每天一篇经济学人

选 文 集

选文目录
Leaders (August 12th 2024, 720 words)
The travel boom: All inclusive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Business (August 13th 2024, 415 words)
Smartphones: Screened out. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Middle East and Africa (August 14th 2024, 555 words)
Milking it: Under the hump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
The Economist explains (August 15th 2024, 622 words)
Would legal doping change the Olympics? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Europe (August 16th 2024, 315 words)
Turkey: Dog gone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Leaders

The travel boom August 12th 2024 — 720 words

All inclusive
Taxes can make tourism work for locals and visitors alike

T
HE DOLLAR is hovering near a two-decade high. That has

unleashed a multitude of American tourists keen to ex-

ercise their newfound spending power, much to the dismay

of snobbish Europeans and anyone who has a fondness for

empty, unspoilt beaches. And it has done so at a time when

tourism is back in fashion. Trips were up by 19% in the first

quarter of this year, compared with a year ago. They are fore-

cast to exceed pre-covid levels across the whole of the year.

2
But tourism’s revival is being met by a backlash. Popular

destinations including Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Majorca and

Santorini have either introduced or are considering lim-

its on cruise ships. Japan is erecting barriers to prevent

tourists gathering to gawp at Mount Fuji. Tens of thousands

of protesters in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands have even

called for an end to “mass tourism”.

3
The arguments underpinning the protests are misguided—as

are many of the policies they inspire. Tourism is a useful

source of revenue. Policymakers can find ways to make it more

bearable and more lucrative at the same time. These do not in-

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Leaders

volve bans on tourists or making destinations less attractive.

Instead, countries should pursue a more capitalist solution,

by exercising their pricing power.

4
Tourism is big business. On a broad estimate, the industry

earned $3.3trn last year, equivalent to 3% of global GDP and 6%

of cross-border financial flows. For host countries, it is a wel-

come source of jobs as well as revenue. The unemployment

rates that spiked above 20% in much of southern Europe in

the 2010s would have been higher still had it not been for the

millions of visitors who came to soak up the sun.

5 The problem, though, is that individual visitors inevitably fail

to take into account the effect they have on others. Conges-

tion is a headache for residents and tourists alike. Having to

compete with the crowds for flat rentals, seats on a bus and

space on pavements spoils the quality of life for city residents

as much as it does the holiday experience for tourists.

6
Taxes can help, by ensuring that tourists pay for the conges-

tion costs they impose. In some places taxes may deter the

crowds. Travellers seeking lovely beaches have lots of options,

for instance. If Thailand were to make visiting more costly,

tourists would go to Vietnam instead. Indeed, one study finds

that every 10% increase in tourist taxes in the Maldives leads

to a 5% reduction in visitor numbers.

7
In some places the crowds might still come. Evidence sug-

gests that tourist taxes are mostly ineffective at dissuading

people from visiting destinations with standout attractions

that cannot be found elsewhere, such as Barcelona’s Sagrada

Família. People respond by reallocating spending, for exam-

ple by choosing a cheaper hotel, rather than cancelling trips.

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Leaders

8
However, that is not a reason for despair. For one thing, im-

posing much higher levies might have more of an effect on

numbers. The taxes that already exist are set at paltry levels. In

October Barcelona’s nightly hotel tax will increase, but only to

€4 ($4.30); a day-pass to enter Venice sets you back a mere €5,

which would barely cover a cup of coffee in St Mark’s Square.

The market could bear much higher prices.

9
If visitors are willing to go elsewhere, underdeveloped tourist

sites could then have a chance to attract their business. If

people insist on visiting the hot spots, extra taxes levied via

airlines or hotels could pay for infrastructure that makes

life better for tourists and residents alike. In addition, other

measures can encourage people to spend time in less con-

gested places or neighbourhoods. As well as erecting barriers,

Japanese authorities more sensibly sometimes impose a con-

gestion charge on Mount Fuji. Copenhagen offers ice cream

to tourists who do a bit of litter picking. Once the pricing is

right, residents who are still grumpy or who hate crowds have

the freedom to move somewhere else.

