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[10月 25, 2024]
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KAL’s cartoon
This week’s cover
The Economist :: How we saw the world
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The world this week
Politics
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
Hopes of a ceasefire in Gaza after the death of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of
Hamas, seemed to fade. Mr Sinwar was the mastermind of the attacks on
October 7th 2023 which unleashed the war. He was killed in a firefight with
an Israeli patrol in the south of Gaza. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime
minister, said that the conflict was not over.
Antony Blinkenmade his 11th visit to the Middle East in just over a year.
America’s secretary of state told Mr Netanyahu that Israel needed to allow
more humanitarian aid into northern Gaza. Earlier this month America
warned Israel that it risked restrictions on military assistance if it did not
increase food supplies and other aid to the strip.
Israel escalated its offensive on its second front, in Lebanon, targeting

institutions, including banks, linked with Hizbullah, the Iran-backed militia.

It called for a broad evacuation before launching air strikes in Tyre, a
historic port city where many displaced people had fled, and hit the suburbs
of Beirut. America asked Israel to scale down its strikes on the capital to
avoid more civilian deaths. Both sides confirmed that Hashem Safieddine
was killed three weeks ago. He was the presumed successor to Hassan
Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s former leader, who is also now dead.
Saudi Arabia began building the Mukaab, a cube-shaped skyscraper in

Riyadh, that would be the world’s largest building. The giga-project is
meant to be finished by 2030.
Two prominent opposition figures, Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe, were
murdered in Mozambique. Mr Dias had been preparing a legal challenge to
the results of the country’s general election. Frelimo, in power since 1975,
is likely to win; international observers said the vote had been plagued by
irregularities.
Egypt became the most populous African country (and the world’s fifth) to
be declared malaria free by the World Health Organisation. Mummies
show the illness, which jumped from great apes to people in the African
rainforest and then migrated up the Nile valley, arrived there more than
5,000 years ago.
Paul Biya reappeared. Cameroon’s 91-year-old president landed in

Yaoundé, the capital, returning from Switzerland. He had not been seen in
public for over six weeks, prompting speculation that he had died.
A little help from my friends
Donald Trump filed a legal complaint accusing Britain’s ruling Labour

Party of sending staff to campaign for his opponent, Kamala Harris, in
swing states. Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said the
volunteers were travelling on their own time, and that the dispute would not
tarnish his “good relationship” with the Republican candidate.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, was criticised for launching
a lottery that awards $1m to a registered American voter every day in an

apparent effort to rally Republicans in swing states.
Maia Sandu secured a first-round victory in Moldova’s presidential

election, which was marred by allegations of Russian meddling. The pro-
Western president is expected to prevail in a run-off against Alexandr
Stoianoglo, a Russophile. In a parallel referendum, Moldovans voted to
enshrine ambitions to join the European Union in their constitution by a
razor-thin majority of 50.46%. Ms Sandu called it an “unfair fight”,
blaming Russian dirty tricks.
At least five people were killed and many wounded in a suspected terrorist
attack at a defence facility near Ankara, Turkey’s capital. No group claimed
responsibility. Turkey’s interior ministry blamed the PKK. It conducted
retaliatory airstrikes on targets linked with the Kurdish militia group in
Syria and Iraq.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, fought to save her scheme to divert
asylum-seekers to Albania. After the first group of 12 migrants from
Bangladesh and Egypt arrived at a processing centre last week, an Italian
court ordered them to be transported to Italy. To overcome the legal hurdle
Ms Meloni’s cabinet passed a decree that designated 19 countries as “safe”
to return to.
Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, asked the chancellor, Karl
Nehammer, whose centre-right party came a close second in the
parliamentary election in September, to form a government, after the other
main parties said they would not join a coalition with the hard-right
Freedom Party, which came top.
President Volodymyr Zelensky presented his “Victory Plan” for Ukraine to

European leaders in Brussels, making the case for his country to be invited
into NATO. The five-point strategy argued for sustained funding and an
expanded arsenal. It also laid out what Ukraine could offer the West if it
were to win the war with Russia.
America and NATO confirmed that North Korea is sending troops to help
Russia fight in Ukraine. America’s secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, said
the escalation would be a “very, very serious issue” with possible

repercussions in the Indo-Pacific region. Ukraine estimated that Russia’s
ally had committed 11,000 troops to the conflict. South Korea said that it
might supply Ukraine with weapons in response.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi,

held their first bilateral meeting in five years on the sidelines of the annual
BRICS summit, in Russia. Mr Xi urged co-operation between the two
powers to promote “the multipolarisation of the world and the
democratisation of international relations”. Days earlier the two countries
reached a truce around patrolling their disputed Himalayan border—an
issue that has overshadowed their relations since 2020.
Clean government
The first stage of the trial of Singapore’s opposition leader, Pritam Singh,
for charges of lying under oath in parliament, wrapped up. Mr Singh, who
heads the Workers’ Party, has pleaded not guilty.
Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s former president, was convicted of corruption in

connection with the Lava Jato scandal that erupted in Brazil a decade ago. A

court found him guilty of taking at least $35m in bribes in a highway-
construction deal. He was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison.
Power was restored to much of Cuba after several days of countrywide

blackouts. The island gets its electricity from unreliable Soviet-era power
plants and generators on ships rented from Turkey. The government has
admitted that it can no longer afford the oil.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-world-
this-week/2024/10/24/politics
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The world this week
Business
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午

Even as many countries’ stockmarkets hover near all-time highs, investors
are feeling jittery. The gold price broke a new record this week, hitting
nearly $2,750 per troy ounce. Meanwhile, government borrowing costs
have been rising sharply on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten-year American
Treasury bonds now yield 4.2%, up from 3.6% in mid-September; ten-year
British gilts also yield 4.2%. The same period saw a slide in the value of
the Japanese yen. One dollar now fetches ¥152, up from ¥140.
Investors in corporate bonds are feeling much more chipper. The spread
between the yield on investment-grade debt and American Treasuries fell to

0.8 percentage points, its lowest in nearly 20 years.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange hosted its biggest initial public offering since
2018. Tokyo Metro, which runs the Japanese capital’s underground
railways, raised $2.3bn and saw its share price soar by 45% on the first day
of trading.
The stockmarket debut of Hyundai Motor India, the world’s second-

largest in the year to date, went less well. Retail traders spurned the offering
and the share price fell a little on its opening day.
Open, sesame
America’s consumer-finance regulator finalised a set of open-banking

rules. Open banking forces lenders to share financial data, fostering
competition and the development of new fintech apps. It is already in place
in Britain and the European Union. The Bank Policy Institute and the
Kentucky Bankers Association, two lobbyists, responded by suing the
regulator.
Deutsche Bank announced its highest-ever profit for the third quarter of a
year. It made €2.3bn ($2.1bn) before taxes, though the bank’s chief
financial officer also warned that its provisions for bad loans would rise to
€1.8bn, from €1.5bn in 2023. Deutsche Bank’s share price has had an
unusually good run of late, rising by 30% since the start of the year. Lloyds
Bank also reported strong earnings. It made a pre-tax profit of £1.8bn
($1.4bn) in the third quarter, beating the £1.6bn expected by the market.
HSBC is restructuring its business, according to plans drawn up by Georges

Elhedery, its new chief executive. The lender will soon have four distinct
units: its British and Hong Kong outfits, plus international divisions for
corporate banking and wealth management. Ping An, a Chinese insurer and
one of HSBC’s biggest shareholders, has long been trying to force its
management to break up the banking group entirely. It would prefer two
separate companies, one operating in Asia and the other in the rest of the
world.

Tesla reported an unexpectedly profitable quarter. Its net income was
$2.5bn, up 8% from a year previously and well above the $2.1bn analysts
had pencilled in. The carmaker’s share price rose by 12% in after-hours
trading on the day of the announcement.
The share price of McDonald’s fell sharply after America’s Centres for
Disease Control and Prevention traced an outbreak of E. coli to the fast-
food chain’s restaurants. The public-health authorities found 49 people who
had been infected, in ten different states, one of whom died. All reported
having eaten at McDonald’s before becoming sick. The chain has stopped
selling “quarter-pounder” burgers, thought to be behind the outbreak, in a
fifth of its American outlets.
James Gorman, the former boss of Morgan Stanley, has been appointed as
the new chairman of Disney. Mr Gorman’s biggest task is to find a
replacement for Bob Iger, the chief executive whom Disney has been trying
to replace, on and off, for nearly a decade.
Boeing’s woes continued. It reported a loss of $6bn for the three months to
September, its biggest since the covid-19 pandemic, and will burn through
more cash next year. The same day, a labour union representing 33,000 of
the firm’s staff rejected a new pay deal, extending a strike that has been
running for six weeks. Boeing’s boss called for a “fundamental culture
change” at the company. It might need a bit more than that.
Made to order
Walmart said it would expand its same-day delivery service for

prescription drugs to 49 American states by January. Amazon is planning to
offer a similar service to around half of its American customers by the end
of 2025.
The new boss of Starbucks surprised investors by publishing preliminary

results for its most recent fiscal year a week early. Store sales during the
three months to September were 7% lower than a year previously, but the
firm still raised its quarterly dividend, from 57 to 61 cents per share.

this-week/2024/10/24/business

The world this week
KAL’s cartoon
10月 24, 2024 04:36 上午
Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:
How to read America’s early-voting numbers

Donald Trump’s terrifying closing message
A culture of conspiracy haunts Arizona’s elections
The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last
week’s here.

this-week/2024/10/24/kals-cartoon


The Economist
This week’s cover

How we saw the world
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
EVERY DAY seems to bring more exciting news. First GLP-1 drugs
tackled diabetes. Then, with just an injection a week, they took on obesity.
Now they are being found to treat cardiovascular and kidney disease, and
are being tested for Alzheimer’s and addiction. How can one class of drug
do so much? GLP-1 drugs not only work in the gut, but also bind to
receptors all over the body and in the brain. They appear to reduce
inflammation and interact with mechanisms linked to cravings and feelings
of reward. With time, experimentation and innovation, the benefits will
become clearer, and the costs will come down. The possibilities are
thrilling. Obesity and addiction may less often be seen as moral failings, but
as illnesses that can be treated. The GLP-1 revolution is just beginning. Its
promise is tantalising.

Leader: It’s not just obesity. Drugs like Ozempic will change the world
Briefing: GLP-1s like Ozempic are among the most important drug
breakthroughs ever
Business: Competition will make weight-loss drugs better, cheaper and
bigger
Finance and economics: The economics of thinness (Ozempic edition)
this-week/2024/10/24/this-weeks-cover

| Next section | Main menu | Previous section |
Leaders
It’s not just obesity. Drugs like Ozempic will change the
world
The everything drugs :: As they become cheaper, they promise to improve billions of lives
Elon’s $1m voter

Mr Musk’s scheme to boost Donald Trump is legally questionable and bad for democracy
The blistering rally in gold augurs ill for the power of the
dollar
Status anxiety :: Central banks are shifting away from the greenback
Decarceration is the key to better prisons

Criminal justice :: Britain is not the only rich country that needs a radical change in approach
Time to shake up Asia’s sleepy monopolies

Making business roar :: The cosy links between politics and business impose large costs on a
dynamic region

The everything drugs
It’s not just obesity. Drugs like

Ozempic will change the world
As they become cheaper, they promise to improve billions of lives
10月 24, 2024 04:08 上午

EVERY DAY seems to bring more exciting news. First the drugs tackled
diabetes. Then, with just an injection a week, they took on obesity. Now
they are being found to treat cardiovascular and kidney disease, and are
being tested for Alzheimer’s and addiction. It is early days yet, but GLP-1
receptor agonists have all the makings of one of the most successful classes
of drugs in history. As they become cheaper and easier to use, they promise

to dramatically improve the lives of more than a billion people—with
profound consequences for industry, the economy and society.
In the three years since semaglutide was approved for treating obesity, it has
taken America by storm. After decades of disappointing “miracle cures”,
these drugs work. Image-conscious influencers and well-heeled financiers
are not their only users. Already one in eight American adults has been on
GLP-1 drugs. Novo Nordisk, maker of semaglutide, branded Ozempic for
diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, and Eli Lilly, which makes
tirzepatide, a more effective alternative, have together added around $1trn
in market value since 2021.
The action is now moving beyond America. With over two-fifths of the
world overweight or obese, demand for GLP-1 drugs is voracious. Pharma
companies are racing to make them work as pills, which would be cheaper
to produce than jabs, and to reduce their side-effects. Generic versions for
older GLP-1 agonists are entering the market. Semaglutide is to come off
patent in Brazil, China and India in 2026; eight such drugs are in the works
in China. That is just as well. As incomes in the developing world have
risen and life has become more sedentary, people’s waistlines are catching
up with those in the West.
Curbing obesity would be consequential. Yet GLP-1 drugs promise to do

much more. Overweight patients on semaglutide have been found to suffer
fewer heart attacks and strokes; the benefits, astonishingly, seem to be
largely independent of how much weight is lost. Tirzepatide improves sleep
apnoea. Trials show that GLP-1 agonists reduce chronic kidney disease in
diabetics; and there are signs they may lessen brain shrinkage and cognitive
decline in Alzheimer’s. Studies of health records suggest that they may help
with addictions, too; people already on GLP-1 drugs in America were less
likely to overdose on opioids or abuse cannabis or alcohol. Researchers are
even talking, in hushed tones, of their anti-ageing effects.
How can one class of drug do so much? As our briefing explains this week,
not only do the drugs act in the gut, but they also bind to receptors all over
the body and in the brain. The drugs appear to reduce inflammation and
interact with mechanisms linked to cravings and feelings of reward. With

every new finding, researchers are learning more about the workings of
disease and the links between the body and the brain.
Naturally, more work is needed. Although GLP-1 agonists have been used
in diabetes for 20 years, some of the newer findings are based on
observational studies, and will need to be supplemented by randomised
trials. Patients may need to remain on these medicines for their whole lives,
and their long-term benefits have yet to be quantified.
That makes the costs uncertain, too. For now the drugs are expensive:
tirzepatide is priced at over $500 a month in America. Their immediate
side-effects, which can include nausea, pancreatitis, diarrhoea and muscle
loss, may be off-putting; the effects from decades of taking them are
uncertain. Some worry about the medicalisation of everyday life, and
whether people will binge, knowing they can fall back on a cure.
Yet with time, experimentation and innovation, the benefits will become
clearer, and the costs will come down. Healthy habits and good public-
health advice will still matter. But practitioners have long despaired that
nothing works for many obese people. If the drugs live up to their early
promise, it would be perverse and cruel to deprive patients of medicines
that could dramatically improve their lives. The drugs could hold the same
promise for addiction.
Stand back and the possibilities are thrilling. In 2019 heart disease, stroke,
diabetes, Alzheimer’s and kidney disease ranked among the top ten global
causes of death. By 2050, as the world ages and developing countries’
health care improves, these diseases will take a bigger toll. Last year more
than 100,000 Americans were killed by opioid overdoses and 180,000 died
from drink.
For patients, the new uses of GLP-1 drugs would mean not just longer,
healthier and more productive lives, but happier ones, too. In a world of
abundance people succumb to their impulses even if they know their
behaviour is harmful in the long term. Although GLP-1 agonists may limit
the pleasure of instant gratification, they promise to end intrusive cravings
and improve long-term health.

The total bill for prescribing these drugs could be vast. Yet for governments
they would lower some other costs: the direct medical bill for obesity alone
amounts to $260bn a year in America; substance abuse is a huge burden for
the criminal-justice system. The state would raise less revenue from taxes
on alcohol, but income-tax revenues would go up, as the workforce became
healthier.
Less is moreish
Rather as the contraceptive pill encouraged women to stay in education and

work, so GLP-1 drugs could lead to profound economic and social change
by enhancing productivity and freedom. Some business models could be
upended. If craving can be controlled, junk-food companies, advertisers and
even drug-dealers may shift their focus from quantity to quality. Social
mores could evolve. In the West thinness is prized as the ideal of beauty,
because for so many it is hard-won, whereas obese people suffer
discrimination and lower wages. If being thin is easier, that may change.
Obesity and addiction may less often be seen as moral failings, but as
illnesses that can be treated. The GLP-1 revolution is just beginning. Its
promise is tantalising. ■
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This article was downloaded by calibre from
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/24/its-not-just-obesity-drugs-like-
ozempic-will-change-the-world

Leaders
Elon’s $1m voter

Mr Musk’s scheme to boost Donald Trump is legally questionable and bad
for democracy
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
WITH LESS than two weeks to go, America’s election remains a coin-toss.
If anything, though, the coin now slightly favours Donald Trump. Our
election-forecast model puts him ahead, for the first time since August.
When the race is this tight, the list of things that could prove decisive is
long. Among them is Elon Musk’s disingenuous scheme to induce
Americans to vote for Mr Trump with a chance to win $1m.
Mr Musk could have any number of motives. He runs a company that

makes electric vehicles (EVs). Mr Trump wants to put huge tariffs on
foreign cars and frequently discourages Detroit’s carmakers from producing
EVs. A Trump victory could knock out Tesla’s competition, juicing its share

price. Mr Musk also has eugenic views about gifted people having too few
children, and he has used his ownership of X to promote—perfectly legally
—objectionable opinions about the replacement of white voters with
immigrants.
The scheme works as follows. Voters in the seven swing states are invited to
sign a petition in support of the First Amendment (free speech) and the
Second Amendment (guns). No matter that neither clause is in imminent
danger from Congress, from the conservative Supreme Court or the Glock-
toting Kamala Harris. In adding their names—and provided they are
registered to vote—they receive what is, in effect, a lottery ticket with a
chance to win a daily prize of $1m, funded by Mr Musk. The intention
seems to be to get unregistered voters to register. Voting for Mr Trump is
optional (and mischievous Democrats may wish to try their luck), but
paranoia about these particular amendments is associated with the right; and
given that Mr Musk is one of the former president’s most prominent
surrogates, who has even inspired a distinct line in MAGA merchandise, it
is clear who is the intended beneficiary.
This sounds sketchy, but is it illegal? The Justice Department has warned
Mr Musk that it may open an investigation. Federal election law prevents
people from buying votes, whether the payment is in cash, crypto or in the
form of a lottery ticket. Paying someone to register to vote is also
forbidden. But rewarding petition-signers in this way is a metallic-silver
area, even if the intent seems clear.
America’s campaign-finance law is so loose that managing to break it

would be a feat. No doubt a sympathetic court could conclude that the
scheme constitutes speech and is therefore protected under the First
Amendment. And someone as deep-pocketed as Mr Musk could fund a
team to keep that argument going long enough for the point to be moot.
Whether it is a good idea is a different matter. Vote-buying was once rife in

America, often in the form of alcohol, although cash was splashed, too.
“The American polling place”, says one study, “was thus a kind of
sorcerer’s workshop in which the minions of opposing parties turned money
into whiskey and whiskey into votes.” An achievement of democratic
reformers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries was to get rid of these

practices. Schemes like Mr Musk’s are still alive in the 21st century, but
they are more commonly found in Kinshasa than Kenosha.
The Supreme Court has deregulated campaign finance in the past few
decades, but it did so when norms against vote-buying appeared
irreversible. That assumption may yet prove to have been mistaken. Mr
Musk’s wheeze looks certain to spawn imitators in 2028. Both parties have
billionaires who could fund similar lottery schemes. Lots of reforms would
benefit America’s democracy. Giving billionaires more influence over the
outcome of elections is not one of them. ■
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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and
reader correspondence.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/23/elons-1m-voter

Status anxiety
The blistering rally in gold augurs

ill for the power of the dollar
Central banks are shifting away from the greenback
10月 24, 2024 04:09 上午
NOT LONG ago gold seemed to have lost its lustre. In the decades after
President Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the yellow
metal fell out of favour with central banks, which hoarded their reserves in
dollars instead. In the 1980s and 1990s investors and households grew
weary of its miserly returns. Goldbugs were dismissed as eccentric doom-
mongers. Gold was alluring when forged into a shiny bauble and useful in
specialist manufacturing, but it was hardly a serious financial asset.
How it glitters now. Its price has soared by a third since the end of 2023,
reaching an all-time high of almost $2,750 per troy ounce. The rush has

been fuelled by war, inflation and fiscal profligacy around the world, which
have drawn in family offices and Costco shoppers.
Yet perhaps no buyers have been as voracious as the world’s central banks,
which have hoovered up hundreds of tonnes of the stuff over the past two
years. Gold now makes up 11% of their reserves, up from 6% in 2008. This
shift brings with it important consequences for America’s dominance of the
global financial system. Even as the dollar remains unchallenged as the
world’s reserve currency, its power is diminishing.

For some central banks, the interest in gold reflects anxiety about the state
of the world. Others have a narrower concern: that their reliance on the
dollar, always uncomfortable and annoying, has become dangerous. Buying
has been enthusiastic in China, India and Turkey, and it began to ratchet up
in the spring of 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, and America and its
allies sought to cripple Russia financially, using sanctions. These included
freezing some $280bn in state assets held overseas, and kicking Russian
banks off SWIFT, an interbank messaging service crucial for making cross-
border payments. Visa and Mastercard, American firms which process
debit- and credit-card transactions in almost every country in the world,
pulled out of Russia, too.
Hence the search for sanctions-proof alternatives to the dollar. Some central
banks are buying physical bars of gold and attempting to ship them to vaults
at home, suggesting that they want to protect themselves from economic
warfare. Countries worried about America’s power are also trying to trade
in their own currencies. According to the Federal Reserve, the share of
Chinese goods trade invoiced in the yuan has shot up to a quarter, from a
tenth in 2020.
Officials in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—which met this
week at a BRICS summit in Kazan, on the Volga—are working towards a
new set of cross-border payment rails that would circumvent the dollar-
based correspondent-banking system which dominates today. A few years
ago the idea that central banks might be able to issue tokens and use these
to settle cross-border transactions quickly and cheaply would have been a
pipe-dream. But the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central
bank for central banks, has been developing such a system and it is ready to
enter operation. The BIS payments mechanism was not designed for the
BRICS, but it could serve as a template for a new system.
What does all this mean for the mighty greenback? Ever since China
emerged as an economic force, worries have swirled that the dollar would
be displaced as a reserve currency, much as it itself supplanted sterling a
century ago. But you need only look at central bankers’ actions over the
past few years to see that there is no reserve currency of second resort.
Central banks worried about sanctions are turning to gold, not the yuan.

Rather than devising a whole new payments system, the BRICS could have
simply agreed to use one of their currencies for trade between them. They
have not done so. Chinese manufacturers may be invoicing in yuan, but
bilateral trade between Brazil and India is not going to be settled via
Beijing.
The dollar will therefore not be dislodged as the world’s reserve currency.
The technology might be ready, but to scale up new cross-border payment
rails requires a degree of co-operation and trust between the BRICS that
may not yet exist. Even if it did, many of the dollar’s privileges—greater
purchasing power, lower yields—would remain.
Nevertheless, the power that has been conferred on the dollar by its reserve-
currency status is diminishing. Central-bank reserves held in physical gold
are out of Uncle Sam’s reach. As more countries settle more of their
transactions without passing through the American banking system,
sanctions will become less effective. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/24/the-blistering-rally-in-gold-augurs-
ill-for-the-power-of-the-dollar

Criminal justice
Decarceration is the key to better

prisons
Britain is not the only rich country that needs a radical change in approach
10月 24, 2024 04:13 上午
“CLEARLY, OUR prisons are not working.” At one level David Gauke, a
former Conservative justice secretary, who on October 22nd was appointed
by Britain’s Labour government to run a sentencing review, was stating the
obvious. Britain’s prisons are scarred by overcrowding and violence. Staff
have suffered almost 10,000 assaults in the past year. Unsurprisingly,
retaining them is difficult; only half have more than five years’ experience.
Instead, teenage officers are being deployed alone on prison wings. Most
new recruits do not last even two years.

At another level, Mr Gauke was signalling something more open to dispute
—a desire to break with an approach to criminal justice that has been
dominant in Britain, and many other rich countries, for three decades. It was
Michael Howard, another, more austere Tory, who distilled that approach
with his declaration in 1993 that “prison works.” That mantra has prevailed
ever since. The number of people behind bars has doubled in the past 30
years; Britain locks up more people than any other country in western
Europe. Jails are packed to the rafters, which is why the government this
week allowed more prisoners out early on an emergency-release scheme.
Britain is not alone in struggling to run its prisons well. According to the
Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, a think-tank, Australia,
Belgium, France and Italy all have prison-occupancy rates above England’s
level of 110%. In France, where it is 127%, thousands of inmates sleep on
mattresses on the floor. Such overcrowding exposes an irony: the desire to
lock people up eventually overwhelms prison’s purpose and the taxpayer’s
willingness to pay for it.
Prisons are supposed to protect the public from genuinely dangerous

people; that becomes harder when they are overrun. In Britain 37 men were
let out by mistake in September in an initial tranche of emergency releases;
one is accused of committing a sexual offence the day he was freed. Full
prisons are also a boon to crooks at large because they take police officers
off the street in order to manage emergency cells. It makes sense to lock up
people who commit serious crimes. But disorderly prisons are unlikely to
mete out punishment in a proportionate way. They also do little for
rehabilitation: 90% of those sent down in Britain are reoffenders. By
making criminals worse, bad prisons add to the need for imprisonment.
In the 1990s and 2000s, governments were able to build prisons as the
demand for places grew. That has become more expensive as easy ways to
upgrade old sites have been exhausted and local opposition to new ones has
mounted. In Britain each new prison place costs around £450,000
($584,000). As prisons have become grimmer, governments have found
them harder to staff; Italy has a shortfall of around 7,000 prison guards.
There is little prospect of the prisons budget rocketing when public finances
are stretched.

Only one option leaves societies safer and richer: fewer prisoners. Bluntly,
too many people are kept behind bars for too long. In Britain Mr Gauke’s
review is a step towards recognising that problem, but it is only a step. The
real problem is not the diagnosis but what follows: winning public consent
for decarceration—hard because “tough” sentencing is often popular—and
managing the transition to a less crowded system. An example of what not
to do comes from Italy. Rampant overcrowding led the government to
release 20,000 prisoners in a couple of months in 2006, unleashing a small
crime wave.
Better models are provided by the Netherlands and America. The Dutch
prison population fell by 44% in the decade to 2015, helped by investment
in community sentencing. Supervising offenders in the community costs
around a tenth as much as keeping them behind bars and the reoffending
rate is usually lower. America still locks up far more people than other rich
countries, but its prison population has fallen by a quarter in the past
decade. California, New York and Texas have led the way by reforming
sentencing and diverting people into drug and alcohol courts. In both
countries the change was popular; in America it was sold as a way of saving
money.
Rich countries can also lean more on technology. Many early offender-
tagging programmes had a deservedly poor reputation, but the latest devices
are much better at monitoring offenders’ behaviour. People can be fitted
with real-time drug or alcohol monitors, or made to stick to strict curfews
when they are not at work.
Imprisonment will continue to play an essential role in the criminal-justice

system. But the public will be safer and better off when cells are less full.
That is how to make prison work. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/24/decarceration-is-the-key-to-better-
prisons


Making business roar
Time to shake up Asia’s sleepy

monopolies
The cosy links between politics and business impose large costs on a
dynamic region
10月 24, 2024 04:14 上午
IN HIS INAUGURAL address as Indonesia’s new president on October

20th, Prabowo Subianto, a 73-year-old former general, vaunted his
country’s consensual model of politics as something to be proud of. His
vice-president, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, is the son of Joko Widodo, his
predecessor, and he has assembled a huge cabinet that incorporates a wide
range of business families.
Alas, unity is not always a virtue; as far as the cosiness between business
and government in Indonesia goes, it is more of a vice. Indeed, the close

ties between politicians and tycoons are a problem across South-East Asia.
And that is holding the region back.
South-East Asia is home to some of the world’s most exciting economies.

Its population of 700m is youthful; it should benefit from investment flows
as multinationals seeking to serve the Western market hunt for factory sites
outside China. The IMF expects South-East Asia’s economy to grow at
almost 5% a year in the second half of the decade. By contrast, China’s
growth rate is projected to sag towards 3%.

But a deadening business environment is limiting the region’s potential. Its
largest companies are overwhelmingly banks, natural-resources firms or
state-owned enterprises. Apart from a handful of exceptions like Grab, a
ride-hailing firm, and Sea, a gaming and e-commerce company, few operate
in high-tech sectors. The combined value of investible stocks across the
region is nearly $900bn, less than half that of India. In dollar terms, share
prices today are a third below their levels in early 1997, before the start of
the Asian financial crisis.
Monopolies are still common across the Association of Southeast Asian

Nations (ASEAN). From Indonesian aviation fuel and the import of rice in
Malaysia to the sale of tobacco in Thailand, governments have often
granted exclusive rights over large markets to a single firm. Some of the
companies are state-owned; others are the relics of colonial fiefs. The result
is the same: less competition and lower efficiency.
Even in areas without a formal monopoly, politically connected

conglomerates dominate the economy, gaining all manner of preferential
treatment. They influence regulations in their favour and enjoy easy access
to credit from state-owned banks. As a result, innovative upstarts are
starved of talent and financing. Venture-capital funds are modest in size,
making small deals the norm. Both VC and private equity tend to be
dominated by the politically connected few. That may be helpful for
startups hoping to be gobbled up by large businesses. But it is bad news for
those aspiring to disrupt them.
Some governments are breaking up uncompetitive industries. The

Philippines’ long-running telecoms duopoly has faced welcome competition
as restrictions on foreign ownership have been loosened. Yet smashing
monopolies is not easy. This month Thai lawmakers rejected a plan to
liberalise the market for alcoholic drinks, which is dominated by two boozy
conglomerates.
The best hope for liberalisation across the region is further economic
integration. Even small steps towards a South-East Asian common market
would help break the stifling nexus of business and politics. Although that
would expose conglomerates to more competition, it would also offer them
the prize of access to a much bigger market.

The ASEAN economic community, established in 2003, has proposed a
regional market for goods, services, investments and labour by 2025. That
has been achieved for some industrial supplies, but reality has fallen far
short of the ambition. Beefing up the bloc’s central body, the ASEAN
Secretariat, so that it can foster progress, would be a start.
South-East Asia is divided by income level, culture, language and ethnicity.

Integration will not yield anything as politically and economically tight-knit
as the European Union in the near future. But without steps towards a
regional market, the domestic rent-seekers will continue to reign. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/24/time-to-shake-up-asias-sleepy-
monopolies

Letters
Letters to the editor
On economics, America, the Chagos Islands, innovation in AI, the Turkic states, Abraham
Lincoln, flies :: A selection of correspondence

On economics, America, the Chagos Islands, innovation in AI, the Turkic states, Abraham
Lincoln, flies
Letters to the editor

A selection of correspondence
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
Letters are welcome via email to [email protected]
Focus more on growth
The work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, the
winners of the Nobel prize in economics, was indeed brilliant (“Nations
fail, academics succeed”, October 19th). But their work does not address
the questions that were compelling to Robert Lucas, another Nobel winner,
who asked whether there was some action a government could take that
would lead an economy to grow. He suggested that: “The consequences for

human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once
one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”
However compelling, those are not researchable questions for publication.

In the current literature there is more micro randomisation than work on
how to accelerate and sustain growth.
MARK HENSTRIDGE
Chief executive
Oxford Policy Management
Oxford
Voting reforms
Regarding electoral reform in America (“Taking the initiative”, October

5th) consider that of the ten congressional Republicans who voted to
impeach Donald Trump, two were from Washington state and one from
California, states with top-two open primaries. Alaska has open primaries
and ranked-choice voting, which allowed Senator Lisa Murkowski to vote
to convict Mr Trump without having to worry about an attack from the right
in a closed primary. Perhaps if we had had more open primaries and RCV,

other Republicans would have found the courage to hold Mr Trump to
account.
SCOTT MEYER
Alexandria, Virginia
The Chagos Islands’ future
Regarding Britain’s intention to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to

Mauritius (“Chagos theory”, October 12th) no deal will be done until
negotiations are completed to establish a formal treaty. That will entail
reaching a consensus between America, Britain, Mauritius and India. I find
it difficult to believe that the Americans will find it harder to protect their
strategic interests under such an arrangement than under the void that now
looms when Britain’s lease of the base on Diego Garcia to America expires
in 2036.
You put great emphasis on the “resettlement rights” of the Chagossians, but
I’m afraid this largely ignores the realities of their sad history. As fully
examined in “Chagos: A History”, a book that I co-wrote, the islands’
maximum population of 1,200, was reached in 1921. By 1962, after the

transfer of the coconut-plantations’ ownership to an entrepreneur from the
Seychelles, the proportion of Seychellois had increased sharply. But when
the plantations were sold many Chagossians followed the advice of
departing Mauritian managers to leave with them. Those plantations are
now totally overgrown and devoid of infrastructure in a world with little
need for coconut products from remote sources with poor soil.
Which brings us to rising sea levels. With the erosion of individual islands
in the Chagos, soils are giving way to fresh sand from sea surges and the
freshwater essential to human and vegetable life is gradually becoming
more saline. On Diego Garcia itself, America is reported to be spending
many millions of dollars on protecting its base from inundation.
NIGEL WENBAN-SMITH
Commissioner for the British Indian Ocean Territory, 1982-85
London
The next innovation in AI
The linear thinking that more chipmaking power equals more artificial
intelligence won’t work (Technology Quarterly, September 21st). Yes,

advancements in AI have been remarkable and hardware advances got us
here. But semiconductors will not solely unleash AI’s full potential or
produce another intelligence leap. The reality is that with each power
“surge” the returns diminish. Even if you supply ten times more
computational power you, most probably, will be only 10% better off, at
this stage. So not only would this be a costly exercise in terms of expense
and environment, there’s also not a lot to gain from continuing to put faith
in silicon alone.
There is a strong case for looking at alternative architectures that provide

reasoning for the next AI breakthrough. And there is more to be gained
from looking at the software layer for the next leap in AI innovation than
from a billion more chips in production. The avenues for software
innovation are multiple, be they the next evolution of transformers, baking
in neurosymbolic approaches or even a rethinking of the AI stack itself.
AI is a game-changing technology. But its widespread adoption won’t come

from doubling down on hardware innovation or large language models. The
market must take a breather. We need alternative smarter approaches to
unleashing true and powerful artificial cognition. I wouldn’t bet all my
chips on the next AI innovation leap being in silicon.
DR IMAD RIACHI
Founder of Honu
London

A thriving region
Thank you for shedding light on the Turkic states, mainly Turkey,
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (“Giant
steppes”, September 28th). It is an important bloc that receives little
attention in the West. Trade is indeed booming along the Middle Corridor,
which connects China with Europe, but not only because of geopolitics.
In a largely landlocked region, all member countries of the Organisation of

Turkic States have long committed to harmonise digital trade and border-
crossing procedures, often based on global UN standards such as the TIR
(international road transport) convention. Uzbekistan, one of just two
double landlocked countries in the world (the other is Liechtenstein), issues
more TIR carnets than any other, allowing trade to soar.
The region is a world leader in this respect, driving easier and faster access
to global markets for its businesses, and thus prosperity for its citizens.
RADU DINESCU
President

International Road Transport Union
Geneva
Was James Buchanan gay?
“Was Abraham Lincoln gay?” (October 5th), asks the latest documentary on
the subject. Americans in the 19th century understood perfectly well that
men could have sexual relationships with each other and had no hesitation
in saying so. James Buchanan, the 15th president of the United States, was
widely believed to have had a sexual relationship with William Rufus King,
who briefly served as vice-president under Franklin Pierce. The two lived
together in a boarding house in Washington and attended social functions
together. Andrew Jackson referred to them as “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt
Fancy”. Others described King as Buchanan’s “better half” and his “wife”.
Such claims were never made against Lincoln by his contemporaries,

despite being a frequent target of vicious political attacks. Our ancestors
were no less observant than we are. Why would any of Lincoln’s opponents
have passed up such a cheap shot?

JOHN DURY
Port Townsend, Washington
Time has wings
Nowhere in your report on the brain of the fruit fly do you explain the
saying, “Why does a fruit fly like a banana when time flies like an arrow?”
(“On the fly”, October 5th).
RICHARD FRIARY
Florence, Montana
https://www.economist.com/letters/2024/10/24/letters-to-the-editor

Briefing
GLP-1s like Ozempic are among the most important drug
breakthroughs ever
The Swiss Army knife of jabs :: Their far-reaching potential could transform how chronic
diseases are managed

The Swiss Army knife of jabs
GLP-1s like Ozempic are among

the most important drug
breakthroughs ever
Their far-reaching potential could transform how chronic diseases are
managed
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
IN THE HISTORY of medicine, a few drugs tower above all others.

Humira for rheumatoid arthritis; Prozac for depression; statins to prevent
heart disease and strokes. All have helped patients far beyond doctors’
initial expectations and continue to benefit millions of people every day. A
new class of drugs is set to join their ranks and has the potential to eclipse
them all—GLP-1 receptor agonists.

These drugs mimic the action of a naturally occurring hormone, glucagon-
like peptide (GLP-1), and for decades have been used to treat diabetes.
More recently they have become a wildly popular way for people to lose
weight. But in March semaglutide (a GLP-1 receptor agonist sold as
Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight-loss) was approved in
America for cardiovascular disease in overweight people. In April
tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound) showed positive results in
late-stage trials for sleep apnoea, a breathing disorder. In other trials it
seems to reduce chronic kidney disease.
This is just the start. GLP-1 agonists are also being tested for everything
from liver disease to substance-use disorders and addiction. One firm is
even considering trials for those at risk of obesity—as preventive
medications. Patients taking semaglutide may have a lower risk of overdose
from opioids, suggesting that it could also be used to treat opioid-use
disorder. The drugs have been mooted as a treatment for long-term
infections, are being investigated for use in delaying Alzheimer’s, and some
even talk of their anti-ageing effects and potential as a longevity drug. On X
recently, Eric Topol, a cardiologist who leads Scripps Research, a non-profit
research institute in San Diego, California, called GLP-1 drugs “the most
important drug-class breakthrough in medical history”.
Drug companies are racing to find, test and market new versions and uses
for these drugs. In the background, however, lies a question: how can GLP-
1 agonists—drugs developed to work for diabetes—have such a diverse
array of beneficial effects across the body? As they look for answers,
scientists are finding surprising details about the many roles of GLP-1
hormone. These drugs seem to activate basic protective mechanisms in
cells, such as reducing inflammation and clearing out junk, thereby keeping
organs healthier. They also have powerful effects on the brain, through
which they can both further influence the health of the rest of the body, and
even affect behaviour.
GLP-1 is a short-lived hormone that is usually released in a person’s

intestines, after a meal. Once in the blood it helps regulate glucose levels,
by stimulating the pancreas to release insulin (which lowers blood-sugar
levels) and suppressing glucagon (which normally increases them). It also

promotes the feeling of fullness, partly by acting on the gut to slow down
how fast food moves through it. But the hormone also acts on the brain: at
the hypothalamus, a part that controls hunger and satiety; and also on the
pathways that modulate cravings. GLP-1’s regulation of blood sugar
explains the success of drugs that mimic it for treating diabetes; that GLP-1
agonists promote satiety and reduce the rewards associated with eating
explains why they have been helpful to people wanting to lose weight.
At first glance, the wider effects seen from GLP-1 drugs might look like
ancillary benefits from their effect on weight—the obese are much more
prone to a range of other serious health problems, from heart disease to
certain cancers, sleep apnoea and fatty liver disease, so losing weight
should improve overall health. That does happen, of course, but research
shows that it is not the full story. A study of more than 17,600 overweight
and obese patients from 41 countries who took semaglutide found that
participants lost about 10% of their body weight and had a 20% reduction in
serious adverse coronary events, strokes, heart attacks and all-cause
mortality. Crucially, these cardiovascular improvements long preceded any
meaningful weight loss.
Multipurpose agonists
For patients living with cardiovascular diseases, GLP-1 drugs work partly
by binding to their namesake receptors on heart cells and blood vessels.
This contributes to better control of blood pressure and fat levels in the
blood. The drugs also help heart cells use glucose more efficiently and
reduce oxidative stress, in other words the damage caused by highly
reactive molecules that are the by-products of metabolism in cells.
Semaglutide has been shown to stimulate the production of nitric oxide,
which relaxes vessels and helps improve blood flow to the heart.
This ability of GLP-1 drugs to act on different problems at once is what

makes them so interesting. Many people at risk of heart disease or diabetes
may be carrying extra weight, have high blood pressure, or have too much
sugar or unhealthy fats in their blood. Drugs exist to tackle each of these
problems individually, but GLP-1 agonists behave like a molecular Swiss
Army knife. (Endocrinologists have noticed something similar in type-2

diabetes: GLP-1 agonists improve most of eight core defects of the
condition—known as the “ominous octet”—which include decreased
insulin secretion and its uptake in peripheral tissues such as muscle.)
Daniel Drucker, a senior scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research

Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, says that having GLP-1
receptors “seems to allow cells to be maintained in a healthier state and to
be less susceptible to death”. This protective effect works across many
organs whose cells have GLP-1 receptors and which the hormone (or a
drug) can reach—in the liver it may improve function and reduce fat levels;
in chronic kidney disease it can reduce adverse outcomes and death,
independent of the ability to control blood glucose.
GLP-1 agonists also act on certain immune-system cells around the body to
reduce their production of inflammatory molecules, known as cytokines.
Inflammation is part of the body’s natural immune response to injury or
infection. But chronic inflammation can end up damaging tissues and is a
powerful driver of health problems such as cancer and cardiovascular,
neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases. So reducing it would be
progress.
GLP-1 is already known to have a role in dampening inflammation in the

gut, which is highly susceptible to infection after a meal. But when people
have Shigella, Salmonella or any kind of infectious diarrhoea, Dr Drucker
says that GLP-1 levels go up “ten- or 20-fold”. The hormone binds to
immune cells that are present in the organ to keep inflammation down.
The reduction of inflammation is the common thread that explains why

patients taking GLP-1 agonists for diabetes or obesity also report
improvements in other conditions, such as arthritis, ulcerative colitis or
post-covid brain fog. Fatima Stanford, a physician who researches obesity
at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, says that
patients with a history of gout and other rheumatic diseases have also seen
their symptoms improve after taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. There is
also evidence that they work on inflammation in the skin, liver and kidneys,
and even in the brain itself.

