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The world this week

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The world this week

Politics
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to the streets of

Washington, DC, taking federal control of its policing operations.
The order lasts for 30 days. Mr Trump evoked his authority under
the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the first time a
president has used it to federalise the police, claiming that the city
was awash in crime and homelessness. Violent crime surged in 2023
but fell by 35% last year to a 30-year low.

Extra-territorial claims

Mr Trump was reported to have signed an order allowing America’s

armed forces to pursue drug cartels, possibly at sea or on foreign
soil. Responding to the reports, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s
president, “absolutely ruled out” allowing American troops into her
country. “We co-operate, we collaborate, but there is not going to be
an invasion”, she said. Such collaboration includes the transfer this
week of 26 suspected senior drug-gang members to the United
States.

Miguel Uribe, a conservative senator who was a leading contender in

the presidential election due next year in Colombia, died in a clinic
two months after being shot by an assailant at a campaign rally. In
1991 his mother, a campaigning journalist and daughter of a former
president, was killed when Mr Uribe was four years old. Many
Colombians fear a return to political violence.

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, led a march to protest against

the recent decision of the constitutional court to suspend parts of
the country’s new security laws. The parts that are suspended
include allowing intelligence officers to use fake identities, the use of
surveillance technology and a presidential power to pardon security
personnel convicted of criminal behaviour in their crackdown on
gangs. The opposition supports the court’s decision and claims that
Mr Noboa’s march threatened the judiciary’s independence. At the
demonstration the president said he had “the mandate of the
people”.

Israel launched intense air strikes on Gaza City. The war cabinet
voted in favour of seizing control of the city but has not said when it
plans to do so. Israel killed six journalists in one of the strikes. It
claimed that one of them, Anas al-Sharif, who worked for Al Jazeera,
was a Hamas operative but provided no convincing evidence for the
allegation. Last year Israel banned Al Jazeera, a popular Arab
satellite channel, from reporting from Israel, alleging that it was a
mouthpiece for Hamas.

Hamas representatives arrived in Cairo for preliminary talks with

Egyptian officials about a deal to end the war in Gaza. Binyamin
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, suggested that he hoped any
agreement would secure the release of all the hostages.

Fighting continued in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

between government troops and M23, a rebel group backed by
Rwanda. Both sides accused the other of violating an agreement,
signed in July, to work towards a permanent ceasefire. Congo and
Rwanda also signed a peace deal in Washington in June.

At least 40 civilians were killed in an attack on el-Fasher, the capital

of Sudan’s North Darfur province, and a nearby refugee camp. The
city has been under siege by the Rapid Support Forces, one of the
main parties in the civil war, since April 2024. The group has been
accused of carrying out multiple atrocities there.

The White House played down expectations of Donald Trump’s

summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15th, describing
it as a “listening exercise”. Volodymyr Zelensky called Mr Trump two
days before the meeting and described their conversation as
positive. Meanwhile, Russia was reported to have made its most
significant military advance in Ukraine for at least a year. Russian
troops gained 15km (nine miles) of ground in their drive to take a
road leading to Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donbas region.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a peace deal brokered by Mr

Trump. The two countries have been in an intermittent conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh since the fall of the Soviet empire. The
agreement creates a transit corridor near the Iranian border for
energy exports that America will have development rights to. Iran
wasn’t happy with that, and neither was Russia.

Finland became the first NATO country to lay criminal charges against
a captain and crew of a ship in Russia’s “shadow fleet” for alleged
sabotage in the Baltic Sea. The captain and two officers of the Eagle
S were charged with cutting underwater cables last December.
Rahul Gandhi, the official leader of the opposition in India’s lower
house of Parliament, and dozens of other senior opposition members
were briefly detained by police during a march on the country’s
Election Commission. Mr Gandhi and others say that voter lists in
some states have been corrupted in order to rig elections in favour
of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP and the commission
reject the claims.

The Philippines criticised China for carrying out “dangerous

manoeuvres” in the South China Sea’s disputed Scarborough
Shoal. A Chinese coastguard ship collided with a Chinese naval
vessel close to a Philippine coastguard ship that was delivering
supplies to fishermen in the area. The Philippines claims that the
Chinese vessels ran into each other as they tried to block its ship.
China said later that it “drove away” a US destroyer that came close
to the Shoal.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, a UN body,

reported evidence of widespread “systematic torture” in Myanmar’s
detention facilities. This includes beatings, electric shocks,
strangulations, gang rape and burning sexual body parts.
Donald Trump picked E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labour
Statistics, having sacked the former head of the agency for what
he claimed was its unfavourable manipulation of job-creation data
(he has offered no evidence of this). Mr Antoni is the chief
economist at the Heritage Foundation, one of America’s foremost
conservative organisations.

Not a Long time at the IRS

Billy Long was defenestrated as commissioner of the Internal

Revenue Service, less than two months into the job. Mr Long, a
former Republican congressman, reportedly refused to hand over tax
records on certain illegal immigrants and had clashed with Scott
Bessent, the Treasury secretary. Mr Bessent is now the IRS’ s interim
commissioner, the seventh person to head the agency this year.
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The world this week

Business
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

America and China suspended the imposition of retaliatory tariffs

for another 90 days as they continue to work towards a trade deal.
November 10th is the new deadline. Meanwhile, the White House
confirmed that Nvidia and AMD have agreed to hand over 15% of
the revenues they receive from selling chips in China to the
American government. It is thought to be the first time that any
company has come to such an arrangement to obtain export
licences. Separately, the Chinese government has urged domestic
firms not to use Nvidia’s H 20 chips, according to reports, but has
stopped short of an outright ban.

Wham, bam, thank you Tan

Mr Trump backed off from his call for Lip-Bu Tan to resign as chief
executive of Intel. Mr Trump’s attack came after Tom Cotton, the
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned Mr Tan’s
links to Chinese companies, as well as “security and integrity” at
Intel. Mr Tan, who dismissed the concerns, recently suggested that
Intel may quit the higher end of chipmaking if its next-generation
semiconductors do not gain enough business. But after a hastily
arranged meeting, Mr Trump praised Mr Tan’s “success”.

Mr Tan was not the only corporate boss to take heat from Mr Trump
this week. The president suggested that David Solomon should
stand down as the boss of Goldman Sachs because of the bank’s
“bad prediction” on the impact of tariffs. Mr Solomon should “focus
on being a DJ ”, he said, a reference to the bank executive’s erstwhile
pastime.

The British government breathed a sigh of relief as new data showed

that Britain’s economy grew by 0.3% in the second quarter
compared with the first quarter (or by 1.2% on an annual basis).
The figure was better than expected; weak output was recorded in
April and May, but GDP rebounded in June. Higher employer taxes
came into effect during the quarter, which was also marked by
uncertainty over trade. https://t.me/+NA8muckncd4yNDUx

Australia’s central bank reduced its benchmark interest rate by a

quarter of a percentage point, to 3.6%, as inflation eases in the
country. The cut was widely expected. The bank stunned markets in
July by holding the rate steady.

Consumer prices in America rose by 2.7% in July on a 12-month

basis, the same as June. The headline inflation rate was subdued
by a dip in energy and food prices. Excluding those items, core
inflation accelerated to 3.1%, mostly because of increases in the
cost of services. Airline fares rose by 4%, for example, month on
month.
Stockmarkets cheered the inflation data, which raises the
probability of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates in
September. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite both hit new all-
time highs. In Japan the Nikkei 225 and Topix broke records amid
optimism about trade and speculation that the government will
expand fiscal stimulus. SoftBank’s share price surged to new peaks
after its quarterly profit beat expectations amid its big bets on AI.

Following billions of dollars in losses at its electric-vehicle division,

Ford announced a big shake-up of the business, which includes a
$5bn investment in factories in Louisville and Michigan. Ford will
switch to a new “universal EV platform” production system that will
build a “breakthrough” low-cost electric pickup truck starting at
$30,000. It expects to start selling the pickup in 2027. Some analysts
think this could be a make-or-break moment for the carmaker.

Perplexity, one of the best-known AI- driven search tools on the

web, made a surprise offer to buy Google’s Chrome web browser
for $34.5bn. In a letter to Alphabet, Google’s parent company,
Perplexity said it was positioning itself as a potential buyer if Google
is eventually ordered to sell Chrome in an antitrust case.

Orsted, the world’s biggest developer of offshore wind farms, lost a

third of its stockmarket value after announcing that it would have to
raise 60bn Danish kroner ($9bn) in a rights issue to boost its
finances. The Danish company blamed “material adverse
developments” in the American market, where the Trump
administration is hostile towards renewable energy.

The long-awaited roll-out of GPT-5, OpenAI’ s latest model, didn’t

quite go according to plan. After social media were flooded with
complaints from users, Sam Altman, the startup’s boss, admitted
that its autoswitcher, which guides queries to the most suitable
model, had broken for a large part of the launch day, so that GPT-5
“seemed way dumber”. With the fixes now in place, GPT-5 could be
the world’s best model in areas such as software engineering.

Web crawler

AOL, an internet pioneer from the 1990s, quietly announced that it

would stop offering its dial-up service to customers. Around
160,000 Americans still use dial-up rather than broadband. AOL’ s
decision was seen as a historic moment by some; others scratched
their heads in disbelief that its dial-up service still existed.
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this-week/2025/08/14/business
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The world this week

The weekly cartoon

8月 14, 2025 04:00 上午

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

How to win at foreign policy

What Putin wants from Trump in Alaska
The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

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

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this-week/2025/08/14/the-weekly-cartoon
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Leaders
How to win at foreign policy
President Unpredictable :: Donald Trump’s capricious dealmaking destabilises the
world

Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of rare-earth

elements will ultimately backfire
Trade restrictions v ingenuity :: How the West can break China’s grip on these vital
minerals

America and its Asian allies need to spend

more to deter China
Defence in the Pacific :: It should be a two-way street

The shutdown of ocean currents could

freeze Europe
Climate tipping-points :: When climate change poses a strategic threat, it needs a
strategic response

Why South Africa should scrap Black

Economic Empowerment
Racial justice :: The ruling party’s flagship policy is a cause of the country’s problems,
not a solution

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President Unpredictable

How to win at foreign policy

Donald Trump’s capricious dealmaking destabilises the world
8月 14, 2025 05:50 上午
WHEN DONALD TRUMP meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska it will be the
seventh time the two have talked in person. This time is different,
though. Since their last sit-down, Mr Putin has launched an
unprovoked war, lost perhaps a million Russian soldiers (dead and
wounded) and inflicted ceaseless misery on Ukrainians in pursuit of
an imperial dream.
Undaunted, Mr Trump hopes to get in a room with a wily dictator,
feel him out and forge a deal. It is the biggest test yet of his
uniquely personal style of diplomacy. It is also a reminder of how
unpredictable American foreign policy has become. Will Mr Trump be
firm, making clear that America and its allies will do what it takes to
guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty? Or will he be in such a rush to
reopen business with Russia that he rewards its aggression and
leaves Ukraine vulnerable to future attacks? As everyone clamours
for the president’s ear, no one knows what he will do.

At the beginning of Mr Trump’s second term his supporters had a

theory about how he would wield American power. Rather than
relying on deep relationships and expertise, he would rely on his gut.
As a master negotiator with a knack for sensing what others want
and fear, he would cut through the waffle and apply pressure
ruthlessly. Everyone wants access to American markets. By
threatening to shut them out, he would force recalcitrant foreigners
to end wars and reset the terms of trade to America’s advantage.
Career diplomats and experts would be replaced by rainmakers. Yes,
his transactional approach might foster a bit of corruption. But if it
brought peace in Ukraine or Gaza, who cared?

Alas, there are drawbacks to this approach. Using tariffs as a

weapon hurts America, too. More fundamentally, junking universal
principles for might-makes-right repels friends without necessarily
cowing foes. And the substitution of presidential whim for any
coherent theory of international relations makes geopolitics less
predictable and more dangerous. Mr Trump is not a globalist,
obviously. Nor is he an isolationist, or a believer in regional spheres
of influence. He simply does what he wants, which changes
frequently.

One way to make sense of Trumpism is that he divides his efforts at

dealmaking into three categories: high, medium and low stakes. In
the first category are America’s relations with unfriendly great
powers, principally China and Russia. Israel is here, too, because of
its importance in American domestic politics. Iran makes an
appearance, because of the way it threatens its neighbours. All these
relationships are complex, difficult and matter a lot to Mr Trump. If
he scores a win here—if he ends the war in Ukraine, or brings peace
between Israel and the Palestinians, or finds a formula for co-
operating with China without endangering national security—then
the pay-off is potentially staggering.

In the medium-stakes category Mr Trump puts Brazil, South Africa

and, oddly, giant India. These are important countries that both
America and China want in their camp. In most cases, their values
are far closer to America’s than to China’s. Ties with them ought to
be win-win. But they are unwilling to be bossed around, and take
offence when Mr Trump insults or tries to bully them.

The small stakes, for Mr Trump, are in small or poor countries. A

superpower can wield great influence over such places, sometimes
to good ends. Mr Trump helped cement a peace deal between
Azerbaijan and Armenia, for example, and brokered a truce between
the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. These are welcome
achievements. Azerbaijan and Armenia had been fighting for 35
years. Mr Trump mediated a reopening of trade and transport links.
The fruits may include a weakening of Russian influence in the area.
The Congo-Rwanda deal is much shakier—Rwandan-backed rebels
have violated it repeatedly—but not nothing. And there may be an
upside for America, in the form of mineral deals.

When it comes to medium-size stakes, Mr Trump’s method works

less well. He has started needless feuds with the leaders of Brazil
(because it is prosecuting a Trumpy ex-president for allegedly
attempting a coup), with South Africa (because he believes, wrongly,
that it is persecuting whites) and with India (infuriating its prime
minister with painful tariffs and undiplomatic boasting). The result?
India will draw closer to Russia again, and be less inclined to act as
a counterweight against China. Brazil and South Africa see China as
a more reliable partner than America. Mr Trump has won headlines
that play well with his most ardent supporters. But America has lost
out.

And when it comes to the highest stakes, the president is

floundering. He has tried to coerce China with tariffs, but it is
fighting back. This week Mr Trump blinked and extended another
deadline. He also undermined his own national-security policy by
lifting a ban on exports of Nvidia chips to China, while insisting that
Uncle Sam gets a 15% cut.

On Ukraine, he has been wildly inconsistent, one day blaming it for

having been invaded and threatening to cut military aid, then
accusing Mr Putin of bad faith and threatening stiffer sanctions on
Russia. On Israel, he has consistently given Binyamin Netanyahu
everything he wants and extracted nothing in return. If Mr Trump’s
bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites made Israel safer, well and good. But
he has failed to use his leverage to restrain Israel’s unending war in
Gaza.

The world is flattery

Other countries are learning how to play Mr Trump. A crypto deal

and a nomination for a Nobel peace prize worked for Pakistan. A
plane helped Qatar. The corruption is turning out to be as bad as
almost anyone feared; the great deals have yet to materialise. Those
who say Mr Trump is looking out for his own interests, not America’s,
have plenty of ammunition.

All this is only a preliminary judgment. If Mr Trump stands up to Mr

Putin this week, perhaps he can make his greatest-ever deal, ending
Europe’s worst war since 1945. Sadly, the odds are against it. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign
up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter.
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Trade restrictions v ingenuity

Xi Jinping’s weaponisation of
rare-earth elements will
ultimately backfire
How the West can break China’s grip on these vital minerals
8月 14, 2025 04:19 上午
SOON AFTER the blockade started, the panic began. When China
choked off the export of rare-earth elements in April, producers and
politicians around the world were quick to sound the alarm. China
provides over 90% of the world’s supply of refined rare earths,
which are used to make the strong magnets inside almost anything
with an electric motor, from vacuum cleaners to cars, and which also
appear in high-tech products from smartphones to fighter jets. Some
carmakers curtailed production; the industry is in “panic mode”, said
one boss. Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission,
thundered against China’s “dominance” and “blackmail”.

At first glance the use of rare earths as a weapon is working—and Xi

Jinping, China’s president, is getting what he wants. After the flow of
rare earths resumed, America’s president lifted controls on the sale
of some Nvidia chips, and delayed a hefty increase in import duties;
on August 11th America and China further extended their trade
truce. In July Mrs von der Leyen went cap-in-hand to Beijing,
seeking looser restrictions. But in the long term, China’s rare-earths
weapon will backfire.

The new controls are a sign of just how sophisticated China’s

economic arsenal has become. After a political spat in 2010 it briefly
blocked the exports of rare earths to Japan; in a fit of pique in 2020,
it increased duties on Australian Shiraz and grass-fed beef. Now,
however, Mr Xi has put in place a system of export controls that seek
to exploit China’s heft in global supply chains. A licensing scheme
covering more than 700 goods, including manufacturing equipment
and critical minerals, began operating in December. Officials keep
careful track of the ultimate consumer of the products, and can
revoke licences. Even though rare-earths exports have resumed in
recent weeks, sales to Western armsmakers, for instance, are still
choked off.

The aim is clear. Mr Xi wants to indigenise supply chains, so that

China is not at the mercy of its enemies for critical inputs—an effort
that was turbocharged after America banned the export of advanced
chips to China. He also hopes to use China’s control of supply chains
as a source of power over others. As long ago as April 2020 he told
officials that dependency on China could be a “deterrent” against
foreigners who would “artificially cut off supply”.

The difficulty for Mr Xi, though, is that export controls have

unintended consequences. Confronted with a ban, companies and
entrepreneurs find ways around the shortage. China’s dominance in
rare earths stems not from exclusive control of the world’s deposits,
nor from the technological sophistication of the refining process, but
instead from efficiency and scale. And the more it uses rare earths
(or indeed other commodities) as a weapon, the more it will
encourage others to find alternatives—weakening its future
firepower.

Start with the nature of China’s chokehold. Despite their name, rare
earths are relatively abundant; less than half of all known reserves
are found in China. Refining is a painstaking and polluting business,
but is not as technologically complex as advanced chipmaking.
China’s grip on rare earths is therefore not as strong as the West’s
on cutting-edge chips, and easier to work around. Indeed, until the
1980s, America was the biggest supplier of the minerals. The
dominance of China came about because it was more willing to
accept the environmental consequences, and has since been
cemented by its gargantuan size, which allows rare earths to be
mined cheaply.

Efforts by China to restrict the flow of rare earths have already

spurred efforts to find alternatives. After the spat in 2010, Japan
invested in rare-earths mines and began building stockpiles;
although it still imports rare earths from China, its dependence has
fallen from 90% to 60%. Earlier this year the Pentagon took a stake
in MP Materials, a miner in California, with which Apple has signed a
deal. All told, 22 new mining projects are expected to be up and
running by 2030.

Trendy “geoeconomic” theory points out that even a small erosion of

China’s dominance in rare earths could weaken its power
disproportionately. Reducing its share from 90% to 80% may not
sound like much, but it would imply a doubling in size of alternative
sources of supply, giving China’s customers far more room for
manoeuvre.
Even so, this diversification could still take years. What could
Western governments do to speed it up? They have a responsibility,
of course, to secure their military supply chains. They could also
streamline the process of approving mining permits (which in
America can take up to a decade), and could revisit environmental
rules. Lowering trade barriers would also help the rest of the world
mimic China’s scale.

It would be a mistake, though, for governments to seek to protect

the entire economy from the impact of shortages. That is because a
far more powerful—and underappreciated—response to shortages is
innovation. Just think of how America’s chip controls have prompted
Chinese firms such as Huawei and DeepSeek to develop new
techniques, or how a cobalt crunch in 2022 quickly eased, partly as
makers of electric vehicles found ways to do without the metal.

Similarly, startups across the West are now working on the recycling
of rare earths, and on the development of alternative ways to make
magnets and motors that do not rely on them. BMW and Renault,
two European carmakers, already sell electric vehicles that do not
use rare earths in their motors. Other companies could follow suit.
China’s restrictions will cause disruption as producers rejig their
processes, but long-term alternatives do exist.

From rare to overcooked

The more China uses its rare-earths weapon, therefore, the weaker
it will become. Time and again, enterprise and ingenuity have
prevailed over attempts to control the flow of goods. China itself
learned that lesson as its technology firms responded to America’s
export controls on chips. It may have to learn it again. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Defence in the Pacific

America and its Asian allies

need to spend more to deter
China
It should be a two-way street
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

UNLIKE IN EUROPE or the Middle East, there are no big interstate

wars taking place in Asia right now. But the threat from China’s
military build-up is obvious. Across the Pacific, American airmen are
busy restoring and upgrading second-world-war airbases so that
they can be used by their forces today. This is part of a policy to
deter China that began under President Joe Biden. Now President
Donald Trump is demanding that America’s Asian friends contribute
far more to this task.

The administration wants them to spend more on defence and do

more to deter an attack on Taiwan. Yet Mr Trump has sown doubts
about America’s commitment to its friends, most spectacularly with
Ukraine and NATO , but also with India. What should America’s Asian
partners do?

Europe could plausibly defend itself without copious American help

against Russia, but America’s Asian friends would have little chance
of deterring China if they were abandoned by Uncle Sam, unless
they resorted to nuclear weapons. China’s relative advantage is
larger, the geography is daunting and there is no Asian alliance
comparable to NATO . Yet fortunately the Trump administration’s
commitment to the Pacific is deeper than to Europe. Its Asian
partners should build on that.

A lack of cash is a problem. Mr Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, passed

last month, will provide an injection of funds for America’s armed
forces. But his budget request for the next fiscal year is flat, implying
a cut after inflation. Congress needs to spend more if the Pentagon
is to keep up with technological change and have enough ships,
airfields, troops and munitions to counter China. Among America’s
five main security partners in the region—Australia, Japan, the
Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan—average annual defence
spending is a threadbare 1.8% of GDP .

Mr Trump is right to ask them to spend 3.5% on defence. Australia,

South Korea and Taiwan have low public debt compared with other
rich countries, and could afford to do more. Australia’s Labor
government, for example, has no excuse. Its own white papers warn
of the seriousness of the threat from China, but its defence budget,
at just under 2% of GDP , tells a different story. It should put off
planned tax cuts and new social programmes or use debt financing
to commit to meeting the new target.
In Japan, tough decisions loom. A minority Liberal Democratic Party
government is under pressure to offer tax cuts, not a jump in
defence spending. With high debt, borrowing to pay for defence is
harder. Across the region the Pentagon should be careful about
these conversations, however. Pushing too hard for unpopular
policies could create a backlash among voters.

Even as they raise spending, America’s Asian partners should do

more together, not least by investing more in the region’s defence-
industrial base. This would helpfully place arms factories closer to
where weapons might be needed. It would also create a modest
hedge against American abandonment. Australia’s recent
announcement that it would buy frigates from Japan is a start. By
lifting their own spending and beefing up their industrial bases, they
can protect themselves, show America that they are not freeloading
and build confidence that China can be deterred in the Pacific.■

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Climate tipping-points

The shutdown of ocean

currents could freeze Europe
When climate change poses a strategic threat, it needs a strategic
response
8月 14, 2025 06:16 上午

THOSE WHO think about national security love to bandy acronyms

such as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and WOMBAT
(Weapon of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank). They need to add
AMOC to the list. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is
not a weapons system. But it could lay waste a continent—
specifically, Europe—to an extent that only a nuclear war could
outmatch.
AMOC is part of a system of currents which move heat around the
oceans of the world. It delivers a stupendous flow of that heat—
more than 1,000 terawatts—to the North Atlantic. That sounds like
the sort of planetary juggernaut it would be incredibly hard for
humans (whose global civilisation runs at a mere 20 terawatts) to do
anything about. Alas, no. AMOC is a curiously delicate thing. Changes
in sea-surface temperature and salinity caused by global warming
could conceivably make it stall; such abrupt shutdowns are clearly
visible in the geological record. For Europe that could mean a
sudden, severe cooling—even as the rest of the world keeps
warming.

Europeans sweltering through yet another summer heatwave might

think such cooling would be just the ticket. Again, alas, no. A
complete AMOC shutdown could see Brussels hitting -20°C (-4°F) in
a bad winter. In Oslo the figure would be almost -50°C (-58°F); not
quite Yakutsk, but not far off. February sea ice in the North Sea
could come as far south as the Humber estuary and the Frisian
Islands north of Holland. Average rainfall in parts of northern Europe
would drop precipitously; according to one estimate as much as
80% of England’s arable land would no longer be farmable without
irrigation. Storms would get worse; so, in some models, might
summer heatwaves. This would be the worst of all worlds.

And it’s not just Europe. By cooling the northern hemisphere as a

whole, an AMOC collapse would push the band of rain which girdles
the tropics towards the south. That would be very bad for the
African countries on the south edge of the Sahara; it could also be
devastating to the Amazon.

Cold, dry and sudden

These ghastly prospects are one of the reasons that AMOC takes a
starring role in worries about climate “tipping points”—effects of
warming that might be dramatic, damaging and irreversible. Another
reason is the strong suggestion, in both theory and models, that
after a (currently unknown) temperature threshold is passed, the
collapse could take just a few decades. A third is that AMOC , or at
least parts of it, may already be in slow decline.

This is well known to people who think about climate change—as is

the level of uncertainty about how far away the threshold actually is
and the spirited debate over how complete a collapse might ensue.
But there is no evidence that such possibilities are feeding into
government planning processes.

You might argue that they shouldn’t: that the response to the risk
should be to redouble all efforts which might keep the temperature
low enough to avoid a tipping point. But preparedness makes sense.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency in Britain is funding
prototype monitoring schemes that might make possible early
warnings of accelerating collapse. If it could be made robust
enough, such a system could make possible years of preparation.

If this were a military threat, such risk-reduction would be second

nature, as would table-top analysis of vulnerabilities and contingency
plans for softening impacts. Larger outlays are not, as yet,
necessary. But larger imaginations are. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
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Racial justice

Why South Africa should

scrap Black Economic
Empowerment
The ruling party’s flagship policy is a cause of the country’s
problems, not a solution
8月 14, 2025 06:05 上午

SOME MONTHS after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in

February 1990, he told businesses that South Africa must
“deracialise the exercise of economic power”. Such words unnerved
the conglomerates that had prospered under apartheid. Mandela’s
African National Congress (ANC ) then thought that nationalising
industries was the best way to uplift black South Africans. To help
convince the ANC of the merits of capitalism—before it won power in
South Africa’s first all-race election in 1994—the firms proposed
“empowerment deals” instead. Discounted assets were sold to
members of the new elite, including Cyril Ramaphosa, today one of
South Africa’s richest men—and its president.

What began as ad hoc inducements has become the most far-

reaching state-sponsored attempt at racial redress in the world.
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE ) requires firms, in effect, to
have a minimum share of black investors, to hire and train black
staff and to buy from black-owned suppliers. Despite criticism of BEE
from President Donald Trump, who cites it to justify 30% tariffs on
South Africa, Mr Ramaphosa has called it “not just a policy choice
but a constitutional imperative”. He says there is no trade-off
between racial “transformation” and economic growth.

Mr Ramaphosa is wrong. A policy that made him rich is making his

country poorer. It should be scrapped.

BEE is meant to reduce South Africa’s stratospheric levels of

inequality. But the main beneficiaries have been a tiny group of new
Randlords. By one conservative estimate around 1trn rand (more
than $50bn at today’s exchange rates) has been transferred to fewer
than 100 people, many of them returning again and again to strike
BEE deals. This is oligopoly, not equality. Under the ANC , inequality
between black South Africans has exploded. The top 10% of black
earners have seen incomes more than triple. Those of the bottom
50% have fallen slightly. This is mostly because of high joblessness,
which reflects persistently low growth.

One reason is BEE . Meeting ownership requirements and paying

extortionate transaction costs is an inefficient use of capital. De facto
quotas reduce productivity. Forcing firms to buy from black suppliers,
even if they are more expensive, squeezes profits. A recent estimate
puts the costs of complying with BEE at 145-290bn rand per year, or
2-4% of GDP . This helps explain why South Africa is last for “ease of
doing business” on a list of 49 countries compiled by the World
Bank.

Larger firms can more easily pay for consultants that advise on BEE ,
shielding them from competition. The policy repels foreign
investment. It also discourages genuine black entrepreneurship. Why
start a firm when you could get a piece of someone else’s? All this
helps explain why the rate at which firms enter and exit the market
is a third of that of other middle-income states. Worse, BEE begets
graft: when the state must procure based on race, not cost, it makes
deals with cronies easier.

Supporters of BEE say that scrapping it is impractical. Even if that

were true, the government could stop it from getting worse, for
instance by ditching plans for a 100bn-rand state-run
“transformation fund” paid for by a tax on firms.

They also argue that abolishing BEE would prevent dealing with the
sins of the past. But to improve the lot of poor South Africans it
would be better to focus specifically on poverty, not on race. Since
the vast majority of the poor are black people, they would be the
main beneficiaries of pro-poor policies.

There is an argument that the elite bargain of the 1990s helped

keep the peace in a fractious country. But today it aggravates social
tensions by fostering inequality and keeping the salience of race
high. In a large poll this year pluralities of South Africans, including
black South Africans, said that BEE reduces economic growth and is
“outdated and divisive”.

Mr Ramaphosa should take these views seriously. It is becoming

ever clearer that BEE is not the solution to South Africa’s problems,
but a cause of them. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Letters
Is the legislation of the GENIUS Act deeply
flawed?
A selection of correspondence :: Also this week, the Onion, the spread of electricity,
religion and video games, Superman

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A selection of correspondence

Is the legislation of the

GENIUS Act deeply flawed?
Also this week, the Onion, the spread of electricity, religion and
video games, Superman
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午

Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.com

Find out more about how we process your letter

Regulate stablecoins

I support responsible innovation in finance, and quite agree that for

stablecoins to succeed appropriate governance and regulation are
needed to make them trustworthy (“GENIUS inspiration”, July 26th).
But although the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US
Stablecoins Act has features that merit consideration globally, such
as requiring issuers to be registered and setting out clear rules on
reserve requirements and disclosures, the legislation is deeply flawed
and serves as a template to reward the issuers of stablecoins rather
than the users.

As an innovation, stablecoins promise lower cost and speedy

transactions. That promise may not always be kept, once one factors
in fees and the vagaries of blockchain settlement. More important,
they are exposed to scams, illicit activity, and operational and cyber-
security risks, and although they are supposed to be backed by high-
quality collateral that is not a guarantee of safety. Financial shocks
have recently affected even the US Treasury market.

The GENIUS Act doesn’t address many of these vulnerabilities.

Although Donald Trump believes that dollar stablecoins will create
new demand for Treasury bills, they may simply reduce or eliminate
demand for government-only money funds. As Simon Johnson and
Brooksley Born remind us, we’ve seen this movie before in the
Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, which weakened oversight
and amplified vulnerabilities in derivatives.

Excessive regulation can hobble innovation in finance and deny the

benefits of it to consumers and businesses. But in this case the rush
to innovate may create a race to the bottom if global regulators are
to use the GENIUS Act as a template.

Richard Berner
Co-director
Volatility and Risk Institute
NYU Stern School of Business
New York
Stablecoin issuance hinges on Treasury supply. If stablecoins take
off, it hands control of the money supply to politicians. So much for
monetary-policy independence. Similar to profligate monarchs,
except this time the person at the helm isn’t even trying to sustain a
dynasty.

Amy Huber
Assistant professor of finance
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

Waiting time for AI

It is true that the adoption of artificial intelligence is proceeding at a

snail’s pace (Free exchange, July 19th). However, the history of the
spread of other ground-breaking technologies is instructive.
Electricity, for instance, became a commodity shortly after
improvements in the light bulb in the 1870s and early 1880s. The
world’s first power station was established by 1882. Yet it was only
in the 1920s that electricity was fully integrated into manufacturing.
This delay wasn’t simply due to friction between various interests or
public-choice arguments. A deeper reason lay in business models
that were ill-suited for electric power. Factories designed around a
central shaft for steam power required a substantial overhaul to
adopt electricity. Similarly, the structural changes needed for AI’s full
adoption require time for new business models to emerge.

Isaac Alfon
London

Our dumb decade

Regarding your piece on satire in the age of Donald Trump (“Sting

like the Bee”, July 26th), I’ve been an avid reader of the Onion for
decades. This includes through normal times (“It Only Tuesday”),
dark times (“A Shattered Nation Longs to Care about Stupid Bullshit
Again”) and bizarre times (“Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All
Day”). I’ve recently wondered if my belief that it has got less funny
is a function of my getting older and grumpier or something else,
and your article made something click for me. It’s not that the
Babylon Bee’s sense of humour is sharper or funnier, but rather that
the Onion has become more like the Bee, whose writers seem to
think that comedy consists of restating one’s beliefs in the format of
a joke.

The Onion’s writers are, as you say, “outraged and exhausted by the
administration”. And the internet has changed how humour is
received (the understanding of irony is virtually non-existent). One
senses that the loss of a certain satirical edge stems from both.

Unlike an earlier era not so long ago, it’s hard to imagine the Onion
today, or indeed most writers working in the broadly left-leaning
world of mainstream comedy, poking fun at socialism (“Marxists’
Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work”). Or
feminism (“Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman
Does”). Or any other viewpoint with which the writers sympathise.

Michael Lueger
Wakefield, Massachusetts

The fire inside

Video games are another perhaps surprising media format where

Generation Z is finding religious inspiration (Letters, July 5th). Sandy
Petersen, a designer on the blockbuster “Doom” franchise, saw its
shotguns and chainsaws as one form of worship, blasting demons
back to Hell.

Joshua Graham, a character who was first introduced in “Fallout:

New Vegas” in 2010, is a missionary bringing the Good News back to
a world ravaged by nuclear war, and struggling to defend the
community he has adopted from marauding bandit tribes.

Recordings of his actions and dialogue in “Fallout” are on YouTube,

and it is instructive to read the viewers’ comments below them.
You’ll invariably find hundreds of remarks from young men saying
how Joshua Graham opened them up to appreciating a Christian
perspective that their secular upbringings had ignored, and more
from revived Christians who thought that they had lapsed from
religion only to find Joshua Graham helping to inspire them.

It was perhaps unintentional on the developers’ part; Joshua

Graham is only a small part of a much larger game-world after all.
But “Fallout” has probably done more to prompt a Christian revival
than 100,000 happy-clappy guitar jams.

Robert Fraze
Salford
Papers please, Mr Kent

I read your piece on what Superman can tell us about American

foreign policy (“A man of steel for all seasons”, July 12th). One can
only wonder how the superhero would be treated as an
undocumented alien in America today.

Jim Harrison
Rensselaer, New York
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deeply-flawed

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By Invitation
The far north has become NATO’s soft
underbelly, writes John Bolton
Arctic geopolitics :: The foreign-policy expert makes the argument for keeping the
Chinese out and the Russians down

The world needs more than drugs to fight

obesity, writes Novo Nordisk’s ex-boss
A weighty challenge :: Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen on how society can pull together to
avoid a health and economic catastrophe

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Arctic geopolitics

The far north has become

NATO’s soft underbelly, writes
John Bolton
The foreign-policy expert makes the argument for keeping the
Chinese out and the Russians down
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

This guest essay is one of three we have published to mark the

centenary of the Svalbard Treaty coming into force on August 14th
1925. The others are by Mikhail Komin and Kieran Mulvaney.

ALTHOUGH LONG a factor in American strategic thinking, the Arctic

now receives far more attention in Washington than in decades.
Several forces are at play: increased use of Arctic maritime passages
for military and commercial purposes; Russia’s historical focus on its
northern territories, now magnified by its aggression against
Ukraine; and, most salient geopolitically, China’s undisguised aim to
be an Arctic power. America and its allies have yet to cope
adequately with these challenges.

In the second world war, Greenland was critical to North Atlantic

convoy routes. The Pentagon clearly understood the Arctic’s cold-war
role, building the “DEW [distant-early-warning] Line” across Alaska,
Canada and Greenland to detect nuclear-equipped Soviet bombers
or ballistic missiles heading to the United States. Responding to the
Sputnik satellite, in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower sent the USS Nautilus,
the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, under the Arctic ice cap
from the Bering Strait to the Atlantic, in the first submerged transit
of the North Pole.

Unfortunately, cold-war victory led to geostrategic complacency, not

just in Washington, but across NATO and bilateral American alliances.
This complacency is disappearing as the race for Arctic hegemony
picks up, but the West has much to do, and quickly, to counter the
rising threats from China and Russia.

The prize is potentially vast. Opportunities to exploit the fabled

Northwest Passage across Canada, or its counterpart across Russia’s
northern coast, are enormous. Greater access to Far North natural-
resource deposits, both at sea and ashore, are also generating a lot
of attention.

