The Economist 20 - 09 - 24

[9月 20, 2024]
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The Economist :: How we saw the world
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The world this week
Politics
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
At least 12 people were killed, including two children, and

2,800 injured when thousands of pagers used by members
of Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed militia, exploded in
Lebanon and Syria. The next day walkie-talkies blew up
across Lebanon, killing another 20 people and injuring 450.
Israel is assumed to be behind the attacks. It is thought
that Israeli agents planted explosive substances inside the
devices before they were imported into Lebanon. Israel had
just expanded its war aims to include the safe return of
60,000 evacuees, displaced by Hizbullah rockets, to the
country's north.
A 2,000km punch
A missile fired by the Houthis in Yemen struck central Israel
for the first time. Going by shrapnel from the blast, it seems
that Israel’s air-defence systems failed to destroy the missile
before it entered the country’s airspace.
A terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility

for attacks in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Militants stormed
a military-police school and an air base where aircraft and
mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Russian network,
were present.
Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s president, dissolved

parliament. The anti-corruption crusader wants a fresh slate
of MPs to carry out reforms, such as renegotiating oil and
gas contracts with foreign firms. The dissolution worried
investors and sent Senegal’s bond yields jumping, but Mr
Faye's party is expected to win an election in November.
South Sudan postponed until 2026 elections that were due

to take place in December, adding to a growing sense of
crisis in the country. Since it took office after independence
from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan’s government has
repeatedly avoided going to the polls.
Arvind Kejriwal stepped down as chief minister of Delhi’s

regional government, after India’s Supreme Court freed
him on bail from six months detention in an alleged
corruption case. Mr Kejriwal says the allegations against him
are politically motivated and he wants a clean mandate
from voters in a forthcoming election. Mr Kejriwal is from the
Aam Aadmi Party and is a fierce critic of the Bharatiya
Janata Party, which heads India’s federal government.
The initial stage of voting began in the first regional election

in Jammu & Kashmir for a decade. The results are
expected on October 8th.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that
at least 5,350 civilians had been killed by Myanmar’s army
since the coup that brought the junta to power in 2021, and
that 2,414 of those had been killed between April 2023 and
June 2024 alone. Adding to the country’s misery, at least
260 people have died in floods and landslides in the
aftermath of Typhoon Yagi. In Vietnam the death toll from
the storm rose to almost 300.
Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister,
held talks at the White House aimed at finding a way of
allowing Ukraine to use Western missiles against targets
inside Russia. The talks were inconclusive. Vladimir Putin
said recently that permitting Ukraine to fire the weapons at
Russia would be a direct act of war. In an attempt to
increase pressure on Britain, Russia expelled six British
diplomats shortly before the White House meeting.
Meanwhile, Ukraine expanded its drone attacks inside

Russia. People were evacuated from the town of Toropets,
which lies 470km (292 miles) north of the border with
Ukraine, after a weapons warehouse targeted in the attacks
exploded. Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities.
Mr Putin issued a decree to increase the number of active

troops in Russia’s armed forces by 180,000 to 1.5m. If
the order is fulfilled, Russia would have the second-biggest
contingent of regular combat forces in the world, behind
China and ahead of America and India.
Georgia’s parliament approved a law curtailing the few

rights gay people have in the country. If enforced it will
outlaw Pride marches, ban the rainbow flag and censor films
and books with a gay theme.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European
Commission, unveiled her new commissioners. The biggest
surprise was the resignation of Thierry Breton, a French
heavyweight who was in charge of the internal market. He
had fallen out with Mrs von der Leyen and she reportedly
said she could no longer work with him. Teresa Ribera, an
environmental minister in Spain, is the new competition
commissioner. She will replace Margrethe Vestager, who
imposed huge fines on American tech firms.
FBI agenst at the crime scene outside the Trump

International Golf Club in Florida following an assassination
attempt
America’s Secret Service came under pressure again, after a

gunman hid undetected for 12 hours on Donald Trump’s golf
course in Florida. Agents saw the man and fired shots at
him, with Mr Trump on the course about 350 metres away.
The FBI said it was an attempted assassination, the
second in two months to target the Republican. The suspect,
who is reportedly a fervent supporter of Ukraine and tried to
recruit Afghans to help its fight against Russia, was arrested.
The Teamsters union will not endorse either Kamala Harris

or Mr Trump in the election, the first time it has not
supported a presidential candidate since 1996. The decision
is a particular blow to Ms Harris, as the union will now not
join voter-mobilisation efforts in the crucial Midwest states.
Faced with a demographic crisis and looming pension

shortfalls, China said it would raise its strikingly low
retirement ages for men and women for the first time since
the 1950s. Starting next year, the pensionable age for most
workers will begin to move closer to rich-world norms.
Canada’s ruling Liberal Party lost another by-election in
what had hitherto been a safe seat, this time in Montreal.
The defeat adds to the pressure on Justin Trudeau, the prime
minister, to call an early federal election before the next one
is due in October 2025.
The widely accepted winner of Venezuela’s presidential

election in July, Edmundo González, said he had been forced
to sign a letter accepting that Nicolás Maduro had been re-
elected to power. Mr González, who has fled to Spain, said
senior members of the Maduro regime had used “coercion,
blackmail and pressure” to get him to sign the document
while he was in the Spanish embassy in Caracas.
In Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president,

signed into law a constitutional amendment that will see
judges elected instead of appointed. The overhaul has been
roundly condemned as a blow to democracy by business
groups, academics and NGOs. But Mr López Obrador is
committed to pushing through a raft of reforms in his last
month in power.
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, presented a proposal to

amend the constitution to once again allow foreign military
bases in the country. For years Ecuador has been wracked
by clashes between drug gangs and Mr Noboa wants
international help. The United States operated a military
base to combat drug-trafficking in Ecuador until 2009, when
it was asked to leave.
He knows his audience
In an unusual gesture Javier Milei, Argentina’s president,

presented the government’s budget to Congress himself. In
a televised set-piece speech he railed against the profligate
“miserable rats” in the opposition and repeatedly said there
would be “zero deficit”. Any legislation which threatens that
would be vetoed, he promised. Markets cheered the speech,
sending one measure of the risk of default to its lowest level
in three months.
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this-week/2024/09/19/politics
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The world this week
Business
9月 19, 2024 08:22 上午
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time
since March 2020, reducing its key rate by half a percentage
point to a range of between 4.75% and 5%. The central
bank suggested it would cut rates again later this year. With
inflationary pressures easing, the Fed is pivoting to tackle a
cooler labour market.
The Bank of England left its benchmark interest rate

unchanged at 5%, having lowered the rate in August for the
first time since March 2020. Britain’s headline annual
inflation rate has held steady at 2.2%, though price
pressures are still evident in the services sector.
As America began to ease monetary policy, Brazil started
to tighten it, raising interest rates for the first time in two
years to tackle stubbornly high inflation. The central bank
lifted its main rate by a quarter point to 10.75%, and
indicated that more rises were to come.
Workers in Boeing’s biggest union went on strike, after

they resoundingly rejected an offer to raise pay by 25% over
four years. The union has been pushing for a 40% increase.
It is the first strike to hit Boeing since 2008. It has
suspended hiring and furloughed white-collar staff to cut its
costs during the industrial action. The strike “jeopardises
our recovery in a significant way”, said the company.
Succession obsession
A hearing got under way at a courtroom in Reno, Nevada, to

determine who will control Rupert Murdoch’s media
empire when he dies. The 93-year-old mogul reportedly
wants to change the terms of the family trust so that his
eldest son, Lachlan, takes full control of News Corporation
and Fox. The trust currently transfers voting shares to four
of his children. The court’s judge has refused access to the
press, determining that the Murdochs’ confidential personal
and financial information needs to be protected.
BP decided to get out of the wind-power business in

America and put its operational wind farms, spread across
seven states, up for sale. The energy company wants to
focus on solar energy in its renewables portfolio instead.
Solar capacity is expected to vastly exceed that of wind in
America over the next decade.
BlackRock launched a $30bn investment fund aimed at

expanding the infrastructure that powers artificial
intelligence at data centres and the new energy sources
needed to support AI. The fund, one of the biggest of its
type ever in America, is backed by Microsoft, Global
Infrastructure Partners, an investment fund, and MGX, an
investment firm in Abu Dhabi. Nvidia will offer its expertise.
The $30bn that the fund raises from private capital swells to
a potential $100bn when debt financing is included.
With its share price down by more than half this year, Intel
said it would pause the expansion of its chipmaking capacity
in Germany and Poland for two years. The company wants
to focus on turning its foundry business, which produces
processors for other chipmakers, into an independent
subsidiary. The German government had promised €10bn
($11bn) in subsidies to Intel to build a new factory.
The European Union’s General Court ruled that Google

should not pay a €1.5bn ($1.7bn) fine imposed on it by the
European Commission in 2019 for forcing websites to use its
AdSense platform to place search ads. The court found that
the commission’s antitrust regulator had failed to show how
innovation had been hampered. It was a big win for Google,
coming a week after the European Court of Justice upheld a
€2.4bn penalty against it in a separate case.
Amazon ordered its employees to return to the office five
days a week, the toughest such edict yet among America’s
big tech firms. Staff had been required to turn up three days
a week. An option of working anywhere for four months a
year has also been scrapped. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief
executive, said the change was needed so that workers
could “invent, collaborate and be connected”. Employees in
America will at least get their own offices back: Mr Jassy
also scrapped hot-desking.
TikTok launched its appeal against the Biden
administration’s plan to ban it in America unless it separates
from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. Lawyers for
the video-sharing app told the appellate judges that the
government was imposing an “extraordinary speech
prohibition” on a single entity, which was unconstitutional.
The government says ByteDance is a national-security
threat. Both sides have asked for a decision by December
6th, so that the Supreme Court can hear the case before the
ban comes into force on January 19th.
Meta banned RT (formerly Russia Today) from its

platforms, after the American government accused the
Russian broadcaster of trying to sway foreign politics. Two
employees at state-backed RT have been charged with
attempting to influence Americans through social media.
Taking a bite in the Big Apple
Pret A Manger reported annual global sales above £1bn

($1.3bn) for the first time. The purveyor of coffee,
sandwiches and snacks has 690 shops, 480 of which are in
Britain, its home country. But the Pret empire is spreading
and international expansion is driving growth. The firm
describes New York as the “overseas capital” for customers.

this-week/2024/09/19/business

The world this week
The weekly cartoon

9月 19, 2024 06:43 上午
Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:
Israel has bloodied Hizbullah but is stuck in a war of

attrition
Israel and Hizbullah play with fire
The Biden administration is trying to walk a fine line in
arming Israel
The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You

can see last week’s here.
this-week/2024/09/19/the-weekly-cartoon

The Economist
This week’s covers

How we saw the world
9月 19, 2024 08:20 上午
THIS WEEK WE had two covers. In the EU, the Middle East
and Africa we looked at how the world’s poor stopped
catching up. During the two decades after around 1995
gaps in GDP narrowed, extreme poverty plummeted and
global public health and education improved vastly. With a
big fall in malaria deaths and infant mortality and a rise in
school enrolment. But extreme poverty has barely fallen
since 2015. Measures of global public health improved only
slowly in the late 2010s, and then went into decline after
the pandemic. Malaria has killed more than 600,000 people
a year in the 2020s, reverting to the level of 2012. What
went wrong? The biggest problem is that home-grown
reform has ground to a halt. With some notable exceptions,
such as President Javier Milei’s efforts in Argentina, the
world’s leaders are more interested in state control,
industrial policy and protectionism than in the 1990s. For
the more than 700m people who are still in extreme poverty
—and the 3bn who are merely poor—this is grim news.
Leader: How the world’s poor stopped catching up
Finance & economics: The world’s poorest countries have
experienced a brutal decade
By Invitation: Bill Gates on how feeding children properly

can transform global health
In the rest of the world we considered the breakthrough that

AI needs. Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm,
improvements in generative artificial intelligence seem to
be slowing. Large language models have a keen appetite for
electricity. The energy used to train OpenAI’s GPT-4 model
could have powered 50 American homes for a century. And
as models get bigger, costs rise rapidly. On top of this,
asking a model to answer a query comes at a computational
cost—anything from $2,400 to $223,000 to summarise the
financial reports of the world’s 58,000 public companies. In
time such “inference” costs, when added up, can exceed the
cost of training. If so, it is hard to see how generative AI
could ever become economically viable. Our leader argues
that there is no need to panic. Plenty of other technologies
have faced limits and gone on to prosper thanks to human
ingenuity. Already researchers and entrepreneurs are racing
for ways around the constraints.
Leader: The breakthrough AI needs
Technology Quarterly: Silicon returns to Silicon Valley

this-week/2024/09/19/this-weeks-covers

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Leaders
The breakthrough AI needs
Power, chips and constraints :: A race is on to push artificial intelligence
beyond today’s limits
How the world’s poor stopped catching up

Held back :: Progress stalled around 2015. To restart it, liberalise
Let Ukraine hit military targets in Russia

with American missiles
Biden dithers :: Hitting back at the forces blasting Ukrainian cities is legal
and proportionate
Britain should let university tuition fees rise

Painful lessons :: Domestic students have been paying less in real terms
every year
After peak woke, what next?

The left’s doctrine of original sin :: The influence of a set of illiberal ideas is
waning. That creates an opportunity

Power, chips and constraints
The breakthrough AI
needs
A race is on to push artificial intelligence beyond today’s
limits
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
TWO YEARS after ChatGPT took the world by storm,
generative artificial intelligence seems to have hit a
roadblock. The energy costs of building and using bigger
models are spiralling, and breakthroughs are getting harder.
Fortunately, researchers and entrepreneurs are racing for
ways around the constraints. Their ingenuity will not just
transform AI. It will determine which firms prevail, whether
investors win, and which country holds sway over the
technology.
Large language models have a keen appetite for electricity.

The energy used to train OpenAI’s GPT-4 model could have
powered 50 American homes for a century. And as models
get bigger, costs rise rapidly. By one estimate, today’s
biggest models cost $100m to train; the next generation
could cost $1bn, and the following one $10bn. On top of
this, asking a model to answer a query comes at a
computational cost—anything from $2,400 to $223,000 to
summarise the financial reports of the world’s 58,000 public
companies. In time such “inference” costs, when added up,
can exceed the cost of training. If so, it is hard to see how
generative AI could ever become economically viable.
This is frightening for investors, many of whom have bet big

on AI. They have flocked to Nvidia, which designs the chips
most commonly used for AI models. Its market capitalisation
has risen by $2.5trn over the past two years. Venture
capitalists and others have ploughed nearly $95bn into AI
startups since the start of 2023. OpenAI, the maker of
ChatGPT, is reportedly seeking a valuation of $150bn, which
would make it one of the biggest private tech firms in the
world.
There is no need to panic. Plenty of other technologies have

faced limits and gone on to prosper thanks to human
ingenuity. The difficulty of getting people into space led to
innovations that are now used on Earth, too. The oil-price
shock in the 1970s encouraged energy efficiency and, in
some countries, alternative means of generation, including
nuclear. Three decades later, fracking made it possible to
reach oil and gas reserves that had previously been
uneconomical to extract. As a consequence, America now
produces more oil than any other country.
Already, developments in AI are showing how constraints
can stimulate creativity. As our Technology Quarterly this
week sets out, companies are developing chips especially
for the operations needed to run large language models.
This specialisation means that they can run more efficiently
than more general-purpose processors, such as Nvidia’s.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all
designing their own AI chips. More money has flowed into
funding AI-chip startups in the first half of this year than in
the past three combined.
Developers are also making changes to AI software. Bigger

models that rely on the brute force of computational power
are giving way to smaller and more specialised systems.
OpenAI’s newest model, o1, is designed to be better at
reasoning, but not generating text. Other makers are
employing less onerous calculations, so as to make more
efficient use of chips. Through clever approaches, such as
using a mixture of models, each suited to a different type of
problem, researchers have drastically cut down on
processing time. All this will change how the industry
operates.
Investors and governments have become used to the idea

that, among tech companies, the incumbent has a natural
advantage. For AI, that assumption can no longer be taken
for granted. Today Nvidia sells four-fifths of the world’s AI
chips. But other more specialised rivals could well eat into
its share. Already Google’s AI processors are the third-most-
used in data centres around the world.
OpenAI may have launched the pioneering large language

model. But as resource constraints have struck, other big
modelmakers such as Anthropic, Google and Meta are
catching up. Although a gap between them and the second-
tier models, such as France’s Mistral, still exists, it may
close. If the trend towards smaller and more specialised
models continues, then the AI universe could contain a
constellation of models, instead of just a few superstars.
This means that investors are in for a rocky ride. Their bets
on today’s leaders look less certain. Nvidia could lose
ground to other chipmakers; OpenAI could be supplanted.
The big tech firms are hoovering up talent, and many of
them make the devices through which, they hope,
consumers will reach their AI assistants. But competition
among them is fierce. Few firms yet have a strategy for
turning a profit from generative AI. Even if the industry does
end up belonging to one winner, it is not clear who that will
be.
Governments, too, will need to change their thinking. Their

fondness for industrial policy focuses on handouts. But
progress in AI is as much about having the right talent and a
flourishing ecosystem as it is about amassing capital and
computing power. Countries in Europe and the Middle East
may find that the hard graft of cultivating ingenuity matters
as much as buying in computer chips. America, by contrast,
is blessed with chips, talent and enterprise. It has many of
the world’s best universities and, in San Francisco and
Silicon Valley, an enviable and long-established cluster of
talent.
Chipped away
Yet America’s attempt to restrain China is backfiring. Hoping

to prevent a strategic rival from gaining the lead in a crucial
technology, it has sought to restrict China’s access to
cutting-edge chips. By doing so it has unintentionally
stimulated the growth of a research system in China that
excels at working round constraints.
When ingenuity counts for more than brute force, a better
way to ensure America’s lead would be to attract and keep
top researchers from elsewhere, for example through easier
visa rules. The AI era is still in its infancy, and much remains
uncertain. But the breakthroughs AI needs will come from
giving ideas and talent the space to flourish at home, not
trying to shut down rivals abroad. ■
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Held back
How the world’s poor

stopped catching up
Progress stalled around 2015. To restart it, liberalise
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
SINCE THE Industrial Revolution, rich countries have mostly
grown faster than poor ones. The two decades after around
1995 were an astonishing exception. During this period gaps
in GDP narrowed, extreme poverty plummeted and global
public health and education improved vastly, with a big fall
in malaria deaths and infant mortality and a rise in school
enrolment. Globalisation’s critics will tell you that
capitalism’s excesses and the global financial crisis should
define this era. They are wrong. It was defined by its
miracles.
Today, however, those miracles are a faint memory. As we

report this week, extreme poverty has barely fallen since
2015. Measures of global public health improved only slowly
in the late 2010s, and then went into decline after the
pandemic. Malaria has killed more than 600,000 people a
year in the 2020s, reverting to the level of 2012. And since
the mid-2010s there has been no more catch-up economic
growth. Depending on where you draw the line between rich
and poor countries, the worst-off have stopped growing
faster than richer ones, or are even falling further behind.
For the more than 700m people who are still in extreme
poverty—and the 3bn who are merely poor—this is grim
news.
To judge what has gone wrong, first ask what previously

went right. In the poorest countries education and
(especially) health have depended on donors writing big
cheques. But even if aid has curbed disease, it has not
unleashed sustainable growth. Likewise with pro-market
technocrats in the IMF and the World Bank. Western
institutions were most involved in Africa and Latin America,
where growth has been patchy and has varied with
commodities prices.
Critics of the “neoliberal era” conclude that globalisation

therefore failed. However, the most successful
liberalisations came from within countries, rather than in
response to donors’ advice. In the 1990s global
convergence was powered by a few big successes: China’s
rapid growth after it opened up under Deng Xiaoping, a
similar—albeit less spectacular—process in India after
reforms dismantling the “licence Raj”, and the integration of
countries in eastern Europe into the global market economy
after the fall of communism. All that amounts to a powerful
endorsement of capitalism.
Just as the rich world did not make convergence happen, it

is not to blame for the stalling of development today. It is
true that the West’s efforts are as flawed as ever. The IMF
and World Bank are juggling promoting reform and
development with fighting climate change, and are caught
in the middle of the power struggle between America and
China, which is making it fiendishly hard to restructure poor
countries’ debts. Aid budgets have been squeezed, hurting
global public-health campaigns, as Bill Gates argues in our
online By Invitation column. Cash has been diverted from
helping the poorest to other causes, such as greening power
grids and helping refugees. Of what aid money remains,
much is wasted rather than being spent after careful study
of what works. The “Sustainable Development Goals”, by
which the UN judges human progress, are hopelessly
sprawling and vague.
The biggest problem, though, is that home-grown reform

has ground to a halt. With some notable exceptions, such as
President Javier Milei’s efforts in Argentina, the world’s
leaders are more interested in state control, industrial policy
and protectionism than the examples of the 1990s—and it is
no accident that such policies boost their own power. Indices
of economic freedom have been broadly flat in sub-Saharan
Africa since the mid-2010s and in South America since the
turn of the century. Nigeria, where nearly a third of the
population is extremely poor, still wastes a fortune on petrol
subsidies; textile bosses in Bangladesh get special
treatment at the expense of manufacturers who might
otherwise create better jobs; and Pakistan’s inefficient state-
backed mining, oil and gas conglomerates are allowed to
stagger on.
Despite its past growth, a quarter of China’s population still
lives on less than $2,500 per year; its present economic
slowdown, made worse by Xi Jinping’s centralisation and the
censorship of economic data, is reducing their chances of a
better life. Even India and Indonesia, which have
successfully liberalised in the past but still contain many
poor people, are now interfering with market forces to try to
bring supply chains home. According to Global Trade Alert, a
think-tank, the 2020s have seen five times as many harmful
trade measures as liberalising ones.
Many of the West’s interventions in the Global South failed,

but in the era of catch-up, it did at least preach the virtues
of free markets and free trade. These ideas spread because
communism was proved to be backward in comparison with
America’s prosperity and power. Today, though, America is
increasingly taken with interventionism, disdaining the old
order and trying to replace it. Many countries instead look to
the Chinese model of industrial policy and state-owned
enterprises, drawing entirely the wrong lessons from the
country’s growth.
As the world has turned towards intervention, so the chosen

instrument for poor countries has become trade restrictions,
as IMF research shows. This contains an uncomfortable echo
of the failed development plans of the 1950s, built around
freezing out imports rather than embracing global
competition. Fans of industrial policy will point to East Asia’s
“tiger economies” such as South Korea and Taiwan. Yet both
embraced harsh global competition. And several African
countries that tried to copy their industrial policies in the
1970s failed miserably.
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

The world will pay for its failure to learn from history. Rich
countries will cope, as they usually do. For the poorest
people, however, growth can be the difference between a
good life and penury. It should not be a surprise that
development has stalled as governments have increasingly
rejected the principles that powered a golden era. Nobody
will suffer more as a result than the world’s poor. ■
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Biden dithers
Let Ukraine hit military

targets in Russia with
American missiles
Hitting back at the forces blasting Ukrainian cities is legal
and proportionate
9月 19, 2024 07:38 上午
EVERY DAY, Vladimir Putin rains bombs and missiles on

civilian targets in Ukraine, spreading terror and trying to
shut down the power supply as winter approaches. Ukraine
has proposed a proportionate, legal response to these illegal
attacks. It would like to use Western missiles to hit military
targets in Russia from which Mr Putin’s forces are launching
their barrage. So far, America has denied this reasonable
request.
The West has been generous to Ukraine. Over the past two
and a half years, it has given it over $200bn in weapons and
cash to defend itself from Russian aggression, with over
$100bn more in the pipeline. But time after time, donors
have refused to supply kit that they later agreed was
essential. First it was tanks, then missiles, then anti-missile
batteries, then fighter jets. “They give us enough to survive,
but not enough to win,” one Ukrainian front-line commander
complained to The Economist this summer.
Next week Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, will

meet Joe Biden, and will renew his plea to be allowed to hit
military targets inside Russia. Britain and France are content
to have their missiles, the Storm Shadow and the SCALP,
used in this way. But that is not happening, apparently
because the missiles rely on American technology to reach
their targets, and America has, so far, exercised a veto.
Germany shares President Biden’s caution, and then some.
It has not given Ukraine its own powerful Taurus missiles.
America may lift its veto on the use of European missiles,

but that will not be enough. What Ukraine really wants is
permission to fire American-supplied ATACMS at Russian
targets. These have a longer range (up to 300km, against
250km for Storm Shadow and SCALP), and more of them are
available. Yet Mr Biden says no. He should change his mind.
Various reasons are given for the veto. One is that the
Russian planes that launch devastating “glide bombs” into
Ukraine have been moved back out of ATACMS range. That
is true; but there are plenty of other military targets, such
as fuel and arms depots and command centres that
Ukrainian drones struggle to hit. Lifting the restrictions
would help Ukraine create a 300km-deep buffer zone on its
border. America also says the missiles are in short supply.
That is true of the European ones, but less so of the
ATACMS.
Unfortunately, America is holding back out of a misplaced

fear of escalation. Mr Putin has said that if Ukraine fires
American missiles into Russia, it would be like NATO joining
the war, and has promised severe consequences. The threat
is not so much that Mr Putin acts in Ukraine—Russia is
already doing everything it can there short of using a
nuclear weapon, and crossing that threshold would provoke
outrage, including among its allies such as China. The threat
is instead that Russia attacks Western interests elsewhere
by, say, giving weapons to Iran or the Houthis. This would
be destabilising, but holding back would encourage Russian
aggression in Europe—even as Mr Putin continued to wield
the threat of stoking proliferation in the Middle East.
Mr Biden’s caution rewards Mr Putin’s recklessness. What is

more, it rubs off on other faint-hearts, such as Olaf Scholz,
Germany’s chancellor, thus dividing NATO. Mr Putin sees
that division, and concludes that the West is tired of war and
keen to cut a deal that will be to his advantage. Peace talks
may indeed begin next year, after America’s election. The
best way to raise morale in Ukraine and to strengthen Mr
Zelensky’s hand in any talks would be for the West to show
that it is fully behind its ally. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/19/let-ukraine-hit-military-targets-in-
russia-with-american-missiles

Painful lessons
Britain should let

university tuition fees rise
Domestic students have been paying less in real terms
every year
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
IN 2012 POLITICIANS in Britain burned lots of political capital

by raising the cap on how much English universities can
charge domestic undergraduates in tuition fees. Sir Nick
Clegg, the deputy prime minister at the time, had previously
pledged not to raise fees and never lived down the U-turn.
This political folk memory helps explain why the Labour
Party, which took power in July and has campaigned in the
past to abolish tuition fees, will find it difficult to raise the
cap again. That is nonetheless what it should do.
The financial strains on British universities are becoming

hard to ignore. In the academic year just gone 40% of
British universities ran deficits. The number is probably
higher now. How to handle a failing university is no longer
an academic question. The effect of tighter immigration
rules on numbers of foreign students, who pay higher fees
than native ones, is one reason why the universities are
under pressure. But the sinking value of tuition fees is
another. The cap of £9,000 ($11,880) that was put in place
12 years ago has been raised only once since then, and by a
tiny amount, to £9,250. Inflation has eaten away at its
value: it is now worth less than £6,500 in 2012 money.
Some argue that charging for higher education is wrong,

and England should go back to the old days of free tuition,
courtesy of the taxpayer. In fact, England’s student-finance
regime offers a lot to like. Britons with degrees earn 35%
more than their peers who stop studying after secondary
school. Given these high private returns, it is fair that they
should pay a big chunk of the cost of their education.
Student-loan repayments do not end in bankruptcy:
graduates in England start paying only when their annual
income exceeds a threshold (currently £25,000 for this
year’s borrowers). The previous jump in tuition fees has not
put off poorer students; and most graduates in a recent poll
said their debts had not had a “negative impact” on their
lives.
From learners to earners
Every way of funding degrees has its flaws. Countries that

pour a lot of public money into higher education generally
limit how many students can go to university (as did
England, until 2015). It is hard to argue that higher-earning
graduates are the worthiest recipients of any new
government spending. And relying on ever more foreign
students to subsidise domestic ones is also not a
sustainable solution. If fees for home students remain stuck,
higher-paying foreigners will eventually start displacing
them. Flows of foreign cash are volatile, and benefit
universities in famous cities such as London more than
others. Also, voters like immigration even less than they like
fees.
Those who would keep fees frozen point out that some
students get poor value for money. A number pursue
qualifications that are unlikely to boost their earnings; they
may be better off with shorter courses or apprenticeships.
But the choice is theirs and, besides, constraining fees for
every student is not an answer to that problem. Britain’s
university regulator has been stepping up its policing of
courses with high dropout rates and of those that lead too
few graduates to good jobs. In 2017 the government
required universities to meet minimum standards before
taking advantage of the small increase in the fee cap. It
could try something like that again.
Universities say that if fees had tracked inflation, the cap

would now be more than £12,000. A sudden increase on
that scale would be unwise. The reforms of 2012 provided
universities with a very large bump in income, some of
which they wasted. The cap was set at a high level in the
vain expectation that some institutions might choose to
charge less. But neither students nor the country are well
served by allowing the real value of fees to fall for ever.
Labour should let them rise. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/18/britain-should-let-university-tuition-
fees-rise
The left’s doctrine of original sin
After peak woke, what

next?
The influence of a set of illiberal ideas is waning. That
creates an opportunity
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
ONE OF THE early uses of the word was by Lead Belly, who
sang about the Scottsboro boys, nine young African-
Americans in Scottsboro, Alabama, who were wrongly
accused in 1931 of raping two white women. They got an
unfair trial; all nine later had their convictions overturned or
were pardoned. In a recording in 1938, Lead Belly warns
black Americans travelling through Alabama to stay “woke”,
lest they be accused of something similar. Even the most
committed anti-woke warrior would grant that the man had
a point.
But in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on

the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme
pessimism about America and its capacity to make
progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the
country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the
solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and
positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines
people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims
and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus
less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on
publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others
(especially others).
The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are
today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing,
higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of
measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has
since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the
share of people who worry a great deal about race relations
climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since
fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used
2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times
in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. That
timing is no coincidence. Many people assume that
wokeness took off after the murder of George Floyd in 2020;
in fact the inflection point was in 2015, as Donald Trump ran
for president.
Mr Trump’s victory had a profound effect on the American

left. It strengthened those who said America is racist and
sexist and undermined those who said that progress is
possible and that persuasion beats cancellation. As those on
the centre-left cowered for fear of being cancelled
themselves, woke ideas spread from sociology departments
to the rest of the university, and from there to company
boardrooms. On campus, controversial speakers were
prevented from addressing students. In corporate America
managers were rewarded partly for hiring to meet targets
based on diversity, equity and inclusion.
The backlash has been led by right-leaning activists and

mainline liberals who disagree about many other things.
And the Democratic Party has realised that woke ideas and
policies are both unpopular with voters and electorally
reckless in a party that relies on a multiracial coalition to
win. Towards the end of her acceptance speech in Chicago,
Kamala Harris talked about “the awesome responsibility that
comes with the greatest privilege on Earth—the privilege
and pride of being an American”. It would have been hard
for a front-line Democrat to say that between 2016 and
2021.
The lesson is not that wokeness is over, still less that it

achieved nothing good. The cycle of overreaction and
counter-reaction can lead to progress. Companies still care
about diversity; universities still disdain hateful rhetoric. But
as the left and their critics on the right score points off each
other, the fight increasingly feels stagey and artificial, like
professional wrestling. The hope now is that race and sex
will once again be discussed as questions of public policy,
where compromise is possible, rather than of identity, where
it is not. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/19/after-peak-woke-what-next

Letters
Letters to the editor
On bitcoin mining, social care, orange juice, dogs, Sudan, country music,
contemporary compositions :: A selection of correspondence

On bitcoin mining, social care, orange juice, dogs, Sudan, country

music, contemporary compositions
Letters to the editor

A selection of correspondence
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
Letters are welcome via email to

[email protected]
Bitcoin mining and energy
You perpetuated common myths about bitcoin mining while

neglecting the real story: bitcoin mining is a powerful new
tool for supporting renewable-intensive grids (“Power
hungry”, August 31st). It is true that electricity grids are
under increasing strain from manufacturing plants, electric
vehicles and data centres, and it would be easy to think of
bitcoin mining as just one more source of electrical demand.
But whereas data centres and the like will buy electricity
regardless of the price, bitcoin mining is different. It
operates only when power is cheap and abundant.
Whenever power is scarce, and therefore expensive, it
curtails its electricity usage in a matter of seconds.
In practice, this means that during severe weather events in

Texas say, such as a heatwave, electricity prices spike, and
bitcoin miners naturally turn their machines off. But when
power is cheap, their machines remain on, providing a
steady stream of revenue to energy producers. Having a
reliable buyer of energy that does not add to peak demand
is ideal for incentivising the building of renewable
generation while still reliably delivering power to
homeowners and hospitals.
Bitcoin miners also participate in demand-response

programmes, allowing grid operators to control their power
consumption to stabilise the grid. You characterised demand
response as some kind of public gift to the bitcoin-mining
industry. In fact, these programmes have been praised as a
crucial part of managing a highly renewable system. The
International Energy Agency, for example, says we must
increase demand-response tenfold, or by 500 gigawatts,
within this decade if we are to meet net-zero targets. Far
from a giveaway, bitcoin miners participate in these
demand-response programmes like any other company,
bidding in an open market and driving prices down for
consumers.
Moreover, the grid-stabilising behaviour of bitcoin miners

puts them in direct competition with natural-gas “peaker”
plants, which run only during peak demand. Both
technologies help grid operators match fluctuating supply
and demand in real-time.
The difference is that a system with more renewable

generation and bitcoin miners is far less carbon-intensive
than a system with less renewable generation and peaker
plants. It is no surprise, then, that the industry lobbying
Texas for more peaker-plant construction has also lobbied
against its grid-balancing competition.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JUNIOR

Washington, DC
Preparing for old age
“The real test of Labour’s ambition” (August 31st) gave a

good summary of the need for reforming social care in
Britain. However, the article suggested that it is
“impossible” for people to plan for their future care costs
“because no one knows how long they will need to be
looked after”. There are insurance solutions that can help
provide protection against catastrophic care costs. These
include immediate-needs annuities (typically taken out as
the insured life enters care) offered by companies such as
Aviva, Legal & General, Just Group and National Friendly.
There are also protection products, sold by firms such as
National Friendly and Vitality.
Some people argue that social care should be the

responsibility of the state and that it is better to allow
individuals to pass on an inheritance than pay for their own
care. However, the state’s finances are constrained and
those who can afford to pay for their care should do so.
The government’s reforms of social-care policy should be

clear about what the long-term position will be on the
balance between the state, private provision and the wider
family. This should enable the public to be made aware of
their potential costs in later life, after any state support, and
make provision for them.
TOM KENNY
Chair of the Social Care Working Party
Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
London
Why we have OJ every day
Talk of orange-juice shortages in the face of strong global

demand is ironic given the industry’s roots (“The big
squeeze”, September 14th). The introduction of orange
concentrate (or “chilled juice”, its chosen euphemism) in the
late 1940s was a response to a surplus of Florida citrus.
According to Alissa Hamilton’s book, “Squeezed”, ballooning
production renewed the imperative to persuade consumers
to buy more oranges. Minute Maid, a concentrate producer,
had no money to advertise and offered Bing Crosby cheap
stock options in exchange for the crooner’s services on the
radio. The resulting marketing boom paved the way for
orange juice to become a staple of the American breakfast.
YACOV ARNOPOLIN
New York
Man’s best friend
Bartleby’s thoughts on pets in the office (August 24th)

reminded me of my experience at the OECD headquarters in
Paris some 50 years ago. I insisted on bringing in my dog,
Meatball, a hefty Briard (French sheepdog). It wasn’t long
before Meatball became the favourite of just about
everyone on the staff. Every morning he would make a tour
of the building to collect the many treats that had been
brought for him, then return to my office to curl up for a
snooze. Our formal work environment soon relaxed to a
remarkable degree, unmistakable evidence that dogs in the
workplace can indeed boost morale and productivity.
BENJAMIN COHEN
Professor emeritus
University of California at Santa Barbara
As a matter of fact, the office grind does not stray far from a
dog’s natural daily routine: hanging out with the pack and
dozing most of the time.
ALEXANDER HILSBOS
Waltenschwil, Switzerland
Stopping the war in Sudan
“An intensifying calamity” (August 31st) compellingly

portrayed both the scope and international implications of
the tragic conflict in Sudan. The war is a vicious power
struggle between competing factions, each of them drawing
support and encouragement from foreign interests anxious
to share, one way or another, in the spoils. The greatest
losers? The people of Sudan, abandoned by their
government, left without protection and caught in the
crossfire to face death or displacement.
Your briefing decried the lack of an international response,

yet nowhere mentions the most obvious means by which it
can be furnished. Almost 20 years ago, UN member states
voted unanimously to adopt a set of principles that
committed them to “take collective action, in a timely and
decisive manner...should national authorities manifestly fail
to protect their populations” from mass atrocities. Growing
out of the shared shame from earlier international failures to
respond to atrocities in Rwanda and the Balkans, the
“responsibility to protect”, or R2P, marked a turning point. In
the words of Martin Gilbert, a historian, the breakthrough
symbolised “the most significant adjustment to sovereignty
in 360 years.”
The R2P principles call upon the international community to

prevent, to respond and to rebuild. Military intervention is a
last resort to be deployed only in the rarest cases. A broad
range of other responses are available, from arms
embargoes to “no fly zones” and targeted sanctions. In
Sudan, measures such as those would signal the end of
international indifference and might well influence the
competing warlords to end the violence.
It is disappointing that The Economist failed to include any

reference to R2P in its description of Sudan’s war and the
search for solutions. And it is high time that UN member
states, and especially the Security Council, respect the
solemn commitment they made in 2005 and provide
protection to the beleaguered population of Sudan.
LLOYD AXWORTHY
Former foreign affairs minister of Canada
ALLAN ROCK
Former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations
Ottawa, Canada
Let your Brits be country
Your article on the boom in country music in Britain

mentioned how it has become popular in clubs (“What ho,
y’all”, August 31st). There are also several country-music
festivals that draw big artists, two examples being Long
Road and Country to Country, which plays across Belfast,
Glasgow and London. It sold out the 20,000 capacity O2
Arena and has been running since 2013. Britain also has
home-grown talent such as Ward Thomas and The Shires.
The popularity of country music in Britain owes a huge
amount to Bob Harris, a radio DJ with a passion for country.
LORENZ JORGENSEN
Saffron Walden, Essex
Country music’s subtle infiltration of Britain allows the

fullest possible appreciation of the genre. Take, for example,
the old standby, “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goal
Posts of Life”. Somewhere in country music the pathos of
modern life is addressed: religiosity, booze, love gone bad,
patriotism, feminism, fidelity, dead-end jobs and on and on.
These are universal themes and you can get the message in
three minutes or so. Anyway, welcome to the club and honk
if you love Willy Nelson.
PAT FLEMING
Washington, DC
Unpopular music
I read your article in remembrance of Arnold Schoenberg (”A

maestro, due an encore”, September 7th). Pierre Boulez
once asked me, when he was about to conduct a new work
by Elliott Carter, a modernist composer, if I knew how often
contemporary compositions are performed? When I
hesitated, he answered: “Twice. The first and the last time.”
ALAN RIDING
Paris

https://www.economist.com/letters/2024/09/19/letters-to-the-editor

By Invitation
Bill Gates on how feeding children properly
can transform global health
Nutrition :: The stomach influences every aspect of human health, says the
philanthropist

Nutrition
Bill Gates on how feeding

children properly can
transform global health
The stomach influences every aspect of human health, says
the philanthropist
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
WHEN HISTORIANS write about the first quarter of the 21st

century, they may sum it up this way: 20 years of
unprecedented progress followed by five years of
stagnation.
This is true for nearly every issue the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation works on, from poverty reduction to primary-
school enrolment. But nowhere is the contrast more stark or
tragic than in health.
Between 2000 and 2020 the world witnessed a global health

boom. Child mortality fell by 50%. In 2000 more than 10m
children died every year, and now that number is fewer than
5m. The prevalence of the world’s deadliest infectious
diseases fell by half, too. Best of all, the progress was
happening in regions where the disease burden had been
the highest. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia saw the
most improvement.
Then covid-19 hit, and progress came to a screeching halt.
Today, the world is contending with more challenges than at

any point in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. It is also
contending with the worst child-health crisis: malnutrition.
Unfortunately, aid isn’t keeping pace with these needs,
particularly in the places that need it the most.
When a child dies, half the time the underlying cause is

malnutrition. Climate change is making the situation worse.
Between 2024 and 2050, some 40m additional children will
be stunted and 28m will suffer wasting as a result of climate
change, according to new data from the Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation. These conditions, the most acute
forms of malnutrition, mean children don’t grow mentally or
physically to their full potential.
The health and economic impacts are catastrophic. A child

who has suffered severe malnutrition before the age of
three will complete five fewer years of schooling than well-
nourished children, and studies show that people who went
hungry as children earn 10% less over their lifetimes and
are 33% less likely to escape poverty.
We must invest in global health to protect children from
hunger’s worst effects, mitigate the impacts of climate
change and spur economic growth. And looking to the past
can provide inspiration for how to rekindle progress.
The global health boom had many causes. A new generation

of political leaders embraced humanitarianism. Hundreds of
thousands of health workers fanned out across the globe,
bringing the latest medicines to places that doctors had
rarely visited. But one often overlooked factor was a small—
yet crucial—increase in funding.
Starting in 2000, the world’s wealthiest countries began

steadily increasing their funding to supplement low-income
countries as they increased their own investments in health.
During the century’s first 20 years OECD countries steadily
increased foreign aid from an average of 0.22% of their
gross national income to 0.33%—with the most generous
countries giving around 1%. In 2020 low-income countries
received an average of $10.47 per person. It doesn’t sound
like much, but that $10.47 made a remarkable difference. It
fuelled the work of organisations like Gavi, the Vaccine
Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, which gave poorer countries access to life-saving
vaccines, drugs and other medical breakthroughs.
The impact of this generosity was stunning. Yet the work is

unfinished. Today, more than half of all child deaths still
occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010 the percentage of
the world’s poor living in the region has increased by more
than 20 points, to nearly 60%. Despite this, during the same
period, the share of total foreign aid going to Africa has
dropped from nearly 40% to only 25%—the lowest
percentage in 20 years. Fewer resources mean more
children will die of preventable causes.
The global health boom is over. But for how long? That’s the
question I have been wrestling with for the past five years.
Will we look back on this period as the end of a golden era?
Or is it just a brief intermission before another boom begins?
I’m still an optimist. I think we can give global health a

second act—even in a world where competing challenges
require governments to stretch their budgets. To do this,
we’ll need a two-pronged approach.
First, the world has to recommit itself to the work that drove
the progress in the early 2000s, especially investments in
crucial vaccines and medicines. They’re still saving millions
of lives each year.
We also need to look forward. The research-and-

development pipeline is brimming with powerful—and
surprisingly cost-effective—breakthroughs. We need to put
these to work fighting the most pervasive health crises. And
it starts with good nutrition.
One of the few failures of the global health boom was that
we didn’t understand the importance of nutrition. But over
the past 15 years doctors have started to uncover the ways
the stomach influences every aspect of human health. If we
solve malnutrition, we make it easier to solve many other
problems. We solve extreme poverty. Vaccines are more
effective. And deadly diseases like malaria and pneumonia
become far less fatal.
This knowledge is now being turned into surprisingly cost-

efficient innovations, such as super-fortified bouillon and
more effective prenatal vitamins. The impact of scaling up
these innovations would be amazing. In Nigeria, modelling
shows that fortifying bouillon cubes wouldn’t just prevent
anaemia; it would also avert more than 11,000 deaths from
birth defects of the central nervous system, known as neural
tube defects. And if low- and middle-income countries
adopted the most complete form of prenatal vitamins, called
Multiple Micronutrient Supplements, almost half a million
lives could be saved by 2040.
The early global health boom is over. “But for how long?” is
a question that’s still in humanity’s control to determine. I
believe we can start a second global health boom by getting
children the nutrients they need to thrive.■
Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A longer version of this
article appears in the foundation’s Goalkeepers report for
2024.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/by-

invitation/2024/09/17/bill-gates-on-how-feeding-children-properly-can-transform-
global-health

Briefing
America is becoming less “woke”
Back to sleep :: Our statistical analysis finds that woke opinions and
practices are on the decline

Back to sleep
America is becoming less

“woke”
Our statistical analysis finds that woke opinions and
practices are on the decline
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | WASHINGTON, DC
REGINA JACKSON and Saira Rao achieved a degree of fame

at the height of the backlash in 2020 after police killed
George Floyd, an unarmed black American accused of
buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note. For a hefty
fee, rich white women would hire the pair to help them
confront unconscious biases at dinner parties that featured
such ice-breakers as, “Raise your hand if you’re a racist.”
Guests may often have broken down in tears when told that
their claims to be colour-blind were simply another brick in
the edifice of white supremacy, but there was lots of
interest. The two women were featured in many news
reports and made a film about their dinners,
“Deconstructing Karen”, in which a guilt-stricken participant
confesses, “I am a liberal white woman. We are absolutely
the most dangerous women.”
The media scrum has since subsided. The last

“Race2Dinner” event took place a year ago. The pair now
host screenings of the film instead. The problem, says Ms
Rao, is not just that they are fed up with having to “sit
across from a white person to tell them why they can’t
use…the N-word”. It is also that public interest in matters of
racial injustice has cooled. “The pulse of anti-racism, anti-
colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-genocide, is dead. There
is no pulse,” Ms Rao laments.
Woke me up
Republicans love to blame everything they consider wrong

with America on an epidemic of “wokeness”, by which they
tend to mean anything that smacks of virtue-signalling or
political correctness. Thus a bridge over Baltimore harbour
collapsed earlier this year not, as it might have seemed,
because it was hit by a wayward cargo ship, but because
one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black
woman whose human-resources firm helps companies
assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things
—or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah
asserted. Donald Trump, when accepting the Republican
nomination for president in July, blamed “woke” leadership
for the failings of America’s armed forces. The party’s
official platform this year complains of “woke…government”
spurring politically motivated prosecutions. The implication
is that woke attitudes are proliferating, and that only
Republicans can stem their rise.
In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in

America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly
since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the
prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion,
the media, higher education and business. Almost
everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness
grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the
political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent
efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in
2021-22 and has been declining ever since (see charts). The
only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only
after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past
year or two.
The term woke was originally used on the left to describe

people who are alert to racism. Later it came to encompass
those eager to fight any form of prejudice. By that
definition, it is obviously a good thing. But Democrats
seldom use the word any more, because it has become
associated with the most strident activists, who tend to
divide the world into victims and oppressors. This outlook
elevates group identity over the individual sort and sees
unequal outcomes for different groups as proof of systemic
discrimination. That logic is then used to justify illiberal
means to correct entrenched injustices, such as reverse
discrimination and the policing of speech. It is this sort of
“woke warrior” that Republicans love to lambast.
Wide awoke
Our analysis subsumes both the advocates and the

denigrators of woke thinking, by looking at ideas and
actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for
ill. It measures, for example, talk of “diversity, equity and
inclusion” (DEI) in the corporate world, regardless of
whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the under-
representation of women and racial minorities or as an
example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks
we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke
activism, such as the number of drives to censure
academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only
the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling
data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial
injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has
passed “peak woke”.
The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is

through polling. We examined responses over the past 25
years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey
(GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial
discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked
around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier
this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal”
about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but
up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of
Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in
life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the
jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that
discrimination is the main reason for differences in
outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the
most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the
biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking
have been among young people and those on the left.
Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern,
albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The
share of Americans who consider sexism a very or
moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the
aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face
obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at
57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds
that the share of people who believe someone can be a
different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily
since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to
trans students playing in sports teams that match their
chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown
from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.
To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we

measured how frequently the media have been using woke
terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”,
“oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our
request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand,
counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six
newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New
York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and
Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the
Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked
between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term
“white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for
every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had
fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
We found largely the same trend in television, by applying

the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC,
MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books,
using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week
between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke
words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the
peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023
followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024.
In academia, which is often thought of as a hotbed of

wokeism, the trend is much the same. Calls for academics
to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in
2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these
calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar
database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative
student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for
scholars to be censored or cancelled. These findings also
dovetail with polling data: the share of Americans who think
that expressions of racist views should be restricted rose
sharply between 2016 and 2021, reaching around 52%, and
has since declined slightly, down to 49% in 2022.
Teaching and research also seem to be shifting away from

wokery, at least somewhat. The use of our set of 154 woke
terms began to rise sharply in 2015 in papers on the social
sciences collected by JSTOR, a digital library of academic
journals. By 2022 the incidence of “intersectional”,
“whiteness”, “oppression” and the like were at their peak. At
our request, Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford
University, counted the frequency of woke words in a
collection of course catalogues from American universities.
Classes that invoked woke terms in their name or synopsis
rose by around 20% between 2010 and 2022, but remained
stable last year.
In part, academia’s retreat from wokeness has been

ordained by law. The Supreme Court banned race-based
affirmative action in admissions last year. According to the
Chronicle of Higher Education, 86 bills in 28 states have
aimed to curb DEI initiatives in academia over the past year;
14 have become law. For example Alabama will from
October 1st prohibit state-funded universities from having
any DEI offices or programmes, from promoting “divisive
concepts” about “race, colour, religion, sex, ethnicity or
national origin” and from allowing transgender students to
use the toilets of their choice.
Nine states ban academic institutions from demanding

“diversity statements” from job applicants. Critics have
assailed these personal meditations on the importance of
inclusivity as ideological litmus tests. Earlier this year
several prominent universities, including Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave in to pressure
from donors and alumni and dropped them. Others, such as
the University of California, have faced lawsuits over their
continuing use.
Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even
though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions
of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the
first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr
Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021,
by which point they were 14 times more common than in
early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-
research company. They have since begun to drop sharply
again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of
2024, mentions were only around three times higher than
before Mr Floyd’s death.
The share of new job listings that mention diversity

continues to grow, however, as ever more firms add
boilerplate about inclusivity at the bottom of ads. But the
evidence also suggests that firms are less willing to put their
money where their mouth is, DEI-wise. The number of
people employed in DEI has fallen in the past few years.
According to Revelio, which tracks labour statistics at a
group of big American firms, DEI roles as a share of overall
employment doubled from the beginning of 2016 to the end
of 2022 (to 0.02% of all employees, or around 12,600 roles).
But in the most recent estimates, from July, these numbers
were down by 11% from their peak (to 0.018% of
employees, or 11,100 roles). According to Farient Advisers, a
pay consultancy, the share of S&P 500 companies that tied
bosses’ remuneration to diversity targets peaked in 2022 (at
53%) and dropped in 2023 (to 48%).
The fall in corporate enthusiasm for DEI could have several

causes. First, in any belt-tightening, support functions are
the first to suffer cuts. This is how DEI consultants explain
away the recent shrinkage of DEI departments at big tech
firms such as Meta and Microsoft. Second, after the
Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in education,
companies are scared that they may be sued for any
practices that could be construed as discriminating against
certain groups. A third possibility is that firms are taking
note of declining public enthusiasm for corporate social
activism. Gallup detected a big drop between 2022 and
2023 in the share of Americans who like companies to take
a stand on matters of public debate. Less than half, for
instance, think businesses should speak out on racial issues
or LGBT rights. Bud Light, a popular brand of beer, suffered
a big drop in sales last year after a promotional
collaboration with a transgender social-media star. Its
parent company’s shares have only recently recovered.
Asked why firms that two years ago were happy to talk up
their DEI credentials were now ghosting The Economist,
Johnny Taylor, from SHRM, an association for people working
in human resources, says with a laugh, “Two years ago
Budweiser was the number-one-selling beer in the country.”
Other big brands including Disney, a media firm, and Target,
a retailer, have also experienced backlashes for behaviour
some customers considered too woke. Robby Starbuck, an
activist who campaigns for firms with relatively conservative
customers to abandon DEI, says he wants to “Make
Corporate America Sane Again”. Egged on by the likes of
Elon Musk, a billionaire conspiracy theorist, he has won
concessions and grovelling apologies from Coors, Ford,
Harley Davidson, Jack Daniel’s and John Deere. Mr Starbuck
claims that whereas his first targets relented only after he
posted castigating videos about them online, these days
firms are beginning to drop DEI initiatives pre-emptively.
The wake of woke
Although our analysis shows a clear subsidence in wokery,

there are several reasons for caution. For one thing,
although all our measures are below their peak, they remain
well above the level of 2015 in almost every instance. What
is more, in some respects, woke ideas may be less
discussed simply because they have become broadly
accepted. According to Gallup, 74% of Americans want
businesses to promote diversity, whatever the troubles of
DEI.
Over time, attitudes to wokeness will doubtless change
again. It’s easy to see how Mr Trump might prompt a revival
in woke activism on the left if he wins the presidency again.
By the same token, if Kamala Harris, the Democratic
candidate, becomes president next year, she may spur a
reaction among anti-woke activists. After all, some of the
biggest differences in opinion between Democrats and
Republicans concern social issues: 80% of likely Democratic
voters believe the legacy of slavery still affects black
people, for example, compared with only 27% of Mr Trump’s
supporters, according to Pew. There is also a chance that
Gen Z, the most woke generation, retains this outlook as it
ages, which would lead to a gradual increase in woke views
among the broader population.
For now, however, advocates of woke thinking are in

despair. Ms Jackson, from Race2Dinner, thinks things have
got “much worse”, particularly when looking at “what’s
going on with banning books, banning LGBTQ, banning trans
folks, stopping DEI”. She thinks Mr Trump has “given
everybody permission to just be an asshole”. Critics are
exultant: Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute, a
think-tank, says, “I think people will one day look back on
the 2015 to 2025 era as being a bit of a moment of
madness.” But even though Mr Teixeira thinks the woke
wave has set social progress back, he does note that, over
the long run, America has been reducing discrimination and
improving opportunity for minorities of all sorts. That trend,
he believes, is lasting. ■

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/09/19/america-is-becoming-less-woke

United States
Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in
America’s election
Swing states :: Buckets of money, vicious advertising and consultants
galore have left the race for the state a virtual tie
Who is Ryan Routh, Donald Trump’s would-

be assassin?
The man behind the gun :: His 291-page screed on Ukraine’s “unwinnable
war” offers some clues
Eric Adams’s friends keep having their

phones taken away
The Adams families :: It can be hard to keep track of all the people around
New York’s mayor who are under investigation
What has been the effect of the Supreme

Court’s ban on affirmative action?
Admit it :: Making sense of the drip-drip of admissions data from American
universities
Kamala Harris’s post-debate bounce is now

visible in the polls
Campaign calculus: now you see it :: But it comes with two big caveats
The never-Trump movement has leaders.

