Freedom force

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. By Robert Gildea.Belknap; 608 pages; $35. Faber & Faber; £20.

GUY MOQUET was just 17 years old when he was executed by firing squad in Nazi-occupied France. In a poignant letter to his family before his death in 1941, the young Communist résistant wrote: “My life has been short, I have no regrets, if only that of leaving you all. I am going to die…Mummy, what I ask you, what I want you to promise me, is to be brave and to overcome your sorrow.” Môquet swiftly entered French history as a Resistance martyr, and remains a potent symbol. In 2007, on the day of his inauguration as president, Nicolas Sarkozy vowed that Môquet’s farewell letter would be read out each year in every French high school.

That a Gaullist president should devote his first day in office to the memory of a Communist is a measure of how far the narrative of the Resistance continues to shape France’s sense of itself. Môquet, said Mr Sarkozy, embodied more than a patriotic belief in France: he showed that “the greatness of man is to dedicate himself to a cause greater than himself.” To this day, French history textbooks dwell on such Resistance heroes. Men in berets, rifles slung over their shoulders, have become in the collective imagination an emblem of the national...

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

Hydra-headed

The New Threat from Islamic Militancy. By Jason Burke. The New Press; 304 pages; $24.95. Bodley Head; £16.99.

ISLAMIC STATE (IS) poses a terrorist threat that is greater than any before or since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, at least according to the British home secretary, Theresa May, speaking last November as she sought to justify extensive new counter-terrorist powers for the government. Barack Obama, also seeking greater powers to attack the group, made a similar assertion three months later: that IS threatens the American homeland itself. With the fall of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in May, IS has shown that it is still on the march. How much ought the West to fear the self-styled “caliphate”?

Perhaps not as greatly as politicians make out, according to Jason Burke. In his latest book, “The New Threat from Islamic Militancy”, he usefully divides the dangers into three main sources, and readers may gain a degree of reassurance from each; so long, that is, as they are not living in the Middle East or parts of Africa.

Into the first category of threat fall the two main organised groups, al-Qaeda and IS. Much of the book consists of a detailed (if somewhat familiar) account of their history and progress. Al-Qaeda, Mr Burke rightly notes, has been constrained and degraded by punishing drone...

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

Blighting the horizon

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. By Gillian Tett. Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; $28.00. Little, Brown; £20.

WHY do organisations fail? Sometimes it is because their market or purpose disappears completely, as in the case of, say, video-rental shops. But often it is because as they grow, they lose the same innovative streak that made them a success. Like individuals, groups can become stuck in their ways, with fatal results.

In her new book Gillian Tett, a columnist with the Financial Times, blames silos for such failures to adapt. Through eight fables, Ms Tett argues that internal divisions and classifications, say, between doctors and surgeons, hold back creative thinking and encourage turf wars. Breaking them down can lead to innovation and, subsequently, success.

Take Sony. Having invented the path-breaking Walkman, a portable cassette player, in the late 1970s, Sony was one of the world’s foremost technology companies. Yet it fell behind during the transition to digital music,...

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

Bones of contention

Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. By Nancy Marie Brown. St. Martin’s Press; 288 pages; $26.99.

IN 2010 an amateur Icelandic historian gatecrashed an international symposium on the Lewis chessmen, the greatest cache of medieval game pieces ever found. Gudmundur Thorarinsson, a chess-player (and an engineer by profession), hoped to convince the assembled scholars that the 92 walrus ivory pieces unearthed on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, in 1831 were the work of a woman carver commissioned by a medieval Icelandic bishop. He was dismissed as a “nuthead”. Though no one really knows where the chessmen were made, the consensus of curators of the Lewis hoard held by the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland is that they probably originated in Norway late in the 12th century.

Mr Thorarinsson’s theory, however, caught the eye of Nancy Marie Brown, an American who has written extensively on the Viking age. Alerted by the disparaging of medieval Iceland as a “scrappy place full of farmers”, she begged to...

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

Ties that bind

The Story of the Lost Child. By Elena Ferrante. Translation by Ann Goldstein. Europa; 464 pages; $18 and £11.99.

NOVELS become literary blockbusters for many reasons. Some are created by mountains of marketing cash, some by media saturation. “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Harper Lee’s long-lost work, “Go Set a Watchman”, both fit this mould. Others are fuelled by something quite different, and their success is impossible to predict. In recent years “The Neapolitan Novels”, four volumes by an anonymous Italian author calling herself Elena Ferrante, have become a fictional juggernaut that not even the author’s English-language publishers, Europa Editions, saw coming.

Starting with “My Brilliant Friend”, which came out in Italy in 2011, the books focus on the lifelong attachment of two women from a tough Neapolitan neighbourhood. In America, where Ms Ferrante had a modest following, not much happened until 2013, when the translation was written up by James Wood, chief critic of the New Yorker. (Ann Goldstein, the translator, is an editor at the magazine.) By the time the...

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

Educating Aida

Good clean family fun

A BABY giggles as its headphones supply a critique on Japanese society to accompany a video of school girls whirling with phallic “moya-moya” sticks fashioned from imaginary heart tissue. The video installation is part of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo that includes Makoto Aida, who has specialised for years in being offensive. Bizarrely, the show is intended for youngsters on their summer holidays, and is all the more provocative for that.

Mr Aida is often labelled sadist, racist and misogynist. An exhibition at the private Mori Art Museum in 2012-13 included a video of himself masturbating in front of the kanji characters for “beautiful young girl”. Another notorious work showed countless naked and bloodied schoolgirls being mashed up in a fruit blender. 

The artist usually demurs when asked what his works mean, but here he says his aim is to show a highly unusual family speaking in a blunt way, to encourage others. His wife, also an artist, and his son built some of the exhibits. Japanese mothers are mocked in a study of a Chanel-...

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

The new rustbelt

IF YOU visit south-western Ontario and the Niagara peninsula you will see scenes of industrial decay. Steel mills, vehicle-parts factories and food processors sit abandoned, their car parks studded with tufts of grass. The region has the look of a rustbelt, and that has Canadians worried.

Manufacturing took a beating in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when high oil prices drove up the value of the Canadian dollar, making factories less competitive. But Canada should now be recovering from that bout of Dutch disease. The “loonie”, as Canadians call their currency, has been dropping along with oil prices. On August 25th it fell to its lowest level in a decade against the American dollar. That, plus the strong economy in the United States, the market for three-quarters of Canada’s exports, should have scraped off much of the rust.

So far it has not. Factory sales rose 1.2% in June, but were 3.1% below their level of a year earlier. The failure of manufacturing to respond to the tonic of a weaker currency is one reason why the economy probably contracted during the first half of 2015.

