Young, tolerant and surprising

Party on, Utah

MUCH of America was built by religious exiles. Utah was founded by exiles from the United States. After leading his disciples from Ohio, Illinois and Missouri in 1847, Brigham Young, the polygamist leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, chose a plain fringed by the snow-capped Wasatch mountains deep in the desert West as the place to found his Zion, Salt Lake City.

For the next 40 years the Mormons’ insistence on polygamy stopped their homeland being fully accepted into the United States; only after the practice was formally renounced in 1890 could the Utah Territory become a state.

Utah’s curious history still defines it: the state’s population is nearly two-thirds Mormon. And so it may seem a strange place to look for lessons for the rest of America. Yet in recent years Utah has taken a surprising political path. The state is among the most Republican: in 2012 just 25% of its people voted for Barack Obama. Its governor, both senators and the entire congressional delegation are all Republicans. Yet, oddly, it is not the most conservative state in America. In several...

from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1zgEyeL

Hillary’s money woes

IN AMERICAN public life, surprising angst is generated by the task of finding private jets for political bigwigs to borrow. The chore is easy when a big corporation makes a plane available. Some billionaires relish flying political chums around, which is even handier. But sometimes, when all else fails, flights end up being cadged from frankly unsavoury jet-owners. This does not matter much once a political leader has left office and hit the global-grandee circuit—a lucrative world of paid speeches, charity work and discreet consulting gigs. But it does if a politician still has campaigns left to run.

The private-jet conundrum sheds light on a challenge facing Hillary Clinton. Her husband Bill long ago passed through what might be termed the “money door”, cashing in his celebrity, eloquence and connections to become a rich man. Fair enough; he is a private citizen and a brilliant speaker. Unlike the Brits, who treat Tony Blair as a pariah these days, Americans do not necessarily think it outrageous that a former head of government should become rich. Mr Clinton’s allies add that personal wealth holds little interest for him. Given a pile of money, he might buy an expensive watch but that is about it, admirers maintain.

His wife’s relationship with big money is more complicated. Mrs Clinton is described—to put it politely—as intently focused on her family’s...

from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1zgEyvu

Why rioting makes things worse

Where will you buy your groceries tomorrow?

OUTSIDE a gutted pharmacy in West Baltimore, William Tyler, a 41-year-old youth worker, illustrates the dilemma of policing in his city. Speaking about Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old who died on April 19th after being arrested by Baltimore’s police, he complains that: “None of these polices ever go to jail, they don’t get fired. Police is nothing but gangs too.” Yet looking at the building behind him, burnt out by riots that followed Mr Gray’s funeral, he adds, “and look at this store! This is where my mom gets her medicine. The police just stood right there and watched it happen. This weren’t the time for protocol. This were the time to go, go, go!”

Baltimore exploded into violence on the evening of April 27th after several days of largely peaceful protests against Mr Gray’s treatment. Soon after the funeral, angry teenagers, some apparently stranded by a shutdown of the city’s transport network, began attacking a mall in the north-west of the city.

By sunset, large areas of West Baltimore had descended into lawlessness. Groups of young men and women looted bars and...

from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1Evbb7V

Oil be damned

IN 2014 oil prices crashed. Americans jumped for joy. Small wonder: each year the average American consumes more energy than a Briton and a Japanese person put together. The oil-price drop pleased economists, too. Many were sure that it would give the economy a nice boost. However, the oil bust was followed not by a boom but a slowdown (see chart). Figures released on April 29th showed that growth in the first quarter of this year was just 0.2%. All this leads wonks to wonder: are lower oil prices such a good thing?

Gross domestic product (GDP), the total annual output of an economy, is made up of four things: government spending, net exports, consumer spending and investment. The oil price does not much affect government spending, but has a big impact on the other three.

Net exports (ie, exports minus imports) have certainly been boosted by the lower oil price. America exports very little oil, but imports a lot: about 9m barrels a day. With the oil price roughly $60 below its peak, Americans now send $500m less abroad every day—or about $200 billion a year.

Add to this the lower price of domestically produced...

from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1Alvale

Latin America’s rural dream

“I THINK everyone in this country…has a dream hidden away in their heads, the secret dream of land, a small plot of land that makes them feel secure, a hidden reserve against the thousand misfortunes that might happen.” So says Pilar Ángel, one of three siblings who are the narrators of “La Oculta”, a new novel by Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s leading writers.

La Oculta (“The Hideaway”) is the Ángels’ 150-year-old family farm in Antoquia, Colombia’s most entrepreneurial and conservative province. Mr Abad’s finely crafted novel not only expounds its narrators’ contrasting attitudes towards sex, rural life and tradition in a modernising country, but also tells in fictional form the true story of an attempt to create a rural middle class in Colombia. In doing so, it throws an evocative light on the enduring pull of the land in Latin America—and the undercurrent of violence that has gone with it.

Conflict over land is the region’s oldest story, dating to before the Iberian conquest. This installed a uniquely unequal pattern of landholding, sustained by serfdom and slavery. That lies at the root of the region’s inequality, and...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1bi8c83

Trouble at the top

COLOMBIANS do not have a high opinion of their judiciary. They see it as slow, corrupt and prone to letting wrongdoers go free. A three-month strike starting last year by workers in the judicial system further tarnished its image. But until now Colombians have held the top courts in higher regard. The Constitutional Court won their gratitude by securing access to health care and upholding the rights of 5m displaced people. The Supreme Court prosecuted politicians who had colluded with right-wing paramilitary groups.

That esteem is now being tested. The Constitutional Court’s president, Jorge Pretelt, faces allegations that he solicited a bribe of 500m pesos ($210,000) to issue a ruling in favour of Fidupetrol, an oil company, in a dispute with the government. Mr Pretelt denies the charge and has temporarily stepped down as the court’s president (though not as a judge) to defend himself before a congressional commission.

“The crisis reaching the Constitutional Court is the last straw,” says Farid Benavides, a law professor at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. Two-thirds of Colombians say they mistrust the high courts, according to a poll taken in March, after news of the scandal broke. Some critics called for the resignation of all high-court magistrates; others proposed a constitutional assembly to overhaul the judiciary.

Colombia’s...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1zgFtMi

Where you been so long?

JIM PRENTICE had every reason to feel confident when he called an election for May 5th. His Progressive Conservative party has governed Alberta without interruption since 1971. It held 70 of the 87 seats in the provincial legislature. Wildrose, the main opposition party (named after Alberta’s official flower), seemed to be self-destructing: late last year nine of its 14 legislators, including the leader, joined the ruling party after Mr Prentice became premier. How could he lose?

Yet opinion polls now suggest that he might. Wildrose is running ahead of the Progressive Conservatives, and both are trailing the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP). Its victory would be a shock for a province that is, as one political scientist puts it, conservative in every sense of the word. And it would worry Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, whose Conservative Party has links to both right-of-centre provincial parties. Alberta is his adoptive home; he hopes to win re-election in October.

Mr Prentice’s biggest problem is the economy, which has sagged along with the oil price (see chart). After several years growing faster...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1bi6XWs

Correction: Sobriety at the carnival

Correction: In our article about Rio de Janeiro’s Olympics (“Sobriety at the carnival”, April 25th) we wrote that more than 50 tonnes of dead fish had washed into Guanabara Bay (the venue for sailing events). They were in fact found in the lagoon where rowers will race.