10
Some might object that tourist taxes are unfair, because

they stop young or poor visitors from seeing the world. Yet

tourism is always unequal. And passes or tax-free travel could

be granted to students or unemployed people, as happens at

many museums. Venetians may shake their fists when a fresh

boatload of cruise passengers arrives; they should instead be

rubbing their hands in glee.

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Business

Smartphones August 13th 2024 — 415 words

Screened out
Dumb phones are making a comeback

Blast from the past

I
T IS HARD TO imagine life without a smartphone these

days. Leave yours at home and you may find yourself

lost, moneyless and severed from social contact. Nine in ten

American adults own one, according to Pew Research Centre.

They spend 3 hours and 45 minutes on them a day, on average,

reckons GWI, a firm of analysts. New versions souped up with

artificial intelligence may be even harder to put down.

2
Yet a market is also emerging for phones that are deliberately

pea-brained. These dumb phones—confusingly called “fea-

ture phones”—account for just 2% of phone sales in Amer-

ica. But demand is growing. In 2016 HMD, a Finnish firm,

bought the rights to relaunch the devices of Nokia, whose ba-

sic phones once reigned supreme. It says it is now selling “tens

of thousands” of flip-phones a month in America. In May it

re-released the Nokia 3210, a mainstay of many millennials’

teenage years, in Europe. It even has Snake, a classic mobile

game.
3
Dumb phones today do not merely replicate those of the past,

though. Startups offer minimalist devices of their own. One

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Business

example is the Light Phone, which is shaped like an iPod and

has an e-ink screen like a Kindle. It also allows users to add op-

tional “tools” including a podcast-player and a directions app.

4
What explains the return of the dumb phone? One factor is

anxiety over the impact of smartphones—and social-media

apps in particular—on young people’s mental health. That

is why Eton, a posh British school, announced in July that

it would bar its future prime ministers from bringing smart-

phones to school, and would provide them with Nokia phones

instead.
5 But plenty of grownups are also choosing dumb phones of

their own accord. Jose Briones, who moderates a forum dedi-

cated to dumb phones on Reddit, a social-media site, switched

to the Light Phone after growing alarmed at his soaring screen-

time tally. Like many neophytes, he still keeps a smartphone

for situations such as travelling abroad. Other smartphone ad-

dicts are instead opting to dumb down their devices, either by

deleting apps or downloading ones that control screen time,

of which there are a growing number.

6
Forswearing the supercharged connectivity of a smartphone

can lead to jitters at first. Christina Dinur, another dumb-

phone convert, remembers wondering what to do with herself

when waiting in a queue without her smartphone. But, she

says, she “settled into it really quickly”. For some, it seems, a

dumb phone can be a smart choice.

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Middle East and Africa

Milking it August 14th 2024 — 555 words

Under the hump
SALAHLEY
Somaliland’s camel herders see commercial prospects in their
dairies

Next stop: camel milkshakes

I
T IS MILKING time on Mustafa Duale’s farm and the camels

are lowing: an eerie groan, like the creak of an old door.

A dozen herders strain the milk through a sieve into metal

pails. They will sleep here tonight, in the open, beside a pen of

thorns. The pails will be loaded into the back of an estate car

and reach Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, with the setting

sun.
2
Mr Duale watches over his reading glasses, looking every inch

the engineer that he is. The city is his home, and boreholes his

trade. But in Somaliland, an unrecognised state on the Gulf of

Aden, camels are a form of wealth. “My father and grandfather

were herders,” says Mr Duale. “It’s like it’s in my genes.” He is

one of a group of entrepreneurs who are turning a longstand-

ing trade in camel milk into a commercial business.