Updating the jocular insight of General Hastings Ismay, NATO ’s first

secretary-general, is a good starting-point for the West’s Arctic grand
strategy: “Keep the Chinese out, the Americans in, and the Russians
down.” The alliance’s soft underbelly is now probably the Far North,
not the Mediterranean.
President Donald Trump remains sceptical of NATO and, indeed, the
very concept of collective-defence alliances. Nonetheless, America is
a front-line Arctic power, as Alaska’s congressional delegation
relentlessly reminds Mr Trump, and the region’s importance to his
presidency’s legacy should be obvious.

American military resources are, however, currently wholly

inadequate to the task, with insufficient Navy and Coast Guard
vessels worldwide, let alone those required for Arctic (and Antarctic)
operations, such as specialised icebreakers. NATO ’s admission of
Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024 helped plug some of the gaps
in the alliance’s Arctic naval capabilities.

William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, looks ever

more prescient. Had he not led the United States to buy Alaska from
Russia in 1867, Russia might have remained a North American
power, and the cold war might never have ended. He also tried to
buy Greenland from Denmark in 1868. Had he succeeded, today’s
circumstances might have been easier.

Mr Trump did not discover Greenland in 2019—when he first mooted

buying it—but he has greatly complicated addressing how the huge
island and its tiny population can once again be fully integrated into
NATO defences. The 1951 US -Danish Defence of Greenland treaty is
a workable basis for guarding against the Chinese and Russians,
while allowing Greenland’s political status to evolve. America had as
many as 17 military facilities there during the cold war, and today’s
focus hopefully precludes China and Russia from acting covertly
against NATO ’s security interests.

Norway’s Svalbard islands graphically embody the alliance’s

dilemmas. John Longyear, an American businessman, initially
exploited their coal deposits in the early 20th century (more
evidence of how ahistorical today’s American isolationists are).
However, allowable under the 1925 treaty confirming Norwegian
sovereignty, Svalbard also features Russian mining operations 30
miles from its major habitation, appropriately named Longyearbyen.

A European intelligence official said recently that “Svalbard has to be

near the top of a list of where Russia might try something.” This is
not fantasy. China poses an analogous threat to Taiwanese islands
like Kinmen and Matsu, just off the mainland, which it could readily
seize without invading Taiwan outright. These are inviting targets,
testing allied resolve in the Far East and the Far North. Can
Svalbard’s treaty-based demilitarisation be preserved? As I found
during a visit there in April, the islands provide NATO ’s adversaries
excellent locations for naval or air bases.

Among NATO ’s Arctic Ocean members, Canada is the hole in the

doughnut. Persistent Canadian underspending on defence during
Justin Trudeau’s governments remains uncorrected. Helpfully,
however, relations between America’s and Canada’s armed forces are
otherwise quite good, including through long-term development of
national missile defences for both countries. It is Canada’s politicians
who have failed.

Moreover, spats between Canada and America over whether various

aspects of the Northwest Passage are international waterways or
Canadian territorial waters must also be resolved. One approach
would be to agree that passage by NATO -member warships would be
freely permitted in fulfilling their alliance obligations.

These are merely preliminary considerations. Formidable issues

remain, including the need for a massive increase in NATO defence
expenditures, not just for the Arctic but worldwide. Cold-war victory
didn’t “end history” in the Arctic any more than anywhere else. And,
critically, isolationism can play no part in strategising about a region
so close and vital to American nationalsecurity interests. Time to pick
up the pace. ■
John Bolton was America’s ambassador to the UN from 2005 to 2006
and its national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.
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A weighty challenge

The world needs more than

drugs to fight obesity, writes
Novo Nordisk’s ex-boss
Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen on how society can pull together to avoid
a health and economic catastrophe
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

OVER THE next decade, obesity and associated chronic diseases will
have a profound impact on economies and global health. Yet for all
the publicity around weight-loss treatments, it is clear that
pharmaceuticals alone cannot solve a crisis that already affects over
a billion people worldwide. The challenge lies not just in developing
medicines and other interventions, but also in finding ways to
prevent obesity and other chronic diseases before they start.

As chief executive of Novo Nordisk from 2017 until earlier this

month, I had a front-row seat to the promise and limitations of
pharmaceutical interventions. These interventions have shown
potential in weight management, but they cannot on their own
address the economic and environmental factors that contributed to
the obesity epidemic in the first place.

The latest forecasts in the Lancet are stark: more than half of adults
and one in three children and adolescents are set to be obese or
overweight by 2050. This represents not just a health catastrophe
but an economic one. The annual global cost of obesity alone is
forecast to reach $4.3trn by 2035. The economic burden posed by
other chronic conditions linked to obesity, including diabetes and
cardiovascular disease, will be measured in the trillions too. Such
eye-popping numbers underline the futility of any notion that
treatment alone can be a silver bullet.

If we are to reverse a curve trending in the wrong direction since the

1990s, a radical rethink is needed. The next five years are crucial: in
parts of the population, notably children and adolescents, the
number of people living with obesity is set to overtake the number
who are overweight but not obese. Shirking from the urgent policy
intervention that’s needed would be a monumental societal failing.

A shift in focus is needed on many fronts. Obesity must be

universally recognised and addressed as a multi-faceted societal
responsibility rather than an individual one. This means restrictions
on junk-food marketing to children and continued work to reduce the
stigma associated with the disease. It also calls for urban planning
that supports people’s health, for instance by emphasising physical
exercise over travelling by car. In short, the world must prioritise
prevention.
This may sound counterintuitive coming from a pharmaceutical
executive. But the reality is that even if every person living with
obesity took medicines, we couldn’t treat our way out of this crisis.

Obesity science has come a long way. It is now widely accepted that
socioeconomic, genetic and environmental factors play an important
role in the development of the disease. Appetite regulation and the
body’s resistance to weight loss are also much better understood.
We know it is not just a matter of calories in and calories out.

Moreover, our improved understanding of the hormones regulating

glucose levels and appetite reinforces the argument for a holistic
approach to interconnected cardiometabolic diseases. The evidence
is clear: obesity is associated with numerous comorbidities. Cancer,
type-2 diabetes, sleep apnoea, liver disease, chronic kidney disease,
Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease—the biggest cause of death
globally—often overlap in people living with obesity. Earlier
interventions to prevent obesity are not simply about limiting weight
gain; they are about enabling good long-term health.

This emerging area of science also offers clues as to how health care
might be redesigned to be more patient-centred. The norm is for
cardiologists to focus solely on cardiovascular disease while
endocrine consultants treat patients with diabetes. A holistic
approach built around the patient, rather than clinical specialisms, is
the way forward.

As data collection and analysis methods improve, so does the ability

to gain new insights into why people develop obesity and which
interventions work. This is an area in which the private sector can
step up to help governments with limited resources, competing
demands and a burning need to effect change now to invest in the
most effective measures.

Novo Nordisk is working with policymakers and academics as part of

the Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative: a controlled study across
six cities in Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, South Africa and Spain,
which is evaluating interventions to improve diets and boost physical
activity among 6,000 children from disadvantaged communities. At
the end of the programme, the plan is to produce a framework to
guide regional and global policy decisions. More public-private action
in this area must follow with pooled investment and, where
appropriate, data-sharing.

Obesity interventions of this kind could mark a milestone in human

health care. However, if managing a single disease in isolation
remains the sole legacy of this era of scientific progress, the world
will have missed an opportunity to fundamentally change how
society views and deals with chronic disease.

Having recently stepped down after eight years at the top of Novo
Nordisk, I am filled with hope rather than despair. Yes, the obesity
epidemic is a huge challenge. But I have witnessed what is possible
when science, policy and human determination align. I have seen
patients improve their health and confidence. I have watched
governments begin to act, from health-care reforms to urban-
planning reforms. Most importantly, I have observed a fundamental
shift in the understanding of obesity: from an issue of individual
responsibility to a condition requiring comprehensive and holistic
care.

The tools exist. The science is clear. Now we need to act on our
knowledge. My generation may have created this crisis, but the next
generation, armed with a deeper understanding and hopefully wiser
policies, can solve it. ■

Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen was chief executive of Novo Nordisk from

January 2017 to August 2025.

Novo Nordisk has a commercial relationship with Economist Impact,

a division of The Economist Group. The Economist operates
independently of Economist Impact.
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invitation/2025/08/11/the-world-needs-more-than-drugs-to-fight-obesity-writes-novo-
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Briefing
China’s power over rare earths is not as
great as it seems
Roiling stones :: There are lots of ways for the West to get around its near-monopoly

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Asia
America’s biggest ask in Asia
Weapons and words :: Elbridge Colby and others push allies to ramp up defence
spending

Cow’s milk, as well as Russian oil, fuels the

US-India trade war
The white stuff :: There is another liquid the two sides cannot agree on

What Sara Duterte’s comeback means for

the Philippines
Nepo politics :: She could be the front-runner for the election in 2028

Indonesia’s new president has daddy issues

Banyan :: Prabowo Subianto wants to imitate his father. Good luck with that

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Weapons and words

America’s biggest ask in Asia

Elbridge Colby and others push allies to ramp up defence spending
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Singapore

DESPITE WARS in Europe and the Middle East, the Pentagon’s top
strategists have recently been focused on Asia. Having got members
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO ) to promise to spend
3.5% of their GDP on defence and a further 1.5% of GDP on
defence-related infrastructure, they have now turned their attention
to the budgets of Asian allies. The European formula, they say, is the
new “global standard”. That would imply a massive increase in
defence budgets from Sapporo to Sydney. To hit 3.5% would add
over $150bn per year in defence spending, the biggest rise among
allies in the Pacific in 50 years. America’s demand also prompts three
questions: what is the right budget level, how should allies spend
the money and will they comply?

Of America’s five big security partners in the region (Australia,

Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan) discussions with
Australia and Japan appear to be the most advanced. They have
been told that they should meet targets of 3.5% of GDP —and
quickly. When asked about the talks, Australian and Japanese
officials show flashes of quiet anger. America has overstepped the
mark, they say, by dictating sovereign budgetary decisions.
And despite talk of a global standard, Donald Trump’s administration
has suggested other figures as well. The Philippines and South Korea
have been told that they should be prepared to match other allies,
but appear to be under less pressure. South Korea already spends
2.6% of GDP on defence, the highest of the five, while the much
poorer Philippines spends the least and would struggle to hit 3.5%.
At the other end of the spectrum, Mr Trump has long said that
Taiwan should spend 10% of GDP on defence. (Taiwan is not a
formal treaty ally.)
Leading these conversations is the Pentagon’s third-ranking official,
Elbridge Colby. He is perhaps the most talked-about appointee to the
role of undersecretary for policy in a generation. His backers include
J.D. Vance, the vice-president, who introduced Mr Colby in glowing
terms at his confirmation hearing in March—an extraordinary gesture
of support. When speaking of America’s demands, allied officials talk
of “what Bridge wants” as often as “what the Trump administration
wants”.

Some defence wonks question Mr Colby’s focus on top-line numbers.

It often takes years for budget increases to translate into new
weapons systems or combat formations. By the time they can make
a difference, it might be too late to deter China. Better, instead, to
have conversations about how to better integrate allies into existing
war plans. But those have been made more difficult by the way that
demands to increase defence spending are souring relations
between allies.

In June Japan reportedly cancelled an annual meeting of its foreign

and defence ministers with their American counterparts in part
because the Pentagon bid up its ask from 3% to 3.5%. One
Pentagon official involved in the effort says that relations are fine,
but admits: “Some of these conversations can be challenging
because they did not take place during the Biden administration, and
so our allies and partners are having these conversations for the first
time.”

An increase in defence spending is not the only request that America

is making of these countries. Australia has been asked to commit to
joining America in any defence that it might mount of Taiwan; Japan
has been pressed for more clarity over how it would respond in such
a situation. The Philippines has been asked to support the
deployment of new weapons on its territory. South Korea and Japan
have been asked to pay more for the privilege of hosting American
forces. For its part, Taiwan is under pressure to spend less on fancy,
high-tech weaponry like fighter jets and tanks and more on smaller,
more mobile forces that would make it hard for China to occupy the
island.

Allies fear that America might abandon them. They worry that Mr
Trump may do a deal with President Xi Jinping that leaves them to
face China alone. Australian officials are anxious that America could
gut the AUKUS submarine-building pact.

A bridge too far?

Even so, unlike in Europe, where America’s allies have given serious
thought to “de-risking” their defence-industrial base against the
possibility of American abandonment, Asian allies have not hedged.
Their reasons are pragmatic. Whereas strategic autonomy in Europe
may be possible, if not cheap, for Asian allies it is out of reach. None
is a nuclear power, so all depend on America’s nuclear umbrella. Of
the five, South Korea has the biggest defence industry, and Japan
has made strides towards reviving its own. But the defence-industrial
bases are small compared with Europe’s. And the allies are looking
at buying more American military gear, not less.

All five countries protest that they are already increasing defence
spending, but can’t hit the Trump administration’s new targets
because of fiscal constraints. Spending even more on defence, they
argue, will require them either to put up taxes or to cut social
outlays. But this is really only true of Japan and the Philippines,
which have high levels of public debt relative to their resources, and
would struggle to finance any big new expenditure.

By contrast, Australia, South Korea and Taiwan have fiscal positions

similar to or better than the median NATO member. Scars from the
Asian financial crisis a quarter of a century ago have made them
frugal. They worry about the liabilities of ageing populations, high
levels of private debt and keeping their credit investment grade. But
they could probably afford to debt-finance any increase to 3.5% into
at least the late 2030s without raising taxes, cutting spending or
going into debt distress.

Taiwan’s fiscal position is the best. Moreover, says Drew Thompson,

who managed defence relations with Taiwan under Barack Obama
and in Mr Trump’s first term: “Butter has won out over guns.” He
points to the island’s excellent education and health care. Yet Taiwan
faces an existential threat from China. In these circumstances, it
should be able to afford to spend another 2% of GDP on defence, on
top of the 3% that President Lai Ching-te has requested for the next
fiscal year.

Political constraints play a bigger role. In Taiwan the opposition

controls the legislature and fears that higher defence spending will
antagonise China. In Japan an unpopular minority government is
facing down a resurgent opposition calling for tax cuts. And in
Australia the Labor government wants to squeeze through some big
new social programmes while keeping its reputation for fiscal
prudence.

Experts and officials on both sides of the Pacific think that America is
likely to get some but not all of what it asks for. A bigger risk is that
America’s tactics will backfire. Mr Trump polls poorly in Australia, and
Anthony Albanese, its prime minister, seems tempted to profit
politically by standing up to him. In the other four countries, Mr
Trump is a bit more popular. But forcing governments to spend more
on defence would not be. The Pentagon dismisses these concerns.
Allies could “leave themselves vulnerable to Beijing, but that would
evidently not be in their interest”, says another Pentagon official. He
may be right. But America’s allies will still bristle at being bossed
around. ■
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The white stuff

Cow’s milk, as well as Russian

oil, fuels the US-India trade
war
There is another liquid the two sides cannot agree on
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午 | Delhi

How dairy you

DONALD TRUMP has beef with India for buying oil from Russia. But
the American president’s tariffs totalling 50% on many Indian
exports—set to come into force later this month—are not just about
geopolitics. Agriculture and dairy have been the most contentious
issues in India’s talks with America, which broke down this month.
And it is over farming that India’s equally combative prime minister,
Narendra Modi, has chosen to fight back. “India will never
compromise on the well being of its farmers, dairy and fishermen,”
he thundered in Delhi on August 7th, a day after Mr Trump’s
announcement.

For Hindu-nationalist politicians like Mr Modi, the dairy industry has

particular importance (the cow is sacred in Hinduism). But it is also a
source of national pride, seen as a poverty-alleviating triumph of
enlightened policymaking, technological advance and international
co-operation. India is a milk superpower. For nearly three decades it
has been the world’s biggest producer and is now the source of
about a quarter of the global total. Yet, from the point of view of
India’s trading partners, notably America, the industry seems to sum
up all that is wrong with India. It is inefficient, subsidised, polluting
(all that methane) and heavily protected by high tariff barriers and a
perplexing lattice of arcane non-tariff ones.

Can these views be reconciled? The answer matters a lot to India’s

trade diplomacy. It is not just America that complains about access
to the Indian market. It is a sticking-point in negotiations with the
EU , too, and was one of the thorniest issues in the negotiations
leading to a free-trade agreement with Britain signed last month. It
may also have been the main reason why India pulled out of a big
regional trade deal in 2019. (As The Economist noted at the time,
Indians’ nightmare was that New Zealand would provide her milk,
while China ate her lunch.)

Indian dairy still basks in the glow of a “white revolution” launched

in 1970. At the time Indians already had more cattle than any other
country, but they consumed an average of about 100 millilitres of
milk a day, far below recommended nutritional standards. Some of
that had to be imported. By the turn of the century India had
virtually doubled the availability of milk per person. Dairy practices
were modernised and the cross-breeding of cattle had boosted
yields. A network of tens of thousands of co-operatives was
established, improving distribution and logistics, financed by the sale
of skimmed milk powder and butter donated by the European
Economic Community, the EU ’s forebear.

Yields have continued to improve this century, but the structure of

the industry remains unchanged. “White Revolution 2.0”, launched
by the government last year, aims not to reform but expand it, with
co-operatives increasing milk procurement by 50% over five years.
Production will still depend on tens of millions of smallholders—
families with a cow that grazes on their plot, produces dung and
urine to be used as fertiliser, and provides milk for the family,
sometimes with a surplus to sell.

Mooing and booing

Himanshu (who goes by one name), a professor of economics at

Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, points out that Mr Modi and Mr
Trump are both very “pro-farmer”. But their farmers, including dairy
farmers, could hardly be more different. India has about 200m
cattle, of which the United States Department of Agriculture
estimates 62m are dairy cows. Yet the average “herd” consists of
fewer than four, and the average landholding has just one hectare. A
number widely used is that 80m families have one or more cows or
buffaloes. America has just 24,000 dairy farms, with an average herd
size of about 390.

Co-operatives guarantee Indian farmers a buyer for their milk, and

pay them bonuses when prices rise. A handful have become big
organisations—notably Amul, from Gujarat, home state of Mr Modi
and his powerful cabinet minister, Amit Shah. So vaunted is the
success of the agricultural co-operative system that in July Mr Shah
unveiled plans to extend it to other businesses such as tourism and
green energy.

Proud as Indians are of their cows and their dairy farmers, they have
to admit that both are, by international standards, woefully
unproductive. The average American cow produces about seven
times as much milk as her Indian competitor. India protects its dairy
farmers with import tariffs comparable to those Mr Trump is now
imposing on Indian exporters: 40% on most butter and cheese and
60% on powdered milk. Without these protections, says Shashi
Kumar, boss of Akshayakalpa, a privately owned organic-dairy
business in southern India that works with 2,200 small farmers,
“smallholder farms will collapse”.

It is not just tariffs that Mr Trump’s negotiators object to. India

excludes imports of all genetically modified crops except cotton, and
in dairy there is a ban on what has become known as “non-veg milk”
—with a requirement that imported dairy products be certified to
come from cows that have not been fed animal products such as
bone meal. The ban is often decried as a non-tariff barrier dressed
up in politically correct Hindu-nationalist clothes. Vijay Sardana, a
lawyer and agri-economist, points out it was in fact introduced in
2003, when he drafted the law in response to the BSE (mad-cow
disease) scare in Europe.

Still, the perception that the Indian government will use any
available tactic to protect its farmers is probably justified. Harish
Damodaran, the agriculture editor of the Indian Express, a
newspaper, points out that twice in four years India’s farmers have
fended off attempts at reform. In 2021 their prolonged, angry
protests in Delhi forced Mr Modi to repeal three laws introducing
sensible deregulatory reforms. Mr Trump’s effort to impose change
through diplomacy may prove equally fruitless. ■

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Nepo politics

What Sara Duterte’s

comeback means for the
Philippines
She could be the front-runner for the election in 2028
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | MANILA

A FEW MONTHS ago, things looked grim for Sara Duterte, the vice-
president of the Philippines. The country’s House of Representatives
had impeached her, accusing Ms Duterte of misusing public money
and threatening to assassinate the president, Ferdinand “BongBong”
Marcos. She faced a ban from politics if convicted of the charges in a
trial in the Senate. Then the International Criminal Court indicted her
father, Rodrigo, for crimes against humanity committed in a brutal
drug war during his presidency (he denies this). The Duterte dynasty
looked like it was over.

Yet the family now seems on the up. The Supreme Court struck
down the impeachment complaints against Ms Duterte in late July. A
couple of weeks later the Senate voted not to proceed with a trial for
now. These wins make Ms Duterte likely to be the front-runner to be
the Philippines’ next president, in 2028. It also means that over the
next three years her nasty feud with Mr Marcos, also a scion of a
political clan with a grubby history, will become even more disruptive
for the country.

Ms Duterte typifies the Philippines’ dynastic political system, where

powerful families make up around 80% of Congress, one of the
highest shares in the world. She first took office in 2007 as vice-
mayor of Davao, a city where her father was elected mayor eight
times. The family name helped her win the vice-presidency in the
2022 election, during which she formed an uneasy partnership with
Mr Marcos.

She also thrives in a political culture dominated by big personalities.

Celebrities are often elected in the Philippines, and politicians play
up to the crowds on social media and in real life. At a recent election
rally in Manila, the capital, the mood felt more like a rock concert,
with her supporters wearing T -shirts emblazoned with the words
“Bring Him [Rodrigo] Home” (from The Hague).

Her views appear to be similar to her father’s. She has criticised Mr

Marcos for tilting towards America and said that the Philippines
“shouldn’t lean toward any foreign power”. Still, it is not clear
whether and how far she would, or could, reorient the country
towards China, which her father cosied up to. Ties with America are
stronger now than in 2016, when Mr Duterte took office. In late July
Mr Marcos secured a trade deal with America. Philippine exports face
a tariff of 19%. This is only one percentage point lower than Donald
Trump’s threat before the agreement, but Mr Marcos still billed it as
a win.

Yet with the Dutertes resurgent—for now at least—the dynastic

dispute could disrupt the second half of Mr Marcos’s presidency. Ms
Duterte has a growing number of allies in Congress. They may try to
obstruct Mr Marcos, who cannot run again because of term limits. As
a result, he could become a lame duck if enough politicians rally
behind her. ■
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Banyan

Indonesia’s new president

has daddy issues
Prabowo Subianto wants to imitate his father. Good luck with that
8月 14, 2025 03:51 上午

AFTER PRABOWO SUBIANTO was elected president of Indonesia last

year, he told his younger brother that he would finally be able to
“carry out programmes from papi” and fulfil their father’s
“aspirations and dreams”. That father is Sumitro Djojohadikusumo,
the architect of Indonesia’s post-independence development. He
served as a minister under both Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president,
and Suharto, the dictator who ruled for 32 years.
But the uncomfortable truth is that if Sumitro were alive today, he
would be appalled by the economic populism masquerading as his
legacy. The cosmopolitan economist, who founded the economics
faculty at the University of Indonesia, would probably see Mr
Prabowo’s signature policies—free school lunches, village co-
operatives and a new sovereign-wealth fund—as precisely the kind
of undisciplined state spending he spent his career warning against.

Sumitro’s economic philosophy wasn’t ideological. Rather, he was

pragmatic, believing in rigorous training and evidence. Though he
came of age as a socialist in Paris, his approach was grounded in a
clear method. First, identify the right problem; second, establish the
facts; and only then apply logic to find a solution. When Indonesia
lacked trained economists, he persuaded the Ford Foundation to
send students to the University of California. That produced the
“Berkeley Mafia” of technocrats who would later drive Suharto’s
economic success. He argued as early as 1952 that the government
should avoid direct economic intervention if there was little capacity
to execute it well.

Mr Prabowo’s pledge to spend $28bn a year on free school meals is

the kind of sweeping state intervention Sumitro warned against.
Indonesian children eat enough, but not well. But instead of
nutritional quality, the programme increasingly prioritises raw
numbers of meals served, says Arianto Patunru of Australian
National University. The best way to reduce stunting is to help
pregnant women and toddlers; the current policy misdirects
resources to schoolchildren.

Or consider the example of co-operatives. Sumitro supported them

as tools for genuine, decentralised development, not as instruments
of political control. This perspective had deep roots. In 1942 he
completed his P hD thesis on rural credit in Java while he was living in
the Netherlands, which was occupied by Germany at the time. For
the rest of his career this research fuelled his belief that small
traders throughout Indonesia would remain trapped in poverty
unless the government invested in education, training and co-
operatives.

This spirit of grassroots empowerment could not be more different

from Mr Prabowo’s latest initiative of “red-white co-operatives”.
Unveiled in July, the programme imposes a uniform model on 80,000
co-operatives nationwide, requiring each to run the same services
regardless of local needs, says Kevin O’Rourke, a political analyst.
This betrays the spirit of genuine co-operatives. The policy is
designed to extend central control into rural areas, rewarding loyal
village heads.

The most glaring case of historical revisionism is Danantara,

Indonesia’s new $900bn sovereign-wealth fund. Mr Prabowo’s
brother, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, has said that it fulfils their
father’s vision of consolidating state assets and directing strategic
investment. But Sumitro might well have thought its structure was a
mess. Danantara reports directly to the president, is chaired by Mr
Prabowo’s former campaign manager and has little oversight.
Sumitro would have recognised this as a textbook case of what he
called Indonesia’s “institutional disease”: the corrosion of public
policy by vested interests. He diagnosed this problem at the height
of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, when Suharto was bending state
power to serve his family’s businesses. This week the head of a
state-owned farming firm quit six months into the job, blaming
Danantara for needless red tape.

Sumitro understood that a developing economy faces a delicate

balancing act. His policies aimed to attract foreign investment while
steadily building Indonesia’s institutional capacity. His son, by
contrast, has chosen to trade fiscal stability for flashy, vote-winning
programmes that entrench his power and do little to drive long-term
growth. His administration blends authoritarian control with populist
spending. This is a travesty of Sumitro’s real legacy: of the
disciplined fiscal policy and strong institutions Indonesia badly
needs. ■
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China
How scared should you be of “the China
squeeze”?
Supply-chained :: Xi Jinping masters the dark arts of the trade war

China claims to want women to have

children and a career
Working mothers :: But special “mum jobs” are hardly helping

Hong Kong is super superstitious

For good or ill :: Why prophetic artists and feng-shui masters hold such sway

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Supply-chained

How scared should you be of

“the China squeeze”?
Xi Jinping masters the dark arts of the trade war
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

“CHINA BEATS you with trade, Russia beats you with war,” mused
President Donald Trump on August 11th. “China is not beating us on
trade, not when I’m in charge,” he added. Many disagree. His
reflection came mere hours before he extended a fragile trade truce
with China for another 90 days. After months of tit-for-tat tariffs, the
Sino-American trade war has settled into uneasy stasis. But China is
using the time to hone a sophisticated arsenal of economic weapons.
Even as the sides contemplate a broader deal to stabilise the
planet’s most important trading relationship—worth $659bn each
year—China knows that its power is not in what it buys, but in what
it sells.

That is a far cry from the last time President Xi Jinping and Mr
Trump went head-to-head on trade, in 2019. Mr Xi agreed to buy
more American goods in a deal much criticised in China. It fitted a
clumsy pattern. Back then China tended to punish transgressions by
cutting access to its consumer market, such as for Australian wine or
Lithuanian beef. No longer. Now Mr Xi prefers to squeeze supply
chains and the foreign industries which depend on them.

Chinese victories have piled up in recent months. First came Mr Xi’s

masterstroke in April: retaliating against American tariffs by choking
off supplies of Chinese-refined rare-earth minerals and magnets
critical to American firms. American carmakers, among others,
panicked and Mr Trump sought peace. In July the European Union
squealed in the run-up to an EU -Chinese summit after flows of rare-
earth minerals and battery technology to Europe slowed without
explanation. Speeding them up then became a subject of
negotiation.

It all appears in line with Mr Xi’s careful plan. In 2020 he called for
China to create asymmetric dependencies, by ridding its own supply
chains of foreign inputs, while also seeking to “tighten international
production chains’ dependence on China”. At a meeting in April that
year, Mr Xi explained to a Communist Party body that such
dependencies are “a powerful countermeasure and deterrent
capability against foreigners who would artificially cut off supply [to
China]”. It wants other countries to depend on it without it
depending on them.
China’s use of economic sanctions of all sorts has reached an all-
time high in 2025, according to research by Viking Bohman of Tufts
University and co-authors (see chart). Like the American export
controls on which China’s new regime is modelled, Mr Xi’s weapons
are difficult to resist using, even at the risk of blowback. “Beijing was
not surprised to find it has leverage, but it must be used discreetly,”
reckons Xiang Lanxin of the National University of Singapore.
So how do China’s economic weapons work? In recent years Mr Xi’s
officials have been drawing up a list of goods that China makes and
the world needs. After Mr Trump’s re-election last year, China’s
government steeled itself. It implemented a long-expected export-
licensing scheme for more than 700 products, many of which are
relied upon by Western armed forces, including advanced
manufacturing machines, battery inputs, biotechnology, sensors and
critical minerals. The listed items are not limited to inputs for military
kit, however. Many are also critical to industries that officials view as
strategic, such as electric vehicles and solar technology. For some of
the items, such as minerals and chemical precursors for medicines,
Chinese producers hold a near-monopoly over global supply. That is
partly a result of market forces concentrating production in China,
where it is cheap, scalable and often subsidised, and partly a
deliberate strategy to control industrial inputs.

Tell me what you need

Crucially, the rules formalise officials’ ability to switch off exports by

revoking licences. Chinese producers applying for them must know
who is the end user of their goods and report as much. This has
allowed China to continue choking supplies of rare earths to specific
Western defence firms, even as it has resumed the flow into America
as part of the trade truce. A shortage of heat-resistant magnets, for
example, is pushing up costs for such things as jet-fighter engines.
The legislation also includes so-called long-arm jurisdiction. It gives
officials the power to mandate that goods manufactured in third
countries using Chinese-made inputs cannot be sold to specific end
users.

When China’s policymakers consider which industries to target

through such rules, they do not appear to focus on what will cause
the most pain, but rather on what will be good for their own firms.
Export controls follow a pattern of keeping high-value-added supply
chains inside China, says Rebecca Arcesati of MERICS , a Berlin-based
think-tank.

If Chinese officials decided to ban exports of finished goods, such as

batteries or drones, it could hurt domestic producers. But by
restricting the flow of industrial inputs needed to make those goods,
policymakers in fact lower prices on domestic markets, and give their
exporters a cost advantage against foreign competition in important
sectors.

This explains what China appears to be doing in India to stop it from

helping others break free of China’s grip. Licences have stopped
being approved for advanced manufacturing machines for India,
where Apple is creating alternative supply chains. The restricted flow
of machine tools and dysprosium, a rare-earth element, has
apparently slowed production of iPhones and AirPods, respectively.
And in June Apple’s in-country manufacturer, Foxconn, withdrew
more than 300 Chinese engineers from India, suggesting that the
recent moves were co-ordinated.

China’s use of its economic weapons this year has mainly been
defensive—in response to American trade policies. But it all comes at
a cost. Foreign officials and firms now fret about being suddenly cut
off from Chinese suppliers, say, in a conflict over Taiwan. Chinese
policymakers have done themselves “enormous reputational
damage”, laments a foreign business leader in Beijing. Officials in
Brussels, Tokyo and Washington are spooked and a flurry of deal-
making is under way.

That means Mr Xi is likely to confront a drawback that America

knows well: the more sanctions are used, the less effective they risk
becoming. For a chokehold to be effective, a country must have a
near-monopoly on supplying a particular good or service, points out
Matteo Maggiori of Stanford University. “Sanctioning power is non-
linear, which means that the difference between controlling 95% and
85% of a market is the difference between whether the targets of
sanctions can find alternative suppliers, or not,” says Mr Maggiori. He
notes that whereas tariffs cause firms to increase prices, export
controls tend to spur them to invest in alternatives.

Some Chinese officials quietly understand. Certain senior ones have

even indicated to European businesses that urgent cases of rare-
earth shortages, such as those that would cause a plant to shutter,
should be raised with the Ministry of Commerce to find informal
work-arounds to keep supplies flowing. Such deft management of
the controls by officials may help dull the desire of foreign firms
focused on short-term profits to invest in alternatives. Wu Xinbo of
the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai told
CNN in June that the flow of exports could be dynamically managed.
From the government’s perspective, “If the bilateral relationship is
good, then I’ll go a bit faster; if not, I’ll slow down.”

Ultimately, China finds itself in a delicate position. It is giving

foreigners reason to think that its supply chains are unreliable while
warning them off seeking alternatives. And its diplomats badger
trade partners not to give in to American demands that would isolate
China from global trade. “Attempting to decouple and disrupt supply
chains”, Mr Xi told foreign bosses in March, “will only harm others
and not benefit oneself.” That is wise advice indeed. ■

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Working mothers

China claims to want women

to have children and a career
But special “mum jobs” are hardly helping
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | Beijing

WHEN MS WANG returned to work at a Chinese internet giant after

having a baby, her boss pulled her aside. She told her she’d be less
invested in her work because the country’s breastfeeding policy
would allow her to leave one hour earlier. “I’ll be a normal colleague,
not a breastfeeding mother,” she replied, staying past 10pm regularly
like the rest. Based in Beijing, she was entitled legally to 158 days of
maternity leave. But she received the worst performance rating in
her team last year because others had to cover her work while she
was away. She was fired in April.
Meanwhile, the government is trying desperately to boost China’s
birth rate. On July 28th it announced that it would give households
3,600 yuan ($500) a year for each child under the age of three.
Economists estimate the subsidy will cost the state about 100bn
yuan a year, or about 0.07% of the country’s GDP . And it promotes
“mum jobs”, which offer mothers with children under the age of 12
more flexible work schedules. In recent months Hubei province
launched one of the first province-wide schemes to provide them.

Mum jobs were first introduced in 2022, when China’s National

Health Commission issued guidelines for supporting childbearing.
Increasingly local governments encourage firms to create them as
part of a national campaign for “a birth-friendly society”. By the end
of last year, Guangzhou had listed 12,760 mum jobs in e-commerce,
housekeeping, manufacturing and other sectors. Chongqing has
tallied more than 23,000.

But most of the time such jobs are menial, low-paid and hourly.
Peng Yingbin, for example, offers flexible schedules for between 30
and 50 mothers who work at his clothing factory in the poor
province of Guizhou. Paid per piece completed, his staff—most of
whom moved to town with their children for better schooling—can
leave earlier for school pickups.

As the number of mum jobs grows, so does the backlash against

them. “In a gender-unequal society, this appears to offer mothers
job opportunities, but it actually offers them low-paid gig work,”
wrote one online commenter. Hubei’s new mum jobs scheme has
raised a furore. “Why are there no dad jobs?” many asked.
(Shanghai got around this objection by introducing “birth-friendly
jobs” in 2024.)

On top of it all, the state also wants women to work as China’s

population ages. Liu Shenglong of Tsinghua University in Beijing,
points out that nearly 60% of current undergraduates are women.
“If we were to remove these people from the labour market,
wouldn’t that be a huge waste?” Most mothers also want
employment. About four in five stay-at-home mums in China want to
re-enter the workforce, and about two in five of them are interested
in part-time or flexible roles, according to a survey conducted by the
All-China Women’s Federation in 2023.

While hunting for new positions, the mum jobs Ms Wang comes
across are basic administrative roles that don’t appeal to her.
“They’re taking women who are already marginalised in the
workplace and pushing them even further into marginal positions,”
she says. Instead she hopes for changes to workplace culture and
greater corporate accountability. Officials should note such pregnant
ideas. ■

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For good or ill

Hong Kong is super

superstitious
Why prophetic artists and feng-shui masters hold such sway
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Hong Kong

TATSUKI RYO is the finest diviner since Nostradamus, in the view of

many Hong Kongers. In 1999 the Japanese manga artist published a
collection of supposedly prophetic dreams warning of a “great
disaster, year 2011, month 3.” In March 2011 Japan suffered from an
earthquake, tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown; perhaps
18,000 people died. So when her manga predicted that a mega-
tsunami would strike Japan on July 5th 2025, it caused alarm.
Luckily, like her 16th-century antecedent (who thought the world
would end in 2012), Ms Tatsuki often gets things wrong. She
thought Mount Fuji would erupt in August 2021. And July 5th came
and went. But on July 30th there was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake
off Russia’s eastern coast, which prompted tsunami warnings around
the Pacific. Fortunately no one died and the tallest tsunami waves to
reach Japanese shores were only 1.3m high. (In 2011 they reached
almost 40m.) Yet fans and anxious theorists saw the event on July
30th as another confirmation of her powers.