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1zgFtMu

The new movers and shakers

VIRIDIANA RÍOS is a 32-year-old activist who grew up in the impoverished suburbs of Mexico City. But she is no left-wing firebrand. She is the Harvard-educated head of an NGO that uses analysis, statistics and cheeky social-media campaigns to agitate for clean government. Instead of adopting the rabble-rousing tactics of the street, she is part of a movement of civil-society wonks who are gaining big influence in Mexico. Their weapons are hard facts and solid arguments. “We are the technocracy of civil society,” she says.

In recent months, after the murder of 43 students in the south-western state of Guerrero in September and widespread allegations of corruption, these organisations have come into their own. They have persuaded the government of Enrique Peña Nieto to go further than he originally wanted in a constitutional reform to tackle corruption. “I would go so far as to say that, without them, this reform wouldn’t have happened,” says Fernando Rodríguez Doval of the opposition National Action Party, which drafted the law.

In April NGOs and think-tanks lobbied successfully for laws opening up greater access to government...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1bi8b3Y

Inside jobs

Friends in high places

SPANIARDS are used to former public officials getting rich from doing business with the state. When news emerged of investigations into a former official in Castile and León who had secured lucrative wind-farm licences from his ex-colleagues and a former official in Andalusia whose companies netted regional contracts for state-subsidised worker-training courses, few were surprised. Corruption and cronyism (the distribution of political favours to businesses) explain much of the Spanish public’s growing disdain for the two parties that have run the country for the past 32 years: the ruling Popular Party (PP) and the opposition Socialists (PSOE).

Distrust reached a nadir with the temporary arrest two weeks ago of Rodrigo Rato, a former PP finance minister who went on to run the IMF in Washington. Police searched Mr Rato’s office and home in an investigation into unexplained income. He was already under scrutiny over freewheeling use of company credit cards during his chairmanship of Bankia, a bank that needed a €22 billion ($27 billion) rescue under his stewardship. Mr Rato was seen as one...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1KxosP9

Great patriotic war, again

ON MAY 9th 150 Russian military aircraft will streak across the Moscow sky, 16,000 troops will march through Red Square and three intercontinental ballistic missiles will be put on display, all in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. Vladimir Putin, the national leader with a fast-developing personality cult, will claim Russia’s ownership of the most important Soviet holidays. He will talk about Russia’s continuing struggle against fascism (in Ukraine) and attempts by its sponsor (America) to impose its dominance on the world.

The leaders of America, France, Britain and Germany will not be there. Mr Putin may be flanked by China’s Xi Jinping, but few other notables. As Andrei Zorin, a Russian cultural historian, says, Western leaders’ decision to abstain will be seen by Russians as confirmation of their continued struggle against the West.

The feelings of isolation and aggression stoked by the Kremlin in the build-up to Victory Day could hardly be more different from those that reigned in Moscow in the early hours of May 9th 1945, when thousands of people kissed and danced in the...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1GKxbPx

Aliyev’s party

Ismailova, a gutsy lady

KHADIJA ISMAILOVA, an Azeri journalist investigating corruption among the country’s ruling elite, knew that she was swimming in deep waters. In 2012 Ms Ismailova received a package containing stills from a secretly filmed sex tape of her, and a warning that unless she stopped digging it would be published online. Ms Ismailova ignored the threat, and the video was duly released. She kept on reporting anyway. In December, she was arrested on charges of inciting a fellow journalist, Tural Mustafayev, to attempt suicide. In February more charges were added, including tax evasion and abuse of power. Meanwhile Mr Mustafayev withdrew his complaint, saying that it had been made under “emotional stress”. No trial date has yet been fixed.

Ms Ismailova is not alone. Azerbaijan has convicted or imprisoned at least 33 other activists, journalists and bloggers over the past year on politically motivated charges, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based advocacy group. Ill-treatment of prisoners is common. There is growing concern about Leyla Yunus, a leading human-rights activist, and...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1GKxbzd

Arrivederci, darling

WHEN divorce was legalised in Italy in 1970, it followed a titanic parliamentary battle. Unwilling to accept defeat, conservative Catholics secured a referendum. Only after that vote finally went against them four years later was the issue settled. So it is a sign of changed times that, when Italian deputies voted to liberalise the divorce laws recently, they did so by a crushing majority (398 to 28) and amid little controversy.

Avvenire, a newspaper owned by the Catholic church, predictably railed against the reform. Other critics termed it another blow to an institution fast losing its appeal in Italy. More and more young Italians opt for cohabitation and have children outside marriage. In 2012 the number of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants was the fifth-lowest in the European Union. Yet even observant Catholics were not united in opposition. Domenico Sigalini, archbishop of Palestrina, said that “if the breakdown [of a marriage] is clear and irrevocable, it’s unfair to waste time on long judicial battles.”

Under the new law, couples can untie the knot after 12 months of separation if...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1KxosyR

Guilt and reconciliation

Asking for forgiveness

GERMANY’S way of remembering the 70th anniversary of the second world war’s end is the opposite of Russia’s grandstanding. Germans see the occasion as an exhortation to humility and moral honesty. They commemorate their own suffering, including mass rapes of German women by the Allies. But mainly they accept responsibility for the suffering that Germans inflicted on so many others. Marking the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April, Joachim Gauck, the president, talked of his country’s “immeasurable guilt”. On May 3rd, Angela Merkel, the chancellor, will strike a similar tone on the anniversary of Dachau’s liberation.

By chance the commemorations coincide with what may be the last big trial of a former Nazi. Oskar Gröning, now 93, was a book-keeper of sorts in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His job was to count the money of the arriving inmates and transfer it to Berlin. He says he sometimes stood at the ramp where the trains disgorged the victims, but only to guard luggage. Mr Gröning is now accused of being an accomplice in the murder of about 300,000 Jews who arrived on trains...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Kxoqab

The enforcer

IF IT’S a Wednesday, it must be Vestager day. Or so it has seemed this month in Brussels, as Margrethe Vestager, the European competition commissioner, has made ambitious moves against formidable adversaries for three weeks in a row. On April 15th it was Google, which Ms Vestager thinks unfairly privileges its shopping service over rivals. A week later she trained her sights on Gazprom, Russia’s mostly state-owned gas giant, accusing it of unfair pricing and market meddling. And on April 29th Ms Vestager announced a probe into the subsidies European governments provide to electric utilities, some of which she thinks may amount to illegal state aid. Amid constant reminders of the EU’s weakness, from Mediterranean migration to the endless Greek saga, Ms Vestager’s shows of strength are a reminder that Brussels has bite.

Ms Vestager, who previously served as Denmark’s economy minister, is clearly a tough cookie. But her impact has as much to do with European law as with her personality. Unburdened by the constraints that shackle most of her 27 fellow commissioners, she can block mergers, launch surprise raids on private offices and threaten...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1GKxbz3

Commitment anxiety

THE romance between Ukraine and the European Union is full of unmet expectations. Ukraine wants commitment from the EU; the EU wants proof that Ukraine has really changed. When EU officials visited Kiev on April 27th for a joint summit, they snubbed Ukraine’s requests for a peacekeeping force in the Donbas, for additional military aid and for visa-free travel. Western financial assistance is trickling in, but Ukraine wants more. “Greece already received $300 billion, with no war, with no Russian tanks,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister, said after the summit. Ukraine, he complained, has received just one-tenth as much.

The EU says help will come, but only after reforms. “You keep reforming, we keep supporting,” said the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker. European leaders want to see Ukraine implement its new laws and decentralise governance, as agreed in the Minsk peace plan. Some worry that failure to do this will invite Russia to relaunch the war. Already violence is ticking up near the rebel capital of Donetsk and the Ukrainian-held port of Mariupol.