What about followers?
Rebels with a cause :: For some dissident Republicans, backing Kamala
Harris seems a step too far
How the right is taking culture war to

culture itself
Lexington :: A new “mockumentary” satirises anti-racist activism

Swing states
Pennsylvania, the crucial

battleground in America’s
election
Buckets of money, vicious advertising and consultants
galore have left the race for the state a virtual tie
9月 19, 2024 10:12 上午 | HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
ON JULY 21st Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County

Democratic Committee, hosted a meeting with volunteers.
The event took a turn when Mr Roan stopped to read a
statement from Joe Biden announcing his departure from
the presidential race. “There was this sort of sense of
sadness—and then immediate hope,” Mr Roan recalls in his
office, which overlooks the Pennsylvania state capitol. The
activist speaks highly of Mr Biden but acknowledged that
“things were not looking good” at the time. The rise of
Kamala Harris attracted a surge of volunteers to a county
that favoured Donald Trump by around 18 points in 2016 but
only 11 points in 2020. If such improvements hold there and
in other areas like it, Ms Harris would probably win the state
and the presidency.
Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as a fulcrum of the 2024

election, and for good reason. The Economist’s forecast
model suggests that the state—with its 19 electoral-college
votes, the most of any swing state—is the tipping-point in
27% of the model’s updated simulations, meaning it decides
the election more often than any other state. Mr Trump wins
only 7% of the time when he loses the Keystone State.
Indeed, he narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016, and then he
lost by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7m cast in his
unsuccessful re-election bid four years later.
No state has drawn more money. Of the $839.5m that the

Harris campaign and allied organisations already have spent
or committed to advertising, $164.1m has gone to this state
of 13m people. The less well-heeled Trump operation has
directed $135.7m of $458.8m to Pennsylvania. Turn on the
television, watch a YouTube video or listen to the radio
inside Pennsylvania and it won’t be long before spots for Ms
Harris or Mr Trump begin to play.
The messaging war is a study in contrasts. Ms Harris seeks

to define herself in uplifting ads while warning in others
about Mr Trump’s effect on the economy, reproductive rights
and American democracy. As one of the most famous people
in human history, Mr Trump doesn’t spend time introducing
himself to voters. His ads and rhetoric relentlessly seek to
paint Ms Harris as an out-of-touch leftist responsible for
inflation and migrant crime. Such fear campaigns have
found success before in presidential elections, but J.J.
Abbott, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, argues that
“there may be some limitations on how much these dark,
brutal ads on those issues may work” this time, citing
similar unsuccessful efforts mounted by Republicans in
recent statewide races.
Mr Trump has also drawn attention to Ms Harris’s past

opposition to natural-gas fracking, an important industry in
western Pennsylvania, which she now supports. The issue
may be top of mind in those energy-producing regions but
elsewhere voters often express indifference. “It is not a slam
dunk for any politician…to think that Pennsylvania is
monolithically in support of further energy exploration,”
says Stephen Bloom, vice-president of the Commonwealth
Foundation, a centre-right think-tank. “No one has ever said
the word fracking to me” while campaigning, says Stella
Sexton, vice-chair of the Lancaster County Democratic
Committee. She says she hears more about the cost of
living and reproductive rights.
For many years a blue state that also elected moderate
Republicans, Pennsylvania voted about three points to the
right of the country in 2016 and 2020. Since 2008, the
percentage of voters registered as Democrats has declined
while the share of Republicans has grown. Republican
registrations outpaced Democratic ones this year until Ms
Harris entered the race (see charts). Democrats argue that
some of the Republican gains have been offset by a rise in
left-leaning independents.
Harris supporters are particularly proud of their ground

game. The campaign has over 350 staffers across 50 offices
in Pennsylvania, 16 of which are located in rural areas that
Mr Trump won by double digits four years ago. The idea is to
chip away at support in heavily Republican areas even when
Ms Harris doesn’t have a chance to win outright. “They’re
play-acting at trying to do better in the rural counties,”
argues Mark Harris, a Republican strategist. “This will once
again be an extraordinarily divided election between
densely populated suburbs versus exurban and rural
communities.”
Republican efforts appear more scattered, with a
constellation of groups working on turnout efforts. Postal
voting is a priority. In 2020 Mr Trump actively discouraged
mail-in voting but has since shifted his rhetoric, albeit
inconsistently, in the hope of cutting down the Democrats’
advantage.
If Mr Trump wins Pennsylvania, it will show that he put
together a coalition of low-propensity white working-class
voters and religious voters, says Ryan Shafik, a Republican
strategist, and would probably also have attracted “a good
amount of newer minority voters”. Ms Harris will have to
reassemble Mr Biden’s coalition built on strength among
urban and minority voters, as well as continuing to make
inroads into the state’s suburbs. Her current lead in
Pennsylvania, according to a polling average maintained by
FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, is less than two
percentage points. For all the money pouring in, the race
remains a virtual tie. ■
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/2024/09/19/pennsylvania-the-crucial-battleground-in-americas-election

The man behind the gun
Who is Ryan Routh,

Donald Trump’s would-be
assassin?
His 291-page screed on Ukraine’s “unwinnable war” offers
some clues
9月 19, 2024 07:42 上午 | LOS ANGELES
RYAN WESLEY ROUTH was prepared for a stakeout. The

lanky 58-year-old from Hawaii waited behind the fence of
Donald Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, for
12 hours, according to mobile-phone records. He had
packed a bag of food, a camera, a semi-automatic rifle and
a scope. A Secret Service agent spotted Mr Routh’s gun and
opened fire before he could attempt to shoot the former
president, who was playing an unscheduled round. The
agency says Mr Routh did not have sight of Mr Trump, but
the apparent assassination attempt was the second in just
over two months.
Mr Routh has been charged with two violations of federal

gun laws and he could serve up to 20 years in prison. He
already has a criminal record, including a conviction in North
Carolina in 2002 for possessing a machine gun. His motive
for wanting to kill Mr Trump remains unclear. But unlike
Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed while attempting to
gun down Mr Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, Mr
Routh’s biography and opinions can be divined from the
public record. Social-media profiles and a self-published e-
book (available for $2.99 online) paint a picture of a man
with changeable political opinions, hatred for Mr Trump, a
predilection for violence and profound naivety.
Mr Routh’s book, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War”, was

published in 2023 following what he describes as a five-
month stint in the country. After claiming that he failed to
join the International Legion, a branch of the Ukrainian army
filled with foreign soldiers (the legion denies any
association), he says he tried to recruit fighters to help
wage war against Russia. The book’s rambling subtitle
—“The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and
the Global Citizen: Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the
End of Humanity”—offers a sense of its broad scope and
incoherent prose. The 291-page text is something between
a diary and a political treatise.
Mr Routh admits in the book that he voted for Mr Trump in

2016. He suggests that he was “fooled” by the “idiot”
former president, and felt let down by his foreign-policy
blunders, including pulling America out of the Iran nuclear
deal, which was brokered by President Barack Obama in
2015. It is on Iran’s behalf that Mr Routh apologises for
voting for Mr Trump, and he offers the country a bloody
solution that now looks like foreshadowing. “I am man
enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake
and Iran I apologise,” he writes. “You are free to assassinate
Trump as well as me for that error in judgement …No one
here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural
selection to work or even unnatural selection.”
Mr Routh seems to have abandoned his support for Mr

Trump at some point during his first term in office. Posts on
X suggest that in 2020 he backed the short-lived
presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic
congresswoman, and that he hoped Nikki Haley and Vivek
Ramaswamy might team up to defeat Mr Trump in the
Republican primary earlier this year. He commends
President Joe Biden for his support for Ukraine, though not
without calling him “frail” and criticising him for the
disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. He never mentions
Kamala Harris, as the book was written before she became
the Democratic presidential nominee. But he does suggest
that “we must get to a place where every leader is always a
woman so that we can avoid this testosterone driven
insanity and macho bullshit.”
While much of Mr Routh’s derision seems reserved for Mr

Trump, his book reveals a man disillusioned by politics more
broadly and unencumbered by his own contradictions. He
condemns the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021
but then advocates for Mr Trump’s assassination and mulls
whether Democrats and Republicans are destined to
“slaughter the entire opposing party”. He offers to be
“kidnapped by North Korea…to show them one by one that
Americans are not the enemy”. There is a revealing
reference to “Homage to Catalonia”, George Orwell’s
memoir about his time on the front lines of the Spanish civil
war. Mr Routh seems to fancy himself a latter-day Orwell,
wanting to fight for freedom in Ukraine only to feel
ineffective in the end.
In 1995 Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, advocated a

revolution against industrial society in a 35,000-word
manifesto. His bombs targeted people he believed to be
complicit in the advancement of technology. Mr Routh may
have similarly hoped that shooting Mr Trump could force a
reckoning. At the end of his book, he writes that he did not
expect to make it out of 2023 alive. “I am certain likewise
that my end will go unnoticed…but I will dream and imagine
that perhaps it would spark motivation in at least one
person to take up arms and fight against the hatred that
ended me.” In crafting his dangerous message to others, he
may have emboldened himself. “If you want to be one of
those action heroes in the movies”, he wrote, “now is your
time to shine.”■


states/2024/09/17/who-is-ryan-routh-donald-trumps-would-be-assassin

The Adams families
Eric Adams’s friends keep

having their phones taken
away
It can be hard to keep track of all the people around New
York’s mayor who are under investigation
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | NEW YORK
ERIC ADAMS, New York City’s mayor, likes to talk about his
devotion to the job: “The goal is stay focused, no
distractions, and grind for New Yorkers.” Yet the distractions
keep coming.
The list of people being investigated by federal agents

includes two deputy mayors, the schools chancellor and a
former police commissioner, who resigned on September
12th. The list of federal agencies poking around includes the
Justice Department, the FBI and the IRS. The city’s own
Department of Investigation is busy too. No indictments
have come down, and no one has been accused or charged
with any wrongdoing, but as federal agents raid the homes
and scoop up the phones of top officials, questions are
multiplying about some of the people Mr Adams has chosen
to help him manage America’s biggest city. The
investigations are not related to one another, but the same
cannot be said of all those caught up in them.
Federal investigators have taken the phones of three

brothers close to the mayor. David Banks, the schools
chancellor, had his phone seized at the home he shares with
his fiancée Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor. Her
phone was also taken. She says she is “co-operating fully
with any investigation” and that she is “confident that I
have done nothing wrong”. Mr Banks said he is co-operating
with investigators and is not the target of their inquiry. His
brother Philip is deputy mayor for public safety. His phone
was also seized in early September. According to press
reports the third brother, Terence, who runs a government-
relations firm, is also under scrutiny. His lawyer says: “We
have been assured by the government that Mr Banks is not
a target of this investigation.” The brothers deny any
wrongdoing.
Another separate investigation involves another set of

brothers. Edward Caban, the former police commissioner,
resigned a week after his phone was seized as part of a
federal investigation, reportedly into the consulting business
run by his brother James. Both men have denied any
wrongdoing. James’s lawyer says his work as a liaison
between the NYPD and a private company is “perfectly
legal”. Edward said he was prompted to resign “for the good
of the city” because the investigation was “a distraction” for
the department.
It does not end there. Timothy Pearson, an adviser to the

mayor, also had a phone seized this month as part of a
federal probe. The mayor is under pressure to fire Mr
Pearson, who allegedly assaulted security guards at a
migrant shelter and also faces sexual-harassment lawsuits.
Mr Pearson’s lawyer has said he denies the allegations in all
the suits. The FBI searched the home of another senior
staffer in February. Last year the FBI looked into donations
made to Mr Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign. At issue was
whether any campaign money came from foreign donors,
which would be illegal. His top campaign fund-raiser later
resigned, and the investigation appears to be continuing.
Mr Adams’s own mobile devices were seized by federal

agents in November 2023. The mayor has repeatedly said
he has done nothing wrong. When the police commissioner
resigned, Mr Adams told New Yorkers he was “as surprised
as you to learn of these inquiries”. He went on to say, “I
spent more than 20 years in law enforcement, and so, every
member of the administration knows my expectations that
we must follow the law.”
But Mr Adams also brags about his loyalty to his team and
says he himself is “perfectly imperfect”. His friendships with
the Banks and Caban families go back decades. Mr Adams
worked with the fathers of both sets of brothers when he
was a police officer, and Mr Pearson was once his own
commanding officer. “City government is a family affair”,
says John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany, a good-government
group. “The mayor’s responsibilities are to the people who
elected him, not the people he has employed the longest,”
says Susan Lerner of Common Cause, a government
watchdog. That is not always the impression Mr Adams has
given. ■


states/2024/09/18/eric-adamss-friends-keep-having-their-phones-taken-away

Admit it
What has been the effect

of the Supreme Court’s
ban on affirmative action?
Making sense of the drip-drip of admissions data from
American universities
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | WASHINGTON, DC
IN JUNE 2023 the Supreme Court banned race-conscious

admissions at American universities. Many supporters of the
practice feared that black and Hispanic enrolment at the
nation’s most selective colleges would plunge, too, when
members of the class of 2028 arrived on campus.
So when some colleges released data this month showing a

decrease in black and Hispanic enrolment, many were quick
to blame the Supreme Court. Harvard University, Amherst
College and the University of Virginia reported decreases in
black enrolment from last year. Brown University and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed declines
in enrolment of both black and Hispanic students. But
assuming that these dips can be blamed solely on the ban
would be a mistake.
Public universities in America are obliged to disclose

demographic data but many have yet to do so for the new
academic year. Private universities do not have to publish
numbers, but many do so anyway. The picture so far is
mixed. Yale, Tufts and the University of Virginia reported
slightly higher enrolment among Hispanic students
compared with last year. Dartmouth College, Princeton
University, and Yale University reported decreases in Asian-
American student enrolment—the group that the Supreme
Court decision was supposed to help (see chart).
College presidents continue to value diversity, but must
operate within the constraints of the court’s ruling. Yet so
many other factors have affected college applications that
isolating the court’s impact is hard. “I’m a neuroscientist by
training, and when you are doing an experiment, you never
tinker with two or three factors at the same time, right?”
says Joanne Berger-Sweeney, the president of Trinity
College, a liberal-arts university in Connecticut.
Those factors include the botched roll-out of the Free

Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, says Angel
Pérez, who heads the National Association for College
Admission Counselling. (FAFSA is a form that families must
complete to qualify for financial aid.) They include laws
passed by some Republican state legislatures, which took
things a step further than the Supreme Court did by passing
laws banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives
altogether. Meanwhile, some colleges made admissions
tests, such as the SAT, mandatory after a brief hiatus during
the pandemic. Black and Hispanic students tend to perform
worse on these tests, and so could have been put off by
them.
Finally, with race no longer mattering in admissions, some

students chose not to report theirs. It is possible that some
of the reported losses among black and Hispanic students
may actually be hidden in the “unknown” racial category.
Some private colleges have stopped collecting race data
altogether, says Bryan Cook of the Urban Institute, a think-
tank. “If you don’t collect the racial data of your applicant
pool, you can’t be accused of using race in your admissions
process.” ■


states/2024/09/19/what-has-been-the-effect-of-the-supreme-courts-ban-on-affirmative-
action

Campaign calculus: now you see it
Kamala Harris’s post-

debate bounce is now
visible in the polls
But it comes with two big caveats
9月 19, 2024 07:41 上午
LIKE BIRD-WATCHERS with binoculars, observers of

America’s presidential race have had their eyes trained on
the opinion polls to see whether they can spot a post-debate
bounce for either candidate. Now they can. According to The
Economist’s poll tracker, Kamala Harris’s nationwide lead
over Donald Trump has widened to 4.5 percentage points,
from 3.8 points on September 10th, the day of their debate.
A 0.7-point improvement is small but potentially significant,
and gives Ms Harris her biggest lead yet in our tracker (see
chart).
Contrary to Mr Trump’s claims, Ms Harris clearly won the

debate. Several surveys have confirmed what CNN’s flash
poll suggested on the night: that a large majority of
Americans thought Ms Harris bested Mr Trump, who
repeatedly waded into the traps his rival laid for him and
came across as angry and rambling. A YouGov poll reported
that 55% of debate-watchers thought Ms Harris won, against
25% for Mr Trump; ABC’s scored it 58% to 36% for Ms Harris.
A good night for the Democrat was capped by an
endorsement from Taylor Swift.
The Harris campaign got an immediate financial boost,
reporting that it raised fully $47m in the 24 hours after the
debate. Will a debate victory have a real impact on the
race? History suggests presidential jousts rarely make a
difference. But President Joe Biden’s catastrophic
performance against Mr Trump on June 27th was a game-
changer, and this time the novelty of Ms Harris’s candidacy
meant that Americans were paying attention: some 67m of
them tuned in, 16m more than watched the Trump-Biden
showdown. It takes a while for new polls to show whether
the debate moved the needle on polling averages. The
needle has now budged.
The true picture may be even rosier for Ms Harris than

aggregated scores suggest, since her bounce is still held
down by pre-debate polling. Some of the latest surveys are
striking. Morning Consult shows Ms Harris leading
nationwide among likely voters by six points, compared with
three before the debate; The Economist/YouGov shows Ms
Harris improving by four points while Mr Trump remains
steady. Of 12 fully pre- and post- polls, Ms Harris has
improved her share by 1.2 points on average and Mr Trump
has worsened by 0.3 points, so the margin has moved by
1.5 points in Ms Harris’s direction.
Voters’ views of Ms Harris have kept improving. Before Mr

Biden dropped out her net-favourability rating was a dismal
minus 17 points. This week, according to FiveThirtyEight’s
poll aggregator, positive views of her equalled negative
ones for the first time since mid-2021 (Mr Trump is at minus
ten).
The good post-debate news for Ms Harris comes with two

caveats, however. One is that it is not the popular vote that
determines who wins, but the electoral college, where the
outcome will hinge on a handful of swing states. State-level
polling since the debate is still scarce and the results so far
have been more mixed. The race remains extremely close.
Even so, overall the polling shifts have been enough to
nudge our election-forecast model a few notches in Ms
Harris’s favour. The model now gives her a 57% chance of
winning (her highest yet), against 43% for Mr Trump,
compared with a 53-47 edge on September 10th. Broadly
speaking, whereas before the debate the model pointed to a
toss-up, now it gives Ms Harris a nearly three-in-five chance
of victory.
The second caveat is that a lot could still change. The latest
polls were conducted before the apparent assassination
attempt on Mr Trump in Florida on September 15th. Since
June the contest has been full of big surprises. They surely
won’t be the last.■


states/2024/09/18/kamala-harriss-post-debate-bounce-is-now-visible-in-the-polls

Rebels with a cause
The never-Trump
movement has leaders.
What about followers?
For some dissident Republicans, backing Kamala Harris
seems a step too far
9月 19, 2024 07:42 上午 | Atlanta
GEOFF DUNCAN knew “The Beast” from the inside. Ahead of

the 2020 election he rode in the president’s aptly named
limousine whenever Donald Trump came to Atlanta. But
when Mr Trump claimed that Georgia’s election was rigged,
Mr Duncan, then the state’s lieutenant-governor, rebutted
him. Death threats soon arrived from Trump loyalists. Mr
Duncan chose not to run for re-election after watching the
former president “hijack the conservative agenda” in the
Georgia legislature and “sidetrack multiple sessions” by
infecting lawmakers with his baseless vote-fraud
obsessions.
In August Mr Duncan joined a chorus of Republican

politicians campaigning against Mr Trump when he endorsed
Kamala Harris on stage at the Democratic National
Convention. “It was like the first day getting traded from the
Yankees to the Red Sox,” he says of sitting in the green
room waiting for his debut. Since then Liz Cheney, once the
third-most powerful Republican in the House, and her father,
former vice-president Dick Cheney, have said that they, too,
will vote for Ms Harris.
Yet the never-Trump movement of anti-Trump conservatives

is not quite what it was. Four years ago it contributed to Joe
Biden’s victory as thousands of Americans who voted for Mr
Trump in 2016 abandoned him. They were encouraged to do
so by an array of generals, press officers and administration
officials who had worked under Mr Trump during his
presidency. Democratic mega-donors financed groups like
the Lincoln Project, a conservative PAC, to run ads warning
fellow right-wingers of Mr Trump’s con-man proclivities and
fondness for authoritarianism.
This time around the movement’s influence appears more

muted. Mr Trump unleashed a campaign of vengeance
against Republicans who voted to impeach him. A Trump-
backed candidate crushed Ms Cheney by 37 points in a
Republican primary in 2022. When Mitt Romney announced
last year that he would not run again, the movement lost its
legs in the Senate. The question in 2024 is whether its
leaders’ voices will matter in battleground states.
They are certainly going to try. This cycle Republican Voters
Against Trump is planning to spend $40m to air testimonials
in swing states from former-MAGA voters, which would be a
four-fold increase from 2020. The Lincoln Project is targeting
two voter blocs it hopes will flip. One is “Red Dawn
conservatives” (named after a cold-war film in which the
Russians invade America), baby-boomers who came of age
politically during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and are
uncomfortable with Mr Trump’s cosiness with Russia. The
other is “Dobbs dads”, conservative millennials struggling to
justify abortion bans to their daughters. The activists reckon
that hearing from more people like Mr Duncan will create a
“permission structure” for voters to quietly leave the top of
the ticket blank or cast a ballot for Ms Harris.
“Cowardice” over Kamala
However, the never-Trump movement is divided over

whether it should explicitly endorse Ms Harris. Stephen
Hayes, co-founder of the Dispatch, a centre-right online
news outlet, is adamant that journalists in his orbit should
be warning Americans of the threat of Mr Trump without
resorting to “partisan boosterism” by backing the
Democratic nominee. Pat Toomey, a former senator from
Pennsylvania and self-described “never-again-Trumper”,
says that he will vote for neither candidate, mostly out of
disdain for Ms Harris’s economic policies. “The outcome is
very likely binary, but that doesn’t mean my choice is
necessarily binary,” he explains.
Sarah Longwell, who runs Republican Voters Against Trump

and publishes the Bulwark, another news outlet, calls that
“the kind of cowardice I have seen play out over and over
again in the Republican Party”. If never-Trumpers believe Mr
Trump is a singular threat to democracy, she thinks they
should work not just to deprive him of votes but to give Ms
Harris more.
Never-Trump has become “a movement of leaders without

followers”, says Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk-
show host and author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind”.
Weekly Economist/YouGov polls show that since 2016 the
percentage of Republicans who plan to vote for Mr Trump
rose from roughly 80% to 90%. When it comes to swing
voters, more importantly, the share of Republican-leaning
independents who plan to back him has nudged slightly
upwards since April, but overall has barely budged since
2020. Why?
The Republican traditionalists most aligned with never-

Trumpers probably already crossed partisan lines. Eight
years into Trumpism those who remain in the Grand Old
Party may be less influenced by its elite old-timers. And,
says Kyle Kondik of the Centre for Politics at the University
of Virginia, persuadable voters tend to be the ones paying
the least attention.
Sitting in his backyard in Forsyth County, Georgia’s

wealthiest, Mr Duncan contemplates his future. He hopes
his Georgia colleagues will admit to backing the wrong guy
if Mr Trump loses again. On the other hand, “If this whole
Republican thing just implodes on itself maybe there’s a
place for me over there,” he says, referring to the
Democratic Party. In October he will go on the road with Ms
Harris.
But campaigning comes with risks. Two weeks ago the town
sheriff called and told Mr Duncan not to go home one
evening. Someone called in claiming there was a sniper
waiting on his rooftop. ■

states/2024/09/14/the-never-trump-movement-has-leaders-what-about-followers

Lexington
How the right is taking

culture war to culture
itself
A new “mockumentary” satirises anti-racist activism
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE WOMAN has a confession to make. Over an elegant

dinner, she admits to her companions that sometimes when
she is out with her husband and he is “really loud” she
shushes him. A normal exchange within a marriage, one
might think. But she is white and he is black. Her impulse,
she worries, is “probably my white supremacy talking”.
The scene appears in the new mockumentary “Am I Racist?”
by Matt Walsh. A conservative podcaster and film-maker, Mr
Walsh wants, he has said, to expose “the so-called-anti-
racist hustle” of the diversity, equity and inclusion
movement. Among the interviews and gags in the film—
some outrageous or funny, others silly—this moment
registers as poignant, an unsettling glimpse into a couple’s
life: “white supremacy” appears to be harming a marriage
that seems to be proof of racial progress. Is that because
the reality of white supremacy has penetrated so deeply
into the woman’s subconscious mind that it warps her
behaviour? Or because the idea of white supremacy has
penetrated so deeply into her conscious mind that she must
forever second-guess how she speaks with her husband?
The movie dismisses the first question and resoundingly

answers “yes” to versions of the second. It luxuriates in the
paradoxes of some anti-racist activists, who while
purporting to want to overcome racism can also treat it as
immutable. “America is racist to its bones,” one consultant
tells Mr Walsh. Clad in tweed and bewigged with a man bun,
he pretended to be a solemn white leftist and paid
thousands of dollars in fees to beguile anti-racist experts
into embarrassing, extreme assertions and acts on-camera.
“Republicans are Nazis,” declares one of the two

moderators of the dinner, at which they schooled the white
women in their racism. America, she says, “is not worth
saving. This country is a piece of shit.” A loud crash startles
her as Mr Walsh, a masked waiter, drops a stack of plates.
He then leads the women in a toast. “Just raise a glass if
you’re racist,” he says, and they do.
Mr Walsh contrasts the anger, not to say nihilism, of the

activists, which he sees as fomenting racism, with the
hopeful, accepting views of some just plain folks. “Why
would you want to forget they’re black?” growls a white man
in a biker bar, after Mr Walsh, in his earnest DEI persona,
tries to explain what he has learned. “You should embrace
them being black.” In another scene, a black woman tells Mr
Walsh, “We didn’t see colours, baby, because we grew up
together and there was a lot of love.”
Those dissonant yet harmonious messages might warrant a

hearing on the right now more than on the left, as
Springfield, Ohio, quakes beneath fact-free claims by the
Republican presidential ticket that Haitian immigrants are
eating pets. Indeed, the movie seems countercyclical. As
The Economist reports this week, concerns over such
matters as “white privilege” peaked three years ago, after
the protests against the police killing of George Floyd.
Yet “Am I Racist?” is finding a sizeable audience. Released

on September 13th, it was fourth at the box office in its first
weekend, bringing in $4.5m and beating out a new action
movie, “The Killer’s Game”. Lexington saw the film in Times
Square, the very belly of the blue beast; the small theatre
was filled with a youngish audience, mostly but only mostly
white. Critics panned “The Killer’s Game”. By contrast, “Am I
Racist?” has not been reviewed by a mainstream
publication, though it has received a 99% audience rating
on the fan site Rotten Tomatoes. Predictably, silence from
left-of-centre publications has sharpened interest from the
right. Elon Musk has tweeted in solidarity.
The film is the first wide theatrical release from the Daily
Wire, a conservative media company. It adds a new
dimension to the parallel right-wing cultural universe
encompassing everything from rap music to fashion. “We
say often on the right that politics is downstream of culture,
but we’re afraid to actually make culture—we just like to
critique it all day,” Jeremy Boreing, a founder of the Daily
Wire, said at the premiere. “The Daily Wire is making
culture.” Maybe, as the film-makers hope, the movie will
attract and amuse people disinclined at first to agree with
its messages. More likely this cultural parallelism will lead to
more mockery and caricature on both sides, uncomplicated,
like the polarisation of the news media, by much
engagement or debate.
Mr Boreing praised Mr Walsh for “using the left’s own

playbook against them”, deploying “tricks” devised by
Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentaries embarrassed
prominent conservatives among others. The genre is largely
lost on Lexington; laughing at the manipulation and
humiliation of the unwitting, however annoying they may
be, can leave an unpleasant taste.
White gullibility
Like Mr Baron Cohen, Mr Walsh is a quick-witted impostor;

unlike him, he is a soothingly mild one. His most sensational
trick ensnares Robin DiAngelo, the author of “White
Fragility”, a bestseller. Though she is clearly uneasy he
prompts her to take cash from her wallet to give to his
producer, who is black, as reparations. Subsequently
learning she was fooled, Ms DiAngelo said she donated Mr
Walsh’s fee of $15,000 to the NAACP Defence Fund. Of Mr
Walsh and his allies, she said, “They will not prevail in their
efforts to stop the work for racial justice.”
But what has become of that work? The left is due for a
reckoning over the reckoning on race. The protesters have
moved on, the book sales have dried up, the DEI
departments are emptying, and the elite white grovelling
and self-flagellation recorded by Mr Walsh have been, on the
left, politely memory-holed. Yet a movement concerned with
structural injustice has achieved little structural change,
whether to policing or the black-white wealth gap. Was it all,
in the end, just a performance? ■


states/2024/09/19/how-the-right-is-taking-culture-war-to-culture-itself

The Americas
Can the voluntary carbon market save the
Amazon?
Rainforest rewards :: Entrepreneurs in Brazil are betting big on planting
trees
How Brazilian lawmakers won extra powers

to waste money
Who’s in charge? :: Congress’s capture of the budget is making Brazil less
governable
A by-election loss puts Justin Trudeau on the

ropes
Canadian politics :: For how much longer can the Liberal leader hold on?

Rainforest rewards
Can the voluntary carbon

market save the Amazon?
Entrepreneurs in Brazil are betting big on planting trees
9月 19, 2024 07:52 上午 | MÃE DO RIO AND MARACAÇUMÉ
A TRACTOR WITH a subsoiler loosens the earth and carves

out deep holes. A dozen men follow, dropping tree seedlings
into them. This industrious scene in a deforested part of the
Amazon is more reminiscent of the paper-and-pulp industry
than the voluntary carbon market, in which companies buy
carbon credits to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions.
Brazil can be to carbon removal what Saudi Arabia was to
carbon production, claims Peter Fernandez of Mombak, the
company that runs the project. “And I want Mombak to be
the Saudi Aramco of that,” he says.
This is big talk for a market with a serious reputation

problem. In 2023 the volume of credits traded on the
voluntary carbon market was less than half that in 2022;
and the market’s value shrank from $1.9bn to $723m (see
chart). Corporate buyers have been put off by scandals:
some project developers claimed credits for protecting
forests that were not at risk of being cut down.
Yet in Brazil optimists like Mr Fernandez abound. Rather than
protecting standing forest, as many carbon-credit projects
do, they are focusing on large-scale reforestation. A ten-
hour drive from Mombak’s farm, re.green, another Brazilian
firm, is planting trees on 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres) of
degraded pastureland. In May Microsoft, which plans to be
carbon negative by 2030, signed a deal to buy 3m tonnes of
carbon credits over 15 years from re.green for an
undisclosed price (the company has a similar agreement
with Mombak). Google is expected to announce a deal with
Mombak at the end of this month, its first foray into
reforestation credits.
Believers say there are two reasons to bet on the market.

First, most of the world’s big listed companies now have
targets to reduce their emissions, as shareholders and
regulators press them to become greener. Heavy industry,
airlines and energy-hungry technology firms cannot fully cut
their emissions, so to achieve net zero they will need to pay
to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Second, many governments are regulating emissions more

aggressively. The World Bank tallies 75 carbon-pricing
schemes around the world, covering an estimated 24% of
global emissions, up from 7% a decade ago. Although the
voluntary market is separate from the compliance market,
the two do sometimes dovetail. California’s cap-and-trade
system allows participants to use some credits issued on the
voluntary market.
Only 2bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year are being

removed from the atmosphere by human-led efforts, mostly
through reforestation. In order to limit global warming to
1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the rate of extraction
needs to rise to between 5bn and 10bn tonnes per year by
2050, researchers at the University of Oxford estimate. At
10bn tonnes, the size of the carbon-removal market would
be between $300bn and $1.2trn, according to McKinsey, a
consultancy.
Carbon-dioxide removal can be done through natural

methods—such as planting trees or restoring wetlands—or
tech-based ones, such as direct air capture and storage
(DACS), in which machines claw carbon dioxide from the air.
Tech-based projects are less prone to scammers. They are
designed to put carbon dioxide away indefinitely, for
example by storing it underground, whereas forests can be
burned or cut down. However, they are expensive. To
sequester a tonne of carbon dioxide using DACS costs
around $1,000, compared with $10-40 by planting trees.
This makes reforestation, and Brazil, attractive in the short

term. Brazil is home to vast tracts of degraded land and its
tropical climate favours quick tree growth. Mombak and
re.green’s projects are on former cattle ranches whose
owners sold their land when it became unproductive. Others
may be tempted to follow suit. Assuming a carbon credit
price of $30 in 2030—a price already being used or
exceeded in high-quality reforestation deals today—it would
become more financially attractive to swap cattle-raising for
reforestation on roughly half of Brazil’s pastureland,
according to calculations by McKinsey.
Rebuilding Earth’s lungs
All told, restored Brazilian forests could account for 15% of

the world’s potential for carbon removal through
reforestation (the only other country that could plausibly
match this is Indonesia). Brazil—currently the world’s sixth-
largest emitter of greenhouse gases—could be the only
large country to become carbon negative.
There is excitement in Brazil. The national development

bank thinks that the country could lease 2.5m hectares of
public land to reforestation companies, generating a huge
number of carbon credits (their value would depend on the
market). Brazil’s Congress is discussing a law that would
create an emissions-trading system.
Developments beyond Brazil also offer reasons for hope. It
is becoming easier to tell good credits from junk. Since 2020
rating agencies have popped up to evaluate projects. Rival
credit issuers are challenging Verra, the dominant one.
Insurance firms have emerged to protect buyers against
events like wildfires.
Yet formidable challenges remain. The greatest is finding

land to buy. Land-grabbers in Brazil often forge titles in
cahoots with local authorities, and many private owners lack
deeds. It will take re.green years to carry out due diligence
on the nearly 2,000 farms it is considering buying. To scale
up reforestation, industrial seed production and sapling
nurseries producing Amazonian trees are needed.
A trillion-dollar market is unlikely to emerge without a lot

more transparency. Most decisions on pricing remain
confidential. Rating agencies publish overall scores for
projects but often charge hefty fees for the underlying data.
That is fine for the likes of Microsoft, which enjoys
monopsony power in carbon removal. The firm, which has
bought credits to remove at least 5m tonnes of carbon
dioxide, has a department dedicated to finding projects.
Smaller companies, by contrast, will struggle to do the
same.
Doubts also linger about how to measure sequestration.

Many credit issuers use methodologies based on temperate
forests in Scandinavia and California, which capture less
carbon than tropical jungles. Some companies are beginning
to use satellite imagery and lidar–laser scans that build
three-dimensional images to estimate carbon stocks. But
such sophisticated tools are not yet widespread.
Market-watchers are waiting for one law that could rev up

the industry. Since the Paris agreement on climate change in
2015, countries have been negotiating rules for an
integrated global carbon market to allow them to buy
credits from one another to offset their emissions—possibly
including from the voluntary carbon market. The last and
most complicated part of the agreement to be hashed out is
how to avoid double-counting offsets. If that ever gets done,
restoring the Amazon will be good for business and for the
world. ■
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americas/2024/09/19/can-the-voluntary-carbon-market-save-the-amazon

Who’s in charge?
How Brazilian lawmakers

won extra powers to
waste money
Congress’s capture of the budget is making Brazil less
governable
9月 19, 2024 12:12 下午 | SÃO PAULO
PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA is exasperated. “In

no other country in the world has Congress kidnapped part
of the budget” as has happened in Brazil, he fumed in
August. He has a point. In the past decade Brazil’s Congress
has become one of the most powerful in the world by giving
itself ever greater control of the country’s federal budget.
The Supreme Court and Lula, as the president is universally
known, are trying to curb legislators’ extravaganza of pork-
barrel spending, which fosters corruption and imperils the
country’s fiscal targets. In response, Congress is threatening
a power grab.
At stake are billions of reais of federal spending. Since

Brazil’s constitution was adopted in 1988, Congress has had
the power to participate in the drafting of the annual
budget. Most of the money is taken up by mandatory
spending on things such as public salaries and pensions.
The remaining 11%, which represented 226bn reais ($41bn)
last year, is discretionary. Lawmakers are allowed to present
amendments to discretionary spending for projects in their
constituencies such as new roads or schools. Today such
“earmarks” make up 24% of discretionary spending, up from
less than 2% in 2015.
These powers are an anomaly. Among the 38 countries of

the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, 20 do not allow
their legislatures to co-draft the budget, according to Marcos
Mendes of Insper, a university in São Paulo. In those that do,
earmarks generally do not account for more than 1% of
discretionary spending. The United States, which caps them
at 1%, has strict rules against legislators or their families
benefiting financially from them.
The purpose of earmarks was partly to make governing

easier. In Brazil’s most recent election, in 2022, 23 parties
won seats in Congress. Presidents used to have the power
to decide which earmarks to approve, and would use them
to reward allies who helped them pass laws.
But offers of pork shrank in the 2010s, thanks to a string of

presidents who had poor relations with Congress and a
crippling recession. In 2015 Congress amended the
constitution to force the president to allocate at least 1.2%
of the government’s annual net revenues to earmarks. In
2019 the then-president Jair Bolsonaro let lawmakers run
amok to win their protection as impeachment motions piled
up against him. Legislators made it obligatory for the
government to allocate an additional 2% of its annual net
revenues for “collective earmarks”, which are proposed by
congressional committees or caucuses.
When Congress began to give itself increasingly obscure

budget powers, the Supreme Court struck them down. But
legislators have found creative fixes. In 2019 they
established a new type of grant, colloquially named Pix
amendments after a popular instant-payments system.
These allow deputies to send money to their constituencies
without specifying what the funds will be used for. Beatriz
Rey of POPVOX Foundation, a think-tank in the United
States, calls them “a blank cheque for corruption”.
According to Transparency International, a watchdog, of the

8bn reais that were approved in Pix grants last year, less
than 1% included information about the projects they would
fund. The destination of some earmarks may be dodgy. In
March Chiquinho Brazão, a legislator from Rio de Janeiro,
was arrested as part of investigations into the murder of a
political rival in 2018. During their enquiries federal police
found evidence suggesting that Mr Brazão and a clique of
allies had diverted millions of reais in earmarks via a charity.
Federal police have requested a probe be opened. (Mr
Brazão denies any wrongdoing.)
All this is altering the balance of power. Since the president

has lost the ability to approve earmarks, the costs of being
in the opposition have declined. Congress is becoming
bolshier and increasingly challenging presidential vetoes.
Earlier this month legislators forced through a law—that Lula
had vetoed—to further defer the introduction of payroll
taxes for a raft of industries. Such moves will make it harder
for the government to control spending, just as investors
fret about Brazil’s debt and deficits.
On August 16th Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended Pix

grants, citing the lack of transparency, and called a meeting
between Congress and the executive. The two sides agreed
that the executive should be obliged to set aside an
unspecified amount of money to fund Pix grants, but that
these should “respect criteria of transparency and
traceability”. The details have yet to be hashed out.
Congress was infuriated by the Supreme Court’s decision.

