the (more numerous) lossmakers, high fuel prices, looming

recession and $220bn in additional industry debt accumulated during
the pandemic may force some of them into bankruptcy—or, for a
lucky few, consolidation. ITA, the successor to Alitalia, Italy’s
perennially disappointing flag carrier, could be snapped up by
Germany’s Lufthansa; IAG group, parent of British Airways and
Iberia, may bring Portugal’s TAP into its fold. Better that than
permanent flightlessness. ■

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up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
More Sino-American business tensions

America tries to nobble China’s tech industry.

Again
Despite a thaw in some areas, Sino-American business relations feel
frosty

Dec 20th 2022 | Hong Kong

FOR
YEARS regulators in Washington have been trying to gain
access to the books of Chinese companies listed in America, to
ensure they are in good order. Their counterparts in Beijing have
refused, invoking vague national-security considerations. This
summer it seemed as though Chinese firms with nearly $1trn-worth of
shares traded in America would be forced to delist from American
bourses as a result of the stalemate. On December 15th America’s
auditing regulator announced a breakthrough: its team has been
allowed to conduct inspections in Hong Kong.

The beancounters’ success belies a bilateral commercial relationship

that is getting increasingly tetchy. On the day of their announcement,
America’s Commerce Department said it had added 36 Chinese
companies to its “entity list”, a designation that makes doing business
with them near-impossible. The previous day a bipartisan group of
lawmakers in Congress proposed a ban on TikTok, a Chinese-linked
social-media platform with 100m American users. The day before
that, Democratic and Republican senators introduced a bill that, if
passed, would add Huawei and other Chinese telecoms companies
to another list, maintained by the Treasury, of “specially designated
nationals”. This would deny them access to American banks, in effect
freezing them out of the global financial system.

The American government has been ratcheting up pressure on

Chinese business since 2019, when Donald Trump first blacklisted
Huawei. His successor, Joe Biden, is even less coy that the policies’
ultimate goal is to hobble a geostrategic rival. In October Mr Biden’s
administration announced sweeping measures that block Chinese
artificial-intelligence (AI) ventures from gaining access to American
technology and talent. Among the latest additions to the Commerce
Department’s entity list is YMTC, China’s most advanced memory-
chip maker.

In order to do business with blacklisted companies, American firms

need express permission from the federal government, which is
difficult to obtain. Because the restrictions apply to any American
technology, even non-American businesses whose products are
partly derived from it are caught up. This month the Financial Times
reported that Arm, a British chip-design firm, has stopped supplying
its most advanced blueprints to Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant.
The halt came after Arm decided it would be unable to obtain licences
for those exports.

Recent media reports suggest that Japan and the Netherlands may
join America in applying sanctions. Japan is the second-biggest seller
of semiconductor equipment to China behind America. By signing up
to Washington’s sanctions it closes a “major loophole” in the current
restrictions, according to Jefferies, an investment bank. Analysts
wonder if ASML, the Dutch monopolist in the market for chip-etching
machines, will keep selling equipment to China. A halt in sales of
ASML’s deep-ultraviolet lithography devices would devastate China’s
semiconductor industry, since no alternative supplier exists. Foxconn,
the Taiwanese firm that assembles iPhones, said on December 15th
that it would sell its small stake in Tsinghua Unigroup, a Chinese
chipmaker with state links. Taiwan’s government had pressed it to do
so.

To avoid Uncle Sam’s cudgel, some Chinese firms are trying to

distance themselves from their country of origin. TikTok has moved its
headquarters to Singapore and downplays its links to ByteDance, its
Chinese parent company. But severing those links is hard: engineers
working on TikTok algorithms are still being hired in China, according
to the Wall Street Journal. A few American states are seeking to ban
the app from government-issued phones. Some have filed lawsuits
alleging that TikTok makes sensitive data accessible to the Chinese
government (which TikTok denies). The beancounters may be getting
along. But make no mistake: technological decoupling between the
world’s two biggest economies is proceeding apace. ■

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Bartleby

How to make the most of LinkedIn

A guide to surviving and thriving on the business world’s favourite
social network

Dec 20th 2022 |

SOCIAL
MEDIA and career development typically don’t mix. Doom-
scrolling Elon Musk’s tweets or getting sucked into the latest TikTok
craze do not exactly enhance your work prospects. Unless, that is,
the social network in question is LinkedIn. Founded in 2003 in Silicon
Valley as a platform for professional networking, and purchased in
2016 by Microsoft for $26bn, it has become a fixture of corporate
cyberspace, with more than 800m registered users worldwide. Its
171m American members outnumber the country’s labour force.
High-school students are creating profiles to include with their college
applications. The chances are you probably have one, too. How do
you make the most of it?

For those who have yet to link up with LinkedIn, the first, critical, step
is fashioning your profile. First, choose a slick photo: think visionary
resolve meets empathetic authenticity. Next, list your educational and
professional history. Remember, nothing is too trivial. Went to a
selective kindergarten? Say so; it illustrates that you were a winner
from a tender age. As you draw up your list, make sure that it reads in
the most deadpan way possible: no adjectives, no personal touch.
The mechanical and the matter-of-fact is at a premium.

Armed with your profile, you can get down to business and begin
creating your network. You need to have 500 or more connections in
your profile to be taken seriously. To achieve this, you need to step
out of your comfort zone and accost complete strangers. Do not treat
it as you would inviting classmates you do not know to your birthday
party, which in real life makes you look desperate. On LinkedIn,
cringeworthy is not part of the lexicon. Your columnist, a guest
Bartleby, has amassed 6,315 connections, of whom she actually
knows maybe 300.

Remember that cousin Dimitris your mother always mentions on the

phone, who works at Bain Capital in Boston? What better way than
an innocuous LinkedIn invite to reconnect—and get a toehold in his
private-equity network. And that man who sat next to you on the red-
eye back from Chicago? Even if you recall only his first name and the
company he works at, LinkedIn’s algorithm should be able to let you
track him down with relative ease.

If you are an analyst at Goldman Sachs, connect with every analyst in

JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and UBS. Don’t worry, they are
thinking the same thing, so are likely to oblige. While you are at it,
you might as well approach everyone with a pulse at Goldman, too. If
a higher-up—best of all, the CEO— happens to accept, you have
struck gold. The boss’s existing connections will treat you as more of
an equal; those desperate to get one degree of separation closer to
the top dog will come begging. Your network will explode.

Next, flaunt your every success. LinkedIn is to white-collar workers

what Instagram is to fashionistas: a way to present the most envy-
provoking version of yourself. “Deeply honoured to have been ranked
in the Global Elite category of Thought Leaders by [insert name of
obscure organisation which hands out random titles].”

If you want everyone to know that you were a speaker at the

Bloomberg Global Regulatory Forum, attach photos of yourself on the
podium—and own it. Posting is, in essence, showing off, so any
attempt to mitigate invariably comes across as humble-bragging (“I
was told by colleagues I should be sharing my successes. So I am
proud to announce that I was invited to participate in the Innovation
Leaders panel.”). Bartleby posts only her columns (such as this one)
with zero commentary.

While you are feeding the app your achievements, do not pay too
much attention to those of others—that will allow you to appear
poised and unflappable, not envious. Ignore automatically generated
prompts like “Congratulate Dimitris on starting a new position as co-
head of European Private Equity at KKR”. These are designed, as if
by your mother, to rub it in your face and motivate you to be more
ambitious (come to think of it, she did mention your cousin had
moved to London).
You need to play it cool so disregard all automatic prompts such as
“Take a moment to recognise one year of being connected to your co-
worker”. That time is better spent forging fresh connections to rack up
the numbers—which, in the gratification-seeking, gamified world of
social-networking, is ultimately a big part of what LinkedIn is all about.
According to the latest notification, “You appeared in 178 searches
this week.” So you must be doing something right.

Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and

work:

The enduring value of an analogue technology (Dec 15th)

The scourge of job-title inflation (Dec 8th)

The open questions of hybrid working (Dec 1st)

To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign

up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
Schumpeter

How Bernard Arnault became the world’s richest

person
The lord of luxury is a model European capitalist—but with American
characteristics

Dec 20th 2022 |

A STORY
BERNARD
ARNAULT likes to tell is of a meeting with Steve
Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple and father of the iPhone. Jobs was
on the verge of launching the Apple Store. Mr Arnault, a Frenchman
whose company, LVMH, provides high society with its Louis Vuitton
luggage, Christian Dior couture, Tiffany jewellery and Dom Pérignon
champagne, knows more than most about turning storefronts into
temples of desire. As they talked, the conversation turned to their
products. Mr Arnault asked Jobs whether he thought the iPhone
would still be around in 30 years’ time. The American replied that he
did not know. Jobs then asked the same question about Dom
Pérignon, whose first vintage was in 1921. Mr Arnault, the story goes,
assured him it would still be drunk for generations to come. Jobs
agreed.

In many ways Mr Arnault, the first European to rise to the top of the
world’s rich lists, is the epitome of how to do business in the old
continent. As his remarks to Jobs suggested, he thinks about the
distant past and decades into the future, not just about next year’s
profits. He relishes craftsmanship, championing outré designers,
perfumers and cellar masters, while often reserving for himself the
last word on product details. His own presence as a business titan is
understated. Unlike Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, his most
recent predecessors as the world’s richest people, he is not a
household name—unless the household is a maison de couture, or
palatial. He is a regular on the Parisian fashion-show circuit, yet lets
the clothes and those that wear them grab the spotlight. He is soft-
spoken but is no soft touch. As a writer on this newspaper put it back
in 1989, he has “a charming smile but teeth, apparently, of steel”.
That reputation, which goes well with his lupine looks, is one he has
never seemed to mind.

Mr Arnault has been high on the rich list for more than 15 years.
Some might think that his rise to the top this month, with a net worth,
according to Forbes, of $180bn, is a cyclical fluke, the result of
American technology stocks falling out of vogue, Mr Musk immolating
his fortune, and analogue stuff—when untouched by the cost-of-living
crisis—having a moment of glory. Yet however different the 73-year-
old Mr Arnault is from a tech mogul, he, too, has remade the world of
business. In the words of Luca Solca of Bernstein, an investment
firm, he has invented a paradox: “selling exclusivity by the million”. To
achieve that, he has brought American-style business tactics to one
of the most traditional of industries and equipped it for a global,
premiumised, Instagrammable world. It is an approach others should
emulate.