The prophecy sent tremors of fear across Asian social media in June.
But Hong Kongers took it particularly seriously. Several prominent
feng-shui masters, experts in ancient Chinese geomancy, warned
locals to heed Ms Tatsuki’s advice not to visit Japan ahead of July
5th. The number of Hong Kongers who did so plunged by more than
a third in June compared with a year earlier, while visitor numbers
from almost all other places rose. Local carriers, such as Hong Kong
Airlines, suspended flight routes to Japan because of the drop in
demand.

Japan will sting from all this. Though only home to 7.5m people,
Hong Kong was the fifth-largest source of international visitors to
Japan last year and its holidaymakers spent HK$33bn ($4bn) there.
Even hard-nosed types stayed away. One Hong Kong-based financial
consultant reports that his boss has refused to take in-person
meetings in Japan all summer; she made him attend them in her
stead.

This is all a reminder of how pervasive superstition is in Hong Kong,

even compared with the rest of Asia. Tower blocks frequently skip all
floors with the number “four” because its Cantonese pronunciation is
similar to the word for “death”. Properties thought to be inhabited by
ghosts lose a fifth of their value on average, according to a paper in
2020 by Utpal Bhattacharya of the Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology. And feng shui guides the design of even the most
sober organisations’ offices. HSBC ’s headquarters has escalators
reportedly angled to ward off evil spirits. The Economist’s offices
contain old coins for prosperity and a dragon image for good luck,
left by a visiting feng-shui master in recent years.

There is little harm in any of this. But superstition shouldn’t

supersede science. The Hong Kong Observatory, a public body, was
forced to release numerous statements in recent months reminding
locals that it is impossible to predict an earthquake. Seismologists
and disaster experts also weighed in. Even Ms Tatsuki cautioned her
fans to heed scientific advice.

But their urgings did little to quell the disquiet. Something similar
happened during the SARS outbreak in 2003: many Hong Kongers
spurned official disease-prevention steps, instead turning to herbs to
ward off the virus. You don’t need to be a soothsayer to see that
sometimes superstition can have rather frightening consequences. ■

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United States
Why Donald Trump is wrong to take over
the DC police
Capital offensive :: The emergency he cites is overhyped

Why the Trump administration excites

some personal-injury lawyers
A sharp prick :: The strange case of vaccine-injury courts

How many pythons could you catch in ten

days?
Conservation :: Florida gamifies conservation in the Everglades

Texas’s renegade Democrats prepare for a

glorious defeat
A room of their own :: With the lawmakers in suburban Illinois

Trump 2 is pushing environmentalists to

rethink their approach
Green new squeal :: The administration is trying to erase climate-change regulation

The real collusion between Donald Trump

and Vladimir Putin
Lexington :: It may be scarier than their critics long suspected

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Capital offensive

Why Donald Trump is wrong

to take over the DC police
The emergency he cites is overhyped
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Washington, DC

AMERICA’S CAPITAL city was designed as a showcase for its

democracy: sweeping boulevards, white-marble palaces of
administration, monuments aplenty. Over the past few days,
however, Washington, DC , has become a manifestation of something
less inspiring: the grandstanding instincts of the current president.

This time, Donald Trump’s preoccupation is violent crime. Mr Trump

has been banging this drum for decades. “Roving bands of wild
criminals roam our neighbourhoods dispensing their own brand of
twisted hatred,” warned Mr Trump nearly 40 years ago. The occasion
then was the rape and assault of a white woman in New York’s
Central Park, for which five black and Hispanic men were later
wrongfully convicted. On August 11th Mr Trump all but quoted
himself: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and
bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out
maniacs and homeless people,” he said from the White House
briefing room. Then he deployed the National Guard to Washington;
took control of its police force; and promised to “get rid of the
slums” and clear out its homeless population.

This is not the president’s first use of the armed forces for civilian
law enforcement in a city that reviles him and that he reviles right
back. Earlier this summer Mr Trump sent National Guard troops to
protect federal property during protests over immigration raids in Los
Angeles. In 2020 he ordered them to disperse Black Lives Matter
demonstrators in Washington. In neither instance did local
Democratic leaders ask for his intervention. Now Mr Trump hints that
the Washington deployment could be a blueprint for other
troublesome (ie, Democratic) places. “Every other blue-city mayor”
should take note, said Rick Scott, a Republican senator. Democrats
agree, describing Washington as a “dress rehearsal”.

That will be easier said than done. The capital has an unusual legal
status as a territory of the federal government granted qualified
“home rule”. Elsewhere the president would face more legal
impediments. The practical impact of his order may also be modest.
He has authorised the DC Guard—which is tiny—to act as cops.
About 200 troops will support law enforcement. Mr Trump’s control
of the city police can last for only 30 days. He says he will seek an
extension from Congress, which is unlikely to oblige. This is a long
way from a federal takeover of Washington.

It is still absurd. Seeking to justify his order, Mr Trump cited several

awful attacks against government workers. In early August
carjackers beat up and bloodied a former DOGE staffer. In June stray
gunfire killed a congressional intern. Last year an official at the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission was shot to death in a
carjacking. In 2023 a Senate aide was stabbed and a congressman
was robbed at gunpoint. “It’s becoming a situation of complete and
total lawlessness,” said Mr Trump, likening the capital to Baghdad
and Bogotá.

The president is right that violent crime in Washington surged in

2023 and that it numbers among the more dangerous cities in
America. He neglected to say that crime there has since tumbled.
This year’s murder rate is falling towards the pre-pandemic trend.
The number of carjackings, which doubled between 2022 and 2023,
is declining, too, though they are still more frequent than they were
before the pandemic. Overall the capital is much safer than it was in
the 1990s, when it had the highest murder rate in the country, and it
is a bit less dangerous than it was a decade ago, notes Jeff Asher, a
crime analyst.

If Mr Trump and his fellow Republicans were really concerned about

public safety in the city, they would not have put DC in an
unnecessary fiscal straitjacket. Congress has sweeping powers over
the city’s finances, and earlier this year Republicans used them to
force it to slash spending, even though its budget was already
balanced (unlike the federal government’s). That has made it
impossible for the city to increase spending on the police—or
anything else. It has money sitting in the bank that Congress will not
allow it to spend. It is defund the police, Republican-style.

Mr Trump’s has a fixation with Washington the city, and not just
because he can see it from his bedroom window. The constitution
gives the federal government authority to run the city directly. It has
much less power over states and even other federal territories. The
president commands the DC National Guard—in states, governors
have that job—and he can take temporary control of the police
department.
Washington’s unique status means these same tactics cannot easily
be replicated outside the capital. To “federalise” the National Guard
for arrest purposes elsewhere—to empower troops to act as cops—
Mr Trump would have to invoke the Insurrection Act. Only then can
the armed forces legally be put to use to quell a domestic uprising.
The act was last used in 1992. Invoking it again would be immensely
controversial. Before Mr Trump, the last president to deploy the
Guard over the objections of a governor was Lyndon B. Johnson,
during civil-rights demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.

Army officials tend to dislike the idea of getting involved in law

enforcement—with good reason. The training and rules of
engagement are different. Battlefields require a mindset primed for
combat.

As it is, Mr Trump’s prior National Guard deployments have been

legally fraught. A federal district judge in California is currently
weighing whether his use of the Guard there flouted the narrow
scope allowed in that instance, where they were only meant to
protect buildings. Mr Trump’s decision to send other states’ Guard
units to Washington in 2020 was even more tenuous from a legal
perspective, says Mark Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University.

Washington’s 700,000-odd residents have little recourse to resist Mr

Trump’s actions. They do not get any votes in Congress. Although
the federal government did grant them an elected mayor and city
council in the 1970s, it could rescind “home rule” at any time. Mr
Trump has threatened to do so several times. Local politicians, for
the most part, are trying to ward off such a possibility by placating
him. Mr Trump’s approach in Washington, then, is clever when
viewed through a politician’s or a lawyer’s lens. Which is not to say
that his order is justified or good policy. ■

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.
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states/2025/08/11/why-donald-trump-is-wrong-to-take-over-the-dc-police

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A sharp prick

Why the Trump

administration excites some
personal-injury lawyers
The strange case of vaccine-injury courts
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午 | Washington, DC

Ambulance chaser

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JUNIOR once worked as a personal-injury lawyer.

That Donald Trump made him America’s health secretary was odd
considering the president despises such lawyers and derisively calls
them the “lawyer lobby”. More consequential for public health is the
fact that Mr Kennedy now intends to make some of his old cohort
very happy.
Mr Kennedy wants to make it easier for people who say they were
hurt by vaccines to sue for damages. He would like to overhaul the
Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme (VICP ), a legal regime
covering more than a dozen mostly childhood jabs. The scheme
routes claimants to a special vaccine court, where they get faster
and easier payouts than in regular civil court since they do not have
to prove fault by vaccine-makers, a higher legal bar. Damages for
pain and suffering are capped at $250,000, plus medical expenses
and lost wages. Vaccine-makers fund the scheme through an excise
tax of 75 cents per jab. In return they are largely shielded from
liability in the normal tort system.

This arrangement underpins public health by ensuring that supply

stays cheap. A separate liability protection covered the covid-19
shot. Preventive vaccines are low-margin; the risk of huge jury
awards would drive firms from the market. That is precisely what
happened to the vaccine for pertussis, or whooping cough, in the
early 1980s and why Congress created the VICP .

Adverse effects from vaccines are statistically rare. Roughly 30,000

are reported to the government annually. About 15% of these are
serious. Meanwhile tens of millions of jabs are given to children a
year. The rate of injury—even assuming that each was caused by a
vaccine—is a fraction of 1%. About half the cases in the VICP are
dismissed. In 60% of the compensated claims, the government does
not accept that the shot caused the injury but pays to resolve the
case anyway.

Mr Kennedy says the VICP “routinely dismisses meritorious cases”

and that it is a “morass of inefficiency, favouritism and outright
corruption”. He dislikes that it takes between two and three years to
adjudicate a claim on average, a consequence of the fact that just
eight “special masters” (ie, judges) oversee more than 3,500 cases.
Mr Kennedy is right that a programme designed for efficiency has
gummed up. But the number of special masters is inscribed in law
and only Congress can increase it.
What the health secretary can do is open the litigation floodgates,
by making more claims eligible for damages. The VICP automatically
compensates people for certain injuries if they appear within a set
period from the time of the shot. People with other “off-table”
injuries can prevail if they show that the vaccine caused theirs. Mr
Kennedy has long pushed the debunked theory that vaccines cause
autism. Everyone thought this battle was over at the VICP , which
long ago dismissed autism cases. Through the rulemaking process,
however, the health secretary can add autism to the table or loosen
the definition of existing injuries.

Attacking that scheme is not the only way Mr Kennedy is upsetting

the market. He has terminated funding worth $500m for mRNA -
related research—which yielded some of the covid jabs—while
publicly questioning the safety of that platform.

The pandemic scrambled the politics around vaccine injury. Plaintiffs’

lawyers once aligned neatly with Democrats, who saw themselves as
consumer advocates, while industry backed Republicans, who tried
to limit lawsuits. When it comes to vaccines, however, MAGA types
are now the biggest bashers of pharma. One Republican
congressman has proposed a piece of legislation (which is unlikely to
pass) to end the liability shield. Of course anyone who believes that
vaccines cause injuries ought to be glad for the ease of the VICP ,
which is enabled by the shield, notes Michael Saks of Arizona State
University.

Eliminating it would hobble vaccine infrastructure. It would also

benefit Mr Kennedy. He held a financial stake in ongoing litigation
against Merck over allegations that its HPV vaccine caused
autoimmune disorders. He transferred this interest—a 10% cut of
some plaintiff lawyers’ potential winnings—to one of his sons. But
the presiding federal judge has gutted those lawsuits, citing the
liability shield. ■
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.
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states/2025/08/14/why-the-trump-administration-excites-some-personal-injury-lawyers

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Conservation

How many pythons could you

catch in ten days?
Florida gamifies conservation in the Everglades
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午 | THE EVERGLADES

BURMESE PYTHONS were introduced to Florida as exotic pets. The

snakes grew too big to be good housemates and were released (or
escaped) into the Everglades, where they feasted on native wildlife
and bred rapidly. Pythons are largely responsible for a 95% drop in
the number of furry animals in the park. No local species is immune:
the snakes, which can grow to nearly 20 feet long, are known to
strangle alligators and swallow them whole. They have no natural
predator to speak of, so Florida man (and woman) has stepped in.
For ten days in July the state hosts the Python ChallengeTM , an
annual open competition to cull snakes. This year over 900 people
descended on the swamps, battling to take home $25,000 in prize
money. Most were Floridians; many were military men. The pursuit
takes place in the dead of night when the snakes leave their nests to
forage. Hopeful hunters sit atop slow-moving pickup trucks and
shine flashlights into the grasses to scan for movement. When they
spot a snake they wrestle it with bare hands. At the end of the night
the snakes are killed, their brains scrambled with a metal rod to
ensure they don’t regain consciousness. “It’s like war: hours of sheer
boredom punctuated by seconds of exhilaration,” says an ex-marine
training to do it professionally.

Taylor Stanberry, a petite woman from Naples, clinched the grand

prize this year with a bounty of 60 snakes. That amounts to a fifth of
all the pythons caught in the challenge this year and triple the
number that last year’s winner took home. The challenge does not
represent a “bloodlust for pythons”, says Michael Kirkland, who
works for the state. It is instead a publicity stunt for Florida’s
conservation project. The python elimination programme, managed
jointly by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and
the South Florida Water Management District, employs 100 year-
round contractors. Since 2017 they have removed 16,000 snakes
from the Everglades.

Contractors are paid $50 for the first four feet of a snake and $25 for
every foot after that. Some choose to sell the snake carcasses to
companies that make the skins into handbags and the vertebrae into
jewellery. Dusty Crum, a self-described “python wild-man”, sells
python-fat soap out of his pizza parlour on the edge of the park. For
many of the hunters the job is about far more than money. Kristine
Bartish, a biologist employed by the state who hunts pythons five
nights a week, says the mission itself becomes addictive: going out
to remove snakes for a good cause is “like an Easter egg hunt for
adults”. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2025/08/12/how-many-pythons-could-you-catch-in-ten-days

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A room of their own

Texas’s renegade Democrats

prepare for a glorious defeat
With the lawmakers in suburban Illinois
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | CHICAGO

Before the exile

VIRGINIA WOOLF wrote in her essay “A Room of One’s Own” that

women who want to write fiction need physical space to think. When
Christian Manuel, a Democratic lawmaker, left Austin on August 3rd
he carried her book with him. He and nearly 40 of his colleagues
from the Texas statehouse would soon find themselves holed up in
bare hotel rooms in a sleepy suburb of Illinois.
If they were novelists this retreat would surely be calm. Instead they
are in the midst of a red-hot political rebellion: they have left the
state to break the legislature’s quorum and prevent a new
congressional map that would give Republicans an edge in future
elections from getting a vote. Their absence has incensed—and
inspired—the very people they hoped it would. Greg Abbott, Texas’s
Republican governor, and Ken Paxton, the attorney general, are
suing to remove some of them from office, and Donald Trump’s FBI
is allegedly trying to hunt them down. Here in Illinois they walk
around like royalty, getting standing ovations in churches on Sunday
and being greeted by Chicago’s mayor as they scarf down hoagies
on Tuesday.

Their battle has drawn national attention because they are spending
hours a day giving Zoom interviews with television stations near and
far. But also because they are Democrats who are walking rather
than talking. Ramon Romero Jr, a representative from Fort Worth,
initially did not like the idea of leaving the state for political reasons
—he’d done it before in 2021, when Democrats were trying to block
or delay changes to voting laws, to no practical avail. What changed
his mind was a call from Hakeem Jeffries, the house minority leader
in Washington, who told him that Democrats are looking for their
politicians to show grit. “You’re in a position to fight when a lot of us
aren’t,” he recalls Jeffries saying in late July. For a party that feels
bulldozed by an overreaching president unfettered by norms or
courts, the fact that the Texans have stalled their opponents for
nearly a fortnight is significant.

The third day that the Democrats spent away from their families was
the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, a law that banned
states from making it hard for black people to vote. The Texas Dems
would like to see themselves as the latest link in a chain of citizens
fighting for suffrage. They reckon the new map proposed by their
legislature dilutes the power of minority voters. To Jolanda Jones,
who says she spent her whole life working to make it out of a tough
neighbourhood, going home would feel like “selling out democracy”.
“The Montgomery bus boycotts took a year,” she says. James
Talarico, an Austinite who packed just one suit jacket but two pairs
of cowboy boots, describes their walkout as “good trouble”.

The Democrats are under no illusion that their quorum break will
stop Republicans from eventually doing as they see fit and passing
changes that, all else being equal, would give Republicans five extra
seats in Congress. This week Mr Abbott, the governor, said that he is
prepared to do battle over the map for “years” by calling one special
session after another. But the fugitive politicians are not fighting to
change laws—they are very used to losing in Texas—but to grab
attention.

They want more Americans to know what redistricting is and to

understand why voters should choose their politicians, not the other
way around. Mr Manuel reckons that the very fact that The
Economist’s Texas correspondent is sitting beside him in a
midwestern coffee shop talking about it is evidence that they’ve
“already won”. ■

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.
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Green new squeal

Trump 2 is pushing
environmentalists to rethink
their approach
The administration is trying to erase climate-change regulation
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | Washington, DC

Where the action isn’t

HALF A CENTURY ago Republicans were leading the charge to clean

up the environment. Richard Nixon prioritised de-smogging America,
protecting endangered species and establishing the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA ), the country’s pollution regulator. But Tricky
Dick’s environmentalism was complicated. The Watergate tapes
capture a conversation from 1971 between the president (“You can
talk to me in complete confidence, I can assure you”), Henry Ford II
and Lee Iacocca. The two auto executives allowed that some rules
made sense (“The citizens of the US must be protected from their
own idiocy”) but complained about the costs of complying. Nixon
stammered his sympathies. Pollution was real, he argued, but he
was “extremely pro-business” and, in fact, some environmentalists
were “enemies of the system”.

President Donald Trump is using a version of that argument to erase

the regulatory framework that Nixon helped create. “Overregulation
has really suppressed economic opportunity,” argues Mandy
Gunasekara, the author of the “Project 2025” chapter on the EPA ,
whose ideas for how to reform the agency are being put in place.
The EPA has announced its intention to weaken emissions and
pollutant standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants, renounce
its ability to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and stop updating
research that helps firms calculate those emissions, among other
things. The House appropriations committee wants to cut the EPA ’s
budget by 23% next year.

Environmentalists are not surprised. The administration’s tactics

reflect the way climate policy has become entangled in the culture
wars. On the day he unveiled the agency’s deregulatory bonanza,
Lee Zeldin, the EPA ’s administrator and a former congressman for
New York, declared: “Today the green new scam ends.”

Mr Zeldin’s biggest swing is his announcement that the EPA will move
to rescind the “endangerment finding”, a scientific judgment from
2009 that underpins the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas
emissions—from cars, for example—as “pollutants” under the Clean
Air Act. The Supreme Court has several times declined to review the
finding, but the Trump administration will be hoping this time is
different.

All I need...
Mr Zeldin’s strategy resembles “a cluster-bomb approach”, says
Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at
Columbia University. Several scientists—who Mr Gerrard says are
“climate minimisers, not climate deniers”—handpicked by Chris
Wright, the energy secretary, wrote a report suggesting that the
science on climate change is not settled. Defenders of the
endangerment finding reckon that argument won’t hold water in
court: the effect of climate change on the environment and public
health has only become clearer. But the administration also contends
that regulating emissions is too important an issue for the agency to
pursue without express direction from Congress. The process of
rescinding the finding, and the inevitable lawsuits to come, could
take years to shake out.

The episode has shed light on the flimsy structures for regulating
emissions at the federal level. Even the EPA ’s staunchest defenders
admit that the Clean Air Act, while remarkably successful at
eliminating pollutants, is an awkward vehicle through which to tackle
climate change. Its effectiveness has been limited by the courts and
changes in administration. Additionally, most of the decline in
America’s greenhouse-gas emissions in recent years can be traced to
the transition from coal to gas, not federal regulation. “It’s not
perfect,” says Mary Nichols, who ran the agency’s air and radiation
programme in the 1990s and later built California’s air-pollution
regime. “It would be better if Congress had passed one of several
different efforts that have been put forward…that focuses only on
global warming, but obviously that hasn’t happened.”

The Trump administration’s assault on the endangerment finding,

and the EPA more broadly, has pushed some climate hawks to
question how they should proceed. After more than a decade of
ping-ponging between Democratic administrations that try to
regulate emissions and Republican presidents who roll back those
rules, is the status quo worth preserving?
Noah Kaufman, a former adviser to Barack Obama and Joe Biden
who is now at Columbia University, argues that climate policy in
America has a “path dependency problem”. Climate advocates may
cling to a policy because it already exists—or because Mr Trump is
attacking it—and not necessarily because it works well. It seemed
plausible for the EPA to try to regulate emissions using the Clean Air
Act in 2009, but 16 years, two Trump electoral victories and many
conservative Supreme Court decisions later, perhaps a new strategy
is needed. “The climate-policy advocacy community is freaking out
justifiably because there is not science to back up what the
administration is doing,” says Mr Kaufman, but “let’s try something
else.”

While Mr Trump is in office most of the action in climate policy will

take place outside Washington, DC . “It’s not the most optimal way to
regulate against climate change,” says Gina McCarthy, a former EPA
administrator and adviser to Mr Biden, “but we’ll have to go to the
states.” Plenty of states are already working towards net-zero
emissions, have clean-energy targets and, on the West Coast at
least, economy-wide carbon markets.

Further inland, Ohio just passed a law to incentivise and streamline

new energy projects praised by groups as disparate as the Nature
Conservancy (an environmentalist outfit) and Americans for
Prosperity (a libertarian group founded by the Koch brothers). The
law speeds permitting for all kinds of energy projects, prioritises the
redevelopment of former mines and brownfield sites, and ends
subsidies for coal. It may prove to be a template for other states as
they try to plan for more electricity generation to feed power-hungry
data centres while keeping energy prices in check. California is
implementing laws passed in 2023 that require big firms to disclose
their carbon emissions. Other states may follow the Golden State.

A potential flurry of state legislation helps explain why even the

fossil-fuel industry was not ecstatic about the Trump administration’s
potential repeal of the endangerment finding. Leaving climate policy
to the states means firms will have to comply with a patchwork of
divergent policies. “I’m not aware of any sort of industry trade
association that was pushing for this,” says Jeff Holmstead, who was
an EPA official under George W. Bush and now represents energy
firms.

...is the air that I breathe

Yet there is retrenchment at the state level, too. Even before

Congress revoked California’s waivers—which since the 1960s have
allowed the state to set stricter vehicle-emissions rules—other states
had begun to back away from their commitments to follow
California’s aggressive policies on zero-emissions trucks. California,
too, may allow for new oil drilling to keep local refineries from
shutting down. This is not a time for making big statements and
setting ambitious goals, says Ms Nichols.

This new reluctance to talk about the pace of the energy transition
recalls that conversation in Nixon’s Oval Office all those decades ago.
“I don’t think we want to talk to you today about emissions,” Ford
told the president. “It’s very political.” ■

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/2025/08/13/trump-2-is-pushing-environmentalists-to-rethink-their-approach

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Lexington

The real collusion between

Donald Trump and Vladimir
Putin
It may be scarier than their critics long suspected
8月 14, 2025 04:12 上午

TO THWART DONALD TRUMP is to court punishment. A rival politician

can expect an investigation, an aggravating network may face a
lawsuit, a left-leaning university can bid farewell to its public grants,
a scrupulous civil servant can count on a pink slip and an
independent-minded foreign government, however determined an
adversary or stalwart an ally, invites tariffs. Perceived antagonists
should also brace for a hail of insults, a lesson in public humiliation
to potential transgressors.

Vladimir Putin has been a mysterious exception. Mr Trump has

blamed his travails over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on
just about everyone but him. He has blamed the war in Ukraine on
former President Joe Biden, for supposedly inviting it through
weakness, and on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for
somehow starting it. Back when Russia invaded in February 2022, Mr
Trump praised Mr Putin’s “savvy”.

For months, as Mr Putin made a mockery of Mr Trump’s promises to

end the war in a day and of his calls for a ceasefire, the president
who once threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea and tariffs
as high as 245% against China indulged in no such bluster. He has
sounded less formidable than plaintive. “Vladimir, STOP !” he wrote on
social media in April. His use of the given name betrayed a touching
faith that their shared intimacy would matter to his reptilian
counterpart, too.

When Mr Putin kept killing Ukrainians, Mr Trump took a step that

was even less characteristic: he admitted to the world that he had
been played for a fool. “Maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s
just tapping me along,” he mused on April 26th. A month later, he
ventured that his friend must have changed, gone “absolutely
CRAZY !” Then on July 8th he acknowledged what should have been
obvious from the start: “He is very nice all the time, but it turns out
to be meaningless.” Mr Trump threatened secondary sanctions on
Russia but then leapt at Mr Putin’s latest mixed messages about
peace, rewarding him with a summit in America.

Why, with this man, has Mr Trump been so accommodating? Efforts

by journalists, congressional investigators and prosecutors to
pinpoint the reason have often proved exercises in self-defeat and
sorrow. The pattern seemed sinister: Mr Trump praised Mr Putin on
television as far back as 2007; invited him to the Miss Universe
Pageant in Moscow in 2013 and wondered on Twitter if he would be
his “new best friend”; sought his help to build a tower in Moscow
from 2013 to 2016; and tried unsuccessfully many times in 2015 to
secure a meeting with him. Then came Russia’s interference in the
election in 2016, including its hack of Democrats’ emails to
undermine the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Some
journalists fanned suspicions of a conspiracy—“collusion” became the
watchword—by spreading claims Mr Putin was blackmailing Mr
Trump with an obscene videotape. The source proved to be a
rumour compiled in research to help Mrs Clinton.

Nine years later Mr Putin’s low-budget meddling still rewards

America’s foes by poisoning its politics and distracting its leaders.
Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, has started a grand-jury
investigation into what Mr Trump called treason by Barack Obama
and others in his administration. The basis is a misrepresentation of
an intelligence finding in the waning days of Mr Obama’s presidency.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that
because Mr Putin did not hack voting machines, the finding that he
tried to help Mr Trump was a lie. The conclusion under Mr Obama
was instead that Mr Putin tried to affect the election by influencing
public opinion.

The exhaustive report released in 2019 by an independent counsel,

Robert Mueller, affirmed on its first page that “the Russian
government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and
worked to secure that outcome.” Mr Mueller indicted numerous
Russians, and he also secured guilty pleas from some Trump aides
for violating various laws. But he did not conclude the campaign
“conspired or co-ordinated” with the Russians.

To wade through the report’s two volumes is to be reminded how

malicious the Russians were and how shambolic Mr Trump’s
campaign was. It is also to lament the time and energy spent, given
how little proof was found to support the superheated suspicions.
And it is to regret how little Mr Trump was accorded a presumption
of innocence. In the final words of the report, Mr Mueller noted that
while it did not accuse Mr Trump of a crime, it also did “not
exonerate him”. One might understand his bitterness.

The puzzle of Mr Trump’s admiration for Mr Putin may have been

better addressed by psychologists. Certainly Mr Putin, the seasoned
KGB operative, has known how to play to his vulnerabilities, including
vanity. Mr Trump was said to be “clearly touched” by a kitschy
portrait of himself Mr Putin gave him in March.

Putin on the blitz

Yet that patronising speculation may be unfair to Mr Trump, too. It

certainly understates the hazard. He has weighty reasons to identify
with Mr Putin. Since the 1930s a cornerstone of American foreign
policy has been that no country can gain territory by force, a
principle also enshrined in the charter of the United Nations. Yet in
his first term, in pursuit of his vision of Middle East peace, Mr Trump
twice granted American recognition of conquered territory, for
Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights and Morocco’s claim to Western
Sahara. He appears to envisage an end to the war in Ukraine that
would also award Russia new territory.

This is how “savvy” people like Mr Trump and Mr Putin believe the
world actually works, or ought to: not according to rules confected
by stripy-pants diplomats to preserve an international order, but in
deference to power exercised by great men. A world hostage to that
theory may be the legacy of their true collusion. ■

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The Americas
Liberal Uruguay and the right to die
Assisted death :: Could its approach spread across Latin America?

A martyr in the making?

The death of Miguel Uribe :: The killing of a senator may reshape Colombian politics

Bolivia’s crazy kingdom of coca

Ever-present Evo :: Former leader Evo Morales is hiding out there

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Assisted death

Liberal Uruguay and the right

to die
Could its approach spread across Latin America?
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Montevideo

PABLO CÁNEPA was a normal, healthy 35-year-old Uruguayan.

Handsome and extroverted, he was a talented graphic designer who
loved to host barbecues with his girlfriend and was fanatical about
Nacional, a local football team. Taking a shower in March 2022, he
suddenly felt dizzy. He thought little of it.

But within four months he was trapped in his own body; his brain
had lost almost all control of his muscles. As a kid, he loved to draw.
Now he cannot sit, feed himself or control his bladder and bowels,
let alone hold a pencil. His 75-year-old mother must change his
sodden nappies. His mind is lucid. He knows exactly what has
happened—what he has lost—but even his eyes do not work; he
sees double. Speaking is exhausting. For three years he has been
lying staring at the ceiling, unable to move his limbs to relieve the
stiffness and pain, his muscles withering. Trapped, he suffers panic
attacks. He has been denied even a clear diagnosis. All the doctors
can tell him with certainty is that he has irreversible brain damage
with no known cause. Pablo wants to die. He has said so repeatedly
since early 2023. But under Uruguayan law no one can help him to
do so.

That could soon change. On August 13th Uruguay’s lower house

passed a law with a thumping majority to legalise assisted dying.
The Senate, where a similar bill got stuck in 2022, is widely expected
this time to follow suit. Legal assisted dying would continue
Uruguay’s long liberal tradition and put it among a handful of
countries in the world to have legal marijuana, gay marriage and
assisted dying. For Pablo, the law cannot come soon enough.

In Colombia and Ecuador assisted dying was decriminalised after

court battles. Cuba recently declared it legal, too. None of these
countries has a comprehensive law to regulate it, so its application is
often very limited. Colombia is the most advanced but even there it
is bafflingly complicated. Uruguay would be the first country in Latin
America to pass a comprehensive law legalising assisted dying that
would make it widely available. Advocates in Chile, where an
assisted-dying bill is stuck in the Senate, are watching closely.

The law that Uruguay’s lower house passed is strikingly liberal, more
so than a current effort in Britain, where assisted dying would be
limited to those with a terminal illness who will anyway die within six
months. Uruguay’s bill imposes no such time limits. Moreover, it is
open to people with an incurable illness that generates unbearable
suffering, even if it is not terminal. That applies crucially to Pablo,
whose disease is torture but not terminal.
Uruguay’s bill still has constraints. Mental conditions such as
depression are not explicitly ruled out but patients need at least two
doctors to determine that they are psychologically fit to make the
choice. Minors are excluded. So are directives whereby people who
are in good health can leave instructions to be helped to die in the
future, should they become so ill that they are unable to
communicate.

Opposition to the law comes chiefly from the religious. Daniel Sturla,
the archbishop of Montevideo, the capital, worries that, together
with legal abortion, assisted dying is creating a “culture of death”.
He warns of “a mindset where life is disposable and where there are
lives worth living and lives not worth living”. Some argue that
palliative care renders assisted dying unnecessary by reducing
patients’ suffering as they near the end. Others add that palliative
sedation, which some doctors in Uruguay apply to relieve suffering
and, in effect, to marginally hasten death at the very last moments,
already does enough.

We shouldn’t have to wait

The frustration of the Cánepa family with such objections is

palpable. Pablo’s brother Eduardo lists a slew of Uruguayan
organisations and politicians campaigning against the law. “They
claim to be empathetic toward life…but it is only in the abstract,” he
says, his voice cracking with emotion. “None of them has called us,
none of them has sent us a message to see if we need something,
to see if they can help—absolutely nothing.”

Palliative care is more widely available in Uruguay than in most of

Latin America. But for Pablo in practice it means two visits of
perhaps 30 minutes a week, even though he has both state help and
private insurance. Palliative care is undoubtedly necessary, but is not
a substitute for assisted dying, argues his brother Eduardo. Indeed
in Canada, he notes, the vast majority of people who choose an
assisted death also receive palliative care.
Florencia Salgueiro, a leading campaigner for assisted dying in
Uruguay, has first-hand experience of the limits of palliative
sedation. Her grandfather and uncle died of a neurodegenerative
disease. Then it got her father, who died aged 57 in 2020 after a
torturous last few months. Doctors obediently followed the law,
apologetically rebuffing his requests to be helped to die sooner
through palliative sedation.

Pollsters reckon some two-thirds of Uruguayans favour legalising

assisted dying. Remarkably, a solid majority of Uruguay’s Catholics
back it, too. “Uruguayan Catholics are different from Argentine
Catholics or Brazilian Catholics,” says Archbishop Sturla.
“Secularisation [in Uruguay] has reached the soul, the culture,” he
laments. Indeed every country in Latin America except Uruguay has
a majority who say they are Christian.

Uruguay’s support for assisted dying is built on a strikingly secular

and liberal tradition that is unique in the region and was promoted
by early political leaders. Back in 1877 they declared state schools to
be free, obligatory and secular. That was five years before France,
the exemplar of secular education. Uruguay’s constitution of 1918
explicitly separated church from state. Unlike in many countries, it is
strictly followed. Easter is officially (and widely) called “Tourism
Week”. Christmas is “Family Day”. The Argentine constitution, by
contrast, still says the government must “support” Roman
Catholicism.

Liberalism in Uruguay runs just as deep. In 1907 it was the first

country in Latin America to fully legalise divorce, some 97 years
before nearby Chile. More recently, in 2012, it was one of South
America’s first countries to fully legalise abortion. In 2013 it was the
second to legalise same-sex marriage. In the same year it was the
first country in the world to legalise marijuana.

History and public opinion may favour the Cánepas but they remain
cautious. “I want to see it approved before I believe,” says Eduardo.
How will he feel if it is? “Relieved,” he replies. “I don’t want people
to die. I want people to be able to choose.” ■

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The death of Miguel Uribe

A martyr in the making?

The killing of a senator may reshape Colombian politics
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | Bogotá

Gone but not forgotten

HISTORY CAN repeat itself in terrible ways. In January 1991 Diana

Turbay, a Colombian journalist and daughter of a former president,
was killed on the orders of Pablo Escobar, a drug lord. She had been
reporting on the assassinations of presidential candidates at the
height of Colombia’s violent struggles. Her son, four years old at the
time, grew up without a mother.

Last October, Miguel Uribe stood where his mother had died and
launched his presidential campaign in her name. “I suffered first-
hand the same pain that millions of Colombians have experienced,”
said the then 38-year-old senator of the Democratic Centre (CD ),
Colombia’s largest right-wing party. He vowed to end the violence
that has robbed Colombians of “lives, hopes and dreams”.

But on August 11th Mr Uribe died in a clinic in Bogotá, Colombia’s

capital, from bullets fired by a gunman on June 7th as he
campaigned. It was Colombia’s worst act of political violence for 35
years. Mr Uribe’s four-year-old son was set to start school this week.
Instead he will mourn a parent’s death, just as his father did.

The country is in shock. Flags are at half mast. Carlos Galán,

Bogotá’s mayor, declared three days of mourning. (He was 12 when
Escobar’s hitmen murdered his father, a presidential front-runner, in
1989.) Many Colombians fear that Mr Uribe’s assassination may
signal a return of the political violence they believed was over.

Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, demanded “justice for

those responsible”. But it remains unclear who ordered the killing.
The government of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first avowedly leftist
president, is blaming the Segunda Marquetalia, a dissident group.
Security experts are sceptical. The prosecutor’s office is unlikely to
conclude its investigation before the presidential election next May.
Conspiracy theories are proliferating in the gap.

Opponents of Mr Petro have seized on the tragedy to stoke fears of

further violence. Vicky Dávila, a journalist who is another presidential
hopeful, lambasted Mr Petro on X: “An opposition candidate was
assassinated and your government did not protect him.”

Mr Petro’s “total peace” policy is failing. He has sought to negotiate

simultaneously with all illegal groups and gangs. Instead,
lawlessness has spread. Kidnappings have increased. The
government has shifted towards a harder-line security policy, with
military operations to kill prominent commanders. That is “good for
politics and cameras”, says Kyle Johnson, an expert on the conflict,
but does not solve the problem. Citizens cite security among their
main concerns.

