[Jun 7th 2025]

The world this week

Leaders
Letters
By Invitation
Briefing
Asia
China
United States
The Americas
Middle East & Africa
Europe
Britain
International
Business
Finance & economics
Science & technology
Culture
Economic & financial indicators
Obituary
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 |

The world this week

Politics
Business
The weekly cartoon

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

The world this week

Politics
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Ukraine· launched a bold attack on airfields deep inside Russia. It

launched 117 drones smuggled in containers, including to eastern
Siberia, some 4,000km from Ukraine. It claims to have damaged or
destroyed at least 41 Russian planes, including strategic bombers,
which are difficult to replace. A few days later Ukraine said it had
“severely damaged” Kerch bridge, which links Russia with the
Crimean peninsula it occupies, with underwater weapons. America’s
president, Donald Trump, said that his Russian counterpart,
Vladimir Putin, vowed on a call to retaliate against the drone
strike.

Meanwhile, Russian forces advanced into Ukraine’s north-eastern

province of Sumy. Peace talks in Istanbul broke up after one hour.
The two sides agreed to a prisoner swap but not a ceasefire.

Karol Nawrocki, the hard-right candidate of the Law and Justice

party, won Poland’s presidential election· in the run-off with
50.9% of the vote, beating Rafal Trzaskowski, the government-
backed centrist. European populists rejoiced. A hostile president will
be a blow for the liberal agenda of Poland’s prime minister, Donald
Tusk. He called a confidence vote for June 11th.

The Dutch government· collapsed after the hard-right leader,

Geert Wilders, pulled his Party for Freedom from the ruling coalition
after smaller partners refused to sign on to his radical plans to cut
migration. New elections are expected in the autumn.

Dozens of Palestinians were killed around the hubs of a new aid-

distribution system in Gaza. Some of them were killed by the
Israel Defence Forces. It said they had left designated routes. Many
Palestinians have to walk for kilometres to reach the points. The UN
said that blocking access to relief may amount to a war crime and
called for an independent investigation.

Indirect ceasefire talks continued. Hamas proposed amendments to

America’s plan for a 60-day truce in Gaza. The plan, which was
accepted by Israel, includes an exchange of Israeli hostages (both
living and dead) for Palestinian prisoners. But the militant group
wants Israel to commit to withdrawing permanently from Gaza and
ending the war.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected American

demands that his country eventually stop enriching uranium. The
issue has been a sticking-point over five rounds of negotiations.
America hopes to reach a deal that would lift sanctions in exchange
for Iran scaling back its nuclear programme.

More than 1m people began the hajj. The annual pilgrimage to

Mecca will be a testing journey this year as temperatures are
expected to rise above 40ºC. The Saudi government is planting
thousands of trees and setting up more shaded areas after some
1,300 pilgrims died in the heat last year.

Running out of road

Five UN aid workers were killed when their convoy was attacked on
the way to the city of el-Fasher in Sudan’s northern Darfur region.
The convoy had travelled some 1,800km from the coast and would
have been the first in over a year to reach the famine-stricken city.
The number of people who have fled the country since Sudan’s civil
war started more than two years ago crossed 4m this week,
according to the UN.

Mr Trump barred citizens of 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran

and Sudan, from travelling to America, and restricted entry from
seven more. The ban, which goes into effect on June 9th, cites
national-security concerns. Days earlier 12 people were injured by
incendiary devices at a rally in Boulder, Colorado, in support of
hostages in Gaza. The suspected attacker, Mohamed Sabry
Soliman, was an Egyptian who had overstayed his tourist visa. He
faces charges of attempted murder of the first degree.

Days after leaving Mr Trump’s administration, Elon Musk·, a tycoon

and nominal ally, called his “big, beautiful” budget bill a “disgusting
abomination”. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office
estimated that the sweeping package would increase the federal
budget deficit by some $2.4trn over the next decade. The bill faces
tough scrutiny in the Senate after narrowly passing the House of
Representatives.

America’s Supreme Court gave Mr Trump the green light to revoke

legal protection in America for more than 500,000 migrants who
had fled economic and political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and
Venezuela. Two of the court’s three liberal justices dissented.
South Koreans turned out heavily to back Lee Jae-myung· in a
presidential election. The candidate for the liberal Democratic Party
won with 49.4% of 35m votes cast. His conservative rival, Kim
Moon-soo, took 41.2%. It was a resounding rebuke to the
presidency of Yoon Suk Yeol, whose short-lived declaration of martial
law and subsequent impeachment triggered the snap poll. Mr Lee
promised to restore stability and revive the economy.

The trial of Sheikh Hasina started in Bangladesh. The country’s

former prime minister, who last year fled to India, was formally
charged with crimes against humanity by a special court back home.
Prosecutors accused her of a “systematic attack” on student-led
protests in which nearly 1,400 people were killed between July and
August 2024.

Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, unveiled bold plans to

prepare the country for war. The strategic defence review·, which
took a year to complete, envisages reforms in military procurement
and organisation as well as spending billions of pounds on nuclear
weapons and up to a dozen new attack submarines. “We are in a
new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK defence,” said
Sir Keir.

Judging the judges

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he would defend Brazil’s

Supreme Court from attack by the United States. He was
responding to remarks made on May 21st by Marco Rubio, the US
secretary of state, who warned of possible American sanctions on
Alexandre de Moraes, a judge on the court, who is closely involved
in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right
president, for allegedly plotting a coup.

Low turnout in Mexico’s first judicial election raised concerns

about its legitimacy. The country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum,
defended the vote, which she claims will combat corruption and
improve the justice system. Yet faced with unfamiliar choices to fill
2,600 posts on all rungs, only 13% of Mexico’s 100m voters took
part—a record low in national elections.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2025/06/05/politics

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

The world this week

Business
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午

Donald Trump· doubled America’s tariffs on imports of steel and

aluminium, taking them to 50%. Speaking to steelworkers in
Pennsylvania, America’s president said the levies meant “Nobody’s
going to be able to steal your industry.” The earlier levy of 25% will
remain in place for steel imports from Britain, which signed a trade
agreement with America last month.
Despite Mr Trump’s metals tariffs, stockmarkets were buoyant. On
June 4th the MSCI All-Country World Index, which tracks global
equities, reached a new high, beating the record it set in February.
The index plunged after Mr Trump announced his punitive
“Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd. He has since paused most of
these levies to negotiate with America’s trading partners.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries· and

its allies agreed to lift oil production by 411,000 barrels a day in July,
the third increase in as many months. The cartel has been
unwinding its production cuts after they failed to raise oil prices and
caused its market share to fall. The oil price is down by 13% since
the start of the year.

Annual inflation in the euro zone fell to 1.9% in May, down from
2.2% in April. That is the first time it has fallen below the European
Central Bank’s 2% target since September 2024. Inflation had been
above 2% for more than three years.

Elon Musk began a $5bn debt sale to fund his artificial-intelligence

company, xAI. The firm also plans to sell $300m in shares. That
would value xAI at $113bn. Mr Musk said he was “super focused” on
his businesses after leaving the Trump administration.

After ten weeks of due-diligence investigations into Thames

Water·, KKR abandoned a plan to rescue the ailing utility. The
American private-equity titan had just days earlier submitted a bid to
Ofwat, Britain’s water regulator, to inject £4bn ($5.4bn) into the
company. Thames Water’s debt-to-equity ratio is 25 percentage
points higher than Ofwat’s recommended level. The government
could renationalise the firm if it fails to provide basic services.

Atoms for lease

The price of shares in American nuclear-power firms briefly

leapt by as much as 9% after Meta signed a deal with Constellation
Energy. The tech giant will purchase electricity from one of
Constellation’s nuclear plants for 20 years. Constellation said the
deal was worth “billions of dollars”. Tech companies are interested in
nuclear plants to power the energy-hungry data centres needed for
training artificial-intelligence systems.

Shares in Airbus, Europe’s biggest aerospace firm, rose by 3% on

reports that China is preparing to order hundreds of the company’s
planes. The deal would be a snub to Boeing. The American
planemaker is about to resume deliveries, after China paused orders
in April.
The Federal Reserve removed a $1.95trn cap on the assets of Wells
Fargo, America’s fourth-largest bank. The Fed imposed the sanction
in 2018 after Wells disclosed that it had opened as many as 3.5m
unauthorised accounts between 2009 and 2016, during which time it
became the world’s most valuable bank. Charlie Scharf, Wells’s boss
since 2019, called the cap’s removal a “pivotal milestone” as the
bank seeks to put the scandal behind it.

Rémy Cointreau withdrew its sales targets for 2030, citing

tensions between Europe, China and America. The French maker of
cognac said trade barriers erected by the two countries could cost it
€100m ($114m), nearly half its operating profits in 2024-25, over
the next financial year.

The European Union warned that China’s restrictions on exports of

rare-earth metals were creating an “alarming situation” for
European industry. The European Association of Automotive
Suppliers, a trade body, said that only a quarter of requests for
export licences had been granted by China since the country
tightened controls in April. It added that some plants had already
stopped production because of the curbs.
https://t.me/+NA8muckncd4yNDUx

Texas removed BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, from

a blacklist of businesses that the state accused of boycotting oil and
gas companies. Glenn Hegar, the Lone Star State’s comptroller,
praised BlackRock for reducing its green commitments. BlackRock’s
place on the blacklist meant that it missed out on billions of dollars
from Texan state-run investment funds, which manage $300bn.

Super smash-hit

Around the world, gamers queued outside shops to get their hands
on Nintendo’s latest console. Retailing for $450 in America, the
Switch 2 is 50% pricier than its predecessor, which came out in
2017. Nintendo predicts it will sell 15m of the devices by March.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2025/06/05/business

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

The world this week

The weekly cartoon

6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon

Elon Musk’s failure in government

The fantastical world of Republican economic thinking
The Senate should vote down Donald Trump’s reckless tax cuts

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

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-

this-week/2025/06/05/the-weekly-cartoon
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Leaders
The stunning decline of the preference for
having boys
Phew, it’s a girl! :: Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often
lean towards them

America’s tax on foreign investors could do

more damage than tariffs
Capital pains :: Provisions in the Republican budget are a dangerous step

The West is rethinking how to fight wars

Lessons from Ukraine :: Ukraine’s daring raid on Russia has lessons for European
armed forces. But they need cash, too

Myanmar is a demonstration of Chinese

hegemony in action
Asia’s forgotten hellscape :: China is playing all sides in the country’s bloody civil war

Africa’s most admired dictator rolls the dice

Guerrillas v gorillas :: Kagame’s intervention in Congo threatens his legacy at home

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Phew, it’s a girl!

The stunning decline of the

preference for having boys
Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean
towards them
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午
WITHOUT FANFARE, something remarkable has happened. The
noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become
dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late
1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the
sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not
want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started
routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000,
a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would
expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is
likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.

The fading of boy preference in regions· where it was strongest has

been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies
for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die
young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio
at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In
China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8
last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it
is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in
1990.

In 2010 an Economist cover called the mass abortion of girls

“gendercide”. The global decline of this scourge is a blessing. First, it
implies an ebbing of the traditions that underpinned it: the stark
belief that men matter more and the expectation in some cultures
that a daughter will grow up to serve her husband’s family, so
parents need a son to look after them in old age. Such sexist ideas
have not vanished, but evidence that they are fading is welcome.

Second, it heralds an easing of the harms caused by surplus men.

Sex-selective abortion doomed millions of males to lifelong
bachelorhood. Many of these “bare branches”, as they are known in
China, resented it intensely. And their fury was socially destabilising,
since young, frustrated bachelors are more prone to violence. One
study of six Asian countries found that warped sex ratios led to an
increase of rape in all of them. Others linked the imbalance to a rise
in violent crime in China, along with authoritarian policing to quell it,
and to a heightened risk of civil strife or even war in other countries.
The fading of boy preference will make much of the world safer.

In some regions, meanwhile, a new preference is emerging: for girls.

It is far milder. Parents are not aborting boys for being boys. No big
country yet has a noticeable surplus of girls. Rather, girl preference
can be seen in other measures, such as polls and fertility patterns.
Among Japanese couples who want only one child, girls are strongly
preferred. Across the world, parents typically want a mix. But in
America and Scandinavia couples are likelier to have more children if
their early ones are male, suggesting that more keep trying for a girl
than do so for a boy. When seeking to adopt, couples pay extra for a
girl. When undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other sex-
selection methods in countries where it is legal to choose the sex of
the embryo, women increasingly opt for daughters.

People prefer girls for all sorts of reasons. Some think they will be
easier to bring up, or cherish what they see as feminine traits. In
some countries they may assume that looking after elderly parents is
a daughter’s job.

However, the new girl preference also reflects increasing worries

about boys’ prospects. Boys have always been more likely to get into
trouble: globally, 93% of jailbirds are male. In much of the world
they have also fallen behind girls academically. In rich countries 54%
of young women have a tertiary degree, compared with 41% of
young men. Men are still over-represented at the top, in
boardrooms, but also at the bottom, angrily shutting themselves in
their bedrooms.

Governments are rightly concerned about boys’ problems. Because

boys mature later than girls, there is a case for holding them back a
year at school. More male teachers, especially at primary school,
where there are hardly any, might give them role models. Better
vocational training might nudge them into jobs that men have long
avoided, such as nursing. Tailoring policies to help struggling boys
need not mean disadvantaging girls, any more than prescribing
glasses for someone with bad eyesight hurts those with 20/20
vision.

In the future, technology will offer parents more options. Some will
be relatively uncontroversial: when it is possible to tweak genes to
avoid horrific hereditary diseases, those who can will not hesitate to
do so. But what if new technologies for sex selection become
widespread? Couples undergoing fertility treatment can already
choose sperm with X chromosomes or determine an embryo’s sex
via genetic testing. Such techniques are expensive and rare, but will
surely get cheaper.

Also, and more important, more parents who conceive children the
old-fashioned way are likely to use cheap, blood-based screening in
the first weeks of pregnancy to find out about genetic traits. These
tests can already reveal the sex of the embryo. Some people trying
for a girl may then use pill-based abortifacients to avoid having a
boy. As a liberal newspaper, The Economist would prefer not to tell
people what kind of family they should have. Nonetheless, it is worth
pondering what the consequences might be if a new imbalance were
to arise: a future generation with substantially more women than
men.

The power of numbers

It would not be as bad as too many men. A surplus of single women

is unlikely to become physically abusive. Indeed, you might
speculate that a mostly female world would be more peaceful and
better run. But if women were ever to make up a large majority,
some men might exploit their stronger bargaining position in the
mating market by becoming more promiscuous or reluctant to
commit themselves to a relationship. For many heterosexual women,
this would make dating harder. Some wanting to couple up would be
unable to do so.

Celebrate the cooling of the war on baby girls, therefore, and urge
on the day when it ends entirely. But do not assume that what
comes next will be simple or trouble-free. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign
up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/05/the-stunning-decline-of-the-preference-
for-having-boys

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Capital pains

America’s tax on foreign

investors could do more
damage than tariffs
Provisions in the Republican budget are a dangerous step
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

AMERICA NEEDS foreign investors, and foreign investors need

America. Yet clauses buried in the Republican budget bill in Congress
are a threat to this crucial symbiosis. Under the obscure “Section
899”, the treasury secretary will gain the power to tax interest,
dividends and rent flowing to foreigners in countries with tax
systems that the law defines as “unfair”. The rate will start at 5%
but could rise as high as 20%. That could mean lower returns for
pension funds, governments and individual investors from the rest of
the rich world. Companies with operations in America would also be
caught in the net when they remit their profits. A separate clause
taxes at 3.5% money sent out of the country by any non-citizen.

It is a worrying new front in the trade war. President Donald Trump’s

tariffs have been highly disruptive, but at least America’s economy
does not depend heavily on trade, which as a share of GDP is less
than half the rich-world average. The same cannot be said for
foreign investment, on which America is unusually reliant. Foreigners
own $62trn-worth of American assets (including derivatives)
compared with only $36trn owned abroad by Americans. The
balance, at -90% of GDP, is by far the lowest “net international
investment position·” of any big, rich economy. One third of
America’s government debt, amounting to $9trn, is held by
foreigners.
This is a particularly bad time for America to become less attractive
to foreign investors. The budget bill, by making past unfunded tax
cuts permanent, will also make annual government borrowing worth
6-7% of GDP the norm. Treasuries will probably be exempted from
Section 899, but that is not yet certain. Even if they are carved out,
foreign buyers might reasonably wonder if the rules could change in
the future. Scaring them when there is such a big deficit to finance
is reckless, especially when foreign investors have already become
skittish about American assets after Mr Trump’s “Liberation Day”
tariff announcement. Moreover, the bill works against the president’s
desire to have foreign companies build factories in America. Why
would they, if they and their foreign staff must pay a steep price to
send money home?

Capital protectionism will also badly hurt the rest of the world. Other
countries could, ultimately, create their own trading arrangements
and make do with restricted access to America’s goods market,
which accounts for only 15% of final demand for imports. Being
denied entry to Wall Street is another matter. American stocks
account for about 60% of global equities by value, and the dollar is
the world’s reserve asset. Even if American investments no longer
produce outsize returns, foreigners would lose the benefits of
diversification. The allocation of capital across the globe would be
distorted, making the world economy less efficient, and therefore
poorer, over time.

Optimists contend that Section 899 is a negotiating tool and that the
tax on remittances is small. And didn’t other rich-world countries
start the tax war by ganging up on America’s technology giants with
“digital services taxes” and other rules designed to extend the reach
of their tax systems across borders? The proposed law specifically
targets these rules; it does not give Mr Trump a free hand.

The trouble with these arguments is that new taxes tend to expand
over time regardless of their initial scope and size. There is no
constituency in Congress to defend the interests of foreigners, and
the legislature’s failure to avert tariffs shows how unwilling it is to
challenge the president’s self-harming protectionism. The budget bill
is a sign that the world could be entering an era of hostility towards
foreign capital, not just foreign goods. If that day arrives, the
damage will be so great that who started the fight will be irrelevant.
■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/05/americas-tax-on-foreign-investors-
could-do-more-damage-than-tariffs

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Lessons from Ukraine

The West is rethinking how to

fight wars
Ukraine’s daring raid on Russia has lessons for European armed
forces. But they need cash, too
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

THE UKRAINIAN drone strike on bombers far inside Russia on June

1st will be ranked among the greatest military raids in history. The
operation, combining old-fashioned sabotage with the iconic weapon
of the Ukraine war, illustrated two things. One is that new
technology, deployed inventively, can be lethal. The other is that
even major powers are vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure
deep inside their own territory, overturning the assumptions of the
1990s and 2000s.
Britain’s defence review·, published the next day, deserves praise for
recognising these lessons. It also serves as an example of the new,
more flexible thinking that will be needed in Europe and Asia to deal
with the breakneck innovations that are transforming warfare.
However, the review also points to the hardest problem in turning
such thinking into reality—finding the money to pay for it.

After decades of complacency, Britain, like its allies, has

acknowledged that it must prepare for war. That means building up
the ammunition, forces and technologies for fighting abroad, as well
as securing the home front. After the cold war, the Royal Air Force
(RAF), like many of its European counterparts, saved money by
shutting down bases and consolidating aircraft at ever fewer places.
Ukraine’s surprise attack is a reminder of why that now looks like a
mistake. The review says that the RAF must relearn how to fight
from a wider range of sites, and to disperse its munitions, spare
parts and fuel.

The same principle of resilience holds more widely: redundancy

applies as much to undersea cables, electrical substations and
communications as it does to air bases. The British review rightly
calls for a “whole of society” approach in which industry, finance,
academia, education and ordinary people are better prepared for
crises.

The thinking about military technology needs to be similarly supple.

“Emerging technologies”, the review warns, “are already changing
the character of warfare more profoundly than at any point in
human history”. Britain and its allies have been slow to adapt. The
review laments that, for defence projects worth over £20m ($27m),
awarding a contract takes an average of 6.5 years. It recommends
that 10% of the procurement budget should be earmarked for novel
technologies.

Bolder, faster reorganisation of military services matters, too. The

Royal Navy will accelerate a “hybrid” carrier air wing, with drones
flying alongside piloted F-35 fighter jets. The army will have a 20-
40-40 mix of equipment. Crewed platforms will make up only 20% of
kit. They will control uncrewed platforms that can be reused (40%)
as well as “consumables” like shells, missiles and single-use strike
drones (40%).
Britain can experiment because big land powers such as Germany
are expanding their traditional ground forces·. Wisely, the review
resists the temptation to declare that old, large equipment is
obsolete. Not every act of war can be waged with drones in trucks.
The review concludes that tanks still matter, for instance, not least
because they protect troops on an increasingly transparent
battlefield. The commitment to build up to a dozen attack
submarines is a reminder that one of the largest and costliest
weapons, the nuclear-powered sub, remains one of the most potent.

So far, so laudable. But a glaring gap remains between ambition and

money. Britain plans to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2027,
with a vague hope of 3% by 2034. That is inadequate. Russia is
rearming and America is signalling that it will shift forces away from
Europe. Germany, facing the same threats, could be spending twice
as much as Britain by 2029.

At a summit on June 24th NATO allies are likely to agree to spend

3.5% of GDP on defence. That would require painful tax rises,
welfare cuts or borrowing. But it is hard to see how Europe can
support Ukraine, deter Russia and fill gaps left by America on less.

In 2014 NATO allies agreed to a 2% target—and many ignored it.

This time, the timeline is as important as the target. There is little
point in deferring spending to the 2030s. “Until recently…a war
against another country with advanced military forces was
unthinkable,” says the British defence review, warning that conflict
would be deadly and long-lasting. How much better to deter such a
war than wage it. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/03/the-west-is-rethinking-how-to-fight-
wars
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Asia’s forgotten hellscape

Myanmar is a demonstration
of Chinese hegemony in
action
China is playing all sides in the country’s bloody civil war
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

THE WORLD is not exactly short of crises. But one of the most
alarming is also the most overlooked: an escalating state of anarchy
in Myanmar, in the heart of Asia. The country is degenerating into a
violent state of nature·. Over 2m of its people are on the verge of
starvation. The effects of crime, including drug-dealing, huge scam
centres and human trafficking, spread far beyond its borders.
What is taking place inside Myanmar is a humanitarian disaster, but
it matters for another, more abstract reason, too. America and
Europe have walked away from what was once an influential role in
the country. Instead, the hellscape is unfolding under the watch of
China, which has become the dominant outside power. Its cynicism
and indifference in Myanmar are a demonstration of its values-free
foreign policy in action.

Myanmar has a desperate past. After a coup in 1962, it suffered 49

years of military rule. Between 2011 and 2021, the army
relinquished some power, and for a while that allowed Aung San Suu
Kyi, a liberal darling of the West, to front a government. Even in
those years there were severe human-rights violations, including
pogroms against the Rohingya minority. In 2021 the army fully
retook power in a coup. Since then, a sinister junta has been
engaged in a civil war with a swirling cast of dozens of armed-
resistance groups, freedom fighters and bandits, turning a country
the size of Ukraine into a bewildering and bloody mess.

As the West has lost interest, China has become more powerful. Its
conduct is pragmatic rather than ideological, and it will do business
with anyone who has clout, money or guns. It has worked with Ms
Suu Kyi, and now co-operates with the junta and also with the
resistance groups and militias. It uses its influence and control over
ammunition and weapon supplies to shape the fighting in order to
safeguard its interests.

These include protecting a 2,500km energy pipeline from the Indian

Ocean. This gives China an alternative supply route that bypasses
the Malacca Strait and might become vital in the event of a war over
Taiwan. China also wants to maintain its access to minerals and
other resources, protect infrastructure built under its Belt and Road
Initiative, clamp down on scammers targeting Chinese citizens, and
keep the West out of a country adjacent to its own southern border.

China plays all sides, arming, threatening and coaxing them into
meeting its demands. The results are lethal. Amid mounting hunger,
the size of the economy has fallen by a quarter in nominal terms
since 2019. The picture could get worse. China is pushing General
Min Aung Hlaing, the junta’s chief, to hold a sham election later this
year, designed to provide a figleaf of legitimacy. That could trigger a
surge in violence as resistance groups seek to disrupt an illegitimate
process. More chaos could spill across the borders Myanmar shares
with Bangladesh, China, India, Laos and Thailand.

Having been mistakenly star-struck by Ms Suu Kyi’s leadership in the

2010s, the West has abandoned the groups fighting for democracy.
Today America and Europe could still help Myanmar by increasing
their humanitarian assistance, publicising abuses and backing pro-
democracy forces in any negotiations and even on the battlefield.
But the Trump administration has cut aid to Myanmar, and Europe is
preoccupied with security on its own eastern border.
Given Western neglect, Myanmar’s best long-term hope is either that
pro-democracy groups eventually consolidate and win the civil
war, or that Myanmar’s other neighbours, such as India and
Thailand, strive for a just peace. Despite all the talk of a multi-polar
world in which power and responsibility are more evenly spread,
neighbouring countries have so far tended to back the junta and
have encouraged other states to normalise relations with it. Yet over
time they may come to recognise that only a more democratic
Myanmar will provide the stability they crave.

Until then, the war will continue and the liberal future that some
Burmese are fighting for will remain out of reach. China’s growing
power and pursuit of its own priorities, the West’s shrinking view of
its own interests, and the apathy of everyone else have consigned a
country to misery. That makes Myanmar not just a tragedy—but also
a warning. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/04/myanmar-is-a-demonstration-of-chinese-
hegemony-in-action

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Guerrillas v gorillas

Africa’s most admired dictator

rolls the dice
Kagame’s intervention in Congo threatens his legacy at home
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

BACK IN THE 1990s Paul Kagame grabbed global attention as the

leader of a rebel group that halted the Rwandan genocide, the worst
mass atrocity of the past four decades. In the 2000s and 2010s he
became Africa’s most admired dictator, turning Rwanda from a
graveyard into a case study at Harvard Business School, with one of
the fastest growth rates in the world. Those who pointed to his
regime’s brutal suppression of dissent and assassinations of
opponents were ignored. For Western donors, Mr Kagame was the
leader who proved that aid could be spent well. For African elites
starved of examples of well-run states, he was a role model.

More than three decades on, Mr Kagame· has gone from the darling
of donors to Africa’s arch-exponent of realpolitik. He has turned to
new friends abroad to gamble on state-led modernisation. In
neighbouring Congo he has fuelled a long-running conflict. But the
Trump administration, with an eye on Congo’s mineral wealth, says it
wants Mr Kagame to stop meddling as part of a peace-for-
investment deal. Unintentionally, America might just save Rwanda’s
president from himself.

Taking advantage of geopolitical shifts, Mr Kagame has befriended

rising powers, acquiring weapons for his formidable army from
China, Russia and Turkey. Rwanda looks up to Israel, another small
nation with a shared history of suffering genocide and fighting its
neighbours. It exports gold to Dubai. Qatar is financing a new
airport. Mr Kagame has long shown how transactionalism can give
minor countries outsize influence. His offers to receive deported
migrants, export critical minerals, or send troops to places where the
West is unwilling to go have helped limit criticism of Rwanda’s
human-rights abuses and its backing of M23, a Congolese militia.

Earlier this year, with the help of Rwanda’s army, that militia seized
the cities of Goma and Bukavu in eastern Congo. In Goma M23 has
set up an ersatz version of Mr Kagame’s rule in Rwanda; it is
ordering the streets to be cleaned at the point of a gun. Elsewhere
fighting still rages.

Mr Kagame’s intervention in Congo has several motives. It is a

chance to create a buffer zone and to vanquish the FDLR, a rebel
group that traces its roots to genocidal militias and which Mr
Kagame still regards as a threat. Rwanda earns hundreds of millions
of dollars from exporting smuggled gold and other metals from
Congo. Some in Rwanda’s elite want to redraw what they complain
are colonially imposed borders. The arrival of the Trump
administration, which Mr Kagame saw as less worried about
territory-grabbing, probably factored in his thinking. Creating facts
on the ground unbothered by an indifferent America, went the
calculation, would at the very least produce leverage in any
negotiations.

The logic may yet prove sound. Félix Tshisekedi, Congo’s president
and an enemy of Mr Kagame’s, has been weakened and his political
rivals are circling. But the risks for Rwanda’s president are mounting,
too.

The costs of the war highlight the flaws of Mr Kagame’s

development model. Growth has mostly benefited the urban elite.
Researchers have disputed government claims about poverty
reduction and agricultural production. The ruling party and the army
own lots of companies, deterring private investment. The ratio of
public debt to GDP has quadrupled since 2012, to almost 80%; the
war will add to fiscal pressures. A gaping current-account deficit of
14% of GDP will widen further if the tourists who pay in dollars to
see mountain gorillas stay at home. The longer the war goes on, the
more Rwanda’s brand will be tarnished.

And in a world where everyone is becoming more transactional, Mr

Kagame may find he has less to offer. President Donald Trump, who
opined last month that “there are a lot of bad things going on in
Africa”, is not famed for his knowledge of the continent. But his
administration wants America to get more of Congo’s vast reserves
of copper, cobalt and other crucial minerals, and to see more
American firms profit in the region. That could grant Congo more
clout at Rwanda’s expense and imperil Mr Kagame’s influence in
Congo’s east.

Mr Kagame is 67 years old—middle-aged by the standard of African

(and indeed American) leaders. But he is thinking about his legacy.
The escalation of the war in Congo suggested he saw no tension
between pursuing vengeance in the region and modernisation at
home. But ultimately Mr Kagame may have to choose between
guerrillas and gorillas. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/05/africas-most-admired-dictator-rolls-
the-dice

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Letters
Has crime fallen in Britain?
A selection of correspondence :: Also this week, Oasis’s loud music, Generation X,
Mark Twain, chessboxing

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

A selection of correspondence

Has crime fallen in Britain?

Also this week, Oasis’s loud music, Generation X, Mark Twain,
chessboxing
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

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

Find out more about how we process your letter

Why crime has fallen

You detailed the brilliant work of Jonathan Shepherd and the Cardiff
University Violence Research Group (“Better angels”, May 17th).
Their recommendations have led to tremendous innovations in data
that helped police lessen the impact of violence. But the long-term
decline in violence in England and Wales happened a decade or so
before the “Cardiff model” was used. Violence declined from the
mid-1990s, and so too did car crime and burglary. There were similar
declines in crime across western Europe, America and other rich
countries that didn’t use the Cardiff model.

You also point to “better policing and changing social norms” for the
drop in violence. Problem-oriented policing can reduce crime, but
there is strong research evidence that policing was not responsible
for the long-term decline. And reduced alcohol consumption among
young people is a changing social norm, but this began in the mid-
to late-2000s, which is also a decade or so too late.

Property crime fell from the early-1990s onwards because of security

improvements, particularly to vehicles and households. As fewer
young people became involved in property crime, fewer progressed
to violence (which is fortunately rarer), and fewer crimes were
committed in which violence also occurs, such as robbery and
aggravated burglary.

The Cardiff model should be celebrated and replicated. The evidence

suggests it may be responsible for some part of reduced violence in
those places it was introduced. But the main lesson from the long-
term crime decline is that government should shift responsibility for
crime prevention to businesses, as it successfully did with the car
industry. This includes internet providers, online banks, the phone
industry, online marketplaces where illegal and stolen goods are
traded, bars and clubs and others. These businesses often profit
from hosting, facilitating or otherwise encouraging crime, including
violence.

PROFESSOR GRAHAM Farrell

School of Law
University of Leeds
Super sonic

“Uneasy listening” (May 10th) looked at research into the harmful

effects of compressed music on the ears. There are two main types
of audio compression: dynamic-range compression and file-size
compression. Dynamic-range compression does affect the relative
loudness of music. A famous example is Oasis’s “(What’s the Story)
Morning Glory?”. Nearly every song on the album is brickwalled, a
term used when the waveform of a song is at or near maximum
volume for much of the track. Most classical recordings would offer
the extreme other end of this loudness spectrum, where the
dynamic range of a recording is seldom adjusted or compressed.
Thus, the long crescendo of pieces such as Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer
of War” or Ravel’s “Bolero” are permitted to actually be quieter at
their starts, rather than just seem quieter.

Nicolas Colarossi
Philadelphia

Talking about my generation

Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z and the equally problematical “millennial” are

arbitrary demographic cohorts (“Reality bites”, May 10th). In
contrast, baby-boomer relates to a real, objective phenomenon, the
surge in birth rates following the second world war. I doubt that the
“Gen” descriptors are reliable indicators of personality or behaviour.
It is implausible that an individual born in 1980 has more in common
with a fellow Gen-Xer born in 1965 than with a millennial born in
1981. Categorising people as baby-boomer, Gen X, millennial, and so
on is nothing more than a way of pointing out their approximate
ages. Assigning characteristics to them strictly in accordance with
these categories is an unwarranted generalisation, a form of
astrology.
And it’s not just unscientific, it’s innumerate too. In ordinary
language, a generation is the average difference in age between
parents and their progeny. In America that is currently around 25 or
30 years, not the 15 years that separates all the Gens except for the
boomers, who for some reason span 18 years.

David Book
Monterey, California

Your article on the woes of Gen X mentioned two films, “The Matrix”
and “Fight Club”, which came to define the overpowering need in the
1990s to break free from the era’s societal rules on conformity.
However, the best example from that genre is Mike Judge’s classic
comedy from 1999, “Office Space”. What better way to capture Gen
X’s frustrations than to show a bunch of young, low-paid and
demoralised IT workers take their chronically malfunctioning printer
out into a field and smashing it to smithereens.

Armen Manuk-Khaloyan
Washington, DC
Neither the Twain did meet

The cry “mark twain” did indeed mean that a river was of safely
navigable depth (“Old times on the Mississippi”, May 17th), and this
is how we believe Samuel Clemens got his pen name. But in his
autobiographical “Life on the Mississippi”, Twain related how Isaiah
Sellers, a steamboat captain, first used the name as a pseudonym.

When he learned of Sellers’s death he took the name. Clemens’s life

was filled with deaths about which he felt guilt. His ten-year-old
brother died when he was eight; at 12 he watched his father’s
autopsy. Then at 23, his younger brother died on a riverboat, aboard
which Clemens had found him a job. So his story about how he got
his pen name is consistent with his feelings of guilt and remorse,
though some scholars dispute it.

Richard Waugaman
Clinical professor of psychiatry
Georgetown University
Washington, DC

A knockout song

I was disappointed that there was no mention of the Wu-Tang Clan

in your article on chessboxing, a sport combining the board game
and knockouts in the ring (“Queen’s gambit, plus a punch”, May
17th). The hip-hop group sang about “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” in
1993.

Laurie Timpson
Marlborough, Wiltshire

The sport of chessboxing actually stems from the work of Enki Bilal,
a celebrated French-Yugoslavian comic-book author, who introduced
it in the last volume of his magnum opus “The Nikopol Trilogy” in
1992. Incidentally, it’s the only sport where “checkmate” is literally a
punchline.

Romain Poirot-Lellig
Lagos
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/letters/2025/06/05/has-crime-fallen-in-britain

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

By Invitation
There is nothing extreme about the Baltic
states’ hard-nosed view of Russia, says
Latvia’s foreign minister
What price peace? :: Baiba Braže argues that it is time to abandon illusions of détente

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

What price peace?

There is nothing extreme

about the Baltic states’ hard-
nosed view of Russia, says
Latvia’s foreign minister
Baiba Braže argues that it is time to abandon illusions of détente
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

THOSE OF US living around the Baltic Sea, more than in any other
European countries, have the most to gain from a friendly and stable
Russia. We also have the most to lose if decision-makers are misled
by the illusory prospect of detente with the Kremlin. This is no time
for wishful thinking.
The Economist’s reporting on our region’s security has long been a
journalistic lodestar, which is why many of us living around the Baltic
Sea were disappointed to read in these pages that our view of
Russia is “extreme”. It is realistic and evidence-based.

Today many admit that we in the Baltics were right in warning about
Russia’s trajectory towards militarism and autocracy, and about its
imperialist objectives. Russian imperialism has deep roots. It
predates Vladimir Putin—and will most likely outlast him. That is not
an “incurable” belief. It is prudence.

Our most important message is that Russia is not just Ukraine’s

problem. It threatens the international order. Mr Putin’s ambitions
stretch far beyond Ukraine. He dreams of spheres of influence and
dominance beyond Russia’s borders. He seeks to divide America and
Europe to split NATO. He is deepening the “no-limits” partnership
with China. He is working closely with rogue states including Iran
and North Korea, and ruthlessly exploiting Africa’s natural resources
via his Africa Corps.

Nothing suggests that Russia is ready for peace in Ukraine. Despite

Mr Putin’s “three-day campaign” turning into a three-year
catastrophe, his war machine is still running. Any weakness only
encourages him to continue with his aggression and seek at the
negotiating table what he has failed to achieve on the battlefield.

Mr Putin is now following step-by-step Russia’s well-worn

negotiations manual: issue absurd maximalist demands and blame
the other party for not accepting them; concede nothing;
continuously delay the process; reset expectations; wait for others to
present compromises or concessions; and exploit this as weakness.

Meanwhile, Russia continues—and indeed is escalating—its missile

and drone onslaught against civilian targets in Ukrainian cities; this
may intensify further after Ukraine’s brilliant, sophisticated drone
operation inside Russia on June 1st. The Kremlin is also stepping up
its non-conventional attacks against European countries, including
cyber-attacks, disinformation operations, sabotage of critical
infrastructure and election interference. All these methods have been
tested and honed across the continent over decades. We in the
Baltics did warn about taking them seriously. Now we all see the
consequences of not pushing back.

Against this backdrop, Latvia sees a clear path towards a durable

peace in Ukraine that rests on three pillars: strengthening our
national and NATO’s collective defence; weakening Russia’s capacity
to wage war; and sustaining Ukraine’s ability to defend itself
diplomatically, militarily and economically.

Rapidly increasing investment in hard deterrence and defence

capabilities is a must. NATO allies should aim to raise defence and
defence-related spending to 5% of GDP. We must focus on aligning
military, intelligence and internal-security resources to respond to
Russia’s non-conventional attacks, overcoming irritants in
transatlantic relations, and (belatedly) achieving full European Union
energy independence from Russia.

This requires political will. The Baltic states show what is possible.
We and Poland will spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2026. This year
we have achieved total energy independence from Russia, having
previously relied on it for most of our natural gas.

Mr Putin will not stop until someone stops him. Our first step should
be to intensify financial warfare. The Graham-Blumental sanctions
proposed in America’s Congress, which include a potential 500%
tariff on countries that buy Russian fossil fuels, would blow a hole in
Russia’s budget—especially if accompanied by powerful new EU
sanctions. Oil and gas exports remain Russia’s fiscal lifeline,
accounting for a third of federal revenue. Increasingly, these exports
are shipped via the Baltic Sea using a shadow fleet designed to
dodge sanctions. We can also do more to restrict Russia’s access to
technology and to deter its international enablers with “secondary”
sanctions on those who trade with it.

This maximum-pressure approach represents the only viable path to

peace. We must deprive the Kremlin of its income through tariffs on
energy imports, financial restrictions and by lowering the oil price. It
is an approach grounded in realism because as long as Russia is
ruled by this regime, it will be geared towards war. Russia is clearly
rearming and preparing for long-term confrontation with the West,
and we must prepare accordingly.

Latvia’s own history shows how peace can be achieved through

strength. We established our republic in 1918 and secured it through
the war of independence. The peace treaty with Soviet Russia in
1920 was signed after the Russians had been pushed back and as
the West stood united. Yet this unity splintered under economic
upheaval, transatlantic disengagement and the failure of the League
of Nations. Poland, the Baltic states and Finland fell victim to Hitler’s
and Stalin’s aggression. Once we won back our independence, after
half a century of Soviet occupation, securing the withdrawal of
Russian troops became possible thanks to Western pressure and
negotiations from a position of strength.

With these lessons in mind, we must abandon once and for all
illusions of detente, or peace achieved through appeasement. As
The Economist’s own editorials have repeatedly warned, anything
less than visible, credible strength and unity risks repeating the
mistakes of history and inviting the next war. We in the West have all
the necessary instruments to prevent it from happening. It would
not cost much, compared with the alternatives. ■

Baiba Braže is the foreign minister of Latvia.

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-
invitation/2025/06/02/there-is-nothing-extreme-about-the-baltic-states-hard-nosed-
view-of-russia-says-latvias-foreign-minister
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Briefing
More and more parents around the world
prefer girls to boys
The fairer sex :: The bias in favour of boys is shrinking in developing countries even
as a preference for girls emerges in the rich world

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

The fairer sex

More and more parents

around the world prefer girls
to boys
The bias in favour of boys is shrinking in developing countries even
as a preference for girls emerges in the rich world
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

AN AMERICAN COUPLE is throwing a party to commemorate the

moment when they discover what sex their unborn child will be. “It’s
a boy!” they blurt out, in a TikTok video that has since gone viral.
But the mother-to-be cannot feign excitement for long. Within
seconds she is clutching her partner and sobbing. He reassures her
that they will have a daughter at some point, before they leave the
room, too upset to stay with their guests.

“Gender reveal” parties can be elaborate, with the news of what sex
an expectant couple’s baby will be delivered by confetti cannons or
smoke bombs, which explode in telltale pink or blue. There are
breathless hashtags: #boyorgirl and #TractorsOrTiaras. But
festivities that end in disappointment for the unsuspecting #boymom
and pity from those attending have spawned a whole new genre on
social media, “gender disappointment” videos, some of which attract
millions of views. Countless posts show or describe “feeling sad you
aren’t having a little girl”.

Parents around the world used to have a pronounced preference for

sons. In many cultures boys traditionally inherit both the family’s
name and its wealth. Indeed, sons were considered so much more
desirable than daughters that many parents would choose to abort
baby girls, leaving whole cohorts of children with far more boys than
girls in China and India, among other places. But in recent years that
preference for boys has diminished dramatically in developing
countries—and signs of a bias in favour of girls are emerging in the
rich world. For perhaps the first time in humanity’s long history, in
many parts of the world it is boys who are increasingly seen as a
burden and girls who are a boon.