His indoctrination into swashbuckling capitalism came in New York in

the early 1980s, where he fled from French socialism. Little is known
about his time there, but when he returned to France in 1984, he was
quick to deploy the barbarian tactics emerging on Wall Street. First
came the leveraged buy-out. He spotted a down-at-heel Christian
Dior buried within a struggling textile conglomerate. He sold the dross
and polished up Dior, the 38-year-old crown jewel. Then he went
hostile, targeting Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton in the late 1980s, and
ultimately ripping it away from the old money behind it. He was not
always successful. Gucci, the Italian fashion house, continues to
elude him. But his modus operandi is consistent. Make crafty use of
the balance-sheet to buy musty fashion houses and turn them into
megabrands. LVMH, worth almost €350bn ($372bn), now has 75
maisons.

He is more than just a dealmaker. He is a master of hype, recruiting

eye-catching designers, many from outside France, to shake up the
fashion establishment. Their shock value is not just confined to the
catwalk. It provides publicity for high-margin fashion accessories,
such as perfumes and handbags, that are LVMH’s more mainstream
bread and butter. Moreover, he imposes a machine-like efficiency on
the group, modernising production processes, mainly selling through
LVMH’s own stores rather than licensees, and recruiting the best in
the business.

His discipline extends to profits. Though he has his eye on long-term

brand equity, quarterly results rarely miss a beat. Louis Vuitton is the
flagship. Mr Solca estimates it generates €20bn in sales (about a
third of LVMH’s revenues in 2021), with operating margins close to
50%. Gucci pales in comparison. The cashflow enables him to
outspend rivals on the fanciest stores and the splashiest marketing
campaigns. An advertisement in the run-up to the World Cup, shot by
Annie Leibovitz, showing footballers Lionel Messi and Cristiano
Ronaldo playing chess on a Vuitton briefcase, is a case in point (even
if Kylian Mbappé, the French striker, would have been a more
inspired choice than Ronaldo).

Pitchforks and silver spoons

LVMH has vulnerabilities. Mr Arnault was early to spot the promise of

globalisation, first identifying the Japanese taste for luxury, and then
the Chinese one. Asia, which had more than 2,200 LVMH stores in
2021, is by far its biggest source of revenue. However, Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine has highlighted geopolitical threats. If the firm had
to pull out of China, it would be a disaster. Moreover, premiumisation
has accompanied the rise of social inequality around the world. While
people believe they can emulate the rich, that is good for business.
But if they feel they will never be able to join the monogrammed elite,
frustrations may rise.

Yet Mr Arnault’s European heritage gives him an extra edge in the

wealth stakes. He has an old-world faith in bloodlines. Unlike Mr
Musk, who has squandered some of his Tesla stock on Twitter, Mr
Bezos, who surrendered part of Amazon to his ex-wife, and Mr
Gates, who has sold most of his Microsoft shares, his number-one
priority is to retain control of LVMH, in which his family holds an
unassailable 48% stake. His five children all work in the business—
albeit in what Mr Solca calls a “Darwinian contest” to succeed him
when he eventually retires. No one knows better than the lord of
luxury the value of keeping hold of the family silver. ■

Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:

America’s biggest ports face a new kind of paralysis (Dec 15th)

The rise of the super-app (Dec 8th)

If Ticketmaster is a greedy capitalist, so is Taylor Swift (Dec 1st)

To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign

up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
Finance & economics
 

Time for a party

Zero zero-covid
Triumph of the Luddites
No time like the present
Paper tigers
Arthur Burns, reconsidered
 
Top of the charts

2022’s unlikely economic winners

Which countries performed best and worst this year?

Dec 18th 2022 | Ibiza

IN
FINANCIAL
TERMS
the past year has been bad for almost
everyone. Inflation of 10% year-on-year across the rich world has
slashed household incomes. Investors have lost out as global
stockmarkets have plunged by 20%. Yet this poor aggregate
performance hides wide differences: some countries have done pretty
well.

To assess these differences, The Economist has compiled data on

five economic and financial indicators—GDP, inflation, inflation
breadth, stockmarket performance and government debt—for 34
mostly rich countries. We have ranked each economy according to
how well it has done on these measures, and created an overall
score. The table overleaf shows the rankings. It includes some
unexpected results.
For the first time in a while, the economic party is happening in the
Mediterranean. Top of our list is Greece. Other countries that
plumbed the economic depths in the early 2010s, including Portugal
and Spain, also score highly. They are not the only pleasant
surprises. Despite political chaos, Israel did well. Meanwhile, despite
political stability, Germany is an underperformer. Two Baltic countries,
Estonia and Latvia, which won plaudits in the 2010s for speedy
reforms, come bottom.

GDP, usually the best measure of economic health, is our first

indicator. Norway (helped by high oil prices) and Turkey (by a boom
in sanctions-busting trade with Russia) have done better than most.
The fallout from covid-19 also looms large. Thanks to strict lockdowns
and a collapse in tourism, a year ago much of southern Europe was
in dire straits, so the region was due a decent year. Visits to the
Balearics recently rebounded beyond their pre-pandemic level. As
your correspondent discovered on a recent trip to Ibiza, the island is
so busy it is difficult to book a taxi or find a spot at a half-decent
restaurant.

Ireland probably had a strong year, though one not nearly as strong
as GDP
numbers suggest. The activities of big multinational
companies, many registered there for tax purposes, have for years
distorted the figures. By contrast, America’s GDP
numbers are
misleadingly weak: in recent quarters official statisticians have
struggled to account for the impact of enormous stimulus packages.

More granular data fill in the picture. Our second measure is the
change in the price level since the end of 2021. Away from the
world’s attention, some countries have seen low inflation. In
Switzerland consumer prices have risen by just 3%. The country’s
central bank, helped along by a strong currency, responded rapidly to
the rise in prices earlier this year. Countries which have non-Russian
energy sources—such as Spain, which gets much of its gas from
Algeria—have also done better than average. Those reliant on
Vladimir Putin for fuel have truly suffered. In Latvia average
consumer prices have risen by a fifth.

Our third measure also relates to inflation. It calculates the share of

items in each country’s inflation basket where prices have risen by
more than 2% in the past year. This provides an indication of how
entrenched inflation is—and therefore hints at how quickly inflation
will fall over the coming year. Some countries that suffer from high
headline inflation have nonetheless been able to limit its breadth. In
Italy, for instance, average consumer prices have risen by 11% this
year, yet “only” two-thirds of its inflation basket has above-target
inflation. Japanese inflation also looks like it may fade away. Britain is
in more trouble. The price of every category in its basket is rising fast.

People’s sense of economic well-being does not just come from

prices in the shops. They also look at the value of their pension pots
and stock portfolios. In some countries it has been a terrible year for
these sorts of investments. Share prices in both Germany and South
Korea are down by nearly a fifth in 2022, double America’s decline.
Swedish stocks have done even worse. Yet there are a few spots of
strength. Norway’s stockmarket is up on the year. So is Britain’s,
which is populated by the sort of dull, plodding companies that tend to
be rewarded when economic times are tough. A fall in the value of
the pound has also increased the value of foreign sales.

Our final measure concerns the change in net government debt as a

share of GDP. In the short run ministers are able to paper over
economic cracks by increasing spending or cutting taxes. However
this can create more debt and thus the need to turn the fiscal screws
in the future. Some governments have spent extravagantly to cope
with the cost-of-living squeeze. Germany has allocated funds worth
about 7% of GDP
to help with sky-high energy costs, meaning its
debt-to-GDP
ratio has risen. Other countries have pulled back from
the splurge, helping to right the fiscal ship. Assisted by high inflation,
public debt in southern European countries seems to be on the way
down.
Will the gap between 2022’s winners and losers persist in 2023?
Before long southern Europe’s economic growth, weighed down by
rapidly ageing populations and high debts, will surely fall back to the
region’s usual less-than-stellar levels. And there are hopeful signs
that in countries such as America and Britain high inflation may finally
be easing, which would help them up the rankings.

Along other dimensions, differences are likely to persist, not least

when it comes to those countries reliant on Mr Putin for their energy
supplies. Against the odds, many managed to replenish their stores
of natural gas before winter set in—but only by paying outrageous
prices. With supplies now largely cut off, the coming year will be a lot
more difficult. That will be a big concern in the Baltics, but less so on
the other side of Europe. It is hard to worry about gas supplies while
eating a giant plate of squid on an Ibicencan beach. ■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
To protect and to swerve

China’s leaders ponder an economy without

lockdowns—or crackdowns
Will market-friendly slogans turn into market-friendly policies?

Dec 20th 2022 | Hong Kong

EACH
DECEMBER the leaders of China’s Communist Party gather to
discuss their “economic work” for the year ahead. The lengthy
statement they then release to the public provides a clue to their
thinking and priorities. But by the time the leaders met on December
15th and 16th in Beijing, the most fateful economic choice of the next
12 months had already been made.

Whether by accident or design, local officials did not impose

lockdowns in November on anything like the scale required to stop a
widespread covid-19 outbreak. Their decision, if that is what it can be
called, has brought an abrupt end to China’s “zero-covid” policy. Now
unable to defeat the virus, China’s central government says it is too
mild to be worth vanquishing.

This will be a great boon to China’s economy—eventually. Before the

country can reach that happier future, it will have to navigate the
world’s last great infection wave. According to HSBC, a bank, growth
could fall below zero in the first quarter of 2023, compared with a year
earlier.

The economy faces near-term threats to both supply and demand.

Some members of the workforce will fall ill; others will take time off to
look after stricken relatives. Schools have moved online in parts of
China, trapping parents at home. As hospitals fill, local officials may
try again to slow the disease’s spread by limiting traffic between
regions, gumming up logistics.

The bigger threat is to confidence and spending. Many Chinese came

to resent the “zero-covid” regime, but lots still fear the disease.
According to a survey by Bank of America, some 61% will stay home
or go out less as infections rise. In November retail sales fell by more
than 7%, adjusted for inflation, compared with a year earlier.

In Beijing, where the virus is spreading rapidly, shopping centres are

unusually quiet, even as fever clinics (and some bars) are packed
with people seeking relief for their body (or spirit). The threat of
infection in the country’s capital is so bad the National Bureau of
Statistics cancelled its regular press conference reviewing the
month’s economic figures—as good an indicator of China’s
predicament as anything the bureau normally publishes.

Thus the country’s leaders will have their economic work cut out in
2023. But you would not necessarily know that from reading their
statement. Just as China’s headline economic statistics are often
suspiciously smooth, the statements China releases after its
economic work conference are also artificially consistent. They repeat
phrases (“proactive fiscal policy”) and slogans (“housing is for living
in, not for speculation”) from previous years.