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, takes umbrage at charges that reforms are lagging. Lawmakers recently passed legislation to break up gas monopolies, increase energy-sector competition, and unbundle the state gas conglomerate Naftogaz, a fiscal black hole. Last month Mr...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Kxoqa7

Shredding the rules

PIONEERING entrepreneurs have often had an uneasy relationship with the law. America’s ruthless 19th-century “robber barons” believed it was easier to go ahead and do something, and seek forgiveness later, than to ask permission first. (It helps if you take the precaution of buying up the politicians who dispense the forgiveness.) The first carmakers had to battle against rules of the road that had been designed for the horse and cart. Britain’s “pirate” radio stations in the 1960s had to retreat to international waters to bring pop music to the masses.

The tension between innovators and regulators has been particularly intense of late. Uber and Lyft have had complaints that their car-hailing services break all sorts of taxi regulations; people renting out rooms on Airbnb have been accused of running unlicensed hotels; Tesla, a maker of electric cars, has suffered legal setbacks in its attempts to sell directly to motorists rather than through independent dealers; and in its early days Prosper Marketplace, a peer-to-peer lending platform, suffered a “cease and desist” order from the Securities and Exchange Commission. It sometimes seems as if the...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JUIPF6

Battle joined

WITHIN the next few months, the biggest defence contract for what will probably be many years to come will be awarded by the US Air Force, to build a new long-range strike bomber. The B-3, as it is likely to be named, will be a nuclear-capable aircraft designed to penetrate the most sophisticated air defences. The contract itself will be worth $50 billion-plus in revenues to the successful bidder, and there will be many billions of dollars more for work on design, support and upgrades. The plan is to build at least 80-100 of the planes at a cost of more than $550m each.

The stakes could not be higher for at least two of the three industrial heavyweights that are slugging it out. On one side is a team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin; on the other, Northrop Grumman. The result could lead to a shake-out in the defence industry, with one of the competitors having to give up making combat aircraft for good.

After the B-3 contract is awarded, the next big deal for combat planes—for a sixth-generation “air-dominance fighter” to replace the F-22 and F-18 Super Hornet—will be more than a decade away. So Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group, an...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JUIT7I

Short-term or short-changed?

Long-term owners only, please

A BATTLE over voting rights, pitting the state against company boards and many investors, is raging among French companies. The biggest fight of all involves Renault, a carmaker with global ambitions. According to the so-called Florange law adopted in 2014, after March 2016 listed French firms must begin granting double voting rights to investors who have held registered shares for at least two years—unless two-thirds of shareholders have voted against this rule. The provision aims to counter “short-termism” by encouraging more loyalty between investors and companies. It will also, fortuitously, allow a government intent on selling down some of its stakes in domestic companies to retain its influence over them while banking the cash.

Renault’s outraged boss, Carlos Ghosn, is particularly worried that suddenly doubling the voting clout of the state will upset its Japanese partner, Nissan, which holds 15% of Renault’s capital but no voting rights. The government, determined to defeat the board’s resolution to retain one vote for one share, has temporarily raised its stake from 15% to 19.7% in...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JUIS3N

Much ado about something

THE plot is worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. Teva is in pursuit of Mylan. But Mylan dislikes its suitor and runs away to declare its love for Perrigo, while seeking a poison pill in case it is forced to marry Teva. Perrigo, though, rebuffs Mylan. With many suitors, Perrigo is holding out for a better offer—perhaps even from Teva itself. It may not be quite midsummer but the unfolding drama featuring three generic-drug makers could well run until then.

This week Mylan, based in the Netherlands, rejected a $40 billion bid from Teva, of Israel, arguing that it “lacks industrial logic”. To be on the safe side it has enacted a poison-pill defence against hostile takeover. Combining the world’s largest generic-drug maker, Teva, with the third-largest, Mylan, would create a company with around $30 billion in annual revenues and, Teva says, $2 billion in cost savings. As part of its plan to escape Teva’s clutches, Mylan has made three successive takeover offers to Perrigo, a smaller Irish rival, only to be spurned each time. Perrigo now seems likely to attract interest from other companies.

For Teva the merger would, besides bringing many economies of scale, allow it to put more effort into copying hard-to-make “biologics”—an increasingly important class of drugs that are manufactured inside animal cells or micro-organisms such as bacteria. It would also...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1zgCJi9

Driven out

The exit is over there, Dr Piëch

WHY Volkswagen’s chairman, Ferdinand Piëch, failed to remove its chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, is unclear. Most observers reckon that the pair fell out over VW’s strategy but are astounded that the wily Mr Piëch (pictured, centre), a member of the family that controls the German carmaker, was forced to resign on April 25th, instead of pushing out Mr Winterkorn (pictured, right). What is obvious is that, in his 22 years as the firm’s CEO and then chairman, Mr Piëch’s obsession with making it the world’s biggest and best carmaker has left it with some significant weaknesses, in its original VW brand and in the American market.

Having got rid of the group’s previous CEO, Bernd Pischetsrieder, in 2006, through a combination of a public snub and a behind-the-scenes campaign, Mr Piëch probably reckoned the same trick would work again. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, a news magazine, he said he was “at a distance” from Mr Winterkorn. But other members of the group’s supervisory board backed the CEO.

Mr Piëch’s defeat leaves Mr Winterkorn in pole...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JUIPVw

Slimming down

“I WILL miss treating my ear infections with the Buffalo Ranch McChicken,” quipped Jon Stewart recently on “The Daily Show”. After sending up McDonald’s announcement that it would phase out its use of chicken that had been fed with antibiotics, the television satirist lampooned a decision by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to let Kraft put the academy’s “Kids Eat Right” logo on its Singles slices, a “prepared cheese product”. That decision was reversed days later.

After decades of rising sales and high popularity, makers and sellers of processed food are under pressure not just from comedians but from policymakers, campaigners for “real” food and an increasingly sceptical public. In February Michelle Obama said she had long banned processed food from the presidential family’s table, in particular Kraft’s macaroni and cheese, one of its biggest sellers. Last month the company said it would remove the artificial colouring that gives the product its neon-orange glow. On April 28th it announced flat sales and a 16% fall in net profits, year on year, in the first quarter. McDonald’s, having replaced its boss in March because of poor sales, said on...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1zgCMdO

The great storyteller’s story

Reagan: The Life. By H.W. Brands. Doubleday; 805 pages; $35.

MORE than a decade after his death, Ronald Reagan still divides people. American conservatives revere him as practically a demigod. He shrank the state, rescued the economy and won the cold war; all Republican candidates must pay homage. The left dismisses him as malign and moronic—a B-movie actor who floated into the White House on an updraft of phoney charm, a man who snoozed during meetings, blew up the deficit and propped up unsavoury third-world despots from Argentina to Zaire.

The truth is more interesting than the caricature, and H.W. Brands’s new biography tells the story as well as you could ask for in a single volume. A lucid and witty writer, Mr Brands lays out the facts in short chapters that bounce along like one of the “bare-fisted walloping action” films that Reagan once starred in. He has a talent for letting his sources speak for themselves. They include not only politicians and Reagan himself, but also his children, who were as neglected as those of any famous parent. Invited to speak at his adopted son Michael’s boarding school,...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMwCh

Aux armes, historiens!

Hitting back

Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. By Janet Polasky. Yale University Press; 371 pages; $35 and £25.

REVOLUTIONARIES want to tear down walls. Between 1776, when America declared independence, and 1804, when Haiti at last threw off the yoke of French rule, the compartments and divisions of established power became everyone’s target. This book assiduously describes how, just as the doctrine of the universal rights of man seized the Western world, so too did an irrepressible iconoclasm.