Not all these organs have GLP-1 receptors on the surfaces of their cells, nor
do they have GLP-1-activated immune cells nearby. The answer to how
they benefit even so from the anti-inflammatory effects of GLP-1 agonists
lies in how these drugs work in the brain.
The brain has GLP-1 receptors in abundance and, though very little drug
seems to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier (the filter that protects the
brain from harmful substances), experiments have shown that GLP-1
agonists can nevertheless activate pathways that transmit signals to these
receptors deep in the brain.
It is unclear exactly how this works, but it has been shown that if GLP-1
receptors in the brains of mice are blocked, the drugs lose their ability to
tamp down inflammation in the body. That finding, published in January by
Dr Drucker and colleagues, points to the existence of a communication
network between the gut, the brain and the immune system that can control
systemic inflammation. This then influences the health of organs—such as
the skin, lungs or muscles—that do not have many (or any) of their own
GLP-1 receptors.
Because they reduce inflammation and improve the health of neurons in the
brain, GLP-1 drugs have also attracted interest as treatments of
neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s. So far, research shows
that GLP-1 drugs can improve learning and memory and reduce the build-
up of proteins called amyloids in the brains of rodents. The drugs also
reduce inflammatory responses and oxidative stress—two contributory
factors to Alzheimer’s disease. A recent (small and preliminary) study from
Imperial College London, involving more than 200 patients with mild
Alzheimer’s disease treated with liraglutide, a GLP-1 drug, found that, after
a year, brain shrinkage had reduced by almost 50%, and cognitive decline
by up to 18%.
Brain gain
Data like these have made endocrinologists such as Caroline Messer,

founder of the Well by Messer, a metabolic and weight-loss clinic in New
York, bullish about GLP-1 drugs. She feels the onus to use them to treat

patients where she thinks appropriate, and is happy to offer semaglutide and
tirzepatide to those with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s.
That is ahead of evidence on efficacy from the sorts of clinical trials that
regulators consider as proof. But Dr Messer argues that patients who are
actively declining have no time to wait, and GLP-1 drugs already have a
good safety profile. Even if these drugs are ultimately proved to be
ineffective for memory loss, she says they are already known to reduce the
risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. She says there are many
connections between diabetes and Alzheimer’s, which makes this class of
drug promising, such as an increase in insulin resistance and an increase in
oxidative stress. Some have even termed Alzheimer’s “type 3 diabetes”, as
it seems to involve insulin resistance in the brain.
Another promising avenue for GLP-1 agonists stems from the core reason
for their astonishing success as weight-loss treatments—their ability to
interact with mechanisms in the brain related to cravings and feelings of
reward. Analysis of electronic health records suggests lower rates of new or
recurrent cannabinoid-use disorder in those taking semaglutide for other
reasons. And a recent study found that patients who abused opioids or
alcohol, given GLP-1 medications for other reasons, had lower rates of
opioid overdoses and got drunk less often. Research on monkeys has shown
that liraglutide can reduce alcohol consumption, though trials involving
human drinking have been inconclusive.

As more and more patients go onto GLP-1 drugs, anecdotal reports of their
benefits (as well as side-effects) have spread. A very common one is that
they work wonders in improving dependence-related behaviour, such as
drug and alcohol addiction. Dr Messer says she has lost count of how many
people have told her that the drug has saved their marriage.
If these drugs are indeed shown to attenuate addictive behaviours, they

would find widespread use in treating the abuse of alcohol, tobacco and
many other drugs. Last year Leandro Vendruscolo, a neuropharmacologist
at America’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, described semaglutide to
Science as the “most exciting drug for the last few decades”. Kyle
Simmons, a pharmacologist at the Oklahoma State University Centre for
Health Science, wondered if positive trials would bring addiction science its
own “Prozac moment”—a reference to the arrival of selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat depression, and its expansion into many
other areas of psychiatry.
There is yet one more emerging field of medicine in which GLP-1 agonists
are generating buzz—ageing. The refrain is now familiar: scientists know
that these drugs keep cells healthy, reduce inflammation, oxidative stress
and cell death. These are exactly the problems that have been identified as
the biggest risk factors of ageing and its associated diseases. In February
Michael Leone and Nir Barzilai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
in New York reviewed drugs that had been approved by regulators and
which were thought likely to extend lifespans. They ranked each according
to its ability to target the hallmarks of ageing. Out of 12 drugs or drug
classes, GLP-1 drugs came fourth. Two of those that rated higher—
metformin and SGLT2 inhibitors—are also drugs for diabetes.
More, cheaper, better
Cost looms large in any discussion about these drugs, as well as the need to
take them for a lifetime. Both concerns are likely to prove temporary. In
years to come the growing level of competition and the arrival of generic
copies will lower prices and broaden access. Countries will negotiate
discounts. Indian and Chinese companies are already racing to make
copycat versions of GLP-1 drugs when patents expire in their countries.

It is also hoped that new formulations will improve the efficacy of current
drugs, and that ways will be found to reduce their shortcomings, whether
this is in the loss of muscle mass and unpleasant gastro-intestinal side-
effects—or even the need to inject medicines. Several firms are exploring
the production of pills, which would be a big step forward and, being
cheaper to produce and distribute, would probably greatly expand the
numbers using them.
As GLP-1 drugs are shown to work on a wider range of conditions, so the

demand for them from both clinicians and patients will grow. When supply
shortages are overcome, governments will have to grapple with complex
calculations to work out which conditions they are cost-effective for
treating, and the overall impact the prescription of the new drugs will have
on stretched health budgets.
It is still unknown if patients will need to remain on these medicines for the
long term, and at what cost and benefit. (The risks of long-term use in
patients who are not diabetic, for example, are not fully understood.) So
estimates of how much they will be used remain guesswork. Moreover,
their prophylactic uses could save money years into the future from the
prevention or amelioration of long-term conditions. But that benefit is hard
to quantify, and existing budgets for prevention are a tiny fraction of what is
available for the treatment of existing conditions. Public-health systems are
likely to be very slow to adopt the drugs as preventive treatments.

GLP-1 drugs are already having a huge impact in the pharma industry, with
a large number of new drugs in the pipeline (see chart). But many other
sorts of business are also feeling the effect. Some are obvious: the food
industry, for example, is looking on nervously, fearing that the drugs’
success may lead to thinner profits, as well as slimmer waistlines. Last year
Morgan Stanley published a survey of 300 patients, entitled “Could obesity
drugs take a bite out of the food industry?” It found that they lead to a
reduction in calorie intake per patient of between 20% and 30%, and that
this could have long-term implications for food-related businesses,
particularly those selling unhealthier foods such as high-fat, sweet and salty
products. But eating habits will not change overnight. The food and

hospitality industry has time to adapt by offering smaller portions and
healthier options.
Other analysts have projected a rise in interest in physical fitness and

sportswear by those who were once overweight who wish to maintain
fitness and muscle mass. Some also speculate that the psychological impact
of weight loss could extend to an increase in interest in cosmetics.
The commercial implications for other businesses are only just beginning to
be recognised. Take a less than obvious one: aviation. Analysts at Jefferies,
an investment bank, calculated in 2023 that if the average United Airlines
passenger were to lose 10lbs (4.5kg), it would save the airline $80m a year
in fuel costs.
The arrival of GLP-1 drugs has also shifted the way in which obesity is
viewed: no longer as a disease of failing willpower but as a lifelong chronic
condition from which the body never truly escapes. But diabetes and
obesity have been just the start. Few drugs, if any, have promised to have
such a revolutionary impact on human health, longevity and happiness. ■
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/10/24/glp-1s-like-ozempic-are-among-the-
most-important-drug-breakthroughs-ever

United States
How to read America’s early-voting numbers
Early returns :: Turnout is off to a roaring start but Republicans have made gains with initial
ballot returns
Will Hurricane Helene tip the vote in North Carolina?

Flooding the polls :: Election officials in storm-ravaged counties must cope with damaged
voting sites and Donald Trump’s calumnies
Donald Trump’s terrifying closing message

Fear and voting :: There is a pattern to the end of his campaigns
Gay voters are smitten with Kamala Harris

Campaign calculus: Kamala’s camp :: Republicans are uninterested in, or hostile to, a growing
voter bloc
A culture of conspiracy haunts Arizona’s elections

Valley fever :: America’s biggest swing county ramps up security before the vote
Kamala Harris’s closing argument

Lexington :: Her vision of the future is also a nostalgic one. Do enough Americans still believe
in it?

Early returns
How to read America’s early-voting

numbers
Turnout is off to a roaring start but Republicans have made gains with
initial ballot returns
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | MOUNT PLEASANT, MICHIGAN
FOR THE first time since August, Donald Trump has overtaken Kamala
Harris in The Economist’s statistical model of America’s presidential
election. Our latest forecast gives Mr Trump a 53% chance of returning to
the White House, up seven percentage points in the past week (see chart).
Although the race remains more or less a coin toss, it is now weighted
slightly in Mr Trump’s direction. The shift in our model reflects a steady
narrowing of Ms Harris’s lead in national polls during the past month.
State-specific polls published in the past week confirm that Mr Trump’s
position has strengthened slightly in the plausibly decisive states.

Clues to what will happen on November 5th are not only to be found in
polls. Millions of Americans have already voted. Nobody knows whom
they voted for, but it is possible to compare turnout with previous cycles
and draw inferences from that.
Both parties are putting their energy into turning out their bases. Elon
Musk’s legally murky scheme to give away $1m a day to registered voters
in swing states—apparently to spur voting by supporters of Mr Trump—has
lately drawn a spotlight. Yet many other less profligate attempts to lift
turnout are shaping the final, frenzied days of the race between Mr Trump
and Ms Harris. One group is distributing 100,000 copies of a “Liberty
Knights” comic book in Philadelphia, to inspire young adults to turn out.
Central Votes, which targets students at Central Michigan University, has
offered inducements such as “walking tacos” (smashed-up bags of crisps
mixed with ground meat), pickles on a stick (“voting is a big dill”) and even
a petting zoo with goats.

Turnout in 2020 was the highest in an American election since 1900. Mr
Trump’s polarising presidency was one big factor. Covid was another, as it
led to emergency measures to make voting by mail easier. This time, covid
restrictions have vanished but Mr Trump decidedly has not. One critical
question is whether voter participation in 2024 will remain so elevated, and
if not, who might benefit. Analysts are also scouring early-vote numbers for
clues about who might ultimately win; some detect warning signs for the
Harris campaign.

Provisional evidence suggests that voter enthusiasm remains high. Early in-
person voters in Georgia have shattered records, with 1.5m turning up in the
first eight days, compared with just 1m in 2020. North Carolina, another
swing state, has also exceeded 2020’s comparable figures, but more
modestly. Officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, the most populous
jurisdiction in that swing state, project turnout similar to 2020.
Turnout may yet falter. If so, would this favour Mr Trump or Ms Harris?
For decades, political-science research found that Republicans benefited
from lower turnout caused by factors such as bad weather, while Democrats
benefited from higher turnout. But Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican
Party has changed the equation. His Republican coalition now draws more
from working-class voters, whereas the Democratic coalition has shifted to
draw heavily on those with college degrees. This means old beliefs about
turnout and partisan advantage must be reconsidered. “We can no longer
make the assumption that high-turnout elections are universally good for
Democrats,” says Elliot Fullmer, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon
College. Mr Trump’s victory in 2016, amid relatively high turnout, offers
evidence for this view.

America’s higher voting rates may not endure beyond the Trump era, but
the stunning rise of early voting almost certainly will. Between mail ballots
and early in-person voting, 64% of Americans cast their ballots before
election day in 2020, up from 42% in 2016. Covid accelerated this, but
early voting had grown steadily since the 1990s, as “convenience voting”
spread to the great majority of states. The total early vote may fall back this
year in the absence of covid, but for campaign managers, “Tuesday’s
Gone”, as the title of a book about early voting by Mr Fullmer puts it.

This year, more than 26m voters have already returned mail-in ballots or
cast in-person early votes. Divining insights from these about how the
election will ultimately turn out is difficult. Yet some of the early numbers
are feeding Democratic anxieties. The Republican share of early returned
mail ballots has risen from 27% last time to 32% so far in 2024, while the
share enjoyed by Democrats has held at just under 48%. Mr Trump’s
supporters find this encouraging, but “there’s still debate as to whether early
voting is just cannibalising election-day vote, or if you actually get new
voters in the mix,” notes Jacob Neiheisel of the University at Buffalo.
Early voting has given rise to a new subtribe of statistics geeks and scholars
who interrogate the initial returns for insights. John Ralston, a veteran
journalist in Nevada, has attracted a devoted following in his swing state.
Our model has the state as a toss-up. Mr Ralston sees “serious danger” for
the Harris campaign in early-vote figures showing that Republicans had
returned more ballots than Democrats. Yet the margins remain tight in polls
and in other early-vote figures. In North Carolina, by October 23rd,
Democrats had lodged just 10,000 more votes than Republicans out of more
than 1m early votes cast.
As in Nevada, The Economist’s forecast shows a dead heat in Michigan.

High participation among working-class voters in western Michigan, a key
Trump constituency, could tip the election towards Republicans. A surge of
voting among young, black and Hispanic voters could benefit Ms Harris.
The polling could be wrong, but neither campaign wants to take that
chance. Both are aggressively working to encourage their likely voters.
Team Harris has 52 campaign offices and more than 375 staff in Michigan
and has signed up 100,000 volunteers since Ms Harris’s late entry into the
race. Republicans heavily rely on a constellation of efforts between outside
groups, down-ballot campaigns and the Trump operation itself. Victoria
LaCivita, communications director for the Trump campaign in Michigan,
says the former president is seeing growing “support from people and states
that Democrats have taken for granted”.
Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic Senate candidate, recently made a campaign

stop at Central Michigan University. She closed her expertly delivered
stump speech by joking that those who had come to hear her were either

“deep political nerds” or “engaged citizens”. She implored them to “please
bother your friends” and make sure they vote. One student said he was
certainly going to vote early: at least, then, “the text messages [will] stop.”■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter
with fast analysis of the most important electoral stories, and Checks and
Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the
state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/united-
states/2024/10/24/how-to-read-americas-early-voting-numbers

Flooding the polls
Will Hurricane Helene tip the vote

in North Carolina?
Election officials in storm-ravaged counties must cope with damaged voting
sites and Donald Trump’s calumnies
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | ASHEVILLE
AROUND A MAP spread out on a table, Buncombe County election

organisers survey the terrain like generals plotting an assault. “The bridge is
out here, but there’s another road,” points out Corrine Duncan, the director
of elections. They are trying to relocate polling places damaged by
Hurricane Helene last month. A red arrow shows where an emergency tent
in a café car park will house polling booths.
There are nearly 1.3m registered voters in the 25 storm-ravaged counties

adopting special voting rules following the disaster. Whether or not these

voters turn out in large numbers may be a factor in the battle between
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In 2020, when Mr Trump won North
Carolina and its 16 electoral-college votes by just over 1%, he won 23 of
the 25 affected counties and outpolled Joe Biden there by more than
200,000 votes. Depressed turnout this autumn could hurt either candidate,
but Mr Trump looks more vulnerable. He received 21% of his statewide
vote in the region last time, compared with 13% for Mr Biden.
Participation will also be an indicator of the recovery of towns staggered by

the confirmed deaths of nearly 100 people, with more than 20 missing. Four
weeks on, flooding has receded and trees and mudslides have been cleared
from roads. Yet reliable access to drinking water may be months away, and
in some areas the storm demolished roads and buildings. Democrats have
largely paused campaigning, citing concerns about the well-being of
residents and staff, in addition to damaged offices. Canvassing is resuming
in areas with reliable water and electricity. “We have to face the fact that the
election is going on, and this is the most important election of our lifetime,”
says Sam Edney, the Democratic party chair in Transylvania County.
North Carolinians years ago discarded election day and embraced election
month. Nearly two-thirds of voters cast early in-person ballots in 2020.
(The next-most-common method was by mail; only 16% turned out on
election day.) Early voting began this year on October 17th. Administrators
here are regularly putting in 16-hour days to open new polling sites and
communicate with voters.
Initial turnout was impressive. In McDowell County, on the first early-

voting day, police were forced to direct traffic at the jammed car park near a
polling site. “Nothing’s going to stop me from voting,” declared a 68-year-
old in Asheville, wrapped in a warm jumper to wait in a long queue. Yet
there were signs of reduced participation, overall. During the first two days,
the early in-person vote in all the storm-hit counties was one percentage
point lower than in 2020, compared with a higher turnout in other counties.
In Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, the region’s largest city, a

fifth of election-day precincts have been changed because they were
damaged or are being used for emergency response. Administrators
themselves have been displaced: the number of early-vote workers available

has fallen by a third. With television still out and internet patchy, telling
people about polling-place changes is “the single biggest challenge that we
have today”, says Jake Quinn, chair of Buncombe’s Board of Elections.
Rural McDowell County is posting letters to every voter; there are
contingency plans for destroyed mailboxes.
Mr Quinn acknowledges that meeting his original turnout target of 80% of

registered voters will probably no longer be possible as people concentrate
on rebuilding their lives. One 80-year-old in Asheville said she “never
found it so hard to vote” as “everywhere seemed closed”. (Your
correspondent met her at the election office, which straightened out most of
her problems.) “What will be a big issue for us is the confusion,” says Mr
Edney.
Campaigns have had to reset too. Among other things, they are rolling out
new messages and replacing innumerable water-sodden lawn signs. A recent
canvass by the Harris campaign in the relatively unscathed town of Brevard
found no one at home, since voters had evacuated after the storm. Without
television, persuading occasional voters will be just as hard for the
campaigns as it is for election officials trying to explain where to vote.
Republican leaders say they are doing “anything that we can do”, as
Michael Whatley, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, put
it during a campaign stop. Yet he acknowledges that “it’s going to be hard”
for some people affected by Helene “to focus on voting”. It is not unusual
for victims of an unexpected disaster to lose faith in their government, even
when it delivers speedy relief. “A lot of people are saying they haven’t seen
FEMA,” says Chad Wolf, a former acting secretary of homeland security,
referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This, he reckons,
could change some minds and energise voters.
Mr Trump, as ever, goes much further. On October 21st the former

president campaigned in Swannanoa, one of the worst-hit towns. Standing
before a pile of debris, Mr Trump falsely claimed that FEMA had
squandered disaster-relief funds on housing for illegal migrants. “A lot of
the money is gone,” he declared. This calumny has emerged as a MAGA
attack line. This and other misinformation is rife in the region. Voters in line

in the town of Rutherfordton cited conspiracy theories about covered-up
deaths in nearby Lake Lure and FEMA confiscating charitable donations.
The atmosphere is redolent of 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic and the
government’s response infuriated a polarised electorate. Rumours online
hold that the new voting rules, passed unanimously in the state assembly,
are designed to encourage election fraud. With a sigh, local officials express
confidence in their procedures. Distributing ballots to precinct captains, a
Buncombe County election worker detects “a pattern here–covid in 2020,
now this”. She pauses. “Asteroid [in] 2028.” ■
states/2024/10/24/will-hurricane-helene-tip-the-vote-in-north-carolina

Fear and voting
Donald Trump’s terrifying closing

message
There is a pattern to the end of his campaigns
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Aurora
IT HAS BEEN nearly a decade since Donald Trump announced his first run
for president in 2015. It is sometimes hard to recall the details of each of his
own campaigns, and those he presided over. They all smush together—a
constellation of red MAGA hats and promises to save America. But look
hard and a pattern emerges. The central tenet of Trumpism, the throughline
between 2016 and 2024 and the foundation for his political cult, is that
Democrats are to blame for “American carnage”, and he alone can fix it.
Consider three of the four election cycles since Mr Trump first took office:
the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential campaign and the 2024 race for

the White House. In October of each of these years, just weeks before the
poll, Mr Trump has portrayed himself, and his party, as the only defence
against a dire threat from illegal immigrants or a diversifying society. In
2018 the Republican Party would protect Americans from a migrant
caravan, thousands strong, heading towards the US-Mexico border. In 2020,
on the heels of national protests against racism, Democrats were planning to
“destroy our suburbs”, in part, by building low-income housing for
minorities. This year the message is the same but the details are different. A
Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), has infiltrated Aurora, Colorado—
and is coming to a city near you.
Mr Trump mentioned Aurora during his debate with Kamala Harris, the
Democratic nominee, in the midst of a riff against immigrants. “You look at
Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the
towns.” He has since used alleged TdA activity in Aurora to campaign
against the Biden administration’s immigration policies. “Kamala has
imported an army of illegal-alien gang members and migrant criminals
from the dungeons of the third world,” he told a crowd in Aurora on
October 11th. “To everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation I
make this pledge…November 5th 2024 will be liberation day in America. I
will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered.”
The true story is foggier. Tren de Aragua is a real gang, originally formed in
the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, according to InSight
Crime, a think-tank. In recent years its influence has expanded throughout
South America. As ordinary Venezuelans fled to America to escape the ruin
wrought by Nicolás Maduro, their country’s despotic leader, police have
noted the gang’s presence in several American cities.
Since December 2022 some 43,000 migrants have shown up in Denver,

Colorado’s capital, which borders Aurora. Denver saw a larger influx of
migrants, per capita, than both Chicago and New York City. They were
“almost universally Venezuelans, and so many of them with the same
story”, says Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver. He recalls watching from
the window of his office as buses of migrants arrived from Texas.
Many Venezuelans who made it to Denver will have settled in neighbouring

Aurora, a city of nearly 400,000 which is roughly 30% Hispanic. Mr Trump

claims the gang will kill people willy-nilly while they walk down the street.
Aurora officials insist that its activity is limited to a few run-down
apartment buildings reviled among tenants for poor living conditions. Gigi
Hagopian, a tenant and housing organiser, says the fly traps are always
buzzing and the roaches threaten to crawl into sleeping residents’ ears.
Ten members of the gang have been arrested thus far. Yet in a letter to the
landlord last year, police said crime at one building increased by 30%
between 2019 and 2023, before allegations were made of TdA’s presence.
The building has since been condemned. “It was really dramatic to say that
the entire city is being overrun by Venezuelan gangs and they’re ‘occupying
the city’,” says Mike Coffman, Aurora’s Republican mayor. “It’s not
accurate.” He worries that Mr Trump’s exaggerated rhetoric will hurt the
city’s economy by keeping firms from holding conventions in Aurora, or
people from moving there.
A recent study from the Justice Department’s research arm looked at arrests
in Texas between 2012 and 2018, and found that illegal immigrants
committed crimes at a lower rate than legal immigrants and American-born
citizens. Crime in Aurora has fallen over the past year. This has not deterred
Mr Trump from showing videos of alleged gang members in Aurora at
rallies around the country.
Each of these three examples—a migrant caravan, changing suburbs, a

Venezuelan gang—begins with a kernel of truth, but in Mr Trump’s
retelling becomes an existential threat: TdA is not just a gang police have to
watch out for, like so many others, it is a threat from which Colorado must
be liberated. “I will give you back your freedom and your life,” he says. But
listen closely, and he gives the game away. TdA are “stone-cold killers”, he
told the crowd in Aurora, but “they are really great if you happen to be
running against the politician that allowed this to happen.”■

states/2024/10/24/donald-trumps-terrifying-closing-message

Campaign calculus: Kamala’s camp
Gay voters are smitten with

Kamala Harris
Republicans are uninterested in, or hostile to, a growing voter bloc
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
IN THE DAYS after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from
the election, a short clip from 2013 went viral on Twitter. It showed the then
attorney-general of California speaking to the County Clerk of Los Angeles
on the phone: “This is Kamala Harris—you must start marriages
immediately.” The Supreme Court had just dismissed a case brought by
opponents of same-sex marriage and Ms Harris was instructing the clerk to
get to work.
The video struck a chord with Twitter users celebrating that the now-vice-
president would assume the Democratic nomination. Polls suggest lesbian,

gay and bisexual voters swung behind Ms Harris in the following weeks,
helping put her within reach of the presidency (data were not available for
trans voters). But despite the hype, neither of the major-party nominees has
spent much time courting gay voters. LGB people seem to like Ms Harris
anyway. Her opponents in the Republican Party are either not interested in,
or hostile to, wooing voters from the growing bloc.

In The Economist’s large-sample analysis of voting behaviour, we find that
being gay or lesbian had the third-largest effect on a voter’s support for Ms
Harris—all else held equal—after being black or an atheist (see chart 1).
Their attachment to the Democrats is long-standing, reflecting the party’s
historical connection to queer activism, but that does not mean support for
the Democratic nominee is assured. Over the course of 2024, as his
candidacy withered, polling by YouGov showed support for Mr Biden fell
from around 71% to 64% of lesbian, gay and bisexual voters (see chart 2).
Ms Harris’s entry into the election galvanised this group. In the first weeks
of her candidacy, her vote share leapt by 14 percentage points with LGB
voters, while increasing by only three points among straight ones. In
YouGov’s data, it was gay voters who delivered Ms Harris’s polling surge
over the summer. This gap has closed slightly since, but she still holds a
solid lead among LGB voters. Though the group makes up less than 9% of
YouGov’s respondents, Ms Harris’s 61-point lead among them is enough to
outweigh her four-point deficit among straight voters.

LGB voters’ support for Ms Harris is overwhelming despite her campaign
being relatively quiet on gay issues. The Democratic Party platform
includes a commitment to outlaw discrimination, as it did in 2020, but she
does not often refer to gay people in her stump speech. Nor does she
routinely trumpet achievements of the Biden administration, such as
delivering federal protections for same-sex marriage.

Part of Ms Harris’s appeal, compared with Mr Biden, is that, coming from
San Francisco, a gay capital, she is more adept at the language of young
LGB people. She has associated herself with queer cultural moments,
meeting the cast of “Queer Eye”, a reality-TV show, and embracing Charli
XCX’s “brat summer”. And in her personality she exhibits what Susan
Sontag, an intellectual, once described as “a sensibility that revels in
artifice, stylisation, theatricalisation, irony, playfulness, and
exaggeration”—in a word, Ms Harris is a trifle camp.
Ironically, that definition could apply to her opponent too. But the
Republican Party Mr Trump leads is toxic to many gay voters. Although Mr
Trump appears uninterested in opposing gay rights—he softened the party’s
opposition to same-sex marriage, for example—he has not challenged some
other Republicans’ homophobia nor made any substantive appeal to LGB
voters. He also trumpets a conservative line in the trans debate, placing
himself at odds with many gay voters. If Ms Harris wins the election, she
could have the gays to thank.■
states/2024/10/24/gay-voters-are-smitten-with-kamala-harris

Valley fever
A culture of conspiracy haunts

Arizona’s elections
America’s biggest swing county ramps up security before the vote
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Phoenix
“YOU’RE ON live streaming right now,” says Jennifer Liewer, a deputy

elections director for Maricopa County, Arizona. “You can wave to your
friends.” She takes your correspondent round the vote-tabulation centre,
known as MCTEC, in downtown Phoenix. She points to cameras attached
to the ceiling. They record everything that happens here. The county began
broadcasting every hour of every day after the 2020 elections, when
Maricopa’s results were audited several times over.
Arizona is one of seven swing states that will, in effect, decide America’s
presidential election. And Arizona’s results will largely be decided in

Maricopa County, which sprawls across the saguaro-covered desert with
Phoenix at its heart. Nearly 60% of Arizona’s 4.1m registered voters live
there. It is now America’s largest swing county. In 2020 Joe Biden became
the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry Maricopa since Harry
Truman in 1948.
Yet with close elections comes attention. Since 2020 Arizona has been
embroiled in controversy over the fairness of its elections. When Donald
Trump lost the state that year, he called Rusty Bowers, the Republican
speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, and asked him to overturn
Arizona’s results. Mr Bowers declined, and in 2022 lost his primary to a
candidate endorsed by the former president. A partisan audit conducted by
Cyber Ninjas, an obscure company with no election-audit experience, could
not refute Mr Biden’s victory. But many Republicans cried wolf
nonetheless. In 2022 Kari Lake, a MAGA warrior and former news
presenter, refused to accept that she lost the governor’s race.
As conspiracies swirled, election officials came under attack. Bill Gates, not
the one of Microsoft fame but on the county’s Board of Supervisors, which
oversees elections, received death threats. “It really started to affect me,” he
recalls. “I became withdrawn. I became angry in a way that I had never
been before.” Shelby Busch, the vice-chair of the local Republican Party,
said she would “lynch” Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican and county
recorder (a position that oversees voter rolls and mail voting) who has
defended the fairness of Maricopa’s elections. She later admitted that was
“probably a poor choice of words”.
A sense of unease now permeates the valley. Officials are hoping for the
best and preparing for the worst. MCTEC will soon become a fortress. Two
layers of fencing surround the building. On election night a SWAT team
will be stationed on the roof and officers will patrol the perimeter on
horseback. “This will be the safest place in Arizona,” says Ms Liewer.
Officials point to three threats to an orderly process. This year Maricopa

County’s ballots will be two pages long. Twice the paper means longer
queues and processing times. Mr Gates reckons the counting will be “95%
done by the end of election week”. But he worries that conspiracies will
spread in the time between when polls close and results are released. Ms

Liewer is alert to an insider threat. The county will hire some 600 people to
work at MCTEC. There is a chance that not all will be trustworthy, despite
vetting. This year a clerk stole a key needed to access computers with
sensitive information. He was caught and arrested. Finally, the threat of
political violence looms large. Poll workers are trained in de-escalation
tactics in case voters, or protesters, get heated.
Maricopa counting
Further risks loom. A study by Andrew Hall and Janet Malzahn at Stanford
University suggests that, in 2022, election deniers running in statewide and
federal races underperformed other Republicans by an average of 3.2
percentage points. Candidates who have cast doubt on the results of
elections, without proof, are running for office despite this penalty. They
want to take charge of Maricopa’s elections.
One closely watched county race is for recorder. Mr Richer lost the
Republican primary to Justin Heap, a state representative who has called
local elections “a laughing stock”. He will face Tim Stringham, a Democrat
who wants to make the job boring again. He jokes that running for recorder
was never a dream of his. “You assume you’ll take a stance on something
that’s of real importance to you—the environment or the economy or
education,” he says. “You’re not like: I’d like to just keep the system from
entirely collapsing.”
Ms Lake is running for the Senate. She is pushing people to vote early.
“Take it to a drop box, even though I hate those damn things,” she tells a
crowd in Anthem, on the valley’s northern edge. But she is trailing Ruben
Gallego, a Democratic congressman, in the polls.
Arizona has a tradition of scepticism of government. When Barry

Goldwater, a Republican senator for the state, accepted his party’s
nomination for president in 1964, he declared that “extremism in the
defence of liberty is no vice.” Arizona’s Never-Trump Republicans point to
the impeachment of a right-wing governor, Evan Mecham, in 1988 as a
moment that radicalised the fringes of their party. “Those folks were just
offended, and thought they were on a holy crusade,” says John Giles, the

Republican mayor of Mesa. “It’s Evan Mecham 2.0 with Donald Trump.” A
poll from Samara Klar of the University of Arizona suggests that 27% of
Arizonans, and 42% of Arizona Republicans, are not convinced their
elections are conducted fairly.
Maricopa County’s Republican Party has adopted a new slogan. It hopes Mr

Trump’s victory will be “too big to rig”.■
states/2024/10/19/a-culture-of-conspiracy-haunts-arizonas-elections

Lexington
Kamala Harris’s closing argument

Her vision of the future is also a nostalgic one. Do enough Americans still
believe in it?
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA was well ahead of the country in 2007, or

so believed some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisers. “Obama is
unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” Mark Penn, her top
strategist, wrote in an internal campaign memo in March that year. Mr
Obama was trying to celebrate his background as “diverse” and
“multicultural”, but Americans were not ready for that message. “Save it for
2050,” Mr Penn wrote.
The future arrived much sooner than Mr Penn expected. But then it went on
to prove stranger than anyone could have imagined. To attend Kamala
Harris’s rallies in the closing days of this year’s presidential campaign is to

be reminded what the future once looked like, before the rise of Donald
Trump and his destabilising synthesis of atavistic and innovative
politicking, of old dog whistles and new media methods, of nostalgia and
revolution.
Many recent news reports have noted that Ms Harris has shifted from her
politics of “joy” to a more solemn message about the menace of Mr Trump.
That is partly true—she has honed her case against him—but her rallies are
still exuberant. On October 19th in Atlanta, Georgia, about 11,000 people, a
pageant of diversity, filled the lawn spreading uphill from the stage of the
Lakewood Amphitheatre. They all seemed happy. Young or old, singly and
in synchronised groups, they danced in the late-afternoon sunshine as a DJ
played hip-hop and pop tunes.
Ms Harris’s soundtrack tends to be more contemporary, and blacker, than

the pop ballads, classic rock and country tunes at Trump rallies. Yet in
Atlanta the crowd belted out the chorus of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet
Caroline” as lustily they did the chorus of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every
Woman”. The seating section reserved for pink-and-green-clad members of
Ms Harris’s black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was among the signs the
Harris campaign is different from that of any nominee who came before.
But when the candidate appeared onstage, to ear-splitting cheers, the rally
turned into a throwback to a more conventional time. Ms Harris is a strong
stump speaker. She improvises confidently—“You guys are at the wrong
rally,” she responded to some hecklers recently in Wisconsin, “I think you
meant to go to the smaller one down the street”—but she delivers only
slight variations of a standard speech. This can be a strength. In Atlanta the
crowd rapturously chanted “We are not going back!” as she reached that
signature line. When she mocked how Mr Trump described his proposal for
health care, she spread her arms wide and made air quotes with her fingers
that the crowd filled in by roaring his limp assurance he had “concepts of a
plan”. Unlike Mr Trump, Ms Harris smiles and laughs, warmly and often.
Mr Trump connects to his audiences in a different way, through the free-

form speechmaking he calls “the weave”. In execution the weave can
conjure less an image of disparate threads forming a beautiful tapestry than
of a drunk lurching down a pavement. But though Mr Trump’s digressions

may be baffling or squalid, as when he recently rhapsodised about the penis
of Arnold Palmer, a golfer, his storytelling creates a sense of intimacy.
Whereas Ms Harris might be on and off the stage in half an hour, Mr Trump
can meander about himself and his relationships for nearly two hours. To
critics this seems like self-indulgence, but to his audiences it seems like
generosity and authenticity, the candidate’s real thoughts rather than the
speechwriter’s epigrams that signpost Ms Harris’s remarks. Whereas her
rallies succeed in the conventional aim of commanding local publicity, his
often make national news that crowds her out of the spotlight and excites
the disaffected voters he is trying to prod to the polls.
Ms Harris reels off policy objectives and criticisms of Mr Trump, but she is
not given at rallies to telling stories about herself. The closest she came in
Atlanta was to say “I took care of my mother when she was sick”, in
explaining her proposal to have Medicare cover home health care. But she
couched even that experience in generic terms. “It’s about trying to help
them put on clothes that won’t irritate their skin,” she said. Her supporters
hear in such universalising an authentic generosity, a signal Ms Harris is
more interested in their experiences and needs than her own.
This approach seems true to Ms Harris’s guarded persona, and it also seems
intended to supply a soothing, grown-up counterpoint to the melodrama of
Mr Trump’s unending perils-of-Pauline act. And unlike Mr Trump’s
messages it seems meant as much for swing voters, particularly female
ones, as for her core audience.
Woman’s work
This was underscored by Ms Harris’s choice to campaign with Liz Cheney,

a former Republican congresswoman. Together the two made a case against
Mr Trump that was not just bipartisan but decidedly female. In Malvern,
Pennsylvania, on October 21st Ms Cheney spoke “as a mother” who wanted
her children to grow up without worrying about the peaceful transfer of
power. She condemned “the misogyny that we’ve seen from Donald Trump
and J.D. Vance”, the Republican nominee for vice-president. Describing
herself as pro-life, she nevertheless decried “what has happened to women”

since the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion. It was a glimpse
back at what the future looked like when Mrs Clinton was the nominee.
By clinging to the presidency, President Joe Biden put his party in a deep
hole. Ms Harris has had less than three months to establish her claim to the
office while trying to shuck the burdens of the dismal public opinion of his
presidency and of her own former leftist positions. She has made
considerable progress because of Mr Trump’s own enduring unpopularity
and because, unlike Mr Biden, she has promised to give Americans back
their old idea of the future. The question is how many still have faith in it. ■

states/2024/10/24/kamala-harriss-closing-argument

The Americas
Millions in the West want mandatory voting. Are they
right?
Much obliged :: Evidence of its impact is surprisingly concentrated in a single region
Blackouts in Cuba highlight the island’s extreme energy

fragility
Dwindling prospects :: The failure of a decrepit, oil-burning power system has plunged
Cubans into darkness and misery
The flesh-eating worms devouring cows

Climate change and parasites :: The Darién Gap used to protect Central America. Not any
more.

Much obliged
Millions in the West want

mandatory voting. Are they right?
Evidence of its impact is surprisingly concentrated in a single region
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | MONTEVIDEO
IN THE WORLD’S most consequential election—for the next president of

the United States on November 5th—just three in five voting-age citizens
are expected to bother casting a ballot. Voters have become similarly
passive in many democracies, from Britain to Japan. Low turnout saps
government legitimacy and stokes fears of democratic decline. One group
of democracies bucks the trend. When Uruguayans go to the polls on
October 27th, turnout will be massive; it was above 90% in the country’s
previous election, among the highest anywhere in the world. Overall, South
America boasts the highest turnout of any region. That is because of the

530m people round the world who are compelled to vote, and for whom the
compulsion is enforced, 343m live in South America.
Other parts of the democratic world are intrigued. Majorities in Germany,

Britain and France say voting should be mandatory. People are less keen on
the idea in the United States, but Barack Obama and Donald Trump are
both proponents (Mr Trump appeared to call for it at a rally on October
6th). South America shows what it yields for democracies. Turnout is
higher, and often more representative of the electorate. The benefits for
democracy are less clear, and there are surprising downsides.

Start with turnout. It regularly breaks 90% in Uruguay and Bolivia. In
Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru it hovers around 80%. Globally,
enforced compulsory voting boosts turnout by an average of 15 percentage
points. When Chile ended its long history of compulsory voting in 2012,
turnout plummeted, only to soar again when it reintroduced it in 2022 (see

chart). Chileans will vote in once-again-compulsory municipal elections on
October 26th and 27th.
Compulsory voting boosts turnout among young and poor voters in

particular. In Argentina, for example, it is estimated to have twice as big an
effect on the turnout of less educated voters as it has of highly educated
ones. Yet the rules matter. In Brazil compulsory voting turns out more rich
people; fines are small but punishments for repeated failures include the
inability to get a new passport. That worries jet-setters more than favela-
dwellers.
The use of compulsory voting changes the behaviour of political parties too.
In the freewheeling United States parties spend billions on glitzy ads to
motivate their supporters to go out and vote; many would prefer a greater
focus on policy programmes. Work by Shane Singh of the University of
Georgia suggests that is exactly what happens when voting is mandatory.
He also shows that compulsory voting in Argentina decreases the practice
of “vote-buying”, whereby voters are paid cash to plump for a specific
candidate.
Compulsory voting appears to have effects beyond the campaign. When

Venezuela in effect abolished it in the early 1990s, inequality, which had
been declining, rose sharply. John Carey and Yusaku Horiuchi of Dartmouth
College suggest the rise occurred because Venezuela’s poor lost political
representation, which compulsory voting had previously helped ensure.
(There is evidence from beyond South America, too. In Australia, after
compulsory voting was introduced in the early 20th century and turnout
leapt, the share of the vote going to the Labor Party increased by almost ten
percentage points, and pension spending jumped.)
Yet many other hoped-for benefits of compulsory voting are elusive. One of
those is the notion that, when compelled to vote, citizens will become better
informed about the issues. In Brazil mandatory voting does push people to
watch the television news, but there is little evidence that it increases
knowledge of issues there or anywhere else. The evidence that voters
perceive governments to be more legitimate owing to high turnouts from
compulsory voting is underwhelming.