Now Canadians are starting to suspect that much of what they lost may never come back. In 2000 manufacturing accounted for 18% of GDP, not much lower than the share in Germany; by 2013 that had dropped to 10%, about the level in Britain and the United States. Factory...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Kn7oOr

Plaguing paradise

Not how it looked in the brochure

SPEYSIDE on the island of Tobago has taken a direct hit. So have Skeete’s Bay, Bathsheba and other beaches on the southern and eastern coasts of Barbados. Cancún, a Mexican resort, has been struck. The bombardment takes the form of globs of sargassum seaweed which have landed on Caribbean beaches this year, forming piles that are sometimes metres deep. They emit a rotten-egg stench when they decompose, ruining holidays for anyone with a sense of smell. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, calls it “the greatest single threat to the Caribbean economy I can imagine.”

There are more than 100 species of sargassum, possibly named after a Portuguese water flower. S. natans and S. fluitans spend their lives afloat and normally bother nobody. Buoyed by gas-filled bladders, they drift from nutrient-rich waters in the Gulf of Mexico into the Sargasso Sea.

They can be as friendly to marine life as a coral reef. Ten species of fish live only in sargassum...

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

Justice decayed

IT STARTED with a shooting. Two men, apparently on a motorbike, attacked a Venezuelan army anti-smuggling convoy on August 19th, close to the main border crossing with Colombia. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, quickly went on television and vowed to hunt down the “murderers” (though the four victims were injured, not killed). He decreed a state of emergency in six municipalities in the frontier province of Táchira and expelled more than 1,000 Colombians living in Venezuela. The Simón Bolívar International Bridge is closed until further notice.

The expulsions were summary and carried out brutally. But for once, the accusations levelled at foreigners, the usual scapegoats for any problem in Venezuela, were not entirely spurious. Colombians are certainly involved in the lively contraband trade in petrol and other goods, which are made artificially cheap in Venezuela by price controls and the weak currency, the bolívar. (Venezuelan mafias, some of them linked to its army, are equally enthusiastic smugglers.) But most Venezuelans, especially the 5m residents of its capital, Caracas, and its metropolitan area, worry more about home-grown killers...

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

Looking for a home

FINLAND, with its baffling language and culture of reserve, is not an easy place for outsiders to penetrate. For Nura Farah, the breakthrough came via the dissected brains of dead cows. Ms Farah, who arrived with her mother in 1993 as a teenager seeking asylum from Somalia’s civil war, spent eight years dreaming of a better life in London while she was taunted at school and bore racist abuse on the streets. But in 2001, working as a lab technician in Helsinki, she found herself charged with testing cow tissue for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease. The work was fulfilling, her colleagues encouraging, and she moved on to bigger challenges. She took on Finnish citizenship, gave birth to a son and last year became the first Somali Finn to publish a novel.

Finland is a long way from the migrant trouble that has erupted across Europe this summer. But as a country with little history of immigration that has had to integrate an unfamiliar minority, its experience resonates. Most EU countries will soon start receiving asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, the main entry-points for illegal migrants. Many residents, particularly in Europe’s...

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

Derailed

A MAINLINE train station in France at the end of summer hums with the thrill of journeys taken and families reunited. The French travel more by high-speed rail than any other European nation. Trains in the French mind are about more than just efficiency and convenience: they are a symbol of national prowess. Which is why the thwarted attack on August 21st on a high-speed train bound for Paris has stirred up a particularly difficult debate.

The attempted assault took place when Ayoub El Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan-born man, emerged from an on-board lavatory shirtless and armed with an automatic rifle, nine clips of bullets, a hand gun and a box-cutter. Thanks to the fortuitous presence and quick thinking of two off-duty American servicemen, who together with other passengers overpowered him, nobody was killed. François Hollande, the French president, said that the assault would otherwise have “degenerated into carnage”. He awarded the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest honour, to six of those who intervened.

The French public prosecutor, François Molins, has opened a formal investigation into attempted murder in connection with a terrorist act. Mr El Khazzani claimed that he found the weapons in a park in Brussels, the Belgian capital, where he boarded the train, and that he meant only to rob passengers, not kill them....

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6Zk

And another one

Melina Mercouri liked doing it

WHEN in doubt, call an election, goes a Greek political adage. It is as valid as ever. After only seven months in power, Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, resigned on August 20th with the intention of winning a new mandate. The move followed a revolt by hardline legislators in his leftwing Syriza party over austerity measures, wiping out Mr Tsipras’s majority in parliament. Greeks will vote for the sixth time in eight years on September 20th or 27th.

It makes political sense for Mr Tsipras to seek a new mandate right away rather than try to limp on. Austerity measures imposed by European creditors will start to bite in October, after which governing may become even trickier.

The creditors have mostly supported the return to the polls even if it increases short-term uncertainty. In any case, they intend to drip-feed aid only when the measures Mr Tsipras signed up to have been implemented.

The most recent opinion polls show Syriza leading the centre-right New Democracy party by 24% to 22%, an unexpectedly narrow margin; some 15% of voters are undecided. Polls...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6Ze

Knocking on heaven’s door

Ready to launch

EVER since the end of the Balkan wars in 1999, the most important question in the region has been when and how to join the European Union. Slovenia made it in 2004 and Croatia followed in 2013. For the rest, however, the goal is still far off. The prospects of Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia—all at different stages of EU integration—have appeared stuck for some time.

But recent months brought progress, mostly unnoticed in the rest of crisis-ridden Europe. On August 25th Kosovo and Serbia signed several EU-aided agreements, including one giving Kosovo’s Serb-dominated municipalities more rights. The EU also mediated an agreement leading to new elections in Macedonia, where a political crisis had come to boiling point. An unworkable EU policy blocking Bosnia’s advancement was abandoned.

The single biggest change, says Remzi Lani, an Albanian analyst, is that western Balkan leaders now take their cue from Berlin, not Brussels. “It is the German moment,” he says. The shift was on display at a regional summit in Vienna on August 27th. Heads of government met as part of...

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

The gambler

WHEN he became Turkey’s first popularly elected head of state last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to be no “ordinary president”. Departing from political tradition once more, he has now called early elections for the first time in the country’s modern history after his Justice and Development party (AK) lost its 12-year majority in parliament on June 7th and failed to form a coalition government.

The setback has not dented Mr Erdogan’s oft-voiced determination to create a powerful executive presidency. It may even have made a return to the polls more attractive, showing him firmly in charge. “Agree or not, Turkey’s regime has de facto changed,” he said on August 14th, implying that a rewriting of the constitution that he has long sought may be unnecessary. Proving his point, Mr Erdogan has stretched the boundaries of his supposedly non-partisan role. He refused to give the opposition leader, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the chance to form a government, triggering allegations of staging “a civilian coup”.