Mr Uribe’s murder is a “big blow to the peace agreement” of 2016,

says Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president from 2010 to 2018,
the accord’s architect. Under its terms, the Marxist revolutionaries of
the FARC disbanded. “The agreement was negotiated to avoid what
happened to Miguel,” says Mr Santos. It stipulated security
guarantees for the opposition. Had the deal been fully implemented,
Mr Uribe would not have been killed, argues Mr Santos. Both Mr
Petro’s government and the previous one have been blamed for
being slow to implement the peace accord.

Colombia’s right now lacks a strong candidate. The deceased

Harvard-educated senator was a rising star. In 2022 he won his seat
backed by Álvaro Uribe (no relation), a former president who
founded the CD . After he was shot in June, Miguel Uribe leapt to the
top of voting-intention polls. The conservatives must find and rally
behind another compelling candidate.

Disarray in their ranks worsened on August 1st when Álvaro Uribe

was sentenced for bribery and perverting the course of justice to 12
years under house arrest. His supporters claim both Uribes are
victims of political persecution. The living Mr Uribe would be wise to
name a successor to stand for the CD .

The right can at least count on Mr Petro’s divisive style of governing.

“He could unite the right in a much better way” than it is doing itself,
thinks Mr Santos. ■

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Ever-present Evo

Bolivia’s crazy kingdom of

coca
Former leader Evo Morales is hiding out there
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Chapare

AFTER A FEW drinks, Feliciano Mamani hoicks up his trouser leg to

show where the police shot him 30 years ago, when he was a young
coca farmer resisting the government’s eradication programme,
leaving a purplish crater in his leg. Yet when he recounts the two
times he came even closer to death, this wound barely makes the
cut.
War stories abound in the Chapare, Bolivia’s coca kingdom. It has
been peaceful since Evo Morales emerged from its coca farmers’
union to lead the Movement to Socialism (MAS ) to power in 2006.
But that may soon change. Torn into factions, the MAS looks set to
lose the coming election. Mr Morales was forced out of the MAS and
is now in the Chapare evading arrest for alleged statutory rape. He
says the charge is politically motivated and wants supporters to spoil
their ballots to protest his exclusion from the poll by a court ruling.
His future hangs in the balance. So do the prospects for the Chapare
—and for Bolivia.
The split in the MAS goes back to 2019, when Mr Morales resigned
after a disputed election in which he sought an unconstitutional third
consecutive term in office. He went into exile, only to return when
Luis Arce, his former finance minister, retook the presidency in 2020.
Mr Morales wanted another run at the top post. But it soon became
clear Mr Arce wanted to keep it.

After years of infighting, neither man has got onto the ballot this
time. An economic crisis, with fuel shortages and inflation likely to
hit 30% this year, ruined Mr Arce’s electoral chances, so he
withdrew. Mr Morales’s candidacy was blocked by a court ruling on
term limits. In the process the MAS ’s reputation was wrecked.

The election Bolivia faces on August 17th is its most unpredictable in

20 years. The front-runners are Samuel Doria Medina, a centrist
tycoon, and Jorge Quiroga, a right-wing former president. Pollsters
reckon neither will surpass 25% in a field of eight; a run-off in
October is likely. The left’s only real hope is Andrónico Rodríguez, 36,
the Senate’s president, who is running not for the MAS but for the
People’s Alliance. Though he is polling at under 10%, the rural vote
has strongly favoured the MAS and is often undercounted in polls: it
could yet back him.

But Mr Morales stands in the way. Mr Rodríguez is part of the same

coca farmers’ union and was considered his political heir. Now Mr
Morales calls him a traitor and wants Bolivians to spoil their ballots.
His plan is to delegitimise the poll, then lead a resistance from the
Chapare again.

The road to the Chapare winds from arid highlands into tropical
forest. About 260,000 people, many descended from internal
migrants escaping drought and poverty, live there across five coca-
growing municipalities. The newcomers turned to coca, which grows
easily and can yield four harvests a year. There is a market for
leaves that Andeans have chewed as a stimulant for millennia. But in
the 1980s demand for coca to produce cocaine exploded.
Coca farmers say the union was forged in the repression that
ensued. When forced eradication backed by the United States
began, farmers fought back. Eventually they won the right for each
union member to have a coca plot of 1,600 square metres. With Mr
Morales as president, the unions took responsibility for stopping
illegal production over the allotted limit.

Almost 50,000 coca farmers belong to an overarching body known

as the Six Federations, still led by Mr Morales. They pay dues, take
part in meetings and, if called upon, take to the streets. Now they
also take turns protecting Mr Morales in the village of Lauca Eñe,
where hundreds of people with sharp staves have formed a ragtag
garrison ever since police fired on his car last October. Mr Morales
accuses the government of trying to kill him; officials say his vehicle
rammed through a checkpoint.

The Six Federations unofficially reigns over the Chapare and the five
coca municipalities. It runs the coca trade, controls prices and taxes
the proceeds. It controls much else, from land tenure to low-level
justice. Its own media pump out propaganda. Mr Mamani, who was
a mayor in the Chapare for ten years, says the union wants to have
an international TV channel.

Under Mr Morales’s presidency the region flourished. Villa Tunari, the

biggest municipality’s hub, now has hotels, gyms and karaoke. Coca
farmers plant tropical fruits and dig ponds to farm tambaqui, a tasty
fish. The price of land has rocketed. A hectare by the main road that
cost $300 or so in the 1990s, says a coca farmer, now goes for
$10,000. Many farmers also own property in the city of
Cochabamba, where their kids go to university.

Not all this prosperity is legal in origin. Mr Morales kicked the US

Drug Enforcement Administration out in 2008. Much of the region’s
coca feeds the drug trade; many of its hotels and tourist ventures
are said to be money-laundries.
But things have soured since Mr Morales left power. Public money no
longer flows to the region. Drug labs have more often been busted.
And the mood could worsen still after the election. Mr Morales’s
loyalists are sure most Bolivians will spoil their ballots, though polls
suggest no more than 15% of Bolivians overall plan to. But even
20% would be startling.

A shot in the foot

In any case, a big null vote makes the current opposition more likely
to win. And Messrs Doria Medina and Quiroga have both said Mr
Morales will go to prison if either of them is elected. “Evo would be a
trophy,” says Iván Canelas, ex-governor of Cochabamba and a friend
of Mr Morales. “They could kill ten people and grab Evo and lots of
people in the city will say it’s what had to be done.”

The Six Federations is preparing to resist. María Eugenia Ledezma,

its top female leader until a few months ago, says they will use
guerrilla tactics against soldiers who venture into the Chapare,
depriving them of sleep, then attacking with sticks and stones. She
says miners have been teaching people how to make boobytraps
with dynamite; sympathisers in the army have been training the
young. “Many of us, many leaders, will surely die or be imprisoned,”
she says, grim-faced. ■

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Middle East & Africa

Race, power and money in South Africa
A black and white case :: The staggering costs of Black Economic Empowerment

Ivory Coast’s president is overstaying his

welcome
Out with Ouattara :: His plan to run for a fourth term raises the risk of violence ahead
of elections in October

The world’s hardest makeover: Hamas

The war in Gaza :: Dissent against it builds inside and outside the strip

Lebanon’s government is taking on a

weakened Hizbullah
Disarming Hizbullah :: Anger at the Shia militia is giving its opponents an opening

The killing of journalists in Gaza

War in the Middle East :: Almost 200 journalists have now been killed in Gaza

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A black and white case

Race, power and money in

South Africa
The staggering costs of Black Economic Empowerment
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Cape Town

AFTER THE end of apartheid South Africa embarked on one of the

world’s most extensive attempts to redress racial inequality. At the
centre of this effort is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE ), a set of
policies that, in effect, force firms to sell discounted assets to black
investors, hire more black managers and buy more from black
suppliers. Though strongly backed by the African National Congress
(ANC ), the party in charge since 1994, BEE is being questioned like
never before.
The Trump administration cites BEE as a reason it is imposing 30%
tariffs on the country. Inside South Africa there is growing concern
that these policies, while perhaps necessary at first, are no longer
useful. BEE has mostly benefited a tiny black elite while constraining
economic growth, undermining the social stability it was meant to
underpin.

BEE was conceived by South Africa’s largest conglomerates, six of

which in the early 1990s accounted for 86% of the value of the
Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE ). To convince the ANC , hitherto
committed to nationalising the economy, of the merits of capitalism,
they needed black capitalists. So they sold discounted shares or
units to ANC bigwigs such as Cyril Ramaphosa, now South Africa’s
president. The ANC ’s response to criticism of the policy as an elite
stitch-up was the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of
2003. The law turned ad hoc corporate atonement into a vast
regulatory system.

Today BEE is a form of gamified affirmative action. Firms are given

points based on meeting criteria for the portion of the firm owned by
black shareholders, the number of senior black staff, investment in
black employees’ skills, charity contributions and purchases from
black-owned firms. Firms with a low score struggle to get state
contracts and licences or attract commercial partners. “Your BEE
rating will determine your success in business in 90% of cases,” says
Deirdre Mitchell of Honeycomb, a BEE ratings firm.

To supporters BEE is a source of harmony. “If we had kept the pre-

democratic status quo, then South Africa would have imploded at
some point,” says Tshediso Matona, who heads the BEE regulator. He
argues that the policy has also grown the black middle class.

Yet South Africa, with one of the highest murder rates in the world
and periodic unrest, is hardly tranquil. Inequality is higher today
than in 1994, partly because of rising inequality among black South
Africans. One study suggests the gross real income of the top 10%
of black earners tripled between 1993 and 2019, while that of the
bottom 50% fell. This reflects high joblessness caused by slow
economic growth. Less than 40% of black South Africans of working
age are in formal employment.

“Very, very conservative” estimates by William Gumede, an academic

who in the 2000s worked on a review of BEE , are that more than
1trn rand ($56bn) in assets may have been transferred to fewer than
100 people since BEE began. The main beneficiaries were a mostly
politically connected elite and the (mostly white) facilitators who
took large cuts. One banker says that a “paper transfer” of 25% of a
firm’s equity typically ends up being worth 8%, after transaction
costs and loans to buy the assets are paid off. Mr Gumede calls BEE
“one of the most wasteful, costly and ineffective redistribution
strategies devised in any post-colonial society”.
Has BEE fostered a black middle class? The number of black-owned
firms doubled between 2002 and 2019, but that might have
happened anyway. The growth of black employment in the public
sector has been more important. Today 75% of senior managers in
state employment are black (roughly in line with the 82% of the
population that is black) versus 15% in the private sector (see
chart). The latter could be evidence of enduring racism or the
lingering effects of apartheid-era schooling on the skills of black
South Africans.

In June the Free Market Foundation, a think-tank, estimated that the

annual cost for firms to comply with BEE was 145bn-290bn rand,
equivalent to 2% to 4% of GDP . Though there are reasons to quibble
with the methodology, BEE certainly adds costs and creates perverse
incentives.

Firms maximise points by buying from businesses owned by black

South Africans, with extra points if they are owned by women. That
often means “three people in the supply chain rather than two,” says
Ms Mitchell. The state can spend 25% above cost if a good or
service is from a black supplier, according to the Institute of Race
Relations, another think-tank. These “BEE premiums” add to already
soaring public debts. Procurement rules provide a pretext for giving
contracts to cronies.

BEE is plagued by “inputitis”, where points are given for spending,

not results. Firms can get points by paying for courses that are never
completed. This has led to a mini-industry of people enrolling in but
never completing multiple vocational schemes known as
“learnerships”. Only firms with at least 50 employees have to adhere
to racial quotas. So companies forgo growth or split into smaller
units.

Some firms try to get around BEE by “fronting”. In its crudest form
this is when a firm dupes a black South African—the company driver,
say—to be their “BEE partner” on paper, while receiving little of the
benefits. Mr Matona says his commission has received more than
1,300 complaints about fronting since 2017.

Foreign firms can win exemptions from the ownership rules of BEE
through “equity equivalence” schemes. Microsoft, for example,
funded local startups. Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-internet firm,
may be able to strike a similar deal. But these are still extra costs for
firms that could invest elsewhere, adding to South Africa’s lack of
dynamism. The rate at which firms enter and exit the economy is a
third of that in other middle-income countries.
Moeletsi Mbeki, a commentator, says that BEE has created a
“parasitic club” of black South Africans, who (with exceptions) are
content to take their share of existing firms rather than build their
own. Combined with high salaries in the public sector—the state
wage bill accounts for 15% of GDP versus the OECD average of 10%
—this leads to low levels of black entrepreneurship, he argues.

Tshepo Mahloele, one of South Africa’s richest men, supports

transformation but worries about the way BEE can add an asterisk to
black success. The 57-year-old, who has taken part in BEE deals but
has also invested successfully outside South Africa, says that in
some eyes “when I walk into a room…I’m not first a business
person; I’m a black business person.”

A recent poll by Ipsos found that 44% of South Africans want BEE to
continue. Some 36% say it should end; 20% are unsure. Those who
say it slows growth are twice as many as those who say it fosters it.
A plurality agree it is “outdated and divisive”. Polling by the Social
Research Foundation finds that about 80% believe governments
should hire the best people and buy the cheapest goods, regardless
of race.

The ANC remains wedded to BEE , despite pressure from the Trump
administration and from its main coalition partner, the liberal
Democratic Alliance. Indeed its solution to problems with the policy
seems to be more state control. It wants to set up a state-led
“transformation fund” paid for by firms. Tweaks passed this year
have imposed more stringent quotas.

Mr Ramaphosa argues that BEE is “not just a policy choice but a

constitutional imperative”. He says it is a “false notion that we must
make a choice between growth and transformation”. The truth is
that, more than 30 years on from apartheid, his country has too little
of either. ■
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Out with Ouattara

Ivory Coast’s president is

overstaying his welcome
His plan to run for a fourth term raises the risk of violence ahead of
elections in October
8月 14, 2025 04:59 上午 | Lagos

Not another five years

THERE HAD been hopes that Alassane Ouattara, Ivory Coast’s 83-
year-old president, might make good on his promise to step down
after three terms in office. (The constitutional limit is two, though he
claims to have “reset” this through a constitutional review.)

At a time of democratic decline in the west African country’s

neighbourhood, bowing out would have signalled a commitment to a
peaceful transfer of power for the first time in 30 years. It would
also have shown a desire to protect the relative economic success
that he helped usher in after two devastating civil wars.

Alas, on July 29th Mr Ouattara announced that he would run for a

fourth term at presidential elections in October. He claims that the
country’s economic and security challenges require a leader who has
“experience” in managing such things.

That argument has not gone down well. Tens of thousands of Ivory
Coast’s 33m people have taken to the streets in recent days to
demand free and fair elections and the reinstatement of banned
opposition candidates. Observers reckon the protests are the largest
since 2020. Thankfully, they have so far been largely peaceful. Yet
unless Mr Ouattara de-escalates, worse may be to come.

The protests reflect the success of opposition parties in rallying

support on the streets in the face of government repression. Several
opposition candidates have been barred from running in the
elections. The two who would have posed the most serious
challenge to Mr Ouattara are Tidjane Thiam, a former boss of Credit
Suisse, and Laurent Gbagbo, a former president who refused to
concede to Mr Ouattara in the election in 2010, sparking a civil war.

Mr Thiam was excluded when a court ruled that he was not an

Ivorian citizen when he registered his candidacy (he held French
citizenship for nearly four decades before renouncing it in March). Mr
Gbagbo was barred based on a criminal conviction for his conduct in
the civil war in 2010-11. The two men’s parties have joined forces to
push for the reinstatement of their candidates, an overhaul of the
electoral commission and other reforms.

Yet with two months to go until the vote, the odds are against them.
The government, not content with barring opposition candidates,
keeps arresting their supporters. “It is really an autocratic state,”
claims Noël Akossi Bendjo of Mr Thiam’s party. Mr Thiam, whose
citizenship status is still unclear, says he cannot safely return to Ivory
Coast and is running his election campaign from Paris.

Having no legal avenue to reinstate the disqualified candidates, the

opposition alliance has little in common apart from its dislike of Mr
Ouattara. It has not managed to find a new s around standard-
bearer around whom to rally. With nominations due by August 26th,
it is unlikely to do so in time to mount a successful campaign.

Mr Ouattara, meanwhile, remains popular despite his refusal to

vacate the top job. He is protected by his party’s control over the
country’s institutions, says Beverly Ochieng of Control Risks, a
consultancy. He has presided over a stellar economic recovery and
largely kept at bay the jihadists who have been menacing
neighbouring countries. Foreign investors see his government as a
beacon of stability in a chaotic region. So do many Ivorian voters. He
could probably win an election even without excluding opponents.

Yet Mr Ouattara’s recalcitrance bodes ill for democracy in Ivory Coast

and the region. His victory in the election in 2020 sparked violent
protests after the opposition boycotted the vote and rejected the
result. At least a dozen people were killed in the violence. His age is
another worry: should he become too ill to govern while in office, it
could spark a political crisis.

The coming election is Mr Ouattara’s second opportunity to make

Ivory Coast an example to its neighbours in politics as well as in
economics. Short of stepping down, he might yet make good on it if
he finds a way of entering into dialogue with the opposition and
assuaging those Ivorians who are keen for a change. But instead he
looks set to squander it. ■

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The war in Gaza

The world’s hardest

makeover: Hamas
Dissent against it builds inside and outside the strip
8月 14, 2025 08:38 上午 | CAIRO AND ISTANBUL

IT WAS BORN as the Islamic Resistance Movement. It is more usually

known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. But talks taking place in Cairo
could determine whether the Palestinian militants drop the middle
word, abandon their 22-month war in Gaza against Israel and
reinvent themselves as a political party.

On August 12th Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’s Gazan wing,

arrived in Cairo for negotiations mediated by Egypt with Qatar and
Turkey. On the table is a proposal to decommission its weapons,
dissolve its armed brigades, free the remaining hostages and
surrender power. In exchange, Israel would withdraw from Gaza, an
interim Palestinian technocratic administration would be put in place
supported by a UN -endorsed international force and the rebuilding of
the devastated territory would begin.

Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East

The external pressure on Mr Hayya to accept such a deal is intense.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is threatening to
occupy the whole of Gaza. On August 12th Israeli forces began
heavy strikes on Gaza city. Another offensive could destroy what
remains of Hamas there and hasten the ethnic cleansing of the
entire strip. The weakening of Iran has stripped the group’s armed
wing, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, of its main foreign backer.
Hamas’s last regional backers, Qatar and Turkey, have long favoured
the group’s political arm. But they seem to be losing patience. They
are understood to have said that if Mr Hayya refuses a deal, they
might refuse to allow him and Hamas’s other leaders, who all left
Doha a fortnight ago, to return.

Hamas faces even more pressure from those on whose behalf it

claims to fight. The movement was born in Gaza. But the population
that propelled it to victory in elections two decades ago has turned
on the group. Few see value in a resistance that invites devastation
upon them. While its fighters shelter in tunnels and its politicians
negotiate over the width of a buffer zone, around a hundred Gazans
were killed each day in July, nearly all by Israel. Threats of reprisals
no longer mute criticism. “People in Gaza are furious with Hamas,”
says a journalist from Gaza now in exile in Qatar. “They just want
the nightmare to end.” A political activist in Gaza blames Hamas for
the famine. “Hamas’s insistence on keeping power gives Israel the
pretext to starve us,” he says. “Hamas should dissolve and
disappear.” Dissent is even spilling through Hamas’s ranks. On
WhatsApp groups, some members are calling for a laying down of
arms before Gaza suffers even more.
Others in Hamas envision the group becoming a political party, in the
manner of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein or Israel’s own legal Islamist
party, the United Arab List. Justice and Development, one suggests
calling it. Reimagined, it could agree to the conditions set by the
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for participation in recently
announced Palestinian elections. They include endorsing a two-state
settlement, negotiations with Israel and Mr Abbas’s demand for a
monopoly on Palestinian weapons. Given the disenchantment with
Fatah, his own lacklustre movement, and the admiration Hamas’s
grit still attracts outside Gaza, they might even win. “It’s been
months since I’ve been this optimistic,” says an adviser to the
movement exiled from Gaza.

And yet in Gaza city the Brigades fight on. Apart from cobbling shoes
out of wood and rubber, it is one of the last job opportunities Gaza
still offers. Israel’s attacks may have decimated Hamas’s ranks, but
they still have weapons to harry their foe. Their presence spared
Gaza even worse atrocities, they say, implausibly. “Without the
Qassam Brigades we’d have had hundreds of Sabras and Shatilas,”
argues the exiled son of a slain military commander, referring to the
slaughter of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Israeli-occupied
Beirut in 1982. Many still think they could regain power in Gaza.
Asked to describe the Qassam Brigades’ mood, a Palestinian
interlocutor with Hamas adopts an Irish lilt. “No surrender,” he says.

Meanwhile in exile, Hamas’s leaders reckon that Israel may be

winning the battles but is losing the war. As in Algeria’s war of
independence, their reading is that the resistance has turned the
enemy’s weapons against itself, exhausting the Israelis and draining
them of their international legitimacy and moral authority. Far from
ending the conflict, they argue, a mass exodus of Palestinians from
Gaza would intensify it. Algeria won independence only after a
million Algerians had lost their lives. “Be patient, Gaza,” says Ghazi
Hamad, a senior member of Hamas.
How can Hamas be pushed to accept a deal? A commitment, if
given, by a new Arab committee overseeing its implementation to
integrate tens of thousands of Hamas’s civil servants into a new
Palestinian administration and perhaps some fighters into the
security forces might help. Hamas’s political leaders have expressed
readiness to hand over their weapons to a new Palestinian
administration in Gaza, once Israel fully withdraws. “The Brigades
will accept the movement’s decision,” says a strategist close to
Hamas in Istanbul.

But many obstacles remain. America and Israel must also accept the
terms, and neither has come to Cairo. Despite the rising costs for
Israel, Mr Netanyahu still prefers military to diplomatic endgames.
The details of Hamas’s disarmament, any international force and an
interim technocratic Palestinian government have yet to be
determined, says an Egyptian observer. And Hamas’s “pragmatism”
has only ever gone so far. In 1991, after the end of the first
Palestinian intifada (uprising), and the start of direct Israeli-
Palestinian talks, one of Hamas’s founders declared mission
accomplished. He proposed disbanding Hamas’s armed wing and
joining the negotiations. How can we forgo our brand recognition,
retorted his brothers? Too many within Hamas may still feel the
same. ■
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Disarming Hizbullah

Lebanon’s government is
taking on a weakened
Hizbullah
Anger at the Shia militia is giving its opponents an opening
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午 | BEIRUT

LAST WEEK Lebanese soldiers retrieved the bodies of six of their

comrades from the smouldering ruins of an arms depot near the
Israeli border. It was the army’s deadliest day since the country was
drawn into a regional war on October 8th 2023. But they were not
killed by enemy fire. They died attempting to secure a cache of
weapons believed to belong to Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed militia
that has dominated Lebanon for years.
Accident or not, the blast underscored the precariousness of
Lebanon’s new government. Backed by America, it seems willing to
take unprecedented steps to reduce Hizbullah’s influence. But any
moves against the militia risk causing further instability in a
perennially unstable country.

Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East

Hizbullah’s grip on the state has never looked weaker. Many of its
leaders are dead. Its armoury is depleted. It has lost control of
Beirut airport. Its land corridor to Iran via Syria and Iraq has been
cut off. And its supporters are angry at its failure to rebuild what
Israel destroyed last year.

America has put forward a four-phase plan to disarm Hizbullah. The

group would hand over its weapons by the end of the year. Israel
would withdraw from its five positions in southern Lebanon and the
still-frequent Israeli air strikes would cease. And Lebanon and Israel
would have to demarcate their border at last.

Ministers debated the proposal last week. Hizbullah’s representatives

and allies stormed out of the cabinet meeting; the government
approved the plan’s objectives regardless. Within days, Iran
dispatched a senior envoy to Beirut.

It has good reason to. Many of the Shia parts of southern Lebanon
and Beirut’s southern suburbs still lie in rubble. But Gulf donors say
money to rebuild is conditional on a credible disarmament plan.

Four decades of entrenched power cannot be dismantled overnight.

“They have been gaining control of the constitution for 40 years;
they have banks, financial institutions, everything,” says Nadim
Shehadi, a Lebanese analyst.

And some Shias fear that without Hizbullah’s protection, they may
face violence or be forced from their homes. The fall of Bashar al-
Assad in Syria to Sunni rebels has unsettled them. They look at the
massacres of Alawites in Syria and Israel’s destruction of Gaza and
tremble.

But so far Hizbullah has done little to defend its weapons. And it is
under pressure from its Shia constituents. “The street is saying
enough is enough,” says Fouad Makhzoumi, a Sunni MP from Beirut
and a vocal opponent of Hizbullah. If Hizbullah does not get
reconstruction going by the next election, reckons Mr Makhzoumi, its
support will collapse. And the group looks increasingly isolated.
“They don’t have allies,” says Muhanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie
Middle East Centre. “Going ballistic with internal opponents would
backfire.”

After the cabinet announced the American plan, Hizbullah members

swarmed through Beirut, burning images of the prime minister and
blocking roads. Disarming them will be not be easy for President
Joseph Aoun. But he knows America and the Gulf states will not wait
for ever. ■
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War in the Middle East

The killing of journalists in

Gaza
Almost 200 journalists have now been killed in Gaza
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

“USQUT, ANAS (Shut up, Anas),” the Israeli agent would say in Arabic
when he called the Palestinian journalist’s mobile. He was not the
only one. Other journalists in Gaza getting such calls had chosen
silence or fled the strip. But Anas al-Sharif, a 28-year-old Pulitzer-
prize winning correspondent in Gaza with a global following of
hundreds of thousands on social media, was different. He spoke of
the need to give Gaza a voice and ploughed on regardless.
On August 9th, the night before an Israeli airstrike killed him and
five colleagues in their makeshift newsroom in a tent next to al-Shifa
hospital, he called a childhood friend in Qatar and told him Israel
was preparing to kill him. Together they recited the Islamic prayer to
ward off fear. His last post on X was to report the resumption of
Israel’s heavy bombardment of Gaza.

Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East

Israel claims he was a Hamas asset; it has provided little evidence

for the accusation. (Last year it banned his Qatari-financed outlet, Al
Jazeera, from reporting in Israel on the grounds that it was a
mouthpiece for Hamas.)
For 22 months Israel has banned all foreign journalists from
independently entering Gaza. It has restricted access to brief trips
with military escorts. Earlier this month it barred those
accompanying air-drops of food into Gaza from filming the
devastation below. It stopped its own press corps or Palestinian
journalists in the West Bank from entering Gaza decades ago.
To date, 186 journalists in Gaza have been killed since the war
began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a monitor
in New York (see chart), a higher rate than in any conflict since its
records began in 1992. Citizen journalists have increasingly taken on
their work. But they say Israel targets them too. Anwar Nimr, an
emaciated filmmaker, explains he wanted to record the Russian
roulette of Palestinians trying to collect sacks of flour at aid hubs.
But he then hid his phone, he says, afraid that Israeli troops would
shoot him. ■
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Europe
What Putin wants from Trump in Alaska
The US-Russia summit :: As the leaders prepare to meet, Russian forces break
Ukraine’s defensive line

Donald Trump brokers a peace plan in the

Caucasus
Have a good TRIPP :: An American-backed deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan
could weaken Russia

The Russian-run town squatting on NATO

territory
Svalbard at 100 :: Could Vladimir Putin exploit the odd legal status of an Arctic
archipelago?

The looming military threat in the Arctic

Frosty geopolitics :: Great-power competition in the far north puts renewed attention
on Svalbard

China’s planned Turkish EV factories have

yet to power up
Slow to spark :: When they do it could spell trouble for TOGG, Turkey’s domestic EV
maker

The colourful civic groups that hold

Germany together
A fine Verein :: Clubs for shooting, rabbit-keeping and everything else are the
backbone of its society

Must Europe choose between “strategic

autonomy” and August off?
Charlemagne :: A continent on holiday from geopolitical reality

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The US-Russia summit

What Putin wants from Trump

in Alaska
As the leaders prepare to meet, Russian forces break Ukraine’s
defensive line
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | Kramatorsk region

THE TIMING could not have been worse. Days before a crucial
summit in Alaska between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin,
scheduled for August 15th, Russian forces broke through Ukraine’s
defensive line. Near the breakout area, north of the Ukrainian
stronghold of Pokrovsk, soldiers report panic and confusion.

Shtyk, an officer in the 93rd brigade, says Ukraine is still working out
where the enemy is. He estimates the main breakthrough penetrated
over 10km, cutting a key supply road. “The wedge hasn’t expanded
yet, but it’s a depressing situation,” Shtyk says. “There was a failure
to build defences.” With crack units deployed to the scene, Ukraine
will probably soon contain the advance.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

But the surge has convinced soldiers that Russia intends to keep
pursuing its war. They worry that the American president will draw
the wrong lesson: that Ukraine is weak, rather than that Russia is
bloodthirsty. “Ukrainian soldiers will always be against a bad peace
on the enemy’s terms,” says Deputy, a drone commander in the 30th
brigade. If there is a ceasefire, he wants to “hang up my uniform
and never put it on again. Not to have to head to draft offices again
in five years.”

Three and a half years into the war, front-line soldiers are tired and
criticism of the leadership is growing. But everyone agrees that the
“land swaps” American leaders have been bandying about ahead of
the Alaska summit are unacceptable. Boar, the nom de guerre of a
company commander in the 56th brigade, says a retreat would
betray fallen comrades. He has just returned from three weeks in
trenches near Chasiv Yar, where Ukraine has held a narrow strip in
the face of years of Russian assaults. Russia continues to throw men
at it, he says, losing perhaps ten soldiers for every Ukrainian. Vasyl,
an infantryman, goes further. “If Trump were here, I’d tell him to go
and do a Russian warship,” invoking the obscene reply Ukrainian
border guards supposedly gave Russian naval officers in the war’s
first days.

Uncertainty hangs over Mr Trump’s summit. There will be no seat at

the table for Volodymyr Zelensky, nor for Ukraine’s European allies.
Although a ceasefire is on the agenda, The Economist understands
that the talks will venture further. One potential area is a deeper
normalisation of diplomatic and business relations between America
and Russia, including a lifting of sanctions. Mr Putin yearns for this
kind of rehabilitation. Another is co-operation in the Arctic, for
example over energy.

What offers Russia might make for peace are less obvious. In July
secret talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators made
notable progress, bringing the two sides closer than they had been
for some time. Then Mr Trump lost patience with Mr Putin,
threatening him with “crippling” sanctions if he did not stop the war.
That seemed to reflect the influence of Keith Kellogg, a retired
American general and presidential envoy.

But another faction in the White House has a competing vision.

Steve Witkoff, a longtime real-estate associate whom Mr Trump
appointed as another special envoy, made an unannounced visit to
Moscow on August 6th. He appears to have made proposals much
less acceptable to Ukraine.
Mr Witkoff favours a grand deal between America and Russia. His
involvement in negotiations has usually been to Ukraine’s detriment.
It has also been marked by incompetence. Reports suggest he did
not understand Mr Putin’s offer to “swap” Ukrainian-controlled land
in Donbas for a promise not to attack elsewhere—getting territory in
exchange for words. Mr Putin has a habit of offering “concessions”
designed to fragment Ukrainian unity.

Somehow, discussion of acknowledging Russian control of territory it

occupies has shifted into talk of giving Russia more. The concept of
swaps has been around since last year, when Ukrainian forces held
positions inside Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine has since lost almost
all of Kursk, rendering that proposal moot. But the zombie notion of
swaps remains alive in Washington. Sources say Ukraine’s latest
proposals insist that a full ceasefire must come before talk of ceding
territory. Anything else, one source warns, would open a “Pandora’s
box”. Yet the Americans are urging Ukraine to make a counter-offer
including some of its own land.

A remote summit on August 13th of European leaders with Mr

Zelensky and Mr Trump, chaired by Friedrich Merz, Germany’s
chancellor, tried to create a united front against such pressure. The
Europeans agreed that a truce had to precede any negotiations, that
Ukraine must have a place at the table and that it would receive
security guarantees in any deal. Mr Merz said Mr Trump “largely
shares” the European and Ukrainian positions, leaving unclear which
ones he did not endorse. Yet Ukraine’s allies still worry that
America’s president will insist on land swaps that will be difficult for
Mr Zelensky to deliver. In recent days Mr Trump has returned to his
old habit of blaming Ukraine’s president for Russia’s invasion.

On the eastern front there is little time to read headlines. Life here
brings a different set of concerns, soldiers say. Boar has spent the
past three weeks trying to stay alive, sleeping with one eye open
while watching for the next group of Russians crawling towards his
position. Mr Trump’s wishes carry little authority, he says. “Authority
means my brothers-in-arms. It means Sasha, who carried 300
people out of a trench under fire…It is the rows of crosses marking
where our comrades fell. How can we simply give that away?” ■

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Have a good TRIPP

Donald Trump brokers a

peace plan in the Caucasus
An American-backed deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan could
weaken Russia
8月 14, 2025 04:56 上午

THE SOUTH CAUCASUS is a mosaic of warring rivals and closed

borders. Lookout posts and bunkers dot its frontiers. On August 8th
Donald Trump met Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and
Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, in an effort to end the conflict
between their two countries. At the White House the trio signed a
peace declaration and agreements on trade and security. Crucially,
Armenia agreed to open an American-operated transport route
across its territory, linking Azerbaijan to its exclave, Nakhchivan (see
map). The corridor will be called the Trump Route for International
Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP ). “A great honour for me,” said
America’s president.

Mr Aliyev and Mr Pashinyan vowed to nominate him for a Nobel

peace prize. The deal will diminish Russia, which has long meddled
in the conflict, as well as Iran. It is not a formal peace treaty. But it
paves the way to a bigger prize: an end to one of the world’s most
intractable conflicts and a regional detente, including the
normalisation of Armenia’s relations with Turkey, Azerbaijan’s ally.
Whether that happens will be a test of American diplomacy and of
Armenia and Azerbaijan themselves. Russia could still sow trouble.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting for more than 35 years.
In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Armenian-
backed separatists seized Nagorno-Karabakh, a region within
Azerbaijan, and later built a buffer zone. For years the conflict was
frozen. Azerbaijan, whose oil-and-gas industry boomed, built a
formidable army equipped with Turkish and Israeli drones and
missiles. In 2020 it recaptured the area around Nagorno-Karabakh.
In 2023 it took back the territory itself; some 100,000 Armenians
fled. Russia, which had supported Armenia during the 1990s, stood
back. It did so partly to punish Mr Pashinyan, a democrat, who rose
to power in 2018 in a peaceful revolution that swept Armenia’s
Kremlin-backed rulers from office.

Since early 2024 the two sides have been inching towards a peace
treaty. In previous negotiations they have relied on intermediaries
such as Russia, Turkey or the Minsk Group, a multilateral forum set
up in the 1990s to deal with the conflict. But recently they have
been speaking directly. In March they agreed on a draft treaty.

Two obstacles remained. The first was Azerbaijan’s insistence that

Armenia remove references to Nagorno-Karabakh from its
constitution, which will require a referendum. The second was
Azerbaijan’s demand for a transport corridor to Nakhchivan. In 2020,
as part of a ceasefire deal, Mr Aliyev and Mr Pashinyan agreed to
open a route supervised by Russian officials. Both men later resiled
from the idea that Russia should be involved, but could not agree on
an alternative.

Mr Trump provided a partial solution. For months, American

negotiators have been shuttling back and forth to the region to
thrash it out. Armenia will lease the land for 99 years to America,
which will hire contractors to run the route. The TRIPP gives America
a long-term stake in the region’s security. Iran is furious. Russia
coolly stated the deal was “positive”, but warned America not to
repeat the “counterproductive outcomes” of its interventions in the
Middle East.

America has offered Armenia and Azerbaijan sweeteners, too. The

boss of SOCAR , Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, visited Washington
with Mr Aliyev to sign a deal with ExxonMobil, an American oil giant.
Armenia, which lacks Azerbaijan’s natural resources, has less to offer
America’s mercantile president, but will get some support on artificial
intelligence and semiconductors. Mr Trump also waived sanctions,
introduced in 1992, that have prohibited military co-operation with
Azerbaijan. He announced a “strategic partnership” with Azerbaijan,
which is a staunch ally of Israel.
The peace deal could also pave the way for Turkey and Armenia to
bury the hatchet. The standoff with Armenia has been “Turkey’s
Achilles heel, in terms of its regional influence”, says Nigar Goksel of
the International Crisis Group, a global think-tank. Rapprochement
between the two began in 2008, but stalled.

To accommodate Mr Aliyev, Turkey had made normalisation with

Armenia conditional on a peace deal between Azerbaijan and
Armenia. That obstacle now appears to be gone. Turkey may decide
to open its border with Armenia, which it shut in solidarity with
Azerbaijan during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1993. “Things
will start moving fast,” Ms Goksel predicts.