There are outright problems, too. Many votes are blank or spoiled. These
are so often cast by the politically disgruntled that in Argentina they are
called the voto bronca, angry votes. Others in effect close their eyes and jab
at the ballot paper. In Brazil some 8% of voters admit to casting valid but
random votes for presidential elections. Worryingly, random voting may
reduce the chances that the preferred candidate of the majority is selected.
Not only is evidence of increased legitimacy hard to find, researchers are

divided on whether compulsory voting boosts satisfaction with democracy
at all. Mr Singh has found that reluctant voters in Argentina, who already
tend to be unhappy with democracy, become even less happy after being
forced to vote. Nonetheless, compulsory voting is popular in much of the
region. Some 70% of Uruguayans support it. Chileans were less keen in
2012 but, having tried voluntary voting and seen turnout plummet, they are
now very enthusiastic. A majority of Argentines support it, too. Brazilians,
who have a dim view of politics, are marginally against it.
Even in Uruguay compulsory voting is not uniformly imposed. The

congressional and presidential races are compulsory—and tight. The latter
will probably go to a run-off between Álvaro Delgado, the centre-right
candidate, and Yamandú Orsi of the left-wing coalition. But voters will also
consider two constitutional referendums on October 27th. One of them,
blithely dismissing demographic trends, would lower the pension age by
five years and boost payouts. Markets, fearing fiscal disaster, have been
selling the peso.
Yet Uruguayans are not obliged to vote in the referendums; anyone who
does not vote (but who votes in the compulsory races) will be counted as a
no. That makes a plunge in the pension age much less likely. If it fails,
expect none of the leading candidates, who all back compulsory voting but
oppose the pension change, to question the legitimacy of the vote. ■
Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to

understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/the-
americas/2024/10/24/millions-in-the-west-want-mandatory-voting-are-they-right


Dwindling prospects
Blackouts in Cuba highlight the

island’s extreme energy fragility
The failure of a decrepit, oil-burning power system has plunged Cubans
into darkness and misery
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
MIGUEL DÍAZ-CANEL, Cuba’s president, usually wears boxy suits with a

revolutionary-red tie. But on October 20th, after days of power blackouts
across the country, he went on television sporting military fatigues
reminiscent of Fidel Castro, the island’s longtime dictator. The getup
conveyed two messages: first, that martial-like efforts had been made to
restore power, and second, a warning to protesters. Cubans should act with
“discipline” and “civility”, said Mr Díaz-Canel. Anyone disturbing public
order, he warned, would be “severely” punished.

Nearly 10m Cubans had been managing without power since the island’s
electricity grid collapsed. Authorities were quick to place the blame on
technical snafus. Small outages began a day earlier, they said, due to an
unexpected surge in electricity demand from air conditioners fitted in
homes and small businesses. An engineering failure at the island’s largest
source of electricity, the oil-burning Antonio Guiteras power plant,
prompted a “total disconnection” of the national grid, said Cuba’s energy
ministry in a post on X.
To make matters worse, attempts to bring in more fuel for the island’s oil-
powered plants failed after a category-one hurricane made landfall on the
night of October 20th; the storm has killed six people so far. By the next
afternoon, around 90% of the electricity supply had been restored in
Havana, according to state-run media. But many places outside the capital
remain without power.
The blackout adds to the drudgery of life in Cuba’s socialist dictatorship.

Food, scarce anyhow, has rotted in fridges. Neighbourhoods have resorted
to cooking what they can salvage on improvised stoves in the street.
Internet traffic dropped sharply as many were unable to charge their
phones.Those whose water supply relies on electric pumps had to go
without. The economic backdrop is also bleak: inflation is running at 30% a
year. Of late, Cubans compare their plight to the 1990s, when the collapse
of the Soviet Union prompted economic hardship and regular power cuts.
The country’s superannuated power system is one part of the problem. The
island relies on a handful of Soviet-era, oil-fired plants, most of which are
half a century old and break down frequently. None has received proper
maintenance for almost two decades. The Cuban government blames
American sanctions for choking off the import of spare parts. The
government has leased eight “powerships” from Turkey to use as offshore
generating plants, a costly and dirty workaround.

But Cuba must still supply the fuel. This has become a problem. Cuba
produces around 40,000 barrels of oil per day, but needs about 120,000 to
cover its energy needs. For years discounted oil from its socialist ally
Venezuela made up much of the shortfall. But Venezuela slashed its exports

to Cuba this year, racked by an economic crisis and looking to capitalise on
the lifting of American sanctions. Other providers, such as Russia and
Mexico, have not made up the deficit (see chart). Puny foreign-currency
reserves and a weak peso make it too costly to source oil on the spot
market. The prime minister, Manuel Marrero, admitted last week that the
country could no longer afford to buy fuel on international markets.
The government is rationing what little oil it has, throttling demand for
electricity by forcing factories, nightclubs and schools to close. It is anxious
to avoid a wave of social unrest. In 2021 tens of thousands of people
throughout the country took to the streets after a similar outage. Smaller
protests have broken out since, in 2022 and earlier this year, evidence of
either a lack of fear or increased desperation.
Others voted with their feet: at least one million Cubans have fled the
country since 2022, around a tenth of the total population and the largest
wave of migration recorded in the island’s history. The latest blackouts
mean more are likely to leave. Only a small number of protests have been
reported, mostly confined to the banging of pots and pans.
Even if Cuba’s ancient fleet of oil-burning generators can be kept running,

the problems will get worse. But replacing the power plants would take
decades and be painfully expensive. Belatedly, the government is turning to
solar panels, which offer a far cheaper method of generating electricity than
burning oil (something it has promised to do for years). Vicente de la O
Levy, the energy minister, has said the government plans to install some
two gigawatts of solar capacity by 2028, enough to cover about a fifth of
the island’s electricity needs. It is also encouraging Cubans to buy their own
panels; a tough ask when average monthly take-home pay is a measly $166,
enough to buy one panel that could perhaps power a fridge.
How the government will scrounge up the hard cash needed to import fuel
in the meantime is another question. China or Russia might see the benefit
in propping up an irritant on the doorstep ofthe United States. Absent that,
radical reform is needed. The best Mr Díaz-Canel can do is a costume
change. ■

americas/2024/10/22/blackouts-in-cuba-highlight-the-islands-extreme-energy-fragility

Climate change and parasites
The flesh-eating worms devouring

cows
The Darién Gap used to protect Central America. Not any more.
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Panama City
A SCREWWORM infestation is gruesome. The female fly lays hundreds of

eggs on the exposed flesh of warm-blooded animals. The eggs hatch into
larvae which gorge themselves on the living tissue, creating a pulsating
mess. Ladislao Miranda’s cattle herd in western Panama had been free of
the parasite for nearly 30 years, but in May the 60-year-old rancher spotted
white eggs on his animals. He now spends his days digging worms out of
haunches and treating wounds with powder. “This plague is back and it’s
stronger than ever,” he says.

Central America is suffering its worst outbreak of Cochliomyia hominivorax
in decades. In a normal year Panama records fewer than a hundred cases of
the parasite. So far in 2024 there have been over 19,700. Infections have
spread north to Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. The Darién Gap, a
100km (60-mile) stretch of rainforest which separates Panama from South
America, where the screwworm is endemic, used to serve as a barrier to the
spread of the fly. But deforestation and migration have degraded the forest,
making it more permeable to the screwworm and helping the parasite to
make a comeback.
The screwworm used to be the scourge of Texan cowboys. In the 1950s,

following the discovery that the female fly mates just once in her lifetime,
the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) began releasing sterile male
flies over the southern United States. Copulation with the barren males
rendered the females infertile, and screwworm populations plummeted.
After the United States was declared free of the pest in 1966, the technique
was rolled out southwards down the Central American isthmus. Panama, the
southernmost country, was declared screwworm-free in 2006.
Since then, a factory outside Panama City has mass-produced male

screwworms. They are reared on cellulose and powdered blood, then
rendered infertile with a zap of X-rays. Every week two small aeroplanes
dump 15m sterile flies over the rainforest of the Darién Gap.
But as the forest has degraded, the screwworm has spread. The factory must
now produce flies to cover all of Central America. So says Carlos Moreno,
the boss of the Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle
Borer Worm (COPEG), an organisation run jointly by the Panamanian and
United States governments which is charged with controlling the
screwworm population. It owns and operates the factory for sterile male
flies.
Higher temperatures caused by climate change helped the screwworm.

Trees are often cleared for cattle grazing, so hundreds of thousands of
potential screwworm hosts have been put into a strip of forest that had been
acting as a barrier. The paths and staging posts that facilitate human
migration through the Darién Gap also help the flies to spread north. All

this has created the “perfect storm” for the screwworm’s spread, says Mr
Moreno.
To arrest this year’s outbreak, COPEG has increased weekly fly production
from 15m to 89m, just short of the factory’s capacity of 100m per week.
Most of these flies are dispersed outside the Darién Gap. Three additional
aircraft have been procured. Pilots now make 1,600km round trips to drop
the barren insects over northern Nicaragua.
The screwworm still has the upper hand. A generation of ranchers who grew
up in a screwworm-free world is learning to identify and treat infections.
Border checks of animals have been ratcheted up. The farther north the fly
spreads, the harder it will be to bring under control, says Abelardo de
Gracia, a director of OIRSA, a regional agricultural health organisation.
Stopping it entering Mexico is key.
It may take several years to control the outbreak, says Mr de Gracia. The
ongoing degradation of the Darién Gap means that investments in
prevention and surveillance will have to keep rising in future if further
outbreaks are to be avoided. But the incentives to curb its spread are high.
The USDA estimates that the absence of screwworm saves the livestock
industry in the United States some $900m annually.
Indeed, the response to its comeback may well spell the end for the
screwworm. The tight supply at COPEG last week prompted an agreement
between the governments of Uruguay and Argentina to begin local
production of sterile screwworms. Uruguay aims to be free of the parasite
by 2030. That may be the first step towards the rancher’s dream: a
screwworm-free Americas. ■

americas/2024/10/24/the-flesh-eating-worms-devouring-cows

Asia
Indonesia’s macho new leader is no “cuddly grandpa”
Getting to know Prabowo :: Prabowo Subianto has fought back from years of disgrace and
exile
Making nickel is a nightmare. Unless you are Indonesian

Prabowo’s plans for nickel :: Gluts and shortages notwithstanding, Indonesia wants to double
down on resource nationalism
Suck up to your fake CEO

South-East Asia’s criminal scams :: The deepfake scam explosion has only just begun
Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping meet and resolve a border

row
Himalayan handshake :: The meeting in Russia signals a new era of closer ties
Japan is remarkably open to AI, but slow to make use of it

Banyan :: The land of Doraemon embraces the new technology in theory but not in practice

Getting to know Prabowo
Indonesia’s macho new leader is no

“cuddly grandpa”
Prabowo Subianto has fought back from years of disgrace and exile
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Singapore
WEARING A BLUE tunic, Prabowo Subianto waved from a gleaming

white jeep on his way to the presidential palace after becoming Indonesia’s
eighth president on October 20th. Sun-baked crowds waved back. For the
retired general, it was the triumphant final leg of a quarter-century journey
back to the centre of power from disgrace and exile. It is also the first time
in a decade that there has been a major shift in Indonesian politics.
Mr Prabowo won the presidency in February’s general election on his third

attempt. The first two times, in elections in 2014 and 2019, Joko Widodo
defeated Mr Prabowo in close contests. On the third, the pair teamed up. Mr

Prabowo drafted Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the elder son of Jokowi, as the
outgoing president is known, to join his ticket as vice-president. And having
long played the part of a blood-and-guts military man, Mr Prabowo
rebranded himself as a cuddly grandfather.
Now, one big question looms: how different will the former general be from
his predecessor? Mr Prabowo’s first cabinet includes many Jokowi loyalists
in important roles. He also promised to continue Jokowi’s “down-
streaming” agenda, by which Indonesia has sought to move from being a
producer of raw minerals like nickel to an exporter of intermediate goods
needed for the green transition, like lithium-ion batteries. But for all the
notes of continuity, Mr Prabowo’s presidency will look different from
Jokowi’s in several serious ways. To understand why, it helps to take a look
at Prabowo’s long history in the national spotlight.
By any measure, he will be Indonesia’s most worldly president. Hailing

from a legendary political family, his grandfather founded Indonesia’s first
national bank. When his father backed the wrong side in a rebellion in the
1950s, the family moved overseas, where Mr Prabowo learned to speak
English, French and German. Returning to Indonesia after Suharto, the
strongman dictator who ruled from 1967 to 1998, came to power, his father
became a minister, while Mr Prabowo chose a military career and married
Suharto’s daughter. In the army he rose rapidly through the ranks. In 1995
he was named commander of Indonesia’s special forces.
By 1998, however, Suharto’s rule had come unstuck amid the Asian
financial crisis and resulting protests. Then Mr Prabowo ordered a special-
forces team to kidnap pro-democracy activists. He says that he returned
nine victims unharmed. But around a dozen were never heard from again.
The day after his father-in-law stepped down in May 1998, his successor
relieved Mr Prabowo of his command. He spent the months and years that
followed in the wilderness. An army board dismissed him. America banned
him from entering the country. He spent three years in self-exile in Jordan.
When he returned to Indonesia several years later, his brother Hashim

Djojohadikusumo bankrolled a new political party, the Greater Indonesia
Movement (Gerindra). In speeches delivered to uniformed cadres across the
archipelago, Mr Prabowo argued that democracy had not delivered for

Indonesians, that foreign investors were merely exploiting the country’s
natural resources, and that Gerindra would give them a more disciplined
politics. Many of Mr Prabowo’s relatives are Christian, but in his
campaigns in 2014 and 2019 he attracted the support of Islamist parties as
Jokowi ran on a more tolerant platform.
The undertones of sectarianism had polarised the country. So Indonesians

were surprised when Jokowi asked Mr Prabowo to join his administration
as defence minister in 2019. Jokowi and Mr Prabowo had come to share at
least one belief about politics: that it works better when all parties split the
spoils of victory, rather than compete in winner-takes-all contests. In his
second term, Jokowi built a broad coalition, including in his administration
not only Gerindra but all but one of the parties with seats in the legislature.
Let the boy run
Jokowi also adopted some of Mr Prabowo’s authoritarian tendencies. Under

Jokowi, the police and other previously impartial state institutions, such as
the General Elections Commission and the Corruption Eradication
Commission, increasingly ruled in favour of Jokowi and his allies. In an
example that critics cite as particularly egregious, the constitutional court in
October 2023 reinterpreted the constitution to allow Jokowi’s son to join Mr
Prabowo’s ticket as his running-mate. This was despite the fact that he had
not yet reached the minimum age for the job.

Mr Prabowo’s coalition looks even broader than his predecessor’s. There
are few ideological differences among Indonesian parties, so most party
leaders are happy to sign up to join the government if given a cabinet role.
Mr Prabowo realises this; his will be Indonesia’s largest cabinet since
democracy returned in 1998 (see chart). All but one party, the Indonesian
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), led by a former president, Megawati

Sukarnoputri, have joined his coalition. But there is something even for her.
In the cabinet line-up that Mr Prabowo announced on October 20th, he
appointed her former aide-de-camp to be the co-ordinating minister for
politics and security, and the brother of another former aide-de-camp to be
the attorney-general. These appointments look as if they are intended to
keep PDI-P, the largest party in the legislature, on side.
Co-opting his coalition partners and Ms Megawati through these

appointments should help Mr Prabowo to achieve what he called in his
inaugural address “a democracy appropriate to our nation, based upon our
history and culture”. In August Mr Prabowo implied that having a political
opposition was disruptive, saying that “the West loves opposition, fighting,
refusing to co-operate”. (It did not seem to be something that he regarded as
a problem when in opposition from 2009 to 2019.)
The risk of such a large cabinet is that it has devalued the currency of a
ministerial appointment. If that is the case, then Mr Prabowo has other
means of distributing patronage at his disposal. Jokowi preferred to offer
seats on the boards of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to loyalists. Mr
Prabowo, who has retained Erick Thohir as the minister for SOEs, will
surely do the same.
While Jokowi sought to build a new $32bn capital city in the jungles of
Borneo, Mr Prabowo told guests at his inauguration that he plans to quietly
abandon the project. Instead his signature policy is a free-school-lunch
programme that would cost $28bn per year. He has billed it as a response to
childhood stunting. But it is just as likely to be used to deliver contracts to
favoured supporters. It is expected to add debt equivalent to 2.3% of GDP
annually, raising concerns about macroeconomic governance. In an effort to
assuage such concerns, Mr Prabowo has reappointed Sri Mulyani Indrawati,
the long-serving finance minister. She will act as a tripwire; if she resigns,
investors will worry that spending is out of control.
Mr Prabowo will also exercise great influence on foreign and defence

policy. He has appointed a close aide as Indonesia’s foreign minister, a post
usually reserved for a career diplomat. While Mr Prabowo is unlikely to
depart from Indonesia’s longstanding policy of non-alignment between
America and China, he has strong views on many international issues and

may episodically pursue them. Last year, as defence minister, he proposed a
peace plan for Ukraine which would have involved holding referendums in
occupied territories. His Ukrainian counterpart responded that it looked
“like a Russian plan”. Such gadfly antics look likely to continue. ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/22/indonesias-macho-new-leader-is-no-cuddly-
grandpa

Prabowo’s plans for nickel
Making nickel is a nightmare.

Unless you are Indonesian
Gluts and shortages notwithstanding, Indonesia wants to double down on
resource nationalism
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Singapore
A SKIM OF this year’s nickel-market commentary reveals a “Darwinian”

“existential moment” of “carnage”. Benchmark prices tumbled by as much
as 72% from all-time highs in 2022. From Australia to Brazil, nickel mines
and furnaces are being shut down or sold off. Most agree on who is
responsible for the destruction: Indonesia. The country’s vast nickel
reserves, lax environmental rules and cheap coal-fuelled power let its
producers undercut competitors. Since Indonesia introduced a ban on raw
nickel-ore exports in 2020, as part of a policy of “downstreaming”, or
moving towards higher value-added activity, Chinese investment has

poured in. It now makes nearly half the world’s refined nickel and two-
thirds of its mined nickel. Both shares have doubled since 2020.
The speed of change has astonished even close nickel-watchers. Just a few
years ago, the dominant belief was that the move to electric vehicles would
sustain roaring demand for high-purity battery-grade nickel, notes Bernard
Dahdah of Natixis, a French bank. Even as Indonesian supply increased,
hitting the market for lower-grade nickel used in stainless steel, few thought
the high-end nickel market was exposed. This is because while traditional
nickel producers like Australia have easily-processed “sulphide” ore
deposits, Indonesia’s are “laterite” deposits, wherein nickel is finely
sprinkled throughout the sediment. These are harder to refine and, many
thought, would be too expensive for mass-producing nickel fit for batteries.

But more recently firms in Indonesia, led by Tsingshan, a Chinese metals
giant, have worked out how to efficiently turn nickel laterites into the purer
stuff. Their techniques have been innovative. One popular method dissolves
ore in hot, pressurised acid to produce “mixed hydroxide precipitate”
(MHP), an intermediate ingredient that is then made into battery-grade
nickel. Likewise “nickel matte”, another intermediate, is alchemised from
low-grade nickel. These have transformed the high-end nickel market.
Nearly three-quarters of battery-grade nickel is now derived from matte and

MHP, up from 40% four years ago. The shift is almost wholly attributable
to Indonesia, says Andrew Mitchell of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy.
However, Indonesia is reeling from its own success. Having nabbed market
share with cut-price nickel, it must now turn a profit. The government is
trying to rein in its nickel smelters. “The state must be present to maintain
supply and demand,” Bahlil Lahadalia, the energy and mineral resources
minister, said on October 18th. Indonesia has tightened nickel-ore quotas
and cracked down on illegal mining. There is a domestic ore shortage. Ore
shipments have fallen by more than a third this year, according to Jim
Lennon of Macquarie, a bank. Imports of nickel ore, mainly from the
Philippines, have hit records. The combination of high ore prices and low
processed-nickel prices is pinching smelters. Some foreign firms are scaling
back or pulling out. Tsingshan has cut back production. In June Eramet and
BASF, two European mining giants, cancelled a $2.6bn investment in North
Maluku.
But while Indonesia may see sense in market management, the broader
policy of downstreaming is unlikely to change. It is credited for recent high-
profile investments. In July Joko Widodo, the outgoing president known as
Jokowi, attended the opening of a $1bn EV battery-cell factory built in West
Java by Hyundai and LG, two South Korean firms. Prabowo Subianto, the
new president, has retained many of the personnel responsible for
downstreaming, notes Siwage Dharma Negara, an Indonesia-watcher. Chief
among them is Luhut Pandjaitan, a retired general who, as a minister under
Jokowi, was instrumental in co-ordinating Indonesia’s bureaucracy. (Mr
Prabowo has kept Mr Luhut on in an advisory role.) The investment
minister has been renamed the minister of investment and downstreaming.
There also exist plans to expand export bans to new commodities, such as
seaweed. Bauxite exports were banned in 2023 and palm-oil ones in 2022.
Mr Bahlil, re-appointed by Mr Prabowo, has praised the policy as one key
strategy “to transform [Indonesia] from a developing into a developed
country”. Speaking at his inaugural address, Mr Prabowo did not mince his
words: “All our commodities must be enjoyed by all Indonesians.” ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/24/making-nickel-is-a-nightmare-unless-you-
are-indonesian


South-East Asia’s criminal scams
Suck up to your fake CEO

The deepfake scam explosion has only just begun
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Singapore
IT SEEMED LIKE just another video call. Earlier this year, a finance
worker based in Hong Kong for Arup, a British engineering firm, logged in
for what he thought was a routine team meeting. On the screen, he saw
several colleagues, including the firm’s chief financial officer, who
instructed him to transfer $26m to five different bank accounts. He
complied. But the man on the call was not Arup’s CFO: it was a deepfake.
It was one of the costliest deepfake scams reported globally. Such scams are
increasingly common. Deepfake technology, which manipulates images and
video using artificial intelligence (AI), has become increasingly realistic. It
is rapidly being adopted by transnational criminals mostly based in South-
East Asia, now the epicentre of online scams targeting people around the

world. Victims in East and South-East Asia lost up to $37bn from online
scams of all sorts in 2023, according to a new report from the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the first time that it has come up with
an estimate. According to the United States Institute for Peace, a think-tank
in Washington, Cambodia’s online scam industry makes more than $12.5bn
each year, equivalent to around half the country’s formal GDP.
Technologies such as generative AI and machine learning are making scams

even more effective. Meanwhile the rise of cryptocurrencies and spread of
social media have decentralised and democratised transnational crime. The
growing popularity of digital payments and e-commerce have made it easier
for large sums of money to move rapidly outside the traditional banking
system. Criminals now conduct their business over apps such as Telegram,
WhatsApp and Facebook. An individual or small team can specialise in one
part of the supply chain: registering foreign SIM cards, selling stolen phone
numbers or identifying targets on social media.
This new type of criminal economy has particularly flourished in the

Philippines. In 2016 the government legalised online gambling hubs known
as Philippine Offshore Gambling Operators (POGOs), which provide
criminals with a convenient front to launder money. Criminals, often from
China, relocated there and began to dabble in cyber-enabled fraud, human-
trafficking, kidnapping, extortion and money-laundering. In July Ferdinand
Marcos, the president, banned POGOs during his annual state of the nation
address. Hours before his speech, a deepfake circulated of him snorting
cocaine. Philippine law enforcement debunked the clip as a “fabricated and
malicious hoax”.
Wealthier countries in the region are also big targets. Scams have surpassed
more traditional crimes, such as burglary, to become the most common
felony in Singapore. Several deepfake videos have been released of
prominent Singaporeans, including the current and former prime ministers,
promoting investment scams. Both politicians released statements warning
the public about the falsehoods.
Increasingly sophisticated malware is another challenge. In September last

year at least 43 Singaporean victims lost almost $1m to malware-enabled
scams on social media, according to Singapore’s police force. When one

woman inquired about a Facebook post advertising a one-day trip to a
durian fruit farm in Malaysia, the seller contacted her over WhatsApp with
instructions to download a smartphone app to browse tour offers. This app
infected her Android phone with malware that enabled scammers to steal
more than $80,000 from her online bank accounts.
Governments in Asia are beginning to try to combat the growing threat of

scams. China and Singapore have some of the most sophisticated responses,
with widespread campaigns to raise awareness and by making it slower and
harder for people to make instant, online payments of large sums. Several
countries have set up national anti-scam centres to report crimes. But the
distributed international structure of this criminal ecosystem is difficult to
fight. Widespread corruption in many parts of South-East Asia undermines
international co-operation, especially since law enforcement often has less
money to deploy than the criminals. ■
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/24/suck-up-to-your-fake-ceo

Himalayan handshake
Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping

meet and resolve a border row
The meeting in Russia signals a new era of closer ties
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Delhi
A FATAL BORDER clash between India and China in 2020 did not just
open a four-year fissure in bilateral ties: it triggered a tectonic shift in Asia’s
geopolitics. In its aftermath, the two countries each sent tens of thousands
of troops to their disputed Himalayan frontier, backed by artillery, missiles
and fighter jets. China expanded military aid to Pakistan, India’s rival to the
west. India, meanwhile, restricted Chinese investment and deepened
defence ties with America and its allies. They, in turn, came to see India as a
key partner in containing China.

A détente which could shake up regional geopolitics again is now under
way. On October 21st Indian authorities said they had reached an agreement
with China on patrolling rights that resolved the border standoff. The next
day, China’s foreign ministry confirmed that a deal had been reached. Then,
on October 23rd, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, met China’s
president, Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Russia. It
was their first official bilateral meeting since 2019.
Details of the border deal have yet to be made public. Much will depend on
how it is implemented in the coming weeks. Even so, the diplomatic
breakthrough heralds a new phase of bilateral ties that prioritises economic
co-operation. That is partly because Mr Xi, concerned by a slowing Chinese
economy and trade barriers abroad, wants better access to India’s market.
But Mr Modi also needs more Chinese technology, investment and
expertise to achieve his manufacturing goals and repair the damage from a
surprise setback in this year’s general election. Despite the border crisis,
China edged past America to reclaim its position as India’s top trading
partner in the 2023-24 financial year.

The timing is opportune for the Indian and Chinese leaders as well, coming
just a fortnight before America’s presidential election. For Mr Xi, it signals
to the next American president that efforts to isolate China economically,
and to build a coalition of like-minded democracies, are not working. And
though Mr Modi is likely to deepen ties with America whoever wins the
White House, a simultaneous rapprochement with China underlines India’s
commitment to a “multi-aligned” foreign policy that encompasses close ties

with Russia too. Mr Modi made this clear when he met Vladimir Putin on
October 22nd.

It is also a useful hedge for Mr Modi. If Kamala Harris wins, it could help
offset American pressure on India over issues including human rights,
exports of restricted technology to Russia and Indian officials’ alleged
involvement in an assassination attempt on a Sikh activist in America. If
Donald Trump prevails, it might mitigate the impact of potential trade
tariffs on India or an American pivot towards China.
The border agreement between India and China does not resolve their
underlying dispute, which stems from the blurry boundaries sketched by the
British when they ruled the Indian subcontinent. China still claims the
Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. India claims Aksai Chin, an area
controlled by China (see map). But the deal could help avert the kind of
military encounters that grew more frequent and violent as each side piled
up frontier infrastructure in the years preceding the clash in 2020. That
skirmish, in which 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese ones died,
was the first fatal one on the border in more than four decades.
The two sides’ military commanders and civilian officials have since held
regular talks to avoid further violence. By September 2022, they had
reduced tensions by establishing “buffer zones”, within which neither side
patrols, at five of seven major flashpoints. But over the past two years they
have struggled to find a solution at the last two flashpoints, Demchok and
Depsang Plains, which both consider to be more strategically significant.
Easing off
Indian officials suggest the new agreement will allow India and China to
patrol as they did before, rather than extending the buffer zones to the two
remaining areas. “We have gone back to where the situation was in 2020,”
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, told a conference on
October 21st. He added that the “disengagement process with China” was
complete, suggesting that troops who had been blocking each other’s
patrols in Demchok and Depsang were no longer doing so.
General Upendra Dwivedi, India’s army chief, was more cautious. He said
the goal was to “restore trust”, including by checking that neither side was
creeping into the buffer zones. India would then look at “disengagement,

de-escalation and normal management” of the border. The Chinese foreign
ministry spokesman who confirmed the deal did not provide more details,
adding only that China would work with India to implement the agreement.
Some Indian media reports said that the two sides had each agreed to patrol
twice a month at different times, according to an agreed schedule and with a
maximum of 15 troops per patrol. Previously, there was no agreed schedule
or size for patrols. Other reports suggested that the agreement would apply
only to Demchok and Depsang, while buffer zones would remain in place at
the other flashpoints.
Deependra Singh Hooda, a former chief of the Indian Army’s Northern

Command, which oversees part of the Chinese border, suspects that the
latter is true. He thinks that India would have insisted on patrolling at
Depsang in particular because the area, which is largely flat, is too big to
monitor remotely and too important as a conduit for a large-scale offensive.
“My own sense is we’re not getting back exactly to the status quo pre-
2020,” he says. “But I think this is the closest we can get to it.”
Neither side is likely to withdraw all the firepower they recently moved to
the wider border area. Nor will they stop modernising their armed forces to
prepare for future clashes. For India, that means sticking to a path of closer
military ties with Western partners. China and India will also still compete
for influence in South Asia. And a fresh border flare-up could easily trigger
another crisis.
The big question now is whether diplomatic reconciliation could turn into a
prolonged period of economic integration between Asia’s giants. If that
were to occur, it would indeed be a landmark of Himalayan significance. ■
Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential India, our free
weekly newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/24/narendra-modi-and-xi-jinping-meet-and-
resolve-a-border-row

Banyan
Japan is remarkably open to AI,

but slow to make use of it
The land of Doraemon embraces the new technology in theory but not in
practice
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
WHICH CULTURAL icons come to mind when an American thinks of

artificial intelligence (AI)? The cyborgs of the “Terminator” film series, or
Hal of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”—rogue computer
systems that rise up to destroy their human creators. What does a Japanese
person recall? Doraemon, the friendly robot helper of an enormously
popular eponymous anime series. So goes an anecdote making the rounds in
Japanese tech circles. It suggests that Japan is a land of opportunity when it
comes to AI.

The tale is instructive. Japanese do feel relatively little angst about AI. Only
25% of Japanese say that products and services using it make them nervous,
the lowest share among 32 countries surveyed this year by Ipsos, a market
research firm. On average, 50% of global respondents feel nervous, and the
share rises to 64% in America. Few Japanese reckon AI will hasten the
apocalypse: just 12% of Japanese think that it will make the future worse,
the second-lowest share in a study of 21 countries conducted last year by
the University of Toronto. Fully 36% of Americans fear the AI future. As
Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, put it last year
while visiting Tokyo, the site of his firm’s first office in Asia: “There’s a
long history of humans and machines working together here to embrace
automation technology.”
Japanese leaders have positioned the country as open for AI business. With
a shrinking, greying population, Japan has little to fear in terms of job
losses and lots to gain in terms of potential productivity improvements. So
far Japan has no comprehensive legal regulations on AI, and it has allowed
tech companies to train their models on copyrighted content. The ruling
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has called for Japan to become “the
world’s most AI-friendly country”. This spring the LDP even turned to AI
to generate a new catchphrase for a political poster backing then-prime
minister Kishida Fumio: “Economic revitalisation: providing tangible
results”. (The results of the slogan, alas, left much to be desired: Mr
Kishida was replaced this month and the party is battling to maintain its
majority in lower-house elections on October 27th.)
Intriguing applications of AI can be found across different sectors in Japan.

Construction companies have used it to improve efficiency on job sites;
tech investors are keen on more such innovations at the intersection of AI
and hardware, where Japanese firms have traditionally been strong. The city
government in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, has reported big productivity
gains since implementing ChatGPT to help with administrative tasks; the
Tokyo metropolitan government is using AI to detect fires and improve
disaster-response times. Qudan Rie, last year’s winner of the Akutagawa
Prize, a prestigious award for the best work of fiction by an up-and-coming
author, used ChatGPT to generate sections of her novel where an AI speaks.

Though her revelation generated some controversy, she was allowed to keep
the award.
Yet for all of Japan’s openness towards AI, it is failing to capitalise on the
opportunity. Masayoshi Son, the boss of SoftBank and Japan’s most famous
tech investor, has been warning for years that his home country has been
behind the curve. Earlier this month he chastised Japanese firms for
focusing on small-scale systems, rather than building ambitious AI giants.
None of the “foundation models”—the algorithms that power generative AI
—released between 2019 and 2023 originated from Japan, according to
Stanford University. (America accounted for the most, with 182.) Tellingly,
the hottest Japan-based AI startup is Sakana AI, which is led by two non-
Japanese alumni of Google’s AI division.
Japanese institutions remain strikingly risk-averse and slow to adopt new

technology. Using AI on an individual basis is easy, but “doing something
deeper—transforming systems or how companies work—that’s a different
story”, says Matsuo Yutaka, who chairs the government’s AI council. A
government survey released this summer shows that less than half of
Japanese firms are using generative AI tools, compared with over 80% in
America or China. Among the small and medium-sized enterprises that
make up the vast majority of Japanese companies, the situation may be even
worse: less than 20% of Japanese SMEs are utilising generative AI,
according to a recent survey by Teikoku Databank, a research firm in
Tokyo. When it comes to AI, Japan does have something to fear: being left
behind.■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/10/24/japan-is-remarkably-open-to-ai-but-slow-
to-make-use-of-it

China
Ambiguity or madness? Where Harris and Trump stand on
China
Decoding America’s election :: The vice-president makes no promise to defend Taiwan; her
rival boasts of being crazy
How China is trying to win back foreign tourists

A long way to go :: Come, spend, don’t worry about a visa
A female comedian has Chinese men up in arms

The last laugh :: They are proving to be a rather prickly bunch

Decoding America’s election
Ambiguity or madness? Where

Harris and Trump stand on China
The vice-president makes no promise to defend Taiwan; her rival boasts of
being crazy
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | WASHINGTON
THROUGHOUT HER campaign, Kamala Harris has hewed to the foreign

policy of President Joe Biden. But there is a little daylight between the two
in at least one important area: America’s relations with China. To judge by
her limited remarks on the topic, Ms Harris seems less hawkish than her
boss. She is reluctant to treat China as an actual or potential enemy and, if
elected, hopes to maintain a dialogue with its leader, Xi Jinping. Unlike her
rival, Donald Trump, she is not interested in a trade war. This impression
was reinforced by a senior adviser who told The Economist: “Conflict is not
imminent. Our job is to ensure that it is not imminent.”

The clearest evidence of this posture is over Taiwan, a democratic, self-
governing island with which China has vowed to “reunify”, by force if
necessary. Mr Biden said four times during his presidency that America
would defend Taiwan if China tried to invade it. But when Ms Harris was
asked a question about this in an interview with CBS News this month, she
did not repeat her boss’s pledge: “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”
Ms Harris is deliberately reverting to the pre-Biden policy of “strategic

ambiguity”, in which America will not say whether it might intervene in a
conflict between the mainland and Taiwan. At a time of growing military
tension across the Taiwan Strait, when every utterance is parsed for
meaning, this is a striking change. It also stands in contrast to comments by
Mr Trump, who has gone for an entirely different sort of ambiguity—at
times implying that Taiwan is not worth defending, at others suggesting he
would threaten Mr Xi with punitive tariffs to deter an invasion. Would he
threaten to use military force? “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me
and he knows I’m fucking crazy,” Mr Trump told the Wall Street Journal.
In the non-crazy world, strategic ambiguity is woven into the Taiwan

Relations Act, a law passed in 1979 after America switched diplomatic
recognition from the Nationalists in Taiwan to the Communists on the
mainland. It commits America to supply weapons for Taiwan to defend
itself, which Ms Harris has vowed to do; and to maintain its own power “to
resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion”. Ms Harris’s non-
committal position is “consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act”, says her
aide. By implication it is Mr Biden who strayed from the norm. The vice-
president may want to reassure Mr Xi that America is not pushing for war.
The danger is that he may take it as a weakening of America’s resolve.
Ms Harris offered another intriguing clue in her interview with CBS News.
Asked which country was America’s greatest adversary, she pointed to Iran,
which she said had “American blood on their hands”. Most politicians in
Washington probably would have named China. Mr Biden’s national-
security strategy identifies the country as “the only competitor with both the
intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic,
diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”

Perhaps Ms Harris had Iran front of mind because it had just fired more
than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Her adviser insists the vice-president is
“clear-eyed” about China, pointing to her comments at the Democratic
National Convention, when she vowed to ensure “that America, not China,
wins the competition for the 21st century; and that we strengthen, not
abdicate, our global leadership”. Moreover, much of her foreign-policy
experience as vice-president has been in dealing with Asian allies alarmed
by China’s bellicosity.
Though her comments and those of her entourage mostly align with current
policy, the tone feels softer than Mr Biden’s or Mr Trump’s. Ms Harris may
talk of competition, but not of deterrence. She has said: “We must be able to
compete and win. We should not seek conflict.” She emphasises the need
for open lines of communication. The only warning to China is that, as her
aide puts it, “there will be real economic consequences” if it invades
Taiwan.
Ms Harris is admittedly in a bind, struggling to emerge from the shadow of

the president she still serves. Policy differences either seem disloyal or
invite accusations of flip-flopping. Nor does Ms Harris want to be
outflanked by Mr Trump, whom she has accused of being meek towards Mr
Xi. Her entourage says she fully embraces Mr Biden’s “responsibly
managed competition” with China. On the competition side of the ledger
this involves industrial policy at home, restrictions on high-tech exports to
China and strengthening alliances in Asia. On the responsible management
side it features co-operation with China on restricting fentanyl smuggling,
dialogue on artificial intelligence, contacts with Chinese leaders and
revived communication between military commanders.
The acute tension between the two powers, which led to dangerous
encounters at sea and in the air, has abated since a Biden-Xi summit in
November 2023. But the cordiality may not last given the wars raging in
Ukraine and the Middle East, and the fact that China is working ever more
closely with Russia, Iran and North Korea in an “axis of autocracy”. In July
a bipartisan commission on America’s national-security strategy, mandated
by Congress, sounded a warning that America faces “the most serious and

most challenging” threats since 1945, including “the potential for near-term
major war”.
Ms Harris’s camp appears not to share such dread, and shows no sign of
heeding the commission’s call for much higher defence spending. As for the
axis of autocrats, “the more they co-operate with each other, the more we
can rally allies to our side,” her aide says. If elected, Ms Harris’s China
policy will depend on the world she finds and the people she appoints. Mr
Biden, with a lifetime’s expertise on foreign affairs, surprised many people
by how tough he turned out to be on China.
Jude Blanchette of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in

Washington says some in the Democratic Party think Mr Biden went too
far, and want a softer line. Indeed, some Democrats see China as the most
biddable member of the axis of autocracy. It wants some form of world
order and co-operates with America in certain areas. Besides, adds Ivan
Kanapathy, a former White House official under Mr Trump, “if you have
two wars going on your watch, and you’re not going to raise defence
spending, you have to turn down the heat in the Pacific.” ■
Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to

understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the
world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/10/23/ambiguity-or-madness-where-harris-and-
trump-stand-on-china

A long way to go
How China is trying to win back

foreign tourists
Come, spend, don’t worry about a visa
10月 24, 2024 04:37 上午
INTERESTING, SAFE and easy to get around, China has what it takes to
be the top tourist destination in Asia. Indeed, it was. In the first half of
2019, before covid-19 hit, China’s travel agencies handled 8.6m tourist
visits, more than any other country in the region, according to the
government (see chart 1). China’s border authorities recorded 47.7m entries
and exits by foreigners, including non-tourists, over that period. But after
plummeting during the pandemic, those numbers have yet to fully recover,
coming in at 3.1m and 29.2m, respectively, in the first half of this year.

This matters to China, not only because it enjoyed the bragging rights of
being Asia’s top destination. The government is also trying to kick-start the
economy—and wants foreign tourists to help. In 2019 their spending
accounted for 0.5% of GDP in China, compared with 0.9% in Japan, 1.1%
in America and 2.5% in France. In the eyes of Chinese officials, there is
plenty of room to grow. But first they must make their country attractive
again.