Returning to the polls is a gamble, however. Mr Erdogan appears convinced that voters, having directed a warning shot at his party at the recent polls, will return it to power. But pollsters see little evidence of that. For the time being, Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister, has been asked to form an interim unity...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Lyk6IX

It’ll cost you

GETTING divorced? Going to the doctor? Flushing a loo? If so, you are increasingly likely to receive a bill from the government. As cash-strapped Western countries try to balance their books without raising unpopular taxes, they are charging higher fees for everyday services. American cities tap their residents for around a quarter more in such charges than they did at the turn of the century. Half the countries in the EU have increased health-care charges since the financial crisis. In Britain, where a severe fiscal squeeze is under way, new fees are popping up in unexpected places, from the criminal courts to municipal pest-control agencies (see article).

Pay-as-you-go government has advantages. Charging for services helps allocate resources efficiently, deterring overconsumption, just as parking meters stop people hogging spaces. And far from being uniformly regressive, fees can be fairer than general taxation. Selling water by the litre, as Ireland controversially began to do in...

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

Lots of heat but not much light

THE intensity of the argument in Washington, DC, over the nuclear pact between Iran, America and five other powers is in some ways impressive. Such an important agreement merits close scrutiny. Sadly, much of the talk has been wildly misleading (see article). For example, Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential hopeful, says the deal would make the Obama administration “the leading global financier” of Islamic terrorism, “sending billions to jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans”. Some critics seem motivated more by loathing of Barack Obama than by the flaws of the accord itself. Yet the White House has hardly been blameless, either. Mr Obama’s insistence that rejection of the pact would put America on a path towards war with Iran is cynically calculated to play on voters’ fears.

The fate of the deal will be decided over the next five or six weeks. Given Republicans’ hostility, Mr Obama knows that he will probably have to use his presidential veto following a first vote in...

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

Let them in and let them earn

ISLAMIC STATE (IS) does not hide its brutality. When it burns men alive or impales their heads on spikes, it posts the videos online. When its fighters enslave and rape infidel girls, they boast that they are doing God’s will. So when fugitives from IS-occupied Syria or Iraq say they are frightened to return home, there is a good chance they are telling the truth.

The European Union is one of the richest, most peaceful regions on Earth, and its citizens like to think that they set the standard for compassion. All EU nations accept that they have a legal duty to grant safe harbour to those with a “well-founded” fear of persecution. Yet the recent surge of asylum-seekers has tested Europe’s commitment to its ideals, to put it mildly (see article). Neo-Nazi thugs in Germany have torched asylum-seekers’ hostels. An anti-immigrant group is now the most popular political party in Sweden. Hungary’s prime minister, channelling his inner Donald Trump, warns that illegal migrants,...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1hI5RaG

Awaiting its iPhone moment

IS IT vividly realistic—or is it still just vapid razzmatazz? Virtual reality (VR), a technology that flopped in the 1990s, is making a glitzy comeback. The dream of a headset that can immerse you in a detailed, realistic 3D world is now being pursued in earnest by a gaggle of startups and the giants of technology alike. Last year Facebook bought Oculus, the most prominent VR fledgling, for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, says “immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video.” Google supports VR in several of its products and is backing a secretive new company called Magic Leap. Microsoft, having missed the boat on smartphones, has developed an impressive VR system named HoloLens. Tech leaders have decided that VR could be the next big thing after the smartphone (see article). Are they right?

The VR devices appearing in the next few months will focus on video-gaming, where VR is a natural fit. But the technology will eventually have many other uses: in data visualisation...

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1hI5SLM

Manage like a spymaster

UNTIL recently, for most businesses security was a question of buying decent locks, doors and windows, installing CCTV, making sure that reception staff sign visitors in and out, and trying not to leave confidential papers in the photocopier. But attacks on their computer systems, be they by business rivals, political activists, criminals or foreign governments, are much harder to defend against—and can have far worse consequences than a physical break-in. A company can suffer a devastating blow to its reputation, its intellectual property, or its ability to serve customers—not to mention its bank balances. It may never learn who has attacked it or why, or how much information has been taken; so it may never be sure if it has done enough to plug the leak.

Cyber-security is now burning a hole in boardroom tables. Before the recent hacking of Ashley Madison, an online broker of adulterous trysts, the most notorious example in the past year was that of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which a torrent of embarrassing e-mails, personal information about employees and copies of unreleased films was released on the internet by unknown infiltrators. But...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JA69ul

Snap judgments

A WHOLE generation of young people has been snapped up by Snapchat. Every day around 100m people worldwide use the smartphone app to send (sometimes saucy) photos, videos and messages that quickly disappear from the recipient’s phone. Some 60% of American smartphone users between the ages of 13 and 34 use the service, the firm claims. It is among the most highly valued private technology firms in the world: its most recent financing round, in May, put a $16 billion price tag on it.

The app’s impermanent messages, which help protect the sender’s privacy, have made it popular among young users. So has its clunky user interface, which dissuades parents from using the app. One of Snapchat’s most-used features is “stories”—mash-ups of videos that users take with their smartphones’ cameras, recapping their day’s activities, over which they can doodle and write captions before sharing them with friends. Perfect for the “selfie” generation.

In recent months advertisers, eager to reach young consumers who spend less time with older media, have become captivated by Snapchat’s potential. Both Facebook and Google reportedly tried to buy it in...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JA6ahY

A brand new game

EARLIER this year BMW advertised on WeChat, a popular messaging app in China with around 550m monthly users. But its ads were shown only to those whose profiles suggested they were potential buyers of expensive cars. Others were shown ads for more affordable stuff, such as smartphones. The campaign bruised a few egos. Some of those not shown the BMW ad complained, referring to themselves as diao, or (putting it politely) losers.

The carmaker’s experience shows the complexities of advertising today, when it is so easy for dissatisfied customers to make their voices heard. But it was also an example of how marketing chiefs are struggling to find the right way to reach consumers on new digital platforms, where they are spending ever more of their time.

Not long ago social-media marketing was something that brand managers might ask their summer interns to deal with. Today it has become a pillar of the advertising industry. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have cultivated vast audiences: 2 billion people worldwide use them, says eMarketer, a research firm. Online advertising of all sorts continues...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1LDcHL0

Croissantonomics

AIRY croissants, rich chocolate-chip biscuits, wedges of succulent cake—the goods at the City Bakery, in Manhattan, look delicious. Maury Rubin, its founder, studied in France. But his best creations are distinctly American: pretzel croissants (surprisingly tasty), and recipes for making money.

Mr Rubin is among those bakers who revere traditional methods but want a fat profit. However, a good bakery is bad business. Flour is cheap but organic butter, which makes up half a croissant, is not. Central locations for outlets are expensive to rent. In all, it costs Mr Rubin $2.60 to make a $3.50 croissant. If he makes 100 and sells 70, he earns $245 but his costs are $260. Since he refuses to sell leftovers—all goods are sold within a day—he loses money. “Welcome to the bakery business,” Mr Rubin says.