The day after the court’s ruling, the speaker of the lower
house, Arthur Lira, proposed a bill that would amend the
constitution to allow Congress to overturn some decisions
made by the court. Due to term limits, Mr Lira cannot be re-
elected as house speaker in a vote next February. Early
indications suggest that his successor could be a machine
politician just as keen to protect Congress’s new powers.
Lula’s job is not about to get any easier. ■
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America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and
complex region.

americas/2024/09/19/how-brazilian-lawmakers-won-extra-powers-to-waste-money

Canadian politics
A by-election loss puts

Justin Trudeau on the
ropes
For how much longer can the Liberal leader hold on?
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | OTTAWA
ADD A POLITICAL beast to Canada’s endangered species

list: Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party. On September 16th the
prime minister’s party lost a by-election in his hometown of
Montreal, an area that it had represented almost
uninterruptedly since the second world war. That was the
second supposedly impregnable Liberal fortress to fall in
just three months, following the loss of a seat in Toronto in
June. The message is unmistakable. Voters are horribly
disenchanted with Mr Trudeau and the Liberals. The
consequence is less clear: whether Mr Trudeau will resign.
Mr Trudeau himself is the main target of voters’ bile. He has

won three successive general-election victories since 2015,
but his popularity has been waning for over a year. In part
voters have simply grown tired of the longest-serving leader
in the G7. But many see him as ignoring their concerns,
including over a housing crisis, inflation that exceeded 8%
at the tail end of the pandemic, and levels of immigration.
Urban constituents who should be strong supporters of the
Liberals are telling their MPs that they’ve had enough of the
prime minister. “I didn’t hear it from two, three people. I
heard it from dozens and dozens of people,” says Alexandra
Mendès, a Liberal MP. “He’s no longer the right leader.”
The Liberals are almost certain to lose at the next general

election, which must take place by October 2025, though
not to Bloc Québécois, the regional separatist party that
narrowly won the seat in Montreal. A recent poll suggested
just 26% of Canadians would vote for Mr Trudeau compared
to 45% of voters who would back his Conservative rival,
Pierre Poilievre. (Quebec, home to Montreal, is the only area
where the Conservatives do not have a lead in the polls.)
Since winning the leadership of his party in 2022, Mr
Poilievre has done a good job of appealing to voters by
talking about their woes.
The first Liberal by-election loss in June caused some

lawmakers, who realise their fate is linked to an unpopular
leader, to call for Mr Trudeau to step aside; more may now
follow. But Mr Trudeau will be hard to dislodge. Prior to the
vote in Montreal he said he would lead his party into a
general election whatever the by-election result. Canada’s
Liberals are one of the most successful political parties in
the Western world. A Liberal prime minister has been in
power in Canada for 92 of the past 128 years. But it was Mr
Trudeau who single-handedly resuscitated it from
irrelevancy a decade ago. Others interested in leading the
party, including Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank
of England, are loth to openly knife him.
Economic issues are not the only ones bedevilling the

Liberal party. It is wracked by bitter divisions over the war in
Gaza. They were laid bare during the Montreal by-election,
when dozens of campaign workers quit in the middle of the
election effort, criticising the prime minister for not
condemning Israel strongly enough. A Liberal leadership
campaign would almost certainly be dominated by a
destructive debate about the conflict in the Middle East. The
day after the result Mr Trudeau again vowed to stay on in
the job, and to “work harder”. But restless lawmakers
stoked by angry voters may soon take the matter out of his
hands. ■

americas/2024/09/19/a-by-election-loss-puts-justin-trudeau-on-the-ropes

Asia
What does Modi 3.0 look like?
A weakened strongman :: India’s prime minister is 100 days into his third
term. It’s not smooth sailing
China and Australia are beefing up their

Pacific policing
Not waving but plodding :: In the competition to police the waves, who will
win?
The Taliban is removing every shred of

freedom from women
No country for women’s rights :: Three years after America’s withdrawal,
the situation is grim
Private tutoring is booming across poorer

parts of Asia
Cramming culture :: Governments are struggling to keep up with an
educational arms race
The private sector won’t save America’s

Indo-Pacific policy
Banyan :: More needs to be done to repair the economic relationship with
South-East Asia

A weakened strongman
What does Modi 3.0 look

like?
India’s prime minister is 100 days into his third term. It’s not
smooth sailing
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Delhi
FOR MANY Indians, the general election result in June was a

stunning repudiation of Narendra Modi, India’s prime
minister. But to hear him speak of it, that isn’t the case. He
insists that, despite the loss of his party’s parliamentary
majority, which has forced him to rely on coalition partners,
the vote was for “continuity”. He has barely changed his
cabinet since cobbling together a government. He has
doubled down on pledges to turn India into a developed
country by 2047, the centenary of its independence. And his
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is campaigning for imminent
regional elections on a familiar platform of development and
Hindu nationalism.
The new government also claims to have completed a plan

for its first 100 days that Mr Modi and his ministers started
to compile as soon as campaigning started. Mr Modi ordered
all ministries to report their progress, details of which were
published on September 17th, the 100th day of his third
term and also his birthday. They included approving
infrastructure projects worth $39bn, expanding an
affordable-housing programme and launching a new
national pension scheme.
On the surface, Modi 3.0 may look much like his first two
terms. Dig deeper, however, and a change becomes
apparent. Mr Modi’s new government has, in fact, withdrawn
a series of politically important initiatives under pressure
from an emboldened opposition and from pressure groups.
India’s courts have been showing their mettle, too,
challenging the government or the BJP in a number of high-
profile cases. And, even within his own political camp, Mr
Modi is facing demands to adjust his leadership style, as
well as some policies.
Further hazards loom. The BJP faces bruising contests in all

five regional elections due in the next six months. One in
Jammu & Kashmir, starting on September 18th, is the first
since Mr Modi scrapped the Muslim-majority region’s semi-
autonomous status in 2019. The BJP may struggle to retain
control of Haryana, which votes on October 5th, and
Maharashtra, where a November poll is likely. The
opposition, meanwhile, is likely to hold on to Jharkhand and
Delhi in elections due by January and February, respectively.
To Mr Modi’s supporters, his recent record demonstrates

sound leadership. They say he has learned from the election
result and is willing to consult more broadly, even as he
advances his reform agenda. He is still popular, they add,
and deserves credit as the first Indian politician to win three
consecutive terms as prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru
in the 1950s and 1960s. Besides, the BJP controls many
more seats in parliament than the Congress party, its main
national rival, did while leading coalition governments from
2004 to 2014.
But can Mr Modi really turn from strongman to consensus-

builder? He has never had to share power before. While
campaigning he suggested he could be of divine birth and
sidelined many political allies. This led to some unusually
public criticism from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), the Hindu-nationalist organisation from which the BJP
grew. And even if he makes the transition, a more
collaborative approach might force him to scrap some
promised reforms and offer some expensive handouts.
The compromise candidate?
Mr Modi may yet master consultative government,

ultimately leading to better policymaking, says Rahul Verma
of the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi. But
results will be slower. And early signs suggest he has yet to
adjust fully: he could, for example, have consulted more
broadly on the recently withdrawn initiatives before putting
them forward. Failure to adapt, meanwhile, could lead to
further electoral losses and even a challenge to Mr Modi’s
leadership from within.
One of the government’s first climb-downs came in early

August, when it referred new legislation on Muslim
charitable endowments to a joint parliamentary committee.
That was remarkable because Mr Modi rammed most laws
through parliament in the past decade. Opposition and
Muslim leaders denounced the bill as a curb on religious
freedom. More tellingly, one of Mr Modi’s key coalition
partners also backed referral to the committee.
Soon after that came a U-turn on a broadcasting-services

bill. The government published one draft in November,
aiming to tighten regulation of digital and other media. A
beefed-up version was then circulated among stakeholders
in July but suddenly recalled in mid-August following
objections from many. They feared it would stifle social-
media platforms such as YouTube, now widely used by Mr
Modi’s critics. A new draft may not appear for two years,
people involved say.
Then, on August 20th, the government withdrew an
advertisement inviting people from outside the civil service
to apply for senior bureaucratic posts. The advertisement
was part of a Modi initiative to bring expertise into
government. But it, too, caused an outcry as no posts were
reserved for lower Hindu castes and other minorities, as is
usually the case under an affirmative-action scheme. The
episode sparked fresh calls for a national caste census (the
opposition had pledged one while campaigning for the
general election). The BJP has long opposed such an
exercise but may be preparing another U-turn: the RSS
voiced support for a caste census for the first time on
September 2nd.
That may appease some lower-caste voters but it could

alienate upper-caste Hindus, many of whom are BJP
stalwarts. If a caste census is conducted, its results could
undermine BJP claims about improved social mobility. And
such policy reversals come at the expense of Mr Modi’s
public image as a muscular, infallible leader. “We have
finished Modi psychologically,” Rahul Gandhi, the leader of
the opposition, said on September 4th. “I sit in front of him
in parliament and I know his confidence is gone.”
Another boost for the opposition came on September 13th

when the Supreme Court granted bail to Arvind Kejriwal, the
chief minister of Delhi and leader of an opposition party.
That will allow him to contest the Delhi election more
aggressively. It is also the court’s latest move to rein in
investigative agencies that have targeted several opposition
leaders. Mr Kejriwal was arrested in March on corruption
charges that he says are politically motivated. Since his
release, he has resigned as Delhi’s chief minister and called
for its election to be brought forward to November.
Although India’s courts are still susceptible to government
pressure, the Supreme Court has been more assertive in
other politically charged cases, too. In July it blocked three
BJP-ruled states from requiring shops and eateries on a
Hindu pilgrimage route to display their owners’ names (a
policy clearly aimed at Muslim owners). In September the
court also warned state governments against demolishing
the property of those accused of crimes before they are
convicted. Such demolitions often target Muslims in BJP-
ruled states.
From 100 days to five years
As for Mr Modi’s 100-day plan, he has hit many of his

targets. But he had to adjust several parts. One omission
was a proposal to privatise at least two state-owned
companies. That apparently faced opposition from some
coalition members. He also added new details, including a
review of a scheme to recruit soldiers for fixed four-year
terms. That scheme was designed to lower pension costs,
which absorb more than a fifth of military spending. But it
was hated by recruits, who were previously hired for at least
15 years with a full pension. Another of Mr Modi’s coalition
partners demanded a review.
None of this spells disaster for Mr Modi. It is early days, and

he has scored some important wins, quickly winding up
government-forming talks with coalition partners and then
tweaking his budget to allocate more money to job creation.
India is still the world’s fastest-growing major economy: on
September 3rd the World Bank upgraded its GDP forecast
for this financial year from 6.6% to 7%. Still, Modi 3.0 clearly
needs more than continuity. It demands compromise, too. ■
Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested Mr

Modi leads a minority government. In fact India is governed
by a coalition. Sorry.
Stay on top of our India coverage by signing up to Essential

India, our free weekly newsletter.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/09/16/what-does-modi-30-look-like

Not waving but plodding
China and Australia are

beefing up their Pacific
policing
In the competition to police the waves, who will win?
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Sydney
A SMALL TEAM of Chinese police has been stationed in

Honiara, the Solomon Islands’ capital, since 2022, when the
two countries signed a security agreement that shocked
America and its allies. The cops train local officers in riot
control and shooting, and give their families lessons in kung
fu. Since their arrival, China’s law-and-order footprint in the
Pacific region has grown. Last year it sent police advisers to
Vanuatu, north-east of Australia. In February officials in
Kiribati, a neighbour of Hawaii, said that Chinese police were
now embedded with its forces. China’s attempts to establish
police stations abroad were part of “transnational repression
efforts”, said an American official.
As well as deploying police, China hosts Pacific officers for

training and is showering cash-strapped forces with
equipment. Those advances have caused jitters in Australia,
which has long been what Anthony Albanese, its prime
minister, calls the “security partner of choice” for Pacific
nations. His Labor government is having to spend lavishly to
remain the region’s go-to power. It scored a much-needed
win on August 28th, when Pacific leaders unanimously
endorsed a plan for Australia to beef up regional policing.
Australia will build several new training centres for Pacific

police, including one in Brisbane, and finance a
multinational unit of Pacific officers to be deployed during
riots or natural disasters. The details are being thrashed out,
but Australia has allocated A$400m ($270m) over five years
to the “Pacific Policing Initiative”. This is in addition to
A$1.4bn over four years promised last year for Pacific
“peace and security”.
The security needs of island states are glaring. Their vast

Pacific Ocean, covering an area bigger than every continent
combined, is by one estimate the world’s largest unpoliced
space. Illegal fishing boats pillage its rich stocks of tuna.
Drug-trafficking is growing. Criminals use the Pacific as a
transit route for methamphetamine and cocaine headed
from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand. Gangs are
putting down roots in Fiji and Tonga, fuelling local crime and
addiction. Rather than cracking down, some police are
cashing in.
But big powers are also lavishing attention on police
because most Pacific countries do not have armies. China’s
interests in policing co-operation are political as well as
strategic, argues Graeme Smith of the Australian National
University in Canberra. Chinese officers are expected to
protect or control Chinese diaspora communities, he says.
(A big settler community in the Solomons has been targeted
in past riots.) China may also hope to gain influence over
national-security decisions.
Against that backdrop, Australia’s new policing deal is a

strategic win. “It was an explicit endorsement of Australia’s
role as the main security provider for Pacific island
countries,” says Mihai Sora, a former diplomat now working
for the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney. But Australia
has had to tread carefully. Unsurprisingly, Pacific countries
do not want to be treated like pawns or bullied by their
neighbours. They are concerned about the militarisation of
their islands. Regional policing plans should be “framed to
fit our purposes”, warned Charlot Salwai, Vanuatu’s prime
minister, last month. For his part, Mr Albanese was at pains
to stress that the plan was being “led by” Pacific police.
Australia has had some other wins. In April Mr Albanese’s

government managed to fend off, for now, the possibility of
Papua New Guinea signing a sweeping security agreement
with China, after it also promised A$200m to the country.
And Fiji has ejected Chinese officers formerly embedded
with its police.
Even so, China still has more to offer. When it failed to push
through a regional security deal with Pacific countries in
2022 it seemed it might have overplayed its hand. But on
September 11th it hosted several Pacific ministers for a
forum on policing, and opened a facility for training Pacific
police forces in Fuzhou. China’s “strategy of picking
countries off one by one…seems to be working”, says Mr
Sora. As in other areas, many Pacific nations see the
benefits of playing both sides. ■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/09/19/china-and-australia-are-beefing-up-their-
pacific-policing

No country for women’s rights
The Taliban is removing

every shred of freedom
from women
Three years after America’s withdrawal, the situation is grim
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
LAST MONTH the Taliban published a new consolidated code

of religious laws. It has left Afghan women reeling, with
many now searching for ways to leave. It also has
implications for the Taliban’s quest for legitimacy and
relations with the world. Three years after America’s
withdrawal from the country, the situation in Afghanistan
looks worse than ever.
Even before the announcement in late August, women were
banned from attending secondary schools, universities,
parks and female-only spaces such as beauty salons. They
were not allowed to work in most professions. Now they are
banned from raising their voices or reciting the Koran in
public. They are prohibited from looking at any man other
than their relatives, and have to cover their faces fully.
Nasiba (not her real name), a 28-year-old midwife in

Badghis, in the north-west of the country, says that after
three years under the Taliban she feels “a sense of
hopelessness, loneliness”. When she leaves the house, she
does so “with fear, shaking, that someone might say
something to me or stop me”. Some women have reacted to
the latest announcement by reducing how much they go
out; others ensure they are never alone outside. Amina, a
widow in Kabul, the capital, locks her daughter and son
inside. Her children eat once a day, if at all: “If there’s food
they eat, if not they wait.”
The new religious code is a “pivotal moment”, says Richard

Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in
Afghanistan, who is barred from the country by the Taliban.
He wants “gender apartheid” to be considered a crime
against humanity. Activists want the Taliban to be tried at
the International Criminal Court (Afghanistan has signed up
to the Rome statute). That seems unlikely. Outrage in the
West has been muted, not least as many are distracted by
the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s choice to be permanent

representative to the United Nations, says the new code was
introduced to “limit” the powers of the morality police, who
have become more present in the country. Mr Shaheen
insists that the law banning women from speaking outside
had been “misinterpreted”. He says that the Taliban has
issued thousands of licences for women interpreters. The
ban applied to women singing at large gatherings of men,
he claims. He adds that women can study midwifery or go to
a religious school.
That is of little comfort to many women. Nasiba says that

she has started to think about leaving the country, mostly
for the sake of her ten-year-old daughter but also of her
five-year-old son, who admires the Taliban. “He sees [the
Taliban] at the shopping centre, he sees their rangers and
wants to take a photo...maybe he’ll become a Talib,” she
says, with a grim laugh. “When there’s no education...no
computer classes, or English, just religious education, what
else is he going to become?” ■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/09/19/the-taliban-is-removing-every-shred-of-
freedom-from-women

Cramming culture
Private tutoring is
booming across poorer
parts of Asia
Governments are struggling to keep up with an educational
arms race
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Delhi and Singapore
THE MORAL of the story is clear in “12th Fail”, a recent

Bollywood hit about a poor farm boy, Manoj, bent on passing
India’s ruthless police exam. Persevere and be richly
rewarded, it suggests. Yet for a film about education and
meritocracy, the portrayal of Indian schools is dismal:
teacher-abetted cheating is rife at Manoj’s local school.
Where he ultimately finds success, and love, is not at
school, but at a jam-packed tutoring centre in Delhi.
Private tutoring is well known as an East Asian

phenomenon. Apart from in China, most students in East
Asia get it: 72% in Hong Kong; 79% at South Korea’s
hagwons; 52% of lower-secondary schoolers, Japan’s main
test-crammers, in the country’s juku. In China, where 38% of
students (and 45% in cities) took private tutoring before a
2021 clampdown, many centres have simply gone
underground. These businesses, whatever their flaws, exist
alongside education systems that are highly effective and
well-funded.
The hard way
But now private tutoring is on the rise in poorer parts of

Asia. The scale is huge. Although the data are scattered and
shoddy, we have tried to estimate tutoring’s prevalence in
South and South-East Asia, excluding Singapore, where the
education system more closely resembles those in East
Asia. From Pakistan to Indonesia, we reckon that roughly
258m children get private tuition.
The biggest market is in India. Fully 31% of rural Indian

schoolchildren under 15 now get private tutoring, up from
23% in 2010; in some poorer states, three in four do (see
chart). Tax revenue from Indian tutoring centres has more
than doubled since 2019. But even removing India from the
mix still leaves a tutoring tally of 131m children, by our
estimate.
The first reason for the growth is gaps left by formal
education systems. In poorer parts of Asia, the state often
struggles to provide good schools. In this century, as
primary education has neared universality, the share of
children enrolled in secondary school rose by 24 points in
South Asia and by 16 percentage points in the rest of Asia,
according to the World Bank. Yet over the same period,
government education spending as a share of GDP has
stagnated or fallen across much of the region.
In many places this has led to cuts to teachers’ salaries and

textbooks. In Cambodia, one of Asia’s poorest countries, an
estimated 82% of students take private tutoring, mostly
from their own low-paid teachers seeking a salary top-up.
Schools end up less equipped to deliver results, and the
worst fall apart. Yet many Asian systems sort children
through high-stakes exams. So parents turn to tutors.
A second factor is heightened social competition, driven by

a growing middle class and a greater demand for a limited
number of university places. Urbanisation also plays a role:
children in cities are likelier to get private tutoring than rural
ones, thanks to the greater supply of tutors and better
internet access. In India, where cities have added 200m
residents in 20 years, many newly urbanised parents think
that buying their children tutoring will help them get a
professional-class job. In Delhi, Mohammad Shahzad, a
supervisor at a generator manufacturer, pays 2,800 rupees
($33) a month to have his two daughters tutored, a 30%
addition to the usual school fees. His daughters’ teachers
are competent, but Mr Shahzad feels that tutoring, despite
its expense, is worth it. “It’s like having one meal: you
survive, but with two or three, you’re healthier,” he says.
The final factor is an arms-race dynamic. Private tutoring is

an anxiety industry: if your neighbour’s children get private
tutoring and yours don’t, they risk falling behind. This holds
whether tutoring demand originates from the pressures of a
rigorous schooling system or the desire to flee a failing one.
The availability of online tutoring, supercharged by the
pandemic, has made it easier to get in on that arms race.
Even so, research measuring the effectiveness of tutoring
has produced mixed results, says Mark Bray, an expert on
Asian private tutoring. Partly this is because of its enormous
diversity. One study in rural India found that students who
had private tuition got higher reading and maths scores
than those who did not, on a par with an extra year of
school. But other research, in Sri Lanka and China, finds
little or no effect on results.
Another brick in the wall
The costs of private tutoring can be large. Studies show

some children in private tutoring sleep less well. The
stresses extend to parents’ wallets. Umesh Sharma, a
chauffeur in Delhi, spends 1,200 rupees a month to have his
two sons tutored: 4% of the city’s average monthly income
and about as much as their school fees. In other parts of
India, it is worse. In West Bengal nearly half of all education
spending, public and private, goes on coaching.
One big worry is that in some places private tutoring is

eroding public education. In Nepal and Cambodia,
schoolteachers withhold parts of the curriculum for their
own paid tutoring after school. The incentive is clear: in
Cambodia, low-paid teachers who offered tutoring doubled
their salaries. In Bihar, India’s poorest state, a recent survey
by JJSS, an NGO, found that dozens of dilapidated
government schools had almost entirely outsourced their
educational functions to private centres. Government
schools have been reduced to “merely providing a midday
meal and arranging examinations”.
What to do? South Korea spent four decades trying and

failing to suppress private tutoring, before such efforts were
ruled unconstitutional in 2000. Similarly interventionist
approaches, like China’s rash crackdown, succeed only in
driving tutoring underground. Some governments are
relaxed: the education ministry in Thailand says that “the
state must begin with an assumption that private tutoring
does not reduce social welfare.” Others are experimenting.
In response to a recent string of suicides, this year India’s
education ministry introduced rules banning bigger
coaching centres from enrolling students aged younger than
16. Private tuition is here to stay. But it could be managed
more effectively. ■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/09/19/private-tutoring-is-booming-across-poorer-
parts-of-asia

Banyan
The private sector won’t

save America’s Indo-
Pacific policy
More needs to be done to repair the economic relationship
with South-East Asia
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
AMERICA WANTS South-East Asians to know that it is the

region’s best friend. In summits, white papers, speeches
and private asides since coming to office in 2021, officials of
the Biden administration have told them that America, not
China, is the top source of foreign direct investment into the
region. It is Uncle Sam who is going to make them rich.
Their audience could be forgiven for feeling gaslit. The most
visible investments in these countries in recent years have
come from China, not America. It is China that is building
new high-speed trains, ports and public buildings, in a bid to
win favour in the region. So why the empty boast?
America’s pitch to South-East Asia is part of a creative effort

by President Joe Biden’s administration to compete for
economic influence without offering Asian countries new
access to American markets. To do this, it has sought to
emphasise investment rather than trade, and to highlight
the American private sector’s part in the region’s economic
growth since the second world war.
There is some truth in what American officials say. America

has built up at least twice as large a stock of investment as
China has in South-East Asia, the heart of geopolitical
competition in the continent. But the bulk of these
investments arrived decades ago. A new report from the
Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney, shows that over the
past decade China invested $218bn in the region. America
invested only $156bn.
It is the marginal dollar that matters to local business

leaders, and to politicians keeping an eye out for their next
ribbon-cutting opportunity. The goodwill and influence that
investment confers must fade as decades pass. The
prospect of future returns is more potent—and here China
has the advantage.
In an earlier era, America might have hoped to compete on

quality, if not quantity. America invested in projects that
moved Asian industries up the value chain, such as
advanced manufacturing and semiconductors. Mr Biden
often talks about America as a provider of high-quality
investment. The contrast with China, whose investments
once focused on things like garments, is implicit.
But China now competes on quality, too. Firms from both

countries are investing in data centres to power the boom in
artificial intelligence. Of the two, only China is bringing
South-East Asian firms into its electric-vehicle supply chain.
Only China is investing in processing critical minerals in
South-East Asia which will go into batteries to power those
vehicles.
That is not to say that American firms cannot still play a

helpful role in reducing Chinese influence. Where an
investment makes sense, they can provide an alternative to
Chinese financing. Competition between the two can lead to
better terms for borrowers. The problem is that American
firms are rarely interested in investing in these projects,
which they regard as riskier.
Nor can America simply tell its firms to invest in unprofitable

projects in South-East Asia, as China can. Asian countries
know that private-sector investment is not directed by
bureaucrats in Washington, so they don’t worry that they
will get less if they fall out of favour.
Chinese investment, however, can be won or lost over

geopolitics. Aides to Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, say
that he has been reluctant to criticise China over its actions
in the South China Sea or Xinjiang for fear of losing its
backing for his infrastructure splurge.
In sum, private-sector investment will not preserve declining

American economic influence in Asia. America has no clear
advantage on quantity or quality. And it cannot convert
capital into political capital in the way that China can.
What would work better? Mr Biden, like Donald Trump before
him, has said no to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade
deal signed by Barack Obama. Mr Trump attacked it in 2016
as a bad deal, and Democrats fear that it sank Hillary
Clinton’s bid for the presidency. Kamala Harris, too, has long
been sceptical of such deals. But only its offer of greater
access to the world’s largest market offers any prospect of
reversing the ebb of American influence in the region.
In the meantime, American officials will keep trying to

benefit from nostalgia for investments past. This is no great
offence; they are working with what they have. The only real
harm would be if they began to believe it themselves. That
would delay their own much-needed reckoning of America’s
declining economic influence in Asia.■

https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/09/19/the-private-sector-wont-save-americas-
indo-pacific-policy

China
Anger abounds as China raises its strikingly
low retirement age
Sunset delayed :: Old people will have to toil a little longer, assuming they
can keep their jobs
By raising the retirement age, has China

created a care crisis?
The trade-off :: Older women tend to look after the country’s young
children
China has freed an American pastor. Does it

want anything in return?
Heading home :: The move followed much pleading by American officials
A typhoon hits Shanghai and the Chinese

economy groans
Battered :: Consumers are stuck inside during a three-day holiday

Sunset delayed
Anger abounds as China

raises its strikingly low
retirement age
Old people will have to toil a little longer, assuming they can
keep their jobs
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
CHINA’S LEADER, Xi Jinping, boasts that his political system

has a matchless ability to get difficult things done. “For
anything that benefits the party and the people,” he has
said, “we must act boldly and decisively.” Yet it was not until
September 13th, after years of indecision, that China
announced the first raising of its retirement age since the
1950s. From among the world’s lowest, it will begin to creep
closer to rich-world norms.
Having seen the unhappy reaction to similar changes

elsewhere, Mr Xi may have had reason to hesitate. Turmoil
in the West is normally something that China’s
propagandists exploit. But huge protests in France last year
against a higher pension age triggered anxious and angry
comments in China over the government’s repeated
mutterings about doing something similar. “The common
people are cursing behind closed doors,” wrote one user of
Weibo, a social-media platform, referring to the contrast
between public anger in France and its furtive form in China.
When China at last bit the bullet and published its own
timetable, it did so with little fanfare. State-run television
mentioned the move below several other headlines on its
main evening news. Viewers had to wait more than 35
minutes (and sit through nearly 20 minutes telling of Mr Xi’s
activities) for just a bare outline. The retirement age for
female blue-collar workers will rise from an astonishingly
low 50 to 55, for female white-collar workers from 55 to 58,
and for men from 60 to 63 (see chart 1). These changes will
begin in January 2025 and be phased in over 15 years. For
men and female white-collar workers, the pension age will
rise by a month every four months. For blue-collar women it
will rise by a month every two months.
The evening news did not bother with a follow-up report. But
Chinese netizens were very much bothered by the
government’s actions. Posts with the hashtag “reform to
delay the statutory retirement age” have garnered more
than 870m views and over 240,000 comments on Weibo.
Censors have been swift to move in. More than 5,100 of
these comments were posted below an early report by
Xinhua, the government’s main news agency. Try reading
these now; fewer than 30 remain, none of them
disapproving.
But anger abounds among comments still visible on less-

filtered accounts. “Capitalist exploitation has reached the
common people. Brilliant!” wrote one in a typical thread.
“So, who was the People’s Congress representing?” asked
another, referring to the country’s rubber-stamp legislature
that suddenly approved the reform without public
consultation. A third weighed in: “Corrupt officials would
love to work for ever.” And another: “If this continues,
society will descend into chaos.”
That is unlikely. Surveillance is so intense and the police so

determined to crush unrest that even if there are
demonstrations, they are almost sure to be small and far
from the country’s most politically sensitive locations. It
would be hard to imagine China tolerating the kind of
protests that erupted in Russian cities in 2018 over pension-
age reform.
China paid attention to those events, including the
concessions made by Russia’s ruler, Vladimir Putin. Russia’s
original plan was to raise the retirement age for women
from 55 to 63. Mr Putin revised that to 60, though he stuck
to 65 for men (up from 60). It had long been expected that
when China made its own move, it would announce gradual
steps towards 65 for men and women. This would be just
over the average in the OECD, a club of mostly rich
countries, which in 2022 was 64.4 for men and 63.6 for
women. In the end, China settled on a plan that will see men
required to work until they are 63, though they may go on
until 66 if they choose. Women will enjoy similar flexibility.
So why, if China is so capable of preventing protests, did it
not act earlier? After all, it faces a demographic crunch and
looming pension-fund crisis no less fearsome than those of
other countries that have raised their retirement ages. Life
expectancy has risen from 35 when the Communist Party
seized power in 1949 to 77 today, less than three years
below the OECD average. People over 60 already make up
more than a fifth of the population. By 2035 that ratio will
be closer to a third (see chart 2). The working-age
population—from which pension contributions are drawn—is
falling. Some experts have said that without any change,
the state’s pension fund, on which most retired people rely
(private pensions have yet to take off), would have run out
of money by 2035.
Concerns raised by critics of reform may have resonated

among policymakers. In many households, the retired play a
crucial role in providing child care. Keep them at work
longer, a common argument goes, and young people will be
even less inclined to have babies.
Another oft-heard objection to reform is that forcing people

to work longer will make it harder for young people to get
jobs. Youth unemployment in China is eye-wateringly high. It
reached 21.3% among urban residents in June 2023. The
government then spent months rejigging its calculations
and came up with a somewhat less embarrassing rate. In
July it was 17.1%. But this argument against raising the
retirement age holds less water: making people work for
longer could encourage them to consume more, which could
boost the economy and create jobs.
For every person who is anxious about youth unemployment

there is someone who frets that raising the retirement age
will cause the same problem among the elderly. Age
discrimination is rampant in China. Working longer may be
fine for people in secure jobs, such as in the civil service or
state-owned firms. But in the private sector people worry
they will be forced out before they reach retirement age
because they are considered too old. On social media,
commenters seethe about state employees for another
reason, too: their pensions are much higher.
Amid this debate a huge part of the population is often
ignored. More than half of China’s citizens have a rural
hukou, or household registration, including most of the
300m or so people who have moved from the countryside to
work in cities. Many are only entitled to a pension that is a
tiny fraction of the amount given to those registered as
urbanites. It is about 200 yuan ($28) per month on average.
No change to this has been announced. The pensionable

age for many rural hukou-holders will remain at 60. One
user of Weibo pointed out a reason for the silence. “If
pensions were distributed evenly across the entire
population, including farmers, I bet everyone’s pension
would be less than it is now,” he wrote. (By “everyone”, he
meant “urban people”.) Mr Xi’s calls for “common
prosperity” do not, it seems, imply equality for farmers and
migrants. ■
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strikingly-low-retirement-age

The trade-off
By raising the retirement

age, has China created a
care crisis?
Older women tend to look after the country’s young children
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
CHINA’S PENSIONS are underfunded and its population is

getting older. So the government’s recent decision to raise
the retirement age for state pensions seemed overdue. But
it may create other problems, most notably in the field of
child care. And these challenges may lead young people to
have fewer babies, exacerbating the country’s demographic
crisis.
According to state media, under 8% of Chinese toddlers are
enrolled in nurseries. Most families rely on grandparents to
care for them. That is true in cities, where nearly 80% of
households are thought to do so. And it is also the case in
rural areas. Parents from the countryside often work far
from home, leaving their children behind. Walk around some
villages and all you will see are the elderly and the young.
So raising the retirement age risks creating a child-care

deficit, which may affect the decisions of young women.
China’s fertility rate, or the number of children that each
woman is expected to have, is 1.1. That is among the lowest
in the world and well below the 2.1 needed to keep the
population stable. In a study published last year, Jing Zhang
of Erasmus University in Rotterdam found that women who
lean on grannies for care are four times more likely to have
a second child than women who do not.
Many women face a choice between starting a family or

continuing their careers. Chinese women are increasingly
choosing the latter. But the availability of grandparent-
provided child care might mean that women need not
choose. Research published in 2019 showed that access to
such care increased the labour-force participation of
mothers with young children in cities by around 40%.
Another area likely to be affected by the higher retirement

age is care of the elderly. It is common for Chinese women
in their 50s to look after the old as well as the young. On
social media some commenters wonder how society will
cope with all this change. He Lin-shan, a popular poster on
Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, asked: “If women can’t
retire, will the policy experts take care of their families for
them?”■

https://www.economist.com/china/2024/09/19/by-raising-the-retirement-age-has-china-
created-a-care-crisis

Heading home
China has freed an

American pastor. Does it
want anything in return?
The move followed much pleading by American officials
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
DAVID LIN had been trying to help an underground Christian

group build a church in Beijing when he was detained by the
Chinese government in 2006. The ruling Communist Party
does not look kindly on spiritual activities it does not
control. So Mr Lin, an American pastor, was charged with
contract fraud, a common pretext for jailing religious
leaders. As expected, he was convicted and condemned to
life in prison. Though his sentence was later reduced, he
was not due to be released until 2029.
Yet on September 15th the American State Department

announced that Mr Lin, 68, had been freed and was heading
home. The move came after much diplomacy. President Joe
Biden raised the issue of detained Americans in China
during a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in
November. So did Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of
state, in talks with China’s chief diplomat, Wang Yi, in July.
When Jake Sullivan, America’s national security adviser,
visited Beijing last month, he is thought to have pressed Mr
Lin’s case.
The pastor was “wrongfully detained” by China, says the

State Department, using a designation that may imply he
was being held in order to influence American policy. Two
other American prisoners still fit that bill, according to the
department. A businessman from Texas called Mark Swidan
has been held since 2012 on drug-related charges. Kai Li,
another businessman, from New York, was detained in 2016
and later convicted of espionage. Both men deny the
charges against them.
In total there are more than 200 Americans under various

forms of “coercive measures” in China, according to
estimates from the Dui Hua Foundation, an American NGO
that lobbies on their behalf. Some of these people are in
prison. Others have been hit with “exit bans”, meaning they
are allowed to travel within China, but cannot leave. The
most unfortunate among this group only discover they have
been banned from exiting China upon trying to check in at
the airport.
China denies engaging in hostage diplomacy. But it likes to

have an “inventory” of foreign prisoners it can use when
negotiating with other countries, says Peter Humphrey, a
China analyst. These detainees come in handy when China
wants to get back its own citizens who are locked up
abroad, or when it tries to retrieve people who have fled for
various reasons, such as officials hoping to avoid corruption
probes. China has signed prisoner-transfer agreements with
several countries.
Mr Humphrey, who is British, spent 23 months in a Chinese

prison between 2013 and 2015 for allegedly violating laws
protecting personal data (he denies this). But it was a more
high-profile case, in 2018, that put China’s detention
policies in the spotlight. In December of that year two
Canadians—Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael
Spavor, a businessman—were taken into custody and later
charged with spying. This seemed to be in retaliation for the
detention in Canada of a Chinese businesswoman, Meng
Wanzhou, on suspicion of violating sanctions against Iran.
The Justice Department in Washington had sought her arrest
so that she could be extradited to America.
The “two Michaels”, as the Canadians became known, spent

more than 1,000 days in prison. Both men were released in
2021, at the same time as Ms Meng. “So hostage diplomacy
ended with a cold-war-style prisoner exchange, with the
skies between China and Canada serving as the frontier
bridge,” we wrote back then. On the next two episodes of
our “Drum Tower” podcast, Mr Kovrig shares the story of his
detention for the first time.
The release of Mr Lin has been celebrated by American

officials. But the State Department continues to warn
Americans to reconsider travel to China because of the “risk
of wrongful detentions” and the “arbitrary enforcement of
local laws”. China calls this unreasonable. It is desperate to
attract tourists and foreign investors to boost its sluggish
economy, so it wants the travel warning to go away.
There have been hints recently that America might tone

down its language. Perhaps the homecoming of Mr Lin will
lead to action. His release is a rare bit of good news from
the world of Sino-American diplomacy. ■


https://www.economist.com/china/2024/09/19/china-has-freed-an-american-pastor-does-
it-want-anything-in-return

Battered
A typhoon hits Shanghai

and the Chinese economy
groans
Consumers are stuck inside during a three-day holiday
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
SHANGHAI WAs hit by Typhoon Bebinca on September 16th.

Hundreds of thousands of residents were evacuated in what
state media called the strongest storm to rip through the
financial hub in 75 years. Fierce winds uprooted trees and
toppled billboards. The weather also disrupted the three-day
mid-autumn festival. Officials had hoped to see a big
increase in consumption during the holiday. Faced with a
sluggish economy, the government is encouraging people to
spend more. But Shanghai’s residents were stuck inside
during much of the festival. Even elsewhere, consumer
demand has been soggy.■


https://www.economist.com/china/2024/09/19/a-typhoon-hits-shanghai-and-the-chinese-
economy-groans

Middle East & Africa

Israel has bloodied Hizbullah but is stuck in
a war of attrition
Electronic warfare :: Two attacks on the Shia militia may not change Israel’s
strategic dilemma in Lebanon
A theatre in Jenin offers a different kind of

Palestinian resistance
Staging protests :: It is a target for both Israel and Palestinian militants
Israel’s government is again trying to

hobble its Supreme Court
Politicians v judges :: While at war, Israel is facing a constitutional crisis
Nairobi’s reputation for crime is outdated

Daylight robbery :: That is only in part thanks to its notorious police
Floods in Nigeria’s north-east are

aggravating a humanitarian crisis
A perfect storm :: The region had already been devastated by the Boko
Haram insurgency

Electronic warfare
Israel has bloodied

Hizbullah but is stuck in a
war of attrition
Two attacks on the Shia militia may not change Israel’s
strategic dilemma in Lebanon
9月 19, 2024 07:34 上午 | DUBAI AND JERUSALEM
Editor’s note (September 19th): This article has been

updated.
FIRST IT WAS pagers; then, walkie-talkies. On September

18th another wave of explosions rocked Lebanon: two-way
radios detonated in homes, offices and even at a funeral, a
day after some 3,000 pagers blew up across the country
and in Syria. In both cases the devices were used by
members of Hizbullah, the Shia militia that has fired rockets
at Israel for almost a year.
Some 20 people were killed and 450 injured in the latest

attack, on top of at least 12 killed and nearly 3,000 hurt,
many badly, in the pager blasts. Hundreds of people were
blinded because they looked at their pagers just before the
devices exploded. Others lost fingers and hands.
Israeli officials have not said much, and they surely will not
claim responsibility. But no one else has both means and
motive to carry out such attacks. “I said that we would
return the residents of the north safely to their homes, and
that is exactly what we will do,” said Binyamin Netanyahu,
the Israeli prime minister, in a statement after the second
round of explosions. Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, said
the war had entered a “new phase” focused on Israel’s
northern border with Lebanon.
All of this raises three questions: how these devices were

made to explode; why Israel would have detonated them
now; and what this means for its year-long conflict with
Hizbullah.
The answer to the first question leads from a bunker in

Beirut to an office park outside Taipei. Earlier this year
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, urged the group’s
rank and file to stop using mobile phones, warning that
Israel could hack the devices for surveillance and to target
assassinations. Instead the militia ordered pagers that
seemed leakproof: they can only receive messages, not
transmit them.
In photos from Lebanon, the devices that exploded on

September 17th seemed to bear the trademark of Gold
Apollo, a Taiwanese company. But the firm denied making
the pagers and said a Hungarian firm, BAC Consulting KFT,
had a “long-term partnership” to produce them. “Our
company only provides the brand trademark authorisation
and is not involved in the design or manufacturing,” Gold
Apollo said in a statement the day after the blasts.
From there, the story gets weirder. Before it was taken

offline, BAC’s buzzword-laden website said the firm was a
consultancy working on sustainability and development. A
LinkedIn profile for its “CEO” says that she worked for the
UN’s nuclear agency, supported small businesses in Libya
and helped women in rural Niger adapt to climate change. It
makes no mention of a side business in pager
manufacturing. The firm’s address is listed as a villa on a
residential street in Budapest. Calls to the number listed
went unanswered.
Wherever they were built, it seems clear that Israeli agents

hid explosives inside the pagers before they reached
Lebanon, and did the same with the walkie-talkies.
Thousands of the militia’s operatives were unknowingly
carrying small bombs on their bodies, which Israel then
detonated almost simultaneously.
Despite the operational success, the timing underscores

Israel’s strategic dilemma. Wounding lots of Hizbullah
members and damaging the group’s communications would
have been an ideal prelude to a major Israeli offensive.
Since October 7th there have been voices calling for this, in
order to reduce Hizbullah’s arsenal of long-range missiles
and occupy a buffer zone inside Lebanon. But the
government has not approved an incursion; instead, a low-
level war of attrition has set in.
Israeli generals still talk of war in terms of when, not if, but
the timing is hotly debated. Some want to take advantage
now of the presence nearby of American aircraft-carriers
and fighter squadrons, which would help shield Israel from
Hizbullah’s missiles. But with their army still fighting in
Gaza, albeit at a lower intensity, others would rather take
time to rest and refit.
That Israel activated the bombs without any further action

indicates that, for now, it is not rushing to all-out war. It may
also suggest that Israeli spies feared that Hizbullah would
soon discover the vulnerability, and they decided to act
before the militia swapped out the pagers.
Hizbullah may not rush to war either. People close to the

group describe a state of shock. It has been obvious for
months that Israel had penetrated the militia: it has had no
trouble assassinating a string of top commanders. But the
back-to-back bombings are by far the biggest security
breach in its history. “Hizbullah’s military arsenal is virtually
paralysed,” says Lina Khatib of Chatham House, a think-
tank.
The group will need to spend months repairing its

communications network and searching for leaks—hardly
ideal conditions for a major attack against Israel. The attack
also highlights a broader vulnerability for Iran and its allies:
their reliance on imported electronics. Militias across the
region will be nervous about what other devices might be
compromised.
Members of Hizbullah often keep their affiliation secret.

Mothers, wives and siblings will have discovered this week
that their loved ones were part of the militia. That could
cause tensions between Hizbullah and its constituents,
some of whom are frustrated with the group’s war against
Israel. It could also produce new intelligence for Israel in
intercepted phone calls and social-media videos from
Lebanon.
None of this, though, changes Israel’s dilemma. On

September 16th the Israeli cabinet updated the official aims
of the war. They had been to defeat Hamas in Gaza and free
the Israeli hostages held there. Now ministers also pledge to
“return the residents of the north safely to their homes”. It
seems no coincidence that the pagers exploded the next
day.
Since October 8th, when Hizbullah began firing rockets at

Israel, the prevailing view has been that only a ceasefire in
Gaza will end those hostilities. But the prospects of a deal
look dim. Israel thus wants to decouple the two fronts. It
hopes the exploding pagers and radios will remind Mr
Nasrallah of the damage that Israel can do to his militia and
its standing in Lebanon.
Not surprisingly, the Hizbullah chief has other ideas. In a

speech on September 19th, his first after the attacks, he
promised that Hizbullah would not stop fighting until Israel
ended its war in Gaza. But he looked tired, and his tone was
unusually subdued: not a leader bent on expanding the war.
As he spoke Israeli jets broke the sound barrier over Beirut,
and the Israeli army said other planes were carrying out air
strikes in southern Lebanon.
For Lebanese, all of this reinforced a feeling of despair. Many

drew comparisons to the massive explosion at Beirut’s port
in 2020, another ordinary Tuesday on which death seemed
to arrive from nowhere. Whatever their views on Hizbullah,
they are nervous about what comes next and feel powerless
to do anything about it. ■
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that keeps you in the loop on a fascinating, complex and
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and-africa/2024/09/18/israel-has-bloodied-hizbullah-but-is-stuck-in-a-war-of-
attrition

Staging protests
A theatre in Jenin offers a

different kind of
Palestinian resistance
It is a target for both Israel and Palestinian militants
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | JENIN
THE EXISTENCE of a theatre in the middle of any refugee

camp would be unusual. But in Jenin, in the occupied West
Bank, it is particularly striking. The camp and its adjacent
city have long been a symbol of deadly terror for Israelis
and fierce—often violent—resistance for Palestinians. And
yet the Freedom Theatre has become the symbol of a
different kind of Palestinian struggle.
The theatre was established in 2006 by Zakaria Zubeidi, a
former militant, and Juliano Mer-Khamis, an actor born to a
Jewish Israeli and a Christian Palestinian. Their vision was of
cultural resistance. “We are like fighters, but our weapon is
the theatre,” says Ranin Odeh who runs the theatre’s youth
programmes. They put on everything from Shakespeare to
plays written by those living in the camp.
And yet today the thespians of Jenin are caught between an

increasingly aggressive Israel which is pursuing deadlier
raids into the restive camp, and a growing number of
uncompromising Palestinian militants who see an armed
struggle as the only way to respond.
Those involved in the theatre have become targets—for

both sides. Mr Zubeidi is serving a lengthy sentence in Israel
for attacks committed during the second intifada. Mr Mer-
Khamis was assassinated by a masked gunman thought to
have links to Hamas in 2011. Another of the theatre’s staff
has been in an Israeli prison since December.
It is growing ever harder for the theatre to function. Israel’s

most recent raid on the camp left 21 people dead. The
theatre survived unscathed, but around it the streets are
filled with craters and stained with blood. And it is hard to
justify its role when the bullets are flying, Ms Odeh admits.
And yet the weekly workshops for children are still full.
Dozens of youngsters relish a few hours’ relief from the
grinding misery of the camp. That in itself is a kind of
resistance.■

and-africa/2024/09/19/a-theatre-in-jenin-offers-a-different-kind-of-palestinian-
resistance

Politicians v judges
Israel’s government is
again trying to hobble its
Supreme Court
While at war, Israel is facing a constitutional crisis
9月 19, 2024 07:53 上午 | JERUSALEM
FOR NEARLY a year Israel’s Supreme Court has been without

a president, as the country’s right-wing government has
tussled with the judiciary over the court’s powers. As soon
as it was elected at the end of 2022, the government of
Binyamin Netanyahu presented plans for “judicial reforms”
which would limit the powers of the Supreme Court and give
politicians control of the appointment of judges. The
proposals prompted huge protests and were abandoned
when the war in Gaza began. But they are back on the
agenda.
The justice minister, Yariv Levin, has provoked the new

crisis. Mr Levin wants the judicial-appointments committee,
which he co-chairs, to abandon the tradition whereby the
senior serving judge on the Supreme Court is appointed
president. His reason? He is determined to keep the current
top judge, Yitzhak Amit, a vocal opponent of his reforms,
from the job.
Having tried—and failed—to change the make-up of the

committee, Mr Levin has refused to convene it since the
previous president retired. The Supreme Court has now
ordered him to present his candidate by September 22nd
and then convene the committee. So far, he has refused to
do so, accusing the judges of “an unlawful usurpation of the
minister’s powers”.
Mr Levin and other members of Mr Netanyahu’s government

have long sought to rein in what they regard as an activist
court. In the past it has overridden government decisions
and laws on grounds of constitutionality. With Israel now at
war, the role of the Supreme Court has become even more
contentious. It is the only forum where questions about how
Israel is conducting the war, such as its obligations to supply
humanitarian aid to the civilian population in Gaza and the
treatment of prisoners, are being investigated, a fact that
has not endeared it to hardliners in the governing coalition.
The court’s president has a crucial role in scheduling such

hearings, and in appointing any national commissions of
inquiry. So far Mr Netanyahu has withstood public pressure
to create such a body. If the prime minister were to relent,
perhaps to fend off his possible prosecution in the
International Criminal Court, the president would decide
who is on the commission.
If Mr Levin persists in his obstructionism, the court could

order the other committee members to convene without
him. But that would be an unprecedented clash between the
branches of government and could in turn provoke other
ministers to defy legal rulings. That is already happening.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-right politician in charge of the
police, has proceeded with the promotion of a police officer
accused of throwing a stun-grenade at protesters, despite
instructions from the attorney-general and a court order to
wait until an investigation is concluded.
The government and court are also at odds over a ruling to

draft rabbinical students into the army and end funding for
their seminaries. This is a red line for the ultra-Orthodox
parties in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition and his ministers are in
no rush to carry out the court’s orders.
“The Supreme Court judges created this confrontation at a

time of war,” insists Simcha Rothman, chair of the law
committee in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament and one of the
architects of the coalition’s judicial reforms. “Instead of
trying to reach a compromise with the justice minister, they
are forcing a vote. This constitutional crisis is on their
heads.”
Others disagree. Yaniv Roznai, an expert in constitutional

law at Reichman University in Tel Aviv, says: “Beneath the
radar, while the guns are firing, the government is taking
advantage of the lack of attention to legal issues to try once
again to achieve the objective of the legal reform—power
without limits.” ■

and-africa/2024/09/19/israels-government-is-again-trying-to-hobble-its-supreme-court

Daylight robbery
Nairobi’s reputation for

crime is outdated
That is only in part thanks to its notorious police
9月 19, 2024 08:42 上午 | NAIROBI
THERE IS AN era in the history of many cities that is

inextricably linked, in the public imagination, to crime and
lawlessness—think 1920s Chicago or 1980s New York. For
Nairobi that period is the 1990s. In the old business district,
carjackings were a daily occurrence, remembers Farida Ali, a
shop-owner there. Violent crime was so common that
residents dubbed the Kenyan capital “Nairobbery”.
For years Nairobi was spoken of in the same breath as

Johannesburg or Lagos, two of Africa’s most dangerous
cities. A survey in 2000 suggested that Nairobians were
more likely to be robbed or assaulted than people who lived
in central Johannesburg. Not much had changed by the
2010s. Robert Ochala, a Kenyan security wonk, says the
gangs which emerged in the middle of that decade were so
lawless “they would rob their own relatives.”
Kenyan tabloids still paint their capital as hopelessly crime-

ridden. And official statistics suggest little improvement. But
speak to experts as well as ordinary residents—not to
mention the city’s perennially security-conscious expats—
and a different picture emerges. Stories of “home invasions”
in wealthy neighbourhoods are much rarer than a decade
ago. It is now generally considered safe to drive, if not yet
walk, at night in all but the most notorious neighbourhoods.
Mrs Ali’s part of the central business district is no longer
deemed a no-go zone. “Violent crime has gone down
overall,” says Mutuma Ruteere, director of the National
Crime Research Centre and the country’s foremost crime
expert. “We’ve come from ‘Nairobbery’ to a fairly safe city.”
What might explain this? New technologies, including the

spread of CCTV, have probably helped. More controversial is
whether Kenya’s police force can take any credit. In 2009 its
reputation for corruption and lawlessness was so terrible
that the UN dispatched a special rapporteur to investigate
it. (The resulting report denounced the use of police death
squads to eliminate suspects and a “climate of impunity”.)
Even today few Kenyans believe their cops do much to
prevent crime. Statistics on wrongdoing are so unreliable
largely because most poor Kenyans do not trust the police
enough to report it.
Kenyans do, however, seem often to approve of their more

heavy-handed tactics. When lawlessness in the central
business district runs amok, says Benjamin Maina, a shop-
owner there, the police “kill two to three people, and once
they do that, crime completely goes down.” These kinds of
execution-style killings have a long history, dating back to
the early days of Kenya’s independence (and, indeed,
before). In the 2000s an undercover squad of killer cops was
credited with dismantling some of Kenya’s most notorious
gangs, such as the Mungiki sect, which at its peak is
thought to have had over a million members. Sometimes
they killed innocent people, but overall “these guys were
really effective at combating crime,” argues Mr Ochalo.
The current government has tried to scrub up the police’s

image. William Ruto, Kenya’s president since 2022,
disbanded an elite special unit soon after taking office,
accusing it of “killing Kenyans arbitrarily”. He also offered to
send 400 officers to gang-racked Haiti to lead an
international peacekeeping mission. In June America
designated Kenya a “major non-NATO ally”, the first in sub-
Saharan Africa.
But their overseas deployment has put Kenya’s police in the

international spotlight just as they have been dealing with
demonstrations back home against Mr Ruto’s proposed tax
rises. The ensuing crackdown, in which police have so far
killed scores of protesters, and abducted dozens more,
reveals how little there actually is to show for 15 years of
police reform. And a growing number of police are involved
in criminality themselves, such as human trafficking or
lending their guns to gangs.
Still, there have been some improvements. Over the past

two decades the police have received gradually higher pay
and more resources. This has helped reduce some of the
worst corruption in their ranks, says John Githongo, an anti-
graft campaigner. Others point to the growth of community
policing, initiatives to improve relations between cops and
the people they serve. Giving residents more ownership
over their own security has helped make poorer areas safer,
argues Kennedy Odede of SHOFCO, an NGO working in
Kenyan slums. In such places the spread of neighbourhood
watches, community justice centres and self-help groups
among former gang members may have done more than
the police to reduce crime.
Some local efforts simply fill a vacuum where the state

should be. In rich areas, security is overwhelmingly the job
of private firms, not the police. Streetlights, which make it
safer to walk around at night, are typically installed by
residents, not the government. And in some areas, justice is
often handed down by vigilantes, not the courts. Mrs Ali
reckons “mob justice” is the main reason crime is down in
her neighbourhood. Videos of lynchings in which suspected
criminals are forced inside burning tyres appear on social
media.
The prevalence of such practices points to a deeper

problem. Currently, when crime spikes in one area, the
police or local mobs move in and use force to contain it.
That may work temporarily. But the more fundamental
causes of crime—which include high levels of inequality and
youth unemployment—are far harder to fix. ■
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A perfect storm
Floods in Nigeria’s north-

east are aggravating a
humanitarian crisis
The region had already been devastated by the Boko Haram
insurgency
9月 19, 2024 07:51 上午 | Maiduguri
THE AMBULANCE rolled into the main teaching hospital in

Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in north-east Nigeria.
Through the open back door two limp, swollen legs were
visible. Skin that was once brown was ashen and wrinkled.
The body had the telltale signs of drowning. Medics took it
to the mortuary, one of the few parts of the hospital still
functioning.
Flood warnings had been ringing out across Nigeria’s north-

east for weeks. Schools in Maiduguri were closed for a
fortnight as the torrential rains came. The reservoir of the
Alau Dam began to overflow; yet the state government
continued to insist that the area was safe. But in the early
hours of September 10th, the dam collapsed and brought
the worst floods the city has seen in 30 years. Houses and
farms have been completely submerged and livestock have
drowned. Corpses floated out of the cemetery and reptiles
escaped from the zoo. Flooded roads have left entire towns
inaccessible. So far, around 400,000 people are estimated
to have been displaced and more than 30 to have died. The
true numbers are almost certainly higher. Rescue efforts are
still going on.
Many people in Maiduguri had already been forced to flee

from their homes to avoid murder or kidnap by Boko Haram,
a jihadist group. The government had tried to close refugee
camps in the city’s centre in hope of restoring some sense
of normality. Now those camps have had to reopen. They
are already overwhelmed by crowds of newly displaced
people seeking shelter.
Children shout “hunger!” at the trucks bringing in food.