3
Hargeisa was not always a good place to be a milkman. The

Somali air force flattened it in 1988 during a civil war. So total

was the devastation that Somalilanders—who had been gov-

erned for 31 years as part of Somalia—decided to declare their

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Middle East and Africa

independence in 1991. One former rebel remembers marching

through the streets of the capital that year and finding a single

functioning tea shop.

4
But today Hargeisa is home to 1.2m people and more tea shops

than a camel herder could shake his stick at. Half a litre of Mr

Duale’s milk goes for $1.30. Cafes sell vanilla and strawberry

flavoured camel milkshakes for almost $2. The rejuvenated

city is both a ready market and a source of capital, as towns-

folk invest their savings in the hinterland. Mr Duale has built

a reservoir to irrigate fields where he grows fodder for his 400

camels. Smaller camel herders without any pasture of their

own also give him their animals to look after in exchange for

a fee.
5
Other camel farmers have made circuitous journeys, travel-

ling even farther than their nomadic forefathers. Mohamed

Isaq escaped to Canada during the civil war but after three

decades there his it job was giving him the hump. He returned

to Hargeisa and started a camel farm. “I thought I could kill

two birds with one stone: have a business and drink camel

milk,” he says, swearing by the restorative power of his creamy

produce.
6
The industry is not yet ready to export, which would need

equipment to pasteurise the milk and keep it cool. But the

demand is there. Mr Duale is discussing opportunities with

Camel Culture, an American firm that sells camel milk to

African and Arab migrants eager for a taste of home. Other

markets are growing, too. A Chinese firm hopes to open a

factory to make camel-milk powder over the border, in the

ethnic-Somali region of Ethiopia. Camelicious, a firm based

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 The Economist August 3rd 2024 Middle East and Africa

in Dubai, uses camel milk to make ice cream with flavours

such as dates, saffron and cardamom.

7
Somaliland still struggles to attract investment, despite the

go-getting spirit of its people. “Investors will not risk their

money because most of them—especially big companies from

the West—will say it’s an unrecognised state,” laments Abdi-

rizak Ibrahim Mohamed, the investment minister. But hope

is hidden in the very word “Somali” itself. Some folk etymol-

ogists speculate it comes from the phrase soo maal: literally,

“Go milk!”

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 The Economist August 10th 2024 The Economist explains

The Economist explains August 15th 2024 — 622 words

Would legal doping change the Olympics?
The impact would be smaller—and worse—than proponents of
drug-taking claim

T
RYING TO RID elite sport of drug cheats is an expensive

and often thankless task. Competition organisers can

never be sure that an event is clean: retests of samples from

the Beijing and London games led to more than 100 medal-

lists being disqualified. A small minority—including Aron

D’Souza, an Australian businessman—believe it is time to lift

the ban and make drug-taking a legitimate means to boost

performance. Mr D’Souza plans to hold a doped competition,

dubbed the Enhanced Games, in 2025. Most athletes have dis-

missed his plan as absurd and dangerous. But he believes that

doped competitors would beat plenty of official world records.

Is that true?
2 It could be, at least at first. Taking banned substances, such

as anabolic steroids for strength events and hormones for en-

durance competitions, can improve performance, sometimes

substantially. In athletics, the women’s world records for the

400m, shot put and discus are 39, 37 and 36 years old respec-

tively. The records they replaced had stood for just two, three

and four years. All three current records were set by athletes

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 The Economist August 10th 2024 The Economist explains

from East Germany or the Soviet Union, where governments

presided over policies of near-mandatory drug-taking. Its ath-

letes also set long-standing records in men’s events and in

other sports. Even significant improvements in training, nu-

trition and biomechanics over the past four decades have not

allowed clean competitors to best them—but with drugs, they

might.
3
But legal doping would be unlikely to revolutionise sport in

the way that proponents claim. If a new world record were

set by a drug-taker, it would not mean that ever greater feats

would follow—after the initial boost, athletes’ chemically in-

duced improvement would plateau. Better drugs might be de-

veloped over time. But over the past four decades new enhanc-

ing substances have not guaranteed victory for cheats over

clean athletes, nor over old-school dopers, as the enduring

records from East Germans show. Athletes would probably

continue to chip away at records, relying, as they do now, on a

mix of factors to set them apart: technique, nutrition, coach-

ing and innate physical gifts, such as the optimal mix of mus-

cle fibres for their discipline, or a higher red-blood-cell count.