The obvious fix is to raise prices. But Mr Rubin says shoppers bristle when the cost of baked goods passes a certain threshold. He has two main solutions. First, don’t be just a bakery. He also sells fancy salads and sandwiches to office workers, which have higher margins.

Second, use data to cut waste. Mr Rubin studies sales to discern trends in demand, then adjusts supply accordingly. There are no brownies or carrot cake on Mondays or Tuesdays—people don’t buy rich desserts after decadent weekends. He watches the weather closely, as demand melts in...

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

Patently problematic

CLARITY or chaos? Supporters of the Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting (BEPS) project, being worked on by the OECD, argue that it will bind multinationals to a consistent set of global tax rules, providing them with less licence than they now have to short-change governments through artful use of loopholes in national laws. Sceptics worry that it could only lead to chaos if countries adopt the new guidelines to differing degrees, or if some governments conclude they are too soft, and take unilateral action to stop tax revenue on profits being siphoned abroad.

With two months to go before the club of rich and middle-income countries presents its plan to the G20 for approval, much of its detail remains unclear. But no one doubts that, with so many clashing national interests at stake, there are limits to what can be achieved. Discord has been evident lately, even among allies: in June a US Treasury official accused Britain and Australia of undermining international agreement by “going their own way”. One beef is over Britain’s new “diverted profits” tax, which imposes a levy on profits routed to tax havens through “contrived...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JA69uq

Young, single and what about it?

IN HER tiny flat, which she shares with two cats and a flock of porcelain owls, Chi Yingying describes her parents as wanting to be the controlling shareholders in her life. Even when she was in her early 20s, her mother raged at her for being unmarried. At 28 Ms Chi took “the most courageous decision of my life” and moved into her own home. Now 33, she relishes the privacy—at a price: her monthly rent of 4,000 yuan ($625) swallows nearly half her salary. 

In many countries leaving the family home well before marriage is a rite of passage. But in China choosing to live alone and unmarried as Ms Chi has done is eccentric verging on taboo. Chinese culture attaches a particularly high value to the idea that families should live together. Yet ever more people are living alone.

In the decade to 2010 the number of single-person households doubled. Today over 58m Chinese live by themselves, according to census data, a bigger number of one-person homes than in America, Britain and France combined. Solo dwellers make up 14% of all households. That is still low compared with rates found in Japan or Taiwan (see chart), but the proportion...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1U8jiSo

The kin and I

LIU CAIPING is a former maths teacher, now 71, who has lived alone in the western city of Xi’an since her husband died last year. The radio is her steadfast companion. Her eyesight is failing and she rarely goes out. Like many city residents, her former neighbours have scattered, and her two daughters are far away. When she can no longer cope on her own she will go to a nursing home, she says. That option remains extremely rare for old Chinese. And that highlights the problem: China is struggling to cope with a rapidly ageing society and a rising number of elderly people living by themselves.

For most of the past two millennia the family has been central to how Chinese have seen themselves—and the state has been seen as a family writ large. Filial piety was somewhere near the heart of a Confucian order regulating society, and the family was an extended, stable unit of several generations under one roof. A very common saying encapsulated it all: yang er fang lao—“raise children for your old age”.

Today multi-generation families are still the norm. Almost three-fifths of people over 65 live with their...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1Jol75A

Journalist wanted

Journalist wanted: The Economist is looking for a journalist to write about global public policy, based in London but travelling everywhere. First-rate analytical and writing skills essential; sense of humour a plus. Salary negotiable. Applicants should send a CV and an original 600-word article on any subject, written in the style of The Economist, to econjob@economist.com by September 4th. For more details, see http://ift.tt/1NsKdAT

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1fI8h7r

Travelling light

10,000 airmiles away from home

A TOURIST flying economy class from Britain to Kenya and back generates around a tonne of carbon emissions, according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation. No matter how many times he reuses his towels or sits on a composting toilet when he is there, he could never hope to offset the burning of all that jet fuel. Does that mean the very notion of “sustainable tourism” is an oxymoron?

The phrase has three possible meanings. The first is ecological. Given the contribution that transport, especially by air, makes to global warming, on this definition it is almost guaranteed to fall short. The only truly sustainable holiday would be camping in the back garden eating berries, says Harald Zeiss of the Institute for Sustainable Tourism at Harz University in Germany. The second is social. Ideally, when cultures meet and gain in mutual understanding the long-term benefits will be intangible, but real. The final one is economic. Tourists who step off the beaten track have a chance to help lift the poor out of poverty and encourage them to preserve their environments for financial gain. The...

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

A place to lay your bread

AT THE Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, one of the world’s most luxurious (pictured), guests can avail themselves of 24-carat gold iPads and caviar facials. The cheapest rooms cost $1,000 a night; those interested in the royal suite can expect to pay nearer $25,000. Such ostentation is not to everyone’s taste. But it illustrates a trend: the way that the rich spend their money is changing.

Once, the well-heeled bought fancy stuff. Nowadays they spend more on things to do and see. A report last year by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that of the $1.8 trillion spent on luxury goods and services worldwide in 2012, nearly $1 trillion went on “luxury experiences”. Travel and hotels accounted for around half that figure.

This partly reflects the growing weight of rich folk from developing countries. Wealthy Chinese spend 20 days a year travelling for leisure, according to ILMT, a travel agency. The most popular destination was Australia, and nearly half made it as far as Europe. On average, affluent Americans went on holiday 3.9 times in 2014, says Resonance, a consultancy, up from 3 times in 2012. Around half travelled more than 1,000...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1fI8fMI

Grand illusions

YOUR correspondent stands, in a pleasingly impossible way, in orbit. The Earth is spread out beneath. A turn of the head reveals the blackness of deep space behind and above. In front is a table full of toys and brightly coloured building blocks, all of which are resolutely refusing to float away—for, despite his being in orbit, gravity’s pull does not seem to have vanished. A step towards the table brings that piece of furniture closer. A disembodied head appears, and pair of hands offer a toy ray-gun. “Go on, shoot me with it,” says the head, encouragingly. Squeezing the trigger produces a flash of light, and the head is suddenly a fraction of its former size, speaking in a comic Mickey-Mouse voice (despite the lack of air in low-Earth orbit) as the planet rotates majestically below.

It is, of course, an illusion, generated by a virtual-reality (VR) company called Oculus. The non-virtual reality is a journalist wearing a goofy-looking headset and clutching a pair of controllers in a black, soundproofed room at a video-gaming trade fair in Germany. But from the inside, it is strikingly convincing. The virtual world surrounds the user. A turn of the...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1LDc6cl

The science of swing

DID Isaac Newton play tennis? He certainly liked to watch it, for as he first observed light rays bending in and out of his prism, in 1666, “I remembered that I had often seen a Tennis ball, struck with an oblique Racket, describe such a curve line.” His three laws of motion, too, as Howard Brody liked to point out, make a pretty good synopsis of a game of tennis: 1, An object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that motion unless it encounters an external force; 2, force equals mass times acceleration; and 3, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (unless the ball goes out).