Even before the floods, hunger was the worst it has been in
north-eastern Nigeria for nearly 15 years, according to the
World Food Programme. Its treatment facilities have seen a
70% increase in the number of malnourished people from
last year, with children and mothers worst affected. Hopes
that the upcoming harvest would provide relief have faded;
over 115,000 hectares of farmland throughout the country
have been ruined by the deluge so far. “Goats, rams, sheep,
turkeys, chickens, most of the domestic animals we rear, we
couldn’t rescue them,” says Balad Mutiza, a teacher, who
fled his home with his family in the middle of the night when
the floods came.
One camp is currently hosting over 16,000 people. Buses of

those who have been rescued from the floods are still
arriving. Overcrowding and disrupted water supplies have
increased the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases.
With Borno’s biggest hospitals still only partially open, those
who become ill have limited options. A nine-day-old baby
who had not been able to breastfeed for three days was
turned away at the teaching hospital. Medical staff cannot
make it to work.
Much of the city is expected to remain waterlogged for

weeks, as heavy rains continue. A dam in neighbouring
Cameroon, which has also been damaged by the rains,
could wreak further devastation on other parts of north-
eastern Nigeria. This year’s rainy season has been
particularly bad in Nigeria, as it has been in much of the
Sahel. The country’s National Emergency Management
Agency says that almost 1m people have been affected
nationwide. A region reeling from one humanitarian crisis
has been pitched into another. ■
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and-africa/2024/09/19/floods-in-nigerias-north-east-are-aggravating-a-humanitarian-
crisis
Europe
Near-shoring is turning eastern Europe into
the new China
Bringing it all back home :: With firms moving production closer to market,
CEE is the place to be
Germany’s conservatives choose the

country’s probable next leader
Friedrich the Great :: Friedrich Merz is in pole position to take over as
chancellor at the election in 2025
Ukraine is a booming market for Balkan

arms makers
The cogs of war :: It’s not just gangsters buying Serbian and Bosnian ammo
these days
Can a new crew of European commissioners

revive the continent?
Brussels reboot :: Ursula von der Leyen picks her team
Aland is lovely, weapon-free and too close to

Russia
Temptation islands :: Finland worries the demilitarised islands could fall
prey in a conflict
Europe is bidding a steady farewell to

passport-free travel
Charlemagne :: Germany is the latest Schengen country to reintroduce
border checks

Bringing it all back home
Near-shoring is turning
eastern Europe into the
new China
With firms moving production closer to market, CEE is the
place to be
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE EUROPEAN UNION has tried hard lately to restrict

Chinese imports. Yet this summer China made it easier to
import one European product: Polish poultry. The gesture
was economically insignificant. But it is part of a broader
push by China to cultivate and invest in central and eastern
Europe (CEE).
China is not alone. CEE countries are benefiting from firms
shifting production closer to the European market (near-
shoring) or to places considered politically reliable (friend-
shoring), as well as old-fashioned offshoring for lower costs.
In his recent report on European competitiveness, Mario
Draghi, a former head of the European Central Bank, argued
that the EU needs to build more resilient supply chains and
invest in domestic production of key goods such as
semiconductors. Globalisation in the early 2000s fuelled
impressive growth in the EU’s newer members. Now they
are set to benefit again.
Take Poland, which has not had a recession since 1991,
except during the pandemic. Its real consumption levels per
person have caught up with Spain’s. Net foreign direct
investment has doubled from an already large $10bn per
year in the mid-2010s to about $20bn these days. A survey
by Kearney, a consultancy, ranks Poland in the top 25
destinations for FDI in the coming years, behind Mexico and
Taiwan.
There are three reasons to expect more investment into the

region. The first is the global transition to climate neutrality.
From electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries to heat pumps
and windmills, new production capacities have to be built.
Upgrading legacy factories in Germany or France costs
about as much as building a new plant in Poland or Hungary.
Rich countries may offer more subsidies, but CEE countries
have cheaper land and labour, looser regulations and lower
taxes.
The second reason is Chinese overcapacity. As growth slows,

China is doubling down on its outsized manufacturing
sector, especially in new areas such as EVs. The EU is the
only market still fairly open to Chinese imports, increasing
the pressure on European producers to compete. That
pushes them to lower-cost regions of the single market. In a
decade, “most of the car production in Europe could be in
CEE countries and other, cheaper places such as Portugal
and Spain,” says Zoltan Torok of Raiffeisen Bank Hungary.
Finally, tension between America and China, with Europe in

between, can disrupt supply chains. This is why firms have
started to bring production closer to markets (near-shoring).
Chinese EV makers will try to produce in Europe, using
Hungary as their bridgehead. The biggest announcements
of Chinese FDI in the past three years were in Hungary and
Serbia, according to fDi Intelligence, a consultancy; Hungary
got the first European factory of BYD, a Chinese EV
producer. Western firms are doing it too. Olaf Scholz,
Germany’s chancellor, went to Serbia on July 19th to sign a
deal to mine lithium for EVs. Intel, a chipmaker, picked
Poland for a $4.6bn plant, though it has paused European
investments amid financial woes.
But the FDI boom also carries risks. Foreign investors are
not exactly popular. A big chunk of the region’s economy is
already foreign-owned. The value added in car production is
almost entirely in foreign hands. Two of the top four banks in
Poland are subsidiaries of ING, a Dutch bank, and
Santander, a Spanish bank. Populist parties like Poland’s
Law and Justice claim the FDI model leads to lower wage
growth and rising inequality. (In fact Polish wages have
grown handily.)
Weaning countries off foreign firms, capital and know-how is

hard, though. CEE countries spend much less on research
and development than western European ones do, and lack
deep capital markets. Poland’s attempt to build an EV of its
own has barely started, even after it joined forces with
Geely, a Chinese EV maker, for much of the technology. The
country’s biggest bus manufacturer, Solaris, was recently
acquired by CAF, a Spanish firm.
CEE countries must compete for FDI with countries such as

Germany and France, which can afford bigger subsidies, and
those with much cheaper energy, such as the Nordics and
Spain. Labour costs are still lower in CEE countries but the
gap is narrowing: their wages are set to go from 44% of the
western EU average today to 59% by 2035, according to
Tomas Dvorak and Mateusz Urban of Oxford Economics, a
consultancy. To compete, CEE governments offer foreigners
cheap land, which displeases local firms; subsidised energy,
which other consumers pay for; and lighter regulation,
which enrages environmental groups. “Battery assembly
with lots of imported inputs is locally a low value-added
activity that on top requires a lot of energy and water,” says
Gergely Tardos of OTP Bank in Budapest. “There is debate
about whether it is good for the country or not.”
Foreign investors also need assurances that they can find

workers. That is a challenge for countries with declining
working-age populations. Millions of their citizens have
moved to richer economies in the West. “Importing labour
for blue-collar jobs is now common,” says Mr Torok. Firms
turn to private agencies and governments for help. “We go
as far as India, even Laos to find them,” says Jakub Fekiac of
Edgar Baker, an agency in Slovakia. Foreign services firms
do not show up much in FDI numbers, but analysts say they
employ as many people as industrial ones do. The number
of foreign students at Hungarian universities has doubled
over the past decade, lured by European visas. Importing
workers may not play out well in countries where voters
oppose immigration.
The investment boom in CEE countries will boost their

standing in the EU along with their economic prospects. It
will also make them more friendly towards China and other
authoritarian countries seeking to nearshore to Europe.
Already, Hungary is resisting EU tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Some analysts worry that CEE countries’ chicken exports
will prove a poor trade for a Chinese Trojan horse. ■
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into-the-new-china

Friedrich the Great
Germany’s conservatives
choose the country’s
probable next leader
Friedrich Merz is in pole position to take over as chancellor
at the election in 2025
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | BERLIN
“FRIEDRICH MERZ is doing it, and I’m fine with that.” This
brief statement by Markus Söder, the head of Bavaria’s
governing Christian Social Union (CSU), was enough to
confirm what had long been clear in German political circles:
that Mr Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic
Union (CDU), the CSU’s larger sibling, would be the parties’
joint candidate at next year’s federal election. Mr Merz will
thus lead the opposition conservatives’ bid to unseat Olaf
Scholz, the Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor.
If the decision came earlier than many expected, it was also

no surprise. Mr Söder is an ill-disciplined sort who has never
worked out how to convert his regional success into the
national leadership he craves. Many in the CDU blame him
for hobbling the CDU/CSU’s disastrous election campaign in
2021 by pursuing the nomination even after it was clear he
could not win it. At a hastily assembled joint appearance in
Berlin on September 17th, Messrs Merz and Söder made it
clear that there would be no repeat of that debacle.
Germany’s next election is due on September 28th 2025.
That leaves Mr Merz, who has bags of political experience
but none of the governing sort, a year to introduce himself
to a sceptical electorate.
Germans are deeply unhappy with their current
government, leaving Mr Merz in pole position to win the next
vote. The CDU/CSU is polling at around 33% (see chart),
more than the combined figure for the three parties in Mr
Scholz’s disputatious “traffic-light” coalition (comprising the
SPD, Greens and liberal Free Democrats, or FDP). The CDU
did reasonably well at state elections in Germany’s east
earlier this month: it retained control of Saxony, holding off
a surge from the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD),
and looks set to take over the government in neighbouring
Thuringia, though in both places it will have to govern with
awkward partners.
A sprightly 68-year-old private-jet-owning millionaire with

multiple lives in politics, business and law, Mr Merz has
shifted the CDU, the party of Angela Merkel, rightward since
taking the reins in 2022. Two previous botched bids to lead
the party, and a reputation for arrogance and grudge-
holding, left many in the CDU wondering whether he had
what it took. His dreadful relationship with Mrs Merkel—he
never forgave her for besting him in an intra-CDU power
struggle two decades ago—worried many who appreciated
her talent at winning elections. He has sometimes seemed
unsure whether he wanted the top job himself.
Yet Mr Merz has silenced the doubters, at least for now. He

has diligently worked to win over the CDU’s moderate or
“social” wing, whose members include important state
premiers, while stamping his own brand of crunchy
conservatism on the party. “As old as he is, he is able to
learn from his mistakes,” says Johann Wadephul, a deputy
chair of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group. In May he was re-
elected by nearly 90% of CDU delegates.
The unpopularity of the traffic-light coalition has helped Mr

Merz’s cause, and his bombastic rhetorical style offers a
sharp contrast to Mr Scholz’s reticence. He has hammered
the government on everything from its budgetary proposals
to what he considers its halting support for Ukraine: he
decries Mr Scholz’s refusal to donate German Taurus cruise
missiles to Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces, for example.
In recent weeks Mr Merz has been especially strident on

irregular migration, following the murder of three Germans
by a Syrian asylum-seeker who had evaded a deportation
order. Last week he led a CDU walkout of a “migration
summit” with the governing parties. Having found receptive
ears for that message, Mr Merz can be expected to stick to
it as the election approaches (he also hopes talking tough
on immigration will stunt the growth of the AfD). But he said
on September 17th that his election priority will be
Germany’s faltering economic performance.
Mr Merz may also need to offer some hint of his preference

for coalition partners, in a fragmented party landscape in
which populist parties of left and right command growing
vote-shares. Mr Söder has declared the Greens beyond the
pale, a potentially troublesome stance that infuriates those
CDU premiers who lead successful coalitions with the
Greens in states like North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-
Holstein. But the FDP, the traditional partner of the
CDU/CSU, is polling so low that it may not make it into the
Bundestag in the next election. Since the CDU/CSU will not
govern with the AfD or other fringe outfits, that would
probably leave a Merkel-style “grand coalition” with the SPD
as the only option.
As for Mr Scholz, he proclaims himself up for the fight. The

chancellor’s advisers think Mr Merz is a deeply flawed
candidate. They aim to portray him as a reckless, out-of-
touch sort who will slash pensions and undermine workers’
rights; they will seek to exploit his relative unpopularity with
women and younger voters. (They may also hope to goad
him into a hot-tempered remark or two in the heat of the
campaign). Although the SPD’s ratings are dismal, for now
voters seem no more keen on either man as chancellor. A
large plurality would prefer neither of them to run the
country (see chart).
Yet without an unpopular record to defend, Mr Merz is in a

better position than his rival. Indeed, Mr Scholz’s own
candidacy is not even assured. Should the SPD fail to take
first place at an election in Brandenburg, another eastern
state, on September 22nd, some in the party will call for the
chancellor to make way for new blood. Mr Merz’s position is
more secure. Having won over his party, and now the CSU,
his biggest challenge awaits: to convert himself, in voters’
eyes, from an opposition leader to a chancellor-in-waiting. ■


https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/17/germanys-conservatives-choose-the-
countrys-probable-next-leader

The cogs of war
Ukraine is a booming
market for Balkan arms
makers
It’s not just gangsters buying Serbian and Bosnian ammo
these days
9月 19, 2024 07:38 上午
TERRORISTS AND gangsters enjoyed a weapons bonanza

after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Now it is
Western governments’ turn. With war raging in Ukraine,
they are hoovering up the region’s ammunition and mortars.
Western Balkan arms-makers are booming. Serbian arms
exports have quadrupled since 2020; some €800m
($890m)-worth of its ammo has gone to Ukraine since the
invasion. Bosnia’s exports in the first four months of 2024
nearly doubled compared with the same period last year. Its
ammunition factories are working around the clock, says
Jasmin Mujanovic of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and
Policy, a think-tank.
During the cold war, security-paranoid Yugoslavia had a

large army supported by a sprawling military-industrial
complex. Vestiges of its defence industry are now
concentrated in Bosnia and Serbia, which account for over
90% of the western Balkans’ military exports. Of particular
interest to Ukraine and its backers is the industry’s ability to
churn out both Soviet- and NATO-standard munitions and
equipment. Its wares are also generally cheap: a Bosnian
shell may go for a quarter the price of a Western one.
Both Bosnia and Serbia have laws that restrict them from
hawking weapons to war zones. But they have found
workarounds through third parties. America, for example, is
the main buyer of Bosnian bullets, which it reroutes to
Ukraine. Serbia, despite its refusal to impose sanctions on
Russia, has funnelled thousands of artillery rounds via the
Czech Republic, Turkey and a thicket of shell companies.
Balkan NATO members—Croatia, Albania, Montenegro and
Macedonia—have transferred much of their inventories of
old Soviet kit. Recent reports suggest that Croatia could
refurbish clapped-out Kuwaiti M-84 tanks (Yugoslavia’s
version of the Soviet T-72) to be sent to Ukraine.
For some regional governments it is an opportunity to win

political credit with America and the European Union. That is
especially true of those aspiring to join the EU, such as
Bosnia and Albania. Ukraine is tapping into that sentiment.
In February Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called
for joint arms production with western Balkan countries to
ensure Ukraine’s “survival”. Economic motives are also at
play, suggests Katarina Djokic of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute, another think-tank.
Bosnian ammunition factories, once on the verge of shutting
down, are now fully staffed.
For Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s president, weapons sales to

Ukraine are part of a delicate balancing act between the
West and Russia. But they are also good business. “I adore it
when we export arms,” he once crowed, “it is a pure influx
of foreign currency.” Serbian weapons tend to show up in
far-flung conflicts. In July Amnesty International, a human-
rights watchdog, reported finding vast quantities of Serbian
arms in war-torn Sudan. An investigation by BIRN, a network
of Balkan reporters, and Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper,
found a spike in Serbian weapons flown to Israel since the
October 2023 attacks.
Serbia’s arms exports do not always suit its nationalists’

tastes. Milorad Dodik, who as leader of the Republika Srpska
(the Serb-dominated part of Bosnia) calls for an ethnic
Serbian superstate, criticises the sale of weapons to
Ukraine. Some ethnic Serbs have gone to fight for Russia.
Others in the region worry about Serbia’s arms imports, not
its exports: its recent purchase of French-built Rafale fighter
jets delighted Western governments, but has made Croatia
and Kosovo jittery. In any case, decades after the end of the
wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkan
arms trade is still going strong. ■


https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/ukraine-is-a-booming-market-for-balkan-
arms-makers
Brussels reboot
Can a new crew of

European commissioners
revive the continent?
Ursula von der Leyen picks her team
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Brussels
FOR A SENSE of what Europeans fret about, look at the job

titles given to European commissioners in Brussels. Five
years ago a Greek official was put in charge of “protecting
our European way of life”—a job that largely entailed
keeping migrants out. (After a furore he was merely asked
to “promote” this elusive way of life.) The recurring theme
of the job titles handed out to a new set of commissioners
on September 17th is that the European Union is now
fretting about its place in the world, particularly its
economy. One commissioner has been asked to look after
not just trade but also “economic security”, another aims to
promote “tech sovereignty”, yet another to deliver
“prosperity”. To add to the anxious vibe, for the first time
the bloc will have a straight-up defence commissioner.
The fretful tone is warranted. War is still raging in

neighbouring Ukraine, whose prospects will dim if Donald
Trump wins the American election in November. Last week
Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister, issued a
gloomy report on the EU economy, spelling out reforms
needed to rekindle the bloc’s growth. Politically, Europe is
rudderless. Governments in France and Germany, the bloc’s
two biggest countries, are unpopular and crippled by
coalition woes.
Ursula von der Leyen, who in June was picked by national

leaders to serve a second term as the European
Commission’s president, thus has lots of scope to shape the
EU’s executive arm. Each of the 27 countries nominates one
commissioner, but it is up to the president to decide who
does what. (The European Parliament will grill the nominees
in the coming weeks.) In the past many top jobs went to
politicians from small, open countries in northern Europe.
This time it is officials from big countries with statist
instincts in southern Europe that dominate.
The most important fresh face in Brussels will be Teresa

Ribera, until now the Spanish ecology minister. One of six
vice-presidents of the commission, her sprawling portfolio
includes Europe’s flagship decarbonisation efforts. Once
known as the Green Deal, it is now to become a “clean, just
and competitive transition”—a concession to those who
think environmental rules have burdened businesses and
imposed costs on consumers, too.
Included in her brief will be the EU’s powers to enforce

antitrust rules, and to prevent national governments from
showering favoured companies with subsidies. Such “state
aid”, in Eurocratese, soared in recent years as the EU faced
first covid-19 and then an energy crisis linked to the war.
The outgoing competition enforcer, Margrethe Vestager, a
Dane with liberal instincts, often stood in the way of the
dirigiste policies egged on notably by France. But it has
been an increasingly lonely fight.
In recent years the chief proponent in Brussels of the statist

approach was Thierry Breton, a former French finance
minister. He had been expected to return for another five
years as the commission’s point man on industry, regulating
and subsidising EU firms to do politicians’ bidding. But a
spat with Mrs von der Leyen led her to suggest to
Emmanuel Macron that he be dumped. Instead it will be
Stéphane Séjourné, a close ally of the French president, who
will take over the job. Defence—meaning mainly trying to
co-ordinate the continent’s fragmented arms industry—will
be the purview of Andrius Kubilius, a former Lithuanian
prime minister.
Another prominent southern European will be Raffaele Fitto,

until now a minister in the hard-right government of Giorgia
Meloni in Italy. His “cohesion and reforms” brief includes
oversight of the vast Next Generation fund, which involved
national governments deploying €750bn ($835bn) of money
jointly borrowed in the aftermath of the pandemic. Mr
Draghi in effect recommended rebooting the scheme to
invest hundreds of billions more euros into making the EU
more productive. His advice, often echoing the dirigiste
faction, has been adopted wholesale by Mrs von der Leyen.
Perhaps Mr Draghi is the official who will have mattered
most of all: incoming commissioners have been asked to
implement his suggestions. ■


https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/can-a-new-crew-of-european-
commissioners-revive-the-continent

Temptation islands
Aland is lovely, weapon-

free and too close to
Russia
Finland worries the demilitarised islands could fall prey in a
conflict
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Aland
“EVERYTHING HAS become more intense,” murmurs Juri

Jalava as his coastguard cutter plies the waters of the Aland
Islands. Tension with Russia means he is spending longer at
sea than ever: “We do not want to be caught out.” Aland, a
Skye-sized island surrounded by 7,000 islets and rocks, is
awkward for Finland. Over 95% of its trade passes through
or near the islands, as do crucial data and electricity cables
linked to the rest of Europe. But Finland is bound by treaty
to keep these Swedish-speaking islands demilitarised in
peacetime. They have been so since the Crimean War, when
Britain and France tried to strangle Russian trade through
the Baltic.
With Finnish soldiers banned from training or storing

weapons on the islands, security types worry they may be
unprepared. Russia would need to take Aland to dominate
the Baltic in any conflict with the West. Sweden remilitarised
nearby Gotland after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014;
Russian soldiers have practised seizing both islands.
“Why should we leave this hole in our defences that benefits

only Russia?” asks Pekka Toveri, a former head of Finnish
military intelligence. He worries a small Russian force could
disrupt NATO reinforcements bound for Finland. Kjell Torner,
who once commanded the force tasked with racing to Aland
during wartime, worries about undercover agents sent to
cause trouble. He claims there are weapons in the cellar of
Aland’s Russian consulate. “It just makes life so much more
difficult,” snaps an official involved in planning Aland’s
defence. The Russians may have prepared to cut the cables
around Aland, another warns.
Yet reopening long-standing agreements risks opening a can
of worms, says Matti Pesu from the Finnish Institute of
International Affairs. Russia, which is party to two deals
forced on a defeated Finland in 1940 and 1947, would surely
object. “Would it not be more dangerous to start ripping up
international treaties?” asks Mats Lofstrom, a local MP.
Among some two dozen pensioners protesting against the
war in Ukraine in front of the clapboard Russian consulate,
none wanted Aland remilitarised. “It makes us safer,” said
Sonja Nordenswan.
Alanders are supposedly the happiest people in the happiest

country on Earth. It is not hard to see why, after walking the
coastal paths lined with boat houses and bird-watching
haunts. Most dismiss mainlanders’ discussions about
remilitarisation as populism at their expense. “It is all pretty
absurd,” snorts Michele Ferrari, a local politician. “We are
demilitarised and shall remain so. The world needs more
demilitarised places.” ■


https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/09/19/aland-is-lovely-weapon-free-and-too-
close-to-russia

Charlemagne
Europe is bidding a steady

farewell to passport-free
travel
Germany is the latest Schengen country to reintroduce
border checks
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
STARING OUT over France and Germany from the vine-

covered hills of Schengen, a village at the southern tip of
Luxembourg, it is hard to tell where one country ends and
the other begins. That is in no small part thanks to a deal
signed there in 1985, which committed the Benelux
countries, France and Germany to abolish the frontiers
separating them. The Schengen passport-free travel area
has since grown to include most of the 450m citizens of the
European Union’s 27 countries, and some neighbours too.
Keen to capture the mysterious essence of Euro-federalism,
a trickle of tourists still flock to the village where it all
started, as Charlemagne did this week. Alas, visitors face
three kinds of disappointment. First, a museum celebrating
the agreement is currently under renovation. Second, the
village has turned into a Saudi prince’s fantasy: with just a
few hundred inhabitants, it has eight sprawling petrol
stations in its vicinity, serving motorists keen to fill their
tanks before leaving low-tax Luxembourg. Finally, and most
distressingly, the freedom of travel that put the place on the
map is steadily being chipped away. A symbol of the EU’s
success at bringing countries together risks succumbing to
reinvigorated nationalism across the bloc.
Starting this week, Schengen will have a Germany-shaped

hole at its heart. On September 16th Europe’s most
populous country opted out of passport-free travel by
reintroducing controls at all its borders, initially for a period
of six months but probably for longer. To those committed to
an ever-closer union, this raising of drawbridges in a country
that sits squat in the middle of the continent bodes ill for
one of the EU’s signature achievements. On the ground, to
be sure, little seems to have changed. Wandering on foot
across the Moselle into Saarland on the first morning the
new measures were in place, your columnist saw no sign of
border posts; they have long since been removed.
(Germany has promised “targeted” checks that will not
disrupt the many workers who commute across borders.
Woe betide anyone inconveniencing a Luxembourgeois
asset manager on his way back from the office.)
Still, the new measures are yet another blow to a system

that has endured a thousand cuts, and may not be able to
withstand many more. Like other European grands projets,
such as the euro or the single market, Schengen requires
each national government to trust that their counterparts in
the union are doing the right thing. Increasingly, they do
not. That is particularly true when it comes to migration,
which worries voters (and thus politicians) from Athens to
Dublin. Germany reintroduced restrictions not because it
worries about Danes or even Frenchmen visiting. Rather, it
has lost faith in its neighbours’ policing of their own borders:
their propensity for letting in migrants from farther afield,
who then make their way to Germany.
This highlights Schengen’s central flaw. The implicit deal

when internal frontiers were abolished in 1995 was that
those countries bordering non-EU countries would have to
police them assiduously, in a way that others could count
upon. That is only occasionally true: nearly 400,000 illegal
crossings into the EU occurred in 2023, the highest since a
wave of migration in 2015-16. Once in the Schengen zone,
migrants can travel uncontrolled wherever they please.
Often that means making their way from a poorer country
like Italy to a richer one like Germany. A continued flow of
migrants that authorities are powerless to do much about is
fertile ground for hard-right politicians, who are keen to
denounce both migrants and the EU. The German Schengen
measures come after a surge in support for the Alternative
for Germany, a xenophobic party that has done well in
recent state elections.
In theory, Germany could enforce the safeguards to

Schengen that already exist. Irregular migrants found to
have travelled across European internal borders can be sent
back to the first EU country in which they set foot, which has
to either grant them asylum or send them back to their
place of origin. In practice the system doesn’t work. The
countries meant to take back migrants, such as Italy,
Greece and Hungary, say they cannot cope with migration
flows outside their control. The bolstering of Frontex, a pan-
European border force, since 2016 has thus far made only a
marginal difference. A wide-ranging “migration pact” agreed
last year is meant to improve matters, for example by
building facilities at the EU’s borders to process irregular
arrivals quickly (and thus send many of them home before
they can travel on to places like Germany). But
implementation is at least two years away. German national
elections, in contrast, are next year.
Your papers, please
Thus the last-straw solution for frustrated interior ministers:

reintroducing border controls within Europe. This goes
against the spirit of Schengen, and indeed some of its
formal rules. In theory suspensions of passport-free travel
are authorised only for up to six months. In practice some
countries, like France and Denmark, have quietly
accumulated years of such “temporary” restrictions. Many
fear Germany will do the same. The EU authorities in
Brussels ought to protest but have tacitly allowed countries
to reimpose controls in the hope of preserving the system.
Seen from Luxembourg, the raising of the German

drawbridge seems manageable for now. Léon Gloden, the
country’s interior minister (and for many years mayor of a
town just up the road from Schengen, bordering Germany)
says that EU member states should ideally refrain from
unilateral measures, even temporary ones. Luxembourgeois
authorities are working with their German counterparts to
prevent traffic blockages. It is an irritant, but far from the
hard German border he remembers from his childhood,
which has long since been forgotten. “If I tell my children
[about border posts] now, they think I lived in the 19th
century.” ■


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passport-free-travel

Britain
The broken business model of British
universities
Grads and grind :: Frozen fees + fewer foreigners = big trouble
Ten years on from Scotland’s independence

referendum
Good times :: The 2014 campaign has been mythologised by nationalists
Britain’s nuclear-test veterans want

compensation
Atomic number :: Other countries have accepted the argument for redress
Treasure-hunting on England’s Jurassic

Coast
Rock and goal :: Fossils on a conveyor belt
British farms are luring the Instagram crowd

Photo crops :: More and more farmers are diversifying into hospitality
How will Labour reform Britain’s public

services?
The vision thing :: Last time it had a philosophy. This time, not so much
The bungee-jumping, sandal-clad right-

wingers of British politics
Bagehot :: If the Liberal Democrats want to replace the Conservatives, they
must move further right on the economy

Grads and grind
The broken business

model of British
universities
Frozen fees + fewer foreigners = big trouble
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Reading
THE LABOUR PARTY barely talked about higher education in

the run-up to the general election in July. In government,
universities’ problems are harder to ignore. In a dour speech
on September 10th Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister,
included universities among a list of public services that he
said were “crumbling” and “worse than we expected”.
Rising costs, combined with a fall in the number of more
lucrative foreign students, are forcing cuts: some 70
institutions are retrenching in one way or another, according
to a list compiled by the University and College Union, a
trade union. In May the Office for Students (OfS), a
regulator, said that 40% of universities and colleges
expected to be in deficit by the end of the 2023-24 financial
year. In a “reasonable worst-case scenario” that could rise
to 80% in three years. At least one or two universities are
rumoured to be close to insolvency. On September 17th the
BBC reported that Universities UK, a lobby group, had asked
for more funding to fill financial holes.
At the root of universities’ difficulties lies insufficient funding

for domestic undergraduates (see chart 1). The tuition fee
they may charge British students was capped at £9,000
($11,880) a year in 2012, and has scarcely risen since.
Inflation has gobbled away at its value: it is now worth less
than £6,500 in 2012 prices.
A crunch might have come sooner but for a sudden and
sharp influx of foreign students, whose fees are not capped
and who can often pay double what their English peers are
charged. Their numbers began to soar five years ago, in
response to a change in visa rules that permitted foreign
students to remain in Britain for two years after their
courses ended. This unleashed demand from students in
places such as India and Nigeria (who find it much easier to
pay for rich-world courses if they come with the right to stay
and work once they have finished). They flocked to
universities that until then had not taken many foreigners,
and enrolled mostly in one-year masters courses.
But the foreigner boom is now turning into a bust. Arrivals

from abroad peaked in the 2022-23 academic year, and are
falling fast (see chart 2). So far this year the government
has granted 17% fewer student visas than it did during the
same period of 2023. One vice-chancellor thinks that the
worst-affected universities could be facing falls of 30-50%.
Some of the reasons, such as an economic crisis in Nigeria,
lie outside anyone’s control. But government policy has also
played a role. At the start of this year the Conservatives,
seeking to bring down net migration, began forbidding most
foreign students from bringing their spouses or children.
That is having a bigger impact than most had expected.
This is not just a problem for universities that are highly
reliant on foreigners. As a hedge against trouble, many
institutions have this year sought to enroll more British
undergraduates than they usually would. Prestigious ones
have found this easiest: the number of British youngsters
winning places in “high-tariff” institutions, such as those in
the Russell Group collection of universities, is up by around
13% this autumn. That has left universities lower down the
food chain short of new domestic entrants. (It doesn’t help
that rising living costs make student life less appealing.)
The financial risks are rising as a result. “I would be

surprised if, after this round of annual reports, there is not
one university that has to have some form of significant
intervention,” says Jonathan Simons of Public First, a think-
tank. Things will get a bit clearer once term starts—when
universities are able to count how many successful
applicants have actually turned up—but conversations with
creditors are already happening. “Some institutions are
talking to banks about potential breaches of covenant on
loans,” says John Rushforth, executive secretary of the
Committee of University Chairs, a charity that advises
university leaders. “And we know that there have been
some discussions with auditors about ‘going concern’.”
Failure and fees
For Labour, two questions stand out: how to handle a

university that runs out of money and how to put the sector
onto firmer ground. On the first issue, the official line is that
failing institutions should not expect government help. On
August 15th Jacqui Smith, the minister for skills, said that “if
it were necessary” the government would let a university go
bust.
That line might just about hold should problems strike at

institutions that are fairly small or in a city such as London,
which has several dozen universities that could soak up
displaced students. In many cases, however, the
government would probably find the fallout from a collapse
intolerable. Administrators would neither prioritise refunds
for students nor make much effort to help them continue
their studies elsewhere. Local bigwigs, terrified of losing one
of their biggest employers, would scream for help. Spooking
foreigners would only deepen universities’ malaise.
During the covid-19 pandemic the then government set up a

process, the “higher education restructuring regime”,
whereby universities that risked running into financial
trouble could discuss their options with the government.
Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a
think-tank, believes Labour should create something similar.
“It wasn’t a perfect process, by any means, but it was a
process—and what we have at the moment is nothing.” If
the government is really willing to contemplate wind-downs
then it ought to rig up a “special administration” regime of a
sort that already exists for colleges of further education,
reckons Mr Simons. That would grant administrators
permission to consider the interests of students, in addition
to those of big creditors.
Even if Labour sidesteps a university bankruptcy in the

coming months, the party will still have to decide what to do
about the sector’s overall financial footing. Since coming to
power the government has confirmed that it has no plans to
further tighten visa rules. But it is very unlikely to reverse
the ban on foreign learners bringing relatives with them.
The problem is not just that dependants were boosting net

migration figures: between 2019 and 2022 the number of
dependants arriving with students rose from 16,000 to
134,000. It was also feared that the system was being
gamed. Under the old regime spouses were permitted to
work in Britain while their partners studied as well as for the
two years after they graduated. Politicians began to worry
that students from poorer countries were enrolling in British
universities solely to gain these working rights.
The other obvious way to steady the ship would be to push
up funding for British undergraduates. There are two ways
to achieve that. The government currently doles out about
$1bn annually in “teaching grants” designed to help fund
high-cost courses such as medicine and dentistry. Widening
and increasing these payments would please people who
think Britain loads too much of the cost of higher education
onto its students (public spending provides only about 25%
of all funding for universities and colleges, compared with
an average of 67% in the OECD club of rich countries).
Higher teaching grants was one recommendation in the last
big government review of university funding, in 2019.
The cheaper, and therefore much likelier, approach is to

increase tuition fees. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, another
think-tank, reckons that this would cost the government
only about a quarter as much as expanding teaching grants
(because graduates would cough up the lion’s share of the
extra cash in student-loan repayments). Only a few years
ago Labour was promising to abolish fees entirely; it would
not relish the prospect of raising them. But policymakers
have overestimated the furore this would cause, says Mr
Hillman: “The funding system is not broken; what’s broken is
politicians’ bravery.”
Were it to go down this path, Labour could perhaps dampen

discontent by bundling a higher fee with reforms to the loan
system. In opposition Bridget Phillipson, now the education
secretary, said that she was interested in ways to reduce
monthly repayments for newer graduates, so as to give
them more “breathing space at the start of their working
lives”.
She has also claimed that changes made by the

Conservatives last year, which increased the amount of
student debt that low-earning graduates pay back to the
government while reducing lifetime costs for well-paid ones,
are “desperately unfair”. The party is said to be interested
in alternative repayment models that might use sliding
interest rates to dramatically increase the sums high-
earning graduates are asked to contribute. In theory this
might generate money that the government could then
spend reintroducing grants to cover living costs for poorer
students, which the previous government junked in 2016.
Universities fret that Labour will end up deciding all these

options are unappealing and put off decisions by setting up
a meandering independent review. On September 12th Lady
Smith, the skills minister, sought to reassure the House of
Lords that her party would not be hanging about. Fixing
university funding “will take some time to get right”, she
said. “But I do not believe that it will take as long as some
people fear.” If institutions start to get into real trouble,
Labour may not have much choice but to act fast. ■
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universities

Good times
Ten years on from

Scotland’s independence
referendum
The 2014 campaign has been mythologised by nationalists
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Glasgow
TEN YEARS ago George Square in Glasgow buzzed with

campaigners for Scottish independence. The anniversary of
the referendum, which fell on September 18th, passed
somewhat more discreetly. Scottish political leaders made
pro forma speeches. Bob Doris, a Scottish National Party
(SNP) politician representing north-east Glasgow, says that
activists planned to talk to local people about the
anniversary, but delicately: “We’ll do it very quietly, in a
dignified fashion.”
Neither supporters nor opponents of independence have

much to crow about. A YouGov poll suggests that, excluding
those who do not know, 44% of Scots would vote to leave
the UK today, almost the same as the 45% who voted that
way ten years ago. But with no clear route to a second
referendum, pro-independence “Yes” supporters are gloomy.
Another poll, by More in Common, finds that only 47% of
them think that Scotland will become independent in their
lifetimes. Fully 74% of “No” voters think it will not.
Politically, the separatists have run out of steam. After the

2014 referendum many “Yes” voters swapped their blue-
and-white badges for the yellow and black of the SNP,
pushing it to a series of spectacular victories in Scottish and
British elections. But the SNP has endured a period of
intense turmoil, including the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon
as leader and the short-lived tenure of Humza Yousaf, and
has been sullied by the experience of government. In the
general election in July, under the new leadership of John
Swinney, it sank from 43 to nine seats in Scotland, partly
because some “Yes” supporters defected to Labour.
Even so, the nationalist myth-making machine is still

humming. On September 17th the National, a pro-
independence newspaper, held a screening in Glasgow of a
skilful film by Jane McAllister about the 2014 campaign. “To
See Ourselves” depicts independence campaigners as
decent and music-loving, and their opponents as thuggish,
English-accented and not infrequently drunk. The film
suggests that the referendum was lost because Scots were
too timid and believed too many unionist lies. The audience
loved it.
If they are to regain momentum, nationalists would do well
to think more seriously about why they failed to convince a
majority of Scots in 2014. But it is nicer to tell a simple story
of plucky underdogs taking on the mighty British state.
“Wasn’t it the best of times?” asked Suzanne McLaughlin,
who created the Yesbar, a one-time pro-independence
watering hole, at the screening. A group that talks so often
about Scotland’s bright future is growing comfortable
reminiscing about the past. ■


https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/18/ten-years-on-from-scotlands-
independence-referendum

Atomic number
Britain’s nuclear-test
veterans want
compensation
Other countries have accepted the argument for redress
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
FIRST CAME a flash that lit “the sky on fire”. Then Gordon
Coggon saw the bones in his hands and blood pumping
through his veins, as if he were looking at an X-ray. Next he
felt an intense heat, like someone was “pushing a fire
through his belly”. Around him men were shouting for their
mums. He soon turned to look at the dark red, blue and
green mass before him. The mushroom cloud “was a very
awesome sight. But frightening at the same time.”
More than 20,000 servicemen were present at British

nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific between
1952 and 1967; Mr Coggon’s experience came on Christmas
Island as an 18-year-old on national service. In the years
since, some nuclear-test veterans like him say they have
suffered health problems, including cancers, which they
worry were caused by radiation from the blasts. “Everything
went wrong after them bombs,” reckons Mr Coggon, now 85,
who says all his teeth “started dropping out”, and that he
has suffered a “bent spine” and cancer.
British atomic veterans have been seeking redress since at

least the 1980s. Their campaign is gaining momentum.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is among
those now backing a public inquiry. In 2021 Sir Keir Starmer
became the first party leader to meet test veterans.
But winning an inquiry or compensation will be tricky. In

2012 Britain’s Supreme Court narrowly ruled against around
1,000 veterans seeking to launch claims against the Ministry
of Defence (MoD), which denies liability. The court said too
much time had passed. It is difficult to prove that a specific
exposure to radiation caused a specific instance of an illness
as common as cancer. Veterans say this makes it hard to
assign legal liability or to receive a regular war pension,
which compensates people with illnesses or injuries “caused
or made worse by service”.
Studies of veterans’ health outcomes also complicate the

campaign. One mortality study, commissioned by the MoD
and published by the National Radiological Protection Board
in 2003, found some evidence that British men who took
part in nuclear-weapons tests had a higher risk of leukaemia
compared with a control group. But it also found that overall
rates of mortality and other cancers were similar. Alan Owen
of Labrats, a veterans campaign group, complains that
researchers have not measured PTSD, fertility problems or
the pain of “seeing fathers die young”, as his did. Most
people who witnessed tests are dead, making it harder to do
new studies.
Other countries have acted. Under a plan introduced in

1990 American atomic veterans who developed any of a list
of 19 cancers were entitled to one-time payments of
$75,000. (That particular scheme expired in June after an
extension failed to pass the House of Representatives.)
Canada and France have also offered compensation to some
veterans. But in July Sir Keir refused to promise an
investigation into what happened. And although Labour
promised in 2019 to pay £50,000 ($66,000) to each
surviving veteran, the pledge was not included in its
manifesto this year.
Money matters less to some veterans than a wish to know

what happened to them. Their latest case, brought by
around 300 servicemen and their families, seeks access to
blood-test records that they claim are held by the MoD and
that they argue would provide either evidence of harm or
peace of mind. The MoD has said no information is being
withheld. Many veterans just want an apology. Last year
Roger Grace, an 86-year-old Briton, reunited with other
veterans for a showing of “Oppenheimer”, a blockbuster
film about America’s atom bomb. He was “quite moved. As
young lads, we didn’t know what we were seeing. Now we
know more…it would be nice to get some better
recognition.” ■

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/19/britains-nuclear-test-veterans-want-
compensation

Rock and goal
Treasure-hunting on
England’s Jurassic Coast
Fossils on a conveyor belt
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Charmouth
ALONG A STRETCH of England’s southern shoreline, gangs

of small children roam the beaches wielding hammers and
searching for remains in the rocks. This is not some post-
apocalyptic scene, a day at the seaside via Cormac
McCarthy, but the mark of an increasingly popular pastime.
The hammering hordes are scouring the Jurassic Coast for

fossilised ammonites that swam in a shallow, tropical sea
hundreds of millions of years ago. The fossils are often
preserved in pyrite, a mineral also known as fool’s gold. And
for prehistoric prospecting, this particular stretch of the
coast is paradise. Not only does it have a near-perfect
geological record from the Mesozoic era (some 66m-252m
years ago), but frequent landslides transport the cliff and its
contents down to the beach. “Fossils on a conveyor belt” is
the way that Paul Davis, a curator at Lyme Regis Museum,
describes it.
Those remains are drawing more and more people. The

Charmouth Heritage Centre, where visitors can learn about
local finds and identify their own fossils, claimed record
turnover in 2023, driven largely by its expert-guided fossil
walks. Social-media videos fuel people’s enthusiasm. They
often show rocks breaking open after one or two light taps
with a hammer to reveal perfectly formed fossils. If only it
were so easy, says Lizzie Hingley, a professional fossil-
hunter who spends days carefully chiselling remains from
rocks. She attributes the popularity of fossil-hunting to a
mixture of therapy (“everything else melts away”) and thrill
(“it is treasure-hunting”).
The treasure can lead day-trippers astray. Emergency

services on the Jurassic Coast occasionally have to rescue
fossil-hunters from cliff edges and mudslides. Stuart
Godman, a fossil warden, is employed by the local councils
and Jurassic Coast Trust to persuade people to hunt on safer
ground. Although he says that the vast majority of rule-
breakers are polite, occasionally someone “throws a
wobbly”. Mr Godman has been told to “go away”, using
language “not as polite as that”.
He puts the rudeness down to the rewards on offer. The

bounty may be encased in fool’s gold but the returns are
real. In August fossils advertised as from Lyme Regis were
listed on eBay for an average price of almost £100 ($131);
some were on sale for as much as £1,650. That may explain
some of the more egregious behaviour to be seen on the
British coastline. In November 2023 police apprehended two
fossil-hunters on a protected beach in south-western
England who were attempting to break apart boulders using
a rock saw and angle grinder. In Scotland one landowner
restricted fossil-hunting “to an absolute minimum” after the
area was “attacked by fossil collectors”.
As long as everyone follows the rules and stays safe, Ms

Hingley is passionate about sharing the excitement of fossil-
hunting. More searching also saves more specimens that
would otherwise be lost to sea. In 2017 she and a fellow
fossilist, Paul Turner, discovered a prehistoric crocodile that
had previously been unknown to science. They came across
it “sitting sunbathing in front of the landslide”, no cliff-
climbing required. ■


https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/16/treasure-hunting-on-englands-jurassic-
coast

Photo crops
British farms are luring

the Instagram crowd
More and more farmers are diversifying into hospitality
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
PETERLEY MANOR FARM, in the Chiltern Hills, has moved a

long way from conventional farming. When Roger Brill, a
fourth-generation farmer, and his wife, Jane, took over the
derelict turkey farm in 1982, they set out to grow and sell
fruit and vegetables from the farm gate. Now the 40-acre
farm boasts a “wild spa” with outdoor ice baths and a log-
fired sauna, yoga classes in a Mongolian yurt and a café in a
converted tractor barn. Produce from the fields, including
Christmas trees and apple juice, accounts for a vanishingly
small share of the farm’s income. It made up less than a
tenth of revenue last year.
“Instagram has changed everything,” according to Katy Brill,

who took over the day-to-day running of Peterley Manor
Farm from her parents in 2014. Novel experiences and
scenic backdrops do very well on social-media platforms. In
addition to the spa, the farm also hosts fitness boot camps,
an outdoor cinema and farm-themed messy play for kids—
all overlooking rolling fields. Plans have been approved for a
new nature-based nursery.
Branching out has become the norm for modern farmers.