Presumably the aim is to create the impression of stability and

continuity. In last week’s statement, China’s abrupt swerve away from
the “zero-covid” policy is mentioned only in passing. The statement
notes that China will focus on the elderly and vulnerable, and
calibrate its response to infections to “get through the latest covid-19
pandemic period smoothly”.

The statement does, though, recognise some of the dangers of a

post-zero-covid world. China’s leaders must revive market confidence
at home and restore China’s appeal to investors abroad, most of
whom have not visited for years. “Improving public confidence and
expectations” is listed as a good starting point for economic strategy
in 2023. To foreign investors, China’s leaders promise “maximum
convenience”.

The statement also provides a rare acknowledgment of criticism, or

what it calls “incorrect” interpretations. It addresses the view that
China has become inhospitable to private enterprise and indisposed
to reforming its big state-owned enterprises. Examples include a
clampdown on indebted property developers and a regulatory blitz
that humbled some of the country’s most successful e-commerce
firms in 2021. In response, the statement promises China will make
clear its adherence to the “two unswervings”, the name the party
gives to its double commitment to consolidate the state sector and
support the private sector.
Robin Xing of Morgan Stanley, another bank, thinks China’s
regulatory, macroeconomic and covid policies are aligned in favour of
growth for the first time in three years. Others are more sceptical. The
government’s attempt to repair confidence is like breaking a horse
into pieces, reassembling it and expecting it to run again, according
to one netizen. The doubters will want to see more evidence that
China is as committed to private enterprise as it is to its market-
friendly slogans. Official rhetoric is not always a good guide to policy.
If it were, China would still be persisting victoriously with zero-covid. ■

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and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Robots and jobs

The pandemic and the triumph of the Luddites

Covid-19 was meant to lead to job-killing automation

Dec 20th 2022 | San Francisco

IT
WAS MEANT to be a bloodbath. When covid-19 struck in early
2020, economists warned that a wave of job-killing robots would
sweep over the labour market, leading to high and structural
unemployment. One prominent economist, in congressional
testimony in the autumn, asserted that employers were ”substituting
machines for workers”. A paper published by the IMF
in early 2021
said that such concerns “seem justified”. Surveys of firms suggested
they had grand plans to invest in artificial intelligence and machine
learning.

Wonks had plenty of reason to worry. Recessions cause many

companies’ revenues, but not wages, to fall, making workers less
affordable. Some previous downturns had produced bursts of job-
killing automation, depriving people of work and leaving them at least
temporarily on the economic scrapheap. Covid seemed to pose an
extra threat to workers. People get sick; robots do not. Past
pandemics, research suggests, have hastened automation.

More than two years on, however, it is hard to find much evidence of
job-killing automation. Rather than workers complaining about a
shortage of jobs, bosses complain about a shortage of workers.
Across the OECD
club of mostly rich countries, there is an unusually
large number of unfilled vacancies, even as recession nears. In many
countries the wages of the lowest-paid, the people thought to be most
at risk of losing their job to a robot, are rising the fastest.

To test the doomsters’ predictions more directly, we dug into

occupational data for America, Australia and Britain. Borrowing a
methodology developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, we
divided occupations into “routine” and “nonroutine” buckets. Routine
jobs involve repetitive movements, which can be more easily learned
by a machine or computer, making them in theory more vulnerable to
automation.
Over time, and especially during past recessions, routine jobs have
declined as a share of the workforce (see chart). But during the
pandemic the rate of decline actually slowed. In the two years before
the pandemic automatable jobs in Australia, as a share of the total,
fell by 1.8 percentage points. In the two subsequent years they fell by
0.6 percentage points. We find similar trends in Britain, though a
recent coding change makes analysis trickier. America today has
slightly more routine jobs than you would expect based on pre-
pandemic trends.

Economists are now working on theories which will be less prone to

malfunction. Perhaps the routine roles which remain are particularly
difficult to automate. Perhaps in some cases technology actually
improves, rather than damages, workers’ prospects. For now a
simple rule will suffice: next time you hear a blood-curdling prediction
about robots and jobs, think twice.

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
No time like the present

The Bank of Japan shocks investors

By lifting its bond-market peg, the bank may herald a period of
tightening

Dec 20th 2022 | Tokyo

IN RECENT
MONTHS
anticipation had grown that in 2023 the Bank
of Japan (BOJ) would at last tighten monetary policy after years of
no-holds-barred stimulus. Almost nobody expected it to happen in
2022. But on December 20th the bank lifted its cap on ten-year
government-bond yields from 0.25% to 0.5%. The Christmas surprise
caused the yen to surge—and set off speculation about what might
come next.

Since 2016 the BOJ has intervened in bond markets to keep the ten-
year bond yield at around 0%, a policy known as “yield-curve control”.
Technically, the bank permitted fluctuations of a quarter of a
percentage point around the 0% goal. But the upper limit of 0.25% is
what mattered, especially this year, as upward pressure on yields
built around the globe. Now the BOJ will allow moves of half a
percentage point around zero. After the announcement, the ten-year
bond yield surged from 0.25% to 0.4%, its biggest daily shift since
2003.
The BOJ had been a global outlier, maintaining ultra-loose policy
even as America’s Federal Reserve and other central banks chose to
raise interest rates sharply. Japan’s benchmark interest rate of -0.1%
has not moved in almost seven years and the bank owns over half of
the government bond market. Yield-curve control was implemented
as a way of allowing the BOJ to control long-term interest rates
without running out of bonds to buy. Paradoxically, when central
banks credibly promise to peg the price of an asset, they often need
not intervene much to enforce the policy. The market implements the
peg by itself.

For most of the policy’s history that more or less worked. In 2022,
however, the peg has come under considerable pressure as traders
have speculated that monetary policy would need to be tightened.
The chasm between the policies of Japan and those in the rest of the
rich world caused the yen to plunge by 23% against the dollar from
the start of 2022 to mid-October. In October, annual inflation was
3.6%, a 40-year high and well above the BOJ’s 2% target. Though
most of the inflation was imported, many central banks have been
caught out since the covid-19 pandemic by assuming price growth
will cool without tighter monetary policy.

Yet it was widely assumed that any pivot by the BOJ would come
after its current governor, Kuroda Haruhiko, leaves in April. That
policymakers moved faster makes sense: it spares the BOJ
months
of bond-buying to enforce the old cap, and the greater losses it would
endure on its bigger bond portfolio.

How far will Japan’s central bank now go? After the announcement
the dollar fell by 3.4% against the yen, but the Japanese currency
remains at its weakest level in two decades. Economists are watching
the shunto, Japan’s springtime wage negotiations between large
companies and trade unions, for more signs of inflation. Japanese
firms raised winter bonuses by 9.7%, according to Nikkei, a business
newspaper, the largest such increase since 1975.

Mr Kuroda claims that he has not tightened monetary policy, only

responded to volatile market conditions. Yet the announcement was
his “sayonara present”, according to Jesper Koll of Monex Group, a
Japanese brokerage. “It opens the door for ‘Operation Freedom’ for
whoever his successor will be.” Japanese financial markets could be
in for a turbulent 2023. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance
and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Buttonwood

India’s stockmarkets are roaring. They also have

serious faults
Investors may have to look elsewhere for diversification

Dec 20th 2022 |

FEW
STOCKMARKETS flourished in 2022. Strong performers
include ones in commodity-exporting countries like Brazil, Indonesia
and the Gulf states, which have benefited from the squeeze on
natural resources. They also include an oddity: India. The country’s
Nifty 50 and Sensex indices reached record highs at the end of
November. Indian stocks are up 4% in local-currency terms this year.
Global stocks are down by 20%.

All this means it is a hopeful time for India. Investors are

reconsidering their exposure to China, the largest emerging market.
Even after a rebound triggered by China’s reversal of its “zero-covid”
policies, the MSCI China index has fallen by a quarter since the start
of 2020, reducing its annual return over the past decade to below 1%.
To many fund managers desperate for diversification, India looks the
most promising alternative.

Yet the country’s markets face problems that will limit its ability to take
up this role. The most straightforward is their size. Indian
stockmarkets are worth $3.4trn, less than the $6trn accounted for by
stocks in Hong Kong and Chinese firms listed in New York—let alone
the $10trn in stocks still mostly out of reach to international investors
in mainland China. India could only absorb a fraction of any capital
redeployed away from Chinese stocks now, and an even smaller
share of what investors eventually hope to invest in the mainland.

Optimists argue that the growth of the Indian economy will solve this
problem. IT firms like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services will
benefit from outsourcing. The decision by Foxconn, a Taiwanese
contract manufacturer, to produce iPhones and semiconductors in
India hints at the potential for larger manufacturing hubs in the future,
featuring home-grown firms. But there is a problem: Indian stocks are
expensive. Their forward price-to-earnings ratio of around 22 is more
than double Chinese stocks’ multiple of ten and more than three
times Brazilian stocks’ multiple of seven. They are even pricey
compared with America’s tech-heavy offerings.
India is an importer of commodities, and the central bank has been
forced to raise interest rates in defence of the rupee. This should
have reduced valuations; the fact that it has not reflects an outbreak
of retail mania. The number of participants in Indian markets has
more than tripled since the start of 2022. In the same period retail
buyers spent a net 3trn rupees ($36bn) on stocks, a stark rise from
the minuscule inflows and occasional outflows recorded between
2015 and 2019. India’s economic prospects are strong, but 2023
looks likely to be a difficult year around the world. A slump in retail
interest could see asset prices tumble.

India’s stockmarkets are far more open to foreign investors than

mainland China’s. But when you broaden the lens to look at debt and
currency trading, its capital markets remain only partly open,
reflecting anxiety that speculation could destabilise the economy.
Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in
2013-16, wanted to internationalise India’s markets and currency.
Despite his instincts as a market-minded liberal, he made slow
progress. In the past year the RBI
has reportedly leaned on domestic
banks, discouraging participation in the offshore rupee market, so as
to retain more control of the currency’s value against the dollar.

There are signs that India wants to open up more. In October T. Rabi
Sankar, deputy governor of the RBI, spoke of the need to entice the
capital required to fund Indian growth, despite the reduced control of
domestic monetary policy this would inevitably bring. Yet there are
logistical hurdles. In the same month JPMorgan Chase decided not to
include India in a widely followed bond index, reflecting investor
concerns about fiddly registration processes and whether its clearing
and settlement systems could handle a surge in inflows. In any case
opening up India’s capital markets further would be a brave
undertaking at a time when global markets are fragile and American
interest rates are rising.