Professor Brody’s love of tennis, perhaps like Newton’s, was never quite matched by his skill. From fumbling tournaments in high school (“The coach gave up”), he progressed to four years of varsity play at MIT, and for one heady month coached the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania where, for almost all his career, he was a physics professor. His original field, though, was particle and nuclear physics, the result of a boyhood fascination with a little book called “Atoms in Action”; and it was only by a fortuitous piece...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1NWJF6I

Off the block

THE first item sold on eBay, an online marketplace, was a broken laser pointer, which was snapped up for $14.83 in September 1995. By 2002 eBay had hosted nearly $15 billion of transactions and had more registered users than Britain had people. Yet the fad for online auctions faded almost as quickly as it appeared. Only 20% of sales on eBay, which turns 20 on September 3rd, now involve auctions.

At eBay’s inception, users could sell things only by auction. This was tremendously exciting for economists, who love the things for their ability to magic prices out of thin air and to allocate goods efficiently by determining who values them most highly. The main obstacle to holding auctions is the cost of bringing together enough interested buyers and sellers. But eBay made connecting buyers and sellers cheap. Without it, that broken laser pointer may well have languished unsold.

EBay also benefited from a first-mover advantage. Buyers want to go where there are lots of competing sellers, and sellers will flock to wherever they can find the most eager customers. The size of eBay’s network was its own, self-perpetuating...

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

The kindness of neighbours

Turning his back

IN THE semi-arid lowlands of Mufindi, in southern Tanzania, water is hard to come by. Villagers rely on irrigation to grow maize, potatoes and spinach. Informal and often woolly codes govern how much water each farmer diverts to their own fields, and how much they leave for their neighbours downstream. Some farmers, naturally, turn out to be more grasping than others. Economists typically see such decisions as irreducible: there is no accounting for individuals’ values and preferences. But a new study* investigates why there is such variation in generosity among Mufindi’s farmers.

The researchers asked other villagers to rank each farmer’s social status on a scale of one to four. Then they invited the farmers to take part in a game in which participants had to decide how much water they would take under different scenarios. Participants were paid small sums, which varied according to how well they did in the game. They received more money if they reaped a bigger harvest by taking more than their share of water, for instance, but less if the other villagers fined them for violating water-sharing norms....

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1MQlMz1

Wheelbarrows to the rescue

YOU might think Godwin Emefiele, the governor of Nigeria’s central bank, had problems enough. The collapsing oil price has slashed Nigeria’s export earnings. Foreign reserves have fallen from more than $40 billion early last year to just over $30 billion now. In response Mr Emefiele (pictured) devalued the local currency, the naira, in November and again in February. The devaluations are stoking inflation. Like many other central bankers in commodity-exporting countries, he is faced with the unenviable choice of raising rates despite the damage to an already faltering economy, or leaving them be despite rising inflation and a swooning currency. Unlike other central bankers, however, Mr Emefiele has decided to compound the awkwardness of his position by getting involved in industrial policy as well.

In June the central bank said it would not provide foreign exchange for 41 categories of imports, ranging from wheelbarrows to private jets. The idea, Mr Emefiele says, is both to conserve dollars and to stimulate local manufacturing. “Central banks in developing countries like ours cannot sit idly by and concentrate only on price and monetary stability...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1MQlOa1

Non-profit paradise

Frond management

JUST off the west coast of Florida lies the sun-drenched island of Little Bokeelia. It is blessed with cascading waterfalls, tennis courts, pools and a Spanish-style villa. Despite such enticing features, the island languished on the market for three years, before selling in July for a mere $14.5m—half the original asking price.

Little Bokeelia is not the only island that is proving hard to shift. In the Bahamas, where prices per acre are among the world’s highest, hundreds of atolls lie unbought. The price of undeveloped islands, which make up around 80% of the market, has dropped roughly by half since the financial crisis, says Farhad Vladi, a private-island broker.

In the early 2000s private islands were the trophy of choice for millionaires but the recession sapped demand. Building on an island is much pricier than on a mainland plot, and there are many potential pitfalls. It is not for the faint-hearted, says Edward Childs of Smiths Gore, an estate agent in the British Virgin Islands. Mega-yachts and private jets are seen as more predictable investments. As a result private islands...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1MQlN61

Core concern

AFTER two years of remission, Japan seems likely to sink back into the “chronic disease” of deflation, as Haruhiko Kuroda, the governor of the Bank of Japan (BoJ), calls it. New data are expected to show on August 28th that core CPI, the central bank’s preferred indicator of inflation, turned negative in July for the first time since the bank launched a big programme of quantitative easing (printing money to buy bonds) in April 2013 (see chart). At the time, it pledged to lift inflation to 2% in two years.

The news will heap further pressure on the BoJ to ease monetary policy yet more this year, as will worries about Chinese growth. The fact that Japan’s economy shrank by 1.6% in the second quarter on an annualised basis adds to the concerns. The central bank is currently buying about ¥80 trillion ($670 billion) of long-term Japanese government bonds (JGBs) a year, or twice the annual issuance. It now holds over ¥300 trillion of JGBs, or nearly a third of all outstanding bonds.

Mr Kuroda’s excuse for deflation’s apparent return is that the falling oil price has pushed down core CPI, which excludes fresh food but includes energy. In the longer...

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

Building works

IT IS hard to exaggerate the decrepitude of infrastructure in much of the rich world. One in three railway bridges in Germany is over 100 years old, as are half of London’s water mains. In America the average bridge is 42 years old and the average dam 52. The American Society of Civil Engineers rates around 14,000 of the country’s dams as “high hazard” and 151,238 of its bridges as “deficient”. This crumbling infrastructure is both dangerous and expensive: traffic jams on urban highways cost America over $100 billion in wasted time and fuel each year; congestion at airports costs $22 billion and another $150 billion is lost to power outages.

The B20, the business arm of the G20, a club of big economies, estimates that the global backlog of spending needed to bring infrastructure up to scratch will reach $15 trillion-20 trillion by 2030. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons that in 2007-12 investment in infrastructure in rich countries was about 2.5% of GDP a year when it should have been 3.5%. If anything, the problem is becoming more acute as some governments whose finances have been racked by the crisis cut back. In 2013 in the euro zone, general...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Jyi8Ez

The Great Fall of China

ONCE the soundtrack to a financial meltdown was the yelling of traders on the floor of a financial exchange. Now it is more likely to be the wordless hum of servers in data centres, as algorithms try to match buyers with sellers. But every big sell-off is gripped by the same rampant, visceral fear. The urge to sell overwhelms the advice to stand firm. 