Nearly 70% of farms in England are pursuing other business
ventures, up from 56% a decade ago. Out of those with
additional income streams, one in five earn more than half
of their revenue from diversified initiatives. Some activities,
such as letting land to other farmers, are linked to
traditional agriculture. But many farms are venturing into
new fields entirely. Half of farm-owners let out space for
other activities, according to figures from the Department
for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA); a fifth
generate income from solar energy (see chart).
Consumer-focused services in particular are booming.
Social-media use and a shift towards sustainability and
wellness after the pandemic have driven demand for farm
experiences. Sales at most farm shops have surpassed their
pre-pandemic levels, according to the Farm Retail
Association, a trade body. Barns and farm venues across
Britain outperformed hotels as wedding venues in 2023,
according to data from Hitched, a wedding-planning
website. Many farms offer glamping—camping for people
who don’t like camping—in luxury shepherd’s huts.
The decision to diversify may not be new: farmers have

sought alternative income streams for decades. But the
need has become more urgent. Farms have been squeezed
by huge rises in energy costs following Russia’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the soaring cost of
agricultural labour in the years since Brexit. Increasingly
unpredictable weather, including record amounts of rainfall,
has made harvests less reliable. Changing subsidy
arrangements add to the uncertainty. DEFRA estimates that
up to 42% of all farms are unprofitable without the Basic
Payment Scheme (BPS), a subsidy that was introduced in
2015 and is now being wound down. New payment schemes
require farmers to make their operations greener.
Diversification brings new business for struggling farms. But

adapting to consumer demands leaves them exposed to
wider economic cycles. It also requires them to find workers
with new skills. In future Peterley Manor Farm will need more
marketers and chefs, for instance, and fewer farm hands. In
one respect, though, things are not that different from old-
fashioned farming. “The hospitality business is notoriously
difficult,” says Ms Brill. “It’s hard work and long hours.” ■


https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/19/british-farms-are-luring-the-instagram-
crowd

The vision thing
How will Labour reform

Britain’s public services?
Last time it had a philosophy. This time, not so much
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
“CHOICE IS CHOICE!” exclaimed Tony Blair. Shortly after the

2001 election, the prime minister had gathered his advisers
at Chequers, his grace-and-favour residence, to discuss
public-sector reform. Three principles—setting standards,
devolving budgets and reducing barriers between
professions—had already been established. But someone
had objected to a fourth, the idea that parents and patients
should be offered choice. Perhaps “preference” would go
down better with the trade unions and the Labour Party?
“Why mince our words?” asked Sir Tony.
Labour has entered office, as it did in 1997, with public

services in a mostly dire state. Its prospects at the next
election in five years’ time will depend, perhaps above all,
on how much voters feel that has changed. The Blair
government’s approach was to develop a rigid set of ideas
about how to run schools and hospitals and apply them
rigorously. The Starmer government’s plans are, at best,
inchoate.
To see why that could become a problem, it helps to recall

New Labour’s approach. Among those in the room at
Chequers was Sir Michael Barber, an education adviser
whom Sir Tony would soon poach to run a new “prime
minister’s delivery unit”. Having spent years trying to
reform failing schools, Sir Michael was disdainful of the idea
—popular among unions and the wider Labour movement—
that teachers or doctors should simply be trusted to run
things. Too often, that meant accepting mediocrity.
At a minimum, Sir Michael argued, ministers needed three

things: a clear strategy, a view of standards and capacity,
and the data to monitor outcomes. This became the basis of
the delivery unit. Ministers would be hauled into Number 10
and grilled on progress against tightly defined targets like
reducing waiting times or improving exam results. They, in
turn, published league tables and penalised
underperformers. Underpinning all of this was a belief that
the left had got two big things wrong: seeing public-sector
workers as motivated purely by altruism and public-sector
users as passive beneficiaries.
The method produced some brilliant results. Waiting times

for operations fell much faster in England than in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland, which all rejected the reforms.
English schools pulled ahead of Welsh ones. One study
found that the drive to reduce A&E waiting times saved
thousands of lives, especially among those who had
suffered strokes. New Labour proved to be adept at turning
bad schools and hospitals into adequate ones.
The approach was less good at freeing adequate or good

performers to innovate, says Ben Glover of Demos, a think-
tank. It could be “stultifying”. It also tilted spending towards
short-term goals: in the case of health care, more money
went into hospitals than into prevention of illness. It led to
some gaming of the rules. And although results improved
many doctors and teachers disliked the mix of “targets and
terror”.
If New Labour’s ideas risked being too rigid, the current

government’s problem is the reverse. It is hard to discern
well-developed ideas about public services in the speeches
of Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, and Rachel Reeves,
the chancellor of the exchequer. High-profile failures in
areas like probation have made politicians wary of applying
market methods to the public sector. If ministers do talk
about reform, many prefer to talk about making services
more “personalised” and “relational”, voguish but vague
ideas developed in local government.
The government’s missions, which include ones focused on

health and opportunity, are very high-level. They lay out
near- and longer-term goals—such as reducing waiting lists
and improving healthy life expectancy—with little sense of
how they will be reached or how resources will be
prioritised. On September 12th, responding to a grim review
into the National Health Service (NHS), the government
floated some ideas about developing financing models that
would shift money towards prevention. But there will be no
detailed plan for NHS reform until next year.
There have been some signals of the government’s

preferences. Ministers are closer to the trade unions than in
Sir Tony’s day. Ms Reeves has agreed to large pay rises for
public-sector workers without asking for anything in return.
In education, Labour has decided to end one-word
judgments of schools by Ofsted, a regulator. Unions had
long argued that they put teachers under extreme strain.
Yet they were hugely popular with parents. The problems
could have been tackled by making changes to the
inspection process and how the judgments were used, says
Nick Davies of the Institute for Government, another think-
tank. It is hard to imagine Sir Tony, who saw extending
choice to parents as critical to winning the support of middle
classes, making the same decision.
The absence of a clear strategy for the public sector is a big

risk for the new government. Before raising taxes to fund
the NHS, Sir Tony insisted that the government had a strong
case that it would be “investment with reform”. The current
government cannot simply reheat New Labour’s ideas: for
one thing, the public finances are in much worse shape. But
without a philosophy of its own and with tax rises expected
in Ms Reeves’s budget next month, it will be vulnerable to
attack. ■


https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/19/how-will-labour-reform-britains-public-
services

Bagehot
The bungee-jumping,
sandal-clad right-wingers
of British politics
If the Liberal Democrats want to replace the Conservatives,
they must move further right on the economy
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
IT WAS ALL worth it. The paddle-boarding, the alpaca-

stroking, the thrusting in the Zumba class, the makeover on
morning television, the rollercoasters, the falling off the
surfboard, the falling off the paddleboard, the falling off an
obstacle course, the bungee-jumping. Every gimmick that
Sir Ed Davey, the usually serious-to-the-point-of-pompous
leader of the Liberal Democrats, endured during the election
campaign was worth it when, on July 4th, the party enjoyed
its best result in a century.
The Lib Dems won 72 seats, snatching 60 of them from the

Conservatives. Nearly all their gains came from the
loveliest, and most prosperous, parts of southern England.
The party’s task at the next election is to replace the Tories
as the main opposition. The party finished in second place in
27 seats, 21 of which are Conservative-held. Conquer them
and the two parties would be almost-level pegging for the
first time since the Edwardian era. “Let’s finish the job,” said
Sir Ed at the party’s annual conference in Brighton on
September 17th.
As a strategy, it is clear. But the consequences of pursuing it

are overlooked. Britain has a two-party system designed,
broadly, to produce one party more to the left economically
and another more to the right economically. Labour has
sewn up the left. The Conservatives have only a loose grip
on the right. There is only one place for the Lib Dems to go
on economics: right.
Pointing this out to a Liberal Democrat triggers outrage or

confusion. The party’s MPs and activists put themselves
somewhere between the centre and beyond Labour’s left on
the political spectrum. Partly this is a trauma response: bad
things happen to Liberal Democrats when they drift right
economically. In 2004 high-flyers in the party published the
“Orange Book”. It was a radical manifesto, which ranged
from a tax lock, insisting that no one should ever pay a
marginal tax rate above 50%, to turning the National Health
Service into an insurance system.
The Orange Book did not have a happy ending. Its authors
enjoyed mixed fortunes. Three, Sir Ed among them, have
become party leader. Others were less lucky. One ended up
in jail for perverting the course of justice. Another’s career
ended after he was embroiled in a scandal that the now-
defunct News of the World described as a “bizarre sex act
too revolting to describe”. More important, the party’s
economic shift to the right paved the way for it to enter into
a coalition with the Conservative Party in 2010. Voters
deserted the party at the next election in 2015. Luring them
back took both the best part of a decade and Sir Ed
repeatedly hurling himself into bodies of water.
It is natural, then, that shifting right makes Lib Dems

nervous. Yet Britain’s third party does not have to move far.
It may be socially liberal, but on the economy it is already
further to the right than people think. Ostensibly left-wing
policy is often, on closer inspection, anything but. For
instance, Sir Ed wants the very richest to pay more
inheritance tax. The example given by his team is that
estates worth tens of millions often avoid inheritance tax
altogether. A crackdown on the mega-rich would allow lower
rates for those lucky enough to own a £1.5m home in, say,
Oxfordshire. The most likely result would be that the
extremely rich find ways to avoid paying, and that
prosperous Lib Dem voters in the home counties toast Sir
Ed’s generosity.
Opposing VAT on private schools is another case in point.

This is a matter of principle, according to Sir Ed. Politically, it
makes sense too. The sort of parent who would send their
child private is likely to be a prosperous professional who
lives in the south-east. In short, the archetype of the new
Lib Dem voter.
The bulk of Lib Dems may feel closer to their Labour peers.
But it is Tory-to-Lib-Dem switchers who will determine the
party’s fate. The seats gained in July include some of the
most conservative places in the country, such as Surrey
Heath, a wealthy web of commuter villages outside London.
Tory voters who jumped ship to the Lib Dems were ever so
slightly more economically right-wing than the ones who
opted for Reform UK, according to Paula Surridge from
Bristol University. Clinging on to them is key.
From FBPE to FDP
Drifting right need not interfere with the long-held concerns

of Britain’s third party. Why should returning to the EU
necessarily be a left-wing thing? European integration was a
centre-right project, with a cabal of Christian Democrats
trying to ensure that the continent did not do that again. It
evolved into a neoliberal project, with strict rules
constraining state action. Electoral reform, another long-
held Lib Dem goal, is not an inherently leftie project either.
An obsession of sandal-wearing, pony-tailed pensioners who
dominate Lib Dem land it may be. But it is also a
preoccupation of Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK.
The Liberal Democrats are left-wing in one crucial way. They

want—or, rather, need—a second Labour term. The party
does not control its own destiny. Labour must be competent
enough for wavering centre-right voters to be prepared to
gamble on the Lib Dems, and thereby give Sir Keir Starmer
another term, rather than reverting to the Tories.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives must stay crackers. If the
state of the Tory party’s leadership election is anything to go
by, Sir Ed is in luck.
What the Lib Dems do have to decide is if they are happy to

ensconce themselves on the centre-right. For those
members and MPs who wince at memories of the coalition,
or who were never on board with the Orange Book, it is an
uneasy shift. For all the campaign gimmicks, Sir Ed admitted
one idea went too far. An aide thought it would be fun for
him to shove his arm up a cow. Mercifully, party wallahs
thought better of it. Some things are too much, even for a
Lib Dem. Drifting further right may be another. ■


https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/18/the-bungee-jumping-sandal-clad-right-
wingers-of-british-politics

International
A UN vote on Palestine underlines America’s
weakening clout
UNintended consequences :: Russia and China are riding a surge of support
for the Palestinians since the Gaza war started

UNintended consequences
A UN vote on Palestine
underlines America’s
weakening clout
Russia and China are riding a surge of support for the
Palestinians since the Gaza war started
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | NEW YORK
“THE RUSSIANS are not the bad guys any more. Now it’s the
Americans.” Thus, explains a European diplomat at the UN,
the war in Gaza is eclipsing the one in Ukraine. These days
many countries are wary of criticising Russia’s aggression.
Instead their outrage is directed at Israel and, increasingly,
at America for arming and protecting the Jewish state. The
accusation of Western double standards, gleefully amplified
by Russia and China, resonated across the halls of UN
headquarters on September 18th as the General Assembly
adopted a far-reaching resolution to exert pressure on Israel
to end its occupation of Palestinian territories within a year.
It passed with an overwhelming 124 votes in favour to 14
against (and 43 abstentions).
The war is hastening the broader realignment of global

forces: America, stretched by multiple crises, is losing its old
supremacy. Russia has recovered the military initiative and
is determined to disrupt the America-built order. China
hopes to refashion it to its liking, convinced of its own
inexorable rise. And lesser states seek opportunity in the
space created by competition among the big powers.
This new world disorder will be on display as leaders gather

in New York this week for the UN’s annual summitry. Much
about the talkfest is, inevitably, theatre. The Security
Council is increasingly paralysed by the rivalry between the
big powers. Even so, the diplomatic battles reflect the
shifting power balance of the world beyond, and affect it.
Lawfare and warfare
As Hamas battles Israeli troops in the ruins of Gaza, its rival,

the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which runs a
patchwork of autonomous territories in the West Bank, has
been waging a diplomatic and legal fight against Israel in
international courts and institutions. Doubling as the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the PLO may be
weak, corrupt and besieged at home. It is nevertheless
advancing abroad in the face of opposition from Israel and
America.
Palestine is the oldest obsession at the UN. In 1947 the
organisation voted to partition the British-ruled territory into
a Jewish state, creating Israel; and a Palestinian one, which
neither diplomacy nor war has yet been able to establish.
Many members regard Palestine as the last great anti-
colonial cause; many in Israel see the UN as anti-Israeli, if
not antisemitic. The recently departed Israeli ambassador,
Gilad Erdan, wore a yellow star, a symbol used by the Nazis
to identify Jews, to protest against the UN’s failure to
condemn Hamas formally for its attack on October 7th.
One front in the international battle has been the creeping

recognition of Palestine as a quasi-state at the UN. It
currently ranks as a non-member observer, akin to the Holy
See. In May, after America vetoed Palestine’s bid to become
a full member, the General Assembly conferred several new
privileges on the Palestinians, including the right to submit
resolutions.
Another front has been legal. Two recent rulings by the

International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s judicial body,
have turbocharged the campaign against Israel. In January
an interim ruling appeared to give some credence to South
Africa’s submission that Israel was committing acts of
genocide (the case is separate from war-crimes accusations
against Israeli and Hamas leaders by prosecutors at the
International Criminal Court). In July the ICJ issued an
advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip—territories it captured in
1967—was illegal.
Using their new privileges, the Palestinians tabled a

resolution at the General Assembly, intended to give force
to the ruling. It tells Israel to withdraw from all Palestinian
land, sea- and air-space; dismantle Jewish settlements;
return seized property; and pay reparations. It also calls on
countries to create an international register of damages,
similar to one being set up by the Council of Europe, a
regional group, to prepare Ukrainian claims against Russia.
Furthermore, countries are urged to impose arms
embargoes on Israel; restrict trade in products from Jewish
settlements; and impose travel bans and asset freezes
against “natural and legal persons” maintaining Israel’s
occupation.
The resolution was passed with the support of Russia and

China, but also some American allies, including France and
Japan. Israel and its small band of loyal friends—among
them America and some Pacific island states—opposed it.
Britain, Canada and Australia abstained.
The resolution will not end the bloodletting in Gaza. Nor will
it create a Palestinian state. General Assembly texts are not
binding on members, and would be vetoed by America if
presented to the Security Council. Still, it could encourage
more countries to recognise Palestine as a state, as Ireland,
Norway and Spain did in May. It could also encourage more
arms embargoes against Israel, such as the partial one
imposed by Britain this month.
More extreme upheavals are possible. The Palestinians

could make another bid for full membership, which America
would again veto. The General Assembly might then resort
to the nuclear option: stripping Israel of its voting rights in
the body, as it did with apartheid-era South Africa in 1974.
Such a move would provoke fury from America’s Congress,
which could decide to halt its funding for the UN. An existing
law already commits Congress to stop payments to any UN
body that treats Palestine as a full member. America
remains the UN’s biggest contributor, paying for about a
third of its spending, counting both mandatory and
voluntary contributions.
Palestinian officials say legal and political pressure on Israel
is the best alternative to a wider war. For Israel, it is the flip-
side of a campaign to delegitimise and ultimately destroy
the Jewish state. “The Palestinians work with both arms,”
says Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN. “Hamas
commits terrorism on the ground. The Palestinian Authority
commits diplomatic terrorism.”
American officials, struggling to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,

say the Palestinian move is “unhelpful”. They argue a
Palestinian state can be created only by agreement with
Israel, not by outsiders imposing a settlement. It does not
help that the resolution comes ahead of the UN summit and
in the final weeks of the American presidential election
campaign. But discomfiting America may be precisely the
point.
Having thrice vetoed Security Council resolutions

demanding a halt to fighting, America in June secured the
council’s support for its own three-phase ceasefire plan to
stop the war, release Israeli hostages and Palestinian
prisoners, and rebuild Gaza. America hopes there will later
be a “credible path” to Palestinian statehood. For months
American officials have claimed that the deal is close, yet
the fighting goes on. Both Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s
prime minister, and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader hiding
in Gaza’s tunnels, seem to think time is on their side.
America seems unable or unwilling to impose a ceasefire on
Israel; has little purchase on Hamas; and President Joe
Biden’s hand is weakening as his term comes to an end.
As for the war in Europe, Ukraine enjoyed Palestine-like

levels of support at the General Assembly for the first year
of Russia’s all-out invasion, such was the shock at the
blatant breach of the UN Charter’s injunction against taking
territory by force. Until February 2023 Ukraine won a
succession of votes, with more than 140 countries
supporting it and no more than seven backing Russia—a
rogue’s gallery including Belarus, North Korea and Syria.
The theatre of summitry
By the summer of 2023, as Ukraine’s counter-offensive

faltered, support for Ukraine began to fade. Martin Kimani, a
recently retired Kenyan ambassador to the UN, now at the
Centre on International Co-operation, a think-tank in New
York, notes that Russia’s narrative—that the war was
provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion—“found a ready
ear” among many in the global south, where suspicions of
Western imperialism still run deep. The memory of
America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought charges of
hypocrisy. Since the war in Gaza, though, anti-American
feeling has intensified. The West stands accused of caring
more about carnage inflicted by Russia than by Israel.
On the back foot, Western diplomats these days urge

Ukraine not to submit resolutions, fearing they would
expose falling support for it. It does not help that Ukraine
abstained in a General Assembly vote in May seeking to
advance Palestine’s full membership of the UN.
Nevertheless, in July Ukraine presented a resolution about
the safety of the Russia-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power
plant. It passed with 99 votes to nine, but many Arab and
Islamic countries abstained.
Forget me not
Though the Security Council holds frequent and competing

meetings on Ukraine, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s
ambassador to the UN, admits that “We have to fight to
keep Ukraine meaningfully on the radar.” Once friendly to
Israel, Russia now positions itself as the champion of the
Palestinian cause. “The Russians behave as though they
have been exonerated,” says Mr Kyslytsya. For instance, at
a session of council on September 16th, the Russian
ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, denounced the “horrific”
conditions in Gaza, the “arrogance” of Israel, America’s
“unconditional support” and the “hypocritical” West. The
same day, a Russian glide-bomb struck a block of flats in
Kharkiv, killing at least one person and injuring 42.
For all its swagger, Russia has yet to recover from repeated
diplomatic snubs, such as losing its seats at the ICJ and
bodies such as the Human Rights Council and UNESCO (the
education, scientific and cultural body). That said, Russia
has thrown its weight around on a growing number of
issues. It has helped to push UN peacekeepers out of Mali;
halted the supply of UN humanitarian aid to areas of Syria
controlled by rebels; and blocked the work of a panel
monitoring North Korea’s compliance with UN sanctions.
Russia, it seems, does not mind being the spoiler. “We see
instability as a risk, as something to fix,” says a Western
diplomat. “The Russians see it as an opportunity, and
something to exploit.”
China plays an altogether different game, often supporting

Russia but at times co-operating with the West, for instance
on how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). In March it co-
sponsored an American resolution on AI; America
reciprocated by supporting a Chinese one in July.
At the UN, China stands as a defender of state sovereignty

against the intrusions of outsiders, for example, in the use
of economic sanctions. It reinterprets human rights as the
expectation of economic development, rather than
individual liberties; and democracy as equality among
states rather than the right of people to choose their
leaders. It sees itself as the vanguard of the developing
world, where it often finds a receptive audience for its
interests-first, values-second approach. “Russia does not
mind being seen as a wrecker of the system. China wants to
remake it in its own image,” says the diplomat.
As the big powers jostle, others seek space to manoeuvre.

For instance, India pursues a “multi-aligned” foreign policy,
triangulating between its old Russian friend and its newer
Western pals. It has refused to impose sanctions on Russia,
benefiting handsomely from the resulting trade. Turkey,
though a member of NATO, has similarly stood apart from
the West.
It is difficult to measure influence. Despite its troubles,

“America is still the main game in town,” says Mr Kimani.
But Western countries “are much easier to resist now than
they were a few years ago”.
Yet many countries, especially those that feel threatened by

bullying neighbours, are also drawing closer to America for
protection. The war in Ukraine has fortified the NATO
alliance. Similarly in Asia, where Japan, Australia and the
Philippines have bound themselves more tightly to America,
and to each other, fearing China’s military build-up.
In the Middle East mighty Israel has relied heavily on the

presence of America’s armed forces to deter a regional war
with Iran and its “axis of resistance”, and to help shoot
down missiles fired at it. Gulf monarchies, which dislike
Hamas, still seek American protection against Iran and
several maintain ties with Israel. As for Gaza, only America
has any chance of negotiating an end to the war.
Hobbled hegemon
America has belatedly woken up to competition with China

for support in the global south amid signs that sentiment is
shifting. An opinion survey of 31 countries, conducted for
The Economist by GlobeScan, found strong support for
Ukraine in many of them. But respondents in India,
Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt and Saudi Arabia sided more with
Russia. The survey also found strong support for American
leadership in the world, though places like Turkey, Egypt and
Saudi Arabia leaned towards China.
A separate annual survey of elite opinion in South-East Asia,

by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, for the first
time recorded a majority saying that if asked to choose
between America and China, they would side with China in a
crisis. Western diplomats say it has become harder to meet
senior figures in Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia
and Indonesia. Some in America’s Congress worry the
damage to America’s standing is becoming irreparable,
though they also think showing loyalty to an embattled ally
will reassure friends worldwide.
A more anarchic world has thrown the UN into a profound
crisis. The body is busy, for instance, providing
humanitarian aid to afflicted peoples, but it is increasingly
marginalised. Even as conflicts rage from Mali to Myanmar,
the Security Council is hamstrung. “The challenges we face
are moving much faster than our ability to solve them,”
warned António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, on
September 12th.
Mr Guterres hopes two big talkfests this month will lead to a

“stronger and more effective multilateralism”. The Summit
of the Future on September 22nd-23rd will seek agreement
on a “pact” that would, among other things, steer a path
towards the difficult, perhaps impossible, reform of the UN.
Then, starting on September 24th, leaders will take part in
the “high-level” meeting of the General Assembly—a week
of pretentious speeches and quiet diplomacy. Expectations
are low. “The UN now suffers from a surfeit of summits,”
says Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group, a
think-tank. “It is still quite good at getting leaders together
to pledge things. The follow-up is typically meagre.”
The Security Council, complains Mr Guterres, is “stuck in a

time warp”. It grants veto powers to five permanent
members—the “P5” of America, China, Russia (as heir of the
Soviet Union), Britain and France—representing the victors
of the second world war. Ten elected members, who lack the
power to veto decisions, are selected for two-year stints. As
great-power enmity deepens, the number of vetoes has
risen. Since the start of 2020 Russia has cast a veto 13
times, America six times and China five times (see chart).
The flaws are ever more glaring. There is no permanent seat
for India, the world’s most populous country; nor for Japan
and Germany which, though not nuclear powers, have larger
economies and populations than either Britain or France.
America has long supported giving each of these three
countries a permanent seat. It has also endorsed a
permanent seat for Latin America and the Caribbean, and
one for Africa (without specifying which countries should
hold them). On September 12th Linda Thomas-Greenfield,
America’s ambassador to the UN, went further, saying the
US supported the establishment of two permanent African
seats, as well as one for small island states, such as Pacific
countries, threatened by climate change. Few believe
America or any other P5 members want to share power, but
America’s move seems calculated to wrong-foot China.
Crucially, America says none of the new permanent

members should have a veto. That may upset India, in
particular, which is pushing hard for equality with the P5. “If
we expand that veto power across the board, it will make
the council more dysfunctional,” said Ms Thomas-Greenfield.
Instead, she suggested, countries should focus on reducing
the use of the veto. In 2022 the General Assembly changed
its rules so that countries wielding the veto had to come
before it to explain why. This mild shaming has had little
effect.
Seeking order in the chaos
Diplomats say Russia, ever the spoiler, has entered 135

amendments and reservations to the draft text of the Pact
for the Future. They include removing mention of the evils of
“aggression” and of climate change as a threat to peace and
stability. It also wants to excise calls for the total elimination
of nuclear weapons. Others will have objections, too. In the
end, however, members will probably weaken the text and
then, as one diplomat puts it, “hold our nose” and adopt it.
Meanwhile, alternative international institutions are

emerging. The BRICS group of non-Western states,
dominated by China and Russia, has expanded to nine
countries, and will hold a summit in Russia next month.
Though a disparate lot, one thing that binds them is the
common desire to break their dependence on the American
dollar and Western payment systems.
A fluid, multipolar international order, says Mr Kimani, is

welcomed by many states. “Competition among big powers
offers countries many opportunities. What one power will
not give you, another might.” That may explain why some
at the UN seem to be untroubled by the possible return to
power of Donald Trump. But would an increasingly
transactional international system with a weakened America
really create a more equitable world? Instead, as the wars in
Ukraine and Gaza seem to warn, it may be one that is far
more chaotic and dangerous for all. ■

https://www.economist.com/international/2024/09/18/a-un-vote-on-palestine-
underlines-americas-weakening-clout

Technology Quarterly
AI has returned chipmaking to the heart of
computer technology
Putting the silicon back in the valley :: And the technological challenges are
bigger than the political ones, argues Shailesh Chitnis
The semiconductor industry faces its

biggest technical challenge yet
Shrink to fit :: As Moore’s law fades, how can more transistors be fitted
onto a chip?
Node names do not reflect actual transistor

sizes
The names are meaningless :: A favourite way of measuring progress in the
chip industry is detached from reality
How to build more powerful chips without

frying the data centre
Getting to one trillion :: Runaway energy consumption remains a problem
AI has propelled chip architecture towards a

tighter bond with software
A Cambrian moment :: It has also been pushed farther towards
specialisation
Researchers are looking beyond digital

computing
OK (analogue) computer :: They are using biology and light to design
powerful, energy-efficient chips
The end of Moore’s law will not slow the

pace of change
The relentless innovation machine :: Semiconductors are likely to continue
their transformational role
Sources and acknowledgments

Chipmaking ::
Silicon returns to Silicon Valley
Chipmaking :: AI has returned chipmaking to the heart of computer
technology, says Shailesh Chitnis

Putting the silicon back in the valley
AI has returned
chipmaking to the heart of
computer technology
And the technological challenges are bigger than the
political ones, argues Shailesh Chitnis
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
A CENTURY AGO, 391 San Antonio Road in Mountain View,

California, was the site of an apricot-packing shed. Today it
is just one of the many low-rise office blocks on busy roads
that house Silicon Valley’s tech startups and wannabe
billionaires. In front of it, though, stand three large and
peculiar sculptures, two-legged and three-legged forms that
bring to mind water towers. They are giant versions of two
diodes and a transistor, components of electronic circuitry.
In 1956, 391 San Antonio Road became the home to the
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a startup devoted to
the idea of making such components entirely out of silicon.
It is the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
The firm, founded by William Shockley, a coinventor of the

transistor, was a commercial flop. The embrace of silicon
was not. In 1957 eight of Mr Shockley’s employees, whom
he dubbed the “traitorous eight”, defected to start Fairchild
Semiconductor less than two kilometres away. Among them
were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, future co-founders of
Intel, a chipmaking giant, and Eugene Kleiner, co-founder of
Kleiner Perkins, a ground-breaking venture-capital firm. Most
of the storied tech companies in Silicon Valley can trace
their roots, directly or indirectly, back to those early
Fairchild employees.
Before semiconductor components were invented,

computers were room-size machines that used fragile and
finicky vacuum tubes. Semiconductors, solid materials in
which the flow of electrical current can be controlled,
offered components that were more sturdy, more versatile
and smaller. And when such components were made mostly
from silicon, it became possible to make a whole raft of
them on a single piece of the stuff. Tiny transistors, diodes
and the like on silicon “chips” could be wired together into
“integrated circuits” designed to store or process data.
In 1965 Moore, while still at Fairchild, noted that the number

of transistors that could be put into an integrated circuit at a
given cost doubled every year (he later relaxed the doubling
time to every two years). His observation, codified as
“Moore’s law”, mattered. Chips produced in 1971 had 200
transistors per square millimetre. In 2023 the MI300, a
processor built by AMD, an American semiconductor firm,
crammed 150m transistors into the same area. The smaller
the transistors got, the faster they could switch on and off.
The MI300’s components are thousands of times faster than
their predecessors were 50 years ago.
All major breakthroughs in computing, from personal

computers and the internet to smartphones and artificial
intelligence (AI), can be traced to transistors getting
smaller, faster and more affordable. The transistor’s
progress has driven technology’s progress.
For a while, the technological centrality of silicon chips was

mirrored by the importance of the businesses that made
them. In the 1970s IBM, which made chips, the computers
that used them and the software that ran on them, was a
giant beyond compare. In the 1980s Microsoft proved that a
company selling only software could be even more
attractive. But Intel, which made the chips on which
Microsoft’s software ran, was a huge force in its own right.
Before the dotcom bust of 2000 Intel was the sixth-biggest
company in the world by market capitalisation.
After the bust, though, the “Web 2.0” services offered by
firms like Google and Meta took centre stage, with the
semiconductors on which their platforms were built
increasingly commodified. To describe the dynamic
underlying the growth of big tech, it was software, not
silicon, that Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, credited
in 2011 with “eating the world”.
The boom in AI has changed that; its progress depends on

immense computational power. Before 2010 the amount of
computing needed to train leading AI systems grew roughly
in line with Moore’s law, doubling every 20 months. Since
then it has doubled every six months (see chart 1). That
means there is ever more demand for ever more powerful
chips. Nvidia, an American company which specialises in
chips of a sort peculiarly well suited to the needs of the
large language models (LLMs) that dominate AI, is now the
third-most valuable company in the world. Since late 2023
the MSCI index of chipmaking firms has outperformed its
index of software firms by a wide margin for the first time in
over a decade (see chart 2).
As AI makes chipmaking important again, companies with AI
ambitions are getting into the game themselves. The driver
is not just training, but subsequent use (also called
“inference”). Answering queries with LLMs, though not as
demanding as training them in the first place, is still a big
computational task, and one that needs to be undertaken
billions of times a day. Because bespoke circuits can do this
more efficiently than the general-purpose ones sold by most
semiconductor providers, some companies running LLMs are
choosing to design chips just for this purpose. Apple,
Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have all invested in building
their own custom AI chips; there are more processors
designed by Google and used in data centres than by any
other company but Nvidia and Intel. Seven of the ten most
valuable firms in the world are now in the chipmaking
business.
The sophistication of a chip depends mostly on how small its

features are; currently the cutting edge is defined as having
“process node” measurements of less than seven-billionths
of a metre (seven nanometres, or 7nm—see box on later
page for a pinch of salt with which to take this). That is
where the AI action is centred. But over 90% of
semiconductor manufacturing capacity works with process
nodes of 7nm or more. These chips are less technologically
challenging, but more widespread, found in everything from
televisions and refrigerators to cars and machine tools.
In 2021, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, an acute

shortage of such chips disrupted production across various
industries, including electronics and cars. The industry’s
pursuit of efficiency had seen it become globally distributed,
with different regions specialising in different bits of the
chain: chip design in America; chipmaking gear in Europe
and Japan; the fabs where that gear is used in Taiwan and
South Korea; the packaging of the chips and their assembly
into devices in China and Malaysia. When the pandemic
disrupted these supply chains, governments took note.
In August 2022 the American government dangled a $50bn

package of subsidies and tax credits to lure chip
manufacturing back to America. Other regions have
followed suit, with the EU, Japan and South Korea promising
almost $94bn in handouts. Things have been made more
complicated by America’s attempts to cut off China’s access
to cutting-edge chips and the tools with which they are
made by means of export bans. China has responded to
those bans by restricting exports of two materials vital for
chipmaking.
But the chipmakers’ biggest worries are not industrial policy

or national rivalries. They are technological. For five
decades, shrinking transistors boosted performance without
increasing energy consumption. Now, as chips get denser
and AI models bigger, energy use is soaring. To maintain
exponential gains in performance, chipmakers need new
ideas. Some, like tighter integration between hardware and
software, are incremental. Others are radical: rethinking
silicon or ditching digital processing for other techniques.
This Technology Quarterly will show how such advances can
keep the exponential engine humming. ■
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/technology-

quarterly/2024/09/16/ai-has-returned-chipmaking-to-the-heart-of-computer-technology

Shrink to fit
The semiconductor
industry faces its biggest
technical challenge yet
As Moore’s law fades, how can more transistors be fitted
onto a chip?
9月 19, 2024 06:39 上午
INSIDE A STERILE, cavernous building in the Dutch city of

Eindhoven, the latest monster dreamed up by ASML, a
maker of chipmaking gear, is quietly humming away.
Weighing 150 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus,
the tool offers humans the latest way to do something they
have been doing since the ice age—writing on stone,
otherwise known as lithography. The stone here is silicon;
the writing is done with light.
The machine fires 50,000 droplets of tin into a vacuum

chamber every second. A laser heats each drop to
220,000°C, 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This
transforms droplets into plasma that emits light of
extremely short wavelength (extreme ultraviolet, or EUV).
The narrow beam of light is reflected, using a series of
mirrors that are smooth down to tens of picometres
(trillionths of a metre) to hit a mask that contains blueprints
of the chip’s circuits.
The EUV rays bounce from the mask and project the design
onto a silicon wafer coated with a thin layer of sensitive
material called photoresist. The wafer is moved very
precisely so that the pattern can be printed again, and
again; a wafer can be used to make hundreds of chips.
Typically, the exposed photoresist (hit by the light) is
washed off, creating a ‘stencil’ on the silicon wafer.
Subsequent machines etch away material, implant ions or
deposit metals onto the ‘stencil’ to create a layer of the
chip. A new layer of photoresist is then added, a new
pattern projected onto it, and a new layer of etching takes
place. A modern chip can require dozens of such layers of
printing.
The latest EUV lithography machines from ASML cost more

than $350m each. They thus highlight a dynamic of the
semiconductor industry: as transistors, the main type of
electronic component found in chips, have become smaller,
the tools and factories to make them have become bigger
and pricier. Brian Potter of the Institute for Progress, an
American think-tank, estimates that in the late 1960s a
semiconductor fabrication plant (or fab) cost about $31m in
today’s money to build and equip. The newest fabs that
TSMC, a Taiwanese giant, is building in Arizona, will cost
$20bn each.
Itsy bitsy teeny weeny
The transistors these fabs now make by the trillion are

switches. Each one has terminals called the source and the
drain that are separated by a channel of silicon. A third
terminal, called the gate, sits atop this channel and
regulates the flow of current between the source and drain.
When voltage is applied to the gate, current flows from the
source to the drain. Without voltage, the current stops.
These on and off states correspond to the 1s and 0s of
binary notation.
However magical a computer program may be, the

hardware it runs on is, at heart, a set of such switches
turning on and off according to the way they are tied
together by circuitry. Simple circuits called logic gates
combine transistors to offer the basic functions of binary
logic: AND, in which the output is 1 if both inputs are 1; OR,
in which the output is 1 if any input is one; and NOT, in
which a 1 becomes a zero (or vice versa). Such logic gates
can be combined to form more complex circuits, and these
circuits in turn can be combined to form powerful processing
chips.
Gordon Moore’s original observation, in 1965, was that as

the making of chips got better, the transistors got smaller,
which meant you could make more for less. In 1974 Robert
Dennard, an engineer at IBM, noted that smaller transistors
did not just lower unit costs, they also offered better
performance. As the distance between source and drain
shrinks, the speed of the switch increases, and the energy it
uses decreases. “Dennard scaling”, as the observation is
known, amplifies the amount of good that Moore’s law does.
In 1970 the gate length, a proxy for the distance between
the source and drain, was ten microns (ten millionths of a
metre, or 10,000nm). By the early 2000s this was down to
90nm. At this level, quantum effects cause current to flow
between the two terminals even when the transistor is off.
This leakage current increases the power used and causes
the chip to heat up.
For chipmakers that was an early indication that their long,
sort-of-free ride was ending (see chart). Transistors could
still be made smaller but the leakage current placed a limit
on how low a chip’s voltage could be reduced. This in turn
meant that the chip’s power could not be reduced as before.
This “power wall” marked the end of Dennard scaling—
transistor sizes shrank, but chip speeds no longer got
quicker and their power consumption was now an issue. To
keep improving performance, designers started arranging
logic gates and other elements of their chips in multiple,
connected processing units, or “cores”. With multiple cores,
a processor can run many applications simultaneously or
run a single application faster by splitting it into parallel
streams.
This allowed performance to keep climbing even though the

speed at which the switches worked was no longer
increasing. But it did not solve the problem that the power
used by each transistor was no longer falling. As the
transistor count continued to rise, chip designers shut down
parts of the chip, known as dark silicon, to prevent waste
heat from melting it.
Getting around the problem of leakage current meant

abandoning the old structure for transistors, in which the
conducting channel sat flush to the surface of the chip and
the controlling gate sat on top of it. In 2011 Intel introduced
a design in which the channel stood proud, like a fin above
water, and passed through the gate, not below it (see
diagram). This allowed the gate to exert greater control over
the channel, even when off. These “finFETs” allowed
chipmakers to continue shrinking their transistors. The new
transistors leaked less current and consumed about half as
much power as the previous generation. Most leading-edge
processes now have two or three fins per transistor to boost
speed. FinFETs allowed the gate length to shrink further, to
around 16nm. But only so many fins can be placed side by
side.
To shrink the gate length further, the next step is to lift the
channel off the surface of the chip altogether, so that the
gate surrounds it on all sides. Samsung, a South Korean
giant, was the first to build such transistors, called “gate all
around” (GAA), in its latest chips. Intel and TSMC are
expected to follow soon. IMEC, a chip-research organisation
in Belgium, expects GAA to take the industry to the end of
this decade, at which point gate lengths will approach the
smallest feature size that can be etched with existing
techniques.
One contender to replace silicon is the carbon nanotube
Beyond this point the only way to increase transistor density

is to redesign chips so that some of the transistors which
used to sit side by side are instead stack one atop the other.
Going three-dimensional allows chipmakers to pack in more
gates than the horizontal approach. Intel, for example, says
that by stacking transistors it can build the simplest kind of
logic gate, an inverter, in half the space usually needed.
Even with stacked transistors, the need to squeeze persists.