In the natural course of things, there are roughly 105 male births for
every 100 female ones, which appears to be an evolutionary
response to higher male mortality. The rate does fluctuate
somewhat, for reasons scientists do not fully understand. Male births
tend to spike immediately after wars, for instance. But until the
1980s, when ultrasound became cheap enough to let most would-be
parents learn the sex of a fetus, there were few ways to act on a
preference for boys beyond having lots of children and coddling the
male ones. And since families tended to be big, most parents would
anyway end up with a mix of boys and girls.
Little bundles of misery

In recent decades, however, as parents in much of the world began

having fewer children, they could no longer assume that at least one
of their children would be a boy. Ultrasound gave parents a way to
choose. The result was a massacre of female fetuses. Roughly 50m
fewer girls have been born since 1980 than you would naturally
expect, according to The Economist’s calculations. In the worst year,
2000, there were around 1.7m more male births than there should
have been. As recently as 2015, the number of excess male births
was still above 1m—which suggests that a similar number of unborn
girls must have been done away with.

Yet this year, The Economist estimates, that figure will fall to about
200,000. The precipitous drop in the sex imbalance equates to
roughly 7m girls saved since 2001 and counting. The global
preference for sons has almost disappeared, and with it the hordes
of missing girls (see chart).
The countries with the biggest skews in favour of boys in sex ratios
at birth have seen a reversion towards the natural rate. In South
Korea almost 116 boys were born for every 100 girls in 1990. The
imbalance was even more pronounced in bigger families. Among
third-born children, there were more than 200 boys for every 100
girls. Among fourth-born children, the ratio approached 250 boys for
every 100 girls. Yet today South Korea has a near-even distribution
between the sexes.

Critically, the desire for sons has also diminished rapidly in China and
India, although the sex ratio at birth remains skewed in both
countries. In China it has fallen from a peak of 117 for most of the
2000s to 111 in 2023. In India the rate was 107 that year, down
from 109 in 2010.

Polling data bear out this shift. In many developing countries, to the
extent that people express any preference about the sex of their
children, they now seem to want a mix of boys and girls.
Bangladeshi women who have not yet had children, for instance,
report an almost identical desire for sons and daughters. Among
those with one or two children, having a son increases the desire for
daughters and having a daughter increases the desire for sons.
Researchers have also observed a similar yen for balance in most of
sub-Saharan Africa.

In the long run, the shrinking of the preference for boys should
return those countries with the most skewed populations to
something approaching a normal sex distribution. That means
eventual deliverance from a host of social problems associated with
a deficit of girls, from increased crime to human-trafficking of foreign
brides—although it will take decades for the legacy of past bias to
disappear.

In the rich world, in the meantime, evidence is growing of an

emerging preference for girls. Between 1985 and 2003, the share of
South Korean women who felt it “necessary” to have a son plunged
from 48% to 6%, according to South Korea’s statistics agency.
Nearly half now want daughters. Similarly in Japan, polls suggest a
clear preference for girls. The Japanese National Fertility Survey, a
poll conducted every five years, shows that in 1982, 48.5% of
married couples wanting only one child said they would prefer a
daughter. By 2002, 75% did. A similar swing existed for parents
wanting two or three children.

In a handful of places, the overall birth statistics appear to reflect a

preference for girls over boys. The sex ratio at birth is slightly lower
than the norm in parts of the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, for
example. A few countries in those regions have ratios as low as 100
or 101. More than one in three households in the Caribbean is
headed by a woman, and the share of Caribbean women who say
they would rather have daughters is bigger than the proportion who
prefer sons. In sub-Saharan Africa a man’s traditional obligation to
pay a hefty “bride price” to the family of the woman he marries may
have helped make girls more desirable.

But in most countries, any preference for girls expressed in polls is

not strong enough to show in the overall sex ratio at birth. Most
parents-to-be seem to balk at sex-selective abortions, in other
words. Nonetheless a bias towards girls is visible in instances when it
is easier to act on, such as when seeking children through adoption
or fertility treatment. The time-honoured indicator of preference—
whether parents go on procreating depending on what sex their
existing children are—suggests a hankering for girls.

Baby bummers

In America parents with only daughters were once more likely than
parents with only sons to keep having children, presumably to try for
a boy. That was the thesis set out in a study published in 2008 by
Gordon Dahl of the University of California, San Diego, and Enrico
Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley. The report, which
analysed census data from 1960 to 2000, concluded that parents in
America favoured sons.

That preference has since reversed, however. A study in 2017 led by

Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell University, found that having
a girl first is now associated with lower fertility rates in America. The
research, which uses data from 2008 to 2013, suggested a
preference for girls among married couples.

Other rich countries follow a similar pattern. A pro-girl bias has been
detected throughout Scandinavia. In these countries, parents with
one son and one daughter have fewer children; those with two sons
have markedly higher birth rates than parents with two daughters.
Finns whose first child is a girl tend to have slightly fewer children.
Studies have also suggested a preference for girls in the Czech
Republic, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Portugal.

Fertility treatment provides further evidence of a bias towards girls.

At New York City IVF, a clinic in Midtown Manhattan, parents pay as
much as $20,000 to select the sex of babies conceived through in-
vitro fertilisation (IVF). Wealthy families travel from countries like
Britain, where the practice is banned. “In the past, it was all about
boys,” says Alyaa Elassar, who leads the practice. But increasingly,
parents opt for baby girls.

Adoptive parents, too, tend to want girls. Those in America were

willing to pay as much as $16,000 to secure a daughter, according to
a study published in 2010. In 2009 Abbie Goldberg of Clark
University asked more than 200 American couples hoping to adopt
whether they wanted a boy or a girl. Although many of them said
they did not mind, heterosexual men and women and lesbians all
leaned on average towards girls; only gay men preferred boys. In
South Korea girls account for a clear majority of adoptions. Although
the greater interest in adopting girls has no effect on sex ratios at
birth at all, it gives a good indication of where parents’ preferences
lie.

The reasons behind the growing preference for girls and the relative
devaluation of boys are not at all clear. There could be many
contributing factors. In Ms Goldberg’s study, which sorted parents by
their sexual orientation, different groups gave different reasons for
their leanings. Heterosexual men, for example, felt girls would be
“easier to raise”, more “interesting” and “complex” as well as “less
physically challenging” than boys. Lesbians were concerned about
whether they would be able to socialise boys and so on.

In countries that used to suffer from a severe bias in favour of boys,

the shift may simply reflect a desire to avoid the problems that have
flowed from skewed sex ratios. In China, where men are so
preponderant that many have ended up as unmarried, childless
“bare branches”, parents may be seeking to avoid a lonely life for
their children. It is also expensive to have boys, insofar as middle-
class urban men are typically expected to own an apartment before
they can get married. Parents of boys often complain about the
ruinous expense of helping them buy homes.

Another possibility is that a preference for girls may not be a sign of

emancipation but a reflection of enduring gender roles. The
assumption that daughters will be more nurturing whereas sons will
grow distant is ingrained even in the most egalitarian societies. In
Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where women are relatively well
represented both in business and in politics, couples nonetheless
place greater importance on having at least one daughter than on
having at least one son. Some sociologists posit that this is because
daughters are much more likely than sons to provide care for elderly
parents living alone.

Babes in the woods

The growing desire for daughters may also reflect the social ills that
afflict men in much of the rich world. Men still dominate business
and politics and earn more for the same work almost everywhere—
but they are also more likely to go off the rails. In many rich
countries, teenage boys are more likely to be both perpetrators and
victims of violent crimes. They also are more likely to commit
suicide. Boys trail girls at all stages of education and are expelled
from school at far higher rates. They are less likely than women to
attend university. The gender gap at American universities is bigger
today than in 1972, when laws prohibiting gender discrimination in
education were enacted. But it is no longer women who are
underrepresented.

Competitive parents may see girls as more likely to reflect well on

them than boys. After all, boys develop fine motor skills later than
girls. They are also worse at sitting still. Those are drawbacks in a
world of toddlers’ music lessons and art classes. “We no longer have
trophy wives,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American
Institute for Boys and Men, which seeks to remedy male social
problems. “We have trophy kids.”

The gender divide continues into adulthood. Whereas high-achieving

young women move out of the family home, young men are less
likely to leave. An example is Japan, with its staggering numbers of
young recluses known as hikikomori, most of whom are men. Young
men in America are also more likely to remain in their parents’
homes than girls. Around one in five American men aged 25-34 lives
with his parents, compared with just over one in ten women of the
same age.
A cultural reckoning with misogyny might also be a factor. In a book
called “BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible
Masculinity”, Ruth Whippman observes that the world has recently
been exposed to a torrent of news about poor male behaviour. The
#MeToo movement revealed male predation first in Hollywood, and
then in a series of other industries and countries. Men such as
Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate have all become
household names after being charged with multiple counts of various
forms of abuse of women (and in Epstein’s case, girls).

More recently, the story of Gisèle Pelicot, a Frenchwoman who was

repeatedly drugged and raped by her husband and 50 other men,
has stirred public indignation. “Adolescence”, a Netflix drama about a
13-year-old British boy who is arrested for murder, sparked a global
conversation about misogynistic behaviour in boys. It is a fraught
time to be raising boys, according to Ms Whippman. The list of fears
is long, she writes in “Boymom”: “Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-
child, interrupter, mansplainer, self-important stoner, emotional-
labour abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters.”

A telling sign of the general alarm about boys in the rich world is the
interest politicians have begun taking in the subject. Last year
Britain’s Parliament opened an investigation into male
underachievement in schools. Norway has gone a step further,
launching a Men’s Equality Commission in 2022. Its final report in
2024 concluded that tackling challenges for boys and men would be
the “next step” in gender equality.

Legislators across America’s political spectrum are making similar

noises. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, a Republican, has created a
task-force on male well-being; Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, a
Democrat, has committed to “targeted solutions to uplift our men
and boys”; Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a woman (and a
Democrat), wants to get more young men into Michigan’s colleges
and vocational courses.
It is important to keep the gloom about boys in the rich world in
perspective. “There is little evidence that a desire for daughters
translates into behaviour that discriminates against boys—or girls,”
says Lisa Eklund of Lund University in Sweden. With 100,000 sex-
selective abortions of female fetuses still taking place in China each
year, eradicating prejudice against girls should remain a priority.

But technology may soon alter the picture, just as cheap ultrasounds
did 50 years ago. Given an easy way to act on their preference for
girls, parents in the rich world might start doing so in greater
numbers. New testing methods are allowing parents to learn the sex
of their unborn child much earlier in its gestation. Some kits can be
bought online or in shops, require just a few drops of blood from the
mother and work from as little as six weeks. At that stage friends
and family may not know that the mother is pregnant and therefore
need not know if she ends the pregnancy.

IVF and other fertility treatments are also becoming cheaper, more
effective and so more common. In America, where sex-selective IVF
is legal, around a quarter of all IVF attempts now lead to live births,
compared with 14% during the 1990s. Some 90% of couples who
use a technique called sperm-sorting to select the sex of their child
said they wanted a balance of sons and daughters. Even so, in
practice 80% of them opted for girls. If that imbalance endures even
as such methods spread, America’s sex ratios will soon start to skew.

And even if sex ratios at birth remain at the natural level, the
preference for girls is still important. Just as sex-selective abortions
in the developing world are a reflection of underlying disparities and
prejudices, the incipient bias towards girls in the rich world
presumably reveals something about how societies function.
Relieving the social pressures that lead parents to prefer girls to
boys would be a good idea, irrespective of the latest statistics on the
sex ratio at birth. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/06/05/more-and-more-parents-around-the-
world-prefer-girls-to-boys

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Asia
China is benefiting from the hell in
Myanmar
Follow the pipeline :: It didn’t create the civil war. But it is playing both sides

Lee Jae-myung is South Korea’s next

president
Martial law, impeachment and, finally, a new president :: What will the left-winger
mean for the country?

The real reason Indians are lost

You are… somewhere :: A dodgy address system means delays that cost billions of
dollars a year

Can India create its own Ivy League?

Indian universities :: The country is home to half the world’s university-age
population. Why are they going abroad?

The mystery of China’s missing military

Banyan :: Why the PLA has ducked a brawl with America

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Follow the pipeline

China is benefiting from the

hell in Myanmar
It didn’t create the civil war. But it is playing both sides
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午 | Chiang Mai

IN MARCH A 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar, in which 3,740

people died. And yet the earthquake is not the main humanitarian
crisis in that troubled country. Since Myanmar’s military junta brutally
took control in a coup in 2021, nearly 10,000 civilians have been
killed. The UN estimates 3m have been displaced and over 2m are
on the brink of famine. The economy has shrunk by a fifth, and is
estimated to be around half the size of its pre-coup trajectory. All
this has made Myanmar a hub of lawlessness in Asia. Illicit drug
production, human-trafficking and a huge scam industry are
booming.

Much of the world has paid scant attention to Myanmar since the
coup. Western countries, which did the most to encourage
democracy there in the decade up to 2021, have been consumed
with crises in Ukraine and Gaza. But China has not lost focus. It has
taken advantage of the chaos next door to steal a march on its
geopolitical rivals. Engaging both the junta and its opponents, China
works to protect its varied interests in the country: ensuring stability
along its border and along the lengthy trade routes leading to the
Indian Ocean; protecting Chinese investments in the country;
shutting down scam centres targeting Chinese citizens; and, above
all, limiting Western influence.

China’s strategy has been a stunning success. Both the junta and
resistance groups started out hostile to Chinese influence. But
neither dares cross their larger neighbour now. Its control of trade in
arms and other illicit goods puts it in a decisive position. One
Chinese investment in particular illustrates the point. A 2,500km
(1,500-mile) oil-and-gas pipeline begins on Myanmar’s south-
western coast and runs through a cross-section of the conflict to
Kunming, the capital of China’s south-western province of Yunnan
(see map). Yet it remains entirely unmolested, with groups on both
sides careful to avoid damaging it.
Those fighting the junta are a ragtag group. Young people who
survived attacks on counter-coup protests fled to the country’s
mountainous borderlands. They were trained and armed there by
ethnic-minority armies, which have fought the government on-and-
off for decades. Those new resistance fighters, who are mostly made
up of the Bamar, the majority ethnic group, returned to the arid
centre of the country known as the “dry zone”. They now challenge
the junta in its own backyard by attacking its convoys and operating
their own schools and clinics. The junta responds through air strikes
and search-and-destroy missions that often lead to the torture and
execution of civilians.

The insurgents have been joined by many of the ethnic armies

based along the country’s periphery. These can be divided into two
camps. Some, like those along the Thai and Indian borders, have
long looked to the West and tend to be more supportive of the
Spring Revolution, as the hotchpotch of those resisting the military
rule call their movement. Their own offensives have taken significant
territory off the military. Other ethnic militias, including most groups
along the Chinese border, have closer ties to China. Several have
historical links with China’s Communist Party, having emerged in
1989 from the Burmese Communist Party. They share an impatience
with democracy and the West.

Brothers in arms

The first camp was quick to support the revolution, but their
progress was slow. Those groups closer to China remained aloof
from the fight at first, observing ceasefires with the junta. Then, in
October 2023, a coalition of these China-linked groups known as the
Three Brotherhood Alliance launched a surprise attack on junta
positions in Shan State in the east, and a few weeks later, in Rakhine
State in the west. Within two months they had handed the army a
string of defeats greater than any since the years immediately
following independence from Britain in 1948. It is probable that the
Brotherhood’s offensive was approved by China, which wanted to
clear out scam centres trafficking Chinese citizens and targeting
Chinese victims. After the Brotherhood accomplished these goals,
China quickly pushed the two sides to sign a truce.

But in June 2024 the Brotherhood groups broke the truce. One
successfully assaulted the city of Lashio in Shan state and the junta’s
Eastern Operations Command. Never before had such a large city or
military base been seized by rebels. Another of the Brotherhood
groups started down the road to Mandalay, stopping just outside the
picturesque hill station above the city, where the military’s service
academies sit. Fearing that these lightning offensives might cause a
demoralised military government to collapse, China cut off trade with
the Brotherhood. It cut electricity and water, too, and kidnapped one
of the group’s leaders. With great reluctance, the Brotherhood
relented. The offensives came to a halt, and in April Lashio was
handed back to the military. The regime was spared a battle for
Mandalay.

China’s greatest fear is that pro-democracy groups will come to

power in Myanmar and turn it into a base of Western influence. To
prevent such an outcome, it has empowered groups that align more
closely with its vision of the world. And it has threatened to cut off
those ethnic militias that train or equip pro-democracy groups
without authorisation. By throttling their supply lines, China can keep
pro-democracy revolutionaries from growing too powerful, while at
the same time preserving some leverage over them.

Myanmar’s revolutionaries might be able to shrug off Chinese

pressure if others were to provide more humanitarian assistance. But
for much of the past four years Western countries’ aid to pro-
democracy groups has not met their needs. There has been no
serious discussion of arming pro-Western groups. Humanitarian
assistance is easier in legal terms, and would boost the groups by
supporting their social role. But it has not been forthcoming: only
39% of the $1bn that the UN requested in humanitarian aid in 2024
was granted. With great difficulty, the United States’ Congress
appropriated $121m in additional cash for democratic groups.
Instead of increasing this to compete with China for influence in
Myanmar, the Trump administration’s closure of USAID has curtailed
it.

What does China want to do with Myanmar? Over the past year
China has pushed General Min Aung Hlaing, the junta chief, to hold
an election at the end of 2025. Chinese diplomats hope that,
following the vote, he will be elected president, shed his uniform and
then hand over command of the army to a more reasonable figure
who will push for peace. But an election held under the junta and
without a ceasefire would be a sham. As great as China’s influence
is, it cannot compel General Min Aung Hlaing to give up power. It
seems more likely that what China wants is a frozen conflict, giving it
maximum leverage over all groups.

Other approaches have been pondered. Thailand and India have

backed the junta, and encouraged other countries to normalise
relations with it. Thaksin Shinawatra, a tycoon and former Thai
prime minister, has also led a drive to legitimise General Min Aung
Hlaing, inviting him to summits at his grand hotel in Bangkok. These
boosters ignore, however, the junta’s parlous battlefield condition
and the much greater levels of anger at the army than existed in
earlier periods of army rule.

Perhaps most promising is an effort tried out by Indonesia in 2023.

That year its foreign minister at the time, Retno Marsudi, brought all
four warring factions—the junta, the democratic resistance and both
pro-democracy and China-friendly ethnic militias—to its capital for
what are known as proximity talks. Each stayed at a different hotel,
and Indonesian diplomats relayed messages between them. None of
the groups was prepared to discuss the main matters then—and may
not be willing to now, either. But if this war is to end at the
negotiating table, it is a format that offers some chance of a
resolution. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/05/china-is-benefiting-from-the-hell-in-
myanmar

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Martial law, impeachment and, finally, a new president

Lee Jae-myung is South

Korea’s next president
What will the left-winger mean for the country?
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | SEOUL

Can he provide stability?

SIX MONTHS of turmoil in South Korea are over. Lee Jae-myung of

the liberal Democratic Party won a commanding victory, with 49.4%
of the vote, in the snap presidential elections held on June 3rd to
replace Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached for declaring martial law
last December. Mr Lee’s triumph serves as a resounding referendum
on Mr Yoon’s failed presidency: Mr Yoon’s ally, Kim Moon-soo of the
conservative People Power Party, came second with just 41.2%. Mr
Lee will inherit a divided society and a battered economy, as well as
big challenges from abroad, in particular Donald Trump, who has
threatened South Korea with tariffs and called America’s security
commitments to its long-time ally into question.

Mr Lee’s win caps an improbable journey. Born into poverty, he

dropped out of school as a teenager to work in factories. He
retrained as a lawyer, became a labour-rights activist, and,
eventually, governor of South Korea’s most populous province. In
2022 he narrowly lost the presidential elections to Mr Yoon. He
survived after being stabbed in the neck last year by an extremist
bent on preventing him from becoming president. Alleged election-
law crimes threatened to derail his second presidential bid, but
South Korean courts gave voters a chance to issue their own verdict.

In choosing Mr Lee, however, it is unclear exactly whom voters will

get. Mr Lee made his name as a progressive populist. Yet in recent
months he has recast himself as a sensible moderate. “Our guiding
value is pragmatism,” he told The Economist in January. He pledged
to boost South Korea’s benchmark stockmarket index and to make
big investments in artificial intelligence. He endorsed South Korea’s
alliance with America and closer co-operation with Japan. Although
he has called for stabilising relations with China, he pushed back
against critics who label him pro-Chinese.

However Mr Lee decides to govern, he will enjoy a commanding

position, with his party controlling a majority in parliament. His first
priorities will be domestic. He has called for constitutional
amendments to allow presidents to serve two four-year terms
instead of a single five-year term and also to make it harder to
impose martial law. He also promised a fiscal stimulus package to
boost the struggling economy.

But the outside world will not give the new president much respite.
Mr Trump imposed steep levies on industries in which South Korean
firms excel, such as cars and steel, and threatened additional 25%
tariffs on goods from South Korea (which has a free-trade
agreement with America). A clash also looms over whether America
should maintain its current troop levels on the Korean peninsula and
continue to dedicate those forces to the defence of South Korea
against its nuclear-armed northern neighbour—or divert them to
broader regional goals, such as deterring China.

Mr Trump may also restart negotiations with North Korea’s dictator,

Kim Jong Un. On that matter, he and Mr Lee, an advocate of more
engagement with the North, could find common cause. But if Mr
Trump cuts a deal over Mr Lee’s head, it could fuel South Korean
fears of abandonment. What’s more, far-right allies of Mr Trump in
America have embraced conspiracies spread by South Korea’s far-
right that Mr Lee is a communist and his election was fraudulent.

Other diplomatic challenges loom. Mr Lee’s attitudes towards Japan

will face an early litmus test when the two countries mark the 60th
anniversary of their formal ties on June 22nd, an occasion that will
bring the historical awkwardness in their relationship to the fore. In
October South Korea will host an APEC summit, which will strain Mr
Lee’s ability to balance between America, China and Russia.

Many South Koreans will be happy to see an end to the Yoon era.
But, even so, any sense of relief will be brief. As Mr Lee himself
acknowledged in his inauguration speech on June 4th,
“Unfortunately, we now face a complex web of overlapping crises in
every sphere.” ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/03/lee-jae-myung-is-south-koreas-next-
president

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

You are… somewhere

The real reason Indians are

lost
A dodgy address system means delays that cost billions of dollars a
year
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | MUMBAI

A WOMAN TAKES her husband to a psychiatrist. “He’s repeated our

address so often he’s lost his mind,” she tells the doctor, as the man
mumbles “A-42 Bhanushali Apartments…” So starts an advertisement
for an app that promises to turn a “long, complex address” into
something usable. Four years and millions of YouTube views later
the problem persists. The huge growth of online shopping means
that many urban Indians are repeating directions several times a
day, often twice or three times per delivery.
Addresses in the West tend to follow a simple, hierarchical system:
street name and number, district, city and post code. Indian
addresses have those features and more: “next to SBI ATM”;
“behind Ganesh Temple”; “near Minerva cinema”. According to
Santanu Bhattacharya, a former head of technology for Delhivery, a
logistics firm, the median distance of “next to” in India is 80 metres.
Around 30% of postcodes are incorrectly written.

The Department of Posts estimates that there are 750m households,

businesses and other such discrete locations in India. A paper
published by the department in 2021 admitted that “reaching the
addressee by means of conventional addresses and landmarks is
arduous”. Apps such as Google Maps are useful, but only if
addresses are accurate. Relying on someone to send a pin of where
they are is not scalable. And landmarks can disappear.

Indians resort to directions because street names are next to

useless. In smaller towns they frequently do not exist. (Estimates of
roads without names nationwide range from 60% to 90%.) When
they do, signage does not. Even if both are present, official names
often differ from those in common use. Moreover, politicians
frequently change the names of streets and even cities to reflect
their preferences.

The problem is an old one. In colonial Bombay and Calcutta, as they

were then known, “only the better houses had numbers…probably
because only they were taxed”, according to a study of directories
and census records from 1900 and 1901. But India has had 78 years
of independence in which to solve the problem.

Consumer sanity is not the only thing that suffers. Businesses such
as logistics, deliveries and e-commerce face higher costs and lower
productivity. Uber drivers squander fuel and time looking for the
right place. The rural economy takes a hit from the chaos in a
different way. Indian states use a mishmash of colonial and pre-
colonial revenue systems. Officers called collectors, tehsildars,
patwaris or mamlatdars assign khasra numbers, khatauni numbers
and, in one state, something called a “7/12” to plots of land. The
sub-division of plots over the decades complicates matters by adding
an ever-expanding series of numbers at the start.

The result is that different documents have different, if similar,

addresses. If a landowner wishes to mortgage a property, banks are
confronted with two problems. The first is that verifying that the
piece of land exists takes a lot longer and becomes more expensive,
often involving sending someone to look at it. The second is a higher
risk of fraud, since a landholder could take different papers to
different banks for loans. That drives up the cost of capital and
“creates inefficiency and delay in both the property decision and the
recovery process”, says Joseph Sebastian, a venture capitalist. Dr
Bhattacharya, now at MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts, estimates
that the combined hit of inefficiencies created by poor addresses
adds up to about 0.5% of GDP.

Private companies have attempted to solve the problem. The

government, too, recognises the issue. Its solution is digital. A
“Unique Land Parcel Identification Number” being rolled out is a 14-
digit alphanumeric identifier. Some cities have a “Unique Property
Identification Code”. The postal department is working on a 10-
character “DIGIPIN”. These systems have their merits. But a good
system should be memorable and intuitive. The cost of being lost all
the time adds up. It is a problem India urgently needs to address. ■

Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India,

our free weekly newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/05/the-real-reason-indians-are-lost

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Indian universities

Can India create its own Ivy

League?
The country is home to half the world’s university-age population.
Why are they going abroad?
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

And now...to America

AROUND THE world, university leaders wonder if Donald Trump’s

crackdown on higher education might present them with an
opportunity. America’s president has frozen funding to universities he
has ideological beef with; he has paused the visa interviews foreign
students must attend if they wish to enroll this year. India has been
losing academic talent to America for decades. At the famed Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs), over 60% of the top 100 performers
migrate abroad, mostly for America. Nearly a third of international
students there are from India.

One estimate suggests that Mr Trump’s policies might cause Indian

students’ applications to American universities to plummet by a
quarter from this year to the next. This could be India’s moment to
reverse the brain drain. The problem is that its top colleges cannot
yet compete in the global intellectual marketplace.

In theory, India’s best universities have much going for them.

Getting into Harvard is painless by comparison: admission rates for
India’s most prestigious institutions sometimes sink to 0.2%, against
3-9% for America’s Ivy League. India is home to half the world’s
university-age population. Parents drum extreme ambition into their
offspring and widespread English-language proficiency gives India an
edge.

But so far, India has no entry in the top 100 of international league
tables. By contrast China, having only broken into the global top 100
in the 2010s, now has the world’s highest number in many rankings.

A big part of the problem is money. In the past decade, India has
spent between 4.1% and 4.6% of its GDP on education. China’s
spending on it as a share of GDP may be roughly similar, but its GDP
per person is five times that of India’s. In the past decade China has
splurged on lucrative research grants and one-off bonuses to lure
back Chinese academics from the West. India lacks the rupees to
match China’s academic charm offensive.

Another issue is scholarly freedom. Indian academics teach from a

government-dictated syllabus and endure oversight by the all-
powerful University Grants Commission. An enterprising researcher
needs clearance from central ministries when organising a
conference with international colleagues and government permission
when travelling abroad for work. Hiring at public universities is
hostage to the whims of the ruling party of the day, since the
government oversees top-level appointments.

Lately government meddling appears to be getting worse. Last year

India ranked as “completely restricted” in the Academic Freedom
Index by Scholars at Risk, an international network headquartered in
New York, and V-Dem, a research group in Sweden; it was the
lowest score since the 1940s. “Indian public universities are an
unrivalled shit-show,” says an Indian political scientist working in
America. The syllabus he uses to teach Indian politics in America
would “invite arrest” at home, he fears.

So far, ideas for reforming India’s academia have not gained much
traction. In 2017 an “Institutions of Eminence” programme was
launched to scout for promising universities and reward them with
more autonomy and funds. But not enough suitable candidates could
be found.

Similarly, in 2020 the government launched a new National

Education Policy. It made bold recommendations to curb government
oversight over boards and top appointments. But reform will be
slow, not least because Indian states run by opposition parties are
protesting against it. And the policy’s proposal to switch from English
to Hindi at central universities and states with Hindi as their main
language would hold back any institution trying to compete in a
global academic system.

The rise of private universities could be India’s best hope. Two

decades ago there were fewer than 20 of them. Today that figure is
over 400, or around a quarter of total academic enrolments in India.
They have shiny campuses, mostly funded by big industrial groups.
Many are snapping up foreign faculty members.

Saumen Chattopadhyay, an education specialist at Jawaharlal Nehru

University, believes the new crop of private universities will
outperform public ones like his—precisely because they have more
freedom. Exempted from the public sector’s expansive affirmative-
action programme and government say over appointments, vice-
chancellors at private outfits can poach top talent as they see fit. If
the government finds a way of supporting private universities from a
respectful distance, India’s league-table game might pick up. ■

Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India,

our free weekly newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/05/can-india-create-its-own-ivy-league

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Banyan

The mystery of China’s

missing military
Why the PLA has ducked a brawl with America
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

CHINESE MILITARY folks have never been great communicators. For

most of the 15 years that Banyan reported from Beijing, the only
way to seek comment from the defence ministry was to send a fax.
A response would often come weeks later, if at all. The regular news
conferences that it launched in 2011 are still dominated by scripted
questions from state media. People’s Liberation Army personnel must
have special permission to speak with foreigners. And those who do
are often professional “barbarian handlers” specially trained to
manage contacts with outsiders—and reveal as little as possible
about the PLA.

One exception in recent years was the Shangri-La Dialogue, a

gathering of defence ministers, military commanders and spy chiefs
in Singapore. The PLA delegation was usually led by China’s defence
minister and given a relatively free rein to talk to foreigners. This
year was different. China’s defence minister, Dong Jun, stayed away.
Its delegation was headed by a rear admiral. It held none of the
press conferences or group interviews of previous years. PLA
delegates did their best to avoid journalists. “Please understand,”
one pleaded as Banyan chased him down a corridor. “Maybe next
year?”

The low-profile Chinese showing, in effect, ceded the space to

America. Without its defence minister, China was denied a chance to
address the entire audience. And Pete Hegseth, America’s defence
secretary, sought to capitalise on his counterpart’s absence in a
speech in which he reaffirmed American commitments to the region
and suggested a Chinese attack on Taiwan was imminent. “We are
here this morning—and somebody else isn’t,” Mr Hegseth said.

Even the Philippines had a bigger platform than China this year. The
Philippines’ defence minister, Gilberto Teodoro, used his speech to
defend his country’s efforts to challenge Chinese maritime claims in
the South China Sea. Two relatively junior PLA officers tried to push
back in a question-and-answer session, suggesting that the
Philippines was an American proxy. “Thank you for the propaganda
spiels disguised as questions,” Mr Teodoro responded, prompting
laughter.

What explains China’s pared-down presence? When its delegation

chief, Rear Admiral Hu Gangfeng, did speak (on a panel at a side
session), he said it was “normal work arrangements” to vary Chinese
representation at the conference. True, China has not always sent a
defence minister. But it has done so since 2019.
Some participants saw a link to recent scandals in the PLA. Since
2023 senior Chinese military commanders, including two former
defence ministers and the most senior admiral, have been put under
investigation for corruption or indiscipline. Another has not been
seen in public since March. Defence ministers at the forum have to
take questions and China may have wanted to avoid a public grilling
on the topic.

China may also have been too uncertain about its relations with
America to risk a public confrontation. One Chinese academic at the
forum who did engage with foreign media said China’s priorities
were to manage the trade war with America and pave the way for a
potential meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. It
anticipated that Mr Hegseth would deliver a more strident speech at
the conference than his recent predecessors. But it did not want to
overreact, partly because it was unsure to what extent he speaks for
Mr Trump.

A third theory is that China has become frustrated with the Shangri-
La Dialogue. It has always disliked the format, which favours candid,
unscripted debate. It also sees the gathering as increasingly pro-
Western, especially as European governments have lately boosted
their presence. And it may hope to boost its would-be equivalent,
the Xiangshan Forum in Beijing.

Whatever the rationale, the results were mixed. China lost an

opportunity to present itself as a reliable regional partner by offering
concessions to neighbours. It could have pulled off a diplomatic
coup. Still, it sees no need for compromise while America is
indulging in self-harm. And China will not suffer lasting damage from
the rhetorical blows.

Mr Hegseth, meanwhile, made some headway in reassuring the

region on security. But he did not address the most pressing
concern: American trade tariffs. And some participants noted that his
position in America’s new political order was now more akin to that
of China’s defence minister, who holds little power in a system
dominated by one man.■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/06/05/the-mystery-of-chinas-missing-military

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

China
China is waking up from its property
nightmare
The Chinese economy :: An ecstatic $38m luxury-mansion auction lights up the
market

Chinese students want an American

education less than they used to
Studying abroad isn’t so sexy :: Many are staying at home or studying elsewhere in
Asia

Now China’s ultra-cheap EVs are scaring

China
Race to the bottom :: They highlight many of the economy’s current problems

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

The Chinese economy

China is waking up from its

property nightmare
An ecstatic $38m luxury-mansion auction lights up the market
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | SHANGHAI

CHINA’S ECONOMY has been through a stress test in the past six
months with the trade war shredding nerves. Tensions over tariffs
are not over yet. On May 29th Scott Bessent, America’s treasury
secretary, said that talks had “stalled”. President Donald Trump then
exchanged accusations with China’s ministry of commerce about
who had violated the agreement reached on May 12th to reduce
duties. On June 4th, Mr Trump wrote on social media that President
Xi Jinping was “extremely hard to make a deal with”. Yet even as the
trade war staggers on, two things may be reassuring Mr Xi. One is
that so far the economy has been resilient. Private-sector growth
estimates for 2025 remain in the 4-5% range. The other is that one
of China’s biggest economic nightmares seems to be ending: the
savage property crunch.

To get a glimpse of that, consider a gated home in Shanghai’s

Changning district. It has an air of traditional German architecture
and a large front garden, a feature of the city’s most ritzy
neighbourhoods. But what really stands out is the price. On May
27th the property sold for a stonking 270m yuan ($38m), creating a
sensation in the Chinese press. At 500,000 yuan per square metre, it
is one of the priciest home auctions in recent memory. That the
wealthy are prepared to pony up such an exorbitant price is being
interpreted as a sign that China’s huge and interminable property
crisis might finally be ending.

Speculation about a turnaround has been building over dinner

tables, in boardrooms and at state-planning symposiums. The
excitement is hardly surprising. Property, broadly defined,
contributed about 25% of GDP on the eve of its crash in 2020. It
now represents 15% or less, showing how the slump has been a
huge drag on GDP growth. The depressive impact of falling prices on
ordinary folk is hard to overstate. In 2021, 80% of household wealth
was tied up in real estate; that figure has fallen to around 70%.
Hundreds of developers have gone bust, leaving a tangle of unpaid
bills. The dampening of confidence helps explain sluggish consumer
demand.

While the market is still falling, you can make a decent case for the
first time since the start of the crisis that the end is in sight. In the
first four months of 2025 sales of new homes by value fell by less
than 3% compared with the year before. In 2024 the decline was
17%. Transactions will continue to drop only modestly this year,
reckon analysts at S&P Global, a rating agency.
One of the biggest problems was that millions of flats were built but
never sold. Last year as many as 80m stood dormant. Now in the
“tier-one” cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, that
problem is easing. At the end of January the inventory held by
developers in those cities would have taken around twelve and a half
months to shift at current sales rates, according to CRIC, a property
data service. That is down from nearly 20 months in July 2024, and
not far from the average of ten months in 2016-19 across the
country’s 100 largest cities. In other words, the overhang is starting
to look less terrifying.

Shanghai’s renaissance illustrates the trend. Transactions rose

slightly each month from February to April compared with the year
before, making it one of the few cities where prices have risen year
on year for months in a row. It still has controls over who can buy
properties and how many. But luxury homes are starting to be
snapped up quickly, says Ms Fang, an estate agent. The prices of
standard properties will probably continue to grow this year, she
says, but the most expensive homes are increasing in value even
faster.

Bottoms up

What explains the bottoming out? Partly, just the passage of time.
The average housing crash takes four years to play out, according to
a study by the IMF of house-price crashes from 1970 to 2003.
Officials in Beijing started deflating the bubble by tightening
developers’ access to credit in mid-2020 and investors started to
panic about the solvency of the monster developers at the end of
that year. But the government is also more determined than ever to
put an end to the downturn. Local governments have been
encouraged to buy unused land and excess housing with proceeds
from special bonds. Some are handing out subsidies for buying
homes. A plan to renovate shantytowns could create demand for 1m
homes. The central bank cut interest rates in May, reducing
mortgage rates for new home purchases. This has boosted property
sales activity, says Guo Shan of Hutong Research, a consultancy.

There are still dangers. The trade war is a drag on confidence. Home
prices across 70 cities surveyed by the National Bureau of Statistics
declined by about 2% in April from a month earlier. Sales of new
homes and the starting and completion of housing projects all fell
month on month. Fewer cities in April notched up month-on-month
price rises compared with the month before. Things are not getting
much worse but they will probably not get better without more
government support, says Larry Hu of Macquarie, a bank.

In Wenzhou, a manufacturing city on China’s south-eastern coast,

price declines are still sharp. Locals say the trade war with America
is shaking confidence. Mr Zhou, a restaurant owner, says the official
data do not capture huge discounts of more than 50% on some new
homes in overbuilt areas. He blames a manufacturing downturn—
and Mr Trump’s trade war.

In all probability the crisis is over in big rich cities, such as Shanghai,
but may last longer in smaller cities, such as Wenzhou. New-home
prices in first-tier cities will be flat this year and increase by 1% next
year, according to S&P. But in third-tier cities and below they will fall
by 4% this year and 2% next. Small cities are full of unwanted
homes. China is escaping its property nightmare. Even so, the
Communist Party must ensure it is not only big-ticket mansions in
Shanghai that look appealing. ■

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.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/06/01/china-is-waking-up-from-its-property-
nightmare

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Studying abroad isn’t so sexy

Chinese students want an

American education less than
they used to
Many are staying at home or studying elsewhere in Asia
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | BEIJING

IT HAS BEEN a difficult week for Chinese students in America. On

May 28th the State Department announced a campaign to start
“aggressively” revoking their visas. One of the targets will be
Chinese students in “critical fields”, the science and engineering
programmes that are deemed to be of strategic interest to China.
Another will be those who have unspecified “connections” to the
Communist Party. It is unclear exactly how wide the net will be cast
and how many students will be forced to leave. But for young people
in China thinking about where to study, America now looks a dicey
proposition.

It was losing its shine long before the latest visa policies. The
number of Chinese students there peaked in the 2019-20 academic
year, at around 372,000. It then fell sharply, largely thanks to China’s
strict covid-19 controls, and never recovered. In the 2023-24
academic year around 277,000 Chinese were studying in America.
Increasingly, middle-class Chinese parents see it as too expensive
and too risky a prospect for their children. They can find much of
what its universities offer in other countries or at home.

Since China opened up in the late 1970s, some 3m young Chinese

have gone to study in America. Many have settled there. Others
have come back, typically to pick up a fancy job. They are known as
haigui (sea turtles), a homophone for “returning from across the
sea”. America’s Ivy League became something of a finishing school
for the children of the well-heeled in Beijing and Shanghai. President
Xi Jinping’s daughter was an undergraduate at Harvard. Mid-career
party officials have also gone to America to learn about modern
governance.

But for many Chinese the perceived return on investment of an

American education has been falling. It has always been expensive,
and these days middle-class families are less willing to shell out amid
an economic downturn and a slump in the property market. They
can choose cheaper universities in Britain, for instance, which in the
2023-24 academic year hosted nearly 150,000 Chinese students. Of
late more have been going to Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere
in Asia. Classes are often taught in English, and they are seen as
friendlier places to study. The number of Chinese students in Japan
increased to 115,000 in 2023 from under 100,000 in 2019.

An overseas degree is also less useful than it was in China’s grim job
market. Many of the foreign consultancies and law firms which once
snapped up haigui have downsized their China operations, says one
tutor who helps Chinese students apply for American colleges.

Like many young Chinese these days, Mr Lei, an economics

undergraduate, dreams of finding a stable position at home after
graduation, in the Chinese government or in a state-owned
company. Such employers are often now suspicious of graduates
with a foreign education, he says. In April Dong Mingzhu,
chairwoman of Gree Electric, a large appliance manufacturer, said
her company did not hire haigui in case they had been recruited as
spies by foreigners.

Meanwhile China’s own top universities are increasingly competitive

and attractive, especially in fields such as science and engineering.
“China can catch up with and even surpass America,” reckons one
biology PhD student at the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing
(ranked 20th in the world according to QS World University
Rankings; Peking University, next door, is ranked 14th). “It just
needs a bit more time.” Just look at his own professors, he says. The
older ones all have degrees from American universities. The younger
ones were typically educated in China.