Stomachs are churning again after China’s stockmarket endured its biggest one-day fall since 2007; even Chinese state media called August 24th “Black Monday”. From the rand to the ringgit, emerging-market currencies slumped. Commodity prices fell into territory not seen since 1999. The contagion infected Western markets, too. Germany’s DAX index fell to more than 20% below its peak. American stocks whipsawed: General Electric was at one point down by more than 20%.

Rich-world markets have regained some of their poise. But three fears remain: that China’s economy is in deep trouble; that emerging markets are vulnerable to a full-blown crisis; and that the long rally in rich-world markets is over. Some aspects of these worries are overplayed and others are misplaced. Even so, this...

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

Controversial hybrids

Roundup Ready—but so are some weeds

SIX companies dominate the business of farm supplies. The interest of Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed producer, in buying Syngenta, the largest agrochemicals firm, had threatened to whittle them down to five. That raised worries about whether the reduction in competition would mean less innovation—and thus slower improvements in crop yields—as well as higher costs for farmers.

However, Syngenta played hard to get. It rebuffed a bid of $45 billion in June. And another, made on August 18th, worth around $47 billion. So, on August 26th, Monsanto walked away. But consolidation of the industry may be in prospect anyway. The takeover battle stimulated the interest of other big agricultural suppliers: BASF, another of the big six, had reportedly sought financing to make a rival offer for Syngenta. And Monsanto itself may not be done. Next year the firm may set its sights on another target, reckons John Klein, an analyst at Berenberg, a bank.

Two decades ago the industry was far more fragmented. In 1994 the top four companies in the worldwide market for seeds and crop...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1K8xF4j

Tinkering around the edges

 

 

 

 

AT FIRST sight, it was a triumph. After months of negotiations Ukraine and a committee of its creditors (which include Franklin Templeton, an American investment house and BTG Pactual, a Brazilian one) reached a deal this week to restructure the country’s international bonds, as well as a smattering of other sorts of debt, worth about $18 billion. Payments have been pushed back, meaning that the government will not need to cough up any principal or interest on the debts in question until 2019. The principal on the bonds will also be cut by 20% on average.

This is a better deal for Ukraine than many were expecting. It is rare for a country to get a haircut on its debts without also defaulting (one exception is Greece). When the negotiations began, the creditors had refused even to consider writing off any of...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1JzZvo0

Why Spanish bulls are now deadlier

What happened to the photographer?

DAVID GONZALEZ was trying to capture a charging bull on his mobile phone camera during a village fiesta in Villaseca de la Sagra in central Spain on August 9th. Instead it was a bull that caught him. The 32-year-old became one of nine people gored to death at festivals this summer (four alone on the most recent weekend), raising questions about Spain’s love-hate relationship with bulls.

Sophisticated Spaniards are dismayed that foreigners associate their country more with stomping beasts and strutting matadors than with painting, music or technology. Whether romantic or revolting, Spain conjures up visions of fearless, sequinned, cape-waving fighters dancing around half-tonne bulls and sinking swords into their necks—or being gored.

The truth is less glamorous. The animals mostly provide entertainment at village fiestas, chasing the brave and the foolish down streets or around makeshift rings. All are amateurs and a few are drunk. The last top matador to die in a Spanish ring was José Cubero, known as El Yiyo, in 1985.

While village fiestas thrive, serious...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1PBGUJ8

Back in the USSR

Leyla and Arif Yunus: freedom fighters

“MY DEAR Arif, after 36 years of life together we’re in different cells in different prisons. Perhaps you’re unaware, I can bear it all: Terrible physical pain (I’m already coming down with pneumonia from the cold water), pressure from a hardened prisoner and even visits from those jackals in the prosecutor’s office. Most difficult of all is you are not nearby. For 36 years we have almost never been apart!”

So wrote Leyla Yunus, a human-rights defender, from her prison cell in Azerbaijan to her husband in August 2014. The day of the couple’s initial detention, April 28th last year, in Soviet days marked the takeover of Azerbaijan by the Bolsheviks in 1920. The legacy lives on. In keeping with Soviet tradition, the Yunuses were arrested and charged with espionage and treason as well as tax evasion and embezzlement. A year later they were given a show trial. Another of Mrs Yunus’s letters could have been written in Stalin’s day. “I was dragged by my feet into solitary confinement without explaining a reason. I heard from Arif that he had also been assaulted during the first days of his...

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

What the classics know

THE Greeks have not had much to laugh about in recent years. Falling incomes, rising unemployment and a pervasive fear of being forced out of the euro foster a gloomy mood. Even the latest news of a third bail-out worth €86 billion ($96 billion) feels more like a reprieve than a promising new start.

Still, the holiday season usually lifts the country, and this year Greeks are cheered by summer performances of classical dramas. Perhaps the gripping plots and rich metaphors of the ancient world seem more relevant than ever. Are labours to repay foreign debts Sisyphean? Was the prime minister’s victory in a recent referendum Pyrrhic?

Aristophanes, the ancient comic playwright whose raunchy satires were first performed 25 centuries ago, is especially popular. His plays, written for an annual drama festival in Athens, first entertained weary citizens impoverished by a long-running war with Sparta. This year productions of two works, “Acharnians” and “Ecclesiazouses”, in modern Greek translation, have become unexpected hits. They opened in July to sell-out audiences at the prestigious annual festival of ancient drama held in a 14,000-seat amphitheatre at Epidaurus in southern Greece. Both productions are now touring the country’s open-air stages.

Audiences grow in difficult times, says Platon Mavromoustakos, professor of theatre studies at Athens...

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

The path to penury

ALMOST 500km (310 miles) separate Moscow, Russia’s glittering capital, from its lesser-known namesake, a dying village deep in the forests of the Tverskaya Oblast. The road that connects them begins as smooth asphalt beside the red walls of the Kremlin and ends as a rutted dirt track amid abandoned wooden homes. The characters that populate the towns and cities along the way often live very different lives. But as Russia’s recession deepens (the country’s GDP shrank by 4.6% in the second quarter measured year-on-year), the effects resonate across every stratum of society.

Inflation has eaten away at family budgets. Falling oil revenues have forced the government to tighten its belt (with the notable exception of defence spending). While many struggle, there is one constant: rather than panicking, Russians adjust. Memories of earlier crises loom—a reminder of how much worse it can get. Nationalist rhetoric serves as a healing balm. People push on. “Russia’s great strength throughout the centuries has been that its people can seemingly adapt to any conditions,” says Maria Lipman, a political analyst.

...