Once a transistor’s gate length approaches 10nm, the
thickness of the silicon channel along which the current
passes through the gate needs to be less than 4nm, making
leakage issues even more pronounced. The industry’s
answer to this is to replace silicon with materials available in
sheets of almost no thickness at all. Circuits made of
materials just a few nanometres thick—the width of a few
atoms—could allow chipmakers to shrink transistors without
concern about current leaking through when they are off.
Thinning out
Among the two-dimensional (2D) contenders to replace
silicon are materials called transition metal dichalcogenides
(TMDs) which can be prepared in layers just three atoms
thick. Of the hundreds of TMD semiconductors that could
replace silicon, three look most promising—molybdenum
disulfide, tungsten disulphide and tungsten diselenide.
But such 2D materials have difficulties to overcome before
they can challenge silicon. The first is that the thinness of
the materials makes them hard to connect with metal
wiring. Another is reliably fabricating chips using these
materials across a 300mm wafer, the standard size for chip
fabrication. Also, chip design relies on two different types of
transistor. Making either type is easy in silicon, whereas the
new materials tend to be better suited to just one type.
Another contender to replace silicon is the carbon nanotube

(CNT), a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms that forms a
cylinder with a diameter of 1.5nm (six times the diameter of
a water molecule). A CNT transistor is built like an ordinary
transistor with source, drain and gate terminals made of
regular semiconductor. But the channel is made up of tiny,
parallel nanotubes instead of the silicon channel in an
ordinary transistor. The smooth structure of the nanotube
allows electric charge to be switched on and off three times
faster than through a silicon channel. The thinness of the
channel also allows the gate more control over the channel,
reducing leakage current and making it more energy
efficient.
Eric Pop of Stanford University believes that foundries are

leaning towards 2D semiconductors over CNTs, because
they are easier to manufacture and integrate with silicon.
Though CNTs could offer superior performance and are ideal
for GAA transistors, they are harder to control due to
manufacturing challenges.
Nanotubes are not easy to build. CNTs are prone to

imperfections in the fabrication process which change their
electrical properties. Most turn out as semiconductors that
turn on and off depending on the gate voltage. About a third
are metallic structures that are on all the time and cannot
be controlled by the gate. And growing a group of parallel
nanotubes as clear parallel lines between the source and
drain is hard.
In 2013 Max Shulaker, now at MIT, with Subhasish Mitra and

Philip Wong, both of Stanford University, built the first
microprocessor using CNT transistors. The researchers
designed an “imperfection-immune” processor that
functions even if a certain number of CNTs misbehave. By
2019 Mr Shulaker had devised a microprocessor built with
14,000 CNT transistors (half the number found in the 8086,
a chip released by Intel in 1978). In 2023 researchers at
Peking University built a transistor using CNTs on
manufacturing technology that can be scaled down to the
size of a 10nm silicon node. The results may seem basic,
but they underscore the potential of CNTs as an alternative
to silicon.
In 1959 Richard Feynman, a physicist, gave a lecture that

presaged the nanotechnology era. He wondered, “What
would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the
way we want them?” With semiconductor device features
now atomic lengths, the world has its answer: build smaller
transistors. ■

quarterly/2024/09/16/the-semiconductor-industry-faces-its-biggest-technical-
challenge-yet

The names are meaningless
Node names do not reflect

actual transistor sizes
A favourite way of measuring progress in the chip industry is
detached from reality
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
PAT GELSINGER, boss of Intel, a chipmaker, loves to brag

that his firm is leading the charge in semiconductor
technology by entering the “angstrom era”. The angstrom,
named in honour of Anders Jonas Ångström, a 19th-century
Swedish physicist, is a somewhat archaic unit equal to a
tenth of a nanometre (0.1nm, or a ten billionth of a metre).
The “process nodes” of Intel’s latest chips are referred to as
“20A” and “18A”. If you take those suffixed As as denoting
“angstrom”—which Intel never flat out says that they do—
that suggests dimensions of just 2nm or so. And at one
point, process node was pretty much synonymous with
transistor gate length.
But banish any visions you may have of transistors just nine
or ten atoms wide. The transistors in the “20A” architecture,
which the troubled company has just abandoned so as to
double down on the 18A, have gate lengths of around 14nm
—140 angstroms, or 140Å.
The “20A” node with a 140Å gate length is just one example
of a widespread trend. In the past decade and a bit, the
dimensions that companies make reference to in their
marketing and the dimensions of the structures on their
chips have diverged.
In the 1970s the size of the process node was taken to be

the distance between the two terminals of a transistor, the
source and drain, also known as the gate length. In practice
this meant the process node was also the chip’s “metal half
pitch”. The half pitch is half the distance between the end of
one metal line (a connecting wire that shuttles data) and the
start of the next, which means, roughly speaking, half the
distance between the chip’s components.
In the mid-1990s, gate length started shrinking much faster
than the half pitch. Then, in the 2000s, problems with power
and waste heat saw progress in shrinking gate lengths slow
down sharply. The measurements referred to by the
companies caught up with the gate lengths and moved on
down below them (see chart). The marketing departments
were going to be Moore’s-law-abiding corporate citizens
regardless of engineering constraints.
This was considered defensible, in part, because gates were

developing internal structures smaller than their overall
length. At one point Intel was making chips in which the
metal half pitch was 40nm, the gate length 26nm and the
fins within the finFET transistors were 8nm wide. They were
referred to, somewhat arbitrarily, as “22nm”.
Most in the industry believe gate lengths will bottom out at

around 12nm and metal pitches at 14nm. That is about as
small as is printable using ASML’s best lithography
machines. But the industry cannot give up talking about its
advances in terms of increasingly small and entirely notional
node sizes. In 2021 Intel rebranded its “10nm” node to
“Intel 7”, dropping the “nm”. TSMC talks of 3nm and now
2nm nodes (which it says are more advanced than Intel’s
18A). In March ZDNet, an online publication, reported that
Samsung had rebranded its 3nm process to 2nm. The
incredible shrinking rhetoric continues. ■

quarterly/2024/09/16/node-names-do-not-reflect-actual-transistor-sizes

Getting to one trillion
How to build more

powerful chips without
frying the data centre
Runaway energy consumption remains a problem
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE BLACKWELL chip from Nvidia, shovel-maker for the

artificial-intelligence (AI) gold rush, contains 208bn
transistors spread over two “dies”, pieces of silicon each
about 800 square millimetres in area, that house the
processor circuitry. The two dies are linked by a blazing 10
terabytes (ie, ten thousand gigabytes) per second chip-to-
chip connection. Each die is flanked by four blocks of high-
bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that together store 192
gigabytes of data. The advanced packaging methods used
to build this megachip are now in the spotlight, with some
speculating that they may lead to production delays.
Blackwell’s putting together of different parts show the

limits to which chipmakers must push their technology to
boost computing power while keeping energy consumption
in check. Over the course of a year one of these megachips,
which cost $70,000, will consume 5.2MWhrs—about half the
energy of an average American household. Adding more
transistors is the best way to boost a chip’s processing
power: communication within a single chip may be a
thousand times faster and use a hundred times less energy
than shuttling data between chips. But since Dennard
scaling hit a wall in the mid-2000s, shrinking transistors has
not significantly improved energy efficiency. Gordon Moore
suggested two other tricks to pack in more transistors:
increase the die size (ie, make chips bigger) and use “device
and circuit cleverness”. In 1971 the 4004, an Intel
processor, had a die size of 12 square mm. Current
lithographic tools cannot build chips bigger than 800 square
mm, about the size of each Blackwell die. Circuit cleverness
is the only other path.
One clever idea is to use the chip area more efficiently. In

profile, a semiconductor chip is like a multi-layer cake, with
the layers which make up the transistors at the bottom and
10-20 layers of metal wiring stacked on top. Leading-edge
chips can use almost 100km of tiny metal wires (the sum of
connections between billions of transistors). This turns the
chip into a crowded highway of data and power lines. At the
top layer are thick metal lines that distribute power across
the chip. Since these beefy power lines burrow down from
the top layer all the way to the bottom layer to connect to
the transistors, they can hog nearly a fifth of the area used
for routing electrical signals.
Baking the cake
To create more space, leading foundries are now working on

“backside power delivery” which moves the thick power
lines to a layer below the transistors, known as the “back”
side of the chip. This has three benefits. First, it frees up
space, allowing all the area above the transistors to be used
for routing data. With less congestion in the metal wires,
groups of transistors, called gates, can be packed more
tightly in the same space. Second, the power lines below
the transistors need shorter connections to link up with
them, and those connections can be thicker, which makes
power delivery more energy efficient. Finally, these robust
power lines are less susceptible to voltage spikes during
demand surges, ensuring faster switching for the
transistors. The result is a faster, more power-efficient chip
without having to shrink the transistor size.
But moving the power wires below the transistor introduces

additional steps in the manufacturing process. Normally,
once the multi-layer cake of the chip has been built, the
wafer is flipped and enclosed in a package that connects
internal circuits to the outside world. With backside power
delivery, the flipping has to be followed by polishing and the
addition of the power lines. The additional steps are worth
the hassle. In 2023 Intel used backside power delivery and
the smarter placement of components which it allows to get
improvements of 6% in transistor speed and 10% in packing
density with components no smaller than the ones it was
using before.
Another tactic is not to cram all functions onto a single chip,

but to pick the best manufacturing technology for each task.
Though the whizzy processors need the most advanced
nodes, other parts of the chip, like the modules that
communicate with the outside world, don’t need the tiniest
transistors. Breaking a chip into smaller blocks called
“chiplets”, and then packaging them together, lets
chipmakers use the maximum area on a die for the
processing units, because the rest of the circuitry is moved
onto other chiplets. Communication between chiplets in the
same package is much faster and uses less energy than
with circuitry outside the package.
Packaging was long the poor relation of chipmaking.
Foundries focused on producing wafers of silicon. But with
the rise of chiplets, packaging is in the spotlight (see
diagram). Chiplets are assembled by placing multiple dies
from different process technologies side by side on a layer
called the interposer. These dies are then bonded to the
interposer with ”microbumps”.
The interposer, which sits on a substrate typically made of

organic resin, acts as a bridge, connecting the dies to each
other with high-density wiring, and connecting them to the
outside world through the package. This allows for fast data
transfer between chiplets and improves power efficiency.
Nvidia’s Blackwell processor uses TSMC’s version of this to
combine its two dies and eight HBM chips into a superchip.
TSMC plans to develop interposers six times the size of the
largest dies, to host multiple processing chiplets and stacks
of HBM.
Intel, meanwhile, has unveiled plans to ditch resin and stack

its chiplets on glass instead. The ultra-flatness of glass is
better for fine-pitch, high-density wiring and it has better
thermal and mechanical stability, especially at larger sizes.
The firm says this switch could increase connection density
ten-fold over organic interposers.
The next big leap in chiplet technology is stacking dies

directly on top of each other, slashing the distance between
them. Memory-makers have been early pioneers in such 3D
stacking. HBM, used in specialist AI chips, typically stacks
eight to 12 memory chips connected by high-capacity
routing lines, boosting bandwidth between the memory and
processor.
Training AI models requires hundreds of processors

linked together
Now AI chips are following suit. 3D packaging can provide
10,000 connections per square millimetre, compared with
25 for side-by-side packaging. More connections means
smoother data traffic between chiplets. It is also more
energy efficient, using less than 1% of the energy of the
previous version to move each bit. The MI300x, a
competitor to Nvidia’s H100 made by AMD, another chip
designer, stacks eight accelerator chiplets on four
interposer dies, along with eight stacks of HBM, in one
package.
These gains come at a cost. Samuel Naffziger of AMD notes

that, because multiple chips need to be tested before being
combined into a single package, 3D packaging adds time
and complexity to the manufacturing process. Packing
chiplets together also increases the heat density in the chip.
To facilitate heat dissipation, chip designers locate the
layers that make the most heat at the top of the stack, and
place less heat-generating components, such as memory,
below.
Training AI models requires huge systems in which hundreds

of processors are linked together. Even after cramming
chiplets into packages, vast amounts of data still need to zip
between these separate processors and their connected
memory chips. Copper wires, the usual method for
connecting components on a motherboard, are sluggish and
waste energy. So some firms are turning to light to speed
things up.
Fibre-optic cables are the backbone of the internet, carrying

99% of intercontinental internet traffic. These cables are
also used over short distances to connect racks in data
centres. In both cases, equipment at each end of the fibre
turns signals from electrical pulses into light and vice versa.
Now optical communication is making its way to silicon as
well. Ayar Labs, an American startup, is among the firms
that is building a chiplet offering optical communication
between processors. Its chiplets sit on the edge of a
package and turn electrical signals into light, which is then
sent through the fibre. At the receiving end, another set of
chiplets converts light back into electrical signals and feeds
data to processors in the package. The firm claims this
improves chip-to-chip bandwidth up to tenfold with eight
times more power efficiency.
Suburbs and skyscrapers
The ultimate leap in energy-efficient, high-speed chip-to-

chip communication would be to collapse all the chiplets
into one single chip, multiple layers of processors, memory
and sensors. This packs even denser connections between
different parts of the chip. Subhasish Mitra of Stanford
University likens this to moving from a sprawling suburban
layout to a towering skyscraper.
Just as a skyscraper has lifts shuttling people up and down,

this megachip would need millions of connections whisking
data between layers of compute and memory. These lifts
could also help keep the chip cool, channelling heat to the
bottom layers. Eventually, chipmakers could cluster these
chip towers side by side. Mr Mitra believes that this could
boost energy efficiency as much as a thousand-fold.
Making such a chip would be hard. Fabrication temperatures

for conventional transistors can exceed 1,000°C. With
transistors located in multiple layers, the metal lines criss-
crossing the skyscraper transistors would melt. To realise
the vertical-chip vision, the logic and memory technologies
on upper layers must be fabricated at temperatures below
400°C. Newer transistor technologies like carbon nanotubes
and 2D materials, which can be processed below 400°C,
might be better suited to this than silicon. Mr Mitra has
demonstrated a version of this chip on a 90nm node, built
with layers of carbon nanotubes and memory.
Speaking in 2015, Gordon Moore admitted he was “amazed”

by how long his prediction had held. But he felt that
extending his namesake law for a few more decades would
require “a lot of good engineering”. TSMC believes that a
combination of these approaches could yield a trillion
transistors on a chip by 2030. Chipmakers are clearly not
done yet. ■

quarterly/2024/09/16/how-to-build-more-powerful-chips-without-frying-the-data-centre

A Cambrian moment
AI has propelled chip

architecture towards a
tighter bond with software
It has also been pushed farther towards specialisation
9月 19, 2024 06:42 上午
EXACTLY WHEN the process started no one knows, but

fossils from the Cambrian period some 540m years ago
show life on Earth going through a remarkable period of
diversification. The point at which it became clear that a
similarly transformational diversification was kicking off in
the world of chips can be dated much more precisely. In May
2016, at Google’s annual event for developers, Sundar
Pichai, the firm’s boss, casually mentioned that “We have
started building specialised custom hardware.”
In the 2000s, software companies like Google, Microsoft and

Meta were content with the incremental processing gains
that chipmakers delivered every few years. But in the early
2010s, Google realised that enthusiasm for artificial
intelligence (AI) applications based on machine learning
could overwhelm it. If everyone with an android phone were
to use its voice-control feature for three minutes a day, one
executive calculated, the firm would need double its data-
centre capacity. By 2015 newer machine-learning algorithms
were demanding 100 times more processing power than
previous versions. Because the chipmaking industry did not
have any idea that would make “everything better” quickly
enough, says David Patterson of the University of California
Berkeley, who is also an adviser to Google, there was little
alternative but specialisation, working on chips that did only
a few things, but did them very much better.
Most machine-learning algorithms are based on artificial

neural networks—programs inspired by the structure of the
human brain. A neural network is made of simulated layers
of nodes or “neurons” which accept a set of inputs. Each
input is multiplied by a weight and the products are added
for a single value. If the value clears a certain threshold, it is
passed to the next layer. This continues until the output
layer spits out the final answer. Deep-learning networks can
be a few layers deep or over 100. While “training”, the
model’s weights and thresholds are tuned until the
network’s output aligns with the training data. During
“inference”, the weights are locked, and the trained model
responds to user queries.
Neural networks require specific calculations, a series of

additions and multiplications known as matrix
multiplication, on a large number of nodes. They can be
“parallelised”, that is, batches of them can be done at the
same time. In the early days of machine learning, central
processing units (CPUs) were used to run these algorithms.
A CPU is an “everything machine” that can run any
software, from word processing and email to spreadsheets
and browsers. But CPUs are not designed for the large-scale
parallel processing needed by neural networks. For every
operation, they sequentially load one data item from
memory, process it in the core, and store the results back in
memory.
Big firms are not the only ones making AI chips
To speed up machine-learning algorithms, specialist AI chips

known as accelerators split tasks into multiple parallel
“threads” that run simultaneously. A graphics processing
unit (GPU), the earliest example of this approach, has
thousands of specialised cores for arithmetic operations
crucial for neural networks. By focusing on specific tasks like
multiplication and addition, GPUs can outperform CPUs by
orders of magnitude. Nvidia’s GPUs, originally designed to
speedily render video-game images by processing countless
pixels simultaneously, turned out to be very well suited to
running neural networks too. But even with this massive
processing power, GPUs still need to access memory to
store the intermediate results of their computations.
Most processors have a small but zippy memory on the chip

called a cache and a much larger but slower-to-access
memory unit off the chip. Accessing the “off chip” memory
takes about a thousand times longer than accessing “on
chip” memory, and uses nearly 200 times as much energy.
As AI models have become bigger, the volume of data that
they process has grown exponentially. SK Hynix, a South
Korean memory-chip maker, estimates that more than nine-
tenths of the processing time for inference (that is, using a
model to respond to user queries) of OpenAI’s GPT-4 was
spent on just shuttling data back and forth. This “memory
wall” throttles a processor’s speed by tying it to the pace at
which data trickles in from the memory.
CPU, GPU, TPU
To tackle this bottleneck, Google took the parallel approach

of a GPU even further. The firm built a chip specifically for
neural networks. Its AI processor, known as the tensor
processing unit (TPU), contains thousands of multiply-and-
add units directly connected in a giant grid. The TPU loads
the data from external memory into its grid, where it flows
through in regular waves, similar to how a heart pumps
blood. After each multiplication the results are passed to the
next unit. By reusing data from previous steps, the TPU
reduces the need to access the off-chip memory.
TPUs are a type of “domain-specific architecture” (DSA),

processors that are hard-wired for one purpose (see
diagram). DSAs designed for AI algorithms are typically
faster and more energy-efficient than generalist CPUs or
even GPUs. Newer versions of Nvidia’s GPUs now sport
hundreds of these units alongside their traditional cores.
Hardware-makers, mindful of battery life, have also joined
the fray. Apple, which as a hardware maker started
designing its own silicon well before the TPU days, has
integrated a neural processing unit (NPU), akin to the TPU,
into its smartphones, iPads and laptops to speed up AI
tasks. In these devices, the NPU is not a separate chip but a
block within the main chip, which also houses CPU and GPU
cores.
Big firms are not the only ones making AI chips. According
to PitchBook, a research firm, since 2017 investors have
poured over $24bn into AI-chip startups. In the first half of
this year alone, upstart chipmakers have attracted $9.7bn,
matching the total raised in the preceding three years.
These startups have devised their own tricks to break
through the memory bottleneck and rein in runaway energy
use.
One of the startling features of the Cambrian revolution was

the emergence of complex creatures larger than any seen
before. In chipmaking, that is the Cerebras approach. The
American startup wants to reduce off-chip memory access
by cramming all its circuitry into one huge chip the size of a
dinner plate. The latest “wafer chip” from the firm has
900,000 cores and 44 gigabytes of on-chip memory, around
half the off-chip memory of the H100, a leading AI chip from
Nvidia. By restricting all the data movements to within the
wafer, Cerebras claims that its chip has 7,000 times greater
memory bandwidth than the leading GPU. But each unit is
much pricier, needs its own cooling system and requires a
specialised manufacturing process.
Given the vast array of machine-learning models, designing

specific architectures to accommodate all of them efficiently
can be a challenge. To address this, some firms are
exploring chip designs that can be reconfigured based on
the algorithm in use. SambaNova Systems, a California-
based chip company, has designed its processing unit with
small local memory blocks that are laid out in a two
dimensional grid, much like the TPU. When a user runs a
machine-learning software framework like TensorFlow or
PyTorch, SambaNova’s software configures the optimum
structure of the grid based on energy and speed.
Although the surge in computational demand has mainly
centred on chips for training large AI models, most chip-
design innovations are tackling the challenge of inference.
Running a single inference is much cheaper but, over time,
the total cost often surpasses that of training. Google
estimates that three-fifths of its total data-centre energy use
goes on billions of inference queries. Jay Goldberg, founder
of D2D Advisory, predicts the AI-chip market will eventually
split into 45% for data-centre inference chips, 40% for
gadget-inference chips and 15% for training chips.
Designing processors that are optimised for machine

learning is smart, but tweaking the algorithms offers
another way for chipmakers to squeeze out extra
performance. There are two ways to improve the efficiency
of neural networks: use less precise numbers, and prune the
network to remove irrelevant cruft.
Computers typically represent numerical values in “floating

point” format across 32 binary digits (bits). But computer
scientists have found that machine-learning algorithms can
use less precise numbers without sacrificing accuracy.
Weights in a neural network often cluster around small
numbers and zero, making a lower-precision format ideal.
Using fewer bits means less shuttling of data between the
processor and memory, which boosts speed and cuts energy
consumption. Switching to 16-bit floating-point notation
halves the memory and energy consumption compared with
a 32-bit implementation.
What are you inferring?
Another way to improve efficiency is to identify and skip

unnecessary operations when performing calculations
relating to a neural network. According to Bill Dally, the
chief scientist at Nvidia, most neural networks are
inherently “sparse”, or contain a large number of zeros,
which means you can remove a large number of weights
without reducing accuracy. The trick is to find the right
balance between the overhead in identifying these zeros
and the benefits of skipping the redundant operations.
Nvidia claims a thousand-fold gain in GPU performance on

AI inference over the past eight years. Moving to smaller
manufacturing nodes, and increasing the die size to pack
more transistors into a chip, improved performance six-fold.
But the biggest gains, almost 160 times, came from smarter
design decisions. Mr Dally admits that when Moore’s law
was going strong, chipmakers were playing “the same card”
over and over simply by shrinking transistors. Though they
have not yet run out of cards, he says the challenge now is
to come up with a new card each time.
Without the support of Moore’s law, sustaining exponential

gains may be hard. Adi Fuchs, a computer scientist at
Speedata, an AI-chip company, points out that during the
Bitcoin boom, once the underlying algorithm stabilised, the
industry exhausted its “bag of tricks” to eke out new gains.
Since 2017 most AI models have used a type of neural-
network architecture called the transformer, which is better
at identifying patterns in data. Mr Fuchs thinks that to
maintain AI’s performance trajectory, the future may lie in
developing new algorithms that outperform current
transformer models, rather than trying to optimise silicon to
run transformer models more efficiently.
For chipmakers this is a problem. It can take up to two years

to design a chip. But software models change quickly. If a
hardware design is too specialised, it can quickly become
obsolete. Mr Patterson believes these are exciting times for
researchers because “this is all brand new stuff”. For bosses
of chip firms that are building specialist chips amid rapid
software changes, he admits it is a “really scary” time. ■

quarterly/2024/09/16/ai-has-propelled-chip-architecture-towards-a-tighter-bond-with-
software

OK (analogue) computer
Researchers are looking

beyond digital computing
They are using biology and light to design powerful, energy-
efficient chips
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
IN 1945 JOHN VON NEUMANN, a Hungarian polymath,

proposed an “automatic digital computing system”. His
design featured a central processing unit (CPU) for
crunching numbers and a memory unit for storing
instructions and data, linked by a communication pathway.
Von Neumann dreamed of a computer where anything
stored in memory would be instantly available to the CPU. In
its absence, he came up with a clever fix: a memory
hierarchy with small, fast memory close to the CPU and
larger, slower memory farther away. Nearly 80 years later,
his original blueprint still forms the basis of most modern
processors.
But shuttling data between the processor and memory eats
up time and energy, particularly for data-hungry artificial-
intelligence (AI) models. An analysis by Amir Gholami and
colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley found
that in the past two decades, processor performance has
tripled every two years, while memory access speed has
increased only by about half (see chart). This means
processors blaze through calculations faster than data can
be fed from memory, creating a “von Neumann bottleneck”.
This has led some to wonder if it is time for a new
architecture. Every engineer, and every reader, carries with
them the proof that such a thing is possible.
Brains do not separate processing and storage. They run

without the central co-ordinating clock von Neumann
architectures use, and do more calculations in parallel than
a computer, performing at exaflop speed—a billion billion
calculations per second—using just 20 watts. To replicate
this scale digitally, an artificial neural network would need 8
megawatts of power. Machine-learning software already
mimics the brain’s parallel processing through neural
networks. Is the next step to build hardware that mirrors the
structure of the brain?
Sound and light show
“In-memory” computers are processors that use specialised

memory devices capable of performing certain
computations. The building block for this type of computer
is a memristor, a type of a resistor whose conducting
properties can be easily adjusted by applying a sufficiently
high current or voltage. Crucially it retains its properties
even after the current or voltage disappears, functioning as
a memory. But unlike transistors which represent values as
binary 1’s and 0’s, memristors record values on a continuum
between the two, like values in the analogue world. When
these devices are arranged in a grid of rows and columns, it
is possible to perform a matrix multiplication in a single time
step. In machine-learning applications, this allows weights
to be stored within the computation unit, making processing
more energy efficient.
Some think the future of computing lies not in silicon

but in our skulls
Drawing on the brain’s efficiency, processing units can be

activated only when needed, to reduce energy consumption.
“Neuromorphic” computing does away with a central clock—
different neurons communicate when they are ready. These
“spiking” neural networks are more efficient because they
require less communication and computation. Joshua Yang
of the University of Southern California believes this can be
efficient and yield a “higher level of intelligence”.
IBM and Intel have both designed chips that mimic this
concept using current digital technology. IBM’s NorthPole
chip has no off-chip memory. The company claims that its
brain-inspired chip is 25 times more energy efficient and 20
times faster than other specialist chips, called accelerators,
for certain AI applications.
Another alternative is to use light, not electricity. Optical

accelerators can process information much faster and using
less power than their electrical cousins. But until recently
these devices relied on components too bulky to be used
with densely packed processors. Advances in photonics
manufacturing have helped shrink these devices to
nanoscale levels.
Mach won
At the heart of an optical computer is an old idea: the Mach–
Zehnder interferometer (MZI), invented in the 1890s. This
device takes a beam of light and splits it into two paths.
Depending on the length of each path, the phase (ie, the
timing of the wave’s crests and troughs) of the beam
changes. The two beams are then recombined so that the
amplitude, or strength, of the output beam is the amplitude
of the input beam multiplied by a value that depends on the
phase difference between the split beams. An optical
accelerator has an array of MZIs laid out in a grid.
Computation within these arrays occurs at the speed of light
and the flow of light through the chip does not use energy.
Nick Harris, boss of Lightmatter, a California-based

photonic-chip startup, points out that optical computers are
not good for logical operations. But he says that, though
they will “never run Windows”, they are a great alternative
for running neural networks because the energy benefit
“scales exponentially”.
Promising as these approaches are, analogue computers still

need to talk to the digital world. Converting non-digital
signals into binary 1s and 0s burns energy. But in inference
applications, where a trained AI model answers user
queries, speed trumps precision. This trade-off might be
enough to bring analogue computers into the mainstream.
■

quarterly/2024/09/16/researchers-are-looking-beyond-digital-computing

The relentless innovation machine
The end of Moore’s law

will not slow the pace of
change
Semiconductors are likely to continue their transformational
role
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE CHIPMAKING industry has always existed in a state of

paranoid optimism. Ever since Gordon Moore’s observation
that processing power would double roughly every two
years was encoded by others into “Moore’s law”, a chorus of
experts has been warning of its end. That dread is tinged
with a fierce belief that there is always a way to stave off
the inevitable. The results have been nothing short of
spectacular. In the past 50 years, processors have come to
operate tens of thousands of times faster, and store a
million times more data in the same area. The cost of a
transistor has also fallen by a factor of a billion, making
technology a global deflationary force. They are also
ubiquitous: semiconductors are now the third-most traded
commodity in the world by value, after oil and cars.
But decades of success have not quelled the industry’s

jitters over the end of Moore’s maxim. In 2017 Jensen
Huang, boss of Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable chip
company, declared that the law was dead. In June, Pat
Gelsinger, chief executive of Intel, the firm that Mr Moore
co-founded, insisted that the law was “alive and well”. This
Technology Quarterly has argued that if not dead, Moore’s
law is on life support.
For much of the transistor’s history it followed a “happy

scaling” path—as the logic gates shrank, they got faster and
used less power. That era is over. Leading-edge AI
processors cram more transistors on a single chip or stack
multiple “chiplets” into one package to boost computing
oomph. But the performance gains have come at a cost: the
energy consumed by a chip has ballooned. A single
Blackwell chip, Nvidia’s latest, runs five times faster than its
predecessor, but uses 70% more power in the process.
Data centres lash hundreds or thousands of these power-
hungry chips together to run large artificial-intelligence (AI)
models. By some estimates, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT,
guzzled more than 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to train
its latest model (see chart). The International Energy
Agency calculates that in 2022 data centres consumed 460
terawatt-hours, or almost 2% of global electricity demand.
The agency expects this figure to double by 2026.
The tricks chipmakers have used to boost processing power

for AI models without causing runaway energy growth hint
at shifts in the semiconductor industry. The first change is
the decline of the computer as a general-purpose machine.
Neil Thompson of MIT argues that, for decades, Moore’s law
held computing together. Every successive generation of
semiconductor technology was faster and more energy
efficient than the previous one. That allowed the tech world
to rely on a universal processor—the central processing unit
(CPU)—that could be programmed for lots of tasks. But the
end of Moore’s law makes it harder now to improve
performance across all applications.
The response, in the case of AI chips, has been to specialise

or fine-tune chips for specific software. Mr Thompson
believes this could split computing into two lanes: the fast
lane, where cutting-edge applications benefit from powerful
customised chips, and the slow lane, where ordinary
applications get stuck using general-purpose chips whose
progress is slowing.
The biggest merger
The need to specialise has precipitated a second shift—the

rise of firms that control both hardware and software. For
over five decades, the tech world was neatly split into two
camps: the hardware crowd who tinkered with their circuits
and the coding geeks who wrote software. The “Wintel”
alliance whereby computers would run Microsoft’s Windows
operating system on chips made by Intel has been one of
the most successful partnerships in technology history.
Now the wall separating the two camps has cracked. Bill
Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist, says that improvements in
software and chip architecture yield bigger gains than
moving to newer manufacturing processes. At the cutting
edge, specialist silicon is the future and the giants are doing
a lot of it themselves.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta all now use
custom silicon that is optimised for their own software.
Google’s processors are designed to run TensorFlow, its
machine-learning software. Apple’s homemade chips are
tuned to run its own software on the gadgets it makes.
These firms partner with firms like Broadcom, an American
chip company, to design these chips, and a foundry like
TSMC to build them. Nvidia is the only one to have made a
great business out of making AI chips for others—but this is
in part because its chips are optimised for CUDA, its
software platform, which has become an industry standard.
According to BCG, a consultancy, between 2018 and 2023

the “big six” firms (the five tech giants plus Nvidia)
accounted for roughly 60% of the value in the technology
sector. But that will not slow innovation. This new world is
even more inventive than the previous era that sparked the
computer revolution. There are now so many more ways for
computers to become better—through silicon cleverness,
better packaging, innovative chip designs and new
materials. It will be competitive in ways the Wintel world
never could be, and may create things even more
wonderful. A combination of silicon, dread and fierce belief
are going to achieve even more in the next 70 years than
they have in the past 70. ■

quarterly/2024/09/16/the-end-of-moores-law-will-not-slow-the-pace-of-change

Chipmaking
Sources and
acknowledgments
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
Acknowledgments
In addition to those people mentioned and quoted in the

text, the author would like to thank the following people and
companies:
Chris Auth, Krste Asanovic, Bob Beachler, Jos Benschop, Eric
Beyne,Ian Cutress, Eric Fetzer, Aart de Geus, Shankar
Krishnamoorthy, Ann Kelleher, Steven Latré, Chris Mack,
Axel Nackaert, Sanjay Natarajan, Julien Ryckaert, Sri
Samavedam, Lisa Su, Christopher Walker, Jon Yu, AMD,
ASML, IMEC, Intel and Nvidia
Selected sources
J von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC”

(1945)
G.E. Moore. “Cramming more components onto integrated

circuits” (1965)
R. H. Dennard, F. H. Gaensslen, H. -N. Yu, V. L. Rideout, E.

Bassous and A. R. LeBlanc. “Design of ion-implanted
MOSFET’s with very small physical dimensions,” (1974)
R.P. Feynman. “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.

Engineering and science” (1960)
N. P. Jouppi, C.Young, N. Patil, D. Patterson et. al. “In-

datacenter performance analysis of a Tensor Processing
Unit” (2017)

quarterly/2024/09/16/sources-and-acknowledgments

Chipmaking
Silicon returns to Silicon

Valley
AI has returned chipmaking to the heart of computer
technology, says Shailesh Chitnis
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
quarterly/2024-09-21
Business
Generative AI is transforming Silicon Valley
The age of the hectocorn :: The technology is forcing America’s disrupters-
in-chief to think differently
How much trouble is Boeing in?

Flying pickets :: A protracted strike could cause lasting damage
Should you be nice at work?

Bartleby :: Kindness is in vogue
Chinese overcapacity is crushing the global

steel industry
Smelted :: Governments are stepping in to protect local producers
How FIFA was outplayed by Electronic Arts

It’s in the game :: The video-game publisher called the football chiefs’ bluff
—and won
Why the hype for hybrid cars will not last

On a detour :: Fully electric vehicles will win the race
PwC needs to rethink its global governance

Schumpeter :: The “big four” accounting giants have outgrown their
decentralised structures

The age of the hectocorn
Generative AI is
transforming Silicon Valley
The technology is forcing America’s disrupters-in-chief to
think differently
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | SAN FRANCISCO AND SEATTLE
A RARE BEAST may soon lumber across the hills of Silicon

Valley: not a $1bn unicorn, nor a $10bn decacorn, but a
hectocorn—a startup valued at more than $100bn. OpenAI,
the maker of ChatGPT, is understood to be in talks to raise
$6.5bn from investors to fund the expansion dreams of its
co-founder, Sam Altman. If it pulls off the deal, OpenAI’s
valuation will be about $150bn, making it only the second
ever $100bn-plus startup in America after SpaceX, a
rocketry giant led by Elon Musk (who co-founded OpenAI in
2015 and is now Mr Altman’s nemesis).
All this makes OpenAI sound like a typical tech sensation: a

sizzling startup reliant on intrepid investors to develop a
new way of doing things that it hopes will change the world.
Think Google, Facebook or Uber. Yet its significance goes
further than that. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), the
technology on which OpenAI is built, is changing the rules of
the game in Silicon Valley itself.
There are three big challenges posed by the new

technology: many venture-capital (VC) stalwarts cannot
afford the huge sums of money that firms like OpenAI need
to train and run generative-AI models; the technology scales
in different ways than they are used to; and it may rely on
unfamiliar approaches to making money. In short,
generative AI is bringing disruption to the home of
America’s disrupters-in-chief. Enjoy the Schadenfreude.
The first shock for venture capitalists is the size of the

cheques required to fund the builders of large language
models (LLMs) like those powering ChatGPT. According to
PitchBook, a data gatherer, the average size of a VC fund
raised in America last year was about $150m. OpenAI is
looking to collect more than 40 times that from investors.
The biggest cheques for LLMs are thus being written not by
the VC industry but by tech giants. Since 2019 Microsoft has
invested $13bn in OpenAI; this year Amazon invested $4bn
in Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s main rivals.
The tech giants do not just offer money. Their cloud services
provide computing power to train the startups’ LLMs and
also distribute their products—OpenAI’s via Microsoft’s
Azure cloud, and Anthropic’s via Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft is expected to invest more in OpenAI’s latest
funding round. Apple (which will offer ChatGPT to iPhone
users) and Nvidia (which sells huge numbers of chips to
OpenAI) are also likely to take part. So are sovereign-wealth
funds, demonstrating the vast sums of money that are
required for a seat at the table.
A few venture investors are undeterred by the high entrance

fee. OpenAI’s fundraising is being led by Thrive Capital, an
investment firm based in New York that has made other big
investments in highly valued startups, including Stripe, a
payments company most recently valued at $65bn. Big
Silicon Valley investors such as Sequoia Capital and
Andreessen Horowitz helped provide part of the $6bn raised
in May by Mr Musk’s xAI, and contributed to the $1bn raised
this month by Safe Superintelligence, a model builder led by
Ilya Sutskever, a former founder of OpenAI, that currently
has negligible revenues.
But the size of the sums involved means some VCs are
adopting a new modus operandi. Typically venture firms
have sprayed capital thinly across an array of startups,
knowing that if a few strike it rich, the returns will eclipse
what is lost on those that do not. In the generative-AI era,
where startups with access to the most capital, computing
power, data and researchers have a big advantage, some
are betting more on those that are already well-established,
instead of kissing a lot of frogs.
The second big challenge to recent VC investment practice

comes from how the new technology scales. Funding LLMs is
coming to look more like the early days of Silicon Valley,
when venture capitalists invested in companies cracking
tough scientific problems, such as chipmakers, than the
more recent trend of backing internet startups.
One of the venture mantras of the past decade has been
“blitzscaling”. With the software behind most internet firms
cheap to build and cheaper to run, startups could focus their
money and attention on growing as fast as possible.
Nowadays, the concept on everyone’s lips is “scaling laws”:
the more computing power and data that you throw at AI,
the cleverer models become. You thus have to invest fistfuls
of money upfront to develop a competitive product, or else
invent a new approach.
In a recent blog Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School at the

University of Pennsylvania grouped state-of-the-art LLMs
into four loose “generations”, each requiring ten times more
computing power and data than the last. He calculated that
in 2022, when ChatGPT was released, models typically cost
$10m or less to train. Some cutting-edge models developed
since then may have cost $100m or more. Those coming
soon could cost $1bn. He thinks training costs will
eventually exceed $10bn. As pundits quibble over how
predictable these scaling laws really are, the cost of training
continues to rise (see chart).
Inference is also becoming more expensive. On September
12th OpenAI introduced a new pair of models, called o1
(nicknamed Strawberry), which are designed to take
multiple “reasoning” steps to produce a more accurate
response to a query, relying heavily on a process called
reinforcement learning. (Ask the latest version of ChatGPT
how many rs in strawberry, and it immediately says two.
Incorporate o1, and after four seconds of what it calls
“thinking”, it gives the right answer.) That step-by-step
approach, particularly useful for complex subjects like
maths and science, improves as more computing power is
used to think through a response.
As LLMs become ever more computationally intensive, those

developing them are furiously searching for ways to bring
down their cost. Meanwhile, many VC firms are being priced
out of the market. Instead of pouring money into models,
some are instead funding the startups that are building on
top of them, such as those providing coding tools, or virtual
health care, or customer support.
This is bringing about a third big shift in the VC playbook, as

the industry is forced to work out how startups that rely on
costly LLMs can become profitable. Digital advertising, the
favoured monetisation model in Silicon Valley for decades, is
tricky to incorporate into generative-AI tools without
undermining their credibility with users. Subscriptions may
also be difficult. Software firms typically charge per user per
month. But as companies roll out AI agents that can help
humans do their work, the number of users may fall.
Backchat
OpenAI still has its sceptics. They struggle to see how its
revenue growth can justify such a stratospheric valuation,
especially given the competition it faces from smaller,
cheaper models, some of which are at least partially open-
source. Big investments from deep-pocketed sovereign-
wealth funds are often a sign of overly exuberant
expectations. Scientific breakthroughs in model-building
could upend the industry. Sceptics also think the rapid
turnover of top talent at OpenAI underscores lingering
corporate-governance and safety concerns, following the
ousting and subsequent reinstatement of Mr Altman less
than a year ago.
It will certainly not be easy for the would-be hectocorn to

continue galloping ahead of its rivals. Anthropic is investing
heavily, with Amazon’s backing. Google, Meta and xAI all
have strong offerings of their own. Competition is fierce. If
the rest of Silicon Valley wants in on the action, it will need
to think differently. ■
To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and

technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly
subscriber-only newsletter.

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valley

Flying pickets
How much trouble is

Boeing in?
A protracted strike could cause lasting damage
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
WHEN KELLY ORTBERG landed in the chief executive’s chair

at Boeing last month the list of problems he had to confront
at the aerospace giant was already daunting. Production of
the 737 MAX passenger jet, Boeing’s most important
product, has been curtailed after a mid-flight blowout of a
fuselage panel in January. Production of the larger 787
Dreamliner has also slowed down owing to supply-chain
problems. Plans to launch the even bigger 777X are years
behind schedule. Add to that losses at Boeing’s usually
lucrative defence division and an embarrassing software
failure that left astronauts piloting its Starliner spacecraft
stranded on the International Space Station and some may
wonder why Mr Ortberg took the job.
Boeing’s boss now has yet another crisis to deal with. On

September 13th a strike by 33,000 union members, a fifth of
the company’s workforce, hit sites in Washington state,
where the firm assembles the 737 MAX, bringing production
to a halt. Morgan Stanley, a bank, estimates that the strike
will cost Boeing $2bn of cash a month at a time when its
finances are already under strain. To conserve funds, Boeing
said on September 18th that it would furlough tens of
thousands of white-collar workers for one in every four
weeks the strike continues. The last big walkout at the
company, in 2008, dragged on for 58 days. This one may
still prove to be short-lived. But, if it doesn’t, it could leave
lasting damage.
Pay is at the centre of the latest dispute. Boeing offered its

employees a 25% rise over four years; its workers are
demanding 40%. That would be less of a problem for the
company than it sounds—assembly accounts for a small
fraction of the total cost of producing its planes, and wages
are a small fraction of that.
By holding out, Boeing will delay its effort to return

production to previous levels. The firm says that it has been
making around 30 737 MAXs a month, so each day of
picketing means one fewer plane. Even if the strike is short,
Boeing is expected to deliver just 400 planes this year, half
of what it managed at its peak in 2018.
A protracted strike would make Boeing’s financial position

even worse. The 737 MAX should be its cash machine, but
has not dispensed reliably since two fatal crashes linked to
faulty software led to its temporary grounding in 2019.
Since then Boeing’s operations have burned through $25bn
of cash and the company has racked up net debts of $45bn.
Airbus, its main rival, has almost none.
Before the strike, analysts projected that the firm would

stop burning cash in the second half of this year, having lost
$7bn of it through its operations in the first half. A prolonged
stoppage would reverse its progress.
Boeing will also risk having its credit rating downgraded by

the big agencies if the stoppage is prolonged. That will
make it more expensive to top up its $11bn cash pile. The
company also has $22bn of bonds that will need to be
refinanced in the next three years, for which the interest bill
would go up. To maintain its investment-grade rating Boeing
may thus choose to raise money by issuing stock (most
analysts reckon that $10bn should be enough). That would
be a further blow to the company’s long-suffering
shareholders; Boeing’s share price is already down by 65%
from its high in 2019.
Boeing may take comfort in its vast backlog of orders for

passenger jets. But Airbus’s is far bigger. The European firm
is likely to manufacture around 770 planes this year, and its
share price is close to its pre-pandemic high. Airbus also
recently announced that it would launch a new aircraft by
the end of the decade. Boeing may not be at risk of
collapse, but the longer it takes to spin up its engines again,
the further behind it will fall. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/19/how-much-trouble-is-boeing-in
Bartleby
Should you be nice at

work?
Kindness is in vogue
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
KINDNESS IS IN the air. Publishers produce business books

with titles like “The Power of Nice” or, simply, “Kind”.
LinkedIn, which is ostensibly a networking site for career-
minded professionals, is overrun with sickly videos showing
people being improbably generous to the homeless. Firms
publicly embrace the values of compassion: one
manufacturer of safety-gear talks of “offering grace
internally”, which sounds terribly intrusive.
The fashion for niceness is both trite and revealing. Trite,
because it is really not surprising that people respond well
to decent behaviour from colleagues and bosses. It would
take a brave author to write a book called “Stand Up for
Psychopathy” or “Three Cheers for the Dark Triad”.
Revealing, because it shows how the leadership pendulum
has swung.
A recent meta-analysis of research into niceness and

effective leadership, by Andrew Blake of Texas Tech
University and his co-authors, concludes that the two do
often go together. Studies into bosses’ agreeableness, one
of the “Big Five” personality traits (along with openness to
experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and
neuroticism), have found that it is tied to ethical behaviour,
workplace trust and psychological safety, among other
beneficial things.
That, in turn, can improve aspects of a firm’s performance.

A recent paper by Charles O’Reilly of Stanford University
and his co-authors looked at the relationship between chief
executives’ personalities and reviews of their organisations’
culture on Glassdoor, an employee-ratings website.
Agreeable bosses were associated with cultures that were
more collaborative and innovative.
Niceness seems to matter more than it once did. A meta-

analysis of research ending in the late 1990s did not find
evidence of a strong connection between agreeableness and
effective leadership. Some of this shift doubtless reflects the
way organisations have evolved: teams matter more, along
with the social skills that ease co-operation. Some of it may
also reflect more volatility in the outside world. A study by
Soo Ling Lim of University College London and her co-
authors looked at the performance of MBA students at
London Business School across ten academic years, and
found that agreeableness improves outcomes when levels of
uncertainty about a task—and presumably, the need to
work together harmoniously—are higher.
It is progress to get away from the era of “nice guys finish

last”, not least for those people who aren’t guys: women
have long suffered more from perceptions of lower
competence if they display warmth. But you can have too
much of anything, even kindness.
Agreeableness is not the only trait that matters for a boss: a

delightful but highly neurotic person may struggle in
stressful situations. Employees vary too: some people care
less about empathy and more about money. There are
moments—when employees have suffered a personal
trauma, for example—when warmth is the most important
test of a company’s character. But in other circumstances,
different traits matter.
People who score less well on agreeableness are liable to be

less trusting, more competitive and more confrontational.
That may not recommend them as friends but could well be
an advantage in certain contexts. Mr O’Reilly’s paper finds,
for example, that different industries attract leaders with
varying personality types: bosses in the financial-services
industry are comparatively less agreeable, for example,
than those who work in health care. Kindness may also
count for less in negotiation-heavy roles like sales.
A recent paper by Daniel Keum and Nandil Bhatia of

Columbia Business School looks at how changing economic
conditions can affect the types of bosses who lead firms.
The researchers gauge chief executives’ “prosociality” (their
concern for the welfare of others) by looking at things like
their charitable activities and their language on earnings
calls. Prosocial bosses can be slower to restructure firms in
bad times, and the authors find that during periods of
intensifying competition they were more likely to be
replaced by less caring types. When layoffs are necessary,
boards don’t want Samaritans in charge.
What there is no excuse for is unkindness. There is a basic

level of decency, civility and courtesy to which everyone is
entitled and from which all organisations benefit. Kindness
is not a management doctrine. But its absence is a
management failure. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/19/should-you-be-nice-at-work

Smelted
Chinese overcapacity is
crushing the global steel
industry
Governments are stepping in to protect local producers
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
EACH YEAR China makes as much steel as the rest of the

world combined. The vast scale of its output—around 1bn
tonnes a year—is obscured by the fact that most of it stays
in the country. Lately, however, China’s exports of the metal
have surged, reaching 90m tonnes in 2023, up by 35% on
the previous year (see chart 1). That may be a fraction of
China’s total production, but it is more than what America or
Japan make in a year. And it is enough to build a thousand
Golden Gate bridges.
With China’s economy struggling, its steelmakers are selling

abroad at bargain prices, to the distress of foreign
competitors and politicians alike. Last month Nippon Steel,
Japan’s biggest steelmaker, called on the government to
impose anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports. In the
quarter to June its net profit shrank by 11% year on year.
ArcelorMittal, Europe’s steelmaking champion, has been hit
even harder: its net profit for the same period was down by
73%. “We want fair competition, and we know that the
competition against China is not fair,” says Genuino
Christino, the company’s chief financial officer. Such
complaints tend to carry weight with politicians.
Steelmaking is often seen as a symbol of a country’s
industrial heft. And although a glut means lower prices for a
diffuse group of consumers, politicians worry about the
concentrated pain it inflicts on manufacturing workers and
regions.
The rich world has experienced surges in Chinese steel
exports before, including in 2008 and 2015. Each of these
episodes led to trade barriers being raised; between 2008
and 2018 America, Britain, Canada and the European Union
implemented more than 500 trade measures affecting
imports of the metal from China. The consequences this
time, however, are likely to be much wider-ranging.
That is partly because China’s economy is in a worse way.
As its commodity-intensive property sector has suffered, its
steelmakers have taken a beating. In August barely 1% of
the 250 steel mills in China that report their finances to the
government turned a profit, according to Isha Chaudhary of
Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy. The domestic price for hot-
rolled coil steel, a benchmark product, has fallen by 16%
over the past year. Despite the slump in prices, many of the
country’s producers have been reluctant to curtail
production; idling a blast furnace can take months and is
often costlier than keeping it running. Facing lacklustre
demand from their usual customers at home, steelmakers
are looking elsewhere.
The result is surging exports—and a fresh round of tariffs.