Yet amid the Trumpian pomp, the deal leaves much to be done. In
Washington Messrs Aliyev and Pashinyan put their initials on a
formal peace treaty, but did not sign it. Azerbaijan’s demand for
Armenia to change its constitution is unmet. The TRIPP ’s benefits will
be concentrated in Nakhchivan and Syunik, the sparsely populated
Armenian region it will cross. But the hope is that it could unlock
more dealmaking. Azerbaijan and Armenia could start talking about
opening other parts of their fortified border.

There are reasons to be cautious. Mr Pashinyan is unpopular: just

13% of Armenians say they trust him. Nationalist hardliners,
including Robert Kocharyan, a former president, accuse him of
compromising Armenian sovereignty. (Mr Kocharyan, for his part,
sold Armenian assets to Russia in exchange for debt relief during the
2000s.) Holding the referendum that Azerbaijan demands will be
divisive, and an election next year will give Russia a chance to
interfere. In June Armenia’s government said it had foiled a coup
planned for September.

Azerbaijan could also disrupt the peace process. Mr Aliyev, an

autocrat who succeeded his father in 2003, had previously
threatened to seize a transport corridor by force. He has indulged in
irredentist fantasies such as calling Armenia “West Azerbaijan”.
Laurence Broers of Chatham House, a British think-tank, says such
talk will be “kryptonite” for peace if it continues. Azerbaijan’s military
dominance only makes it harder for Armenia to trust it.

Another risk is that America loses interest. Historically, peace in the

south Caucasus has often been brought by outside powers. “It was
Russia and Turkey in 2020, it was the Minsk Group in the 1990s, it
was the Bolsheviks in the 1920s,” says Mr Broers. Mr Trump has
positioned America as the latest peace broker in a tough
neighbourhood. Whether it lasts will not be in his control. ■

Editor’s note (August 11th): This piece has been updated.

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Slow to spark

China’s planned Turkish EV

factories have yet to power
up
When they do it could spell trouble for TOGG, Turkey’s domestic EV
maker
8月 14, 2025 03:45 上午 | Manisa

WHEN BYD , China’s biggest electric carmaker, offered a $1bn

investment in the summer of 2024, Turkey rolled out the red carpet.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president, attended the signing
ceremony. Officials in Manisa, where the company plans to open a
new factory, mused about a future “Chinatown” to house BYD
workers. Yet a year down the line, despite reports the company
would accelerate work on the plant at the expense of one in
Hungary, things have not progressed much. The factory is supposed
to open next year, but there are no signs of construction save for a
few containers and the occasional dump truck.

Turkey’s location and relatively low labour costs make it a big draw
for Chinese EV makers. So does its customs-union agreement with
the European Union, which allows cars built in Turkey to be exported
to the bloc tariff-free. Last year the EU slapped tariffs of up to 35%,
on top of an existing 10% duty, on Chinese EV s. Other Chinese auto
makers looking to Turkey as a way to avoid the tariffs include Chery,
said to be eyeing a $1bn investment.

China is also keen to grab a slice of Turkey’s booming domestic EV

market. High fuel prices and an extortionate consumption tax of up
to 220% for conventional vehicles have driven up demand for EV s.
Over 100,000 fully electric cars were sold in Turkey in the seven
months to July, an increase of 147% on the same period in 2024.

Desperate for foreign investment but hoping to stem the tide of

cheap Chinese EV s—which threaten its own electric carmaker, TOGG
— Turkey has sought to solve both problems in one go. Last year the
country raised tariffs on Chinese cars to 50%. But it made BYD and
other carmakers who pledge to invest in Turkey exempt. Sales of
BYD cars have surged.

On paper TOGG , one of Mr Erdogan’s flagship projects, has fared

well. Since its launch in 2023, it has outsold every other EV brand at
home, partly thanks to government support. But competition from
foreign EV s and the prospect of 150,000 BYD cars per year from the
plant in Manisa could spell trouble. “They may not survive in such a
market,” says Cagdas Ungor of Marmara University.

Chinese investments in Turkey amount to only some $5bn, lower

than in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Iraq. Politics is no longer the main
obstacle. Turkey has toned down its criticism of China’s treatment of
its Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group. The biggest brake is instead
Turkey’s rule-of-law record. Mr Erdogan and his inner circle enjoy
nearly unchecked power. “Regulations and tariff decisions are made
overnight without any consultations with the key actors,” says Ceren
Ergenc of the Centre for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think-
tank. “China perceives that as a high risk.”

China’s EV operations in Turkey have not escaped scrutiny by EU

bureaucrats. Earlier this year the European Commission warned that
it would go after countries and companies that engage in tariff
circumvention. EU anti-dumping rules mean that cars made in Turkey
could face punitive tariffs if imported parts account for 60% or more
of their value, unless assembly adds over 25% to manufacturing
costs. To have unfettered access to the EU market, companies like
BYD will need to source at least some parts from Turkey.

Fear of pushback from the EU may explain why work in Manisa has
slowed. Firms like BYD are hedging their bets, says Ms Ergenc, and
waiting for the EU and China to settle their EV tariff dispute. Local
officials and other analysts say BYD will finish the factory, though
perhaps not on time. Turkey may be a convenient backdoor to the
EU , but the Chinese have not yet prised it open. ■

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A fine Verein

The colourful civic groups that

hold Germany together
Clubs for shooting, rabbit-keeping and everything else are the
backbone of its society
8月 14, 2025 03:46 上午 | ARNSBERG

TUCKED AWAY in the car park of a drinks warehouse, hundreds of

men in green jackets and feathered caps, plus a handful of women,
are swapping gossip and glugging beer. Suddenly comes the call:
“Schützenbrüder antreten!” (marksmen line up), and the men fall
into columns as a brass band strikes up. They begin a good-natured,
not especially disciplined parade up the streets of Arnsberg, a small
town in Germany’s Sauerland region, hollering “Horrido!”, an old
hunting cry, to well-wishers. Soon they arrive at a large tent where,
after a Catholic mass, the festivities begin: speeches, dancing and a
lot of beer. Later that evening—having been forced to learn,
somewhat against his will, a dance called the “discofox”—your
correspondent takes his leave as a conga line begins.

This is the summer festival of Arnsberg’s St Hubertus

Schützenverein, or shooting club (nicknamed ”Muffrika” after its
neighbourhood). It is one of several in town. With their archaic
traditions and military cosplay, Schützenvereine, rooted in medieval
militias, look anachronistic. But in many German Catholic heartlands,
they are thriving. In 2015 UNESCO added German shooting culture to
its “intangible heritage” list. Some clubs have had awkward brushes
with modernity: the feathers of older Schützenbrüder have been
ruffled by such novelties as Muslims winning shooting contests. But
they are soon smoothed.

No understanding of Germany is complete without an account of the

Vereine (clubs or associations) latticed across the land. As an old
joke has it, when three Germans meet, the first thing they do is form
a Verein. The 19th century saw a Cambrian explosion of these clubs,
catering to every interest, as cities grew and an industrial
bourgeoisie emerged. By the 1920s Vereine were so established that
Kurt Tucholsky, the great Weimar-era satirist, poked fun at them in
his poem Das Mitglied (The Member): “I only really get excited in my
club/I look down on those who aren’t in it.”

The requirements for a Verein are simple: seven people, a board and
statutes. The template has proved versatile and enduring: there are
over 600,000 Vereine across Germany, spanning interests as
mainstream as painting and football—some Bundesliga teams are
organised as Vereine—and as niche as sugar-packet collecting. The
number of clubs has grown faster than their membership has,
suggesting diversifying interests in a plural society. One recent trend:
with municipal budgets squeezed, Fördervereine, or “support clubs”,
have mushroomed to help fund cultural and educational institutions.
Their champions see Vereine as social glue: Edmund Burke’s “little
platoons” enshrined in Germany’s civil code. In Arnsberg members
say they provide a place for younger folk to party and older ones to
socialise, and note that committed members chip in time or labour.
Jonas, a younger member, celebrates the levelling that unites the
carpenter and lawyer: “With these jackets on, we are all the same.”
It is a romantic sentiment, befitting a society that still aspires to a
certain egalitarianism.

And if there seems to be rather less shooting than drinking at the

club—a breathalyser is available for tipsy motorists—that need not
undermine its community purpose. Schütze means protecting those
who need it rather than shooting as such, says Horst Thoren of the
Association of Historical German Shooting Brotherhoods (BHDS ). In
the pandemic members mobilised to drive vulnerable locals to
vaccination centres. During refugee waves Vereine have been called
on to help newcomers integrate, albeit with mixed results.

Indeed, Germans freshly arrived in a new part of the country will

often seek out a sympathetic Verein. Big claims are sometimes made
for the Verein’s powers of integration: Friedrich Merz, Germany’s
chancellor and a proud Sauerlander, recently congratulated shooting
clubs for doing a “great job” integrating people into village
communities. The sentiment is welcomed in Arnsberg, Mr Merz’s
home town, even if outsiders are plainly not thick on the ground. “Of
course these clubs don’t drive social integration,” says Peter
Schubert, a social scientist who has conducted surveys of Germany’s
Vereine.

The claim may ring truer in Germany’s 86,000 sports clubs. “The
Verein became my connection to German people,” says Asadullah
Nemati, an Afghan who arrived in Stuttgart in 2016 knowing no one.
A keen wrestler, he joined a club and met people who helped him
find a flat and a job. He is now a star on his local team, nicknamed
the “Swabian Afghan”. Dedicated Migrantenvereine often provide
newcomers with a foothold in Germany.
The future of some Vereine is threatened by red tape, and especially
the struggle to find youngsters to commit to roles beyond “episodic”
volunteering. “I’d like to retire,” says Wolfgang Heitner, chair of the
Muffrika club. “But I can’t find anyone to take over.” Mr Schubert
blames the huge demands Vereine place on volunteers for the
slowing rate of their formation.

Not very clubbable

Germany’s resurgent far right presents a different challenge. In 2019

the Alternative for Germany (A fD ) called for a “march through the
organisations”, in a conscious echo of 1960s student protesters.
Especially in rural regions, the A fD and other radical groups have
tried to exploit Verein structures rather than create their own. In
response the BHDS has banned A fD members from its clubs.
Sportvereine have strategies to keep the far right at bay. “Politics is
the last thing we talk about,” says Jürgen Hufnagel, a veteran
Muffrikaner. Nevertheless, last year the Arnsberg shooting clubs
created a one-off Gegen Extremismus (against extremism)
campaign.

“I’ve always liked the idea of Vereine as schools of democracy,” says

Daniel Watermann, a historian, “but I’ve always doubted that it’s
universally true.” Based in Halle in eastern Germany, fertile ground
for the far right, he notes that the success of Vereine in organising
and propagating ideas is precisely why they appeal to extremists.
Researchers have found that Nazi ideology spread more quickly in
parts of Weimar Germany with a high density of Vereine.

In Arnsberg, as the beer flows, the Bratwürste grill and the band
plays on, such concerns seem far away. Muffrika was founded in the
1950s, and its grounding in tradition is why the members love it.
Asked how he would spend his time if there were no shooting club,
Mr Hufnagel does not miss a beat: “I’d start one.” ■
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Charlemagne

Must Europe choose between

“strategic autonomy” and
August off?
A continent on holiday from geopolitical reality
8月 14, 2025 06:19 上午

EUROPEANS AND Americans concur: there is something fishy about a

two-week summer holiday. But the rationale for their concerns is
markedly different. To Wall Street and Silicon Valley types, indulging
in an uninterrupted fortnight of vacation—a whole fortnight!—means
essentially throwing in the towel. Imagine what opportunities for
promotion will be forsaken by bunking off for 14 straight days. To
office toilers in Stockholm, Rome or Paris, two weeks of leave seems
equally suspect. Seulement two weeks? That would be acceptable
only as the opening act of a proper summer break. Ideally this
should stretch to a whole month. How else to recover from the
existential drudgery of work? American out-of-office emails beseech
the sender to wait a few hours while the holidaying recipient snaps
out of beach mode to respond to their message (sorry!). European
out-of-office messages politely invite the sender to wait until
September (not sorry).

Europe quietly revels in being a lifestyle superpower, with better

food and longer life expectancy than America. But it is also an
anxious place these days. The two months since June 21st—the
traditional start of the Scandinavian holiday season—will go down as
a summer of geopolitical subservience. At a NATO summit in June, a
parade of European leaders toadied to Donald Trump; the alliance’s
(Dutch) boss elicited cringes by praising him as the group’s “Daddy”.
A summit marking the 50th anniversary of the European Union’s
diplomatic ties to China in July was shifted to Beijing after President
Xi Jinping made clear he had no intention of travelling to Brussels.
The killing in Gaza goes on, even as European leaders protest. They
have also had to swallow Trumpian edicts on trade, meekly agreeing
not to reciprocate even while their exports to America get walloped
with tariffs. On August 15th Mr Trump will host his Russian
counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska to discuss Ukraine. For France,
Germany and other Europeans, the war is the ultimate threat to their
continent’s security, yet they will not get a seat at the table.

The Alaska confab is a sharp reminder to Europeans that they live in

a world where others increasingly call the shots. The idea that the
continent needs to recover some measure of “strategic autonomy”
was once a French obsession. Now it is widely shared. But shaping
one’s own future—spending more on defence, producing more stuff
instead of importing it, and so on—looks a lot like hard work. Shorter
summer holidays by themselves will not rid Europe of its
dependencies on China and America. But Europe’s geopolitical
irrelevance is in no small part down its somnolent economy. There,
working habits do matter. Whereas productivity gains in America and
China have in recent decades translated into higher GDP , and in turn
geopolitical heft, in Europe those advances have been used to toil
less instead.

Though not exactly an indolent continent, Europe prides itself on

indulging in la dolce vita. Not feeling tip-top as you head to the
beach? Fret not: under EU law employees can suspend their holidays
if they are unwell, ensuring that any sick days translate into more
holidays later. Taken as a whole, Europeans work fewer hours in the
week than most others globally, either because of legal restrictions
or thanks to a penchant for part-time work (nearly a third of
Europeans work fewer than 35 hours a week, a world record). They
then work fewer weeks in the year, thanks not just to long holidays
but to parental leave—as much as 480 days, for Swedish mums and
dads. The average German now takes 15 days of sick leave every
year, too. And to top it all off, Europeans work fewer years in their
career, despite long life expectancies. The average Frenchman
spends 23 years in retirement, over half a decade more than his
Japanese or American counterparts.

E allora? some might say. By forsaking the office or factory floor

Europeans are in effect purchasing leisure, rather than putting in
extra hours to buy yet more stuff. Who is to say an inflated pay slip
is worth more than time spent eating and playing? Yet increasingly, it
feels like the extra cash would come in handy. Europe’s public
finances are ever more stretched. Hefty defence commitments
agreed in June are framed as a tussle of “warfare v welfare”, as if
governments can only spend on defence by cutting pensions. But
Europe might not need to choose between guns and butter: by
working more it might be able to afford both. The focus in the
continent’s economics ministries has been to improve productivity.
Fostering innovation and cutting red tape are indeed needed to
squeeze more output for every hour of labour. But while working
better matters, what about working more?
Working nine to three

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has warned that “work-life

balance” and four-day weeks stand in the way of national prosperity.
He is right. Happily for holidaymakers in Berlin and beyond, little is
likely to change soon. While “strategic autonomy” sounds nice to
those voters who can make sense of it, more time at the beach
sounds even better. Politicians who have goaded their compatriots to
put in an extra shift—Nicolas Sarkozy, a former French president,
suggested people “work more to earn more”—have been rewarded
with early retirement. A plan to cut two national holidays in France
to help public finances has been greeted with the kind of enthusiasm
reserved for August storms.

There is nothing reprehensible about wanting to work to live rather

than live to work. Alas, the laws of geopolitics, unlike most European
labour codes, do not offer five weeks of holiday. Put simply: more
working means more money, and more money means added clout in
global affairs. Until the 1960s Europeans toiled longer hours than
Americans, and mattered somewhat more in the world. That is no
coincidence. If Europeans want a seat at the global geopolitical
table, they will have to work for it.■

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Britain
Britain is a global gaming superpower
Game changing :: Can it remain one?

The Fantasy Premier League is changing

Britain’s favourite sport
Soccer stats :: Football is becoming nerdier

Asian tourists are returning to Britain. But

they look different
Foreign visitors :: No more coach parties

Vaccinations to prevent cervical cancer

have plummeted in Britain
Falling off a cliff :: Blame declining confidence, a lack of convenience and rising
complacency

Still want to be a London cabbie?

The Knowledge :: Surprisingly, many do, and are prepared to study for the gruelling
test to become one

Aux barricades, boomers!

Bagehot :: The rise of the revolutionary retiree

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Game changing

Britain is a global gaming

superpower
Can it remain one?
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | BRIGHTON

THE ARRIVAL of “ Grand Theft Auto VI” in 2026 will be less a video-
game release than a cultural moment. The game, which has players
stealing cars, selling drugs and killing cops, will have cost upwards
of $2bn to build. Yet it will almost certainly turn a profit within its
first week. With its glitzy cityscapes, radio soundtrack and trademark
swagger, the series looks, sounds and feels like a warped parody of
America. Yet this blockbuster began its life in the small Scottish city
of Dundee and is still made by a team of tartan nerds in Edinburgh—
a feat celebrated in the British government’s strategy for the creative
industries, released in June.

Such recognition is overdue: gaming has long been a British

superpower. The industry generates annual revenues of some
$200bn globally. Strip out the Cayman Islands (a British overseas
territory) and Britain is the third-largest exporter of video games,
behind only America and Japan. Understated and quirky, it often
plays the role of incubator. “Tomb Raider”, a billion-dollar franchise
with its own Netflix series, began as a sketch in Derby. Recent
successes include “Fall Guys”, a battle-royale obstacle course,
“LittleBigPlanet”, a pioneer in user-generated content, and “Total
War: Warhammer”, based on the tabletop series. In Britain video
games generate more revenue (£4.3bn, or $5.8bn) than the film
(excluding streaming) and music industries combined (£3.4bn).

Not everyone is convinced that Britain should be as supportive of its

gaming industry as of, say, its life sciences. Outdated stereotypes
that gaming turns youth into obese oddballs or school shooters still
prevail in parts of Westminster. Others fret about the future: with
investment slowing and artificial intelligence (AI ) looming, the global
gaming industry is in turmoil. Such pessimism is misguided. As in
other creative industries—from film to fashion—British ingenuity
makes it well-placed to thrive in an age of (sameish) AI .

To understand Britain’s unique role in the global gaming industry, go

back to its origins. In the early 1980s cheap, programmable home
computers gave rise to a generation of bedroom coders. This
grassroots mix of creativity and code stood in contrast with America
and Japan, where console-driven markets, not PC games, took off
first. Britain’s offbeat scene spawned hits with cultish fan bases,
such as “Broken Sword”, a mystery adventure starring an American
puzzle-solver. This soon attracted the attention of industry giants. In
1997 Dundee’s Abertay University launched the world’s first
computer-game degree.
Britain is also good at making mobile games, which are more
accessible and cheaper to create than console blockbusters. Golf
Clash, the top-grossing sports-mobile game in America in 2021, was
made in less than a year by around 20 people in a leafy town in
Cheshire. Tripledot Studios, popular for its Solitaire game, is based in
London. In June it bought the mobile-games arm of AppLovin, a
Nasdaq-listed American tech firm, for $800m.

As the industry has grown, with exports increasing from $3.4bn in

2016 to $8.8bn in 2021, its benefits have become more evident. It
employs 30,000 or so developers, artists and composers and is
unusually productive. The gross value-added per video-games
worker is almost double the British average, according to
government data.

It is also a sector where Britain really is levelling up. Almost four-

fifths of video-game developers work outside London (clusters
tended to form around successful early studios and to reflect the
sector’s bedroom origins). Katie Goode, a burgundy-haired rocket
scientist turned games designer, runs her virtual-reality (VR ) studio
from north Cornwall—one of the country’s remotest corners. Hubs
have emerged in places like Dundee, Leamington Spa, Slough and
Teesside.

Britain has also begun to recognise gaming’s wider benefits. In the

right hands, gaming encourages learning, not laziness. Take Demis
Hassabis, known for starting DeepMind, an AI company bought by
Google for $600m in 2014. He attributes much of his success to
making a theme-park game as a teen in north London, and later
founding a games studio. VR is changing how doctors rehearse
surgery and how pilots train for take-off. The National Health Service
now prescribes games to treat anxiety and depression.

Yet the belated recognition comes at a tough time. Some issues are
specific to Britain. Gaming suffers from the same woes as British
tech more broadly: mainly a shortage of venture-capital funding.
Smaller studios that struggle to attract investment are unable to
scale up. Instead they are often snapped up by foreign buyers, such
as Tencent, a Chinese tech conglomerate, which bought Sumo
Group, a developer based in Sheffield, in 2022. “We’re incredibly
good at creating games,” says Sir Ian Livingstone, the first Briton
knighted for services to the industry. “We’re not so good at hanging
onto them.”

The second challenge is a global slowdown. The pandemic helped

gaming boom. Investors piled in, hoping to profit from millions of
housebound players. British exports grew by 259% between 2016
and 2021. But the surge led to overproduction. In July Microsoft,
maker of the Xbox, announced mass lay-offs in its gaming division,
leading to the cancellation of projects in Britain. Sony, a Japanese
publisher, closed its London studio in 2024.

At the industry’s biggest annual conference in Britain, held in July in

Brighton, the mood is subdued. Jobseekers wander the halls with
lanyards reading “seeking new opportunities” or “looking for work”.

Technological disruption adds to the unease. Gaming has long been

at the bleeding edge of tech—Nvidia made its GPU s for gamers long
before they were used on AI models. Alan Turing, a British computer
pioneer, created the world’s first algorithm capable of playing chess.
But many developers are wary of being displaced by machines. “A lot
of us feel like Luddites…we just want to start burning the textile
mills,” says one attendee in Brighton. One game on show lets players
explore the abandoned server of a failed studio, its fictional
founders’ ideas drowned in a tide of generic content, or “AI slop”.

Creative destruction

Yet as artists and disrupters have shown through the ages, in turmoil
lies opportunity. And Britain is uniquely well-placed to reap the
benefits. Some of the laid-off are starting their own studios, such as
Yasmina Fadel, who co-founded a games company after being made
redundant last year.

There are also signs that Britain is beginning to better value its
ideas. Licensing its distinctive IP to gaming developers helped turn
Games Workshop, the creator of “Warhammer”, into a FTSE 100
company in 2024 (it has focused on mid-size games). The
government’s new strategy includes a promise of funding through
the British Business Bank to help plug the venture-capital gap, and a
promise of a copyright scheme to protect firms’ IP from AI .

AI may end up increasing the value of British developers rather than

depleting it. It can boost productivity. At one studio in Brighton, a
level that once took 90 days to build now takes just ten, notes Nick
Poole of UK Interactive Entertainment, an industry body. “In a world
of synthetic material and AI -generated content,” the government’s
creative-industry strategy correctly identifies that “human endeavour
and creativity will be more important than ever.” The only way to
mitigate the threat of AI is to “tell great stories that haven’t been
told before”, notes Charles Cecil, the creator of “Broken Sword”.
What is exciting, he says, is that it is “playing to [British] strengths”.

In Brighton that is clearly on display. One arcade-style game, made

in Cornwall, stars a cat wielding a revolver and a samurai sword. In
“Atomfall”, players explore a post-apocalyptic Lake District, complete
with distinctive red British telephone boxes. “Thank Goodness You’re
Here”, a surreal indie hit, follows a travelling salesman through a
Yorkshire village as he helps residents free themselves from drains,
and bake oversize meat pies. “It captures a bit of the British soul,”
purred Le Monde. Only a human, arguably only a British human,
could dream up ideas like this. Eccentricity may well be Britain’s
greatest asset. ■

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Soccer stats

The Fantasy Premier League

is changing Britain’s favourite
sport
Football is becoming nerdier
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

Data with destiny

LIVERPOOL AGAINST Bournemouth on August 15th is the first Premier

League game since May 25th. Some dread the first whistle as the
end of 12 weeks of premier-football-free peace. For others those
three months have felt like a lifetime.
Among them are not just traditional fans but a new generation of
nerds—data obsessives who pore over metrics like PPDA (pressures
per defensive action), and compare players’ statistical
profiles. Outlets like the Athletic cater to them with reporting that
highlights, say, players in the 98th percentile for dribbling success.
Freelance analysts, or “tacticos”, make a career on social media
using data to explain how players fit different tactical systems.
Nowhere is this hunger for data keener than among participants in
the Fantasy Premier League (FPL ). The game, with more than 11m
players worldwide, is simple. Each week you pick a team of 11
players. If they do well in real life, you get points. Some rely on
intuition for team selection. They are not the ones who win. The
game is dominated by analytical types who obsess over the
“expected goals” (xG ) created, conceded, and converted.

xG is the poster boy of football’s data obsession. It uses data on

hundreds of thousands of shots to estimate a player’s chance of
scoring from various points on the pitch. Such metrics took off in the
mid-2000s, propelled by numerate hobbyists. It took years for the
football mainstream to recognise their value.

Football managers were insulted by the notion that speccy whizzkids

might know the game better than them. European football experts
resented the American investors, inspired by the stat-heavy
strategies of the most successful baseball teams, pushing this data
revolution. Some saw analytics as but another stage in the
gentrification of the working man’s game.

But football is about results. Liverpool’s embrace of data in the

2010s is often credited for enabling them to compete with
petrostate-owned Manchester City. “Yo-yo” clubs like Brighton and
Brentford, owned by gambling experts who were among the first to
enact a data-led strategy, have become established Premier League
outfits.

Over the past decade scouting departments have been overhauled,

and specialist coaches using analytics to perfect corner and throw-in
routines brought in. And fans are warming to data. Nathan Clark, an
analyst for the “Extra Inch”, a Tottenham Hotspur podcast, explains:
“Fans want to know why their club is losing games when they’re
losing them, and…why they’re winning them when they’re winning
them.”
Data are invaluable for an aspiring FPL player. By ascribing numerical
values to specific footballing actions, FPL turns a subjective game
into something more formulaic. Specialised FPL websites charge
players to access data tables. Influencers add context. Last season,
when asked if Nottingham Forest’s Chris Wood might be a good
choice for an upcoming week, one FPL expert replied: “Not when his
wife is eight and a half months pregnant.”

Some are still reluctant to accept data’s growing role. On social

media “proper football blokes” lament the “complete bollocks” of
metrics like “expected assists” (which measures the xG value created
by a pass). There will always be some holdouts, but the rise of data
is inexorable. “We’ve won the culture war,” proclaims Mr Clark, “for
better or worse.”■

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Foreign visitors

Asian tourists are returning to

Britain. But they look
different
No more coach parties
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | YORK

Expanded horizons

“YORK IS VERY famous. It’s a must-go place!” insists Yuxia, a tourist

from Beijing, who is growing frustrated with questions about why
she chose to visit a small city in northern England. She learned
about York by watching videos on TikTok, Xiaohongshu and other
social media. With impressive vigour, she has popped over from
Cumbria, some 120km away, for the day.
In 2019 fully 1.7m people visited Britain from China (excluding Hong
Kong) and India, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Although much less numerous than American or French visitors, the
Chinese in particular were loved for their free-spending ways and
because they visited from spring to autumn, not just in the summer.
The tourism industry was bereft when covid-19 drove the number of
Asian visitors almost to zero.

Now they are returning. Just over 1.1m visitors arrived from China
and India last year; the Grand Hotel in York says that Asian
customers are booking almost twice as many nights as they did in
2019. But the recovery in numbers is less striking than other
changes. Today’s Asian tourists seem to be younger than those who
came before the pandemic, and they behave differently.

North Yorkshire lies between London and Edinburgh, two obvious

destinations. Will Zhuang, who works with the York tourism agency,
says Chinese visitors also find it more unfamiliar and exotic than
London: “They come to Yorkshire and they say, ‘This is England.’”
That is important, because Chinese tourists now want to experience
something of British life, he says. No longer do they stream out of a
coach, take a few pictures and move on. These days they tend to
visit in small groups, and linger.

The change is also evident at Castle Howard, near York. The 18th-
century stately home has been famous in East Asia since Jay Chou, a
Taiwanese singer, held his wedding reception there in 2015. Ammie
Jones, head of sales at the house, says that Chinese visitors have
taken to buying tickets individually, rather than in big groups as they
did before the pandemic. They seem more patient and curious.
Castle Howard offers audio guides in nine languages. Chinese is the
third-most-popular, after English and German.

The most intrepid tourists from China, India and other Asian
countries make it across the North York Moors to Whitby, a seaside
town. Some are drawn by Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula”, which
mentions the town and its ruined medieval abbey, says Michelle
Brown of English Heritage, a charity. An added attraction in summer
is the chance to observe British holidaymakers as they engage in
traditional native customs such as fishing for barely edible crabs,
swimming in the frigid North Sea and working on their sunburns.

Elsewhere, Asian tourists are drawn to film locations. Polling for

VisitBritain, the national tourism promoter, found that 84% of
tourists from China and 79% of those from India (but only 47% of
those from France) visited somewhere they had seen in a film or TV
series. The Scottish Highlands still benefit from appearing in the
“Harry Potter” films of 2001 to 2011. A particularly popular spot,
Glen Nevis, appears in those films and in a Bollywood production,
“Bade Miyan Chote Miyan”, where it doubles as a Himalayan valley.

One reason why Asian tourists have become more independent is

that solo travellers and families can negotiate visa and other
bureaucratic restrictions more easily than big groups. The Chinese
government lifted many of its covid-era restrictions only in 2023.
Organised coach tours of Britain often take more than a year to put
together, so a recovery has been delayed. The whirlwind itineraries
of the past might yet return.

But the number of independent visitors could keep growing, too. To

judge by the accounts of Asian tourists in the Shambles, a
picturesque street in York, the habit of researching destinations by
watching videos on social media has become ingrained. The videos
could make tourists feel comfortable tackling stranger places.
Besides, some are visiting Britain for the second or third time. They
have seen London.■

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Falling off a cliff

Vaccinations to prevent
cervical cancer have
plummeted in Britain
Blame declining confidence, a lack of convenience and rising
complacency
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

HUMAN PAPILLOMAVIRUS (HPV ) is an unwelcome consequence of a

joyful pursuit. Skin-to-skin contact during sex allows the virus to
spread, which can lead to genital warts and cancers of the
reproductive system. In Britain HPV causes about 3,500 cases of
cervical cancer each year and 900 deaths. A vaccination programme
that inoculates against the virus—once a runaway success—is
floundering.

The HPV vaccine is given to children aged between 12 and 15 before

they are typically sexually active. Take-up in girls was around 90% in
the years up to 2017. Today the rate for year-nine girls is 74%, on a
par with Sierra Leone. In boys, who have been offered the jab for
five years, it has fallen by nine percentage points to 69%. In some
areas, such as Luton and Leicester, fewer than half of children are
vaccinated.

Vaccination rates have fallen in all of Britain’s child-immunisation

programmes, but the drop is sharpest for HPV . The evidence of the
vaccine’s efficacy is unequivocal: a study from Scotland in 2024
found no cases of cancer-causing HPV virus among women who
received it a decade earlier. The National Health Service (NHS ) wants
to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040, but says it needs to achieve a
90% vaccination rate by 2030. To do so means tackling the three C s
of vaccine hesitancy: confidence, convenience and complacency.

Confidence in vaccines was dented during the coronavirus pandemic.

Surveys conducted by the Vaccine Confidence Project (VCP ), a
research group, find that the share of respondents who agreed that
vaccines are “safe” and “important for children” declined sharply
during the pandemic in many countries, but the drop was especially
pronounced in Britain.
New survey data from the VCP on vaccine attitudes in Britain, shared
exclusively with The Economist, show that confidence in vaccines in
general has since improved. Among a representative sample of
adults, 85% agree that “in general, vaccines are safe”, 15
percentage points up on 2023. But when asked specifically about the
safety of the HPV vaccine, that figure drops to 74%.

Blame disinformation. Anti-vax parents allege that it causes ovarian

failure and other issues. In 2019 Robert F. Kennedy junior, now
America’s health secretary, called it “the most dangerous vaccine
ever invented”. Numerous studies have found that its adverse effects
are similar to, and no more frequent than, other common vaccines.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA ) says that the rates of
ovarian failure and other illnesses are no greater than would occur
naturally in adolescent girls.

Are today’s children affected by anti-vax views? Surveys of teenagers

show that they know where to seek information they trust about
vaccines: from their parents. Worryingly, the latest VCP survey shows
that middle-aged people (ie, the parents of teenagers) are among
the least likely to say the HPV vaccine is safe (see chart).

The HPV vaccine is administered in schools, but parents must sign a

form to consent to their child being inoculated. The UKHSA says that
many go unsigned, not because a parent actively objects but
because of a lack of convenience. It wants to tackle this by allowing
children to self-consent if the nurse giving the vaccine believes that
they are mature enough—though only one in five teenagers say they
alone should decide whether to get vaccinated, rising to one in three
by age 16.

Some parents worry that vaccination might affect their child’s

behaviour. Dr Tehseen Khan, a GP in the London borough of
Hackney, says Orthodox Jews he works with believe the vaccine is
unnecessary because their children will have only one lifelong
partner. Although there is no evidence that having the vaccine
changes sexual behaviour, some parents fear that it promotes
promiscuity. In Scotland, which (unlike England) publishes data by
ethnicity, Pakistani and Polish children have the lowest HPV
vaccination rates; white British and Chinese the highest.

Complacency may also lead children and parents to wonder why the
vaccine is necessary. Helen Bedford of University College London
says parents often ask: “Why do I need to get my child who is not
yet sexually active vaccinated against something which may or may
not happen to them in 20 or 30 years’ time?” Vaccination
programmes are often victims of their own success, making cervical
cancer less common and parents less worried about it.

The NHS recently launched a catch-up campaign, targeting some

400,000 women aged under 25 who did not get inoculated in school.
Whether they will get a jab may not be down to the facts. Margaret
Stanley at the University of Cambridge, whose research helped
develop the HPV vaccine, says at this stage you should “forget the
science, it’s all about the marketing.”■

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The Knowledge

Still want to be a London

cabbie?
Surprisingly, many do, and are prepared to study for the gruelling
test to become one
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | Camden

ASIF TUGS at his right cheek as he ponders how to navigate from

Holloway Road Station to the Quality Chop House, two miles away
on Farringdon Road. A dozen fellow students of the Knowledge of
London, the gruelling qualification required to drive one of the
capital’s famous black taxis, watch him squirm under the instructor’s
classroom interrogation, with another dozen listening in via a video
call. Eventually he concedes defeat and rejoins the onlooking
semicircle.
London’s cabbies have had a hard few years. Ride-hailing platforms
such as Uber upended the market, with satnav-equipped drivers who
no longer needed to memorise routes. Tighter environmental
standards pushed up the cost of vehicles. Councils blocked favourite
cut-throughs. Over half of London’s roads now have 20mph (32kph)
speed limits. Since 2017 the number of black-cab drivers has fallen
from about 25,000 to barely 16,500, according to Transport for
London (T fL ).

Before picking up their first passengers, all black-cab drivers must

pass the Knowledge, a 160-year-old test that involves memorising
more than 6,000 streets and points of interest within a six-mile
radius of Charing Cross. They also need to navigate between them
by the most direct route, as mileage helps determine fares.
Examiners can make things even harder by insisting on being set
down on a specific side of the road or impersonating customers with
heavy regional accents.
Surely satnav, augmented with live traffic insights, has made the
Knowledge an anachronism? Up to a point. Expert navigation is only
part of the purpose of the exam. It also serves to protect access to
what is in effect a 371-year-old guild.

Students are discouraged from using satnav. “Google Maps is full of

errors and often calculates routes which are the quickest,” says Gert
Kretov, an instructor at the Knowledge Point School. “We must learn
the shortest route.” He estimates that passing the Knowledge costs
£10,000 ($13,300) over two to three years, including classes and
renting a scooter, the favoured means of sussing out routes.
Another threat to cabbies now looms in the rear-view mirror: taxis
that don’t require a driver at all. From next spring the government
will allow pilot schemes for autonomous taxis to roam England’s
roads without human oversight. This brings the country into line
with China and American states including California and Texas,
where Tesla and Alphabet’s Waymo division are operating robotaxis.