But what sets “Revolutions Without Borders” apart as a work of history is that Janet Polasky tears down walls, too: scholarly ones. Instead of telling the usual heroic national story, she ranges wherever her wayfaring revolutionaries take her—to Paris and Washington, but also to Poland, Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. Instead of confining herself to the deeds of valiant men, she also gives the stage to women and slaves. The result is a...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMvyp

A singular voice

When the Doves Disappeared. By Sofi Oksanen. Translated by Lola Rogers. Knopf; 320 pages; $25.95. Atlantic; £12.99.

BETRAYAL, secrecy and memory are the haunting themes of Sofi Oksanen’s accomplished new novel. Like her previous work, “Purge”, it features the history of Estonia at the moment when it was caught between Stalin’s hammer and Hitler’s anvil in the second world war.

Most readers will start the book with only a hazy grasp of the intricacies of Baltic history—a brief but traumatic Soviet annexation followed by a selectively lethal German invasion, and then renewed Soviet occupation which lasted until 1991. But they will be gripped by the dilemmas it created for Estonians, and the ways they are resolved in the book: through bravery, hypocrisy and denial, leading to a mysterious murder. The political and personal dilemmas are elegantly echoed in a subplot involving sexual identity.

Details are provided lightly: they tantalise rather than intrude (though a helpful glossary is provided at the end of the book). The title comes from the bitter winter when hungry German soldiers ate even the pigeons in the capital, Tallinn.

Ms Oksanen’s characterisation is similarly sparse, but flawless. The abandoned and sex-starved Juudit takes a seemingly sympathetic Nazi lover. The ghastly and mendacious Edgar starts life...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Gz91Ca

The other modernism

Gaining a foothold

IN AVANT-GARDE art, as in polar exploration, it’s getting there first that counts. The history of modernism is often viewed as a series of discoveries with the glory going to whomever made the next conceptual breakthrough. As that story is usually told, for the first half of the 20th century the innovative centre was Europe, before the old world was overtaken in the aftermath of the second world war by America.

In recent years that comfortable narrative has been disrupted. In the 1950s and 1960s some of the most daring work began to come not from cities like Paris or New York but from near Osaka, a second-tier city in a nation already considered marginal to the modernist project. The source of this innovation was a movement known as Gutai (meaning something like concreteness). It was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara, a Japanese painter who encouraged his followers to challenge the conformity that had contributed to the authoritarianism of the preceding decades. In place of the wartime slogan, “one hundred million hearts beating as one”, Yoshihara championed an art of radical individualism summed up by...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMsm1

Heart of the matter

The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? By Nick Lane. Profile; 360 pages; £25.

“THERE is a black hole at the heart of biology.” Grandiose openings like this are often a warning sign in popular science books, a signal that the author is trying to gussy up a collection of unremarkable observations. Not in this case. Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, knows whereof he speaks. His latest book is a persuasive, demanding attempt to answer some of the most fundamental questions in biology.

Science offers a broad overview of how life works, but many intriguing details remain unclear. Mr Lane tackles some of them, including the origins of life, the connections between sex and death and what, if anything, Earth can tell us about the possibility of life elsewhere.

The book’s overarching argument is that life is a natural, chemical process, and therefore faces constraints imposed by the iron laws of physics or chemistry. Despite its spectacular surface diversity, those constraints restrict its chemical underpinnings, and that affects how life develops. Such considerations, says Mr Lane, can shed light on some of biology’s most profound questions.

The most accessible of those is how life got started in the first place. Most people learn some version of the “primordial soup” theory, which posits that...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Gz8Y9H

Nose-to-tail eating

Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig. By Mark Essig. Basic Books; 310 pages; $27.50.

“IF YOU are going to kill the animal, it seems only polite to use the whole thing,” says Fergus Henderson of London’s beloved piggy restaurant, St John. Mark Essig, a historian residing in the hoglands of North Carolina, would agree. Mr Essig’s “Lesser Beasts” concludes by outlining “the dilemma of modern pork”: big agricultural companies sell a lot of bacon to consumers for a pittance, whereas struggling smallholders offer small quantities of high-quality pork at organic markets for four times as much. These farmers can turn a profit only by selling every inch of their animals to adventurous chefs and gourmets.

Mr Essig’s broad, well-researched book highlights that this is merely the latest stage in man’s on-off-and-on-again relationship with pigs. The curly-tailed animals have proven extraordinarily useful to human development and have been present from the earliest permanent dwellings to modern metropolises. The porcine ability to turn waste of almost any description into protein—thanks to “a simple...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JDMr1C

The wars don’t work

IN 1971 Richard Nixon fired the first shot in what became known as the “war on drugs” by declaring them “public enemy number one”. In America and the other rich countries that fought by its side, the campaign meant strict laws and harsh sentences for small-time dealers and addicts. In the poor, chaotic countries that supplied their cocaine and heroin, it meant uprooting and spraying coca and poppy crops, and arming and training security forces. Billions of wasted dollars and many destroyed lives later, illegal drugs are still available, and the anti-drug warriors are wearying. In America and western Europe addiction is increasingly seen as an illness. Marijuana has been legalised in a few places. Several countries may follow Portugal, which no longer treats drug use as a crime.

But even as one drug war begins to wind down, another is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East (see article). Echoing Nixon, China’s president has called for “forceful measures to wipe [drugs] out”; his...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1FAf2Cs

Bless it

APRIL DEBOER and Jayne Rowse have lived together for ten years and want to get hitched. However, the state of Michigan, where they live, won’t let them. So they cannot formally adopt each other’s children and there is no guarantee, if one of them dies, that the rest of the family will be allowed to stay together. Another gay couple, Ijpe DeKoe and Thomas Kostura, were married in New York. But after Mr DeKoe, a soldier, finished serving in Afghanistan, the couple moved to Tennessee, which does not recognise their union. Both couples are suing to have their states’ bans on same-sex marriage struck down. The case, named Obergefell v Hodges, reached America’s Supreme Court on April 28th (see article). Many expect the justices to make gay marriage legal throughout America.

That would be a slap in the face of democracy, some say. Marriage has long been a matter for the states to regulate, not the federal government. In several liberal states lawmakers have given the go-ahead...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1FAf2m0

Sea of troubles

AMERICA and its friends in Asia have long worried about the South China Sea becoming a Chinese lake—a vast stretch of water, through which half the world’s commercial shipping passes, falling under the control of China’s fast-expanding navy and coastguard. In the past few months these fears have been amplified by satellite pictures showing Chinese barges pouring sand onto disputed reefs, in order to turn them into islands. On several of these remote outcrops, unsuited to civilian habitation, China appears to be building airstrips and harbours to accommodate jets and warships.

With this show of military force, China is asserting a long-standing, if outrageous, claim to ownership of virtually the entire sea. This is a dramatic change of tack (see article). China still claims to believe in settling territorial disputes by diplomacy. Yet, by going ahead and planting its flags, it is ignoring the protests of its neighbours, not to mention America.

This change is even more unsettling, given that for years...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1ParcTl

Making waves

IN NOVEMBER, after months of frantic land reclamation in the South China Sea aimed at boosting its vast territorial claim there, China tried a subtler approach. It opened a think-tank in Arlington, Virginia—an outpost of its National Institute for South China Sea Studies on Hainan, a tropical (and indisputably Chinese) island on the sea’s northern shore. One role for the new think-tank is to make an academic case for China’s vaguely backed assertion that most of the strategically vital waters are within its domain—despite rival claims by South-East Asian countries.