The Economist dug into data from OAG, a consultancy, to figure out which
travellers have stopped visiting China. We examined the sales of tickets for
flights to and from China, breaking them down by country. The biggest
drop-off has been in the number of travellers from America, which declined
by two-thirds in the first half of this year, compared with the same period in
2019 (see chart 2). The tallies from South Korea, Japan and Thailand—all
big providers of tourists—are also way down.
Flights in the ointment
During the pandemic China closed its borders and put in place draconian
restrictions to stem outbreaks. That may have reinforced impressions of the
country, held by some travellers, as a brutal and uninviting place. It also led
to a decline in the number of flights to China. As of September, monthly
seating capacity for flights between America and China was still only 28%
of what it was in 2019. America’s big international carriers—American,
Delta and United—recently asked the Department of Transportation in
Washington for permission to keep most of their routes to China dormant
owing to a lack of demand.

Another big problem for airlines is Russia. Traversing its airspace is the
quickest way to fly to China from America and Europe. But two years ago
America, Canada, Europe and several other places barred Russian airlines
from entering their airspace, punishment for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine. Russia responded in kind. That has extended flight times and
driven up prices for Western carriers. Take British Airways, which restored
flights between London and Beijing in June of last year, after a three-year
hiatus because of the pandemic. In August of this year the airline said it

would again suspend the route. No reason was given, but reports pointed to
the issue of Russian airspace.
The Chinese government is trying to make up for all this by easing entry for
some. Over the past year it has begun allowing people from 13 European
countries and several others to visit for up to 15 days without a visa.
Travellers from dozens of countries can stop in China for up to six days
before flying to a third country. These trial programmes are having an
effect: in the first half of this year 58% of all visits to China were made
without a visa, according to the government.
But officials acknowledge that more needs to be done. A common

complaint of tourists is that many vendors do not accept cash or foreign
credit cards. In order to purchase most things, visitors must download one
of the country’s payment apps, WeChat or Alipay. So the government has
released a guide on how to use them. Language is another problem. Outside
metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, few people speak English. And
China’s “great firewall” prevents visitors from using services such as Gmail
and Facebook without a virtual private network.
The biggest problem, though, may be that negative impressions of China

are growing in many places. A survey published last year by the Pew
Research Centre in America found that, across 24 countries, a median of
67% of adults expressed unfavourable views of China, compared with 28%
who had a favourable opinion. The negative perceptions were largely
concentrated in rich countries, or those most likely to send tourists to China.
In America, for example, half of respondents named China as the top threat,
making it an unlikely holiday destination. ■

world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/10/24/how-china-is-trying-to-win-back-foreign-
tourists

The last laugh
A female comedian has Chinese

men up in arms
They are proving to be a rather prickly bunch
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
YANG LI IS no stranger to online uproars. Four years ago the stand-up

comedian (pictured) riled many Chinese men with a mildly worded ribbing
on a streamed show. Her line, “Why does he look so ordinary, but can still
be so confident?” remains infamous among touchy male netizens. On
October 18th one of China’s biggest e-commerce firms, JD.com, dropped
Ms Yang as a promoter of its services after an outcry from still-offended
men. Yet women are fighting back.
JD.com did not name Ms Yang, but the context of its announcement made it
clear that she would no longer be helping to boost the company’s sales

during the annual “Singles’ Day” shopping festival, which reaches a climax
on November 11th. On Weibo, a frequently censored social-media platform,
access has been blocked to many of the comments that poured out in
response. One can get a sense of the mood, though. Some men accused
JD.com of failing to apologise enough for what the firm called the
“unpleasant experience” caused by signing up Ms Yang. “How is this any
different from Japan’s understanding of the second world war?” asked a
user in Beijing. Outraged women saw things a little differently. “Just how
ordinary and insecure are they?” said one, commenting on the male
reaction.
The company should not have been surprised. Ms Yang’s associations with
other firms, such as Intel and Mercedes-Benz in 2021, had also triggered
fury among men. But the 32-year-old comic remains a celebrity in China’s
stand-up business, which only began to take off in 2009 with the opening of
the country’s first clubs dedicated to the art. She has nearly 2.5m followers
on Weibo; online videos of her routines have drawn millions of views.
Thin-skinned men have not been the industry’s only problem. It has had to
navigate the sensitivities of a government that takes offence easily. In May
last year a comedian, Li Haoshi, cracked a seemingly innocuous joke at an
offline venue about his two dogs chasing a squirrel. “Exemplary in conduct!
Capable of winning battles!” he said of their behaviour, using a slogan
promoted by China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, to encourage Chinese
troops. Furious netizens, backed by state media, accused him of insulting
the army. Mr Li’s company, Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media, was fined
$2m and ordered to suspend performances. He was dismissed. The
authorities began investigating whether his quip had broken the law.
Stand-up comedy suffered the fallout for months. Officials inspected venues
across the country to warn managers and performers to keep in line with
“core socialist values”. Some performances were cancelled. But in August
stand-up comedy returned to streaming channels with two hugely popular
talent shows. Ms Yang was the screenwriter of one of them. “If you’re
going to take offence, go and watch something else,” she joked with the
audience.

Stand-up comedy in China is still a male-dominated business. Both shows
have declared their winners in the past few days. Both were won by men.
Only about one-third of the contestants were female. But they caused a stir
with jokes about menstruation, gender bias and pressures on women to get
married and have children. An online Chinese newspaper called them “even
more outspoken than Yang, with many taking bold stances on a string of
hot-button gender issues in their sets”.
Some men quivered, but officials were probably content. Participants

avoided politics or anything bawdy. They clearly knew the bounds. ■

world.
https://www.economist.com/china/2024/10/24/a-female-comedian-has-chinese-men-up-in-
arms

Middle East & Africa

Do Israel’s assassinations work?
Killing an idea :: Why the conventional wisdom about decapitating Hamas and Hizbullah
might be wrong
Yahya Sinwar made Hamas his own fief

Yahya Sinwar’s death :: Will his successor embrace more violence or compromise?
Israel’s leaders are watching America’s election closely

Israel’s waiting game :: Who wins will shape Israel’s approach to its three wars
Mozambique’s ruling party wins a dodgy election

The wages of truth :: Two opposition figures were murdered days before the result was
announced
Gold is booming. So is the dirty business of digging it up

Not so mellow :: It is mined in Africa, traded in Dubai and lucrative for warlords and jihadists
How African churches are keeping the faith alive abroad

Religion re-rooted :: A revamped version of the prosperity gospel appeals to young immigrants

Killing an idea
Do Israel’s assassinations work?

Why the conventional wisdom about decapitating Hamas and Hizbullah
might be wrong
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | DUBAI
IT HAS BECOME almost an article of faith: assassinations don’t matter.

For more than a year Israel has been killing leaders of Hamas, a Palestinian
Islamist group, and Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia. Each time it does, a
chorus of officials and analysts insist that Hamas and Hizbullah will simply
regroup and regain their previous strength. Maybe so: Israel’s history offers
ample reason for such scepticism. But there is also good reason to believe
that this time may be different.
Three arguments support the belief that targeted killings do not work. One
is historical. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, studied how more than 450 terrorist groups met their end. She

found that so-called “decapitation” strikes tend to work against small,
newly formed groups that lack a process for picking new leaders.
Neither Hamas nor Hizbullah fits that description. When Israel killed Abbas
Musawi, the leader of Hizbullah, in 1992, the group did not die with him.
On the contrary: his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, proved to be a far more
capable leader. Similarly, Hamas survived the assassination of Ahmed
Yassin, its founder, in 2004. “If Hamas were vulnerable to a decapitation
strategy, it would probably have been defeated already,” Ms Cronin wrote
in Foreign Affairs after Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas,
earlier this month.
The problem with this historical argument is that the past year has few
historical parallels. When Israel killed Musawi in 1992, it was a one-off
event: another 16 years would pass before it succeeded in assassinating
someone else of his stature.
Contrast that with its current campaign against Hizbullah. By the time Israel
killed Mr Nasrallah on September 27th, it had already wiped out most of
the group’s military commanders. Since then it has killed Hashem
Safieddine, Mr Nasrallah’s heir-apparent, and perhaps Wafiq Safa, a feared
enforcer who used threats and violence to cow Lebanese officials. Even the
most resilient group would struggle after losing the top four or five levels
on its org chart.
The same goes for Hamas, which in the past year has lost two leaders; its
military chief and his deputy; and scores of lower-ranking commanders.
Both groups have also had thousands of cadres killed and wounded in
Israeli attacks.
Add to that the unique stature of both Mr Nasrallah and Mr Sinwar. The
former was the most powerful man in Iran’s “axis of resistance” and a
trusted confidant of its supreme leader. The latter, unlike his predecessors,
dominated all Hamas’s disparate branches: he controlled both the military
and political wings and bent the diaspora leadership to his will. Neither will
be easily replaced, and their successors may not enjoy as much support
from Iran.

A second argument is structural. Before October 7th Hamas was the de
facto government in Gaza, with tens of thousands of civil servants on its
payroll. Hizbullah is a state within a state: it hands out patronage jobs,
operates a chain of discount groceries and runs a bank. These are not just
militant groups, in other words, but political and economic entities with
deep roots.
Yet some of those roots have been ripped out over the past year by Israel’s
actions. For Hamas to re-emerge as Gaza’s ruler, it will need money to pay
its fighters and bureaucrats. But Gaza’s economy is in ruins: the merchants
who once paid Hamas $360m a year in taxes have been killed or lost their
businesses. Hamas no longer has a monopoly on violence and extortion, as
increasingly powerful gangs steal aid shipments and run protection rackets.
In Lebanon’s clientelist system, a party is as strong as the benefits it

provides. Long the richest party in Lebanon, Hizbullah is now under strain.
Some fighters grumble that their salaries are late; displaced civilians
complain they are not receiving help for housing and other needs.
The final argument is philosophical. “Hamas is an idea, and you don’t kill
an idea,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, said in
February. The head of the Arab League said the same of Hizbullah earlier
this month. It is a pithy statement. It is also wrong.
Analysts made similar claims about Islamic State (IS) a decade ago, as the
jihadist group declared a caliphate and seized a swathe of territory across
Syria and Iraq. The caliphate lasted less than four years: it crumbled in the
face of an international coalition that killed tens of thousands of IS fighters
in a ferocious campaign.
Or consider the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest Islamist

movement. It thrived for almost a century in its native Egypt, even though it
was officially banned. But in 2013 Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Egypt’s
elected president, a Brotherhood member, in a coup. He massacred
hundreds of the group’s supporters and jailed tens of thousands more. The
group’s assets were seized, its schools and charities closed.

To be fair, neither group was eliminated. IS endures as a rural insurgency in
Syria and Iraq; the Brotherhood, as squabbling factions of exiles in London
and Istanbul. But it will be years before either can wield power again.
Perhaps you cannot kill such groups—but if you are willing to apply an
enormous level of violence and repression, you can marginalise them for a
long time.
Hamas and Hizbullah are institutions, not ideas. It is not a given that Hamas
will be the leading Palestinian militant group, or that Hizbullah will be
Lebanese Shias’ chief representative. The question is what might emerge to
replace them. Many in Lebanon fear that a weakened Hizbullah could mean
a fight within the Shia community. And though it may not be under the
banner of Hamas, as long as Israel denies the Palestinians a state, there will
be Palestinians willing to fight Israel. ■
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and-africa/2024/10/24/do-israels-assassinations-work

Yahya Sinwar’s death
Yahya Sinwar made Hamas his

own fief
Will his successor embrace more violence or compromise?
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | BEIRUT
AFTER THE Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in 2021 Yahya Sinwar appeared

sitting in an armchair in the open air, surrounded by rubble and smiling. It
became a defining image of defiance for many Hamas supporters. This time
the story ended differently. Mr Sinwar died in the ruins of Gaza, like tens of
thousands of victims of the war he unleashed a year ago. In a firefight with
an Israeli patrol in southern Gaza, the leader of Hamas, the Palestinian
Islamist group, was killed on October 16th. His death leaves Hamas
shattered and divided.

To his supporters, the architect of the October 7th atrocities punctured
Israel’s sense of invincibility and catapulted a waning cause into the world’s
headlines. To his opponents, he brought hellfire down on Gaza. His rise was
the culmination of decades of planning and outmanoeuvring of opponents,
turning a movement into the Sinwar show. In prison the man became
systematic in his thinking. “He had this military mindset,” said Khaled
Zawawi, who was incarcerated with Mr Sinwar. According to Yuval Bitton,
an Israeli intelligence agent, “He studied us through enemy eyes…he
looked for weakness, for a point at which he could say, this is the time to
attack.”
Released in 2011, Mr Sinwar was appointed to Hamas’s Gaza bureau. By

2017 he led it. His lieutenants from prison rose with him. He strengthened
the military wing—the al-Qassam brigades. Hamas’s less extreme leaders
were marginalised, including Khaled Meshal, who headed the group until
2017 and drafted a new charter for the organisation that appeared to nod
towards a two-state solution. By 2021 Gaza had become Mr Sinwar’s fief.
He ignored the group’s Shura Council, and kept exiled leaders in Doha in
the dark. In July he formally assumed leadership of the whole of Hamas,
breaching its succession rules. Hamas’s resilience over the decades is in
part due to its institutionalisation of authority. But now its formal structures
have been pushed aside.
One potential successor is Khalil al-Haya, who was closest to Mr Sinwar

and supports close relations with Iran. Another is Mr Meshal, who might
want Hamas to come under the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in effect
accepting a two-state solution. In 2012 he cut the group’s ties with Syria in
response to the Hizbullah-backed regime’s fierce suppression of the
uprising there.
If Hamas survives Israel’s onslaught, whoever wins may determine where

the group goes next. It may embrace more violence and extremism. Another
path leads to moderation and compromise. Power politics at the top of
Hamas will decide which route is taken.■

and-africa/2024/10/24/yahya-sinwar-made-hamas-his-own-fief

Israel’s waiting game
Israel’s leaders are watching

America’s election closely
Who wins will shape Israel’s approach to its three wars
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | JERUSALEM
SHORTLY BEFORE taking off from Tel Aviv on October 23rd, after a one-
day visit to Israel, Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, along
with the other guests in his hotel, was forced to rush into a bomb-shelter.
The rockets fired that morning from Lebanon by Hizbullah, the Iran-backed
Shia militia, towards central Israel failed to cause much damage or any
casualties. But it was yet another frustrating reminder for America’s senior
diplomat how little he had achieved on his 11th visit to Israel in over a year.
Mr Blinken (pictured) hoped to make some progress towards ceasefires in

Gaza and Lebanon and to limit the ferocity of Israel’s expected strike on

Iran. He urged Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to turn Israel’s
recent successes on the battlefield “into an enduring strategic success”. But,
as one Israeli official described the conversations: “We listened politely.”
The exhausted efforts of Mr Blinken highlight how limited America’s

efforts to shape Israel’s policy have become. But its political schedule is
increasingly shaping the decisions of Israel’s leaders in prosecuting their
three conflicts: in Gaza, in Lebanon and with Iran. Israel is unlikely to make
any big policy changes before the American presidential election. If Kamala
Harris wins, Mr Netanyahu knows he will face greater pressure to scale
back Israel’s wars. If Donald Trump is elected, the Israeli prime minister
believes he will have more latitude. He does not want to make concessions
today that might turn out to be unnecessary after November 5th.
Regarding Iran, America has been trying to convince Israel to aim at less
strategically sensitive targets, such as its missile and drones factories, rather
than its nuclear sites or oil terminals. On October 18th President Joe Biden
answered in the affirmative when asked if he had “a good understanding” of
Israel’s plans. But two events since then may have caused Israel to re-
evaluate them.
First, a leak of what appear to be top-secret American intelligence

documents has been published on pro-Iran channels on Telegram, a social-
media platform. These include details of the Israeli air force’s preparations
for a long-range strike mission—which have now been revised. Second was
the detonation on October 19th of an explosives-laden drone next to Mr
Netanyahu’s weekend villa in the coastal town of Caesarea. It was launched
from Lebanon by Hizbullah. Iran has officially denied any involvement in a
direct attempt on the life of Israel’s prime minister. Israel sees things
otherwise and could use this as justification for targeting the most valuable
Iranian targets, including its leaders.
Meanwhile in Lebanon the assessment by America’s envoy on October 21st

that the war there had “escalated out of control” has fallen on deaf ears.
Israel is methodically working through Hizbullah’s capabilities and keeping
open the option of expanding its war. On October 20th it launched a series
of air strikes against branches of al-Qard al-Hassan, Hizbullah’s financial

network. Israel’s ground forces now almost completely control the area of
southern Lebanon by its border.
While your correspondent was embedded with Israeli troops in Lebanon,

one of the generals directing the fighting on the ground said: “Our mission
here is clear: to locate Hizbullah infrastructure and destroy it.” His troops
were combing through tunnels apparently prepared by Hizbullah for
launching an attack on Israel, similar to Hamas’s on October 7th last year.
Previously, Israel and America had been pushing Hizbullah for a truce. Now
Israel is insisting that a deal in Lebanon is possible only with an
internationally guaranteed agreement that would stop Hizbullah rearming
on the border. Israel is also demanding the right to send in its forces in the
future if needed to enforce such a deal.
And in Gaza, despite America’s pleas, a ceasefire remains as elusive as

ever. The Israeli army has launched a series of ground and air attacks
around Gaza City, notably on the Jabalia refugee camp, and drastically
reduced the number of supply convoys going into northern Gaza. Officially
the Israel Defence Forces say they are operating against Hamas fighters
seeking to re-establish their presence there. But some officers say there are
efforts to force the remaining civilians in the north (thought to number
between 250,000 and 400,000) to flee south. The dire humanitarian
situation has led to open warnings from the Biden administration that
America could reconsider its arms supplies to Israel.
But any such decision would be made only after the presidential election.
Mr Biden’s time to try and bring peace to the Middle East has all but run
out. The two candidates to replace him are already getting involved. Ms
Harris, as vice-president, has been on Mr Biden’s recent calls with Mr
Netanyahu. Mr Trump has spoken to Mr Netanyahu as well. Once a new
president has been chosen, Israel will have to start making its own
decisions. ■
and-africa/2024/10/24/israels-leaders-are-watching-americas-election-closely


The wages of truth
Mozambique’s ruling party wins a

dodgy election
Two opposition figures were murdered days before the result was
announced
10月 24, 2024 09:38 上午 | Maputo
HE FEARED HE was a marked man. In April Elvino Dias wrote on

Facebook that death squads were plotting to kill him. But as a lawyer for an
opposition leader, in an election year, he felt it was his duty to speak out.
“In a country as upside down as ours, truth and justice have their price,” he
wrote, “and the biggest price is the death of the one who says it.”
Those words echoed like bullets on October 19th, when Mr Dias was shot
dead in his car in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Paulo Guambe, an
opposition party official, was killed in the seat beside him. Police have not

found the gunmen. But the timing of the murders suggests a motive: Mr
Dias was preparing a legal challenge to the outcome of this month’s general
election. His client, the independent candidate Venâncio Mondlane, has
pointed the finger at state security forces and called on his supporters to
“paralyse the country”. State officials have warned against spreading
“disinformation”.
To nobody’s surprise, the official results of the election, published on

October 24th, showed a big majority for Frelimo, the ruling party, and
Daniel Chapo, its presidential candidate. Mr Chapo received 71% of votes.
Mr Mondlane was placed a distant second with 20%. The candidate for
Renamo, the traditional opposition, won 6%, slumping to third. It once
fought a civil war against Frelimo, but the old foes have learned to get
along.
Few think the numbers are credible. In some provinces the electoral
commission registered more voters than there are adults. An EU observer
mission found that results from some polling districts were altered. Frelimo,
which has ruled Mozambique since independence in 1975, has used state
resources to tilt the playing field ever since it first allowed elections in
1994. Edson Cortez of Mais Integridade, a civil-society coalition, says the
party has chosen to get better at fraud rather than improve its running of the
country.
Mozambique’s economy grew quickly for two decades after the civil war
ended in 1992. But Mozambicans are poorer today than they were in 2016,
when more than $1bn of secret state-backed borrowing was exposed. The
scandal sank the economy and convulsed politics. Investigations revealed
that officials had pocketed millions of dollars in bribes, leading to court
cases on three continents.
Politicians and their cronies are involved in businesses of varying legality,

from cement production to the heroin trade. Their economic stranglehold
has fuelled resentment in the north, where a jihadist insurgency has thrown
a huge natural-gas project into limbo. The government was relying on gas
revenues to pull the country out of its funk.

That sorry record compounds the frustrations of young people, who struggle
to find decent work. They want change, and will follow anyone who
promises it. Right now that is Mr Mondlane, a charismatic engineer with a
knack for social media. “What he brings is the idea of freedom,” says
Xicanekiço Mate, a Podemos party organiser. “What he is doing is historic.”
Opposition leaders in Africa’s authoritarian states know that the real battle
begins after polling day. Mr Mondlane has a familiar menu of options.
Protests have already erupted, and he is calling for more after the result is
announced. But street activism is hard to sustain in a country where many
people live hand-to-mouth and the state has no qualms about shooting them.
The opposition will probably mount a court challenge, too. The murders of
Messrs Dias and Guambe do not augur well for success.
Assassinations have been a recurring motif of Frelimo rule. Carlos Cardoso,

a journalist, was shot dead in 2000 after investigating corruption. In 2019
an activist named Anastacio Matavel was killed after training election
observers.
Mr Chapo has condemned the latest killings and says that he will fight
corruption when he takes office in January. But he is a relative unknown,
beholden to party factions who have little interest in genuine change. On the
streets, young Mozambicans have had enough of empty promises. ■
Editor’s note (October 24th): This piece has been updated since
publication to reflect the result of Mozambique’s election.
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and-africa/2024/10/24/mozambiques-ruling-party-wins-a-dodgy-election

Not so mellow
Gold is booming. So is the dirty

business of digging it up
It is mined in Africa, traded in Dubai and lucrative for warlords and
jihadists
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Accra
“IT KEEPS getting worse and worse,” sighs Camry Tagoe, an activist in
Accra, the capital. “If you look at Google maps, Ghana has turned from
green to brown.” Over the past month Mr Tagoe has helped organise
protests across the city that call for an end to “galamsey”, or wildcat gold
mining. Long a way of getting by in the west African country, it has
exploded in recent years, damaging forests and polluting water. The
protesters blame politicians, many of whom own mining firms, for letting
the practice get out of control. Galamsey is a crucial issue ahead of
elections on December 7th.

Ghana, the largest gold producer on the continent, exemplifies Africa’s new
gold rush. The gold price has doubled since 2019, to a record high of more
than $2,700 per troy ounce, promising higher margins for industrial miners
but also encouraging more artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Nearly
half of the roughly 1,000 tonnes of gold produced in Africa every year is
mined in this way. It is the largest source of jobs in rural Africa, save for
farming, so a sustained gold boom could mean higher incomes for some
very poor people. At the same time it could damage ecosystems and
people’s health. Much ASM is legal, but a lot is untaxed and unregulated. In
a report in May Swissaid, an NGO, estimated that the amount of smuggled
gold more than doubled from 2012 to 2022. Once again, African states are
missing out on the full benefits of a commodity boom.

The latest rush has several new elements. The first is the breadth of the
irregularity: there are 12 countries, including Ghana, that each account for
at least 20 tonnes of smuggled gold every year (see chart). The second is
that, despite the artisanal label, a lot of ASM is fairly industrial, partly
because of Chinese miners and their bulldozers and excavators. In Ghana

some are infamous. Last year Aisha Huang, dubbed the “galamsey queen”,
was sentenced to prison for mining without a licence, among other offences.
Another feature is the growth of Dubai as a refining hub. Gold exports from
the United Arab Emirates (UAE) went up more than 60-fold between 2002
and 2022; gold is now the most valuable export from the UAE after
hydrocarbon products. The Global Initiative Against Transnational
Organised Crime, an NGO based in Geneva, argues that Dubai’s “no
questions asked” approach to African gold encourages illicit trade. In 2022
around two-thirds of the African gold imported into the UAE was smuggled
from African countries, according to Swissaid. (The UAE says it is not
accountable for other countries’ records and that it is adopting policies to
curb money-laundering using gold.)
Thousands of miles from the souks of Dubai, the gold rush is shaking up
rural economies. Malian gold mines are sucking in workers from across the
Sahel and, increasingly, northern Nigeria. In South Africa one industrial
miner recorded 241% more incidents of illegal mining on its sites in the
first quarter of 2024 compared with the same period the previous year.
Some 10m people in sub-Saharan Africa work directly in ASM, several
times more than two decades ago. Gavin Hilson, an expert on ASM based at
the University of Surrey, argues that it is a lifeline for those in poverty. “A
mine is often the only place in Africa where you will find someone with a
master’s degree from Europe and an illiterate farmer.” He adds: “They all
know the market price for gold. And even if you get 50% of that, you can
pay school fees.”
Gold-mining and farming have long been complementary, with farmers

topping up incomes in a lean season at mines or raising cash by leasing
land. Yet, in Ghana as elsewhere, there is concern that the balance has been
lost. Gold is often found in soils conducive to cocoa, the country’s third-
largest export after gold and oil. The Ghana Cocoa Board, the country’s
state-run buyer, says that galamsey is one reason why thousands of hectares
of forests with cocoa have disappeared in recent years.
The failure of successive governments to formalise ASM has encouraged

unsound mining practices. The Ghana Water Company, a local utility, has
warned that around 60% of Ghana’s water bodies are polluted because of

galamsey. Paul Ossei Sampene, a pathologist, says that the heavy metals
used by miners are linked to miscarriages, stillbirths and birth defects.
Gold also funds wars. Jihadists control mines across the Sahel. In eastern
Congo gold is fought over by militias and exported via Uganda or Rwanda.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of two main belligerents in Sudan’s
civil war, are partly funded by gold. Wagner, the Russian mercenary group
that fought with the RSF, controls mines in the Central African Republic.
Politicians have little incentive to curb mining. Members of Ghana’s ruling

party have financial interests in the sector. Officials benefit from charging
vast sums for licences. Last year “Gold Mafia”, a TV documentary by Al-
Jazeera, a Qatari channel, scared Zimbabwe’s ruling party enough for a
bigwig to threaten to disconnect the satellite dishes of locals watching it. In
Lesotho political parties have links with gangs that control access to
abandoned mines in neighbouring South Africa.
There have been various international efforts to make supply chains more
transparent and encourage due diligence by buyers. Plenty of laws
ostensibly regulate ASM. But in practice the mix of a light, meltable metal
with a record price, willing buyers and weak African states means it has
been hard to stop smuggling. While there is money to be made, there will be
grey markets in the yellow metal. ■
and-africa/2024/10/24/gold-is-booming-so-is-the-dirty-business-of-digging-it-up

Religion re-rooted
How African churches are keeping

the faith alive abroad
A revamped version of the prosperity gospel appeals to young immigrants
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | London
THE SERVICE is off to a chaotic start, in true Nigerian fashion. The band
is missing a member. The head pastor is nowhere to be found. With some
delay the lead vocalist, wearing a pink sequinned turban, begins to sing:
“Iwo l’oyẹ, Baba iwo l’oyẹ” (“You are worthy, Father you are worthy” in
Yoruba, which is spoken in south-west Nigeria). She could be in Lagos,
Nigeria’s commercial capital. But the church is in Croydon, on London’s
southern fringe.
It is one of over 50,000 global branches of the Redeemed Christian Church

of God (RCCG), a Nigerian Pentecostal church. With more than 870

parishes, RCCG is perhaps the fastest-growing church in Britain, bucking
the broader trend of secularisation in the West. The contributions from its
foreign branches are an important source of hard currency for the church.
Yet for the congregants in Croydon, it mainly serves as a slice of home.
More than 95% of Africans have a religious affiliation, compared with just
over half of Britons. More than half of the Africans say they are Christian.
The influx to Britain of Nigerian and other West African immigrants since
the 1980s has thus been lucrative for the RCCG. Until recently Enoch
Adeboye, its leader, preached an aggressive version of the prosperity
gospel, telling his followers that “anyone who is not paying his tithe is not
going to heaven”.
The church has since turned things down a notch: this month Mr Adeboye
apologised and admitted the Bible said no such thing. The branch in
Croydon is still aligned with RCCG’s teachings. But like other Nigerian
churches abroad it has found ways to appeal to its young congregation.
Services feature grand testimonies about resolved immigration woes and
celebrations of visa-sponsoring job offers.
The church also helps keep alive Yoruba. For many the monthly services it
has held for a decade are the most of the language that they will hear, or
speak, for weeks. It can be tough to keep up: at one point the preacher
giggles as she struggles to find the Yoruba word for “Bible”. Yet, “people
believe that the type of prayer that they pray in Yoruba is more powerful
than when they do it in English” says Femi Adebanjo, who pioneered the
Yoruba services. The sound of talking drums and shekere, a percussion
instrument made of dried gourd, adds to the feeling of home.
Digital evangelising has made that feeling more accessible: two-thirds of

the congregants in Croydon dialled in online. It has also made it easier to
attract new members. RCCG has a “digital missionary” bot to answer
scriptural questions one might ask a minister. Live prayer sessions on
Instagram and sermon clips on TikTok can bring in new flocks. Pastors
often ask worshippers mid-service to “like” the YouTube livestreams so that
the algorithm boosts their messages. QR codes let congregants pay their
tithes from wherever they are, without a velveteen offering basket.

For all the outreach, RCCG does not try particularly hard to attract
members without African heritage. For now, appealing to devout and
increasingly mobile young Africans is enough to sustain it. “I pray it
continues like that”, chuckles Mr Adebanjo, “before people all start
speaking the Queen’s English.” ■
and-africa/2024/10/24/how-african-churches-are-keeping-the-faith-alive-abroad

Europe
Germany’s populist superstar demands peace with Russia
The disrupter-in-chief :: In an interview Sahra Wagenknecht trashes the consensus on Ukraine
—and much more
North Korea is sending thousands of soldiers to help

Vladimir Putin
Blood brothers :: It shows how far Russia has fallen as a strategic power
Giorgia Meloni would make Machiavelli proud

The tightrope walker :: Italy’s prime minister is far more popular than Emmanuel Macron and
Olaf Scholz
The world’s most improbable smash-hit cooking show

Country cuisine :: It’s notching up billions of YouTube views
Angela who? Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible

Charlemagne :: 16 years of no reforms are taking a toll on Germany and Europe

The disrupter-in-chief
Germany’s populist superstar

demands peace with Russia
In an interview Sahra Wagenknecht trashes the consensus on Ukraine—and
much more
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Berlin
FEW GERMAN politicians divide opinion like Sahra Wagenknecht. A

Putin-loving demagogue to her detractors, simply “Sahra” to her legions of
adoring fans, Ms Wagenknecht has injected a high-octane blast of populism
into a country that prefers its politics staid and consensual. Invariably
decked out in her trademark high-necked jackets, Ms Wagenknecht rules the
airwaves with her brainy but pointed polemics on Ukraine, immigration and
other prickly subjects. Her political formula is unorthodox, yet the success
of her Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a party she launched only in
January, proves a talent for political entrepreneurship. And she has

developed an uncanny knack for forcing other politicians to dance to her
tune.
In an interview in her parliamentary office in Berlin, Ms Wagenknecht

outlines her political philosophy and her aims. “Without a prominent face,
no one knows what young parties stand for,” she says, explaining why she
launched a party with her image and under her name (the BSW will
eventually be renamed, she says). “It is simply a programme that
corresponds to what many people want. On the one hand, social justice. On
the other, a conservative politics based on cultural traditions and reduction
of migration, and which addresses the question of war and peace.”
What Ms Wagenknecht calls her “left-conservative” politics blends a

traditional left-wing menu—higher taxes on the rich, more generous
pensions and minimum wage, scepticism towards big business—with a
nationalist concern for cultural identity and a healthy dose of woke-bashing.
The holder of a doctorate in microeconomics, she strongly backs Germany’s
industrial model and its backbone of the Mittelstand, small and medium-
sized business she credits with providing ordinary Germans with decent
wages and careers. She says Germany’s government, which she has called
the “stupidest in Europe”, has hobbled firms by putting sanctions on
Russian gas, and she laments the “foolishness” of, for example, climate
activists who wish to kill off the combustion engine, the source of so much
of Germany’s past prosperity. And she is vocal about the “major problems”
of irregular migration, which she says is “overwhelming Germany”.
Front and centre of her offer is Ukraine, or what she calls “peace”. Long
steeped in the NATO- and America-bashing of the German hard left where
she served her political apprenticeship, Ms Wagenknecht has found in the
war an issue that clearly sets her aside from Germany’s pro-Ukraine
mainstream. She condemns Vladimir Putin’s invasion, but says it sprang
from Russia’s legitimate concerns over NATO expansion. In June, together
with the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), BSW MPs boycotted a
Bundestag address by Volodomyr Zelensky, whose “uncompromising
attitude” she blames in part for the ongoing fighting. There is a market for
these views, especially in Germany’s east.

Ms Wagenknecht says she accepts Ukraine’s need for security guarantees in
the event of the peace settlement she demands. But her preference would be
for them to come from countries like China and Turkey; Ukraine must
certainly be denied NATO membership, since Russian concerns over the
alliance inspired the war in the first place. As for Germany, “it would have

been wiser if we had held on to the old policy” of “mediating between
Russia, eastern Europe and the US” rather than sending Ukraine arms and
tanks. She has dismissed Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, as a “vassal” of
America, which sums up her worldview and helps explain why the German
establishment finds her so toxic. (Ms Wagenknecht’s repetition of
Putinesque talking-points also earns her frequent appearances in Kremlin
propaganda.)
She grew up in communist East Germany, and remained a true believer well
after the wall came down. Her political journey took her into The Left (Die
Linke), a hard-left outfit in part descended from East Germany’s ruling
Communists. As co-leader of the party’s parliamentary group in the 2010s,
she became a fixture on the talk-show scene and a well-known author. But
her tensions with The Left over immigration and lifestyle issues—she
thought the party had been captured by tofu-munching metropolitans—and
the growing strength of her personal brand made a break inevitable. Taking
nine Left MPs with her, Ms Wagenknecht declared her intention to change
“German politics, not for years, but for decades”.
Hers might be the most impressive political debut in German history. The
BSW took over 6% of the vote at its first test, elections to the European
Parliament in June. Then came votes in Saxony, Thuringia and
Brandenburg, three states in Germany’s east, where her brand of politics has
always been most popular. The BSW’s double-digit results in all three
obliged the mainstream Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats
to consider forming coalitions with it, given the need to retain a “firewall”
around the AfD, which also outperforms in the east. One year ago the BSW
did not exist. It is now preparing to take office in three of Germany’s 16
states.
Or is it? Her party’s success forces an unfamiliar question on Ms

Wagenknecht: is she ready to accept the compromises of governing? There
are reasons to doubt it. For although Ms Wagenknecht counsels compromise
on Ukraine, in eastern Germany she plays hardball. She has paused
coalition talks in Thuringia because a position paper by the three would-be
partners does not formally reject a recent German agreement to host long-
range American missiles from 2026—even though states have next to no

say in foreign policy. And she has upped the ante by insisting that CDU
politicians with whom her colleagues are negotiating in the eastern states
distance themselves from Friedrich Merz, their national leader, who wants
Germany to deliver more weapons to Ukraine.
For many observers, making outrageous demands over symbolic issues

looks like a prelude to blowing up the talks entirely, or forcing others to
bow out: some in the Saxony CDU are already getting cold feet about the
woman they dismiss as a “neo-Bolshevik”. “The coalition talks are
primarily about achieving better living conditions,” says Ms Wagenknecht,
mentioning Germany’s “desolate” education system. “Yet the question of
war and peace is elementary, because if war comes to Germany, there is no
point in thinking about education.” This attitude troubles those of Ms
Wagenknecht’s BSW colleagues conducting the coalition talks, which
seemed to be going well until head office got involved. But “we won’t join
governments in which we would disappoint our voters,” says Ms
Wagenknecht. “That would lead to a quick end to our party’s success.”
Sarah Wagner, a BSW-watcher at Queen’s University Belfast, believes that

Ms Wagenknecht does not want compromises over state governments to
jeopardise her campaign for next year’s federal election, her real priority.
“The basis of this party is opposition, and that isn’t going to work if they’re
in government,” she says. One insider says the party would be delighted to
retain its current polling level of around 9% at that election. That would be
enough to turn the BSW into a spoiler, making the business of forming
coalitions yet more complicated than it already is, but not enough to move
Ms Wagenknecht’s party out of her oppositional comfort zone. Perhaps that
is fine with her. ■
To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our
weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/23/germanys-populist-superstar-demands-
peace-with-russia

Blood brothers
North Korea is sending thousands

of soldiers to help Vladimir Putin
It shows how far Russia has fallen as a strategic power
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | KYIV
UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT, Volodymyr Zelensky, declared last week that

North Korea is sending troops to Russia, in effect joining the invasion as a
co-combatant. The appearance of one of the world’s most erratic and
heavily-armed nations in the fight might test the best-resourced and well-
rested defences. After 32 months of grinding war against a much larger
enemy, Ukraine is neither.
The Ukrainian claims were later backed up by South Korea and on October
23rd by America’s defence secretary, Lloyd Austin. Ukraine maintains that
North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, has decided to commit at least 11,000

troops to the war. General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military
intelligence, says they are training at four ranges in and around the
Khabarovsk region in Russia’s far east. He says they include at least 500
officers and three generals. A contingent of 2,600, he says, is due to be
transferred to battle in Russia’s Kursk region by the end of October. A
senior NATO official told The Economist that the alliance has yet to see
signs of “large-scale” movements towards the front.
If the Ukrainian claims are true, it would not be the first time North Korea
has come to Russia’s assistance in the war. It is already a big supplier of
arms. Mr Budanov says shipments that began in late 2022 have reached
2.8m shells a year, just 100,000 short of Russia’s own annual production at
2.9m. Since late 2023 North Korea has also sent ballistic missiles, with
launch systems serviced by North Korean crews. Pulled mostly from old
stock, the battlefield performance of these missiles has been erratic. They
regularly overshoot military targets to wreak havoc on Ukrainian towns and
cities.
North Korea is not donating its men or weapons out of charity. The
enhanced co-operation stems from a mutual assistance treaty, signed by
Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un during a fawning dictators’ ceremony in
Pyongyang in June 2024. Mr Budanov describes the secret provisions of the
agreement as a quid pro quo: Russian hard cash and know-how in return for
North Korean men and missiles. Russia is helping North Korea circumvent
sanctions and “strengthen” its nuclear capabilities. In particular, he says, it
is transferring some technologies for low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and
submarine missile-launch systems. However, there is no independent
corroboration of this alarming claim.
John Foreman, who paid close attention to North Korea in his role as
British defence attaché to Russia during 2019-22, says Russian attempts to
strengthen the military relationship predates the invasion. But he interprets
the latest developments as a sign of Russian desperation, a reflection about
just how far the self-appointed “world’s second army” has fallen as a
strategic power. “Russia used to look down on North Korea as a pygmy
state,” he says. It was the great power “with Tchaikovsky and Chekhov and

ballet…not some bloke with ill-fitting suits in love with artillery and killing
people.”
But if the partnership is indeed a sign of Russian weakness, it isn’t yet

pronounced or immediate enough for Ukraine. On the battlefield, things are
still looking grim. Russia is making significant progress pressing
simultaneously at several points along the 1,000km front line, despite
staggeringly high casualties that have now surpassed 600,000 dead and
wounded, by American estimates. Russia is in the process of encircling
Pokrovsk, an important logistical hub in eastern Ukraine, and advancing
further south, after taking control of the heights around Vuhledar.
A Ukrainian official says Russia’s next objective may be an advance on the

city of Zaporizhia, a major industrial centre in Ukraine’s south close to a
Russian-occupied nuclear-power plant. The same source suggests Russia
may already have taken back as much as half of the territory Ukraine seized
in the Kursk region in August 2024, Ukraine’s only serious advance since
the failed 2023 counter-offensive.
Ukraine’s worries go beyond the shaky front lines. Western support, already
stretched thin, is looking more precarious than before. This week the G7
further fleshed out the details of a loan of $50bn, to be paid for by interest
on seized Russian assets; final agreement should be reached in the next few
days. But a win by Donald Trump in the American election, now two weeks
away, could choke off much of the direct military assistance. A victory by
Kamala Harris offers no promises either. Germany, Ukraine’s second-
biggest backer, has already signalled that aid will fall. France has done
likewise.
Meanwhile Russia is busy internationalising the war in other ways as well.

Last week Andrei Belousov, its defence minister, met officials in China for
talks on strengthening military co-operation. Iran continues to supply
Russia with drones, though its long-promised ballistic missiles have not so
far appeared. The North Korean relationship is growing in strength. “We
have partners, they have allies,” grumbles General Budanov. Ukraine is
already neck-deep in a world war, he warns. “Just like the early days of the
second world war, not everyone sees it yet.”