A fleet of 15 autonomous Ford Mustangs (overseen by safety drivers

for now) is already venturing onto London’s roads from the King’s
Cross headquarters of Wayve, a British tech company that last year
raised over $1bn from Japan’s SoftBank and others. On a recent 15-
minute demo ride, it drove with a mix of calm and authority, like the
best taxi drivers. Wearing a crown of seven cameras, the car was
unfazed by pedestrians dawdling near zebra crossings, impatient
cyclists jumping red lights or road works blocking its path.
For all these challenges, a new generation of drivers is in training:
1,166 are currently studying the Knowledge, an increase from the
low of 759 students in 2022, according to T fL data. Unlike existing
drivers, who tend to be white, this new cohort is more ethnically
mixed. Many are Uber drivers seeking higher wages and freedom
from the ride-hailing apps. Students complain that the apps can pay
as little as £1 a mile; a typical black-cab fare might be five or six
times that. “We’re seeing more and more communities realising what
the earning potential is,” says Steve McNamara, general secretary of
the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association.

At the Knowledge Point School on a Tuesday evening in July, Robleh

Salah takes a break from studying the large laminated maps that line
the walls to explain that his main motivation is independence. A
former mechanic, he has been studying the Knowledge for three
years and is close to finally passing. His schedule is 11am to
midnight at the school, four days a week. He drives an Uber on the
other three days.
London’s transport authorities seem unsure how to treat taxi drivers.
The mayor has set a target that 80% of journeys should be made on
foot, by bike or with public transport by 2041 (though that figure has
never breached 64% since he announced the goal in 2018). Are
taxis to be nurtured as essential public infrastructure or punished
like private cars? “Anything on four wheels that isn’t a bus falls into
the 20%,” says Elly Baker, chair of the London Assembly’s transport
committee. “Taxis, as shared transport (because I think that’s how
they should be categorised), I think they’ve got the crappy end of
the stick.”

Where to, guv?

The future of London’s cabbies isn’t entirely black. In a recent

simplification of the Knowledge, T fL limited the list of locations to be
memorised. Ride-hailing apps have allowed their fares to rise—and
they have also introduced new clients to the convenience of taxis.
“There’s a whole generation of people, young people, who have
never got a bus,” notes Mr McNamara. “Uber did us a favour.”
Nowadays passengers can even book a black-cab ride through Uber.

Drivers are also sceptical that robotaxis will ever be able to navigate
central London’s roads, or that passengers will want them. “It will
take quite a while for your average Londoner to be comfortable with
not having somebody actually there,” reckons Ms Baker. For now,
however, the number of licensed cabbies keeps ticking lower. ■

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Bagehot

Aux barricades, boomers!

The rise of the revolutionary retiree
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

ONE BY ONE , the police plucked supporters of Palestine Action, a

banned terrorist organisation, from the crowd outside the Houses of
Parliament on August 9th. At 75 years old, Sir Jonathon Porritt, an
environmentalist, was fairly typical. About one in five of those
arrested was in their 70s. A frail 81-year-old was gingerly
shepherded away by three policewomen (“She’s got a stick!” shouted
one protester). She was not the only octogenarian. Fifteen 80-
somethings were carted away by the Metropolitan Police, compared
with only six teenagers. By day’s end 532 people had been arrested,
half of whom were over 60 years old.
An army of pensioners had gathered to protest against a silly law.
The government placed Palestine Action on a terror list in July after
its members vandalised two aeroplanes on a British air base. Most
were arrested for holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide”
(which is legal to say) and “I support Palestine Action” (which
contravenes section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000). Yet it revealed an
overlooked facet of British politics. At street protests, it is often the
boomers who are on the barricades.

Britain is an outlier when it comes to the politics of its elderly. In

other European countries, boomers are a bulwark against radicalism.
In France, for instance, Marine Le Pen struggles among pensioners.
In Britain, boomers are often ballast for radical parties or
movements. It was older voters who dragged Britain out of the
European Union. Pensioners provide the bedrock of Reform UK ’s
support. It is the same on the radical left, where octogenarians
outnumber teens in standing up against Britain’s, at times, deranged
anti-terror laws.

Politics is always more of an older person’s game than people think.

When Jeremy Corbyn took over the Labour Party, the image was of
young lefties flooding the party. In fact, the average age of new
joiners was 51. For all that Reform likes to boast about its TikTok
presence, it is the elderly who flock to its rallies when the Nigel
Farage Show rolls into town. When liberal England rebelled against
Britain’s departure from the EU , it was pensioners who led marches
through Whitehall, wearing blue berets covered in yellow stars.
Naturally, the designer of the “bEU ret” was an OAP .

Now the radical fringes of politics are dominated by aged agitators.

After all, the retired have the means to be there. Protest may be a
right. Being able to turn up is still a privilege. Who has the time and
money to travel to London, sit in the sun, be arrested, spend two
hours in a police tent and then spend the next few months worrying
whether the police will press charges?
And boomers are able to live with the consequences. For younger
people, a terror charge, however overblown, is not something one
wants on a CV . It is a heavy burden for someone in their 20s, but it
is a smaller deal for someone in their 80s. Those who turned up at
the weekend knew they would probably be arrested. Age, however,
brings a certain invincibility. “I’m retired so I’m not scared,” one
pensioner told a camera. “I won’t lose a job over it.”

If the young were radical in the 1960s, it was because they could
afford to be. Jenny Diski, who wrote a memoir about her activism in
the period, summed up the quid pro quo: “The underlying promise
was that after we had dropped out, we would be able to drop back
in.” Education, work and stability would follow. In more precarious
eras, such gay abandon is impossible for many. Only the old can
afford to rebel. The spirit of ’68 is held by those who are now 68.

Boomer impunity can result in more extreme actions. Older folk

made up a surprisingly large share of last summer’s riots, when
mobs gathered outside hotels full of asylum-seekers. Some of those
charged were well past 50; others were pensioners. “Get off me, I’m
fucking 70, you pricks,” shouted one rioter. The officer replied: “Then
why are you here? Why are you at a fucking riot?”

Yet the radicalisation of the old attracts little notice compared with
the panics about the young. “Adolescence”, a Netflix drama about a
13-year-old boy who stabs a girl to death after falling under the spell
of “toxic masculinity”, triggered weeks of political discourse. Sir Keir
Starmer, the prime minister, demanded it be shown in schools. Few
panic about the potential for a similar dynamic among the elderly,
even when memes rip through boomer WhatsApp chats, like
smallpox through an Inca village. Grannies on Parliament Square
have seen the same horrifying images from Gaza on social media as
their grandchildren.

Elderly extremists can be just as deadly as the more sprightly. Actual

terrorism is increasingly an older man’s game. Thomas Mair was 53
when he shot Jo Cox, a Labour MP , just before the Brexit
referendum, after devouring racist memes online. In 2022 Andrew
Leak firebombed a migrant centre in Dover after a similar spiral. At
66, he had just qualified for his state pension.

Old, wild and free

The fiscal problems of an ageing population are well-covered; its

strange political consequences less so. A group of voters are able to
live an insulated, consequence-free existence, with the mortgage
repaid, pension guaranteed and children off the books. Radicalisation
can affect all voters, but Britain’s boomers have the time and the
money to act on it.

Rebellion while young can be cut short. Prosaic life admin—bills,

children, work—sometimes makes it impossible. But once such
burdens have disappeared, it can flower again. There is no reason
for it not to stay in bloom. The 60-, 70- and 80-year-olds on
Parliament Square are too old to grow up. And why should they
when righteous rebellion is such fun? Photographers caught the
moment one of the eldest activists was arrested. An 89-year-old
woman in a beige bucket hat was carried away by the police,
surrounded by paparazzi. In at least one picture she was beaming. ■

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International
America’s new plan to fight a war with
China
Rumble in the jungle :: Readying for a rumble in the jungle

The end of the second world war

Archive 1945 :: How The Economist reported on the war, week by week

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Rumble in the jungle

America’s new plan to fight a

war with China
Readying for a rumble in the jungle
8月 14, 2025 03:52 上午 | TINIAN AND GUAM

IT COULD BE a giant archaeological dig. Bulldozers tear at the jungle

to reclaim the history of the second world war and its dark finale:
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this
month. The work on Tinian, a speck in the Pacific Ocean, has
exposed the four runways of North Field. Glass protects the cement
pits where Little Boy and Fat Man, the first and only atom bombs
used in war, were loaded onto American B -29s. For a time Tinian
was the largest air base in the world, but it was soon mostly
abandoned.
With China as its new rival, America is reviving old wartime facilities
across the Pacific. Tinian once allowed its bombers to smash
Japanese cities. These days China wields the long spear: it has built
up a vast stockpile of missiles that can blast American bases in the
region. Any war between the superpowers would be a cataclysm.
And both now have nuclear weapons.

As in the cold war, nuclear worries go hand in hand with

preparations for conventional conflict. The air force is expanding
Tinian’s small commercial airport as a backup landing place. On the
day your correspondent visited, two F -22 jets—America’s most
capable fighters—took off with a deafening roar. Crews huddled in
tents as C -130 transporters brought gear.

The fighters had deployed from Alaska for the recently concluded
REFORPAC exercise—part of the biggest air-force war game in the
Pacific since the cold war—involving more than 400 aircraft and 50
locations thousands of miles apart. It demonstrated America’s ability
to bring forces quickly from the American mainland. It was also a
test of “Agile Combat Employment” (ACE ), a doctrine of hide-and-
seek whereby American aircraft disperse to small bases to survive
attacks by China, rejoin in the air to punch back and then scatter
again—like a murmuration of starlings.
Because of China’s reach, the air force can no longer mass its planes
in big bases close to the action, as it has done in recent decades. It
must plan to survive and fight throughout China’s deep “kill zone”,
learning from the island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific war and
more recent conflicts. Ukraine has shown how, even under relentless
attack, its planes can keep fighting by hiding and moving. America
intends to do the same on a grand scale. “In a peer conflict our
airmen will be under constant threat,” explains General David Allvin,
the chief of the air force. “We must be lethal and agile, aggregating
for effect and disaggregating for survival.”

Even so, it faces formidable difficulties, including the vastness of the

Pacific; the density of China’s firepower; the paucity of usable
airfields; the shortage of bomb-proof hangars; the vulnerability of
air-refuelling tankers; the complexity of logistics; and the disruption
of data networks.

China would be fighting mostly in its backyard, within the “first

island chain” that runs from Japan to Malaysia—with Taiwan, about
100 miles away, at its heart (see map). Most American forces would
be rushing in from the far side of the vast ocean, thousands of miles
away. Many of China’s ballistic missiles have a greater range than
the usual combat radius of America’s fighter jets (typically 500-600
nautical miles, or nm).
Calculations for The Economist by Timothy Walton of the Hudson
Institute, an American think-tank, illustrate the challenge. His model
suggests China could rain about 2,000 bombs or missiles a day on
targets within 500nm, including hundreds on Kadena, a big American
air-force base in Okinawa. It could simultaneously drop some 450
munitions a day over the second island chain, including Guam and
its vital complex of bases, 1,600nm away; 60-odd over important
rear bases in Alaska; and perhaps a score a day over faraway places
such as Hawaii, the headquarters of America’s Indo-Pacific
Command (INDOPACOM ), 3,600nm back. Missiles can strike quickly
and accurately, though most munitions would in fact be delivered by
aircraft. (These theoretical figures assume that no planes or missiles
are shot down, and Chinese facilities are not attacked.)

Ride into the danger zone

There are relatively few good landing spots east of the first island
chain before reaching the continental United States. Mr Walton
counts just 21 in American and allied territories with the runways,
aprons and fuel supplies to take tankers, bombers and larger
aircraft. Smaller fighter jets could use up to 125 airfields, but most
are farther from China than their usual range, even with air-to-air
refuelling. All this assumes host countries would grant permission for
“ABO ”—access, basing and overflight—and risk China’s wrath.

Aircraft-carriers, which helped win the Pacific war and have

symbolised American power ever since, are increasingly vulnerable
to China’s long-range “carrier-killer” missiles, such as the DF -26B
with a range of more than 2,000nm. Unlike carriers, which may sink
when struck, airfields can be repaired, often within hours.

Thus the importance of Tinian. Its four new runways, once

refurbished, will provide valuable alternatives to the two at Andersen
air base on Guam, and two more that have been refurbished nearby.
The air force, which says it just needs “places, not bases” to make
ACE work, is concentrating on dispersal and improved air-defence
systems for the likes of Guam. But the more it scatters, the more
places it must defend.

American think-tanks say it is neglecting passive defences such as

hardened aircraft shelters made of concrete. Portable pop-up
shelters that can stop shrapnel would be useful, too, since China
would have to fire more missiles to hit all of them, including empty
ones, in a high-stakes shell game. Generals talk of dispersing planes
within airfields and “flushing the force” by getting planes in the air
before a missile can strike.

And yet, even during the ACE exercise, about two dozen fighter jets
were parked close together in the open in Guam—convenient for
pilots and ground crews, but an easy target for missiles. Similar
concerns apply to fuel dumps and, indeed, ground crews. It is also
unclear how far the air force is responding to newer threats,
exemplified by Ukraine’s use of lorry-launched drones to destroy
Russian bombers thousands of miles from the front.

In a war, America would fire at Chinese ships crossing the Taiwan

Strait and other targets with long-range bombers, submarines and
ground units lurking on islands. It would require vast amounts of air-
to-air refuelling. Yet tankers and bombers are precious assets and,
apart from the B -2, easy to see on radar. Moreover, America’s tanker
fleet is more than 50 years old, on average. Mr Walton says China is
optimising missile warheads to seek big planes such as tankers and
airborne radars. Most may have to be held far back. But the farther
planes must commute to war, the less effective they are.

Hiding and moving complicates China’s targeting, but also America’s

logistical task. Fuel, crews and spare parts must be brought to the
right place at the right time. Supply convoys would be juicy targets.
Logisticians are thinking about how to move them through safer
routes, via Australia. 3D -printing of spares in theatre will help, as will
artificial intelligence. The lesson of the second world war, notes
General Kevin Schneider, the head of Pacific Air Forces, is that
“logistics and sustainment are absolutely key to generating air
power.”

Co-ordinating an ever-shifting military kaleidoscope requires robust

command-and-control systems. Combatants will seek to wreck each
other’s data systems, not least by attacking satellites. Even so, top
brass argue, data flows may be degraded but not permanently
severed. Units will have “windows” of connectivity. Above all, they
will rely on “mission command”, the ability to act without explicit
orders in line with the commander’s intent. That initiative, say
generals, gives America an advantage over rigidly controlled Chinese
forces.

Is that enough to win? China may not need to defeat America, only
hold it at bay for long enough to take Taiwan. War games suggest
that, as China runs out of long-range munitions, American forces
could move closer and defeat a landing, albeit at great cost. But
America is short, too, and China’s greater industrial capacity may
give it the means to outlast America.

Out along the edges

David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation, another think-tank,

reckons China has enough firepower to overwhelm airfields in the
first island chain for as long as needed, and may soon be able to do
so in the second chain. He argues that, close in, the air force must
shift to drones that do not need runways. These would be bigger
than the hand-held quadcopters ubiquitous in Ukraine, or even the
loitering munitions that INDOPACOM is thinking of to create a
“hellscape” for China near Taiwan. Air-combat drones with greater
range, sensors and even weapons could be fired from rails, lorries or
rockets, he argues.
The air force is far from giving up on pilots, though this year it will
start testing prototypes of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA ), a
drone that for now will use runways and be controlled by crewed
aircraft to augment their firepower. Yet even if drones can be made
“runway independent”, they will still need ground crews, fuel and
munitions.

For all the Trump administration’s boasts of a trillion-dollar defence

budget, it has provided only a sugar rush in its “Big Beautiful Bill”.
Its core defence-budget request is flat, ie, a cut after inflation.

After Tinian’s capture in 1944, construction teams started building

North Field. B -29s were using it within six months. The modern
restoration is slower. Eighteen months after starting work, engineers
are still clearing vegetation. When might the first F -22 be able to use
it? Enveloped in smoke and rain, the officer in charge shrugs. China’s
leader, Xi Jinping, wants his armed forces ready to invade Taiwan by
2027. America, though, is still preparing for war with a peacetime
mindset. ■
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Archive 1945

The end of the second world

war
How The Economist reported on the war, week by week
8月 14, 2025 07:04 上午

THE POST -1945 order is crumbling. Donald Trump, who holds a

warped, America-First view of history, trashes the transatlantic
alliance formed to keep peace after the second world war. In June
he belittled the role of America’s allies in defeating Nazi Germany.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, exploits the Soviet Union’s
wartime past to fuel nationalist support for his invasion of Ukraine.
On September 3rd he will join Xi Jinping in Beijing for China’s Victory
Day parade. Don’t expect a sombre commemoration. China’s leader
wants a sabre-rattling pageant of military might.
Every week since January, The Economist has republished excerpts
from its archive—a time capsule of how we reported on the final
year of a war that transformed the world order.

January 1945: Deadlock in Europe

“The year 1945 is opening gloomily for the Allies.” Locked in the
Battle of the Bulge with Germany, hopes of a quick end to the war
were lost.

January 1945: Germany’s war machine

The Nazis used eastern Europe as a factory hub. As the Red Army
advanced it would land “a very severe blow to Germany’s war
industry”.

February 1945: Conference in the Crimea

“The world’s triumvirate” of America, Britain and the Soviet Union
met in Yalta to weigh the “last stages of the war and the first steps
of the peace”.

April 1945: Gangsters’ end

“Mussolini is dead. So, according to general belief, is Hitler, though
the world has not yet been given the spectacle of his corpse...kicked
around the streets as proof of death.”

June 1945: Bavarian roads

Meetings between German soldiers and survivors of Nazi camps
were “a cross-section of the great problems of Germany and
Europe”.

August 1945: Victory in the east

“The bombs which wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki stopped the
war”, but started “a new age in human history”. Japan was defeated.

On August 15th, as The Economist went to press, North and South

Korea marked the anniversary of the peninsula’s liberation from
Japan, now a staunch American ally. Earlier this month Japan
commemorated America’s nuclear attacks. The Philippines will mark
its liberation on September 3rd.

The geopolitics of modern Asia was forged in 1945. The atomic

bomb, now wielded by both China and North Korea, casts an
especially long shadow. Taiwan, occupied by Japan during the war, is
today the world’s most worrying flashpoint. At the most dangerous
time since 1945, it pays to look back. ■
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Business
How AI could create the first one-person
unicorn
The rise of the “solopreneur” :: The technology is allowing entrepreneurs to start and
grow businesses on their own

Japan’s carmakers are trying to tinker their

way out of tariff pain
The Toyota Way :: Clever optimisation will only get them so far

A 400-year-old Chinese cough syrup is

winning over Westerners
Herbal essences :: Young shoppers in particular are going gaga for Nin Jiom Pei Pa
Koa

Italian bosses want Giorgia Meloni to hurry

up with reform
Step on the gas :: Will she squander her chance?

A new wave of clean-energy innovation is

building
Different shades of green :: Donald Trump’s attacks on wind and solar will not stop it

Should you trust that five-star rating on

Airbnb?
Bartleby :: How to make sense of online customer reviews

Trump wants to command bosses like Xi

does. He is failing
Schumpeter :: His dealings with business borrow from China’s playbook

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The rise of the “solopreneur”

How AI could create the first

one-person unicorn
The technology is allowing entrepreneurs to start and grow
businesses on their own
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午 | LOS ANGELES

SARAH GWILLIAM is neither a software engineer nor—by her own

admission—someone who “speaks AI ”. But after her father died
recently she got the spark of an idea for creating a generative
artificial-intelligence startup that would help others like her handle
their grief and sort out their late loved ones’ affairs. Call it wedding
planning for funerals.
Her firm, Solace, is still more of an early-stage startup than an
established business. But apart from herself, almost no human being
is helping her build it. She has joined an AI -powered incubator,
called Audos, which decided that her idea was promising. Its bots
helped to set her up online and on Instagram. If her idea works out,
the incubator will not only provide capital; its AI agents will support
Ms Gwilliam with product development, sales, marketing and back-
office work, all in exchange for a royalty. She does not need staff. In
effect, AI helped her co-found the company. “I can’t tell you how
empowering it was,” she says.

As is its custom, Silicon Valley has already coined a neologism that

describes single founders like Ms Gwilliam: they are “solopreneurs”.
In tech circles, there are bets on which of them is likely to create the
first single-person unicorn—an unlisted firm worth more than $1bn.
Some hope that generative AI will make starting a business so cheap
and hassle-free that anyone will be able to become an entrepreneur
much as anyone can become a YouTuber—a breath of fresh air in
America’s concentrated business landscape. Whether people like Ms
Gwilliam will be able to escape the suffocating grip of the tech
giants, however, is another matter.

Technological revolutions have a habit of shaking up the way firms

do business. The increased importance of machinery combined with
the expansion of transport networks in the late 19th century led to
the rise of giant corporations. Ronald Coase, a British economist,
argued in his 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm” that their
existence was a testament to the efficiency of consolidating and
managing work within the confines of a business, rather than
outsourcing activities to the market. That, however, began to change
thanks to digital communication. Not only could companies more
easily outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost
countries. They could also rely on internet platforms like Google for
marketing and Amazon Web Services for computing.
The rise of AI could well accelerate the trend, as semi-autonomous
agents provided by Silicon Valley enable firms to perform the same
amount of work with fewer employees. Henrik Werdelin, who co-
founded Audos, says that the rise of cloud computing helped him
start several new businesses over the past 20 years or so with little
more than the swipe of a credit card to get going. He describes AI as
the next wave in that “democratisation”. “You don’t need to code,
you don’t need to be able to use Photoshop, because you can get AI
to help with that.” This, he hopes, will give rise to a flood of startups
built by people like Ms Gwilliam with no background in technology
but who have identified real problems to solve.

Another evangelist is Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School. It

now offers a leadership course for executives in which they use
generative AI to build a snack-food company in 90 minutes, using
the technology to perform customer research, generate recipes, find
suppliers and design packaging. In a recent paper, Mr Lakhani and
his co-authors presented a field trial in which 776 professionals at
Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods company, were asked to
address a real business need either individually or in two-person
teams, with and without using generative-AI tools. It found that AI
significantly boosted performance, helping individuals with AI match
the performance of teams without it. AI proved to be more of a
“teammate” than a tool.
With the era of free money over, entrepreneurs are eager to find
ways to keep costs down. Peter Walker of Carta, which helps
startups manage equity ownership, says that founders used to boast
about how many employees they had. “Now it’s a badge of honour
to say, ‘look how few people work for me’.” According to Carta’s data,
the typical period it takes founders to hire their first employee after
their startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in
2022 to more than nine months in 2024 (see chart). Base44, an AI
coding startup, was recently sold to Wix, a web-development
platform, for $80m. It had just eight employees.

It is early days, of course. For one thing, AI agents are far from
foolproof. In June Anthropic, an AI lab, revealed the results of an
experiment in which its Claude Sonnet model operated a vending
machine at the firm’s headquarters. The bot’s goal was to avoid
bankruptcy. It was good at identifying suppliers and adapting to user
requests (including hunting for a tungsten cube mischievously
requested by one employee). But it ignored lucrative opportunities,
hallucinated, offered too many discounts and ultimately failed to
make money.

Other forces may also get in the way of an AI -infused surge in

entrepreneurship. Despite the growth of the internet, social media,
software-as-a-service and cloud computing over recent decades,
business formation in America was anaemic until the pandemic—the
result in part of an ageing population. That demographic pressure
will only intensify.

For all the promise of generative AI , it poses problems for

entrepreneurs, too. Annabelle Gawer of the University of Surrey
notes that although the technology lowers barriers to entry for new
businesses, it also makes it easier to quickly copy ideas. Unless a
founder has unique expertise in their domain, that may make it
harder to sustain a competitive advantage.

Moreover, the provision of AI tools is dominated by tech giants and

the labs they invest in, such as OpenAI , backed by Microsoft, and
Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google. Ms Gawer draws an
analogy with the rise of cloud computing in the 2010s, which those
three tech giants dominate. Although that infrastructure has made
life easier for startups, it has also left them dependent on the cloud
triumvirate, which has been able to capture a good share of the
value these firms have generated. Last year the trio’s net profits
were equivalent to 7% of America’s total, up from 2% a decade
before.

Another possibility is that the tech giants could pinch smaller

companies’ best ideas. For now, Ms Gwilliam of Solace is sanguine.
What she calls “first-mover disadvantage” could be “a bummer”, but
it could also validate her idea. “Maybe they’ll come to me and say,
‘We want Solace.’ And then I’ll be, like, ‘Great, sold!’” Just like a
typical entrepreneur, then. ■
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The Toyota Way

Japan’s carmakers are trying

to tinker their way out of
tariff pain
Clever optimisation will only get them so far
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

EVER SINCE Toyota entered America in the 1950s, the country has
been a vital market for it. The carmaker, which sells more vehicles
worldwide than any other, hawks around a quarter of its cars there.
That makes President Donald Trump’s 15% tariff on Japanese
vehicles a big problem, considering that only around half of the cars
Toyota sells in America are made in the country (see chart). In an
earnings call on August 7th, Japan’s most valuable company said
that American duties cost it ¥450bn ($3bn) in the three months to
June. For its full fiscal year it expects the impact to be close to
$10bn, the biggest hit reported so far by any carmaker.
Toyota could, of course, pass tariffs on to consumers through higher
prices. But this brings with it the risk of losing market share to
competitors that choose not to do so. Instead, the company is
relying on one of Japan Inc’s great strengths: obsessive tinkering. In
the second quarter it revealed a ¥305bn boost to operating profit
from various efforts to optimise its business, offsetting around two-
thirds of the tariff hit. That included a mix of cost-cutting, marketing
to boost sales, particularly of more profitable vehicles, and measures
to earn more from add-on services, such as car parts and vehicle
financing.

Toyota is not the only Japanese carmaker pursuing such efforts.

Mazda, which also generates a sizeable share of its sales from
America, is pruning costs and shifting what cars it sells where to lift
profits. It reckons it can offset nearly three-quarters of the tariff hit.
Subaru, which sells more than 70% of its cars in America, is also
busily pursuing measures to mitigate the duties. Nissan, whose
troubles predate Mr Trump’s tariffs, is in the middle of a sweeping
overhaul of its business.

Eventually, however, Japan’s carmakers may run out of ideas to

boost profits. Cox Automotive, a consultancy, reckons carmakers
both foreign and domestic have already incurred more than $25bn in
tariff obligations on vehicles imported into America so far this year,
equivalent to a little over $5,000 per vehicle. Even for cars made in
the country, duties on imported parts and materials such as steel are
adding to costs. In time the fear of losing market share will run up
against the need to make selling cars in the world’s second-largest
market profitable.

Shifting more manufacturing to America, as Mr Trump desires, would

be another solution. For those carmakers with limited production in
America, assembling more vehicles there may make sense. Subaru
suggested earlier this year that it might expand production at its
factory in Indiana. Japanese carmakers have long tended to suffer
from a home-production bias. Toyota, for example, sold around a
seventh of its cars in Japan last year, but made around a third of
them there, which is hardly a cheap place to manufacture. American
tariffs may encourage a rethink.

Yet that would require much more clarity on future tariffs than has
so far been given. Building factories can take years. Once
completed, they should last for decades. Mr Trump’s duties, by
contrast, seem to change every few weeks. That makes it difficult for
Japan’s carmakers to commit to any lasting changes to their
production footprint. The upshot is likely to be ever more tinkering—
and, in time, pricier cars for Americans. ■

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Herbal essences

A 400-year-old Chinese cough

syrup is winning over
Westerners
Young shoppers in particular are going gaga for Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa
8月 14, 2025 03:55 上午 | Hong Kong

THE RECIPE for Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa has not changed since it was
first concocted in the 1600s. Yet the sweet Chinese cough syrup,
which has the colour and consistency of mud, is enjoying a renewed
surge in popularity. Sales rose by almost a third between 2019 and
2024, reaching 635m yuan ($88m) last year. Those coughing up for
the syrup are not just in China, but increasingly in the West, too.
Pei Pa Koa, as it is known, can now be found in more than 20
countries. Bottles of the medicine, which includes ingredients such
as loquat leaf and pomelo peel, go for around $5 in pharmacies in
Hong Kong, where it is mostly manufactured. But they fetch around
three times that price when sold through third parties on Amazon,
an e-emporium, in America.

The enthusiasm has been particularly infectious among young

people. Worldwide Google searches for Pei Pa Koa rose by a quarter
last year; tutorials on how to administer it have racked up millions of
views on TikTok, a short-video app. Western celebrities have
espoused Pei Pei Koa’s benefits: Zayn Malik, a singer for One
Direction, a now-disbanded pop group, has praised the cough
syrup’s ability to soothe scratchy vocal cords, as have Cynthia Erivo
and Jonathan Bailey, two actors in last year’s film adaptation of the
musical “Wicked”.

Traditional Chinese medicines have been steadily gaining interest in

the West, spurred on in part by the social-media craze for
“biohacking”, which focuses on improving health through
experimental—and often spurious—fads. Chugging herbal cough
syrups is but one example (Pei Pei Koa is unlikely to receive the
blessing of America’s Food and Drug Administration any time soon).
Ancient Chinese healing techniques such as gua sha (rubbing
coloured rocks on your face) are also all the rage among young
Westerners, with social-media tutorials likewise accruing vast
numbers of views.

As for Pei Pa Koa, stubborn coughs are not its only enemy. In 2020
America revoked Hong Kong’s special customs status, meaning
products imported from the territory are now subject to the same
duties as those from the mainland. Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese
goods—including a 30% levy that was extended for another 90 days
on August 12th—will translate into higher shelf prices for American
fans of Pei Pei Koa. Herbal remedies are particularly vulnerable to
tariffs: many of the syrup’s ingredients come from China and cannot
be sourced elsewhere. There will be little relief for as long as the
trade war lasts. ■

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Step on the gas

Italian bosses want Giorgia

Meloni to hurry up with
reform
Will she squander her chance?
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | MILAN

No time to waste

THE FOREST of cranes along the skyline of Milan attests to the

construction boom that is under way in the financial capital of Italy.
Rich foreigners have lately been flocking to the city, drawn not only
by the promise of la dolce vita, but by the country’s annual flat tax
of €200,000 ($230,000) on worldwide income. Yet Italy as a whole
continues to stagnate. The economy has barely grown over the past
decade. In June the national statistics bureau downgraded its
forecast for growth this year from a measly 0.8% to an even more
paltry 0.6%.

Italian business leaders want Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, to

pick up the pace of reform. She has now been in power for almost
three years, a rare feat in a country with such unstable politics. She
has succeeded in keeping her three-party coalition government
together while deftly handling Italy’s foreign relations. “Now she has
a once-in-a-lifetime chance to implement internal reforms,” says
Andrea Bonomi, chairman of Investindustrial, a private-equity firm.

Ms Meloni’s record in the eyes of Italy SpA has so far been mixed.
She was roundly criticised for scuppering a proposed merger
between UniCredit and Banco BPM , two banks, which fell apart last
month as a result of opposition from the government. But she has
been making an effort to cut the red tape that is strangling Italian
companies, including by shortening the delay they encounter when
resolving disputes and recovering debts. Ms Meloni has also
launched a commission to come up with reforms to the tax code,
and another to look into changes to the financial rulebook known as
the Testo Unico della Finanza (TUF ).

Rather than a simple reduction in the headline corporate-tax rate,

some bosses have been arguing for incentives to spur growth. Ms
Meloni’s government has cut the tax credits for innovation, from
10% to 5%, and intangible investment, from 15% to nothing. “The
government made a grave error,” says Corrado Passera, a former
economy minister who runs Illimity, a bank specialised in lending to
smaller Italian firms. Others want changes to payroll taxes. Angelica
Donati, boss of Donati Immobiliare, a construction business, says
that employers’ social-security contributions are a big problem for
her industry. These amount to around 40% of the employee’s gross
salary, compared with only around 30% in Spain, for instance.
Reforming the TUF , including simplifying public listings, could also
give a much needed boost to Italy’s capital markets. Most local
companies rely on banks for finance, rather than the stockmarket.
The total market value of investible Italian shares is around €660bn,
roughly a fifth as much as in Britain. A dearth of opportunities, in
turn, leads investors to look elsewhere. Shallow capital markets is
one of the reasons why Italy has fewer big businesses than other
large European countries. Only five of the world’s 500 biggest
companies by revenue hail from the country, according to Fortune, a
magazine, compared with nine from Spain, a smaller economy, and
30 from Germany. Among Europe’s 20 most valuable companies,
none is listed in Italy.

The country also still lags behind when it comes to the use of private
credit, which offers more flexible terms than conventional bank
lending. Only around a quarter of debt transactions in Italy are
financed this way, compared with an average of 60% across the
European Union and as much as 90% in the Netherlands. There are,
however, signs this is changing. This year, for example, Carlyle, an
American private-equity firm, and Arcmont, an asset manager based
in London, lent €470m to Bianalisi, a medical-diagnostics business.

Giorgia on their mind

Plenty of bosses praise Ms Meloni. “She is a pragmatic leader who

understands the needs of business, in particular small business,”
says Ms Donati. But others still worry that she will be swayed by
Fratelli d’Italia, her party, which is sceptical of free markets. The
prime minister has between now and the next election in 2027 to
prove her doubters wrong. ■

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Different shades of green

A new wave of clean-energy

innovation is building
Donald Trump’s attacks on wind and solar will not stop it
8月 14, 2025 05:56 上午 | Torrance and San Jose

MAKE YOUR way around the busy warehouses of Torrance, near the
twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and you will find an
unexpected sight. Dozens of electrified 18-wheelers belonging to
Maersk, a Danish logistics firm, are hooked up to fast chargers. The
lorries are tapping into electricity from linear generators, which are
more efficient, and thus greener, than traditional rotating ones.
These generators are the product of Mainspring, a Californian
startup that has raised over $250m this year.
Its success may be surprising amid what seem like dark times for
climate tech. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB ) act,
signed last month, stripped away subsidies for solar and wind power
in America. Next week the Treasury Department is due to unveil tax
guidance that will clarify just how damaging the law will be for these
industries. Orsted, a Danish offshore-wind developer, saw its shares
plunge on August 11th when it said that it would raise $9bn of
equity to shore up its finances as Mr Trump’s aversion to the
technology weighs on project valuations.
Look past wind and solar, however, and the picture is brightening for
other forms of green-energy innovation. Global equity funding for
climate-tech firms plunged in 2023 amid rising interest rates. But
investment has recently been climbing back up, rising by nearly
60%, year on year, in the first half of 2025, according to
BloombergNEF , a data provider (see chart). There are good reasons
to believe that the next few years will see the emergence of a new
wave of innovative clean technologies.

The first cause for optimism is, strangely enough, the OBBB itself,
which solidifies American support for certain novel energy
technologies preferred by Republicans, even as it withdraws it for
solar and wind. The law extends tax credits for, among other things,
linear generators, geothermal energy, fuel cells, which can produce
electricity using various possible fuels, and new types of nuclear
power. Tim Latimer, the boss of Fervo, a startup based in Texas
which uses fracking techniques to harness geothermal energy, notes
that the law provides the long-term, bipartisan certainty his firm
needs.

At a time when politicians have become increasingly concerned

about energy security, such technologies have the added benefit of
reducing dependence on imports, whether of oil, minerals or solar
panels. That impulse is also strong in Europe, which wants to shed
its reliance on Russian gas while continuing to decarbonise.

A final force behind the new wave of green-energy innovation is

America’s tech giants, which are struggling to find sufficient power
for their data centres. Rich Powell, head of the Clean Energy Buyers
Association, which represents large power users with a green
mindset, says that its members are “now investing in the next wave
of climate tech”, having played a pivotal role in scaling solar and
wind over the past decade. New forms of nuclear power are
particularly popular among the tech firms; Amazon and Google have
both signed deals with startups developing small-modular reactors.
Stationary fuel cells like those made by Bloom Energy, a Californian
company that has seen its share price rise by over 80% this year,
are another option. Last month it announced a deal to supply its
technology to Oracle, a software company that is investing heavily in
building cloud infrastructure. At a vast data centre in San Jose,
banks of the fuel cells silently provide power that is not just cleaner
but also more flexible and reliable than that of traditional generators.
Before long such sights may well be commonplace. ■

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Bartleby

Should you trust that five-star

rating on Airbnb?
How to make sense of online customer reviews
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午

IT’S SUMMER in the northern hemisphere. And as holidaymakers

travel to unfamiliar places, that means demand for online customer
reviews. Want to find a restaurant that won’t give everyone food
poisoning, or the perfect accommodation for a city break, or a
mosquito repellent that actually works? Whether you are looking on
Tripadvisor, Airbnb or Amazon, you will almost certainly be guided by
reviews from other people. Should you be?
The short answer is yes: better to have some information than none.
But the flaws of online reviews are evident. For products with some
objective measures of quality, there is a big gap between the views
of punters and experts. A study in 2016 by Bart de Langhe of Vlerick
Business School, in Belgium, and his co-authors found that user
ratings for 1,272 items listed on Amazon.com bore little relation to
either the verdict of Consumer Reports, an American product-testing
organisation, or to their resale value.