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

Poisonous connections

What the blast laid bare

RESIDENTS who had their homes destroyed by the huge explosions that rocked the northern city of Tianjin on August 12th are being offered 2,000 yuan ($312) a month for three months. “The government says it is taking care of people who lost their homes,” says one resident, Chang Zaixing. “But they’re lying and cheating. Everyone in Tianjin knows it, but we should let the rest of China and the rest of the world know it.”

After one of China’s biggest industrial accidents, the government’s emergency response is being met with open contempt. Residents with banners, loudhailers and face masks dog officials’ footsteps, demanding full compensation for their homes. Others want to know what has happened to their relatives—65 people remain unaccounted for. It took almost a week for the mayor, Huang Xingguo, to appear before a press conference. When he did, on August 19th, the city’s claim that air-quality readings were acceptable met with incredulity. “Are the data really true?” asked a reporter from the Communist party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily.

Perhaps the...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1K8vk81

Uncivil society

RECENTLY the Communist Party has put forward a raft of proposals aimed at preventing perceived challenges to its monopoly of power. On July 1st a national-security law was passed that authorised “all measures necessary” to protect the country from hostile elements. Now a draft of China’s first law for regulating foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is expected to pass in the coming weeks. The law is deemed necessary because of the threats NGOs are presumed to pose.

The draft law represents a mixture of limited progress and major party retrenchment in a sensitive area. Under Mao Zedong, China had no space for NGOs. But they have multiplied in the past decade to fill the gaps left by the party’s retreat from people’s daily lives. Officials say the law will help NGOs by giving them legal status, a valid claim. But it will also force strict constraints on foreign or foreign-supported groups. No funding from abroad will be allowed. And all NGOs will have to find an official sponsoring organisation. They will then have to register with China’s feared public security apparatus, which will now oversee the entire foreign-backed sector.

...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1K8vk83

Glider spiders

AS FAR as biologists can tell from the fossil record, only four groups of animals have...

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

What goes around, comes around

Murano eat your heart out

GLASSMAKING began 4,500 years ago, in Mesopotamia. The industry’s first products were trinkets, such as beads and pendants, cast from moulds and carved by hand. But craftsmen quickly worked out how to make more practical stuff, such as jugs, bottles and drinking vessels, by coiling strands of molten glass around a sand or clay core of appropriate shape, which could then be shaken or scraped out after the glass had cooled.

Since those early days, many other ways of forming glass have been invented. These range from blowing forcefully through a tube to inflate a hot gob of the stuff, creating a hollow vessel, to floating it as a liquid on a bed of molten tin to produce perfectly flat window panes. But ancient wisdom often still has value, and now a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have had another look at the coiling method, pronounced it good, and modernised it. Their principal updating is to dispense with the core. Instead, they have turned to the field of 3D printing—or additive...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1HXVQL9

Bringing up baby

IT IS a long way from the western Pacific Ocean to the flooded streets of Buenos Aires where, this month, the city’s Good Samaritans have been distributing food and candles by kayak after some unseasonably heavy rain. But there is a link. Its name is El Niño.

El Niño (Spanish for “The Boy”) is a Pacific-wide phenomenon that has global consequences. A Niño happens when warm water that has accumulated on the west side of the Pacific floods eastward with the abatement of the westerly trade winds which penned it up. (The long, dark equatorial streak on the map above, which shows sea-surface temperatures for August 10th-16th, indicates this.) The trade winds, and their decrease or reversal, are part of a cycle called ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation—see article).

The consequences of this phase of ENSO include heavy rain in south-eastern South America, western North America and eastern Africa, and drought in Australia, India and Indonesia. Another consequence, around Christmastide, is the sudden...

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

Childbirth

EL NIÑO is part of a wider climate system called El Niño Southern Oscillation, in which the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere above it influence each other. This interaction drives the warming and cooling of the equatorial Pacific, which in turn affects the weather elsewhere in the world.

The process starts with surface water, propelled westward across the ocean by trade winds and heated by the sun as it travels, running into the Philippines, the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea. Over the course of between two and seven years the pool of warm water thus created grows into something with an area of about 12m km{+2} (4.6m square miles). Balmy, humid air rises from the pool, cooling and shedding rain as it does so, as part of a phenomenon called the Walker circulation (see chart). Some of this air travels west, where it irrigates Indonesia with its precipitation. Some travels east, discharging its load on the Pacific, and then sinks back to the surface near the coast of South America, replacing the air that has travelled west as the trade winds.

Below the surface things are happening, too. The movement of warm water towards...

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

Down and dirty in city hall

Broken dream

“SHOW ME A HERO”, a new series on HBO, starts with a victory speech: an ominous sign. When a first episode ends in triumph, the only way ahead is down. The year is 1987, and 28-year-old Nick Wasicsko, an ex-cop, has just become the youngest mayor of Yonkers, a New York suburb that was then mostly working-class and white. Wasicsko won because he promised to appeal a federal court order requiring Yonkers to build subsidised housing on its richer, whiter east side, to counteract the concentration of poverty in its mostly black west.

As he speaks, a telephone ringing in the background grows gradually louder. The scene cuts to the next day, when the new mayor takes a call from the city’s lawyers. There are no grounds for appeal, they tell him. Wasicsko is disappointed, but resigned. Now it’s time to follow the law and build the houses, he reasons: nobody can blame me for that, right?

Over the next five episodes, the ramifications of Wasicsko’s decision play out in two worlds. In the world of city politics he is, of course, roundly blamed: it costs him his career (saying this gives away nothing:...

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

The money trap

Other People’s Money. By John Kay. PublicAffairs; 352 pages; $27.99. Profile; £16.99.

WHAT is the finance sector for? This vital question is all too often forgotten in the debate about the debt crisis of 2008 and its aftermath; it certainly seemed to be forgotten by bankers in the build-up to the debacle. But if the world is to avoid future banking collapses, or at least limit their economic impact, people need to think clearly about the issue.

John Kay’s new book, “Other People’s Money”, does the job; it should be read by everyone concerned with preventing the next crisis. The early books after the crash, like Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Too Big to Fail”, analysed how the collapse unfolded in minute detail; Mr Kay, an academic and columnist for the Financial Times, takes the longer and broader view.

In doing so, he skewers the pretensions of the finance sector and questions whether its high rewards reflect its true economic contribution. Barely a page goes by without an acute observation or pithy aphorism. “A country can be prosperous only if it has a well-functioning financial...

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

Horrible history

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. By Steve Silberman. Avery; 544 pages; $29.95. Allen & Unwin; £16.99.

EVERYTHING about autism, which is among the most common and the most slippery of mental conditions, is contested. The American Psychiatric Association, which determines what ailments American insurance companies will pay to treat, classifies it as a disorder. Many parents of autistic children are desperately searching for a cure, and find themselves easy prey for people who overpromise, selling remedies that have no scientific basis. Plenty of other people think that autism—which is characterised, among other things, by an inward focus that makes it hard to abide by the conventions of social behaviour—is not a disorder at all, and therefore has no need of a cure. America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention thinks that one in 68 children in the country have at least a touch of autism, which if true means there are more autistic Americans than Jewish ones. This too is contested.