Sea turtles all the way down

All these factors are going to mean the total number of Chinese
studying overseas will probably start to fall soon, reckons Julian
Fisher, of Venture Education, a consultancy. In part this is because
China’s low birth rate has shrunk the size of future generations of
students. But it is also because parents of young children are
increasingly deciding to put them on a domestic education track,
rather than applying to the international schools which could lead to
a foreign university, says Mr Fisher. That has created a “time-bomb”
in the international education system, he says. It will rock the
institutions which have grown dependent on Chinese students’ cash.
Many students at home do not seem too dismayed by America’s new
visa policies. Mr Li, a masters student researching satellite
propulsion at Beihang University in Beijing, says he can understand
why America does not want to let Chinese citizens into its high-tech
programmes (Beihang graduates have been banned from studying in
America since 2020 because of the university’s close links to China’s
armed forces). But he sees a silver lining. “People who can go study
overseas tend to be pretty impressive. So if they stay, it will help
domestic research and development,” he says. “We can’t change
how America is acting,” says Mr Zhang, another doctoral researcher.
“So long as we’re developing well, then everything is an
opportunity.” ■

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.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/06/05/chinese-students-want-an-american-
education-less-than-they-used-to

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Race to the bottom

Now China’s ultra-cheap EVs

are scaring China
They highlight many of the economy’s current problems
6月 05, 2025 08:33 上午 | BEIJING

Xi’s electric

CHINA’S ABILITY to make electric vehicles (EVs) cheaply has caused

angst in countries with big carmakers, prompting governments to
investigate China’s subsidies for the sector and to erect trade
barriers. Now, though, it is China’s own government that is worrying
about how cheap its producers’ EVs are. The race to the bottom
shows no sign of letting up, and the industry has become
emblematic of some of the broader problems facing the economy.
On May 23rd China’s biggest EV manufacturer, BYD, caused
shockwaves when it slashed the cost of 22 electric and hybrid
models. Now the starting price of its cheapest model, the Seagull,
has fallen to a mere 55,800 yuan ($7,700). The move came just two
years after BYD had originally unveiled the electric hatchback, at a
then astonishingly low cost of 73,800 yuan.

The latest move triggered official concern about how low prices
could go in the world’s largest car market. On May 31st China’s
industry ministry told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that “there
are no winners in the price war, let alone a future.” The ministry
vowed to curb cut-throat competition, which it said harmed
investment in R&D, and could cause safety problems. On June 1st
People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, argued that low-
priced, low-quality products could harm the reputation of “made-in-
China” goods.

The backlash comes as leaders crack down on unproductive, self-

harming competition between firms and local governments that has
created overcapacity and lowered profits. Their moves are part of a
broader effort to rebalance the economy. “Recent developments
suggest the old supply-driven model remains intact,” Robin Xing,
Morgan Stanley’s chief China economist, wrote in a note.

BYD’s shares fell after the price cuts and the official
pronouncements, amid concerns that the price war will be
unsustainable. But to cling to market share, other carmakers cut
their own prices. Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motor, one of
the largest, called the industry unhealthy and invoked the collapse of
the property market as a cautionary tale. “Now, the Evergrande of
the automobile industry already exists, but it just hasn’t exploded
yet,” he told Sina Finance, a news outlet, referring to the world’s
most-indebted developer. A BYD executive responded that Mr Wei’s
comments were “alarmist”.
The situation is not helped by the fact that there are 115 Chinese EV
brands, according to Jato Dynamics, a research firm. Only a few,
including BYD, make any money and are expected to survive in the
long run. Brutal price wars are a common affliction across Chinese
industries. By the end of last year’s third quarter, nearly 25% of
China’s listed firms were in the red, more than double the proportion
five years ago.

Panic in Detroit

Consolidation will take time and will be painful. BYD is well

positioned, given its scale and vertical integration. The firm controls
everything from mining rights of minerals it needs to build its own
batteries to cargo ships for transporting its cars to foreign markets.
In November it sparked fears of even fiercer competition when it
pressed suppliers to cut prices by 10%. Suppliers may now be
squeezed further. That could mean layoffs and less money for car
workers to spend, at a time when the government is playing up the
need to boost weak domestic demand to help absorb the shock of
the trade war with America.

An increasingly tough market at home will fuel Chinese car exports.

Reuters reports that BYD plans to sell over half of its cars overseas,
especially in Latin America and Europe, by 2030. That would be a
big jump. China accounted for about 90% of the firm’s 4.3m car
sales last year. But the higher prices that EVs command abroad
could offset the ever-smaller margins in China. And it is making
inroads in spite of stronger trade headwinds. In April, despite the
EU’s increased tariffs on Chinese EVs, BYD sold more of them in
Europe than Tesla, an American rival, for the first time, according to
Jato Dynamics

Though the price war is at its worst in China, its ramifications will be
felt worldwide. Cheaper EVs would be a silver lining, but that will be
little comfort for governments already anxious about China exporting
overcapacity to their markets. More trade tensions are inevitable. ■
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.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/06/05/now-chinas-ultra-cheap-evs-are-scaring-
china

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

United States
Meet SCOTUSbot, our AI tool to predict
Supreme Court rulings
Trial run :: Impending decisions will be a test of our model

Pete Hegseth once scared America’s allies.

Now he reassures them
The neo-neo-con :: The defence secretary is a MAGA radical at home but a globalist
abroad

Elon Musk’s failure in government

DOGE bites man :: His legacy will be to make reform even harder

Police are cracking down on cyclists in New

York City
Squeezing the brakes :: The lycra-clad are getting swept up in problems around e-
bikes

California’s carbon market reaches an

inflection point
Cap and fade :: With ramifications for the West Coast and beyond

What a New Jersey election says about

MAGA America
Primary colours :: Republican moderates have converted and Democrats are divided

Why stricter voting laws no longer help

Republicans
Election daze :: The party is pushing tougher requirements anyway

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Trial run

Meet SCOTUSbot, our AI tool

to predict Supreme Court
rulings
Impending decisions will be a test of our model
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | NEW YORK

THIS JUNE may be the most harried for the Supreme Court’s justices
in some time. On top of 30-odd rulings due by Independence Day,
the court faces a steady stream of emergency pleas. Over 16 years,
George W. Bush and Barack Obama filed a total of eight emergency
applications in the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). In the past 20 weeks,
as many of his executive orders have been blocked by lower courts,
Donald Trump has filed 18.
Into this maelstrom, The Economist is introducing a tool to help
analyse how the high court is acquitting itself under pressure. A year
ago Adam Unikowsky, a frequent litigator before the justices, asked
Claude, Anthropic’s large language model (LLM), to decide 37
Supreme Court cases. Claude’s decision matched the court’s 27
times. Inspired by this example, we tested several models of our
own and settled on o3, OpenAI’s best reasoning engine for ChatGPT.
We fed our SCOTUSbot the main briefs and oral-argument
transcripts for ten of the court’s biggest pending cases—plus three
cases that have already been decided—and asked it to predict how
each justice would vote and why.

For good measure, we repeated each of the 13 queries at least ten

times: these models are statistical beasts that reason with
probabilities and do not always come to the same conclusion. Then
we ran each case through the bot (again, ten times) without the oral
arguments. For each iteration we requested a justice-by-justice roll
call, with brief explanations of their votes and a 400-word majority
opinion.

Our beta version of SCOTUSbot does not threaten to replace human

analysis of the Supreme Court’s work. But it offers a lens on AI itself:
how reliably it can predict case outcomes, how much light oral
arguments may shed on those predictions and whether, when AI
gets it wrong, this says more about the limits of LLMs or the
unpredictability of the justices themselves. If the justices faithfully
follow legal principles, an AI aware of all the precedents ought to
predict their votes fairly reliably. If politics drives some decisions, the
patterns may be less clear.

SCOTUSbot nailed the three sample rulings: Bondi v VanDerStok

(allowing the government to regulate ghost guns as firearms), Food
and Drug Administration v Wages and White Lion (allowing the FDA
to reject sweet vape flavours that attract children) and Seven County
Infrastructure Coalition v Eagle County (greenlighting the
construction of a railway carrying crude oil in Utah). Our model was
very close on the votes, too. It showed its savvy even when it
committed one apparent error: SCOTUSbot predicted three
dissenters in Seven County, a case that in reality came out
unanimously. As it happened, the trio of liberal justices identified by
SCOTUSbot did indeed write separately to defend a more restrained
approach.

What about the ten impending decisions? SCOTUSbot predicts broad

agreement among the justices in three. Ames v Ohio involves a
woman who says she was demoted because she is heterosexual; the
question is how hard it should be to claim “reverse discrimination” in
the workplace under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The
model predicts a unanimous decision that courts may not “demand
extra proof from some plaintiffs based solely on their demographic
status”. Only one or two dissenters are projected in Kennedy v
Braidwood Management, a challenge to free preventive health
services guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act. SCOTUSbot
reckons the plaintiffs will lose.

A 9-0 or 8-1 decision may also be coming in Catholic Charities

Bureau v Wisconsin Labour & Industry Review Commission, which
asks if Wisconsin must give a Catholic charitable group the same
state-tax exemption that churches and other religious organisations
enjoy. Based only on the briefs, SCOTUSbot predicted an ideological
6-3 split. But after hearing the liberal justices’ support for Catholic
Charities in the oral argument, it settled on a 9-0 or 8-1 result—
suggesting oral arguments can reveal considerations that briefs
alone miss. This is also evident in Trump v CASA, Mr Trump’s
attempt to rescind the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright
citizenship by eliminating nationwide injunctions. After reading the
transcript, SCOTUSbot became more resolute in its prediction that
Mr Trump will lose, 7-2.

Two cases are more likely to split the justices 6-3 along familiar
conservative-liberal lines. In Medina v Planned Parenthood South
Atlantic, the majority seems amenable to South Carolina’s position
that it can block its residents enrolled in Medicaid from receiving
care in Planned Parenthood clinics. In Mahmoud v Taylor the six
conservatives seem keen on allowing religious parents to pull their
children out of public-school classrooms so as to avoid exposing
them to LGBT-themed books. But in Federal Communications
Commission v Consumers’ Research, SCOTUSbot predicts a different
6-3 majority to let the FCC collect fees to subsidise telephone and
internet service in underserved areas. Only Justices Samuel Alito,
Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas seem poised to dissent.

Our AI model is not always sure of itself. Does Louisiana’s latest

congressional map with a second majority-black district violate the
14th Amendment? Probably not, but SCOTUSbot is less confident
than usual. Can Texas require age-verification for online
pornography? Free Speech Coalition v Paxton came out both ways in
the bot’s repeated iterations, but it seems this clash will turn on
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett
Kavanaugh. The bot was downright Solomonic in United States v
Skrmetti, concerning whether Tennessee can ban puberty blockers
and cross-sex hormones for transgender teenagers. In ten run-
throughs, the state won five times and lost in the other five.

In addition to these moments of uncertainty, SCOTUSbot seems

susceptible to blowing a fuse. Occasionally it provides analysis of the
wrong case. When we deprive it of the oral arguments, the bot can
be unhinged: “Williams: majority opinion. Jones: Concurring on
points, disagreeing with others…Petitioner wins 2-2.” We’re still
getting to know our SCOTUSbot; culling nonsense from cogent
analysis is part of the relationship. And on the decisions that attract
the most political interest—the emergency cases brought by the
Trump administration—SCOTUSbot is silent because these are
typically addressed without oral arguments.

Lessons of this beta test will become clear after this month’s
decisions are handed down. When we have those, we will examine
the predictions and whether cases that flummox our bot split the
justices in novel ways. But SCOTUSbot is unequivocal about
how Trump v United States—last year’s presidential-immunity case—
should have come out: 7-2 or 9-0, it insists, against Mr Trump
(rather than 6-3 in his favour). A new precedent, it says, might
establish “a monolithic rule” that does “unacceptable violence to
fundamental legal principles and risks rendering the president ‘above
the law’”. The justices saw it differently. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/04/meet-scotusbot-our-ai-tool-to-predict-supreme-court-rulings

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

The neo-neo-con

Pete Hegseth once scared

America’s allies. Now he
reassures them
The defence secretary is a MAGA radical at home but a globalist
abroad
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | SINGAPORE

TO SOME HE embodies the “revenge of the field-grade officers”, the

angry mid-ranking veterans who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan
with loathing for the politicians and generals who sent them to fight
losing wars. Pete Hegseth, a former army major and now America’s
defence secretary, celebrates soldiers “with dust on their boots”. But
though he may be a MAGA radical at home, there are signs that he
is turning into a surprisingly conventional American globalist abroad.

Begin with the disrupter. In the name of restoring the “warrior

ethos”, he has fired prominent black and female commanders,
banished transgender soldiers and banned books promoting “woke”
ideas. He has also been obsessed with leaks, sacking staff suspected
of disloyalty. As a “recovering neocon”, he shocked European allies in
February by appearing to forsake Ukraine and NATO. “President
Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” he
warned.

Yet on May 31st he presented an altogether more reassuring and

familiar American persona at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual
Asian security conference in Singapore organised by the
International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think-tank. Mr
Hegseth described allies not as a burden, but as “force multipliers”.
As he put it, “America First certainly does not mean America alone.”

Mr Hegseth told Asian allies that America had their backs: “We are
here to stay.” And rather than berate Europeans, he held them up as
models for Asia to emulate as they rushed to re-arm. He warned
that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan “could be imminent” and implied
any assault would lead to war with America. “We will not be pushed
out of this critical region, and we will not let our allies and partners
be subordinated and intimidated,” he insisted.

For all his bellicose tone—China warned him not to “play with fire”—
many in the audience welcomed his comments as a return to
normality. Mr Trump, after all, has accused Taiwan of “stealing”
America’s chip industry. Even such erstwhile defenders of the island
as Elbridge Colby, recently confirmed as the Pentagon’s under-
secretary for policy, seemed to want America to stand back when he
said a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would not be an “existential”
threat. In Mr Hegseth’s telling, it “would result in devastating
consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world”.
Foreign interlocutors who meet him are pleasantly surprised. “He is
not a caricature. He listens,” says one. The forthcoming defence
budget, and decisions about force deployments globally, will reveal
much about his philosophy. He has privately assured NATO that any
drawdown in Europe will be done “responsibly”. South Korea worries
about American troop withdrawals, too.

How to explain Mr Hegseth’s duality as a culture warrior at home

and apparent upholder of the status quo overseas? He has not given
up being the grunts’ champion. Before dawn Mr Hegseth set out for
physical training with the troops, doing jumping jacks and push-ups
with the crew of the USS Dewey, a guided-missile destroyer docked
at the island.

Those who know him say it comes down to him being a “half-trained
Jedi”. He has fierce views about masculinity and loyalty to the
“trigger-pullers”. But he is out of his depth in one of the world’s most
complex bureaucracies, which explains the managerial chaos.
Although a Princeton graduate, he lacks fully formed views on
geopolitics, never having gone to war college or worked at a think-
tank or in Congress. (After his service, Mr Hegseth ran veterans’
organisations and became a Fox TV host). Thus, some surmise, on
matters of strategy he may be deferring to the very generals he
claims to despise.

Many abroad, and even some critics at home, see signs that Mr
Hegseth is learning fast. His former associates, though, worry he is
being tempted away from the MAGA faith. The question for all is
whether the new-look Mr Hegseth speaks for Mr Trump, or will be
disowned by him. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/05/pete-hegseth-once-scared-americas-allies-now-he-reassures-them

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

DOGE bites man

Elon Musk’s failure in

government
His legacy will be to make reform even harder
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | CHICAGO

WHEN DONALD TRUMP announced last November that Elon Musk

would be heading a government-efficiency initiative, many of his
fellow magnates were delighted. The idea, wrote Shaun Maguire, a
partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm, was “one of the
greatest things I’ve ever read”. Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund
manager, wrote his own three-step guide to how the Department of
Government Efficiency, or “DOGE”, could influence government
policy. Even Bernie Sanders, a left-wing senator, tweeted hedged
support, saying that Mr Musk was “right”, pointing to waste and
fraud in the defence budget.

America’s government needs to change. Mr Musk has built several

remarkable businesses in areas that seemed impossible. That he
could help seemed plausible. And yet just a few months in, most in
Washington think DOGE is a failure, and Mr Musk is on the way out.
Was this inevitable? And what does it say about the future of
government reform?

Mr Musk announced his departure from government service on May

28th, via a post on X, his social-media platform. Steve Davis, a
lieutenant of his who had reportedly run much of the operation, is
also stepping down. Katie Miller, who had served as DOGE’s
spokesperson, is leaving too. Two days later Mr Musk appeared at a
press conference with Mr Trump sporting a black eye, which he said
was given to him by his five-year-old son, also called X. The
departure was not absolute, Mr Trump insisted: Mr Musk will still
advise. But he presented Mr Musk with a golden key.

Despite the bonhomie, Mr Musk seems to have fallen out with his
one-time “best buddy”. In an interview with CBS aired before his
departure he criticised Mr Trump’s new tax bill for undermining his
cost-cutting efforts. He did not want “to take responsibility for
everything”, he said. Since leaving, he has tweeted that the bill is a
“disgusting abomination”.

Mr Musk has also failed to fulfil his promises. Having pledged to save
$2trn in federal spending, he eviscerated foreign aid and sent tens of
thousands of workers packing. But foreign aid and federal salaries
together made up only 6% of government spending. By DOGE’s own
dubious accounting, $175bn of savings were made. According to
Treasury figures, spending overall in fact continued to rise.

Mr Musk’s efficiency drive seemed grounded in conspiracy theories.

Democrats, Mr Musk argued, had turned the government into a
device for funnelling money to illegal immigrants. The federal
workforce, he reckoned, was riddled with ghost employees who did
not actually exist. None of it was true. According to a recent report
in the New York Times, Mr Musk’s belief in this nonsense coincided
with him consuming prodigal amounts of powerful drugs. (He denies
the report.)

Fraud and improper payments may genuinely cost hundreds of

billions a year, according to estimates from the Government
Accountability Office. But to uncover these abuses and errors
requires forensic accountants and people with a deep grasp of policy.
Mr Musk quickly alienated those experts. Mass firings meanwhile got
bogged down in lawsuits. In the end, most departments have been
forced to make cuts via the traditional legal process, with protection
given based on seniority and veteran status.

Mr Musk has, however, made changes. His biggest impact is abroad.

According to modelled predictions by Brooke Nichols of Boston
University, cuts to foreign aid could have already caused 300,000
deaths. Bill Gates, a fellow-billionaire and philanthropist, has accused
him of “killing the world’s poorest children”. In Washington the
group’s young engineers have acted like enforcers for Mr Trump’s
theory of absolute executive power. Those who resisted—like the
United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally established think-
tank—were shut down by brute force. (The institute has since
reopened, after a court ruling. On re-entering the building, cleaners
found marijuana apparently thrown out by DOGE staffers.)

The irony is that a smaller, more focused form of DOGE’s

intervention would have been helpful. “The underlying proposition
that our government needs to be modernised...is a very right one”,
says Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, a charity.
Important work is tied up by stifling thickets of red tape. Mr Musk’s
intuition that many rules can and perhaps should be broken was
correct. Sadly, thanks to DOGE’s actions, should another
administration ever try a more purposeful reform effort, it may be all
the harder. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/02/elon-musks-failure-in-government

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Squeezing the brakes

Police are cracking down on

cyclists in New York City
The lycra-clad are getting swept up in problems around e-bikes
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | NEW YORK

Wheels of injustice

PITY THE cyclists of New York City. As well as having to slalom

double-parked cars and piles of rubbish, they only get a few weeks a
year without oppressive humidity or frigid cold. And this spring, even
their meteorological bliss has been disturbed. The New York Police
Department (NYPD) has started issuing criminal summonses for bike
riders committing a slew of seemingly low-level fouls. Now, if caught
running red lights, stopping in the pedestrian crossing or wearing
headphones, wayward cyclists must appear before a judge, even if
they are not contesting the fine. If they do not, they risk arrest.

Oddly, this is a steeper punishment than drivers get for such

offences. Both pedal and electric bikes are being targeted by the
rules. Enforcement is up by a factor of 100 compared to this time
last year. Cyclists are understandably miffed. It is “insane”, says Carl
Mahaney of Open Plans, an advocacy group, since most deaths and
injuries are caused by motorists. Indeed, of the 449 pedestrian
deaths in the city between 2020 and 2023, electric bikes, scooters
and mopeds led to just eight of them.

Yet cyclists are a growing nuisance. E-bikes have become ubiquitous

in the city since they were legalised in 2020, coinciding with a
pandemic-era rise in food delivery. Under pressure from delivery
apps (and hungry New Yorkers) to bring food as quickly as possible,
riders go well beyond the city speed limit. “Every New Yorker
understands how frightening it is to jump out of the way as an e-
bike drives on the sidewalk,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch
wrote in an op-ed for The New York Post, explaining the new
enforcement.

E-bike riders are “one of the top, if not the single, highest generator
of complaints” from constituents, says Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a state
senator representing the Upper West Side. But despite the moans,
the city and state have so far failed to regulate them. Mr Hoylman-
Sigal supports putting licence-plates on commercial e-bikes, so that
violators can be held accountable. But such proposals have gone flat
due, in part, to a desire to protect the largely immigrant delivery
drivers.

The two-wheeled lobby would prefer, predictably, more bike lanes

and tighter regulation of delivery apps, requiring them to give more
generous journey times to workers. Cyclists are coming up with
shorter-term solutions. Pelotons of bell-ringing protesters have filled
downtown Manhattan. On Reddit forums, some are trying to map
police hotspots. Others suggest simply not stopping when pulled
over. Next up: lycra-clad police chases on Park Avenue. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/05/police-are-cracking-down-on-cyclists-in-new-york-city

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Cap and fade

California’s carbon market

reaches an inflection point
With ramifications for the West Coast and beyond
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Los Angeles

Coast not clear

IT WAS THE equivalent of a warning siren. The results of California’s

latest auction of carbon allowances, released on May 29th, showed
that prices had hit the floor. Each quarter companies shell out for
credits that cover their greenhouse-gas emissions. Demand is weak,
and lower revenues from the auction are bad news for lawmakers
who are already trying to plug a $12bn budget deficit. The poor
showing is also a signal that firms are not confident that California’s
cap-and-trade programme, the fourth-largest carbon market in the
world, will continue to exist.

America is a laggard when it comes to putting a price on carbon.

The last time Congress seriously considered (and declined to adopt)
a federal cap-and-trade scheme, Barack Obama had just been
inaugurated and Lady Gaga was headlining her first tour. Some
states, mostly Democratic, have been more aggressive. A consortium
of east-coast states created an emissions-trading programme for
their power sectors back in 2005. California implemented its
economy-wide carbon market in 2013; Washington followed in 2023.
But California’s plummeting prices portend trouble. New policies
hashed out (or not) in West Coast legislatures over the next few
months could determine whether more states move towards an
integrated carbon market or the markets that do exist fall apart. The
outcome could affect America’s emissions levels.

California’s cap-and-trade problems began at the programme’s birth.

Rather than authorising the system for as long as it would take to
reach net-zero emissions—the state reckons it can do this by 2045,
though that is up for debate—lawmakers gave the green light only
until 2020. Eventually they extended the programme until 2030.
Firms that stockpiled allowances when prices were cheaper are
skipping auctions while they wait to see if cap-and-trade persists.
“The state kicked the can down the road for the better part of a
decade,” says Danny Cullenward, who sits on California’s
Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee.

Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, wants to reauthorise cap-and-

trade via the annual budget bill, which must pass the legislature by
mid-June. His sense of urgency is needed. But there are questions
about how well the programme works that would not be solved by a
blanket reauthorisation, which leaves most of the details to the
California Air Resources Board (CARB), the air-pollution regulator.
What price ceiling would fill the state’s coffers without pushing
excessive costs onto consumers? What should the state spend its
auction winnings on? How to deal with carbon offsets? Lawmakers
are working on their own proposal. If no one acts, CARB can try to
save the programme. But a quirk in California’s constitution requires
a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature to enact a new tax.
Without that, the scheme could be vulnerable to legal challenges.

What happens in California matters elsewhere in the country.

Washington is exploring whether to link its carbon market to
California’s, which is already connected to Quebec’s. Because
California has a glut of allowances, a link would drop Washington’s
price, leaving the Evergreen State poorer. But a report from
Resources for the Future, a think-tank, suggests that overall
emissions in the region would decline. Washington is also looking for
stability. Last year a ballot measure to repeal cap-and-trade was
rejected, but it spooked the state’s climate hawks. Linking with
California “will ensure that if we do have more attacks on the
programme, that prices won’t dip”, says Altinay Karasapan of Climate
Solutions, a non-profit in Seattle.

Oregon is the slowpoke on the Left Coast. In 2019 and 2020

Republicans literally fled the Capitol building in Salem to avoid voting
on a cap-and trade bill. State agencies began enforcing an emissions
cap in 2024 but the programme has less staying power than it would
if it were enshrined in law. Last month several lawmakers
resurrected the idea.

Squint hard and it’s just possible to envision an integrated West

Coast carbon market. New Yorkers are fighting over whether to
implement their own scheme, and could one day join ranks. The
more states that join, the less those places have to worry about
leakage—firms and jobs moving to other states that don’t have a
price on carbon. Before any of that can happen, though, California
needs to decide if its carbon market will lead the country, or
languish.■
For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue,
our fortnightly subscriber-only newsletter, or visit our climate-change
hub.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/05/californias-carbon-market-reaches-an-inflection-point

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Primary colours

What a New Jersey election

says about MAGA America
Republican moderates have converted and Democrats are divided
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | MORRIS COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

NEW JERSEY’S gubernatorial election, held in odd-numbered years

following presidential contests, offers an early measure of how
Donald Trump is faring and how upcoming mid-term elections for
control of Congress are shaping up. The two major parties will
choose their candidates in a primary election on June 10th. Mr
Trump looms large; last November he came within six points of
pulling off a shocking upset here. Amid MAGA triumphalism in
Washington, Republicans and Democrats will define themselves by
who their voters select for what looks likely to be a competitive
November contest.

New Jersey Republicans have set the clearest direction: MAGA or

bust. Jack Ciattarelli, a former state lawmaker, is the favourite to win
on the 10th. He once decried Mr Trump as “out of step with the
Party of Lincoln” and “not fit to be President of the United States”.
Four years ago, when he narrowly lost the governor’s race to Phil
Murphy, the departing incumbent, he kept Mr Trump at a distance.
In keeping with the party’s drift, this year he embraced the president
and welcomed his endorsement. At a recent “tele-rally” for Mr
Ciattarelli, Mr Trump said: “New Jersey’s ready to pop out of that
blue horror show.”

There are about 800,000 more registered Democratic voters in the

state than there are Republicans. But here, as in other northeastern
and mid-Atlantic states that turn blue in presidential contests, voters
often elect Republicans for governor, Chris Christie most recently.
None of them have been as firmly aligned with Mr Trump as Mr
Ciattarelli now claims to be, however. “There is no room in the party
for a nominee who is not fully on board the Trump bandwagon at
this point,” says Micah Rasmussen of the Rebovich Institute for New
Jersey Politics, a research group.

New Jersey Democrats have a wide choice of candidates to lead the

fightback against Mr Trump in November. The front-runner is Mikie
Sherrill, a Congresswoman and former Navy helicopter pilot; she
often appears in campaign ads wearing a flight suit. She has racked
up endorsements from the county Democratic chairs, but it is no
longer clear how much that once-powerful New Jersey party
machine matters. Last year saw the demise of the archaic “county
line” system, which gave candidates backed by county chairs prime
real estate on the printed ballot.

Ms Sherrill’s lead is not insurmountable. In recent weeks she has

become a target for the five other Democrats in the running, who
range from good-governance mayors to unabashed progressives.
Before she pulled ahead, she and her rivals had been more
interested in beating up Mr Trump than one another. Josh
Gottheimer, a Congressman from northern New Jersey, released an
advert depicting him fighting Mr Trump in a boxing ring.

Steve Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, is not too far behind Ms
Sherrill in polls. He has built a statewide coalition of dozens of local
and state candidates as an alternative to county-chair support. Ras
Baraka, the progressive mayor of Newark, is running from the party’s
stalwart left. On June 3rd he sued federal officials over his recent
high-profile arrest outside an immigration detention centre, alleging
malicious prosecution and false arrest. The Democrats are also
fielding the head of the teachers’ union and Steve Sweeney, a union
official and a former president of the state senate.

Democrats will chart their course by imperfect means. New Jersey’s

primaries are not open to all voters; there is no ranked-choice
system; and only a plurality of votes is required to win the
nomination. Worryingly, a recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that
only 4% of voters even knew there was an election on June 10th. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/05/what-a-new-jersey-election-says-about-maga-america

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Election daze

Why stricter voting laws no

longer help Republicans
The party is pushing tougher requirements anyway
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | ATLANTA

“THE REPUBLICANS should pray for rain”—the title of a paper

published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom
of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each
inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by
1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge, because the party’s
affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was
inconvenient. Their opponents, less so.
The findings offered an empirical reason for Republicans to make
voting harder. The party had already adopted voting restrictions as
an ideological plank, one previously advanced by southern
Democrats courting white support in the Jim Crow era. In 2013 the
Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance system under the Voting
Rights Act that had forced southern states to vet changes to their
voting rules with the federal government. Alabama, Mississippi and
Texas immediately enacted voter ID laws that had been previously
blocked. Over the next decade 29 states passed nearly 100 bills to
restrict voting, and Donald Trump’s obsession with “election
integrity” became Republican doctrine.

Yet Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has scrambled the

voting coalitions that underpinned the pray-for-rain logic. Rich
people used to vote Republican and poor people Democratic. But the
correlation started to wane in the 2000s and ultimately flipped for
white voters when Mr Trump ran, according to research by Michael
Barber and Jeremy Pope at Brigham Young University. Poor blacks
and Hispanics still voted Democratic, but in 2024 they too moved to
the right. At the same time, voters without college degrees took to
the Republican Party and the college-educated moved in the other
direction. Today voters who may or may not bother to turn out for
elections no longer vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Having embraced voting restrictions for so long, Mr Trump and his

party are reluctant to abandon them, even if they no longer help
them win elections. In his second term the president is jostling for
even tighter rules. Among his barrage of executive orders just one
has dealt with elections, but it is one of his most constitutionally
ambitious. In it Mr Trump criticises America’s “patchwork of voting
methods” and calls for a national set of rules that require voters to
prove their citizenship before registering. The attorney-general, it
said, would also force states to stop counting absentee ballots that
arrive after election day. A judge blocked the order, writing that
Congress and the states set election rules under the constitution, not
the president. She noted that Congress is considering a similar bill
and Mr Trump should not “short-circuit” that. The SAVE Act, which
cleared the House in April, also requires voters to prove citizenship.
But it is very unlikely to pass the Senate.

States, however, are passing voter restrictions with gusto. Since

January at least 25 states have introduced new voter ID bills. Thirty
have bills related to citizenship verification and 26 are trying to
change the rules around absentee voting. Florida lawmakers decided
to punish non-citizens who vote with up to five years in prison, and
Wisconsin voters enshrined a voter ID requirement in their state’s
constitution in April. Americans want it to be harder to cheat in
elections and “that’s why states aren’t waiting for a solution from
Washington”, says Lee Schalk of the American Legislative Exchange
Council, a conservative group that writes model legislation. Indeed,
Gallup polling shows that more than 80% support stricter ID and
citizenship rules.
In every country in Europe voters must show ID at the polls. Would
even stricter rules affect election outcomes in America? Consider
Georgia, a swing state controlled by Republicans. When an omnibus
election bill that tightened voter ID rules passed in 2021, Stacey
Abrams, a Democrat who had run for governor, warned that it would
disenfranchise black voters. She called it “Jim Crow in a suit and tie”.
But turnout in the next year’s midterms surged, and a consensus
grew among election wonks that the suppression effect was
negligible. Analysis by the Brennan Centre for Justice, a public-policy
institute, found that the turnout gap between white and black voters
did widen in Georgia between 2020 and 2024. But the new rules
may not have been to blame. The drop-off was mostly limited to
younger black men, who were particularly unenthused by Kamala
Harris. Fewer young women of both races voted for the first time,
but white women slipped by more than black women.

Democrats across the country argue that new citizenship-verification

policies will cause confusion and tangle citizens in bureaucracy. The
hassle would be more justifiable if the new laws solved a problem,
but non-citizens rarely vote. An audit by Georgia’s secretary of state
from the summer of 2024 found just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2m on
the voter rolls. Most were registered before Georgia checked for
citizenship and had never cast a ballot.

Crow pie

The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is

minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics
of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict
voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor
prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer,
according to research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos.
Whereas in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by
3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in
party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even
tighter voting rules could now “easily be a wash” when it comes to
benefiting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos,
who studies elections at Harvard University.
Will Republicans change tack? After the 2020 election some
Republicans blamed Mr Trump’s loss on his tirades against mail-in
voting. By 2024 the party and Mr Trump himself had changed their
tune on it. In an ad titled “Swamp the Vote” Mr Trump encouraged
voters to “use every appropriate tool available to beat the
Democrats”, including absentee ballots. Republicans may again
decide that winning matters more than being consistent. But any
retreat from insisting on stricter rules around voting would be a tacit
admission that American elections are already safe and fair. ■

Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily

newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news,
and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington
columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the
issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/06/01/why-stricter-voting-laws-no-longer-help-republicans

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

The Americas
Swimming-pool economics haunt Latin
America
Still divided :: Its tax and welfare systems are shockingly bad at reducing inequality

Mexico’s ruling party, Morena, has captured

the judiciary
Cherry picked :: Turnout in Mexico’s judicial elections was pathetic. Morena’s favoured
candidates tended to prevail

Suriname’s chaotic democracy just chose

its first woman president
Multi-ethnic, mega-corrupt :: An oil windfall may make it harder for Jennifer
Geerlings-Simons to clean up the country

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Still divided

Swimming-pool economics
haunt Latin America
Its tax and welfare systems are shockingly bad at reducing inequality
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | MONTEVIDEO

TO SEE REALITY in the Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro, consider

the drone’s-eye view (pictured). A razor-straight line divides lush
gardens and smooth clay tennis courts from a mess of corrugated
iron roofs in one of the city’s “villas miserias”. Santa Fe in Mexico
City looks similar, the jewel-green of the golf club hemmed in by
endless concrete boxes of the city’s strugglers. Rio de Janeiro’s
favela of Rocinha sees makeshift dwellings spiral down the
mountain, all but crashing into the turquoise swimming pools below.
Such visceral inequality is the defining feature of Latin America’s
economies. The disparities in the region are rivalled only by those in
sub-Saharan Africa. Yet because inequality is usually lower in richer
places, and Latin America’s GDP per person four times that in Africa,
its inequality is extraordinary. Some countries such as Colombia and
Guatemala are extremely unequal, others such as Uruguay less so.
Yet there are no exceptions. The World Bank does not class a single
country in the region as “low-inequality”.

This shapes Latin America in countless ways beyond bird’s-eye

photography: physically, through the proliferation of high fences and
security cameras; politically, in populism and leftward lurches; and
economically, through low social mobility, large informal economies
and weak internal demand. The Economist will publish several
articles this year exploring this dynamic. To start, it helps to
understand why Latin America made good progress to reduce
inequality in the 2000s, and why that progress has slowed.
The most common way to measure inequality is the Gini coefficient.
This ranks a country’s income inequality between zero and one. Zero
means everyone in the country gets the same income; one means a
single person receives everything. Other kinds of inequality matter,
too, but none transcend income. Unequal access to good education
and health care are both outcomes of income inequality as well as
being important causes of it.
The broad trend in Latin America is clear: inequality rose through
the 1990s, peaked in about 2002 and then began to fall. Around
2014 the decline began to slow, and recently it has flatlined (see
chart 1). There are exceptions—the Gini coefficient is still falling,
though more slowly, in Peru and has been rising in Colombia—but
the overall trend is plain.

Two things drove the decline between 2000 and 2010. One was
government handouts. Conditional cash-transfer programmes such
as Bolsa Família in Brazil gave money to poor families if they sent
their children to school and for health check-ups. Across the region,
transfer programmes of all kinds accounted for about 20% of the fall
in inequality on average. A second factor mattered much more:
strong growth in wages for the poor. This accounted for over half of
the fall. The backdrop to this was a long period of robust economic
growth, helped along by a commodities boom. The lesson, says Ana
María Ibáñez of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), is that
“If we want to reduce inequality, we need to grow.”

There is a series of smaller problems, too. One is the heavy

influence of family background. A paper by Paolo Brunori of the
University of Florence and co-authors finds that more than half of
the current generation’s inequality is in effect inherited, largely as a
result of their parents’ level of education and type of jobs.
To see how this works, consider the cycle a family background can
set off. As Ms Ibáñez and co-authors explain, toddlers of richer
parents often get better food and more attention, so develop more
skills. This helps them take advantage of the better (often private)
schools they attend, which in turn push them on to university where
attendance strongly boosts earnings in Latin America, in large part
by helping students get formal jobs in big companies. Children born
into poorer families tend to go to worse schools, often don’t make it
to university and end up working in Latin America’s large, less
productive informal sector. And so the cycle revolves.

When inequality was falling, strong economic growth boosted poor

Latin Americans’ wages, helping break the cycle. Yet growth has
stalled horribly. Real income per person in Latin America and the
Caribbean increased by a dismal 4% in total between 2014 and
2023. In South Asia, by contrast, it increased by 46%.

Governments have turned to other less effective remedies. A popular

choice is to up the minimum wage. Mexico’s last president, Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, doubled it in real terms during his six years
in office. Claudia Sheinbaum, his successor, has promised annual
increases of 12%. This has helped reduce poverty and inequality in
Mexico, in part because the minimum wage was very low when Mr
López Obrador took office. But there are limits. If productivity does
not also increase, a rising minimum wage tends to increase informal
jobs, dragging people back into the inequality feedback loop.
Governments also hope redistribution can deal with inequality. The
immediate problem with this is that soft growth means thin
government revenues, so less money to redistribute. Still, Latin
American tax and welfare systems could do far better. When the
region’s income inequality is measured before taxes and
redistribution, it is only slightly higher than in rich countries. But
whereas taxes and transfers reduce the Gini coefficient by almost
40% in rich countries, in Latin America they only reduce it by about
5%. Shockingly, in about half the region this translates into an
increase in poverty.

The biggest problem is taxation. Across the OECD, a club of mainly

rich countries, personal income taxes, which are usually progressive,
are worth 8% of GDP. In Latin America they are worth just 2%.
Instead, the region relies more on indirect taxes, such as VAT on
goods and services (see chart 2). These are often regressive, as the
rich and poor pay the same rate but the poor consume a larger
portion of their income, so are hit harder.

Many welfare programmes are also riddled with problems. An IDB

study of transfer programmes in 17 countries found that targeting is
wayward. Only about half of people living in poverty benefit, while
about 40% of those not in poverty get at least one kind of transfer.
The amounts being transferred are often too small.

The circle is still vicious

Fixing this could put a big dent in inequality. But even as anger
about disparities dominates election campaigns and sometimes
explodes in the streets, as it did during violent protests in Chile in
2019, there is little progress. Though cross about the status quo,
voters are not keen to change tax and welfare systems either. A
study by Matias Busso of the IDB and co-authors surveyed eight
countries and found that, while respondents are unhappy about
inequality and support redistribution in theory, they are reluctant to
pay extra taxes to fund it. One reason is that many mistrust the
state and ruling elites.

All this adds up to a daunting challenge. Sustained growth, last seen

over a decade ago, would provide the sharpest relief. Political
reforms that build trust in government and allow for improvements
to taxation and welfare would help. Both would be ideal. Neither
seems likely. ■

Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin

America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex
region.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-
americas/2025/06/05/swimming-pool-economics-haunt-latin-america

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Cherry picked

Mexico’s ruling party, Morena,

has captured the judiciary
Turnout in Mexico’s judicial elections was pathetic. Morena’s favoured
candidates tended to prevail
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Mexico City

ON THE EVENING of June 1st, as polls closed, Mexico’s President

Claudia Sheinbaum hailed the historic vote to elect the country’s
judiciary as “a complete success”. There are few measures whereby
that could be said to be true. Turnout was a paltry 13%. Of the
ballots that were cast, more than 20% were spoiled or left blank.
But in one way the election was certainly a triumph: it has
consolidated the grip of Morena, Ms Sheinbaum’s ruling party, over
the third branch of government—and over Mexico as a whole.
It will be days before full results are announced. Thousands of
positions were up for grabs, mostly in local courts, but including 850
federal judgeships, half of all federal posts; the rest will be elected in
2027. But results for the highest courts are clear. They show that
Morena-friendly candidates have won. All nine seats on Mexico’s
Supreme Court were taken by people with links to the ruling party. A
new disciplinary tribunal which is empowered to punish judges will
probably have a similar hue. The electoral tribunal looks like it will
tilt the same way.

This was expected. In theory the process was non-partisan. Unlike

legislative elections, or some judicial elections in the United States,
candidates were not affiliated with parties and political
endorsements were banned. But flaws in how candidates were
selected and flagrant rule-breaking made a mockery of that.

Morena controlled two of the three committees that vetted

candidates. Each candidate’s approving committee was noted on the
ballot, guiding those who wished to vote with Morena. In the days
before the vote, Morena operatives circulated “cheat sheets”
showing voters the slate of preferred candidates. Carlos Heredia of
CIDE, a university in Mexico City, says that “in reality it was not an
election, it was a designation.” Headlines dubbed the new judiciary
“cherry-coloured”, referring to Morena’s official hue. The new judges
will take their seats in September.

Morena’s cheat sheet for the Supreme Court was perfectly predictive.
The greatest number of votes went to Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, a lawyer
close to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Ms Sheinbaum’s predecessor
and the architect of the judicial reform. He had been in charge of
getting indigenous groups to go along with Mr López Obrador’s
flagship projects. Another winner is María Estela Ríos, a former chief
legal adviser to Mr López Obrador, who proudly advertised it by
calling herself “AMLO’s lawyer” (Mr López Obrador is widely known
as AMLO). The only justices reappointed to the Supreme Court were
three who were appointed by Mr López Obrador in the first place,
and rarely ruled against his reforms. None of the other sitting judges
put themselves forward.

Turnout was lower than expected (even Mr López Obrador’s bizarre

referendum to ratify his presidency half way through his term
attracted 18%). The vote was marked by confusion and apathy.
Volunteers manning a polling station in Mexico City struggled to
explain the seven different ballots, one of which featured scores of
names divided by specialisation and gender. Many of those who
bothered to turn up were mobilised by Morena.

Ms Sheinbaum claims that electing judges makes Mexico “the world’s

most democratic country”. This is a stretch. Morena and its allies
hold a supermajority in Congress and three-quarters of state
governorships. Since coming to power in 2018 it has eliminated or
weakened Mexico’s checks and balances. Morena increasingly
resembles the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party which ran
the country for most of the 20th century.

The vote has provoked a torrent of criticism. Opposition parties said

they would seek to have the election cancelled. Even Morena fans
have suggested the process should be improved. The vetting could
be depoliticised and the required qualifications raised. But Morena
tends to ignore feedback. Ms Sheinbaum blamed the opposition for
the low turnout.