On April 16th the Institute for China-America Studies, as the Virginia-based centre is called, held a conference at a hotel in Washington. Its Chinese-government connections clearly had pull. Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state whom Chinese leaders much revere, spoke in a pre-recorded video about the importance of ties between Beijing and Washington. Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to America, attended in person. Mr Cui told participants that his country would act with “restraint” in the South China Sea, although he also said it would vigorously defend its interests there...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1Q2TZeU

Not so far away

“THE mountains are high; the emperor is far away,” goes a Chinese saying that has always given comfort to bureaucrats who play fast and loose with the law in remote parts of the country. But often, these days, distance is not enough. Those who hanker after the added protection of a foreign jurisdiction are often called “naked officials”. The term describes people who have moved families and assets abroad in readiness for escape themselves. Now, however, anti-graft officers are trying to extend their reach beyond China’s borders.

Since late last year, as part of the most intense and sustained anti-corruption drive in the history of Communist-ruled China, officials have been stepping up efforts to persuade foreign countries to send back those who have fled with their ill-gotten gains. On April 22nd they released a wanted list, together with mugshots, of 100 such people, as part of a new operation called Sky Net. The list was compiled by a Communist Party body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), whose agents often hold suspects in secret detention and torture them. “We will apprehend them no matter where they flee to,” Fu Kui, a...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1zgBQ95

The worst is yet to come

RUSSIA’S currency, the rouble, had a terrible 2014. As oil prices collapsed and Western sanctions bit, export revenues slumped. Nervous investors pulled $150 billion from the country. As a result, the rouble lost about half its value against the dollar (see chart). But over the past few months, it has climbed out of its trough. Russian bonds and stocks have done well, too. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has been cutting interest rates—an unthinkable prospect just a few months ago. On April 30th it lowered its main rate from 14% to 12.5%. All this, some say, is proof that investors are too pessimistic about the Russian economy. They are wrong.

Oil prices have risen slightly since the start of the year. That is helpful for an economy where the stuff provides half of all exports. The cheaper rouble has buoyed exports, too. A new deal to end the Russian-backed insurgency in Ukraine, signed in February, has also made investors less jittery.

Nonetheless, the rouble’s strength is a puzzle, since in many ways the Russian economy looks worse than it did in December. Inflation, at 16.9%, is 5.6 percentage points higher, a...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgzYNC

Buried

An ever more marginal existence

UNCERTAINTY is supposed to lift the gold price. But neither upheaval in the Middle East, nor the travails of the euro zone, nor startlingly loose monetary policy in the rich world is brightening the spirits of those who swear by bullion. After a big rally during the financial crisis, the price has sagged to about $1,200 an ounce, a third below its peak in 2011. Little seems likely to turn it round. “We’ve seen everything gold bugs could hope for: endless money printing, 0% interest rates (both short-term and long-term adjusted for inflation), rising debt and debt ratios in the public and private sectors…So where’s the damn hyperinflation?” asks Harry Dent, a newsletter publisher, in a recent blog post.

The biggest pressure on the gold price comes from the expectation that interest rates in America will rise later this year. Matthew Turner of Macquarie, a bank, says that low interest rates cut the opportunity cost of owning gold. Higher interest rates, by contrast, raise the cost of holding non-interest-bearing assets. Mr Turner thinks expectations of rising rates are already built into...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgzYxi

Fifteen years of hurt

STOCKS are the best investment for the long run. That is the common mantra among investment pundits. But the recent record high for the NASDAQ, America’s tech-heavy equity index, ought to give investors pause. Like the FTSE 100 in London, it has taken 15 years for the NASDAQ to surpass its previous high (see chart). Even so, that counts as a sprightly performance compared with Japan’s Nikkei 225, which still trades at only half its 1989 peak.

Such statistics make it hard to argue that “there are no such things as bubbles”, as the occasional economist still contends. A very high stockmarket valuation implies the expectation of rapid growth in future profits. The average price-earnings ratio of the NASDAQ back in 2000 was more than 150. In other words, if profits did not rise, a shareholder would have had to wait for well over a century to recoup his original investment.

Perhaps investors were thinking of their great-great-great-grandchildren, but that was not how it seemed at the time. Technology companies were expected to take over the world and drive “old economy” firms out of business; their profits would soar as a...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgA0VG

Deposits go walkabout

OVER $13 trillion is sitting in American bank accounts and money-market funds, earning little or no interest. If consumers were even marginally more demanding, they could earn tens of billions of dollars in extra returns. That is the premise behind MaxMyInterest, a year-old electronic service aimed at slothful but yield-hungry savers. It offers to move money from banks that want to shed deposits, and that therefore pay savers low interest, to ones in need of them, and so willing to pay more. At the same time, it makes sure that each account holds no more than $250,000, the maximum amount insured by the government, providing not just higher returns, but risk-free ones.

The average interest paid on deposits in America is a microscopic 0.09% a year, according to BankRate, a data firm. MaxMyInterest’s clients receive 0.75% to 1.05%, with a weighted average of almost 1%. That may seem small, but it amounts to $2,000 a year for every $250,000 account, and should rise considerably whenever the Federal Reserve starts to raise rates. (At a meeting this week the central bank left rates unchanged, but it is still expected to start lifting them later this year...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgzYx3

That’s it?

CORPORATE bosses hope for a bump in their share price when they present a new five-year plan. Deutsche Bank’s leaders had no such luck on April 27th: their “Strategy 2020” was met by a 10% tumble over three days, reversing a six-week climb propelled by expectations of a more radical overhaul.

Deutsche’s new tack is to do a little less of most things. Postbank, a German retail bank it only finished buying in 2012, will be spun off through a relisting. Deutsche will leave up to ten of the 70 countries it does business in. Its dominant investment bank will be trimmed a little, too. Instead, it will invest more in its asset-management arm.

The board of Deutsche had been mulling a far more daring plan to split the bank in two: a staid retail lender including Postbank and Deutsche’s own-brand branches on one hand, and an emancipated investment bank on the other. On the face of things that should have appealed to regulators, who have pushed lenders to isolate “casino-like” activities from their deposit-taking arms. Their refusal to allow Deutsche to use Postbank’s deposits to fund its investment bank undermined the entire rationale for its purchase—hence the reversal.

But regulators do not seem to like the idea of a European version of Goldman Sachs, either. Even fans of the idea admit that a stand-alone investment bank would probably have struggled to...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Ev5yXf

Forced errors

WHEN Tata Motors wanted to build a factory for the Nano, a cheap “people’s car”, the Indian state of West Bengal seized 1,000 acres (400 hectares) of farmland on its behalf at Singur, just up the motorway from Kolkata. The state government invoked a colonial-era law to forcibly acquire the plot in 2006 from 13,000 landholders, many of them unwilling sellers. Protests against the purchase continued even as the factory was being built. Tata eventually fled. Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, offered it a way out by providing it a factory-ready plot there.

The Singur protests have come back to haunt Mr Modi, who is now India’s prime minister. They led to a new law in 2013 which set arduous terms for coercive land purchases. Mr Modi is trying to relax these rules for certain categories of project, such as rural infrastructure, industrial parks and low-cost housing. It is now his government that faces protests from farmers. Yet if India is to become richer, it needs to be able to build roads and factories.

The economic case for allowing the state to acquire property by coercion starts with...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgA0oU

The calm before the tantrum

INVESTORS in bonds want high returns and stability. In recent years South-East Asian bond markets have offered both. Yields on ten-year government bonds average 7.8% for Indonesia, 6.7% for Vietnam, and around 4% for Malaysia and the Philippines—far above what is on offer in the rich world. Inflation is low and budget deficits are either manageable or non-existent. Local currencies have lost less value against the dollar than most in emerging markets.