Steve Silberman’s interest in autism was prompted more than a decade ago by his work...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1JkAM2E

Life out loud

Fine views

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal. By Jay Parini. Penguin Random House; 480 pages; $35. Published in the UK as “Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal”. Little, Brown; £25.

“NEVER lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television” is a familiar Gore Vidal quip—and, as Jay Parini notes in a marvellous new biography, Vidal enthusiastically followed his own advice. The sex was almost always homosexual; invariably “on top”; and usually in the afternoon, to allow for disciplined writing in the morning and extravagant socialising in the evening. For Vidal, television meant a show of eloquent punditry projected on both sides of the Atlantic, but most memorably—as any trawl through YouTube will confirm—in the form of confrontations on American chat shows with William Buckley, editor of the conservative National Review, and with a pugnacious fellow writer, Norman Mailer.

Vidal died in 2012 at the age of 86. He wrote so many novels, screenplays, television shows, literary commentaries and essays that he ought to...

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

Brilliant threads

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. By Peter Frankopan. Bloomsbury; 656 pages; £30. To be published in America in February by Knopf.

THIS is, to put it mildly, an ambitious book. The author, a historian at Oxford University, could have crafted a dozen pithy histories of, among other subjects covered: the rise of Persia; the creation of the Silk Roads, the story of long-distance trade across the Eurasian continent; the commercial as well as religious revolution that was Islam; the first global economy in the 17th century, powered by discoveries of South American silver; the 19th-century geopolitical intrigues known as the Great Game; the reasons for Germany’s push east in the second world war (wheat); the Asian dimensions of the cold war and the rise of Islamist extremism.

Yet by spinning all these stories into a single thread, Peter Frankopan attempts something bold: a history of the world that shunts the centre of gravity eastward. “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” is a counterblast to another ambitious book from an earlier generation, J.M. Roberts’s Western-centric “Penguin History of the World”, which came out in 1976.

Mr Frankopan writes with clarity and memorable detail. When Cyrus the Great, creator in the sixth century BC of the Persian Empire, was killed attempting to subdue the Scythians, his...

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

Wonder women and macho men

“CRISTINA’S pleasure” blared the cover of a 2012 edition of Noticias, a tabloid news magazine in Argentina. A caricature of the country’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, seemed to show her in mid-orgasm, her head thrown back, her mouth open. “Every day she seems more confident, sensual and even shameless,” the story went on. For further enlightenment, readers were invited to watch an animated video online of the president masturbating.

Good taste is not how tabloids sell copies in any country, but it is hard to imagine a British red top describing a female politician quite so crudely. The treatment of Ms Fernández in Noticias points to a Latin American paradox. Women have made great progress towards equality with men, especially in schools, workplaces and politics. But social attitudes have changed more slowly. Women’s ambitions are often belittled; hostility towards them is common. Raw statistics tell a story of female advancement; machista culture has yet to catch up.

In the past quarter-century, the proportion of women in the workforce has risen more in Latin America than...

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

The migrant nation

IT WAS a slim volume, just 108 pages, and its title was hardly one to quicken pulses. Nevertheless Desborde Popular y Crisis del Estado (“Popular Overspill and Crisis of the State”) quickly became a bestseller in Peru after its publication in 1984. That was because the author, José Matos Mar, an anthropologist who died this month aged 93, had put his finger on a far-reaching social revolution which continues to reshape his country and has echoes across Latin America.

Mr Matos’s argument was that migration from the Andes to Lima and the other cities of Peru’s Pacific coast was no mere movement of population. Rather it amounted to an unstoppable tide of social change that smashed down or simply bypassed Peru’s oligarchic political and economic structures. The migrants settled—there would be 8m of them between 1940 and 2010—in largely self-built shantytowns (though by now many have brick houses and paved streets). They forged a new culture, mestizo (mixed) but with Amerindian roots, and had their “own sense of law and morality”. They created jobs for themselves in a growing “informal” (ie, unregistered)...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1KxKI9X

Girl power

SEXISM is not just wrong. It is also expensive. Latin America has made progress in bringing women into the workforce (see article). But their participation rate still lags far behind that of men. If the gap were closed, the region’s GDP per person would be 16% higher, estimate David Cuberes of Clark University in Massachusetts and Marc Teignier of the University of Barcelona.

In a new paper these two economists also looked at the economic effects of gaps in the rates at which men and women run businesses. Latin American women are relatively enterprising. The effect of the difference between male and female entrepreneurship is smaller in the region than it is, for example, in the United States. Still, if the difference were eliminated Latin America would be 4.7% richer per person, they claim (see chart).

Labour-force participation rates vary widely. In Mexico, the second-largest economy in Latin America, and in Chile, one of the most advanced, it is much...

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

Together we stand

WHEN plans to merge Wind and 3 Italia, the third- and fourth-largest mobile operators in Italy, were announced on August 6th their rivals breathed a sigh of relief. Italian operators’ revenues from mobile services have fallen by 40% since 2011, according to GSMA, a global trade association. That has made them skimp on investment. Though half of Italians have a smartphone, fewer than one in ten has access to speedy “4G” services. A weak domestic economy had something to do with this, but so did the industry structure, some argue: too many operators wooing price-sensitive customers the only way they could.

If approved by regulators, the Italian job will be the latest in a series of deals that are consolidating Europe’s mobile market. One by one, countries are switching from having four principal operators—ones that own their cell towers and radio spectrum—to just three (see map). In 2012 European Union regulators let the Austrian subsidiary of 3 Italia’s parent, Hutchison Whampoa, buy the Austrian operations of Orange of France. Telefónica of Spain bought the German mobile business of KPN of the Netherlands, to combine it with its own, and Hutchison bought...

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

Death of a car salesman

THE internet was supposed to do away with all sorts of middlemen. Yet house sales are mostly conducted by estate agents, and car sales are still finalised in cavernous showrooms that smell of tyres. Technology is diminishing the role of car dealers, however. Customers are using the internet for much of the process of choosing a new car, and are increasingly getting loans and insurance online rather than buying them from the dealer who sells them their car. Some carmakers are seeking ways to bypass dealers too.

In the motor industry’s early days, a century ago, manufacturers tried selling their vehicles at the factory gate, in shops they owned themselves, by mail order and through travelling salesmen. But eventually they settled on a system of franchising, in which independent dealers mostly sell just one maker’s models. Now, almost all of the 90m motor vehicles sold worldwide each year cross dealers’ forecourts. In America, the second-largest car market, their total revenues reached $806 billion in 2014. China’s car market, the largest, has rapidly come to resemble the West’s, with all its faults (see...

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