An additional danger lies ahead, when the results for the lower
courts come in. The concern is not only that Morena will dominate,
but that criminal groups may get their allies into the judiciary, just as
they do in local government. At least 16 candidates with links to
gangs managed to be listed on the ballot.

Bad for democracy, bad for business

Morena’s control of the judiciary is likely to hurt Mexico’s already

sluggish economy. Coparmex, the local employers’ association, said
the election would deter investment. The judicial elections may well
constitute a breach of the terms of the free-trade deal between the
United States, Mexico and Canada. As such, they provide Donald
Trump with leverage over a forthcoming review of the deal.

The elections have handed Ms Sheinbaum enormous power. Mr

López Obrador reshaped Mexico, but several signature policies, such
as giving control of the National Guard to the army, were delayed or
overturned by the Supreme Court. Ms Sheinbaum faces no such
constraints. ■

Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin

America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex
region.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-
americas/2025/06/05/mexicos-ruling-party-morena-has-captured-the-judiciary

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Multi-ethnic, mega-corrupt

Suriname’s chaotic democracy

just chose its first woman
president
An oil windfall may make it harder for Jennifer Geerlings-Simons to
clean up the country
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Paramaribo

HIS FINGER ink-stained from voting, Wagirin Tjokrosetiko, a 62-

year-old driver of Javanese descent, has a simple reason for wanting
a woman to run Suriname, a multi-ethnic former Dutch colony of
under 700,000 people on the north-eastern shoulder of South
America. “Male presidents only fill their pockets,” he says.
Mr Tjokrosetiko has got his way. In elections on May 25th the
National Development Party (NDP) led by Jennifer Geerlings-Simons
(pictured below) won 18 of the 51 seats in the National Assembly.
That is one more than the incumbent president, Chandrikapersad
Santokhi, and his Progressive Reform Party (VHP) managed to win,
relying on the country’s large Hindustani population as its voter
base.

Suriname’s political system is unusual, designed to foster consensus

between an array of ethnic groups. It is the only country in South
America where presidents are not chosen directly by voters, but by a
supermajority in the legislature, so real politics begins after elections
end. On June 1st Ms Geerlings-Simons announced a wide coalition
with smaller parties representing creoles, Javanese and maroons
(descendants of escaped slaves). That would give her the 34 seats
needed to become Suriname’s first female president.

For 15 years Suriname has been ruled by three men with a history of
conflict and betrayal dating back to the 1980s. The NDP’s Dési
Bouterse, the country’s former military ruler, won elections in 2010
and 2015. On both occasions his former bodyguard, Ronnie
Brunswijk, joined him in government. In the 1980s Mr Brunswijk had
broken with him to lead a guerrilla war against his junta. He later set
up a political party for maroon voters before joining a coalition with
the NDP.
In 2020 Mr Brunswijk crossed the floor to form a government with
Mr Santokhi, a former police chief who had long pursued Mr
Bouterse for brutal crimes committed by his military government.
Suriname’s dominant politician for 40 years, Mr Bouterse was finally
sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2023. He managed to evade jail,
dying of natural causes in December 2024.

A system designed to build consensus has proved vulnerable to

corruption and dirty dealmaking. As a reward for switching
allegiance, Mr Brunswijk—who built his wealth on gold and timber
businesses and is wanted by Dutch authorities for cocaine-trafficking
—was given the vice-presidency and ministries for his party in
resources, forestry and justice. Since its transition to democracy in
1987 Suriname has become a major cocaine-trafficking hub. Mr
Bouterse’s son Dino is in prison in the United States for drug-
smuggling and attempted dealmaking with Hizbullah, a Shia Muslim
movement in Lebanon. His finance minister, Gillmore Hoefdraad,
went into hiding in 2020 and was convicted in absentia to 12 years
in prison for embezzlement. Mr Hoefdraad’s appeal continues.
The VHP government that Ms Geerlings-Simons hopes to replace has
had scandals of its own. Mr Santokhi appointed his wife to the
supervisory board of the national oil company. He attempted to give
vast tracts of land to a group of Mennonites, a Christian sect
widespread in South America, and to award generous mining
concessions to a Chinese aluminium firm. Fierce public opposition
killed off both deals. Illegal mining is rampant.

But Mr Santokhi did lay the groundwork for a more promising future.
In October France’s TotalEnergies announced it would invest
$10.5bn to develop a large offshore oilfield in Surinamese waters. It
is due to start producing in 2028. As part of his re-election campaign
Mr Santokhi promised to give every Surinamese citizen $750 of this
windfall. It wasn’t enough to convince voters.

Though Ms Greelings-Simons was speaker of the National Assembly

under both Bouterse governments, she has remained relatively free
of scandal. That reputation will certainly be tested by five years as
president. Karel Eckhorst, the country’s chief negotiator with the
IMF, says she needs to strengthen Suriname’s institutions to manage
its looming hydrocarbon wealth. “Oil isn’t the magic bullet,” he says.
“Good governance is.” ■

Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin

America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex
region.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-
americas/2025/06/05/surinames-chaotic-democracy-just-chose-its-first-woman-president

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Middle East & Africa

Africa’s cynical master of power politics
The Clausewitz of Africa :: Can Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s dictator, secure his legacy at
home and abroad?

Israel “won’t commit suicide”, says the

government’s ideologue
The Israeli far right :: In an interview Bezalel Smotrich is uncompromising about the
war in Gaza

Kurdish armed groups are laying down

their weapons
A lasting peace? :: In a changing Middle East, for some talking seems more promising
than fighting

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

The Clausewitz of Africa

Africa’s cynical master of

power politics
Can Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s dictator, secure his legacy at home and
abroad?
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Kigali

FOR THE moment there is not much to see in Bugesera, a district

replete with verdant bush 45km south of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital.
But it is the site of what Paul Kagame, the president of the central
African country of 14m people, views as a legacy project. If all goes
to plan there will soon be an airport complex, financed largely by
Qatar, that he hopes will aid the transformation of Rwanda from, in
1994, the blood-drenched scene of a genocide to an African emirate
—a hub for commerce and a draw for tourists keen to snap the
gorillas that lurk in the country’s mountains. Mr Kagame, a fan of
Formula One, wants to host what would be Africa’s only circuit.

But Mr Kagame also has other ideas for his legacy. Some 200km to
the west are Goma and Bukavu, respectively the capitals of North
and South Kivu, the provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo
that border Rwanda (see map). Earlier this year M23, a Congolese
militia supported by Rwanda, seized the cities, escalating a conflict
between Congo and its neighbour that has its roots in the genocide
and has flared repeatedly in the decades since. The war has
uprooted millions and, this year alone, killed thousands.
The last time M23 took Goma, in 2012, Western pressure on Mr
Kagame led to the group’s withdrawal after 11 days. This time the
militia has stayed put. Rwanda’s president, who has long aspired to
greater influence over eastern Congo, has gambled that he might
get away with it.

In doing so Mr Kagame is showing that as a leader he embodies a

changing Africa—and a changing world. He courts rising middle
powers. He was transactional before that was the go-to term for
today’s realpolitik. He learns from other leaders who flout norms and
laws. His image as an effective strongman with a go-to-hell attitude
towards Western critics makes him popular in Africa as the continent
seeks to reduce its dependency on others.

Now Mr Kagame’s attempt to exploit the moment faces a huge test.

Congo has been added to the list of conflicts that Donald Trump
believes he can fix with hard-headed diplomacy. That is an
opportunity to cement Rwanda’s hold on the Kivus. But it is also a
challenge, since the Trump administration wants Rwanda to stop its
meddling there as part of a peace deal that would see more
American investment in the region, especially in mining. It could be
a moment of triumph for Mr Kagame or an indication that he has
overreached.

The art of darkness

Mr Kagame’s evolution can be seen in three phases. In the first he

was the rebel leader of the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF), a party dominated by Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. Mr
Kagame’s rebels fought a civil war against Rwanda’s Hutu-led regime
in the early 1990s. When that regime slaughtered more than
500,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, in the space of around 100 days in
1994, he led his forces from Uganda to end the genocide. Mr
Kagame has run Rwanda ever since, though he became president
only in 2000.

After the genocide the RPF took the fight across the border with
what was then Zaire, in the name of hunting down fleeing
génocidaires. Human-rights groups allege that the Rwandan army
killed many civilians in the process. In 1997 Rwanda, alongside
Uganda, toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s dictator, and installed
Laurent Kabila as leader of what became Congo. When Kabila proved
less pliant than it hoped, Rwanda invaded again, helping bring about
the Second Congo War, which involved nine African states and the
deaths of millions. The war ended in the early 2000s and Rwanda
withdrew. But Mr Kagame never stopped seeing eastern Congo as in
his zone of interest.

The end of that war made it easier for Mr Kagame to present his
second phase to the world—that of a “donor darling”. Western
powers lavished aid on Rwanda, partly because of a sense of guilt
that they had not done enough to stop the genocide, and partly
because Mr Kagame’s government seemingly offered rare proof that
donor cash could be spent well in Africa.

Since 1994 economic growth has averaged 6.7% per year, the
eighth-fastest rate of the nearly 200 countries tracked by the IMF,
and ahead of Vietnam and India. GDP per person, just over $250 a
year at the turn of the century, has since quadrupled to around
$1,000 a year. Rwanda has tried to build a service economy based
on tourism, conferences and finance. It has promoted “Brand
Rwanda” via sponsorship of football teams and paid media (most of
the money is spent on advertising for tourism). Mr Kagame’s “Vision
2050” aims to make Rwanda a high-income country by the middle of
the century.

There is a lot to do. The rural poor, most of whom are subsistence
farmers (and Hutus), have benefited less from growth than the
urban rich (who are disproportionately Tutsis). Rwanda’s rate of
inequality is among the highest in east Africa. Researchers have
questioned Rwanda’s claims about poverty reduction and agricultural
production.

Questions are increasingly asked about the macroeconomy, too. The

current-account deficit is a troubling 13.8% of GDP. The ratio of
public debt to GDP has risen from 19% to 78% since 2012, in part
because of projects like the airport. The role of the RPF and the
Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF), the army, in the economy crowds
out private investment. They run firms involved in everything from
milk to construction and private security.
Not that there is much open questioning in Rwanda. Dissent from
the official narrative—that Mr Kagame saved the country and is
rebuilding a united nation where nationality trumps ethnicity—is
crushed in the name of stopping more bloodshed. Dissidents abroad
are threatened and sometimes assassinated, according to Human
Rights Watch (HRW). Opposition politicians have been jailed, and
barred from elections that Mr Kagame wins with close to 100% of
the vote.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his ruthlessness Mr Kagame

remains popular among Africa’s elite. To many he embodies the
sense of urgency, confidence and self-reliance they wish their
leaders had at a time of aid cuts and trade turmoil. In an unscientific
straw poll at a recent business conference in Ivory Coast, about
which African leader attendees would like running their country, Mr
Kagame won by a landslide. “He manages to run effectively two
states, both well—a competent bureaucracy and a ruthlessly efficient
military,” says a former Kenyan politician.

The third coming

The debate about whether Mr Kagame’s economic achievements

outweigh his repressive methods will rumble on. But it risks
obscuring how, especially after M23’s withdrawal from Goma in
2012, he underwent a third shift—into a leader who has taken
advantage of a multipolar and transactional world to pursue his
aims.

Today only America rivals Qatar’s importance to Rwanda. The Gulf

state has a 60% stake in the airport project and is negotiating an
investment in Rwandair, the national airline. After Goma was
retaken, the first meeting between Mr Kagame and Félix Tshisekedi,
Congo’s president, took place in Doha. Rwanda exports gold, much
of it smuggled from Congo, to the United Arab Emirates. Turkey,
Russia and China equip the RDF with, respectively, drones,
helicopters and artillery.
Rwanda has perhaps the closest ties of any African country with
Israel, a source of surveillance technology and another country
shaped by genocide. Rwanda has been compared to Russia for its
invasion of Congo. But its self-image is of an African Israel: small,
tough and proud. “It’s strange to have African officials say they want
to be just like us,” says an Israeli diplomat.

At the same time Mr Kagame has found ways to be useful to the

West beyond being the poster child for aid. The EU helps pay for the
RDF’s mission to fight jihadists in Mozambique who threaten a gas
project led by Total, the French energy giant. In 2024 the bloc
signed a memorandum of understanding on critical minerals. Mr
Kagame blunted the previous British government’s criticism of him
by offering to take in migrants deported from Britain.

Compared with 2012, Mr Kagame has been more defiant in the face
of Western censure. The UN Security Council has told Rwanda to
stop backing M23. The EU has sanctioned three Rwandan generals,
including a commander in Mr Kagame’s inner circle, and a refinery in
Kigali that the bloc says processes illicit gold from Congo. America
has sanctioned a cabinet minister. Britain has cut some aid. Yet Mr
Kagame said in April, at his annual speech to commemorate the
genocide, that those sanctioning Rwanda could “go to hell”. When
asked how much pain Rwanda will endure, one senior politician is
fond of saying that “we will eat potatoes forever”.

To what end? Mr Kagame’s allies emphasise his desire to protect

Tutsis in the Kivus and to vanquish the FDLR, a Hutu militia with
roots in the genocide that has collaborated with the Congolese army.
To point out that the militia is of no serious threat to the RDF,
arguably Africa’s strongest army, is beside the point, they say. It is
the idea he wants to destroy, as much as the group. The culture of
the RPF—a rebel movement that took a country and whose
legitimacy is based on preventing a return to ethnic violence—
produces a state of endless vigilance, or paranoia. Some in the RPF
also imply support for a “Greater Rwanda” that transcends current
boundaries. Dignitaries who visit Rwanda are given a presentation
that begins with the impact of 19th-century colonial borders.

Then there are the minerals dotted in the soil of eastern Congo. The
region is rich in gold and the “3T” minerals important in electronics:
tin, tungsten and tantalum. In 2024 Rwanda recorded bumper
annual earnings from minerals. It exported $1.75bn-worth, up from
about $500m in 2021. Though Rwanda has some mines of its own,
the export figures also include smuggled minerals from Congo. The
RDF part-owns tin and gold smelters, notes Jason Stearns of New
York University.

Whatever the mix of factors, Rwanda sees the Kivus as in its sphere
of influence. And when it feels that influence is under threat it acts.
In 2021 Mr Tshisekedi invited Burundi and Uganda into eastern
Congo on the grounds of wanting their help rooting out militias. Mr
Kagame saw these invitations as a threat to his interests, “so he
flicked the switch: M23”, says a friend. With diplomatic efforts to end
the conflict flagging and Mr Trump back in the White House, he
seems to have taken the chance to escalate things.

The conflict has weakened Mr Tshisekedi. Having said it would not

talk directly to M23, Mr Tshisekedi’s government is now doing just
that. The Congo River Alliance, a political coalition led by M23, says
it wants regime change in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. Joseph Kabila,
son of Laurent and Mr Tshisekedi’s predecessor, reportedly arrived in
Goma on May 26th, sparking speculation that he is plotting a
comeback. “If Tshisekedi went, there would be no tears in Kigali,”
says the friend of Mr Kagame’s. That person insists that Rwanda
does not want a repeat of 1997, with a march on Kinshasa and a
coup d’état. But the RPF hopes that the political cascade it has
caused in the Congo will help its allies within the country. The aim of
some in the party is to ensure at least that the Kivus gain more
devolution as part of a federal Congo.
Creating facts on the ground to gain leverage is typical of Rwanda’s
president, according to one admirer, who describes him as “Africa’s
Clausewitz”. For Mr Kagame, like the Prussian general, war is the
continuation of politics by other means.

Stumble in the jungle

But Mr Kagame faces a new challenge: Mr Trump. After M23 took

Goma Mr Tshisekedi made America an offer that many African
leaders have previously served up: my resources for your protection.
(He is believed to have offered the same to others, including Russia
and the UAE.) He wanted American support in exchange for access
to minerals. Mr Tshisekedi appeared on Fox News. “We would be
very happy to have our American friends here,” he said.

To help its case Congo has welcomed initiatives by American firms.

In April KoBold Metals, an American mining firm, said it was
expanding into the country by taking over a lithium mine. In May a
ban on Elon Musk’s Starlink was lifted. Erik Prince, a Trump
supporter who used to head Blackwater, a private security firm
known for its controversial work in Iraq, has reportedly struck a deal
with Kinshasa to help it tackle copper-smuggling.
America has no interest in sending actual soldiers to Congo. But it
wants minerals. And Mr Trump no doubt likes the idea of claiming
credit for a big, beautiful peace deal. So in April Massad Boulos, a
senior adviser on Africa, and father-in-law to Mr Trump’s youngest
daughter, visited the Great Lakes. His emphasis on business rather
than human rights went down well. He has insisted, though, that
Rwanda must stop supporting M23 and withdraw the RDF soldiers
that are helping the militia. (The UN reckons there are between
3,000 and 4,000 of them in eastern Congo.)

On April 25th Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, hosted the

foreign ministers of Congo and Rwanda. They signed a “declaration
of principles” that America hopes will lead to a formal peace deal
next month. Both want the other to move first: Congo wants M23
and Rwanda out of the Kivus; Rwanda wants to know FDLR will be
quashed. Nevertheless, the administration in Washington hopes that
self-interest on all sides may produce peace. The message from Mr
Trump is: why fight when we can all make money instead?

Rwanda, which is 1/88th the size of Congo and has far fewer mineral
resources, is trying to please the peace-broker. Ahead of Mr Boulos’s
visit M23 withdrew from Walikale, the site of an American tin mine.
Rwanda is—with some irony—pitching itself as the place where
Congolese minerals can be transparently processed, cleaning up
supply chains used by American tech firms. In May Trinity Metals, a
firm operating in Rwanda whose major shareholder, Tech Met, has
received investment from the American government (and recently
hosted a critical-minerals dinner party at Mar-a-Lago), signed a letter
of intent to export tin with an American processor. Later that month
Mr Kagame visited one of its mines. Rwanda is also offering to host
migrants deported from America. Rwandan officials contrast the grip
Mr Kagame has on his country with the weak hold that Mr Tshisekedi
has on Congo.

Mr Kagame will want to avoid any deal that ties his hands. Having
spent blood and treasure in eastern Congo, he will be reluctant to
relinquish his gains. He may reasonably hope that Mr Trump will
have little interest in monitoring what happens after any deal is
struck.

But there is a risk of hubris. M23 is already facing problems running

Goma, where cash is in short supply. Its leaders say they will run the
city like the RPF runs Kigali, but they have neither the skill nor the
legitimacy among the population. On June 3rd HRW said M23 had
systematically killed civilians in Goma.

Then there is the mounting cost of the war. Rwanda does not
disclose how many soldiers have died in this latest conflict but
fatalities may be in the hundreds. Taking control of mining assets
can help M23 pay its own way but it will not cover all the costs. In
March Moody’s, a credit-rating agency, revised its outlook for
Rwandan bonds to negative, in part because of the war. The IMF is
warning of rising public debt. If tourism, the main source of foreign
exchange, suffers, there could be balance-of-payments problems.
Also at stake is arguably Mr Kagame’s most valuable asset—Brand
Rwanda. Though businesspeople in Kigali do not openly criticise the
regime, they hint at their deepening concern.
Mr Kagame faces a fateful decision. Since 2012 he has peppered his
speeches with the idea of agaciro, a Kinyarwanda word meaning
“dignity” or “self-reliance”. To outsiders these bootstrappy
exhortations can seem banal. But in Rwanda, where the genocide is
the overwhelming context for national life, the message resonates.
For Mr Kagame the chief lessons of the 1990s are that you cannot
rely on outsiders and that a lack of freedom is a price worth paying
for security. He is terrified that younger Rwandans will forget these
lessons, says a diplomat.

Dealing with the unpredictable Mr Trump will complicate things even

for a seasoned operator like Mr Kagame. Maybe the cynical master
of power politics will have to choose between two legacy projects:
control in Congo and modernisation at home. Vision 1994 or Vision
2050. ■

Sign up to the Analysing Africa, a weekly newsletter that keeps you

in the loop about the world’s youngest—and least understood—
continent.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-
and-africa/2025/06/05/africas-cynical-master-of-power-politics

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

The Israeli far right

Israel “won’t commit suicide”,

says the government’s
ideologue
In an interview Bezalel Smotrich is uncompromising about the war in
Gaza
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午 | Tel Aviv

ACCORDING TO THE unofficial ideologue of Israel’s government, its

war in Gaza is going well. The new plan to distribute aid to civilians
through hubs controlled by Israel is working, says Bezalel Smotrich,
the finance minister. It is a “gamechanger” in the fight against
Hamas. He has repeatedly opposed ceasefires, by threatening to
leave the coalition of which he is a key member.
Now he has a different emphasis. Providing the government seeks to
end the war with the defeat of Hamas, he will stay (though there is
now a chance that the government may be brought down
imminently by its ultra-Orthodox partners, who are frustrated that a
controversial law exempting religious students from military service
has not been passed by the coalition).

Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East

Since the atrocities of October 7th 2023 Mr Smotrich’s words have

been among the most incendiary from Israeli politicians. He has
predicted Gaza will be “totally destroyed”. He has been accused of
justifying starvation as a tactic in war, saying last year that aid
should flow into Gaza only if the hostages are returned.

In an interview with The Economist on June 3rd he sought to

present himself as a sober-minded, constructive member of the
government. But there is no disguising that his vision is extreme and
messianic. The war has given him and those who share his views an
opening, and they have seized it.

The day after we spoke to Mr Smotrich, Israel closed its new aid
centres in Gaza temporarily. The Israel Defence Forces said that the
roads leading to the hubs will be considered “combat zones”. That
decision came after days of chaos around the distribution centres in
which dozens of Gazans were shot and killed on their way to collect
food.

Under the new system, aid is brought in convoys protected by Israel

and distributed by American mercenaries, rather than by the UN.
Gazans must travel to any of four distribution hubs in the ruined
enclave to pick up family-sized boxes on a weekly basis. Mr Smotrich
says this method of delivering aid is important for Israel to win the
war.

No time for critics

He says he is bewildered by criticism from international aid
organisations and European governments. Critics say the aid scheme
is insufficient to feed Gaza’s hungry people and a cover for plans to
corral Palestinians into a small area while depopulating most of
Gaza. It is the best way to shorten the war and alleviate suffering,
counters the finance minister.

He claims he has always favoured letting aid into Gaza (though less
than two months ago he said Israel should not allow “even a grain of
wheat” to enter the strip); he simply opposed the way in which it
was being done. He said it kept Gazans reliant on Hamas and
allowed the group to profit from it. Breaking that link is crucial to
Israel’s victory, he explains.

Stick to the plan and the war can be over in a matter of months, he
says, but Hamas must surrender, disarm and send its leaders into
exile. Anything less will leave the group in a position to attack again
in a few years. Once Hamas is gone, Gaza can be “rehabilitated”, he
says. But the tunnels used by Hamas will still need to be dismantled;
so far Israel has destroyed only a quarter, he claims. If Hamas does
not leave, and the fighting continues, further devastation for Gaza
seems inevitable.

Mr Smotrich acknowledges no wrongdoing on Israel’s part. More

than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed but he says the ground
assault has been “gentle” and the army has been “using tweezers” in
its targeting. He says half of those killed are combatants (Israeli
officers say it is closer to a third; there are no verified figures
distinguishing between combatant and civilian fatalities). He blames
Hamas, as terrorists who hide behind civilians, for the death toll.

He has no thought of Israel leaving Gaza. He has called for the

building of Israeli settlements throughout a Gaza depopulated of
Palestinians: “Where there are settlements and the army, there’s
security; where there aren’t settlements and army, there is no
security.” He denies Gazans would be forced to leave but concedes
that the war has rendered Gaza uninhabitable and that those who
want to should be “allowed” to emigrate. The European countries
that are threatening to impose sanctions on Israel and “preach”
about solving the conflict should welcome Palestinians, he suggests.

His longer-term vision for the Palestinians involves them either

abandoning the land that Israel occupies or living with limited rights
under its control. Mr Smotrich grew up in settlements in the West
Bank (which he insists on calling Judea and Samaria, its biblical
name). He still lives in one and rejects any possibility of Palestinian
statehood there. He says allowing this would create the “existential”
threat of an attack on Israel “20 times worse” than the one that
occurred on October 7th.

When it comes to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, “there is

a big difference between individual rights and national rights”. This
means that most Palestinians, apart from those who currently live in
Israel, will remain without full citizenship or voting rights. “If there is
a process of deradicalisation, if there is a generation that accepts
that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, that wants to live with
us in a pact…I don’t mind giving them the vote,” he suggests. But “I
can’t let them destroy me through democracy after they failed to do
it by terror.”

This seems to rule out normalising relations with Saudi Arabia. The
kingdom has said it will not establish ties with Israel without a
process towards a Palestinian state. A Saudi deal is a prize but “we
won’t commit suicide for it”, says Mr Smotrich. He insists that “in
closed rooms” Israel is hearing other things from its Arab
counterparts: “All our neighbours are looking at Gaza and waiting to
see what we do.” He is confident that a bright future of regional
integration awaits.

Israelis may welcome the finance minister’s talk of peace with their
neighbours but his vision for their country raises alarms. Some fear
that, given the opportunity, he would turn Israel into a theocracy.
Asked about his call in 2019 for restoring “the laws of the Torah” as
in the biblical days of King David, he says: “There is no contradiction
between halachic [religious] law and democracy.”

Mr Smotrich is in many ways a minority figure. Were elections to be

held, surveys indicate his ultra-nationalist party would struggle to
cross the electoral threshold of 3.25% of the vote. At best, it would
win a handful of seats. After Binyamin Netanyahu returned as prime
minister in 2022, he insisted that the far right “are joining me, I’m
not joining them”.

And yet this is the hardliners’ government. Under their pressure it

has tried to tamper with Israel’s legal system and has lavishly funded
religious programmes and expanded settlements in the West Bank,
with a stated aim to annex the territory. If Mr Smotrich left the
coalition, his fellow radical, Itamar Ben-Gvir, would follow suit,
denying Mr Netanyahu his majority. But Mr Smotrich has stayed
because, for him, the war has proved an unparalleled opportunity to
fulfil his long-held vision. ■
Sign up to the Middle East Dispatch, a weekly newsletter that keeps
you in the loop on a fascinating, complex and consequential part of
the world.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/israel-wont-
commit-suicide-says-the-governments-ideologue

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

A lasting peace?

Kurdish armed groups are

laying down their weapons
In a changing Middle East, for some talking seems more promising
than fighting
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

FOR MUCH of the past century, as the Kurds dreamed of autonomy

in Turkey and the Middle East, armed groups drove the agenda.
Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the largest such group, the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), wielded influence across Turkey,
Iran, Iraq and Syria. Now, though, he says it is time for the guns to
fall silent. “There is no alternative to democracy in the pursuit and
realisation of a political system,” he said in February. After months of
secret negotiations with Turkey, he called for the PKK to disband.
On May 12th, the group said it would comply. That could mark the
end of one of the world’s longest conflicts: its fight with the Turkish
state lasted more than four decades and claimed 40,000 lives.
Meanwhile the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American-backed
group that includes the PKK’s Syrian proxy, said it would integrate its
fighters into Syria’s new army (Turkey has since accused it of not
being serious).

Both announcements mark a big shift in Kurdish strategy. Kurds

hope that relinquishing their arms will help them negotiate for safety
and political freedoms. Not everyone agrees with the new approach.
Negotiations have failed in the past. But some of the disputes that
scuttled past efforts may no longer be obstacles.

The Kurdish shift comes partly out of necessity. Turkish drones have
battered the PKK in northern Iraq in recent years. The fall of the
Assad regime in Syria left the SDF vulnerable to attacks by the so-
called Syrian National Army, a coalition of Turkish-backed militias.
They can no longer rely on America’s help, either: it has already
withdrawn several hundred of its 2,000 troops from north-east Syria,
and Donald Trump is keen to pull out the rest.

If they are weaker on the battlefield, the Kurds still hold negotiating
clout. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to expand Turkey’s
influence in post-Assad Syria. A dialogue with the PKK could win him
favour with Syrian Kurds, and may help him woo them away from
Israel, which has tried to court the Kurds and other minority groups
in Syria. Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s foreign minister, has warned that the
alternative in Syria is “internal strife that would threaten Turkey’s
stability”.

Closer to home, Mr Erdogan also wants the support of Kurdish MPs

in Turkey, amid talk that he may seek to change the constitution and
allow himself to run again in the next presidential election.
The latest move is by no means the first attempt to solve the
conflict. The most recent peace process, which included a two-year
truce, collapsed in 2015 partly because Mr Erdogan’s party lost its
majority in a general election. Some Kurds fear that the latest effort
will be similarly short-lived.

Sceptics point out that hundreds of members of Turkey’s biggest

Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM),
have been arrested or removed from office since 2016. That is part
of a broader trend of democratic backsliding under an increasingly
authoritarian Mr Erdogan, who has spent years trying to destroy his
opposition.

Yet there is reason to think this time could be different. For one
thing, Mr Erdogan and his coalition partners are on the same page:
it was the nationalists who urged negotiations with Mr Ocalan in the
first place. Nor is Syria a point of disagreement any more. With the
Assad regime gone, Turkey and the Kurds agree that a settlement
would help stabilise Syria.
Some 400 Kurdish delegates from Turkey, Iraq and Syria gathered at
a recent unity conference on the Syria-Turkey border to discuss plans
for co-operation. Since the SDF’s accord with Ahmed al-Sharaa,
Syria’s president, normalisation of relations has progressed. On June
2nd the SDF and the government swapped 470 prisoners. Kurds are
working with the Syrian government to facilitate the return of Kurds
who fled Afrin, a Kurdish city in north-west Syria, which the Turkish
army and its proxies captured in 2018 (see map). The SDF hopes it
may be able to bargain for a federal arrangement similar to the
Kurds’ semi-autonomy in Iraq, though Mr Erdogan, who wields
considerable influence in Syria, is likely to scupper such a plan.

The PKK’s decision to disband was broadly welcomed by Kurds in

Turkey, who saw it as a profound change. Besides, after so many
years underground, the PKK was becoming less relevant. Pollsters
say most Kurds feel closer to political parties and leaders like
Selahattin Demirtas, an imprisoned former head of the DEM.

They hope negotiations with Mr Erdogan will bring tangible benefits,

such as an amnesty for political prisoners and more power for local
government. “People do not trust the talks, but they trust people
who represent them,” says Reha Ruhavioglu, director of the Kurdish
Studies Centre in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir. “They have
faith that representatives will stand up for their rights and
freedoms.” ■

Sign up to the Middle East Dispatch, a weekly newsletter that keeps

you in the loop on a fascinating, complex and consequential part of
the world.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-
and-africa/2025/06/05/kurdish-armed-groups-are-laying-down-their-weapons

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Europe
Germany is building a big scary army
German militarism :: Its allies are ready. But are the Germans?

What Poland’s new president means for

Europe
Populist pugilist :: Karol Nawrocki is the liberals’ nightmare

Ukraine smashes Russia’s air force and a

key bridge
Drones and diplomacy :: The window for diplomacy is closing

The hard-right’s champion blows up the

Dutch government
Populist paralysis :: Geert Wilders won an election but bails without getting much
done

The constitution that never was still haunts

Europe 20 years on
Charlemagne :: The stumble of 2005 resulted in a better EU

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

German militarism

Germany is building a big

scary army
Its allies are ready. But are the Germans?
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午 | BERLIN AND GÖRLITZ

THIS TIME they were invited. On May 22nd locals cheered as

German tanks rolled through the streets of Vilnius, the Lithuanian
capital once occupied by the Nazis. City buses flashed tributes to the
fraternal bonds linking the NATO allies. Even so, when the
Bundeswehr’s brass band struck up a rendition of “Prussia’s Glory”,
some of the German dignitaries assembled for the inauguration of
their army’s 45th Panzer brigade felt a twinge of unease. It wasn’t
until they saw the beaming faces of their Lithuanian counterparts
that they were able to enjoy the show.
The armoured brigade, which will number 5,000 by 2027, is
Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since the second
world war. It is also the starkest sign of the extraordinary turn taken
by a country that took full receipt of the peace dividend after 1990,
sheltering under American protection as its own army withered and
its commercial ties with Russia strengthened (see chart 1). The
Lithuania decision was taken in 2023 as part of the Zeitenwende, or
“turning-point”, in security policy instigated by Olaf Scholz, the then
chancellor, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The €100bn ($114bn)
spending spree he unleashed has already given Germany the world’s
fourth-biggest defence budget, reckons the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute.
More is to come. Bolstered by a recent decision to loosen Germany’s
debt brake, a fiscal straitjacket, the new government plans to ramp
up defence spending further. Indeed, rearmament is set to become
its animating mission. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, says he intends
to make the Bundeswehr the “strongest conventional army in
Europe”. He has also signalled that Germany will sign up to a new
long-term NATO defence-spending target of 3.5% of GDP, plus 1.5%
for related infrastructure, at a summit this month—a total that would
translate into €215bn a year at today’s level of output. (A budget will
follow the NATO summit.) Like the Lithuanians, almost all of
Germany’s allies are delighted by the country’s belated commitment
to European security. Haltingly, and not without a degree of
historically inflected torment, Germans themselves are getting there
too.

Mr Scholz’s fund largely “filled in the potholes”, as General Carsten

Breuer, the head of the armed forces, has put it, but much remains
to be done. The coming wave of spending will aim to bolster
Germany’s role as NATO’s “critical backbone”. Priorities include
reinforcing air defence, refilling ammunition stocks and building
long-range precision-strike capabilities.

Officials’ priorities are clear. “Time is of the essence,” says General

Alfons Mais, the head of the army, encouraging Germany’s defence
industry to focus on mass production. Insiders are sceptical about
building up domestic or European industry at the expense of off-the-
shelf solutions from elsewhere, such as America, in the name of
“strategic autonomy”. “If we face delays or delivery challenges at
home,” says General Mais, “it’s better to take a broader approach
and look at who can deliver.”

Some worry that Germany is failing to learn from Ukraine, with its
drone swarms and “transparent” battlefields. “Tech in Germany is
amazing,” says Nico Lange, a former defence-ministry official. “But
the political side does not know how to use it.” No one wants to fight
the last war by building up stockpiles of drones that quickly become
obsolete. But planners also need to ensure Germany is not left over-
reliant on legacy systems. “We need a market-driven industry that
innovates, fails in one place and succeeds elsewhere, using private
capital,” says Gundbert Scherf, the co-CEO of Helsing, a startup with
a focus on AI-enabled land, air and maritime systems.

Upgrading the Bundeswehr also means tackling a sluggish planning

and procurement bureaucracy. When Mr Merz proposed his change
to the debt brake, he said he would do “whatever it takes” to protect
peace and freedom in Europe. Yet turning the money taps on first
inevitably reduces the pressure to reform, notes Claudia Major of the
German Marshall Fund, a think-tank. Germany’s federal audit office
recently called for “far-reaching changes” to a Bundeswehr it said
had become “top-heavy” with management. Many experts share this
analysis. “Procurement takes too long,” laments General Mais.
“Signing a contract is one thing, getting the stuff to the troops is
another.”

A common grumble is that Germany “gold-plates” its processes,

imposing onerous requirements such as ensuring tanks are suitable
for pregnant women. “The 80% solution now is better than the
100% one in five years,” says Matthias Wachter, head of security
policy at the Federation of German Industries. The German IRIS-T
air-defence system, which has proved itself in Ukraine, is
nevertheless still undergoing testing for domestic use.

Tackling these roadblocks falls to Boris Pistorius, the defence

minister, whose plain speaking has made him Germany’s most
popular politician. Despite that, not everyone is convinced he has the
patience to grapple seriously with the Bundeswehr’s bureaucracy.
“He is the best minister we’ve had for years,” says Sara Nanni, a
Green MP on the Bundestag’s defence committee. “But he can be a
bit superficial.” A new law, the imperiously named Planungs- und
Beschaffungsbeschleunigungsgesetz (Planning and Procurement
Acceleration Act), aims to relax some regulations. But merely
tweaking the system may not be enough.
Are Germans ready to make themselves kriegstüchtig, or “war-
ready”, as Mr Pistorius has demanded? Paranoid about reopening the
social rifts of the covid-19 years in a country that retains a
scepticism about military force, Mr Scholz was cautious in his
rhetoric and halting in his help for Ukraine; Mr Merz strikes a sharper
tone. Vestiges of the old attitude remain, such as the self-imposed
bans at dozens of universities on accepting government money for
military research. Ms Major worries that if Ukraine is forced into a
“dirty ceasefire”, the momentum of recent years may be squandered
as calls for diplomacy and détente with Russia gather steam.
So far, perhaps because skirting the debt brake has allowed
Germany to avoid guns-or-butter trade-offs, voters have by and
large backed the changes (see chart 2). Attitudes towards the army
are changing, too. Soldiers marvel at the esteem they now
encounter in daily life. “Sometimes when I’m on the street people
stop me to say, ‘Thank you for your service’—like in America!”
exclaims one cadet officer.
A trickier test will come when Germany begins a serious debate over
restoring conscription, which was suspended under Angela Merkel in
2011. The Bundeswehr is struggling to get troop numbers over
180,000, well short of the current target of 203,000, itself likely to
be lifted after the NATO summit. Given Germany’s NATO
commitments, General Breuer thinks Germany will need 100,000
extra troops, including reservists, by 2029.

For now, Mr Merz’s government hopes to get there with compulsory

questionnaires for 18-year-old men (an extension to women would
need a constitutional change). That will at least buy time to rebuild
Germany’s crumbling barracks and hire the military trainers a bigger
army needs. But hardly anyone thinks an element of compulsion can
be avoided. “I’m absolutely convinced we will have this debate,” says
General Mais. Polls find a majority of Germans in favour of restoring
conscription; support is predictably lowest among the young.

A long march ahead

Germany’s various agonies found expression at a recent

“Zeitenwende on Tour” event in Görlitz, an east German town on the
Polish border where nearly half of voters support the hard-right, pro-
Russia Alternative for Germany party. Mr Lange, the former defence
official, led a discussion on rearmament in front of a disputatious
audience. Some angrily blamed NATO enlargement for the Ukraine
war, or issued jeremiads against profiteering arms companies.
Others pushed back. Andre, a hospital worker who had driven from
Dresden to support the case for rearmament, says the issue splits
his colleagues 50-50.

“The government should have been doing this from the start,” says
Mr Lange, who has been taking his message to Germans for over
three years. It is grinding work, especially since Germans are now
being asked to make sacrifices on behalf of foreign lands. In Vilnius,
Mr Merz said: “Lithuania’s security is also our security,” a plain
statement of his country’s NATO commitments that also implies
tough demands of ordinary Germans. Only now, perhaps, is that
message beginning to get through. ■

To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café

Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/06/04/germany-is-building-a-big-scary-army

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Populist pugilist

What Poland’s new president

means for Europe
Karol Nawrocki is the liberals’ nightmare
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Warsaw

THE PRESIDENTIAL election in Poland on June 1st was a distillation

of the political choice facing all Europe these days. Rafal
Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, was backed by the
centrist, pro-European government. Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist
historian and former amateur boxer, was nominated by Law and
Justice (PiS), the hard-right opposition party, and supported by
Donald Trump’s administration and by populists abroad. The
campaign was bitter, and close enough that exit polls on the evening
of the election had the mayor narrowly ahead. But when all the
votes were counted it was Mr Nawrocki who had won, taking 50.9%
of the vote to Mr Trzaskowski’s 49.1%.

Mr Nawrocki presented himself as the candidate to hold the

government of the prime minister, Donald Tusk, in check. “We will
not allow Donald Tusk to consolidate his power,” he said at his post-
election rally, denouncing the government for aiming to achieve a
“monopoly”. For supporters of Mr Trzaskowski or Mr Tusk, that has
an ironic ring. Since coming to office in 2023 the prime minister has
been trying to undo PiS’s attempt at state capture while it was in
power from 2015 to 2023, when it packed the courts and
independent institutions with its cronies. Conflicts with European
courts led the European Union to cut off aid for years.

Mr Nawrocki’s victory may now cripple the government’s effort to

repair the rule of law. The PiS-backed candidate is new to politics,
but he can wield a simple tool—by using the presidential veto to
block Mr Tusk’s agenda. The government lacks the three-fifths
majority in parliament needed to override it. The hard right’s win
seems also likely to touch off a crisis for Mr Tusk’s eclectic coalition,
which includes everything from progressive leftists to a conservative
farmers’ party. PiS will doubtless try to persuade right-leaning MPs to
defect and bring down the government.

Even if it fails, the next elections to parliament are due in

2027. Either way, Mr Tusk appears now to be a lame duck, though
he tried to dispel that impression by calling a confidence vote
supposedly to demonstrate the strength of his coalition’s majority; it
will take place on June 11th. Mr Nawrocki’s victory worried investors.
Poland’s bullish stockmarket fell by 2% after the results were
announced.

Mr Trzaskowski owes his loss in part to the government’s inability to

deliver. When Mr Tusk won the election in 2023, he promised to
purge PiS’s cronies from the courts, public media and state-owned
companies. But the outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, also aligned
with PiS, blocked crucial reforms and routine appointments. Mr Tusk
put much of his rule-of-law agenda on hold. That was not his fault,
but on other priorities, such as liberalising access to abortion (which
PiS had all but banned), he was unable to get his unruly coalition to
agree. Poles have clearly lost patience: in an exit poll on June 1st by
OGB, a Polish pollster, 47% of voters said they had a poor opinion of
the government, while just 30% had a favourable one.

The Polish presidency is not responsible for EU policy; Mr Tusk, not

Mr Nawrocki, will continue to attend EU summits. Nonetheless, the
president-elect can be expected to try to shift the country in a
Eurosceptic direction. He was endorsed during the campaign by
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, and by others from the EU’s
populist bloc. “We don’t want to be a European Union province,” he
told supporters at a rally. Mr Nawrocki has also turned away from
PiS’s traditionally firm support for Ukraine, pledging during the
campaign to oppose that country’s admission to NATO, though there
is very little chance that this will happen soon.