That might be because consumers place greater value on more

subjective things like a product’s brand. But if ratings are based on
subjective criteria, then another problem arises: what if your tastes
differ from other people’s? The best book ever, according to
members of GoodReads, an online community of bibliophiles, is “The
Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins. You may agree, but plenty of
people do not.

Another problem is that the people who bother to leave reviews and
ratings may not be representative of consumers as a whole. In a
study published in 2020, Verena Schoenmueller of Esade, a business
school in Spain, and her co-authors examined the distribution of
ratings left in around 280m reviews of more than 2m products and
services on 25 different platforms. They broadly confirm a familiar
pattern: a polar distribution of ratings, with more of them at the
extremes of the scale than in the middle, and a skew towards more
positive ratings.

There are lots of theories as to why online reviews follow this

pattern. People who have chosen to buy something are already more
likely to be satisfied with it. Extreme experiences, good and bad, are
more likely to prompt reviews. Some write-ups are not real:
estimates of the prevalence of fake reviews vary but they are
certainly a problem, and one which generative AI may make worse.

The type of platform matters, too. Sharing-economy markets have a

different feel. You could leave a four-star review for your Airbnb stay,
but now that you have established a relationship with the hosts, and
since they are also rating you, it’s much easier to just award five. A
paper by Georgios Zervas of Boston University and his co-authors,
last updated in 2020, found that average ratings for Airbnb
properties are consistently higher than those for hotels on
Tripadvisor.

In theory, businesses have an interest in soliciting as representative

a sample of reviews as possible. Honest customer feedback is the
best way to spot and fix problems, after all. In practice, the
importance of good ratings, particularly for firms that are struggling
for visibility, is an incentive for jiggery-pokery. A study from 2013 by
Dina Mayzlin of the University of Southern California and her co-
authors suggested, for example, that small, independently owned
hotels generated more positive fake reviews on Tripadvisor than
branded hotel chains.

If the incentives of businesses and consumers do not always align,

then platforms have an interest in ensuring that reviews are as
informative as possible. Weighting scores by the number of reviews
that a customer writes could help mitigate the problem of polarity;
Ms Schoenmueller’s research suggests that the more reviews a
person writes, the less extreme their ratings.

But consumers can also help themselves. Mr de Langhe’s research

suggests that people put too much weight on the overall average
rating. The absolute number of reviews is a better indicator of actual
popularity. And it is the detail in a review that tells you whether the
person writing it prefers dystopian young-adult fiction to other
genres, or whether a diner values buzz or the ability to hear
themselves think. Reviews, then, are even more useful if you read
them. ■

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Schumpeter

Trump wants to command

bosses like Xi does. He is
failing
His dealings with business borrow from China’s playbook
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午

IGNORE FOR a moment Donald Trump’s shakedown of Nvidia, in

which he has allowed the world’s most valuable firm to resume
limited exports of its artificial-intelligence (AI ) chips to China in
return for giving a 15% cut of the proceeds to Uncle Sam. Think
instead of the argument about whether it is wise to let China have
access to one of America’s most coveted technologies.
One side of the debate wants to flood China’s market. By permitting
Nvidia to resume exports of its dumbed-down H 20s, the argument is
that it will reduce the incentive for China’s own chipmakers, such as
Huawei, to develop substitutes. That will keep Chinese developers of
generative AI hooked on American hardware, and make China less
likely to invade Taiwan, where the bulk of the world’s cutting-edge
chips are made. The other side takes a tougher approach. Its
advocates, including this newspaper, contend that choking off access
to the H 20s, which are hot stuff in China even if sub-par by
American standards, would slow the development of Chinese
technology just enough for the US to secure an insurmountable lead
in the AI race.

Mr Trump alluded to neither of these arguments when he confirmed

on August 11th that Nvidia would resume selling H 20s to China
(AMD , a rival, will be able to sell some of its AI chips there, too).
Instead he boasted of the haggling that took place between himself
and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boss, to determine how big a cut
America should get in return for the favour (and floated a similar
approach for Nvidia’s “super-duper-advanced” Blackwell chips).
Contrast that with the shrewder way China has used one of its most
sought-after resources—rare earths—as a bargaining chip. When it
comes to meddling with markets, America’s nickel-and-dimer-in-chief
has much to learn from Xi Jinping.

A lot about the way Mr Trump has handled chip exports to China
pales in comparison with how America’s rival has used rare earths
for leverage. The American president’s strategy is capricious and
confusing. In the space of three months, H 20 sales have been
banned and unbanned. His export levy probably violates Article 1 of
the constitution, so it may face a legal challenge. By contrast,
China’s approach is becoming more sophisticated. In recent months
it has established a system of export controls that tries to track the
end customer of commodities and spans hundreds of products, from
sensors to manufacturing equipment.
So far Mr Trump’s approach appears neither to help America nor to
hurt China. He has surrendered an important part of America’s
national-security strategy for a pittance. Assuming H 20 sales
generate $20bn of revenues for Nvidia, the 15% surcharge would
net $3bn—less than the cost of a new nuclear-powered submarine.
Mr Trump has also given away one of America’s biggest sources of
leverage before a proper deal is reached with China. Meanwhile, Mr
Xi still has the rare-earths cudgel in hand, even if in the long run its
use would spur efforts around the world to reduce dependence on
Chinese supplies.

Mr Trump’s H 20 gambit is muddle-headed. If his intent is to undercut

Huawei and make China dependent on American chips, it would
make more sense to dump cheap Nvidia products rather than raising
their price through an export tax. That is the approach China has
taken with great effect in its exports of solar panels, electric vehicles
and drones (as well as, on occasion, rare earths). It knows the
implications. Perhaps that is why it is pressing Chinese firms to shun
the H 20s.

Mr Trump’s ham-fisted approach to chips is not the only way in

which he is proving to be a poor student of Mr Xi. Consider the pair’s
efforts to assert themselves over their countries’ chief executives.
When Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant,
became too big for his boots in 2020, Mr Xi’s government did not
just reprimand him. He was purged from public life for five years.
Such was Mr Xi’s paranoia about the balance of power shifting from
China’s Communist Party to its internet billionaires. Mr Trump is
similarly determined to keep America’s bosses under his thumb. In
the past week he has called directly or indirectly for the resignations
of Lip-Bu Tan, the new boss of Intel, a chipmaker, and David
Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, an investment bank.
But he is more easily won over than Mr Xi. After Intel’s boss visited
the White House on August 11th, Mr Trump hailed his career as an
“amazing story”.
Mr Xi has likewise been more effective at whipping up patriotic
fervour among companies in order to get them to do his bidding.
China installs party cells to ensure they adhere to the government’s
objectives. Mr Trump has used the threat of tariffs to encourage
companies like Apple to reshore manufacturing to America. Yet
America’s president receives mostly lip service. When Apple’s boss,
Tim Cook, unveiled a $600bn, four-year investment pledge into
America this month, it was more of an update than a change of
plan. Not for nothing did he embellish it with a 24-carat gold gift to
Mr Trump.

No big dealmaker

It is perhaps unsurprising that Mr Trump, who lacks Mr Xi’s

authoritarian power, has been less effective at making his country’s
businesses subservient to his political goals. It is also a relief. China’s
approach of state capitalism may seem attractive to politicians in
countries held back by democratic processes that make it difficult to
effect change. But the model has its flaws. Growth in China has
slowed and venture-backed entrepreneurial activity has waned in
recent years. Businesses are mired in a brutal price war.

Thankfully, Mr Trump only dabbles in state capitalism. Even so, his

approach is damaging. These days businesses in China can at least
rely on a degree of coherence and consistency in policymaking.
America Inc will not thrive amid chaos. ■

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Finance & economics

Growth-loving authoritarians are failing on
their own terms
Putting the boot in :: In Asia, East Africa and the Gulf leaders now face an unpleasant
choice

Where will win from Trump’s tariffs?

Asian trade :: New rates mean new “China plus one” locations

Ivy League universities are on a debt binge

College credit :: The borrowers, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, benefit from a
“prestige premium”

To sell Fannie and Freddie, Trump must

answer a $7trn question
Liquid courage :: Investor optimism means the duo are outperforming Nvidia

America’s housing market is shuddering

Stone cold Austin :: For the country’s homeowners, the good times are coming to an
end

Palantir might be the most overvalued firm

of all time
At Orthanc’s peak :: What would make it worth buying?

What 630,000 paintings say about the

world economy
Free exchange :: Kandinsky, Monet and Rembrandt were economists as well as artists

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Putting the boot in

Growth-loving authoritarians
are failing on their own terms
In Asia, East Africa and the Gulf leaders now face an unpleasant
choice
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

MUHAMMAD BIN SALMAN is one of the world’s most secure autocrats.

He has no need to pay off rivals or buy elections. Yet by 2030 his
government will have spent almost $3trn on Vision 2030, a plan to
transform Saudi Arabia’s economy. Officials are backing man-made
islands, luxury hotels and electric-vehicle factories. “They will take
anything that has the smallest chance of creating economic growth,
even if it is in decades,” says a megaproject executive, “even
fantasies and failures.”
MBS is one of several autocrats fixated on economic growth. Gulf
monarchs, East African leaders, strongmen in (just about)
democratic countries—all are inspired by China and Singapore, which
managed to combine authoritarian rule with economic success. Many
are willing to adopt orthodox policy. They see growth as a source of
legitimacy, seeking to enrich their populations, rather than just
elites. As such, they employ skilled technocrats to set policy, try to
lure investors with promises of stability and engage in lavish
industrial policy. And yet, despite all this, they are increasingly
struggling to deliver growth.

China and Singapore are an inspiration for a reason—they stand out.

Autocrats have tended to pursue growth haphazardly at best. Kevin
Grier of Texas Tech University and Michael Munger of Duke
University have found that, from 1950 to 2006, those who managed
a decade or more in power produced growth of 1% a year, a measly
amount. The worst treated policy as a means of personal
enrichment. More often the likes of Suharto in Indonesia and
Myanmar’s junta ran the economy in such a manner as to placate
elites, apportioning profits to allies while repressing citizens.

The new breed of rulers was first identified in 2015 by Hilary Matfess
of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. She termed them
“developmental authoritarians”. Paul Kagame has courted investors
by opening Rwanda’s capital account, promising subsidies and
sending roadshows across the world. In Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed, who
came to power after Ms Matfess’s paper, has scrapped capital
controls and floated the birr. In the Gulf ruling families are trying to
reduce their dependence on oil. Vietnam may already be South-East
Asia’s fastest-growing economy, but To Lam, its new ruler, wants to
up the pace.

After all, under Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule, which ran from
1963 to 1979, the average South Korean’s income went from that of
a sub-Saharan African to that of an eastern European. And whereas
South Korea became a democracy, Deng Xiaoping in China showed
that there was nothing inevitable about such a transition. Instead,
he oversaw strong economic growth and cemented his party’s rule
while doing so. Today everyone from Mr Kagame to Indermit Gill, the
World Bank’s chief economist, professes admiration for China’s and
Singapore’s achievements.

The change of approach reflected demographic trends. In the 2000s

economists talked of “authoritarian bargains”, in which despots
compensated for the general unpleasantness of life without political
rights with handouts. Today populations are too large and too young
for such deals. The Gulf is racing against the depletion of oil funds;
Ethiopia’s population is forecast to grow by 90m from 2020 to 2050.

From the Kennedy School to Kuwait

Melding pro-growth policy to an authoritarian political economy

means ceding control. The Rwandan government has provided
venture capital for everything from milk production to peat mining. It
then sells stakes in successful ventures to private investors (part of a
telecommunications firm recently went to T -Mobile, an American
giant, for instance). One of Mr Lam’s first policies in Vietnam was to
exempt small businesses from corporate tax. Two years ago, for
those putting more than $50m into the country, Bahrain got rid of
almost all the paperwork foreign investors usually require. MBS ’s
latest reforms, introduced in February, seek to bring employment
practices into line with America.
Well-run, relatively efficient state-owned conglomerates also attract
foreign investors. They crave stability and a young, popular autocrat
is less likely to rip up commitments than a cast of leaders in a
democracy. Why, ask state-sponsored salespeople who tour
investment conferences, take the risk? Abiy is 48 and MBS is 39; they
make plans in decades. Alongside Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030
(published in 2016), there is Bahrain’s Vision 2030 (published in
2008) and Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation Plan (lasting until
2030).

Despite the alluring pitch, in recent years flaws have emerged.

Foreign businesspeople complain of micromanagement. State-owned
firms crowd out private ventures: so ambitious are the government’s
plans, Saudi Arabia suffers from a shortage of construction
materials; the IMF has warned Ethiopia its banks are too busy
lending to the state to support local businesses. In some places,
when goals are not met, officials may fiddle the figures to avoid
reprisals. Indeed, an IMF official suggests that the true Rwandan GDP
growth rate is a couple of percentage points below the official one.
Ethiopia appears to be overstating its wheat production.

Although many of the plans are long-term, they have been in place
for long enough to start to make judgments. We have picked four
measures: foreign investment and economic growth reflect core
ambitions; GDP per person and health spending, the extent to which
benefits are trickling down. Most regimes are failing to meet their
own lofty goals. In 2000 Mr Kagame said he wanted Rwanda to be a
middle-income country by 2020—a target he is still to meet. Non-oil
portions of Gulf economies are growing more slowly than the upper-
middle-income average. Since 2015 the average income of someone
under a growth-fixated autocrat has risen by 14%, against 23% in
comparable countries.

This is not to say that growth is meagre everywhere. Ethiopia’s

economy grew by over 7% last year, four percentage points above
the African average. Rwanda managed a similar pace, according to
official figures. Saudi Arabia was thought to be among the most
sluggish. But on August 4th the IMF revised its calculations, looking
at more industries. Its non-oil growth estimate for 2023 rose from
3.8% to 5.8%.

In many cases, though, growth relies on state spending. The Public

Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, is responsible for a
tenth of non-oil GDP . Last year over half Rwanda’s investment came
from state-owned firms. Foreign private-sector cash would indicate a
true capitalist boom. Last year Saudi Arabia received less than the
average country in the region as a share of GDP ; Bahrain, less than
Nicaragua. Trade balances have hardly improved. Saudi Arabia
imports three times more non-oil goods and services than it exports.

All told, growth has not been sufficient to satisfy ballooning

populations, nor to boost tax revenues. In 2023 Saudi Arabia
collected less tax, as a share of GDP , than an average low-income
country. Fiscal pressure is building and IMF economists reckon the
country’s non-oil growth will stay below 3.5% for the next two years.
Rwanda’s debts will force Mr Kagame to cut back. Although
technocratic policy has delivered better outcomes, and some
measure of popularity, leaders may soon face a choice: properly
liberalise, turn to even nastier methods of securing acquiescence or
try to buy popularity with handouts in tighter times. How deep does
their commitment to economic change run? ■

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Asian trade

Where will win from Trump’s

tariffs?
New rates mean new “China plus one” locations
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午 | Singapore

ONE QUESTION looms for a manufacturer working out where to build

a factory: how big is a potential location’s tariff gap with China?
President Donald Trump’s latest levies, which took effect on August
7th, have shaken things up. Despite his fighting words, China
appears to have a better deal than before, at least compared with
other countries: the gap between tariffs applied to it and the rest of
the world has shrunk. Mr Trump also promises a clampdown on
“transshipment”, which would curb firms’ ability to tariff-hop.
As a consequence, some now suggest that he has delivered a mighty
blow to “China plus one”—a strategy which led firms to build
production hubs outside China, particularly in India and South-East
Asia. By creating economically meaningful tariff differentials between
China and its neighbours, Mr Trump’s first trade war in 2018
supercharged the trend. From shoemaking in Vietnam to car
assembly in Thailand, foreign investment poured into alternatives to
China. Now with the gap between China and the rest of the world
shrinking, will the trend go into reverse?

Perhaps not. For the China-plus-one strategy is not just a way to

dodge tariffs. It is also a way to avoid rising Chinese labour costs,
political crackdowns and American export controls. On top of this,
headline tariff rates are misleading. The fentanyl-related tariffs
America imposes on China cover many more products than the
“reciprocal” duties it imposes on most countries. According to data
from Fitch, a rating agency, when these are taken into account, the
gap between China’s tariff rate and the rest of Asia’s has in fact
swollen.
Thus “China plus one” will live on, but in a new form. Previous
winners have seen big rises in their effective tariff rates, too, even if
not by nearly as much as the region’s superpower. One new winner
is Malaysia; the effective rate applied to it has risen from under 1%
last year to a (comparatively) modest 12% today. As a result, the
China-Malaysia effective-tariff differential has shot up, from ten to 30
percentage points. Meanwhile, the likes of Cambodia and Indonesia
have made up less ground.
Which country is most exposed to a transshipment crackdown?
America has yet to specify what this will mean in practice, but
Chinese-made goods sent via third countries to its shores appear to
be in Mr Trump’s sights. We have previously identified such
locations, ranking them by the extent of suspected transshipment,
using American and Chinese customs data to examine products
where there have been simultaneous increases in imports from
China and exports to America. By this measure, we found that most
re-routing happened in India, Thailand and Vietnam. For the time
being, Cambodia, Indonesia and (once again) Malaysia seem most
likely to avoid American retribution.

In the event of a crackdown, countries will seek to sell to big

markets other than America. Cambodia and Vietnam, which each
send a third of exports to America, may struggle. India, Indonesia
and Malaysia rely less on Uncle Sam, who attracts less than a fifth of
their exports. Some 40% of Indonesia’s sales already go to Australia,
China, Europe and Japan; just 10% head for America. In preparation
for what may be to come, Indonesia’s prawn farmers, whose main
market is America, have recently stepped up marketing efforts in
China.

Across the three measures, Malaysia is best positioned if levies stay

put. It has favourable tariff differentials, limited transshipment and
less reliance on American demand. Firms have noticed: “It puts
Malaysia in a good light for investments,” cheered Datuk Seri Wong
Siew Hai of the country’s semiconductors association. Some
countries outside Asia also look well-placed. Hungary, which has so
far acted as China’s gateway to Europe, faces effective American
tariffs 30 percentage points lower than China does.

There is a tension, though. If Malaysia’s tariff gap with China and

lower risk of a transshipment crackdown leads more firms to set up
shop there to sell to America, its dependence on American demand
will rise, making it more vulnerable. Something similar happened last
time round. In 2024 Malaysia sent 13% of its exports to America, up
from 9% before Mr Trump’s first trade war. And President Joe Biden
targeted the country’s solar-panel industry for facilitating Chinese
tariff-dodging. In the new China-plus-one regime, it will be hard for
even winners to feel secure. ■

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College credit

Ivy League universities are on

a debt binge
The borrowers, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, benefit from a
“prestige premium”
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

FOR STEWARDS of university endowments, the past year has been

difficult. All eight Ivy League colleges lagged behind the S &P 500
index by at least ten percentage points in their most recently
reported fiscal year. Those ensnared in President Donald Trump’s
culture wars, including Columbia and Harvard, are writing cheques
for hundreds of millions of dollars to settle disputes and regain
public funding. And the endowment model itself is under strain.
Devotion to alternative assets is being questioned amid high fees,
revised valuations and low liquidity. Some colleges, including Yale,
have sought to offload private-equity stakes in order to raise cash.

Treasurers can take comfort from the size of their funds—Harvard’s

comes to $53bn, for instance—and the fact that, over the long run,
their endowments have outpaced smaller peers’. They can also
console themselves with one other perk: privileged access to debt
markets.
Since January, Ivy League universities have together issued more
than $1.7bn in debt, the most in any year since 2020. In doing so,
they have borrowed at rates many firms, governments and less
illustrious rivals must envy. Even the priciest recent bond issuance by
Harvard, Princeton and Yale trades at 0.34 percentage points above
the Treasury curve—about the same as debt issued by Johnson &
Johnson, one of only two American companies with a triple A credit
rating. Lenders are less forgiving to universities further down the
league table. Many of Pepperdine’s bonds trade at more than two
percentage points above corresponding Treasuries.

The pattern holds across the pecking order. Using US News & World
Report’s rankings of colleges, and comparing them with value-
weighted spreads on their debt, a clear pattern emerges: the better
a private university, the lower its borrowing cost. This reflects the
size of their endowments, a comfort to creditors. As in the corporate
world, where larger firms are more likely to borrow on the bond
market and benefit from cheaper rates, a similar pattern appears in
academia. All the top 15 private colleges have tapped bond markets;
by contrast, only 26 of the next 45 have any outstanding bond debt.

Although elite universities would prefer not to borrow, ready access

to debt markets allows them to commit more capital to illiquid assets
and reduces the need to sell during downturns. This, in turn, lets
them capture the extra returns such alternative investments can
offer. As such, low borrowing costs boost their performance. Cheap
leverage is not what made elite universities elite, but it certainly
helps them keep their lead.■

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Liquid courage

To sell Fannie and Freddie,

Trump must answer a $7trn
question
Investor optimism means the duo are outperforming Nvidia
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午 | New York

“NOTHING IS SO permanent”, noted Milton Friedman, “as a

temporary government programme”. Friedman died in 2006, a
couple of years before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two enormous
government-sponsored enterprises (GSE s) that provide liquidity to
the American mortgage market, were bailed out during the global
financial crisis. The firms were taken into “conservatorship”, a form
of temporary government control. It has now been in place for
almost 17 years.

The temporary measure may at last be coming to an end, however.

President Donald Trump’s team is looking into plans to return the
government’s stake in the GSE s to the private sector via an initial
public offering. Investors in the duo’s battered stocks have already
made enormous returns in anticipation of such a sale, enjoying gains
of over 2,000%. Even buyers of Nvidia may look on with envy.
In reality, any privatisation will be extravagantly difficult. Returning
the GSE s to private hands will mean unpicking knotty inconsistencies
in the bail-outs that followed the financial crisis, which other
administrations have avoided touching. It may also mean resolving
questions about American housing policy that date back to the
1930s. And it will mean clarifying exactly what the Trump
administration hopes to achieve with the process.

The first challenge is the companies’ insufficient capital. Fannie and

Freddie have vast balance-sheets, holding more than $7trn in
mortgage debt. As private institutions, they would face shortfalls of
“Tier 1” capital, as required by regulators, of $188bn and $139bn,
respectively. Issuing such a large amount of equity in one go would
be a ludicrous undertaking. To put it in context, the IPO of Saudi
Aramco in 2019, the biggest ever in nominal terms, raised $26bn.
The amount could be negotiated down during the privatisation. But
even raising smaller sums in chunks over a period of years would
prove tough. Although lowering capital requirements might speed
things up, it would raise the risk of another blow-up.

Capital punishment

The second, related question is what role the government will play in
the firms’ future. So far, the administration’s approach has been
confusing. Bill Pulte of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which
oversees Fannie and Freddie, has suggested they might remain in
conservatorship even after an IPO begins. Yet conservatorship means
purchasers of any stock would lack the ordinary rights of
shareholders. Good luck finding buyers for billions of dollars in newly
issued equity who are willing to accept continued government
control.
How will the Treasury deal with its own financial interest? It has
invested $193bn in the companies, in the form of senior preferred
shares which used to pay a dividend of 10%. A tweak to the rules in
Mr Trump’s first term allowed the firms to skip the dividends and
retain earnings, building up their capital. In exchange, the
government gained a “liquidation preference” (money owed if the
GSE s are ever sold). This had risen to $355bn by the end of June.

Owners of the private stakes, who include Bill Ackman, a competitive

tennis player and sometime investor, think that the government has
made quite enough money from the firms already. He notes the
Treasury was paid more than $300bn in dividends before the end of
2019. In his proposal for privatisation, the government would
combine Fannie and Freddie as a single entity, and would in effect
write down its own holdings. That would be great news for owners
such as Mr Ackman, whose firm does not disclose the size of its
stake in the GSE s. But American taxpayers may disagree that leaving
hundreds of billions of dollars on the table makes sense.

The last, and perhaps largest, challenge is what to do about the

government’s implicit guarantee of the GSE s. The idea that the state
will come to their aid in a crisis, which proved to be true in 2008,
has underpinned their cheap funding and high credit rating. Without
it, the duo might be downgraded by credit-rating firms. Ultimately,
the lack of a government-backed player could raise mortgage rates
across the country, as holders of mortgage-backed securities
demand higher returns to compensate for the additional risk.

Mr Trump, no fan of subtext, pledged to keep the arrangement in a

social-media post in May: “I want to be clear, the US Government will
keep its implicit GUARANTEES.” Small-government types have long
wanted Fannie and Freddie returned to private hands, hoping to
spark more competition in mortgage finance. John Cochrane of the
Hoover Institution, a think-tank, has noted that GSE rules on asset
purchases in effect prevent new types of home lending from
emerging. But Fannie and Freddie would have to lose their
guarantees, in effect a subsidy, to encourage such innovation. With
Mr Trump’s promise of state support, it is not entirely clear what
problem privatisation is intended to solve. Taxpayers would yet again
be left on the hook in the case of any future blow-up. Government
intervention in the mortgage market would continue, just in a new
form. Public risk would enable private gain.

There is a reason why no administration since the bail-out of Fannie

and Freddie has found the time, or made the effort, to end the
temporary fudge which governs the pair. The benefits of returning
the GSE s to private hands are far from certain, and doing so will
create a group of losers. Despite investors’ excitement, it is far from
clear the Trump administration has an appetite for the immensely
difficult task. ■

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Stone cold Austin

America’s housing market is

shuddering
For the country’s homeowners, the good times are coming to an end
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

FEW PANDEMIC-ERA bets will have paid off quite as nicely as nabbing
a house in a boomtown such as Atlanta, Austin or Miami with a two-
point-something-per-cent mortgage rate—and holding on as its value
soared in the subsequent years. People wanted sun, space and an
escape from covid killjoys. These cities offered it.

Now, though, the good times are coming to an end. America’s

housing market is flagging. Across the country, prices have drifted
down in the first half of the year, with most cities seeing falls in the
past three months (see chart 1). Tight monetary policy has kept
interest rates high. And this is feeding through to the property
market, just as President Donald Trump’s tariffs are chipping away at
the economic growth that had been keeping sales strong.

Prices are still creeping up in the north-east and the mid-west, but
the west and, in particular, the south are hurting (see map). Pity the
homeowner in Dallas or Phoenix who bought last year. They are
carrying a beefy mortgage rate of 7% or so and the value of their
house is already down a few percentage points in nominal terms, or
more after accounting for inflation.

Such cities face a number of difficulties. Fewer Americans are

moving to the sunbelt than during the pandemic, when internal
migration jumped (see chart 2). Mr Trump’s border crackdown may
be making a difference, too, by reducing international arrivals.
Housebuilding boomed in these cities when demand was high and
rates were low. Although it has slowed, many covid-era
constructions are only just hitting the market. Worse, public
perception of the cities has changed. Austin and Miami failed to
attract enough superstar firms when they were in favour; few tech
bros today tout them as the new Silicon Valley.
For similar reasons, some of the worst-performing markets in the
north-east are holiday towns. Prices are falling in Nantucket and
Martha’s Vineyard and on the coast of Maine. Big-city suburbs,
another pandemic winner, do seem to be faring better—whereas
dialling into Zoom from the beach house doesn’t quite work, hybrid
work schedules perhaps make adding 15 or 30 minutes to the
commute viable.

The state that fares worst of all combines these trends and adds a
few peculiarities of its own. It is Florida, where prices have fallen by
4% in the past year. Aziz Sunderji, an independent analyst, points to
high and rising home-insurance premiums owing to climate change
($11,000 or so a year in Florida, versus $2,400 nationwide). Other
reasons are a sharp drop-off in demand from rich Canadians (a
surprising number of whom flee cold winters to Florida) and
expensive new safety rules that came in after a condominium in
Surfside, a Miami suburb, collapsed in 2021.
What does the market say about America’s economy? Historically,
housing has been one of the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors;
buyers lever up to make purchases, and are less likely to do so when
borrowing is expensive, dampening sales and construction. The
industry both helps drive economic growth—housing employs lots of
people and homes are a slug of families’ wealth—and is worth
watching to see where the economy is heading.
The current slowdown is partly deliberate: the Fed is keeping policy
tight to squeeze out the last of America’s above-target inflation.
Other parts of the economy are cooling, too: real private
consumption and investment rose at an annualised rate of just 1.2%
in the second quarter of 2025, having run at or above 2% for most
of the past few years.

Yet relief for the housing market, in the form of much looser
monetary policy, may not be on the horizon (even if the Fed does
look likely to lower rates a bit in the months ahead). Tariffs have
complicated the job for policymakers, as they may cause inflation to
spike. At the same time, a colossal build-out of artificial-intelligence
infrastructure, data centres and the like is helping buoy growth.
Capital spending by the “magnificent seven” big technology
companies now accounts for over 1% of GDP , and has near doubled
in just a few years, according to Renaissance Macro Research,
reducing the need to stimulate the economy. The past decade has
been very kind to America’s homeowners. Perhaps aspiring buyers
are due a break. ■

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At Orthanc’s peak

Palantir might be the most

overvalued firm of all time
What would make it worth buying?
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

Karping on

FOR A FEW days in March 2000, as the dotcom bubble neared

bursting point, Cisco was the world’s most valuable company. Now
the seller of networking gear is a cautionary tale, even if it is also an
enduring success, with real earnings per share of four and a half
times what they were back then. Investors became so exuberant
about the firm’s prospects 25 years ago that they valued it at more
than 200 times its annual profit, around $1trn in today’s money.
Starting from a valuation that stratospheric, Cisco’s solid-but-
unspectacular growth was a bitter disappointment. Its market value
is now $280bn.

No one can accuse Palantir, a data-analysis outfit and the most

searingly hot stock of 2025, of unspectacular growth. It reported
revenue of $1bn for the second quarter of this year, 48% higher
than for the second quarter of 2024 and quadruple the figure for the
same period in 2020. Silicon Valley types seek out companies
satisfying the “rule of 40”, meaning that the sum of their operating
margin and year-on-year sales growth, both expressed in percentage
points, is higher than 40. Palantir’s score on that measure is 94:
higher than any other enterprise-software firm with equivalent or
greater sales. Among the world’s 25 biggest companies by market
value—of which Palantir is one—only Nvidia, with its near-monopoly
on artificial-intelligence chips, scores higher.
Any investor would want a piece of that. The trouble is that Palantir’s
market value has already soared to $430bn (see chart 1), more than
600 times its past year’s earnings and nearly triple the equivalent
multiple for Cisco (or, indeed, Nvidia) at its peak. Software firms
often prefer to express their valuation in terms of underlying sales,
which puts Palantir’s multiple at around 120. For comparison, in
2005, the year before the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb
“Google”, Google’s price-to-sales ratio peaked at 22.
You need not look far to explain why Adam Parker of Trivariate
Research, an investment firm, has published a note entitled “Could
Palantir be the best short idea?” Writing in late May, he examined
the ratio of enterprise value (which adjusts market value to account
for debt and cash on the balance-sheet) to forecast sales for the
coming year. On this measure Palantir then scored 73 and now
scores 104. Mr Parker looked for other listed companies that had hit
a multiple of 70 since 2000. Excluding financial firms and those with
annual revenue of less than $50m, he found 14, the largest of which
has a market value around a quarter of Palantir’s. That was Strategy
(formerly MicroStrategy), a firm that sells some software but pitches
itself to investors as a “bitcoin treasury company”, with a value
derived from its cryptocurrency holdings rather than its sales.
Mr Parker also looked at the shareholder returns such companies
have generated. He first lowered the bar to an enterprise-value-to-
sales ratio of 30, since so few firms have ever hit Palantir’s heights.
He then measured their subsequent returns after first hitting this
level, relative to the S &P 500 index (see chart 2). A year after its
multiple first hit 30, the median firm had underperformed the index
by 22% and seen its multiple contract to 18.

What, then, would it take to make Palantir’s shares worth buying?

The firm helps everyone from spooks to fast-food chains analyse
their data better and thereby improve their operations. Its blistering
recent growth comes, in large part, from enthusiasm over adopting
AI for such purposes. Palantir’s competitive advantage derives not
just from its software and clever engineers, but from a high-level
security clearance allowing it to process classified information from
America’s defence and intelligence agencies. This gives it a “moat”
with which to fend off competitors.

It will certainly need one. To reduce its price-to-sales valuation to

“only” Google’s at its peak in 2005, while maintaining its current
share price, Palantir needs to multiply its revenue by 5.6—
substantially more than the barnstorming progress it has made over
the past five years. Doing this over the next five would require an
annual growth rate above 40%.

Sustained revenue growth of that magnitude or more is possible,

even at Palantir’s scale: Google (now called Alphabet), Meta and
Nvidia have all managed it. Yet none was priced to do so in advance
—and they are, after all, among the most successful firms in history.
On a call with analysts and investors after announcing Palantir’s
most recent results, Alex Karp, the chief executive (pictured),
admitted that “this is a once in a generation, truly anomalous
quarter.” The remarkable thing is that shareholders need the
company’s revenue to continue to grow at a similar rate just to have
a good chance of breaking even. There is no allowance for an
upstart competitor, a scandal that makes clients wary or even a mere
slowdown. If any of those strike, Cisco will need to make way for a
new cautionary tale. ■

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Free exchange

What 630,000 paintings say

about the world economy
Kandinsky, Monet and Rembrandt were economists as well as artists
8月 14, 2025 05:56 上午

TWO FIGURES share a table, but not much companionship, in a

Parisian café. The man looks distracted, a pipe gripped in his mouth.
The woman, eyes down, shoulders slumped, nurses a glass of moss-
green absinthe. The painting, unveiled by Edgar Degas in 1876,
boasts several titles (“L’Absinthe”, “In a Café” and others). It also
divides opinion. One viewer, appalled by the woman’s loose morning
shoes and the thought of her soiled petticoats, saw the painting as a
cautionary tale against idleness and “low vice”. He then changed his
mind. “The picture is merely a work of art”, he later said, “and has
nothing to do with drink or sociology.”

Great paintings can inspire entire volumes of interpretation. The

ArtEmis project, which concluded in 2021, took a more concise
approach. It recruited people to log their emotional responses to
thousands of paintings in a digital archive. These “annotators” could
choose one of eight feelings, each illustrated by an emoji. Based on
this exercise and a later, bigger project called ArtELingo, complex
works of art like Degas’s 1876 masterpiece can be succinctly
summarised in a handful of numbers. When asked how L’Absinthe
makes them feel, over three-fifths of people choose “sadness”.
Almost a fifth choose amusement. About a tenth pick contentment
(perhaps they appreciate roomy footwear). None chooses the other
listed emotions: anger, awe, disgust, excitement or fear. A few pick a
ninth, residual option: “something else”.

ArtEmis carried out polls for 80,000 or so paintings. The project also
tried, with mixed success, to emulate human responses with artificial
intelligence, training a model to predict how people might feel. A
new paper, entitled “State of the Art”, by Clément Gorin of the
Sorbonne School of Economics, Stephan Heblich of the University of
Toronto and Yanos Zylberberg of the University of Bristol, tries to do
the same. The authors trained a model on 70% of the paintings, and
tested if it could predict poll results for other works. Once satisfied,
they unleashed this automated aesthete on over 630,000 paintings
from the 15th century onwards.

The trio describe the data as a “historical time series of emotions”,

subscribing to a theory of art laid out by Tolstoy in 1898. He believed
that artists could transmit feelings to an audience through their
work, as if by contagion. “The stronger the infection, the better is
the art as art.” If paintings do communicate in this way, then, in
principle, the steps of transmission can be retraced in the reverse
direction, from audience back to origin. The emotional response of
people today to an artwork of yesteryear tells you something about
its creator and the world that shaped them.

Messrs Gorin, Heblich and Zylberberg show that painters have their
own emotional signatures. Kandinsky tends to excite or amuse,
Monet evokes contentment, Rembrandt sadness. If you simply know
the artist, you can explain 40-50% of the variation in art’s emotional
valence, the authors calculate. But that leaves a lot to be explained
by other factors. There are, for example, small but systematic
differences between countries in the impact of their art. Pick a
random year and painting, and the chances that it will evoke
contentment are 31-32% if it was produced in Denmark or Britain
but only 26% if in Italy or Spain. These probabilities also respond to
historical upheavals, such as the Spanish civil war.