Ukraine is keen to use North Korean involvement to boost its own
diplomatic efforts. “In such circumstances, our relations with partners need
further development,” Mr Zelensky said on October 13th. Three days later,
the Ukrainian president published his five-point “Victory Plan,” previously
presented in private to American officials. The key points are proposals that
Ukraine receives an invitation to join NATO; a bigger arsenal of weapons;
and something described as “non-nuclear deterrence”—essentially a large
number of long-range missiles that could take out key logistical and
military targets in Russia.
A Ukrainian official, who asked to remain anonymous, says the package

should be interpreted as “coercive diplomacy”, or a way to get Russia to
negotiate peace on more favourable terms. But the same official was also
frank: its potential for escalation had not been well received in Washington.
“They say it’s a non-starter, though part of the problem is they don’t tell the
[Ukrainian] president that to his face.”
Russia, in contrast, is not overly concerned about its own escalation plans.
How untested North Korean troops will fare on the European battlefield is
still an open question. They have not yet been exposed to the realities of a
modern war, now dominated by cheap, deadly tactical strike drones. It will
take them a few weeks to adjust—if they last that long. But for General
Budanov, the development is an “unwelcome experiment”. Russian soldiers
are one thing, the spy chief says, with the vast bulk of them unmotivated
and resigned to their fate. The North Koreans, on the other hand, come with
a pre-programmed ideology. They have families back home that could be
executed if things do not go well. “They fix some problems for the
Russians. There is reason to be concerned.” ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/22/north-korea-is-sending-thousands-of-
soldiers-to-help-vladimir-putin

The tightrope walker
Giorgia Meloni would make

Machiavelli proud
Italy’s prime minister is far more popular than Emmanuel Macron and Olaf
Scholz
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | ROME
THE POLITICS of Italy have long been trapped in a cycle of rancid

interaction between judges and prosecutors on the one hand and
conservative politicians on the other. It dates from at least 1994, when the
then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was served with a subpoena while
hosting a conference in Naples on organised crime. Berlusconi and his
supporters claimed he was a victim of politically motivated jurists—and
repeated that claim ad nauseam over the years that followed.

On October 21st similar accusations were heard as Giorgia Meloni’s right-
wing cabinet met to discuss its response to another dramatic judicial
intervention. A court in Rome had ruled that 12 migrants, shipped to
Albania, should be taken back forthwith to Italy. The ruling came just days
after two Italian-built centres for receiving and holding asylum-seekers had
been proudly unveiled at the launch of a €670m ($730m) scheme for
outsourcing Italy’s immigration problems. The government’s response was
to pass a decree that aims to get round the ruling by designating a list of
countries as “safe” for the return of people who are not assessed as genuine
refugees; but there is no guarantee that the courts will not overturn it.
Ms Meloni now risks a protracted wrangle with the courts like that in
Britain over the previous Conservative government’s plans to send migrants
to Rwanda. Whether it erodes her support remains to be seen. But reducing
the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean is crucial to her mission. And
if the centres stand empty for long, they will become the butt of comedians’
jokes and taxpayers’ criticism.
The abrupt suspension of the scheme is the most embarrassing rebuff that
Ms Meloni has suffered since taking office two years ago. Until last week,
indeed, she and her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party had enjoyed a remarkably
smooth ride. Partly that is a matter of luck. The opposition to her
government is rancorously split between the centre-left Democratic Party
and the maverick Five Star Movement. The Brothers’ coalition partners, the
more moderate Forza Italia party led by Antonio Tajani and the more radical
League headed by Matteo Salvini, bicker incessantly but show no sign of
defecting. Italy’s economy has grown, albeit modestly.
But her good luck should not detract from a recognition of Ms Meloni’s
skills as a political and diplomatic tightrope walker. Take the manoeuvring
that followed the European Parliament elections in June. Miffed at being
shut out of the talks that crafted a renewed appointment for Ursula von der
Leyen as president of the European Commission, Ms Meloni abstained
from approving her reappointment in the European Council and the
Brothers gave Mrs von der Leyen the thumbs-down in the European
Parliament. That aligned them with the EU’s most Eurosceptic and
pugnaciously rightist elements.

Italian opposition MPs were appalled. Commentators warned that the prime
minister had scuppered any chance of Italy obtaining a heavyweight
economic portfolio. In the event, nothing of the sort happened. Ms Meloni’s
candidate, Raffaele Fitto, is set fair to become a commission vice-president.
And, once his appointment has been approved by the European Parliament,
his responsibilities will include the pandemic recovery fund of which Italy
is by far the largest beneficiary.
At home, Ms Meloni has played a similarly deft, ambiguous game. A

potentially controversial constitutional reform has been delayed and will
probably not be put to a referendum before the end of the current legislature
in 2027. Her government’s management of the economy has been sensible
enough, though free of any real effort to tackle its structural weaknesses.
Next year’s draft budget, which imposes cuts to rebalance the public
accounts, might have been written in Brussels.
More radical action has been reserved for social issues. The most recent
example is a law, approved by parliament on October 16th, criminalising
people who travel abroad to arrange a surrogate pregnancy. But, as with
previous such initiatives, it targets a limited section of the population, made
up of people who would anyway probably never vote for the Brothers.
Three questions hang over the remainder of Ms Meloni’s term. One is

whether the cumulative effect of such “culture war” incursions could turn
Italy into a much less liberal country, aligning it more with central than
western Europe. Another is whether, in the absence of reform, a slow-
growing economy could cause the government problems in the financial
markets. Public debt, which had fallen, is expected to rise to almost 140%
of GDP by the end of 2026. But tax revenues this year have been higher
than forecast and analysts seem untroubled. On October 18th Fitch, a
ratings agency, revised its outlook for Italy’s long-term debt from “stable”
to “positive”.
A less quantifiable risk concerns Ms Meloni’s micro-managerial style. “She

wants to control everything,” says Giovanni Orsina, professor of
contemporary history at the LUISS university in Rome. “And she doesn’t
trust anyone. She could overload herself—or lose touch with reality.”

But for the moment the reality is that Ms Meloni enjoys an approval rating
of more than 40%—twice as high as those of President Emmanuel Macron
of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany. Not bad for a prime
minister approaching the mid-term point at which leaders’ popularity often
crashes. ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/21/giorgia-meloni-would-make-machiavelli-
proud

Country cuisine
The world’s most improbable

smash-hit cooking show
It’s notching up billions of YouTube views
10月 24, 2024 05:43 上午
“THIS IS A balm for the soul, this is real relaxation,” reads a comment on
YouTube under Country Life Vlog. But can cooking pilaf with beef and
pumpkin or baking bread on a barrel really have a transforming effect? With
nearly 7m subscribers and 2bn views, to say it is boring is to miss the point.
Those tuning in from London, Sydney, Yekaterinburg and Kyiv do so for a
glimpse of a tiny arcadia on the southern flanks of the Caucasus Mountains.
Five years in, there are no special effects, plot twists or suspense. What the
almost 500 episodes (around 25 minutes each) unapologetically provide is a
dollop of tranquillity and harmony with nature. The echo is of a bygone era

where summer fruit was canned for the winter months and simple
agricultural chores were part of food preparation.
The Azerbaijani matron, in housedress and apron, works outdoors quietly

chopping vegetables and seasoning meat surrounded by foliage, flower pots
and running water. There is an economy of motion—only cats and puppies
frolicking nearby, mountain ridges covered in fog. Her son chops wood for
the stove and harvests almonds from the trees. The ancient recipe of “duck
in the mud” is followed by quince and dogwood preserve, pickled cabbage
and other traditional dishes, most cooked in cauldrons before being
transferred into big metallic vats. The setting is bucolic; there is no sound
except birdsong, the pouring of tea (freshly brewed from rose petals and
wild flowers) and the occasional fragment of dialogue, which is never
translated.
Bounded by Russia and Georgia to the north, the Caspian Sea on the east,
Armenia on the west and Iran to the south, Azerbaijan seems an unlikely
place to find a pocket of calm. Yet the pristine life it evokes somewhere on
the slopes of Mount Shahdag rings true. The filming of unhurried
preparation and cooking, unaided by modern kitchen gadgets, has struck a
chord; what emerges is a feeling of relaxation vicariously absorbed through
Azerbaijani cuisine and the outdoors. Similar niche shows have sprung up
in Turkey and Uzbekistan. Although they are not to be underestimated, this
Azerbaijani channel is the best. Long on turmeric, saffron and onions; short
on stress. ■
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/24/the-worlds-most-improbable-smash-hit-
cooking-show

Charlemagne
Angela who? Merkel’s legacy looks

increasingly terrible
16 years of no reforms are taking a toll on Germany and Europe
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
TWO WOMEN have thoroughly dominated the politics of their respective

northern European countries in living memory. Beyond their gender, Angela
Merkel and Margaret Thatcher are often lumped together as centre-right
stalwarts with a knack for political survival. They governed very differently
—one menacingly wielding her handbag, the other patiently cajoling
coalition partners—but for so long that by the time they stepped down even
teenagers could not recall anyone else having been in charge. But their
legacies look more different still. Though Thatcher was forced out by her
own party in 1990 as her poll numbers slid, she has since topped a poll of
Britain’s best post-war leaders; Sir Keir Starmer, the current prime minister,

last month faced brickbats for merely moving the portrait of his
predecessor-but-eight to a different part of Downing Street. Mrs Merkel
opted to retire after four terms, still so popular that both her party’s
candidate and the opposition fellow (now in office) tried to claim her
mantle. Yet every month that goes by brings a reminder of how her reign
propelled Germany into the mire.
The Iron Frau’s legacy will come into focus on November 26th as she
releases her 736-page memoirs. What would once have been a lap of
honour (along with a few obligatory digs at former political foes) will need
to adopt a rather more defensive tone instead. Just about every big decision
taken by Mrs Merkel now seems to have resulted in Germany—and often
the entire European Union—ending up worse off. Geopolitically she left the
country with a now-famous trifecta of dangerous dependencies: unable to
defend itself without America, struggling to grow without exporting to
China, relying on Russian gas to keep its industry going. The report card on
the economy is if anything more damning: 16 years of muddling through
with no reforms has left Germany once again the economic sick man of
Europe.
What went wrong? “Vladimir Putin” is one pithy answer. The Russian
president’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022
showed that Germany’s ill-preparedness was not just a theoretical pitfall.
Mrs Merkel had cultivated Mr Putin, speaking to him regularly (that they
spoke each other’s languages helped). She will no doubt repeat in her
memoirs that she never really trusted him, then remind the world of how
she led the movement to impose sanctions on Russia after its invasion of
Ukraine in 2014.
Even the sleepiest reviewer, however, will wonder why German defence
spending stayed at a measly 1.3% or so of GDP throughout her time in
office. Worse, why did she allow Russian gas to make up an ever-bigger
slice of German consumption—even allowing a new pipeline from Russia
to be built after 2014? Beyond being iffy for the planet, Mrs Merkel’s
impetuous call to turn off Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants after
the Fukushima meltdown in 2011 left the country even more hooked on
Russia. But why question German ways when the place seemed to be

running like a well-oiled machine? China soaked up its exports, glad to face
few questions over human rights, while Germany failed to worry about
getting hooked on another autocratic regime.
Much of the book will doubtless deal with her time attending—in practice
all but running—EU summits. By Charlemagne’s calculations she sat
through over 100 of them, spending as many hours in windowless Brussels
meeting rooms as the average German works in an entire year. And for
what? It was here that the cruel-but-deserved new verb Merkeln (to put off
big decisions for as long as possible) really came into its own. Whatever
immediate crisis was handled was for the most part dealt with sensibly, if
not always from Greece’s perspective, though often only after having been
made worse by months of inaction. Yet the focus on putting out fires meant
nobody focused enough on the future. Yes, the EU was kept in one piece
(minus Britain). But in what shape?
Three big pitfalls have become obvious. The EU has been made more
fragile by the democratic backsliding of some of its members, most notably
Hungary. Mrs Merkel deserves lots of blame here, as she shielded its
budding autocrat Viktor Orban from criticism for reasons of lazy
convenience (Hungary is tied in to German industrial supply chains). The
second is how Europe turned out to be on the economic slow track. A recent
report by Mario Draghi, a former prime minister of Italy, excoriated
European economic policymaking, pointing out how far the continent had
fallen behind America. Finally, her kindness towards migrants, all but
inviting over a million Syrians and others to Germany in 2015, while
laudable, led to a political backlash that has helped fuel the rise of the hard
right in Germany and elsewhere.
This lady’s not for reforms
There is an irony in how things turned out. Germany nagged southern

Europeans into austerity, but now its own pfennig-pinching ways look
misguided. A constitutional amendment limiting budget deficits, dating
from Mrs Merkel’s time in 2009, has resulted in chronic underinvestment in
public services. Spending that could have been done at 0% interest might

have made Germany fit for the 21st century. Instead, bridges are literally
collapsing and the train system is kaput due to previous neglect.
Those wondering how Europe ended up in its current pickle will rightly
look to Mrs Merkel’s stint in charge. But Germans might use the launch of
her memoirs to do their own soul-searching. They are the ones who voted
time and again to put off reforms of the sort undertaken in the early 2000s
by Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder (though the less said about
his legacy after leaving office, as a well-paid pal of Mr Putin’s, the better).
For Mrs Merkel’s part, she led Germany as if in a make-believe world,
letting it enjoy an extended geopolitical and economic nap from which it
still needs to wake up. ■

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/24/angela-who-merkels-legacy-looks-
increasingly-terrible

Britain
Britain’s prison service is caught in a doom loop
It’s worse than you think :: Overcrowding leads to violence. Violence worsens a staffing crisis.
A staffing crisis impedes rehabilitation
How to hold armed police to account in Britain

The Chris Kaba case :: A murder charge angers officers and sparks reforms
Why “The Rest Is Politics”, a British podcast, is a hit

The most sensible show on earth :: Centrism and an old-fashioned approach to broadcasting
are at its core
Britain is a world leader in pet health care

Fur’s aid :: It’s never been a better time to be a diabetic cat
Scotland’s failure to build homes is mainly due to its

government
A construction slowdown :: Meddling in the market has not worked
The shortfall in British adoptions

Match postponed :: The cost-of-living crisis has hurt children and prospective parents
King’s Cross, a miracle in London

Bagehot :: If Britain has a future, it’s there

It’s worse than you think
Britain’s prison service is caught in

a doom loop
Overcrowding leads to violence. Violence worsens a staffing crisis. A
staffing crisis impedes rehabilitation
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
WHEN ANDY LAIDLAW began working as a prison officer in 1998 it was

“an enjoyable job”. There were “low lows” as well as “high highs”, but it
was mostly safe and you “could feel like you were making a difference”.
Mr Laidlaw, a straight-talking Scouser, climbed the ranks, eventually
becoming a deputy governor. He describes the work—which demanded the
skills to handle the most troubled people and the dexterity to “get assaulted
safely”—with pride. The best officers were a “mixture of Kofi Annan and
an MMA champion”.

Mr Laidlaw reckons the rot set in about a decade ago. A cost-cutting drive
meant that thousands of experienced officers were paid to leave.
Overcrowding started to become less manageable, violence more routine.
Rather than run towards a problem, fearful officers would retreat behind
locked doors. In March Mr Laidlaw left the service, aged 57, stripped of
hope.
The roots of the mess in Britain’s prisons lie even further back, in a set of
punitive policies adopted over several decades. The Labour government
seems to recognise there is a problem. On October 22nd it announced a
sentencing review; promisingly, it will be chaired by David Gauke, a former
Tory justice secretary with a reformist bent. But to grasp how entrenched
the problems are, they must be seen as a cycle that affects both inmates and
officers. Call it the prison doom loop.

Stage one is obvious: a relentless rise in the prison population. Britain
incarcerates far more people than the rest of western Europe (see chart one).
In England and Wales the number of inmates has doubled in the past three
decades, to 87,500, driven by a shift to much longer sentences. As courts
work through a backlog of cases, the population is set to reach 100,000 next
year, and to keep rising. New prisons are expensive: spending on buildings
and staff has lagged behind demand.

Inside prison walls, the effect has been like gradually turning a vice. Cells
designed for one are shared between two or three. Officers struggle to let a
whole wing, often comprising several hundred inmates, out for work,
education or “association time”. Emergency-release programmes have
become an unavoidable pressure valve: the latest batch of releases took
place this week. But there are still thousands more prisoners in England and
Wales than can be held in “safety and decency”, according to official data.
Crowding squeezes a prison’s ability to maintain control. That leads to the

second stage of the cycle: a surge in violence. Brutality has always lurked
within British prisons. Read a prison memoir from the 1970s or 1980s and
you will find stories of inmates being “turned over” by the “screws”. That
became much rarer when the prison service modernised in the 1990s,
including by recruiting female officers. But in the past decade every other
type of violence—inmates harming staff, one another and themselves—has
soared (see chart two).

If you become a prison officer in Britain today, you are, bluntly, likely to
get hurt. In the past year there were almost 10,000 assaults on staff. Around
3,200 of those led to serious injuries, a tally that would be enough to leave
one in eight officers badly hurt. Several interviewees for this piece say,
unprompted, that it is only a matter of time until an officer is killed.
The ever-present threat of violence worsens stage three of the cycle: a

staffing crisis. Between 2010 and 2015 the prison budget was cut by 16%.

Desperate to find savings, ministers removed a senior officer grade and
offered experienced, better-paid staff early retirement. Ever since, the
service has been running to stand still. Only half of officers today have
more than five years’ experience, down from 80% in 2010.
Recent governments have tried to fill the gap in two ways. The first has
been to raise the starting wage for a prison officer to £32,000 ($42,000).
That is not always enough. “I can get the same on trains or as a lorry driver
and not be attacked,” says Mark Fairhurst of the Prison Officers’
Association, a union.
The second is, in effect, lowering standards. Since 2022 officers have been
recruited through a centralised process carried out by private firms like
SSCL (which did not reply to our request for comment). These firms are
paid for the number of trainees they sign up and push through the prison
gates; they lack incentives to screen rigorously for quality or suitability. The
main part of the training lasts six weeks, and is all online. One officer says a
colleague bragged about getting their 15-year-old niece to click through it
for them.
New officers arrive utterly unprepared for prison life, says David Wilson, a
former governor who worked on recruitment in the 1990s. Even then, when
the training lasted 20 weeks, he felt that was too short; in Norway it takes
two years. Many recruits are teenagers in their first job.
A less robust recruitment process is vulnerable to malign actors. Criminal

gangs need not bother corrupting existing officers to get drugs into prisons
when they can put their own members through training. In July a female
prison officer was fired after she was filmed having sex with an inmate at
HMP Wandsworth; she had previously told a reality TV show that her types
were “bandits”, “outlaws” and “criminals”.
The bigger concern is for prison officers with good intentions. The number
of staff days lost to illness has soared in the past five years. Shortages mean
recruits are soon out on the wings alone. “You have terrified 18-year-olds
on night shifts responsible for a wing of 200 very troubled people,” says Liz
Bridge, until recently a chaplain at HMP Wandsworth.

As prisons become more wretched and less able to attract good staff, they
are also less likely to prepare inmates for life outside. Britain has a high
recidivism rate, which exacerbates the problem of overcrowding. The doom
loop is complete.
One thing did interrupt this grim cycle: the covid-19 pandemic. With
inmates confined to their cells to stop the spread of disease, violence
dropped. Staff felt they had regained control—even if it was with bolts and
keys rather than what older officers call “jailcraft”. But even though the
pandemic ended, some of its practices did not. Before covid, “22-hour
bang-up”, as prisoners call it, was vanishingly rare. Now more than two-
thirds of inmates spend at least 18 hours a day in the cells. In reception
prisons, where new prisoners are taken first, only half of inmates get out for
more than two hours a day.
Staff know that isolating prisoners is only likely to spur mental ill-health
and drug use (a study last year of a high-security prison found that 47% of
prisoners had used spice, a synthetic drug that can encourage violence).
Still, there is debate within the prison service about whether it is desirable,
or even feasible, to get back to the old routines. In many category A and B
prisons, for more serious offenders, there are few officers left with any
experience of opening a whole wing.
The best way to break the prison doom loop is to have fewer prisoners.
Building support for such a shift will be hard. It is a political axiom, backed
up by polling, that the public likes “tough” sentences. But the public also
likes the idea of rehabilitation, and shows little obvious appetite to pay for
incarcerating ever more people.
Mr Gauke’s review, which will report in the spring, has the task of squaring
this circle. Its scope is wide; as well as sentencing and the use of mandatory
minimum tariffs that have extended the length of prison terms, there is talk
of using new technologies for home detention. But reviews do not always
turn into policies, and the government’s messaging remains cautious.
Other countries do at least offer promising examples. America’s prison

population has fallen by over a quarter in the past decade. The Netherlands
cut its prison population by 44% in the decade to 2015 while investing in

community supervision. Neither country has seen a public backlash. “It has
been done in places not dissimilar to us,” says Mr Laidlaw. “I think we can
get there.” ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty,
our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/22/britains-prison-service-is-caught-in-a-
doom-loop

The Chris Kaba case
How to hold armed police to

account in Britain
A murder charge angers officers and sparks reforms
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
THE VIDEO CLIPS from body-worn cameras will have been seen by
millions of Britons. Armed police jump out of their cars and swarm around
a black Audi, yelling “show me your hands!” The driver briefly ducks,
before lurching his car forward, ramming a police car in front. He then
reverses, hitting another police car. After 15 seconds, a single shot is fired.
The trial of Martyn Blake, the police sergeant who fired the shot and killed
Chris Kaba, the driver, in September 2022, has sparked a storm of
controversy. On October 21st it took a jury just three hours to find Mr Blake
not guilty of murder. Critics argue that the verdict will further erode public

confidence in policing. Many police officers are furious that Mr Blake faced
the charge in the first place. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has already
announced some reforms; more may follow.
The trial hinged on whether Mr Blake’s use of force—he shot Mr Kaba

once in the forehead through the car windscreen—was necessary,
proportionate and reasonable. On the night in question armed police did not
know the identity of the driver (it has since been revealed that Mr Kaba was
a member of a south London gang with a string of serious convictions). But
they did know that the car had been associated with a firearms offence the
previous evening.
In court, Mr Blake argued that he did not intend to kill Mr Kaba but that Mr
Kaba’s use of his car as a battering-ram had posed a lethal threat to himself
and his colleagues. The prosecution argued that, hemmed in by a police
roadblock, Mr Kaba posed no such threat. In such events, armed officers
have to make rapid judgments on the basis of limited information. The jury
decided that the bar for murder—proving that Mr Blake did not honestly
believe there was such a threat and had used force unreasonably—was not
met.
Cases of this sort are very rare in Britain. Armed police attend around
18,000 incidents each year; there have been only 65 in the past decade in
which they have fired at people. This is the first police shooting in which
video footage from body-worn cameras, which have become commonplace
in the past decade, has been made public. That has focused attention as
never before on the split-second judgments that armed officers make.
In retrospect, it seems wrong that Mr Blake was named. That does not
usually happen but media organisations argued for it on public-interest
grounds. There have since been reports that the gang Mr Kaba was part of
has placed a bounty on Mr Blake. On October 23rd Ms Cooper said there
will be a presumption of anonymity in cases involving police shootings
unless there is a conviction.
She also promised to speed up the process for deciding whether such cases
should be brought to court, which involves both the Independent Office for
Police Conduct (IOPC), a watchdog, and the Crown Prosecution Service

(CPS). Politicians from both main parties argue that it takes far too long,
creating painful uncertainty for officers and victims.
Senior police officers question why the IOPC decided to pass the case onto
the CPS and why the CPS then brought a murder charge against Mr Blake
(the IOPC may yet hold a hearing for gross misconduct after reviewing
evidence from the trial). Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of London’s
Metropolitan Police Service, has called for exemption from criminal
convictions unless prosecutors can show that officers “deliberately
departed” from their training. Ms Cooper is unlikely to agree to that, but she
will raise the threshold at which cases are handed from the IOPC to the
CPS. Fine judgments everywhere. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/24/how-to-hold-armed-police-to-account-in-
britain

The most sensible show on earth
Why “The Rest Is Politics”, a

British podcast, is a hit
Centrism and an old-fashioned approach to broadcasting are at its core
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
THE VOLUME is thundering, the lighting dazzling. Some in the crowd

who fill the O2 arena in east London on October 15th are downing burgers
and beer; others wear T-shirts bearing their heroes’ faces. And on a small
stage in the centre of the venue, Rory Stewart, a 51-year-old former Tory
MP in a Nehru jacket, is talking about the tax policies of the new Labour
government. “They’ve ruled out income tax, which is the blue; VAT, which
is the silver,” he sighs. Around the arena 15,000 pairs of eyes study a
colourful graph that fills the screens suspended over his head. “All the other
stuff is rounding errors!” There is applause, and a shout of: “More!”

Welcome to the most sensible show on earth, a surreal mixture of the
wonkishness of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, and the
razzmatazz of World Wrestling Entertainment. The O2 event was the last
night of a live tour of “The Rest Is Politics” (“TRIP”), a podcast that Mr
Stewart presents with Alastair Campbell, who made his name as the
communications guru for the New Labour government of Sir Tony Blair.
TRIP, launched in March 2022, is Britain’s most popular politics podcast.
TRIP’s format is hardly revolutionary. In hour-long shows the pair talk

about the state of their respective parties, the war in the Middle East and
more. But its success reveals two things about British politics.
The first is that the public has an appetite for a less cynical and less
combative approach to political journalism. TRIP self-consciously harks
back to an earlier age. The pair studied films of John Freeman, an
interviewer of the 1960s, who would ask guests questions such as: “Are you
on the whole more interested in ideas or in people?” Bickering is a faux
pas; so is excessive partisanship. At one point in the O2 show Mr Stewart
jokingly ticks off Mr Campbell for being too pro-Labour by pressing an
emergency stop button; the arena is bathed in red light, a siren sounds and
the word “tribal” flashes on the screens.
The appeal of a quieter form of broadcasting points to TRIP’s second

ingredient—the transformation of centrism into a political identity, in
response both to Brexit and to Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left former Labour
leader. “We have a degree of nostalgia for a kind of Fukuyama ‘end of
history’ 90s era,” says Mr Stewart. “We share a sense that there was a time
when the UK and its allies were part of a world that seemed to be getting
more peaceful, more prosperous, more stable, and that something’s gone
badly awry.” Only a smattering of those at the O2 say they would pick
Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick, the two remaining right-leaning
contenders, for the Tory leadership. Asked whether Brexit is going well, a
solitary arm goes up.
Trippers, says Mr Campbell, “feel that they’re not taken seriously because
they don’t have extreme views”. That may seem unlikely. To judge by the
ticket price at the event (£91.25, or $118, for a mid-tier seat) and the
conversations about house prices in the queue, the podcast’s listeners might

be counted among life’s winners. But to be overlooked is a state of mind
rather than an economic predicament. And although the victory of Sir Keir
Starmer, a cautious anti-populist, ought to please centrists, his is what Mr
Stewart calls an “anxious triumph”; if Sir Keir fails, the door may open to
more dangerous forces.
It is not all doom and gloom. Mr Stewart ends the show on a soaring
oration. “These ideas, which as British people, we’re very embarrassed by,
are foundational to our democracy: hope, truth, equality, justice, dignity,”
he says. Then Mr Campbell’s bagpipes are produced, the audience links
hands and 15,000 voices join in a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne”. “They are
showmen,” says John Wilson, a 90-year-old audience member, with a touch
of disapproval. “But enjoyable, nevertheless.” ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/21/why-the-rest-is-politics-a-british-
podcast-is-a-hit

Fur’s aid
Britain is a world leader in pet

health care
It’s never been a better time to be a diabetic cat
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Hatfield
AN ONCOLOGY PATIENT lies face down, surrounded by an expert team,

as they edge him into a state-of-the-art CT scanner. In the intensive-care
unit a ventilated patient lies under an inflatable warming blanket, receiving
one-to-one care from a specialist nurse; watching on is an anaemia sufferer
wearing an unseasonal Christmas jumper. There is an emergency room but
this afternoon it is empty, says Vicky Lipscomb, a soft-tissue surgeon and
the hospital’s clinical director. Welcome to the Queen Mother Hospital for
Animals (QMHA) in Hertfordshire.

Britain is a country that is mad about animals. Sweden aside, no other
nation has a higher uptake of pet insurance. According to Co-op Legal
Services, one in every eight people who inquire about a will want to leave
something to their animals. As pets become more like family members, it
follows that owners want to give them the best health care possible. With
humans waiting longer for treatment on the National Health Service and the
quality of pet care advancing in leaps and bounds, the gap between species
is closing.
The QMHA, whose 100 vets and 300 nurses saw around 19,000 cases last
year, is at the luxury end of the scale. Its dedicated cat ward plays relaxing
classical music; its underwater treadmill allows for timely post-surgical
rehab. Around half of the patients who are admitted for the hospital’s
pioneering mitral-valve replacements, a form of open-heart surgery, fly in
from America, says Professor Lipscomb. The Royal Veterinary College
(RVC), which runs the hospital, tops the global rankings for veterinary
schools; a fifth of its students are American, too.
None of this comes cheap. The QMHA was a pioneer in hypophysectomies,

a procedure to remove the pituitary gland, particularly in cats with diabetes.
Once the diagnostics and a lengthy stay in hospital are factored in, the cost
of a hypophysectomy can easily reach £10,000 ($13,000). But veterinary
procedures in Britain do not have to be cutting-edge to be costly. At a vet’s
practice in London, one owner pays £900 to have her dachshund’s stomach
pumped after he swallowed chewing gum but shudders to think how much
more she would have paid had she agreed to the “hourly blood tests”.
Concerns about rising prices, transparency over fees, and potential lack of
competition have prompted the Competition and Markets Authority, a
regulator, to launch an investigation into the veterinary market.
If costs are one concern, ethical dilemmas are another. Much as clinicians
must think about the risks of over-treating a human at the end of life,
“there’s always a question about whether or not we should do things”, says
Lynne James of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, a veterinary
charity.
Staff at the QMHA agree. “We don’t do chemotherapy to the point where
their hair falls out, since they can’t consent,” says Andy Yale, an oncologist

at the hospital. In the blood-transfusion centre, pets are rewarded with tins
of premium food and an “I’m a life saver” bandanna if they donate, though
consent is considered to be withdrawn if a dog or cat does not lie still
(you’re not allowed to sedate a blood donor and “quite rightly”, says
Professor Lipscomb). This is far removed from practices in America, notes
David Church, the RVC’s deputy principal, where some hospitals will
perform feline renal transplants on the condition that the owner agrees to
adopt a stray cat as a kidney donor.
For people who find pet-pampering baffling, one argument for state-of-the-
art veterinary medicine is that it complements human health care. Studying
the pituitary tumours of diabetic cats may help to understand why a similar
syndrome happens in people, says Professor Church. At the University of
Glasgow researchers are trying an epilepsy medication in dogs that may
help humans in the future. But the simpler argument is that it makes owners
happy. “They gave our fur baby girl’s sight back,” gushes one review after
successful cataract surgery at the QMHA. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/24/britain-is-a-world-leader-in-pet-
health-care

A construction slowdown
Scotland’s failure to build homes is

mainly due to its government
Meddling in the market has not worked
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | EDINBURGH
STUDENTS IN EDINBURGH are in for a treat. If its plans are approved,

Ediston, a developer, will soon build hundreds of student rooms on the
northern edge of the New Town, the most elegant part of a fine city. Or
perhaps you would prefer to study in Glasgow? If so, you might be able to
live in a new tower, the Ard, which will be Scotland’s tallest residential
building. The surge of high-quality accommodation is a boon for students.
But it is also a sign that something has gone badly wrong in Scotland’s
housing market. Developers are putting up student housing because it
makes little sense to build anything else. For that, thank the Scottish
government.

In the second quarter builders started work on 3,344 homes—the lowest
quarterly number for a decade, excepting the spring of 2020 when covid-19
rampaged. Construction of private homes is down sharply; social house
building has fallen by more (see chart). Builders have been idle in England,
Northern Ireland and Wales too, but the slowdown in Scotland has been
exceptionally abrupt.

Market turmoil is one reason. In 2021 the price of construction materials in
Scotland jumped; the next year, mortgage rates went the same way. Many
small builders have folded under the pressure. Homes for Scotland, a trade
group, estimates that in the late 2000s at least 40% of homes were built by
firms that put up fewer than 50 homes per year. Small outfits now build less
than 20% of a smaller total.
The planning system is irksomely slow, as it is elsewhere. Scotland has

some new rules known as NPF4, which are gumming things up while local
authorities get used to them, says John Boyle of Rettie, a property firm.
Over the past five years the length of time taken to decide a local planning
application has crept up from nine weeks on average to 11 weeks; major
developments take more than a year. In May a court ruling over a proposed
development known as Mossend, between Edinburgh and Glasgow, made it
easier to block the bulldozers.
Worse still is the meddling in the private rental market. In 2022 the ruling
Scottish National Party (SNP) and its then ally, the Green Party, temporarily
capped rent increases at 3% a year. A new housing bill will allow ministers
to control rents for longer. In a panic some developers cancelled “build to
rent” projects. Others switched from rental flats to student rooms, which are
not covered by the bill. Hence the fancy digs in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
As if the troubles in the private market were not enough, the Scottish
government has cut funding for affordable homes, including rented ones. At
the same time it is pressing for dramatic improvements in energy efficiency
in those homes, which ought to have a welcome effect on bills but will have
an unwelcome effect on construction costs. Private and social house-
building are linked, because developers are often required to build mixed
estates with a proportion of affordable homes.
Scotland’s housing minister, Paul McLennan, played the old nationalist

tunes in a statement about the housing market in early October. He blamed
the government in Westminster for the rise in construction costs and
mortgage rates, and for the cut in funding for affordable homes. It did not
go down well. “Those in need of a new home deserve better than that,”
sniffed Homes for Scotland.

The blame-shifting in Scotland contrasts with the situation in Westminster,
where the new Labour government has loudly promised to build more
homes (whether it will succeed is another matter). It also creates an
opportunity for Scottish Labour. On September 18th, as the leader of the
SNP marked the ten-year anniversary of the independence referendum,
Anas Sarwar, the head of Scottish Labour, spoke at a housing conference to
lament the Scottish government’s record. He will not run short of things to
complain about. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/24/scotlands-failure-to-build-homes-is-
mainly-due-to-its-government

Match postponed
The shortfall in British adoptions

The cost-of-living crisis has hurt children and prospective parents
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
IF “OLIVER TWIST” were written today, it would be different in many

ways. One of them might be the ending. In Charles Dickens’s novel, Oliver
is adopted by Mr Brownlow, a benefactor, without any trouble. Today Mr
Brownlow would go through a fine-grained background check. His mansion
would be inspected for safety and he’d be strongly advised to volunteer
with children. If he liked a pipe after dinner, he could end up being rejected
for smoking.
Many children eligible for adoption today are not finding families. The
number of children in England who are waiting to be matched with families
has increased by 22% over the past year. In the past decade the number of
families approved as prospective parents has decreased by 60%.

Some argue that a well-intentioned screening process has become too
stringent. The only statutory requirements to be able to adopt a child in
England and Wales are legal residency and being over 21, but local councils
implement their own policies on top. “Many local authorities see the
adoption process as a way to test parents’ resolve,” says Erik Ferm, co-
founder of Jigsaw Adoption, a non-profit organisation that provides
adoption services. “This means you lose some good adopters along the way,
but it is not given that those with the best stamina will be the best parents.”
Although the approval process is daunting, it has not changed greatly since
2015, when there was an all-time high in the number of adoptions. One
thing that has changed in that time is the pressure on household budgets.
According to Carol Homden, the boss of Coram, a children’s charity, the
primary cause of the falling number of adoptions is the cost-of-living crisis,
which makes it prohibitively expensive for some to start a family.
Some local authorities require that each child has their own bedroom—not
always easy in a country with a well-documented housing shortfall—and
strongly recommend that at least one parent takes a full year off work. In
theory, this is a good idea: most adopted children have experienced
tremendous trauma and need time to bond with their new families. In
reality, statutory adoption pay covers six weeks on a near-full salary, and
only £180 ($234) per week for another eight months.
A post-pandemic backlog in family courts has exacerbated the problem. In

2019 a child in care was already waiting 719 days on average before an
adoption was made legal; that figure now stands at 864 days. Because of
prospective parents’ preferences to adopt young children, a wait of this
length can significantly lower a child’s chance of finding a family:
according to Coram, a six-year-old is 25% less likely to be adopted than a
five-year-old.
As well as the emotional costs for children of not finding a permanent

home, keeping a child in care is expensive for the taxpayer. Each child
placed in an adopted home is reckoned to save local authorities an average
of £1m. More funding for adopting parents, including access to therapy,
would help; a change in statutory adoption leave to cover the self-employed

might encourage new applicants, too. One thing that would still work in Mr
Brownlow’s favour today is his wealth. ■
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/24/the-shortfall-in-british-adoptions

Bagehot
King’s Cross, a miracle in London

If Britain has a future, it’s there
10月 24, 2024 11:22 上午
TO GAUGE WHETHER Britain is going to make it, go to the central

London district of King’s Cross. Exit the station to the west and then head
north to Regent’s Canal. Stride past the solitary but well-used children’s
swing inside the technicolour birdcage. To your right is Google’s
sidescraper—a flat, 300-metre-long slug of wood, concrete and glass, which
is due to open next year. To your left is the new headquarters of
AstraZeneca, a pharma giant, which moved here in 2022. Cut through a
snicket and past Universal Music Group, which in 2018 ditched plush
Kensington for an area that has gone from industrial wasteland to the best
hope for the British economy in barely a decade.

On the three-minute stroll, consider what came before. Until the 19th
century the story of King’s Cross was a mixture of myth (Boudicca
probably did not fight the Romans here) and trivia (the remains of a
mammoth were discovered here in 1690). History really began only in
1852, when Lewis Cubitt finished the austere yellow-brick railway station
of King’s Cross, sparking a development flurry to rival the one that has just
occurred.
By the late 19th century the area was the most important transport node in
the world’s most important city. By the late 20th century, it was a ruin.
Squatters hewed gigantic sculptures in its abandoned factories; Sir Antony
Gormley, the artist behind the Angel of the North statue, lived in a nearby
squat. Drugdealers dealt; sex workers serviced clients in stairwells. A
concerned local resident called Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition,
spoke for many when he said in 1997: “It’s actually quite a frightening
place.”
Stroll onto Granary Square, a vast public square in a city that lacks them,
today, and it is anything but. In summer children skip through a giant set of
fountains; on unseasonably warm autumn days, people sun themselves on
Cornish granite benches. Central Saint Martins, an art school, moved here
in 2011, which was a coup for Argent, the developer behind the
regeneration of King’s Cross. A public-sector body like a university is a
good tenant: they rarely move and rarely go bust. Central Saint Martins had
an added bonus: 5,000 art students and staff create a vibe.
For waymarkers, use the skinny boys in baggy clothes smoking outside
their workshops and head north to Handyside Street. If artificial general
intelligence does spring to life, one of the most likely spots for its birth is a
ten-storey terracotta building next door to a Gail’s, a bougie bakery.
Numbers 14-18 Handyside Street are the headquarters of DeepMind, a
British AI company bought by Google in 2014. DeepMind’s co-founder, Sir
Demis Hassabis, won a Nobel prize for chemistry at the start of October for
work predicting the shape of proteins.
In the 19th century transport companies were pulled to King’s Cross “like
iron shavings attracted to a powerful magnet”, in the words of Allies and
Morrison, one of the area’s main architects. A similar force is now at play

with AI. The Alan Turing Institute, which researches AI, has based itself
here. OpenAI, DeepMind’s main rival, is setting up on nearby Pentonville
Road. Aria, a government research agency that backs high-risk, high-reward
ideas, joined in, too. XTX, a market maker that relies on AI and is perhaps
Britain’s most successful private company, has the top three floors of
DeepMind’s building.
Everyone is here because everyone is here. And everyone is here, in part,

because it is lovely. It is also expensive. A two-bed flat in a lovingly
restored gasholder overlooking the canal will cost a smidge under £2m
($2.6m). The annual service charge is £14,768, about the annual cost of a
mortgage for a large family home in most of the country. Sir Antony, the
former squatter, lives in one. (This time he paid.) In 2010 corporate rents in
King’s Cross were about half the central London average. Now they are
about a fifth more, says Centre for Cities, a think-tank. If engineers are
being paid grotesque sums to try to build God, it makes no sense to skimp
on location.
Walking back along Regent’s Canal, a 200-year-old waterway, it is

reasonable to wonder how much of the redevelopment is replicable. Some
elements are: other places can be made car-free and mixed-use. But 27-
hectare (67-acre) plots of land in the middle of a capital city are rare—never
mind ones near leading institutions such as the Francis Crick Institute,
University College London and King’s College London. So are sites that
have had roughly £30bn spent on infrastructure that stops or passes through
the area. The recipe is simple. But few can follow it.
At this point, some hand-wringing is obligatory. Next door is Somers Town,

a district literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Four in ten children in
Somers Town are in poverty; on almost every metric it does terribly. But a
path does run from the outstanding primary school in its heart to the world-
class universities that lie across Euston Road and, perhaps, into a well-paid
job next door. It is at least easier to imagine that journey for a poor child
living in subsidised housing in London than for a child in a former pit
village in the north-east of England. Poverty is spread out; opportunity is
concentrated. The inequality may gall, but there is no better place in Britain
to be poor.