For many of Mr Nawrocki’s opponents, the most troubling aspect of

his victory is his tainted past. In the last weeks of the campaign,
journalists reported claims that in the early 2000s he procured sex
workers for guests at a hotel where he worked. He denies those
allegations. He has acknowledged, however, that in his 20s he
engaged in mass brawls with other football hooligans. Newspapers
reported for weeks on his relationship with an aged neighbour,
whom he allegedly scammed out of his flat. Mr Nawrocki and his
allies call such allegations a smear campaign by Mr Trzaskowski and
the state media. ■

To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café

Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/06/02/what-polands-new-president-means-for-
europe
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Drones and diplomacy

Ukraine smashes Russia’s air

force and a key bridge
The window for diplomacy is closing
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午 | KYIV

RARELY HAS a week of war seemed so confusing. In a few early

June days, underlying assumptions about Ukraine and Russia were
shaken in three ways. On June 1st Ukraine launched one of the most
daring raids in the modern history of warfare, releasing killer drones
from trucks to scavenge on strategic bombers deep inside Russia,
reimagining old types of sabotage and exposing Russia’s
vulnerabilities. Two days later Ukraine struck the bridge linking
occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland. In between, there were
peace talks in Istanbul that were not really talks: Russia doubled
down with its ultimatums, but lines of communication were opened.
On the war front, meanwhile, Russia continued to press Ukraine
hard, while bleeding hard too, suffering perhaps its millionth
casualty·. In a telephone call to Donald Trump on June 4th, Vladimir
Putin promised retaliation.

The operation the Ukrainians codenamed “Spider Web” was 18

months in the making. In scale, audacity and timing, it played out
like an orchestra. The attack focused on at least four air bases, the
farthest over 4,000 km from Kyiv. They used over 100 quadcopters
that emerged almost simultaneously from hidden compartments
inside trucks, which then self-destructed. Ukraine’s main intelligence
agency, the SBU, which led the operation, claimed to have damaged
or destroyed at least 41 aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers
and early-warning planes. Satellite images suggest fewer were
destroyed, but with over 13 confirmed losses, it was a spectacular
blow to Russian capabilities—and pride.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Ukrainian intelligence sources said they hoped the operation would

sow doubt in the Kremlin that it could sustain a full-scale war. “The
longer this drags on, the more Pandora’s boxes we’ll be forced to
open,” one said. A key outcome was proof that Ukrainian intelligence
was still able to operate with extreme secrecy, despite fears of
Russian penetration. Russia had no warning of the attack.

The June 3rd attack on the Kerch bridge would have led most other
weeks’ news. Ukraine claims the strike, probably conducted by
underwater drones, seriously damaged the bridge’s foundations.
That seems unlikely, given the flow of traffic that resumed a few
hours later. But even if the physical damage was limited, the
psychological effect was large enough. Ukraine even hacked the
bridge’s own CCTV to show the hit taking place.
But a larger question hangs over botched sabotage operations in
Russia’s border regions in the early hours of June 1st. Two Ukrainian
sources say the goal had been to derail a munitions train headed for
the front; instead, a passenger train crashed, killing at least seven
people. Russian media splashed on the tragedy, while leaving attacks
on its airbases unreported.

Russia’s delegation arrived in Istanbul on June 2nd with a similarly

disciplined line. In curt exchanges that lasted slightly over an hour,
they referred to the operations on their soil only once—dismissing
them as “terrorism”. They handed over a “memorandum” effectively
demanding Ukraine’s surrender: concessions on sovereignty,
neutrality and military capabilities. Ukraine countered with a list of
hundreds of children taken from occupied areas. The Russians called
that a “show for childless, bleeding-heart European old ladies”.

At the same time, traces of a diplomatic track remained. The sides

agreed to resume prisoner swaps, including all-for-all exchanges of
the young and infirm. Some messages may have been passed from
the Kremlin in secret. Even so, a Ukrainian security official warned
that the window for diplomacy was closing. A full ceasefire before
the end of Russia’s summer offensive, only just now getting under
way, now seems unlikely.“The Russians are stalling,” said Heorhii
Tykhyi, spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry. “They’re too
confident. They’re too arrogant.”

That confidence stems partly from Russian progress on the front

lines, but it is coming steadily if at high cost. Russia is pressing in
two main directions: against Sumy in the north-east, reversing
Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk across the border; and at the Donetsk
region, Russia’s main focus since 2014. However much Ukraine
celebrates its new raiding prowess deep inside Russia, the victory
has little immediate relevance to the front lines. For now, this aspect
of the war remains its most difficult—and its most dangerous. ■
To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café
Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/06/05/ukraine-smashes-russias-air-force-and-a-
key-bridge

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Populist paralysis

The hard-right’s champion

blows up the Dutch
government
Geert Wilders won an election but bails without getting much done
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | AMSTERDAM

GEERT WILDERS has been trying to ride anti-immigrant sentiment to

the top of Dutch politics ever since he founded his Party for Freedom
(PVV) in 2006. In an election in 2023 the hard-right populist finally
succeeded, finishing first with 23.5% of the vote. His party became
the biggest in government, though led by a compromise prime
minister rather than by Mr Wilders. The PVV leader promised the
toughest asylum policy ever, cheaper health-care and various other
boons. But as the months went by, almost none of his pledges came
to fruition. Some were stranded in ministries or the courts; others
fell to budget concerns. On June 3rd Mr Wilders pulled the plug on
the coalition he had dominated, complaining that other parties had
sabotaged his immigration plans.

The PVV had been sliding in the polls, from 33% in early 2024 to
about 20% in May. Mr Wilders’s furious coalition partners accused
him of blowing up the government as a political stunt. Dilan Yesilgoz,
leader of the centre-right Liberals (VVD), called it “super-
irresponsible”. On May 26th, at a surprise press conference, Mr
Wilders unveiled ten demands for tougher asylum policy, including
poorly worked-out notions such as deploying the army at the border.
In meetings over the past two days he insisted the other parties sign
on. When they asked him to first work out the details and present
his proposals to parliament, he brought down the cabinet. In
typically apocalyptic language, he said he had been elected to stop
asylum-seekers, not to facilitate “the downfall of the Netherlands”.

The country is almost certainly headed for fresh elections. Any

alternative coalition would need to include the large Labour-
GreenLeft party, but its leader, Frans Timmermans, has ruled that
out. In the meantime Dick Schoof, the non-partisan prime minister,
will stay on in his job, along with most of the current ministers; the
PVV’s ministers have resigned. Lack of a governing majority will
complicate the Netherlands’ position when it hosts the NATO summit
on June 24th-25th in The Hague, where the lame-duck Mr Schoof
will be expected to pledge huge increases in defence spending.

The outgoing Dutch government was the farthest-right one since the
second world war. To some extent its collapse can be ascribed to Mr
Wilders’s peculiarities. He is the sole registered member of the PVV,
and entirely controls its MPs and staff. That has kept the party from
building up skilled cadres. It was Mr Wilders’s own pick for
immigration minister, the inexperienced and obstinate Marjolein
Faber, who failed to get her boss’s asylum policies implemented,
clashing constantly with parliament, mayors and civil servants.

Mr Wilders has had a reputation as a bad partner since 2012, when

he brought down the first cabinet of Mark Rutte, the long-serving
prime minister from the VVD, rather than share responsibility for
unpopular austerity measures. (He had supported it in a confidence
and supply deal.) Mr Rutte vowed never to collaborate with him
again, but Ms Yesilgoz lifted that cordon sanitaire in 2023. She has
now resurrected Mr Rutte’s favourite epithet for the PVV leader:
wegloper, or someone who walks away. Others were harsher still.
Mona Keijzer, the minister of housing, accused Mr Wilders of
“betraying the Netherlands”.

Yet in other ways the PVV’s difficulties in governing recall those of

other populist parties across Europe. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-
right prime minister, saw her plan to deport asylum-seekers to
processing camps in Albania struck down by judges. Her promises to
move Italy towards a presidential system have gone nowhere.
Sweden’s populist Sweden Democrats have pushed immigration and
climate policy modestly rightwards, but those policies are
implemented by the centre-right Moderates whose government they
back from the outside; they are not in the cabinet themselves. On
June 1st Polish voters elected a hard-right presidential candidate,
Karol Nawrocki, but the main effect will be to stymie the centrist
government through his power of veto.

Hard-right parties can transform countries when they have an

absolute majority and are not checked by other branches of
government, as in Hungary under Viktor Orban or in Poland from
2015-23. That is not possible in the Netherlands’ fragmented political
landscape, with 15 parties in parliament. Besides the PVV and VVD,
the outgoing cabinet included New Social Contract, a centrist party
focused on governance reform, and the small agrarian Farmer-
Citizen Movement, whose chief mission is to relax European Union
limits on pollution from farms. Those parties floundered in
government as well, and polls show that new elections would nearly
wipe them out.

As Dutch politics shifts back into campaign mode, the main action
will be between the VVD, the PVV and Labour-GreenLeft. Mr Wilders
will try to deflect blame for the government’s failures and return the
focus to immigration, the issue where his party is the strongest. “He
will try to create a narrative that it was the established parties and
elite institutions that made it impossible for him to get things done,”
says Sarah de Lange, a political scientist at the University of
Amsterdam. Mr Timmermans, the sole big player on the left, must
decide whether to run mainly against the PVV or the VVD.

To see what the legacy of the Netherlands’ first government to

include the PVV will be, watch Ms Yesilgoz. As the leader of the
biggest mainstream conservative party, she will decide whether or
not to marginalise Mr Wilders again, and hence whether future
governments move back to the centre or cement the shift to the
hard right. She must also contend with the resurgence of the centre-
right Christian Democrats, just to her left. “The VVD used to be the
gatekeepers between the traditional order and the right-wing
radicals,” says Mark Thiessen, a columnist and former VVD strategist.
Since Ms Yesilgoz took over the party, “they’ve become the bridge.”
■

To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café

Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/06/03/the-hard-rights-champion-blows-up-the-
dutch-government

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Charlemagne

The constitution that never

was still haunts Europe 20
years on
The stumble of 2005 resulted in a better EU
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

EUROPE IS FAMED for its zippy German cars, French high-speed

trains and sleek Italian motorboats. But for decades the contraption
most often favoured to describe the workings of the European Union
was the humble bicycle. Federalists painted the EU as an inherently
unstable machine whose only chance to avoid a crash was to keep
moving forward. The self-serving analogy justified furious pedalling
by those who dreamed of “ever-closer union” lest the whole thing
keel over. By the early 2000s the argument that more integration
was always better had made its way. What had once been a modest
pact between six countries to regulate coal and steel production had
morphed into a political union of 25 (later up to 28), with a shared
currency, no internal borders and the rights for citizens from Lisbon
to Lapland to settle down where they saw fit. Who could tell where a
few more decades of such freewheeling towards continental
convergence would lead?

In an anniversary precisely nobody in Brussels is marking, the theory

of more-integration-or-bust got a nasty puncture 20 years ago this
month. A “constitutional treaty” dreamt up as the next big step in EU
integration was voted down by French voters on May 29th 2005, by
a 55-45% margin. On June 1st Dutch voters rejected it by an even
wider one. Those convinced the EU had only one gear—en avant,
toute!—fretted that the defeat might result in gradual disintegration;
war pitting Europeans against their fellow Europeans would be only
a matter of time. That was always hyperbole; it also proved to be
entirely wrong. After 2005 the EU shelved its grandiose plans for a
more technocratic life—and has never been more popular with
citizens as a result. Bitter as it seemed at the time, defeat at the
polls set the union on a better track.

These days the idea of a constitution is remembered as a curio of

European history. The EU and its forebears had, since its inception in
1957, been ruled by intergovernmental treaties, in legal terms a
souped-up regional version of the UN. By the early 2000s a new text
was undoubtedly needed to streamline the club’s workings after a
period of rapid expansion. Enlargement with ten new countries in
2004, most of them in central Europe, threatened to gum up the
machine’s gears if not revised (a lot of business that had required EU
national governments to agree unanimously was to be replaced by
qualified-majority votes). But the second purpose, just as important
to some, was to endow the EU with the regalia of a nation state—
hence the constitution bit.
The document had been crafted by a “convention” chaired by Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing, haughty even by the standards of former French
presidents. The parallels with the birth of America were intentional.
The preamble of the Euro-constitution invoked the “will of the
citizens” as a justification for these new arrangements between them
(never mind that the citizens knew little about this supposed will of
theirs). Symbols meant to foster citizenly love for the EU oozed from
the text. It already had a directly elected parliament; now the union
was to have its own official flag, anthem, foreign minister and even
a dedicated holiday.

For all the symbolism it contained, the constitution was no federalist

power-grab. Despite being denounced as a “blueprint for tyranny” by
Britain’s Daily Mail, a fount of Euro-outrage, the text disappointed
those who wanted the EU to have its own taxation powers, for
example. (The Economist felt the text was confusing and
recommended filing it in the nearest rubbish bin.) The French non
and Dutch nee were not enough to send the machine entirely off
course. By 2009 much of the 450 pages of the constitution—brevity
was not one of Giscard’s strong points—had been recycled into the
Lisbon treaty, which shoehorned most of its provisions into a
whopper amendment of two EU treaties already in force. The union
did deepen somewhat as a result, for example giving its parliament a
bit more power. But anything that smacked of symbolism was left on
the cutting-room floor. The post of foreign minister was replaced
with the odd-sounding “High Representative/Vice-President” for
foreign affairs.

Worse, the failed constitutional gambit allowed a new brand of

Euroscepticism to take root. The urban and upper classes had
backed the EU in the French and Dutch referendums. Rural and
working-class types had not. Populists decried the adoption of most
of the constitution’s clauses by the back door; Marine Le Pen in
France dubbed it “the worst betrayal since the second world war”.
Brussels has never shaken off the idea that it is a project of the
elites.
We the People are not keen on this sort of thing

Voters in Ireland and Denmark had previously rejected EU treaties—

before being made to vote again. Having two of its six founding
members reject the constitution was a different matter. The votes
“brought the process of European integration to an abrupt and
durable halt”, says Jean-Claude Piris, who served for decades as the
EU’s top lawyer and helped draft the treaties. It made the prospect
of future treaties too daunting to even contemplate. The EU
retreated into intergovernmental technocracy, where it remains to
this day.

This is dispiriting to some. It need not be. Yes, the EU is still a

distant beast to citizens. Over a third of Europeans admit they have
little idea how it actually works. But that has not stopped the union
from being effective: 74% of Europeans think it serves their own
country well, a record high. The EU has even integrated more, on
necessary occasions, such as when governments in 2020 agreed to
jointly issued bonds to fund a post-pandemic recovery stimulus. A
union of states, with independent institutions on hand to push
common interests forward in areas where Europe needs to act as
one, turns out to be a fine idea. It had never needed to be more
than that. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/06/05/the-constitution-that-never-was-still-
haunts-europe-20-years-on

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Britain
Britain’s ambitious plan to rearm looks
underfunded
Defence plans :: Many of the new capabilities will not show up for years

A ruling in Britain stokes fears of backdoor

blasphemy laws
Fire and furore :: Concerns over a case involving the burning of a Koran

Can Britain untangle the mess in its water

industry?
Drip, drip :: Sir Jon Cunliffe wants to regulate water companies like banks

Britain’s AI-care revolution isn’t flashy—but

it is the future
AI and social care :: To see the future of social care, come to England’s Black Country

A new London attraction hopes to revive

interest in Elvis
All shook up :: At “Elvis Evolution”, the king of rock ’n’ roll ain’t dead

Manchester’s Town Hall renovation will be

late, costly and worth it
Fixing public buildings :: An age of endless discovery

All pain, no gain: Labour’s odd strategy

Bagehot :: Britain’s governing party spends its political capital for little return

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Defence plans

Britain’s ambitious plan to

rearm looks underfunded
Many of the new capabilities will not show up for years
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Editor’s note (June 2nd): This article has been updated.

IF THERE IS one thing that Britain’s political parties agree on, it is

that British defences are broken. The armed forces were “hollowed-
out…overstretched and under-equipped”, acknowledged Ben
Wallace, then defence secretary, in 2023. John Healey, his Labour
successor, speaking last year, agreed: “What we’ve not been ready
to do is to fight.”
On June 2nd the government published a “root and branch” defence
review that was a year in the making. The 140-page strategic
defence review (SDR) was written by three outside figures led by
George Robertson, a former British defence secretary and NATO
secretary-general. They handed a first document to ministers in
December. Several drafts later, and after vicious battles with the
Treasury, it was launched by Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, in
Scotland. All 62 of the review’s recommendations have been
accepted.

Its central conclusion is simple: British forces, and society, must

move decisively to “warfighting readiness”. America is likely to shift
military forces from Europe to Asia, it notes. Britain’s “long-standing
assumptions about global power balances and structures are no
longer certain”. It proposes a campaign to explain the threats to the
British public, and a Defence Readiness bill that would allow the
government to mobilise reserves and industry in case of a larger war,
alongside other measures to increase civilian and military resilience.

The review does not set out a detailed order of battle—that will
come in later documents—but makes a handful of big commitments.
Britain will buy “up to” a dozen future SSN-AUKUS attack
submarines, a marked increase from the current Astute-class fleet,
which is capped at seven. It raises the possibility that the Royal Air
Force might buy F-35A jets, which are cheaper and can fly farther
than the current carrier-capable F-35Bs.

More important, they can also carry nuclear bombs. The review
recommends that Britain should open discussions with America and
NATO on taking part in the alliance’s nuclear sharing, in which
European air forces practise delivering American B61 bombs. Less
dramatic, but no less important, is the recommendation that Britain
should develop offensive anti-satellite weapons.

The review also begins to tackle areas of critical weakness. The level
of ammunition stockpiles “would make your hair stand on end”,
noted Sir Patrick Sanders, a general, last year. The government will
now invest £1.5bn ($2bn) to build at least six new factories for
munitions and “energetics” that go inside them. The idea is that
these will form the basis of what the review describes as an “always
on” capability, which could be scaled up in wartime to compensate
for losses.

The most important aspects of the review are less about hardware
than reforms. The upper echelons of defence have been reshuffled
to empower the chief of defence staff and create a powerful new
national armaments director. A new cyber and electromagnetic
command will oversee the protection of military networks and
electronic warfare. Procurement will be overhauled “from top to the
bottom”, with details to come in a defence industrial strategy this
year. A “Defence Uncrewed Systems Centre” is to be established by
February 2026, aimed at pushing drones into front-line units across
all three services more quickly.

More broadly, the review endorses a change in the way that Britain
should fight. “It is through dynamic networks of crewed, uncrewed,
and autonomous assets and data flows,” it argues, rather than
simply numbers of troops and platforms, “that lethality and military
effect are now created.” Encouragingly, it acknowledges that
previous efforts to create a “digital targeting web” to knit together
sensors, weapons and commanders have failed, and proposes new
ways to bring one about by 2027. It promises, vaguely, that the
army will eventually become “10x more lethal”.

The review acknowledges that the European Union is of “increasing

significance” in defence matters and that the bloc might
“complement NATO’s role”. But there is not even a hint that Britain
fears a rupture with America. The Anglo-American defence
relationship is “unlike any other”, says the review, noting that British
military activity is “underpinned” by the Five Eyes intelligence
alliance.
Money, money, money

Some awkward questions are left unaddressed. There is little on

expanding missile defence over British soil, which is largely non-
existent. If Britain does buy F-35As, it could eat into future orders
for the next-generation jet produced as part of the Global Combat
Air Programme (GCAP), a joint project with Italy and Japan. Some of
the announcements also appear to be recycled from past pledges.
Only half of the £4bn for autonomous systems is new money, for
instance. The government’s promise of £15bn for a new warhead
refers to money that was privately committed in budget planning
long ago. The £1.5bn for ammo factories will not go as far as it
might seem. Internal estimates suggest that Britain would need to
spend approximately £8bn to replenish its ammunition stockpiles to
meet the demands of a high-intensity war.
Murkier still, and more troubling, is the broader question of defence
spending. The Treasury has privately estimated that for Britain to
fully meet its commitments to the AUKUS submarine deal, GCAP and
nuclear-related projects would require spending between 3% and
3.5% of GDP on defence. In February the government committed to
the rather more feeble target of 2.5% of GDP by 2027, a 0.2
percentage-point increase from the current level, and 3% only in the
next parliament (ie, before 2034), and then, too, with caveats.
Crucially, that appears not to have changed. On June 1st the Ministry
of Defence said that the 3% target remained an “ambition” for the
next parliament, and only “when economic and fiscal conditions
allow”.

That timeline raises several problems. The Treasury tends to ignore

spending commitments beyond the planning window for the Office
of Budgetary Responsibility, which runs to 2029-30. A nine-year
timeline for hitting the 3% target is also close to the upper estimates
of how long it would take Russia to rebuild its armed forces to a size
and level where they might feel capable of attacking NATO.
Germany’s top general has suggested that Russia might reach that
point as early as 2029, by which time America might have pulled
some forces out of Europe. Yet many of the review’s
recommendations would yield new capabilities only in the 2030s.

That could change. NATO defence ministers, who met in Brussels on

June 4th, are close to agreeing on a new 3.5% spending target,
which would be announced at the NATO summit in The Hague in
three weeks’ time. The real debate is over the deadline—early 2030s
or later in the decade—and whether there should be annual targets
for incremental growth, to encourage allies to front-load cash.

For now, Mr Healey appears to have lost his battle with the Treasury.
In a foreword to the review, Mr Healey says that the government will
produce £6bn in savings. Such claims should be taken with a pinch
of salt. The result is a plan that has great potential to revive British
military power, but could fall short of the “genuinely transformative”
review promised by Lord Robertson last month. ■

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

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/02/britains-ambitious-plan-to-rearm-looks-
underfunded

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Fire and furore

A ruling in Britain stokes fears

of backdoor blasphemy laws
Concerns over a case involving the burning of a Koran
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

IT TAKES A lot to get religious lobby groups to agree with the

National Secular Society (NSS). But such an alliance has emerged
since Hamit Coskun was convicted on June 2nd of a religiously
motivated public-order offence after setting fire to a Koran. He was
fined £240 ($325).

On February 13th Mr Coskun had stood outside the Turkish

consulate in London, holding a burning Koran aloft while shouting
“Islam is the religion of terrorists”. He was attacked by a man
brandishing a large knife who said he was going to kill him, and
kicked by a passing delivery man. The whole encounter was filmed
and circulated on social media.

The Crown Prosecution Service at first charged Mr Coskun with an

offence against “the religious institution of Islam”. Critics said this
amounted to a charge of blasphemy. (England abolished its
blasphemy laws in 2008.) Mr Coskun was eventually convicted for
“disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to
be caused harassment, alarm or distress”. Judge John McGarva did
not accept Mr Coskun’s claim that his dispute was with Islam, ruling
that he was “motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims”.
Stephen Evans of the NSS said the verdict suggests “a troubling
repurposing of public-order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws”. Mr
Coskun himself asked, “Would I have been prosecuted if I’d set fire
to a copy of the Bible outside Westminster Abbey?”

The ruling said the proof of Mr Coskun’s disorderly conduct was “that
it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two
different people”. Tim Dieppe of Christian Concern, a lobby group,
says that is “victim blaming” and amounts to an argument that
“because some Muslims are prone to violence if their religion is
insulted, the police will enforce protection of their religion.”

Miqdaad Versi, of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), insisted the

ruling is “about public order and hate-crime laws, not silencing free
speech or protecting any one religion”. Neither the MCB nor most
British Muslims, he says, are calling for blasphemy to be a criminal
offence.

Mr Coskun is appealing against the conviction. His supporters have

urged him to be careful. Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee in
Sweden, who burned a Koran in public in 2023, was shot dead in
January at his home in Stockholm. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to
Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/05/a-ruling-in-britain-stokes-fears-of-
backdoor-blasphemy-laws

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Drip, drip

Can Britain untangle the mess

in its water industry?
Sir Jon Cunliffe wants to regulate water companies like banks
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

BOWING TO THE Byzantine financial complexity of privatised water

in Britain, the government made an unusual choice for its “once-in-
a-generation” review into the troubled sector: putting a central
banker in charge. Sir Jon Cunliffe, until recently of the Bank of
England, released his interim findings on June 3rd. That same
morning the industry laggard, Thames Water, announced that rescue
plans had collapsed. After ten weeks of due diligence KKR, a private-
equity giant, decided not to inject fresh cash into the struggling and
over-indebted utility.
Water is in the muck for two reasons. One is decades of
underinvestment. The blame for that sits mostly with Ofwat, the
regulator. Water is a natural monopoly, so the industry has a peculiar
structure: Ofwat must approve firms’ investment plans, and the bill
rises that fund them.

Companies’ relationship with Ofwat has tended to be testy. Ofwat

prioritised keeping bills low over funding more investment. After
public outcry at sewage spills—amplified by a pandemic-era boom in
wild swimming—Ofwat is now letting companies raise bills by 36%,
plus inflation, to fund £104bn ($141bn) in investment. Five firms
have appealed against that decision to the Competition and Markets
Authority, another regulator, arguing that bills need to go up even
further.
Then comes Thames Water. Many in the sector loaded up on debt to
juice water’s slow-but-steady returns in the years after privatisation
(see chart 1). The ramp-up in borrowing for Thames Water under its
previous owners, Macquarie, an Australian investment firm, was
especially stark. Thames is the only water company to have over
80% of debt relative to its assets. Ofwat recommends 55%; the
industry average is around 70%. Ofwat has also flagged the finances
of Southern Water and South East Water as worryingly fragile. Over
the past few years a surge in borrowing costs and higher
performance-related fines from Ofwat have shaken this model. Sir
Dieter Helm, an economist at Oxford University, reckons the sector
“would have limped along without those shocks”, even if the
situation was ultimately “unsustainable”.

Sir Jon’s final verdict is not due until later in the summer, but his
interim report offers a sense of likely reforms. Core to his vision
seems to be a “supervisory” approach akin to how financial
regulators approach banks, with specific teams assigned to track
individual companies. A gripe in the industry has been that Ofwat
focuses on comparing companies against a “notional” structure that
doesn’t match their own.
He also wants to simplify the messy laws and duties governing
water, and to make the sector more attractive to investors. That is a
challenge. Sir Dieter calls the industry “pretty close to uninvestible”
in light of political and regulatory risk. (Labour has threatened to
lock up water bosses.) Another worry for investors is uncertainty
around asset health—whether the quality of water infrastructure is
up to snuff. The number of Ofwat fines over the past few years
suggest it may not be (see chart 2). The returns on offer have failed
to entice much new capital. The global buildout of renewable power
and data centres means there are ample investable projects
elsewhere. Analysis by Vallorii, a technology firm, suggests default
risk alone raises Thames Water’s cost of equity from the 4.8% real-
terms return that Ofwat allows to 13.7%.

As a result, Thames Water is cash-starved and may not be far off

special administration, a type of insolvency. The Ontario Municipal
Employees Retirement System has already written its 31.7% stake
down to zero. Distressed-debt specialists like Silver Point Capital and
Elliott Management, known for seizing an Argentinian naval vessel
during a decades-long court battle over sovereign-bond repayments,
have swooped in.

The government says it is still hoping to avoid special administration.

If Thames Water went bust, calls from the Labour backbenches for
outright nationalisation might be difficult to ignore. Not quite “too
big to fail”, but at least “too inconvenient to fail”. Sir Jon’s banking
experience may come in handy after all.■

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

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/05/can-britain-untangle-the-mess-in-its-
water-industry

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

AI and social care

Britain’s AI-care revolution

isn’t flashy—but it is the
future
To see the future of social care, come to England’s Black Country
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Dudley, West Midlands

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is typically associated with Silicon

Valley coders or researchers in Shanghai, not chain-smoking care
workers in the Black Country. Yet in England’s post-industrial
heartland Samantha Woodward, a manager at Cera, a home-care
company, arranges carers’ schedules with Amazon-like efficiency. A
custom-built app plots the quickest routes to see the most clients in
the shortest time. Carers log their arrival by sharing their GPS
location. Alerts ensure that medication is given on schedule. So good
are the data that Cera can even predict which workers are likely to
quit (staff turnover is said to be down by 20%).

England may seem an unlikely pioneer in an AI-care revolution.

Whereas Japan is deploying robots, a quarter of care providers in
England still keep paper records. The country’s care system is
underfunded and overstretched. Yet necessity is spurring innovation,
albeit not from cash-strapped local councils (over 40% of their
spending on services already goes on adult social care). Young
entrepreneurs are teaching carers to use tools more common to
delivery services and dating apps.

One of them is Ben Maruthappu, Cera’s founder. He launched Cera

after failing to find reliable care for his mother (an origin story
typical of aspiring age-tech entrepreneurs). If groceries could be
tracked in real time to the doorstep, he reasoned, then why not
medication? Today Cera claims to have created Europe’s largest
home-care data set—over 200bn data points—to train AI that
predicts patients’ needs.

A promising use of AI is to predict falls. Falls are among the gravest

risks for the elderly: hip fractures are their most common cause of
accidental death. They also cost the National Health Service (NHS),
which is separate to social care, around £2bn ($2.7bn) a year. With
its app, which uses algorithms to predict fall risk, Cera claims to have
cut falls by a fifth. A peer-reviewed study from 2022 found that its
app had reduced hospitalisations by 52%. In March the NHS said it
would work with Cera to roll out its AI tool across the country.

Fifty kilometres south of Ms Westwood’s patch is The Lawns, a

nursing home. There, another tech adopter, Melanie Dawson, a
former rugby player turned care manager, has overseen an NHS pilot
using acoustic-monitoring devices. White boxes combine motion
sensors and machine learning to detect unusual movements or
noises in the residents’ rooms, a kind of Shazam for ambient noise.
Over a year-long trial, falls decreased by 66%, and staff made 61%
fewer checks in person. With fewer disturbances, residents also slept
better and, with less daytime-napping, ate more. When the pilot
finished, the home chose to keep using them at its own cost.

At Cavendish Park, in Worcestershire, residents can play with robotic

companion pets and try an interactive driving simulator. Most,
though, stay in their rooms, chatting to smart speakers called Alexa
(made by Amazon). Cavendish Park was the first home in Europe to
build Alexas, adapted to care homes, into its infrastructure,
integrating them with its alarm and communication systems.
Residents can use them to ask for help, for a drink or to make an
emergency call.

AI’s adopters say the tech is meant to support staff, not replace
them. At Cavendish Park, carers scan residents’ faces using
PainChek, a mobile app, which detects micro-expressions linked to
pain. Within seconds, they can detect pain more quickly and
accurately than a trained nurse.

Yet in other cases, AI appears to be filling gaps left by a shortage of

carers. In Northamptonshire, Cera is testing robots to give routine
prompts, like whether clients have eaten or taken their medication.
Though fine for the most mundane tasks, they are no replacement
for Ms Westwood’s kind and competent team. At Cavendish Park,
residents treat their chatbots as companions (one 99-year-old says
she spends all her time playing “Quick-fire Quiz”). Meryem Tom, who
leads the Alexa division at Amazon, insists that the Alexas are
“complementary” to humans.

One risk is that care workers could become tethered to digital

metrics, a grim prospect for such a human job. Consent is another
concern. Many of the clients whom AI might best help have
dementia, raising doubts about whether they can meaningfully opt
in. Some homes already feel like prisons: the dementia wing at
Cavendish Park, Chatsworth House, is locked with keypads. AI could
worsen that controlling urge. With enough surveillance, warns
Andrew Sixsmith, a gerontology professor at Simon Fraser University,
they risk resembling Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical
prison where a single guard can watch every cell.

Still, for those needing care, the benefits of safety and independence
appear to outweigh the risks—at least for now. Brenda Adkin is a
101-year-old Cera client who recently suffered a fall. Still enjoying a
sherry with her neighbour in the morning, she has no wish to go into
a care home. “I like my independence,” she says. AI helps the carers
she loves keep her at home. Solving the care crisis will take more of
this kind of innovation, not less. ■

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

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/05/britains-ai-care-revolution-isnt-
flashy-but-it-is-the-future

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

All shook up

A new London attraction

hopes to revive interest in
Elvis
At “Elvis Evolution”, the king of rock ’n’ roll ain’t dead
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Royal Docks

LONDON’S ROYAL DOCKS once hummed with the commerce of

empire. Today they have a new buzz and a new name: “Immerse
LDN”, a collection of interactive entertainment attractions. The area
lures tourists and tech nerds who come to enjoy virtual reality—and,
soon, Elvis Presley.
The much-anticipated star of this revived neighbourhood is to be
“Elvis Evolution”, a walk-through exhibition of the king of rock ’n’ roll,
due to open in July. The attraction will bring together two of
London’s talent pools: West End actors and East End technologists.
The result is a multisensory extravaganza that promises to take
punters on a journey through Presley’s music, fashion and favourite
foods, culminating in a serenade by a human-sized hologram of the
singer. Layered Reality, the firm behind it, hopes the wizzy tech will
help introduce a classic artist to the young while catering to the
nostalgia of the old.

Unlike “ABBA Voyage”, which stuck motion sensors on the band’s

(living) members to create hologrammatic representations of their
younger selves, the makers of “Elvis Evolution” had no flesh and
blood to work with. Instead they used AI to project Presley, with his
mannerisms and movements, based on thousands of photos and
videos.

Immersive experiences are having a moment. Also on offer in

Docklands are an Egyptology show centred on Tutankhamun, an
escape-room-style activity based on Netflix’s series “Squid Game”
and a “Friends”-themed homage to NBC’s sitcom. The British
immersive-tech market, encompassing virtual, augmented and mixed
reality, reached £1.06bn ($1.35bn) in 2024 and is expected to grow
to £6.24bn by 2033, according to iMarc, a market-research firm.
“Elvis Evolution” may eventually rock up in other cities: Layered
Reality talks of Berlin, Paris and (of course) Las Vegas. The
technology behind it has wider potential. For smaller venues or
markets unable to attract headline acts, the AI-enabled model offers
an affordable alternative, through a digital proxy. Who says Taylor
Swift could never play Newton Abbot? Layered Reality’s CEO,
Andrew McGuinness, says that two artists have already approached
the company about a possible collaboration—one in the twilight of
their career, the other in their prime.

The West End needn’t fear east London’s upstarts, and modern
rockers shouldn’t worry about competing with AI ghosts. There’s
ample room for both. Video, after all, didn’t kill the radio star.■

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

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/04/a-new-london-attraction-hopes-to-
revive-interest-in-elvis

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Fixing public buildings

Manchester’s Town Hall

renovation will be late, costly
and worth it
An age of endless discovery
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | MANCHESTER

“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL thing to behold,” says Paul Candelent, looking

across the roof of Manchester Town Hall. Unfortunately, Mr
Candelent, who is overseeing the renovation of the building, is not
talking about the edifice itself—although that, too, is a marvel. He
means the scaffolding that has enveloped it for rather too long.
When Manchester Town Hall opened in 1877 it was not just a
magnificent ornament for a confident city. It also proclaimed to
Britain and the rest of the world that wealth is created by industry
and free trade. On its floors are images of worker bees and cotton
flowers, evoking the material that made the metropolis rich. Its
sculpture gallery contained busts of the Anti-Corn Law MPs John
Bright and Richard Cobden, which have been temporarily removed
for safe keeping.

Other British cities put up similarly showy edifices in the second half
of the 19th century, often in neo-Gothic style (like Manchester Town
Hall) or neoclassical. With typical brashness, Manchester resolved to
create a hall that would be “equal if not superior, to any similar
building in the country at any cost which may be reasonably
required”. It would not be outdone in any way. Sheffield had recently
taken delivery of an organ by the French master Aristide Cavaillé-
Coll. Manchester Town Hall had to have an organ by Aristide
Cavaillé-Coll.

Perhaps Manchester’s town hall is no grander than those of rival

cities like Leeds and Liverpool. But it is more fanciful and more fun.
Ceilings are painted with stars, or decorated with mosaic glass. The
roof is interrupted by steeply pitched gables and turrets; the interior
courtyard is a riot of architectural styles. Tracey Cartledge, who has
repaired some of the building’s roughly 4,000 square metres of
mosaic, calls it “a fairy-tale palace”.

Her ministrations, and those of many other craftsmen and women,

were badly needed. By the time the town hall closed for repair, in
2018, large parts of it had become unsafe and unusable. The
Carrara marble on the floors was worn through in places. The roof
leaked. Stained-glass windows were buckling under their own
weight. And much of the interior was in need of cleaning or
repainting.

Exploring without a map

Some of the renovations are drastic. The whole roof, which has a
surface of more than 5,000 square metres, is being refurbished with
thick Cumbrian slate. But the workers are not trying to turn
Manchester Town Hall pristine. Scrubbing the entire exterior might
have made it look like a pastiche, says Mr Candelent. Better to keep
some of “that Manchester grime—140 years of soot”.
Other cities have transformed their great civic buildings into hotels,
events spaces and tourist attractions. Manchester is preserving its
town hall as a town hall. After the renovation is completed, all being
well in August 2026, coroners and registrars will move in, along with
some councillors and staff. Five new lifts are being installed to bring
the building up to date as an office complex.
Need it be spelled out that the renovation of the town hall and the
adjoining Albert Square is over budget and behind schedule? The
city council originally budgeted £305m ($410m at today’s rate). It
now expects to spend £429m. Manchester Town Hall was built in
nine years, although some fine murals by Ford Madox Brown were
not finished until later. It will be closed for renovation for almost as
long.

Some of the delay and increased cost is a result of covid-19 and the
nationwide surge in construction prices that followed the peak of the
pandemic. Another cause is what builders call “discovery”, often
meaning nasty surprises. Many of the gutters around Manchester
Town Hall looked fine through binoculars and drone cameras. Once
the scaffolding was up, and workers could inspect them more
closely, they turned out not to be.

The original builders left no detailed plans, so there was much to

discover. A tunnel was revealed. One chimney was found to rise
through the building, turn 90 degrees, run under the great hall, then
rise again. Because the town hall is protected, such revelations force
the architects to draw new plans and submit them for approval.
Every delay costs money.

Still, the project has created more than 300 jobs and 170-odd
apprenticeships—a boon to a city that can no longer claim to be
among Britain’s richest. Jon Greenough of Greenough & Sons, a
roofing firm, says that the conditions in Manchester, where workers
are protected from the elements, has enticed young people into the
trade. (His firm is also working on the Old College in Aberystwyth,
where the wind tears in from the Atlantic.)

And the craftsmen and women can be proud of their work. The
renovation of Manchester Town Hall will take too long, cost too
much, and create something of great beauty. It is a common
combination. Great buildings that define cities are not cheap—think
of François Mitterrand’s grands projets, or the Sydney Opera House.
The visual result is what people remember.

When the town hall reopens, attention may turn to another great
Victorian neo-Gothic building, to the south. The Palace of
Westminster is in an awful state. It costs around £100m a year to
patch up, and needs a complete overhaul. That could proceed more
quickly if the politicians agreed to move out. Much of this has been
known for decades, but decisions are put off and put off again. A bit
of Mancunian industriousness is needed in London.■

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

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/05/manchesters-town-hall-renovation-will-
be-late-costly-and-worth-it

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Bagehot

All pain, no gain: Labour’s odd

strategy
Britain’s governing party spends its political capital for little return
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

ALL POLITICS is about pain. Governing is a matter of deciding who

is hit and how hard. Sometimes this can be a virtue. “If it isn’t
hurting, it isn’t working,” was the mantra of John Major, a former
Conservative prime minister, who embraced high interest rates and
high unemployment in order to bring down inflation during the early
1990s. Ronald Reagan opted for a similar slogan when suffering the
same ailment: “No pain, no gain.”
Today in Britain Labour has a different approach: all pain, no gain.
Under Sir Keir Starmer, the party spends its political capital in places
where it generates the lowest return. Whether it comes to winter
fuel or welfare reforms or even dishing out cash to northern mayors,
the government has an unnerving ability to endure the maximum
amount of pain for the smallest possible gain.

Under this government, fiscally irrelevant savings provoke uproar.

Scrapping the universal winter-fuel allowance to save an annual
£1.1bn ($1.5bn, or 0.04% of GDP) was a totemic policy. It was
deeply unpopular (pensioners liked receiving £300 for nothing) when
announced by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. What Labour would
suffer in political pain was worth it for what it would gain: a
reputation for pursuing sound policy, even if voters squealed. Now,
the government has back-pedalled. All but the richest pensioners will
receive the handout. A cost-saving measure will save practically no
cost. Pain? Plenty. Gain? Almost none.

Labour has long stuck by the two-child benefit cap, citing its £3.5bn
cost to remove. That left 540,000 or so children in poverty and made
backbench MPs furious. Nearly a year on, Sir Keir is thinking of
reversing course. What kind of Labour prime minister wants to
oversee a rise in child poverty? Labour could be a party of fiscal
prudence or one committed to lowering child poverty. Somehow, it
has managed to come across as neither.

Even where Labour has stuck to its plans, it has done so in a way
that maximises punishment and limits reward. In the spring Ms
Reeves reduced disability benefits by £5bn. The cuts were deep
enough to upset a base which sees any reduction in disability benefit
as a sin. Yet they were nowhere near enough to placate bearish
investors who see welfare spending going up for ever. (They are
right: these benefits are forecast to rise by 0.2% of GDP by 2030,
even with Labour’s stricter criteria.) Labour has taken to threatening
a chainsaw and then wielding a scalpel and wondering why
everyone, across the spectrum, is annoyed.
The timing and size of the welfare cuts were not due to an
ideological belief that fewer people should be on benefits. It was to
ensure that Ms Reeves would not break her fiscal rules. A £5bn hole
had appeared in the Treasury’s spreadsheet and £5bn was found to
fill it. Labour’s fiscal rules are supposed to hurt. But they are meant
to guarantee stable policymaking. Increasingly they guarantee the
opposite. Fiscal policy becomes a recurring drama, whereby Treasury
officials amend spending today to hit a forecast—and almost
certainly wrong—number in four years’ time.

Labour has to fiddle with its fiscal position so often because it will
not think big on tax. By ruling out increases to the broadest taxes,
such as income tax and VAT, Ms Reeves has focused on steep rises
to less lucrative ones. An inheritance tax on farms raises barely £2bn
but guaranteed tractors turning up in Whitehall and blasting their
horns outside Downing Street.