Last month Canada joined the fray, imposing levies on
Chinese steel. Even in America, where hefty tariffs already
keep out most Chinese steel imports, producers still face
cut-price competition as global prices fall. In July America
announced a 25% duty on any steel coming from Mexico
that had not been melted and poured in North America, in a
bid to keep out any trace of Chinese steel that may travel
via other countries.
The backlash is not confined to rich countries. These days

most of China’s steel exports go to the developing world,
which accounted for nine of the top ten foreign destinations
for its steel in 2023 (see chart 2). Unlike in the rich world,
demand for the metal is roaring in much of the global south.
India’s steel consumption, for instance, is expected to grow
by 8% this year and at a similar rate next year thanks to a
boom in infrastructure investment, according to the World
Steel Association, an industry group. The Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure bonanza, has
helped its steelmakers expand their global reach. Chinese
construction companies building ports and laying railways in
poorer countries have done so largely with Chinese steel.
Yet steelmakers in developing countries are also starting to
grumble about Chinese exports. In August Thachat
Viswanath Narendran, the boss of Tata Steel, India’s biggest
steelmaker, complained of “predatory pricing” by Chinese
competitors. As in the West, governments in the global
south are taking notice. This month India announced that it
would impose tariffs of up to 30% on some steel products
from China. Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Turkey have also
slapped tariffs on Chinese steel this year. Vietnam, the
biggest export destination for Chinese steel, is also
undertaking anti-dumping investigations.
In response to both the worsening economic situation at

home and the deteriorating trading environment abroad,
China’s government has taken some steps to boost demand
and reduce supply. It has offered incentives for Chinese
businesses and households to swap old machinery and
appliances for new ones. Last month it suspended approvals
of new steel mills. But without more forceful reforms it is
hard to see much changing. According to S&P Global, a data
provider, more Chinese steel capacity will come online by
the end of next year than will be shut down.
That leaves Chinese steelmakers with little option but to

keep searching for new customers. Wood Mackenzie
forecasts that Chinese steel exports will reach 103m tonnes
this year. Some producers are also building new production
bases in the hope of retaining access to foreign markets. In
July China Baowu Steel, the world’s largest steelmaker,
doubled its investment in a plant in Saudi Arabia. Tsingshan
Group, a Chinese metals and mining company, has started
production at a steel mill in Zimbabwe. That could worsen
the global glut, but at least it creates jobs abroad.
Other Chinese steelmakers are shifting sales at home from

the moribund property sector to manufacturers of things like
electric vehicles—which also, as it happens, are looking
abroad to compensate for lacklustre domestic demand.
“Steel will always find a home,” says James Campbell of
CRU Group, a consultancy. Whether the world’s politicians
like it or not. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/17/chinese-overcapacity-is-crushing-the-
global-steel-industry

It’s in the game
How FIFA was outplayed

by Electronic Arts
The video-game publisher called the football chiefs’ bluff—
and won
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
A NEW FOOTBALL season will begin on September 27th: not

the Premier League or La Liga, but the annual update of the
world’s favourite football video-game. “FIFA”, as the
franchise was known from its pixelated debut in 1993, sells
nearly 30m copies a year. In-game spending pushes its
annual revenue above $3bn, estimates MoffettNathanson, a
firm of analysts, which calculates that the title contributes
nearly two-thirds of the profit of its publisher, Electronic Arts
(EA). Gaming has few bigger names than “FIFA”.
Yet a year ago EA changed the name of its mega-hit to “EA

Sports FC”, after its licensing deal with the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association, football’s governing
body, fell apart. FIFA had reportedly demanded more than
the $150m or so that it had been charging EA each year for
the privilege of using its name. EA decided instead to
embark on what Andrea Hopelain, who runs its sports-game
publishing business, calls “one of the biggest rebrands in
entertainment history”.
The gamble seems to have paid off. EA reported in July that

revenue from the game was up by “mid-single digits”
compared with the previous, FIFA-branded edition. EA Sports
had already become a strong brand in its own right, says Ms
Hopelain; English referees have had its logo on their sleeves
for years. A marketing blitz has made it even stronger:
money that would have gone to FIFA has been spent on
promotions like sponsoring the Spanish league (now called
“LaLiga EA Sports”). Sony and Microsoft also had reason to
keep the renamed game visible in their PlayStation and
Xbox app stores. It accounts for as much as 10% of
spending on the platforms (of which they take a cut),
estimates Clay Griffin of MoffettNathanson.
Dropping the FIFA name has brought with it other

opportunities. EA has been able to work more closely with
partners like Nike and Pepsi, which had been sidelined by
FIFA’s relationship with their arch-rivals Adidas and Coca-
Cola. EA has had a freer hand to innovate, too. Players can
now share video highlights of their footballing heroics with
one another within the game and will soon be able to buy
merchandise from brands such as Nike to match their
avatars’ digital outfits.
Will FIFA hit back? In May Gianni Infantino, its boss, said it
was working on a rival game that “obviously, as everything
we do, will be the best”. Yet Take-Two, a game-maker
rumoured to be involved, poured cold water on the idea last
month. Konami, which makes eFootball, a free-to-play game
that is big on mobile, is another possible partner.
Any rival will struggle to beat EA. Decades of incumbency

have created powerful network effects, as players compete
with their friends online. EA has spun a web of licensing
deals with footballers, clubs and leagues, some of them
exclusive, costing hundreds of millions a year. These factors
make sport a winner-takes-most genre in gaming, argues Mr
Griffin: EA’s basketball title, “NBA Live”, was crushed by
Take-Two’s “NBA 2K” for the same reasons. With or without
FIFA, EA’s football game will be hard to tackle. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/19/how-fifa-was-outplayed-by-electronic-
arts

On a detour
Why the hype for hybrid

cars will not last
Fully electric vehicles will win the race
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE CAR industry’s effort to decarbonise revolves around

replacing petrol with batteries. A growing number of
customers want both. Buyers who cannot afford a fully
electric car, or worry about the availability of charging
points, are turning to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles
(PHEVS), sales of which are rocketing. But the hype for
hybrids may prove to be short-lived.
Worldwide sales of cars running purely on batteries (BEVs)

were more than double those of PHEVs last year. But the
gap has been rapidly closing. Sales of PHEVs were up by
almost 50%, year on year, in the first seven months of 2024,
compared with just 8% for BEVs, according to estimates
from Bernstein, a broker.
Carmakers have been cooling on BEVs and warming to

hybrids. This month Volvo backtracked on its commitment to
go all-electric by 2030. It now says BEVs and PHEVs will
together account for 90% of its sales by the end of the
decade. Last month Ford announced that it was abandoning
plans to make a large fully electric SUV, opting instead for
hybrid power. Hyundai is doubling its range of hybrids from
seven to 14 models. Volkswagen, too, has pledged to
increase investments in hybrids as it rethinks its plans for
BEVS.
Consumers are turning to hybrids partly because they are

cheap. The big batteries required to run fully electric
vehicles make them far more expensive than petrol cars.
That is a problem when it comes to selling to the mass
market; most buyers “will not pay a premium”, says Jim
Farley, the boss of Ford. Plug-in hybrids, by contrast, run on
much smaller batteries: they typically have a 20-kilowatt-
hour unit, around a third of the size of those in BEVs. As a
consequence, PHEVs are only a little more expensive than
petrol-powered cars, and cost less to run. Although hybrids
can typically travel only around 40 miles on their batteries,
the option of using petrol avoids the anxiety many drivers of
BEVs have about running out of charge.
For their part, carmakers are fond of hybrids because they

are usually as profitable as petrol-powered cars, in contrast
to BEVs, many of which are loss-making. Smaller batteries
mean lower production costs. Hybrids also allow legacy
carmakers to draw more on their existing expertise and
supply chains.
The fashion for hybrids, however, may prove to be fleeting.
Rules in California, adopted by 16 other American states,
stipulate that by 2035 only 20% of the new vehicles sold by
carmakers can be plug-in hybrids; the remainder must be
fully electric. The EU plans to slam the brakes on even
harder: the bloc will ban the sale of all cars that run on
petrol engines, including hybrids, by 2035.
Hybrids may already be less competitive by then. Battery
prices have been falling, and will fall further as production
expands and new chemistries are developed. Carmakers
such as Renault have plans to roll out BEV models that cost
significantly less than their current offerings, spurred on by
Chinese competition. Charging networks are continuing to
expand.
Bernstein predicts that PHEVS will capture a growing share

of the car market until around 2030, but that sales will then
stabilise and eventually decline as those of BEVs speed up
(see chart). Hybrids are “winning now, but BEVS will win
eventually”, reckons Patrick Hummel of UBS, a bank. Xavier
Smith of AlphaSense, a consultancy, thinks the obsession
carmakers currently have with hybrids will prove short-
sighted. Those that lose focus on electrification could soon
fall behind. ■


https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/17/why-the-hype-for-hybrid-cars-will-not-
last

Schumpeter
PwC needs to rethink its

global governance
The “big four” accounting giants have outgrown their
decentralised structures
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
LIKE HIS fellow Victorian beancounters, Edwin Waterhouse

made his name in part by unearthing frauds perpetrated
during the railway mania that gripped late-19th-century
Britain. These days the accounting-and-consulting
powerhouse that traces its history to his successful
sleuthing more often makes news for failing to detect
financial malfeasance—or for engaging in mischief itself.
Between 2010 and 2023 it faced around $450m in fines and
settlements related to botched audits and other misconduct
in various countries. The firm, which now goes by PwC
rather than PricewaterhouseCoopers, at least spares Edwin’s
memory the indignity of having his name openly tied to the
mess.
The latest stain on PwC’s reputation came on September

13th. China’s authorities slapped its affiliate in the country,
PwC Zhong Tian, with a record $62m fine and barred it from
doing business for six months. Its staff, regulators said,
“concealed or even condoned fraud” in the accounts of
Evergrande, a property developer which inflated its
revenues by nearly $80bn in the two years before its
collapse in 2021.
In anticipation of a ban, big mainland clients have been

fleeing PwC’s “assurance” practice, as auditing is known in
the industry. Some may never be reassured enough to come
back. The fallout could spread to Hong Kong, where
Evergrande was listed and whose accounting watchdog is
carrying out its own investigation. PwC has reportedly
downed shovels on a new $140m Chinese campus for
“building trust in leadership”, possibly concluding that it
might be wise to rebuild trust in its brand first.
Mohamed Kande, PwC’s newish global boss, admitted that

its work for Evergrande “fell well below our high
expectations and was completely unacceptable”. Six
partners and five other staff have been sacked, the top-
ranking partner in China has stepped down and a crisis
manager from PwC’s head office in London has been
parachuted in to replace him.
If only that were the end of it. Such mea culpas are
becoming distressingly common in the professional-services
business, which is dominated by PwC and its three giant
rivals: Deloitte, EY and KPMG. Since 2019 the “big four”
have on at least 28 occasions found themselves on the hook
for multimillion-dollar fines and settlements related to
behaviour in the past decade or so. In the five years before
2019 the like-for-like figure was four.
One explanation is that regulators are becoming more

watchful. If so, about time. Yet the profusion of scandals also
coincides with a period of rapid expansion in the quartet’s
size and reach. Growth may be putting intolerable strain on
the franchise-like model adopted by the big four, which
have long functioned as networks of independent national
partnerships. That structure makes it impossible for Mr
Kande and his counterparts to supervise their sprawling
empires.
The big four’s sheer bigness is something to behold.

Together they check the books for nearly all American and
European blue chips, as well as offering advice on
dealmaking, digitisation and plenty besides. Their collective
fees have ballooned from $134bn in 2017 to $203bn last
year. In the same period their combined ranks swelled by
500,000 employees, to 1.5m. In 2023 alone PwC hired
130,000 people, more than its total head count in 2002. And
it bid farewell to 94,000. Lots of young hires just want a
reputable employer on their CV and to move on after a year
or two. With so many coming and going, fewer have a long-
term stake in ensuring that the firm’s reputation remains
intact.
Staff face pressure to cut corners in other ways. Fresh-faced

accountants can expect to earn around $60,000 a year at
the big four in America, compared with around $100,000 for
a young management consultant at prestigious strategy
shops such as McKinsey, Bain or BCG. Yet that difference
narrows substantially once you become a partner, meaning
there are big gains to doing whatever it takes to climb up
the greasy pole. “You don’t make partner because you are a
good auditor. You make partner because you close deals,”
recalls a former big-four employee in China.
Such misalignments are especially acute in the rough-and-

tumble markets of the emerging world. Laxer corporate
oversight means more temptation for bad behaviour.
Employee churn also tends to be higher, because workers
are readier to jump ship to secure even a modest pay rise.
With little management from the top, these problems could
become widespread as a greater share of the firms’
business comes from poor countries. Around two-thirds of
the corporate entities that make up EY’s global network
reside outside the rich world. “It’s a wonder there aren’t
more scandals,” says Tom Rodenhauser of Kennedy
Intelligence, a research firm.
Split attention
Adopting a more top-down structure is, alas, out of the

question for the big four: most countries have laws that
require accountancies to be domiciled locally and owned by
citizens. Still, the giants could simplify their businesses by
hiving off the fast-growing consulting arms, as EY attempted
last year before some American partners got cold feet. Such
a split has a commercial logic: it would allow the consultants
to raise the pots of money needed for technologies such as
artificial intelligence. It would also allow the global
leadership of the rump assurance networks to focus single-
mindedly on audit quality. Splitting apart will not be easy, as
EY’s experience shows. But it is probably inevitable.
In the meantime, another way to beef up oversight is to get

serious outsiders onto the firms’ boards. That requires
regulators to relax rules barring auditors from enlisting
independent directors with ties to their clients. Given that
the big four serve the world’s finest companies, such rules
exclude just about any business figure of note. That is no
way to run a company—or audit one. ■
If you want to write directly to Schumpeter, email him at

[email protected]


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governance

Finance & economics

The world’s poorest countries have
experienced a brutal decade
End of the road :: Why has development ground to a halt?
Why the Federal Reserve has gambled on a

big interest-rate cut
Ignoring the noise :: The bold move carries economic and political risks
The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cuts

may disappoint investors
Buttonwood :: Jerome Powell could still surprise on the hawkish side
How China’s communists fell in love with

privatisation
Smashing pots, selling iron :: Even though they are not very good at it
European regulators are about to become

more political
Competition policy :: That will worry many in Silicon Valley
What the history of money tells you about

crypto’s future
Free exchange :: The thread from shipwrecks and sheep flocks to digital
currencies

End of the road
The world’s poorest

countries have
experienced a brutal
decade
Why has development ground to a halt?
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THERE ARE now a billion fewer people subsisting on less

than $2.15 a day than in 2000. Each year since the turn of
the millennium, a cast of aid workers, bureaucrats and
philanthropists, who often claim credit for this extraordinary
plunge in extreme poverty, has met on the sidelines of the
UN’s General Assembly to celebrate progress in their
catchphrase-cum-targets of “sustainable development
goals”. When on September 22nd the latest gathering
begins in New York, many will once again be feeling pleased
with themselves.
But here are some startling facts. Almost all of the progress
in the fight against poverty was achieved in the first 15
years of the 2000s (see chart 1). Indeed, in 2022 just one-
third as many people left extreme poverty as in 2013.
Progress on infectious diseases, which thrive in the poorest
countries, has slowed sharply. If the share of people
contracting malaria, in countries that have the disease, had
continued to fall at the same pace as from 2000 to 2012,
there would have been half as many cases as there in fact
were in 2022. Developing-world childhood mortality
plummeted from 79 to 42 deaths per 1,000 births between
2000 and 2016. Yet by 2022 the figure had dropped only a
little more, to 37. The share of primary-school-aged children
at school in low-income countries froze at 81% in 2015,
having risen from 56% in 2000. Poverty is a thing of the past
in much of Europe and South-East Asia; in much of Africa it
looks more ingrained than it has in decades.
The poor world has, in short, experienced a brutal decade.
Development agencies have responded by pouring cash into
education and health care, in a form of emergency triage.
Now money is growing scarce and few countries show signs
of economic take-off, despite the best efforts of institutions
such as the IMF and the World Bank. Across the world, 700m
people are still extremely poor and 2.8bn people reside in
regions that are getting no closer to rich-world living
standards.
What is going on? The answer begins with economic growth.

In theory, poor countries should be able to roll out rich-world
technology, dodging the costs and mistakes that are
associated with invention. Capital should also become
plentiful as investors search far and wide for the best
returns on offer. Together these benefits ought to lead to
higher growth in the poor world. In 2021 Dev Patel of
Harvard University and Arvind Subramanian, a former
adviser to the Indian government, now at Brown University,
established that this sort of “catch-up” growth really did
begin to happen around 1995. Over any given five-year
period, low- and middle-income countries saw their GDP per
person grow 0.1 percentage points faster than high-income
countries. China, India, East Asia and eastern European
countries that escaped the Soviet Union were responsible
for the vast majority of this progress.
In the following decade, catch-up growth briefly became

widespread. The world’s 58 poorest countries—home to
1.4bn people—grew by 3.7% a year between 2004 and
2014, against average annual growth of just 1.4% in the
OECD club of mostly rich countries. Since 2015, however,
the wealth of a country has had no influence on its
economic growth, according to Paul Collier at the University
of Oxford.
Much of East Asia and eastern Europe is now rich, meaning

that the regions’ robust growth contributes to divergence
between the rich and poor world, rather than convergence.
A new generation of fast-growing countries might have
picked up the slack were it not for a series of shocks. The
covid-19 pandemic was a disaster for all countries, but
particularly those in the developing world. Interest-rate rises
that followed, to bring down inflation, proceeded to squeeze
budgets and drag on investment. Climate change adds to
the pressure, as does an increase in the number of conflicts
around the world. Coups and corruption remain big
problems.
Stuck in the 1970s
The result is that by the end of last year, GDP per person in
Africa, the Middle East and South America was no closer to
that in America than in 2015. Things are particularly grim in
Africa (see chart 2). The average sub-Saharan’s inflation-
adjusted income is only just above its level in 1970.
Consumption remains depressed. Last year domestic
savings on the continent fell to 5% of GDP, down from 18%
in 2015.
Aid is not coming to the rescue. In the early 2000s the
unlikely duo of Bono, front man of U2, an Irish rock band,
and President George W. Bush argued that the West had a
moral responsibility to help the poor escape from poverty.
There was no reason to wait for sluggish economic growth
to do the job. By 2005 the world’s poorest 72 countries
received funds equivalent to 40% of state spending from a
combination of cheap loans, debt relief and grants.
Partly as a result, “external resources underpin much of the

work of basic health systems from supply chains to drugs,”
says Mark Suzman, chief executive of the Gates Foundation,
a charity. By 2019 nearly half of clinics and two-thirds of
schools in sub-Saharan Africa were built or had workers’
salaries paid by outside cash. The fight against malaria,
tuberculosis and HIV, the world’s most deadly infectious
diseases, is almost entirely reliant on such funding. Now,
however, money is drying up as Western enthusiasm sags
and new causes emerge. Today aid provides just 12% of the
poorest countries’ state spending.
Competition for funding will only grow as climate change

and rich-world refugee problems become more pressing.
Last year, for instance, global aid flows on paper increased
by 2%. Yet 18% of total bilateral aid was spent by rich
countries caring for refugees on their own soil—a loophole
that few countries took advantage of until 2014 (see chart
3). A further 16% went on climate spending, up from 2% a
decade ago. In total, the world’s 72 poorest countries
attracted just 17% of bilateral aid, down from 40% a decade
ago. At the same time, Chinese development finance has
evaporated. In 2012 the country’s state banks doled out
$30bn in infrastructure loans. By 2021 they handed out only
$4bn.
Whereas development aid has what could be politely
described as a mixed record, the efficacy of basic health
interventions has been more convincingly established. Thus
their absence, combined with low economic growth, is
painful. New cases of AIDS and HIV are still falling, but more
slowly than before. Much of this is down to the emergence
of new clusters of the disease in countries that had been
close to eradication. In part owing to the emergence of two
new treatment-resistant strains, the number of tuberculosis
cases is now once again on the rise.
There is little reason to believe the situation will soon

improve. Aid flows are not about to become larger;
economic growth is not picking up. How much worse, then,
could things get? Many in the development industry used to
view aid spending as a sticking plaster to be applied until
convergence between the rich and poor world brought
incomes in the latter up to speed. Yet Mr Subramanian’s
calculations suggest that, even at the more impressive
growth rates recorded in the early 2000s, it would take the
average developing country 170 years to reach just half the
rich world’s income per person. At current growth rates
progress will be considerably slower.
And developing-world finance ministers are short of more

than just money. What is remarkable is the lack of ideas—
either home-grown or emanating from institutions based in
Washington, DC—about how to get growth going again.
Economic planning is back in vogue everywhere from Brazil
and Cambodia to Kenya, with politicians claiming inspiration
from China and increasingly America, too, in a little-noticed
side-effect of President Joe Biden’s fondness for industrial
policy. Their masterplans are often big on manufacturing
ambitions, with all the tariffs and handouts you can imagine,
regardless of the cost to international competitiveness.
World Bank officials note that the governments they deal
with are today more focused on boosting jobs than
productivity, even if this means receiving investment that is
less likely to pay off.
Perky pen-pushers
Politicians often respond to tight budgets by focusing
spending on what they believe will ensure re-election, which
is mostly protecting civil servants’ salaries and public
services. Some countries, including Ghana and Sri Lanka,
are continuing to splurge on subsidies, even at the risk of
fiscal disaster. Although the IMF implores leaders to shrink
the size of their states, its dollars are less persuasive today
than they used to be. Not only are the economies with
which it deals bigger, the fund has also been enfeebled by
an insistence on repeatedly lending to countries that refuse
to stick to the conditions on which the money is disbursed.
Pakistan has, for instance, enjoyed four emergency
packages in the past decade, despite the fact that it has
failed each time to trim its lavish subsidies.
Having watered down their “neoliberalism” and insistence

on tough rules, Washington’s institutions have failed to
come up with another big idea. So far, their best attempt
has been “inclusive growth”, which covers matters such as
jobs, inequality and sexism, along with more traditional
subjects like trade and GDP. But it represents more of a
wishlist than a rescue plan, and ultimately lacks rigour.
Esther Duflo, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, is blunt: “We
can be sure that a lot of [what the World Bank does] is
useless.”
For their part, development economists are refining smaller

and smaller interventions, rather than trying to come up
with ideas that might change the world. New research
divides into two strands. One produces elaborate theories to
explain how capital and workers in the poor world ended up
producing less than their rich-world counterparts. Another
crunches the numbers to come up with effective micro-
projects, as illustrated by Ms Duflo’s widely admired work—
which, for instance, looks at the impact of the introduction
of computers in Indian schools. Researchers in both groups
insist their work is only relevant to the countries on which it
focuses. “There are just not many big ideas left in
development,” says Charles Kenny of the Centre for Global
Development, a think-tank. “Everything is about the
plumbing.”
Some think this a tragedy. For others, it is a relief. Ms Duflo

reckons that any given small intervention has a better
chance of succeeding than an equivalent policy born of
overarching economic theories dreamed up in the rich
world. On current population trajectories, poor, slow-growing
regions of the world will be home to 4bn people by 2040.
The question is whether interventions such as Ms Duflo’s
can be conducted at this vast scale. If they really are the
best hope, the welfare of billions depends on the answer. ■
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economics/2024/09/19/the-worlds-poorest-countries-have-experienced-a-brutal-decade

Ignoring the noise
Why the Federal Reserve

has gambled on a big
interest-rate cut
The bold move carries economic and political risks
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Washington, DC
THE FEDERAL RESERVE’S decision on September 18th to

lower interest rates by half a percentage point, to between
4.75% and 5%, is momentous. As the first cut by America’s
central bank since it lifted rates to quell inflation, the shift
marks the start of a monetary-easing cycle. It also
represents a bet that inflation will soon be yesterday’s
problem and that action is required to support the labour
market. For the first time since 2005, one of the Fed’s
governors in Washington dissented from the decision.
Michelle Bowman preferred to cut rates by a quarter-point.
When the Fed raised rates between early 2022 and mid-
2023, it telegraphed the size of each rise in advance. This
time there was uncertainty about how big the reduction
would be. A week earlier, market pricing implied roughly
65% odds that the Fed would cut rates by a quarter-point
and 35% odds of a half-point. By the day before the
decision, pricing had flipped, indicating a 65% probability of
a half-point cut. That some investors, albeit a minority, were
still positioned for a smaller move helps explain why stocks
rallied at first after the Fed opted for a bigger cut.
The argument for a half-point cut rests on several pillars.
Crucially, the Fed is confident that it is on track to bring
inflation under control. Price rises have slowed to an annual
pace of 2.5%, not far from its target of 2%. With oil prices
sagging and rents rising more slowly, there is a good chance
that inflation will soon ease further. So the Fed’s worries
have shifted to the job market. The unemployment rate of
4.2% is low, but nearly a full percentage point higher than
early last year. And companies have pared back their hiring.
Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, portrayed the rate cut as a
recalibration of monetary policy in line with a lessening of
inflation risks and an increase in unemployment risks.
Mr Powell’s cut is also a form of insurance. It takes months

for rate reductions to filter through the economy. Given this
lag, and given the expectation that the economy will
continue to slow, it makes sense for the Fed to make a
bigger move now in order to get ahead of the coming
weakness. The central bank was late in raising rates in
2022. This time, it hopes that starting with a bigger cut will
steer the economy towards a soft landing, avoiding the
recession which many analysts once thought inevitable. “We
don’t think we’re behind,” said Mr Powell. “We think this is
timely. But I think you can take this as sign of our
commitment not to get behind.”
The Fed’s big cut nevertheless poses some dangers. Despite

the cracks in the labour market, the economy as a whole
appears to be holding up well. Resilient consumption has
put it on track for annualised growth of 3% in the current
quarter, well ahead of most forecasts just a month ago. A
hefty rate cut against a strong economic backdrop risks
sending the wrong signal to financial markets. The central
bank judged that this risk was manageable. According to
projections released on September 18th, the median
forecast of Fed officials is that they will reduce rates by
another 1.5 percentage points by the end of next year. They
could easily make fewer cuts if inflation proves to be more
stubborn.
Another danger is politics. Coming just before the

presidential election, the big rate cut may attract criticism
from Donald Trump as a sign that the Fed, a frequent target
of his ire, is trying to help Kamala Harris. Yet a quarter-point
cut could just as easily have invited a charge from
Democrats that Mr Powell had been intimidated by Mr
Trump. Mr Powell has long said that he tunes out the
political din. He may well need a hefty pair of noise-
cancelling headphones in the coming weeks. ■
Editor’s note: This article was updated following the Fed’s

interest-rate announcement on September 18th.


economics/2024/09/18/why-the-federal-reserve-has-gambled-on-a-big-interest-rate-cut

Buttonwood
The Federal Reserve’s

interest-rate cuts may
disappoint investors
Jerome Powell could still surprise on the hawkish side
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE LONGED-FOR moment has at last arrived. For two and a

half years, ever since America’s Federal Reserve embarked
on its fastest series of interest-rate rises since the 1980s,
investors had been desperate for any hint of when it would
reverse course. But by the time Jerome Powell, the central
bank’s chair, announced the first such reduction on
September 18th, the debate among traders was no longer
“whether” but “how much”. Weeks beforehand, at an
annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, Mr Powell had already more or less confirmed
that a cut was imminent. In the event officials plumped for a
jumbo-sized chop, of 0.5 percentage points, to between
4.75% and 5%.
After an initial bounce, share prices finished the day slightly

below where they started it. That might seem odd given
how investors have reacted to Mr Powell’s pronouncements
over the past couple of years. After all, America’s
stockmarket has spent much of the time cratering whenever
it looked like interest rates would stay higher for longer, and
soaring on any suggestion that borrowing costs might soon
come down. It is not for nothing, though, that “buy the
rumour, sell the fact” is such an enduring mantra in
financial markets. For all that the prospect of rate cuts sets
investors’ pulses racing, their actual arrival has often proved
disappointing—and not just on the day they are announced.
Consider how share prices have responded to previous

loosening cycles. Although the three episodes in the 1990s,
when Alan Greenspan was at the Fed’s helm, did give the
stockmarket successive boosts, this century’s record has
been a little drearier. Rate reductions in the early 2000s
took place during the bursting of the dotcom bubble; those
starting in 2007 coincided with the market crash that
accompanied the global financial crisis. The doveish turn
that got under way in 2019 buoyed share prices at first, but
the effect was then swamped by the onset of the covid-19
pandemic.
Like so much in finance, rate cuts have a small effect on

share prices (in this case a positive one) that is easily
obscured by other factors. The fillip comes from a reduction
in borrowing costs, which allows companies to keep more of
their profits and encourages customers to spend more on
their products. If bond yields also fall, prospective returns on
shares become that much more attractive by comparison,
providing another boost.
What, then, might be the swamping factors this time? One is

perennial: that money never gets cheaper in isolation, but
because central bankers fear economic weakness and want
to stave it off. Just now, that seems like less of a concern
than normally is the case. True, America’s labour market has
cooled, which prompted a brief growth scare among
shareholders over the summer. However, unusually for the
end of a tightening cycle, the economy appears to be
merely slowing down rather than entering a recession.
Company profits should therefore be safer than usual as the
Fed reduces rates—and so should share prices.
More worrying are the infamous “long and variable lags”, as

named by Milton Friedman, between changes in monetary
policy and their impact on companies and consumers.
Counterintuitively, even as the Fed loosens, many borrowers
will face steeper interest bills. Any firm that issued fixed-
rate debt while money was nearly free, which is plenty of
them, will eventually need to refinance. Since there is little
prospect of the Fed returning interest rates close to zero any
time soon, debt-servicing costs for such companies will be
rising for some time yet. Homeowners on fixed-rate
mortgages who need to refinance (after moving house, for
instance) will be in a similar position. As such, rate cuts may
energise the economy, and hence the stockmarket, less
today than they would have done in the past.
The biggest hint that the Fed’s largesse will disappoint

investors in the coming months, though, is the extent to
which the market has been anticipating it. Before the rate-
setting committee met, traders’ central expectation was
already for 1.25 percentage points’ worth of cuts before the
year is out, followed by another 1.25 next year. Such rapid
moves have only occurred in the past amid recessions or
crises. There is plenty of room, in other words, for Mr Powell
to surprise on the hawkish side even as he continues to
slash rates, which would raise bond yields and make stocks
less attractive. Rate cuts ought to be good for the
stockmarket. But not if investors have already pocketed
their benefits.■


economics/2024/09/16/the-federal-reserves-interest-rate-cuts-may-disappoint-
investors

Smashing pots, selling iron
How China’s communists

fell in love with
privatisation
Even though they are not very good at it
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Shanghai
ON A RECENT visit to his hometown of Laixi, in eastern

China, Guo Ping received a shock: the local government had
sold off a number of state-owned assets, including two
reservoirs. The small city’s finances, as well as those in the
neighbouring port of Qingdao, were under strain, forcing
officials to come up with new sources of revenue. This
meant hawking even large bits of regional infrastructure.
The sales seemed to be part of what Mr Guo, who asked to
use a pseudonym, views as a gradual economic
deterioration.
Cities and towns across China are struggling to pay their

bills. As policymakers labour to revive the economy, tax
revenues continue to fall. A property crisis makes matters
worse, hurting the ability of local authorities to sell land-use
rights to property developers, usually one of their main
sources of income. Land revenues fell to 26% of total local-
authority revenues last year, down from 36% in 2020. Thus
cadres have had to come up with ways to raise money—no
matter how awkward.
Bus operators in small cities are suspending services. Low-
level civil servants gripe about salaries being delayed or
slashed. Tax collectors have been looking back decades for
unpaid bills. And cities are raising fines for infractions such
as traffic violations. In Wuzhou, southern China, these now
provide almost 50% as much income as taxes, compared
with less than 8% in most cities. After waiving tolls on
highways for over a decade, provinces such as Anhui, Gansu
and Shandong have started to collect them again.
So why not sell some assets? Local financial analysts insist

that cities are sitting upon incredible wealth. They control
the sale of land and are in possession of varied portfolios,
which include holdings in state-owned firms, parks, utilities,
train lines and even Buddhist temples. If officials can
monetise just a small share of these by renting or selling
them to the private sector, the thinking goes, they may be
able to plug some of the holes in their budgets.
Although there were some asset sales before, the central

government first began promoting privatisation in 2022,
when it called on local governments to “revitalise” assets as
a way to reduce debt. Then last year a document circulated
by the State Council, China’s cabinet, instructed the 12
most-indebted provinces to “smash the pots and sell the
iron”, an idiom signifying a last-ditch effort to raise funds.
Many areas are picking up their hammers. By May the

government of Ganzhou, in south-east China, had brought in
370m yuan ($50m) by allowing municipal water and bus
firms to sell plots of land. A district in Chongqing, a south-
western megacity, announced in August that it would
“smash the pots” in order to relieve a debt crisis. Some local
governments have bundled more sought-after government
projects with assets they want to dump, pushing buyers to
take unwanted office buildings or industrial parks off their
hands.
These types of asset sales are now picking up momentum.

In Jiangsu and Shandong, two coastal provinces, non-tax
revenues, which include proceeds from asset disposals, rose
by 15% in the first half of the year. In Qingdao, which
includes Laixi, the price of state assets sold on a local
exchange hit 5.9bn yuan last year, more than double the
year before. This includes sales of use-rights for seven
reservoirs with contracts that last for up to 40 years.
Just how much can be flogged? The first obstacle is

ascertaining which bit of the state owns an asset. For those
more than two decades old, documentation is poor. As cities
have grown, many have been joined together or emerged
from local districts. Huang Wenyin of S&P Global Ratings, a
rating agency, says that the building in which she grew up
in Beijing was owned by a state firm, even as employees of
another state firm lived in it as part of an informal
arrangement. A third state firm may have also had claims
on the building. As decades passed, a lack of documentation
meant that the building was never demolished. A potentially
lucrative plot of land therefore remains undeveloped.
There are also risks for purchasers interested in taking on

state assets, since they have a quasi-sacred status. Unlike
Russia, which sold many of its assets following the collapse
of the Soviet Union, China has never experienced a “big
bang”. Instead it has slowly privatised since the early
1980s, when little private property existed. Questions
remain about how assets have been sold and whether fair
prices were paid many years ago. Peking University, for
instance, launched a lawsuit in 2019 against the
shareholders of a firm called Founder Group, averring that
its sale of a stake in the company 15 years ago had
happened on fraudulent grounds.
Bosses worry that deals may attract attention and later be

probed for corruption. Meanwhile, those at state-owned
companies fear making losses. Chinese law does not allow
deals to be agreed on such terms and the central
government has warned that it will punish managers who
break the rules. Public opprobrium is never far away. Mr Guo
was unhappy to hear about the reservoir sales in Laixi.
Some social-media users question the legality of the deals,
while online articles also criticise them.
Perhaps the main challenge is to create a true market for

state treasures. Private buyers risk being accused of insider
dealing and snaffling assets on the cheap. At the same time,
they fear ending up with a lemon—an asset that appears
nice to outsiders but has little value to those in the know.
This might explain why many of the assets are simply being
passed between state companies. Such transactions do not
involve the private sector and therefore cannot be accused
of creating losses for the state. Although documents for the
sale of two of Laixi’s reservoirs note that the deal attracted
“social capital”, or private-sector money, the true buyer was
another state firm in the same city. Perhaps the sale will
help alleviate short-term liquidity problems for the city
government. It will, though, hardly stop its debt build-up. ■


economics/2024/09/15/how-chinas-communists-fell-in-love-with-privatisation

Competition policy
European regulators are

about to become more
political
That will worry many in Silicon Valley
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午 | Brussels
EUROPE’S TOUGH competition policy is something of a

historical accident. After the second world war Germany
wanted to contain cartels, which it viewed as a threat to its
young democracy and market economy. France, meanwhile,
saw cracking down on big firms as a way to promote its
economic interests. Messy negotiations ended up handing
lots of power to the European Commission, where it resides
to this day—much to the dismay of many in Silicon Valley. In
recent years Brussels has launched a series of regulatory
investigations into America’s tech giants, including Apple,
Google and Meta.
How should the commission wield its power? The question is

increasingly fraught. On the one hand, Europe’s markets
appear to be less competitive than in the past. At the turn of
the millennium the four largest firms in the average
European industry claimed a market share of less than 26%.
By 2019 that figure has risen to 31%, with some smaller
national markets, including Finland and Hungary, much
more concentrated. There is also less change in the
composition of the market leaders. On top of this, mark-ups
appear to be growing, especially in services and the most
digitised industries, where they are up by about 10% in the
past two decades.
On the other hand, Europe is nervous about its global

stature, which some officials believe would be enhanced by
having more corporate behemoths. Europe’s economy is
growing slowly, its industry faces Chinese competition and
innovation in things like artificial intelligence is happening
elsewhere. Mario Draghi, a former governor of the European
Central Bank, recently published a 400-odd-page report on
these issues, recommending tweaks to competition policy.
Teresa Ribera, appointed competition commissioner on
September 17th (and pictured), has been instructed by
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s
president, to use the report to forge “a new approach”.
The first issue is innovation. So-called killer acquisitions,

where a bigger, dominant firm buys a smaller, more
innovative competitor, are a hot topic in Europe, with its
many small- and medium-sized companies. Ms Ribera has
been told to look in particular at such takeovers by foreign
firms, even though European competition rules until now
have tended to be neutral when it comes to the nationality
of ownership. On another front, Mr Draghi proposes a
broader, dedicated “innovation defence” that companies
could use to justify a merger. Together, the measures would
produce a more complex approach to competition policy,
and one that places less emphasis on consumer welfare.
Next is how to incorporate geopolitical goals into regulation.

The commission wants European firms to develop more
robust supply chains, as well as business models that are
less dependent on the goodwill of other governments. If that
means joint efforts to, say, buy critical minerals or develop
common tech standards, then so be it, reckons Mr Draghi.
The difficulty is that joint actions do not necessarily increase
resilience if they mean that lots of firms are reliant on the
same single source. Mr Draghi also wants a new body to
advise on security-sensitive areas. Taking such concerns into
consideration in competition decisions could give EU policy
a more “Buy European” flavour.
Then there is the issue of government spending. The EU is

keen to bolster its own industrial policy, while seeking to
protect the continent’s industries from being swayed by
such policy elsewhere. New provisions to ensure that foreign
subsidies do not tilt the playing field against European firms
should be enforced vigorously, Mrs von der Leyen demands.
When EU countries themselves want to spend money in
support of green industries and others deemed strategic, Ms
Ribera will probably be faster to make decisions and more
lenient in her verdicts, so long as spending is co-ordinated
with other countries. This builds upon the more laid-back
approach that emerged during the covid-19 pandemic and
Europe’s energy crisis.
The final potential changes concern new areas for
competition policy. American technology firms are feeling
the brunt of the Digital Markets Act, which is the EU’s
attempt to intervene when it decides that anti-competitive
behaviour may, in the future, damage the market. Mr Draghi
also suggests new competition tools to address tacit
collusion, as well as in markets where consumers are
reluctant to change suppliers, such as in energy provision.
Most economists, including Mr Draghi, agree that Europe’s

competition policy, though occasionally overbearing, is one
of the continent’s success stories. In the years to come,
however, there is a danger that it will be forced to serve too
many masters. Ambitions to catch up on digital innovation,
for instance, may be better pursued by encouraging deeper
European capital markets or a less fragmented services
market. It is far from clear that competition policy should
concern itself with supply chains. Ms Ribera has a big job on
her hands—probably too big a job. ■


economics/2024/09/19/european-regulators-are-about-to-become-more-political

Free exchange
What the history of money

tells you about crypto’s
future
The thread from shipwrecks and sheep flocks to digital
currencies
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THIS MONTH China’s central bank revealed that its digital

currency, the e-CNY, had been used for 7trn-yuan-worth of
transactions in its short life—an amount equivalent to
almost $1trn. China is not alone. Over 130 countries are
exploring digital currencies, according to the Atlantic
Council, a think-tank. Proponents of official digital currencies
believe that a combination of ubiquitous smartphones,
innovative cryptography and vast computing power means
it is possible to remake the financial system.
The future of money, in other words, is attracting attention.

What of its past? In a new paper, Adam Brzezinski of the
London School of Economics, Nuno Palma of the University
of Manchester and François Velde of the Chicago branch of
the Federal Reserve urge readers also to pay close attention
to money’s long history. It is capable of “delightful
surprises”, they point out. It also contains some parallels to
the supposed novelties of today.
Central-bank digital currencies, for example, could give

members of the public an account at the central bank. That
sounds new. But as several economists have noted, it is also
a return to the past. The Bank of England used to take
deposits from the public: in 1855 a Regent Street hatter is
recorded to have opened an account at the bank’s
handsome new branch in Mayfair. And in 1900 the Bank of
Spain held over half the country’s current accounts.
The study of history may also disappoint crypto enthusiasts

who wish to liberate money from government control.
Monetary policy—the manipulation of money by the state—
is almost as old as money itself. Even when coins were
made out of gold or silver, governments fiddled with their
weight and purity. The value of coins often departed from
the preciousness of their materials. Indeed, governments
sometimes diluted the silver content of smaller, more
practical coins to prevent shortages.
Until the 19th century, the value of coins was rarely

inscribed on their face. They had no “face value” in this
literal sense, as Mr Brzezinski and co-authors point out. This
allowed for a separation between two functions of money
that are now seamlessly joined. Coins served as a medium
of exchange, the thing people swapped for the stuff they
bought. Yet they did not serve as the unit of account, the
thing in which everything else is priced. Often the unit of
account was an old coin that had since disappeared from
circulation; “ghost money”, in the words of Carlo Cipolla, a
historian.
Such separation allowed the French court to carry out a

grand monetary-policy experiment in the 1720s. In an effort
to lower prices—what you might call an Inflation Reduction
Act—the king’s council decided, without warning, that coins
would be worth less than before. From 1723 to 1724, it cut
their value by 45%. The policy resembles the kind of
thought experiment beloved of economic theorists. David
Hume, for example, once imagined what would happen if £5
was “slipt” into the pockets of every man in Britain,
doubling the money in the kingdom. Would this miracle
make everyone twice as rich? He assumed that it would only
increase the price of everything “without further
consequence”. The French in 1724 likewise expected prices
to fall quickly.
They were wrong. “Everyone is so accustomed to sell dearly

that no one can bring themselves to lower their prices,” one
observer reported. “By a barely conceivable madness it
seems that everyone in concert insists on doing the
opposite of what common sense and reason dictate.” It took
almost four years for prices to fall back into line. In the
interim, France suffered an industrial recession: the number
of looms in operation fell by about 30%.
The French decision was reckless, rather than random. It

was imposed on an economy that suffered from inflation. It
was not therefore a clean test of the effects of monetary
shocks. Unfortunately, it is hard to conduct randomised
trials of monetary policy.
History does nevertheless throw up “natural” experiments.

In an earlier paper, Mr Brzezinski, Mr Palma and two co-
authors exploited one source of variation in the money
supply of early modern Spain: disasters at sea. Ships
carrying treasure to Spain from the Americas would
sometimes encounter hurricanes, privateers or the British
navy. In 42 incidents from 1531 to 1810, they lost some or
all of the precious metals that Spanish merchants had
expected to receive. The losses averaged 4% of Spain’s
money stock. Drawing on a variety of sources, including tax
records and tallies of sheep, the authors showed the
damage these losses inflicted on Spain’s economy. Credit
became scarce, making it hard for merchants to buy
supplies for weavers, and consumer prices were slow to
adjust. A loss of 1% of the money stock could reduce real
output by about 1% in the subsequent year. Sheep-flock
sizes fell by 7%.
Paper, the barbarous relic
To the modern eye it seems strange to allow the money

supply to be such a hostage to fortune. Why should it shrink
when ships sink? Why should it expand when fresh deposits
of silver are discovered? Even in the 18th century, some
visionaries thought money should break its link to metals.
The most prominent example is John Law, a Scottish banker
and chancer who somehow persuaded France to shake up
its monetary arrangements in 1716.
Law was ahead of his time—his experiment with fiat paper
currency ended in disastrous inflation. In the future, money
may need to change form again. It may shed all physical
manifestations, as coins and notes become obsolete; the
bank deposit may be replaced by a claim on the monetary
authority itself. But some economists worry that such a
transition also poses risks, making bank runs, or even runs
out of currency into physical assets, easier. Although the
forms money takes may be new, its effects will rarely be
neutral. And as Mr Brzezinski and co-authors point out, it is
cheaper to learn from the mistakes of the past than to make
instructive mistakes in the present. ■


economics/2024/09/19/what-the-history-of-money-tells-you-about-cryptos-future

Science & technology

Most electric-car batteries could soon be
made by recycling old ones
Waste not, want not :: Mining for raw materials may peak by the mid-2030s
New battery designs could lead to gains in

power and capacity
Energy storage :: Researchers are looking beyond the cathode
Earth may once have had a planetary ring

Geology :: It would have collapsed 450m years ago
China’s AI firms are cleverly innovating

around chip bans
The mother of invention :: Tweaks to software blunt the shortage of
powerful hardware
How bush pigs saved Madagascar’s baobabs

Long-standing mystery :: Non-native species are not always harmful

Waste not, want not
Most electric-car batteries

could soon be made by
recycling old ones
Mining for raw materials may peak by the mid-2030s
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
DESPITE A SLOWDOWN in electric-vehicle (EV) sales in some

countries, demand for batteries was up by around 40%
globally last year, and seems likely to continue at a similar
pace. Consequently, the world’s appetite for lithium, the
vital ingredient in the lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that
dominate the EV market, is expected to exceed 2.4m tonnes
in 2030, more than twice its present level.
Where all this lithium will come from is a thorny question.
Although 70% of the world’s reserves of lithium carbonate
(from which it is mined) are in Argentina, Australia and
Chile, processing it into a form suitable for use in batteries is
a business currently dominated by China. As China also
commands the processing of other important battery
materials, including manganese, cobalt and nearly all
battery-grade graphite, there is concern about the
vulnerability of supply chains should China begin restricting
supplies of certain raw materials, as it has done in the past.
As a result, legislators and carmakers in Europe and North
America have been trying to establish local supplies for
batteries.
These efforts are about to be given a big boost. Recent

breakthroughs in recycling, together with a spate of
technological improvements, mean that within a decade or
so most of the global demand for raw materials to build new
batteries could be met by recycling old ones.
Lithium, manganese and cobalt are widely used to make

electrodes called cathodes, the most expensive part of a Li-
ion battery. When the battery is recharging, electrons are
stripped from lithium atoms on the cathode to create
charged particles called ions. The ions then migrate through
an electrolyte, typically a liquid medium, to a second
electrode called an anode. This is made from graphite, a
pure form of carbon. Meanwhile, the electrons created at
the cathode travel along the wires of the charging circuit
towards the anode, where they reunite with the ions and are
stored there. When the battery discharges, the process
reverses, with electrons in the circuit powering a device—
which in the case of an EV is its electric motor. Although
different chemistries can be employed, manganese and
cobalt are particularly good at stabilising and boosting the
performance of a Li-ion battery.
At present battery recycling is mostly confined to recovering
raw materials from the scrap produced by gigafactories. A
much richer vein will soon present itself, however, as the
first wave of EVs reach the end of their lives. By 2040,
according to PwC, a professional-services firm, up to 60% of
the materials used to make batteries in Europe could come
from recycling old ones, helped along by innovations in
recovery processes.
Other analysts take a similar view. Globally, the mining of

raw ingredients for battery manufacturing could peak by the
mid 2030s, reckons RMI, an American think-tank. This will be
caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing
advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy
density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer
raw materials. This, RMI believes, might see mineral
extraction for batteries being avoided altogether by 2050.
The ways in which batteries are recycled today pose many

problems. Some are labour-intensive, whereas others need
lots of energy or are environmentally harmful. But each
hurdle is a spur to innovation. Stripping cells apart by
physical means to remove their components, for example,
takes a lot of effort. A process called pyrometallurgy can
simplify the harvesting of metals like nickel and cobalt by
roasting batteries at temperatures of up to 1,600°C, but this
is no good for getting at the lithium. That metal instead
requires a process called hydrometallurgy in which old
batteries are crushed and the resulting “black mass” is
treated with harsh chemicals known as lixiviants.
Some lixiviants use concentrated acids which can carry

environmental and health risks. This means they have to be
treated carefully before disposal, driving up recycling costs.
More benign alternatives exist, such as the deep eutectic
solvents (DES) developed by researchers at Rice University
in Houston, Texas, which are biodegradable and non-toxic.
But these solvents come with problems of their own.
Because they generally require heating for a long period at
around 200°C, during which time they can degrade and lose
effectiveness, DES have so far not been proved to be
commercially viable.
The Rice group has found a simple solution to the problem

of heat-induced degradation: popping them into a
microwave oven. It turns out that choline chloride, a DES
ingredient which specifically leaches out lithium, is an
excellent absorber of microwaves. This means the DES can
rapidly heat up to the temperatures necessary to extract
lithium from a black mass, says Sohini Bhattacharyya, one
of the Rice team.
In a recent study published in Advanced Functional

Materials, a journal, the group reports that by using
microwaves a DES was able to recover some 50% of the
lithium in a spent cathode in as little as 30 seconds.
Recovering 87% took 15 minutes, an improvement on the
12 hours necessary to collect the same amount using a
conventional electrically powered oil-bath. This discovery
promises to make lithium recovery faster, cheaper and more
effective (some conventional recycling processes extract as
little as 5%). It should also be possible to tune DES solutions
to speedily extract other metals, too.
Other researchers are taking an interest in non-metallic

compounds. The graphite in an anode, for example, can
represent about half of a battery by volume. Although
graphite can also be mined, most of it is currently produced
in a synthetic form by roasting needle coke, a by-product of
some coal-processing and petrochemical plants. As graphite
must be purified to above 99.95% in order to make anodes,
recovering it from contaminated battery waste is extremely
difficult.
Pure and simple
Talga, an Australian materials firm, has come up with a

solution to that problem. It recently signed deals with two
recyclers, Altilium, a British company, and Aurubis, a
German one, to purify graphite recovered from scrap and
end-of-life batteries so that it can be used again to make
new anodes. Talga will use a chemical purification process,
the details of which are being kept under wraps while
patents are pending. It is, however, known to be based on a
technique used at Europe’s first anode-production facility.
This was set up by Talga in northern Sweden, where the
company also operates a graphite mine.
As recycling technology continues to evolve, a circular

supply chain may emerge. That should allow more localised
battery production and avoid supply-chain vulnerabilities. It
would also reduce the overall lifetime carbon emissions
involved in the mining and refining of battery raw materials
—allowing the drivers of EVs to more rightfully claim to be
green. ■
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technology/2024/09/19/most-electric-car-batteries-could-soon-be-made-by-recycling-
old-ones

Energy storage
New battery designs could

lead to gains in power and
capacity
Researchers are looking beyond the cathode
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
IN THEIR QUEST to build a better battery, researchers have

blazed a trail through the elements of the periodic table.
The earliest prototype cells ran on nickel and cadmium;
successors have used everything from zinc and iron to
sodium and lead.
All have had what it takes to serve as a cathode for a

battery: namely, an ability to have electrons ripped away
from their atoms to be turned into electric current, leaving
positively charged ions behind. For the past four decades,
though, it is lithium that has beaten all comers. Lightweight
and reactive, it serves as an ideal cathode component;
lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are widely used in electricity
grids and can be found in most of the world’s electric
vehicles. So effective are lithium-based cathodes that
scientists hoping to make batteries better and more
powerful are turning their attention instead to the other,
long-overshadowed components of cells. Those efforts are
starting to pay off.
As important as a cell’s cathode, but much less studied, is

the anode, the electrode where electrons reunite with their
host atoms while a battery charges (during discharge, the
electrons and ions reunite at the cathode). While electrons
flow between the electrodes through a wire, the movement
of ions is made possible only by a carefully chosen
electrolyte, a conductive medium in which both electrodes
sit. Another component is the current collector, which lives
up to its name by ensuring any electricity generated is
delivered to the circuit, rather than going to waste.
Each is ripe for improvement. The ideal anode material

must, among other things, be able to absorb lithium ions.
Graphite has thus far been the ideal candidate, but
scientists are now trying to replace it with silicon, which is
both cheaper and more absorbent. The amount of energy
that it can store by weight is about ten times higher than
graphite, too. When silicon anodes charge, though, the
incoming lithium ions cause them to swell quickly,
eventually leading to cracks.
Several companies are looking for a fix. American battery-

component startups such as Sila Nano and Group14 have
developed composite materials that embed molecules of
silicon into a web of carbon molecules. This would be able to
contain the swelling. Sila Nano’s product will boost the
energy density of Li-ion batteries by between 20% and 40%;
Group14’s will increase it by as much as 50%.
Amprius Technologies, a company based in Fremont,

California, is opting for anodes built from hundreds of
nanowires of pure silicon, each surrounded by empty space
into which it can expand. Amprius’s latest generation of
anodes can achieve energy densities of up to 500 watt-
hours per kilogram, compared with just under 300 watt-
hours per kilogram for typical Li-ion batteries with graphite
anodes. NanoGraf, a company based in Chicago, has
meanwhile developed a low-cost anode made of silicon
oxide which can be filled with lithium ions before being
installed in a battery. This pre-swelling, in effect, limits the
amount of expansion the anode will subsequently undergo.
Gains may also be found beyond the “active components”,

as electrodes are known. Thus far, innovation on inactive
components has mostly focused on shrinking them down, so
that more electrode material can fit in the cell. But these
long overlooked parts are the cool kids now, says one
battery-component startup founder.
Electrolytes are the true game-changer, says Shirley Meng,

the chief scientist at Argonne National Laboratory’s energy
storage unit. This is because they make physical contact
with every other component. Given their pivotal role,
researchers like Dr Meng believe better electrolytes hold the
key to big gains not just in lithium-ion batteries, but in their
successors, too.
In June researchers at Asahi Kasei, a Japanese

conglomerate, found significant performance gains when
they substituted the electrolyte used in a standard Li-ion
battery with their proprietary alternative. At -40°C the cells
with the Asahi Kasei electrolyte retained charge, though the
carbonate-based electrolyte used in standard batteries did
not. At 60°C, 15 degrees above the maximum operating
temperature for a Li-ion battery, the new electrolyte-filled
cell could undergo twice as many charging cycles before
seeing a 20% drop in battery health. As the world heats up,
such temperature-resistance will be crucial for the stability
of electric vehicles and other energy-storage systems.
Perhaps the most promising battery innovations affect the

least considered component: the current collector. This
element, made of thin aluminium sheets that sit atop the
cathode and copper sheets that sit atop the anode,
conducts electricity from the battery to the circuit.
Addionics, an Israeli company, has found that tweaking the
geometry of these sheets can boost the batteries’
performance. Unlike the smooth sheets used in today’s
batteries, Addionics’s offering has hills and valleys; like a
“tiny egg carton”, says Moshiel Biton, the company’s
founder. It is also porous. This combination of factors allows
active materials such as lithium or graphite from the anode
and cathode to seep into the current collectors and thereby
improve their conductivity.
When Addionics tested its 3D current collector, it found that

the design was less likely to come unstuck from the
electrodes than conventional collectors were. Among other
things, that increased its capacity and ability to carry
current. Tests have also shown that this design of collector
could also help the latest generation of Li-ion batteries
double the number of charging cycles they can undergo. As
Addionics’s 3D current collector is chemistry-agnostic, it will
work just as well on a lithium-ion battery as on any
successor.
Such advances, though significant, have yet to be
manufactured at scale. Big battery companies want “drop-
in” products, says Francis Wang, NanoGraf’s boss. In many
cases, manufacturers would need to overhaul their
production processes to accommodate any single change in
design, a risky and expensive proposition. If they can get
over their risk aversion, though, then lasting breakthroughs
could await. ■


technology/2024/09/19/new-battery-designs-could-lead-to-gains-in-power-and-capacity

Geology
Earth may once have had

a planetary ring
It would have collapsed 450m years ago
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
COULD EARTH once have had a planetary ring like the ones
around Saturn? Scientists from Monash University in
Australia think so. In a recent paper they identify 450m-
year-old craters that lie close to Earth’s historical equator.
They propose these were caused by the collapse of a ring of
debris (possibly the remnants of a large asteroid) that once
circled the planet. The ring might have lasted tens of
millions of years, cooling Earth with its shadow. ■

technology/2024/09/18/earth-may-once-have-had-a-planetary-ring

The mother of invention
China’s AI firms are

cleverly innovating around
chip bans
Tweaks to software blunt the shortage of powerful hardware
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
TODAY’S TOP artificial-intelligence (AI) models rely on large

numbers of cutting-edge processors known as graphics
processing units (GPUs). Most Western companies have no
trouble acquiring them. Llama 3, the newest model from
Meta, a social-media giant, was trained on 16,000 H100
GPUs from Nvidia, an American chipmaker. Meta plans to
stockpile 600,000 more before year’s end. XAI, a startup
backed by Elon Musk, has built a data centre in Memphis
powered by 100,000 H100s. And though OpenAI, the other
big model-maker, is tight-lipped about its GPU stash, it had
its latest processors hand-delivered by Jensen Huang,
Nvidia’s boss, in April.
This kind of access is a distant dream for most Chinese tech

firms. Since October 2022 America has blocked the sale of
high-performance processors to China. Some Chinese firms
are rumoured to be turning to the black market to get their
hands on these coveted chips. But the majority have shifted
their focus to making the most of limited resources. Their
results are giving Western firms food for thought.
Among the innovators is DeepSeek, a Chinese startup based

in Hangzhou. Its latest model, DeepSeek-v2.5, launched in
early September, holds its own against leading open-source
models on coding challenges as well as tasks in both English
and Chinese. These gains are not down to size: DeepSeek is
said to have just over 10,000 of Nvidia’s older GPUs—a big
number for a Chinese firm, but small by the standards of its
American competitors.
DeepSeek makes up for this shortfall in a number of ways.