N1, anyone?
Some complain that this sleek King’s Cross is a betrayal of its grotty past.
Far better to see the district as a sign of a city building its future. If a
resurgent Britain finds itself at a technological frontier, it will be thanks to
the likes of DeepMind plying their trade in the place where prostitutes once
did theirs. If Britain is only to maintain its current trajectory of relative
decline, then the success of King’s Cross is still necessary: selling off
Victorian gasworks and charging foreign students £28,570 per year in
tuition fees is a good living. If even that model fails? Lord knows. ■

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/10/23/the-miracle-of-kings-cross

International
Putin’s plan to dethrone the dollar
Launching a currency war in Moscow :: He hopes this week’s BRICS summit will spark a
sanctions-busting big bang

Launching a currency war in Moscow
Putin’s plan to dethrone the dollar

He hopes this week’s BRICS summit will spark a sanctions-busting big bang
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, was cock-a-hoop on October 22nd

when he welcomed world leaders including Narendra Modi of India and Xi
Jinping of China at the BRICS summit in Kazan on the Volga river. Last
year, when the bloc met in South Africa and expanded from five to ten
members, Mr Putin had to stay home to avoid being arrested on a warrant
issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This time he
played host to a rapidly growing club that is challenging the dominance of
the Western-led order.
Now in their 15th year together, the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa) have achieved little. Yet Mr Putin hopes to give the
bloc heft by getting it to build a new international payments system to

attack America’s dominance of global finance and shield Russia and its pals
from sanctions. “Everyone understands that anyone may face US or other
Western sanctions,” Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said last
month. A BRICS payments system would allow “economic operations
without being dependent on those that decided to weaponise the dollar and
the euro”. This system, which Russia calls “BRICS Bridge”, is intended to
be built within a year and would let countries conduct cross-border
settlement using digital platforms run by their central banks.
Controversially, it may borrow concepts from a different project called
mBridge, part-run by a bastion of the Western-led order, the Swiss-based
Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
The talks will shine a light on the race to remake the world’s financial
plumbing. China has long bet that payments technology—not a creditors’
rebellion or armed conflict—will reduce the power that America gets from
being at the centre of global finance. The BRICS plan could make
transactions cheaper and faster. Those benefits may be enough to entice
emerging economies. In a sign that the scheme has genuine potential,
Western officials are wary that it may be designed to evade sanctions. Some
are frustrated by the unintended role of the BIS, known as the central bank
for central banks.

America’s dominance of the global financial system, centred on the dollar,
has been a mainstay of the post-war order and has put American banks at
the centre of international payments. Sending money around the world is a
bit like taking a long-haul flight; if two airports are not linked, passengers
need to change flights, ideally at a busy hub. In the world of international
payments, the biggest hub is America.

The centrality of the dollar provides what Henry Farrell and Abraham
Newman, two scholars, call “panopticon” and “choke-point” effects.
Because almost all banks transacting in dollars have to do so through a
correspondent bank in America, it is able to monitor flows for signs of
terrorist-financing and sanctions-evasion. That provides America’s leaders
with an enormous lever of power.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West froze $282bn of

Russian assets held abroad and disconnected Russian banks from SWIFT,
which is used by some 11,000 banks for cross-border payments. America
has also threatened “secondary sanctions” on banks in other countries that
support Russia’s war effort. This tsunami has prompted central banks to
accumulate gold and America’s adversaries to move away from using the
dollar for payments, which China views as one of its biggest vulnerabilities.
Mr Putin is hoping to capitalise on this dollar dissatisfaction at the BRICS

summit. For him, creating a new scheme is an urgent practical priority as
well as a geopolitical strategy. Russia’s foreign-exchange markets now
almost exclusively trade yuan, but because it cannot get enough of this
currency to pay for all of its imports, it has been reduced to bartering.
Mr Putin wants the summit to advance plans for BRICS Bridge, a payments
system that would use digital money issued by central banks and backed by
fiat currencies. This would place central banks, not correspondent banks
with access to the dollar clearing system in America, in the middle of cross-
border transactions. The biggest advantage for him is that no one country
could impose sanctions on another. Chinese state media say that the new
BRICS plan “is likely to draw on the lessons learned” from mBridge, an
experimental payments platform developed by the BIS alongside the central
banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates (see
chart).
That BIS experiment was innocent in design and initiated in 2019, before
Russia’s full-scale invasion. It has been stunningly successful, according to
several people involved in the project. It could cut transaction times from
days to seconds and transaction costs to almost nothing. In June the BIS
said mBridge had reached “minimum viable product stage” and Saudi
Arabia’s central bank joined as a fifth partner in the scheme. This week an

Emirati official said the platform has since processed hundreds of
transactions worth billions of dollars in total—a figure that is growing
rapidly. By creating a system that could be more efficient than the current
one—and which would weaken the dominance of the dollar—the BIS has
unwittingly stepped into a geopolitical minefield.
“If someone is transacting outside of the dollar system for political reasons,
you want that to be more expensive for them than the dollar system,” says
Jay Shambaugh, a Treasury Department official. The efficiency gains of
new kinds of digital money may erode the use of the dollar in cross-border
trade, according to the Fed. Reciprocally they could boost China’s currency.
Speaking to bankers and officials about mBridge in September, a Hong
Kong official said it “provides another opportunity to allow the easier use of
the renminbi in cross-border payment, and Hong Kong as an offshore hub
stands to benefit”.

Most international payments are in dollars and typically plod along a chain of intermediary banks.
Instead, the mBridge project relies on central banks, and gives them visibility and some control over
domestic banks and over the use of their digital currencies by foreign banks. In step one a bank
sending a cross-border payment would swap normal currency (A$) for a digital currency (e-A$)
issued directly by the central bank. In step two the bank would trade it for a foreign digital currency
(e-B$), which it would send in step three. The foreign bank would swap this back into normal money
in step four.

Is it possible that mBridge’s concepts and code might be replicated by the
BRICS, China or Russia? The BIS doubtless views mBridge as a joint
project and believes that it has the ultimate say over who can join. Yet some
Western officials say that participants in the mBridge trial may be able to
pass on the intellectual capital it involves to others, including participants in
the BRICS Bridge. According to multiple sources, China has taken a lead
on the software and code behind the mBridge project. The People’s Bank of
China (PBOC), the central bank, leads its technology subcommittee and,
according to comments made by a BIS official in 2023, its digital ledger
“was built by” the PBOC. Perhaps this technology and know-how could be
used to build a parallel system beyond the reach of the BIS or its Western
members. The BIS has declined to comment on any similarities between its
experiment and Mr Putin’s plan.
The BRICS’s foray into the payments race reveals the new geopolitical
challenges facing multilateral organisations. At a meeting of the G20 group
of large economies in 2020, the BIS was given the job of both improving
the existing system and, at China’s urging, of experimenting with digital
currencies. Earlier this year Agustín Carstens, its boss, called for “entirely
new architectures” and a “fundamental rethink of the financial system”. As
different members of the organisation have rival objectives, staying above
the fray is getting harder. The world has become more difficult to navigate,
acknowledges Cecilia Skingsley, the boss of the BIS Innovation Hub. But
she says the BIS still has a role to play in solving problems for all countries
“almost independent of what other kind of agenda they might have”.
One option for America and its allies is to try to hobble new payments
systems that compete with the dollar. Western officials have warned the BIS
that the project could be misused by countries with malign motives. The
BIS has since slowed down its work on mBridge, according to some former
staff and advisers, and is unlikely to admit any new members to the project.
Another option is to improve the dollar-based system so that it is as

efficient as new rivals. In April the New York Fed joined six other central
banks in a BIS project aimed at making the existing system faster and
cheaper. The Federal Reserve may also link its domestic instant-payments
system with those in other countries. SWIFT plans to conduct trials of

digital transactions next year, leveraging some of its incumbent advantages
including strong network effects and trust, says Tom Zschach, its innovation
chief.
Any rival BRICS payments system will still face huge challenges.
Guaranteeing liquidity will be difficult or require large implicit government
subsidies. If the underlying flows of capital and trade between two
countries are imbalanced, which they usually are, they will have to
accumulate assets or liabilities in each other’s currencies, which may be
unappealing. And to scale up a digital-currency system, countries must
agree on complex rules to govern settlement and financial crime. Such
unanimity is unlikely to win the day in Kazan.
For all that, the BRICS scheme may have momentum. There is a broad
consensus that current cross-border payments are too slow and expensive.
Although rich countries tend to focus on making it quicker, many others
want to overturn the current system entirely. At least 134 central banks are
experimenting with digital money, mostly for domestic purposes, reckons
the Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington. The number working on
such currencies for cross-border transactions has doubled to 13 since Russia
invaded Ukraine.
This week’s BRICS summit is no Bretton Woods. All that Russia and its
pals have to do is move a relatively small number of sanctions-related
transactions beyond America’s reach. Still, many are aiming higher. Next
year the BRICS summit will be held in Brazil, chaired by its president, Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, who fulminates over the power of the greenback.
“Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the
dollar,” he said last year. “Who was it that decided?” ■
https://www.economist.com/international/2024/10/20/putins-plan-to-dethrone-the-
dollar

Business
America’s growing profits are under threat
Earned out? :: Look beyond a bullish earnings season and risks loom
Are bosses right to insist that workers return to the office?

Dig out your trousers :: Company mandates are infuriating employees
South-East Asia’s stodgy conglomerates are holding it back

Tropical depression :: The region’s ageing corporate empires are stuck in the past—and too
cosy with politicians
Competition will make weight-loss drugs better, cheaper

and bigger
Pharma frenzy :: Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly face a growing number of challengers
Memory chips could be the next bottleneck for AI

Down memory lane :: SK Hynix is dominating the market
How to manage politics in the workplace

Bartleby :: Polarisation affects bosses as well as employees
Can Google or Huawei stymie Apple’s march towards

$4trn?
Schumpeter :: The contest for global smartphone dominance gets interesting

Earned out?
America’s growing profits are

under threat
Look beyond a bullish earnings season and risks loom
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
MANY INVESTORS will have greeted the start of corporate America’s

latest earnings season feeling chipper. After a brief wobble in the first half
of last year, the profits of big American firms in the S&P 500 index have
climbed steadily higher in each subsequent quarter. This time round their
profits are expected to grow by a bit more than 4%, year on year.
Faced with fat profits in the present—and the promise of fatter ones in the
future thanks to artificial intelligence (AI)—investors have sent the S&P
500 index up by 22% this year, its strongest performance since 1997.
Valuations, at 22 times forward earnings, are at eye-watering levels,

compressing the difference in yields between stocks and government bonds
(see chart 1). What could go wrong?
One place to look for threats is the earnings season. So far, however, that
has made investors only more bullish. The quarter of firms in the S&P 500
that have already reported their results have easily beaten expectations—
even as chief executives have signalled caution. Jamie Dimon, the boss of
America’s biggest bank, fixed a bleak warning to the front page of

JPMorgan Chase’s earnings print. Geopolitics and spiralling government
debt, he wrote, pose a serious threat to the economy. The bank’s stock
nonetheless rose by 5%. Investors seemed to read Mr Dimon’s musings
more as a pitch to be America’s next treasury secretary than an earnest
warning.
As interest rates come down, lending margins for banks like Mr Dimon’s
are being squeezed. Yet cheaper debt also means more companies raise
money and strike deals, providing juicy fees. At Goldman Sachs, for
instance, investment-banking revenue in the most recent quarter was up by
a fifth year on year, more than twice as much as expected.
Worries of a collapse in consumer spending are also starting to fade.

Pessimists may point to results from Ally Financial, the lender that was split
off from General Motors, which significantly increased its provisions for
bad car loans. The number of Americans not paying these off is now at
levels seen during the financial crisis. Other signs, however, suggest
America’s consumers remain indefatigable. Cheaper ad-supported
subscriptions have buoyed Netflix; premium credit cards have boosted
American Express. National retail-sales figures rose for the third straight
month in September.
Corporate America has been propped up in part by surging profits among its
technology giants, which have yet to report their results for the quarter.
Nvidia, the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom, is expected to account for
13% of all profit growth in the S&P 500 this year. Add its six famous
cousins, which together make up the “magnificent seven” stocks, and that
figure rises to 62%. Exclude all seven and the S&P 500’s earnings recession
ended not in the third quarter of 2023, but only in the second quarter of this
year.
Investors are now betting that America’s profit bonanza will become more
evenly shared. Profits among the S&P 493 next year are expected grow by
13%. The Russell 2000 index of smaller listed companies is also trading
above its long-run valuation multiple, suggesting that investors are bullish
not only about the outlook for America’s corporate giants but about its
middling companies, too.

That is a bold call. To those with a historical bent, it looks like a foolish
one. When tallied as a share of GDP, profits have been on a 40-year bull
run (see chart 2). In a paper published last year Michael Smolyansky, a
researcher at the Federal Reserve, showed that the acceleration in America’s
profit growth from 1989 to 2019 was “entirely due to the decline in interest
and corporate-tax rates”. This suggests that the outlook for corporate profits
will hinge on the decisions of central bankers and politicians.

Since the Fed began raising interest rates in 2022, big American firms have
been shielded from the rising cost of financing by high cash balances and
long-dated bonds paying low, fixed coupons. The IMF has shown that
between 2021 and 2023 net interest expenses of non-financial American
companies fell even as interest rates rose. Smaller firms, including the
highly indebted ones owned by private-equity funds, were less fortunate.
Like many European companies, they tend to rely more on floating-rate
loans than on fixed-rate bonds.
The holiday for big American firms, though, is coming to an end. The
Federal Reserve may be reducing its benchmark rate, but few expect a
return to the record lows of the past decade. American firms owe $2.5trn
worth of fixed-coupon bonds due before the end of 2027. For the $840bn of
that pile owed by non-financial firms in the S&P 500 index, the median
coupon is 3.4%; the yield to maturity, a proxy for the minimum rate firms
will have to offer when they refinance these debts, is 4.5%. What is more,
the spread between the yields of investment-grade corporate bonds and
government debt is also historically low, at just above 0.8 percentage
points. If it widens, the cost of refinancing will soar.
The outcome of America’s presidential election could also slow America’s

profit juggernaut. Donald Trump, whose chance of victory has been rising,
promises a sugar rush for businesses if he returns to the White House.
During his first presidency he cut the statutory corporate-tax rate from 35%
to 21%. He wants to lower it further, perhaps to 15%. That would be a big
boost to profits: each percentage-point decrease in the statutory rate lifts
S&P 500 earnings by nearly 1%, reckon analysts at Goldman Sachs. Yet
this will have to be weighed against the dangers Mr Trump poses in the
longer term. His promise to levy hefty tariffs may cover some companies in
protectionist bubble wrap, but others will find their profits squashed if they
are unable to pass higher costs on to consumers. His disregard for
institutions, meanwhile, could cause confidence in America’s markets to
rot.
A Kamala Harris presidency would not pose such nightmarish threats. But
nor would it give businesses a sugar rush. If her predecessor’s record is any
guide, Ms Harris will continue to frustrate profit-pumping mergers among

big American companies and may even seek to break some businesses up.
Even more worrying for bosses, she has proposed raising the corporate-tax
rate to 28%. Ms Harris would need a majority in both houses to make that
happen, something that polls currently suggest is unlikely. Still, as America
counts down the days until the election, its corporate titans may wish they
could keep things as they are. ■
Editor’s note (October 24th): Chart 1 has been updated to include both
real and nominal treasury yields.
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to

the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/22/americas-growing-profits-are-under-
threat

Dig out your trousers
Are bosses right to insist that

workers return to the office?
Company mandates are infuriating employees
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
“MY MORALE FOR this job is gone, gonna totally check out,” an Amazon
worker recently wrote on Blind, an online forum where employees whinge
about their employers. The cause of his discontent was a letter sent last
month by Andy Jassy, the tech giant’s boss, that ordered staff back to the
office five days a week. The mandate has caused grumbling among
Amazon’s office drones, who had previously been required to show up in
person only three days a week. At a meeting on October 17th Matt Garman,
head of Amazon’s cloud-computing division, told a group of staff that if
they did not want to adhere to the policy they could quit.

Amazon is not the only big company that has clamped down on remote
work. Goldman Sachs, a bank, PwC, a professional-services firm, and
Stellantis, a carmaker, are among those that have raised the number of days
they require their employees to come into the office. More are set to follow.
A recent global survey by KPMG, another professional-services firm, found
that four-fifths of bosses expect a return to the office five days a week
within three years.
Such mandates may already be starting to show up in aggregate figures.

Every month WFH Research, a group of academics, asks Americans how
many days they were able to work from home in the past week. In
September around 28% of their working days were at home, down about
two percentage points from the year before. The change in some industries
is more dramatic: the portion of employees in tech, financial and
professional-services firms who work at least some of the time from home
has fallen by an average of ten percentage points.
Mandating a return to the office tends to irritate staff. A survey by Gartner, a

research firm, found that a third of executives and a fifth of other
employees would leave their jobs if they were forced back to the office. For
some companies, that may be the point. Many tech firms and consultancies
hired too many workers during the covid-19 pandemic boom. Getting some
of them to leave voluntarily would reduce severance costs—though it also
risks pushing talented employees to join rivals.
The more likely explanation is that many bosses believe having employees
in the office leads to better performance. Plenty of studies now suggest that
remote employees are less productive. One paper that looked at data-entry
workers in India found that those consistently working from home were
18% less productive than those consistently in the office.
There is less evidence, though, that letting staff work from home a couple
of days a week in a hybrid arrangement has a negative effect on
performance. A randomised control trial at a Chinese online travel agency
by Nick Bloom of Stanford University and two other researchers found no
discernible difference in performance between hybrid workers and those
who toiled entirely from the office.

Bosses may quibble that a call centre is not representative of the work many
of their staff perform. More complex tasks, such as advising a client on how
to structure a merger or designing a user interface, can require a lot of
collaboration that may be difficult to replicate virtually. Junior employees
may also receive less coaching if they interact with others only through
scheduled Zoom calls.
Some bosses fret that hybrid work will erode their company’s culture, as
new employees don’t absorb it and old ones forget it. In his letter, Mr Jassy
wrote that Amazon’s culture “has been one of the most critical parts of our
success”, and that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practise,
and strengthen” it when working together in the office.
For now, investors seem to be withholding judgment. A study published in

April by Sean Flynn of Cornell University and two co-authors looked at
600 or so listed American firms that had published remote-work policies.
The authors found that variation in the stringency of these had no
significant effect on the performance of the firms’ shares relative to those of
their peers. If Mr Jassy is right, that may soon change. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/23/are-bosses-right-to-insist-that-
workers-return-to-the-office

Tropical depression
South-East Asia’s stodgy

conglomerates are holding it back
The region’s ageing corporate empires are stuck in the past—and too cosy
with politicians
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Singapore
FEW PARTS of the global economy hold more obvious promise than
South-East Asia. Multinational firms hoping to move manufacturing away
from China are racing to establish supply chains in the region. Indonesia,
the Philippines and Vietnam are expected to be among the fastest-growing
economies in the world during the rest of the decade. Malaysia is likely to
join the ranks of the world’s high-income economies soon. Singapore’s
importance as a financial hub has grown as foreigners have deserted Hong
Kong.

But when it comes to home-grown businesses, the picture in South-East
Asia is murkier. The market value of investible stocks in Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand is around $900bn. Those
five economies have roughly the same GDP as India but less than half its
investible market value (see chart 1). Seven American companies are each
worth more than the entire South-East Asian market.

Among the top 50 firms in South-East Asia by revenue, only one—Sea, a
Singaporean gaming and e-commerce firm—was founded in this century.
State-owned enterprises account for 15 of the top 50. Subsidiaries of the
region’s tentacular conglomerates account for 14.
Sprawling corporate empires with long histories—such as Thailand’s CP

Group, Malaysia’s Sime Darby, Indonesia’s PT Djarum and the Philippines’
San Miguel—play an outsize role in South-East Asia. Their portfolios span
industries from agriculture, energy and property to banking, telecoms and
retail. And they often have deep political ties, which help them thrive in
industries that rely on the government for licences and permits. Across
South-East Asia conglomerates dominate business—and keep the region
from reaching its potential.

Not long ago South-East Asia’s conglomerates were star performers.
Between 2003 and 2012 they generated an annualised shareholder return,
including dividends, of 28%, compared with 20% for South-East Asian
firms focused on specific markets, according to Bain, a consultancy. That
pattern, however, has since inverted: between 2013 and 2022 South-East
Asia’s conglomerates generated a meagre 4% annualised return, well below
the 11% notched up by the region’s more focused companies (see chart 2).

Partly that reflects a downturn during the latter period in the prices of
various commodities the conglomerates sell. But it also reflects the failure
of the groups to adapt. “The industries on which these conglomerates grew
are mature or declining,” observes Till Vestring, a partner at Bain in
Singapore. “Many haven’t managed to move into newer sectors.”
Some conglomerates want to change that. Vingroup, the biggest

conglomerate in Vietnam, has launched VinFast, an electric-vehicle brand,
and briefly made its own smartphone.
A number of the region’s conglomerates have sought help from foreign

firms to move into areas such as e-commerce, digital banking and
renewable energy. Sinar Mas, an Indonesian conglomerate, has joined up
with LG CNS, the cloud-computing arm of the South Korean giant, to build
data centres. Ayala Group, a conglomerate in the Philippines, teamed up
with Ant Financial, a Chinese fintech firm, to launch Mynt, an e-wallet
provider. Earlier this month Ayala sold half its stake in the venture to
Mitsubishi, a Japanese conglomerate, for $319m.
For many of South-East Asia’s conglomerates, though, extensive political

ties have dampened the incentive to innovate. Foreign-ownership
restrictions shield them from competition, especially in areas like telecoms,
banking, media and property. Cosy relationships with regulators keep
domestic upstarts at bay, too.
South-East Asia’s conglomerates are also among the biggest sources of

funding for the region’s new businesses, and not only through their banking
subsidiaries. Many have substantial venture-capital arms. In the Philippines
conglomerates like JG Summit and Ayala are big providers of startup
funding. Sinar Mas and Lippo Group, another Indonesian conglomerate, are
big venture investors in the country. That might be a plus for entrepreneurs
who are happy for their businesses to be subsumed into one of the region’s
conglomerates. But it is awkward for those who might wish to compete
with them.
Influential conglomerates are common across Asia, and may even be

beneficial for economies where markets are underdeveloped, by improving
the allocation of capital and talent. But the conglomerates of South-East

Asia are particularly worrisome. South Korea’s chaebols—family-owned
conglomerates such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG—are big and innovative
in part because they compete with foreign companies in overseas markets.
South-East Asia’s conglomerates, by contrast, focus on their domestic fiefs.
When they do sell abroad, it tends to be basic commodities such as
agricultural goods.
Focusing on the domestic market may be enough to give India’s

conglomerates, such as Reliance Industries and the Adani Group, the
efficiencies that come with sheer size. Not so in South-East Asia.
Indonesia’s economy, the largest in the region, is a third as big as India’s—
and it is around three times as large as those of Malaysia, the Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. As a consequence, the conglomerates run
by South-East Asia’s tycoons are likely to remain smaller and less
productive than those in larger economies.
Barbarians on the shores
The deteriorating performance of South-East Asia’s conglomerates has

caught the attention of foreign private-equity (PE) firms that have broken
up similar groups elsewhere. KKR and Blackstone are among those that
have been expanding their presence in the region. South-East Asia’s
conglomerates tend to list only some of their stock publicly, which would
make hostile bids tricky. More than half the shares of Malaysia’s YTL, the
Philippines’ SM Investments and Thailand’s ThaiBev are privately held.
But plenty of opportunities exist to nibble around the edges. In August
CVC, a European PE firm, purchased a majority stake in Siloam
International Hospitals from Lippo Group for more than $1bn.
Still, the shallowness of local capital markets makes a subsequent listing of

these businesses tricky, and appetite from foreign investors for modestly
sized Asian businesses is limited. Without more competition, South-East
Asia’s corporate morass will continue to blight its otherwise optimistic
economic story. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/24/south-east-asias-stodgy-conglomerates-
are-holding-it-back

Pharma frenzy
Competition will make weight-loss

drugs better, cheaper and bigger
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly face a growing number of challengers
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
AMONG THE many newcomers to the business of weight-loss drugs is

Hims & Hers, an American e-pharmacy better known for hawking remedies
for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Since May it has offered its own
version of Wegovy, a blockbuster slimming jab, thanks to a quirk in
American law that lets pharmacies replicate some brand-name drugs when
there are shortages. Analysts expect that the company will pocket around
$145m from its weight-loss drug this year.
Over the past two years rocketing sales of Wegovy and its main rival,
Zepbound, have propelled the combined market value of Novo Nordisk and

Eli Lilly, the drugmakers behind them, from $560bn to $1.3trn. The GLP-1
hormone that forms the basis of both drugs has proven highly effective at
helping users shed pounds, so much so that their makers have struggled to
keep up with demand.
What is more, researchers are now discovering that the benefits of these
drugs extend far beyond weight loss, just as prices are set to fall and more
convenient forms are under development. Bloomberg Intelligence, a

research firm, forecasts that global spending on weight-loss drugs will surge
from $15bn this year to $94bn by 2030 (see chart 1). With hundreds of
challengers eyeing a vast market of potential users, obesity drugs are
shaping up to be one of the biggest and fiercest battlegrounds in the history
of pharmaceuticals.
So far health insurers and governments have been reluctant to cover the cost
of using GLP-1s for weight loss (a smaller dose is prescribed for diabetes).
In America, the largest market by far for the drugs, Wegovy can cost up to
$17,500 a year for those paying out of pocket. Only half of privately
insured patients are covered for it. Medicare, the country’s public health-
care system for the elderly, is barred by law from providing anti-obesity
medicines.
Yet as evidence grows that these slimming drugs offer more than just
cosmetic benefits, insurers and governments may start to view them
differently. Many of America’s 110m obese people suffer from related
conditions ranging from heart disease to sleep apnea. Weight-loss drugs
could help. There are also early indications that GLP-1s could be used to
treat substance-use disorders, Alzheimer’s disease and various other
conditions. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, with these new
uses, around a fifth of Medicare’s population, some 16m patients, could
have access by 2026.
At the same time, competition is likely to make weight-loss drugs both

better and cheaper. Although Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are expected to
dominate the market for the time being, challengers are racing to develop
alternatives, forcing the duo to continue innovating. Citeline, a research
firm, estimates that more than 300 drug candidates are in the works, plenty
of which are expected to arrive in the next few years (see chart 2). Patrik
Jonsson, head of the division at Eli Lilly that is responsible for weight-loss
drugs, says that the level of competition is something he has never
experienced before.

One area of competition is around ease of use. Amgen, a large American
biotech firm, is developing a drug that requires patients to inject themselves
perhaps only once a month, rather than once a week as currently required.
Another solution is to eliminate the needle entirely. Pills are not only
simpler to make but also avoid the need for expensive cold storage. Both
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are expected to launch oral GLP-1 drugs in
2026.
Drugmakers are also racing to produce more effective treatments, including

by experimenting with other active ingredients. Some drug candidates aim
to increase the share of body weight patients are able to lose, to perhaps as
much as a quarter. Others look to reduce the side-effects of treatment, which
should lead more people to take them. About a third of GLP-1 users quit
within three months, often because of nausea, vomiting, muscle loss and
other nasty things. Zealand Pharma, a Danish biotech firm that is
developing a weight-loss drug that targets a different hormone, amylin, says
it could offer weight-loss benefits similar to those from GLP-1s but with
fewer such problems.
All that competition is expected to bring down prices. Eli Lilly has already
halved the price of its jabs. Jefferies, an investment bank, estimates that by
the end of this decade the annual cost of weight-loss drugs in America will
have fallen to around $3,000. Still, such prices will be out of reach for the
vast pool of potential patients in poor countries. Of the 1bn adults around
the world who are obese, more than two-thirds live in developing countries,
according to the World Obesity Federation, an NGO. Chinese and Indian
pharmaceutical companies are now eyeing those markets.
In China nearly half of all adults are overweight or obese, making it a huge
potential market for weight-loss drugs. Both semaglutide (the active
ingredient in Wegovy) and tirzepatide (the active ingredient in Zepbound)
have now been approved to treat obesity in the country. Eli Lilly and
Innovent, a Chinese biotech firm, are developing a drug for the market
called Mazdutide that is expected to be available from next year at around
half the price of Zepbound in America.
Generics will be even more important in widening access to weight-loss

drugs in the developing world. Patent expiries will help: semaglutide will

lose its protection in China and India in 2026, which should unleash a flood
of biosimilars (as generic versions of biological medicines are known). In
China eight weight-loss biosimilars are set to come on the market after
2026. India’s drugmakers, which supply more generic drugs than any other
country’s, are also developing their own knock-offs. The market for weight-
loss drugs will not go flabby anytime soon. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/24/competition-will-make-weight-loss-
drugs-better-cheaper-and-bigger

Down memory lane
Memory chips could be the next

bottleneck for AI
SK Hynix is dominating the market
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
INVESTORS ARE accustomed to volatility in the semiconductor industry.

But recent ups and downs have been especially discombobulating. On
October 15th ASML, a supplier of chipmaking gear, reported that orders
during its most recent quarter were only half what analysts had expected,
causing its shares to plunge. Two days later TSMC, the world’s biggest chip
manufacturer, reported record quarterly profits and raised its sales forecast
for the year.
Those contrasting signals reflect the diverging fortunes of the chips needed
for artificial intelligence (AI), for which demand has been “insane”,

according to C.C. Wei, TSMC’s boss, and those needed for everything else,
for which it is soggy. That pattern is reflected in memory chips. On October
7th Samsung, the market leader, issued a public apology for its lacklustre
financial performance. On October 24th SK Hynix, which has surged ahead
in the fast-growing segment of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips,
which are needed for AI, reported a record profit.
HBM chips have become a vital component in the race to build more
powerful and efficient AI models. Running these models requires logic
chips that can process oodles of data, but also memory chips that can store
and release it quickly. More than nine-tenths of the time it takes an AI
model to respond to a user query is spent shuttling data back and forth
between logic and memory chips, according to SK Hynix. HBMs are
designed to speed this up by integrating a stack of memory chips together
with the logic chips, boosting speed and reducing power consumption.

Arete Research, a firm of analysts, estimates that HBM sales will hit $18bn
this year, up from $4bn last year, and rise to $81bn by 2026 (see chart). The
chips are also highly profitable, with operating margins more than five
times those of standard memory chips. SK Hynix, whose share price has
more than doubled over the past two years, controls over 60% of the
market, and more than 90% for HBM3, the most advanced version. Nam
Kim, an analyst at Arete, says the company took an early bet on HBM
chips, well before the AI boom. Its leadership has since been cemented by

its close ties to TSMC and Nvidia, whose graphics processing units run
most of the whizziest AI models.
HBM chips are now emerging as another bottleneck in the development of

those models. Both SK Hynix and Micron, an American chipmaker, have
already pre-sold most of their HBM production for next year. Both are
pouring billions of dollars into expanding capacity, but that will take time.
Meanwhile Samsung, which manufactures 35% of the world’s HBM chips,
has been plagued by production issues and reportedly plans to cut its output
of the chips next year by a tenth.
With a shortage of HBM chips looming, America is pressing South Korea,

home to Samsung and SK Hynix, to restrict its exports of them to China.
There are rumours that a further round of chip sanctions by America will
include some advanced HBM versions. As demand for them rises, so too
will interest from governments. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/24/memory-chips-could-be-the-next-
bottleneck-for-ai

Bartleby
How to manage politics in the

workplace
Polarisation affects bosses as well as employees
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
HOWEVER MUCH you might want to keep politics out of business,

politics has other plans for you. Events have a habit of sucking
organisations into controversy. In 2022 Disney was caught up in a very
public row with the state of Florida over a bill about teaching sexuality and
gender identity in public schools. Earlier this year Google fired some
employees who had taken part in a sit-in to protest against the tech firm’s
cloud-computing contract with Israel. University administrators have
conspicuously struggled to manage the passions aroused by the war in
Gaza.

Some firms try to make it part of their culture to remain out of the political
fray. One software company, 37signals, is explicit that it “does not weigh in
on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business”.
Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai, told employees after the protest that “This is
a business, and not a place to…attempt to use the company as a personal
platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
But avoiding political and social controversy is very difficult, as “The Age
of Outrage”, a thoughtful new book by Karthik Ramanna, a professor at
Oxford University, makes clear. Polarisation is increasing in many
countries; grievances are quickly amplified by social media.
What is more, politics can infect organisations, their leaders included, in

deeply insidious ways. In America, now just days away from another
divisive presidential election, partisanship is becoming a feature of the
boardroom. A study by Vyacheslav Fos of Boston College and his co-
authors found that between 2008 and 2020 the executive teams at S&P
1500 firms grew more likely to be dominated by people affiliated to a single
party. This echo-chamber effect is caused primarily by a tendency for
bosses to team up with people who share their political views.
Partisanship feeds through into management decisions. A recent study by

Anthony Rice of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which infers
bosses’ political preferences from their campaign contributions, finds that
managers in America increase investment when their preferred party gains
control of the White House. Splurging based on partisanship tends not to
work out that well: it is associated with lower valuations and operating
profits.
Another study, by Ran Duchin of Boston College and his co-authors, finds
that politically divergent firms in America, as measured by the affiliations
of employees who are registered party supporters, have become less likely
to merge over time. Between 1980 and 2010, mergers between extremely
divergent firms—those in the top deciles for leaning Republican and
Democrat—made up 11% of all deals; by 2019 that figure had fallen to 3%.
When firms with different political leanings do merge, there is likely to be
higher subsequent turnover among employees.

Political polarisation is not restricted to America. Another study, by
Emanuele Colonnelli of the University of Chicago and his co-authors, looks
at the political affiliations of private-sector business owners and employees
in Brazil. They find that owners are substantially more likely to employ
workers who belong to the same party. As you might expect if decisions are
being influenced by something other than merit, this seems not to be great
for business: firms with a higher share of workers who have the same
political views as their owners grow slower compared with those that have
more politically diverse workforces.
This picture implies three things. The first is that political polarisation is not
something that can easily be suppressed; it might erupt in specific
firestorms or it might take hold more insidiously. The second is that the
benefits of diversity can extend to political views: partisanship can limit
your market, narrow your employee base and hurt your business.
The third lesson, and the argument of Mr Ramanna’s book, is that bosses
who want to act in a non-partisan way need to develop a process for dealing
with polarisation, rather than responding on an ad hoc basis. Among the
recommendations he makes is that organisations should appoint a group of
people to debate and adjudicate on controversial issues as they emerge.
Meta’s independent oversight board, which hears appeals about the tech
firm’s content-moderation decisions, is one model. Rabobank, a Dutch
lender, has a long-standing ethics committee to consider dilemmas, from
whether its staff can trade cryptocurrencies to the use of client data.
Politicians have parliaments. Firms may need an equivalent. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/24/how-to-manage-politics-in-the-
workplace

Schumpeter
Can Google or Huawei stymie

Apple’s march towards $4trn?
The contest for global smartphone dominance gets interesting
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
TO CALL APPLE a corporate behemoth is to be uncharitable. It is much

bigger than that. On many financial measures it makes more sense to
compare the iPhone-maker not with other companies but with stockmarket
indices—and not some obscure ones, either. Exclude financial firms and
India’s Nifty 50 sit on less cash. When Apple reports its annual results on
October 31st analysts reckon its net profit will be just below what
Germany’s DAX blue chips raked in last year. On October 21st its market
capitalisation nudged $3.6trn, more than Hong Kong’s Hang Seng.

Rivals in Apple’s core smartphone market look puny next to the colossus of
Cupertino. Samsung, a down-on-its-luck South Korean electronics
conglomerate which sells more handsets globally than any other firm, is
worth one-thirteenth as much, despite also boasting a huge semiconductor
business. Xiaomi, a Chinese challenger whose devices outsold iPhones in
August, generates less than 5% of Apple’s gross profit. The average iPhone
sells for $900, compared with $300 for a Samsung and half that for a
Xiaomi. Google, a Silicon Valley neighbour with a tidy digital-ad operation
and growing hardware ambitions, shifted $5bn-worth of Pixel phones in
2023—which against a $200bn screen of iPhone sales looks, well, like a
pixel. Competition? What competition?
Going by Wall Street analysts’ targets for Apple’s share price, it seems
nothing can stand in the way of its triumphant march towards $4trn. Still,
the iPhone’s everlasting presence in the world’s deepest pockets cannot be
taken for granted. In many ways, its position appears less certain than it has
been in years.
The iPhone looks the most unassailable in its home market. Nearly half of
all Americans aged 12 or more own one. And many of those who do not
would like to, given how powerful a marker of status the Apple logo has
become. If you are under the age of 20, “you either have an iPhone or
blame your parents,” sums up Runar Bjorhovde of Canalys, a research firm.
A big wrinkle is that America’s smartphone market is shrinking. Americans

bought some 124m new handsets in 2023, according to Counterpoint,
another research firm, down from 174m six years earlier. Now the strategy
of grabbing a bigger slice of a shrinking American pie may have run its
course. Apple’s domestic sales peaked in 2021, at 77m. Last year it shipped
70m.
Samsung has long craved a bite out of Apple’s business. Its latest high-end
phones were early to use Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) to
enhance search, photo-editing and other tasks. Gemini, whose co-creator
just shared a Nobel prize, slots in neatly with the Android operating system,
also designed by Google and made available to Samsung and others on an
open-source basis. But not as neatly as it does in Google’s own Pixels,
which integrate Gemini not just with Android but also with its custom-made

mobile chips. Apple has historically relied on a similar fusion of hardware
and its operating system, iOS. But it has largely eschewed AI model-
making and, in a departure from its habitual control-freakery, has chosen
instead to rely on outside help for a critical technology. Apple Intelligence,
an AI assistant which it will begin rolling out within days courtesy of
OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, thus risks offering a choppier user experience
than Pixels do.
Apple faces even more trouble in China. Its second-largest market is

likewise in secular decline, but much more fiercely competitive. No
smartphone brand in China exceeds 18% of unit sales. Five local ones—
Oppo, Vivo, Honor, Huawei and Xiaomi—plus Apple each chalk up at least
14%. On October 22nd the American firm’s chief executive, Tim Cook,
unexpectedly popped up in Beijing for the second time this year—possibly
in an effort to shake up what Horace Dediu, a veteran Apple-watcher, calls
the Chinese market’s “steady state”.
If so, Mr Cook had better get jiggling. According to a recent survey by

Canalys, Chinese consumers are keener than Westerners on AI capabilities,
which local rivals have been quick to offer. Apple, meanwhile, still has no
launch date for a Chinese-language Apple Intelligence. The ultra-high-
resolution cameras that Apple shuns are a selling point for homespun rivals
in a selfie-obsessed nation. So is their Chineseness: patriotic consumption
has helped Huawei, which America has tried to smother with sanctions
since 2019, stage a remarkable comeback. It recently overtook Apple’s
shipments in China for the first time in three years. Chinese devices, which
use a greater portion of cheap but high-quality Chinese components than
iPhones do, offer better value for money, says Yang Wang of Counterpoint.
At a time of sour consumer sentiment, that matters.
Beyond Pax Cupertina
In parts of the world where smartphone sales are still growing apace, Apple
has a different problem—its pricey iPhones are almost nowhere to be seen.
Transsion’s cut-price devices reign supreme in Africa. In India, where
Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi together account for two-thirds of handsets sold,
Apple’s share languishes at 5%. It is possible that as their disposable

incomes rise, phone-buyers in the global south will, like many Chinese
before them, opt for higher-end offerings from their current suppliers, rather
than hurrying to buy an iPhone.
Apple may console itself by arguing that these problems look trifling today.
The world’s 1.5bn iPhone-users represent the wealthiest one-fifth of
humanity. Many happily lock themselves in the iOS walled orchard, where
Apple sells them high-margin services from cloud storage to streaming and,
soon, AI. Apple Intelligence may be a compromise worth making, given
OpenAI’s machine-learning chops. And Mr Cook is pushing into India,
tomorrow’s biggest prize. Still, Apple must not forget that dominant doesn’t
mean indomitable. ■

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/10/24/can-google-or-huawei-stymie-apples-
march-towards-4trn

Finance & economics

What the surging price of gold says about a dangerous
world
Going for it :: Financial fears and geopolitical tremors combine to great effect
The West faces new inflation fears

Wide Atlantic :: Having moved in lockstep, America and Europe now have very different
concerns
The economics of thinness (Ozempic edition)

Hunger games :: Will skinny still be desirable when it is more easily achieved by the masses?
Investors should not fear a stockmarket crash

Buttonwood :: Take a long view, and shares are a lot less risky than many realise
Hizbullah’s sprawling financial empire looks newly

vulnerable
Economic war :: Why Israel is now bombing Lebanese banks
How bad are video games for your grades?