All pain, no gain is the guiding principle of even the party’s more
radical flank. Angela Rayner, supposedly the most left-wing member
of the cabinet, came up with a plan to target the relatively rich,
which helpfully ended up in the newspapers. Pensions could be
raided and dividends taxed more heavily. It amounted to £4bn. For
context, the British government hoovers up £1.3trn in tax revenues.
Middle England would squeal, naturally, yet the public finances
would hardly look healthier. Less soak the rich; more squirt them
with a water pistol.

Where there is a case for collective sacrifice, such as when it comes

to defence spending, the government refuses to make it. Instead it
promises no pain, just gain. After the cold war, countries slashed
defence spending, allowing them to splurge on welfare without
having to raise taxes. It was called the peace dividend. Now the
government faces the inverse: defence spending will have to rise
from 2.3% of GDP to at least 3%. Rather than admit that this will be
painful, Sir Keir insists it will be pleasant. It will be a “defence
dividend”, says the prime minister, bringing jobs and investment. He
promises it “will be felt in the pockets of working people”. Voters will
indeed feel it in their pockets. But not in the way the prime minister
thinks.

No pain, no gain? No! Pain. No gain

Back in July, when Labour should have enjoyed a post-electoral

glow, Ms Reeves promised only pain. The chancellor made a show of
pausing a slew of planned infrastructure projects when she arrived in
office. “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it,” was the chancellor’s
mantra. It turned what should have been a deluxe honeymoon into a
wet weekend in Wales. Almost a year later, on June 4th, Ms Reeves
gave these projects the green light once more. Almost a year has
been wasted. For a government whose only hope of re-election
relies on people feeling better off than they did five years ago, this is
not time they could afford to lose.

Pain without a purpose is pointless. Policy without any pain is simply

a lie. The restraint in day-to-day spending that Labour will unveil in
its spending review on June 11th will not be popular. It never is. But
it could be accepted as necessary. If this often rather vague
government has a project, it is making Britain accept that it must
consume less and invest more. That means there will be short-term
pain, for long-term gain. There is a case that the government could
make. It will hurt. But it might just work. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/06/04/all-pain-no-gain-labours-odd-strategy

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

International
Vladimir Putin’s sickening statistic: 1m
Russian casualties in Ukraine
Deathonomics :: His regime uses payouts to salve Russian families’ grief

To earn American help, allies are told to

elect nationalists
The Telegram :: MAGA-world flirts with forces that once tore Europe apart

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Deathonomics

Vladimir Putin’s sickening

statistic: 1m Russian
casualties in Ukraine
His regime uses payouts to salve Russian families’ grief
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

JUNE IS TURNING into an ill-fated month for Russia’s armed forces.

It started with a daring Ukrainian drone attack on airfields stretching
from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north that Ukraine
claims destroyed 41 large planes, or about one-third of Russia’s
strategic-bomber fleet. (Analysts viewing satellite pictures of some of
the airfields reckon the real number is about half that.) But another
momentous statistic looms. Before the month ends, Russia will
probably suffer its millionth casualty since its full-scale invasion of
Ukraine in February 2022, based on current trends of about 1,000-
1,200 soldiers killed or injured every day.

Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all

its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s
stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to
shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-
grinder attacks ought also to pose sobering questions for NATO’s
European members. How can democracies that value the individual
deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers
that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of
attrition? Russia’s human-wave attacks are “largely useless, grinding
stuff” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, a leading British strategist. “But
there are no signs of exhaustion, they are just carrying on.”

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

The grim tally of losses comes from figures compiled by the

Ukrainian general staff, leaving it open to question. But the number
is not far out of line with estimates by Western intelligence services.
It also roughly chimes with attempts by Russian independent media,
such as Meduza and Mediazona, to count the bodies. By this time
last year, Meduza reckoned that 106,000-140,000 Russian soldiers
had died. Much of its analysis was based on inheritance records and
obituaries on social media and in other outlets.

An estimate of excess mortality among Russian men based on

probate records gave a figure of 165,000 by the end of 2024, with
90,000 having been added in the previous six months. Given the
intensity of Russian operations for much of the past year, it would
not be hard to reach a figure of about 250,000 killed by now. The
ratio of severely wounded to killed is thought to be about four to
one, reflecting both the severity of injuries inflicted in Ukraine and
the low priority Russia gives to medical evacuation or the prompt
field-hospital treatment that saves lives.

Another reason to have confidence in the casualty figures is that, to

an unusual degree, they are attributable to those sustained by
soldiers in action. In most wars a high proportion of deaths, even
among combatants, result from disease, famine, accidents and the
deliberate persecution of people in occupied territories, which
inherently defy the best attempts at statistical accuracy.
A good example is the second civil war in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, from 1998 to 2003. The most lethal conflict of this century, it
is believed to have been responsible for 5.4m deaths, mostly from
disease and hunger. In the second world war, out of the nearly 27m
Soviet citizens who lost their lives, some 6.3m were killed in action
or died of their wounds.

Ukraine does not publish its own combat losses in any detail. In
February its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that more than
46,000 had been killed and 380,000 wounded since Russia’s
invasion. That is probably an underestimate. Last September a
leaked Ukrainian intelligence report suggested that 70,000-80,000 of
its soldiers had been killed in action. But the relatively smaller
number of Ukrainian deaths compared with their enemy reflects
various factors.

Apart from its ill-fated counter-offensive two years ago, Ukraine has
been fighting a largely defensive war. Advances in drone technology
have thus far favoured defence over offence. Racing drones packed
with explosives, known as first-person view (FPV) drones, which are
flown into tanks or soldiers, are playing a similar role to the
machinegun in the first world war. That innovation made infantry
attacks so costly that neither side could break the stalemate of
trench warfare until the development of new tactics and the
invention of tanks. FPV drones have now made tanks vulnerable,
too. Russia has lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000
armoured infantry vehicles since the war began. Now it depends
largely on infantry attacks by small groups of men, sometimes on
foot, sometimes on motorcycles.
Another reason why Russia’s casualties are much higher is that
Ukraine has only about a quarter as many people to draw upon, so it
cannot afford to waste its soldiers’ lives. Moreover, as a democracy,
it must show concern for its troops’ welfare, in how it fights the war
and in the way it cares for injured soldiers. Its ratio of wounded to
killed is thought to be eight to one. Whenever Ukraine’s army has
seemed indifferent to its troops, its struggle to mobilise more of
them has intensified.
Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such
staggering losses: it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 soldiers a month
to fill the lines. To put Russia’s losses into context, they are to date
on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war
of 264,000 killed. They are approaching America’s battlefield losses
(292,000 killed) in the same conflict, when its population was similar
in size to Russia’s today. The number of Russians killed in Ukraine is
probably more than four times the 47,000 combat losses that
America suffered in the eight years of its direct involvement in the
Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses also
dwarf the roughly 68,000 casualties (both killed and wounded)
suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin,

Russia’s president, has choices. Yet he appears to be under little
domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost much of the mainly
professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years
ago, he has come up with an almost entirely novel way of
replenishing manpower at the front without risking social
destabilisation.

It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by persuading

most Russians that they are in a war against an imperialistic NATO
and that there is glory in death, with lavish contracts for those
willing to sign up. “Putin believes that the Afghan war is one of the
main reasons the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of
the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come
up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market
mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics’.”

The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from
poorer provincial towns and are in their 30s and 40s, are genuinely
life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to
Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist now researching at
Oxford University, the signing-on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles
($15,000), whereas the average annual pay for a contract soldier
was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the
average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive
between 11m and 19m roubles.

According to a survey last October by the Levada Centre, an

independent Russian polling organisation, 40% of Russians would
approve of a family member or close friend signing up. Another
journalist, Olesya Gerasimenko, reporting last summer from a
recruiting centre in Moscow, found that many middle-aged fathers
were accompanied by their wives and children when they came to
sign up, determined to improve their family’s fortunes. Mr Golts says
the impact can be seen in small towns across Russia, where
recruitment has been most brisk. New houses are being built,
smarter cars are turning up on the streets, and nail bars and gyms
are opening.

For now, Ms Racheva reckons, Russian society accepts that the

system is an alternative to fully enforced mobilisation. Some 88%
approve of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going
to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge
payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice…and they
allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and
injuries they endure,” wrote Ms Racheva. In other words, the
contract is not just between the soldier and the state, but also wider
society. The question nobody can answer is how long that contract
will hold. ■
Stay on top of our defence and international security coverage
with The War Room, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/international/2025/06/02/vladimir-putins-sickening-
statistic-1m-russian-casualties-in-ukraine

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

The Telegram

To earn American help, allies

are told to elect nationalists
MAGA-world flirts with forces that once tore Europe apart
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

A CORE SKILL in MAGA diplomacy is the making of offers that

cannot be refused. Karol Nawrocki “needs to be the next president
of Poland. Do you understand me?” Kristi Noem, America’s
Homeland Security Secretary, urged voters in Poland on May 27th.
Ms Noem was addressing a rally in Jasionka, a logistics hub near the
frontier with Ukraine, days before a presidential election pitting Mr
Nawrocki, a nationalist historian, against the progressive, pro-
European mayor of Warsaw.
Then Ms Noem added a hint of menace, seeming to imply that Poles
should choose the right head of state if they want American troops
to stay in their country. To many Poles, that garrison is a flesh-and-
blood guarantee of American support. If Poles elect a leader who will
work with President Donald Trump, they will have a strong ally
against “enemies that do not share your values”, Ms Noem told the
crowd. With the right leader, “you will have strong borders and
protect your communities” and “you will continue to have a US
presence here, a military presence”, she went on.

Mr Nawrocki pulled off a narrow victory on June 1st. In a message of

congratulations, America’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared:
“The Polish people have spoken and support a stronger military and
securing their borders.” It will never be known how many votes were
swung by Ms Noem’s intervention. Still, her election-eve visit is
evidence of a revolution in America’s relations with Europe. The
notion that America sees a vital interest in Europe’s collective
security is being replaced by something more grudging and
conditional. This selective American offer builds on familiar
complaints, from Democratic and Republican presidents, that
European members of the NATO alliance need to spend more on
their own defence. But Trumpworld’s impatience with Europe goes
beyond grumbles about free-riding. Take Ms Noem and Mr Rubio at
face value, and foreigners who hope to be defended by America
would do well to show fealty to Trumpism.

Europe’s leaders face a dilemma. Though they are desperate to

maintain defence ties with America, Mr Trump is not focused on the
same threats as they are. His aides are obsessed with borders. He
sounds eager to cut deals with President Vladimir Putin, though it is
fear of Russia that explains why Poles want an American garrison. As
for the European Union, Mr Trump treats it as a hostile power, which
he says was created to “screw” his country.

Mr Trump and aides condemn Europe’s approach to transatlantic

trade, and to the regulation and taxation of businesses, notably
American technology firms. Its leaders are called hysterical about
climate change. The EU is deemed disastrously open to immigration,
and a bully for asking governments to share the burden of hosting
asylum-seekers who arrive at its external frontiers (a charge of
bullying that Mr Nawrocki made to Polish voters).

Some criticisms are worth pondering. Addressing the Munich

Security Conference in February, the vice-president, J.D. Vance, was
right to question heavy-handed European controls on free speech
and the bans that some countries impose on political parties with
broad support. But Mr Vance was point-scoring when he called that
“threat from within” more dangerous than Russia.

It is now painfully clear that Europe is caught up in America’s

domestic, partisan politics. Asked to explain that Munich speech, a
well-connected Washington conservative reports that, as a “culture-
war Catholic”, Mr Vance felt personally offended when secular-
minded “chattering-class Europeans” scolded America’s Supreme
Court for ruling against abortion rights. To Trumpworld, the EU is a
haven for globalist, woke elites, to be brought to heel like Harvard
University or the State Department.

Trumpian loathing for Europe goes beyond present-day culture wars,

though. Mr Trump’s real fight is with the American presidents who
defined post-war transatlantic relations. Closer European co-
operation was not a plot to “screw” America. Indeed, post-war
American governments urged Europeans to seek economic and
political union, invoking the example of America’s founding fathers.
Only a prosperous continent could avoid the “despair” that led
people to seek out fascism and communism, Harry Truman said in
1947, as he urged Congress to approve the Marshall Plan to fund
Europe’s reconstruction. The 33rd president praised post-war
European leaders for shunning “narrow nationalism” and agreeing to
“the reduction of trade barriers, the removal of obstacles to the free
movement of persons within Europe, and a joint effort to use their
common resources to the best advantage”.
Thank your predecessors

Today’s German laws to ban extremist parties were drafted at the

urging of post-war American lawyers and diplomats, anxious about
Nazism’s return. Dwight Eisenhower, the former general turned 34th
president, said European unity was needed to demonstrate to
America that its provision of aid was worthwhile. To leaders in
Washington, European integration was the answer to the “German
problem”: how to let Germany re-emerge as an economic giant
without terrifying its neighbours and risking another war.

For all modern Europe’s flaws, Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower and

their peers succeeded. In Mr Nawrocki, Poland has just elected a
nationalist fire-breather as president who scorns the EU and says he
will seek vast reparations from Germany for wartime crimes. Yet the
risks of war between Poland and Germany, or between any EU
countries, remain approximately zero. That miracle of peace was not
known in any earlier century. It allows Ms Noem and her ilk to use
America’s role as a security guarantor for leverage and to play divide
and rule with EU unity, with no risk of conflict within Europe’s
borders. Mr Trump and his team may despise the visionaries who
rebuilt Europe after 1945. But they are free-riders on their work. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/international/2025/06/03/to-earn-american-help-allies-are-
told-to-elect-nationalists

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Business
Even as the Murdochs bitterly feud, their
empire thrives
Media’s first family :: Why are investors so keen on their legacy media companies?

Which universities will be hit hardest by

Trump’s war on foreign students?
A degree of uncertainty :: It’s not the Ivy League

How managing energy demand got

glamorous
Power brokers :: Technology and power come together

What Bicester Village says about the luxury

industry
Retail therapy :: Everyone loves a bargain

Germany thinks about cancelling a public

holiday
Yet another day of rest? :: There are plenty to chose from

A short guide to salary negotiations

Bartleby :: Don’t threaten. Do research

AI agents are turning Salesforce and SAP

into rivals
Schumpeter :: Artificial intelligence is blurring the distinction between front office and
back office

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Media’s first family

Even as the Murdochs bitterly

feud, their empire thrives
Why are investors so keen on their legacy media companies?
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

NOTHING IN FOX’S television schedules last year was quite as

exciting—or, at times, as profane—as the drama that played out in a
closed probate court in Reno, Nevada. Rupert Murdoch, the now 94-
year-old founder and controlling shareholder of Fox Corporation and
its sister company, News Corp, was trying to change the terms of a
family trust in order to block three of his children from inheriting
control of the companies on his death. The high-stakes legal
manoeuvre was rejected. An appeal—and thus a new season of
morbid entertainment for media watchers—is in the works.
As the Murdochs continue their decades-long, multi-billion-dollar
family feud, the empire they are fighting over is flourishing. This is
doubly surprising. For one thing, succession crises and legal
uncertainty tend not to bolster investors’ confidence in a company.
What’s more, the Murdoch firms are giants in linear television and
print journalism, declining industries that markets have not been
kind to. Why are a pair of legacy media companies controlled by a
dysfunctional dynasty so popular with investors?

Start with Fox, the larger of the two, with a market value of around
$24bn. Its business is concentrated in American broadcast and cable
television, which in recent years have witnessed a bloodbath. Over
the past decade and a half the share of homes with pay-TV has
fallen from nearly 90% to barely 50%, as viewers have defected to
streaming services such as Netflix. As for broadcast television,
Americans today spend half as much time watching it as they do
streaming, according to Nielsen, a data company.
While other legacy media companies’ values have stagnated or
worse, Fox’s has soared (see chart 1). The difference lies in its
content mix. In 2019 Fox sold its general-entertainment assets to
Disney for $71bn, at what turned out to be the top of the market,
deciding to focus on news and sport. It was the right call: streamers
like Netflix have since grabbed the audience for general
entertainment, while news and sport have mostly stayed on linear
TV, and thus with Fox. “They were always the most entrepreneurial
company—they could always see around corners,” says Jessica Reif
Ehrlich, a media analyst at Bank of America.

Despite streamers’ growing interest in sport, Fox’s audience is

stable: its first showing of the Indianapolis 500 last month brought
in 7.1m viewers, the most for the motor race since 2008. Fox News,
meanwhile, recently recorded the most-watched quarter in the
history of cable news, thanks in part to the chaos generated by the
new occupant of the White House. Healthy audiences mean that,
despite a shrinking cable market, Fox has seen modest growth in its
affiliate fees (the sums it charges cable providers for carrying its
channels) from $5.9bn in 2020 to $7.3bn last year.

The return of Donald Trump has also helped Fox’s advertising

business, by normalising opinions which once made mainstream
advertisers queasy about airing commercials on Fox News. Ads on
the channel are no longer just for gold and magic pillows: in recent
months the likes of Amazon, Netflix and GE have paid for spots on
the network. “Because of the election results, many advertisers have
sort of rethought their positioning in this country and understand
that the Fox News viewer really does represent middle America,”
Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s chief executive, said in March.

Having mostly sat out the ruinously expensive streaming wars, in

which media companies lost billions trying to woo subscribers, Fox is
now experimenting with the new medium. In 2020 it bought Tubi, an
unglamorous free streaming service with adverts. Tubi has since
overtaken rivals such as Pluto, owned by Paramount, and is on track
to bring in more than $1bn this year. In February Fox aired the
Super Bowl on Tubi, drawing 8m new viewers to the platform. Some
40% of the audience was under 34 years old, a group that is hard to
reach on cable.

Its latest streaming experiment is Fox One, combining all Fox’s linear
content, which will launch before the National Football League kicks
off in September. Unlike other legacy media companies, which must
reckon with the trade-off that putting their best stuff on streaming
will undermine people’s willingness to pay for a bigger bundle of
entertainment content on cable, Fox faces no such dilemma. “The
beauty of Fox is, because they don’t have the long tail of crappy
linear cable channels to protect, they’re very nimble,” says Jason
Bazinet of Citigroup, another bank. On the transition to streaming he
notes, “They’re sort of agnostic, and so from a strategic standpoint
they’re just in a very good position.”
News Corp, the other half of the Murdoch empire, which holds titles
including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is in favour
with investors for different reasons. Print news looks no more
promising than cable television, as circulations at many titles decline
and the advertising business is swallowed by Google and Meta. By
one estimate more than 3,000 newspapers have closed in America in
the past 20 years—a third of the country’s total. Yet, like Fox, News
Corp’s stock is buoyant, rising by nearly 50% in the past two years.

One reason is the success of Dow Jones, the part of News Corp
which holds the Journal. Whereas advertising-reliant titles like the
New York Post are struggling with declines in web traffic, the
globalised, subscription-focused Journal has thrived in the same way
as rivals like the New York Times. Dow Jones also has a high-margin
business supplying data to companies. Its revenue has risen by 40%
since 2020, offsetting a decline among News Corp’s other news
businesses. HarperCollins, a book publisher owned by News Corp,
has also contributed to growth, helped by a boom in audiobooks.

Yet the biggest driver of News Corp’s share price has nothing to do
with news. Among the company’s eclectic assets is a 61% stake in
REA Group, a publicly traded Australian property-listing platform.
The Murdochs invested in the company in 2001 when it was on the
brink of bankruptcy after the dotcom crash. It proved to be an
inspired bet: following a housing boom in Australia, REA’s market
value has grown to over $20bn, some $4bn more than News Corp
itself. Shareholders’ excitement about News Corp has little to do with
newspapers or books, argues Mr Bazinet of Citigroup: “The market’s
enthusiasm is for REA.” He calculates that, between 2017 and 2024,
there was an 84% correlation between the movements in News
Corp’s share price and those of REA.

As the Murdoch empire ploughs successfully on, the family continues

to feud. Rupert Murdoch is apparently determined to protect the
leadership of his eldest son, Lachlan—who as well as running Fox is
chairman of News Corp—against a future challenge by three siblings,
Prudence, Elisabeth and James, who disagree to varying extents
with the right-wing politics of the Murdoch outlets. Under the terms
of the family trust, the three will have enough votes to oust Lachlan
after their father dies. Unless he can amend the trust, or buy out the
rebel siblings, change could be on the way for Rupert Murdoch’s
companies.

Yet the prospect of such an upset seems to be stoking enthusiasm

for the stocks in some quarters. Activist investors in News Corp have
long lobbied for the company to spin off its stake in REA, arguing
that the property company and the newspapers would fare better
separately than they have as a bundle. Fox has likewise benefited
from speculation that the company could become a target for
acquisition, as Hollywood’s studios rush to bulk up.

If control of the companies passes to siblings who are unhappy with

the status quo, the chances of a sale or break-up rise. Investors’
enthusiasm for Fox and News Corp is partly explained by the fact
that Mr Murdoch has run them so shrewdly. But it is also due to a
sense that his time in charge is drawing to a close.■

To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign

up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/02/even-as-the-murdochs-bitterly-feud-
their-empire-thrives

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

A degree of uncertainty

Which universities will be hit

hardest by Trump’s war on
foreign students?
It’s not the Ivy League
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Donald Trump would prefer a MAGA hat

IF COLLEGE PRESIDENTS were hoping Donald Trump would tire of

lambasting America’s universities, the latest tirades against
international students have left them freshly agog. On June 4th Mr
Trump escalated his attacks against Harvard, issuing an order
suspending the university from a student-visa programme, which
would stop foreigners from attending. Of wider impact is the
government’s decision to pause scheduling new visa interviews for
foreign students, no matter where they aim to study. Beyond the
damage this is doing to America’s reputation, and its prowess in
research, the tumult has bean-counters across the country’s higher-
education system wringing their hands.

Many American colleges and universities were facing financial

problems long before Mr Trump’s return to the White House.
Americans have soured on higher education, after years in which
participation grew fast. The share of high-school leavers going
straight to college fell from around 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022. In
December Moody’s, a rating agency, said a third of private
universities and a fifth of public ones were operating in the red.

Looming demographic change will bring more trouble. The total

number of high-school graduates in America may fall by around 6%
by 2030 and 13% by 2041, according to one estimate. The impact
will vary widely by region: in some north-eastern and mid-western
states (which for historical reasons have a surfeit of universities) the
decline could be as high as a third.

Foreign students are not an antidote, but they are helping offset
some pain. The million or so foreigners studying in America are
roughly double the number in 2000. They pay far higher fees than
locals for undergraduate courses—in some public universities as
much as three times the rate, says William Brustein, who has led
international strategy at several of them. Over half the foreigners are
postgraduates; these courses tend to bring outsize profits.

Though America has more foreign students than any other country,
it would seem to have room for more: they make up only about 6%
of those in higher education, compared with over 25% in each of its
main competitors—Britain, Australia and Canada. For now, alas,
growth is the last thing anyone expects. The risk is both that the
number of foreigners who turn up this autumn will fall sharply, and
of a longer-lasting depression caused by future applicants turning to
countries that seem more welcoming than America.

The big question is who might suffer the most if there is a bust.
Ultra-elite institutions may look exposed: around 28% of Harvard’s
students and a whopping 40% at Columbia come from abroad. But
these institutions have many ways to balance the books: last year
tuition fees (both domestic and foreign) and payments for room and
board made up only about 20% of Harvard’s total income, compared
with over 80% at the least prestigious private universities. Demand
for spots at the highest-ranking universities is rarely affected by a
slowdown and their home-grown students could pay more.

The trouble might be greater for second- and third-tier institutions,

where foreign students are not quite so numerous but are often
more important to the bottom line. For many years public
universities ramped up foreign enrollment to make up for declining
funding from the state where they are located. The best of these
institutions were able to boost revenues by attracting high-paying
Americans from out of state, whereas the rest had no choice but to
pay agents and marketers to bring in overseas students.

A pronounced slowdown in overseas arrivals could damage

institutions, even those that have never enrolled a single foreigner. If
highly regarded universities adapt by enrolling more local students,
that will make it harder for institutions with lesser reputations to
attract them, and thus to pay their bills. In Britain, changes to visa
rules have recently brought sharp falls in arrivals of foreign students.
Last year about 40% of universities predicted operating deficits.

This would not be a problem if it were to put shoddy and unpopular

institutions out of business. But it is a worry if it leads to regional
“cold spots” in which affordable degrees become difficult to find. Or
if it benefits complacent incumbents that trade on their reputation
rather than their teaching. Mr Trump’s war on the Ivy League could
have much wider effects than he bargained for. ■
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign
up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/03/which-universities-will-be-hit-
hardest-by-trumps-war-on-foreign-students

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Power brokers

How managing energy

demand got glamorous
Technology and power come together
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | NEW ORLEANS

Electric avenue

THE SHED, A glittering cultural centre in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards

where Ralph Fiennes and Sir Kenneth Branagh have graced the
stage, hosted an unlikely gathering of utility and technology bosses
on May 29th. They were there not for Shakespeare, but for
something as dramatic in its own way. The event celebrated Mercury,
a new effort led by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an
industry body, to create interoperability standards for “micropower”
devices inspired by the Bluetooth technology that revolutionised
consumer electronics. It will allow such things as electric-vehicle
(EV) chargers, heat pumps, solar panels, smart thermostats and
residential batteries to communicate seamlessly with electricity grids.

Days earlier, NRG Energy, a big American utility, announced the

purchase of CPower, a pioneer in “virtual power plants”. Because
VPPs aggregate and manage many small dispersed sources of
electricity (like the micropower devices Mercury will connect) to act
as one large power plant, they can help balance supply and demand
remotely. CPower’s micropower units together produce over 6
gigawatts (GW), as much peak power as six nuclear plants.

When power grids approach peak demand and big generators

cannot cope, VPPs can ease that crunch by harnessing distributed
power. In Australia, Tesla is connecting 50,000 homes with solar
panels and big batteries to form the world’s biggest VPP. Next
Kraftwerke has stitched together thousands of biogas facilities,
hydropower plants and solar units in Germany to operate flexibly
and so take advantage of price spikes on electricity markets.

The theatrical announcement and big acquisition are straws in the

wind. Demand-side approaches to managing energy have been
disregarded in the past, but no longer. That’s because they are
becoming a big business: revenues are forecast to grow globally at
over 12% a year from $35bn in 2025 to $127bn by 2035, according
to Future Market Insights, a research firm, with China and India
leading the way (see chart 1).
America’s Department of Energy reckons that distributed-energy
resources have leapt from 14GW in 2019 to 142GW last year, and
look to exceed 320GW by 2028 (see chart 2). Battery-powered
vehicles could be a valuable source of flexible energy. Eurelectric, an
industry body, and EY, a consultancy, reckon that the capacity of EVs
in Europe will be enough to power 30m homes for a year by 2030
and over a tenth of Europe’s power needs by 2040.
The overall potential could be huge. Centre for Net Zero, a think-
tank, reckons that such flexibility could unlock up to 7% of total
demand or 30% from peak demand in Britain. But why are these
techniques taking off now after previous false starts? The answer
lies in a combination of booming electricity demand and
technological innovation that is forcing utilities to reconsider their
supply-side bias.
Consider first the demand shock. Over the past two decades,
demand for electricity in developed economies was essentially flat.
Now, propelled by data centres serving the computational needs of
artificial intelligence (AI), advanced manufacturing and digitisation, it
is taking off. ICF, a consultancy, projects that American electricity
consumption could grow by 25% by 2030 and 78% by 2050.

Utilities would customarily respond by building big power plants.

They still want to, but red tape, NIMBYism and supply-chain snags
are making it harder and costlier. VPPs can quickly aggregate
existing idle assets. Because power grids are built for extreme stress
occurring for just a few hours every year, many have plenty of spare
capacity. A study by Duke University found that American grids could
potentially handle 76-126GW of new load without adding giant
power plants if new data centers were designed so that they could
be cut off from grid power during peak periods for only up to 1% of
the time.

Though clean energy is out of favour with Donald Trump’s

administration, demand response still attracts bipartisan support.
Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia (the state with
the biggest AI power consumption by far), recently signed legislation
mandating certain VPPs and calling for new electric school buses to
be capable of feeding power back into the grid.

One reason is economics. Calvin Butler, boss of America’s Exelon, a

giant power utility with over 10m customers, observes that
residential-demand programmes that, for example, might allow a
utility to automatically lower the air conditioning in your home
remotely during a grid peak period, such as a money-saving scheme
run by an affiliate in Baltimore, “are highly popular with customers”.
Another reason is resilience. A report by Citigroup, a bank, argues
that demand response could not only help stabilise grids, but also
save money and reduce emissions “as it cuts reliance on fossil-fuel
plants that do not need to be called up during peak demand”.
Another reason is the importance of reliable electricity supplies to
power America’s AI boom. The coming demand crunch was the
hottest topic at a gathering in New Orleans of utility bosses
organised by the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents
America’s private-sector power utilities. Two of the main speakers
were the bosses of buzzy technology firms involved in both AI and
demand management.

Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, told the crowd, “You are the
gatekeepers for the availability of AI.” Her firm is one of the biggest
energy buyers among big tech. Along with OpenAI and SoftBank, it
is developing Stargate, an AI mega-project in Texas. It also provides
software to manage energy demand to utilities globally. The firm
reckons that use of its platform has saved $890m for Exelon and its
customers.

Also at the gathering was Greg Jackson of Britain’s Octopus Energy,

a privately held power utility with a valuation approaching $10bn. It
aggregates over 2GW-worth of energy from 300,000 micropower
devices like EVs and heat pumps. Kraken, its tech affiliate, provides
software enabling flexible-energy offerings at over a dozen utilities
worldwide. Other innovators are rushing in. Emerald AI, an American
startup, recently showed it can cut power use at AI data centres
with software to manipulate computational loads without meaningful
loss of performance.

The economic logic is compelling. Con Edison, a utility in New York,

put off a $1.2bn substation upgrade by spending just $200m on
distributed-energy resources. Utility officials in states confronting
years-long backlogs of projects awaiting grid connection are
considering prioritising customers capable of shifting demand. “If
you can be flexible, you’ll be able to go to the head of the queue for
grid connections,” predicts Varun Sivaram, Emerald AI’s founder.
Thanks to the coming power squeeze, demand management at last
looks set to soar.■
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign
up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/05/how-managing-energy-demand-got-
glamorous

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Retail therapy

What Bicester Village says

about the luxury industry
Everyone loves a bargain
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Bicester Village

England’s green and pleasant shopping centres

AT FIRST GLANCE Bicester Village looks like any other in the

Cotswolds, the bucolic corner of England it is located near. It is filled
with low-rise buildings with gabled roofs, cobbled streets, wooden
benches and greenery. It is, in fact, a shopping centre where
designer brands, from Armani to Zegna, sell their wares at discounts
of 30% or more. Announcements on the train from London come in
Mandarin, as well as English, testament to its status as one of
Britain’s most popular tourist destinations.
Bicester Village was built 30 years ago by Value Retail, a privately
held group founded by Scott Malkin, whose father once owned the
Empire State Building, and backed by L. Catterton, a private-equity
firm part-owned by LVMH, a French luxury-goods giant. The group
has since built 11 similar sites around wealthy cities including
Shanghai and Milan. It seems shoppers can’t get enough of cut-price
designer gear.

Value Retail takes 15-18% of sales plus a service fee from brands,
rather than charging rent on their stores in its villages. As a private
company it is coy about giving precise numbers but does say that it
recorded double-digit growth in net sales in 2024 and it is on track
for the same again this year. The firm reckons 50m people will visit
its shopping centres in 2025. So what does the success of Value
Retail say about the current state of the luxury industry?
First and foremost, it is a sign that luxury brands are struggling.
Demand for pricey frocks and handbags has drooped amid an
economic slump in China and a cost-of-living crisis in the West. This
in turn has prompted luxury brands to discount their wares and lean
more heavily on bargain hunters. Of all the places for luxury
shopping, including brands’ own shops and department stores, sales
ticked up only in outlets last year, reckons Bain, a consultancy (see
chart). As Mr Malkin puts it, in a downturn it becomes a “must have”
for a label to have a store at one of his shopping centres, not a “nice
to have”.

Value Retail’s growth also reflects changes in distribution. Brands are

eager to take more control of discounting and customer experience
to avoid damage to their image. In recent years luxury brands have
sold more through their own shops, websites and concessions within
department stores combined than through wholesale channels for
the first time, according to Bain. This shift, says Anita Balchandani of
McKinsey, another consultancy, is making outlets the “prime
channel” through which brands are able to offload excess inventory.

As far as customers go, the throngs at Value Retail’s sites are

evidence that in-person shopping is not going away. Returning
unsuitable online purchases is a bother and the opportunity to see
and touch items is still valued, especially for costly goods. BCG, yet
another consultancy, estimates that 75-80% of luxury sales this year
will take place in person.

Shoppers do, however, expect more from stores nowadays to make

a visit worthwhile. That’s why Value Retail’s outlet centres boast
fancy restaurants, storefronts pretty enough to post on social media
and toilets that wouldn’t look out of place in a five-star hotel. VIP
customers at Bicester Village get access to a lounge and can use a
“hands-free shopping” service, whereby shoppers can pick up all
their purchases from one place when their spree is concluded.

Value Retail still faces limitations. Its carefully designed spaces and
highly trained staff come at a high cost. There is only so much room
for growth, too. The firm opened its first village in America last year.
Expansion into other fast-growing markets, such as India and parts
of the Middle East, is out of the question because of local regulations
that complicate foreign investment, says Mr Malkin. That leaves a
ceiling on the number of places around the world with droves of
customers willing to drop large sums of money on discounted luxury
goods. ■
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign
up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/05/what-bicester-village-says-about-the-
luxury-industry

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Yet another day of rest?

Germany thinks about

cancelling a public holiday
There are plenty to chose from
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | BERLIN

“JA, JA, JA, now we’re gonna spit on our hands, we will increase the
gross national product!” is the refrain from Geier Sturzflug’s biggest
hit. The band’s “Gross National Product” topped Germany’s pop
charts in 1983, when the country’s work ethic was still ferocious:
“when grandpa gets on his bike on Sunday/and sneaks into the
factory/then grandma worries he’ll collapse/because grandpa is
working an extra shift again today.”
German workers now move to a more languorous beat. They
laboured for the shortest time over a year of any wealthy economy
in 2023, according to the OECD, clocking up an average of 1,343
hours, compared with Americans who slogged away for 1,705 hours
and—perhaps more surprisingly— Greeks, who toiled for 1,897
hours. If Germany is to pay for much needed investments in defence
and infrastructure, this needs to change, reckons Clemens Fuest,
head of the Ifo Institute, a think-tank in Munich. He has suggested
cancelling of one of the country’s many public holidays, a sacrifice
which he claims would boost GDP by about €8bn ($9bn) annually.

Germans can probably afford to lose one day of rest. They will enjoy
nine nationwide public holidays this year, a middling number
compared with the rest of Europe. But the country’s 16 states add
many more of varying justification, such as Thuringia’s Weltkindertag
(World Children’s Day) and Saxony’s “Day of Prayer and
Remembrance”. Bavaria leads with 13, followed by Baden
Württemberg with 12, and Saxony and Thuringia with 11 each.

The spacing of some public holidays makes a day in the office

almost a novelty at times. Berlin had three in May this year: Labour
Day, the “anniversary of the liberation from national socialism and
the end of the second world war” and Ascension Day. All were on a
Thursday, so many Berliners took Friday off for good measure.
Another long weekend is in the pipeline for Whit Monday (June 9th).
And many across the country are out of sync, says Mr Fuest, which
can, for example, prevent lorries making deliveries in neighbouring
states that are taking a break.

Business leaders back the idea of losing a public holiday (some even
call for cancelling two), but unions are, unsurprisingly, staunchly
opposed. German politicians should look to Denmark. In 2023 its
government decided to abolish “Great Prayer Day”, a religious
holiday on the fourth Friday after Easter, to help pay for higher
defence spending. Tens of thousands took to the streets in protest,
but Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, was not deterred.
Last year the holiday was cancelled. Germany’s government will
need similar resolve to get workers to spit on their hands and boost
GNP. ■

To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign

up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/05/germany-thinks-about-cancelling-a-
public-holiday

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Bartleby

A short guide to salary

negotiations
Don’t threaten. Do research
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

TALKING ABOUT how much money you earn is uncomfortable for

many people. But there are moments when it is an unavoidable topic
of conversation. When you take a new job or learn how much your
rise will be for the coming year, you have to talk about salaries. You
also have to make a decision about whether to negotiate for more.

Negotiating does seem to pay off, at least in monetary terms. In its

2025 survey of American jobseekers, Employ, a recruiting-software
provider, found that 37% of candidates had asked for more money,
and that 80% of them had got more than their initial offer. That is
consistent with a paper published in 2011 by Michelle Marks of the
University of Colorado and Crystal Harold of Temple University, which
found that candidates who chose to bargain bumped up their
starting salaries by an average of $5,000 ($7,160 in today’s money).

Negotiating, which is the subject of this week’s episode of our Boss

Class podcast, comes more naturally to some than others. A recent
study by Jackson Lu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
looked at 19 consecutive years of MBA graduates from an American
business school, and found that graduates of East Asian and South-
East Asian ethnicity had markedly lower salaries than South Asians
and whites. The propensity to negotiate among different groups
explains the gap; East Asians and South-East Asians who did not try
to negotiate were more likely to say they were concerned about
damaging the relationship with an employer.

Women are more likely than men to worry about the effect of
negotiating—with some cause. As part of a paper on salary
negotiations published in 2024, Francesco Capozza of the Berlin
Social Science Centre conducted a survey of HR managers in
America. The respondents thought that candidates who attempted
to negotiate on pay were less likely to receive a job offer than those
who did not, and that this penalty hit women disproportionately
hard.

If negotiating both raises salaries and risks a backlash, what is a

bargainer to do? Leigh Thompson, who teaches at the Kellogg
School of Management at Northwestern University, gives two pieces
of advice to her MBA students as they look for work. One is not to
start negotiating until you actually have a job offer (further evidence
that MBAs may lack many things but confidence isn’t one of them).
The other is not to turn a negotiation into a bidding war, deliberately
playing potential employers off against each other to extract higher
offers. Don’t be combative, she says. Don’t threaten.
Jim Sebenius, who teaches negotiating at Harvard Business School,
advises scoping out the role as fully as possible and then finding the
market rate for that sort of job. Information on pay is much easier to
find than it was, owing to sites such as Glassdoor, and requirements
in some places to publish salary ranges for advertised roles.

If candidates can attach themselves to a reasonable principle—that

they only want to be paid the going rate—and point to evidence to
back up their argument, that is more likely to work than arbitrary
numbers, begging or threats to go elsewhere. Even if more money
isn’t available, other things might be on the table: a promise to
review pay after a certain period, named parking bays or whatever
floats your boat.

It can be annoying for bosses to hear requests for more money,

when all they really want is unbridled enthusiasm. But some
employers actively want people to be good at negotiating.
Photoroom is a French AI startup that makes photo-editing software;
it offers negotiating training to anyone at the firm who wants it. Its
primary goal is to enable engineers to buy kit fast without getting
lost in red tape; the training helps them to do so at a good price.

Matt Rouif, its boss, says Photoroom also wants to know if it is

paying below market rate; it buys in benchmark data on salaries and
shares that data with employees so that conversations have a
common starting-point. “A lot of people think it’s a fight. We’re trying
to find the best outcome that looks fair.” That’s not a bad way for
employees to frame a salary negotiation. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/02/a-short-guide-to-salary-negotiations

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Schumpeter

AI agents are turning

Salesforce and SAP into rivals
Artificial intelligence is blurring the distinction between front office
and back office
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE is an unlikely source of hubbub. Bringing

up CRM or ERP in conversation has usually been a reliable way to be
left alone. But not these days, especially if you are chatting to a tech
investor. Mention the acronyms—for customer-relationship
management, which automates front-office tasks like dealing with
clients, and enterprise resource planning, which does the same for
back-office processes such as managing a firm’s finances or supply
chains—and you will set pulses racing.
Between June and early December 2024 Salesforce, the 26-year-old
global CRM giant, created more than $120bn in shareholder value,
lifting its market capitalisation to a record $352bn. In the past 12
months SAP, a German tech titan which more or less invented ERP
in the 1970s, has generated more. It is Europe’s most valuable
company, worth $380bn, likewise an all-time high. Both enterprise
champions rank among the world’s top ten software companies by
value. Maybe not so dull, after all?

The source of the excitement is another, much sexier acronym: AI.

Builders of clever artificial-intelligence models may get all the
attention; this week Elon Musk’s xAI hogged the headlines when it
was reported that the startup was launching a $300m share sale
that would value it at $113bn. But if the technology is to be as
revolutionary as boosters claim, it will in the first instance be
because businesses use it to radically improve productivity. And as
anyone who has tried—and probably failed—to replace corporate
computer systems will tell you, they are likely to do so with the
assistance of their current IT vendors.

Salesforce and SAP each believes it will be the one ushering its
clients into the AI age. The trouble is that many of those clients use
both firms’ products. Perhaps nine in ten Fortune 500 firms run
Salesforce software. The same share relies on SAP.

This did not matter when the duo focused on their respective bread
and butter. A client would run Salesforce’s second-to-none CRM in
the front office and SAP’s first-rate ERP in the back. Amazon and
Walmart, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, BMW and Toyota: pick a household
name and the odds are it does just that.

A big reason for SAP and Salesforce to slather a thick layer of AI on

top of their existing offering, though, is to give customers a way to
uncurdle their data, analyse it and, with the help of semi-
autonomous AI agents interacting with one another on behalf of
their human managers, act on it. In this newly blended world, the
lines between front and back office are fudged. “It’s one user
experience,” sums up Irfan Khan, SAP’s data-and-analytics chief.

Controlling the user interface for this “agentic” AI experience

promises fat profits. It also creates a head-to-head rivalry between
the two enterprise masterchefs. For their AI recipes look alike.