India has a compelling story. It offers a vibrant

IT-services industry, a
burgeoning domestic tech scene, an increasingly attractive location
for global manufacturers—and strong economic growth. This is
enticing when the appeal of its mighty neighbour to the northeast has
diminished. But a pricey stockmarket and a tentative approach to
opening up is preventing the country from achieving its potential in
capital markets. Fund managers desperate for diversification should
not rely on India alone.

Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial

markets:

For bond investors, every country is an emerging market now (Dec

8th)

Has private equity avoided the asset-price crash? (Dec 1st)

How crypto goes to zero (Nov 24th)

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Free exchange

The Federal Reserve’s great anti-hero deserves a

second look
Lessons for modern policymakers from Arthur Burns

Dec 20th 2022 |

SINCE
INFLATION took off, a former Federal Reserve chair has been
on the minds of politicians and pundits. A number have argued that
Jerome Powell, the current incumbent, must not become the next
Arthur Burns. As chair of the Fed in the 1970s, Burns represents
central-banking failure: a weak leader who blinked in the face of
inflation and steered the economy towards disaster.

It is not that this warning from history is incorrect. Richard Nixon

picked Burns to run the Fed, viewing him as a friend who would do
his bidding. Despite stubborn inflation, Nixon pressed Burns to cut
interest rates in 1971, thinking it would help him win re-election. Sure
enough, the Fed did just that. Nixon was re-elected and inflation
soared, hitting double digits by 1974.

But the story is more complicated than the basic outlines suggest,
and its complexity contains lessons for today’s policymakers. With the
holiday season upon us—and with the Fed approaching a turning
point in monetary policy—it is a fine time to reassess the legacy of
the much-maligned central banker.

Start with what happened after inflation took off. The Fed jacked up
interest rates from 3% in 1972 to 13% in 1974, one of its sharpest-
ever doses of tightening, and enough to help tip the economy into a
deep recession. Doing so took some of the heat out of price growth,
with inflation settling at around 6% for the remainder of Burns’s
tenure. This was uncomfortably high, and Burns never delivered the
death blow to inflation that Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s.
Nevertheless, his initial assault heralded a new era. In 2016
economists from the Fed’s branch in Richmond assessed monetary-
policy settings over the years. Their model suggested that the
“Volcker shock” had not appeared like a bolt from the blue. Burns had
laid the groundwork for it.

He did this in formidable circumstances. An oil shock that began in

1973 led to a near quadrupling in energy prices as well as a surge in
food costs. A second oil shock in 1978, just after Burns left the Fed,
kicked off another inflationary surge. Given this backdrop, how much
of the inflation can truly be blamed on the Fed? A review written in
2008 by Alan Blinder and Jeremy Rudd, two economists, found that
supply-side factors were decisive. They calculated that the energy
and food crises accounted for more than 100% of the rise in headline
inflation relative to its baseline level. The Fed could have reacted
more strongly, given that inflation had already been unanchored. But
Burns was not responsible for the massive shocks facing the
economy.

Burns’s troubles also illustrate the pitfalls of real-time indicators. The

Fed today is seen as “data-dependent”. If inflation momentum stays
relatively weak, its next rate rise is likely to be one quarter of a
percentage point; if inflation shoots back up, a half-point rise may be
on the menu. That is entirely reasonable. But consider the head-fake
of 1975. Initial data from the first quarter registered a 10% annualised
drop in GDP
and a remission in price pressure. The Fed cut rates
aggressively. Subsequent revisions showed that the GDP loss was
only about 5% and that inflation had remained persistent. If this had
been known at the time, Burns’s Fed might well have acted
differently.

That real-time figures may be flawed is, on one level, not terribly
helpful: it is impossible to know whether future revisions will push
growth up or down. Yet this uncertainty does counsel against
overreacting to limited data. Having tightened policy so much over the
past year, the Fed wants to proceed more gingerly. Even if there is an
upside surprise in inflation between now and its next meeting in
February, sticking to that gradualism may still be the right course—
just as Mr Powell has avoided reading too much into an apparent
inflation slowdown in November.

The main economic outcome associated with Burns’s Fed is, of

course, high inflation. But his relatively loose policy also fuelled an
investment boom. Capital expenditures—that is, money spent by
businesses on things such as buildings and equipment—reached
about a third of American GDP in 1978, which still stands as the
highest level since at least 1946. Responding to the supply shocks at
the time, much of that went into energy and commodity production.
Jeffrey Currie of Goldman Sachs, a bank, recently noted that these
investments helped to “de-bottleneck” oil and metals production
capacity for decades, setting the economy up for lower inflation in the
long run.

Today the world’s economy is at another inflection point. The frayed

global trading system, declining immigration and climate change may
well constrain America’s productivity, leading to persistently lower
growth and higher inflation. There is also renewed debate among
economists about whether the Fed should pursue a slightly higher
inflation target than 2%. Such a switch could help it to avoid
squeezing the economy too hard amid profound challenges. The
Fed’s task is to accurately forecast the future shape of the economy
and its interaction with monetary policy. The deep effects of the
1970s’ investment boom are a reminder that it must pay heed to the
current array of economic structural shifts.

First-degree Burns

The closer one examines Burns’s record, the more that complexities
emerge. The former Fed chair carefully managed the dissolution of a
major bank in 1974, in an augury of the central bank’s present
framework of letting bad firms fail so long as doing so does not
precipitate a financial crisis. His advocacy of wage controls is now
seen as a classic example of bad policy, doomed to failure. Yet the
context was a powerful union movement which had locked in upward
cost-of-living adjustments—something that no longer exists. Even his
relationship with Nixon is far from straightforward. Burns was no
sycophant, and did at least try to resist the president’s bullying. All
this provides the final and most important lesson from the Fed’s great
anti-hero: historical analogies are useful, but rarely the whole story. ■

Read more from Free Exchange, our column on economics:

The insidious threats to central-bank independence (Dec 15th)

Tackling sexual harassment could bring sizeable economic dividends

(Dec 8th)

A playbook from the 1980s for dealing with inflation (Dec 1st)

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Science & technology
 

Enlightened computing
Trust no one
Layering it on
 
Information technology

Artificial intelligence and the rise of optical

computing
Photonic data-processing is well-suited to the age of deep learning

Dec 20th 2022 |

MODERN
INFORMATION technology (IT) relies on division of labour.
Photons carry data around the world and electrons process them.
But, before optical fibres, electrons did both—and some people hope
to complete the transition by having photons process data as well as
carrying them.

Unlike electrons, photons (which are electrically neutral) can cross

each others’ paths without interacting, so glass fibres can handle
many simultaneous signals in a way that copper wires cannot. An
optical computer could likewise do lots of calculations at the same
time. Using photons reduces power consumption, too. Electrical
resistance generates heat, which wastes energy. The passage of
photons through transparent media is resistance-free.

For optical computing to happen, though, the well-established

architecture of digital electronic processing would have to be replaced
by equivalent optical components. Or maybe not. For some people
are working on a novel optical architecture that uses analogue rather
than digital computing (that is, it encodes data as a continuous signal
rather than as discrete “bits”). At the moment, this architecture is best
suited to solving one particular class of problems, those of a branch
of maths called linear algebra. But that is a potentially huge market,
for linear algebra is fundamental to, among other matters, artificial
neural networks, and they, in turn, are fundamental to machine
learning—and thus artificial intelligence (AI).

The power of the matrix

Linear algebra manipulates matrices. These are grids of numbers

(representing coefficients of simultaneous equations) that can be
added and multiplied a bit like individual numbers. Among the things
which can be described by matrices are the equations governing the
behaviour of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) that were
discovered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell. Light’s
underlying Maxwellian nature makes it easy, using appropriate
modulating devices, to encode matrix data into light beams and then
manipulate those data.
Artificial neural networks are programs that represent layers of nodes,
the connections between which represent numbers in matrices. The
values of these change in response to incoming signals in a way that
results in matrix multiplication. The results are passed on to the next
layer for another round of processing, and so on, until they arrive at a
final output layer, which synthesises them into an answer. The upshot
is to allow a network to recognise and learn about patterns in the
input data.

The idea of turning neural networks optical is not new. It goes back to
the 1990s. But only now has the technology to make it commercially
viable come into existence. One of the people who has observed this
transition is Demetri Psaltis, an electrical engineer then at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and now at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was among the first
to use optical neural networks for face recognition.

The neural networks of Dr Psaltis’s youth were shallow. They had but
one or two layers and a few thousand nodes. These days, so-called
deep-learning networks can have more than 100 layers and billions of
nodes. Meanwhile, investments by the telecoms industry—the part of
IT that ships data around through all those optical fibres—have made
it possible to fabricate and control optical systems far more complex
than those of the past.

That is the technological push. The financial pull derives from

shedding the cost of the vast amount of electricity consumed by
modern networks as they and the quantities of data they handle get
bigger and bigger.

Most efforts to build optical neural networks have not abandoned

electrons entirely—they pragmatically retain electronics where
appropriate. For example, Lightmatter and Lightelligence, two firms in
Boston, Massachusetts, are building hybrid “modulators” that multiply
matrices together by manipulating an optically encoded signal
according to numbers fed back electronically. This gains the benefit of
parallelism for the optical input (which can be 100 times what
electronics would permit) while using more conventional kit as what
Nicholas Harris, Lightmatter’s founder, describes as the puppet
master.

The modulators themselves are made of silicon. Though this is not

the absolute best material for light modulation, it is by far the best-
developed for electronics. Using silicon allows hybrid chips to be
made with equipment designed for conventional ones—perhaps even
affording it a new lease of life. For, as Maurice Steinman, vice-
president of engineering at Lightelligence, observes, though the
decades’ long rise in the performance of electronics is slowing down,
“we’re just at the beginning of generational scaling on optics”.

Ground zero

Ryan Hamerly and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (the organisation from which Lightelligence and
Lightmatter were spun out) seek to exploit the low power
consumption of hybrid optical devices for smart speakers, lightweight
drones and even self-driving cars. A smart speaker does not have the
computational and energetic chops to run deep-learning programs by
itself. It therefore sends a digitised version of what it has heard over
the internet to a remote server, which does the processing for it. The
server then returns the answer.

All this takes time, though, and is insecure. An optical chip put in such
a speaker could perform the needed linear algebra there and then,
with low power consumption and without having to transfer potentially
sensitive data elsewhere.