Free exchange :: Chinese students provide an answer

Going for it
What the surging price of gold says

about a dangerous world
Financial fears and geopolitical tremors combine to great effect
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Singapore
LESS THAN A mile from Singapore’s luxurious Changi Airport sits a

rather less glamorous business park. Residents of the industrial estate
include freight and logistics firms, as well as the back offices of several
banks. One building is a little different, however. Behind a glossy onyx
facade, layers of security and imposing steel doors, sits more than $1bn in
gold, silver and other treasures. “The Reserve” hosts dozens of private
vaults, thousands of safe-deposit boxes and a cavernous storage room where
precious metals sit on shelves rising three storeys above the ground.

After four years of retrofitting, the complex is almost complete. Its grand
opening will come at an opportune moment: gold is in the midst of an
extraordinary renaissance. Over the past year investors have piled into the
metal, driving its price up by 38% to over $2,700 per troy ounce—a record
high (see chart 1). The buzz has reached unusual places: gold bars have hit
the shelves of Costco, an American retailer, and CU, a South Korean
convenience-store chain, as the resurgence of inflation and fears of war
drive consumer enthusiasm. Central bankers are also getting involved, as
financial fragmentation increases appetite for an ancient asset. The world
has entered a new golden age.
Professional investors are often scornful of precious metals, for good

reason. Gold produces no income. Warren Buffett, one such investor, says
that bets on gold are made by those who fear other assets, and believe that
the ranks of the fearful will expand. Among American institutional investors
managing more than $100m in assets, only a quarter report owning shares
in gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs), according to Dirk Baur and Lai
Hoang of the University of Western Australia. Just 1.5% of such firms’
assets are in gold. All this helps explain why holdings in gold ETFs have
failed to rise, even as the price of the metal has climbed (see chart 2).
The biggest fans of precious metals do not always help themselves.

Goldbugs make outlandish predictions to justify their bets. A looming
American debt default is a favourite; the supposed launch of a gold-backed
currency by China and Russia is a new and even more fantastical forecast.
But today there are more people convinced that things really are heading
south than just a few years ago, and there are more rational reasons to
believe so.
Family offices, the preferred investment vehicle for the privately wealthy,
are growing fast—assets under management have risen from $3.3trn in
2019 to $5.5trn today—and many investors want to protect their wealth
from dire outcomes. The value of a currency may fall both against others
and in terms of its purchasing power; gold’s relatively fixed supply and
historical popularity encourages investors to believe it can protect them
against surging prices and misjudged policies. According to Campden
Wealth, a data provider, over two-thirds of family offices invest in gold.

Lots of demand is Asian: China and India make up a fifth of the world’s
economic output, yet account for half of consumer purchases of physical
gold. The average Indian is now about as keen on the metal as an American
or German (see chart 3).

Moreover, Chinese and Indian fondness for gold is growing. In China a
property crisis has prompted people with capital to look elsewhere.
Purchases of gold bars and coins rose by 44% in the year to June against the
previous 12 months. As India gets richer, more people are able to buy gold.
One consequence is that gold-backed lending has taken off. Muthoot
Finance, one such lender, has seen its share price almost triple in the past
five years.
But it is another class of investors—perhaps the most paranoid and

conservative of all—that has really driven the recent rally: reserve
managers at central banks. Gold’s share of central-bank reserves had
declined for decades, from almost 40% in 1970 to just 6% in 2008. More
recently, though, its share has steadily climbed, rising to 11% last year, the
highest in more than 20 years (see chart 4).
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent freezing of its foreign-

currency reserves, was a pivotal moment. It demonstrated to reserve
managers that if their country was put under sanctions, American Treasuries
and other supposedly safe assets denominated in Western currencies would
be of no use. Since the start of 2022, monetary authorities in China, Turkey
and India have bought 316, 198 and 95 tonnes of gold respectively,
according to the World Gold Council, an industry group. Instead of
investing in ETFs, central banks mostly accumulate physical gold, and
make sure that they have it close to hand: just as financial assets face the
possibility of seizure, so does gold held overseas. The British government,
for instance, has refused to repatriate dozens of tonnes of gold to Venezuela,
since it refuses to recognise Nicolás Maduro as a legitimate leader.
Not all the central banks snapping up gold have difficult relations with the
West. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has accumulated 75 tonnes
since the start of 2022. The National Bank of Poland has raised its holdings
by 167 tonnes over the same period as part of a strategy to keep 20% of
reserves in gold. Adam Glapinski, the bank’s president, refers to gold as a
strategic hedge, as it has low correlations with other asset classes. “The
price of gold,” he said in 2021, “tends to be high precisely at times when
the central bank might need its ammunition most.” In September Laos

opened up a flashy monument to the new golden era: a gold-panelled
bullion bank in its capital.
Central-bank demand is unlikely to fall soon. A survey of sovereign

investors by Invesco Asset Management this year found that none of 51
central banks expect to cut their gold allocation in the next three years, and
37% expect to raise it. Among central bankers, some 56% believe that gold
offers protection against the “weaponisation” of central-bank reserves, and
70% see it as a hedge against inflation.
Demand from central banks, which invest for security reasons rather than
returns, also helps explain why gold’s relationship with interest rates has
broken down. The metal usually does poorly when real yields on safe
government bonds are high, which means they provide a solid return even
after inflation. Conversely, when returns to the safest bonds are low, gold
tends to rally. In a low-yield environment, investors are more likely to
consider an asset that produces no income. Since the end of 2021, however,
the once-trusty correlation has collapsed. Gold has climbed in price even as
yields on ten-year inflation-protected American Treasuries rose from minus
1% to around 1.8%. When real yields were last this high, gold was worth
around $1,000 per troy ounce, almost two-thirds less than its current price.
How useful will gold be in a crisis? Nicholas Mulder of Cornell University

notes that it can be sold in small quantities in the politically neutral Gulf, in
exchange for a variety of currencies. Although Russia was cut off from
Western gold markets by the restrictions deployed against the government,
and some firms have been punished for dealing with Russian miners, a
suspicious surge in gold imports by Switzerland from the United Arab
Emirates in the months after the invasion of Ukraine suggests that Moscow
was managing to market its gold. Preventing the sale of an asset that can be
smuggled around the world in small quantities, and melted down, is an all
but impossible task.
Ultra-rich investors may buy more gold, too. But for gold purveyors the real
target is institutional investors: bringing in just a sliver of the tens of
trillions of dollars they manage would be a huge boon. Such purveyors may
be in luck. Goldman Sachs, a bank, notes that demand for gold ETFs tends
to rise only as American interest rates fall, not before. Typically, a rate cut

of a quarter of a percentage point increases gold ETF holdings by 60 tonnes
—currently $5bn in value—over the subsequent six months. Mr Buffett’s
criticism that gold requires fear, and a belief that the fear will spread, is
true. At the moment, though, there are a lot of fearful investors. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and
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This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
economics/2024/10/22/a-dazzling-new-gold-rush-is-under-way-why

Wide Atlantic
The West faces new inflation fears

Having moved in lockstep, America and Europe now have very different
concerns
10月 24, 2024 04:18 上午
CENTRAL BANKERS have avoided celebrations. They know full well

that consumers and firms, stung by the highest inflation since the 1970s,
would not appreciate them. In private, though, many are elated. The
sharpest rise in borrowing costs in decades, dubbed “the great tightening”
by the IMF, appears to have worked better than anyone expected. Global
inflation has retreated to more comfortable levels. Better still, this has been
achieved without a sharp rise in joblessness or a recession.
But as inflation cools, new dilemmas emerge. What is striking is how

different they are on either side of the Atlantic. European policymakers,
having dealt with the novel phenomenon of high inflation, now worry they

are returning to a more familiar problem: inflation that is too low, as the
continent’s economic growth looks increasingly frail. At the same time,
American central bankers are discovering that although they have made a
lot of progress, inflation is still higher than they desire. The country’s
economy is booming.
Until recently, prices in the two regions had moved in lockstep. Recent
analysis by the IMF makes clear the extraordinary nature of the inflationary
wave. In the view of the IMF, it came in stages. First, during covid-19
lockdowns, demand for goods surged as supply chains strained. Then, as
economies re-opened, pent-up demand for services raised price pressures.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated problems. By mid-2022 global
inflation was triple its pre-pandemic average, and many of its causes
applied to countries everywhere.
Beneath the surface, however, there were differences. American inflation

was at first driven by the same shocks as elsewhere, but from late 2021 a
tight labour market contributed. The IMF’s research suggests a lack of slack
in America’s job market has added two to three percentage points to annual
inflation rates. In Europe, which was more exposed to high energy prices
after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the labour market has been looser. The
result—high inflation—was the same, but the two regions got there
differently.

Now that supply chains are pretty much back to normal, these differences
are becoming apparent. They can be seen in financial markets. The “five-
year, five-year forward” inflation expectation is a favoured measure of
central bankers. Derived from interest-rate futures contracts, it shows the
inflation rate expected by investors for the five years starting in five years’
time. By the middle of last year, European and American rates had
converged. Against a backdrop of high inflation, market participants
expected annual price rises to settle at 2.5% on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over the past year rates have since diverged, with American medium-term
inflation now expected to be higher than European inflation (see chart).
American consumer-price inflation fell to 2.4% in September, coming in

above projections of a drop to 2.3%. On October 14th Christopher Waller, a
member of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee, described the data
as “disappointing”. Investors have begun to scale back their expectations of
how quickly the Fed will cut. By contrast, rate-setters at the European
Central Bank are more alarmed by the lack of inflation than its persistence.
On October 17th the ECB cut rates for the third time this year; markets now
expect a further three reductions by the end of March. At their previous
meeting, minutes noted “the risk of undershooting the target [of 2%]”.
Indeed, the latest reading suggests that today euro-zone inflation is at 1.7%.
Too little, not too much, inflation is a problem with which the ECB is
familiar. Inflation was below 2% for most of the decade before 2021. With
European growth weakening, Germany in recession and price pressures
appearing newly absent, some economists now fear that the ECB mistook a
global inflationary surge for a fundamental change in European price
dynamics, and raised rates by too much as result. The most recent survey of
professional economists by the ECB points to medium-term euro-zone
growth of just 1.3% a year, the lowest since the survey began.
Hence the divergence. In America a still-tight jobs market is continuing to

make reducing inflation difficult; in Europe the old picture of sluggish
growth and weak price pressures is once more reasserting itself. The
Atlantic is 5,000km and 0.7 percentage points wide. ■
economics/2024/10/20/the-west-faces-new-inflation-fears

Hunger games
The economics of thinness

(Ozempic edition)
Will skinny still be desirable when it is more easily achieved by the masses?
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | New York
ARRIVING IN STEPFORD, Connecticut, Joanna—protagonist of “The

Stepford Wives”, a horror novel—is dragged to a “workout class” at the
Simply Stepford Day Spa by a neighbour. The duo are met by 15 identikit
women. Their hair, heights and skin colours differ a little. Their waist sizes
do not. Each can be no bigger than a British size 8, their waists nipped in by
belts and accentuated by 1950s skirts.
As some describe it, this is where the world is now heading owing to the
discovery of weight-loss drugs. In three short years since America’s Federal
Drug Administration approved these medications their use has exploded.

Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, has become Europe’s most
valuable company. Eli Lilly, which manufactures Mounjaro, was one of
America’s best performers last year. And celebrities including Oprah
Winfrey and Kelly Clarkson have emerged, almost overnight, slimmed
down and svelte.
Morgan Stanley, a bank, estimates that as many as 9% of Americans will

take brand-name versions of weight-loss drugs by 2035. That is just the tip
of the iceberg. Demand for versions of these medications is only growing.
On the subway in New York, Ro, a health-care startup, advises riders to
“skip the shortages” and get access to cheaper versions for as little as $99 a
month. Instagram is plastered with advertisements from firms such as hers
and eden, which target young people by using lower-case brand names and
soothing colour schemes. In September Kourtney Kardashian, a socialite,
began selling a capsule through lemme, her supplement firm, which also
flogs vaginal probiotic gummies and anti-cellulite pills.
The most important consequence of the drugs’ discovery is well understood:

they will improve the health and lives of most of those with access to them.
But the understandable rejoicing at the health benefits has been tempered,
in some quarters, by a fear that the drugs will encourage the worst of
society’s aesthetic impulses: that they will bring about an even fiercer
expectation that everyone should conform to contemporary beauty
standards, a trend which may come with its own health burden in the form
of mental-health conditions and disordered eating.
People clamour to get on weight-loss drugs for aesthetic reasons, as well as

owing to health concerns. This is not mere vanity. Evidence of
discrimination against fat people is widespread. In Sweden and Mexico,
where including a photograph with a CV is common, researchers
manipulated images to make identical fictitious job applicants seem fatter
or obese. They found that they were significantly less likely to be offered
interviews. Petter Lundborg of Lund University and John Cawley of
Cornell University have compared the wages of thin and fat women,
adjusted for education, experience and other factors, in Europe and America
respectively, and found that women with obese BMIs earn around 10% less
than their peers. The implication of this is stark: for an obese woman

earning, say, $80,000 the impact of getting on Ozempic could be more
economically consequential than any eventual savings she might make on
her health bills.
Will weight-loss drugs make discrimination worse? Tressie McMillan

Cottom, a New York Times columnist, has argued against the notion that
Ozempic will cure “the moral crisis of fat bodies that refuse to get and stay
thin”. The implicit promise of the drug is that “it can fix what our culture
has broken.” (Her preferred solution: rather than solving obesity with drugs,
society should simply stop stigmatising fat people.) “Ozempic has won,
body positivity has lost. And I want no part of it,” lamented Rachel Pick, a
writer, in the Guardian.
Such concerns are fuelled by the fact that the “body positive” movement,
which pushes back on the idea that everyone should strive to meet the same
body ideal, had been gaining ground. Retailers offer more sizes. It has
become common to see clothing displayed on bigger women when
shopping online. John Galliano of Maison Margiela, a luxury fashion house,
used models of all sizes at a show in Paris.
It is natural to think that, in the short term, prejudice against fat people
might be reinforced by weight-loss drugs. So far they have mostly been
available to the rich, notes Mr Cawley: “If being able to lose weight is
something that is very correlated with a person’s income there is a risk that
having obesity could be seen as signalling being lower-income.” But mass
adoption is under way—and that will change things.
The signal and the scale
Early man first invented tools. Then he invented jewellery. Archeologists

have discovered strings of shells, believed to have been necklaces or
earrings, that are 150,000 years old—more ancient than the development of
language. The urge to use your appearance to signal ways in which you are
distinct from others is one of humanity’s oldest impulses.
People have sent different signals over time and across cultures. Sometimes
the impulse for change is the discovery of a newer, shinier material: snail

shells were replaced with gold beads and later diamonds. The high-status
beauties of the Renaissance were the voluptuous ladies painted by Rubens.
Then the industrial revolution made food more affordable for the masses
and a leaner look became more desirable. Had Malthus—who in 1798
predicted populations would soon be imperilled by food constraints—been
right, fatness would surely still be in vogue.
Weight-loss drugs will probably be responsible for the next big change, and
it will not be the creation of Stepford dystopia. Thinness is desirable now
because it sends a signal: that one has the time to work out, the money to
afford healthy foods and the education to know what diet to follow. In low-
income countries such as Malawi and Uganda, where food is scarce for
poorer people, obesity is more desirable, as it was in the pre-industrial West.
A study by Elisa Macchi of Brown University, carried out in these
countries, manipulated images attached to loan applications, and found that
applicants who appeared obese had better access to credit.
The economics of signalling was best articulated by Michael Spence, a

Nobel prizewinner. In 1973 Mr Spence developed a simple model of how
the labour market works. There are two kinds of job candidate: good, high-
productivity ones and bad, lazy ones. Potential employers do not know
which is which. Applicants can acquire a degree, but this is hard; bad
candidates are unlikely to be able to do it. It is also costly for the good ones
to acquire a degree; it takes time and money. In this model, even if there are
no true benefits to education, good candidates will acquire degrees as a
signalling device, to let employers know they are strong candidates.
Before Mr Spence’s paper, the thinking was that employers valued

education because it improved productivity. Mr Spence showed that there
might be more to it. Would you rather have gone to Harvard—to have
studied, taken classes, made connections—and never be able to reveal it?
Or would you prefer to have a piece of paper that says you went? A similar
question gets to the truth about body types. Would you rather look slender
and in shape? Or would you want to actually be healthy?
With their appearance, people are sending signals that have value in the job
and marriage markets. But what if someone did not have to be rich or
disciplined to be thin? A signal is useful only if it sends the right message.

In Mr Spence’s model, the signal works only if a university education is
difficult to attain and acquired only by strong candidates.
Consider another example to see how fast the value of a signal can be lost.
When email was new it was clear that, if one addressed you by name in the
subject line or the text, a real person was trying to catch your attention.
They had, after all, crafted a message just for you. Then it became possible
for senders to namecheck a long list of people with ease. For a time, email
users were tricked: they clicked, expecting an important message, and
instead received a generic ad. Yet they soon learned.
In gossipy corners of the internet a transformation in the perception of thin

people is already under way. Posters on the “NYC influencer snark”
subreddit, a forum dedicated to needling the poor taste of D-List TikTok
stars and Instagram influencers, accuse any- and everyone of being on the
jab. Often this is idle chatter, but sometimes they provide evidence (or
“receipts”). Two months ago “Nycundercover”, a habitual poster, published
a screenshot of Serena Kerrigan, who has 217,000 Instagram followers,
standing in front of her fridge. “Not that any proof was needed, but she isn’t
even bothering to hide her Ozempic use now,” they wrote, above an image
annotated with a red arrow, pointing to the tell-tale cap of a GLP-1 pen.
As the medication must be kept cold to be effective, kitchen pictures and

bruises on the abdomen (the typical injection site) have become the internet
sleuths’ way of figuring out who is on the drugs. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
these posters are not pointing this out to be nice or to flatter users of the
drugs for their new figures. It is a gotcha moment. In the jargon of
economics, they are revealing that the signal the person is sending with
their body is a false one. They did not get thin the hard way.
Ozempic is not going to fix society and rid it of status games. Signalling
that you are unique or better than others is hard-wired into human nature.
However, the idea that it might become easy to be thin suggests that
thinness will lose some of its grip on the popular psyche. Something else
will doubtless replace it. Perhaps it will be a fixation on muscles, which are
more difficult to feign. Or perhaps the truly elite will be those who signal
that they are above it all, anyway, doing so with softer, middling body
types.

In many ways, this could be a blessing. The pursuit of thinness, especially
for young girls, has come at a great cost. Contrary to what many seem to
think, by making it easy for almost anyone to be thin, Ozempic might not
only fix America’s weight problems—it might also fix America’s problem
with weight. ■
economics/2024/10/24/the-economics-of-thinness-ozempic-edition

Buttonwood
Investors should not fear a

stockmarket crash
Take a long view, and shares are a lot less risky than many realise
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
SHAREHOLDERS ARE enjoying one of their best runs in history. Since a

trough last October the S&P 500 index of large American firms has risen by
more than 40%; peers in Europe, Japan and Canada have all gone up by at
least half as much. The fears of last year, that stubborn inflation would
prevent central banks from cutting interest rates, keeping bond yields high
and dragging share prices down, have all but vanished. In fact, many of the
world’s monetary guardians have been slashing borrowing costs just as
corporate profits have climbed and animal spirits have surged. The result is
that plenty of stockmarkets are now hovering near all-time highs.

Accordingly, investors are engaged in the activity that is traditional for such
moments: not sending champagne corks flying, but obsessing about
whether the good times are already over. They are hardly short of reasons to
fret. Relative to underlying profits, American stocks have rarely been
pricier, and then only before big slumps. Unnervingly, more than a third of
the S&P 500’s market value is concentrated in just ten firms. Spurred on by
rich-world governments’ insatiable appetite for borrowing, and especially
the prospect of Donald Trump entering the White House and sending
America’s deficit even higher, bond yields are again rising quickly.
Volatility is up, too, and gold—typically seen as a hedge against chaos—has
been on a rally for the ages. A crash would need a catalyst. But a lot of other
potential causes are already in place.
Here, then, is a reason to be cheerful should you end up watching a big

chunk of your portfolio go up in smoke. Naturally, this would be
unpleasant. Yet the nicest result of the past few decades’ academic research
on finance is that, at least in the long run, it matters less than you might
think. The reason is that stocks are more like bonds than most investors
realise. As prices (or, more precisely, valuations) fall, expected returns rise.
For bonds, this is easy to see. Just consider what happened in 2022. Interest
rates rose by several percentage points, dragging up bond yields with them.
To align existing bonds, many of which paid next to no interest, with
prevailing yields, prices were hammered. After all, investors would buy
bonds only if they were sufficiently discounted from face value to make up
for their low coupons. Viewed this way, American Treasuries had their
worst year in over a century. Unless they sold after the crash, though, this
would not have altered their owners’ returns by one jot. If they held their
Treasuries to maturity, they would still receive every coupon they had been
promised, followed by the repayment of principal.
It is not obvious that stocks behave similarly—for one thing, there is no

repayment of principal to make up for a drop in prices. Even so, they do,
concluded a panoramic survey of asset-price research published in 2011 by
John Cochrane, then at the University of Chicago. The ratio of profits to
share prices, once thought to forecast future earnings, in fact does not. What
it does predict, much like the yield on a bond, is the shareholder’s expected

return. Unlike a bond yield, this is not a sure thing: realised returns might
fall on either side of the forecast. Thankfully, as is the case with bonds,
investors are compensated for falling share prices with higher expected
returns.
Armed with this information, one class of investor should welcome a crash.
Sky-high stock valuations have badly eroded the returns youngish savers
can expect to earn as they age. In a recent note, analysts at Goldman Sachs,
a bank, put this into grim numbers. Based on valuations and factors such as
market concentration and interest rates, they forecast annualised nominal
returns of just 3% for the S&P 500 over the coming decade, compared with
a historical average of 11%. A painful crash might at least reset the dial and
give youngsters a better chance of retiring at some point.
The broader implication is that anyone holding stocks for the long run—in a
pension pot, say—is taking less risk than they might think. Investors often
imagine year-by-year returns as like a series of independent coin tosses, in
which a run of poor luck implies nothing at all about the odds of the next
flip. In this world a crash is simply terrible news. Reality is more pleasant.
Investing in stocks is like flipping the coin of the gambler’s fallacy: a long
series of tails really does make it more likely that you will come up heads
next time. Cold comfort, perhaps, when prices are plunging and some of
your savings have disappeared. But a good reason to buy at the bottom.■

economics/2024/10/24/investors-should-not-fear-a-stockmarket-crash

Economic war
Hizbullah’s sprawling financial

empire looks newly vulnerable
Why Israel is now bombing Lebanese banks
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Istanbul
RESIDENTS OF BEIRUT are, by now, used to warnings from the Israel

Defence Forces ahead of bombing runs. Typically, these instruct locals to
stay away from a tower block suspected of harbouring fighters, or perhaps a
school said to double as a weapons cache. The warning on October 20th
was a little different. It told people to steer clear of branches of al-Qard al-
Hassan (AQAH), a bank.
Israel targeted the bank because it is linked to Hizbullah. Once a mere

militia, the group has enormous sway in Lebanon, where it runs a sprawling
welfare system, in part funded through business interests at home and

abroad. It draws power from a reputation as the Middle East’s most
professional non-state outfit and from the popularity of its services, which it
provides to Lebanon’s Shia sect even as it wages war against its neighbour.
Israel hopes, therefore, that destroying AQAH branches will help
undermine this strength and disrupt the financial flows which keep
Hizbullah’s soldiers armed, fed and paid.
Lebanon’s economy has been a disaster since 2019, when a shortage of

dollars precipitated a financial crisis. A huge explosion at Beirut’s port in
2020, in which more than 200 people died, made things worse. The
government resigned; no subsequent caretaker one has lasted much longer
than a year. At official exchange rates, the Lebanese pound has lost 98% of
its value against the dollar since the financial crisis. Last year inflation
reached a high of 221% and debt hit 285% of GDP. IMF officials say that
there is no one with whom to even begin discussing a bail-out.
This misery has only increased reliance on Hizbullah’s services, most of

which are funded through AQAH. To dodge Western sanctions, the bank
mostly exists outside mainstream finance. It does not hold accounts with
Lebanon’s central bank and carries out few transactions with the country’s
other financial institutions. Although America, Europe and Israel have put
AQAH under strict sanctions, and America has placed Adel Mohamad
Mansour, the bank’s boss, on a blacklist, Israeli officials believe these
moves have had little effect.
Where does the money Hizbullah holds in AQAH accounts come from?
Getting cash into Lebanon is a labyrinthine operation, and often involves
Iran. According to several Western officials, Iran’s ambassador brings cash
on a private jet each time he arrives in Beirut. Funds dribble in through a
network of small currency exchanges that Iran uses to take payments for oil.
Hizbullah officials are also employed as middlemen for Iran’s oil trade.
According to America’s Treasury, Muhammad Qasim al-Bazzal, one of the
group’s financiers, each year trades Iranian oil worth hundreds of million of
dollars.
Iran provides $700m a year in direct support. Less than $200m of this
makes it to Hizbullah’s civilian administration—far from enough to fund its
varied social programmes. The rest is siloed in the budget of the military

wing, which is kept away from the organisation’s bureaucrats, so as to
prevent them from being subject to the extremely strict American sanctions
that the military arm already faces.
Such distance enables Hizbullah’s bureaucracy to solicit funding via a

network of humanitarian charities, into which money pours from Europe
and North America. Sanctioneers spend a lot of time trying to work out
whether new charities are fronts for Hizbullah’s financiers, or genuine. The
Martyrs Foundation distributes handouts to families of Hizbullah fighters;
America placed it under sanctions in 2021.
Other sources of finance are unambiguously illicit. The Treasury reckons

that Nazem Ahmad, just one dubious financier, has overseen at least $1bn in
sales of goods, including art and diamonds, in the past decade. According to
American officials, many of the most dodgy flows arrive from West Africa
and Latin America. The Ivory Coast is a hotspot for the gem trade;
Colombia plays a similar role for drugs. Different regions send cash in
different ways. West Africa favours jets laden with cash, whereas South-
East Asia tends to opt for disguised remittance payments.
Lebanon’s state is a final source of funding. Hizbullah’s allies control

ministries and, though the government has been in debt default since 2020,
it has not stopped spending. The state is due to disburse 20% more than it
takes in via taxes this year, with money cobbled together from monetary
financing and international aid. Western officials believe contracts go to
firms that employ off-duty Hizbullah fighters, among other forms of
patronage.
Even before Israel bombed AQAH branches, war was putting this system
under strain. Of the million or so Lebanese people displaced in the past
month, some 150,000 are believed to be in Hizbullah-run areas. Payments
to injured soldiers and the families of those killed are growing. Experienced
financial tsars have been killed, prompting a reshuffle and spooking backers
abroad, who are nervous of being linked to Hizbullah’s military arm.
Donors want to fund orphanages, not explosives.
Iran is unlikely to come to the rescue. Despite its military support for
Hizbullah, the country is itself mired in economic difficulties and will not

have an appetite to bail out its ally’s welfarism. America is seeking support
for a plan to force Hizbullah out of Lebanon’s government, which would
only add to the group’s problems. Its soldiers are now said to be
complaining about not being paid on time. And Israel’s targeting of AQAH
could throw everything from handouts to Lebanon’s financial plumbing into
disarray. As a Western sanctions official puts it: “Job done, for us.” ■
economics/2024/10/21/hizbullahs-sprawling-financial-empire-looks-newly-vulnerable

Free exchange
How bad are video games for your

grades?
Chinese students provide an answer
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
ARRIVING ON THE magical continent of Teyvat, you and your twin are
attacked and separated by an unwelcoming god. When you regain
consciousness, you set off in search of your lost sibling, exploring seven
beguiling worlds (one of which resembles a Chinese national park). Along
the way you team up with other heroes, blessed with elemental powers. One
can cross lakes by freezing the water beneath his feet. Another can float on
air currents of his own creation. Together, your travelling party must fight
monsters, solve puzzles and plunder treasure chests.

Released in September 2020 by a Chinese developer, the online game
“Genshin Impact” became a big hit. A year after its release, it was attracting
more than 13m monthly users in China and more than 50m worldwide. The
success of this home-grown creation and others like it was not, however, a
source of great pride for China’s government. It worries that gaming
addiction poses a threat to teenagers. In 2021 a state-run newspaper
complained that online games were contributing to myopia, bad grades and
alienation. They are often described as “spiritual opium”, it said.
In 2019 China’s government limited children under 18 to an hour and a half

of online game-time a day during the school week. In 2021 it went further,
permitting only three hours a week. The limits were part of a crackdown on
consumer-tech firms that horrified entrepreneurs and investors. Still, parents
around the world will be keen to know whether they did any good.
Those curious will find some clues in a remarkable new study by Panle Jia
Barwick and Chao Fu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as
Siyu Chen of Jinan University and Teng Li of Sun Yat-Sen University. It
sheds light on the impact of gaming (and other mobile-phone habits) on the
grades, well-being and job-market success of Chinese students. To tease out
such effects, the researchers make use of the government’s imposition of
time limits and the arrival of Genshin Impact. They show that mobile-phone
apps are contagious: students will use their phone more if roommates do.
The study also demonstrates some digital harm: grades suffer along with a
graduate’s initial job offers.
What sets the study apart is the data. The authors have access to the
university records of thousands of undergraduates who enrolled at a mid-
tier university in an unnamed southern province from 2018 to 2020. More
remarkable, they also have access to mobile-phone records—calls made,
apps used, locations visited—for millions of subscribers. Because
customers provide their national-identity number when they register for a
phone, the researchers can match the university records of 6,430 students to
their phone data. By looking at their calls, they can map out their friendship
networks, even before they arrived at university. And by consulting course
schedules and class locations, they are also able to chart where students
were meant to be each hour of the week.

The data provide a detailed portrait of undergraduate life. Students spend 93
hours a month on mobile-phone apps, including 12 hours on games. But
these averages mask wide variation. A third of the students use their phones
at least 210 hours a month—equivalent to 7 hours a day—and a third spend
30 hours a month on games. After the arrival of Genshin Impact, the
average student arrived at their study hall 18 minutes later and returned to
the dorm 25 minutes earlier, according to the data from their phones. Those
treasure chests were not going to open themselves.
Gaming can be a way to retreat from the people around you. Yet the
scholars show that app use is social. Extroverted students use games more
than their less outgoing peers. Students who report more game-time also
report better relationships with roommates. Phone habits spread. A student’s
use of apps is correlated with their roommates’ use, and this correlation
seems to reflect causation. How else to explain why a student’s use of apps
in college correlates with even their roommates’ pre-college use?
One difficulty in capturing the effects of phone habits is reverse causality:

students doing badly at school may seek escapist comfort. In addition, an
independent source of stress, such as homesickness or loneliness, might
simultaneously hurt a student’s grades and glue them to their phone,
without the phone itself harming their grades. The researchers therefore
exploit two factors that affected phone use but not grades. One was the
appearance of Genshin Impact. The other was the government’s curbs on
gaming. These limits affected only a few of the students directly: 92% of
them were already 18 when the rules began. But the regulation did affect
their underage friends. And since gaming is contagious, a reduction in their
friends’ usage curtailed their own.
Sacrifice to the digital gods
The findings are best conveyed by imagining two nearly identical students,
one of whom spends twice as much time gaming as the other. The gamer’s
grades, on a scale from 0 to 100, would be 0.8 points lower. Because
averages are clustered in Chinese universities, that would reduce their class
ranking by 10 percentile points. Now imagine two identical students with
contrasting roommates: one set spend twice as much time on gaming apps

as the other set. That would lower a student’s grade average by 0.4 points,
partly because it would encourage the student to spend a bit more time
gaming as well, reducing their rank by 5 percentile points.
What if gaming limits were extended to undergraduates? The authors

estimate it would cut a student’s monthly game time from 12 hours to under
eight, partly because friends and roommates would also play less. The
restraint would raise their grades and lift their wages after graduation by
0.9% or 48 yuan ($6.80) a month. Games like Genshin Impact, which are
free to play, exact a real cost. For some spiritual opium-eaters, intent on
discovering other kinds of treasure, even lost wages may seem a small
sacrifice. ■

economics/2024/10/24/how-bad-are-video-games-for-your-grades

Science & technology

The study of ancient DNA is helping to solve modern
crimes
Old case files :: Such techniques have helped secure two convictions this year
Why Oriental hornets can’t get drunk

Buzzing without being buzzed :: They can guzzle extreme amounts for their size, without
suffering ill effects
Winemakers are building grape-picking robots

Robocrop :: Automating this delicate task is harder than it seems
Perovskite crystals may represent the future of solar power

Sunny side up :: Their efficiency rates far exceed those of conventional silicon panels

Old case files
The study of ancient DNA is

helping to solve modern crimes
Such techniques have helped secure two convictions this year
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
ESKE WILLERSLEV was an unusual witness for a murder trial. An expert

in ancient DNA (aDNA) at the University of Copenhagen, his day job
involved studying the lives of prehistoric peoples and extinct megafauna.
And yet over the summer of 2024 he was asked to persuade a jury that he
had something to offer in another field altogether: crime-scene
investigation.
The crime in question was the murder of Emilie Meng, a 17-year-old

Danish girl who went missing in July 2016 and whose strangled body was
found in a lake on Christmas Eve that same year. The police had hoped that

Meng’s trousers, found metres from her body, would yield valuable DNA
clues for them to follow up. But after being exposed to the elements for six
months, any traces of useful material left on the clothes would be seriously
damaged. Desperate for answers, the police turned to Dr Willerslev.
The Meng case is one of the first in the world to make use of techniques
honed in the sequencing and analysis of time-ravaged scraps of genetic
material. It may not be the last. In Denmark standard forensic methods fail
to retrieve useful genetic information from 20% to 30% of the items in
police custody that may or may not contain DNA. In other, less forensically
developed, countries, the figure is likely to be higher, potentially
contributing to unsolved cases or even wrongful convictions. The forensics
community is rightly conservative when it comes to using new technology
that could help, says Dr Willerslev. “But on the other hand, I also think it’s
important that you take up these new inventions and start testing [them].”
For aDNA techniques, that moment appears to have arrived.
All DNA is made up of four distinct molecules known as bases, strung

together in combinations to form long polymer chains. Pairs of chains are
linked together by bonds that form between their bases, giving DNA its
famous double-helix structure. At certain specific sites along the chains
short strings of bases will repeat, often many times in a row, in what are
called short tandem repeats (STRs).
Different people will have a different number of STRs at each site, which
allows DNA samples to be matched to their owner simply by measuring the
number of repeats. If two samples are identical across several sites (a full
STR profile usually consists of between 16 and 25 sites), the chances they
come from two different people is vanishingly small. The technique is quick
and cheap, and massive STR databases of criminals already exist. But it has
one big limitation: scientists need stretches of DNA no shorter than 100-400
base-pairs long to be sure of capturing any single STR in full. That is not
always possible, as DNA carries on breaking down over time or when
exposed to the elements. In such cases, police are left with little to go on.
Researchers working with aDNA cannot afford to be so easily discouraged.

In ancient human and animal remains, DNA fragments can easily be as
short as 35 base pairs. To extract information from these fragments,

researchers must identify or “sequence” every single base they can lay their
hands on. This involves carefully dissolving the DNA into a solution and
separating it from other gunk in the sample, which may include DNA of
hitchhiking microbes. After some more preparation, the DNA is then fed to
a next-generation sequencing machine that can read millions of fragments
in parallel.
Puzzle-solving
Because almost all human DNA is conserved between individuals, software

can use a reference genome to put each little fragment in its correct place.
The result is long strings of DNA where each pair of bases is identified.
Sites where individual pairs of bases differ between individuals are known
as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Scientists often find tens of
thousands of such sites.
Dr Willerslev had been able to obtain SNPs from Meng’s trousers. Then
came the task of trying to identify whom they could have come from. In
2023 a man called Philip Patrick Westh was arrested in connection with a
kidnapping case in the same area; because of similarities between the cases,
the police believed that he had killed Meng too (Mr Westh denies most of
the accusations related to the kidnapping case and pleaded not guilty to the
charge of killing Meng). To assess the probability that the genetic material
from Meng’s trousers had come from Mr Westh, Dr Willerslev made use of
a DNA database of ordinary, healthy Danes. If the SNPs found on the
trousers were identical to those in Mr Westh’s DNA, went the logic, and
enough of them were sufficiently rare variants, the probability that they did
indeed come from Mr Westh went up. Dr Willerslev testified that this
particular pattern of SNP variants would be at least one million times more
likely to turn up if the sample included DNA from Mr Westh, or a close
relative, than if it did not.
Modern forensic labs do some SNP analysis already. For instance, says Bo
Thisted Simonsen from the Danish state forensic genetics lab at the
University of Copenhagen, SNP data is sometimes used to obtain
information about a perpetrator’s height, ethnicity and eye colour. In certain
cases, police can also upload a suspected perpetrator’s SNP profile to a

commercial ancestry database to look for matches. As many home kits
allow people to test themselves for certain SNPs, police can often turn up
people related to the perpetrator. The American authorities did just this to
catch the Golden State Killer in 2018, using DNA collected from an old
rape kit.
But identifying a suspect from SNPs is another matter. Degraded samples

can be extremely complex to analyse, says Dr Simonsen, in particular if
material from several people has been mixed together. There are no
standardised forensic protocols for separating out those signals, nor for how
to confidently calculate the probability that the DNA belongs to a suspect.
That matters because the stakes are somewhat higher in a criminal case than
in the study of mammoths and dodos. But, says Dr Simonsen, “We expect
that nut to be cracked.” He hopes to learn from Dr Willerslev’s team and
develop new forensic tools. The work has already started: in September,
researchers from Aalborg University and the University of Copenhagen,
with whom he collaborates, published a paper describing an approach for
doing identification calculations based on SNPs.
He is not the only one to see potential. An American company called Astrea
Forensics has recently spun out from the palaeogenomics group at the
University of California in Santa Cruz, to offer aDNA expertise to law
enforcement. Their speciality is the nuclear DNA found within hair, which
has long been considered too fragmented and scarce to be of any use.
Next-generation forensics
One of the cases that spurred the scientists to start the company involved
the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl called Daralyn Johnson in 1982.
Hair found on her underwear was initially linked to a man named Charles
Fain. Seventeen years after receiving a death sentence, Mr Fain was
exonerated: mitochondrial DNA—which is easier to obtain than nuclear
DNA but can only rule people out—found in the hair proved that it did not
belong to him. But it was not until the hair’s fragmented nuclear DNA
underwent next-generation sequencing for SNPs that a new suspect was
found. On June 26th a man called David Dalrymple, who was already
serving a sentence of 20 years to life for kidnapping and sex crimes, was

found guilty of Johnson’s murder. He has appealed against the verdict and
maintains his innocence.
Among prosecutors and scientists looking at aDNA-style analysis, “This is

the next big phase of forensic DNA testing,” says Theodore Lagerwall of
Canyon County in Idaho, who prosecuted the Johnson case. Kelly Harkins
Kincaid, the co-founder of Astrea Forensics, calls the case “historic”; to her
knowledge, it is the first time that these methods have identified a suspect
in America. Two days after Mr Dalrymple’s conviction, Mr Westh was
found guilty of the murder of Emilie Meng; he immediately appealed. The
case does not rest entirely on aDNA analysis; conventional forensic
techniques also found Meng’s DNA on a roll of tape at his house. The
courts have yet to reach a conclusion. ■
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technology/2024/10/23/the-study-of-ancient-dna-is-helping-to-solve-modern-crimes

Buzzing without being buzzed
Why Oriental hornets can’t get

drunk
They can guzzle extreme amounts for their size, without suffering ill effects
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
LIKE PEOPLE, many animals enjoy having a drink every now and again.
Rather than sip brandy or Chablis, though, they feed on fermented fruit, but
the effects are the same. Though alcohol is rich in calories, it muddles
minds and shortens lifespans. It presents a serious risk to animals and most
avoid drinking to excess.
Then there is the Oriental hornet, a bug native to northern Africa and south-
western Asia, which loves fermented fruits and is so attracted to human-
made alcoholic beverages that it will aggressively fight for them with a
sting that is akin to being jabbed with a searing hot tack. Everyone has

assumed that the rules for the hornet were the same as those for other
species—that the alcohol poses them problems. But new research reveals
that the rules do not apply. The bugs are immune to becoming drunk and do
not have their lives shortened by booze, either.
The problems from alcohol come from the yeast that makes it. The fungus
guards the fruits, vegetables and grains that it grows on by producing a
toxin, ethanol, to ward off competitors. Very few animals can endure
consumption of food rich in ethanol. To date, the champions of this
particular contest have been tree shrews and fruit flies, which can
periodically ingest concentrations of up to 3.8% and 4% ethanol
respectively without suffering ill effects (humans can tolerate far more:
wine is typically 10% alcohol and spirits are around 40%). With this in
mind, Sofia Bouchebti at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Eran
Levin at Tel Aviv University found themselves perplexed by Oriental hornet
oenophilia.
Since the existing literature on the predilection of Oriental hornets for

strong human drinks was sparse, Dr Bouchebti and Dr Levin decided to
explore how much ethanol the bugs could cope with. They put small groups
of the insects into testing boxes where they were fed sugar water for seven
days that was laced with 0%, 1%, 10%, 20%, 60% or 80% ethanol. The
hornets fed the 80% solution were, in effect, a negative control and were
not supposed to survive. All the same, they did.
Stunned, the researchers ran experiments to monitor longevity and nest-

building behaviour. They report in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences this week that even as the hornets gorged on the 80% ethanol
solution they maintained normal lifespans, built ordinary nests and behaved
as they usually did. Unlike all other known animals, they were unphased by
chronic consumption of exceedingly high levels of ethanol. Follow-up work
with chemically labelled ethanol that was fed to the insects revealed that the
key to their extraordinary abilities is the presence of multiple copies of the
gene for alcohol dehydrogenase, which supports the production of enzymes
that break ethanol down into components that can be metabolised.
As to why Oriental hornets have multiple copies of this pivotal gene, Dr

Bouchebti speculates that it has to do with a close relationship that the

hornet has with the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as
brewer’s yeast. During the winter, the queens of many social wasps, like the
Oriental hornet, are known to harbour the yeast on their bodies along with
other microbes. Then, when spring arrives, they transfer it to their newly
hatched workers who then spread it to the fruits they come into contact
with. It would seem that evolution has driven hornets carrying extra copies
of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene to be selected for over time, so they can
continue to make use of these food sources even after they are rendered
utterly inedible to other species by the ethanol released by the yeast.
In essence, the relationship between the yeast and the hornets seems to be
symbiotic; the hornets carry the yeast to things it can feed on and the yeast
then preserves these food sources for these hornets, and only them, to feast
upon. Whether any other species of social wasp has such a remarkable
tolerance for alcohol remains to be determined; but Dr Bouchebti and Dr
Levin think it is likely, given the fondness that so many of them seem to
have for brewer’s yeast. ■

technology/2024/10/23/why-oriental-hornets-cant-get-drunk

Robocrop
Winemakers are building grape-

picking robots
Automating this delicate task is harder than it seems
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | Saffron Walden
MODERN FARMS are increasingly automated—from GPS-controlled

combine harvesters to machines that shake apples from trees. One task,
though, seems stubbornly resistant to being ceded to robots: picking grapes.
Like all soft fruit, grapes have a narrow window of ripeness, and are prone
to being bruised or crushed if picked by clumsy metallic fingers. Matters
are worse if the fruit is intended for fine wine. At upwards of £5,000
($6,480) per tonne, the value of an individual grape—grown in the right
place at the right time—is enough to make such accidents unacceptable.
Most vineyards therefore have a strict no-robots policy.