4 In many cases that plateau would probably occur before a

world record was broken. In the men’s 100m sprint, drug-

taking has been so rife that four of the five fastest men in

history have served suspensions for (knowingly or otherwise)

taking banned substances. Yet even with chemical assistance,

none of the four could do what the fifth and fastest man, Us-

ain Bolt, could do clean. His unique physical gifts and mental

toughness made him unbeatable.

5
But the normalisation of drug-taking would entail serious

health risks. The effects of doping are not immediately ap-

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 The Economist August 10th 2024 The Economist explains

parent, but can be severe. In 2005, decades after they had

competed, almost 200 East German athletes sued a pharma-

ceutical manufacturer, alleging that the drugs they had taken

had caused infertility, heart problems and breast and testic-

ular cancer. Drugs such as erythropoietin, which stimulates

the production of red blood cells to aid recovery, put addi-

tional pressure on the heart and raise the risk of stroke. And

in some cases, the long-term effects of drugs used to dope

are unknown. That is true of tetrahydrogestrinone, which

became the steroid of choice for doping athletes in the 2000s:

because the drug was developed illicitly for sports cheats it

was not subject to clinical testing.

6
If doping were legalised, it would in effect become compul-

sory: few athletes with serious designs on winning titles

would cede what could be a decisive advantage to their ri-

vals. That might make times and distances a little more

impressive—but it would not revolutionise the Olympics.

Many would argue that even if performances improved, the

games would not.

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 The Economist August 10th 2024 Europe

Turkey August 16th 2024 — 315 words

Dog gone
ISTANBUL
Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuses to let sleeping dogs lie

Enemy of the state

S
TRAY DOGS HAVE been a fixture of Turkey’s cities for cen-

turies. Butchers ply them with scraps, pensioners of-

fer them water, while others use boxes fitted with blankets to

shield them from the winter cold. The strays are chipped, vac-

cinated and spayed by local vets.

2
Now the dogs seem poised to disappear. A law drawn up by the

ruling Justice and Development (AK) party and passed by par-

liament on July 30th requires municipal authorities to round

up Turkey’s strays and keep them locked in shelters. Aggres-

sive or terminally sick dogs would be put down.

3
At an animal clinic in Kemerburgaz, on the outskirts of Istan-

bul, officials say they receive an average of 20 sick or injured

street dogs every day. For years, they would nurse the animals

back to health and return them to the neighbourhoods where

they roamed. From now on, however, the dogs in their care

must remain penned up, unless they can be adopted. The law

gives Turkey’s municipalities until 2028 to build enough new

shelters for the country’s estimated 4m strays. At the moment,

these can house only 105,000.

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 The Economist August 10th 2024 Europe

4
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and AK frame this

as the only solution to a dangerous menace, citing instances

of children being mauled. Animal-rights activists say the

measures will create shelters teeming with dogs and disease,

paving the way for a mass cull. A political stand-off is brew-

ing. The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which

runs the country’s biggest cities, says it will not comply.

5
Turkey’s dogs have been here before. In 1910 the Young Turks,

in their zeal to modernise the crumbling Ottoman Empire,

dumped tens of thousands of Istanbul’s strays, deemed a sym-

bol of backwardness, on a rocky island near the city’s shores.

Mad with hunger, the dogs turned on each other and eventu-

ally starved, but not before keeping the city awake for weeks

with their howling. Today’s strays deserve better.

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