From 2005 to 2014 annual bond issuance from Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam rose from $38 billion to $109 billion, according to Dealogic, a financial-data firm. Corporate-bond issuance more than tripled, from $20 billion to $78 billion, although most firms in the region still rely on banks for borrowing. Home-grown institutions such as pension funds and insurers are starting to emerge and invest. And foreigners are taking more of an interest too: between 2009 and 2014 foreign ownership of local-currency bonds more than doubled in Indonesia and Malaysia, and more than quintupled in Thailand (see chart).

But some worry that the...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1zgzY00

Double trouble

FRANCE has always been proud of its corporate champions. But these are worrying times. Only one French firm is in the global top 50 by market value. The country’s stockmarket is just 3% of the world’s total, down from 5% a decade ago.

An American activist fund, PSAM, has just mauled Vivendi, a media firm. Flagging Gallic contenders, among them Alstom (engineering), Alcatel (telecoms) and Lafarge (cement), are being bought by foreigners. The Chinese are coming. Peugeot has sold a stake to Dongfeng, a carmaker from Wuhan that doubtless hopes to take control eventually. Club Med, a holiday firm managed by the son of a French president, is now in the hands of a billionaire who began by selling bread in Shanghai.

Enter, stage left, the French government, which has legislated to strong-arm firms to give souped-up voting rights to loyal shareholders. It reckons this will protect firms from speculators and raiders, and allow them to punch above their weight. The idea has plenty of support across Europe. In reality, it will do more harm than good.

A revolutionary idea

The “Florange law” was passed in 2014 and will...

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The 100-year view

AT THE beginning of April international investors made two whopping bets by snapping up the first ever 100-year bond denominated in euros. The first bet was that the euro would still exist a century from now. No bookie would give short odds on that. The second was that the issuer, Mexico, which suffered three long cycles of boom and bust in the past century, would continue to be creditworthy for the next 100 years.

Mexicans, whose country has, as one economic historian puts it, lived longer in moratoria than with access to capital markets, reacted with bemusement. A typically gloomy columnist predicted that, since Mexico will have run out of oil by 2115, it will have to sell off the country’s extremities to repay the bondholders.

Foreign creditors are more bullish. Over the past five years they have extended the equivalent of more than $5 billion of 100-year bonds to Mexico in three currencies: dollars, sterling and now euros. It is the only country to have tapped the so-called centennial market since China and the Philippines in the 1990s, and it has done so at relatively low yields—of 6.1% on its dollar bond in 2010 and just 4.2% on...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Ev5w1E

Fractious, divided but still essential

Looking for lift-off

THE conference of the 191 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) got under way at the UN headquarters in New York this week. The last such meeting, in 2010, produced agreement over a 64-point action plan. This time it is likely to be a much more divisive affair.

The aim of “RevCon”, as it is known, is to take stock of progress (or otherwise) over the previous five years in strengthening the three pillars on which the NPT’s “grand bargain” rests: the commitment to pursue disarmament by the five “official” nuclear weapons states—America, Russia, Britain, France and China, also known as the P5; action to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons; and promotion of the peaceful use of nuclear energy. RevCons are high both on obscure technical discussion, and on diplomatic grandstanding. And the NPT has often been under stress since it came into force in 1970. But without it the world would be a more dangerous place. Only three countries have never signed up—India, Pakistan and Israel. Only one, North Korea, has ever left.

At least one bit of good news for the four-week...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1bi6J1F

The new drug warriors

THE war on drugs, it seems, is edging towards a truce. Half of Americans want to lift the ban on cannabis, the world’s favourite illicit drug. Four states have legalised it, as has Washington, DC. Latin American presidents whose countries once battled narcos with helicopter gunships now openly wonder if prohibition was a mistake; Uruguay has legalised weed. Much of Europe has decriminalised it; Portugal has decriminalised all drug-use (though not drug-dealing). Heroin addicts in Western countries usually have access to clean needles, substitutes such as methadone and, in parts of Europe, heroin prescriptions. Many governments are starting to believe that managing drug use causes less harm than trying to stamp it out.

In Indonesia, things look very different. On April 29th eight convicted drug offenders, seven of them foreign, were executed by firing squad. Joko Widodo, the president, became convinced of the need for a hard line on drugs as mayor of Solo, a city in central Java, and governor of Jakarta, the capital. Since taking office he has promised “no clemency” for traffickers, despite intense lobbying by other governments...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1HUzWN9

Karachi’s wild child

NOBODY, of course, had anything to do with it, when Sabeen Mahmud’s car was stopped by two men on a motorbike who shot her at point-blank range through the windows. The Pakistani Taliban denied all responsibility. The Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI, promised all possible help to the police. Nawaz Sharif’s government ordered the police to find the perpetrators within three days. The police said they were very busy ascertaining a motive.

Really, it wasn’t hard to spot one. Here in the midst of anarchic, dysfunctional, crammed, crazy, noisy Karachi was a woman who was even more anarchic, crazy, noisy and in-your-face. She was at the heart of every disturbance, from supporting rank outsiders in the local elections to organising flash protests on social media, and spiced up every organisation she belonged to, which was any outfit committed to challenging discrimination or injustice.

No veil or scarf for her; with her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, she looked like a New York intellectual and felt like a postmodern hippie child. She loved Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and the Beat poets. She’d give you a straight, cool...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1DYQaig

Copping a ’copter

ON APRIL 22nd a drone carrying radioactive sand landed on the roof of the Japanese prime minister’s office in Tokyo. It was the latest of a string of incidents around the world involving small drones. Last year more than a dozen French nuclear plants were buzzed by them. In January one crashed on the White House lawn. In February and early March several were spotted hovering near the Eiffel tower and other Parisian landmarks. Later in March someone attempted to fly one full of drugs (and also a screwdriver and a mobile phone) into a British prison. The employment of drones for nefarious, or potentially nefarious, purposes thus seems to have begun in earnest. It is only a matter of time before somebody attempts to use a drone, perhaps carrying an explosive payload, to cause serious damage or injury. The question for the authorities is how to try to stop this happening.

The French government is already taking the issue seriously. In March, it held trials of anti-drone “detect and defeat” systems. These trials used two sorts of drone as targets. One was fixed-wing aeroplanes with a wingspan of up to two metres. The other sort was quadcopters—miniature...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1JDMbzG

Jail birds

DIRECT action against drones (see article) is one way to deal with those that are up to no good. In part of the United States, however, politicians propose to go after drone operators too, by making the use of a drone to commit a felony an aggravating action. A bill now being steered through Washington’s state legislature by Pam Roach, a state senator, would create an offence of “nefarious drone enterprise”.

So far, Mrs Roach’s proposal has passed votes in both houses of the legislature, winning the support of Democrat representatives and senators as well as that of her fellow Republicans. If she can succeed in attaching it to a forthcoming vote on the state’s budget, it could become law within weeks.

If that happens, anyone convicted of using an unmanned aerial vehicle to plan or carry out a felony would automatically have a year in prison tacked onto his sentence. Nefarious drone enterprise would thus join such activities as carrying a firearm (up to five years extra), trying to outrun a police car (one year) or being armed with a crossbow or hunting knife (at least six months).

Mrs Roach fears drones may be used to smuggle drugs into prisons, to help burglars scout empty houses or to enable poachers...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Alv51b

Are you easily pleased?