A project at Saffron Grange vineyard in Essex, however, aims to change
some minds. Engineers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL),
working with Extend Robotics, a firm also based in London, are building a
grape-picking robot equipped with visual sensors powered by artificial
intelligence (AI) to tell when fruit is ripe, and pressure-sensitive fingers to
grasp and cut bunches from vines without having to shake any fruit loose.
The visual sensors work by looking for light that has passed through the
grapes and measuring which wavelengths come out the other side. A glass
of ethanol and a glass of water may look the same to the naked eye but if
you can see exactly which wavelengths of light are absorbed by the liquid,
it is trivial to tell them apart. The same technique can be used to determine
the levels of sugar present in grape juice, says Lei Su, a photonics
researcher at QMUL. Doing all this when the juice is still inside a grape, the
grape is still on a vine, and the vine is in the Essex countryside is the
challenge: “The information contained in the spectrum is actually too
abundant,” says Dr Su. So the team has trained an AI model to focus on the
grape itself and ignore the noise. In the long run, the hope is to separate the
sensors from the robot entirely, and have a static system that can
autonomously monitor an entire vineyard—an array of cameras watching
the grapes grow, checking for disease, and alerting vintners to when the
optimal time is to start their harvest.
The project is still in its early stages. The current version of the robot has to
be awkwardly puppeteered in real-time by a pilot wearing a virtual-reality
(VR) headset (a Quest 3, produced by Meta, a social-media giant). The
owners of Saffron Grange vineyard have provided leaf, grape and juice
samples to train the AI systems and committed to planting half a field of
vines in which the robot can run amok. Needless to say, the machine is not
yet ready to be allowed anywhere near this year’s actual grape harvest.
Robotic help would be a boon for the vineyard. Harvest time is short and
intense—a ten-day flurry of activity when a typical English vineyard’s staff
will swell five-fold. The perfect window to harvest grapes for sparkling
wine is just “a few days”, says Nick Edwards, Saffron Grange’s director,
but sparse autumn sunlight, labour shortages and variations induced by
climate change mean it often takes more than a week. With a robot, Paul

Harrison, the vineyard’s manager, envisions turning grape-picking into a
24-hour operation by hiring skilled labourers in Australia who could dial
into the VR controls and pick grapes remotely, after his local workers have
clocked off for the day. He hopes to offer the same service in reverse during
the southern hemisphere’s harvest, since the two growing seasons and time
zones perfectly offset each other. By picking grapes over a shorter time,
losses of crops to mildew, frost and pests could also be reduced.
Remote-controlling the grape-picking robots will also help to break what

Chang Liu, Extend’s founder, describes as a vicious circle for robotics
companies, in which there are too few robots around to generate useful
data, and too little useful data with which to train and build future robots.
With the help of robots piloted at a distance, Extend will be able to amass
training data (in this case on how to best pick grapes). In time, the robots
would become autonomous, leaving the humans with more time to relax
and enjoy the English sparkling wine. ■

technology/2024/10/23/winemakers-are-building-grape-picking-robots

Sunny side up
Perovskite crystals may represent

the future of solar power
Their efficiency rates far exceed those of conventional silicon panels
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午 | OXFORD
IT IS COMMONLY claimed, and also true, that enough sunlight falls on

Earth in the course of an hour to meet a year’s worth of global power needs.
Some of that sunlight is currently converted into electricity by arrays of
solar panels: by the end of 2023, these panels covered almost 10,000 square
kilometres of Earth’s surface, producing some 1,600 terawatt-hours of
electricity, about 6% of that generated worldwide.
The amount of installed solar-capacity has been doubling roughly every

three years. This is happening as the silicon-based solar cells used in the
panels have been getting cheaper with intense competition among firms in

China, which with state support have come to dominate the industry. At the
same time, researchers have found ways to make the cells better at
absorbing the energy in sunlight. Modern solar panels operate with
efficiency rates of 22-24%—a massive increase from the 6% achieved when
the first practical solar cells were invented in the 1950s at Bell Labs in New
Jersey, and were so expensive they mostly powered satellites.
Yet most processes have their limits. The maximum theoretical efficiency of
a silicon solar cell—the amount of energy in sunlight that is turned into
electricity—is around 29%. This is possible only in laboratory conditions.
When cells are packed together into solar panels, the total efficiency of the
panel is unlikely to get above 26%. This is partly because the spaces
between cells and other parts of the panel, such as the frame, do not
contribute to making electricity. There are also inevitable losses of energy
in the wires connecting the cells.
The future of solar power, however, could lie in a new, more efficient, type
of solar cell that has just gone into production. Made with a family of
crystalline materials called perovskites, they are capable of delivering
panels with practical efficiency rates well above 30%.
Jumping the gap
Traditional solar cells typically contain two layers of ultra-pure silicon, both
doped with an additive to make them semiconducting (ie, the ability to
work as either a conductor or insulator). As they absorb light, electrons
receive enough energy to jump across the junction between the layers,
producing an electric current. Although other semiconductors can do the
same, none rivals the affordability of silicon, which is produced cheaply
from sand.
The original perovskite is a mineral called calcium titanium oxide. It was

discovered in 1839 and named after Count Lev Perovski, a Russian
mineralogist. The name has since become a generic term for substances
with a similar crystalline structure. One of the things that makes perovskites
so attractive to researchers as an alternative to silicon is that, in addition to
being efficient at absorbing the energy in sunlight, they can also be made

cheaply from easily obtainable materials, including a number of metals and
halogens, like chlorine, bromine and iodine.
Even though their light-absorbing superpowers have been known for some
time, they have been difficult to harness, not least because perovskites
degrade quickly and can be susceptible to moisture. Researchers are
therefore searching for ways to make them more stable and to adapt
manufacturing processes to protect the cells from the elements.
A leader in developing perovskite panels is Oxford PV, a British company.

The firm has developed “tandem cells”, consisting of a thin layer of
perovskite placed on a bed of silicon. The idea is that the two materials
working together can extract a greater amount of energy from sunlight than
each could individually. To do so, the perovskite layer is tweaked to absorb
light from the blue end of the spectrum while the silicon layer mops up the
wavelengths at the red end, says Chris Case, the company’s chief
technology officer.
The firm has opened a factory in Germany which has just started to supply
commercial tandem-cell solar panels to its first customer, an unnamed
utility in America. The panels are being installed, along with conventional
silicon units, at a new grid-connected solar farm. This will provide
perovskites with their first big test at this scale, not just for efficiency but
also durability and longevity. As silicon panels are expected to continue
working for 20-25 years, perovskites must demonstrate similar lifespans.
The first production panels have an average efficiency of 24.5%, adds Dr

Case. A new generation under development has reached 26.9%, and this is
expected to increase to well over 30% as research continues. The theoretical
efficiency limit for a perovskite tandem cell in a laboratory is around 43%
(compared with the 29% for silicon) even if that is also unlikely to be
reached once it is integrated into a panel.
Other companies are also close to commercialising their versions of

perovskite-on-silicon solar panels. Hanwha, a big South Korean industrial
group, has invested 137bn won ($102m) in a factory to make tandem cells
for its QCells range of solar panels. At lab scale, the firm says individual
cells have achieved a maximum efficiency of 29.3%.

The current world record for a lab-based perovskite tandem cell is 34.6%.
This was claimed in June by LONGi Green Energy Technology, a big
Chinese manufacturer. It began working on mass-production for the cells in
October 2023. The firm says it has also achieved 30.1% efficiency in a
prototype commercial-size panel, though it has not yet announced when
production will begin. ■

technology/2024/10/21/perovskite-crystals-may-represent-the-future-of-solar-power

Culture
In a posthumous memoir, Alexei Navalny chronicles his
martyrdom
Opposing Putin’s tyranny :: “Patriot”, by the murdered Russian opposition leader, will be seen
as a historic text
Is the idea of sexual identity relatively new?

Sexy time :: A new history of American sexuality argues that it is
TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks

Why do you Tok like that? :: On social media new words spread far and fast
Can there ever be another great le Carré novel?

You look so familiar :: John le Carré’s son has written a bold new thriller in the vein of the
great spy writer’s chronicles
Softbank’s gambling founder, Masayoshi Son, is catnip for

authors
The setting Son? :: But readers will remember him as much for his missteps as for his
successes
What the row over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book reveals about

free speech
Back Story :: The deep message of “The Message” is about narrow-mindedness, not Israel

Opposing Putin’s tyranny
In a posthumous memoir, Alexei

Navalny chronicles his martyrdom
“Patriot”, by the murdered Russian opposition leader, will be seen as a
historic text
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
Patriot. By Alexei Navalny. Translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel.

Knopf; 496 pages; $35. Bodley Head; £25
THREE AND A HALF years before Alexei Navalny was murdered by

Vladimir Putin, he was very nearly killed by him, and he described the
feeling of sliding into oblivion. “It’s all lies, what they say,” he wrote. “My
whole life is not flashing before my eyes. The faces of those dearest to me
do not appear. Neither do angels or a dazzling light.” He sensed his brain

was shutting down: “Life is draining away, and I have no will to
resist...Then I died.”
In August 2020 Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was

poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia by assassins from the FSB, Russia’s
security service. Flown to a hospital in Berlin, he stayed in a coma for 18
days. Less than six months later, in January 2021, he returned to Russia to
face Mr Putin, the tyrant who wanted him dead. His encounter with
oblivion in 2020 had only strengthened his determination to face squarely
up to death inside Russia.
To your correspondent, who sat two rows behind Navalny on that flight,
one thing was clear: Navalny’s return to Moscow was more than a physical
journey. It marked his transformation from man to hero. His death earlier
this year in a prison above the Arctic Circle enhanced that reputation. Now
his book, “Patriot”, creates a record that will last. It has been published in
22 languages, including Russian.
Ever since he was arrested at passport control, the question his fellow
prisoners and much of the world asked openly (and guards discreetly) was:
why did he return to Russia, given that he would almost certainly be
arrested or killed? Navalny writes that the question frustrated him. He went
back to his country and his people because he had a clear sense of mission
—to liberate Russia from a despot’s grip. “If your convictions mean
something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices
if necessary.”
The early chapters of “Patriot” cover his childhood in military towns near
Moscow; his summers spent near Chernobyl with his Ukrainian
grandmother; his courtship of his wife, Yulia; and his infatuation (and
disillusionment) with Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia after the
Soviet Union’s collapse. Those chapters—which go up to 1999, when Mr
Putin came to power and Navalny entered politics—were written as he
recovered in Germany. Had he stayed there, he would have written a
complete memoir as an exiled politician.
But he did not. A quarter of the way into the manuscript, Navalny flew back
to Moscow. He reflects on the dramatic change in his narrative with

characteristic irony. “It is traditional in fiction to write something along the
lines of: ‘The smooth flow of my narrative is disrupted at this point by
such-and-such event.’” The remaining three-quarters of the text was written
in prison. Guards tried to intercept the notes he passed from his cell and
arrested three of his lawyers; they limited his access to pen and paper to 90
minutes a day. Somehow his words broke through prison walls.
“Patriot” carries echoes of works by political prisoners in Russia and

elsewhere. Much like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The House of the Dead”
(1862), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” (1973) and
Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), “Patriot”
transcends its place and time. Its value lies not in what it tells you about the
cruelties of Mr Putin’s regime, but in what it reveals about the human spirit.
Yet in its intensity and colloquial style, Navalny’s book is best understood
as a 21st-century counterpart to one of the most important texts in Russian
literature: “The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written By Himself”.
Avvakum was a 17th-century cleric and religious dissident who defended
his faith. He was twice banished, imprisoned in Siberia and eventually
executed by being burned alive. Avvakum entitled his book zhitie—which
can be translated as “life” and interpreted as “hagiography”. A heretic in the
eyes of the church and state, Avvakum wrote a book that prepared him for
sainthood.
“Patriot”, too, is a passionate account of Russia’s extreme violence and a

moving reflection on endurance and accepting death. It is animated by
Navalny’s faith, his love for Yulia, his land and his people, as well as his
hatred of those who corrupt Russia’s souls and despoil its lands.
Navalny hated Mr Putin not because this man tried to kill him, but because
he suppressed individual dignity and built a state based on greed and lies,
glorying in cynicism and violence. Mr Putin’s war against Ukraine was also
a war against Navalny’s dream of Russia as a normal European country
whose citizens could be free to make their own decisions. In a dictatorship,
Navalny’s only weapon was his life.
The stronger Navalny was spiritually, the angrier Mr Putin grew. He

deprived Navalny of sleep and locked him in solitary confinement, housing

a yelling psychopath nearby to try to drive him mad. He sought to break
Navalny’s will during a hunger strike by tantalising him with the smell of
fried chicken. “Prison is the best place to improve your stamina,” Navalny
wrote in December 2023, when he was moved to the Arctic penal colony.
His body was wasting away, but he wrote that his mood “is great and quite
Christmassy”.
Navalny collapsed suddenly, showing signs of poisoning, and died on

February 16th 2024. But his story does not end there; nor does the book. An
epilogue, written in March 2022, describes Navalny’s calm reaction to a
new sentence of nine years in a penal colony. “I knew from the outset that I
would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end
of the life of this regime.” He also knew that a regime does not “come
crashing down in such a way that its falling debris breaks open the doors of
prisons”.
He prepared for death by working on what he called his “prison Zen”. He

had two techniques. One was to imagine the worst thing that could happen
and accept it, skipping the stages of denial, anger and bargaining. “I will
spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody
to say goodbye to...All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll
never see my grandchildren.”
The second technique involved faith. If you are “a disciple of the religion
whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins”
and you trust “in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff”,
then “what is there left for you to worry about?” He remained a devoted
Christian until the end and trusted that “Good old Jesus and the rest of his
family…won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say
in prison here: they will take my punches for me.” ■
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies,
sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/22/in-a-posthumous-memoir-alexei-navalny-
chronicles-his-martyrdom


Sexy time
Is the idea of sexual identity

relatively new?
A new history of American sexuality argues that it is
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
Fierce Desires. By Rebecca Davis. W.W. Norton; 480 pages; $35
THE FIRST time the lads slept together was in 1864. Teenage soldiers in
the Union army, Hubbel Pierce and Alonzo Choate met on the march to the
South and fell for each other, brothers in arms. When they returned to their
lives as homesteaders in Michigan, Pierce gave Choate a ring. In letters
they called each other “beloved husband” and joked about their sex life.
Relatives joined in the teasing. In one letter, Choate’s sister wrote a
postscript in which she referred to her brother as Pierce’s “wife”.

If they had lived in modern times, Choate and Pierce might identify as gay,
and people might refer to them as such. Today sexuality makes people who
they are: straight and gay, the stripes in a rainbow flag, she/her/they/them.
Some argue that is the way it has always been. Many on the left believe that
“Today’s sexual identities are authentic because they are eternal,” writes
Rebecca Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware.
Poppycock, Ms Davis writes in “Fierce Desires”, a chronicle of American

shagging from the colonial era to the present. The idea that sex defines
people did not emerge until, roughly, the turn of the 20th century. If Choate
and Pierce had met just a few decades later, their contemporaries would
have seen them as categorically different from heterosexuals. Meeting as
they did in the 1860s, neither they nor their relatives appeared to believe
that their intimacy made them different. And their romance did not stop
them from going on to marry women.
In the 19th century sex was something you did, not who you were. Sex
among young men was “common and mostly unpunished” because it was
seen as a passing phase in the transition to marriage. Before the 20th
century identity was not intrinsically sexual, Ms Davis argues. People were
gentlemen or servants; free or enslaved; bad Christians or good (or non-
believers); indigenous, English and, later, American. Those identities
shaped their sex lives and ideas about the morality of sex. For the Pueblo of
New Mexico, intercourse between an unwed native woman and a foreign
man was an act of diplomacy. Christians saw the same act as sinful.
(Luckily for Christians prone to slipping up, God is often a forgiving sort.)
A slew of historical forces gradually pushed sex to the centre of the self.
Gays and lesbians flocked to cities and, as they found each other, began to
pinpoint their sexual orientation as “the defining aspect of their difference”,
writes Ms Davis. As gays became more visible in the 1920s, particularly on
stage in cabarets and speakeasies during what people once called the “pansy
and lesbian craze”, those who were not gay began to define themselves in
opposition to homosexuals. These people began to call themselves
“heterosexual”.
The idea that sex formed the cornerstone of identity was just emerging; it
would be popularised by intellectuals, activists and the state. In the late

1800s doctors came to understand same-sex desire as an illness of the mind
rather than an aberrant act of an otherwise normal person. The government
agreed and purged homosexuals from the army and civil service in the
1940s-50s. At the same time, thinkers including Herbert Marcuse, a
German-American philosopher, laid the intellectual groundwork for the
sexual revolution of the 1960s when they wrote that sexual liberation was a
prerequisite for the political kind. By this point, no matter whether one
favoured sexual repression or freedom, everyone seemed to agree: sex was
more than an act. It defined the person.
Ms Davis is an engaging guide to the past, especially when she upends

assumptions. But as the book builds to a climax, her account stops just short
of satisfaction. She chronicles the emergence of sexual identity but does not
adequately explain how it arose. Why, exactly, gay urbanites identified
sexual orientation as the source of their difference goes unanswered.
“Fierce Desires” is therefore an entertaining romp but ultimately frustrating.
Ms Davis is a tease. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/24/is-the-idea-of-sexual-identity-
relatively-new

Why do you Tok like that?
TikTok is changing how Gen Z

speaks
On social media new words spread far and fast
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
THE WORD “demure” is old—it describes the sort of modest lady

Victorians esteemed—but it is freshly fashionable. There are some 800,000
posts on TikTok with the tag #demure. Youngsters today are using the word
with lashings of irony, invoking it to describe everything from Saturn to
sunset to New York City’s bin service.
TikTok is changing how young people talk. Other fusty words, such as
“coquette”, are fashionable again. Colloquialisms are on the rise: members
of Gen Z say “yapping” instead of “talking” and trim “delusional” to
“delulu”. New words have also become popular. Take “skibidi”, a term

popularised by a meme of an animated head singing in a toilet; it means
“cool”, “bad” or “very”, depending on the context.
On social media words spread far and fast. Each year at least 100 English
words are produced or given new meaning on TikTok, reckons Tony
Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College
London. Some linguists think the platform is changing not just what
youngsters are saying, but how they are saying it. A “TikTok accent”, which
includes “uptalk”, an intonation that rises at the end of sentences, may be
spreading.
The platform’s versatility encourages experimentation. Users can combine

audio, text and video in a single post. That means words that sound
especially satisfying can go viral, as well as those that are memorable in
written form. Linguistic code has emerged, dubbed “algospeak”, to dodge
content-moderation algorithms. It includes euphemisms (sex workers are
called “accountants”), and misspellings (“seggs” instead of sex).
The mutation of language on TikTok is also due, in large part, to the age of
its users. Most are 18-34 years old. That matters because “Young people are
language innovators,” says Christian Ilbury, a sociolinguist at the University
of Edinburgh. For decades youngsters have created words to distinguish
themselves from adults. On social media such neologisms find a big
audience. Mr Ilbury describes this as “linguistic identity work”; parents
have long called it attention-seeking.
The platform brings together fan groups and communities, from #kpopfans
(people who like Korean pop music) to #booktokers (people who love
reading). These groups create their own slang, says Adam Aleksic, a linguist
and influencer. Some of it leaks into the mainstream. Other slang comes
from specific groups: black people have innovated and spread hundreds of
English words over the years, from “cool” to “tea” (gossip). Journalists and
screenwriters popularise such words; now TikTokers do, too.
All this speeds up the evolution of language. That delights logophiles but
befuddles dictionary-makers, who must keep a record of the ever-expanding
lexicon. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Britain’s most illustrious
chronicler of language, adds a word only after it has been used for about

five years. That is too slow to keep up with modern parlance. The OED is
just now adding words such as “binge-worthy”, which already feels tired;
its own “word of the year” for 2023, “rizz” (charm), which originated and
was popularised online, has not yet made the cut. TikTok has just the phrase
to describe such a modest approach: very demure. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/21/tiktok-is-changing-how-gen-z-speaks

You look so familiar
Can there ever be another great le

Carré novel?
John le Carré’s son has written a bold new thriller in the vein of the great
spy writer’s chronicles
10月 24, 2024 04:47 上午
Karla’s Choice. By Nick Harkaway. Viking; 320 pages; $30 and £22
CHARACTERS DO NOT die with their creators. Some live on in bold new
guises in modern spin-offs and mash-ups. Over the past two decades,
authors have brought Shakespeare’s protagonists and Jane Austen’s
heroines into the 21st century in a range of inventive “retellings”. Another
sort of resurrection can come in the form of a continuation novel. Literary
estates commission authors they regard as a safe pair of (typing) hands to

breathe new life into a franchise and further the adventures of much-loved
characters.
Some writers have risen to the challenge more than once. Sophie Hannah
has five whodunnits featuring Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Anthony
Horowitz wrote two Sherlock Holmes novels, and Sebastian Faulks has
produced a breezy Jeeves and Wooster caper in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse;
both authors have taken James Bond on separate missions with Britain’s
Secret Intelligence Service.
Another literary spy features in a new novel four years after the death of his
creator: John le Carré’s (pictured) valiant yet unassuming cold-war warrior,
George Smiley. Set between the events chronicled in “The Spy Who Came
in From the Cold” (1963) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974) and
incorporating familiar faces from le Carré’s fiction, “Karla’s Choice” is a
continuation novel crafted with more care and attention than most. It was
written by Nick Harkaway, the nom de plume of le Carré’s son.
The book begins with an unexpected visitor and a mysterious

disappearance. In the spring of 1963 a Soviet assassin named Miki Bortnik
turns up at the door of Laszlo Banati’s literary agency in London and
announces to the assistant, fellow Hungarian émigré Susanna Gero, that he
has come to kill her boss. No murder is committed: Miki reveals he has
changed his mind; more important, Laszlo has gone missing. British
intelligence is alerted, and George Smiley, recently retired, is lured back to
“the Circus” to locate him and find out why he has fallen foul of Moscow.
From this premise, Mr Harkaway thickens his plot and spins a satisfyingly
intricate tale filled with intrigue and suspense. Laszlo, more a Soviet agent
than a literary one, becomes a wanted man by both sides. Smiley follows
his trail to Vienna, Budapest and Berlin, a city that “existed in a frozen
parody of peace”. As stakes are raised and loyalties are tested, he comes to
realise that lurking in the background and calling the shots is his Russian
counterpart and nemesis, Karla.
Continuation novelists must be expert impersonators. They have to adhere

to tried-and-tested formulas and emulate distinct narrative styles and voices.
To render his book authentic, Mr Harkaway draws on all the winning

elements that made his father’s novels so memorable. He creates a
recognisably murky world of treachery, duplicity and moral complexity. He
blends in le Carré’s tradecraft and jargon, such as lamplighters (surveillance
agents) and Cousins (Americans). His cast includes the usual ragtag
members of the Circus along with “the Stasi’s favourite son”, Hans-Dieter
Mundt. Now and again he delights with a knowing wink to aficionados:
“Spying is waiting,” he declares, recycling a leitmotif from “The Russia
House” (1989).
In his author’s note, Mr Harkaway poses a question that is central to the

success of a continuation novel: “Does it feel right?” The answer here is a
resounding yes. “Karla’s Choice” could have been a crude pastiche and a
dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller.
It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue
playing the imitation game. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/24/can-there-ever-be-another-great-le-
carre-novel

The setting Son?
Softbank’s gambling founder,

Masayoshi Son, is catnip for
authors
But readers will remember him as much for his missteps as for his successes
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
Gambling Man. By Lionel Barber. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be

published in America by Atria/One Signal in January; $29.99
The Money Trap. By Alok Sama. St Martin’s Press; 304 pages; $30.
Macmillan Business; £22
MASAYOSHI SON, boss of SoftBank, a Japanese tech and telecoms giant,

is one of the boldest investors of modern times. He earned billions from

prescient investments in Arm Holdings, a chip company, and Yahoo and
Alibaba, two internet pioneers. Yet Mr Son also vaporised billions with
astonishing speed by staking the likes of WeWork and countless other tech
confections. Revered for his insight, he is mocked for his overreach.
Discerning the true Masa, as he is known, is no small task. Two new books
illuminate his essence, though neither quite reconciles the central
dichotomy of his long career. One, a cradle-to-present treatment by Lionel
Barber, former editor of the Financial Times, lays claim to being the first
Western biography of Mr Son. The other, a lively memoir by Alok Sama,
Softbank’s former chief financial officer, offers an unvarnished insider’s
peek at the man.
Mr Barber paints Mr Son, who granted the author extensive access, as

heroic, if flawed. “If hubris brought him tumbling down, not once, not
twice but three times, he never gave up,” he writes. Mr Son’s career arc is
epic and his persistence legendary. As an ethnic Korean growing up in
poverty in Japan, he was a keen student who yearned from a tender age to
be wealthy. A teenage Mr Son fixated on and finagled a meeting with a
Japanese entrepreneur, Den Fujita, who had brought McDonald’s franchises
to Japan. Fujita gave him two pieces of advice: learn English and pursue
computers.
Before long, Mr Son found his way to the University of California,

Berkeley, where he teamed up with a professor to start his first company.
Mr Barber outs Mr Son as slippery, both in his own mythmaking and in his
business dealings: the professor, 92 years old when Mr Barber tracks him
down in Berkeley, claims Mr Son cheated him out of money.
Operating from Japan, Mr Son forged himself into the tech world’s “Zelig”
(a constant chameleon played in a film of that name by Woody Allen). He
did a deal with Rupert Murdoch, an Australian media baron; claimed to
have shared with Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, his own sketch for a
smartphone before the iPhone’s release; and in 2017 launched the largest-
ever tech investing fund, the so-called “Vision” fund, with $100bn. With
that he fuelled a fundraising craze among startups.

A literary tell-all, Mr Sama’s narrative chronicles his own journey as an
Indian-born former investment banker to become one of Masa’s key
lieutenants. As such, his tale functions as a Rorschach test for readers, who
will either interpret it as a paean to the glories of dealmaking or a screed
against the vacuousness and intellectual dishonesty of pursuing wealth at
the expense of relationships.
Figuring out what makes Masa “tick” is Mr Sama’s mission, though he

never quite fulfils it. He concludes that it is too simple to attribute Mr Son’s
verve to the scars he got as an outsider growing up in Japan. If anything, Mr
Son is sui generis, a cultural, financial and entrepreneurial black swan. Mr
Sama cleverly captures his former boss’s charm—“When he looked at me
and smiled, it was like Nick Carraway meets Gatsby”—yet he also narrates
Mr Son’s absurd and reckless side. For example, an affection for “numerical
symmetry” led Mr Son to promise India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, a
$10bn investment over ten years and America’s president-elect Donald
Trump an investment of $50bn and the creation of 50,000 jobs.
In the end, Mr Sama says he tried warning Mr Son that his breakneck
investments would end poorly. Mr Son eventually lost more than $10bn just
on WeWork, an office-letting firm. Why? The enormous size of his
investing fund meant that Mr Son needed to write large cheques, so he
favoured big bets, even in firms that were not really tech companies.
However, Mr Sama cannot help but judge his former boss in a net-positive
light. “No matter the results, I will always be inspired by the colossal
vitality of Masa Son’s visions,” he writes.
But what of those visions? After his investments imploded Mr Son

announced he was taking a breather, only to say more recently he and
SoftBank are back in the tech-investing game. This month the firm put
$500m into OpenAI’s latest fundraising round, which values the startup at a
stunning $157bn. The inveterate gambler of Mr Barber’s title cannot quit
the casino. Mr Son is 67 and still has billions to burn.
His lasting impact on Silicon Valley is likely to be how he egged on venture

capitalists to raise ever-larger sums to compete with him. But his spotty
record disqualifies him from the list of tech-investing greats such as Arthur
Rock, an early backer of Apple, or John Doerr and Michael Moritz, who

staked Google. Were his career to end today, Mr Son would be remembered
as a bold financier whose timing was awful as often as it was spectacular
and who has not created anything nearly as unique as the entrepreneurs
whose companies he has sometimes correctly backed. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/24/softbanks-gambling-founder-masayoshi-
son-is-catnip-for-authors

Back Story

What the row over Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s book reveals about free
speech
The deep message of “The Message” is about narrow-mindedness, not
Israel
10月 24, 2024 04:50 上午
IT IS A common response among visitors to Israel, even before the war in

Gaza. They see the “teeming cafés” and “cocktail bars” of Tel Aviv, as Ta-
Nehisi Coates puts it, and, in the West Bank, hardship and expropriation.
The contrast offends natural justice and inspires compassion for
Palestinians. It would be odd if it did not. The book Mr Coates has written
on the basis of such impressions, and the controversy it has ignited, together
spotlight an urgent issue—but perhaps not the one he intended.

Mr Coates (pictured) has justly won acclaim and fame for his trenchant
essays on race in America. “The Message”, out in Britain next year and in
America now, recounts trips he made to a slave-trading site in Senegal and
to South Carolina, where obtuse book-banners targeted another of his titles.
These chapters introduce his theme of the use and abuse of stories in the
service of repression. But the main tale he tells is about Israel and the West
Bank, where in 2023—before the atrocities of October 7th—he spent ten
days.
Therein lies a glaring problem with “The Message”. It is discourteous to

both your subjects and readers to spin a book out of a ten-day visit to a
bitterly contested foreign land. First impressions can be valuable—and Mr
Coates’s observations on the wrongs of Israeli settlements are powerful—
but they are also incomplete. His is “a stranger’s story”, he acknowledges,
yet he tells it anyway.
The second problem is what, in a passionate indictment of Israel, Mr Coates

intentionally leaves out. He alludes to Israel’s wars with hostile neighbours
without saying why they were fought. He makes no mention of Palestinian
terrorism, nor of what the failures and fanaticism of Palestinian leaders
have cost their own people. The only Israeli views to feature are those of
chastened peaceniks. All this contradicts the journalistic credo that Mr
Coates himself sets out: that writers must “walk the land” they mean to
describe.
Excluding the context of Israel’s actions, which he calls “patently

immoral”, nobbles his analysis. On the plus side, it helps him liken the
Palestinians’ plight to the long oppression of African-Americans. This
flawed analogy between Zionism and white supremacy—between a tragic
internecine struggle and a one-sided subjugation—is axiomatic on the “anti-
colonial” left. With talk of the “separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule”,
Mr Coates labours the comparison. As much as a political dispatch, his
book reads as a bid to prove his bona fides to his comrades.
So “The Message” is pompous and misguided. Importantly, however, it is

not—as some have unfairly alleged—hateful or antisemitic. Its faults are
not disqualifying. Mr Coates had a perfect right to publish it.

And critics have an equally perfect right to interrogate it and him. Tony
Dokoupil, a morning-show host for CBS, did that on September 30th.
During an interview to promote “The Message”, he suggested it would “not
be out of place in the backpack of an extremist”, and asked whether Mr
Coates was questioning Israel’s right to exist.
Cue a brouhaha that is as much about media ethics as about the contents of
the book. Keyboard activists called Mr Dokoupil racist (he is white and
Jewish; Mr Coates is black). Meanwhile some of his colleagues at CBS
complained about the interview to executives, who admonished the
presenter for falling short of editorial standards. Shari Redstone—whose
conglomerate, Paramount Global, owns CBS—stood up for Mr Dokoupil
and rebuked his bosses.
The episode was profoundly troubling: the shaming of Mr Dokoupil, not the
interview. That was robust but cordial. Mr Dokoupil ensured Mr Coates had
time for his answers and ended by calling him “buddy”. It fell squarely
within the bounds of responsible broadcasting. Evidently, though, some at
CBS and beyond think certain in-group orthodoxies are too sacred to be
challenged. (To his credit, Mr Coates did not encourage the pile-on,
insisting “I can take care of myself.”)
This is the message that “The Message” has crystallised. It is not about the
conflict in the Middle East but the Western intellectual malaise it has
exacerbated. Legitimate opinions of all stripes are increasingly seen as
inadmissible, and reasonable questions as unaskable. For some,
disagreement is grounds for character assassination or censorship. In that
insidious way of thinking, free expression is a conditional right—in other
words, not a right at all. ■
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/10/18/what-the-row-over-ta-nehisi-coatess-
book-reveals-about-free-speech

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and

markets
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午

This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/economic-and-
financial-indicators/2024/10/24/economic-data-commodities-and-markets

| Main menu | Previous section |
Obituary
Fethullah Gulen tried to transform Turkey in the subtlest
ways
The Grand Infiltrator :: The scholar, teacher and activist died on Ocrober 20th, aged 83
| Main menu | Previous section |

The Grand Infiltrator
Fethullah Gulen tried to transform

Turkey in the subtlest ways
The scholar, teacher and activist died on Ocrober 20th, aged 83
10月 24, 2024 04:04 上午
AT THE CENTRE of a luxury retreat centre in the wooded Poconos

Mountains in Pennsylvania, a stocky elderly man sometimes walked slowly
about. He had been there since 1999, but was not often seen. In his native
Turkey he was under investigation, and from 2014 a wanted man. When,
reluctantly, he let BBC journalists come to interview him that year, he
showed them his living quarters: not the grand Ottoman-style palace at the
centre of the private estate, but two rooms in an adjacent building. His
bedroom barely had space for a mattress on the floor, his prayer mat, a chest
of drawers and a glass-fronted cabinet. How modestly and simply he lived!
The second room, however, was lined with crammed bookshelves, and on a

desk was a computer. Through this Fethullah Gulen still regularly preached,
in his archaic and Koran-coloured cadences, to his millions of followers in
Turkey and beyond. It was through this he was to become the second-most-
powerful man in Turkey, with only President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
surpassing him.
His rise had begun with schools. As a travelling preacher in eastern Anatolia
in the 1970s, he had set up “lighthouses” for poor but devout boys who
could not otherwise get an education: boys much as he had been in this hard
region, learning the Koran at a tender age, hanging on the wise talk of
village elders rather than playing with his friends, surrounded by the smoke
of the incense lamp his imam father lit in the evenings. He added to his
curriculum, though, ideas he had picked up later, including modern science
and Western philosophy, all blended with a mild, mystical Sufi strain of
Islam. The schools multiplied, and acquired dormitories; at their peak there
were 2,000 in Turkey and abroad. Their amazing spread, he liked to say,
was nothing to do with his own intellect or energy. It was God’s gift to him,
and to Turkey.
His schools were so good that parents fought to get their children on the list.
Their graduates breezed through exams for the civil service, the army and
government jobs. Each “golden generation” of graduates helped the next up
and on. By 2016 his followers, “Gulenists”, as people called them, held an
estimated 30% of the top judiciary posts and 50% of jobs in the police.
Their presence was so ubiquitous that they formed a state within the state.
“Dark”, “opaque” and “secret” were the words often applied to them. In his
view, they were bringing only light. His organisation—for his network of
schools, thanks be to God, had rapidly grown into one—was called Hizmet,
“service”. His followers were working for pluralism, peace and clean
government; they emphasised friendly relations with other faiths; they
believed, as he insisted he did, in democracy, free markets and free speech.
And they had purpose. They should move within the arteries of the secular
system, he told them, without anyone noticing, until they reached all the
centres of power.
He liked to compare this subtle, incremental work to restoring a ruined

house. Islam in Turkey was now corrupted. It was their duty to rebuild it in

the ancient style as a place of halls and heavenly kiosks, welcoming and
peace, filled with light and with ideas of immortality. It might seem that the
hurly-burly of politics did not belong there. But Islam did not require its
adherents, especially civil-society groups, to leave politics alone.
For a time, this had suited Mr Erdogan’s purposes. He was elected in 2002
by the people, but with few supporters in the bowels of government. Mr
Gulen had plenty, so they became allies. Mr Erdogan, like him, wanted to
see more Islam in public life. Mr Gulen posed no threat to him, for he was
already in America. And his followers embedded in the bureaucracy could
dispatch all the president’s critics to maximum-security jails. They proved
the ideal instrument to clinch Mr Erdogan’s grip on power.
The president then fell out with him in spectacular fashion. In 2013
Gulenists among the judges and in the police began to investigate
corruption in the government. They arrested many of the president’s allies,
some of them ministers. The investigation was stopped, but Hizmet was
now a cancer, in Mr Erdogan’s words. Then, in 2016, an army faction
backed by Gulenists staged a violent coup. It collapsed, but not before 250
people had been killed. Mr Erdogan responded with mass indiscriminate
purges. Hizmet’s schools were shut down and its newspapers closed.
Most Turks were convinced Mr Gulen was behind both events. As Hizmet’s
leader, he had to be. Sitting in America, he might even be a CIA asset. He
denied it completely. In the corruption investigation, how could he have
issued orders to the judges to act? From Pennsylvania, he had no power to
make them do anything. As for the coup, he had suffered through four, and
was insulted to be linked to another. If the coup-leaders claimed to be
protecting democracy, they were betraying his ideals. How could he, a
scholar concerned with wisdom and the divine breaths of poetry, soft-
hearted as a child, a man who stressed good manners and had never in his
life missed a prayer, involve himself in this fight?
That serene mask, however, often slipped aside. He pitied his oppressors,
but declared them stains on the pages of history. With savage chops of his
right hand and arms appealing to the heavens, he cursed Mr Erdogan online
and wanted to spit in his face. He bewailed the state of Turkey under him,
and feared for its future.

Clearly he could not return. Turkey had appealed frequently for his
extradition, and there was plenty of circumstantial evidence, including his
audience with two coup leaders; but the Americans needed more. He still
insisted that he did not want power, but did not object when his followers in
the Poconos venerated his shoes, or fought over the scraps he had left on his
plate. He was their leader and Messiah, and could have been Turkey’s too.
As it was, all he had of it, in his glass-fronted cabinet, was a small
collection of different sorts of dry Turkish sand. ■
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2024/10/24/fethullah-gulen-tried-to-transform-
turkey-in-the-subtlest-ways

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