Individual painters change over the course of their career. Evocations

of fear increased in the later work of El Greco, a Greek painter who
moved to Spain, perhaps because of the Counter-Reformation.
Degas himself had ups as well as downs. About a quarter century
after “L’Absinthe”, he produced another famous painting, “Blue
Dancers”, depicting four ballerinas, yet to take the stage, their
gleaming limbs and (unslumped) shoulders arrayed in striking
diagonals across the canvas. When asked how this work made them
feel, only one out of 20 people chose sadness.

Messrs Gorin, Heblich and Zylberberg wonder if shifts in an artist’s

emotional repertoire can be linked to changes in their country’s
economic circumstances. This is not straightforward. Look at a chart
of GDP per person in almost any country over recent centuries and it
tends to look like a “hockey stick that is more or less delayed”, Mr
Zylberberg points out, whereas the output of a country’s artists is
always far more crooked. The trio nonetheless find that economic
growth was associated with changes in artists’ emotional mix. If GDP
per person were to rise by 4% a year over 25 years, the chance that
a given artist’s painting would convey sadness falls by 2.2
percentage points from 11% to 8.8%. The chance it would evoke
contentment rises from 31.4% to 33%.

Globalisation and its contents

The three authors also find suggestive correlations between artistic

mood and economic openness. In the last three decades of the 19th
century, for example, Britain’s trade with the rest of the world
expanded briskly: imports grew from 28% of GDP to 48%. This kind
of globalisation is associated with happier artwork, according to their
calculations: a decline of 1.4 percentage points in the chances that a
given artist’s work will evoke sadness, and a rise in the probability
that it will convey contentment or even awe. This newspaper was
established in the 19th century in the belief that free trade is good.
It turns out it can also be awesome.

Art critics may object to the reduction of great paintings to

emotional percentages, especially as most of the numbers are
generated by a machine. None of the three economists claims any
qualification in art history. But as it happens, Mr Zylberberg’s father
was a professional painter. Deeply marked by the Holocaust, his
early work evoked “fear and anger”, says his son. Towards the end
of his career, his art “became more positive”. This data does not
appear in the paper. It is nonetheless a poignant illustration of the
thesis that art reflects society—and that shifts of feeling in an artist’s
oeuvre can serve as an emotional index of the times. ■

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Science & technology

Earth’s climate is approaching irreversible
tipping points
Points of no return :: Scientists are racing to work out just how close they might be

Smoke from boreal wildfires could cool the

Arctic
Fires that freeze :: But the damage such blazes cause outweighs their benefits

Drones could soon become more intrusive

than ever
Eyes in the sky :: “Whole-body” biometrics are on their way

Are nightmares bad for your health?

Sweet dreams :: If you have them often, the answer seems to be yes

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Fires that freeze

Smoke from boreal wildfires

could cool the Arctic
But the damage such blazes cause outweighs their benefits
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

Much to reflect on

THERE ARE two things which climate scientists hate about “positive
feedbacks”. One is that they are bad news. A positive feedback, in
the science of complex systems, is an amplification; in climate
change, this comes about when a consequence of rising
temperatures drives a further rise in temperature. Such feedbacks
are the sorts of things that drive tipping points.
The other problem is that they sound like good news. Negative
feedbacks face the opposite problem. In a negative feedback, which
need not be harmful, a change in the system produces a response
that pushes the system back towards where it was. Think of an air
conditioner’s temperature setting or a radiator’s thermostat.

A recent analysis by Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth of the

University of Washington and colleagues suggests that a much more
important negative feedback may now be operating in the Arctic,
one which could curb the region’s rapid temperature increase and
markedly slow the decline in its sea ice. Indeed, it looks strong
enough to have an effect on overall global average temperature.

This particular negative feedback is driven by the increasing

frequency, size and intensity of wildfires in boreal forests. The
climate models that scientists use to simulate warming over the
coming century run on scenarios that assume these fires will
continue more or less as they did in the 2000s and early 2010s.
Since then, though, they have become considerably larger.

Where there is fire, there is smoke. Some is sooty and dark; some is
lighter. Dr Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and his colleagues think that the
brighter, more reflective smoke wins out, cooling the ground below.
Taking the fire-trend into account, they reckon that, in the 2030s,
the extent of sea-ice cover in the Arctic ocean will be at least 3m
square kilometres more than it would be in a fire-trend-free model.
Without the fire trend, an ice-free Arctic September would be
expected in 2050. Fires delay its onset by over a decade.

None of this says that the fires are a good thing, or that they will
avert catastrophes elsewhere. Fires are a massive shock to
ecosystems, and smoke which reflects sunlight also harms humans
and other animals. Moreover, the carbon that fires release will warm
the entire planet for some time to come. That is clearly bad news. ■
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Eyes in the sky

Drones could soon become

more intrusive than ever
“Whole-body” biometrics are on their way
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

FOR ALL the impressive tasks that drones can do, there is one that
remains beyond their power: facial recognition. Drones are generally
much farther from their subjects than the kind of cameras, such as
CCTV s, that are ordinarily used for biometrics. At these distances a
face may consist of only a few dozen pixels. Atmospheric turbulence
caused, for example, by rising hot air, can distort features like the
distance between one’s eyes. And because they record from the sky,
drones’ on-board cameras may capture only a partial view of a face
(or, if someone is wearing a wide-brimmed hat, none at all).

But new technology from a team at Michigan State University (MSU )

seeks to change all that and extend the spying powers of artificial
intelligence (AI ) into the skies. The system, known as FarSight,
suggests that long-range aerial surveillance could soon become far
more accurate—and intrusive—than ever before.

The project is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research

Projects Activity (IARPA ), part of the American government
responsible for marshalling fanciful spy-gadget ideas into real-world
use. Other current IARPA projects include an effort to build a device
that can modulate a voice in real-time in order to avoid detection by
speech-recognition tools, as well as an initiative to make snooping
devices small and pliable enough to be woven directly into clothing.
FarSight works with a similarly crafty technique known as “whole-
body biometric recognition”. Rather than trying to recognise a
subject from their face alone, the system uses a combination of
biometric-recognition algorithms that run in parallel.

One set of algorithms discerns a person’s gait. Another generates a

3D reconstruction of their body. Xiaoming Liu, a professor of
computer science and engineering at MSU who leads the project,
likens it to essentially undressing subjects in order to generate an
accurate model of their anatomy, regardless of what they happen to
be wearing.

A third set of algorithms runs the subject’s face through a turbulence

model that seeks to undo the refractive effects of the choppy air on
the light that comes into the camera. This returns the image
gathered by the drone to a simulated undistorted state, from which
a detailed mapping of the subject’s features is then extracted.

Once captured, the three biometric markers—gait, body shape and

face—are fused into a combined profile. This profile can be matched
to those of known individuals or, if the target is new, saved for future
matching. The entire operation happens in about a third of a second,
says Dr Liu. His team is working to scale down the system so that it
could fit on a quadcopter

Though it is still an experimental system, FarSight’s early results are

impressive. The National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST ), America’s standards body, which has been rating facial-
recognition systems for more than a decade, tested FarSight on a set
of tricky low-resolution images and videos collected at hundreds of
metres, in many cases from a high angle. FarSight outperformed all
other systems tested on the same set.

The project also illustrates how large vision models (LVM s), a variant
of large language models, could be useful for surveillance. The MSU
team used CLIP , a model made by OpenAI , to annotate images of
thousands of subjects with textual descriptions—“Muscular-slender,
long torso”, “Short torso”, “High-waisted”, “Low-waisted”—which it
then used to train the body-shape reconstruction system. The gait-
recognition feature is based on a different large vision model, called
DINO v2, which was released last year by Meta.

Dr Liu says that LVM s could have even broader applications in the
years ahead. This is because LVM s achieve high-performance
recognition without requiring big training-data sets, which are
difficult and expensive to produce. FarSight’s training and testing
data, much of which were collected by Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, a scientific-research facility, consists of 876,000 videos
and photos of about 3,000 subjects. An LVM , by comparison, is
already pre-trained on billions of images and videos, and may
require only minimal fine-tuning before it can be used for
surveillance-video analytics.

FarSight is not yet ready for the field. Although it outperforms other
systems on long-range recognition, its accuracy, as well as its false-
positive and false-negative rates, remain “far behind the
performance that would be required to make the system
deployable”, says Josef Kittler, a professor working on biometrics and
computer vision at the University of Surrey, who was not involved in
the research.

The system has other limitations, too. A person’s gait, for instance,
can change drastically if they carry a heavy load or have suffered an
injury, says Dr Kittler. In a second NIST test on a wider data set,
FarSight was not the best performer. Dr Liu says that FarSight’s
performance also drops considerably if the camera’s angle is very
high, if the weather is warm (which causes fiercer turbulence) or if
the distance to the target exceeds a kilometre.

Should these shortcomings be resolved, though, it is not hard to

imagine how such a system might end up overhead. According to
contracting documents, IARPA is looking to create a technology not
only for drones but any high or distant camera, such as those
mounted on tall buildings or border-surveillance towers. The agency
has noted that the outcomes of the programme—which is known as
BRIAR and has at least one other active research team, led by an
American company called Science and Technology Research—are
also intended for “protection of critical infrastructure and
transportation facilities”.

“That implies its routine use on civilian populations,” says Jay Stanley
at the American Civil Liberties Union, and “creates serious risks of
abuse and chilling effects on people’s sense of freedom”. In cities
like London or New York, where CCTV cameras are ubiquitous but
not contiguous, whole-body recognition could help track individuals
across long distances. Veritone, an American company, already
markets a system that can match individuals according to such
attributes as body shape and hairstyle. In May the company’s boss,
Ryan Steelberg, told MIT Technology Review, a magazine, that the
tool could be useful in cities where facial recognition is banned.

Those who take matters of privacy into their own hands might also
find their personal powers of evasion diminished in the face of
whole-body biometrics. Someone wishing to evade a tool like
FarSight could no longer just rely on an outfit change or a big hat.
They would also need to adjust their gait and, somehow, present a
different body shape to cameras. In other words, Dr Liu says, “the
whole enchilada”. ■

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Sweet dreams

Are nightmares bad for your

health?
If you have them often, the answer seems to be yes
8月 14, 2025 05:53 上午

NIGHT HAGS and night mares. Succubi and incubi. Sleep has long
been a demon-haunted world. In olden days such visitations were
thought to drain the dreamer of life-energy and, though modern
science has no truck with actual demons, the fear that bad dreams
somehow sap a dreamer’s health has not vanished. Instead, it has
been confirmed.

Almost everyone has nightmares. But it is among those who have

them weekly—somewhere between 2% and 6% of the population—
that connections with ill-health seem to arise.

Some links are to be expected. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia

and post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, all have nightmares
as a common symptom. The same goes for chronic pain. But other
connections are more mysterious. Research by Abidemi Otaiku, now
at Imperial College London, suggests that nightmares may warn of
neurological illnesses, such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia.
And other groups have shown that other conditions including
cardiovascular problems and autoimmune diseases like lupus, seem
linked to nightmares, too.

Worst of all, nightmares may kill. Dr Otaiku’s most recent work,

presented in June at a conference in Helsinki, shows that frequent
nightmares are stronger predictors of early death than smoking,
obesity, poor diet or sloth.

Dr Otaiku reached this conclusion by analysing six long-term studies

from America and Britain, involving more than 180,000 adults and
almost 2,500 children. Those with frequent (at least weekly)
nightmares were three times more likely to die before the age of 70
than those who had them less than once a month. Out of 174
people who died prematurely, 31 had frequent nightmares.

Part of the explanation is his finding that the chromosomes of the

nightmare-prone show signs of accelerated ageing, perhaps brought
about by the stress hormones nightmares are known to promote.
These chromosomal effects, he reckons, are responsible for about
40% of the increased risk of premature death in those prone to
nightmares. Where the other 60% comes from is unknown.

All of which suggests paying attention to nightmares is a good idea.

Where they are a symptom, they can warn of trouble ahead. And
where they are a cause, treatments to reduce nightmares can be
undertaken as a priority.
That is not to say the two are always easy to distinguish. In the
cases of depression, anxiety and so on, nightmares are both
symptom and cause. Bad dreams triggered by psychiatric
disturbance induce stress that reinforces the underlying problem.

Something similar is probably also true of lupus, in which the

immune system attacks healthy organs, including the brain,
promoting inflammation. That may well trigger nightmares, with any
stress hormones released as a consequence then likely to make
things worse.

In conditions such as Parkinson’s and dementia, though, which are

the results of specific types of neurological damage, nightmares are
unlikely to be anything other than symptomatic. By contrast, for
cardiovascular problems they are probably causes, not
consequences. The stress they create will encourage blood-vessel-
damaging inflammation.

Treating nightmares is harder than spotting them. Psychotherapy

may help some. And certain drugs, such as prazosin (ordinarily used
to treat high blood pressure), may assist. But the study of
nightmares remains an underexplored field of medicine. That needs
to change.■

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Culture
The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in
Pompeii
Roman, not ruins :: What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent

Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs: Luis Walter

Alvarez’s eclectic career
On the case :: He won a Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. But his
interests ranged far beyond that field

Private chefs are spilling the culinary

secrets of the super-rich
World in a dish :: On social media they serve recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue

The four years when old New York died and

a new one was born
Donnie, Rudy, Al and the gang :: Some of America’s most outlandish politicians also
made their debuts in 1986-89

What’s your preferred playback speed: 1x,

1.5x or 2x?
Digital media :: Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to
go faster

Thought John Proctor was one of the good

guys? Think again
From hero to zero :: A hit Broadway show brings “The Crucible” into the era of
#MeToo

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On the case

Bombs, dinosaurs and UFOs:

Luis Walter Alvarez’s eclectic
career
He won a Nobel prize in 1968 for his work on particle physics. But
his interests ranged far beyond that field
8月 14, 2025 03:35 上午

Collisions. By Alec Nevala-Lee. W.W. Norton; 352 pages; $31.99

and £23.99

LUIS WALTER ALVAREZ’S career was marked by two explosions. The

first was one the physicist enabled: a plutonium bomb, whose design
he oversaw, destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki in August
1945. The second was one he theorised: the terrestrial impact 65m
years ago of an asteroid sufficiently powerful to drive the dinosaurs
to extinction. It may be for the asteroid theory—developed alongside
his son and widely accepted after his death—that Alvarez is best
remembered, rather than his groundbreaking contributions to the
Manhattan Project.

Yet, as a new biography by Alec Nevala-Lee shows, Alvarez’s

scientific contributions extended far beyond even those two projects.
He developed airborne radars that are sometimes credited with
winning the second world war, as well as enabling the Berlin airlift.
His work on particle physics won him the Nobel prize in 1968.

Mr Nevala-Lee calls Alvarez “the world’s foremost scientific

detective”. (The author’s previous book was about Buckminster
Fuller, another polymath.) The list of mysteries on which Alvarez
consulted would have raised even Sherlock Holmes’s eyebrows.
Alvarez investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, looked
into unidentified flying objects and searched the pyramids of Giza for
hidden chambers.

His interest in science developed early, in part because both his

father and paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Spain, were
doctors. A bright student—so unlikely to make mistakes that he
completed his maths exams in pen, not pencil—he graduated from
high school at 17 and enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1928.
Alvarez’s arrival could not have been better timed. Nuclear physicists
in those decades were the first to set foot on a new scientific
continent: any experiment might yield a Nobel-prizewinning
discovery. Moving fast and fearlessly was the only way to build a
reputation, even if it meant exposure to dangerously high doses of
radiation. Alvarez never stopped getting his hands dirty.

His combination of ambition, intellect and self-belief meant he was

not always easy to get along with. One early collaborator described
him as a “little fascist”; another deplored his manner of treating
colleagues as servants. Frustrated by his frosty reception among
palaeontologists, he dismissed them as stamp-collectors rather than
real scientists. Alvarez’s dedication to his work also strained his
relationship with his first wife, Geraldine, a brilliant mind herself.

Most notably, he clashed with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific

director of the Manhattan Project, whose alleged communist
sympathies led to a hearing and the revocation of his national-
security clearance in 1954. Alvarez was one of Oppenheimer’s most
persistent critics, which Mr Nevala-Lee attributes to Oppenheimer’s
post-war change of heart with regards to the use of atomic energy
for war. (Alvarez considered the development of a thermonuclear
bomb to be a national priority.) Whatever his motivations, there is
little doubt that Alvarez’s testimony helped him make friendships
with powerful figures in Washington that would subsequently benefit
his career.

Unsurprisingly, Alvarez was particularly proud of his Nobel prize,

awarded for his work designing a new generation of bubble
chambers: giant vats of liquid hydrogen in which the paths of
individual particles could be observed and photographed. No less
noteworthy to Alvarez was the fact that his award citation was the
longest ever for a Nobel prize in physics. (The record would not be
broken until 2013.)

In a fast-moving career spent pushing the boundaries of what was

known and what was possible, it is remarkable how rigorously
Alvarez vetted his own reasoning. That tendency to look for trouble,
inculcated by a university instructor who encouraged students to
secretly interfere with each other’s experimental set-ups, saved him
from embarrassment on multiple occasions. In an age where people
are all too prone to believing what they wish to be true, rather than
challenging their own assumptions, it may also be the most
important lesson his example can offer. ■
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World in a dish

Private chefs are spilling the

culinary secrets of the super-
rich
On social media they serve recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

“MY CELEBRITY CLIENT wants a $2,000 pizza,” Brooke Baevsky

(pictured), a private chef, tells the camera. How do you prepare such
a pie? Add lashings of caviar, organic figs and manuka honey, then
dust everything with 24-carat gold flakes, which are tasteless in both
senses of the word.
The pizza was the appetiser for a posh dinner party in Los Angeles.
Ms Baevsky—who says she cooks for royalty, sports stars and actors
—made sure to record herself serving the pizza, lest anyone think it
was satire. Known online as Chef Bae, she is part of a batch of
private chefs offering their followers a chance to ogle opulence.

Private chefs serve up their recipes with a side of celebrity intrigue.

They give fans tours of gargantuan fridges and record trips to fancy
food shops such as Erewhon and Citarella. Ms Baevsky says a client
spent $20,000 to send her across the world to fetch some favourite
chocolate and nuts. Emily Ruybal serves four-course menus on
yachts in the Bahamas. All this draws in viewers: the hashtag
#privatechef has been viewed some 5bn times on TikTok.

In the summer many private chefs head to the Hamptons, an

upscale coastal resort near New York. Private chefs such as Meredith
Hayden, whose username is @wishbonekitchen, have gone viral for
video diaries of 17-hour catering shifts. According to TikTok the
“Hamptons aesthetic”, a style of decor inspired by the luxurious
beach houses, is one of the trends of the moment.

Menus in the Hamptons typically involve salad leaves rather than

gold ones, harvested by hand from immaculate vegetable gardens.
As Jill Donenfeld, co-founder of The Culinistas, an American private-
chef agency, puts it, clients not only seek “caviar and lobster” but
also simple “farm-fresh ingredients”. The firm’s most popular dish is
its “burrata bar”, in which the creamy cheese is heaped with
toppings such as prosciutto, peaches and pistachios. Some clients
ask chefs to make the dishes served at their favourite restaurants.

The industry has benefited from its viral moment. The Culinistas
says business in the Hamptons this summer is up by 40% from the
year before. (It costs around $50,000 to hire one of its chefs for the
season.) The rich and famous are seeking out chefs they see on
their Instagram feeds. In turn, private cheffing—a career long seen
as inferior to chefs de cuisine—is being taken more seriously by
culinarians.

Yet not much is private about TikTok’s private chefs. In a business

that often demands discretion, Ms Baevsky notes how “fun” it is to
make videos with Hollywood clients such as Emma Roberts and
Sarah Michelle Gellar. Some chefs are now celebrities themselves. Ms
Hayden’s “The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook” is a bestseller. She has
quit the long shifts and bought her own house in the Hamptons.
Perhaps, in time, she will hire a private chef. ■
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Donnie, Rudy, Al and the gang

The four years when old New

York died and a new one was
born
Some of America’s most outlandish politicians also made their debuts
in 1986-89
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

The Gods of New York. By Jonathan Mahler. Random House; 464

pages; $32. Hutchinson Heinemann; £25

MIKE BLOOMBERG once mused that New York was “a luxury product”.
The former mayor meant that businesses—and, by extension, their
staff—should be willing to tolerate higher costs in exchange for the
advantages of living in a megacity. But many voters crave Manhattan
buzz at Midwestern prices. This is one reason why New York’s
Democrats recently backed a young, charismatic, far-left mayoral
candidate, Zohran Mamdani, whose plans to ease the cost of living
(such as a rent freeze) would surely make things worse (by
discouraging new construction).

Because New York has been tolerably well run since the 1990s, some
New Yorkers have forgotten how much damage a dysfunctional city
government can do. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975, after
decades of financial mismanagement. By the early 1980s crime and
homelessness were visibly out of control. “Squeegee men” menaced
motorists while purporting to clean their windscreens. Vandals and
graffiti artists despoiled public spaces unchecked. The police were
inept and sometimes corrupt. Between 1986 and 1989 an average of
1,760 people were murdered each year: nearly five times as many
as were killed in 2024. AIDS , crack, racial tension, welfare fraud and
cronyism added to the sense of chaos. Yet in “The Gods of New
York”, Jonathan Mahler—a writer for New York Times Magazine and
author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning”—argues
that “luxury” New York was born in those four turbulent years.

Part of the pleasure of this book, especially for readers too young to
remember the late 1980s, is that it chronicles a time when several
important American political figures first strode onto the public
stage. Here is Donald Trump, suing everyone, puffing out clouds of
bluster and braggadocio, wildly overspending on his Atlantic City
casinos and taking up with Marla Maples while still married to Ivana.

There is Al Sharpton, a rabble-rouser leading street protests—a

rather different figure from the slender, sober-suited version who
appears on network TV today. Here is Rudy Giuliani (pictured), with
“the demeanour of an undertaker and the verbosity of a lawyer”, as
one columnist wrote, making his first failed run for mayor. And an
ambitious young medical bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci faces
withering criticism from gay activists for what they see as his too-
cautious response to the spread of AIDS. (Readers may wonder
whether the long lockdowns he recommended during covid-19 were
an overcorrection.)

Mr Mahler paints a portrait of a city facing multiple crises. AIDS was

at first not just a death sentence but also a terrifying mystery, as
healthy young men swiftly sickened and died. New York accounted
for one-third of America’s recorded AIDS deaths by March 1987, and
the city’s response was woefully inadequate, with too few beds and
tests, and public nursing homes that would turn infected patients
away, for fear of contamination. New York’s efforts to deal with
homelessness were similarly flat-footed.

Race relations were dire. Black men were murdered for setting foot
in white enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens. Five black and Latino
teenage boys were falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger
in Central Park; Mr Trump took out newspaper adverts urging New
York to bring back capital punishment. In 1984 a vigilante was
acquitted of attempted murder after shooting four black teenagers
who he thought were about to mug him—and became a folk hero to
many white New Yorkers.

Presiding over the chaos was Ed Koch, first elected mayor of New
York in 1977. Querulous, combative and tireless, he said he wanted
to be “mayor for life”. Mr Mahler recounts his political demise. He
was an avatar of an older New York—more working-class, with
political control wielded by “white ethnics” (largely Italian, Irish and
Jewish Americans)—and he failed to understand or respond to a
changing city. Elected for a third term in 1985, he would lose the
Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, the staid and courtly
Manhattan borough president who would go on to become New
York’s first black mayor.

The city’s economic engine also changed in this period; the industrial
base was gone, and Wall Street’s boom in the 1980s presaged the
rise of FIRE —finance, insurance and real estate—that would drive
the city’s remarkable growth through the 1990s and beyond. As the
crack epidemic ebbed, and as policing improved when Mr Giuliani
was mayor (1994-2001), New York grew safer and more desirable.
Rents soared as people flocked in.

Mr Mahler’s book is skilfully constructed and vividly written. The

author avoids the longtime New Yorker’s trap of nostalgia. As with all
great cities, things are always dying and being reborn: anyone who
wants placidity is free to catch a flight to Bruges or Santorini. ■

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Digital media

What’s your preferred

playback speed: 1x, 1.5x or
2x?
Young people, in particular, want audiobooks, podcasts and videos to
go faster
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午

GLEN POWELL , a Hollywood heartthrob, likes 1x listening speed: “I

want to hear people talk at a normal human rate.” Bowen Yang, an
American comedian, prefers his narration fast and loose—“You can
round up to 2x”—though he reckons 1.8x is the perfect “Goldilocks”
pace.
Both men appeared in an advert by Audible, an audiobook platform,
earlier this year, which featured various celebrities talking about the
speed at which they listen to their chosen titles. It provoked fierce
debate online for implying that those who make haste are weird,
even psychopathic. “I listened [to] your judgmental ad on 2x speed,”
one TikTok user said. Some claimed to feel “shamed” by the advert
and threatened to cancel their subscriptions.

The online brouhaha points to the changing way in which audiences,

particularly young ones, engage with digital media. Polling by The
Economist and YouGov found that 31% of Americans between the
ages of 18 and 29 listen to audio at playback speeds faster than 1x,
compared with 8% of people aged 45 and over.

Both Apple and Spotify offer users the option to dash through
podcasts. Many newspapers—including this one—offer audio
versions of their articles at a variety of tempos. Netflix has a button
to switch up videos’ speed in its web pages and apps. YouTube has a
similar feature and recently rolled out a 4x option for its premium
subscribers, apparently by popular demand.

The time-saving benefits can be enormous: YouTube claims that its

viewers collectively save more than 900 years per day thanks to its
fast-playback feature. If you had a ten-hour journey, you could listen
to “Persuasion” in eight hours and 13 minutes at 1x speed. But, if
you clicked 1.5x, you’d hear all about Anne Elliot’s exploits in five
and a half hours, leaving space for “Animal Farm” and “The Little
Prince”, with time to spare (they would take 120 and 80 minutes at
1.5x, respectively).

A more garrulous pace does not seem to affect listeners’ ability to

concentrate. The average person speaks at a rate of about 150
words per minute, but most brains are capable of processing
information faster than that, says Marcus Pearce, a cognitive
scientist at Queen Mary University of London. A recent meta-analysis
led by academics at the University of Waterloo in Canada looked at
the test scores of students who had watched lectures back at
varying speeds. They found that up to 1.5x there was not much of a
difference in performance, although scores started to decrease
noticeably as playback speeds approached or exceeded 2x.

For audio and video platforms, there is no downside to offering

different playback options: the more books or episodes a subscriber
gets through, the better the advertising and sales revenues. But for
listeners, the experience differs greatly between 1x and 2x. “There’s
an art of pacing, tone and suspension” to reading aloud, says
Kimberly Wetherell, an audiobook narrator. “If you speed that up too
much, you’re losing that part of the performance.”

Rhetoric often relies on rhythm and pauses for emphasis and

meaning: few actors race through the soliloquies in “Hamlet”, for
instance. Yet for many, to speed or not to speed is no longer a
question. ■

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From hero to zero

Thought John Proctor was

one of the good guys? Think
again
A hit Broadway show brings “The Crucible” into the era of #MeToo
8月 14, 2025 05:56 上午 | NEW YORK

ON BROADWAY, AMONG the jukebox musicals turning out the old hits,
the stage adaptations of blockbuster films and the star-studded
revivals with eye-wateringly expensive tickets, a new play with a
single set and a mostly teenage cast has been quietly packing the
house night after night. Audiences have been leaving the Booth
Theatre stirred and tearful.
“John Proctor is the Villain” is about a classroom of clever high-
schoolers who grapple with “The Crucible” in the wake of #MeToo. It
opened to acclaim in April and was meant to close in early July, but
popular demand kept extending its run. It will vacate the stage in
September only because the theatre has another play on deck, but
Universal has recently picked up the film rights and tapped the
talented young playwright, Kimberly Belflower, to adapt her sharp
script for the screen. Schools and universities across America are
licensing the play for their own productions.

Ms Belflower wrote and set the play in 2018. In October 2017

Harvey Weinstein, a Hollywood producer, was accused of sexual
abuse by multiple women, setting off a tidal wave of allegations
against powerful men. Women across the world shared their
experiences of harassment and violence; voices long silenced were
suddenly heard and even believed. It was a thrilling moment and an
alarming one, in which long-standing rules about sex and power
were being rewritten in real time.

This is the charged atmosphere in which the teenage girls in a one-

stoplight town in Georgia grapple with Arthur Miller’s take on the
Salem witch trials of 1692-93. It is a classic play their energetic and
beloved teacher, Mr Smith (Gabriel Ebert), says features “one of the
great heroes of the American theatre” in John Proctor, a married
farmer who is doomed to hang for refusing to falsely confess to
witchcraft. Proctor’s resolution and refusal to provide untrue
testimony was seen as especially admirable when “The Crucible” was
first staged in 1953. It was the height of McCarthyism—a time when
many were baselessly accusing their fellow Americans of communist
ties or sympathies.

The consensus view that Proctor is a hero conveniently overlooks the

fact that the play’s drama stems from an affair Proctor had with a
17-year-old orphan girl named Abigail, who worked for him as a
servant before she was fired over their romance. In the cold light of
2018, this aspect of Proctor’s behaviour seems dishonourable at
best. “I think he sucks,” says Shelby, one precocious student (played
originally by Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things” fame, and now by
Chiara Aurelia).

This ensemble play is rich with vivid, well-developed characters, but

in many ways it is Shelby’s story—though it takes around 30 minutes
for her to make her entrance. Much of the play involves learning just
why Shelby has good reason to identify with Abigail, whom Proctor
dismisses as a vengeful “whore”. In the same classroom where Mr
Smith teaches both English and sex education, the other girls meet
after school at their new “feminism club” to talk about Taylor Swift,
sex, the hotness of their teacher (“Have you seen how big his feet
are?”) and Shelby.

In hushed tones they make it clear that Shelby betrayed her best
friend by sleeping with her boyfriend. She has been mysteriously
absent for months; her return triggers a cascade of uncomfortable
revelations, which bring the thorniness of #MeToo into the
classroom.

Ms Belflower, like many Americans, read “The Crucible” in high

school, but she saw something different in the play when she
returned to it in 2018. Her decision to revisit it was prompted, in
part, by Woody Allen’s dismissal of #MeToo as a “witch-hunt”. (The
film-maker has been accused of sexual assault by his daughter. He
has denied the charges and said he is “perfectly innocent”.) “I said to
my dad: ‘It’s so weird because it seems like John Proctor is the
villain,’” Ms Belflower says. “I knew the title of this play before I
wrote it.”

The playwright was 30 and just out of graduate school when she
started writing the play, her Broadway debut. The dialogue of her
ensemble of awkward, thoughtful teens rings true, in all its
searching and stuttering. The show is artfully directed by Danya
Taymor, who won a Tony award for “The Outsiders” last year.
Today it is fashionable to dismiss #MeToo as an overcorrection,
maybe even a witch-hunt. But what makes “John Proctor is the
Villain” such an intelligent, invigorating drama is that it captures the
excitement many people felt at the time of suddenly having a
language to describe sexual transgressions—and of being in a
society receptive to hearing it. Many of the teens in high school at
the time are now entering the workforce with a few more terms and
tools at their disposal.

The play lands differently now from the way it would have even a
few years ago. The fairness the girls hoped for has not transpired.
Few abusers other than Mr Weinstein have been brought to justice.
Some disgraced men have been able to resurrect their careers with
ease, even at the level of America’s highest office. ■

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Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

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Indicators

Economic data, commodities

and markets
8月 14, 2025 03:36 上午
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financial-indicators/2025/08/14/economic-data-commodities-and-markets

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Obituary
Razia Jan insisted on educating
Afghanistan’s girls
Most willingly to school :: The fearless teacher and campaigner died on July 20th,
aged 81

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Most willingly to school

Razia Jan insisted on

educating Afghanistan’s girls
The fearless teacher and campaigner died on July 20th, aged 81
8月 14, 2025 05:56 上午

EVERY DAY she was at her school, Razia Jan held a kindergarten
inspection. Passing along the desks of excited, fidgety little girls,
most of them proudly in their uniform of green scarves and grey
salwar kameez, she commanded each small mouth to open. “Did you
brush your teeth this morning?” “Yes,” each one answered, often
unconvincingly, for these were country children from dusty village
compounds. “Are you fibbing? I’ve told you before, if you don’t have
toothpaste, use salt.” Nothing escaped Auntie Razia’s eagle eye.
“What’s that stain on your scarf? Didn’t I tell you to get your mother
to wash it? You must always come here clean and neat.” Her stern
commands were still met with joyful smiles, for she was their
teacher.

This was not, however, her first inspection of that day. The first was
to visit the hose in the playground from which they replenished the
water coolers. She filled her jolly spotted mug to the brim and drank
it steadily down. Then she wandered round for a while, just to see if
the water would sicken her. If she was absent, staff did this for her;
not a day could be missed. In girls’ schools elsewhere in Afghanistan
the wells had been poisoned. Other schools had been set on fire or
attacked with guns and grenades, mostly by Islamist Taliban
terrorists. The rule for girls walking to school, since almost all of
them walked, was to go in pairs or a group, keep their heads down,
and go fast. Even so some were pelted with stones, or had acid
thrown in their faces, by men who thought that girls should not go
to school at all.

Razia Jan never ceased to be outraged by this. She grew up in the

1940s and 1950s in a beautiful country and in a well-off, liberal
family. As a matter of course she went freely anywhere, never
covered her head and even rode a bike. Naturally she went to school
and after that to college, studying early education and ending up in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In America, where she stayed because
the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, she had full charge of her
own life. She brought up her son Lars alone, started a tailoring
business on Boston’s South Shore and rose to be president of the
local Rotary chapter, a force to be reckoned with.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 her attention

turned back to Afghanistan. Her country, though now free of Soviet
invaders and a five-year Taliban government, needed everything: not
only physical rebuilding but food, clothing, medicines and fuel. She
helped send over 30,000 pairs of children’s shoes, but random
donations like that barely scratched the surface. Only a much slower,
deeper project would assure a brighter future for her country:
defying the blind bigotry of most Afghan men, she had to champion
the education of girls.

Her school, the Zabuli Education Centre, opened in 2008 in a cluster

of seven poor villages called Deh’Subz, 30 miles north of Kabul. With
typical persistence, she had persuaded the Ministry of Education to
donate a plot to her. There, in the teeth of intense local suspicion,
she saw her school emerge: two storeys, 14 smallish rooms, with
funding largely from American Rotary friends.

Girls soon flooded in. More than 100 enrolled in the first year; in
2020, 800 were there. In 2016 Zabuli celebrated its first graduates
from 12th grade. She had an institute ready for them, where they
could train as midwives or teachers to educate more girls. But then,
in 2021, the Taliban returned to power and all that stopped. No
institute, and no classes beyond sixth grade when the pupils, at 11
or 12, were beginning to revel in learning English, Persian and
Pashto, harder maths and science. Auntie Razia had even added a
tech lab with a computer and internet in it. There the older pupils
could watch videos, all crowding wide-eyed round her.

That loss of half her students made her sadder than she could say.
But she was still there, having got further than almost anyone else.
Her secret was her fearless handling of men. She liked to think they
were a bit afraid of her, because she was so forthright and also
because she was old. Mind you, she had not made life easy for
herself by building a school in the countryside. There the crazy views
of women persisted, whether or not the Taliban were in power. In
early meetings with the village elders, 35 of them, none would look
at her. She was talking! And she wasn’t covered! But her own head
was high; she knew how to soften them up. A man, addressed as
“honorable Headmaster”, was the last word on discipline. She
appealed to the elders to protect the school, employing some of
them to guard the gate. Very early on all pupils were taught to write
their fathers’ names, as many of their fathers could not do. This
caused joy and astonishment. The school fed and clothed the girls,
and sometimes their families, free of charge.

Hostility surfaced again, though, when little girls became teenagers.

Older pupils would be stopped in the street and admonished to wear
the burqa. They became engaged, even married, and usually to men
they had not chosen. An acclaimed film of the school, “What
Tomorrow Brings”, made in 2016, showed how girls might stop
attending then, spending hours, like their mothers, crouching in
murky kitchens to chop coriander, or cleaning the house. Razia and
the other teachers struggled to rescue them, confronting the fathers
if necessary and, if they failed, at least continuing to send books.
The school had a mobile library that still functions for housebound,
frustrated young women.

Amid her own frustrations, Auntie Razia stayed positive. When the
older girls left, she took in many more younger ones. To plant even a
little education in a girl’s mind was to sow a seed that would flower.
As she was building her school, some elders had asked her to make
it for boys, since these were the backbone of the community. Ah,
she said, but women were the country’s eyes. Though silent, they
did not miss much. They observed the little things, as she did: the
stain on a scarf; the bruise from a beating; the pride at reading a
sentence, colouring a small girl’s face. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2025/08/14/razia-jan-insisted-on-educating-
afghanistans-girls

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