Other researchers, including Ugur Tegin, at Caltech, reckon optical

computing’s true benefit is its ability to handle large data sets. At the
moment, for example, image-recognition systems are trained on low-
resolution pictures, because high-res versions are too big for them to
handle efficiently, if at all. As long as there is an electronic component
to the process, there is limited bandwidth. Dr Tegin’s answer is to
forgo electronics altogether and use an all-optical machine.
This has, however, proved tricky—for what allows neural networks to
learn pretty well any pattern thrown at them is the use, in addition to
all the linear processing, of a non-linear function in each of their
nodes. Employing only linear functions would mean that only linear
patterns could be learned.

Fortunately, although light does behave mostly in a linear fashion,

there is an exception. This, Dr Tegin explains, is when an extremely
short and intense pulse of it is shone through a so-called multi-mode
fibre, which exploits multiple properties of light to enhance its ability to
carry parallel signals. In these circumstances, the pulse’s passage
changes the properties of the material itself, altering the behaviour of
the passing light in a non-linear manner.

Dr Tegin exploited this feature in what is, save its final output layer, an
all-optical network. He describes this in a paper published last year in
Nature Computational Science. He is able to keep all of the
information in an optical form right up until its arrival at the last layer
—the one where the answer emerges. Only then is it converted into
electronic form, for processing by the simpler and smaller electronic
network which makes up this layer.

Meanwhile, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Aydogan

Ozcan is taking yet another approach to all-optical matrix processing.
In a paper published in Science in 2018, he and his collaborators
describe how to create optical devices that do it without involving
electrons at all.

The magic here lies in the use of thin sheets of specially fabricated
glass, each the size of a postage stamp, laid on top of each other in
stacks analogous to the layers of an artificial neural network.
Together, these sheets diffract incoming light in the way that such a
neural network would process a digital image.

In this case, the optics work passively, like the lens of a camera,
rather than receiving active feedback. Dr Ozcan says that provides
security benefits. The system never captures images or sends out the
raw data—only the inferred result. There is a trade-off, though.
Because the sheets cannot be reconfigured they must, if the
inference algorithm changes, be replaced.

How far optical computing of this sort will get remains to be seen. But
AI based on deep learning is developing fast, as recent brouhaha
about ChatGPT, a program that can turn out passable prose (and
even poetry) with only a little prompting, shows. Hardware which can
speed up that development still more is thus likely to find favour. So,
after decades in the doldrums, the future of optical computing now
looks pretty bright. ■

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coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Optical cryptography

A better way to process encrypted data

Fully homomorphic encryption is easy if you do it with light

Dec 20th 2022 |

THE
DIGITISATION of modern life means data security is ever more
important. Data in storage and transit are normally encrypted, and
therefore safe from prying eyes. But for computation to happen, they
usually have to be unencrypted first. This is a particular problem with
so-called cloud computing (in reality, just row upon row of stacks of
computers in server farms), which happens beyond a data-owner’s
control. And it is getting worse, as more and more devices refer
calculations back to various clouds, rather than doing them locally.

A possible answer is a technique called fully homomorphic encryption

(FHE). This permits computation directly on encrypted data.
Someone with the correct key could, using FHE, send information to
a cloud, have it processed there, and get the results back without
putting anything sensitive at risk.

The difficulty with this approach is that it is slow. Very slow. Nick New,
boss of Optalysys, a small firm in Britain, says a computation that
takes a second on unencrypted data might require 1m seconds with
FHE. Mr New’s answer, as his firm’s name suggests, is to employ
optical rather than electronic computing.

Optical computing encodes data in beams of light instead of electric

currents. The computation is done by manipulating the beams. This
works well for a type of mathematics called linear algebra—and
luckily, Fourier transforms, a way of speeding up all the multiplications
involved in FHE, are easily handled this way. Mr New reckons FHE
and optical computing together would reduce the processing time in
his putative problem from 1m seconds to between ten and 100.

In Optalysys’s system, the information is encoded into the phase and

amplitude of many different beams. These are then sent in particular
directions by structures called waveguides, before being shone into
free space, where they combine and interfere with each other.

The computation happens when the resulting wavefront passes

through a specially designed lens, the output of which is translated
into an electrical signal, for more conventional processing, by a
camera. A bonus is that, like all optical computing, the actual
computation consumes no energy, saving both money and carbon-
dioxide emissions.

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coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Smart coatings

A golden sandwich that demists your windscreen

It is a clever use of nanotechnology

Dec 20th 2022 |

AS
THE
NORTHERN hemisphere’s winter arrives, the problem of
fogged-up car windscreens becomes more pressing for drivers. When
humid air hits a surface colder than it is the water vapour it carries
condenses onto that surface as myriad tiny droplets. These scatter
light at random. The result, if the surface is transparent, looks to a
human eye like fog. Depending on what is fogged, be it windows,
spectacle lenses or windscreens, that can be a curiosity, a nuisance
or a serious hazard.

Antimisting sprays are one way to deal with such fogging. But they
need frequent reapplication. Another approach is to embed within the
thing to be demisted a set of electrically powered heating wires. That
works for a car’s rear window but not (because of the visual
distraction created) for its front windscreen. Nor does it suit the
windows of buildings or the lenses of spectacles to be demisted in
this way.

Iwan Hächler and Dimos Poulikakos of the Swiss Federal Institute of

Technology in Zurich have, however, come up with another way of
warming something up to stop condensation forming. Their new
material, which they describe in Nature Nanotechnology, is a coating
ten nanometres thick. It is flexible, easily made using existing
processes, and can be applied as a coating to glass or plastic, or
embedded inside such materials. Its demisting properties are
powered by sunlight.

In effect, this material is a gold sandwich. The “bread” of this butty is

a pair of layers, top and bottom, of titanium dioxide, each three
nanometres thick. The filling is a four-nanometre deep golden filigree.
The whole kaboodle lets visible light pass untrammelled, while
absorbing infrared and converting it into heat. And there is plenty to
be absorbed. Only about 40% of solar radiation is visible to the eye.
More than 50% of it is infrared.

It is the filling that warms the glass. When gold is deposited onto a
surface at random, it first forms miniature islands. Since these are not
connected to each other, the result is an insulator. Then, as more
gold is added, bridges form between the islands. At a certain point
these bridges transform the developing network from an insulator into
a conductor, by letting electrons hop from island to island. That
permits heat to spread.

The network will now, like any other metal, absorb heat if left in the
sunshine. It does so best, Mr Hächler and Dr Poulikakos say, when it
reaches the so-called percolation limit—the moment at which it
switches from an archipelago to an electrically interconnected sheet.

The titanium-dioxide layers boost that absorption. This substance has

a high refractive index, meaning the speed of light passing through it
is greatly reduced. That prolongs the time such light can interact with
(and thus heat up) the gold. The upper layer of titanium dioxide also
protects the gold beneath it from damage.

Glass coated with Mr Hächler’s and Dr Poulikakos’s invention is, they

claim, four times more effective at preventing fog than an uncoated
surface. It absorbs around 30% of solar radiation incident upon it—
which, on a sunny day, increases the temperature of what it is applied
to by around 8°C. On a cloudy day, that temperature rise is closer to
3-4°C. But in either case the enhancement is sufficient both to
remove any fog that has condensed and to prevent new fog forming.
The main problem is that it does not work at night.

The next step, Mr Hächler says, is to find the product’s best market.
Dr Poulikakos reckons spectacles are a good starting point. (This is
not an entirely disinterested suggestion, for he wears them himself.)
Spectacle lenses already have many layers of coatings applied to
them. The cost of adding this extra one is low. Even though gold is
used, so little is required that the materials themselves are worth only
20 cents or so. For the two inventors, though, the idea might prove a
gold mine. ■

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coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
Culture
 

Heart of darkness
Rogues’ gallery
The year of the underdogs
 
Heart of darkness

Francisco Goya’s vision of war is powerful and

urgent
Bleak yet compassionate, his art feels as contemporary as ever

Dec 20th 2022 | MADRID

THE
LINE of drably uniformed infantrymen, rifles aimed, forms a
forceful diagonal across the right side of the painting, a machine of
terror. Their target is a terrified rebel in a white shirt, his arms flung
upwards in vulnerability and defiance, imitating Christ on the cross.
His comrades cover their faces. Several already lie inert on the
ground in pools of blood.

The subject of Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” (pictured),

also known as “The Executions”, is the reprisals exacted by
Napoleon’s troops after a rebellion by the populace of Madrid,
portrayed in a companion painting, all slashing daggers and sabres.
Yet it is also a universal indictment of violence. “It’s a work of today, of
Ukraine, of all wars,” says Gudrun Maurer of the Prado museum in
Madrid, where it hangs. “You could put it in a square in Kyiv and
people would understand it.”

Almost two centuries after his death Goya seems ever more
contemporary, especially amid a war in Europe. He was not the first
war artist but no one has captured its horrors more powerfully. Many
of his concerns—the exploitation of women, mental health, human
rights and the treatment of prisoners, the power of false beliefs and
fake news—resonate today. He was the first Western artist to paint
his own ideas, visions, dreams and nightmares, not just external
realities. In other words, he was “the first Modernist”, as Robert
Hughes, an art critic, called him, and the first Expressionist. His eye is
searching, often compassionate and ultimately bleak.

Not surprisingly, Goya is in fashion, though he has rarely been out of

it. The Fondation Beyeler in Basel staged a rare blockbuster show
devoted to him in 2021. Next summer an exhibition in Oslo will pair
works by Goya with those of Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece “The
Scream” echoes some of the Spaniard’s images. For several
contemporary artists, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Emily
Lombardo and Michael Armitage, Goya is a direct point of reference.
Last year Philippe Parreno, a French video artist, released “La Quinta
del Sordo”, a 40-minute film showing Goya’s late “Black Paintings” in
swirling hyper-close-ups, set to a soundtrack of interplanetary roars
and moans. The effect is ghoulish and mesmeric. Two Goya portraits
will be auctioned at Christie’s in January; they seem guaranteed to
smash the record price for his work, currently $7.8m.

Goya was an extraordinarily versatile and innovative artist who lived a

long life, dying in 1828 aged 82 in voluntary exile in Bordeaux. He
was born in a village near Zaragoza to middle-class parents, his
father a professional gilder. He was ambitious—and supremely
confident of his abilities. Moving to Madrid, he became court painter
to three successive monarchs and director of painting at the Royal
Academy of Fine Arts. His early work included the religious paintings
that were obligatory for a budding artist. A breakthrough came with
commissions for scores of cartoons for the royal tapestry factory
portraying scenes of Spanish life. He became an insightful and
sought-after portraitist.