Step one: expand your range of products. SAP has improved its
front-office chops by buying CRM firms (like CallidusCloud) and
marketing platforms (such as Emarsys). Though Salesforce has not
gone full-ERP, it has a 16-year-old partnership with Certinia, whose
financial-management system sits exclusively atop its platform. It
has bought firms like ClickSoftware, which helps businesses manage
their service workforce. On June 2nd it hired the team behind
MoonHub, a recruitment-and-HR startup. Clients, spared from
switching between providers for every specialist function, love it. So
do SAP and Salesforce, since it amasses more client data, AI’s great
leavener, in their own systems.

Step two: piggyback on the “hyperscalers”. This allows clients to

choose between the cloud giants, including, in China, Alibaba and
Tencent (and, in Salesforce’s case, excluding Microsoft, with which
its co-founder and boss, Marc Benioff, has a long-running feud). It
saves SAP and Salesforce from splurging on what each sees as
infrastructure destined for “commoditisation”. Oracle, the giant of
corporate-database management which has taken the opposite
approach, has seen its quarterly capital budget explode from $400m
in 2020 to nearly $6bn in its latest quarter; SAP and Salesforce
spend $300m-400m a quarter between them.

Step three: whip up the AI layer. In February SAP teamed up with

Databricks, a $60bn AI startup, to help clients make sense of their
information, including that stored outside SAP systems, and deploy
SAP’s Joule AI agents across their operations. On May 27th
Salesforce said it would pay $8bn for Informatica, which designs
tools to integrate and crunch corporate data. This will make its own
Agentforce easier for clients to use beyond the front office.

Right now investors prefer what SAP is serving up. Its systems cover
a wider range of functions and thus contain more data. This data is
also notoriously hard for non-SAP systems to extract. As annoying as
this may be for clients, it gives them an incentive to look from inside
the SAP platform out rather than the other way round. SAP’s share
price has risen by 12% in the past six months.

Meanwhile, Salesforce’s has collapsed like a bad soufflé. It is down

by nearly 30% since its peak in early December. Although its sales
passed those of SAP in 2023, growth is slowing while SAP’s
accelerates. Analysts wonder if Agentforce, the launch of which
fuelled last year’s rally, can make real money. They also fear a return
to profligate dealmaking that culminated with the $28bn purchase in
2021 of Slack, a corporate-messaging platform.

Too many cooks

Investors could yet sour on SAP just as they have on Salesforce.

Gartner, a research firm, reckons that between 2020 and 2024 rivals
like Workday cut its share of the ERP business from 21% to 14%.
For all its front-office efforts, its CRM sales declined around that
time, even as Salesforce preserved its 20% slice of a growing
market. Microsoft, which has its own cloud, its own cutting-edge AI
and plenty of business clients, is elbowing its way into ERP, as well
as CRM. The enterprise-AI food fight is just beginning. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/05/ai-agents-are-turning-salesforce-and-
sap-into-rivals
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Finance & economics

Trump thinks Americans consume too
much. He has a point
Taking liberties :: He will not like the remedy, however

Who would pay America’s “revenge tax” on

foreigners?
Capitol controls :: Overseas investors at first—then Americans

Trump’s tariffs have so far caused little

inflation
Tracking prices :: Our estimate of their impact will update every month

Will the UAE break OPEC?

Reality sheikh :: We find that the Emiratis are flouting the cartel’s rules on a grand
scale

Why investors lack a theory of everything

Buttonwood :: Markets have no fundamental laws, which is why they are so
interesting

Stanley Fischer mixed rigour and realism,

compassion and calm
Free exchange :: The former IMF, Bank of Israel and Federal Reserve official died on
May 31st

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Taking liberties

Trump thinks Americans

consume too much. He has a
point
He will not like the remedy, however
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Washington, DC

REBALANCING THE global economy is Donald Trump’s defining

cause. China should produce less and consume more, the president
thinks; meanwhile, America should produce more by
reindustrialising. There is a final logical step to this equation:
America should also consume less.
Such abstemiousness is unavoidable if MAGA-maths is to add up, as
even the administration admits. Scott Bessent, the treasury
secretary, calls for “less consumption”; more floridly, Mr Trump says
his trade war might result in children having “two dolls instead of
30”. As J.D. Vance, the vice-president, puts it: “A million cheap,
knock-off toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American
manufacturing job.”

The belief that America consumes too much has been building for
decades. Left-wing types decry America’s consumer culture. In the
2000s, before the global financial crisis, some economists
characterised Americans as gorging themselves on low long-term
interest rates. In 2010 Glenn Hubbard, a technocratic Republican,
teamed up with an obscure Democrat called Peter Navarro to argue
that “boosting the American saving rate should be part of our
national economic overall trade policy.” Mr Navarro would later
switch parties; today, he is Mr Trump’s trade guru.

To see how over-consumption and trade are linked, consider what

happens when a country consumes beyond its means: it must
borrow from abroad. These financial flows are the flip side of the
trade deficit, hated by Mr Trump. It is as if shipping containers arrive
in America, unload goods, and then sail back filled with Treasury bills
or shares in S&P 500 companies. Mr Trump wants the trade deficit to
close, meaning that the financial flows must slow, too. But he also
wants America to enjoy an investment boom. The only way to make
the equation add up is if America ponies up its own capital by saving
more. In other words, it must cut its consumption.

It is not crazy to seek such a rebalancing. America’s gross domestic

savings are around 17% of GDP, compared with an average of 23%
in high-income countries. America invests about 22% of GDP,
roughly in line with the rich-world average. The difference between
saving and investment is the capital the country must import, which
last year amounted to $1.3trn. Meanwhile, America’s consumption as
a share of GDP—81% once that by the government is included—is
the highest in the G7 apart from Britain. Among the other five big
rich economies, the consumption share is on average five
percentage points lower.

Relying on net capital inflows has left America with deep financial
obligations to foreigners. The difference between the assets that
Americans own overseas and those foreigners own in America has
fallen to -90% of GDP. This is the kind of “net international
investment position” (NIIP) that would be hair-raising in almost any
other country.

For years America could take solace from the fact that its income
statement was healthy. Even as its NIIP worsened, the country
earned more on its overseas assets than it paid out to foreign
investors. Foreigners own lots of low-yielding debt, including
Treasuries; Americans own more stocks and FDI, which have higher
yields. The stubborn positivity of the country’s net foreign income
has been part of the “exorbitant privilege” that comes from issuing
the world’s reserve currency.

Yet as the NIIP has lurched into the red, this comfort has dissipated.
In the third quarter of 2024 America paid more to owners of its
assets than it earned on foreign investments for the first time this
century, in part because of higher interest rates.

This is the grain of truth to Mr Trump’s claim that trade deficits

transfer wealth overseas (the president also applies this logic,
nonsensically, to bilateral trade with every foreign country). In
textbook economics, persistent large current-account deficits slowly
make a country less wealthy, the way a spendthrift household
eventually finds itself poorer than a neighbour who spends little. In
the harsh reality of the global economy, excessive current-account
deficits can bring about sudden currency crises as foreign investors
lose faith in a country’s ability to pay its debts.
If America’s thirst for consumption cannot go on for ever, how long
can it last? There have been two previous waves of alarm about
America’s current account. In the 1980s, as the NIIP fell and in time
turned negative, economists questioned how long it could go on. A
very long time, it turned out. Then, in the early 2000s, when
America’s current-account deficit surged, Ben Bernanke, later
chairman of the Federal Reserve, pointed to a “glut” of savings
abroad that were flowing into America. Many economists blamed this
for a consumption binge and housing bubble. But the subprime
mortgage crisis that followed was not a current-account crisis for
America. Instead, the dollar strengthened.

The country also benefits from some natural hedges. Because it

borrows in its own currency, as the dollar declines—as it has this
year—its NIIP improves. The same thing happens if its stockmarket
falls. Indeed, one reason the NIIP has looked especially bad in
recent years is Wall Street’s incredible bull run, which has pushed up
the value of American assets owned by foreigners. And to the extent
that foreign investment enables higher economic growth, everybody
wins—even if foreigners take a slice of the pay-off.

At the same time, there are reasons to think that things may now be
different, and that the hedges may not be sufficient to prevent pain.
Consider the views of economists outside the president’s orbit.
Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist of the IMF, likens a
country’s trade balance to a government’s primary budget balance.
There has to be at least the expectation that it will eventually move
towards surplus to maintain confidence in the country’s ability to pay
its foreign debts, he says. Peter Hooper of Deutsche Bank, a scholar
of current-account issues since the 1980s, describes America’s
persistent trade deficits as a chronic malaise, “like termites in the
woodwork”. Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for
International Economics, a think-tank, points out that no advanced
economy has sustained a foreign-liability position as negative as
America’s. “That begins to be worrisome,” he says.
Barbie barbecue

What would a current-account crisis look like? The $62trn-worth of

American capital owned by foreigners is distributed across tens of
millions of balance-sheets belonging to firms and individuals. A third
is debt instruments that cannot be marked down as seamlessly as
equity prices or property values; of that debt, two-fifths is
government-issued. Moreover, since America’s debt liabilities are
mostly denominated in dollars, it should always be able to honour
them, at least in nominal terms.

But a loss of faith in America’s ability to deliver the necessary real

returns for foreign investors could cause a large depreciation in its
asset prices, which have reached eye-watering highs. The country’s
bonds, properties and stocks, as well as the dollar itself, would come
under intense selling pressure. A much weaker dollar and lower
prices for American bonds and stocks would force a rebalancing by
reducing the size of America’s external liabilities relative to its
external assets. Tighter financial conditions would discourage
consumption, whipping the current account into line no matter how
uncomfortable such a sudden adjustment would prove.
The question for America, and indeed the global economy, is
whether it can defuse its external liabilities without paying such a
steep price. Mr Trump’s solution is to pull up the drawbridge. Tariffs
discourage consumption by raising prices and hurting living
standards. Barriers to capital mobility, the first signs of which are
buried in Mr Trump’s tax bill·, force up domestic interest rates and
encourage domestic saving. But this solution is as bad as the
disease. It makes Americans poorer, and by imperilling the returns
earned by foreign investors, threatens to bring about the very crash
rebalancing is supposed to prevent. The sharp but brief sell-off in
April, after Mr Trump announced his global “reciprocal” tariffs,
offered a preview of the possible dynamics of a crisis, argues Mr
Gagnon.

A smoother adjustment—one that does not seek to make America a

creditor nation overnight—should be possible. If faith in the country
is maintained, its exorbitant privilege means it ought to be able to
repay its foreign debts with smaller trade surpluses than other
countries, says Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If America avoids sullying its own assets, it can afford to be gradual
in its transition towards a trade surplus.

To bring about an incremental transition, America must stop blaming

foreigners. Mr Navarro thinks that other countries have fuelled
America’s trade deficit by keeping their currencies artificially weak,
propping up their exporters and blocking American goods from their
markets. Stephen Miran, another adviser, points to America’s position
as a magnet for financial flows from overseas, which inflates the
value of the dollar and so depresses American exports. It has
become increasingly fashionable to believe that global imbalances—
notably, China’s excess savings—have forced overconsumption on
America. One way they might do this is by artificially depressing
global interest rates.

But in America, a country that accounts for over a quarter of global

GDP at market exchange rates, domestic forces almost always
matter more than the foreign winds around them. Nobody forces the
country to consume too much. And though it is impractical and
undesirable to alter the consumption and savings decisions of
millions of American households, there is one obvious lever to pull:
cutting the enormous budget deficit of the federal government.

It is this deficit—at 7% of GDP over the past year—that drives

American overconsumption. When the government spends, it
consumes, too; when it levies insufficient taxes, it encourages
households to binge. Government debts soak up savings that could
fund investment, helping produce the current-account deficit. In fact,
America’s private sector last year saved enough to fund all its
investment and more. The government was the problem.

America’s external vulnerabilities are therefore closely linked to its

fiscal fragility. Cutting government borrowing would kill two birds
with one stone. Mr Chinn estimates that a reduction of a percentage
point in the budget deficit would cut the current-account deficit by
about half a percentage point. For his part, Mr Obstfeld is blunt
about the alternative to a fiscal rebalancing: “If the government
keeps borrowing the way it is, it is quite unlikely that we will ever
achieve a trade surplus.”

Several potential paths to smaller budget deficits would have the

additional benefit of encouraging consumers to save. For instance, if
the government reformed health-insurance and pension programmes
to make them less generous as the population ages, it would be
rational for households to save more themselves. The government
could also implement a well-designed consumption tax at the
national level (the complete absence of such a levy makes America
unusual). Unfortunately, the political reality is that no fiscal
consolidation is in the offing. Mr Trump’s tax bill, which is making its
way through Congress, will prolong enormous deficits.

In this respect, Mr Trump is hardly unique: successive

administrations have presided over wider budget deficits,
endangering the country’s fiscal health and accumulating external
liabilities that threaten to amplify financial turmoil. The Trump
administration does stand out, however, for its simultaneous
insistence it is rebalancing the world economy. Its fiscal stance is
more suitable for a crisis economy sucking in emergency imports
than one attempting a move away from consumption. A
simultaneous hatred of trade deficits and embrace of government
borrowing is utterly contradictory—perfectly normal, in other words,
for Trumponomics. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance
and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/05/trump-thinks-americans-consume-too-much-he-has-a-point

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Capitol controls

Who would pay America’s

“revenge tax” on foreigners?
Overseas investors at first—then Americans
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

THE TROUBLE started, as it often does, with France. Congressmen

in the 1930s complained about “nations throughout this world who
are not particularly friendly to Uncle Sam in a business way”. Mainly
that meant the European power, which had slow-walked ratification
of a tax treaty and was double-taxing Americans in the meantime. In
1934, to persuade French policymakers to pick up the pace,
Congress passed a provision that is now known as Section 891. It
granted the president the power to double levies on citizens and
companies from countries that he judged to be overtaxing
Americans.

Ultimately, France ratified the treaty and Section 891 was never
used. But it has stayed on the books ever since. Nearly a century
later, during another period in which globalisation is threatened,
President Donald Trump and his congressional allies have revived the
idea of a revenge tax. As a consequence, foreign investors, who
collectively own more than $60trn in American assets, are growing
worried about a fresh round of chaos—just months after the
“Liberation Day” tariff saga.

The source of this stress is Section 899, a proposed addition to the

tax code in Mr Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, which has passed
the House of Representatives and is now being considered by the
Senate. This targets countries with “unfair foreign taxes”, principally
digital-service taxes, which mainly affect American tech giants, and
undertaxed-profit rules, aimed at ensuring companies do not squirrel
away profits in tax havens.

As in the 1930s, these taxes have been pushed most enthusiastically

by Europeans. But most rich jurisdictions, including Australia, Britain,
Canada, the EU, Japan and South Korea, have at least one offending
levy. The Tax Foundation, a think-tank, estimates that 80% of
America’s foreign direct investment comes from countries covered by
Section 899. For once, China is a rare exception.

Section 899 penalises investment and business income earned by

foreigners in America. Dividends paid to foreign shareholders, profits
from the American outposts of foreign firms and proceeds earned by
foreigners selling property would all suffer as a result of the
provision. Most interest payments, including on Treasuries, would
probably be safe, with the odd exception of interest on lending in
America by foreign banks. Total affected flows add up to over half a
trillion dollars a year.
The provision would add five percentage points of tax each year, up
to a cap of 20, to the bills of those from offending countries. It
would also widen the scope of the base erosion and anti-abuse tax,
America’s own effort to deter foreign companies from moving profits
abroad. Investors connected to foreign governments on the wrong
side of Section 899, such as pension and sovereign-wealth funds,
would lose other protections they now enjoy.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a watchdog, Section

899 is a rare tax rise on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve (meaning
that it would shrink rather than raise revenues). By the early 2030s,
the JCT forecasts, the provision would start to lose the government
money by scaring off foreign investors and therefore lowering
American asset prices.

In reality, section 899’s purpose is to intimidate, not to raise

revenue. Alan Cole of the Tax Foundation uses a military metaphor:
“We are tossing a grenade at your stuff while it’s inside our house.
But we are also tossing a grenade inside our own house.” The White
House must hope the mere threat of Section 899 taxes persuades
countries to wind back their own levies.

Such an approach, alongside a proposed tax of 3.5% on remittances

that has also passed the House, hints at a troubling pattern. As Tan
Kai Xian of Gavekal, a consultancy, notes: “The revenge tax [could
be] perceived as some sort of inbound capital control…the
remittance tax could easily be perceived as a mini version of an
outbound capital restriction.” The combination marks a clear but
small step towards soft capital controls, transposing Mr Trump’s
protectionist logic from goods trade to capital flows.

A century or so ago, it was France that blinked first. Today Mr

Trump’s volatile behaviour has already made investing in America a
riskier bet. And his enormous deficits still require foreigners to
finance them. If Section 899 roils the market enough, the outcome
may not be in America’s favour this time. Mon dieu. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance
and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/04/who-would-pay-americas-revenge-tax-on-foreigners

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Tracking prices

Trump’s tariffs have so far

caused little inflation
Our estimate of their impact will update every month
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

RARELY HAVE economists spoken in such unison. Even before

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd, the median
estimate among the 48 who were surveyed by the University of
Chicago’s business school was that Mr Trump’s levies would raise
inflation in 2025 by 0.8 percentage points. Meanwhile, the
president’s position is that, in his press secretary’s words, “tariffs are
a tax hike on foreign countries [which]...have been ripping us off”.
The implication is that foreigners will “eat the tariffs” and leave
America’s consumer prices unaffected.
When the first post-Liberation Day data for personal-consumption
expenditures (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s preferred price index,
came out on May 30th, evidence of tariffs’ impact was strikingly
absent: seasonally adjusted goods prices rose by just 0.1% in April.
Many companies will have hoarded imports and drawn down
inventories in order to avoid raising prices. But the administration
should not be cheering just yet. With tariffs higher than during much
of the Depression, consumers are bound to see some effect in time.
The question is how much, and how soon? To answer it, The
Economist has produced an estimate of the impact of tariffs on
prices, which we will update monthly.

The most straightforward way to measure this effect would have

been to calculate the share of American consumer spending
represented by imports from each country, before multiplying it by
tariff rates. Unfortunately, doing so would be too simplistic. Although
consumers bear much of the cost of tariffs, American and foreign
firms pay a share as well, and imports represent only part of a retail
price: much of the cost of a shirt, for instance, goes on rent, wages,
transport fees and profits. Moreover, many imports are intermediate
goods, such as the crude oil that gets refined into petrol once in
America.

Pricing protectionism

Fortunately, a recent paper by Omar Barbiero and Hillary Stein of the

Boston Fed tackles these issues, modelling all the channels through
which imports feed into shopping baskets. Since America is a fairly
self-sufficient, services-driven economy, the duo find that the
potential impact of tariffs on consumer prices is small. In 2023
imports that were directly consumed made up 6% of the core PCE
index, which excludes food and energy. Those of inputs like steel,
after counting all the products that use them, constituted another
4%.

Their study did not address one crucial question: how behaviour will
change. In the long run, exporters will probably shift production to
countries that face lower levies, even if doing so makes
manufacturing less efficient. This should yield costs somewhere
between the previous level and the rate implied by new tariffs.
Similarly, consumers may switch to inferior local goods, or buy
different products altogether. Such adjustments are difficult to
predict. However, if tariffs do raise prices, then the gap between
goods facing heavy levies and those with lower ones will grow
during Mr Trump’s term. Our estimate of the “tariff tax” rests on this
comparison.

The first step in calculating the tax is determining the tariff rate for
each possible pairing of a product and an exporting country on each
day. There is no website listing all current tariffs. Officials rely on a
bulletin run by Customs and Border Protection, which updates after
every executive order. With the help of ChatGPT, we have extracted
data from these messages and reconstructed the shifting rules.
Next, using these rates and historical data, we calculated the
average tariff on each product on each day, assuming trade patterns
remain unchanged. In late April, for goods often imported from
China, such as prams, this was 141%. By contrast, for those like
cod, which comes from lightly tariffed countries, it was 11%.

Using the method outlined in the Fed paper, we calculated the share
of total consumer spending accounted for in 2024 by imports of each
product in each of 212 PCE sub-indices. For most services, this was
tiny: for expenditure on lawyers it was just 3%, reflecting attorneys’
use of, say, computers and phones. It was far higher in categories
where imports account for much of the final price paid by
consumers, reaching 47% for televisions.

Last, we multiplied these proportions by the tariffs for each product

and country, yielding the tax burden in each category. Most affected
is “electric personal-care appliances”. For every dollar spent on
hairdryers, razors and so on in late April, importers faced a bill of 59
cents, of which 56 came from China’s triple-digit rate. The next-
highest categories—small appliances (total burden of 49%), cook-
and tableware (28%); and military uniforms (25%)—were also
dominated by China. The 18% on personal computers in early May
came from China (7.6 percentage points), Mexico (4.8), Taiwan
(2.6), Vietnam (1.6) and Thailand (0.7). Of the 9.2% on watches, in
effect only on April 9th, Switzerland accounted for 5.7 percentage
points. Cars produced at home faced a still lower burden.

In practice, prices for hairdryers did not rise by 59%. But using
these notional rates, we can estimate the tariffs’ effect on inflation.
For each category, we first measured how much its inflation rate
differed from the economy-wide average during Joe Biden’s final six
months in office. We compared this with the corresponding figure for
the period from January to April. Then we tested how changes in
relative inflation rates following Mr Trump’s inauguration lined up
with his tariffs.

So far, their impact has been modest. In April each percentage point
of increased input cost from tariffs for a given category was
associated with 0.14 points of “excess inflation” for that grouping.
Because the consumption basket consists mostly of tariff-free
services, these costs have risen by almost 1% economy-wide.
Holding all else equal, this implies prices are just 0.13% higher than
if Mr Trump had never imposed new tariffs.

No one knows where tariffs are heading. However, even if they

remain at or below their current levels, firms may raise prices
because of the tremendous uncertainty. If they do, prices for goods
should rise relative to those for services, which would increase our
estimate of the tariffs’ impact. To know whether to blame Mr Trump
if your Amazon basket seems strangely expensive, watch this space.
■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/05/trumps-tariffs-have-so-far-caused-little-inflation

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Reality sheikh

Will the UAE break OPEC?

We find that the Emiratis are flouting the cartel’s rules on a grand
scale
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午 | Abu Dhabi

ON MAY 31ST the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

and its allies (OPEC+) said that it would pump 411,000 more barrels
per day (b/d) of crude in July. The statement marked the third such
rise in as many months. OPEC+’s increased production is equivalent
to 1.2% of global demand, and represents a drastic acceleration
from plans drawn up last year, when the group said that it would
raise output by 122,000 b/d each month.

Big moves, if not big enough to sink oil prices. You might, therefore,
think that OPEC+ is in total control. The cartel, which supplies half
the world’s oil, exists to keep prices high. In reality, it faces a crisis
that could mark the beginning of its end.

Over its 65 years of existence OPEC has navigated many crises, from
Gulf wars and America’s shale boom to a pandemic-era oil bust. But
today is different. Knowing oil demand could peak in the coming
decade, members want to liquidate reserves. That, together with the
spending required for petrostates moving away from oil, means
some are flouting the cartel’s cardinal rule: to not supply more than
agreed upon. Although Saudi Arabia, the group’s enforcer, is trying
to ensure obedience, one serial cheater is getting a free pass: the
United Arab Emirates, OPEC’s third-largest exporter, and its biggest
menace.

To understand OPEC’s problem, look at the justifications for its latest

increases in output. The one broadcast by the group—“healthy
fundamentals” mean the world needs more oil—does not pass
muster. Analysts, OPEC’s included, have revised down demand
forecasts to account for the damage of Donald Trump’s trade wars.
Non-OPEC countries, meanwhile, keep pumping more. The world is
swimming in oil.

There are more credible explanations for the move. One is that Gulf
states are trying to please Mr Trump, who wants cheap petrol in
America’s forecourts. Another is that the group wants to recover lost
market share. A third frames it as an effort by Saudi Arabia to punish
members who are flouting their quotas.

It is possible that, at the margin, the second 411,000 b/d hike—

announced days before Mr Trump started touring the Gulf—helped
Saudi Arabia and the UAE obtain goodies from Uncle Sam, such as
artificial-intelligence chips. But “Saudi Arabia does not want to set
too much of a precedent,” says a former OPEC executive.

Clawing back market share will also prove hard. Demand is expected
to jump by 1m b/d from May to August in OPEC countries alone, as
extra-hot weather means more air-conditioning, which will help
absorb the output hikes so far. Should the cartel opt to pump still
more, however, prices could drop below $50, at which point
members may revolt. And OPEC+ remains far from recovering its
market power. By June its target output will still be 5m b/d or so
lower than in August 2022, when it began to announce cuts.

What of enforcing discipline? Iraq, last year’s biggest overproducer,

appears to have trimmed output a little despite not having control
over all its production, some of which is in Kurdish territory.
Kazakhstan, which overshot by 300,000 b/d in April, is more
troublesome. Its production is dominated by international firms over
which the state holds little sway.

Yet the trickiest pupil of all is the UAE. The country tells OPEC it
produces 2.9m b/d, bang on its quota. The cartel’s own assessment,
which averages estimates from “secondary sources” (eight
consultancies) has not deviated from 2.9m b/d since at least 2023.
Computing an exact, independent figure is impossible, since the UAE
stopped releasing detailed data years ago. All the same, OPEC’s
figures look impossibly low: tanker-tracking suggests the country’s
crude exports alone add up to 2.8m b/d, and that is before
accounting for any local refining or additions to stocks. (The
country’s energy ministry did not respond to our requests for
comment.)

In private, analysts admit their numbers are massaged. Several—

including one at a secondary-source firm—say they produce one
estimate for internal purposes and another for external consumption.
Two reckon that the UAE overproduces by 200,000 to 300,000 b/d.
The International Energy Agency, an official forecaster that OPEC
ditched as a secondary source in 2022, estimates the UAE’s output
at nearly 3.3m b/d in April. Some foreign producers with outposts in
the UAE suggest all these estimates are too low. One Gulf-based
analyst who supplies data to national and international oil firms goes
as high as 3.4m b/d.

Almost everyone upholds the fiction in public. After a reshuffle in

February, when OPEC dropped America’s Energy Information
Administration as a source, all its external assessors are now
commercial outfits. Foreign consultancies count the cartel and its oil
giants, such as Saudi Aramco and Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC, as clients.
Journalists fear being cut off.
Why does Saudi Arabia allow this? At oily get-togethers its leaders
are now frostier towards the Emiratis, notes one confidant to Gulf
leaders. But they cannot get too angry. Among OPEC+ members,
the UAE has long had the most idle capacity as a share of its total,
which generates enormous frustration in Abu Dhabi. When global oil
demand rebounded post-covid, a clash over quotas twice led the
UAE to consider leaving OPEC, which could have been a fatal blow.
Saudi leaders now fear it might really walk if criticised again.
Things will probably get still more fraught. The UAE cares less about
low oil prices than Saudi Arabia. An economist at an Emirati bank
says that the country needs them at just $50 a barrel to balance its
books, whereas its bigger neighbour, which is spending lavishly on
real-estate projects, requires them at $90 a barrel. In the five years
to 2027 the UAE is slated to invest $62bn in new production,
bringing its capacity to 5m b/d, up from 3.6m b/d in 2021; ADNOC,
which pumps most of the territory’s oil, says that capacity has
already almost hit the target for two years’ time. The UAE’s OPEC
quota has not kept up with this growth. Last year it negotiated a
300,000 b/d increase, to be phased in over 18 months. On May 28th
OPEC+ postponed a more comprehensive revision of quotas—
originally due this year—until 2027.

The Emiratis are unlikely to accept their straitjacket. One analyst

with contacts in both governments says that it is only a matter of
time before Saudi Arabia and the UAE openly clash. A descent into
disorder, fuelled by conflict between OPEC’s largest and third-largest
exporters, could then make the cartel unworkable. ■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance

and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/01/will-the-uae-break-opec

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Buttonwood

Why investors lack a theory of

everything
Markets have no fundamental laws, which is why they are so
interesting
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午

IF THERE WAS to be some cataclysm, and he could preserve just

one sentence for future scientists, Richard Feynman would have
made it about atoms. Tell them everything was made of tiny
particles in constant motion, thought the great 20th-century
physicist, attracting and repelling each other along the way. With a
little imagination they could then uncover the rest. That was because
the universe had a marvellous feature: though vast, it could be
described by surprisingly few laws. Armed with the knowledge of
atoms, Feynman reckoned his successors could work some of these
out and then deduce far more.

At first sight, the less illustrious field of financial theory resembles

Feynman’s. A popular destination for recovering physicists, it
includes many people who would have studied his old lectures as
undergraduates. Some of the equations look similar, too. Were you
to pick one branch of maths to teach a budding financial theorist, it
would probably be stochastic calculus—the same one used to
analyse the behaviour of Feynman’s jiggling atoms. Asset prices,
after all, also jump around with seeming randomness. If you could
specify how—and how they, too, jostle each other—you would have
markets cracked for good.

But that is where finance and physics part ways, because the quest
for the laws of markets is doomed. This is seldom as obvious as it
has been recently, when the ground has been shifting and long-
standing links between assets have snapped. Rich-world currencies
normally strengthen when bond yields rise; no longer for the dollar
and American Treasuries. Gold is supposed to do well when investors
are panicking, and share prices when they are ebullient; now, both
gold and plenty of stockmarkets are at or near all-time highs. The
volatility implied by the options market is supposed to rise when
things get riskier. It has been falling for months. Who, then, thinks
markets have become safer—those dumping their dollars or
snapping up gold?

There are plausible narratives to explain all these developments. But

the reason investors reach for them is that they lack anything more
concrete. Even physical laws that are merely approximate govern
multitudes: Newton’s concerning gravity and motion got men to the
moon, as well as explaining why apples fall. By contrast, all the
financial candidates are both limited and empirically dubious.

The efficient-market hypothesis says that investors, in aggregate,

perfectly and promptly incorporate new information into asset prices.
It is an appealing thought, though not a convincing one if you have
observed a crowd, a trading floor or a stockmarket bubble. Arbitrage
theory, which says portfolios of assets with the same pay-offs must
have the same price, is more useful. It governs how derivatives
(contracts with pay-offs dependent on some underlying asset price)
are valued by specifying how traders can replicate them. But the
replication strategies it prescribes can come badly unstuck if prices
jump sharply. Models relating risk to returns—such as the widely
taught “capital asset pricing model”—usually make the maths
tractable by assuming returns are distributed along a bell curve.
Unfortunately, they are not.

None of these approaches the ideal theory of markets, which would

fully explain how fundamentals move prices and how they sway each
other. It is no surprise, then, that practitioners pursue narrower
goals. The bright sparks who work at today’s dominant quantitative
hedge funds are not searching for a theory of everything. They want
to find links between assets that have held in the past, will hold in
the near future and from which they can make money. One example
is “trend following”, which does what it says after spotting a new
pattern early. Another is “statistical arbitrage”, which searches for
assets that usually move in a set relationship to each other, snapping
back if they get out of line.

If that sounds unsatisfying to investors who are wondering what

comes next, it is not the theorists’ fault. The complexity of markets
is dizzying, and in complex situations even the iron laws of physics
can produce surprising, unstable results (think of aeroplane
turbulence). More important still, finance is ultimately driven by
people, not particles, and they do not always respond to similar
stimuli in similar ways. They look at what happened last time, try to
do better, anticipate what other traders will do and seek to outfox
them. The absence of fundamental laws in markets is frustrating,
disorientating—and what makes them so interesting. ■
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,
which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/04/why-investors-lack-a-theory-of-everything

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Free exchange

Stanley Fischer mixed rigour

and realism, compassion and
calm
The former IMF, Bank of Israel and Federal Reserve official died on
May 31st
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

HE LOOKED RIDICULOUS, his wife assured him. Stan Fischer, the

number-two official at the IMF, was supposed to be enjoying a
holiday on Martha’s Vineyard in July 1998. Instead, he was perched
on a sand dune, mobile-phone at his ear, trying to negotiate a bail-
out of Russia, a country deemed “too nuclear to fail”.
Russia’s crisis also ruined Mr Fischer’s next holiday on the Greek
island of Mykonos. He had to fly back to Washington, records “The
Chastening”, a book by Paul Blustein, huddled under a blanket so
other passengers could not overhear his phone calls.

Mr Fischer, who died on May 31st aged 81, bore such indignities with
stoical good humour. This composure, as well as his wisdom,
endeared him to his peers, his staff and even the many emerging-
market officials, “fear in their eyes”, who turned to the fund for help
during his tenure from 1994 to 2001. They hailed from Mexico,
Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil and Argentina, as well as
Russia. The Thai central bank, which had hidden the parlous state of
its foreign-exchange reserves, eventually offered to reveal the true
number. But only to Mr Fischer. One head of Brazil’s central bank
refused to deal with IMF staffers, whose command of economics
failed to impress him. But he spoke every day to Mr Fischer, whose
credentials could not be doubted.

The IMF man had travelled a long way to earn those credentials. Mr
Fischer grew up in Mazabuka, a small town in what is now Zambia,
where his father, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, ran the general
store. He won a scholarship to the London School of Economics,
where he was beguiled by the technocratic promise of his new
discipline: “all it would take is a bit of algebra” to solve the problems
of policymaking. He earned his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he returned as a faculty member after a few
years away at the University of Chicago.

Although he had been charmed by Keynes’s “General Theory”, he

saw the assault on Keynesian economics from Chicago and
elsewhere as an opportunity not just a threat. He adopted the critics’
internally consistent, forward-looking models, added a dash of
realism, and reached different conclusions. The critics claimed that
monetary policymakers are powerless to steer output if everyone
knows what they are up to. But this policy fatalism ceases to be true
if wages are somewhat “sticky” or inflexible, as Mr Fischer showed in
a breakthrough paper published in 1977.

With its simplicity and punch, the paper was in keeping with a
vibrant tradition of MIT economics. Indeed, Mr Fischer became what
economists might call a “transmission mechanism” for that tradition,
co-writing two textbooks, teaching a legendary class and advising
the theses of some of the world’s most influential economists,
including Mario Draghi, former head of the European Central Bank,
and Ben Bernanke, former chair of America’s Federal Reserve, where
Mr Fischer himself would serve as vice-chair from 2014-17.
According to Olivier Blanchard, another protégé and co-author, some
of this advising would take place while jogging along the Charles
river. When Mr Fischer wanted his student to slow down their
presentation, he would speed up his jogging.

Mr Fischer’s first foray into policymaking was seductively successful.

In the 1980s he provided advice on quashing triple-digit inflation to
Israel, a country close to his heart (and where he would later serve
as central-bank governor). Israel cut its budget deficit, pegged its
currency temporarily and raised interest rates, combined with a less
orthodox wage freeze. The plan worked. Mr Fischer’s main regret
was the neglect of structural reforms, such as privatising
government firms, which were not essential to the rescue plan, but
proved difficult to implement after it succeeded.

Crises he faced at the IMF defied similar treatment. Neither Mexico

nor Thailand, which had borrowed heavily in dollars, could exit their
currency peg as painlessly as Israel. Budget-tightening prescribed in
Thailand and South Korea was counterproductive. Indonesia’s plan
included too many structural reforms.

In some debates within the IMF, Mr Fischer had a dovish reputation.

He gave his blessing to fiscal easing in Thailand and South Korea
when it quickly became clear austerity was unnecessary. He
understood that investors’ expectations could be self-fulfilling. Like
Peter Pan, the fund often found itself trying to persuade investors to
believe in rescues that could have worked if investors had only
believed they would. Their failure was not in itself proof they were
wrong to try. He was less worried than many of the fund’s critics
about moral hazard—the argument that saving people from the
consequences of their misdeeds makes future mistakes more likely.
In Mr Fischer’s view, if you have to cripple a country to send a
message, the message is being sent too late.

A dash of realism

But he was no softie. He recognised that macroeconomics often

requires choosing between bad options. “Whatever type of
exchange-rate arrangement a country has, there will be times when
it wished it had a different one,” he once said. He compiled a list of
lessons from the crises he faced at the IMF, the Bank of Israel and
the Fed. One was the value of what he called the “eternal verities”
preached by the IMF, including the need to keep inflation and the
public debt in check and to follow growth-friendly policies.

In 1995 he paid a visit to his father’s hometown in Latvia where he

saw the damage wreaked by communism, an experiment that lasted
two generations and set the country back a generation, according to
his calculations. A trip back to Zambia in 2000 was more
encouraging. He was welcomed by the new owner of his father’s
shop and saw considerable progress. It is, he reflected, “a long way
from Mazabuka to the IMF”. He had crossed that vast interval. And
like the hurricane lamps that once illuminated his home, he was an
unstinting light even in the worst storms. ■

Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter,

which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2025/06/05/stanley-fischer-mixed-rigour-and-realism-compassion-and-calm
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Science & technology

The Alzheimer’s drug pipeline is healthier
than you might think
Glimmers of hope :: It reflects a more nuanced understanding of the disease

How old are the Dead Sea Scrolls? An AI

model can help
Scrollytelling :: Scientists are using it to estimate the age of ancient handwriting

A leaderless NASA faces its biggest-ever

cuts
Empty space :: More than 40 science missions would be cancelled if Donald Trump’s
budget goes through

How much coffee is too much?

Well informed :: Studies suggest moderate consumption is harmless. It may even be
beneficial

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Glimmers of hope

The Alzheimer’s drug pipeline

is healthier than you might
think
It reflects a more nuanced understanding of the disease
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

OF ALL THE medical challenges that scientists have faced,

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, has been
one of the trickiest. Between 1995 and 2021 private money spent on
Alzheimer’s research came to $42.5bn, but more than 140 trials
failed to yield a single drug capable of slowing the disease. Yet the
tide may be turning. There are now two working drugs, offering
modest benefits, on the market, and a new review paper suggests
more could soon follow.

There are 182 clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments under way in
2025—an 11% increase on last year—testing 138 different drugs, of
which 12 are likely to complete their final “phase 3” trials this year.
Moreover, this pipeline includes medicines aimed at a diverse range
of targets in the brain, reflecting an increasingly sophisticated
understanding of the molecular processes behind Alzheimer’s and
dementia.

For decades, the theory that has dominated Alzheimer’s research,

and drug pipelines, has been the amyloid hypothesis. It argues that
the primary cause of the disease is the accumulation of plaques of
beta-amyloid proteins in the brain. These supposedly lead to a
cascade of negative effects including neuronal dysfunction, brain-cell
death and neuroinflammation.

The amyloid hypothesis was supported by genetic evidence, which

showed mutations in certain genes within families were linked to
early onset of the disease. The success of the two drugs already
treating Alzheimer’s—lecanemab and donanemab, which arrived on
the market in 2023 and 2024, respectively—proves that a connection
exists. Both help clear amyloid from the brain, and offer modest help
to a subset of patients for whom the drug is thought to be safe and
useful. They slow the progression of the disease by about one-third,
according to clinical trials, meaning patients can retain their quality
of life for longer.
The excitement generated by these drugs has been tinged, however,
with a feeling that they were not much to show for decades of
effort. The singular focus on amyloid was probably misplaced. James
Rowe, a professor of cognitive neurology at the University of
Cambridge, says that although amyloid accumulation is a critical
“early trigger” for the disease, by the time patients arrive at his
clinic, other neural processes are accelerating the illness. These
include the accumulation of a misshapen version of another protein,
called tau; increased metabolic stress on brain cells;
neuroinflammation; and degeneration of the brain’s blood supply.

This more nuanced understanding of Alzheimer’s is at last being

reflected in drug development. That is the conclusion of Jeffrey
Cummings at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and colleagues, in
their new review, published on June 3rd in Translational Research &
Clinical Interventions.

Academic experts, and investors, agree. Dame Kate Bingham is the

managing partner of SV Health Investors, a venture-capital firm
based in London that, in 2015, started the first fund dedicated to
discovering new treatments for dementia. At the time, the drug
pipeline for Alzheimer’s was mainly focused on tackling amyloid. She
says the growing diversity of potential targets today gives her
increased optimism.

Fully one-third of the new drugs are repurposed, which means they
are already approved for use in other conditions and are being
redeployed to Alzheimer’s. The appeal of this approach is that the
drugs already have known safety and toxicity profiles, and can be
approved quickly and developed cheaply. One of the better known is
semaglutide, a diabetes and weight-loss drug whose anti-
inflammatory and metabolic benefits have led to its being tested as a
treatment for mild cognitive impairment. The drug piromelatine,
meanwhile, works on melatonin and serotonin receptors in the brain,
which help regulate sleep. As healthy sleep is thought to increase
the rate at which amyloid and other waste proteins are cleared,
improving it may slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.

Then there is AR1001 (also known as mirodenafil), which was

originally developed for erectile dysfunction and is being tested for
its neuroprotective properties. The drug increases levels of a
molecule in the brain called cGMP which, in turn, activates pathways
that support the survival of nerve cells and improve connections
between them. Drugs of this kind are known to improve blood flow,
so AR1001 might also improve the brain’s vascular health.

Another repurposed drug is nabilone, which interacts with the

cannabinoid receptors in the body. (The most well known molecule
of this kind is tetrahydrocannabinol, the active compound in
cannabis). It was originally developed to treat nausea and vomiting
in those undergoing cancer chemotherapy. It is now being tested as
a potential treatment for agitation and behavioural problems in those
with Alzheimer’s. Guanfacine, a drug that improves attention and
executive function in those with ADHD, is also being tested to see if
it can offer similar benefits.

Repurposed drugs do not necessarily have a higher chance of

success in late-stage trials than those with a novel mechanism.
Indeed, Dame Kate argues that innovative approaches which use
new molecular targets, rather than repurposing, will have the
greatest impact on the disease.

Fresh approaches

One area of innovation is centred on drugs that can tackle

inflammation in the brain. Particular attention is being paid to brain
cells called microglia, which play an important role in the brain’s
immune response and, most probably, its fight against Alzheimer’s.
Microglia have been described as acting as the brain’s fire service,
police and binmen, because they simultaneously respond to
emergencies, maintain order and clear up debris. A number of drugs
are trying to target the protein TREM2 on the surface of microglia in
the hope of boosting their activity.