GIVE someone who is sick a sugar pill that you have told him is a powerful drug, and it will often make him feel better. Even if you tell him what it really is, he may still feel better. The placebo effect, as this phenomenon is known—from the Latin for “I shall please”—is one of the strangest things in medical science. It is a boon to doctors and a bane of those running clinical trials, who must take account of it in their designs. But how it works is obscure.

Knowing that would open up a new field of medicine. If placebos could be exploited rationally, perhaps in conjunction with functional drugs, better treatments might be effected. Drug testing, too, would be simplified, as trial designers were able select those more and less susceptible to the effect as the needs of the trial dictated. That would save effort, time and money.

One thing that is known about the placebo effect is that it involves several brain systems, each under the control of a particular type of messenger molecule, called a neurotransmitter. These systems, like everything else in the body, are regulated by genes. This has led some researchers to ask whether different versions of the genes in question might modulate a person’s susceptibility to placebos.

A review of these researchers’ studies, published recently in Trends in Molecular Medicine by one...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1JDM8Uv

Every step they take

Track that, sucker

IN THE late 1990s Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a baseball club, made a radical change to the club’s recruiting methods: he decided to apply some science to them. Instead of relying on the instincts of scouts, he and his deputy Paul DePodesta, a statistically astute Harvard economics graduate, crunched candidate players’ numbers. Baseball is awash with such numbers, and the two men applied simple statistics to them to identify valuable players whom scouts had rejected, and who could thus be hired cheaply. The result transformed the club’s performance. Despite having one of the league’s lowest payrolls, it qualified for the post-season tournament run by Major League Baseball (MLB), the professional game’s organiser, for four years running.

This success, which was the subject of a book (and later a film) called “Moneyball”, caused others to copy the method. Before long, teams had extracted all the information they could from the game’s traditional statistics. To produce even more accurate predictions, they would need better data. And the means to gather those numbers have...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Alv6lC

Who should govern Britain?

BRITAIN is a midsized island with outsized influence. Its parliamentary tradition, the City’s global role, the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, membership of the European Union and a history of leading revolutions in economic policy mean that British elections matter beyond Britain’s shores. But few have mattered more than the one on May 7th, when all these things are at stake.

Though you would never know it from the campaigns’ petty squabbling, the country is heading for profound and potentially irrevocable change. The polls suggest that no combination of parties will win a stable majority—which could be the death knell for strong government (see article). May 7th could also mark the point of no return for the troubled union between England and Scotland, thanks to a surge in support for the secessionist Scottish National Party (SNP). The Tories have promised to renegotiate Britain’s relations with the EU and put the result to an in/out referendum on ...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1AlgGC6

Heavens above

Here’s one they made earlier

The Wright Brothers. By David McCullough. Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $30.

THE journey from nutter to genius can be short. For Wilbur and Orville Wright, inventors of the aeroplane, it took just 12 seconds. In 1903 their 605-pound (274-kilo) contraption, dubbed the “Flyer”, lifted off the sand dunes of North Carolina and stayed aloft just long enough to make history. Elated, the brothers quickly learned to go farther, higher and faster.

The Wrights broke through against great odds, as David McCullough recounts in this enjoyable, fast-paced tale. Neither had any formal engineering training. They ran a bicycle shop in Ohio and decided to build an aeroplane after reading up on gliders. Having studied books and birds, they constructed first a glider, then a motor-powered craft, to test in the windy Carolina dunes. They worked with deliberation, taking time to master the basics of flying (such as how the wind works) and spurning pointless risk. Proceeds from the bike shop funded their efforts.

Scepticism was intense. Plenty of people dismissed...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1PoJXob

A sonata in two movements

Bela Bartok. By David Cooper. Yale University Press; 436 pages; £25. To be published in America by Yale in June.

ALONG with Franz Liszt, Bela Bartok, who died in 1945, is regarded as one of Hungary’s greatest composers. Many consider his six string quartets, completed between 1908 and 1939, to be second only to Beethoven’s. Though not as atonal as the work of many of his contemporaries, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Bartok’s compositions can be heavy-going, combining influences from Hungarian folk, jazz and Arabic music. In this weighty tome, David Cooper of Leeds University digs into Bartok’s life, interlacing his discussion of the compositions with wider discussions of politics and culture.

Just as Bartok’s music is not for the faint of heart, neither is this book. The level of research is astonishing, at times to the point of scholasticism. And a big chunk of it is filled with detailed analyses of Bartok’s compositions, along with dozens of musical illustrations. Musical jargon peppers the discussion: for readers who do not know their arpeggios from their appoggiaturas, parts of the book will be difficult to understand.

But even for musical neophytes, the book has much to offer. Bartok was born in Nagyszentmiklos (now Sannicolau Mare in Romania), a...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1yT6ENc

In need of a green revolution

The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency. By Mark Clifford. Columbia University Press; 306 pages; $29.95 and £19.95.

THE Asian economic miracle has lifted millions out of poverty, but at terrible cost. Deforestation and foul water are just two of the insults to nature resulting from breathless expansion. Air pollution in Beijing has been described by the American embassy as “crazy bad”. Asia is one of the biggest contributors to global warming.

Many blame economic growth, and the market forces and corporations that drive it, for this. So it is refreshing to see a clear-headed argument set out by Mark Clifford, a former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, that markets and greenery can go together. Asian companies, he says, are ready to clean up.

Three conditions need to be met first. One is public engagement. In China a powerful independent documentary on pollution, “Under the Dome”, was viewed online by about 200m people before it was blocked by the authorities. From Korea to Kalimantan, the hyperactive use of social media...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1PoJTos

Starry, starry night

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot. By Mark Vanhoenacker. Chatto & Windus; £16.99. To be published in America by Knopf in June.

HOW much does Mark Vanhoenacker love flying? Consider this, poor reader, when next you are wedged into a middle seat between squalling child and armrest hog, or ruing a battery just gone dead in the fourth hour of a thrice-extended delay. When Mr Vanhoenacker was a young man, after university and postgraduate study, he became a management consultant because he judged it the profession that would let him spend most time on aeroplanes. But even that proved insufficient, and after a few years he began training to become a pilot. Today he flies a Boeing 747 for British Airways.

One might think that a commercial pilot would grow inured to the essential strangeness of air travel: how people can step into a metal box outside their flats, descend below street level and enter another metal box, this one on wheels, that takes them to an airport, where they board yet another metal box that will deliver them halfway round the world in the time it takes to eat dinner, nap and watch two films. Many of Mr Vanhoenacker’s former colleagues in management consulting probably fly from Boston to Tokyo or London more often than they drive from Boston to, say, New Haven, which is just two hours away on a well-travelled...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1yT6C7M

On the Gredge

EVENTUALLY every long-running drama, from “Downton Abbey” to “Dr Who”, feels formulaic. So it is with Greece’s debt saga. For five years it has followed a wearily familiar script of unpayable debts, aborted reforms and 11th-hour compromises that let the country stagger on inside the single currency. That history has lulled many into expecting the usual denouement in the latest wrangling between Greece’s Syriza government and its European creditors. But this is looking ever less likely. Unless Syriza suddenly capitulates—and a meeting of euro-zone finance ministers on April 24th is one of its last chances to do so—Greece will fail to pay its creditors. If that happens, its exit from the euro will be just a step away.

Greece has already restructured its debts once, in 2012. It now owes money mainly to other European governments, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF. These official creditors have slashed interest rates and stretched out maturities, but not enough. With a debt stock of 175% of GDP, Greece will need more relief. Most European politicians quietly accept this. The danger lies in a chaotic default born of brinkmanship. The Greek...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1K9bWVX

Northern exposure

THE general election that will be held in Britain on May 7th is so finely balanced that predictions are foolhardy. Save one: the Scottish National Party (SNP) will triumph. And that spells grave danger for the United Kingdom, including—indeed, especially—for Scotland itself.