But he retained a lifelong appreciation of demotic tastes—bullfighting,

hunting, the fiesta—even as he made friends among the intellectuals
of the Spanish Enlightenment. His knowledge of those contrasting
worlds, and affection for them, gave him a unique understanding
when they came into conflict. “His art is always aimed at more than
one side,” says Ms Maurer.

From the 1790s, two things happened to turn Goya into the artist so
admired today. One was a mysterious illness, possibly lead poisoning
from his paints, that left him deaf. That caused him to look inwards.
His paintings began to deal with beliefs and transgressions. A great
colourist, his canvases became almost monochrome, dominated by
blacks and browns. One series denounced violence against women.
Paintings now in the Academy detailed fanaticism in flagellants and
the Inquisition, the phenomenon of witchcraft, the plight of prisoners
and fantasies of the madhouse that mocked the “normal” world. Goya
also became a prolific printmaker. In “Los Caprichos” (“The
Caprices”) he lampooned the church and social hypocrisies.
The second turning-point was the French revolution, with which he
sympathised, and Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the long
Peninsular war that followed. The ensuing brutality forced him to
review his ideas. “Goya goes from being a follower of the
Enlightenment who believes in the capacity for regeneration to a
person whose experience leads to despair,” according to Javier
Portús, the chief curator for Spanish painting at the Prado.

This bleak vision was expressed in the “Black Paintings”, executed as

frescoes on the walls of La Quinta del Sordo, Goya’s country house,
and now occupying Room 67 of the Prado. They were painted for
himself, not the public or the court. They are peopled by nightmare
figures, crones and paupers in rags, their mouths gaping cavities. It is
as if dead souls returned to haunt the living. Yet they are recognisable
in the homeless people found in the streets of post-pandemic cities.

There was despair, too, in a series of prints, “The Disasters of War”,

not published until 1863: body parts strewn on trees, piles of corpses,
people being clubbed to death. “I saw it,” he wrote on two of the
prints. He certainly visited the ruins of Zaragoza after the French
siege, and he lived through the famine in Madrid in 1811-12 in which
perhaps 20,000 died. Yet the power of his portrayal of war is not as a
literal record, but that it cuts to the essence. It is war seen close-up,
never heroic.

Each age sees what it wants in Goya, Mr Portús notes. That testifies
to his genius in communicating ideas and images. He was of his time;
other Enlightenment artists shared his concerns. But he alone
transcended that time to speak universal truths about the human
condition so directly. ■

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newsletter
A family affair

A delightful world history, told through influential

families
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s moreish chronicle is laced with sex and
violence

Dec 20th 2022 |

The World: A Family History. By Simon Sebag Montefiore. W&N;
1,344 pages; £35. To be published in America by Knopf in May; $45

LOCKDOWN, FOR Simon Sebag Montefiore, was not a time for

baking or box sets. Instead he set about recounting the history of the
world through the lives of its most influential families. He begins over
4,000 years ago with the rape and vengeance of Enheduanna,
daughter of Sargon, the self-made ruler of the Akkadian empire in
Mesopotamia. He ends with the Trumps and the Xis. Sargon’s family
faced the same problems that afflicted nearly every dynastic empire
that followed: “The bigger it grew, the more borders had to be
defended; the richer it was, the more tempting a target it became for
less settled neighbours—and the greater was the incentive for
destructive family feuds.”

The device of weaving together the past using the most enduring and
essential unit of human relations is inspired. It lets readers empathise
with people who helped shape historical events and were shaped by
them. They have hopes, fears, lusts and ambitions that are familiar,
even if they are manifest in ways that border on the psychopathic.
The method also allows the author to cover every continent and era,
and to give women and even children a voice and presence that they
tend to be denied in more conventional histories.

Despite the book’s formidable length, there is never a dull moment.

The story moves at pace across terrible battles, court intrigues,
personal triumphs and disasters, lurid sexual practices and hideous
tortures. Almost every page offers what used to be known in Fleet
Street as a “marmalade dropper”. Amid the sensationalism, you find
yourself adapting to the cruelties of moral universes that are both
alien and, on their own terms, comprehensible.

The technicolour cast includes the Borgias, the Habsburgs, the

Kennedys and the Nehrus. Between the great, the good, the damned
and the merely incompetent or criminal, there are far too many stars
to mention. But some stand out:
• Darius the Great defeated eight rivals for the throne of Persia and
ensured stability by marrying nearly all his female relations. Ruling
with splendour and conquest for nearly 40 years until 486BC, he
declared: “I am Darius, King of Kings. Whoever helped my family, I
favoured; whoever was hostile, I eliminated.”

• Liu Bang was a hard-drinking peasant nicknamed “Little Rascal”

who became a warlord. Through clever generalship and (for the time)
enlightened politics, he founded the Han dynasty in 202BC. It ruled
China with only a minor interruption for more than 400 years.

• Aged 56, and still exceptionally beautiful, Empress Zoe, niece of

Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, drowned her husband Romanos in his bath in
1034 with the help of a 25-year-old paramour. Despite a brief exile,
Zoe was kingmaker and the real power in Constantinople until her
death 16 years later.

• Thanks to his family’s obsession with consanguinity, poor Carlos II,

the last Habsburg king of Spain, was born with a brain-swelling, one
kidney, one testicle and a jaw so deformed that he could barely chew.
Only semi-literate, he died in 1700 of explosive dysentery.

For her ruthless cunning and insatiable appetite for power and sex,
this reviewer’s favourite character is Empress Wu, who at 14 was a
palace maid and rose to become the most dominant woman in
Chinese history. To secure her place as empress consort, she may
have strangled her own baby so as to accuse a rival of murder. She
died as empress dowager at the age of 81 in 705AD, having seen off
internal and external foes for over 50 years, supposedly kept youthful
by drinking the semen of much younger (and usually doomed) lovers.

A perennial theme is the dynastic problem caused by having too

many sons, who fight each other for the throne—a difficulty
exacerbated by the sensual temptations afforded by absolute power.
For instance, Ismail, a slave-trading sultan of Morocco, fathered
1,171 children by the time he died in 1727. (His heirs still rule today.)
As Nizam al-Mulk, an 11th-century vizier, observed: “One obedient
slave is better than 300 sons for the latter desire their father’s death,
the former their master’s glory.”

A solution sanctioned by Mehmed II, the conqueror of

Constantinople, was to make fratricide an official policy. Having had
his own brother strangled, he decreed: “Whichever of my sons
inherits the sultan’s throne it behoves him to kill his brothers.” Around
80 Ottoman princes were strangled by bowstring so as to avoid
spilling royal blood.

The author tells these stories with verve and palpable relish for the
unbridled sex and inventive violence that run through them. His
character sketches are pithy and witty. Mary, Queen of Scots was “a
calamitous bungler of impulsive stupidity and unwise passion”. The
Duke of Buckingham, a Jacobean playwright, rake and Catholic
plotter, was “slippery, graceful and vicious”. The footnotes, often short
essays in themselves, have the acid drollery of Edward Gibbon.

As the chronicle reaches more familiar territory some of the zest is

lost. Margaret Thatcher is no Empress Wu; Donald Trump, grandson
of Friedrich Drumpf (owner of the Poodle-Dog, a bawdy restaurant in
Seattle), seems quite forgiving compared with Genghis Khan.
Occasionally the segues are lumpy: “Meanwhile in China…” But
overall this book is a triumph and a delight, an epic that entertains,
informs and appals in enjoyably equal measure. ■

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Back Story

The year of the underdogs

From Volodymyr Zelensky to the Moroccan football team, they shone
in 2022

Dec 20th 2022 |

ROCKY
HAS always been a good fighter. He hits like hell and his
nose has never been busted. The trouble is, he never got a break. He
lives in a hovel and rarely takes off his fingerless gloves. But lightning
strikes, and Apollo Creed, the world heavyweight champion, gives
him a shot at the title. “This time”, says the loan shark who employs
Rocky as muscle, “Lady Luck may be in your corner.”

“We are the Rocky of this World Cup,” said Walid Regragui,
Morocco’s football coach, invoking the latter-day saint of underdogs
at the close of what has been the underdog’s year. His team were not
the only outsiders to stun the tournament. Saudi Arabia beat
Argentina; Japan beat Germany. But the dauntless Moroccans were
the underdog kings, seeing off the Belgians, Spanish and
Portuguese, three of the favourites, to become the first Arab and
African side to reach a semi-final. (In the stands, some Iranian fans,
underdogs in a benighted nation, booed their country’s anthem and
cried.)

Morocco proved an essential verity of underdogs: they can triumph

even when, technically, they lose—as the Spartans did at
Thermopylae and the Finns to the Soviets in the “winter war”. Rocky
loses on points to Creed, but shows himself, and the world, that he is
more than “just another bum from the neighbourhood”. If you haven’t
already seen it, look up the clip of Sofiane Boufal, a Moroccan
playmaker, dancing with his mother on the pitch. It is the jig of a
champion.

Fictional underdogs prowled two of their habitual environments on

screen in 2022. One was the workplace. In “Severance”, office grunts
struggled to break free of a shadowy dystopian company. “Slow
Horses” portrayed a bunch of has-been spies, down but not quite out.
In “The White Lotus”, American tourists with more money and libido
than sense were rinsed by a pair of Sicilian hookers. In “Triangle of
Sadness”, meanwhile, the sinking of a superyacht turned a minion
with survival skills into an overlord.
The other underdog habitat—as always and everywhere—was the
family. “Bad Sisters” depicted an abused wife and her officious
siblings. A musical adaptation of “Matilda”, Roald Dahl’s underdog
revenge fantasy, is out soon on Netflix. True, Matilda has magic
powers that most underdogs lack. But she is also a classic product of
what psychologists have called “desirable difficulties”.

Riffing on that idea, in his book “David and Goliath” Malcolm Gladwell
explores how childhood hardships can sometimes nurture resilience
and ingenuity, leading the Matildas of the world to outperform gifted
peers who “inherited an excessive amount of psychological health”.
The underdog, observes Mr Gladwell, may be liberated by having
nothing to lose. “It really don’t matter,” Rocky says of his expected
thrashing. “I was nobody before.”