The first is that it consists of a number of different networks,
each best suited to a different problem. This “mixture of
experts” approach allows the model to delegate each task
to the right network, improving speed and reducing
processing time. Though DeepSeek has 236bn
“parameters”—the virtual connections linking distinct bits of
data—it uses less than a tenth at a time for each new chunk
of information it processes. The model also compresses new
data before they are processed. This helps it handle large
inputs more efficiently.
DeepSeek is not alone in finding creative solutions to a GPU
shortage. MiniCPM, an open-source model developed by
Tsinghua University and ModelBest, an AI startup, comes in
varieties with 2.4bn and 1.2bn parameters, respectively.
Despite its small size, MiniCPM’s performance on language-
related tasks is comparable to large language models
(LLMs) with between 7bn and 13bn parameters. Like
DeepSeek’s model, it combines a mixture-of-experts
approach with input compression. Like other small models
with fewer parameters, however, MiniCPM may not be
terribly high-perfoming in areas outside its specific field of
training.
MiniCPM’s tiny size makes it well-suited for personal

devices. In August its creators released a version of the
model for mobile phones, which supports multiple
languages and works with various types of data, from text
and images to audio.
Similar approaches are being tried elsewhere.

FlashAttention-3, an algorithm developed by researchers
from Together.ai, Meta and Nvidia, speeds up the training
and running of LLMs by tailoring its design for Nvidia’s H100
GPUs. JEST, another algorithm released in July by Google
DeepMind, is fed smaller quantities of high-quality data for
its initial training before being let loose on larger, lower-
quality data sets. The company claims this approach is 13
times faster and ten times more efficient than other
methods. Researchers at Microsoft, which backs OpenAI,
have also released a small language model called Phi-3 mini
with around 4bn parameters.
For Chinese firms, unlike those in the West, doing more with
less is not optional. But this may be no bad thing. After all,
says Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital, an AI investment
fund, “The scarcity mindset definitely incentivises efficiency
gains.” ■


technology/2024/09/19/chinas-ai-firms-are-cleverly-innovating-around-chip-bans

Long-standing mystery
How bush pigs saved

Madagascar’s baobabs
Non-native species are not always harmful
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
THE MALAGASY baobab tree, whose thick trunks and tiny

branches dot Madagascar’s landscape, should not, by rights,
have survived to the present day. Scientists believe that its
large seeds were once dispersed by the giant tortoises and
gorilla-size giant lemurs that roamed the island. When these
species went extinct over one thousand years ago owing to
human activity, the baobab tree should have vanished too.
It did not. Seheno Andriantsaralaza at the University of
Antananarivo in Madagascar and Onja Razafindratsima at
the University of California, Berkeley, now think they may
know the reason why.
Together with their colleagues, the scientists monitored 15

tree canopies in a western region of Madagascar, to identify
any animals that might have claimed the mantle of baobab-
seed disperser. The researchers also set up camera traps
around seed-containing fruits lying on the ground, and
searched any faeces that they encountered along the way
for the presence of seeds.
They report in the journal Biotropica that a native rodent

known as the western tuft-tailed rat was caught on camera
handling whole fruits on four occasions. Although there was
no footage of the rat breaking the fruits open, the team did
stumble upon 13 fruits that had been chewed into and had
their seeds removed. Though the bite marks were not clear
enough to identify a culprit, this was clear evidence that a
seed-distributing animal was out there. They then found the
ecological equivalent of a smoking gun: baobab seeds in
seven different piles of bush-pig dung.
The discovery is not without irony. Scientists believe bush

pigs were brought to Madagascar by humans sometime
between 1,000 and 5,000 years ago, just as the giant
lemurs and tortoises were going extinct. Their arrival was a
lucky break for the baobabs—especially as scientists have
determined that a seed’s journey through the porcine
digestive system does not hamper its ability to germinate.
While the finding is important in its own right, it also

provides valuable evidence that introduced species may not
be entirely harmful. Madagascar’s pigs, for example, though
not native, have made themselves essential to the survival
of truly native species. Similar relationships are suspected
to hold in South America between rabbits native to Europe
and plants with no seed distributors. For Dr
Andriantsaralaza, that suggests the full ecological role of
introduced species should be considered before talk of
extermination begins.■


technology/2024/09/18/how-bush-pigs-saved-madagascars-baobabs

Culture
How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape
the world
God in the bedroom :: Despite their shaky grounding in scripture
How today’s wealthy present themselves

differently
Rich people’s problems :: A new book offers an engrossing but flawed
takedown of Britain’s most privileged
How the martini became the world’s most

iconic cocktail
World in a dish :: It has a glamorous history and can be endlessly
personalised
Weight-loss drugs have changed culture

Here’s the skinny :: And slimmed demand for diet books
Meet the world’s most elusive arms dealer

Rocket man :: Karl Lee helped Iran build missiles. Where is he?
One of history’s biggest drivers is not what

you might think
Unbridled :: The horse has moulded empires, wars and human affairs
profoundly

God in the bedroom
How odd Christian beliefs

about sex shape the world
Despite their shaky grounding in scripture
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
Lower than the Angels. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen

Lane; 688 pages; £35. To be published in America by Viking
in April 2025; $40
THE WORRY was the Virgin Mary’s vagina. Early Christians

were very clear on some things. They knew that the Holy
Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was
still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how
those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God
got in?
Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—
and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off
limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested
one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through
her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary
through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine
being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.
God is odd about sex. The Bible and Christian writings are
odder yet. If all this weirdness affected only believers, it
would be important enough. With more than 2bn adherents,
Christianity is the world’s largest religion and—though it
might not always feel like it in the smugly secularising West
—is still growing in many regions.
But Christianity’s sexual hang-ups—on everything from

celibacy to contraception, homosexuality and more—carry
consequences for more than the faithful. In America
abortion could sway the election. In Russia Vladimir Putin
signed legislation against “non-traditional sexual relations”.
In Britain a fight over ending restrictions on abortion is
brewing. This is a good time to try to understand sex and
Christianity.
Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers

to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to
find, argues a compendious new book on sex and
Christianity. Its author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is an Oxford
academic whose big, fat books on Christianity are almost
always a big deal, winning him awards and starring roles in
television series.
The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd

books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is
less a book than a library—and displays a correspondingly
broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer
monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy
poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender
descriptions of a man’s passion for his male lover. There is,
Mr MacCulloch writes, “no such thing as a single Christian
theology of sex”.
Not that such an inconvenient truth has ever stopped

Christians from claiming that there is—or getting cross with
those they see as deviating from it. From those who burned
“sodomites” at the stake in the 12th century to those who
flame “deviants” on social media today, Christians have a
habit of getting angry about this stuff. Where once they
argued about transubstantiation, now they are far more
likely to argue about trans issues, notes Mr MacCulloch.
He has a point: the entire Anglican Communion, the third-

largest club of Christian churches (after Roman Catholic and
Eastern Orthodox), has for years been in danger of a
schism. Its members are sparring about whether or not to
allow gay marriages in churches. Add the horror over the
scale of Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of children, as well as
arguments over contraception, abortion and the ordination
of women, and it is possible to see why Mr MacCulloch
writes that sex and gender are currently causing more
arguments within the church than “at virtually any time over
the last two millennia of Christian life”.
Any religion is as much almost random accretion as actual

doctrine. Christianity’s sexual obsessions are no different.
Much of what people “know” about Christianity is, to put it
mildly, hard to find in the Bible. There was, for example, no
apple in Eden (it reputedly grew out of a translator’s pun:
the words for “apple” and “evil” are almost identical in
Latin). As a fiery place of torture, hell is similarly almost
entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament. And
the word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer—often the only
Christian prayer that many know—is pure bunkum. (No one
has a clue what the Greek word that appears before the
word “bread” actually means.)
Christians may have banged on about sex, celibacy and

homosexuality for centuries, but, in truth, Jesus had
precious little to say about any of them. Though he was fiery
in his condemnation of greedy people, he had absolutely
nothing to say about gay ones; yet, as one modern
theologian pithily pointed out, “No medieval states burned
the greedy at the stake.” There is, similarly, little in the way
of Christian “family values” to be spotted in the life of this
man who was rude to his mother and who himself never
married.
Christianity’s oddness about sex and families can be traced,

in part, to Christ’s odd start in life. The Mary-Joseph-God
ménage à trois was unusual enough for Mary—and was not
much fun for Joseph either. While all that was going on
between his betrothed and God, St Joseph had to sit on the
sidelines—sometimes sanguine, occasionally annoyed,
eventually sanctified. Rarely has a man deserved his
sainthood more. There were, as Mr MacCulloch puts it,
“three of them in that marriage, so it was a bit theologically
crowded”.
To understand where the various Christian sexual hang-ups

come from, Mr MacCulloch goes on a quick tour of the
heroes and villains of two millennia of Christian theology,
from St Paul (whose angry epistles inspired centuries of
homophobia), via St Jerome (who championed celibacy), and
on to St Augustine (who, having screwed around in the
fleshpots of Carthage, then helped screw up the ensuing 16
centuries of Christians with his doctrine of original sin).
Things finally brighten up a bit with the humanist scholar
Erasmus, who in 1518 published a pamphlet championing
the pleasures of marriage, dedicated to a patron with the
improbable if unimprovable name of “Lord Mountjoy”.
Mr MacCulloch offers other similarly pleasing titbits. It is, for

example, interesting to learn that the word “buggery” is a
corruption of the word “Bulgarian”, because medieval
Christians accused heretics who were thought to come from
Bulgaria of it. But far too much of this book is heavy going.
Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast
amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all
down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font. Doubtless there are
some who will thrill to discover that in 451AD, at the Council
of Chalcedon, a non-Chalcedonian church “proudly adhered
to the ‘Dyophysite’ theology of the displaced Patriarch of
Constantinople Nestorios”. Many more will be left scratching
their heads.
Does it matter that many will buy Mr MacCulloch’s book, but

perhaps not finish it? Christian attitudes to sex are so
important in world politics at the moment. But it feels like a
mistake to take this oddness towards sex too much on its
own terms. Why are American conservatives currently
crushing women’s reproductive rights? Why is the Russian
Orthodox church inveighing against homosexuality? The
writings of St Augustine and St Paul offer one answer.
Perhaps a simpler answer is provided by the old saying that
everything in the world is about sex, except for sex, which is
about power. The Christian church, which has been
described as the most powerful persecuting force that the
world has ever seen, knows this well. ■
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Rich people’s problems
How today’s wealthy

present themselves
differently
A new book offers an engrossing but flawed takedown of
Britain’s most privileged
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
Born to Rule. By Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman.

Belknap Press; 328 pages; $29.95 and £20
SIR PETER DANIELL went to Eton College, a grand private

school favoured by royals and the rich. He was not a strong
pupil but was admitted to the University of Oxford in 1927
after his cousin had a quiet word with a college. Daniell had
a “wonderful” time there, doing almost no work, then took a
job in his father’s financial firm. Did he feel at all guilty
about his gilded upbringing? Certainly not. Meritocratic
ideas were “damned stupid”, he later said, and nepotism
was harmless.
Anybody expressing such views today would be laughed out

of the room, including by other privileged people. In “Born
to Rule”, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, two British
academics, describe how their country’s elites have
changed since the 19th century, becoming cleverer and
better at presenting themselves as ordinary. The book, flush
with research, including more than 200 interviews, is superb
—although like Daniell, the authors make the mistake of
expressing their views too frankly.
The elite can be defined in many different ways. Mr Reeves

and Mr Friedman adopt an extremely narrow measure. Their
elite consists of the people who have been listed in “Who’s
Who”, a guide to the powerful first published in 1849 and
updated annually. At the moment, this group has around
33,000 members. The authors are especially interested in a
subgroup, the wealthy elite, with only 6,000 members—
0.01% of the British population.
The great advantage of using “Who’s Who” as a yardstick is

that you can see how the top dogs have changed. Much of
“Born to Rule” is about this transformation, which is
startling. The elite used to be thick with clerics and military
men. These days there are lots of lawyers and media
figures. Women, who were excluded from “Who’s Who” until
1897, make up one-third of new entrants.
Elites are also increasingly well educated. More than a third

went to Oxford or Cambridge—a share that has changed
little since the 19th century, despite the rapid growth of
other universities. Attending Oxbridge means something
quite different these days. Elites used to slide into
universities on the strength of their connections, chuck a
few bread rolls about, then ease into good jobs. These days
they work hard to get in and often work hard while they are
there. Top private schools, which supply the elite with an
alarmingly large share of members (though less than in the
past), are academically excellent.
Above all, elites now present themselves differently. They

claim to be working-class even when they are not. Their
hobbies are now more like everyone else’s. In the 19th
century the elite favoured golf, hunting and riding; in the
20th century they took a serious interest in art and
literature. More recently they have mixed high culture with
popular pursuits: Anthony Giddens, an influential sociologist,
listed his interests as “theatre, cinema, playing tennis,
supporting Tottenham Hotspur”.
The authors believe that this is a pose intended to make

powerful and privileged people appear normal. They seem
not to like their subject much, arguing that elites oppress
working people. After all, they write, elites have cut welfare
and undermined trade unions, among other sins. This is
true, yet meaningless. Such things are done by senior
politicians, who are members of the elite simply by virtue of
their jobs. It would be equally true to say that the elite
created the post-war welfare state and introduced the
minimum wage.
In their conclusion Mr Friedman and Mr Reeves suggest

some ways of disrupting the British elite. They argue that
Cambridge and Oxford should be obliged to recruit at
random from regional pools of top students, and that the
House of Lords ought to be replaced with a randomly
appointed senate. Those sound like excellent ways of
diminishing two of Britain’s shrinking number of world-class
institutions and enhancing the already huge power of the
House of Commons.
And for what? The elites described in “Born to Rule” are too
posh and too good at replicating themselves, but hardly
toxic. The authors surveyed members of “Who’s Who”, and
discovered that they tend to hold rather sensible, centrist
views. Their attitudes to taxing and spending are about
average, and they are more likely than others to believe
that feminism is necessary. They also seem to be growing
more left-wing. Perhaps they are not just pretending to be
normal. ■

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differently

World in a dish
How the martini became

the world’s most iconic
cocktail
It has a glamorous history and can be endlessly
personalised
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
AT DUKES BAR in London there is a limit of two martinis per

person. Enrico Chiappini, the head bartender, says that in
his 16 years he has made almost no exceptions. That is
because the bar’s martinis, made with chilled gin or vodka
and vermouth, are famously dangerous: each contains
120ml of booze. Two hold ten shots.
As James Thurber, an American humorist, warned, two
martinis may be too many—but three are not enough. That
thrill has attracted drinkers for more than a century. Ian
Fleming, a British novelist and frequent patron of Dukes,
invented the Vesper martini for James Bond, who ordered
his “shaken not stirred”. Ernest Hemingway, also a
committed drinker, extolled the macho tipple in his novels,
including “A Farewell to Arms”.
A “boozy cultural prism” is what Alice Lascelles, who writes

a column in the Financial Times, calls the drink in a new
book, “The Martini”. It is resilient and adaptable. As distilling
improved in the 20th century, drinkers started to request
dry cocktails. In the 1980s tastes swung the other way, with
fruity froths and coffee liqueur filling the Y-shaped glasses.
Yet the martini’s basic recipe has always been simple. It

requires no specialised equipment. That makes it “a kind of
perfection that’s well within one’s grasp”, writes Ms
Lascelles. During Prohibition in the 1920s in America,
martini-making moved from bars to homes. A century later,
covid lockdowns once again enticed many to experiment
with mixology at home.
A basic formula can be endlessly personalised. That taps

into the trend across lifestyle industries, from fragrances to
fashion, of tweaking a product to express something about
yourself. You may have a rotating repertoire of spirits. (In
your correspondent’s case, it is a potato vodka from Poland.)
Or it may be the garnish: citrus rind or olives? Franklin D.
Roosevelt would add both, along with a splash of the olive
brine. Hemingway had a fetish for adding onions: both
frozen and raw.
A study by Claire Warner and Tristan Stephenson, two

mixologists, identifies at least 21 variables yielding 6.9
quadrillion possible martini combinations. Meanwhile,
bartenders use the drink to show off their skills. Tayēr +
Elementary in London, one of the world’s best bars, riffs on
its form by serving a green olive stuffed with blue cheese in
a bite-sized vodka martini.
As people drink less, they want to drink better. That is

especially true among young drinkers; last year a survey of
millennials in America and Britain showed that 30% opted
for homemade cocktails to start the night—almost double
the share five years ago. They might even drop £25 ($33)
on a martini at Dukes, which is made tableside to their
specifications and poured theatrically into an ice-cold glass.
It is a ritual rich with history—and potential for sharing on
Instagram. #Cheers. ■

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iconic-cocktail

Here’s the skinny
Weight-loss drugs have

changed culture
And slimmed demand for diet books
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
FROM LOS ANGELES to London, weight-loss drugs such as

Ozempic are reshaping culture as much as waistlines. Some
Ozempic-takers have tiny appetites and dine at unusual
hours to avoid spells of nausea. Others have lost their taste
for alcohol. Many have given up on the gym, either because
they are tired or because the drugs keep them svelte.
#MyOzempicJourney posts have racked up millions of views
on TikTok, as people share how they are adjusting to their
new lifestyles.
These drugs have also slimmed people’s demand for diet
books. Since June 2021, when Wegovy, the first blockbuster
slimming jab, was approved by America’s Food and Drug
Administration, sales of “health and fitness” print books in
America have fallen by 15%, according to Circana, a
research firm. (Sales of print books overall fell by 4%.) The
category shifted fewer than 10m hard copies in the years
ending June 2023 and June 2024, the lowest in a decade.
Diet, exercise and weight-loss titles are among the worst
sellers.
Publishers are trying to fight back by expanding beyond

books that promise fast results from calorie-counting and
new dieting fads; they are focusing more on longevity and
vitality. Living longer is the most exciting topic for readers
today, says Olivia Morris, publishing director of Ebury Self,
which released “Outlive” by Peter Attia, a doctor, in Britain
last year. (It has sold more than 2m copies globally.) Sales of
books about longevity rose by 50% in the past year,
according to Circana. Another pocket of growth is women’s
health. “The Cortisol Reset Plan”, to be published next year,
investigates how the stress hormone causes female fatigue
and weight gain.
Diet books that have achieved brisk sales, including Davinia

Taylor’s “It’s Not A Diet” and Ben Carpenter’s “Everything
Fat Loss”, tell readers to forget fads and make simple
lifestyle changes. By promising low effort and high reward,
they offer an easy, cheap alternative to drugs (which have a
list price of more than $1,000 a month in America). There is
also growing demand for “natural alternatives” to jabs,
according to Victory Belt, a health publisher. On TikTok
“nature’s Ozempic”—berberine, a plant extract claimed to
promote weight loss—has gone viral.
Publishers are not entirely pessimistic about injectable
medicines. “Health and fitness” remains the ninth-largest
adult non-fiction print book category in America. They are
also faring better than others in the diet industry. The
market value of WW (formerly Weight Watchers) has fallen
by more than 90% since June 2021, with investors worried
about growth prospects.
In time the drugs may even lure new readers. Books are
being written for those with suppressed appetites: “The
Mayo Clinic Diet”, first published in 1949, has released a
“weight-loss medications edition”. Some publishers predict
greater demand for titles about diabetes and blood sugar,
as people try to learn more about the science behind the
drugs. (They mimic the hormones that the body produces
after a meal to suppress appetite.) But as even cheaper and
more convenient weight-loss drugs emerge and spread,
publishers will probably need to change tack. Nobody in
publishing is entirely sure what the next chapter will bring.
■

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Rocket man
Meet the world’s most

elusive arms dealer
Karl Lee helped Iran build missiles. Where is he?
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
The Chinese Phantom. By Christoph Giesen, Philipp Grüll,

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer. Translated by
Simon Pare. Scribe; 288 pages; £20
IRANIAN MISSILES are lodged in the centre of Middle Eastern

conflict today. In April Iran conducted the largest-ever
missile barrage, firing more than 300 drones and rockets at
Israel. Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon have fired
them at Israel; the Houthis in Yemen have fired them at
ships in the Red Sea. Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq
have used them to target American troops. How did Iran
become a missile superpower?
It is all down to one man, argues “The Chinese Phantom”, a

book by four German journalists, published last year in
German and recently translated into English. Karl Lee, a
shady Chinese arms dealer, supplies the bulk of material
and equipment for Iran’s ballistic-missile programme,
America’s State Department avers. Mr Lee has a long and
eye-popping rap sheet. Having built up contacts as a
Chinese government official, he then set up an innocuous-
sounding company in Dalian, a port on the Yellow Sea, in
1998. It was the first of many. For the past quarter-century
he is believed to have provided aluminium, carbon fibre,
gyroscopes and more to help Iran build lighter missiles that
can fly farther and stay on course.
“The Chinese Phantom” weaves together the story of that

illicit arms network, America’s frustrated efforts to put
pressure on China to shut it down and the geopolitics of
Iranian missile technology and Sino-American competition.
The authors hunt for Mr Lee in parts of China where few
foreign reporters are likely to have set foot. Two of the
authors won the Pulitzer prize for their reporting on the
Panama papers, a series of leaks of corporate and financial
records published in 2016; they draw on that work to
unravel parts of Mr Lee’s byzantine shell companies.
However, what might have been a riveting true-crime tale

has two problems. One is the authors’ flabby, undisciplined
writing. Descriptions of undramatic meetings with sources
are preceded by paragraphs of flowery prose. “Lee ranks so
highly on the CIA’s wanted list”, the authors implausibly
argue at one point, “that special forces…etch his face into
their memories the moment they start their training.”
The bigger issue is that it is a whodunnit without a satisfying
ending. Mr Lee, apparently protected by the Chinese state,
is a spectral presence throughout the book. The authors do
an admirable job of chasing every lead, however slender.
They speak to Mr Lee’s family and a wide array of spooks
and even visit Mr Lee’s factories, which have graphite (well
suited to rocket-motor nozzles) piled up in the courtyard.
But by the end the authors cannot even tell for sure whether
he is in prison or not.
Still, the book is an accomplished piece of investigative

journalism that sheds light on the inner workings of the
global arms trade. The subject is urgent and timely. Iranian
officials have hinted that an old fatwa, or religious
prohibition, on nuclear weapons might be abrogated.
Recently American and British officials have grown
concerned that Russia, in exchange for drones and missiles,
has provided Iran with nuclear secrets. Should Iran develop
a nuclear weapon in the coming years it would be mounted
on the ballistic missiles that the elusive Mr Lee has so
assiduously, and profitably, helped spread. ■

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dealer

Unbridled
One of history’s biggest

drivers is not what you
might think
The horse has moulded empires, wars and human affairs
profoundly
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
The Horse. By Timothy Winegard. Dutton; 544 pages; $35
Hoof Beats. By William Taylor. University of California

Press; 360 pages; $28.95 and £25
Raiders, Rulers and Traders. By David Chaffetz. W.W.

Norton; 448 pages; $32.50 and £25
THERE WAS nearly a world without horses. At the end of the
last ice age warming temperatures turned the grasslands
where horses roamed into swamps and forests. Humans
hunted them heavily for meat. Wild horses did, in fact, go
extinct in North America around 7,600-12,000 years ago.
You could say that by stopping hunting and starting to
domesticate and harness them, humans saved horses. Or
you could say that horses decided to bet on people.
Humans were forever changed by their equine alliance. Able

to gallop at more than 40mph (64kph) and to convey heavy
objects, horses altered the arc of empires and determined
victors and losers in battle. Timothy Winegard, a historian,
calls horses “humanity’s longest-serving weapon system”.
They also transformed the way people could hunt,
communicate, trade and even dress. Trousers spread only
after horses were domesticated, as an innovation for riding.
The oldest surviving pairs, dating to 1300BC, belonged to
horsemen.
A herd of new books has come out looking at the horse’s

impact on human history, though their approaches are very
different. David Chaffetz, a scholar of Asian history, focuses
his deeply researched, elegantly written “Raiders, Rulers
and Traders” on the interplay between horse-borne nomads
and settled peoples, a defining aspect of Chinese, Indian
and Persian civilisations. He argues that “What we now call
the Silk Road should more accurately be called the Horse
Road, for it was the horse, and not silk, that drew buyers
and sellers together…to form the first large-scale
international trading routes.”
The broadest and most accessible view comes from Mr

Winegard. Ranging from horse anatomy to the role of horses
in both world wars, his book is packed with fascinating
detail. For example, by weight, Britain shipped more horse
feed than ammunition to the western front in the first world
war; 20 years later Hitler enlisted some 2.7m horses in the
second. In contrast, “Hoof Beats” by William Taylor, an
academic and curator at the University of Colorado Museum
of Natural History, is based primarily on archaeology;
unfortunately it reads like a competent textbook.
All three books consider how mastery of the horse

empowered the people who first achieved it in the third
millennium BC. Their homeland was the Pontic-Caspian
steppe, the vast grasslands north of the Black and Caspian
seas. Using horses for food, transport and warfare provided
mobility and an edge over others. One result is that their
language, Proto-Indo-European, forms the root of tongues
spoken by 46% of people today, such as Bengali and
Portuguese. Their genetic imprint stamps 40-50% of
Europeans. Some 60-90% of men on the Indian subcontinent
can trace patrilineal DNA back to these early horsemen.
Superior horses and horsemanship continued to determine

sweeping population movements. By around 2000BC horses
had trampled older civilisations across Europe and India,
such as those that built Stonehenge in England and
Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley. Mastery of mounts brought
the Huns into Europe (around 370AD), the Arabs into Spain
(711AD) and the Turks into India (1020AD) and Anatolia
(1071AD). Horses also spread the vast Mongol armies under
Genghis Khan across nearly the whole of the Eurasian land
mass, including China (around 1200AD).
In Europe feudalism and chivalry arrived on horseback, as

did Napoleon’s troops. According to Mr Winegard, in the
French army’s disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812 it was
the loss of 200,000 horses, which could not be quickly
replaced, rather than of half a million soldiers who could,
that sealed the emperor’s fate.
A look at the “biotechnology” of the horse explains its
usefulness. In terms of power a horse packs more than ten
times that of a human. (People still use “horsepower” as a
way to quantify might.) Horses hardly need sleep, run fast
for long stretches and have temperaments that make them
easy to herd and train. Their teeth snip grass with front
incisors and crush it with back molars, leaving a useful gap
for a bit. Their milk has five times more vitamin C, and their
flesh more protein, than cows’. Handy “hardware” like
stirrups and saddles, as well as the innovation of hitching
horses to wheeled vehicles (from around 2000BC), have
given people more control.
Horses’ utility translated into muscular pricing. An ordinary

mount in ancient Athens cost upwards of 500 drachmas,
compared with 140 for an unskilled slave. In Brazil in the
17th century a fine steed could fetch as much as 20 slaves.
It is only in the past 100 years, since the invention and
spread of automobiles, that horses became less integral to
human civilisation and people’s daily lives. However, as
these books make clear, it would be unwise to put horses
out to pasture in people’s memories. They deserve enduring
respect, for their hoof beats changed the world. ■

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The Economist reads

What to read about modern feminism
An introduction to a large, evolving and controversial subject

The Economist reads
What to read about

modern feminism
An introduction to a large, evolving and controversial
subject
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
FEMINISTS HAVE a basic belief: that men and women are in

all important respects equal. But getting people, especially
men, to accept that truth and act on it has been the work of
centuries. Feminists have made the case through activism,
politics, economics, journalism and art. The work is
unfinished. Western feminist theory has divided the
movement’s history, and writing about it, into “waves”. In
this interpretation feminism began in the late 1840s with
the campaign for women’s suffrage in America. The second
wave came in the 1960s with the call for women’s
“liberation” and equality under the law. A third wave in the
1990s was more rebellious than reformist, more anarchically
individualistic than disciplined and legalistic. Some think we
are in the midst of a fourth wave, sustained by the internet
and social media; the #MeToo movement, which calls out
sexual misconduct by powerful men, is its characteristic
expression.
Many commentators now regard the “waves” framework as

too rigid, too white, too Western and too middle class and
too recent (feminism did not begin in the 1840s) to take
account of all important aspects of feminist history. The
waves framework leaves out thinking about how sex
discrimination combines with other sorts that are based on
race, class, sexual orientation or disability (a phenomenon
sometimes called “intersectionality”). The books we’re
recommending will acquaint readers with the classics and
with writings by or about women who are not Western, white
or rich.
The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. Edited by

Hannah Dawson. Penguin Classics; 720 pages; £14.99
In this anthology, published in 2021, Hannah Dawson, a

historian at King’s College London (who has written for The
Economist), presents 116 essays, manifestos, poems and
other writings by women from between 1405 and 2020. The
collection introduces famous Western writers, such as Mary
Wollstonecraft and Betty Friedan, as well as women from
non-Western cultures. A harrowing description of female
circumcision in Egypt and Sudan by Nawal El Saadawi
(pictured in the mural above) appears alongside the
philosophising of Audre Lorde, a black American lesbian. Ms
Dawson provides an illuminating foreword, weaving
discussion of her own experiences and beliefs with thoughts
on the writers represented in the collection. She gives only
the barest details of their lives, trusting the texts to “do the
talking”. They are a fine introduction to the diversity of
feminist writing.
Feminisms: A Global History. By Lucy Delap. University

of Chicago Press; 256 pages; $30. Pelican; £10.99
In this history Lucy Delap, a historian at Cambridge

University, analyses the lives and work of feminist activists
and writers, including many of those in Ms Dawson’s
anthology. Rather than taking a chronological approach, Ms
Delap organises her book by themes, such as the “dreams”
feminists have, the “spaces” they make and the “actions”
they take. The book pays particular attention to movements
in which activists participated, such as those advocating
socialism or anti-colonialism. Another focus is differences of
opinion and background and instances of discrimination
within the feminist movement itself. Ms Delap also discusses
feminist men. “It is normal, and productive, for any social
movement to have many goals and strategies and to mean
different things to different people,” she explains.
Men Explain Things to Me. By Rebecca Solnit. Haymarket

Books; 176 pages; $40 and £28.99
At a party the (male) host questions Rebecca Solnit about

her work, only to interrupt her answer to lecture her on an
important new book on the subject. Even though another
guest tells him repeatedly that she is the author of that very
book, it takes a long time for that to sink in. Ms Solnit, a
historian and the author of this collection, is often credited
with inventing the word “mansplaining”. She does not use
the word here, and is not a fan of it. She enjoys people
explaining things to her—if they know what they are talking
about. But she worries that women do not enjoy equal rights
to explain. In essays on colonialism, social injustice and
marriage equality Ms Solnit argues that society applies a
discount to what women say and write, by ignoring it,
disbelieving it or downplaying its importance. “Most women
fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic
is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be
acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to
have value, to be a human being,” she writes. The right to
be taken seriously, Ms Solnit argues here, is a basic human
right.
We Should All Be Feminists. By Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie. Knopf; 64 pages; $10. Fourth Estate; £6.99
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of “Half of a Yellow

Sun”, offers a Nigerian perspective on gender stereotypes
and the experience of growing up as an (unintentional)
feminist. In this book, based on a TED Talk she gave in 2012,
Ms Adichie laments the pressure on boys to prove their
masculinity and the conditioning of girls to coddle male
egos by limiting their own ambitions. She describes how
women she knows underplay their successes in front of
men. Her least favourite English word, she writes, is
“emasculate”. This slim volume, published in 2014, made a
big splash. Beyoncé sampled the text, and in 2015 several
organisations teamed up to give a copy to all 16-year-old
Swedish pupils.
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White

Feminists Forgot. By Mikki Kendall. Viking; 288 pages;
$16. Bloomsbury; £9.99
“For a movement that is meant to represent all women,

[feminism] often centres on those who already have most of
their needs met,” admonishes Mikki Kendall. “Hood
Feminism”, which was published in 2020, is “not going to be
a comfortable read”, she warns. Her feminism is “rooted in
an awareness of how race and gender and class all affect
my ability to be educated, receive medical care, gain and
keep employment”. Ms Kendall uses her own experiences of
family and community in South Side Chicago to describe
how the priorities of poor black American women, and of
members of other minority groups, differ from those of
privileged white women. Worrying about violence and how
to feed children is very different from fretting about the
number of women in boardrooms. Ms Kendall argues that
feminists should champion the rights of sex workers, the
unemployed and criminals; “respectability” should not be a
criterion for deciding who is entitled to support. Her concern
extends to transgender women, whose rights, she says,
tend to be ignored by mainstream white feminists.
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. By Helen Joyce.

Oneworld; 320 pages; $25.95 and £18.99
Not all feminists believe that the cause should be so friendly

to assertions by activists about transgender rights. Helen
Joyce, a journalist and campaigner (and former editor at The
Economist), has become a spokeswoman for British
“gender-critical” (GC) feminists. They argue that, although
people may choose their gender, they cannot change the
sex they were born with. (Detractors malign the GC crowd
as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, or TERFs.) In
“Trans” Ms Joyce states her concerns about the influence of
“transactivism” and the consequences for individuals and
society when “gender self-identification” is allowed to trump
biological sex. Self-identified transgender women should
not, she argues, automatically get access to facilities,
services or sports competitions for females. She worries that
“gender-affirmative” medical care, which accepts patients’
self-diagnosis, can be harmful, especially when the patients
are children and they are offered irreversible gender
surgery. The opposite point of view is put by Judith Butler,
sometimes called the “godmother of queer theory”.
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World

Designed for Men. By Caroline Criado Perez. Abrams
Press; 448 pages; $18. Vintage; £16.99
In “Invisible Women”, published in 2019, Caroline Criado

Perez, a British author, identifies a “gender data gap”.
Knowledge, and the institutions and products it shapes, is
based on male bodies and minds, she argues. Ms Criado
Perez presents examples from the workplace, as well as
health care, family life and the media. Cars, phones, clothes,
medicines and transport systems are designed using data
about men. The results can be deadly. In Britain when
women have a heart attack they are 50% more likely than
men to be misdiagnosed; they are 17% more likely to die in
car crashes. Ms Criado Perez is not the first to notice that
men are default humans. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir wrote
that women are the second, or “other”, sex, defined by not
being male. Ms Criado Perez shows how de Beauvoir’s
notion affects many aspects of contemporary life. The
newest technologies are not exempt. Artificial intelligence,
for example, has gender biases. Does it matter that the data
machines learn from skew male? Yes, it does.
Also try
Here is The Economist’s annual glass-ceiling index. We’ve

written about how young men and women are drifting apart
and how their diverging worldviews could affect politics,
families and more. Our coverage of sexual politics includes
analysis of why nations that fail women fail; how
motherhood hurts careers; and why the war on baby girls is
winding down. This article looked at how incels and anti-
feminists in Asia could worsen the region’s demographic
decline. Read our obituary of Betty Friedan, the author of
“The Feminine Mystique”, a feminist classic that we
described as “rambling and badly written”. And learn why
French women no longer wear high heels. ■
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reads/2024/09/19/what-to-read-about-modern-feminism

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

Indicators
Economic data,
commodities and markets
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
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financial-indicators/2024/09/19/economic-data-commodities-and-markets

| Main menu | Previous section |
Obituary
Francisco Lopera’s travels in the Andes
began to solve a great mystery
The land of forgetting :: The Colombian neurologist and Alzheimer’s
researcher died on September 10th, aged 73
| Main menu | Previous section |

The land of forgetting
Francisco Lopera’s travels

in the Andes began to
solve a great mystery
The Colombian neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher died
on September 10th, aged 73
9月 19, 2024 06:21 上午
HIS FATHER’S tears persuaded him. Francisco Lopera, then

in his first year of medical training, had gone with him to
see his grandmother in Medellín. His father had not wanted
him to study medicine; he thought he was not intelligent
enough. But that was not why he wept. He wept because
the old lady, in the last stages of Alzheimer’s, stared blankly
at them, not knowing who they were. Then and there,
Francisco made a vow: when he became a doctor, that was
not going to happen to any granny.
Every ounce of his energy went into that promise. But it was
hard to keep. Alzheimer’s was incurable. By his count, more
than 800 drugs had been tried on it, to no effect. It was a sly
disease, asymptomatic for as much as 30 years, but all that
time sticky plaques of amyloid protein, rubbish as he
thought of it, were being laid down in the brain, and neurons
were dying. Silently, the patient—his grandmother—was
being destroyed. First she forgot small things, then how to
cook, then who she was. When dementia set in, she would
not even know she had it. But her family would be
exhausted and devastated.
In the northern Colombian province of Antioquia, in the poor

mountain villages where he had grown up, people had many
theories about what caused la bobera, “the foolishness”. He
had heard them all. You could catch it by having sex with a
mad woman, or touching the bark of a rare tree. Or a priest
had left a curse, after he found people stealing from the
collection box. The prevalence of the disease in Antioquia
was certainly strange. But that was a mystery he solved
himself.
In 1982 a farm labourer came to the hospital. At 47 he had

abandoned work, and his speech was a crazed laugh. Nor
was he alone. His father, his grandfather and several aunts
had had Alzheimer’s too, not in old age but in their 40s and
50s. This was early-onset, and it was hereditary. At that
point, Dr Lopera saw his life’s work mapped out: he would
go, with a team of helpers, into the villages, not only to
treat the patients but to forage through wills and parish
records, tracing the disease both back to the source and
forward, to those who were likely to suffer it in future.
This meant weeks and years of travelling on horseback, or

in a complaining car, up steep, rocky roads in a country that
was locked in a civil war between right-wing paramilitaries
and Marxist FARC rebels. He had been kidnapped by the
FARC a few years before, when he was working in the jungly
Darién Gap on bat-bites and snake-bites, and was forced to
treat a shot guerrilla; later, a nurse working for him was
abducted. The more serious effect of the war, for him, was
that well-funded medical-research teams in the United
States did not want to go to Colombia. Until the 2000s,
those essential collaborations were mostly at arm’s length.
Inside the village houses he would comfort the families and
engage with the victims. Some were already almost gone,
vanishing into themselves and staring at infinity. He could
not look away, though. He had to help. Many other patients
were lively, combative, denying there was anything wrong.
But if he asked them to hop, draw an object, or remember
simple sentences, they no longer could. Younger family
members lived in dread of going the same way in middle
age. His hand-drawn genealogical chart, going back to one
Basque family in the 18th century, grew to contain 6,000
family members, a fifth of them carriers. It took 40 years of
work by 100 people, most of them members of the
University of Antioquia’s Neurosciences Group, which he had
founded and led. The whole of Antioquia was an Alzheimer’s
laboratory.
His journeys to villages also included asking for the brains of

patients who had died. This was difficult. Generally the
families wanted to help him, because he was kind,
reassuring, wise, and a great dancer. They eagerly took part
in a decade-long trial, from 2012, of a new drug,
crenezumab, which he hoped (sadly, mistakenly) might
delay the onset. Donating brains was harder. Sometimes he
had to go to the funeral and join in the prayers to persuade
them. But on the evidence of those brains, more than 300
stored in a special bank on campus, he and his colleagues
found that hereditary Alzheimer’s was linked to a single
mutation of the presenilin 1 gene in chromosome 14. Now
what he needed to find was another genetic mutation that
would hamper the first. If the cause lay in Nature, so would
the cure.
This meant investigating the rare individuals who carried

the mutation for early-onset Alzheimer’s, but had avoided it
until old age. His work there paved the way to identifying
two candidate genes, AP0E3 Christchurch and Reelin-
COLBOS, which seemed to have protected the neurons. If a
molecule could now be found to inoculate younger adults, it
could delay the disease for decades: a cure, or almost so.
For that was still elusive. Prevention was his best hope.
Besides, hereditary Alzheimer’s was a tiny fraction of all
cases. In the rest, the cause was unknown. However, his
genetic discoveries might also prove useful there. The
human brain continued to hold mysteries, and he still
burned to solve them. As a boy he had wanted to be an
astronomer, imagining all the greatest secrets lay out in the
cosmos. Now he knew they were inside human heads.
So was terror. Could anything be done, he was asked, to

stop the fear of Alzheimer’s that now possessed people as
they aged? Yes, he said. First, they should not see it as a
tragedy. It was a serious illness, certainly, but one largely
without pain to the patient. It should not be over-
dramatised, but if possible treated kindly within the family
in an atmosphere of happiness. It should be seen as a new
form of life. ■

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andes-began-to-solve-a-great-mystery

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[9月 20, 2024]

The world this week

The world this week

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The world this week

At least 12 people were killed, including two children, and

A terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility

Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s president, dissolved

South Sudan postponed until 2026 elections that were due

Arvind Kejriwal stepped down as chief minister of Delhi’s

The initial stage of voting began in the ﬁrst regional election

Meanwhile, Ukraine expanded its drone attacks inside

Mr Putin issued a decree to increase the number of active

Georgia’s parliament approved a law curtailing the few

FBI agenst at the crime scene outside the Trump

America’s Secret Service came under pressure again, after a

The Teamsters union will not endorse either Kamala Harris

Faced with a demographic crisis and looming pension

The widely accepted winner of Venezuela’s presidential

In Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president,

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, presented a proposal to

He knows his audience

In an unusual gesture Javier Milei, Argentina’s president,

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

| Section menu | Main menu |

The world this week

The Bank of England left its benchmark interest rate

Workers in Boeing’s biggest union went on strike, after

A hearing got under way at a courtroom in Reno, Nevada, to

BP decided to get out of the wind-power business in

BlackRock launched a $30bn investment fund aimed at

The European Union’s General Court ruled that Google

Meta banned RT (formerly Russia Today) from its

Taking a bite in the Big Apple

Pret A Manger reported annual global sales above £1bn

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| Section menu | Main menu |

The world this week

The weekly cartoon

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

Israel has bloodied Hizbullah but is stuck in a war of

The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You

| Section menu | Main menu |

This week’s covers

By Invitation: Bill Gates on how feeding children properly

In the rest of the world we considered the breakthrough that

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How the world’s poor stopped catching up

Let Ukraine hit military targets in Russia

Britain should let university tuition fees rise

After peak woke, what next?

| Next section | Main menu | Previous section |

Power, chips and constraints

Large language models have a keen appetite for electricity.

This is frightening for investors, many of whom have bet big

There is no need to panic. Plenty of other technologies have

Developers are also making changes to AI software. Bigger

Investors and governments have become used to the idea