After failing to win last year’s independence referendum, the SNP might have been expected to collapse. Astonishingly, it has roared back. Through relentless campaigning and exemplary use of social media, the SNP has made fervent supporters out of nationalist sympathisers, many of them working-class Scots who always voted Labour. As a result, it now has 100,000 members from among 5m Scots; the Conservative Party, which draws from all 64m Britons, has only about 150,000. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, has been the star of the campaign’s televised debates. Polls suggest that the “Nats” may win as many as 50 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the House of Commons, up from just six in 2010. If (as seems likely) no clear winner emerges, they could well hold the balance of power.

This is a big problem for the Labour Party, and not just because its MPs occupy most of the seats...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1K9bZ4e

Don’t treat trade as a weapon

GOOD news out of Washington is rare. Last week congressional leaders agreed on a bipartisan bill which, if passed, would for the first time in years give the president “fast-track” authority when negotiating trade deals. The bill would be a boost for the prospects of a huge trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), binding America with 11 economies (including Japan but not China) around the Pacific rim. Now, as if on cue, come welcome signals about the TPP itself. As Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, prepared to head to Washington for a much-anticipated trip including an invitation to address a joint session of Congress (see article), he claimed that America and Japan were close to agreement over their bilateral terms—on which the whole TPP deal hinges.

Yet there are two big caveats. First, fast track, formally known as Trade Promotion Authority, may still fall foul of Congress. Second, Japan may not make any serious cuts to tariffs that protect its farmers. Those outcomes are more likely because...

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Flights of hypocrisy

IT IS a remarkable piece of detective work. Investigators hired by three big American airlines have scoured the world for the regulatory filings of three fast-growing rivals owned by Gulf states—Emirates, Etihad and Qatar—and stitched together the most detailed picture yet of the ways in which their governments have pampered them. According to the American carriers, which released the supporting documents for their allegations this week, airlines in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar have enjoyed a host of benefits, including handouts, “loans” without interest or any schedule for repayment, free land and below-cost charges at state-owned airports. Over the past decade this was worth a total of $42 billion.

Delta, American and United Airlines, the carriers that sponsored the investigation, are shocked—shocked—to find that government aid is being provided to the aviation industry. But by pointing out the motes in the eyes of rivals, they draw attention to the planks in their own. Another American lobby, representing business travellers, has dug out a study undertaken by the Congressional Research Service in 1999. It...

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Super-connecting the world

THE Gulf states have been on the radar of the world’s airlines since the 1930s. Then Dubai, a pearl-fishing port, served as a stopover for the flying boats of Imperial Airways (a forerunner of BA) on routes connecting London to distant colonial outposts. BA still serves Dubai but most of the tail fins at its vast main airport, which recently overtook London’s Heathrow as the world’s busiest for international traffic, carry the logo of Emirates, the small state’s own network airline. The balance of power among the world’s carriers has shifted.

A decade ago Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, were insignificant. But these three “super-connectors”, in recent years joined by Turkish Airlines, increasingly dominate long-haul routes between Europe and Asia. Whereas most other international airlines rely heavily on travellers to or from their home countries, the super-connectors’ passengers mostly just change planes at the carriers’ hub airports on their way to somewhere else. Last year the four carriers flew about 115m people into and out of their hubs in the Gulf or Istanbul, compared with 50m in 2008. Their combined fleet has...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1yT5Oje

Not quite what we said

IN 1961 A.J.P. Taylor suffered a caustic book review at the hands of Hugh Trevor-Roper, another British historian. The book put Taylor’s standing as a serious academic in peril, said his reviewer. Taylor responded with an article: “How to quote: exercises for beginners”. In it he juxtaposed quotations from his book alongside passages from the review. They were somewhat at odds. Trevor-Roper’s methods of quotation might harm his reputation for seriousness, concluded Taylor, “if he had one”.

Half a century later, the seriousness of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been questioned in a Taylor-style takedown by SaveTheInternet.in. The group, which lobbies for net neutrality (the equal treatment of all internet traffic), has analysed a text box in a recent TRAI discussion paper, which the agency attributed to The Economist. Compared with the two original articles on which the box was based, in our January 31st 2015 issue, the campaigners found that arguments against strict net neutrality had been inserted while arguments for it had been removed or tweaked. For instance, “net neutrality is under threat” became: “net neutrality is difficult to sustain”. Robert Ravi of TRAI denies any deception. The text does not purport to be verbatim, he says. And the tweaks? “I don’t find there is a great difference between ‘difficult to sustain...

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The coming crash

“THIS is one of the most advanced and sustainable car factories in the world.” So declares Karsten Engel, chief executive of BMW China, as he greets visitors to his firm’s newish manufacturing facility in the grim north-eastern city of Shenyang. The plant, run by a joint venture with a local firm called Brilliance, is indeed spotless and efficient, with robots and humans together producing nearly 40 cars each hour. China is the largest market in the world for the firm’s big 5 Series and 7 Series models, and source of perhaps half of its global profits in recent years. Unsurprising, then, that the firm is hoping to double the number of models built locally.

The bosses of many big foreign car firms were in China this week for the Shanghai Auto Show, and they too offered a pretty rosy view of the Middle Kingdom. China has overtaken America as the world’s largest car market, and it has contributed between a third and a half of the global profits of many big automobile manufacturers in recent years. Like BMW, other foreign firms are also betting heavily that the good times will continue by expanding production capacity in the joint...

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Twilight of the gurus

IT IS customary nowadays for management gurus to preach that competition is fiercer than ever. Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School talks about “the end of competitive advantage”. Richard D’Aveni of the Tuck School of Business refers to “hypercompetition”. Ram Charan, a consultant and writer on management, lauds “The Attacker’s Advantage”.

Yet the management-guru industry itself seems remarkably stable. Competitive advantage is strikingly enduring, competition is far from “hyper” and the defender has the upper hand. The latest two “Thinkers50” rankings of the world’s leading management pundits, published in 2011 and 2013, show no change at the top, with Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School and the duo of Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of INSEAD ranking first and second respectively. Two of the most prominent business books of the past few months have been retreads rather than new publications with new ideas: the tenth-anniversary edition of Mr Kim’s and Ms Mauborgne’s “Blue Ocean Strategy” and the 20th-anniversary edition of Don Tapscott’s “The Digital Economy”. It is a far cry from the glory years of the 1980s and 1990s, when “In Search of...

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Margrethe and the bear

GAZPROM revelled in its untouchability. It was the main supplier of imported gas to the European Union, benefiting both from close Kremlin patronage (the Russian state is its largest shareholder) and from a web of business and political relationships in countries it sold gas to, notably Germany. Alternatives to Russian gas were scant, as was customers’ willingness to resist Gazprom’s dominance.

Now the EU is taking on the Russian gas beast. The first blow fell on April 22nd when the EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, sent the company a long-expected “statement of objections” (Euro-parlance for a charge-sheet) alleging market abuses. The unpublished document runs to hundreds of pages. They detail the murky world of Russian gas exports, featuring lucrative intermediary companies with unknown beneficial ownership, deals struck by politicians not businessmen, and a hefty dose of geopolitical favouritism.

The EU claims Gazprom is “pursuing an overall strategy to partition central and eastern European gas markets.” It curbs customers’ ability to resell gas, which allows it to charge “unfair prices” in five countries:...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1K9eZ0m