It is not just the ride from the bottom to the top, wilder and more
exhilarating than shorter ascents, that makes these stories so
rousing. Underdog heroes and heroines do not merely surmount
obstacles or defeat adversaries. The best and most moving beat a
whole rotten system. They hold out hope that might—or reputation,
power and influence—will not always prevail; that even if the rules are
rigged, the game can still be won. They suggest life is not
predetermined. They make their own fate.

The staggering underdog feat of 2022 involved an actor, but he

wasn’t acting. Volodymyr Zelensky faced down a nuclear-armed
invader with a smartphone camera, rhetoric and guts. Ukrainian
civilians lay down in the path of Russian tanks. In his book Mr
Gladwell argues that, though he brags like a wrestling villain,
lumbering Goliath was always likely to lose to a nimble shepherd,
equipped with a sling and those five smooth stones. Unconventional
tactics, he notes, often vanquish heavy arms. Likewise, in ten months
of war Ukraine’s grit and invention have come to seem formidable
assets.

But the contest looked much less even when Russian forces rolled
across the border in February. The underdog’s resistance songs
became the soundtrack of the year: a rendition of “Let It Go” by
seven-year-old Amelia Anisovych in a bomb shelter in Kyiv; Andriy
Khlyvnyuk, a Ukrainian rock star, dressed in fatigues and singing
“Chervona Kalyna” (“Red Viburnum”), an anthem of defiance, in front
of St Sophia cathedral.

To put all that another way: in the end, the loan shark is wrong about
Rocky. His story is not about luck; it is about justice. The most
inspiring underdogs get only what they deserve. All they needed was
a break.

Read more from Back Story, our column on culture:

Twenty-five years on, “Titanic” feels like a prophecy (Nov 23rd)

The World Cup is tarnished. Should fans enjoy it anyway? (Nov 10th)

Pinocchio is the hero of our time (Oct 27th)

For more on the latest books, films, TV

shows, albums and
controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
Economic & financial indicators
 

Economic data, commodities and markets

 
Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Dec 20th 2022 |
Graphic detail
 

The year of Ukraine

 
The year of Ukraine

War replaces disease as the world’s most

newsworthy subject
Russia’s invasion accounted for one-quarter of news-reading hours

Dec 20th 2022 |

JUST
AS
IN 2020 and 2021, during the past year a single story has
dominated news coverage. Rather than covid-19, however, in 2022
readers have focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

These rankings come from a dataset of 6.5m stories on 32 newsy

topics compiled by Chartbeat, an analytics firm. Of the 1bn hours
audiences spent reading them, the war accounted for 278m in total—
a similar share to covid’s in 2021—and 6.4m on the day the invasion
began. That exceeds the combined first-day tallies for the death of
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the
Oscars. Readership fell slowly until May, and has averaged 550,000
hours a day since then. That is just above the daily rate for the men’s
football World Cup recently won by Argentina.

Various American political topics also ranked highly, though this may
reflect the concentration of Chartbeat’s clients in English-speaking
markets. The midterm elections racked up 145m hours and Joe Biden
137m. Strikingly, Donald Trump, now just a former president, still
amassed 100m—matching the combined total for stories about
politics in Britain, which ran through three prime ministers in 50 days.
As for the previous year’s leading subject, pandemic fatigue among
audiences set in just as the war in Ukraine began. In early January
the then-novel Omicron variant was the biggest story, peaking at
800,000 hours of readers’ time on January 6th. Since then, however,
interest has waned, even though the death toll attributable to covid in
2022 is probably similar to that of 2020. Only when protests erupted
in November against the Chinese government’s strict lockdowns did
the pandemic briefly recapture readers’ attention.■

Chart source: Chartbeat

The Economist explains
 

Is Russia running out of ammunition?

How to understand 2022 in memes

 
The Economist explains

Is Russia running out of ammunition?

Many of its shells are probably older than the conscripts firing them

Dec 20th 2022 |

“SO
LET
ME
TELL Putin tonight what his own generals and ministers
are probably too afraid to say,” declared Admiral Sir Tony Radakin,
Britain’s chief of defence staff, on December 14th: “Russia faces a
critical shortage of artillery munitions.” Ten days earlier Avril Haines,
America’s top intelligence official, had offered a similar judgment. Is
Russia running out of shells?

Western officials have been talking up Russia’s ammo crunch for

months. In September they said that Russia had turned to North
Korea for replenishment. In November Lloyd Austin, America’s
defence secretary, spoke of “significant shortages”. At a briefing on
December 12th a senior American defence official said that, at
current rates of use, Russia could sustain “fully serviceable” tube and
rocket artillery ammunition only until early 2023.

Others disagree. On December 9th Colonel Margo Grosberg, the

head of Estonian defence intelligence, said that Russia had around
10m shells and the capacity to produce 3.4m more within a year. At
the peak rate of fire, during the summer in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas
region, Russia was using around 20,000 rounds per day, he said,
meaning that the country has sufficient ammunition “to fight for at
least a year, if not longer”. In a recent interview with The Economist
General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s most senior officer, warned that
Russia was preparing for a fresh offensive in the spring, which could
include another attempt on Kyiv. “Ammunition is being prepared,” said
General Zaluzhny. “Not very good stuff, but still.”

There are several possible explanations for these differing views.

One is a difference in the sort of ammunition being counted.
America’s tally of “fully serviceable” ammunition could refer to that
which is within its expiry dates, properly stored and not in need of
refurbishment before use, suggests Michael Kofman of CNA, a think-
tank. Estonia’s count probably includes a wider range of ordnance
which may be unreliable or unsafe, he says—though not necessarily
ineffective.

Russian ammunition is often stored in poor conditions and for far

longer than would be the case in NATO
armies. If the Pentagon is to
be believed, Russia is firing some shells that were produced in the
early 1980s. “You load the ammunition, and you cross your fingers
and hope it’s going to fire,” said the American defence official.
(Ukraine is drawing on old shells too.)

It is also unclear how much ammunition Russia has lost and gained in
ten months of war. Its rate of expenditure can be calculated fairly
accurately from observed fire. But working out how much ammunition
Russia has lost in Ukraine’s long-range rocket attacks on its depots,
which were particularly effective over the summer, is slightly trickier. It
is especially hard to pin down the rate at which Russia can replenish
these stocks.

Some metrics, such as steel output, offer a clue. But they can also
mislead. In September Jack Watling of the Royal United Services
Institute (RUSI), another think-tank, explained that earlier
assessments of Russian artillery production, from June, had
overstated capacity because they focused on Russia’s ability to cast
and fill shells rather than on the production of explosives inside.
American and British intelligence both say that Russia’s production
rate is highly constrained.

As well as making shells, Russia can import them. Belarus has

provided large quantities of ammunition from its Soviet-era stockpiles,
according to Western officials. But much of that is likely to be sub-par.
In his speech, Admiral Radakin accused North Korea of “seeking to
smuggle artillery shells to Russia.” But that supply is not substantial
at present, according to Ms Haines.

Russia’s rate of shellfire has declined since the intense artillery

barrages of the summer. In theory, if its ammunition shortage is as
dire as some claim, its rate of fire should fall further over the coming
months. In that case, barring an unexpected spurt in production or a
generous benefactor, the Russian army will be in no position to mount
a large shell-hungry offensive of the sort that General Zaluzhny
foresees. But William Owen, a former soldier and now editor of
Military Strategy Magazine, warns against such rosy calculations.
Even if some Russian shells are duds, plenty will work. “You will
never go wrong by assuming the Russians have the ammunition they
judge they need,” he says. To do otherwise is “utterly pointless and
stupidly dangerous.”■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

The Economist explains

How to understand 2022 in memes

What distracted The Economist this year

Dec 14th 2022 |

Beauty and the beast
In February, as Russia massed troops along its border with Ukraine,
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, met his French counterpart,
Emmanuel Macron, in the Kremlin. Photographs showed the two men
sitting at opposite ends of an enormous table, which was apparently
wheeled out as a social-distancing precaution. Mr Putin, who
frequently stars in macho propaganda, looked ridiculous. On social
media the table soon became a see-saw and a badminton court. The
following week Mr Putin, his foreign minister and his defence minister
met around another lengthy table. That one became a sushi belt.
The slap heard around the world

In March Will Smith, an actor, shocked Hollywood’s glitterati—and

viewers around the world—when he attacked Chris Rock, a comedian
presenting one of the prizes at the Academy Awards. After first
appearing to laugh at, and then objecting to, a joke about his wife,
Jada Pinkett Smith, Mr Smith stormed on stage and slapped Mr Rock
in the face. Later, during his acceptance speech for the Best Actor
award for his role in “King Richard”, Mr Smith credited himself, in life
and art, with being a “fierce defender” of his family. Within 24 hours,
one video of the slap had been watched more than 59m times. Some
memes show Mr Smith being guided by a furious Mrs Smith to seek
revenge. The Academy banned Mr Smith from the Oscars for ten
years.

Laughing all the way to the test centre

Chinese censors work tirelessly to scrub the internet of complaints
about the country’s brutal covid-19 lockdowns. Yet some memes
survive. A favourite captures the Chinese phrase touzhele. In
December 2021 Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the ministry of foreign
affairs, told foreign journalists that they could “chuckle to themselves”
about the privilege of living in China during the pandemic, instead of
the West, where the disease was then rampant. Chinese people
living through the chaos of “zero covid” now use the phrase to mock
the government. People often “chuckle to themselves” during
quarantines or when waiting in long queues for covid tests. Even
though China’s restrictions are now being lifted, the ensuing chaos
will bring little to laugh about.

The dogs of war

The North Atlantic Fella Organisation is a virtual army that champions
Ukraine and harangues its foes on social media. Its members use the
avatar of a cartoon shiba inu dog and post memes mocking Russia’s
military performance. The NAFO acronym and imagery were invented
and tweeted by a user named @Kama_Kamilia in May, within three
months of the invasion. They quickly went viral. The combination of a
catchy name, playful imagery and satirical edge provided a collective
identity to like-minded activists—including Ukrainian soldiers—who
could channel their outrage about the invasion into irreverent images.
Sales of customised NAFO artworks also raise money for Ukraine.

Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran

Protests have rocked Iran since the death in September of Mahsa

Amini, a Kurdish woman who was arrested and allegedly beaten by
police for showing her hair beneath her obligatory hijab. In the
streets, and online, artwork is used to capture the bravery of
protesters, many of whom are young women, in standing up to Iran’s
theocratic regime. Many images show hair, objecting to the
punishments women face for being insufficiently covered. In one Iran
is a woman brushing religious clerics from her flowing locks.