Combinations of drugs are also being tested. For example, it is

hoped that pairing dasatinib, a cancer drug, with quercetin, a
molecule derived from plants, will clear ageing and dysfunctional
cells. Drug combinations that target different pathways and
components of an illness have made big inroads into other complex
diseases such as cancer and HIV.

Some of the errors of the past have been corrected. Dr Rowe says
that early attempts to design amyloid-clearing drugs did not remove
enough amyloid, or did so too slowly. The patient selection in trials
was also poor, with many patients included who—it later turned out
—did not have Alzheimer’s at all.

Today’s trials still have blind spots, warns Antonella Santuccione-

Chadha, the founder of the Women’s Brain Foundation, a non-profit
based in Switzerland that studies how sex affects brain and mental
health. Many still fail to differentiate patients by sex, she says. Yet
women are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s, a difference that
cannot be explained solely by their longer lifespans, and the disease
seems to progress differently in their brains. At any given stage of
the disease, tau proteins spread farther in women than in men, says
Dr Chadha.

It would help the trials—and patients—if more people were tested

for Alzheimer’s earlier on, so that they could be enrolled to try the
new drugs. A single register of those with the disease would also be
useful, making it easier for patients to find trials, and for drug
companies to find patients.

Much, therefore, remains to be done. But for those suffering from a

horrible and as yet insurmountable disease that steals so many
minds, there is also some much needed hope. ■
Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science
coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/06/03/the-alzheimers-drug-pipeline-is-healthier-than-you-might-think

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Scrollytelling

How old are the Dead Sea

Scrolls? An AI model can help
Scientists are using it to estimate the age of ancient handwriting
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Sensitive subject

EVER SINCE the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin

shepherds in the 1940s, debate has raged over their exact age. The
scrolls, which contain the earliest surviving copies of books from the
Hebrew Bible and other religious texts, mostly written in Aramaic
and Hebrew, are thought to have been compiled sometime between
300BC and 200AD. Dating each of the 1,000-odd individual scrolls
would help historians understand how literacy spread among ancient
Jewish populations and the first Christians, and offer a valuable
window into the genesis of the sacred texts. But scholars hoping to
do so have had little but their own intuition to rely on.

Until now. In a paper published in PLOS ONE on June 4th, scientists

report that a new artificial-intelligence (AI) model can date the
ancient scrolls based on the style of handwriting they contain. This is
possible because writing can change in distinctive ways even within
a few generations (a much-mourned modern example is the decline
in cursive). Scholars already look for such differences to estimate the
age of ancient documents, but the degree of subjectivity involved
means that different experts often reach conflicting conclusions.

The new AI model offers the promise of standardising the discipline.

It draws its conclusions by accurately measuring small angles and
curves within individual letters, as well as identifying patterns across
larger chunks of text, in ways that humans cannot. It also allows its
calculations to be examined, which the researchers hope will lead to
more objective date estimates. Indeed, the model has already made
several intriguing findings.

The model, called Enoch, was developed by a team led by Mladen

Popovic, a scholar of religion from the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands. To calibrate the model, Dr Popovic and his team
extracted and carbon-dated tiny samples from 24 of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. The team then fed Enoch the carbon-date estimates, as well
as 62 scanned images of the dated scrolls. Their intention was to
allow the model to find relationships between shapes and patterns in
the scanned script and the physical age estimate given by the
carbon dating. The team then validated the model by giving it extra,
unseen scans from the carbon-dated scrolls as a test; it proved
robust, providing age ranges that largely overlapped with the
carbon-dating results. Enoch was then provided with images of 135
undated scrolls and asked to offer dates. The age ranges it gave
were generally between 50 to 100 years older than human
estimates.
The most striking of the new dates concerned two scrolls that
contain fragments of the biblical books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes.
Historians believe that the original text of the Book of Daniel was
finished sometime around 160BC and the Book of Ecclesiastes in the
third century BC. Enoch suggests the versions found in the Dead Sea
Scrolls were written around those times, too. Dr Popovic says that
though it is unlikely that the scrolls were written by the original
authors of the Bible—an assessment he makes based on the quality
of the script—they could have been contemporary copies, perhaps
jotted down as scribes were listening to the originals being read out
loud. The result is sure to spur further investigation.

An AI model that can help scholars date manuscripts “is a significant

contribution”, says Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University
of Nottingham who has made use of AI models to restore and
explain ancient Greek inscriptions, and who was not involved with
the work. Dr Popovic hopes that models such as Enoch will one day
be able to help date ancient manuscript collections in any language.

Collecting enough data to train similar models for other scripts will
take time. For now, Dr Popovic is happy to be reducing the outsize
role that gut feelings play in palaeography. “Sometimes,” he says,
“our human mind is more of a black box than…the AI model that we
have built.” ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science

coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/06/05/how-old-are-the-dead-sea-scrolls-an-ai-model-can-help

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Empty space

A leaderless NASA faces its

biggest-ever cuts
More than 40 science missions would be cancelled if Donald Trump’s
budget goes through
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

NASA KNEW it was in for a grim year. In early May the White House
published a preliminary budget that proposed drastic cuts in the
agency’s funding, from $24.8bn to $18.8bn. That would bring it to
its lowest level, when adjusted for inflation, in several decades, with
the agency’s scientific work taking the brunt. On May 30th the
agency was given the full details, as a newer version of the budget
spelled out exactly where the axe would fall.
Nor was that the end of the bad news. The next day Donald Trump,
America’s president, announced he was withdrawing his nomination
of Jared Isaacman, a well-regarded businessman and private
astronaut, as NASA’s boss. For at least the next several months, the
agency will have to contemplate its straitened future without a
permanent leader.

The White House’s budget proposes a modest rise in spending on

human space flight, and doubles down on the agency’s so-far
successful experiment in handing off much of that work to the
private sector. NASA’s scientific work, by contrast, would be gutted,
with its budget cut almost in half, to $3.9bn a year. Around 5,500
people, out of a workforce of 17,400-odd, would lose their jobs.
Dozens of missions—both planned and already operating—would be
abandoned. It would, says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the
Planetary Society, be an “extinction-level event” for NASA’s scientific
work.

The budget slays several sacred cows in the area of human space
flight. It proposes abandoning the Space Launch System (SLS), a
giant rocket intended to take astronauts back to the Moon. Built
from 1970s technology and with an estimated cost of more than
$2bn per launch, the SLS is as much a congressionally mandated
jobs programme as it is a rocket. Many at NASA will be privately
relieved to see it go. The budget likewise withdraws funding for the
Lunar Gateway, a space station intended to orbit the Moon. Many
observers, including at least one former NASA administrator, regard
the Gateway as a boondoggle that further complicates future
missions.

The hope is that private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin,
which already have contracts to build landers for NASA’s Moon
missions, can do a better job. That may be a risky bet: SpaceX’s
giant Starship rocket, the most obvious replacement, has struggled
in recent test launches. Nevertheless, the budget includes $864m to
encourage a commercial replacement for SLS and Orion (the vehicle
that will carry astronauts to the Moon). There is also $200m for
private companies to show they can transport cargo to Mars—as
they are already starting to do to the Moon.

The enormous cuts to scientific research seem to have little internal

logic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Republican hostility to the
subject, NASA’s Earth Sciences division, which includes its work on
climate change, faces a 52% reduction in funding. But less political
areas of research are slashed, too. The planetary-science budget
(which covers the other planets) would fall by nearly 32%. Money
for heliophysics (the study of the Sun) would drop by 46%.
Astrophysics faces a 66% chop.

Cuts that big cannot be made by salami-slicing. Instead 41 different

scientific missions, both upcoming and already under way, would be
abandoned. One casualty is the Mars Sample Return mission, which
aims to return Martian rocks to Earth where they can be studied in
much greater detail than any robotic rover can manage. Late and
over budget, it may have been cancelled under any president. But
other missions suffer, too. The DAVINCI and VERITAS probes, due to
launch in the early 2030s, would be the first American missions to
Venus since 1989. Both are on the chopping block. The Nancy Grace
Roman Space Telescope—chosen in 2010 as NASA’s highest
astronomical priority—will get less than half its previous budget.

Ongoing missions face the axe as well. The budget would cancel the
OSIRIS spacecraft’s examination of Apophis, a large asteroid which
will narrowly avoid colliding with Earth in 2029. It would end the
missions of Juno, a probe which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, and New
Horizons, which flew past Pluto the year before and which has
explored the far reaches of the solar system ever since.
Seeing all these changes through would tax even the best
administrator. But for the next few months at least, NASA will have
no administrator at all. The White House gave no reason for ditching
Mr Isaacman, who had enjoyed support among both Republicans
and Democrats, beyond vague allusions to his “prior associations”.
(One common speculation is that his nomination was pulled as a way
to damage Elon Musk, who is thought to have championed Mr
Isaacman’s appointment, and whose influence in the White House
has waned.) No replacement has been announced.

The biggest question is the response of America’s Congress—which

must approve the White House’s budget before it can become law.
Prioritising crewed missions over science is more or less the opposite
of what the Pew Research Centre, a polling organisation, found the
American public wanted in 2023 (see chart). Democrats, and even
some Republicans, have said they will fight the science cuts—though
Congress has so far shown little willingness to take on Mr Trump. In
any case, says Mr Dreier, even if lawmakers manage to reverse half
of the cuts, they would remain the biggest the agency has faced in
decades. ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science

coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/06/04/a-leaderless-nasa-faces-its-biggest-ever-cuts

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Well informed

How much coffee is too

much?
Studies suggest moderate consumption is harmless. It may even be
beneficial
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Editor’s note (June 5th 2025): This article has been updated to
incorporate recently published research

HUMANITY DRINKS around 2bn cups of coffee every day. The good
news for those who contribute to that figure is that regularly
consuming moderate amounts does not appear to be harmful. There
may even be health benefits. Experiments conducted in vitro and in
animals have long shown that some components of coffee, including
cafestol, kahweol, caffeine and chlorogenic acids, can reduce
inflammation as well as cell damage caused by a chemical process
known as oxidation.

When a team led by Marzieh Moeenfard of the University of Porto

looked more closely, they found that the potential benefits ran
deeper. She reported in the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry in 2016
that cafestol and kahweol (which tend to be more prevalent in
unfiltered than in filtered coffee) arrested tumour growth by making
it less likely that new blood vessels would form around tumour cells,
and that chlorogenic acids inhibited the formation of carcinogens
within the body. This suggested coffee might be good for fending off
cancer.

One follow-up study led by Jin-Kyoung Oh of the Karolinska Institute

in Stockholm reported that post-menopausal women who claimed to
drink three or four cups of coffee per day were significantly less
likely to develop breast cancer than women who said they drank up
to two cups. Similar work in Japan suggested that those who said
they drank three or more cups every day had a reduced risk of
developing liver cancer.

Because caffeine is a stimulant that improves mood and combats

tiredness, its presence in coffee has prompted some to test whether
it reduces the risk of a person developing psychiatric and
neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression.
Some have found beneficial effects. For example, Hong Chien-Tai of
Taipei Medical University reported in 2020 that in patients with
Parkinson’s who consumed caffeine regularly, their disease
progressed more slowly than in those who abstained.

Other findings, whether on cancer or mental health, have yielded

mixed results. The uncertainty may well come down to the
multitudes that coffee contains. Beans are sourced from different
species, roasted in different fashions and served up in a variety of
drinks of different sizes and strengths. Still, moderate consumption
seems, at worst, harmless.

Overindulgence has clearer-cut consequences. Ingesting more than

400 milligrams of caffeine daily (an espresso contains around 60)
has been found to lead to headaches, nervousness, irritability,
muscle tremors and insomnia. It is also associated with mental-
health conditions such as anxiety, and can make chronic health
problems, like heart disease, worse by increasing blood pressure.
The effects of overdosing on coffee’s other active ingredients are
unclear.

But these are not the only risks associated with drinking coffee.
Many lace their cup with additives like milk, sugar, cream and
syrup, chronic overconsumption of which can also cause harm. A
study of over 46,000 adults published in the Journal of Nutrition in
May is suggestive. The results showed that participants who drank
between one and three cups of coffee per day were roughly 15
percent less likely to die during the next decade than those who
consumed none. That said, the benefit vanished if they stirred more
than around a teaspoon of cream or half a teaspoon of sugar into
their drink.

To maximise the benefits, therefore, don’t overdo the cups and take
it as black—and as bitter—as you like. ■

Curious about the world? To enjoy our mind-expanding science

coverage, sign up to Simply Science, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/science-and-
technology/2025/05/30/how-much-coffee-is-too-much

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Culture
The 40 best books published so far this
year
Spine-tingling :: When you lie down by the pool this summer, pick up one of these
titles

Would you pay $100,000 for an orchid?

Blooming expensive :: When orchidomania swept Europe in the 19th century, people
forked out for flowers

Hit songs are getting shorter

Stay tuned :: The trend is not as bad as it sounds

African architects have cool designs for a

warming planet
Material benefits :: They take inspiration from everything from the local terrain to
termites

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Spine-tingling

The 40 best books published

so far this year
When you lie down by the pool this summer, pick up one of these
titles
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

Biography and memoir

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House; 1,040 pages; $40 and £33

William Buckley revived American conservatism in the second half of

the 20th century with his love of argument and erudite, incisive
prose. This biography runs to more than 1,000 pages—yet is not a
word too long.

Careless People. By Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron Books; 400

pages; $32.99. Macmillan; £22

Sold as “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read”, this memoir is a
riveting corporate kiss-and-tell. It portrays Mark Zuckerberg, the
company’s founder and boss, as unfeeling and shallow.

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI and the Race to Invent

the Future. By Keach Hagey. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99 and
£25

A deeply researched, gripping account of OpenAI. Though the

author had access to Sam Altman, its co-founder and chief
executive, this is no hagiography.

Source Code: My Beginnings. By Bill Gates. Knopf; 336 pages;

$30. Allen Lane; £25

The tech billionaire-turned- philanthropist recounts his origin story,

from his birth in 1955 to the early years of Microsoft in the late
1970s. Mr Gates’s programming prowess and entrepreneurial zeal
were entwined from the start, it shows.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the

World’s Most Coveted Microchip. By Stephen Witt. Viking; 272
pages; $30. Bodley Head; £25

This book is a guide to Nvidia and Jensen Huang, the man who
turned the company from a pedlar of graphics chips for computer
gamers into the semiconductor titan at the heart of the artificial-
intelligence revolution.

Business, economics and technology

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest
Company. By Patrick McGee. Scribner; 448 pages; $32. Simon &
Schuster; £25

Can Apple thrive without China? A journalist at the Financial Times

explains how the company became enmeshed in the country and
what the fracturing of global trade means for one of the world’s
most valuable firms.

The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance,

Risk and Luck. By David Spiegelhalter. W.W. Norton; 336 pages;
$32.99 Pelican; £22

Using some intuitive assumptions and (very) simple algebra, this

book offers an invaluable guide to thinking about uncertainty. It will
appeal to many more than just aspiring mathematicians.

Chokepoints. By Edward Fishman. Portfolio; 560 pages; $40. Elliott

& Thompson; £25

An insider’s guide to economic warfare. With a satisfying amount of

dash and drama, the author takes readers on a global tour of
American sanctions. Ingenious technocrats have forged new, more
precise tools of economic coercion.

The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost)

Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong. By John
Kay. Yale University Press; 448 pages; $35. Profile; £25

One of Britain’s leading economists asks what firms are for. Texts
about purpose in business are all too often waffly and worthy, but
this one is admirably clear.

Empire of AI. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $32 and
£25
A journalist explores the murky mix of missionary zeal, rivalry and
mistrust at OpenAI in the run-up to the birth of ChatGPT. This tale
reveals disturbing truths about the culture of Silicon Valley.

House of Huawei. By Eva Dou. Portfolio; 448 pages; $34. Abacus;

£25

A technology-policy reporter has parsed decades’ worth of

documents to piece together how Huawei’s enigmatic founder rose
from poverty to lead what is probably China’s most powerful
company.

Culture and arts

Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the

World’s Greatest Museum. By Elaine Sciolino. W.W. Norton; 384
pages; $29.99 and £22.99

Few of the nearly 9m people who visit the Louvre each year leave
feeling as if they have truly mastered it. The author is a chatty,
amiable tour guide; she focuses on themes and small details.

Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words.
By Michael Erard. MIT Press; 344 pages; $32.95 and £30

This book dismantles many long-held beliefs about utterances at

both the beginning and end of life. It may sound a hard read, but it
is a beautiful and even strangely comforting one.

Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power. By Augustine

Sedgewick. Scribner; 320 pages; $30. Picador; £20

An American scholar describes how thinking about dads has changed

over time. What is striking is the sheer variety of nonsense that
people have believed. Another common theme is cruelty.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. By Ian Leslie. Celadon
Books; 448 pages; $32. Faber & Faber; £25

A rich reading of the relationship between John Lennon and Sir Paul
McCartney. Their friendship moved from complicity to competition to
something curdled and, eventually, to terrible loss.

Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. By

John McWhorter. Avery; 240 pages; $28

The title might lead readers to expect some culture-war bomb-

throwing. Instead, the author provides an erudite tour in five
chapters, one each for: “I”, “you”, “we”, “he/she/it” and “they”.

Raising Hare. By Chloe Dalton. Pantheon; 304 pages; $27.

Canongate; £18.99

In this tale, joy and wonder come bundled in a four-legged, long-

eared, skittish little package. Caring for the leveret opens the
author’s eyes to the natural world; she is an elegant writer and
sharp-eyed observer.

Fiction

Among Friends. By Hal Ebbott. Riverhead Books; 320 pages; $28.

Picador; £18.99

This accomplished debut revolves around two wealthy families that

come together to celebrate a birthday at a country house.
Simmering tensions and festering rivalries test relationships, but
eventually a brutal betrayal threatens to upend lives and maybe
even destroy them.

Beartooth. By Callan Wink. Spiegel & Grau; 256 pages; $27.

Granta; £14.99
Thad and Hazen, two brothers, make a living chopping down trees in
Montana. One day a forbidding outsider known as “the Scot”
approaches them with a lucrative but perilous offer involving an
illegal venture in Yellowstone National Park. A taut, compelling book.

The Dream Hotel. By Laila Lalami. Pantheon; 336 pages; $29.

Bloomsbury; £16.99

An intriguing novel about the creep of technology and the trade-offs

people make for convenience. The author tells her dystopian tale by
combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s
terms of service, medical reports and meeting minutes.

Flesh. By David Szalay. Scribner; 368 pages; $28.99. Jonathan

Cape; £18.99

A man’s life is dramatised in a few crucial stages, from a youthful

sexual relationship with an older woman in Hungary to a stint as a
multi-millionaire in Britain and then on to uncertainty after a
personal tragedy. The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers
a narrative rich in pathos.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way. By Elaine Feeney. Harvill Secker;
320 pages; $19.99 and £16.99

Claire returns home to care for her dying father. As she tries to settle
down again in her family home in the west of Ireland and negotiate
a new future with an old flame, she finds herself confronting past
pain. A powerful, poignant book.

Ripeness. By Sarah Moss. Picador; 304 pages; £20. To be published

in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September; $28

In the summer of 1967, 17-year-old Edith travels to Italy to help her

sister in the final weeks of her pregnancy. In modern-day Ireland,
Edith offers her assistance again, this time to a friend who is
weighing up meeting a man claiming to be her half-brother. An
insightful examination of family ties and belonging.

Theft. By Abdulrazak Gurnah. Riverhead; 304 pages; $30.

Bloomsbury; 256 pages; £18.99

Badar, Fauzia and Karim—three people from different walks of life—

come of age in Tanzania. The author’s first novel since winning a
Nobel prize in 2021 is a tightly focused, beautifully controlled
examination of friendship and betrayal.

Twist. By Colum McCann. Random House; 256 pages; $28.

Bloomsbury; £18.99

A journalist travels to South Africa to accompany a crew that repairs

cables at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He clashes with the
ship’s chief of mission, John Conway. When Conway later disappears,
the writer endeavours not just to find him but to find out who he
really is.

We Do Not Part. By Han Kang. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige

Morris. Hogarth; 272 pages; $28. Hamish Hamilton; £18.99
The winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature chronicles a bloody
chapter in South Korea’s history: the killings that took place on Jeju
island in 1947-54. Ms Han incorporates quotations from archive
material into her novel. It conjures beauty alongside tragedy.

History

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a

Nazi in Patagonia. By Philippe Sands. Knopf; 480 pages; $35.
W&N; £25

Weaving together travelogue, detective story and legal drama, this

book shows that the long-rumoured connection between Augusto
Pinochet, a Chilean dictator, and Walter Rauff, a Nazi officer, was
real. The third instalment in a loose trilogy about justice and
impunity.

The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War. By
Charlie English. Random House; 384 pages; $35. William Collins;
£25

The story of the CIA’s most highbrow covert operation. The agency
smuggled 10m books into the eastern bloc, including George
Orwell’s “1984”, John le Carré’s spy thrillers and Virginia Woolf’s
writing advice. The leader of the scheme described it as “an
offensive of free, honest thinking”.

The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini and a Murder That

Haunts History. By Thomas Harding. Michael Joseph; 384 pages;
£22

As a world-famous Jew, revered physicist and vocal critic of Nazism,

Albert Einstein had long been an assassination target for the Nazis,
but he was out of reach. Did Hitler order the murder of his cousin,
Robert, instead? The author doggedly pursues his own investigation
into the triple murder of Einstein’s relatives.
Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the
Catholic Church. By Philip Shenon. Knopf; 608 pages; $35 and £30

How did the Catholic church go so wrong? A journalist chronicles its

failures through the history of seven popes. An ecumenical council,
known as Vatican II, might have changed everything, but the
reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary. This book is
gripping and damning in equal measure.

The Last Days of Budapest. By Adam LeBor. PublicAffairs; 512

pages; $35. Apollo; £27.99

At one time Budapest almost rivalled Berlin, Paris and Vienna in

intellectual heft; the city was one of Europe’s finest cosmopolitan
capitals. But the second world war changed Budapest for ever. This
book is a reminder of how quickly a liberal, sophisticated society can
be overrun by baser, crueller forces.

Peak Human. By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books; 400 pages;

$32.99 and £22

A Swedish historian charts the rise and fall of golden ages around
the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the
Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that
outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade,
to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty.

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. By

Tiffany Jenkins. Picador; 464 pages; $28.99 and £20

A highly original and perceptive take on how thinking about the

private sphere has evolved from ancient times to today, in domains
ranging from religion and free speech to sexuality—and, of course,
privacy in the digital era.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. By

Charlotte Beradt. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University
Press; 152 pages; $24.95 and £20

This remarkable work of journalism—unique in the canon of

Holocaust literature—has been newly translated into English. It
shows how authoritarianism affects the subconscious.

Politics and current affairs

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun,

Father of Xi Jinping. By Joseph Torigian. Stanford University
Press; 718 pages; $50 and £41

There are only a handful of ways to understand Xi Jinping, such as

poring over party records or studying the people who most
influenced him. Few have shaped Mr Xi more than his father. Xi
Zhongxun’s relationship to the Chinese Communist Party and his
thwarted ambitions offer clues to what his son wants for China.

Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling

Abusive Governments. By Kenneth Roth. Knopf; 448 pages; $30.
Allen Lane; £30

Having run one of the world’s most effective human-rights groups

for three decades, the author has sparred with more nasty regimes
than most people could name. Here he distils his hard-earned
insights. The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, he argues, is to
avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”.

Russia’s Man of War: The Extraordinary Viktor Bout. By Cathy

Scott-Clark. Hurst; 424 pages; $34.99 and £25

A richly reported and detailed biography of Viktor Bout, a notorious

Russian arms dealer, which benefits from rare extensive interviews
with him. In 2022 he was swapped for Brittney Griner, an American
basketball player, after 15 years in American custody. Was it one of
history’s most reckless prisoner exchanges?
Science and health

Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to

Cure Alzheimer’s. By Charles Piller. Atria; 352 pages; $28.99. Icon
Books; £20

An investigation into how dishonesty and dogma steered Alzheimer’s

research off-course. A fascinating story of medical groupthink and
warped incentives; some chapters read like a scientific whodunnit.

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton; 384 pages;

$31.99. Hamish Hamilton; £25

Through a mixture of storytelling and argument, supplemented with

a touch of derring-do, the author makes a convincing case for rivers
being living subjects that must be endowed with rights.

More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of

Energy. By Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Harper; 320 pages; $32.50. Allen
Lane; £25

A necessary, eye-opening and frequently gobsmacking book by a

French academic, newly translated into English. It explains how the
energy transition is a concept misused and misunderstood to the
brink of meaninglessness.

Waste Wars. By Alexander Clapp. Little, Brown; 400 pages; $32.

John Murray; £25

The broad facts of the fiction of recycling are no secret. But this
book traces the growth of the global trade in waste and chronicles
the effects of consumption by following rubbish to some of the
world’s most unpleasant places. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and

controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/06/05/the-40-best-books-published-so-far-
this-year

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Blooming expensive

Would you pay $100,000 for

an orchid?
When orchidomania swept Europe in the 19th century, people forked
out for flowers
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

The Lost Orchid. By Sarah Bilston. Harvard University Press; 400

pages; $29.95 and £24.95

IN 1818 AN orchid was sent from Brazil to Britain. The specimen,

later christened Cattleya labiata, had been collected by William
Swainson, an English naturalist keen to make a name for himself in
an age when natural history was newly fashionable. When eventually
induced to bloom, revealing crimson, lip-shaped petals, C. labiata
was agreed to be among the most splendid of its kind. It “must
strike with admiration every beholder who is not actually insensible
of the charms of nature”, one keen fan wrote.

Unfortunately, and unhelpfully, Swainson had emigrated to New

Zealand without stating exactly where his specimen had come from.
Other members of the genus Cattleya were subsequently described,
but no further examples of C. labiata turned up. By the 1880s, to
anthophiles’ disappointment, it was widely doubted that it still
existed. Then, ahead of the World Fair in Paris in 1889, a painting
was found, suggesting there were more. A frenzied new era of
“Orchidomania” sprang up.

Sarah Bilston, a British academic, came across this phenomenon

while researching an earlier book. Victorians had become obsessed
by the idea of possessing the plants partly out of scientific interest
and partly as a chance to show off in a newly rich society. Exotic
orchids could fetch what a clerk earned in a month, so the flowers
were status symbols akin to a Birkin bag or sports car today. The
fervour reached the very top of society: even Queen Victoria was a
fan of the blooms.

By 1889 prices for the rarest specimens had risen roughly a

hundred-fold since Swainson’s time, sometimes fetching the
equivalent of $100,000 in today’s money. An intense competition to
rediscover C. labiata’s natural habitat was soon under way, involving
men from several European countries. They risked injury and illness
to get their hands on it. (They often turned to local expertise and
labour for support on their expeditions.) “The Lost Orchid” offers an
entertaining account of the rivalry between the plant hunters.

Dr Bilston weaves from these facts a story of social change, laissez-

faire capitalism and the interaction of science and commerce.
Readers will detect all the contradictions of the 19th century in the
story of C. labiata. On the one hand, it was a time of unprecedented
progress. Scientific discoveries were feted, trade and industry
boomed and people grew richer, healthier and more literate. In
Britain the orchid became a symbol of such developments. It “was a
tangible signal of...Britain’s global reach and growing technical and
economic power”, the author writes.

At the same time, Dr Bilston points out, the orchid embodied fears
about “the dangers of consumerism and capitalism”. Forests across
the world were ransacked for orchids. In Malaya, one local
complained in 1850, “Jungles are nearly stripped of all the
Orchidaceous plants, such has been the demand for them of late.”

As Brazil was logged for timber or charcoal, the very places where
orchids such as C. labiata grew were decimated. Land was given
over to plantations, as coffee beans proved more valuable than
blooms. Dr Bilston observes that “A tone of dismayed grief about the
engines of modern life is a common feature of the Victorian fin de
siècle in Britain and Europe.” As people became more conscious of
humans’ impact on the environment, the seeds of a conservation
movement were sown.

Thus Dr Bilston uses the orchid to unfurl a greater story about

progress and the planet. At times this tips into needless hand-
wringing about the diversity of her sources and the use of vague
terms such as “practices of erasure”—which proves that all history is
a reflection of the time in which it is written. Still, horticulturists and
economists alike will enjoy her colourful tale of C. labiata and its
multifarious meanings. “It was an alluring spectacle and an object of
science, a delight for a broadening swathe of the public and a
meeting ground of the serious...a market commodity and a glimpse
of the divine hand of God.” Talk about flower power. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and

controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/06/03/would-you-pay-100000-for-an-orchid
| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Stay tuned

Hit songs are getting shorter

The trend is not as bad as it sounds
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

WHAT IS THE “song of the summer”? For more than a century,

music fans and critics have considered which anthems capture the
season of barbecues and suntans. In 1910 the New York Tribune
wondered whether the year’s “summer song” would be “sentimental”
or “humorous”, “unmitigated trash” or “at least bearable”.

The songs that will define summer in the northern hemisphere this
year will probably be bearable, for they will probably be short.
Consider two albums that were loved last summer. “Short n’ Sweet”
by Sabrina Carpenter, an American pop star (pictured), lived up to its
name. “Brat” by Charli XCX, a British musician, was full of two-
minute tunes.

Of the songs that Spotify, a streaming service, reckons will “take

over the summer”, half are under three minutes. Yet The Economist’s
analysis of almost 1,200 number-one hits suggests brevity is not
season-specific. The average length of songs that top the Billboard
Hot 100 has decreased by around 18%, from four minutes and 22
seconds in 1990 to three minutes and 34 seconds in 2024 (see
chart). Songs are the shortest they have been since the 1960s. The
mentality, summed up by Jennie, a South Korean artist, is: “Don’t
bore us, take it to the chorus.” (Her song, “Like Jennie”, lasts two
minutes and three seconds.)

Song lengths are influenced by technology. For much of the 20th

century tracks were short because shellac and vinyl records could
hold only three to five minutes of music on each side. The
introduction of cassettes in the 1960s and CDs in the 1980s allowed
artists to croon for longer; hits such as “Hotel California” (1977) and
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” (1988) were six or seven minutes long.
Runtimes remained lengthy for much of the 1990s. But in the digital
age they have shrunk again.

The economics of streaming is one driver of the trend. Artists are

paid each time their song is streamed, so long as the listener tunes
in for at least 30 seconds. That has encouraged music-makers to get
snappy, with brief introductions and early choruses. In general “The
shorter the song is, the more streams it’s going to get,” says Bart
Schoudel, a producer and engineer who worked on Ms XCX’s “Brat”.

Another oft-cited explanation is TikTok. By one count more than

75% of the tracks in Britain’s top 40 singles chart have gone viral on
the short-form video app. On social media, disgruntled listeners have
complained that “embarrassingly short pop songs” are an attempt
“to appease the TikTok generation”. Yet, as Adam Read, TikTok’s
music editorial lead in Britain, points out, the app boosts “songs of
every length”. A recent viral song, “Messy” by Lola Young, runs for
nearly five minutes.

Short songs are often seen to represent the erosion of taste. Some
of them are indeed firmly in the unmitigated trash category, such as
“Steve’s Lava Chicken”, a 34-second song from “A Minecraft Movie”
that recently broke the record for the shortest song to chart on the
Billboard Hot 100. But plenty are good. “Hit The Road Jack” (1961)
lasts just two toe-tapping minutes.

Making a song shorter is similar to editing a book—it is the musical

equivalent of killing your darlings. That is particularly important for
new artists, notes Mr Schoudel, as talent scouts tend to skip songs
that do not get “to the point”. Musicians hoping to make the next
summer hit may wish to follow Ms Carpenter’s example and keep
things short and sweet. ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and

controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/06/02/hit-songs-are-getting-shorter

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 | 上一项 |

Material benefits

African architects have cool

designs for a warming planet
They take inspiration from everything from the local terrain to
termites
6月 05, 2025 08:13 上午 | OUAGADOUGOU

Shady design, in the limelight

THE FIRST thing you notice, stepping from the scorching Sahelian
sun into the laterite-stone dome, is how cold it is. There is no air-
conditioning, just shade and natural ventilation; nor is there plaster.
Diebedo Francis Kere, the architect behind the new mausoleum in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, strives to use only what can
be sourced nearby. “I’m a construction-material opportunist,” he
says. “I look around at what is most abundant, and how people use
it, and try to do something new.” The result is a building so austere,
low-tech and elegant that it is like entering a temple of the ancient
world.

In 2022 Mr Kere became the first black architect to win the

prestigious Pritzker prize (considered architecture’s equivalent of the
Nobel). He is the best known of a cohort of African architects whose
ideas are at the profession’s cutting edge. In particular, they are
showing how to build sustainably for a warming, changing planet;
what’s more, they are doing so on the cheap. At a time when
African-made music, art and TV is crossing into the global cultural
mainstream, the continent’s architecture and design are becoming
increasingly influential, too.

For a long time, ideas flowed the other way. Since the 1950s, many
of the most important public buildings in Africa have been modernist
in style and monumental in scale. The “tropical modernism” of the
post-war era—a style inspired by the radical functionality of Le
Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect—was a way for newly independent
African states to assert themselves on the world stage, says Tosin
Oshinowo, a Nigerian architect. But the architects behind these
buildings, who mostly did not come from Africa, often used materials
unsuited to local climates, such as concrete (which can crack and
blister in humidity) and plate-glass (which can make buildings
oppressively hot inside).

Shiny buildings still have appeal: some African elites “want

something that they’ve seen in the global north or Dubai”, says
Kunle Adeyemi, another Nigerian architect. This can lead to staid
uniformity at best and cheap mimicry at worst. In Ethiopia, for
instance, the historic heart of Addis Ababa, the capital, is currently
being demolished to make way for bland, identikit high-rises
implanted from the Gulf.

Mr Kere and his peers point to another way. They draw inspiration
from the immediate and familiar rather than styles and materials
imported from elsewhere. The rustic appearance of the John Randle
Centre (JRC), a museum which opened in Lagos last year, aims to
evoke the mud rendering used for centuries by the Yoruba, one of
Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. Seun Oduwole, who designed the
JRC, says too many new buildings in Lagos are “white boxes
divorced from their surroundings”. He aims to create edifices that are
in harmony with “nature and the physical environment”.

Down to earth

So, too, does Sumayya Vally, a South African architect who has
drawn on the cooling systems of termite mounds in her recent
designs. And Mariam Issoufou, from Niger, created an angular
design for the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre in Liberia
based on traditional palava huts, whose roofs divert the heavy rains
common in the country. She was shortlisted for the prestigious Aga
Khan award in 2022.

Mr Kere was influenced by Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s former

president, who preached national self-reliance. (The mausoleum is
part of a memorial for Sankara, who was assassinated on the site in
1987.) In design terms, this means making canny choices. Mr Kere
uses clay-earth bricks, which can cost between 20% and 70% less
than the concrete equivalents.

These architects’ ideas are finding a wide audience. In 2023, at the

previous edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, perhaps the
industry’s most important event, more than half the participants
were from Africa and the diaspora. Mr Kere has taught at Harvard
and Yale. “This is a unique moment,” says Martino Stierli of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. “We have this incredibly
exciting generation of African architects who have built locally, but
are having an impact globally.”

That is evident in the commissions being won by African architects.

Mr Kere’s first major project in America is the Las Vegas Museum of
Art, which is expected to open in 2028; it will take inspiration from
the nearby Nevada desert. Ms Vally is designing a bridge in Belgium
which will nod to traditional Congolese riverboats.

As urban planners contemplate the future as well as construction’s

present impact on the climate, they are looking to the continent’s
materials and methods. (Consider that cement manufacturing
accounts for around 8% of global CO2 emissions.) Mr Adeyemi has
won international recognition for his “water cities”: floating
settlements designed in response to land scarcity in fast-growing
metropolises such as Lagos as well as rising sea levels.

Design innovations pioneered in Africa are catching on elsewhere.

The “passive cooling” techniques of the kind used in the mausoleum
are increasingly common in hot countries around the world. Western
architects such as David Chipperfield, who won the Pritzker in 2023,
are utilising the same sustainable building materials, such as
rammed earth and clay. Mr Kere says such approaches were often
scorned as “backwards” when he was growing up in Burkina Faso in
the 1970s and 80s. Now, more than ever, they are the future. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/06/05/african-architects-have-cool-designs-
for-a-warming-planet

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

| 下一章节 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

Indicators

Economic data, commodities

and markets
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/economic-and-
financial-indicators/2025/06/05/economic-data-commodities-and-markets

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |
 | 主菜单 | 上一章节 |

Obituary
Amanda Feilding fought to rescue the
reputation of psychedelics
The queen of consciousness :: The campaigner and scientific collaborator died on
May 22nd, aged 82

| 主菜单 | 上一章节 |
 | 下一项 | 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |

The queen of consciousness

Amanda Feilding fought to

rescue the reputation of
psychedelics
The campaigner and scientific collaborator died on May 22nd, aged
82
6月 05, 2025 08:12 上午

THE FEELING was not at all what she had expected. It was very
subtle. A lightening and a lifting, as when you put breath into a
balloon. A feeling of return, like the tide coming in.

The tide she actually saw was much more scary. Big splashes of
blood on her white tunic, and a river down her face. Well, you
couldn’t expect much else when you trepanned yourself. She had
done it with a pedal-operated dentist’s drill, right in the middle of her
forehead. Quite neatly, in fact, with a hole in her skull of only half a
centimetre. Her surgery was so clever that, after mopping herself
up, she was ready to party, in a flowing Moroccan robe and with a
gold turban hiding the wound.

The reason she had done it, up in her attic in December 1970, was
to let lightness in. Her lover, Bart Huges, a young Dutch scientist,
believed that much mental illness stemmed from sluggish blood-flow
to the brain. The full heartbeat had to express itself within the
cranial cavity, loosening the grip of the tyrant ego. She had dreamed
as a child of watering the desert; now trepanation, an ancient
procedure to let bad spirits out, might revitalise the desert of her
brain. No modern doctor would perform it, so it was do-it-yourself
time. Amanda’s pet pigeon, Birdie, had made sure to fly out of the
window before she began.

She had tried several other things. In the 1960s and 70s, almost
everyone did. At 16 she smoked cannabis; it made her hear the
world in a new way. In her early 20s she sampled LSD. Her first trip
was like a heavenly funfair; her second, a disaster. Someone had
spiked her coffee with hundreds of trips-worth of the stuff, and she
took months to recover. The psychic wound was never quite cured,
she felt. But her scientific curiosity was undaunted.

Hers had been an odd childhood. The family were upper-class

bohemian farmers, cash-poor but sitting on many acres in a three-
towered Tudor hunting lodge. They were isolated and barely
socialised. Her most vivid experiences took place outdoors, in the
large garden, full of winding paths, where she imagined a god lived;
and in the fields where from the age of three she followed her
diabetic father, with glucose in her pocket to save him during his
hypoglycemic fits. This dosing of the blood fascinated her. She won
the science prize at school, but dropped out to study mysticism
instead. The two subjects seemed to go together, and later fused in
a single campaign: to find out with the best science how
psychedelics worked, and thereby to show how their consciousness-
expanding effects might safely benefit human beings.

This was a hard path to tread. After the mind-bending hippie years,
psychedelics were taboo. In government wars against drugs the
potentially useful, non-addictive ones—LSD, cannabis, psilocybin
(magic mushrooms) DMT, MDMA (ecstasy) and ayahuasca—were
criminalised along with heroin and cocaine. Doctors would not touch
them; scientists ignored them. Yet in other civilisations these were
sacraments, not the devil’s work. Of course taking them willy-nilly
was highly dangerous; she knew all about that. Yet if they could help
relieve the physical and mental ills of the modern world, they were
worth researching.

How could she get that message across? Her first thought was to go
into politics. She had a certain fame in the press as the drug-crazed
woman with a hole in her head, so she ran twice as an independent
for her Chelsea constituency, in flowing robes and turban and with
Birdie on her shoulder, offering trepanning on the NHS. (On her
second run in 1983 her vote doubled, to 139.) But she knew that
science was the way forward, not sensation.

The real problem was that she had no letters after her name. It was
an uphill push to campaign from her kitchen table; she would have
to work her way into the scientific establishment with some sort of
Trojan horse. So she set up a foundation. She did that in 1996,
eventually calling it the Beckley Foundation (BF) after her family
home. Conveniently, it had an Oxford postcode; her marriage the
year before to the Earl of Wemyss gave her extra social heft; and
persistence did the rest, drawing to her cause the professors of
neuroscience at both Oxford and Cambridge and David Nutt, Britain’s
former, interestingly maverick drug tsar. Her particular prize was
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had synthesised LSD, felt it
had been a gift for the world, and tirelessly preached the importance
of studying psychedelics properly.
Her foundation’s HQ was a five-person office in a converted cowshed
at Beckley, but it soon found impressive venues elsewhere. From
1998 she hosted 11 international seminars on drug policy for
government ministers and intellectuals in the House of Lords: a nice
high seat to shoot from. BF also collaborated with some of the best
labs in the world. With Johns Hopkins, in 2006, it produced the first
scientific evidence that psilocybin might be useful in treating nicotine
addiction; ten years later, a collaboration with Imperial College
confirmed it seemed to help in treatment-resistant depression. She
was especially keen to see the physiological effects of altered states
of consciousness, so BF helped generate the first images, flaming
orange, of the brain on LSD. Microdosing with acid, as she had done
for years, also seemed to make dying patients happy.

This was hardly a revolution. But it shifted medical thinking. Once

doctors were confronted with evidence-based research (as well as
her 80 co-written articles in peer-reviewed journals), their minds
opened a little. In fact, you could say, their consciousness expanded.
She was careful not to push them too far. But as she took reporters
round her magic garden, among the tall topiaries and the ponds she
had dug in accordance with sacred geometry, she would let slip
further mystical thoughts: that the brain might be a receptor for a
wider form of consciousness; that consciousness might in fact be
everywhere. And that you did not necessarily need a hole in the
head to let the light in. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2025/06/05/amanda-feilding-fought-to-rescue-the-
reputation-of-psychedelics

| 章节菜单 | 主菜单 |