The tip of the iceberg

On October 11th an article in The Economist
predicted that the
hapless Liz Truss, who had become Britain’s prime minister only on
September 6th, was already on her way out. Excluding the mourning
period for the death of Queen Elizabeth II, when British politics
ground to a halt, Ms Truss had been in control for just seven days,
our leader said—“roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce”. The lettuce
theme took off. On October 14th the Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper,
launched a live stream of an iceberg lettuce, which was given a
blonde wig, to determine whether it could outlast Ms Truss. On
October 20th, when the prime minister resigned, the Star, and much
of the rest of the country, proclaimed the lettuce the winner.

A crashing reality
On the evening of November 8th Lauren Boebert, a Republican
congresswoman from Colorado, claimed on Twitter that “The red
wave has begun!”. Other Republicans accompanied predictions of a
substantial victory for their party in America’s midterm elections, with
photos of a big red wave. Mrs Boebert supported Donald Trump’s lie
that he had won the presidential election in 2020; that earned her an
endorsement from the former president. But her race was so tight that
after a recount she was awarded just 50.06% of the votes. The wave
was more of a ripple. Many of Mr Trump’s other favoured candidates
lost their races and the Democrats retained control of the Senate.
Riding high in defeat

On October 30th Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential

election, beating Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent. Supporters of Mr
Bolsonaro blockaded motorways in protest. One bolsonarista, Júnior
César Peixoto, found internet fame as patriota do caminhão, or the
“truck’s patriot”. On November 2nd Mr Peixoto, dressed, as Bolsonaro
supporters often do, in a Brazilian football shirt and a yellow
“Bolsonaro 2022” cap, clung to the front of a lorry during a protest.
Later a film of him plastered to its windscreen—yet remarkably calm
—as it hurtled 6km down a highway, went viral. Music from the
driver’s radio provides the soundtrack to Mr Peixoto’s discomfort. A
later meme superimposed him on the nose of a rocket.

The joke is on you

Elon Musk’s erratic management of Twitter has been a source of

much amusement on the platform. One of Mr Musk’s first acts after
he bought the company in October was to allow users to purchase a
blue tick, which indicates verification on Twitter, for $7.99 per month.
Some accounts that paid were roundly mocked. Others impersonated
real brands and accounts. Even Jesus Christ got a blue tick. So did
Satan. After declaring that his commitment to free speech meant that
“comedy is now legal on Twitter” Mr Musk ruled that parody accounts
must include the word “parody” in their usernames. Many then
pretended to be the chief twit himself. They were promptly kicked off.

It’s not fair

On November 28th, during a football World Cup match between
Portugal and Uruguay, Cristiano Ronaldo, a brilliant-but-smug
Portuguese star, celebrated scoring a goal. Officials later awarded it
to his teammate, Bruno Fernandes. One meme shows Mr Ronaldo,
with added schoolboy rucksack, marching off the pitch to tell Piers
Morgan, a British television host, about the injustice. In an interview
with Mr Morgan before the tournament Mr Ronaldo had criticised his
club team, Manchester United, who promptly dropped him. When it
was later reported that Mr Ronaldo really did text Mr Morgan insisting
the goal was his, the internet went wild. To add insult to injury Mr
Ronaldo started Portugal’s next (winning) match on the bench. His
team were later knocked out by Morocco. ■
Obituary
 

The endless quest

 
The endless quest

Daniel Brush’s drive to understand beauty led him

to the life of a hermit
The astonishing worker in gold, jewels and steel died on November
26th, aged 75

Dec 20th 2022 |

IN
SEPTEMBER 2017 a group of young women from a jewellery
school came to Daniel Brush’s studio-cum-home, a loft in mid-
Manhattan. They crammed onto his sofas, awed to be meeting a
figure who, to them, was a worker of miracles with gold, steel and
jewels: an artist unknown to all but a few cognoscenti, who
considered him one of best there was.

He, facing them, could hardly stand still for nerves. He leaned against
the wall as if he hoped it would swallow him. His words jerked, and
sometimes burst out in anger. Deliberately, he still wore his surgical
binoculars and 40-power loupe clamped over his eyes and his leather
apron round his waist. He had broken off his work to talk to them, he
was touched to see them, but he must get back to it. He had to get
back.

For 45 years in that loft, living like a hermit, he had pursued his
calling. Almost no one knew he was there or what he was doing. His
wife Olivia was the only company he needed; his work was her work.
Together they set a rhythm to each day, and over 40 years it did not
change. Every breakfast, Cheerios; every lunch, lentil soup. He rose
very early and then, for three or four hours, swept the loft to empty his
mind, as an apprentice initiate might sweep a temple. Pacing, reading
and meditating, especially on Zen texts or ancient technical manuals,
were necessary to the work. So was worrying. Did he have anything
to say? Did he know enough?

If he thought he did, he would be in the studio by 11, and might work

for 18 hours straight. He went in like a boxer, expecting a fight. His
thoughts and the material grappled together as long as his
momentum lasted; he downed tools as soon as it lapsed. A piece
might dwell in the studio for decades before he addressed it again.
He did not grasp or use the word “complete”, for the work was never-
ending.

He produced hundreds of objects: boxes, brooches, collars, perfume

flasks, objets de vertu of all sorts, most of them exquisite and many
astonishingly small. He once made 117 collars, over three years,
simply to have them photographed as a “visual poem” in a book. It
was still time well spent. Every piece advanced his understanding of
the materials he was using.

Those materials included marble, aluminium and even Bakelite,

sometimes presented to him by fans who simply wondered what he
might make of them. When one of his devotees presented him with a
packet of tiny pink diamonds from Australia, he whimsically decorated
the Bakelite with sparkling flamingos and rabbits; but he refused to be
called a jeweller. Jewellers traditionally waxed, cast and filed; he
wrought and struggled. Working with steel, for example, was almost
brutal: hammering, forging, chiselling, resharpening for every cut, like
forcing an ice-breaker through Antarctica.

Each piece was hand-made there in the studio. He worked alone, too
impatient to do otherwise, and never finding anyone else who wanted
to do what he wanted to do. Rather than use electricity, he laboured
in a forest of antique machines, including the largest private collection
of lathes in the world. On these he turned minutely patterned boxes
made of mastodon ivory 40m years old, or engraved thousands of
rainbow-reflecting lines on flattened billets of steel. When tools
frustrated him he made his own, displaying them in cabinets as art in
themselves. He painted, too, applying the same technique—learned
from Japanese Noh theatre—as he did to the objects he sculpted or
turned. Using his grandfather’s ruling-pen, containing one drop of ink,
he would approach the paper, inhale, and make one line; then exhale,
step back, and repeat until the momentum stopped.

Above all else, he worked in gold. He did so first in 1967, when he

bought an ounce of it to make Olivia’s wedding ring. Yet his
obsession had taken fire long before, on a trip to London, when at 13
he had seen an Etruscan gold bowl in the Victoria and Albert
Museum. The ancient technique of granulation, applying geometries
of gold beads as fine as sand-grains to a curved gold surface without
solder, was stunning, but so was the lightness of spirit, the
insouciance of the thing.
He resolved then and there that he would make such a bowl, and
gold became the study of his life. Simply to watch it melt, turn to red-
hot and white-hot, then glow purple, was magical. To hold pure gold
grain and let it sift through his fingers restored his equanimity of spirit.
To outside eyes his own granulation, with 78,000 hand-made grains
applied to one dome five inches in diameter, was peerless. He
thought he was still rubbish at it.

What was this search? What was his work for? Certainly not for fame.
And not for money, either. He refused to take commissions, though
his pieces could command six-figure sums, because neither he nor
Olivia could bear to let them go. They crowded his studio as the
record of his life, and of passing time. His dreams and blood were in
them. They could be bought only by those who had the sensitivity to
appreciate what they were. That connection of ideas, as the piece
passed from warm hand to warm hand, was where their only value
lay.

His chief motivation, he said, was to understand both the material

and, through that, himself. He wanted to know why his heart had beat
so fast in the V&A that day. Gold in particular had a message for him.
His manipulation of this glorious metal, like his daily sweeping of the
loft, might empty his mind to hear it. He longed for that clarity.

It would come, he believed, if he took ego out of the process; if he

became a vessel the pieces just flowed through. His work could then
be precious to others not in a monetary way, but as a link to
something greater and a source of calm. He had long admired the
Tendai monks of Japan, who made gruelling treks through the
mountains to find enlightenment. He loved the idea that such a monk
might take a Brush piece out of a pocket, let its beauty pass from
emptied mind to emptied mind, and smile. That too was what its
maker was after. ■
 Table of Contents
The Economist
The world this week
The world this year
KAL’s cartoon
Leaders
Why 2022 mattered
It has to be Ukraine
A $44bn education
The year of the rate shock
The laws of nature
Letters
On needle-exchange programmes, Kenya, the EU, the
Titanic, street names, job titles
By Invitation
Jaime Yassif on the need for better safeguarding of
bioscience
Europe
Peace on Earth
No room in the middle
The last taboo
Balkan barricades
Food of the frauds
Britain
A way in the world
Scrooge-onomics
Nursing a grievance
Westminster’s other cathedral
United States
Care or confinement
Move along
Disorder on the border
Listen up
Middle East & Africa
 Finding faith in the fund
Shell companies
An election with no voters
The Americas
Man bites watchdog
Lessons from Messi
Asia
Slum-mop billionaire
Dumplings and skewers
Moving house
China
A covid stress test
Way back when
Christmas Specials
Time lords
All uncreated men are equal
The two Brazilian booms that bookmark the history of
the car
Use your loaf
Paws for thought
When money dies
Going off grid
Batter up
The wibbly-wobbly circle of life
The weight of the world
The myth of the holy cow
Complex saviours
The three knife trilogy
Hot spot
Taking the mickey
Through a crystal curtain
Secrets of the shallows
Business
When brown meets green
Parting of the clouds
A thaw, and lots of frost
 Making the most of LinkedIn
The sovereign of savoir-faire
Finance & economics
Time for a party
Zero zero-covid
Triumph of the Luddites
No time like the present
Paper tigers
Arthur Burns, reconsidered
Science & technology
Enlightened computing
Trust no one
Layering it on
Culture
Heart of darkness
Rogues’ gallery
The year of the underdogs
Economic & financial indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail
The year of Ukraine
The Economist explains
Is Russia running out of ammunition?
How to understand 2022 in memes
Obituary
The endless quest